Telling Israel like it is — in Arabic
Times of Israel
By Philippe Assouline
October 17, 2012,
A secular, liberal woman from the Galilee, Boshra Khalaila leaves passionate critics of Israel open-mouthed simply by describing the rights and freedoms she routinely enjoys
...
Boshra, a secular, independent and patriotic Israeli Arab woman, defies stereotypes. She grew up in a liberal home in the Arab village of Deir Hana, in the Galilee. Her first contact with Jewish Israelis came at the age of 18, when she enrolled in Haifa University. There, she had to speak Hebrew for the first time. And it is there that she started to develop her political conscience and her attachment to the State of Israel.
“I am married and doing a master’s degree [in Tel Aviv]. I am a liberal, free woman, with all the rights that I could enjoy. I compare myself to other women my age in Jordan, the territories, Egypt, any Arab country. They don’t have the rights that I have: freedom of expression, the right to vote. They are forced into marriage at a young age, and religious head covering, despite their own convictions. With me it’s the opposite; I have everything.”
...
Boshra was part of a team of five people, including another Israeli Arab and a Druze, who were sent to South Africa with Faces of Israel during Israel Apartheid Week. Like us, Boshra and her team had to deal with widespread ignorance about Israel, compounded by a campaign of demonization waged by pro-Palestinian students. Unlike us, she could counter the anti-Israel Middle Eastern students as an Arab herself, in Arabic.
...
Boshra and her team were generally not welcome. “They didn’t even know that there was such a thing as Israeli Arabs. They accused us of being Jews. Some people were hostile, they told us ‘get out,’ ‘we don’t want to hear from you.’ [Some] were even more unwilling to talk to me because I am Arab and was seen as a traitor, but this was only a small part of their group. Others, thankfully, came to listen; they were open-minded about it.”
Boshra and her team delivered a number of lectures, told their personal stories, dialogued with students and gave interviews. “You want to defend yourself from people that tell the world that [Jews and Arabs] travel on different buses and study at different schools and that there is segregation,” she said. “That just isn’t true: I study in same educational institutions, ride the same buses, shop in the same supermarkets. Everything that they say is absolutely false. And I do feel that I belong to my country.”
Hoping to give South Africans a glimpse of her everyday life as an Arab citizen of Israel, Boshra instead found herself publicly debating politics with a Palestinian PhD student from Gaza, in Arabic.
“This is what I told him in front of everyone; I spoke in Arabic, and I was translated: ‘I don’t enjoy it when soldiers attack and mothers and babies end up getting killed or injured. It’s hard. But the same is true for Netivot and Sderot, when Kassam rockets hit and, God forbid, someone is killed, it is very hard. On both sides there are mothers and it is hard. I want the Palestinian people to have a country. It’s a natural right. That said, there are all kinds of conflicts within the Palestinian authority, mainly with Hamas, that prevent progress toward a peaceful settlement for the state of Israel and that is unfortunate.”
She added, “If there is any Apartheid — in the sense of a flagrant injustice — in the world, it is what is happening in Syria. Thousands of people murdered…the number of dead doesn’t even come close here.”
Thinking back to my experience in California, I assumed that her message would fall on deaf ears. But she surprised me:
“Most of the talks ended with a handshake and a hug. To me this says it all. I have to say that it was important that I wasn’t there representing the government of Israel. It was surprising for them to see that I was a simple person, defending my country for the rights that I have and not speaking on behalf of the government. It came across as very genuine. For them, this was huge — to be able to listen to someone who is not from the government, including for the pro-Palestinian students. When you tell them you are a student and not a government spokesman, they no longer see you as an enemy.”
Boshra’s appearances on campus made waves, and, among her many radio appearances, she was interviewed by an Islamic, Arabic-language radio station in Johannesburg. The interviewer, a religious Saudi man, asked her questions which revealed a disheartening level of ignorance about Israel, the most over-scrutinized and documented country in the world — an ignorance that is unfortunately all too common.
“He asked why Israel doesn’t let Muslims pray or go to Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem; why only Jews are allowed to pray [in the State of Israel]. I told them that in my own small village in the Galilee there are not only one but two mosques and two imams who both get a monthly salary from the state. The interviewer was in shock. I added that I could go pray at Al Aqsa mosque at will, freely. Sure, sometimes there are security concerns and they limit entrance temporarily, but that’s it.”
The host was receptive to Boshra’s story and as the conversation turned to the rights of Arabs in Israel, her assertiveness grew.
“I said to him: ‘In Saudi Arabia, can a woman drive a car?’ He said no. I said: ‘I can.’ And he was silent. I asked: ‘Can a woman in Kuwait or Saudi Arabia meet a man and get to know him before getting married or is she just forced into marriage at a young age?’ He said no, she can’t. I said: ‘I can.’ And I would answer his questions with my own questions…and each time he would be stunned silent.”
Boshra went on to correct other popular misconceptions that the host had, including ideas about the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip. She informed him of the supplies that Israel provides to the strip on a monthly basis, and she reminded him that Egypt also enforces the embargo. She asked him why it was Israel and not Egypt, an Arab county, that provided for the territory’s necessities. “He was speechless. He was often speechless during our interview.”
The host’s silence, and the reception she got from many if not all of the Arab students that she met, stood in stark contrast to my experience at Berkeley. Boshra’s interviewer, a religious Saudi, was more receptive to new facts than the “liberal” Ivy league students that I faced. “He saw me; I spoke Arabic, I was liberal and secular. This made him quite open-minded, actually.”
Her tale begs the question of why, if a religious Muslim from a hyper-conservative state in the Middle East is willing to shed preconceived notions about Israel — even temporarily — the state is still faced with such disastrous public relations. Boshra’s diagnosis: “Every media outlet pushes this narrative painting Israel as an evil aggressor. It’s enough that a popular prime-time show plays, a few times, a clip of the IDF bombing a target in Gaza where a baby was killed, for people to be convinced that Israel is an evil state. It’s hard for people to see tragedies like that.”
“And our public diplomacy here in Israel,” she went on, underlining why people are not told the rest of the story, “is catastrophic. I can tell you first hand, it’s catastrophic.” She uses the Hebrew slang expression “all hapanim” — flat on its face — to describe Israel’s public relations apparatus.
more...
Saturday, October 20, 2012
Thursday, October 18, 2012
Murray on 'dual-loyalty' Brits joining the anti-Assad jihad
In a thought-provoking piece, Murray challenges the assumption that those Brits who are flying off to Syria to fight Assad are likely to be the kind of people we should be praising.
Who Would You Fight For?
Gatestone Institute
by Douglas Murray
October 18, 2012
...
During the civil war in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, every side committed some variety of atrocities on the others. The worst, in brutality as well as numbers, were committed by Serbs, but, as in any civil war, nobody came away clean. To say that everybody did bad things is not to claim that everybody was equally guilty. But run the following thought around: It is early in the Balkan conflict. You are a British citizen. You happen to be a Christian and you are also – though this may not necessarily play a part – pale-skinned. Let us imagine that you have heard clear word of violence against Christian Serbs in parts of the former Yugoslavia. Or fast-forward two decades and say that this same person becomes aware of the suffering of Christians in Syria amid the recent violence. None of these parallels is exact, but then none ever is exact.
