Wow - I had no idea. Fascinating.
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The mysteries of Azerbaijan: A Shiite nation embraces its Jews
Jewish Journal
December 18, 2013
by Rob Eshman
Red Village rises up along the Qudiyal River like a Jewish Brigadoon.
To get there, you fly 13 hours from Los Angeles to Istanbul, then catch a three-hour flight to Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan — a former Soviet country of some 9 million people on the Caspian Sea. From Baku, you take a bus past churning oil derricks and miles of empty desert, up into the Caucasus, through tiny villages surrounded by apple orchards. After two hours, you arrive in Quba, the capital of Azerbaijan’s northeast region. About a mile past an attractive central mosque, a simple steel bridge spans a wide, mostly dry riverbed and leads directly into Red Village.
One of the first things you see is a large brick building atop which sits — improbably, impossibly — a Jewish star.
About 4,000 people live in Red Village, every one of them Jewish. That makes Red Village the largest all-Jewish settlement outside the State of Israel.
This entirely Jewish town exists in an almost entirely Muslim country — ancient, placid, prosperous. It is also completely unknown to the majority of the world’s Jews. I had to see Red Village to believe it. I had to figure out: What’s the deal with Azerbaijan?
Earlier this month, Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev convened 750 journalists, scholars, activists and scientists from around the world to participate in the annual Baku International Humanitarian Forum.
The invitation offered a chance to see for myself a country that, from what I’d heard over the years, has never quite fit the standard American perception of Muslim = Fanatic and Shiite = Really Fanatic.
After all, Iran, also a Shiite nation, lies just across Azerbaijan’s southern border. But while Iran is the Jewish state’s mortal enemy, Azerbaijan is Israel’s largest supplier of oil and a major purchaser of Israeli defense technology. The Shiites of Iran would treat me, an American Jew with a passport full of Israeli stamps, as an enemy. In Azerbaijan, I was an honored guest.
My visit was personally arranged through Azerbaijan’s Western Region Consul General, Nasimi Aghayev. I’m not the first journalist lured to explore Azerbaijan’s incongruities, but I do seem to be the first in my crowd. Few people I talked to about my travel plans beforehand had heard of Azerbaijan, and even fewer of its Jewish connection.
You could fault Azeris for not getting the word out, but in the 22 years since it gained its independence, Azerbaijan has had to focus on rebuilding, not rebranding.
What struck me first when I arrived in Baku is that Azerbaijan is in the midst of a fast transition. Now that its tremendous oil and gas wealth isn’t being siphoned off to feed the Soviet empire, the country’s GDP (gross domestic product) has soared.
For most of the 19th and early 20th centuries, Azerbaijan was under the rule of the Russian empire, which exploited its resources. When the tsar fell in 1918, Azerbaijan quickly formed a secular republic, the first Muslim majority country in the world to do so. Its parliament immediately granted women the right to vote — a year before the United States did. But the flowering of democracy, commerce and art was brief. The Bolsheviks arrived just 22 months after Azerbaijan declared independence, attacked what they called liberal and decadent Baku Muslims, crushing a rebellion and absorbing Azerbaijan into the USSR.
When Hitler invaded Russia, his brass ring was Baku’s oil, which provided more than 80 percent of the fuel for the Soviet war effort. In 1942, Hitler’s general staff gave him a cake in the shape of the Caucasus. Hitler ate the slice with “Baku” written on it. “Unless we get Baku oil,” Hitler said, “the war is lost.”
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Baku finally won its independence in 1991. Its first president, Heydar Aliyev, who died in 2003, and his son and successor, Ilham Aliyev, have managed to negotiate lucrative long-term oil and gas contracts that, for the first time, keep Azerbaijan’s money at home and have tilted the former Soviet satellite westward.
Oil money has enabled a modern, busy city with cutting-edge architecture and luxury stores to grow up around the well-preserved walls and narrow cobblestone streets of the Old City. Baku is a cleaner Tel Aviv surrounding a smaller-walled Jerusalem.
What’s even more surprising about Baku is its people. The majority are traditional but secular. Few women wear headscarves — the look is skirts and heels, more Westwood Boulevard than Riyadh.
But Azerbaijan’s tolerance is not a Western import. It’s homegrown, even ancient.
“The multinational, multiconfessional society is one of our assets,” President Aliyev said in the conference’s keynote address. “All nationalities see their religion respected. … This contributes to the building of a civil society.”
For the Jews, that is remarkably true.
“There has never been anti-Semitism in Azerbaijan,” Arye Gut, the Azeri-born founder of the international association Israel-Azerbaijan (AZIZ), told me. Like many Azeris who have immigrated to Israel, he maintains strong personal and business ties to his home country.
In a meeting at his office, Ambassador Elshad Iskandarov, chairman of the State Committee for Work With Religious Organizations, pointed out with some understatement that Azerbaijan has resisted the increasing anti-Semitism in the Muslim world.
Iskandarov, an urbane graduate of Columbia University, theorized that Azerbaijan’s location on the Silk Road international trade route long ago encouraged its people to accept all kinds of cultures.
Or, as a Cambridge-educated Azeri told me later in my week there, “Our philosophy is, ‘Why fight when you can trade?’ ”
Like many Azeri officials I met, Iskandarov could rattle off the names of famous Azerbaijani Jews — who are pretty much the most famous Azerbaijanis, period — among them pianist Bella Davidovich, Nobel Prize physicist Lev Landau, Israeli singers Sarit Hadad and Yaffa Yarkoni, pioneering physician Gavril Ilizarov and chess master Garry Kasparov, who is half Armenian.
There is also writer Lev Nussimbaum, aka Essad Bey and Kurban Said, author of the most famous Azeri novel, “Ali and Nino.”
“The magic of this town lies in the mystical bond between its races and its people,” the book’s narrator said. “The race of a peaceful Caucasus is forged on the anvil of Baku.”
Iskandarov wondered aloud whether the nation didn’t share a lineage with the eighth-century Khazars who converted en masse to Judaism. Perhaps, the ambassador posited, Azerbaijani Shiites have Jewish blood.
“When we are talking about Jews,” he said, “this is tolerance of our own past.”
I asked how the government keeps extremist Islamic ideologies from taking root in Azerbaijan. Iskandarov pointed to his bookshelf, where there were thick tomes of sermons prepared by government-appointed imams and distributed to mosques — local imams were encouraged not to veer from these more liberal teachings. There is freedom of religion — but not too much.
Many countries, including Iran, say they love the Jews — it’s just Israel they can’t stand. Azerbaijan is different. It has strategic defense partnerships with Israel, and the two countries conduct $5.5 billion in trade annually.
Last year, Iran protested and even threatened “consequences” after the Azerbaijan foreign minister announced an official visit to Israel. President Aliyev refused to back down.
“I know who my friends are,” Aliyev said, “and who my enemies are.”
During the tsarist regime, Jews were not permitted to buy land in Baku. But a local Muslim stepped up and bought the property for what became one of the city’s two synagogues. On Friday night, as Sabbath services concluded, I went there to meet Milikh Yevdayev, chairman of the Religious Community of Mountain Jews.
About 10,000 of Azerbaijan’s 15,000 Jews live in Baku. The synagogues serve different groups — one is Ashkenazi style, staffed by a Chabad rabbi, and the other, the one I visited, is well-appointed and known as the New Synagogue, for the Mountain Jews.
The Mountain Jews trace their lineage to ancient Persia. They speak Juhuri, a blend of Farsi and Hebrew; if you close your eyes, you’re back again on Westwood Boulevard. Historians believe the Mountain Jews first settled in the Caucasus in the fifth century. It is their descendants who settled Red Village.
“We live like brothers,” Yevdayev assured me.
On the wall of the synagogue are photos of the stout, middle-aged Yevdayev and other synagogue leaders alongside President Aliyev, as well as the country’s leading imam and the head of the Armenian church.
The $2 million it took to build the synagogue last year came directly from President Aliyev. Some 60 people attend Shabbat services weekly, and 300 on the holidays. Two schools, entirely paid for by the government, serve 300 students. The sanctuary has some local touches — a central pulpit, Oriental carpets, stacks of the local Jewish newspaper, which is printed in Russian.
Yevdayev is originally from Red Village. His daughter now lives in Brooklyn. I ask him if Jews are leaving Red Village and Baku for Israel and elsewhere.
“They go; they come back, they go — it’s not a trend,” he said. “You’ll see.”
The next day, I saw. Our bus of some 30 conference participants followed a new highway north from Baku into the foothills of the Caucasus.
Quba is a medium-sized city, surrounded by pear and apple orchards. In 1730, the Khan Huseyn Ali decreed that Jews could own property in his district. Their settlement, Red Village, resembles a more prosperous version of the many small towns we had passed en route.
“There are many Jewish billionaires,” our tour guide informed us on the way up.
He wasn’t kidding. Since independence, Azeri Jews have flourished in business, especially in Russia, and they have spent millions restoring the old village, even buying up properties there as a link to their past. The soccer field and park look new, the stone, brick and wood homes refurbished. It was quiet — we arrived on Shabbat, when the cafes, restaurants and small businesses were closed. Azerbaijan’s Jews are as traditional, and as secular, as its Muslims.
Inside Red Village’s main synagogue, services were just letting out. There was a cacophony of kids and young men. The only sign that we were in the exotic East: Visitors are asked to remove their shoes, as in a mosque. The floor of the shul’s rich wooden interior is covered in Persian carpets.
Boris Simanduyen, chairman of the community, told us that until the Bolshevik Revolution, the town had 13 synagogues. Back then, the village was called Krasnaya Sloboda (Red Settlement) in Russian and had 18,000 residents. Now, Red Village has a Hebrew school with 60 students and three synagogues. President Aliyev’s administration pays for the heating oil for them all.
Simanduyen is a serious elderly man who speaks not a word of English or Hebrew. Through an interpreter he told me the town receives many visiting Jewish groups, people like me who can’t quite believe such a place exists. As if to offer more evidence, he called over a teenage boy who opened a prayer book and recited a Hebrew prayer at a breakneck pace.
Outside the synagogue, we ran into a group of high-spirited boys, most wearing kippot. They posed for pictures, and shouted back “hello,” and “Shabbat shalom!” to our own greetings.
“Our neighbors say, ‘Why do you send oil to Israel,’ ” our guide, a Shiite, said, summarizing the Azeri attitude toward the Jewish minority. “We say, ‘The Jews are our brothers. They make a big contribution to the economy and culture of Azerbaijan.’ ”
That contribution is beginning to extend beyond the historic. A subtext of every speech we heard and visit we made was that Azerbaijan is seeking international support for its ongoing conflict with Armenia, which, in 1992, fought a brutal war with Azerbaijan over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh and has occupied that region since, in contravention of United Nations resolutions.
The continued occupation by force of some 20 percent of Azerbaijan’s territory consumes Azeri political discourse.
Near Quba, we pulled into a brand-new memorial complex of angular concrete and polished granite. Just beside it lay mounds of human skulls, recently excavated at the site of a massacre in 1918 of Muslim and Jewish residents by Bolshevik, Armenian and Christian forces. About 600 people were slaughtered by what our guide referred to as “Armenian gangsters.” The exhibit looked as if it had been airlifted directly from Yad Vashem.
In a meeting with Yevda Abramov, Azerbaijan’s sole Jewish parliamentarian, a big, deep-voiced Mountain Jew, we asked what message he wanted us to convey to American Jews.
“Please present the Armenian holocaust against us,” he said, then launched into a tirade on the “double standard” in how the world only cares about Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory and ignores Armenia’s occupation of Azeri land.
Abramov raised his considerable voice. “The Armenian lobby prevents a just solution!” he said.
Of course, as in any tribal-religious-political conflict, the Armenians level their own accusations of land grabs and massacres. Azerbaijan, a country suffering from occupation, has allied itself with Israel, a country trying to extricate itself from being an occupier. The situation is not as ironic as it seems when you look at a map. Squeezed between Vladimir Putin’s neo-imperialist Russia to the north and Iran’s mullahs to the south, Azerbaijan sees in Israel a natural ally also ringed by enmity.
Israeli military technology and know-how is helping the once-poor Azerbaijan develop an army that can credibly threaten to take Nagorno-Karabakh back by force. In exchange, one expert told me, Israel gets to park drones and perhaps even launch operations right at the edge of the Iranian border.
“The Almighty presented us with oil, but not with neighbors,” Abramov said with a sigh.
And, just like Israel, Azerbaijan’s historic feud with its neighbor constantly threatens to keep dragging it into the bloody past, even as it carves out a uniquely promising future.
Political strife has challenged Azerbaijan’s journey to full-fledged democracy. Earlier this year, the government announced the results of its presidential election before it was held, making the country a punch line on “The Daily Show.” But in their 21 years at the helm, the Aliyevs have transformed a communist police state into a catpitalist, struggling semi-democracy — all the while negotiating a treacherous neighborhood.
“Don’t write off Azerbaijan just yet,” Matthew Bryza, former United States ambassador to Azerbaijan, told CNN last month.
Indeed, the country’s long history of tolerance may yet ensure its success.
In Baku, I told Ambassador Iskandarov how much I’d enjoyed the local food, a blend of Persian and Turkish cuisines. He told me I should really visit the best Azerbaijani restaurant in the United States — Baku Palace, in Brooklyn. Its owner, he said, is a Jew.
Monday, December 30, 2013
Wednesday, December 25, 2013
The real story of Christmas: from sun-worship to Sinterklaas
Interesting history. Love the bit about Jews at Chinese restaurants.
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The real story of Christmas: From sun-worship to Sinterklaas
Haaretz 24/12/13
By Elon Gilad
The first Christians wouldn't recognize today's Santa-centric holiday, let alone figure out what that tree is doing in the living room.
History doesn’t record when the first Christmas was celebrated, but it was probably sometime in the fourth century CE, in the Roman Empire. What's sure is that the first historic record of the holiday is a calendar dating from 354 CE, belonging to a rich Roman Christian named Philocalus.
That calendar tells us that on the same date - December 25 - another holiday was celebrated, marking the birth of Sol Invictus, “the Unconquered Sun.” That was a new pagan cult, worshiping a new sun deity.
Both these holidays coincided with the Roman festival of Saturnalia, which had been celebrated from December 17 to December 24th. That was a festival celebrating the god Saturn, which – as we will see - contributed heavily to latter-day Christmas traditions.
Why December 25?
Scholars differ on why December 25, was chosen as the birthday of Jesus, since it apparently wasn't. Hippolytus, in the second century, was probably the first to propose this date. The New Testament doesn’t tell us when the birth took place: and the only clue the text gives us - "some shepherds staying out in the fields keeping watch over their flock by night" (Luke 2:8) actually implies that the birth took place in the spring or summer, as sheep would have been kept indoors during the cold winter nights.
Most probably that date was based on the birth-date of Sol Invictus, which is marked on the Winter Solstice - when the sun overcomes darkness and the days begin to get longer.
The sun is born
Early Christian symbolism would often liken Jesus with the sun. As Christianity developed, becoming the official religion of the Roman Empire, many pagan traditions were assumed . This is blatantly clear in the case of Christmas, which took on many of the traditions of Saturnalia, most notably the traditions of gift-giving and merrymaking.
When the Germanic tribes adopted Christianity and with it the holiday of Christmas, they too contributed to the traditions of the holiday by incorporating aspects of the pagan winter festival Yule into the Christian holiday. Most notable of these are the veneration of evergreens, which would with time morph into the Christmas tree; the traditions of holly and mistletoe decoration; and a wild hunt of flying creatures led by the long-bearded god Odin, who is believed to have been the prototype of Santa Claus.
A Greek bishop merges with Odin
Another aspect that Christmas adopted from the Germanic Yule is heavy drinking. Though this is not associated with Christmas anymore, during the Middle Ages drinking was a major part of the holiday. In general Christmas during the Middle Ages would have been very foreign to a modern-day observer - it was mostly a festival of drinking and revelry, much closer to Saturnalia than our modern Christmas.
It was during the Middle Ages when the veneration of Saint Nicolas, a third to fourth-century Greek bishop living in what is today Turkey, developed into the holiday figure of Sinterklaas in the Netherlands.
St. Nicolas was said to have given gifts to children and thus was considered the patron saint of schoolchildren. According to tradition, Sinterklaas would come from Spain on a steamboat accompanied by a mischievous Moorish helper called Zwarte Piet. This helper would kidnap bad children and report to Sinterklaas on good children, who would then receive gifts on Dece,ber 6th, which was Sinterklaas' feast day.
Later, during the Reformation, many Netherlanders stopped celebrating the saints’ feast days, and the gift-giving associated with Sinterklaas migrated from December 6 to Christmas.
Christmas is banned, the people are unimpressed
In the English-speaking world, the Protestant Reformation was even more radical, abolishing not only saint feasts but going as far as banning Christmas itself.
In the wake of the English Civil War, Christmas was abolished in 1647, though many outright acts of protest followed, with people defying the Puritans and continuing to celebrate the holiday, albeit in a less public manner.
Even after the restoration of the Monarchy in 1660, celebration of Christmas wasn’t completely restored to its former glory.
At roughly the same time, the tradition of setting up a tree in one’s home and lighting candles began to spread in Germany. The concept spread among European nobility during the 18th and 19th centuries, reaching the lower classes only in the late 19th century.
The huge success of Charles Dickens’ "A Christmas Carol" in 1843 greatly contributed to popularizing Christmas, and gave it much of the qualities we associate with it today: a holiday centered around the family, as opposed as a community holiday celebrated in church.
The book also contributed to the popularity of the phrase “Merry Christmas,” which appears many times throughout it. That very same year the first commercially printed Christmas cards were printed and sold, bearing that wish - "Merry Christmas".
Meanwhile in 1823, "A Visit From St. Nicholas" (that’s the poem starting with “'Twas the Night Before Christmas”) by Clement Clarke Moore was published in the United States. This contributed to the spread of Santa Claus, at this point merging the serious Dutch Sinterklaas with the jolly English personification of Christmas known as Father Christmas, and gift-giving in the English-speaking world.
Come the Chinese restaurant
This emphasis on gifts led merchants and manufactures to decorate their stores and ads with Christmas themes, hoping it would be their products that would be bought and gifted. By the mid-19th century people began to complain that the holiday was losing its “true meaning” in face of commercialization.
In 1870, President Ulysses S. Grant signed a law that officially made Christmas a secular federal holiday.
This coincided with a mass influx of Eastern European Jewish immigrants into America. Finding shops closed on this day and not celebrating Christmas themselves, they found themselves going to Chinese restaurants that stayed open because their owners didn’t celebrate Christmas either. Moreover, the Chinese restaurants were located nearby, as Jewish, Chinese and other poor immigrants tended to live in the same slums.
This is the origin of the Jewish-American tradition of eating at Chinese restaurants on Christmas.
Many of the most popular Christmas carols were written and composed in the 19th Century: “Silent Night,” originally in German in 1818, “O Holy Night,” originally in French in 1847, “Joy to the World,” originally in English in 1839, “Jingle Bells,” also originally in English, in 1857, and “Deck the Halls,” originally in Welsh in 1877, to name a few.
These began to be superseded after the advent of the radio and the phonograph by popular Christmas songs especially during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Many if these were written by Jews, among them: “Sleigh Ride,” written by Mitchell Parish, originally Michael Hyman Pashelinsky, in 1948, Let It Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow!" was written and composed by Sammy Cahn (b. Samuel Cohen) and Jule Styne (b. Julius Kerwin Stein) in 1945. Irving Berlin (b. Israel Isidore Beilin) wrote “White Christmas”, and Johnny Marks wrote both “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree."
Christmas broadcasts began in earnest during the second half of the 20th century, most notably Frank Capra’s “It's a Wonderful Life” from 1946 and “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” which first aired in 1965.
In recent years Christmas has become a battleground for the opponents of the separation of church and state, who oppose the public endorsement of the Christian holiday by government and public companies and conservative Christians, who believe a “War on Christmas” is being waged. The liberals claiming the worship of Jesus shouldn’t be forced on them and the conservatives claiming that their right to worship freely is being infringed upon. But if the Protestant Reformation with all its power couldn't manage to stamp out the holiday spirit, grousing in the op-eds section of the press isn't likely to either.