But what would we think of a person who in the 1990s had seen violence against Serbs in the nascent civil war and decided to go off and fight with – and for – them? What would we think if they then explained their reason for doing so as being that their "white, Christian, brothers were suffering, that being a bystander while such suffering went on was intolerable and that they and their kind needed to come to their aid"?
My own response would be that the person in question was clearly some very nasty variety of sectarian. Presumably a religious sectarian, though if the person referred clearly to some common heritage, let alone skin-pigmentation, then I might easily presume that they were also a nasty racist. My expectation then, as now, would be that the press would not regard them as being people of any honor. Certainly people would not write of their efforts with any kind of admiration – either sublimated or overt.
...
Who Would You Fight For?
Gatestone Institute
by Douglas Murray
October 18, 2012
...
During the civil war in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, every side committed some variety of atrocities on the others. The worst, in brutality as well as numbers, were committed by Serbs, but, as in any civil war, nobody came away clean. To say that everybody did bad things is not to claim that everybody was equally guilty. But run the following thought around: It is early in the Balkan conflict. You are a British citizen. You happen to be a Christian and you are also – though this may not necessarily play a part – pale-skinned. Let us imagine that you have heard clear word of violence against Christian Serbs in parts of the former Yugoslavia. Or fast-forward two decades and say that this same person becomes aware of the suffering of Christians in Syria amid the recent violence. None of these parallels is exact, but then none ever is exact.
But what would we think of a person who in the 1990s had seen violence against Serbs in the nascent civil war and decided to go off and fight with – and for – them? What would we think if they then explained their reason for doing so as being that their "white, Christian, brothers were suffering, that being a bystander while such suffering went on was intolerable and that they and their kind needed to come to their aid"?
My own response would be that the person in question was clearly some very nasty variety of sectarian. Presumably a religious sectarian, though if the person referred clearly to some common heritage, let alone skin-pigmentation, then I might easily presume that they were also a nasty racist. My expectation then, as now, would be that the press would not regard them as being people of any honor. Certainly people would not write of their efforts with any kind of admiration – either sublimated or overt.
...
Friday, October 12, 2012
European Union wins 2012 Nobel Peace Prize
Parody this. It even beats Obama.
There's also this delightful touch: "Norway has twice voted "no" to joining the EU, in 1972 and 1994. The country has prospered outside the bloc, partly thanks to huge oil and gas resources."
And just before you start finding it funny: "Among those tipped to win was Russia's small Ekho Moskvy radio, a frequent critic of the Kremlin. Editor in chief Alexei Venediktov conceded the prize to a worthy winner. We are only 115. They are 500 million. It is an honour (to lose to the EU), he told Reuters."
-----------
European Union wins 2012 Nobel Peace Prize
Reuters
Oct 12, 2012
The European Union won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for promoting peace, democracy and human rights over six decades in an award seen as a morale boost as the bloc struggles to resolve its economic crisis.
The award served as a reminder that the EU had largely brought peace to a continent which tore itself apart in two world wars in which tens of millions died.
The EU has transformed most of Europe "from a continent of wars to a continent of peace," Nobel Committee Chairman Thorbjoern Jagland said in announcing the award in Oslo.
"The EU is currently undergoing grave economic difficulties and considerable social unrest," Jagland said. "The Norwegian Nobel Committee wishes to focus on what it sees as the EU's most important result: the successful struggle for peace and reconciliation and for democracy and human rights."
Jagland praised the EU for rebuilding Europe from the devastation of World War Two and for its role in spreading stability after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
While welcomed by European leaders, the award will have little practical effect on the debt crisis afflicting the single currency zone, which has brought economic instability and social unrest to several states with rioting in Athens and Madrid.
On the streets of the Greek capital, where demonstrators have burned Nazi flags to protest against German demands for austerity, the award was greeted with disbelief.
"Is this a joke?" asked Chrisoula Panagiotidi, 36, a beautician who lost her job three days ago. "It's the last thing I would expect. It mocks us and what we are going through right now. All it will do is infuriate people here."
contd
There's also this delightful touch: "Norway has twice voted "no" to joining the EU, in 1972 and 1994. The country has prospered outside the bloc, partly thanks to huge oil and gas resources."
And just before you start finding it funny: "Among those tipped to win was Russia's small Ekho Moskvy radio, a frequent critic of the Kremlin. Editor in chief Alexei Venediktov conceded the prize to a worthy winner. We are only 115. They are 500 million. It is an honour (to lose to the EU), he told Reuters."
-----------
European Union wins 2012 Nobel Peace Prize
Reuters
Oct 12, 2012
The European Union won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for promoting peace, democracy and human rights over six decades in an award seen as a morale boost as the bloc struggles to resolve its economic crisis.
The award served as a reminder that the EU had largely brought peace to a continent which tore itself apart in two world wars in which tens of millions died.
The EU has transformed most of Europe "from a continent of wars to a continent of peace," Nobel Committee Chairman Thorbjoern Jagland said in announcing the award in Oslo.
"The EU is currently undergoing grave economic difficulties and considerable social unrest," Jagland said. "The Norwegian Nobel Committee wishes to focus on what it sees as the EU's most important result: the successful struggle for peace and reconciliation and for democracy and human rights."
Jagland praised the EU for rebuilding Europe from the devastation of World War Two and for its role in spreading stability after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
While welcomed by European leaders, the award will have little practical effect on the debt crisis afflicting the single currency zone, which has brought economic instability and social unrest to several states with rioting in Athens and Madrid.
On the streets of the Greek capital, where demonstrators have burned Nazi flags to protest against German demands for austerity, the award was greeted with disbelief.
"Is this a joke?" asked Chrisoula Panagiotidi, 36, a beautician who lost her job three days ago. "It's the last thing I would expect. It mocks us and what we are going through right now. All it will do is infuriate people here."
contd
Thursday, June 21, 2012
Former Hamas man to ‘tell truth’ about Muhammad
Brave man.
Former Hamas man to ‘tell truth’ about Muhammad
JPost
20/06/2012
Ramallah-born Mosab Hassan Yousef has made enough enemies in the Palestinian territories to last a lifetime. The eldest son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, one of the founders of Hamas, spent his early years as a Hamas activist and went through more than a few stints in Israeli prison.
But for ten years, Yousef was “the Green Prince,” a code name given to him by the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency), with whom he worked to prevent dozens of terrorist attacks during the second intifada, saving hundreds of Israeli lives.
Two years ago, Yousef – who now lives in the US – published the book Son of Hamas: A Gripping Account of Terror, Betrayal, Political Intrigue and Unthinkable Choices, in which he detailed his disillusionment with the violence inside Hamas and his decision to assist Israel from around 1996 to 2006.
Now 34, Yousef is a devout Christian who is open about his faith as well as his pessimism for the future of peace in the Middle East.
“This is not a time to surrender, this is a time to inspire the new generation,” said Yousef during a press conference on Tuesday organized by Media- Central. “I understand shame and sensitivity. The most shameful thing was to work for Israel, and I did it voluntarily, because I wanted to set an example that we must fight for freedom.”
The guiding principal throughout his tumultuous tenure, Yousef said, was his dedication to saving lives.
“Nobody knew of my existence, the only light I had in my life was, ‘how can I go wrong by saving a human life?’” said Yousef. “Yes, there are lots of politics involved and lots of national agendas and it was a very complicated situation, but it was about saving human beings. I had to trade culture, religion and identity – all this for the sake of humanity.”
“If I did something wrong in the eyes of many ignorant people, I am okay with that, and I hope one day they will be able to see this,” he added.
But Yousef, whose family disowned him, was not cowed by the enemies he created during his public revelation of his years as a Shin Bet double agent. Now, he is taking on an even bigger challenge: a movie depicting the life of Muhammad, Islam’s holiest prophet.
“Muslims don’t understand the real nature of Islam,” said Yousef, who said it is a fanatical religion that favors war over peace. He cited the Arab Spring’s failure to create meaningful change and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt as proof that Islam is propelling Arab states backward rather than forward.
Yousef noted that he has the authority to criticize Islam because he comes from an Islamic background. He said he wants the world to know about what he says is “the truth” about Muhammad, Islam’s holiest prophet: that he glorified and encouraged murder as a form of worship, married a 9- year-old bride and valued violence.
He is working with Israeli film producer and actor Sam Feuer. Feuer played the role of Yosef Romano in the film Munich and is releasing the movie The First Grader in the fall. Feuer will produce both a feature film adaptation of Son of Hamas as well as the Muhammad movie, and insists that the film will be a “historical account” faithful to Muslim texts.
Depictions of Muhammad are forbidden according to Islamic tradition. The famous Danish cartoons of the prophet published in 2005 prompted riots across the Arab world in which more than 200 people were killed. The newspaper and the cartoonist also received multiple death threats.
But Yousef and Feuer insisted they are not frightened by the possibility of violence surrounding the film. Yousef frequently brushed off questions about his personal safety, especially in light of his decision to visit Israel as a guest of Likud MK Ayoub Kara. “I feel very safe,” he said repeatedly.
Yousef said the film would be a historical depiction of Muhammad’s life as told through Ibn Ishaq, an Arab historian from the eighth century who is believed to be one of the most reliable biographers of the prophet. Feuer said the movie has already interested sponsors and a major screenwriter who is in the process of creating the script.
Yousef added that he wants to free the world of “the absolute power of all religions,” starting with Islam. “It is time to bring Allah to the table and see [Islam] for what it is,” he said.
Former Hamas man to ‘tell truth’ about Muhammad
JPost
20/06/2012
Ramallah-born Mosab Hassan Yousef has made enough enemies in the Palestinian territories to last a lifetime. The eldest son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, one of the founders of Hamas, spent his early years as a Hamas activist and went through more than a few stints in Israeli prison.
But for ten years, Yousef was “the Green Prince,” a code name given to him by the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency), with whom he worked to prevent dozens of terrorist attacks during the second intifada, saving hundreds of Israeli lives.
Two years ago, Yousef – who now lives in the US – published the book Son of Hamas: A Gripping Account of Terror, Betrayal, Political Intrigue and Unthinkable Choices, in which he detailed his disillusionment with the violence inside Hamas and his decision to assist Israel from around 1996 to 2006.
Now 34, Yousef is a devout Christian who is open about his faith as well as his pessimism for the future of peace in the Middle East.
“This is not a time to surrender, this is a time to inspire the new generation,” said Yousef during a press conference on Tuesday organized by Media- Central. “I understand shame and sensitivity. The most shameful thing was to work for Israel, and I did it voluntarily, because I wanted to set an example that we must fight for freedom.”
The guiding principal throughout his tumultuous tenure, Yousef said, was his dedication to saving lives.
“Nobody knew of my existence, the only light I had in my life was, ‘how can I go wrong by saving a human life?’” said Yousef. “Yes, there are lots of politics involved and lots of national agendas and it was a very complicated situation, but it was about saving human beings. I had to trade culture, religion and identity – all this for the sake of humanity.”
“If I did something wrong in the eyes of many ignorant people, I am okay with that, and I hope one day they will be able to see this,” he added.
But Yousef, whose family disowned him, was not cowed by the enemies he created during his public revelation of his years as a Shin Bet double agent. Now, he is taking on an even bigger challenge: a movie depicting the life of Muhammad, Islam’s holiest prophet.
“Muslims don’t understand the real nature of Islam,” said Yousef, who said it is a fanatical religion that favors war over peace. He cited the Arab Spring’s failure to create meaningful change and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt as proof that Islam is propelling Arab states backward rather than forward.
Yousef noted that he has the authority to criticize Islam because he comes from an Islamic background. He said he wants the world to know about what he says is “the truth” about Muhammad, Islam’s holiest prophet: that he glorified and encouraged murder as a form of worship, married a 9- year-old bride and valued violence.
He is working with Israeli film producer and actor Sam Feuer. Feuer played the role of Yosef Romano in the film Munich and is releasing the movie The First Grader in the fall. Feuer will produce both a feature film adaptation of Son of Hamas as well as the Muhammad movie, and insists that the film will be a “historical account” faithful to Muslim texts.
Depictions of Muhammad are forbidden according to Islamic tradition. The famous Danish cartoons of the prophet published in 2005 prompted riots across the Arab world in which more than 200 people were killed. The newspaper and the cartoonist also received multiple death threats.
But Yousef and Feuer insisted they are not frightened by the possibility of violence surrounding the film. Yousef frequently brushed off questions about his personal safety, especially in light of his decision to visit Israel as a guest of Likud MK Ayoub Kara. “I feel very safe,” he said repeatedly.
Yousef said the film would be a historical depiction of Muhammad’s life as told through Ibn Ishaq, an Arab historian from the eighth century who is believed to be one of the most reliable biographers of the prophet. Feuer said the movie has already interested sponsors and a major screenwriter who is in the process of creating the script.
Yousef added that he wants to free the world of “the absolute power of all religions,” starting with Islam. “It is time to bring Allah to the table and see [Islam] for what it is,” he said.
Saturday, June 16, 2012
Sex work and the disabled
Very interesting Woman's Hour interview with Rachel Wotton, "an Australian sex worker, whose clients include people with disabilities. She is the subject of a documentary 'Scarlet Road' which is being screened at the Sheffield Documentary Festival this week. Rachel says it's often the parents of the client who initiate contact with her, on behalf of their adult child. … Rachel campaigns for the rights of people with disabilities and speaks at conferences on the subject all over the world."
It's a very moving 5/10 minute interview on this prog, go listen. Very morally challenging for any more conservative types who are against legalising prostitution.
Woman's Hour
BBC Radio 4
12/06/2012
(available on BBC iPlayer till 19/06)
It's a very moving 5/10 minute interview on this prog, go listen. Very morally challenging for any more conservative types who are against legalising prostitution.
Woman's Hour
BBC Radio 4
12/06/2012
(available on BBC iPlayer till 19/06)
Monday, June 11, 2012
Britain no longer rules the waves
It's still sometimes possible to be proud to be British in this day and age. Reading this is not one of those moments.
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Diamond Jubilee: The Queen no longer rules the waves
By Neil Tweedie and Thomas Harding
Daily Telegraph
01 Jun 2012
The Coronation was marked by a Spithead Review – but Her Majesty is being denied one now because the Royal Navy has been sunk by wave upon wave of spending cuts
For mile upon mile they stretched, their flag-bedecked ranks receding into the haze. The ships of the Royal Navy, 165 of them, drawn up at Spithead on June 26 1897 to mark the diamond jubilee of Victoria, for 60 years Queen of Great Britain and Ireland and her dominions beyond the seas, and, since 1876, Empress of India.