-----------
The real story of Christmas: From sun-worship to Sinterklaas
Haaretz 24/12/13
By Elon Gilad
The first Christians wouldn't recognize today's Santa-centric holiday, let alone figure out what that tree is doing in the living room.
History doesn’t record when the first Christmas was celebrated, but it was probably sometime in the fourth century CE, in the Roman Empire. What's sure is that the first historic record of the holiday is a calendar dating from 354 CE, belonging to a rich Roman Christian named Philocalus.
That calendar tells us that on the same date - December 25 - another holiday was celebrated, marking the birth of Sol Invictus, “the Unconquered Sun.” That was a new pagan cult, worshiping a new sun deity.
Both these holidays coincided with the Roman festival of Saturnalia, which had been celebrated from December 17 to December 24th. That was a festival celebrating the god Saturn, which – as we will see - contributed heavily to latter-day Christmas traditions.
Why December 25?
Scholars differ on why December 25, was chosen as the birthday of Jesus, since it apparently wasn't. Hippolytus, in the second century, was probably the first to propose this date. The New Testament doesn’t tell us when the birth took place: and the only clue the text gives us - "some shepherds staying out in the fields keeping watch over their flock by night" (Luke 2:8) actually implies that the birth took place in the spring or summer, as sheep would have been kept indoors during the cold winter nights.
Most probably that date was based on the birth-date of Sol Invictus, which is marked on the Winter Solstice - when the sun overcomes darkness and the days begin to get longer.
The sun is born
Early Christian symbolism would often liken Jesus with the sun. As Christianity developed, becoming the official religion of the Roman Empire, many pagan traditions were assumed . This is blatantly clear in the case of Christmas, which took on many of the traditions of Saturnalia, most notably the traditions of gift-giving and merrymaking.
When the Germanic tribes adopted Christianity and with it the holiday of Christmas, they too contributed to the traditions of the holiday by incorporating aspects of the pagan winter festival Yule into the Christian holiday. Most notable of these are the veneration of evergreens, which would with time morph into the Christmas tree; the traditions of holly and mistletoe decoration; and a wild hunt of flying creatures led by the long-bearded god Odin, who is believed to have been the prototype of Santa Claus.
A Greek bishop merges with Odin
Another aspect that Christmas adopted from the Germanic Yule is heavy drinking. Though this is not associated with Christmas anymore, during the Middle Ages drinking was a major part of the holiday. In general Christmas during the Middle Ages would have been very foreign to a modern-day observer - it was mostly a festival of drinking and revelry, much closer to Saturnalia than our modern Christmas.
It was during the Middle Ages when the veneration of Saint Nicolas, a third to fourth-century Greek bishop living in what is today Turkey, developed into the holiday figure of Sinterklaas in the Netherlands.
St. Nicolas was said to have given gifts to children and thus was considered the patron saint of schoolchildren. According to tradition, Sinterklaas would come from Spain on a steamboat accompanied by a mischievous Moorish helper called Zwarte Piet. This helper would kidnap bad children and report to Sinterklaas on good children, who would then receive gifts on Dece,ber 6th, which was Sinterklaas' feast day.
Later, during the Reformation, many Netherlanders stopped celebrating the saints’ feast days, and the gift-giving associated with Sinterklaas migrated from December 6 to Christmas.
Christmas is banned, the people are unimpressed
In the English-speaking world, the Protestant Reformation was even more radical, abolishing not only saint feasts but going as far as banning Christmas itself.
In the wake of the English Civil War, Christmas was abolished in 1647, though many outright acts of protest followed, with people defying the Puritans and continuing to celebrate the holiday, albeit in a less public manner.
Even after the restoration of the Monarchy in 1660, celebration of Christmas wasn’t completely restored to its former glory.
At roughly the same time, the tradition of setting up a tree in one’s home and lighting candles began to spread in Germany. The concept spread among European nobility during the 18th and 19th centuries, reaching the lower classes only in the late 19th century.
The huge success of Charles Dickens’ "A Christmas Carol" in 1843 greatly contributed to popularizing Christmas, and gave it much of the qualities we associate with it today: a holiday centered around the family, as opposed as a community holiday celebrated in church.
The book also contributed to the popularity of the phrase “Merry Christmas,” which appears many times throughout it. That very same year the first commercially printed Christmas cards were printed and sold, bearing that wish - "Merry Christmas".
Meanwhile in 1823, "A Visit From St. Nicholas" (that’s the poem starting with “'Twas the Night Before Christmas”) by Clement Clarke Moore was published in the United States. This contributed to the spread of Santa Claus, at this point merging the serious Dutch Sinterklaas with the jolly English personification of Christmas known as Father Christmas, and gift-giving in the English-speaking world.
Come the Chinese restaurant
This emphasis on gifts led merchants and manufactures to decorate their stores and ads with Christmas themes, hoping it would be their products that would be bought and gifted. By the mid-19th century people began to complain that the holiday was losing its “true meaning” in face of commercialization.
In 1870, President Ulysses S. Grant signed a law that officially made Christmas a secular federal holiday.
This coincided with a mass influx of Eastern European Jewish immigrants into America. Finding shops closed on this day and not celebrating Christmas themselves, they found themselves going to Chinese restaurants that stayed open because their owners didn’t celebrate Christmas either. Moreover, the Chinese restaurants were located nearby, as Jewish, Chinese and other poor immigrants tended to live in the same slums.
This is the origin of the Jewish-American tradition of eating at Chinese restaurants on Christmas.
Many of the most popular Christmas carols were written and composed in the 19th Century: “Silent Night,” originally in German in 1818, “O Holy Night,” originally in French in 1847, “Joy to the World,” originally in English in 1839, “Jingle Bells,” also originally in English, in 1857, and “Deck the Halls,” originally in Welsh in 1877, to name a few.
These began to be superseded after the advent of the radio and the phonograph by popular Christmas songs especially during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Many if these were written by Jews, among them: “Sleigh Ride,” written by Mitchell Parish, originally Michael Hyman Pashelinsky, in 1948, Let It Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow!" was written and composed by Sammy Cahn (b. Samuel Cohen) and Jule Styne (b. Julius Kerwin Stein) in 1945. Irving Berlin (b. Israel Isidore Beilin) wrote “White Christmas”, and Johnny Marks wrote both “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree."
Christmas broadcasts began in earnest during the second half of the 20th century, most notably Frank Capra’s “It's a Wonderful Life” from 1946 and “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” which first aired in 1965.
In recent years Christmas has become a battleground for the opponents of the separation of church and state, who oppose the public endorsement of the Christian holiday by government and public companies and conservative Christians, who believe a “War on Christmas” is being waged. The liberals claiming the worship of Jesus shouldn’t be forced on them and the conservatives claiming that their right to worship freely is being infringed upon. But if the Protestant Reformation with all its power couldn't manage to stamp out the holiday spirit, grousing in the op-eds section of the press isn't likely to either.
Thursday, December 12, 2013
Iran nuclear deal - pro & con
Interesting pro & con juxtaposition.
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Iran deal: should we embrace it?
Jewish Chronicle
28/11/2013
Part 1 - YES by Lawrence Freedman
It is possible to imagine a better deal — it always is in a negotiation — but, in practice, this outcome exceeded expectations.
The expert consensus is that its key elements — no extra centrifuge activity, existing stockpile of 20 per cent enriched uranium neutralised, work on the Arak heavy water reactor suspended — will add significantly to the time it would take Iran to produce the fissile material needed to produce nuclear weapons, even if there is no further deal after six months.
The verification measures are intrusive and will give inspectors access to all the key facilities.
The sanctions relief is also not trivial and could be worth some $7 bn.
By itself, however, this is not going to make much difference to Iranian national wealth, especially in the absence of more fundamental reforms of the Iranian economy.
This creates a breathing space, providing the time to see if a comprehensive settlement can be negotiated. If the provisions of the interim agreement are honoured, there should be a growth of confidence and trust on both sides. These final negotiations will, however, be hard to conclude in the time available.
If diplomacy does fail, those who believe that any negotiations with this regime are doomed to failure must not assume that military action offers a reliable alternative. It could also well fail, especially if attempted by Israel alone. Iran has a distributed and defended nuclear infrastructure that cannot be taken out with one “surgical” blow. Sustained strikes might set the programme back a number of years, but the short-term costs could be extremely high — Iran’s regional supporters would exact revenge.
For some the details of the agreement are almost irrelevant because the real objection is to the mere fact of diplomatic engagement with such an obnoxious regime. On this view, Iran has been given an undeserved legitimacy which will encourage it to continue to follow its malign foreign policy. This critique tends to include a routine reference to Munich and appeasement.
Against this, all we can note is that some sort of shift has been taking place in the Iranian power structure, marked by the election of President Hassan Rouhani last June.
It is too early to say whether this will lead to a more moderate course in Iranian foreign policy. Hardliners in Tehran are unhappy and may well try to derail further negotiations while urging continuing strong support for Iran’s regional allies, such as Hizbollah and President Assad of Syria. This is not an argument to abandon diplomacy, but it does warn against overselling the agreement. It is by no means clear where and how this process will conclude. All we can say is that it has not started with a sell-out.
Sir Lawrence Freedman is Professor of War Studies at King’s College London
Part 2 - NO by Saeed Ghasseminejad
Last Friday, Iran was on the verge of economic collapse. It was suffering from high unemployment, high inflation and negative growth. It was totally isolated and running out of cash as it fought a Vietnam-type war in Syria.
In a word, it was desperate.
Despite their immensely strong bargaining position, the US and the West accepted a deal that neither stops Iran’s nuclear programme nor rolls it back.
In fact, by failing to address the entirety of the programme, leaving the capacity to build a bomb intact and opening the flood-gates for Iran to return to international markets, the agreement actually facilitates the country’s nuclear ambitions.
Of the three parts to Iran’s military nuclear programme — uranium enrichment (creating the fissile material), weaponisation (constructing the bomb) and building the delivery system — the deal addresses neither the second nor the third phases, and is not tough enough on enrichment. Uranium enrichment above 5 per cent will be temporarily halted, but Iran can keep its 5 per cent-enriched stockpile, which can easily be used to create 20 per cent-enriched uranium — the level required for a nuclear weapon — at a later date. And although Iran cannot add new centrifuges, it will keep around 19,000 centrifuges intact and in working order.
The agreement gives the International Atomic Energy Agency better access to the operations at Iran’s known nuclear facilities and therefore makes it easier for the world to detect an attempt at nuclear break-out. This is a significant concession, but there is barely any reference in the deal to Iran’s past military nuclear activities, which effectively leaves the weaponisation and delivery system programmes free to steam ahead over the next six months.
Barack Obama’s administration estimates that the sanctions relief is worth around $7bn. This is likely to be a wild underestimate. Iran expert Mark Dubowitz has calculated that through the repatriation of frozen assets, gold transfers to Iran in exchange for its oil and natural gas sales, petrochemicals exports and the lifting of sanctions on the Iranian auto sector, the value relief will come closer to £20bn.
With Western companies now scrambling to do business with Iran, President Hassan Rouhani is correct to have said that, thanks to this deal, the wall of sanctions will collapse in the near future.
All of this means that in six months, Iran’s economy will no longer be collapsing. If Mr Obama could not stop Iran when the country was on the rack, why we should believe he can do it when Iran is up and running again?
Over the next six months, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei will respect the deal that his foreign minister has signed, but he will not go further.
He will come back with a stronger hand and will not need to offer any more than what has just been offered.
Despite the official rhetoric, it appears that US does indeed accept a nuclear-capable Iran and its efforts now are focused on preventing a nuclear-armed Iran. This is a very dangerous road.
Many say that the cold war between Iran and US has just ended. They are wrong: it has just started. The mullahs in Tehran will use their nuclear capability to blackmail the West. The first installment is worth at least $7bn and a free hand in Syria — in six months’ time we see what the second installment looks like.
Saeed Ghasseminejad is co-fonder of the Iranian Liberal students and Graduates and PhD student in Finance at City University of New York.
-------------
Iran deal: should we embrace it?
Jewish Chronicle
28/11/2013
Part 1 - YES by Lawrence Freedman
It is possible to imagine a better deal — it always is in a negotiation — but, in practice, this outcome exceeded expectations.
The expert consensus is that its key elements — no extra centrifuge activity, existing stockpile of 20 per cent enriched uranium neutralised, work on the Arak heavy water reactor suspended — will add significantly to the time it would take Iran to produce the fissile material needed to produce nuclear weapons, even if there is no further deal after six months.
The verification measures are intrusive and will give inspectors access to all the key facilities.
The sanctions relief is also not trivial and could be worth some $7 bn.
By itself, however, this is not going to make much difference to Iranian national wealth, especially in the absence of more fundamental reforms of the Iranian economy.
This creates a breathing space, providing the time to see if a comprehensive settlement can be negotiated. If the provisions of the interim agreement are honoured, there should be a growth of confidence and trust on both sides. These final negotiations will, however, be hard to conclude in the time available.
If diplomacy does fail, those who believe that any negotiations with this regime are doomed to failure must not assume that military action offers a reliable alternative. It could also well fail, especially if attempted by Israel alone. Iran has a distributed and defended nuclear infrastructure that cannot be taken out with one “surgical” blow. Sustained strikes might set the programme back a number of years, but the short-term costs could be extremely high — Iran’s regional supporters would exact revenge.
For some the details of the agreement are almost irrelevant because the real objection is to the mere fact of diplomatic engagement with such an obnoxious regime. On this view, Iran has been given an undeserved legitimacy which will encourage it to continue to follow its malign foreign policy. This critique tends to include a routine reference to Munich and appeasement.
Against this, all we can note is that some sort of shift has been taking place in the Iranian power structure, marked by the election of President Hassan Rouhani last June.
It is too early to say whether this will lead to a more moderate course in Iranian foreign policy. Hardliners in Tehran are unhappy and may well try to derail further negotiations while urging continuing strong support for Iran’s regional allies, such as Hizbollah and President Assad of Syria. This is not an argument to abandon diplomacy, but it does warn against overselling the agreement. It is by no means clear where and how this process will conclude. All we can say is that it has not started with a sell-out.
Sir Lawrence Freedman is Professor of War Studies at King’s College London
Part 2 - NO by Saeed Ghasseminejad
Last Friday, Iran was on the verge of economic collapse. It was suffering from high unemployment, high inflation and negative growth. It was totally isolated and running out of cash as it fought a Vietnam-type war in Syria.
In a word, it was desperate.
Despite their immensely strong bargaining position, the US and the West accepted a deal that neither stops Iran’s nuclear programme nor rolls it back.
In fact, by failing to address the entirety of the programme, leaving the capacity to build a bomb intact and opening the flood-gates for Iran to return to international markets, the agreement actually facilitates the country’s nuclear ambitions.
Of the three parts to Iran’s military nuclear programme — uranium enrichment (creating the fissile material), weaponisation (constructing the bomb) and building the delivery system — the deal addresses neither the second nor the third phases, and is not tough enough on enrichment. Uranium enrichment above 5 per cent will be temporarily halted, but Iran can keep its 5 per cent-enriched stockpile, which can easily be used to create 20 per cent-enriched uranium — the level required for a nuclear weapon — at a later date. And although Iran cannot add new centrifuges, it will keep around 19,000 centrifuges intact and in working order.
The agreement gives the International Atomic Energy Agency better access to the operations at Iran’s known nuclear facilities and therefore makes it easier for the world to detect an attempt at nuclear break-out. This is a significant concession, but there is barely any reference in the deal to Iran’s past military nuclear activities, which effectively leaves the weaponisation and delivery system programmes free to steam ahead over the next six months.
Barack Obama’s administration estimates that the sanctions relief is worth around $7bn. This is likely to be a wild underestimate. Iran expert Mark Dubowitz has calculated that through the repatriation of frozen assets, gold transfers to Iran in exchange for its oil and natural gas sales, petrochemicals exports and the lifting of sanctions on the Iranian auto sector, the value relief will come closer to £20bn.
With Western companies now scrambling to do business with Iran, President Hassan Rouhani is correct to have said that, thanks to this deal, the wall of sanctions will collapse in the near future.
All of this means that in six months, Iran’s economy will no longer be collapsing. If Mr Obama could not stop Iran when the country was on the rack, why we should believe he can do it when Iran is up and running again?
Over the next six months, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei will respect the deal that his foreign minister has signed, but he will not go further.
He will come back with a stronger hand and will not need to offer any more than what has just been offered.
Despite the official rhetoric, it appears that US does indeed accept a nuclear-capable Iran and its efforts now are focused on preventing a nuclear-armed Iran. This is a very dangerous road.
Many say that the cold war between Iran and US has just ended. They are wrong: it has just started. The mullahs in Tehran will use their nuclear capability to blackmail the West. The first installment is worth at least $7bn and a free hand in Syria — in six months’ time we see what the second installment looks like.
Saeed Ghasseminejad is co-fonder of the Iranian Liberal students and Graduates and PhD student in Finance at City University of New York.
Tuesday, November 05, 2013
The Greatest Enemy of Privacy Is Ambiguity
Superb article.
---------
The Greatest Enemy of Privacy Is Ambiguity
If we can't define what it means to be left alone, don't be surprised when the government comes knocking.
J.M. Berger
31/10/2013
Foreign Policy Mag
The details of who is listening to what and who knew may be decidedly unclear, but it's hard to escape the clamor over one of our most cherished possessions: privacy.
But that word, and the concept behind it, is fluid, subjective, contextual, and self-referential -- shifting sands that have come to the forefront in our torturous public debate about NSA surveillance.
In their formative years, most people discover the dictionary game -- in which you look up a word and then look up all the words used in the first word's definition.
Properly executed, this exercise teaches us something important about the power and challenge of language -- how some of our most important words drift into meaninglessness because their definitions are circular, while others bloat into unmanageable complexity due to the number of additional, definable terms needed to describe them.
Depending on what dictionary you choose, the word "privacy" has multiple definitions, and the border between one and another is not always clear. Random House provides the following three definitions that are relevant to our current national drama:
1. the state of being private; retirement or seclusion.
2. the state of being free from intrusion or disturbance in one's private life or affairs: the right to privacy.
3. secrecy.
"Intrusion" and "disturbance" are highly subjective, and privacy as the state of being private or in reference to one's private affairs immediately invokes the circular problem. As an adjective, "private" offers up five more definitions, four of which are relevant to this discussion:
1. belonging to some particular person: private property.
2. pertaining to or affecting a particular person or a small group of persons; individual; personal: for your private satisfaction.
3. confined to or intended only for the persons immediately concerned; confidential: a private meeting.
4. personal and not publicly expressed: one's private feelings.
There is a long road from "belonging to a particular person" to "personal and not publicly expressed." The definitions of intrusion and disturbance take on a similarly wide range. We don't have to take this game to its invariably frustrating conclusion to grasp the point.
Countless volumes have documented the history of privacy as a concept, from open-air latrines to individual bedrooms. The idea of privacy many of us grew up with -- the proposition that people are entitled to locks on a door -- has few precedents in the long history of mankind, and it has mutated considerably in my lifetime.
Locks are devices that protect our physical selves, our belongings, and our "privacy" -- the idea of secrecy pertaining to what actually goes on behind those closed doors. But within a generation, many of our most cherished secrets have migrated from the physical realm to the immaterial.
Our secrets are now represented as data, in an unfathomably complex infrastructure of servers and lines of communication (and we didn't need the NSA leaks to let us know that the locks on those doors are not deadbolts).
But secrets are no longer something we scrupulously hoard. They have become currency. We barter personal data for convenience on a near continual basis, whether by using a bank card, providing an email address in exchange for a coupon, applying for a mortgage, managing a Facebook page -- or supporting a phantasmagoric government mandate of zero-tolerance for terrorism.
The ethereal web of our intertwined personal currencies has now reached a tipping point, and it's time to start making tough choices.
Unlike paper money, each datum we spend is not a discrete, anonymous unit. It is collected, stored, aggregated, and analyzed to create a set of increasingly accurate inferences about personal thoughts and preferences that people never intended to disclose.
The debate is arguably already out of control, the product of a media and social media machine that chews up issues, spits them out in wads on the sidewalk, and proudly points at them, saying "Look what I did!"
But it's still worth trying to nail down concrete definitions that can enable us to talk about exactly what it is that we want and what we fear.
The most relevant definition of "privacy" at play in current events -- debates over NSA surveillance, stop-and-frisk, the NYPD's massive intelligence apparatus, and the FBI's widespread use of informants -- is this: "the state of being free from intrusion or disturbance in one's private life or affairs," with "private" defined as "personal and not publicly expressed."
This sets up three basic questions we need to answer, just to get started:
1) What is public expression?
2) What is intrusion?
3) What is disturbance?
Let's look at each in turn.
Public Expression
Almost everyone agrees that our personal information -- whether thoughts, views, or phone numbers -- is entitled to some sort of protection. But we engage in a wide variety of transactions in which the line between public and private is ambiguous or inconsistent.
The cell phone is the exemplar of the spiraling complexity of this question. Although it is by no means the only place where privacy transactions occur, the tradeoffs one accepts in carrying and using a cell phone in a typical manner are breathtaking.
Your cell phone number is "private" by default -- which is to say unlisted. This protects you from the most gross and unsubtle level of intrusions and disturbances -- unsolicited calls and texts from total strangers.
But you continually barter your cell phone's information in exchange for services, and the information you offer is increasingly comprehensive.
For starters, your service provider unavoidably has access to your number, which means they can (and do) call and text you with sales pitches, surveys, and billing reminders. That's the tip of the iceberg.
If you keep GPS and WiFi turned on, enabling a host of services, your carrier has access to your precise location at virtually all times -- and not just longitude and latitude. This data is easily and automatically correlated to the kind of places you visit -- what grocery store you use, which restaurants you visit, what bookstores you patronize.
If your email and social media accounts flow into the phone, that's a whole new level of information for barter: the books you order online, the news sources on which you rely, who are your friends and where do they live and what are their phone numbers, email addresses, and social media accounts.
Each piece of data by itself is relatively limited in what it says about you, and each feels innocuous when you give it up. Of course, you provide an email when ordering from Amazon.com. Why wouldn't you? And checking Facebook or Twitter on your phone is just so convenient. All it costs is your account information.
For the most part, we presume, this information just dumps into an anonymous sea of data, disassociated from our individual lives, or at least from any important aspect. But regardless of whether this is true, simply owning and using a cell phone represents a continual disclosure of information -- an expression of thoughts, views, and preferences.
Is this expression public? Not exactly, but it's not private either.
Each vendor of convenience requires you to express something about yourself -- sometimes individually, such as when you type in an address for GPS navigation, or in aggregate, such as when you use the Google Now phone app, which scans a broad spectrum of your data in order to inform you what restaurants are nearby, the gate from which your next flight will depart, and when your packages will arrive.
Based on the privacy settings you have selected (or failed to select), you disclose information so rich that it's hard to truly appreciate how much it says about you.
You also allow certain groups of companies to share that data with other companies and services. Each time you do anything with your phone, you give up a little shred of data, or perhaps a whole bucketful. Few people are rigorous about tracking where that data goes and what a company does with it.
Intrusion
You have expressed information by using your phone, and while it's not exactly public, it's also not secret. It's been given to a third party on the basis of an explicit contract that dictates how the information can be used -- even though you probably haven't read it.
When you agree to the terms of service for Google Now, for instance, you explicitly agree to let it analyze your life and draw inferences about you. It then serves those inferences back to you in the form of reminders and helpful prompts, such as how long it will take you to get home from your current location using your normal mode of transportation.
This situation gets dicier when you agree to share information with companies that share with third parties. If you spend a few minutes Googling information about where to buy widgets and click onto a few promising sites, you will probably notice that ads for widgets miraculously start displaying on other websites you visit.
This feels intrusive, at least depending on how you parse the definition, but you agreed to this, either explicitly by okaying a terms-of-service contract, or implicitly by enabling cookies in your web browser.
If you're not careful about settings and practices, you might later find emails about widgets in your inbox, or tweets and Facebook posts about widgets in your timeline, a higher degree of intrusion. If you're extraordinarily careless, you might get robotic phone calls about widget bargains in your area.
Most people tolerate a certain amount of intrusion in exchange for convenience, a fact that is cited by some defenders of the NSA's massive data collection program, who argue that American citizens have consented to this collection by voting, or failing to vote -- in the same way that they may or may not read the terms of service for Google Now.
While there is some validity to this argument, democracy is a very indirect form of consent, full of complications and considerations. And consent to intrusion is not the only issue at play.
Disturbance
Where the NSA differs substantially from Google or the phone company is its potential for disturbance -- which is almost never consensual. One might support stop-and-frisk as a policy, but nearly everyone would opt out for themselves, given a choice.
No one disputes that telecommunications and Internet service providers can and do use your data in intrusive ways. But they have neither a compelling motive nor a commercial interest in disturbing your private life.
In contrast, government surveillance is entirely predicated on an intent to disturb.
One of the primary reasons for surveillance is to determine whether the government should actively interfere in your life -- by arresting you, infiltrating your social circles, freezing your assets, taking away your security clearance, prohibiting you from air travel, or even targeting you for death.
For the vast majority of people, government data collection is used to rule out such disturbances. For a much smaller number, that data will be used to justify hostile action.
And for a smaller number still, the data will be used to justify that which is unjust -- disturbances of people who have been wrongly identified as a threat. This can mean anything from an intrusive investigation to a wrongful arrest, or even a targeted killing.
The government is not simply collecting data, it's using that data to judge the people represented therein, whether as potential targets for military action overseas or for a referral to the FBI.
Collecting data -- the focus of most NSA debates -- carries different considerations than using that data to judge people.
For many, the act of collection is enough to constitute an intrusion. But judgment is inextricably tied to disturbance, a much more serious issue.
For nearly everyone in the world, the NSA's judgment is "we're not interested." But when the stakes are so high, who wants to be judged at all?
All of this takes place in deep secrecy, which is also reasonable cause for concern. Complicating matters further still is the method by which the vast majority of such judgments are rendered. Here, we veer into entirely new and largely untested waters.
Judgment by Inference
There are two reasons the NSA wants so very much data. The first reason is prosaic. If the data has already been collected, it can be searched almost instantaneously, as opposed to starting with a phone number or email, obtaining a warrant, then waiting for one or several service providers to return the requested information days or even weeks later.
The second reason is exotic and far more problematic.
If someone picks up your cell phone and reads everything on it, they will likely come away with a rich portrait of your life and personality. But -- law and conscience aside -- it's physically impossible for the NSA or Google or anyone to manually read each subscriber's content.
It's different when you collect a massive amount of data. Even when the content of communications is not reviewed, an analyst can use complicated mathematical techniques to draw inferences about individual users.
These algorithms are difficult for non-mathematicians to understand, but not necessarily difficult to employ. It's not totally clear what the NSA is doing with the data it collects, but it is clear this type of analysis is part of the agency's toolkit.
The tools that allow Amazon.com to accurately guess what books you would like can also be used to infer your race, religion, sexual orientation, and political party, even though you have never provided that information to the company.
It's possible to do the same thing with the largest source of data the NSA collects (as of the latest disclosures). Known as metadata, this information ignores the content of your communications -- such as an audio recording of a phone call -- and instead focuses on who you call, when, where, and for how long.
On the face of it, this seems less intrusive than listening to the content. But content-free metadata can be used to make inferences about your religious or political views -- even if you never explicitly stated them during the call. Metadata is currently being used to determine whether callers are probably terrorists.
In theory, the massive quantities of data collected should make these inferences pretty accurate, but the degree of certainty will never reach 100 percent. More troubling, there are no public records about exactly what the success rate is. Ninety-nine percent? Sixty-five percent? Twenty? Does the NSA itself even know?
Instead, we're asked to have blind faith in the power of math and the integrity and competence of a government that all too often disappoints us in spectacular fashion.
Where do we go from here?
So far, the privacy debate sparked by the NSA's surveillance program has foundered in a morass of emotional reactions, bad and incomplete information, and personality-driven analysis. On Twitter and on TV, heated reactions fly as each nugget of new information emerges, and theses are rewritten each time the picture changes.
But the discussion is equally hobbled by the rapidly changing landscape of privacy definitions and expectations, layered onto a woefully outdated legal framework.
The Fourth Amendment's guarantee against "unreasonable searches and seizures" is more ambiguous by the day, setting an extremely subjective standard (reasonableness) for searches of what the Constitution's authors certainly understood as material things.
A concept that would have been foreign to our forefathers now dominates the debate over privacy. Who owns our personal data?
Ownership is crucial to both the legal and philosophical questions raised by the development of social media and by the NSA's surveillance collection, much of which is informed by a 1979 Supreme Court ruling, Smith v. Maryland, which in its most simplistic dimension ruled that companies own most of the data we share with them.
When Smith v. Maryland was written, "metadata" consisted mainly of paper sheets listing phone calls that had been dialed, which typically had to be correlated with subscriber information through manual searches of large printed directories. The contents of a phone call were ephemeral if not purposefully recorded, compared to the contents of an email, which persist indefinitely on servers.
Today's metadata is richer and more informative, and it can be processed using instantaneous analytical techniques that were only science fiction in 1979. Even today, we can barely grasp how much personal information metadata reveals.
Rather than embark on a new round of laws and court rulings that cover the current technologies and will require revision in another 10 or 30 years, it's time to start thinking about underlying principles.
The answers to these questions will determine the direction of policies. If we want broad changes to government surveillance practices that protect as many people as possible, we have to focus on intrusion. If we want narrower changes designed to protect most people while preserving the utility of these techniques for law enforcement and counterterrorism, we need to focus on disturbance.
This question will only become more pressing. While mass collection of data is still primarily the province of counterterrorism, it is almost impossible to imagine that it will not find applications in more ordinary law enforcement -- the war on drugs, gun control, fraud detection, drunk driving, and more. It would be foolish to defer dealing with this issue until local police are using predictive algorithms to search car trunks and correlate high school truancy patterns with the likelihood of drug use.
In an age of reactionary politics and infamous gridlock, it may be too much to expect that the U.S. government can tackle these issues in a responsible and comprehensive manner, but if we fail to do so, we are only delaying the moment of truth. These questions will continue to return, in murkier and more complex forms.
It may be satisfying to demand quick fixes in reaction to specific programs, policies, and technologies, but such correctives do little to address the underlying ambiguities that stem from our loose definition of privacy, and our urgent but as yet inchoate expectations of control over our personal information.
For those who worry about government power, ambiguity is a far greater enemy than any individual or institution, even if corrupt. We will never have a government entirely free from honest mistakes and intentional overreach. But when we fail to define our expectations, we invite abuse and make accountability next to impossible.
If we can't clearly articulate what we want and need, don't be surprised when the government takes full advantage of the gaps.
---------
The Greatest Enemy of Privacy Is Ambiguity
If we can't define what it means to be left alone, don't be surprised when the government comes knocking.
J.M. Berger
31/10/2013
Foreign Policy Mag
The details of who is listening to what and who knew may be decidedly unclear, but it's hard to escape the clamor over one of our most cherished possessions: privacy.
But that word, and the concept behind it, is fluid, subjective, contextual, and self-referential -- shifting sands that have come to the forefront in our torturous public debate about NSA surveillance.
In their formative years, most people discover the dictionary game -- in which you look up a word and then look up all the words used in the first word's definition.
Properly executed, this exercise teaches us something important about the power and challenge of language -- how some of our most important words drift into meaninglessness because their definitions are circular, while others bloat into unmanageable complexity due to the number of additional, definable terms needed to describe them.
Depending on what dictionary you choose, the word "privacy" has multiple definitions, and the border between one and another is not always clear. Random House provides the following three definitions that are relevant to our current national drama:
1. the state of being private; retirement or seclusion.
2. the state of being free from intrusion or disturbance in one's private life or affairs: the right to privacy.
3. secrecy.
"Intrusion" and "disturbance" are highly subjective, and privacy as the state of being private or in reference to one's private affairs immediately invokes the circular problem. As an adjective, "private" offers up five more definitions, four of which are relevant to this discussion:
1. belonging to some particular person: private property.
2. pertaining to or affecting a particular person or a small group of persons; individual; personal: for your private satisfaction.
3. confined to or intended only for the persons immediately concerned; confidential: a private meeting.
4. personal and not publicly expressed: one's private feelings.
There is a long road from "belonging to a particular person" to "personal and not publicly expressed." The definitions of intrusion and disturbance take on a similarly wide range. We don't have to take this game to its invariably frustrating conclusion to grasp the point.
Countless volumes have documented the history of privacy as a concept, from open-air latrines to individual bedrooms. The idea of privacy many of us grew up with -- the proposition that people are entitled to locks on a door -- has few precedents in the long history of mankind, and it has mutated considerably in my lifetime.
Locks are devices that protect our physical selves, our belongings, and our "privacy" -- the idea of secrecy pertaining to what actually goes on behind those closed doors. But within a generation, many of our most cherished secrets have migrated from the physical realm to the immaterial.
Our secrets are now represented as data, in an unfathomably complex infrastructure of servers and lines of communication (and we didn't need the NSA leaks to let us know that the locks on those doors are not deadbolts).
But secrets are no longer something we scrupulously hoard. They have become currency. We barter personal data for convenience on a near continual basis, whether by using a bank card, providing an email address in exchange for a coupon, applying for a mortgage, managing a Facebook page -- or supporting a phantasmagoric government mandate of zero-tolerance for terrorism.
The ethereal web of our intertwined personal currencies has now reached a tipping point, and it's time to start making tough choices.
Unlike paper money, each datum we spend is not a discrete, anonymous unit. It is collected, stored, aggregated, and analyzed to create a set of increasingly accurate inferences about personal thoughts and preferences that people never intended to disclose.
The debate is arguably already out of control, the product of a media and social media machine that chews up issues, spits them out in wads on the sidewalk, and proudly points at them, saying "Look what I did!"
But it's still worth trying to nail down concrete definitions that can enable us to talk about exactly what it is that we want and what we fear.
The most relevant definition of "privacy" at play in current events -- debates over NSA surveillance, stop-and-frisk, the NYPD's massive intelligence apparatus, and the FBI's widespread use of informants -- is this: "the state of being free from intrusion or disturbance in one's private life or affairs," with "private" defined as "personal and not publicly expressed."
This sets up three basic questions we need to answer, just to get started:
1) What is public expression?
2) What is intrusion?
3) What is disturbance?
Let's look at each in turn.
Public Expression
Almost everyone agrees that our personal information -- whether thoughts, views, or phone numbers -- is entitled to some sort of protection. But we engage in a wide variety of transactions in which the line between public and private is ambiguous or inconsistent.
The cell phone is the exemplar of the spiraling complexity of this question. Although it is by no means the only place where privacy transactions occur, the tradeoffs one accepts in carrying and using a cell phone in a typical manner are breathtaking.
Your cell phone number is "private" by default -- which is to say unlisted. This protects you from the most gross and unsubtle level of intrusions and disturbances -- unsolicited calls and texts from total strangers.
But you continually barter your cell phone's information in exchange for services, and the information you offer is increasingly comprehensive.
For starters, your service provider unavoidably has access to your number, which means they can (and do) call and text you with sales pitches, surveys, and billing reminders. That's the tip of the iceberg.
If you keep GPS and WiFi turned on, enabling a host of services, your carrier has access to your precise location at virtually all times -- and not just longitude and latitude. This data is easily and automatically correlated to the kind of places you visit -- what grocery store you use, which restaurants you visit, what bookstores you patronize.
If your email and social media accounts flow into the phone, that's a whole new level of information for barter: the books you order online, the news sources on which you rely, who are your friends and where do they live and what are their phone numbers, email addresses, and social media accounts.
Each piece of data by itself is relatively limited in what it says about you, and each feels innocuous when you give it up. Of course, you provide an email when ordering from Amazon.com. Why wouldn't you? And checking Facebook or Twitter on your phone is just so convenient. All it costs is your account information.
For the most part, we presume, this information just dumps into an anonymous sea of data, disassociated from our individual lives, or at least from any important aspect. But regardless of whether this is true, simply owning and using a cell phone represents a continual disclosure of information -- an expression of thoughts, views, and preferences.
Is this expression public? Not exactly, but it's not private either.
Each vendor of convenience requires you to express something about yourself -- sometimes individually, such as when you type in an address for GPS navigation, or in aggregate, such as when you use the Google Now phone app, which scans a broad spectrum of your data in order to inform you what restaurants are nearby, the gate from which your next flight will depart, and when your packages will arrive.
Based on the privacy settings you have selected (or failed to select), you disclose information so rich that it's hard to truly appreciate how much it says about you.
You also allow certain groups of companies to share that data with other companies and services. Each time you do anything with your phone, you give up a little shred of data, or perhaps a whole bucketful. Few people are rigorous about tracking where that data goes and what a company does with it.
Intrusion
You have expressed information by using your phone, and while it's not exactly public, it's also not secret. It's been given to a third party on the basis of an explicit contract that dictates how the information can be used -- even though you probably haven't read it.
When you agree to the terms of service for Google Now, for instance, you explicitly agree to let it analyze your life and draw inferences about you. It then serves those inferences back to you in the form of reminders and helpful prompts, such as how long it will take you to get home from your current location using your normal mode of transportation.
This situation gets dicier when you agree to share information with companies that share with third parties. If you spend a few minutes Googling information about where to buy widgets and click onto a few promising sites, you will probably notice that ads for widgets miraculously start displaying on other websites you visit.
This feels intrusive, at least depending on how you parse the definition, but you agreed to this, either explicitly by okaying a terms-of-service contract, or implicitly by enabling cookies in your web browser.
If you're not careful about settings and practices, you might later find emails about widgets in your inbox, or tweets and Facebook posts about widgets in your timeline, a higher degree of intrusion. If you're extraordinarily careless, you might get robotic phone calls about widget bargains in your area.
Most people tolerate a certain amount of intrusion in exchange for convenience, a fact that is cited by some defenders of the NSA's massive data collection program, who argue that American citizens have consented to this collection by voting, or failing to vote -- in the same way that they may or may not read the terms of service for Google Now.
While there is some validity to this argument, democracy is a very indirect form of consent, full of complications and considerations. And consent to intrusion is not the only issue at play.
Disturbance
Where the NSA differs substantially from Google or the phone company is its potential for disturbance -- which is almost never consensual. One might support stop-and-frisk as a policy, but nearly everyone would opt out for themselves, given a choice.
No one disputes that telecommunications and Internet service providers can and do use your data in intrusive ways. But they have neither a compelling motive nor a commercial interest in disturbing your private life.
In contrast, government surveillance is entirely predicated on an intent to disturb.
One of the primary reasons for surveillance is to determine whether the government should actively interfere in your life -- by arresting you, infiltrating your social circles, freezing your assets, taking away your security clearance, prohibiting you from air travel, or even targeting you for death.
For the vast majority of people, government data collection is used to rule out such disturbances. For a much smaller number, that data will be used to justify hostile action.
And for a smaller number still, the data will be used to justify that which is unjust -- disturbances of people who have been wrongly identified as a threat. This can mean anything from an intrusive investigation to a wrongful arrest, or even a targeted killing.
The government is not simply collecting data, it's using that data to judge the people represented therein, whether as potential targets for military action overseas or for a referral to the FBI.
Collecting data -- the focus of most NSA debates -- carries different considerations than using that data to judge people.
For many, the act of collection is enough to constitute an intrusion. But judgment is inextricably tied to disturbance, a much more serious issue.
For nearly everyone in the world, the NSA's judgment is "we're not interested." But when the stakes are so high, who wants to be judged at all?
All of this takes place in deep secrecy, which is also reasonable cause for concern. Complicating matters further still is the method by which the vast majority of such judgments are rendered. Here, we veer into entirely new and largely untested waters.
Judgment by Inference
There are two reasons the NSA wants so very much data. The first reason is prosaic. If the data has already been collected, it can be searched almost instantaneously, as opposed to starting with a phone number or email, obtaining a warrant, then waiting for one or several service providers to return the requested information days or even weeks later.