There were 21 battleships and 44 cruisers, their names conveying the confidence of a world-spanning Empire: Victorious, Renown, Powerful, Terrible, Majestic and Mars. A vast, intimidating presence intended to impress on friend and foe alike the continuing potency of the British behemoth. And what was more, the assembly of this great fleet had required the recall of not a single ship from the Mediterranean or the far-flung squadrons guarding the imperial sea lanes.
Jingoistic hyperbole was the order of the day. “If the British taxpayer does not feel more than a thrill of satisfaction at a sight so splendid and so inspiring,” gushed one newspaper, “he is no patriot and no true citizen.”
The Solent was a mass of small craft jammed with sunburned day-trippers, fussing around the black hulls of battleships riding at anchor. The pleasure boats parted only for the Royal Yacht Victoria and Albert. It carried the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, taking the salute from the quarterdeck on behalf of his mother. Victoria, 78, was exhausted by the jubilee celebrations and had opted to observe proceedings by telescope from Osborne House, her retreat on the Isle of Wight.
One hundred and fifteen years later and Britain is celebrating only the second diamond jubilee in its history. The occasion calls for a naval review, a staple of coronations and other great moments in the life of the nation, but it is not to be. The Royal Navy, the country’s saviour in two world wars, is a sorry shadow of its former self, so depleted by successive rounds of cuts that it can no longer muster a dozen ships for the occasion. So embarrassed are the ministers and civil servants at the Ministry of Defence who have overseen these disastrous reductions that they have quietly drawn a veil over the issue, hoping no one will notice the absence of a major role for the Senior Service in this week’s celebrations.
A serving commander in the Royal Navy, recently returned from operations, says the MoD has made it clear that no comment is to be made in public on the subject. “It would have been just too embarrassing,” he says. “There aren’t many ships and those we do have are a long way away. It was just too difficult to mount a spectacle worth having.” Lord West, a former First Sea Lord, the professional head of the Navy, says an attempt to stage a review would result only in national humiliation. “I suppose now we could get a couple of submarines out and five or six frigates and destroyers, but it would be very small and not very splendid,” he says. “That gives one a feel for how things have changed. Because the number of ships has reduced so dramatically the event would be too small to make a meaningful and sensible fleet review.”
The contrast with yesteryear is stark. Naval reviews have been held since 1415, when Henry V surveyed the fleet gathered for the invasion of France. In this century reviews have marked the coronation of George V in 1912, the mobilisation of the fleet in 1914, the coronation of George VI in 1937, the coronation of the present Queen in 1953, her silver jubilee in 1977 and the bicentenary of Trafalgar in 2005. The Queen’s golden jubilee was another casualty of defence cuts, with no review.
“A fleet review is an opportunity for the Queen to see her ships and sailors and for the men of the Royal Navy to pay their respects to the monarch,” says Steve Bush, editor of the naval directory British Warships & Auxiliaries. “It is an event of great tradition and spectacle. The Trafalgar review of 2005 saw more than 100 ships mustered but almost half were from overseas navies, the biggest being the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle.” Since 2005 the Navy has lost its Harrier force and the ability to protect itself, and strike, from the air. Illustrious, its sole-remaining carrier, now operates only helicopters, as does the amphibious assault ship Ocean, the only other ''flat-top’’ in the fleet.
The Queen and Duke of Edinburgh, a career officer before marriage, must look back ruefully on June 15 1953, when they boarded the frigate Surprise to review the armada gathered off Spithead to mark the Coronation. The Navy was anything but short of carriers then, benefiting from the surge in construction during the Second World War. Eagle, Indomitable, Illustrious, Theseus and Perseus, lined the way, together with Canada’s Magnificent and Australia’s Sydney. Other carriers were away on operations, from the Mediterranean to the Far East. In all some 300 ships, cruisers, destroyers, frigates and minesweepers, took part in the review, overflown by some 300 aircraft of the Fleet Air Arm.
The fleet had shrunk dramatically by the silver jubilee of 1977 but was the third biggest behind the navies of the United States and Soviet Union. Two aircraft carriers, including Ark Royal, attended, with two cruisers, one assault ship, 17 destroyers, 18 frigates, 14 submarines and a host of minor vessels and auxiliaries. There was no need to flesh out the review with foreign vessels, just 18 attending.
And today? Allowing for inflation, Britain’s GDP is four times greater than in 1953 but the country appears incapable of maintaining a viable fleet. Today it comprises two helicopter carriers, 1 active assault ship, six destroyers, 13 frigates, 42 minor vessels and 13 auxiliaries. Take away escorts on operations or in refit and the Navy would, as Lord West says, struggle to field more than a handful for a review. But one thing our increasingly Ruritanian fleet is not short of is admirals. There are 28 full, vice and rear admirals, one per major combat unit, surely the most over-managed structure in the country.
“I don’t think it’s particularly likely that we could muster another fleet review,” says Sir Sandy Woodward, commander of the task force that in 1982 retook the Falklands. “A diamond jubilee review should be a grand thing.”
In contrast, the navies of Brazil, Russia, India and China, are growing. Last year the Indian navy staged its presidential fleet review off Mumbai. There were 81 vessels, 10 more than the entire Royal Navy, including the carrier Viraat (ex British carrier Hermes). She still flies Sea Harriers, giving India a lead over its former naval mentor.
David Cameron must take his share of the blame for the parlous state of the Navy. It was he who did away with the carrier Ark Royal and the Harrier force, effectively ending the Navy’s ability to mount independent expeditionary operations – until the (alleged) introduction of a new carrier in 2020. He also did away with nine new RAF Nimrods as they were about to be introduced into service, denuding the fleet of long-range aerial surveillance and anti-submarine protection.
But governments of both shades are answerable. It can be argued that billions of pounds have been squandered reinforcing failure in Afghanistan, money that could have prevented the hollowing-out of the service, which guards the 95 per cent of British international trade conducted by sea.
There is also the question of procurement: the Navy, like the other services, is very bad at buying affordable and effective equipment. The new Type 45 destroyers cost £1 billion each but lack the land-attack capability of their cheaper American counterpart. Only six can be afforded. “Ministers have ordered cuts upon cuts in the number of ships and aeroplanes for the Navy,” says Tim Ripley of Jane’s Defence Weekly. “No matter how capable the weapons of today are, a ship can only be in one place at a time. This Government wants our armed forces to be smaller and to do less.”
After visiting the 1897 review, Rudyard Kipling was moved to compose the poem Recessional. The Empire was at its apogee but there were intimations of decline.
Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Britain, a maritime nation dependent on the sea lanes, has allowed its blue-water navy to melt away. The reckoning awaits.
--------
Diamond Jubilee: The Queen no longer rules the waves
By Neil Tweedie and Thomas Harding
Daily Telegraph
01 Jun 2012
The Coronation was marked by a Spithead Review – but Her Majesty is being denied one now because the Royal Navy has been sunk by wave upon wave of spending cuts
For mile upon mile they stretched, their flag-bedecked ranks receding into the haze. The ships of the Royal Navy, 165 of them, drawn up at Spithead on June 26 1897 to mark the diamond jubilee of Victoria, for 60 years Queen of Great Britain and Ireland and her dominions beyond the seas, and, since 1876, Empress of India.
There were 21 battleships and 44 cruisers, their names conveying the confidence of a world-spanning Empire: Victorious, Renown, Powerful, Terrible, Majestic and Mars. A vast, intimidating presence intended to impress on friend and foe alike the continuing potency of the British behemoth. And what was more, the assembly of this great fleet had required the recall of not a single ship from the Mediterranean or the far-flung squadrons guarding the imperial sea lanes.
Jingoistic hyperbole was the order of the day. “If the British taxpayer does not feel more than a thrill of satisfaction at a sight so splendid and so inspiring,” gushed one newspaper, “he is no patriot and no true citizen.”
The Solent was a mass of small craft jammed with sunburned day-trippers, fussing around the black hulls of battleships riding at anchor. The pleasure boats parted only for the Royal Yacht Victoria and Albert. It carried the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, taking the salute from the quarterdeck on behalf of his mother. Victoria, 78, was exhausted by the jubilee celebrations and had opted to observe proceedings by telescope from Osborne House, her retreat on the Isle of Wight.
One hundred and fifteen years later and Britain is celebrating only the second diamond jubilee in its history. The occasion calls for a naval review, a staple of coronations and other great moments in the life of the nation, but it is not to be. The Royal Navy, the country’s saviour in two world wars, is a sorry shadow of its former self, so depleted by successive rounds of cuts that it can no longer muster a dozen ships for the occasion. So embarrassed are the ministers and civil servants at the Ministry of Defence who have overseen these disastrous reductions that they have quietly drawn a veil over the issue, hoping no one will notice the absence of a major role for the Senior Service in this week’s celebrations.
A serving commander in the Royal Navy, recently returned from operations, says the MoD has made it clear that no comment is to be made in public on the subject. “It would have been just too embarrassing,” he says. “There aren’t many ships and those we do have are a long way away. It was just too difficult to mount a spectacle worth having.” Lord West, a former First Sea Lord, the professional head of the Navy, says an attempt to stage a review would result only in national humiliation. “I suppose now we could get a couple of submarines out and five or six frigates and destroyers, but it would be very small and not very splendid,” he says. “That gives one a feel for how things have changed. Because the number of ships has reduced so dramatically the event would be too small to make a meaningful and sensible fleet review.”
The contrast with yesteryear is stark. Naval reviews have been held since 1415, when Henry V surveyed the fleet gathered for the invasion of France. In this century reviews have marked the coronation of George V in 1912, the mobilisation of the fleet in 1914, the coronation of George VI in 1937, the coronation of the present Queen in 1953, her silver jubilee in 1977 and the bicentenary of Trafalgar in 2005. The Queen’s golden jubilee was another casualty of defence cuts, with no review.
“A fleet review is an opportunity for the Queen to see her ships and sailors and for the men of the Royal Navy to pay their respects to the monarch,” says Steve Bush, editor of the naval directory British Warships & Auxiliaries. “It is an event of great tradition and spectacle. The Trafalgar review of 2005 saw more than 100 ships mustered but almost half were from overseas navies, the biggest being the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle.” Since 2005 the Navy has lost its Harrier force and the ability to protect itself, and strike, from the air. Illustrious, its sole-remaining carrier, now operates only helicopters, as does the amphibious assault ship Ocean, the only other ''flat-top’’ in the fleet.
The Queen and Duke of Edinburgh, a career officer before marriage, must look back ruefully on June 15 1953, when they boarded the frigate Surprise to review the armada gathered off Spithead to mark the Coronation. The Navy was anything but short of carriers then, benefiting from the surge in construction during the Second World War. Eagle, Indomitable, Illustrious, Theseus and Perseus, lined the way, together with Canada’s Magnificent and Australia’s Sydney. Other carriers were away on operations, from the Mediterranean to the Far East. In all some 300 ships, cruisers, destroyers, frigates and minesweepers, took part in the review, overflown by some 300 aircraft of the Fleet Air Arm.
The fleet had shrunk dramatically by the silver jubilee of 1977 but was the third biggest behind the navies of the United States and Soviet Union. Two aircraft carriers, including Ark Royal, attended, with two cruisers, one assault ship, 17 destroyers, 18 frigates, 14 submarines and a host of minor vessels and auxiliaries. There was no need to flesh out the review with foreign vessels, just 18 attending.
And today? Allowing for inflation, Britain’s GDP is four times greater than in 1953 but the country appears incapable of maintaining a viable fleet. Today it comprises two helicopter carriers, 1 active assault ship, six destroyers, 13 frigates, 42 minor vessels and 13 auxiliaries. Take away escorts on operations or in refit and the Navy would, as Lord West says, struggle to field more than a handful for a review. But one thing our increasingly Ruritanian fleet is not short of is admirals. There are 28 full, vice and rear admirals, one per major combat unit, surely the most over-managed structure in the country.
“I don’t think it’s particularly likely that we could muster another fleet review,” says Sir Sandy Woodward, commander of the task force that in 1982 retook the Falklands. “A diamond jubilee review should be a grand thing.”
In contrast, the navies of Brazil, Russia, India and China, are growing. Last year the Indian navy staged its presidential fleet review off Mumbai. There were 81 vessels, 10 more than the entire Royal Navy, including the carrier Viraat (ex British carrier Hermes). She still flies Sea Harriers, giving India a lead over its former naval mentor.
David Cameron must take his share of the blame for the parlous state of the Navy. It was he who did away with the carrier Ark Royal and the Harrier force, effectively ending the Navy’s ability to mount independent expeditionary operations – until the (alleged) introduction of a new carrier in 2020. He also did away with nine new RAF Nimrods as they were about to be introduced into service, denuding the fleet of long-range aerial surveillance and anti-submarine protection.
But governments of both shades are answerable. It can be argued that billions of pounds have been squandered reinforcing failure in Afghanistan, money that could have prevented the hollowing-out of the service, which guards the 95 per cent of British international trade conducted by sea.
There is also the question of procurement: the Navy, like the other services, is very bad at buying affordable and effective equipment. The new Type 45 destroyers cost £1 billion each but lack the land-attack capability of their cheaper American counterpart. Only six can be afforded. “Ministers have ordered cuts upon cuts in the number of ships and aeroplanes for the Navy,” says Tim Ripley of Jane’s Defence Weekly. “No matter how capable the weapons of today are, a ship can only be in one place at a time. This Government wants our armed forces to be smaller and to do less.”
After visiting the 1897 review, Rudyard Kipling was moved to compose the poem Recessional. The Empire was at its apogee but there were intimations of decline.
Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Britain, a maritime nation dependent on the sea lanes, has allowed its blue-water navy to melt away. The reckoning awaits.
Saturday, June 02, 2012
Panorama's "Stadiums Of Hate" - exposing racism and anti-semitism in Poland and Ukraine
Panorama's "Stadiums Of Hate" - exposing racism and anti-semitism in Poland and Ukraine
Football365
John Nicholson and Alan Tyers
31/05/12
If you haven't seen this week's Panorama, we urge you to check it out. Euro 2012: Stadiums Of Hate (Mon, 8.30pm, BBC1) can be viewed on the iPlayer here.
...
Presenter Chris Rogers had spent a month going to games in Poland and the Ukraine to see what the matchday experience might be like. The first conclusion is that there are some truly horrible people in Poland and the Ukraine, and that some of them like going to the football and behaving like utter dicks.
Rogers' experiences in Poland seemed to centre on anti-Semitic chanting, graffiti and general objectionable behaviour. Derby games in both Lodz and Krakow showed both sets of fans chanting anti-Jewish slogans at each other.