The second reason is exotic and far more problematic.
If someone picks up your cell phone and reads everything on it, they will likely come away with a rich portrait of your life and personality. But -- law and conscience aside -- it's physically impossible for the NSA or Google or anyone to manually read each subscriber's content.
It's different when you collect a massive amount of data. Even when the content of communications is not reviewed, an analyst can use complicated mathematical techniques to draw inferences about individual users.
These algorithms are difficult for non-mathematicians to understand, but not necessarily difficult to employ. It's not totally clear what the NSA is doing with the data it collects, but it is clear this type of analysis is part of the agency's toolkit.
The tools that allow Amazon.com to accurately guess what books you would like can also be used to infer your race, religion, sexual orientation, and political party, even though you have never provided that information to the company.
It's possible to do the same thing with the largest source of data the NSA collects (as of the latest disclosures). Known as metadata, this information ignores the content of your communications -- such as an audio recording of a phone call -- and instead focuses on who you call, when, where, and for how long.
On the face of it, this seems less intrusive than listening to the content. But content-free metadata can be used to make inferences about your religious or political views -- even if you never explicitly stated them during the call. Metadata is currently being used to determine whether callers are probably terrorists.
In theory, the massive quantities of data collected should make these inferences pretty accurate, but the degree of certainty will never reach 100 percent. More troubling, there are no public records about exactly what the success rate is. Ninety-nine percent? Sixty-five percent? Twenty? Does the NSA itself even know?
Instead, we're asked to have blind faith in the power of math and the integrity and competence of a government that all too often disappoints us in spectacular fashion.
Where do we go from here?
So far, the privacy debate sparked by the NSA's surveillance program has foundered in a morass of emotional reactions, bad and incomplete information, and personality-driven analysis. On Twitter and on TV, heated reactions fly as each nugget of new information emerges, and theses are rewritten each time the picture changes.
But the discussion is equally hobbled by the rapidly changing landscape of privacy definitions and expectations, layered onto a woefully outdated legal framework.
The Fourth Amendment's guarantee against "unreasonable searches and seizures" is more ambiguous by the day, setting an extremely subjective standard (reasonableness) for searches of what the Constitution's authors certainly understood as material things.
A concept that would have been foreign to our forefathers now dominates the debate over privacy. Who owns our personal data?
Ownership is crucial to both the legal and philosophical questions raised by the development of social media and by the NSA's surveillance collection, much of which is informed by a 1979 Supreme Court ruling, Smith v. Maryland, which in its most simplistic dimension ruled that companies own most of the data we share with them.
When Smith v. Maryland was written, "metadata" consisted mainly of paper sheets listing phone calls that had been dialed, which typically had to be correlated with subscriber information through manual searches of large printed directories. The contents of a phone call were ephemeral if not purposefully recorded, compared to the contents of an email, which persist indefinitely on servers.
Today's metadata is richer and more informative, and it can be processed using instantaneous analytical techniques that were only science fiction in 1979. Even today, we can barely grasp how much personal information metadata reveals.
Rather than embark on a new round of laws and court rulings that cover the current technologies and will require revision in another 10 or 30 years, it's time to start thinking about underlying principles.
- What is privacy? Do we define privacy in its strictest sense as "secrecy," or broadly, as being free from intrusion and/or disturbance in our individual lives?
- When we share information with a third party, do we automatically forfeit secrecy? Is providing information to a company a limited form of public expression? And if so, does that mean the information is no longer private?
- Who owns the data we provide to companies? Can we take our data back after bartering it for a service?
- Companies like Amazon and Google use algorithms to make inferences about our preferences -- what we like to read, where we like to go, and where we get our news and information. Can the government access these inferences, along with the data that lies beneath them?
- Are such inferences an acceptable pretext for starting an investigation?
- How do we define intrusion and disturbance, legally speaking?
- How much intrusion are we willing to tolerate when there is no unjust disturbance? Regardless of how one defines it, most people tolerate intrusion on a nearly continuous basis, in exchange for services or simply due to thoughtlessness. When the government intrudes on our privacy, is that the same kind of barter on a society-wide basis? Should we require a more explicit form of consent?
- Regardless of where we fall on the question of intrusion, should we focus government oversight more intensely on disturbances, such as wiretaps, physical surveillance, arrests, and investigations? Isn't that where the harm is most imminent and grievous?
- If our data is fair game, what about the government's? Shouldn't we force the government to disclose in broad numbers how many conversations it actually listens to, how many of those conversations involve American citizens, how many investigations are opened as a result of mass surveillance, and how many of those leads ultimately prove pertinent to national security?
The answers to these questions will determine the direction of policies. If we want broad changes to government surveillance practices that protect as many people as possible, we have to focus on intrusion. If we want narrower changes designed to protect most people while preserving the utility of these techniques for law enforcement and counterterrorism, we need to focus on disturbance.
This question will only become more pressing. While mass collection of data is still primarily the province of counterterrorism, it is almost impossible to imagine that it will not find applications in more ordinary law enforcement -- the war on drugs, gun control, fraud detection, drunk driving, and more. It would be foolish to defer dealing with this issue until local police are using predictive algorithms to search car trunks and correlate high school truancy patterns with the likelihood of drug use.
In an age of reactionary politics and infamous gridlock, it may be too much to expect that the U.S. government can tackle these issues in a responsible and comprehensive manner, but if we fail to do so, we are only delaying the moment of truth. These questions will continue to return, in murkier and more complex forms.
It may be satisfying to demand quick fixes in reaction to specific programs, policies, and technologies, but such correctives do little to address the underlying ambiguities that stem from our loose definition of privacy, and our urgent but as yet inchoate expectations of control over our personal information.
For those who worry about government power, ambiguity is a far greater enemy than any individual or institution, even if corrupt. We will never have a government entirely free from honest mistakes and intentional overreach. But when we fail to define our expectations, we invite abuse and make accountability next to impossible.
If we can't clearly articulate what we want and need, don't be surprised when the government takes full advantage of the gaps.
Tuesday, October 01, 2013
On Pilgrimage with the Hasids
I had never heard of the Hasidic pilgrimage to Usan in the Ukraine, the "Hasidic Mecca", before reading this article, and it's a fascinating topic. But over & above that, this is a truly magnificent bit of writing.
The Hasidim travel to the burial site of Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, who in the hours before he stopped breathing, shouted in the presence of two witnesses that if when the Moon says it is Jewish New Year, a man should come to his grave in Uman and repent, he, Nachman, would pull him out of Hell by his sidelocks..
Intense religious madness. Read & enjoy.
---------
On Pilgrimage with the Hasids
Ben Judah
Standpoint Mag October 2013
...
In death the Rabbi was a tragic figure. Blinking out of a broken body, he saw his minions dancing around him. Nachman believed he had the soul of the Messiah. But he had achieved for his people — both socially and politically — precisely nothing.
He left behind obsessive writings about the dangers of masturbation, but also fables so enchanting when read in lilting Yiddish they can even induce a state of trance. He left the cryptic, frightening idea that we live in the universe of an "absent God". Nachman's writings are so fresh, yet so obscure. Read in a certain light, it would seem the Rabbi died knowing that the innermost secret of the mystical Kabbalah was that there is no God at all — he is merely what they call a "social construct", that God must constantly be created through chanted confessions and ecstatic prayer.
But then, read from another direction, his texts read like the ramblings of a medieval madman who believed he was the reincarnation of Moses, who lay sobbing, banging on the tomb of his great-grandfather in Medzhybizh, the holiest tzaddik of all, the Baal Shem Tov, demanding he reveal himself and all the secrets.
It doesn't even matter who the Rabbi really was. What matters is that in the hours before he stopped breathing, he shouted in the presence of two witnesses that if when the Moon says it is Jewish New Year, a man should come to his grave in Uman and repent, he, Nachman, would pull him out of Hell by his sidelocks.
What matters is that Hasidic Jews never stopped coming on that day to Uman. Hasids are the mystical Amish of Judaism. They go to extreme lengths to live the Torah's 613 commandments. Hasids still follow dynasties founded by charismatic Eastern European rabbis whose descendants guard specific traditions. Nachman's Hasids are different. They have no dynasty. Their tradition is coming to Uman.
Lenin sealed the city to foreigners in 1917; Hasids smuggled themselves in. The NKVD political police banned them; Hasids refused to listen. NKVD commissars were not used to being ignored. So in 1934 its agents laid a trap. They granted Hasids 34 visas. They killed half of them on the spot; the rest were deported to Siberia.
But Stalin could not stop them. Hasids kept smuggling themselves into Uman. Then Hitler invaded in 1941. The 20,000 Jews of Uman were drowned in the lake under the Rabbi's tomb. This did not stop the Hasids. Rabbis crept in incognito. Soviet refusenik Jews systematically aided the secret pilgrims coming every year. Gorbachev reopened Uman in 1988.
Uman is a Hasidic magnet. When Ukraine first reopened, 250 made the pilgrimage to the Rebbe's tomb. By the late 1990s, more than 5,000 were making the trip. Now almost 30,000 pilgrims come every New Year. Since Ukrainian independence 400,000 single pilgrimages to Uman have taken place. This has made Nachman's tomb Europe's largest — and only — Jewish mass pilgrimage. I had to see it for myself.
...
I woke up to the sound of bugling rams' horns. These were hundreds of ritual shofars, blown by Jews since they were Mesopotamian nomads. The Talmudist stopped chanting. He sighed: "Everybody is tripping the fuck out."
I closed the door. Electricity was dead in the stairwell. The stairs had turned into a health hazard. Hasids were leaving litter everywhere, from food packaging to popped juice cartons. Little boys etched Stars of David into the wall, blind to the Russian message scratched above them: "When You Litter Our Home Don't Forget To Honk, Piggies."
I was shocked to see Jews — whom I knew as lovers of degrees and certificates, accountancy courses and MBAs — rejecting every piece of modernity. I had always thought Jews a people who would do almost anything to send their daughters to Harvard. These men would disown their sons for wanting a degree.
Nightfall in Uman. The orange glow around the street lamps was brought out by the drizzle. I stumbled, psychologically. Uman hit hard, like time travel. The Yiddish child-beggars darting around my legs. The white-haired and wild-eyed Kabbalists mumbling magic incantations as they shuffled to the synagogue. The wild, rippling excitement filling the hour before Rosh Hashanah — our New Year.
The walls were plastered with Hebrew posters and Yiddish notices in the antique script that Babylonian rabbis called "the alphabet of flames". Fools hawked madman's literature on street corners while tubby rabbis threw out cartons of chocolate bread for the poor.
The hour was coming. I felt tingly and I felt lost. Under the bare bulbs of a makeshift prayer house I tried to ask what texts were being whispered. "Yiddish, Yiddish . . . Speak no Yiddish?" I shook my head. They shook theirs back in disgust. For a calming half-second I thought I had found another rationalist. Samuel was a watch salesman from Florida wearing cryptic Levantine amulets. His beard was a ketchup red. He stank of weed. But he gasped: "Uman is a taste of Messiah."
I tried to talk to a portly Hasid with a skin disease about his utter rejection of modernity but all he wanted to talk about was the exchange rate. I strode, sweating and confused, towards a stream. Hundreds of tents crammed its edge like a Jewish refugee camp. Someone tugged at my jacket pocket. It was a child, visibly disturbed. He wore a white dressing-gown. He shrieked: "Are you . . . Jewish? Are you . . . Jewish?"
I nodded.
"Can you . . . kick me in the stomach! I want to fight . . . Karate!"
Ringing laughter rushed past me. Little boys with shaved heads and shoulder-length blonde sidelocks raced their fathers to the synagogue. I struck up conversation with two Yiddish-speaking hoodies from Brooklyn's most fanatical enclave, the dominant one comically thin, his friend grotesquely overweight. They let me in on the subtext in exchange for a promise to help them track down 60 cartons of Marlboro Lights.
"This whole fucking thing is the most fun a Hasid gets all year. It's the furthest he gets from his wife he was forced to marry at 18. It's the furthest he gets out from his community. It's the furthest we get from our moms." The fat one butted in. "Is this what a festival is like?"
They swore me to anonymity before a Canadian neurologist engaged me. Between answering calls from his clinic in Toronto he made it clear it was time I faced up to "the Rebbe". We passed giant corrugated-steel warehouses turned into mega-synagogues lined with hundreds, thousands of plastic garden chairs laid out for pews. The three of them together, fleetingly, turned into the biggest synagogues in the world.
The neurologist was exulting: "Not since the Temple have so many Jews prayed in one place." The hour was here and he left me at the gate. Hebrew letters curled round the curved arch one must pass through to the Rebbe's tomb. Inside, the believers were speaking rapidly to each other as if the Rebbe was still alive: "The Rebbe is to the left." "The Rebbe is waiting for you." "May the Rebbe help you, my friend."
...
They began to scream — deep male, ungodly wails. Before sound left my mouth I imagined a hook inside my head and called it my reason. I pulled onto it. Screwing up my face, I tried not to let go, then ripped myself into the next room — the tomb itself.
The Sephardic wail of the silver-bearded cantor rushed through me. A hundred or more men crammed into small pews rocked back and forth. These were Aramaic prayers. I saw a man with pupils horrifically dilated. I saw a man in such ecstasy I thought he was convulsing. I saw a man collapse back, overcome, from the tomb. I saw sobbing men rip each other back by their shoulders just to touch it.
I tried to imagine who they were in their everyday lives in Baltimore or Eilat. But they had ceased to be those things. Behind the wall, behind the tomb, the men in white were thumping and wailing and howling out through the stone to the Rebbe. Howling that could wake the dead. Trance overcame me. Then the name of the Rebbe. In the enormity of that space I found inside me I named every family name for-whatever it was— to bless them. Then, red-eyed and tearful, I pulled myself outside. Terrified of collective hysteria. This was not my Judaism.
An old friend was sitting unfazed on the bench outside — a miserable and depressed sacked Russian diplomat. He liked to remind people he had "worked with the President himself", but I knew his attaché position in the Delhi embassy had mostly involved dealing with the visa problems of mad Russian Hari Krishnas refusing to leave ashrams.
"This is nothing compared to India. Very mild."
...
The Hasidim travel to the burial site of Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, who in the hours before he stopped breathing, shouted in the presence of two witnesses that if when the Moon says it is Jewish New Year, a man should come to his grave in Uman and repent, he, Nachman, would pull him out of Hell by his sidelocks..
Intense religious madness. Read & enjoy.
---------
On Pilgrimage with the Hasids
Ben Judah
Standpoint Mag October 2013
...
In death the Rabbi was a tragic figure. Blinking out of a broken body, he saw his minions dancing around him. Nachman believed he had the soul of the Messiah. But he had achieved for his people — both socially and politically — precisely nothing.
He left behind obsessive writings about the dangers of masturbation, but also fables so enchanting when read in lilting Yiddish they can even induce a state of trance. He left the cryptic, frightening idea that we live in the universe of an "absent God". Nachman's writings are so fresh, yet so obscure. Read in a certain light, it would seem the Rabbi died knowing that the innermost secret of the mystical Kabbalah was that there is no God at all — he is merely what they call a "social construct", that God must constantly be created through chanted confessions and ecstatic prayer.
But then, read from another direction, his texts read like the ramblings of a medieval madman who believed he was the reincarnation of Moses, who lay sobbing, banging on the tomb of his great-grandfather in Medzhybizh, the holiest tzaddik of all, the Baal Shem Tov, demanding he reveal himself and all the secrets.
It doesn't even matter who the Rabbi really was. What matters is that in the hours before he stopped breathing, he shouted in the presence of two witnesses that if when the Moon says it is Jewish New Year, a man should come to his grave in Uman and repent, he, Nachman, would pull him out of Hell by his sidelocks.
What matters is that Hasidic Jews never stopped coming on that day to Uman. Hasids are the mystical Amish of Judaism. They go to extreme lengths to live the Torah's 613 commandments. Hasids still follow dynasties founded by charismatic Eastern European rabbis whose descendants guard specific traditions. Nachman's Hasids are different. They have no dynasty. Their tradition is coming to Uman.
Lenin sealed the city to foreigners in 1917; Hasids smuggled themselves in. The NKVD political police banned them; Hasids refused to listen. NKVD commissars were not used to being ignored. So in 1934 its agents laid a trap. They granted Hasids 34 visas. They killed half of them on the spot; the rest were deported to Siberia.
But Stalin could not stop them. Hasids kept smuggling themselves into Uman. Then Hitler invaded in 1941. The 20,000 Jews of Uman were drowned in the lake under the Rabbi's tomb. This did not stop the Hasids. Rabbis crept in incognito. Soviet refusenik Jews systematically aided the secret pilgrims coming every year. Gorbachev reopened Uman in 1988.
Uman is a Hasidic magnet. When Ukraine first reopened, 250 made the pilgrimage to the Rebbe's tomb. By the late 1990s, more than 5,000 were making the trip. Now almost 30,000 pilgrims come every New Year. Since Ukrainian independence 400,000 single pilgrimages to Uman have taken place. This has made Nachman's tomb Europe's largest — and only — Jewish mass pilgrimage. I had to see it for myself.
...
I woke up to the sound of bugling rams' horns. These were hundreds of ritual shofars, blown by Jews since they were Mesopotamian nomads. The Talmudist stopped chanting. He sighed: "Everybody is tripping the fuck out."
I closed the door. Electricity was dead in the stairwell. The stairs had turned into a health hazard. Hasids were leaving litter everywhere, from food packaging to popped juice cartons. Little boys etched Stars of David into the wall, blind to the Russian message scratched above them: "When You Litter Our Home Don't Forget To Honk, Piggies."
I was shocked to see Jews — whom I knew as lovers of degrees and certificates, accountancy courses and MBAs — rejecting every piece of modernity. I had always thought Jews a people who would do almost anything to send their daughters to Harvard. These men would disown their sons for wanting a degree.
Nightfall in Uman. The orange glow around the street lamps was brought out by the drizzle. I stumbled, psychologically. Uman hit hard, like time travel. The Yiddish child-beggars darting around my legs. The white-haired and wild-eyed Kabbalists mumbling magic incantations as they shuffled to the synagogue. The wild, rippling excitement filling the hour before Rosh Hashanah — our New Year.
The walls were plastered with Hebrew posters and Yiddish notices in the antique script that Babylonian rabbis called "the alphabet of flames". Fools hawked madman's literature on street corners while tubby rabbis threw out cartons of chocolate bread for the poor.
The hour was coming. I felt tingly and I felt lost. Under the bare bulbs of a makeshift prayer house I tried to ask what texts were being whispered. "Yiddish, Yiddish . . . Speak no Yiddish?" I shook my head. They shook theirs back in disgust. For a calming half-second I thought I had found another rationalist. Samuel was a watch salesman from Florida wearing cryptic Levantine amulets. His beard was a ketchup red. He stank of weed. But he gasped: "Uman is a taste of Messiah."
I tried to talk to a portly Hasid with a skin disease about his utter rejection of modernity but all he wanted to talk about was the exchange rate. I strode, sweating and confused, towards a stream. Hundreds of tents crammed its edge like a Jewish refugee camp. Someone tugged at my jacket pocket. It was a child, visibly disturbed. He wore a white dressing-gown. He shrieked: "Are you . . . Jewish? Are you . . . Jewish?"
I nodded.
"Can you . . . kick me in the stomach! I want to fight . . . Karate!"
Ringing laughter rushed past me. Little boys with shaved heads and shoulder-length blonde sidelocks raced their fathers to the synagogue. I struck up conversation with two Yiddish-speaking hoodies from Brooklyn's most fanatical enclave, the dominant one comically thin, his friend grotesquely overweight. They let me in on the subtext in exchange for a promise to help them track down 60 cartons of Marlboro Lights.
"This whole fucking thing is the most fun a Hasid gets all year. It's the furthest he gets from his wife he was forced to marry at 18. It's the furthest he gets out from his community. It's the furthest we get from our moms." The fat one butted in. "Is this what a festival is like?"
They swore me to anonymity before a Canadian neurologist engaged me. Between answering calls from his clinic in Toronto he made it clear it was time I faced up to "the Rebbe". We passed giant corrugated-steel warehouses turned into mega-synagogues lined with hundreds, thousands of plastic garden chairs laid out for pews. The three of them together, fleetingly, turned into the biggest synagogues in the world.
The neurologist was exulting: "Not since the Temple have so many Jews prayed in one place." The hour was here and he left me at the gate. Hebrew letters curled round the curved arch one must pass through to the Rebbe's tomb. Inside, the believers were speaking rapidly to each other as if the Rebbe was still alive: "The Rebbe is to the left." "The Rebbe is waiting for you." "May the Rebbe help you, my friend."
...
They began to scream — deep male, ungodly wails. Before sound left my mouth I imagined a hook inside my head and called it my reason. I pulled onto it. Screwing up my face, I tried not to let go, then ripped myself into the next room — the tomb itself.
The Sephardic wail of the silver-bearded cantor rushed through me. A hundred or more men crammed into small pews rocked back and forth. These were Aramaic prayers. I saw a man with pupils horrifically dilated. I saw a man in such ecstasy I thought he was convulsing. I saw a man collapse back, overcome, from the tomb. I saw sobbing men rip each other back by their shoulders just to touch it.
I tried to imagine who they were in their everyday lives in Baltimore or Eilat. But they had ceased to be those things. Behind the wall, behind the tomb, the men in white were thumping and wailing and howling out through the stone to the Rebbe. Howling that could wake the dead. Trance overcame me. Then the name of the Rebbe. In the enormity of that space I found inside me I named every family name for-whatever it was— to bless them. Then, red-eyed and tearful, I pulled myself outside. Terrified of collective hysteria. This was not my Judaism.
An old friend was sitting unfazed on the bench outside — a miserable and depressed sacked Russian diplomat. He liked to remind people he had "worked with the President himself", but I knew his attaché position in the Delhi embassy had mostly involved dealing with the visa problems of mad Russian Hari Krishnas refusing to leave ashrams.
"This is nothing compared to India. Very mild."
...
Monday, September 02, 2013
Steyn on Obama on Syria - "An Accidental War"
Excellent from Steyn. "In the Middle East, the enemy of our enemy is also our enemy."
-----
An Accidental War
National Review
August 30, 2013
By Mark Steyn
Perfunctory and ineffectual war-making in Syria is worse than nothing.
I see the Obama “reset” is going so swimmingly that the president is now threatening to go to war against a dictator who gassed his own people. Don’t worry, this isn’t anything like the dictator who gassed his own people that the discredited warmonger Bush spent 2002 and early 2003 staggering ever more punchily around the country inveighing against. The 2003 dictator who gassed his own people was the leader of the Baath Party of Iraq. The 2013 dictator who gassed his own people is the leader of the Baath Party of Syria. Whole other ball of wax. The administration’s ingenious plan is to lose this war in far less time than we usually take. In the unimprovable formulation of an unnamed official speaking to the Los Angeles Times, the White House is carefully calibrating a military action “just muscular enough not to get mocked.”
...
The problem with the American way of war is that, technologically, it can’t lose, but, in every other sense, it can’t win. No one in his right mind wants to get into a tank battle or a naval bombardment with the guys responsible for over 40 percent of the planet’s military expenditures. Which is why these days there aren’t a lot of tank battles. The consummate interventionist Robert Kagan wrote in his recent book that the American military “remains unmatched.” It’s unmatched in the sense that the only guy in town with a tennis racket isn’t going to be playing a lot of tennis matches. But the object of war, in Liddell Hart’s famous distillation, is not to destroy the enemy’s tanks (or Russian helicopters) but his will. And on that front America loses, always. The “unmatched” superpower cannot impose its will on Kabul kleptocrats, Pashtun goatherds, Egyptian generals, or Benghazi militia. There is no reason to believe Syria would be an exception to this rule. America’s inability to win ought to be a burning national question, but it’s not even being asked.
Let us stipulate that many of those war-weary masses are ignorant and myopic. But at a certain level they grasp something that their leaders don’t: For a quarter-century, from Kuwait to Kosovo to Kandahar, the civilized world has gone to war only in order to save or liberate Muslims. The Pentagon is little more than central dispatch for the U.S. military’s Muslim Fast Squad. And what do we have to show for it? Liberating Syria isn’t like liberating the Netherlands: In the Middle East, the enemy of our enemy is also our enemy. Yes, those BBC images of schoolchildren with burning flesh are heart-rending. So we’ll get rid of Assad and install the local branch of al-Qaeda or the Muslim Brotherhood or whatever plucky neophyte democrat makes it to the presidential palace first — and then, instead of napalmed schoolyards, there will be, as in Egypt, burning Christian churches and women raped for going uncovered.
So what do we want in Syria? Obama can’t say, other than for him to look muscular without being mocked, like a camp bodybuilder admiring himself in the gym mirror.
Oh, well. If the British won’t be along for the ride, the French are apparently still in. What was the old gag from a decade ago during those interminable U.N. resolutions with Chirac saying “Non!” every time? Ah, yes: “Going to war without the French is like going hunting without an accordion.” Oddly enough, the worst setback for the Islamic imperialists in recent years has been President Hollande’s intervention in Mali, where, unlike the money-no-object Pentagon, the French troops had such undernourished supply lines that they had to hitch a ride to the war on C-17 transports from the Royal Air Force and Royal Canadian Air Force. And yet they won — insofar as anyone ever really wins on that benighted sod.
Meanwhile, the hyperpower is going to war because Obama wandered off prompter and accidentally made a threat. So he has to make good on it, or America will lose its credibility. But he only wants to make good on it in a perfunctory and ineffectual way. So America will lose its credibility anyway.
Maybe it’s time to learn the accordion . . .
-----
An Accidental War
National Review
August 30, 2013
By Mark Steyn
Perfunctory and ineffectual war-making in Syria is worse than nothing.
I see the Obama “reset” is going so swimmingly that the president is now threatening to go to war against a dictator who gassed his own people. Don’t worry, this isn’t anything like the dictator who gassed his own people that the discredited warmonger Bush spent 2002 and early 2003 staggering ever more punchily around the country inveighing against. The 2003 dictator who gassed his own people was the leader of the Baath Party of Iraq. The 2013 dictator who gassed his own people is the leader of the Baath Party of Syria. Whole other ball of wax. The administration’s ingenious plan is to lose this war in far less time than we usually take. In the unimprovable formulation of an unnamed official speaking to the Los Angeles Times, the White House is carefully calibrating a military action “just muscular enough not to get mocked.”
...
The problem with the American way of war is that, technologically, it can’t lose, but, in every other sense, it can’t win. No one in his right mind wants to get into a tank battle or a naval bombardment with the guys responsible for over 40 percent of the planet’s military expenditures. Which is why these days there aren’t a lot of tank battles. The consummate interventionist Robert Kagan wrote in his recent book that the American military “remains unmatched.” It’s unmatched in the sense that the only guy in town with a tennis racket isn’t going to be playing a lot of tennis matches. But the object of war, in Liddell Hart’s famous distillation, is not to destroy the enemy’s tanks (or Russian helicopters) but his will. And on that front America loses, always. The “unmatched” superpower cannot impose its will on Kabul kleptocrats, Pashtun goatherds, Egyptian generals, or Benghazi militia. There is no reason to believe Syria would be an exception to this rule. America’s inability to win ought to be a burning national question, but it’s not even being asked.
Let us stipulate that many of those war-weary masses are ignorant and myopic. But at a certain level they grasp something that their leaders don’t: For a quarter-century, from Kuwait to Kosovo to Kandahar, the civilized world has gone to war only in order to save or liberate Muslims. The Pentagon is little more than central dispatch for the U.S. military’s Muslim Fast Squad. And what do we have to show for it? Liberating Syria isn’t like liberating the Netherlands: In the Middle East, the enemy of our enemy is also our enemy. Yes, those BBC images of schoolchildren with burning flesh are heart-rending. So we’ll get rid of Assad and install the local branch of al-Qaeda or the Muslim Brotherhood or whatever plucky neophyte democrat makes it to the presidential palace first — and then, instead of napalmed schoolyards, there will be, as in Egypt, burning Christian churches and women raped for going uncovered.
So what do we want in Syria? Obama can’t say, other than for him to look muscular without being mocked, like a camp bodybuilder admiring himself in the gym mirror.
Oh, well. If the British won’t be along for the ride, the French are apparently still in. What was the old gag from a decade ago during those interminable U.N. resolutions with Chirac saying “Non!” every time? Ah, yes: “Going to war without the French is like going hunting without an accordion.” Oddly enough, the worst setback for the Islamic imperialists in recent years has been President Hollande’s intervention in Mali, where, unlike the money-no-object Pentagon, the French troops had such undernourished supply lines that they had to hitch a ride to the war on C-17 transports from the Royal Air Force and Royal Canadian Air Force. And yet they won — insofar as anyone ever really wins on that benighted sod.
Meanwhile, the hyperpower is going to war because Obama wandered off prompter and accidentally made a threat. So he has to make good on it, or America will lose its credibility. But he only wants to make good on it in a perfunctory and ineffectual way. So America will lose its credibility anyway.
Maybe it’s time to learn the accordion . . .
Tuesday, June 04, 2013
Riots in Turkey
Excellent.
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The Good News in Turkey
by Daniel Pipes
Los Angeles Times
June 4, 2013
How to interpret the recent unrest on the streets of Istanbul and about 65 other Turkish cities? Specifically, is it comparable to the Arab uprisings over the last 2½ years in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Yemen and Bahrain?
On one level, they appear unrelated, for Turkey is a far more advanced country, with a democratic culture and a modern economy. But two connections — autocracy and Syria — do tie them together, suggesting that the Turkish demonstrations could have a potentially deep importance.
The rebellion did not come out of nowhere. I was in Istanbul last fall, and it was clear then that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's dictatorial tendencies worried Turks more than his Islamic aspirations. I heard unceasing criticisms about his being "intoxicated with power," an "informal caliph" and "Turkey's elected chief social engineer."
Turks enumerated to me a lengthy list of authoritarian symptoms they suffered from the decade-long rule by Erdogan's Justice and Development Party, or AKP: suppression of political criticism, crony capitalism, manipulation of the judiciary, unjust imprisonment, show trials and a disregard for the separation of powers. In particular, they evinced annoyance at the way Erdogan seeks to impose his personal tastes on the country.
The demonstrations since Friday are protesting these actions and more. What began as a localized dispute over the uprooting of a small park at Taksim Square in the heart of modern Istanbul has rapidly grown into a national statement of defiance.
Erdogan is no Moammar Kadafi or Bashar Assad, and he will not massacre peaceful demonstrators, but heavy-handed police operations have reportedly led to 2,300 injured and, according to Amnesty International, two deaths. Further, the prime minister has reacted defiantly, not just insisting on his original plan for the park but announcing he can do whatever he pleases.
Rival die-hard football fans do the unthinkable and join forces against Erdogan.
As paraphrased by Hürriyet Daily News: "A mosque will be built in Taksim, Erdogan said. He added that he did not have to take permission from the main opposition leader or a 'few marauders' for the projects, noting that the authority had already been given by people who voted for the AKP."
Erdogan is saying, in other words, that having voted the AKP into office, Turks have given him authority to do anything he wants. He is the elected, unaccountable padishah. Well, the demonstrators and those hitherto eager foreign investors have something to say about that, perhaps putting the country's China-like economic growth at risk.
Significantly, Abdullah Gül, the president of Turkey and increasingly Erdogan's rival, adopted a very different approach to the protests. "Democracy does not only mean elections," he said. "The messages delivered with good intentions have been received." By distancing himself from the prime minister, Gül exacerbated Erdogan's isolation.
As for Syria, after a charmed near-decade in power, Erdogan made his first major miscalculation by intensely involving Turkey in the Syrian civil war. He acted with pique when Assad, the Syrian despot and a onetime buddy, ignored his (sound) advice to make reforms. Not one to take well to being rebuffed, Erdogan responded emotionally and thrust his country into the civil war, hosting the rebels, provisioning and arming them and trying to guide them.
The results have been close to disastrous from Turkey's viewpoint. The country has experienced new hostilities with Moscow, Tehran and Baghdad, lost both overland trade routes to the Persian Gulf and trade with Syria, suffered terrorism on Turkish soil (in Reyhanli) and — perhaps most ominous — witnessed tensions surge between its stridently Sunni government and the country's heterodox Muslim populations.
Thanks to the Syrian imbroglio, Turkey has lost its enviable position of strength and popularity — its "zero problems with neighbors" policy that brought with it real accomplishments — in favor of a sense of being surrounded by foes. If President Obama once bragged of his "close working relationship" with Erdogan, last month's White House meeting between the two showed neither the personal chemistry nor the practical results vis-à-vis Syria that Erdogan had sought.
In short, it appears that a decade of electoral calm, political stability and plentiful foreign investment has come to a halt and a new, more difficult era has begun for the AKP government. The moribund opposition parties may find their voice. The antiwar faction may feel emboldened. The secularists may be able to tap the wide unhappiness with the regime's efforts to corral citizens into becoming more (Islamically) virtuous.
This is excellent news. Turkey has been heading in the wrong direction under the AKP. Although a democracy, the AKP government has jailed more journalists than any other state in the world. Although secular, it has with growing urgency imposed arrays of Islamist regulations, including last week's rushed limitation on alcohol as well as warnings against public displays of affection.
Although a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Turkey engaged in 2010 in a joint air exercise with China. Although an applicant to the European Union, it plays footsie with the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, founded in 1996 by Russian and Chinese leaders as an anti-NATO grouping. Although supposedly an American ally, Turkey has humiliated Israel, called Zionism a "crime against humanity," and acclaimed the terror-listed Hamas organization.
Thanks to the demonstrations, we can be newly hopeful that Turkey may avoid the path it had been on, that of despotism, Islamification and increasingly rogue foreign relations. Perhaps its secular, democratic and pro-Western heritage can be revived.
--------------
The Good News in Turkey
by Daniel Pipes
Los Angeles Times
June 4, 2013
How to interpret the recent unrest on the streets of Istanbul and about 65 other Turkish cities? Specifically, is it comparable to the Arab uprisings over the last 2½ years in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Yemen and Bahrain?
On one level, they appear unrelated, for Turkey is a far more advanced country, with a democratic culture and a modern economy. But two connections — autocracy and Syria — do tie them together, suggesting that the Turkish demonstrations could have a potentially deep importance.
The rebellion did not come out of nowhere. I was in Istanbul last fall, and it was clear then that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's dictatorial tendencies worried Turks more than his Islamic aspirations. I heard unceasing criticisms about his being "intoxicated with power," an "informal caliph" and "Turkey's elected chief social engineer."
Turks enumerated to me a lengthy list of authoritarian symptoms they suffered from the decade-long rule by Erdogan's Justice and Development Party, or AKP: suppression of political criticism, crony capitalism, manipulation of the judiciary, unjust imprisonment, show trials and a disregard for the separation of powers. In particular, they evinced annoyance at the way Erdogan seeks to impose his personal tastes on the country.
The demonstrations since Friday are protesting these actions and more. What began as a localized dispute over the uprooting of a small park at Taksim Square in the heart of modern Istanbul has rapidly grown into a national statement of defiance.
Erdogan is no Moammar Kadafi or Bashar Assad, and he will not massacre peaceful demonstrators, but heavy-handed police operations have reportedly led to 2,300 injured and, according to Amnesty International, two deaths. Further, the prime minister has reacted defiantly, not just insisting on his original plan for the park but announcing he can do whatever he pleases.
Rival die-hard football fans do the unthinkable and join forces against Erdogan.
As paraphrased by Hürriyet Daily News: "A mosque will be built in Taksim, Erdogan said. He added that he did not have to take permission from the main opposition leader or a 'few marauders' for the projects, noting that the authority had already been given by people who voted for the AKP."
Erdogan is saying, in other words, that having voted the AKP into office, Turks have given him authority to do anything he wants. He is the elected, unaccountable padishah. Well, the demonstrators and those hitherto eager foreign investors have something to say about that, perhaps putting the country's China-like economic growth at risk.
Significantly, Abdullah Gül, the president of Turkey and increasingly Erdogan's rival, adopted a very different approach to the protests. "Democracy does not only mean elections," he said. "The messages delivered with good intentions have been received." By distancing himself from the prime minister, Gül exacerbated Erdogan's isolation.
As for Syria, after a charmed near-decade in power, Erdogan made his first major miscalculation by intensely involving Turkey in the Syrian civil war. He acted with pique when Assad, the Syrian despot and a onetime buddy, ignored his (sound) advice to make reforms. Not one to take well to being rebuffed, Erdogan responded emotionally and thrust his country into the civil war, hosting the rebels, provisioning and arming them and trying to guide them.
The results have been close to disastrous from Turkey's viewpoint. The country has experienced new hostilities with Moscow, Tehran and Baghdad, lost both overland trade routes to the Persian Gulf and trade with Syria, suffered terrorism on Turkish soil (in Reyhanli) and — perhaps most ominous — witnessed tensions surge between its stridently Sunni government and the country's heterodox Muslim populations.
Thanks to the Syrian imbroglio, Turkey has lost its enviable position of strength and popularity — its "zero problems with neighbors" policy that brought with it real accomplishments — in favor of a sense of being surrounded by foes. If President Obama once bragged of his "close working relationship" with Erdogan, last month's White House meeting between the two showed neither the personal chemistry nor the practical results vis-à-vis Syria that Erdogan had sought.
In short, it appears that a decade of electoral calm, political stability and plentiful foreign investment has come to a halt and a new, more difficult era has begun for the AKP government. The moribund opposition parties may find their voice. The antiwar faction may feel emboldened. The secularists may be able to tap the wide unhappiness with the regime's efforts to corral citizens into becoming more (Islamically) virtuous.
This is excellent news. Turkey has been heading in the wrong direction under the AKP. Although a democracy, the AKP government has jailed more journalists than any other state in the world. Although secular, it has with growing urgency imposed arrays of Islamist regulations, including last week's rushed limitation on alcohol as well as warnings against public displays of affection.
Although a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Turkey engaged in 2010 in a joint air exercise with China. Although an applicant to the European Union, it plays footsie with the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, founded in 1996 by Russian and Chinese leaders as an anti-NATO grouping. Although supposedly an American ally, Turkey has humiliated Israel, called Zionism a "crime against humanity," and acclaimed the terror-listed Hamas organization.
Thanks to the demonstrations, we can be newly hopeful that Turkey may avoid the path it had been on, that of despotism, Islamification and increasingly rogue foreign relations. Perhaps its secular, democratic and pro-Western heritage can be revived.
Thursday, May 23, 2013
Top 10 warning signs you may be a ‘Guardian Left’ anti-Semite
Top 10 warning signs you may be a ‘Guardian Left’ anti-Semite
CiFWatch
22/05/13
The Guardian’s associate editor Seumas Milne – who, in case it needs reminding, worked for the pro-Stalinist communist publication ‘Straight Left’ earlier in his career – was kind enough to Tweet a link to a piece in Foreign Policy Magazine by Stephen Walt.
The piece is titled ‘Top 10 warning signs you are a liberal imperialist‘.
The essay itself, written by the co-author of a book widely condemned for its shoddy scholarship and for arguing that Jews wield too much power in Washington, D.C., is unintentionally quite comical – a kind of ‘Western Guilt-Driven Guide to the Universe for Dummies’ – and includes, as #1, the following:
So, in the spirit of Walt’s mockery of those who ‘unknowingly’ are compromised by a deep-seeded imperialism lurking in their subconscious, here is CiF Watch’s own ‘Top 10 warning signs you may be a Guardian Left anti-Semite‘ – a list, per the links below, inspired by real life Guardianistas!)
1. You claim the mantle of human rights yet find yourself running interference for anti-Semitic world leaders and helping to spread the propaganda of Islamist extremists - and even terrorist leaders who openly call for the murder of Jews.
2. You claim to condemn racism at every opportunity yet are strangely silent or seriously downplay even the most egregious examples of antisemitic violence.