As well as being vile and totally unacceptable, there was also a pathetic quality about the Polish stuff. It was clear that certain sections of support in lots of clubs hated Jews, and had apparently taken the word Jew to be a sort of all-purpose put-down or taunt, a bit like when a playground cottons on to the word 'gaylord' or 'retard'. "You're a Jew...no, you're a Jew...you're a Jewy Jew" etc. Which is not to say, of course, that these abusive words are not backed up by physical violence and intimidation on a daily basis, and nor should anyone with even one brain cell need reminding of their particular historical power in that part of Europe. All that said, this particular documentary had captured only verbal bad behaviour towards ethnic monitories in Poland. Either way, Britain's many Polish migrants must have been cringing.
Brainboxes of various allegiances apparently go around altering graffiti so 'Newcastle United' becomes 'Jewcastle' or 'Toon Army' becomes 'Jew-n Army' (Polish equivalents obviously; we're not saying the programme was exposing the hidden horror of Anti-Geordie persecution). The programme didn't take particular pains to elucidate if 'such-and-such a club are the worst offenders', and it seemed at times that pretty much each team was as bad as the next for having what we all like to tell ourselves is 'a minority of idiots'.
As is often the case when racists and hate crime-types are put on TV the overall effect is to show just of how utterly backward and sad these people are. There was a slight unintentional comedy with two different sets of arseholes all calling each 'Jew club' etc.
Two black players, Ugo Ukah - who was very briefly at QPR and was late of Widzew Lodz - and Prince Okachi, who still plays for Widzew, had predictably depressing accounts of racist abuse from the stands, from fellow players, and no support or intervention whatsoever from the authorities. Sol Campbell, a dignified and impressive talking head here, expressed dismay and real pain at the situation.
However, it has to be said that Kharkiv in the Ukraine made Lodz look like Greenwich Village. Rogers got some brilliant footage of a Metalist game with, he says, 2,000 fans giving it the always charming Nazi Salute. This was backed up with a grimly hilarious interview with a Colonel in the local police force claiming:
"Nazi salute? Oh, no no no no. These people were merely pointing at the opposing fans." If nothing else, you had to admire the truly world-class brass neck on display.
The footage of Metalist fans beating up on some visiting Indian students who were supporting the same team as them was disgusting; and when the programme got into meeting the Ukrainian Neo-Nazi Ultras who practice knife-fighting and military combat techniques, Rogers was in full Donal MacIntrye territory. It looked like pretty scary stuff, as potentially serious as their pathetic little clubhouse with flags of fellow nasties around the world (SS Lazio...The Confederate Flag...The, erm, St George Cross with ENGLAND on it) was sad and laughable.
[more]
Football365
John Nicholson and Alan Tyers
31/05/12
If you haven't seen this week's Panorama, we urge you to check it out. Euro 2012: Stadiums Of Hate (Mon, 8.30pm, BBC1) can be viewed on the iPlayer here.
...
Presenter Chris Rogers had spent a month going to games in Poland and the Ukraine to see what the matchday experience might be like. The first conclusion is that there are some truly horrible people in Poland and the Ukraine, and that some of them like going to the football and behaving like utter dicks.
Rogers' experiences in Poland seemed to centre on anti-Semitic chanting, graffiti and general objectionable behaviour. Derby games in both Lodz and Krakow showed both sets of fans chanting anti-Jewish slogans at each other.
As well as being vile and totally unacceptable, there was also a pathetic quality about the Polish stuff. It was clear that certain sections of support in lots of clubs hated Jews, and had apparently taken the word Jew to be a sort of all-purpose put-down or taunt, a bit like when a playground cottons on to the word 'gaylord' or 'retard'. "You're a Jew...no, you're a Jew...you're a Jewy Jew" etc. Which is not to say, of course, that these abusive words are not backed up by physical violence and intimidation on a daily basis, and nor should anyone with even one brain cell need reminding of their particular historical power in that part of Europe. All that said, this particular documentary had captured only verbal bad behaviour towards ethnic monitories in Poland. Either way, Britain's many Polish migrants must have been cringing.
Brainboxes of various allegiances apparently go around altering graffiti so 'Newcastle United' becomes 'Jewcastle' or 'Toon Army' becomes 'Jew-n Army' (Polish equivalents obviously; we're not saying the programme was exposing the hidden horror of Anti-Geordie persecution). The programme didn't take particular pains to elucidate if 'such-and-such a club are the worst offenders', and it seemed at times that pretty much each team was as bad as the next for having what we all like to tell ourselves is 'a minority of idiots'.
As is often the case when racists and hate crime-types are put on TV the overall effect is to show just of how utterly backward and sad these people are. There was a slight unintentional comedy with two different sets of arseholes all calling each 'Jew club' etc.
Two black players, Ugo Ukah - who was very briefly at QPR and was late of Widzew Lodz - and Prince Okachi, who still plays for Widzew, had predictably depressing accounts of racist abuse from the stands, from fellow players, and no support or intervention whatsoever from the authorities. Sol Campbell, a dignified and impressive talking head here, expressed dismay and real pain at the situation.
However, it has to be said that Kharkiv in the Ukraine made Lodz look like Greenwich Village. Rogers got some brilliant footage of a Metalist game with, he says, 2,000 fans giving it the always charming Nazi Salute. This was backed up with a grimly hilarious interview with a Colonel in the local police force claiming:
"Nazi salute? Oh, no no no no. These people were merely pointing at the opposing fans." If nothing else, you had to admire the truly world-class brass neck on display.
The footage of Metalist fans beating up on some visiting Indian students who were supporting the same team as them was disgusting; and when the programme got into meeting the Ukrainian Neo-Nazi Ultras who practice knife-fighting and military combat techniques, Rogers was in full Donal MacIntrye territory. It looked like pretty scary stuff, as potentially serious as their pathetic little clubhouse with flags of fellow nasties around the world (SS Lazio...The Confederate Flag...The, erm, St George Cross with ENGLAND on it) was sad and laughable.
[more]
Monday, May 21, 2012
Muslim Child-Rape Gangs in Britain
Amazing. I've agreed with something Baroness Warsi has said.
----
Muslim Child-Rape Gangs in Britain
Gatestone Institute
by Soeren Kern
May 21, 2012
It recently emerged that British police had known for more than a decade that Muslim rape gangs were targeting young girls, but they ignored the evidence of rapes because "they were petrified of being called racist." Rather than acknowledge that there is a problem, Muslim groups have decided to play the victim card instead. They are working overtime trying to silence public discussion about Muslim sex crimes by branding critics as "far-right racists" and "Islamophobic." Several of the men on trial in Liverpool apparently told their victims that it was all right for the girls to be passed around for sex with dozens of men "because it's what we do in our country."
[...]
Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, Britain's most senior Muslim politician, told the London Evening Standard that there are "Pakistani men who believe that white girls are fair game. And we have to be prepared to say that. You can only start solving a problem if you acknowledge it first."
Warsi said the color of the victims' skin, as well as their vulnerability, helped to make them a target. She also said that some Pakistani men "see women as second class citizens and white women probably as third class citizens" and that these men "are to be spoken out against."
Warsi called on British authorities to stop being squeamish about investigating allegations involving Muslims. "Cultural sensitivity should never be a bar to applying the law," she said.
[More]
----
Muslim Child-Rape Gangs in Britain
Gatestone Institute
by Soeren Kern
May 21, 2012
It recently emerged that British police had known for more than a decade that Muslim rape gangs were targeting young girls, but they ignored the evidence of rapes because "they were petrified of being called racist." Rather than acknowledge that there is a problem, Muslim groups have decided to play the victim card instead. They are working overtime trying to silence public discussion about Muslim sex crimes by branding critics as "far-right racists" and "Islamophobic." Several of the men on trial in Liverpool apparently told their victims that it was all right for the girls to be passed around for sex with dozens of men "because it's what we do in our country."
[...]
Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, Britain's most senior Muslim politician, told the London Evening Standard that there are "Pakistani men who believe that white girls are fair game. And we have to be prepared to say that. You can only start solving a problem if you acknowledge it first."
Warsi said the color of the victims' skin, as well as their vulnerability, helped to make them a target. She also said that some Pakistani men "see women as second class citizens and white women probably as third class citizens" and that these men "are to be spoken out against."
Warsi called on British authorities to stop being squeamish about investigating allegations involving Muslims. "Cultural sensitivity should never be a bar to applying the law," she said.
[More]
Sunday, May 20, 2012
Spare a thought for the other ‘nakba’
Spare a thought for the other ‘nakba’
Lyn Julius
Times of Israel blog
May 12, 2012
The news that student groups on Tel Aviv University campus will be commemorating the Palestinian “nakba” this week with a special ceremony should come as no surprise. Why shouldn’t they join the thousands of youngsters around the world protesting the “catastrophe” of Israel’s birth and the creation of hundreds of thousands of Arab refugees? Palestine is one of the great global “radical chic” causes.
None of these indignant protestors will spare a thought for the other “nakba” — the Jewish one. For, while 700,000 refugees fled in one direction — from Palestine — over 850,000 fled in the other — from Arab countries.
The cause of the flight of the Palestinians in 1948 was war — a war their side launched. In the Arab countries, the cause of the Jewish flight was ethnic cleansing. If Israel had had a deliberate policy to drive out the Arab population, Arabs would not constitute 20 percent of Israel’s population today, nor would they be occupying prominent positions in government and the judiciary.
In Arab countries, by contrast, the Jewish population is down from a million to about 4,000. The Arab Spring is taking a further toll on the Jewish remnants in Tunisia, Yemen and Morocco. A drastic reduction of over 99 percent cannot be explained away as “Jews leaving their homes of their own free will.”
Where their suffering is acknowledged, and not swept under the rug, “the Jews only have themselves to blame,” goes the argument. Riots, executions, internment and abuse were justifiable payback for the “usurpation of Palestine.” (In Tunisia and Morocco, a gentler form of exclusion and harassment ushered the Jews toward the exit.)
All those exercised by the destruction of 400 Palestinian villages in Israel should spare a thought for the Jewish life, culture and civilization erased from almost every city and town in the Middle East and North Africa. According to the World Organisation of Jews from Arab Countries, Jews lost not only homes, schools, shops, markets, synagogues and cemeteries, but deeded land and property equivalent to five times the size of Israel itself.
The “understandable backlash” theory exonerates the scapegoating of innocent civilians as “enemy aliens” hundreds of miles from the battlefield. To claim that before Zionism Jews and Muslims coexisted in harmony masks another inconvenient truth. Anti-Semitism in Arab countries did not suddenly spring up as a reaction to Zionism; it predated the establishment of Israel by centuries. Under Muslim rule, Jewish life was precarious and often dispensable, depending on the ruler of the day. The dhimmi rules, humiliating the Jews but sparing their lives in exchange for payment of a poll tax, may have appeared tolerant in the 9th century. Today they appear arbitrary and racist.
Furthermore, the “understandable backlash” theory collapses under the weight of evidence that the Arab League drew up a plan to persecute their Jews in 1947 — before it declared war, and just two years after the slaughter of six million Jews in Nazi camps had come to light. The brutal truth is that Arab states conspired to get rid of and defraud their Jews. In other words, the Arab regimes imposed a set of “Nuremberg Laws“ on their own Jewish citizens. The result was ethnic cleansing and dispossession.
In 1948, five Arab states launched a double jihad on the Jews: they lost the military war on the Jews of Israel, but comfortably won the “civil war” against the defenseless Jews of Arab lands. What the keffiyeh-clad youngsters demonstrating on university campuses at Nakba Week events are really doing is deploring the Arab failure to wipe out the Jews entirely from the region. How progressive is that?
It is no accident that the fascism that precipitated both jihads will not tolerate Christians and other non-Muslims, heretical sects, and anyone else who doesn’t fit the Islamist “one nation, one people, one religion” straightjacket.
Impressionable students and their professors are taken in by the lie that Jews came to steal land belonging to the natives. The refugees of the Jewish “nakba” are living proof that Jews are not colonial interlopers, but indigenous to the region, members of communities that in many cases predated Islam by centuries. The fact that some 50 percent of the Jewish population of Israel descends from these refugees is a powerful statistic.
Moreover, the anti-Semitism that Arab-born Jews suffered is key to understanding the Arab world’s deep religious and cultural resistance to the idea of a Jewish state. For 14 centuries Jews lived under Muslim rule as dhimmis – inferior subjects — surrendering their right to self-defense to Muslims. For all its shortcomings, Israel has delivered these Jews from the yoke of Arab-Islamist supremacy.
In all conscience, every liberal ought to see the self-determination of a small, indigenous Middle Eastern people – the Jews – as a progressive cause. Instead, students and their teachers supporting the Palestinian campaign against Israel – deceptively cloaked in the language of human rights — have become unwitting agents for ethno-religious fascism.
----
Palestine's Self-Inflicted Wound
Alan Dershowitz
May 17, 2007
I just returned from a visit from several university campuses during which I spoke about the Israeli-Palestine conflict. On these and other campuses anti-Israel students commemorate the Palestinian Nakba. They call this the Day of Catastrophe on which the Palestinians were deprived of their homeland and were made refugees from their birthplace. They compare their catastrophe to the Holocaust. Perhaps out of deference to the suffering of the Palestinian people, Pro-Israel students generally say nothing in response to these Nakba commemorations. The impression is thus created that everyone agrees that this was indeed a catastrophe inflicted by Israel on the Palestinians. The time has come to reply to this canard and to place it in its historical context.
The Nakba was indeed a catastrophe, but it was a self-inflicted wound. The Palestinian Nakba was a direct result of the refusal of the Palestinian and Arab leadership to accept the two state solution offered by the United Nations in 1947-48. The UN divided what remained of Palestine, after Trans-Jordan was carved out of it, into two states of roughly equal size (The Israelis got slightly more actual land, but the Palestinians got considerably more arable land). Israel would control territories in which Jews were a majority, while the Palestinians would control territories in which Arabs were a majority. Israel accepted the partition and declared statehood. Palestinians rejected statehood and attacked Israel with the help of all the surrounding Arab countries. In the process of defending their new state, Israel lost 1% of its population (1 out of every 100 Israelis were killed.) In the ensuing war- a war declared to be genocidal by Israel's enemies- 700,000 Palestinians left their homes, some voluntarily, some at the urging of Palestinian leaders and some forced out by the Israeli military. None of these people would have had to leave Israel had the Palestinians and other Arabs been willing to accept the two state solution. It was indeed a catastrophe for all sides, but the catastrophe was caused by the Palestinians and Arabs.