3. You claim to be a champion of progressive politics yet often use terms and advance tropes indistinguishable from classic right wing Judeophobia - such as the argument that Jews are too powerful, use their money to control politics, and are not loyal citizens.
4. You support nationalism, and don’t have a problem with the existence of more than 50 Muslim states, yet you oppose the existence of the only Jewish state in the world.
5. Even when putatively condemning antisemitism you can’t help but blame the Jews for causing antisemitism.
6. You condemn the Holocaust yet also obsessively condemn living Jews for their alleged ‘inhumanity’ and even argue that Jews haven’t learned the proper lessons from the attempt to annihilate their co-religionists from the planet.
7. You not only support Palestinian rights, but support their “right” to launch deadly terrorist attacks on Israeli Jews, under the mantle of anti-imperialist ”resistance”.
8. You characterize extremist reactionary Islamist movements as “progressive“.
9. You accuse Jews of cynically misusing the charge of antisemitism to “stifle” debate about the Jewish state.
10. You champion diversity and multiculturalism of all kinds, yet suggest that Jewish particularism represents an inherently tribal, ethnocentric and racist identity.
CiFWatch
22/05/13
The Guardian’s associate editor Seumas Milne – who, in case it needs reminding, worked for the pro-Stalinist communist publication ‘Straight Left’ earlier in his career – was kind enough to Tweet a link to a piece in Foreign Policy Magazine by Stephen Walt.
The piece is titled ‘Top 10 warning signs you are a liberal imperialist‘.
The essay itself, written by the co-author of a book widely condemned for its shoddy scholarship and for arguing that Jews wield too much power in Washington, D.C., is unintentionally quite comical – a kind of ‘Western Guilt-Driven Guide to the Universe for Dummies’ – and includes, as #1, the following:
You frequently find yourself advocating that the United States send troops, drones, weapons, Special Forces, or combat air patrols to some country that you have never visited, whose language(s) you don’t speak, and that you never paid much attention to until bad things started happening there.Whilst I don’t speak fluent academic-ese like the esteemed Harvard professor, I have become adept at deciphering an even more obscure dialect – the language of the Guardian Left.
So, in the spirit of Walt’s mockery of those who ‘unknowingly’ are compromised by a deep-seeded imperialism lurking in their subconscious, here is CiF Watch’s own ‘Top 10 warning signs you may be a Guardian Left anti-Semite‘ – a list, per the links below, inspired by real life Guardianistas!)
1. You claim the mantle of human rights yet find yourself running interference for anti-Semitic world leaders and helping to spread the propaganda of Islamist extremists - and even terrorist leaders who openly call for the murder of Jews.
2. You claim to condemn racism at every opportunity yet are strangely silent or seriously downplay even the most egregious examples of antisemitic violence.
3. You claim to be a champion of progressive politics yet often use terms and advance tropes indistinguishable from classic right wing Judeophobia - such as the argument that Jews are too powerful, use their money to control politics, and are not loyal citizens.
4. You support nationalism, and don’t have a problem with the existence of more than 50 Muslim states, yet you oppose the existence of the only Jewish state in the world.
5. Even when putatively condemning antisemitism you can’t help but blame the Jews for causing antisemitism.
6. You condemn the Holocaust yet also obsessively condemn living Jews for their alleged ‘inhumanity’ and even argue that Jews haven’t learned the proper lessons from the attempt to annihilate their co-religionists from the planet.
7. You not only support Palestinian rights, but support their “right” to launch deadly terrorist attacks on Israeli Jews, under the mantle of anti-imperialist ”resistance”.
8. You characterize extremist reactionary Islamist movements as “progressive“.
9. You accuse Jews of cynically misusing the charge of antisemitism to “stifle” debate about the Jewish state.
10. You champion diversity and multiculturalism of all kinds, yet suggest that Jewish particularism represents an inherently tribal, ethnocentric and racist identity.
Friday, May 17, 2013
Venezuela runs out of bog roll - viva la revolucion!
So this is where a "Bolivarian revolution" gets you.
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Venezuela hopes to wipe out toilet paper shortage by importing 50m rolls
Associated Press in Caracas
guardian.co.uk
Thursday 16 May 2013
Minister blames shortage on 'excessive demand caused by media campaign generated to disrupt the country'
First milk, butter, coffee and cornmeal ran short. Now Venezuela is running out of the most basic of necessities – toilet paper. Blaming political opponents for the shortfall, as it does for other shortages, the government says it will import 50m rolls to boost supplies.
That was little comfort to consumers struggling to find toilet paper on Wednesday. "This is the last straw," said Manuel Fagundes, a shopper hunting for tissue in Caracas. "I'm 71 years old and this is the first time I've seen this."
One supermarket visited by the Associated Press in the capital on Wednesday was out of toilet paper. Another had just received a fresh batch, and it quickly filled up with shoppers as the word spread. "I've been looking for it for two weeks," said Cristina Ramos. "I was told that they had some here and now I'm in line."
Economists say Venezuela's shortages stem from price controls meant to make basic goods available to the poorest parts of society and the government's controls on foreign currency. "State-controlled prices – prices that are set below market-clearing price – always result in shortages. The shortage problem will only get worse, as it did over the years in the Soviet Union," said Steve Hanke, professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University.
President Nicolás Maduro, who was selected by the dying Hugo Chávez to carry on his "Bolivarian revolution", claims that anti-government forces, including the private sector, are causing the shortages in an effort to destabilise the country. ... Commerce minister Alejandro Fleming blamed the shortage of toilet tissue on "excessive demand" built up as a result of "a media campaign that has been generated to disrupt the country.
"The revolution will bring the country the equivalent of 50 million rolls of toilet paper," he was quoted as saying Tuesday by state news agency AVN. "We are going to saturate the market so that our people calm down."
more...
----
Venezuela hopes to wipe out toilet paper shortage by importing 50m rolls
Associated Press in Caracas
guardian.co.uk
Thursday 16 May 2013
Minister blames shortage on 'excessive demand caused by media campaign generated to disrupt the country'
First milk, butter, coffee and cornmeal ran short. Now Venezuela is running out of the most basic of necessities – toilet paper. Blaming political opponents for the shortfall, as it does for other shortages, the government says it will import 50m rolls to boost supplies.
That was little comfort to consumers struggling to find toilet paper on Wednesday. "This is the last straw," said Manuel Fagundes, a shopper hunting for tissue in Caracas. "I'm 71 years old and this is the first time I've seen this."
One supermarket visited by the Associated Press in the capital on Wednesday was out of toilet paper. Another had just received a fresh batch, and it quickly filled up with shoppers as the word spread. "I've been looking for it for two weeks," said Cristina Ramos. "I was told that they had some here and now I'm in line."
Economists say Venezuela's shortages stem from price controls meant to make basic goods available to the poorest parts of society and the government's controls on foreign currency. "State-controlled prices – prices that are set below market-clearing price – always result in shortages. The shortage problem will only get worse, as it did over the years in the Soviet Union," said Steve Hanke, professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University.
President Nicolás Maduro, who was selected by the dying Hugo Chávez to carry on his "Bolivarian revolution", claims that anti-government forces, including the private sector, are causing the shortages in an effort to destabilise the country. ... Commerce minister Alejandro Fleming blamed the shortage of toilet tissue on "excessive demand" built up as a result of "a media campaign that has been generated to disrupt the country.
"The revolution will bring the country the equivalent of 50 million rolls of toilet paper," he was quoted as saying Tuesday by state news agency AVN. "We are going to saturate the market so that our people calm down."
more...
Friday, May 10, 2013
Education in the UK - Gove attacks the 'Culture of Excuses'
At Last: Gove Goes For the Culture of Excuses
by Matthew Hunter
Standpoint April 2013
"However specious in theory the project might be of giving education to the labouring classes of the poor, it would, in effect, be found to be prejudicial to their morals and happiness."
Davies Giddy MP, 1807
"The academic, subject-based curriculum is a middle-class creation . . . whose effect, if not intention, has been to make it difficult for many children not from a middle-class background to adjust to a highly academic school culture."
Professor John White, 2007
Although two centuries and the political spectrum divide these two quotations, they are united in an important sense: both deny the ability of poor children to benefit from an academic education. The first quotation comes from a Tory MP speaking against the 1807 Parochial Schools bill. The second comes from a man at the heart of today's education establishment, an emeritus professor at the Institute of Education, University of London. His is a different sort of bigotry, one that comes with the gentle inflection of liberal sympathy, but is no less socially damaging. "The soft bigotry of low expectations" is a phrase many, including the Education Secretary Michael Gove, have used to describe such thinking.
In February, Gove gave a speech to the Social Market Foundation which will be remembered as one of the definitive accounts of his mission. Introducing a new, more academic National Curriculum, Gove confronted the idea that such schooling is not suitable for all pupils. He described a pair of exceptional London state schools, and said such schools demonstrated that "children from every background are as capable of success — as able to grasp for the glittering prizes — as children from the wealthiest backgrounds, if they are given access to the sort of education which the rich have always felt they should enjoy by right."
The idea that all pupils should receive an academic education may sound like an incontrovertible platitude. In fact, it is a declaration of war on the received wisdom of state education. To understand the significance of this war, one has to know something of the intellectual history of British schooling. "The soft bigotry of low expectations" has its origins in what can be seen as a "sociological" view of education. In 1970, the radical sociologist Basil Bernstein wrote an essay for the now defunct magazine New Society entitled "Education cannot compensate for society". He argued that social and economic factors have such an overwhelmingly strong effect on children's upbringing that schools are powerless to overcome their socially predetermined chance of success. The title of his essay became something of an adage in schools; one professor at the Institute of Education observed, "We are all, in some respects, Bernsteinians now."
I am under no illusions about the challenges posed to schools in deprived areas. Throughout the country, parental income remains the best predictor of a pupil's success at school. It was revealed last year that only 4 per cent of pupils aged 15 eligible for free school meals end up going to university, compared with 33 per cent of their wealthier peers. However, while it is one thing to say that a low socioeconomic background tends to hold back a child's education, it is something completely different to say that their education can only improve once their low socioeconomic status is changed. When transferred from the lecture theatre to the classroom, this sociological determinism — we might call it "the sociological view" — breeds a culture of excuses and low expectations.
I teach at an inner-city state school, and the academic and behavioural expectations made of the pupils are distressingly low. Our catchment area is deprived, but it is hardly a ghetto. Unemployment is high, and about 40 per cent of the pupils are eligible for free school meals, meaning their parents have a combined income of less than £16,190. However, many of the pupils come from stable, hard-working families, and it is only a small minority whose home lives can be described as "chaotic".
One can judge the extent to which an "excuses culture" pervades a school by the frequency with which references are made to "our kids". At my school, this phrase, redolent with sympathy and concern, is used on a daily basis to keep standards low. When a pupil tells a new member of staff to "fuck off", senior staff explain such behaviour is to be expected from "our kids". When I asked why we did not teach a more academically challenging GCSE history course, I was told it would not be right for "our kids". When my teaching style is criticised for being didactic, I'm told "our kids" cannot listen to a teacher in anything more than five-minute bursts. On one memorable occasion, a French teacher decided to hand out detentions to pupils who did badly in their weekly vocabulary homework, but was told to stop by a member of senior management. Apparently, compulsory homework was unfair, considering the home backgrounds of "our kids". Choosing to teach in a deprived area, I expected to be surrounded by colleagues aiming to overcome social disadvantage, not capitulate to it.
In America, where I worked part-time as a teaching assistant, I often heard teachers claim: "We'll never solve education until we solve poverty." Rhetorically, the sociological view provides a very useful argument for those who wish to deflect all conversations about education standards to wider issues of social justice. Recently, a friend who is studying for a masters degree in education told me about a university seminar he had attended. The professor delivering it has written in a recently published book, "Social variables are too significant to be ignored and there can be no hope of improving education until we have understood and found ways to deal with the pernicious problems of poverty and social disadvantage."
At the seminar, he launched into a tirade against Michael Gove. How dare we expect schools to raise standards, he fulminated, while belonging to a government which is "making the poor poorer".
The idea that education can only be improved through solving the root cause of social disadvantage has a rotten effect on our nation's classrooms. Consider the following claim from Matthew Taylor, former head of Tony Blair's policy unit, now chief executive of the Royal Society of Arts and a prominent education commentator, writing about a 2007 study into educational outcomes: "This unprecedented project has revealed that a child's social background is the crucial factor in academic performance, and that a school's success is based not on its teachers, the way it is run, or what type of school it is, but, overwhelmingly, on the class background of its pupils." As a teacher, I find it hard to think of a sentiment that does more to undervalue the profession. The sociological view of education is a gospel of defeatism.
It is not hard to see how in many of the nation's classrooms the sociological view becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. In her speech to the Conservative party conference in 2010, Katharine Birbalsingh criticised schools which avoid punishing misbehaving black pupils for fear of being labelled racist. She concluded, "Black children underachieve because of what the well-meaning liberal does to them."
The same effect can be seen in academic expectations, where school curricula are relentlessly dumbed down by sympathetic educators hoping to make schoolwork more "accessible" for their pupils. "Subject to Change", a 2007 report by Martin Johnson, deputy general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, criticised the teaching of discrete, academic subjects. Johnson wrote that this "classical and elite model containing a narrow range of intellectual knowledge and skill is inappropriate for an age of universal education". In one of the most absurd recommendations I have read, he proposed a new national curriculum focused on "principles, concepts and attitudes". As an example, he recommended "physical skills such as walking, which involves a disposition as well as a technique, and digging".
However, there is hope to be found in the trends emerging in some of Britain's most ambitious state schools. A new mindset of "no excuses" designed to combat the decades-long rot of "low expectations" is gaining ground. This approach originated in the American charter school movement, on which Britain's free schools policy is partly based. KIPP schools, the largest and best-known network of charter schools in the US, have an enviable track record in educating pupils from deprived backgrounds: 94 per cent of their pupils are either African-American or Hispanic, and 76 per cent qualify for the federally-supported free meals programme. By the end of eighth grade, 94 per cent of KIPP classes outperform their local districts in reading, and 96 per cent in maths.
Central to this success is the KIPP network's core "operating principle" of high expectations. "KIPP schools have clearly defined and measurable high expectations for academic achievement and conduct that makes no excuses based on the students' backgrounds." There is no secret as to how such expectations are upheld. They are achieved through "a range of formal and informal rewards and consequences for academic performance and behaviour".
The same thinking has been expressed by the current head of Ofsted, Sir Michael Wilshaw. His achievements as headmaster of Mossbourne Academy in East London are now the stuff of legend, but bear repetition. The school had the same proportion of pupils on free school meals as the one where I teach, but 89 per cent of them obtain five A*-C grades at GCSE, including English and maths. This is not achieved through a cynical focus on the C grade borderline, as Mossbourne also cultivates high achievers. Last year, 63 per cent of its pupils gained an A*-A grade in English literature GCSE, and 52 per cent of its A-level grades were A*-B. This places it in the top 1 per cent of schools nationwide, an astonishing achievement. Wilshaw said: "There are a growing number of schools producing fantastic results in areas of deprivation. We've got to stop making excuses for background, culture and ethnicity and get on with it."
A key part of such advances is adopting strict rules and punishments. "We teach the children the difference between right and wrong, good and evil," said Wilshaw. "They know that if they disrupt class or are rude to teachers, there will be consequences." Sadly, this is not a particularly fashionable way to run a school within Britain's state sector, and many of Wilshaw's detractors criticise the "prison camp" ethos of his old school. Apologists for contemporary British education tend to prefer a more child-centred, progressive outlook where pupils comply through choice, not coercion.
Such a philosophy forms a convenient alliance with the sociological view. I have lost count of the number of times the terrible behaviour at our school has been blamed on the social background of the pupils, instead of the school's unwillingness to implement a functioning behaviour policy. The sociological view is also used to discount the importance of the different methods employed in rapidly improving schools. In her book School Wars, Melissa Benn implies that the real root of Mossbourne's success is not its traditionalist outlook, but instead a change in the catchment area's social makeup. She points out that the predecessor school had 77 per cent of pupils on free school meals, nearly double the current number. So there are sociological excuses for success as well as failure.
In order to fulfil its professional responsibility, a school must strenuously resist taking on the sociological view. This is difficult when education departments in British universities turn out acres of paper every year reinforcing the message that socioeconomic background dictates success. What they show is undeniable: in the broad averages of large-scale longitudinal studies, social background does correlate with educational outcome. But schools deal with individuals, not averages. It is a school's responsibility to do all it can to iron out such differences and never treat them as a foregone conclusion. Recent research suggests that there are more than 440 secondary schools where the average GCSE score for children on free school meals is above the national average. Taught well in a good school, poor pupils can succeed.
It is a paradox that idealistic educators in favour of social justice are seduced by the sociological view into accepting their own inability to achieve it. In today's Britain, schools which use social background as an excuse for the underachievement of their pupils are the cause of a far greater deprivation than the social background itself.
by Matthew Hunter
Standpoint April 2013
"However specious in theory the project might be of giving education to the labouring classes of the poor, it would, in effect, be found to be prejudicial to their morals and happiness."
Davies Giddy MP, 1807
"The academic, subject-based curriculum is a middle-class creation . . . whose effect, if not intention, has been to make it difficult for many children not from a middle-class background to adjust to a highly academic school culture."
Professor John White, 2007
Although two centuries and the political spectrum divide these two quotations, they are united in an important sense: both deny the ability of poor children to benefit from an academic education. The first quotation comes from a Tory MP speaking against the 1807 Parochial Schools bill. The second comes from a man at the heart of today's education establishment, an emeritus professor at the Institute of Education, University of London. His is a different sort of bigotry, one that comes with the gentle inflection of liberal sympathy, but is no less socially damaging. "The soft bigotry of low expectations" is a phrase many, including the Education Secretary Michael Gove, have used to describe such thinking.
In February, Gove gave a speech to the Social Market Foundation which will be remembered as one of the definitive accounts of his mission. Introducing a new, more academic National Curriculum, Gove confronted the idea that such schooling is not suitable for all pupils. He described a pair of exceptional London state schools, and said such schools demonstrated that "children from every background are as capable of success — as able to grasp for the glittering prizes — as children from the wealthiest backgrounds, if they are given access to the sort of education which the rich have always felt they should enjoy by right."
The idea that all pupils should receive an academic education may sound like an incontrovertible platitude. In fact, it is a declaration of war on the received wisdom of state education. To understand the significance of this war, one has to know something of the intellectual history of British schooling. "The soft bigotry of low expectations" has its origins in what can be seen as a "sociological" view of education. In 1970, the radical sociologist Basil Bernstein wrote an essay for the now defunct magazine New Society entitled "Education cannot compensate for society". He argued that social and economic factors have such an overwhelmingly strong effect on children's upbringing that schools are powerless to overcome their socially predetermined chance of success. The title of his essay became something of an adage in schools; one professor at the Institute of Education observed, "We are all, in some respects, Bernsteinians now."
I am under no illusions about the challenges posed to schools in deprived areas. Throughout the country, parental income remains the best predictor of a pupil's success at school. It was revealed last year that only 4 per cent of pupils aged 15 eligible for free school meals end up going to university, compared with 33 per cent of their wealthier peers. However, while it is one thing to say that a low socioeconomic background tends to hold back a child's education, it is something completely different to say that their education can only improve once their low socioeconomic status is changed. When transferred from the lecture theatre to the classroom, this sociological determinism — we might call it "the sociological view" — breeds a culture of excuses and low expectations.
I teach at an inner-city state school, and the academic and behavioural expectations made of the pupils are distressingly low. Our catchment area is deprived, but it is hardly a ghetto. Unemployment is high, and about 40 per cent of the pupils are eligible for free school meals, meaning their parents have a combined income of less than £16,190. However, many of the pupils come from stable, hard-working families, and it is only a small minority whose home lives can be described as "chaotic".
One can judge the extent to which an "excuses culture" pervades a school by the frequency with which references are made to "our kids". At my school, this phrase, redolent with sympathy and concern, is used on a daily basis to keep standards low. When a pupil tells a new member of staff to "fuck off", senior staff explain such behaviour is to be expected from "our kids". When I asked why we did not teach a more academically challenging GCSE history course, I was told it would not be right for "our kids". When my teaching style is criticised for being didactic, I'm told "our kids" cannot listen to a teacher in anything more than five-minute bursts. On one memorable occasion, a French teacher decided to hand out detentions to pupils who did badly in their weekly vocabulary homework, but was told to stop by a member of senior management. Apparently, compulsory homework was unfair, considering the home backgrounds of "our kids". Choosing to teach in a deprived area, I expected to be surrounded by colleagues aiming to overcome social disadvantage, not capitulate to it.
In America, where I worked part-time as a teaching assistant, I often heard teachers claim: "We'll never solve education until we solve poverty." Rhetorically, the sociological view provides a very useful argument for those who wish to deflect all conversations about education standards to wider issues of social justice. Recently, a friend who is studying for a masters degree in education told me about a university seminar he had attended. The professor delivering it has written in a recently published book, "Social variables are too significant to be ignored and there can be no hope of improving education until we have understood and found ways to deal with the pernicious problems of poverty and social disadvantage."
At the seminar, he launched into a tirade against Michael Gove. How dare we expect schools to raise standards, he fulminated, while belonging to a government which is "making the poor poorer".
The idea that education can only be improved through solving the root cause of social disadvantage has a rotten effect on our nation's classrooms. Consider the following claim from Matthew Taylor, former head of Tony Blair's policy unit, now chief executive of the Royal Society of Arts and a prominent education commentator, writing about a 2007 study into educational outcomes: "This unprecedented project has revealed that a child's social background is the crucial factor in academic performance, and that a school's success is based not on its teachers, the way it is run, or what type of school it is, but, overwhelmingly, on the class background of its pupils." As a teacher, I find it hard to think of a sentiment that does more to undervalue the profession. The sociological view of education is a gospel of defeatism.
It is not hard to see how in many of the nation's classrooms the sociological view becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. In her speech to the Conservative party conference in 2010, Katharine Birbalsingh criticised schools which avoid punishing misbehaving black pupils for fear of being labelled racist. She concluded, "Black children underachieve because of what the well-meaning liberal does to them."
The same effect can be seen in academic expectations, where school curricula are relentlessly dumbed down by sympathetic educators hoping to make schoolwork more "accessible" for their pupils. "Subject to Change", a 2007 report by Martin Johnson, deputy general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, criticised the teaching of discrete, academic subjects. Johnson wrote that this "classical and elite model containing a narrow range of intellectual knowledge and skill is inappropriate for an age of universal education". In one of the most absurd recommendations I have read, he proposed a new national curriculum focused on "principles, concepts and attitudes". As an example, he recommended "physical skills such as walking, which involves a disposition as well as a technique, and digging".
However, there is hope to be found in the trends emerging in some of Britain's most ambitious state schools. A new mindset of "no excuses" designed to combat the decades-long rot of "low expectations" is gaining ground. This approach originated in the American charter school movement, on which Britain's free schools policy is partly based. KIPP schools, the largest and best-known network of charter schools in the US, have an enviable track record in educating pupils from deprived backgrounds: 94 per cent of their pupils are either African-American or Hispanic, and 76 per cent qualify for the federally-supported free meals programme. By the end of eighth grade, 94 per cent of KIPP classes outperform their local districts in reading, and 96 per cent in maths.
Central to this success is the KIPP network's core "operating principle" of high expectations. "KIPP schools have clearly defined and measurable high expectations for academic achievement and conduct that makes no excuses based on the students' backgrounds." There is no secret as to how such expectations are upheld. They are achieved through "a range of formal and informal rewards and consequences for academic performance and behaviour".
The same thinking has been expressed by the current head of Ofsted, Sir Michael Wilshaw. His achievements as headmaster of Mossbourne Academy in East London are now the stuff of legend, but bear repetition. The school had the same proportion of pupils on free school meals as the one where I teach, but 89 per cent of them obtain five A*-C grades at GCSE, including English and maths. This is not achieved through a cynical focus on the C grade borderline, as Mossbourne also cultivates high achievers. Last year, 63 per cent of its pupils gained an A*-A grade in English literature GCSE, and 52 per cent of its A-level grades were A*-B. This places it in the top 1 per cent of schools nationwide, an astonishing achievement. Wilshaw said: "There are a growing number of schools producing fantastic results in areas of deprivation. We've got to stop making excuses for background, culture and ethnicity and get on with it."
A key part of such advances is adopting strict rules and punishments. "We teach the children the difference between right and wrong, good and evil," said Wilshaw. "They know that if they disrupt class or are rude to teachers, there will be consequences." Sadly, this is not a particularly fashionable way to run a school within Britain's state sector, and many of Wilshaw's detractors criticise the "prison camp" ethos of his old school. Apologists for contemporary British education tend to prefer a more child-centred, progressive outlook where pupils comply through choice, not coercion.
Such a philosophy forms a convenient alliance with the sociological view. I have lost count of the number of times the terrible behaviour at our school has been blamed on the social background of the pupils, instead of the school's unwillingness to implement a functioning behaviour policy. The sociological view is also used to discount the importance of the different methods employed in rapidly improving schools. In her book School Wars, Melissa Benn implies that the real root of Mossbourne's success is not its traditionalist outlook, but instead a change in the catchment area's social makeup. She points out that the predecessor school had 77 per cent of pupils on free school meals, nearly double the current number. So there are sociological excuses for success as well as failure.
In order to fulfil its professional responsibility, a school must strenuously resist taking on the sociological view. This is difficult when education departments in British universities turn out acres of paper every year reinforcing the message that socioeconomic background dictates success. What they show is undeniable: in the broad averages of large-scale longitudinal studies, social background does correlate with educational outcome. But schools deal with individuals, not averages. It is a school's responsibility to do all it can to iron out such differences and never treat them as a foregone conclusion. Recent research suggests that there are more than 440 secondary schools where the average GCSE score for children on free school meals is above the national average. Taught well in a good school, poor pupils can succeed.
It is a paradox that idealistic educators in favour of social justice are seduced by the sociological view into accepting their own inability to achieve it. In today's Britain, schools which use social background as an excuse for the underachievement of their pupils are the cause of a far greater deprivation than the social background itself.
Feminism or Islamism: which side are you on?
Outstanding.
Worth reading along with these older posts:
Feminism Or Islamism: Which Side Are You On?
Nick Cohen
Standpoint
April 2013
No group is better than liberal academics at illustrating how racist anti-racism has become. As liberals, they ought to respect individual rights and oppose reactionary attempts to corral and control. As academics, they ought to look for evidence that shakes comfortable opinions. As it is, they do neither.
In human rights organisations, leftish political parties, liberal newspapers and, above all, in the universities, committed and morally earnest people would rather die than admit that radical Islam is a murderous and oppressive movement. The effect of their evasion is to promote the racism they say they oppose, while denying their supposed allies in "Muslim lands" and immigrant communities the same rights as they enjoy. Hypocrisy is too meagre a word to cover their behaviour.
Take the latest effort to land in my pigeonhole: On the Muslim Question by Anne Norton, a professor of political science at Pennsylvania University. Norton's publishers, Princeton University Press, modestly declare that she is a "fearless, original and surprising" author. In truth she is timid, unthinking and hackneyed. Like thousands of her contemporaries, Norton argues that conservative elites in the West use radical Islam to befuddle the doltish masses. There is truth in the charge that ever since 9/11 security services have taken the opportunity to bring in excessive coercive powers to fight the menace of Islamist violence. If that were the end of the argument, I could not object. Norton is a typical representative of the Anglo-American intelligentsia because she goes on to pretend that there is no real menace, and to cover up the mistreatment of women, the suppression of free speech, the inquisitorial punishment of heresy, and all the other woes armed and militant religion brings.
As with everyone of my generation (I was born in 1961), the "Rushdie test" tells you all you need to know about a political writer's willingness to choose freedom or brute power. Norton fails it, and seems to me to want to fail it. She tells us that Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa against Salman Rushdie, was a "very local fuss" and a "very British affair" — as bland and unthreatening as a walk in the park. She assures the reader without caveat or elaboration that "no arrests or injuries occurred as a result of the demonstrations" against Rushdie. Even as a description of the formal demonstrations against The Satanic Verses that isn't true — the police arrested 84 people as they hung effigies of Rushdie outside Parliament in May 1989. But formal demonstrations were not the end of the protests, as she must know. Norton does not tell the reader how the supporters of religious reaction murdered or attempted to murder Rushdie's translators, staged riots in which dozens died in Bangladesh, Pakistan and Turkey, and bombed bookshops in central London and the US for stocking copies of the blasphemous novel.
Instead of speaking plainly about the violence and the chilling effect on criticism of Islam that followed, Norton sneers. She implies that the true friends of the oppressed should not have sympathised with Rushdie because he had crossed over to the other side. Rushdie "was wealthy, educated and famous", she says, and had "won the acceptance and acclaim that many fellow immigrants lacked". Her lip curls again when she goes on to discuss Theo van Gogh, whom you may remember a Jew-obsessed fanatic slaughtered for making a "blasphemous" film with the Somali-Dutch feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Van Gogh belonged to the Amsterdam of "cannabis and copulation", she says, and "enjoyed the freedoms of the wealthy and the privileged: of people who can buy goods and command pleasures".
You do not need to read the tabloids to recognise the trick she is pulling. Half-envious and half-disgusted finger-wagging about sex, wealth and education is a way of implying that Rushdie and van Gogh had it coming to them. Not that she is justifying murder and attempted murder, of course, but she wants the reader to understand why the poor and the unprivileged — the traditional objects of leftish concern — might take against them.
To notice the slipperiness of Norton's prose, however, is to miss the wider point. In On the Muslim Question, Muslims form an undifferentiated bloc. The notion that there are conflicts within Islam and choices to be made is never entertained. She brushes aside the Arab and Iranian artists who supported Rushdie, the Danish Muslim politicians who supported the right of newspapers to publish cartoons of Muhammad, the Iranian green movement, the Egyptian and Tunisian secularists and Christians now confronting the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Bangladeshi secularists and Hindus now fighting Jamaat-e-Islami.
It is as if in her mind a global reactionary movement, which is based on identity politics and systematically discriminates against women and sexual and religious minorities, does not exist. As if Muslims and non-Muslims are not fighting it. As if there is no need for American academics to take sides, or even acknowledge there are sides to take.
You can present such blindness as a polite averting of the eyes. But it is the mirror image of anti-Muslim racism. The French National Front, say, or the British National Party or Serb and Hindu nationalists, portray "the Muslims" as a bloc of terrorists or barbarians. Leftists denounce the stereotypes but then reinforce them. Their motives are different but the effect is the same. "No one should have to argue any longer that terrorism can be a rational and reasonable strategy," says Norton as she justifies violence. As for worrying about women's rights, that is to fall into an imperialist trap. "Attention to the plight of women in the Muslim world turns the gaze of potential critics away from the continuing inequality of women in the West."
Forget that you should oppose misogyny wherever you find it, and notice that by implying that violence and sexism are excusable Norton does not refute stereotypes but excuses them. With an ignorance remarkable in a professor of political science, she makes my point for me by saying that Marx's On the Jewish Question inspired her. This founding document of left-wing anti-Semitism was hardly friendly to the Jewish people. Marx repeated every prejudice. The religion of the Jews was "huckstering" and their god was money. He concluded that only when "society has succeeded in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism — huckstering and its preconditions — [will] the Jew have become impossible". For left-wing Muslims and ex-Muslims Norton's writing is just as insulting. Yet I suspect that she thinks of herself as being left-wing in some sense.
In her essential pamphlet Double Bind: The Muslim Right, the Anglo-American Left and Universal Human Rights (The Centre for Secular Space), Meredith Tax asks why leftists and liberals — who once said they believed in the separation of church and state, social equality and the emancipation of women — are siding with or condoning a religious Right that has made it violently clear that it agrees with none of the above.
Tax is well-placed to dissect the duplicities of our time. She is a distinguished member of a dissenting movement in modern feminism that is hugely unfashionable, and all the more necessary for that. It refuses to accept "the double bind" that says the emancipation of women must always wait. Far-leftists placed women in it when they said, "You must put up with sexism until the revolution comes." You could not be against sexism and for socialism simultaneously. Now hopes of revolution have vanished, its proponents say, "Women must put up with sexism until American imperialism has gone."
Tax quotes the example of Leila Ahmed, the Harvard scholar of women and Islam. At one point in her writings, Ahmed lets out a cry of pain. She says that she believes that the rights of women "in Muslim-majority societies often are acutely in need of improvement, as indeed they are in many other societies. But the question now is how we address such issues while not allowing our work and concerns to aid and abet imperialist projects, including war projects that mete out death and trauma to Muslim women under the guise and to the accompaniment of a rhetoric of saving them."
Put like this, Ahmed sounds ridiculous. What is the problem? Why can't you oppose, say, the war in Afghanistan, if you wish, while also opposing the subjugation of women? Why can't you say that Western societies give women greater rights, while also opposing this or that Western policy decision or politician? Why, in short, can you not walk and chew gum at the same time?
I don't mean to single out academics for special condemnation. The postmodern university may not be able to guide society, but it reflects its deformities and double standards. I know civil servants, liberal journalists, broadcasters, politicians, diplomats and police officers who never read an academic paper from one year until the next. They will condemn the gender pay gap or the sexual abuse of white-skinned women, but stay silent about the religious oppression of brown-skinned women. Fear of violent reprisals, fear of causing offence, fear that their enemies will denounce them for possessing a racial or sectarian hatred play their part. On the Left, there is the strong fear of accusations of complicity with the status quo, which never go down well in arts and humanities departments. Tax quotes one left-wing academic booming at a colleague: "Secular feminists' concern that Muslim fundamentalist religious codes impose and sanction violence on women and queers relies on a myopia that understands Muslim women only as victims of Muslim men and Islam, ignoring the role of imperial violence in defining Muslim realities around the world." No one looking for tenure wants to hear words like that directed against them.
But we should be able to acknowledge that there is now a general taboo against discussing religious oppression, which is not confined to campuses or left-wing meetings. Universal standards are everywhere in retreat.
Tax and her allies are among the few who will fight back. Her friends include members of Southall Black Sisters, who took considerable risks when they took to the streets during the Rushdie affair to declare that they were as against mullahs who wanted to subjugate Asian women because of the arrangement of their chromosones as racists who wanted to subjugate them because of the colour of their skin. Together they have formed a new feminist pressure group, the Centre for Secular Space, along with Gita Sahgal, whose treatment by Amnesty International encapsulated a rotten culture in one disgraceful moment.
Sahgal objected to Amnesty's relationship with Moazzam Begg. She did not complain that Amnesty demanded due process for an Islamist interned in Guantánamo but that it treated him as a respectable partner. And not just Amnesty. A roll call of supposedly liberal organisations followed suit. Freedom from Torture, Human Rights Watch, Justice, Liberty, Redress, Reprieve, and the US Center for Constitutional Rights all promoted Begg. The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trustan organisation set up by pacifist Quakers — and the Roddick Foundation — which was set up by a feminist — funded him. I speak from experience when I say that not only the managers of human rights charities but their supporters could not get enough of him. To the left-wing middle class of the last decade, Begg was a star: the ideal victim.
He was also an Islamist fighter in Bosnia, and the manager of a bookshop in Birmingham that was a magnet for cranks and extremists. He moved his family to Afghanistan because he admired Taliban rule so much he wanted to live under it. While there, he helped at a school for the children of al-Qaeda fighters, and one can guess that "empowering" girls through education was not the first aim of its curriculum. Nato forces captured him, and after the Americans released him from Guantánamo, he set up Cageprisoners. It claimed to be a human rights organisation of the sort that liberal ladies and gentlemen should endorse. Sahgal examined its websites and literature and found that the only prisoners it was interested in were jihadis — not much support for universal human rights there — and that Cageprisoners endorsed the oxymoronic concept of "defensive jihad", which in the case of Afghanistan involved para-militaries murdering civilians and executing teachers for allowing girls to learn to read and write.
Sahgal raised her concerns with her superiors at Amnesty. Their response said it all. Faced with a conflict between feminism and Islamism, Amnesty chose Islamism and in 2010 forced Sahgal out. (She later won compensation under laws that protect whistleblowers.) The "liberal" human rights group then announced that in its considered opinion defensive jihad was not "antithetical" to human rights.
The Sahgal affair was the biggest scandal the human rights movement has seen in years. In her attempt to explain why so many liberals and leftists have gone along with ideologists who want to kill liberals and leftists, Meredith Tax shows a novelist's insight into the psychology of delusion and betrayal.
When confronted with the horrors of the wars of Bush and Blair, many saw groups that can be fairly described as clerical fascists, as "anti-imperialist". As Vijay Prashad of Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, explained in an interview with Asian online journal, Political Notes, last year, while leftists opposed evangelical Christians in the US, and Hindu and Jewish nationalists, when it came to Hamas, the Taliban, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood, "we are divided from them but not against them". They are against "imperialism" and therefore cannot be our enemies.
Many another professor has parroted that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter". Many have opined that we in the West know nothing of the desperation that pushes men to violence, and that in the circumstances of imperialist occupation such violence is as justified in Afghanistan or Iraq as it was in South Africa or Algeria in the 20th century.
I have had this argument many times, and I always ask the question: "Who is doing the killing and where?" There is no Western "imperialism" in Iran, Nigeria, Bangladesh or the Yemen, I say. This normally slows people down, unless of course my opponents believe that the puppet-masters of Western imperialism secretly rule the world, in which case they are beyond argument. Tax quotes a 2009 study of Arabic media sources by the Combating Terrorism Centre, which reinforces my point. It found that only 15 per cent of all of the casualties caused by al-Qaeda between 2004 and 2008 were Westerners. The main target of Muslim extremism is Muslims. The main financial support for Salafi-jihadi groups is Saudi Arabia, arguably the most reactionary country in the world and, we should not forget, a staunch ally of the same US imperialists the jihadis say they are fighting.
"When fundamentalists come to power", Tax says, "they silence the people; they physically eliminate dissidents, writers, journalists, poets, musicians, painters like fascists do. Like fascists, they physically eliminate the ‘untermensch' — the subhuman — among them ‘inferior races', gays, mentally or physically disabled people. And they lock women ‘in their place', which as we know from experience ends up being a straitjacket."
Turn on the news and you will see the fatuity of "anti-imperialist" alliances. In Mali, to take the latest example, the jihadist group Ansar Dine took control of the north of the country and sacked the libraries and mosques of Timbuktu — a truly "Islamophobic" crime, although you will never hear it described as such. "We are against independence," its spokesman declared. "We are against revolutions [that are] not in the name of Islam." Ansar Dine proceeded to show what an Islamic revolution looks like by banning television, alcohol and music, forcing women to veil, cutting off the hands of robbers and stoning couples to death for having children outside wedlock. The refugees who fled, and the survivors who cheered François Hollande after "imperialist" French forces intervened, were Muslims.
The supporters of defensive jihad practise the same policies when they seize power in "occupied Muslim lands". The absurdity of calling them anti-imperialists or comparing them to the anti-colonial nationalists of the 20th century ought to be evident.
Nor is the phrase "Muslim lands", which I hear Western broadcasters use too often, as neutral as it seems. Are they the lands controlled by Turkey during the widest extent of the Ottoman Empire, which would include most of the Middle East, North Africa, the Caucasus Emirate and large parts of Eastern Europe? Spain or India? What about Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines? What about Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Somalia? What about Western countries with substantial Muslim populations? Not all Salafi-jihadis have the same definition of the territory they plan to liberate. The Indonesian group Jemaah Islamiyah, for instance, has in mind an Asian version of the Caliphate stretching from southern Thailand through Malaysia across Indonesia and into the Philippines, which would link with other branches established by al-Qaeda. But whichever way you cut it, fanatics who wish to establish a global caliphate are pro- rather than anti-imperialist. This is hardly a secret. But for far too many Westerners it is a secret in plain view, which is not talked about — or, more importantly, not thought about.
To Meredith Tax and Gita Sahgal the sight of people who call themselves human rights defenders going along with the omerta is close to unbearable. I heard them speak at the launch of the Centre for Secular Space in Toynbee Hall, east London, and understood their anger. For Tax and Sahgal, the UN Declaration of Human Rights is one of the most optimistic documents in history, the benchmark against which governments, corporations and, indeed, defensive jihadis must be judged. To see it ignored by the very people who claim to defend human rights has forced them to change their assumptions. As they point out, a state or pan-Islamic empire ruled by a hardline version of Sharia law directly contravenes just about every clause in the declaration. Article 7 states "all are equal before the law", not that Muslims are more equal than non-Muslims, or that Shia Muslims in Iran are more equal than Sunni Muslims, or that Sunni Muslims in Pakistan are more equal than Shia Muslims, or that men everywhere are more equal than women anywhere. Article 18 states "everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion", not that the punishment for blasphemy or apostasy is death.
As for "Islamophobia", feminists have had that charge thrown at them so often that they have come to doubt the motives of their accusers. Obviously fascist groups and some nationalist politicians do their best to whip up prejudice against immigrants and are currently focusing on Muslims for that purpose. But is discrimination against Muslims worse than, say, racism against people of Caribbean descent in the UK or Latinos and African-Americans in the US? If police harassment is a criterion, young Caribbean men are the group that suffers the most.
Where Muslims are the victims of racism, once again the question arises: why can't people oppose white racism and clerical reaction with equal strength and for the same reasons? A commitment to fight prejudice does not exclude the possibility of criticising religious texts and religious movements. Indeed, any serious commitment against prejudice must include a willingness to fight men who would use religion to censor, subjugate and kill.
Tax ends with a radical suggestion for the Anglo-American Left: "Instead of allying with and protecting the Muslim Right, how about solidarity with actual popular movements of democrats and feminists struggling in the Global South?" I have been saying the same thing for years and know as well as Tax and Sahgal do that there is a long struggle to shift attitudes.
I don't want to criticise them, for they are among the best people I know, but they underestimate how it suits Westerners to ignore religious oppression. On the Left, radical Islam has taken the place once filled by socialism. As I said in my book What's Left?, when the dreams of Karl Marx died, many leftists concluded that any enemy of the West was better than none. It did not matter that the most violent enemies of the West were against everything leftists supported. They were also against America and that was all that mattered. Beyond the Left, in the politically indifferent mainstream, ignoring oppression has its advantages. Members of a consumer society do not want to campaign against the mistreatment of women in immigrant communities at home or support costly and dangerous interventions abroad. They want to get and spend. Rousing a nation of shoppers against injustice is always a hard task, and it seems to me that one of the chief functions of Anglo-American intellectuals is to provide respectable reasons for staying quiet.
That so many liberals are prepared to urge quiescence is a scandal. That Southall Black Sisters, Meredith Tax and Gita Sahgal are prepared to fight them is a reason for hope. Their Centre for Secular Space is, by the way, desperately short of money. The rich Quakers and progressives who opened their wallets for Cageprisoners will not fund feminists. If you can afford to help, may I point you in their direction and suggest that there is no worthier cause around?
Worth reading along with these older posts:
- The Left-Islamist Alliance
- Has Amnesty given up on human rights?
- Anti-Israel bias in human rights groups
Feminism Or Islamism: Which Side Are You On?
Nick Cohen
Standpoint
April 2013
No group is better than liberal academics at illustrating how racist anti-racism has become. As liberals, they ought to respect individual rights and oppose reactionary attempts to corral and control. As academics, they ought to look for evidence that shakes comfortable opinions. As it is, they do neither.
In human rights organisations, leftish political parties, liberal newspapers and, above all, in the universities, committed and morally earnest people would rather die than admit that radical Islam is a murderous and oppressive movement. The effect of their evasion is to promote the racism they say they oppose, while denying their supposed allies in "Muslim lands" and immigrant communities the same rights as they enjoy. Hypocrisy is too meagre a word to cover their behaviour.
Take the latest effort to land in my pigeonhole: On the Muslim Question by Anne Norton, a professor of political science at Pennsylvania University. Norton's publishers, Princeton University Press, modestly declare that she is a "fearless, original and surprising" author. In truth she is timid, unthinking and hackneyed. Like thousands of her contemporaries, Norton argues that conservative elites in the West use radical Islam to befuddle the doltish masses. There is truth in the charge that ever since 9/11 security services have taken the opportunity to bring in excessive coercive powers to fight the menace of Islamist violence. If that were the end of the argument, I could not object. Norton is a typical representative of the Anglo-American intelligentsia because she goes on to pretend that there is no real menace, and to cover up the mistreatment of women, the suppression of free speech, the inquisitorial punishment of heresy, and all the other woes armed and militant religion brings.
As with everyone of my generation (I was born in 1961), the "Rushdie test" tells you all you need to know about a political writer's willingness to choose freedom or brute power. Norton fails it, and seems to me to want to fail it. She tells us that Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa against Salman Rushdie, was a "very local fuss" and a "very British affair" — as bland and unthreatening as a walk in the park. She assures the reader without caveat or elaboration that "no arrests or injuries occurred as a result of the demonstrations" against Rushdie. Even as a description of the formal demonstrations against The Satanic Verses that isn't true — the police arrested 84 people as they hung effigies of Rushdie outside Parliament in May 1989. But formal demonstrations were not the end of the protests, as she must know. Norton does not tell the reader how the supporters of religious reaction murdered or attempted to murder Rushdie's translators, staged riots in which dozens died in Bangladesh, Pakistan and Turkey, and bombed bookshops in central London and the US for stocking copies of the blasphemous novel.
Instead of speaking plainly about the violence and the chilling effect on criticism of Islam that followed, Norton sneers. She implies that the true friends of the oppressed should not have sympathised with Rushdie because he had crossed over to the other side. Rushdie "was wealthy, educated and famous", she says, and had "won the acceptance and acclaim that many fellow immigrants lacked". Her lip curls again when she goes on to discuss Theo van Gogh, whom you may remember a Jew-obsessed fanatic slaughtered for making a "blasphemous" film with the Somali-Dutch feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Van Gogh belonged to the Amsterdam of "cannabis and copulation", she says, and "enjoyed the freedoms of the wealthy and the privileged: of people who can buy goods and command pleasures".
You do not need to read the tabloids to recognise the trick she is pulling. Half-envious and half-disgusted finger-wagging about sex, wealth and education is a way of implying that Rushdie and van Gogh had it coming to them. Not that she is justifying murder and attempted murder, of course, but she wants the reader to understand why the poor and the unprivileged — the traditional objects of leftish concern — might take against them.
To notice the slipperiness of Norton's prose, however, is to miss the wider point. In On the Muslim Question, Muslims form an undifferentiated bloc. The notion that there are conflicts within Islam and choices to be made is never entertained. She brushes aside the Arab and Iranian artists who supported Rushdie, the Danish Muslim politicians who supported the right of newspapers to publish cartoons of Muhammad, the Iranian green movement, the Egyptian and Tunisian secularists and Christians now confronting the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Bangladeshi secularists and Hindus now fighting Jamaat-e-Islami.
It is as if in her mind a global reactionary movement, which is based on identity politics and systematically discriminates against women and sexual and religious minorities, does not exist. As if Muslims and non-Muslims are not fighting it. As if there is no need for American academics to take sides, or even acknowledge there are sides to take.
You can present such blindness as a polite averting of the eyes. But it is the mirror image of anti-Muslim racism. The French National Front, say, or the British National Party or Serb and Hindu nationalists, portray "the Muslims" as a bloc of terrorists or barbarians. Leftists denounce the stereotypes but then reinforce them. Their motives are different but the effect is the same. "No one should have to argue any longer that terrorism can be a rational and reasonable strategy," says Norton as she justifies violence. As for worrying about women's rights, that is to fall into an imperialist trap. "Attention to the plight of women in the Muslim world turns the gaze of potential critics away from the continuing inequality of women in the West."
Forget that you should oppose misogyny wherever you find it, and notice that by implying that violence and sexism are excusable Norton does not refute stereotypes but excuses them. With an ignorance remarkable in a professor of political science, she makes my point for me by saying that Marx's On the Jewish Question inspired her. This founding document of left-wing anti-Semitism was hardly friendly to the Jewish people. Marx repeated every prejudice. The religion of the Jews was "huckstering" and their god was money. He concluded that only when "society has succeeded in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism — huckstering and its preconditions — [will] the Jew have become impossible". For left-wing Muslims and ex-Muslims Norton's writing is just as insulting. Yet I suspect that she thinks of herself as being left-wing in some sense.
In her essential pamphlet Double Bind: The Muslim Right, the Anglo-American Left and Universal Human Rights (The Centre for Secular Space), Meredith Tax asks why leftists and liberals — who once said they believed in the separation of church and state, social equality and the emancipation of women — are siding with or condoning a religious Right that has made it violently clear that it agrees with none of the above.
Tax is well-placed to dissect the duplicities of our time. She is a distinguished member of a dissenting movement in modern feminism that is hugely unfashionable, and all the more necessary for that. It refuses to accept "the double bind" that says the emancipation of women must always wait. Far-leftists placed women in it when they said, "You must put up with sexism until the revolution comes." You could not be against sexism and for socialism simultaneously. Now hopes of revolution have vanished, its proponents say, "Women must put up with sexism until American imperialism has gone."
Tax quotes the example of Leila Ahmed, the Harvard scholar of women and Islam. At one point in her writings, Ahmed lets out a cry of pain. She says that she believes that the rights of women "in Muslim-majority societies often are acutely in need of improvement, as indeed they are in many other societies. But the question now is how we address such issues while not allowing our work and concerns to aid and abet imperialist projects, including war projects that mete out death and trauma to Muslim women under the guise and to the accompaniment of a rhetoric of saving them."
Put like this, Ahmed sounds ridiculous. What is the problem? Why can't you oppose, say, the war in Afghanistan, if you wish, while also opposing the subjugation of women? Why can't you say that Western societies give women greater rights, while also opposing this or that Western policy decision or politician? Why, in short, can you not walk and chew gum at the same time?
I don't mean to single out academics for special condemnation. The postmodern university may not be able to guide society, but it reflects its deformities and double standards. I know civil servants, liberal journalists, broadcasters, politicians, diplomats and police officers who never read an academic paper from one year until the next. They will condemn the gender pay gap or the sexual abuse of white-skinned women, but stay silent about the religious oppression of brown-skinned women. Fear of violent reprisals, fear of causing offence, fear that their enemies will denounce them for possessing a racial or sectarian hatred play their part. On the Left, there is the strong fear of accusations of complicity with the status quo, which never go down well in arts and humanities departments. Tax quotes one left-wing academic booming at a colleague: "Secular feminists' concern that Muslim fundamentalist religious codes impose and sanction violence on women and queers relies on a myopia that understands Muslim women only as victims of Muslim men and Islam, ignoring the role of imperial violence in defining Muslim realities around the world." No one looking for tenure wants to hear words like that directed against them.
But we should be able to acknowledge that there is now a general taboo against discussing religious oppression, which is not confined to campuses or left-wing meetings. Universal standards are everywhere in retreat.
Tax and her allies are among the few who will fight back. Her friends include members of Southall Black Sisters, who took considerable risks when they took to the streets during the Rushdie affair to declare that they were as against mullahs who wanted to subjugate Asian women because of the arrangement of their chromosones as racists who wanted to subjugate them because of the colour of their skin. Together they have formed a new feminist pressure group, the Centre for Secular Space, along with Gita Sahgal, whose treatment by Amnesty International encapsulated a rotten culture in one disgraceful moment.
Sahgal objected to Amnesty's relationship with Moazzam Begg. She did not complain that Amnesty demanded due process for an Islamist interned in Guantánamo but that it treated him as a respectable partner. And not just Amnesty. A roll call of supposedly liberal organisations followed suit. Freedom from Torture, Human Rights Watch, Justice, Liberty, Redress, Reprieve, and the US Center for Constitutional Rights all promoted Begg. The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trustan organisation set up by pacifist Quakers — and the Roddick Foundation — which was set up by a feminist — funded him. I speak from experience when I say that not only the managers of human rights charities but their supporters could not get enough of him. To the left-wing middle class of the last decade, Begg was a star: the ideal victim.
He was also an Islamist fighter in Bosnia, and the manager of a bookshop in Birmingham that was a magnet for cranks and extremists. He moved his family to Afghanistan because he admired Taliban rule so much he wanted to live under it. While there, he helped at a school for the children of al-Qaeda fighters, and one can guess that "empowering" girls through education was not the first aim of its curriculum. Nato forces captured him, and after the Americans released him from Guantánamo, he set up Cageprisoners. It claimed to be a human rights organisation of the sort that liberal ladies and gentlemen should endorse. Sahgal examined its websites and literature and found that the only prisoners it was interested in were jihadis — not much support for universal human rights there — and that Cageprisoners endorsed the oxymoronic concept of "defensive jihad", which in the case of Afghanistan involved para-militaries murdering civilians and executing teachers for allowing girls to learn to read and write.
Sahgal raised her concerns with her superiors at Amnesty. Their response said it all. Faced with a conflict between feminism and Islamism, Amnesty chose Islamism and in 2010 forced Sahgal out. (She later won compensation under laws that protect whistleblowers.) The "liberal" human rights group then announced that in its considered opinion defensive jihad was not "antithetical" to human rights.
The Sahgal affair was the biggest scandal the human rights movement has seen in years. In her attempt to explain why so many liberals and leftists have gone along with ideologists who want to kill liberals and leftists, Meredith Tax shows a novelist's insight into the psychology of delusion and betrayal.
When confronted with the horrors of the wars of Bush and Blair, many saw groups that can be fairly described as clerical fascists, as "anti-imperialist". As Vijay Prashad of Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, explained in an interview with Asian online journal, Political Notes, last year, while leftists opposed evangelical Christians in the US, and Hindu and Jewish nationalists, when it came to Hamas, the Taliban, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood, "we are divided from them but not against them". They are against "imperialism" and therefore cannot be our enemies.
Many another professor has parroted that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter". Many have opined that we in the West know nothing of the desperation that pushes men to violence, and that in the circumstances of imperialist occupation such violence is as justified in Afghanistan or Iraq as it was in South Africa or Algeria in the 20th century.
I have had this argument many times, and I always ask the question: "Who is doing the killing and where?" There is no Western "imperialism" in Iran, Nigeria, Bangladesh or the Yemen, I say. This normally slows people down, unless of course my opponents believe that the puppet-masters of Western imperialism secretly rule the world, in which case they are beyond argument. Tax quotes a 2009 study of Arabic media sources by the Combating Terrorism Centre, which reinforces my point. It found that only 15 per cent of all of the casualties caused by al-Qaeda between 2004 and 2008 were Westerners. The main target of Muslim extremism is Muslims. The main financial support for Salafi-jihadi groups is Saudi Arabia, arguably the most reactionary country in the world and, we should not forget, a staunch ally of the same US imperialists the jihadis say they are fighting.
"When fundamentalists come to power", Tax says, "they silence the people; they physically eliminate dissidents, writers, journalists, poets, musicians, painters like fascists do. Like fascists, they physically eliminate the ‘untermensch' — the subhuman — among them ‘inferior races', gays, mentally or physically disabled people. And they lock women ‘in their place', which as we know from experience ends up being a straitjacket."
Turn on the news and you will see the fatuity of "anti-imperialist" alliances. In Mali, to take the latest example, the jihadist group Ansar Dine took control of the north of the country and sacked the libraries and mosques of Timbuktu — a truly "Islamophobic" crime, although you will never hear it described as such. "We are against independence," its spokesman declared. "We are against revolutions [that are] not in the name of Islam." Ansar Dine proceeded to show what an Islamic revolution looks like by banning television, alcohol and music, forcing women to veil, cutting off the hands of robbers and stoning couples to death for having children outside wedlock. The refugees who fled, and the survivors who cheered François Hollande after "imperialist" French forces intervened, were Muslims.
The supporters of defensive jihad practise the same policies when they seize power in "occupied Muslim lands". The absurdity of calling them anti-imperialists or comparing them to the anti-colonial nationalists of the 20th century ought to be evident.
Nor is the phrase "Muslim lands", which I hear Western broadcasters use too often, as neutral as it seems. Are they the lands controlled by Turkey during the widest extent of the Ottoman Empire, which would include most of the Middle East, North Africa, the Caucasus Emirate and large parts of Eastern Europe? Spain or India? What about Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines? What about Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Somalia? What about Western countries with substantial Muslim populations? Not all Salafi-jihadis have the same definition of the territory they plan to liberate. The Indonesian group Jemaah Islamiyah, for instance, has in mind an Asian version of the Caliphate stretching from southern Thailand through Malaysia across Indonesia and into the Philippines, which would link with other branches established by al-Qaeda. But whichever way you cut it, fanatics who wish to establish a global caliphate are pro- rather than anti-imperialist. This is hardly a secret. But for far too many Westerners it is a secret in plain view, which is not talked about — or, more importantly, not thought about.
To Meredith Tax and Gita Sahgal the sight of people who call themselves human rights defenders going along with the omerta is close to unbearable. I heard them speak at the launch of the Centre for Secular Space in Toynbee Hall, east London, and understood their anger. For Tax and Sahgal, the UN Declaration of Human Rights is one of the most optimistic documents in history, the benchmark against which governments, corporations and, indeed, defensive jihadis must be judged. To see it ignored by the very people who claim to defend human rights has forced them to change their assumptions. As they point out, a state or pan-Islamic empire ruled by a hardline version of Sharia law directly contravenes just about every clause in the declaration. Article 7 states "all are equal before the law", not that Muslims are more equal than non-Muslims, or that Shia Muslims in Iran are more equal than Sunni Muslims, or that Sunni Muslims in Pakistan are more equal than Shia Muslims, or that men everywhere are more equal than women anywhere. Article 18 states "everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion", not that the punishment for blasphemy or apostasy is death.
As for "Islamophobia", feminists have had that charge thrown at them so often that they have come to doubt the motives of their accusers. Obviously fascist groups and some nationalist politicians do their best to whip up prejudice against immigrants and are currently focusing on Muslims for that purpose. But is discrimination against Muslims worse than, say, racism against people of Caribbean descent in the UK or Latinos and African-Americans in the US? If police harassment is a criterion, young Caribbean men are the group that suffers the most.
Where Muslims are the victims of racism, once again the question arises: why can't people oppose white racism and clerical reaction with equal strength and for the same reasons? A commitment to fight prejudice does not exclude the possibility of criticising religious texts and religious movements. Indeed, any serious commitment against prejudice must include a willingness to fight men who would use religion to censor, subjugate and kill.
Tax ends with a radical suggestion for the Anglo-American Left: "Instead of allying with and protecting the Muslim Right, how about solidarity with actual popular movements of democrats and feminists struggling in the Global South?" I have been saying the same thing for years and know as well as Tax and Sahgal do that there is a long struggle to shift attitudes.
I don't want to criticise them, for they are among the best people I know, but they underestimate how it suits Westerners to ignore religious oppression. On the Left, radical Islam has taken the place once filled by socialism. As I said in my book What's Left?, when the dreams of Karl Marx died, many leftists concluded that any enemy of the West was better than none. It did not matter that the most violent enemies of the West were against everything leftists supported. They were also against America and that was all that mattered. Beyond the Left, in the politically indifferent mainstream, ignoring oppression has its advantages. Members of a consumer society do not want to campaign against the mistreatment of women in immigrant communities at home or support costly and dangerous interventions abroad. They want to get and spend. Rousing a nation of shoppers against injustice is always a hard task, and it seems to me that one of the chief functions of Anglo-American intellectuals is to provide respectable reasons for staying quiet.
That so many liberals are prepared to urge quiescence is a scandal. That Southall Black Sisters, Meredith Tax and Gita Sahgal are prepared to fight them is a reason for hope. Their Centre for Secular Space is, by the way, desperately short of money. The rich Quakers and progressives who opened their wallets for Cageprisoners will not fund feminists. If you can afford to help, may I point you in their direction and suggest that there is no worthier cause around?
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