In the aftermath of the war, Jordan occupied the West Bank and Egypt occupied the Gaza Strip. There were no United Nations condemnations of these occupations though they were brutal and denied the Palestinians autonomy and sovereignty. Only when Israel occupied these lands, following a defensive war against Egypt and Jordan, did the occupation become a source of international concern.
This is the reality. This is the historical truth. And the world should understand that this particular catastrophe, as distinguished from others like the Holocaust, could easily have been prevented had the Palestinians wanted their own state more than they wanted to see the destruction of the Jewish state of Israel.
The Germans don't celebrate the catastrophe resulting from their invasion of Poland. Japanese do not celebrate their catastrophe resulting from the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Why do Palestinians celebrate their catastrophe resulting from the Arab attack against Israel?
Lyn Julius
Times of Israel blog
May 12, 2012
The news that student groups on Tel Aviv University campus will be commemorating the Palestinian “nakba” this week with a special ceremony should come as no surprise. Why shouldn’t they join the thousands of youngsters around the world protesting the “catastrophe” of Israel’s birth and the creation of hundreds of thousands of Arab refugees? Palestine is one of the great global “radical chic” causes.
None of these indignant protestors will spare a thought for the other “nakba” — the Jewish one. For, while 700,000 refugees fled in one direction — from Palestine — over 850,000 fled in the other — from Arab countries.
The cause of the flight of the Palestinians in 1948 was war — a war their side launched. In the Arab countries, the cause of the Jewish flight was ethnic cleansing. If Israel had had a deliberate policy to drive out the Arab population, Arabs would not constitute 20 percent of Israel’s population today, nor would they be occupying prominent positions in government and the judiciary.
In Arab countries, by contrast, the Jewish population is down from a million to about 4,000. The Arab Spring is taking a further toll on the Jewish remnants in Tunisia, Yemen and Morocco. A drastic reduction of over 99 percent cannot be explained away as “Jews leaving their homes of their own free will.”
Where their suffering is acknowledged, and not swept under the rug, “the Jews only have themselves to blame,” goes the argument. Riots, executions, internment and abuse were justifiable payback for the “usurpation of Palestine.” (In Tunisia and Morocco, a gentler form of exclusion and harassment ushered the Jews toward the exit.)
All those exercised by the destruction of 400 Palestinian villages in Israel should spare a thought for the Jewish life, culture and civilization erased from almost every city and town in the Middle East and North Africa. According to the World Organisation of Jews from Arab Countries, Jews lost not only homes, schools, shops, markets, synagogues and cemeteries, but deeded land and property equivalent to five times the size of Israel itself.
The “understandable backlash” theory exonerates the scapegoating of innocent civilians as “enemy aliens” hundreds of miles from the battlefield. To claim that before Zionism Jews and Muslims coexisted in harmony masks another inconvenient truth. Anti-Semitism in Arab countries did not suddenly spring up as a reaction to Zionism; it predated the establishment of Israel by centuries. Under Muslim rule, Jewish life was precarious and often dispensable, depending on the ruler of the day. The dhimmi rules, humiliating the Jews but sparing their lives in exchange for payment of a poll tax, may have appeared tolerant in the 9th century. Today they appear arbitrary and racist.
Furthermore, the “understandable backlash” theory collapses under the weight of evidence that the Arab League drew up a plan to persecute their Jews in 1947 — before it declared war, and just two years after the slaughter of six million Jews in Nazi camps had come to light. The brutal truth is that Arab states conspired to get rid of and defraud their Jews. In other words, the Arab regimes imposed a set of “Nuremberg Laws“ on their own Jewish citizens. The result was ethnic cleansing and dispossession.
In 1948, five Arab states launched a double jihad on the Jews: they lost the military war on the Jews of Israel, but comfortably won the “civil war” against the defenseless Jews of Arab lands. What the keffiyeh-clad youngsters demonstrating on university campuses at Nakba Week events are really doing is deploring the Arab failure to wipe out the Jews entirely from the region. How progressive is that?
It is no accident that the fascism that precipitated both jihads will not tolerate Christians and other non-Muslims, heretical sects, and anyone else who doesn’t fit the Islamist “one nation, one people, one religion” straightjacket.
Impressionable students and their professors are taken in by the lie that Jews came to steal land belonging to the natives. The refugees of the Jewish “nakba” are living proof that Jews are not colonial interlopers, but indigenous to the region, members of communities that in many cases predated Islam by centuries. The fact that some 50 percent of the Jewish population of Israel descends from these refugees is a powerful statistic.
Moreover, the anti-Semitism that Arab-born Jews suffered is key to understanding the Arab world’s deep religious and cultural resistance to the idea of a Jewish state. For 14 centuries Jews lived under Muslim rule as dhimmis – inferior subjects — surrendering their right to self-defense to Muslims. For all its shortcomings, Israel has delivered these Jews from the yoke of Arab-Islamist supremacy.
In all conscience, every liberal ought to see the self-determination of a small, indigenous Middle Eastern people – the Jews – as a progressive cause. Instead, students and their teachers supporting the Palestinian campaign against Israel – deceptively cloaked in the language of human rights — have become unwitting agents for ethno-religious fascism.
----
Palestine's Self-Inflicted Wound
Alan Dershowitz
May 17, 2007
I just returned from a visit from several university campuses during which I spoke about the Israeli-Palestine conflict. On these and other campuses anti-Israel students commemorate the Palestinian Nakba. They call this the Day of Catastrophe on which the Palestinians were deprived of their homeland and were made refugees from their birthplace. They compare their catastrophe to the Holocaust. Perhaps out of deference to the suffering of the Palestinian people, Pro-Israel students generally say nothing in response to these Nakba commemorations. The impression is thus created that everyone agrees that this was indeed a catastrophe inflicted by Israel on the Palestinians. The time has come to reply to this canard and to place it in its historical context.
The Nakba was indeed a catastrophe, but it was a self-inflicted wound. The Palestinian Nakba was a direct result of the refusal of the Palestinian and Arab leadership to accept the two state solution offered by the United Nations in 1947-48. The UN divided what remained of Palestine, after Trans-Jordan was carved out of it, into two states of roughly equal size (The Israelis got slightly more actual land, but the Palestinians got considerably more arable land). Israel would control territories in which Jews were a majority, while the Palestinians would control territories in which Arabs were a majority. Israel accepted the partition and declared statehood. Palestinians rejected statehood and attacked Israel with the help of all the surrounding Arab countries. In the process of defending their new state, Israel lost 1% of its population (1 out of every 100 Israelis were killed.) In the ensuing war- a war declared to be genocidal by Israel's enemies- 700,000 Palestinians left their homes, some voluntarily, some at the urging of Palestinian leaders and some forced out by the Israeli military. None of these people would have had to leave Israel had the Palestinians and other Arabs been willing to accept the two state solution. It was indeed a catastrophe for all sides, but the catastrophe was caused by the Palestinians and Arabs.
In the aftermath of the war, Jordan occupied the West Bank and Egypt occupied the Gaza Strip. There were no United Nations condemnations of these occupations though they were brutal and denied the Palestinians autonomy and sovereignty. Only when Israel occupied these lands, following a defensive war against Egypt and Jordan, did the occupation become a source of international concern.
This is the reality. This is the historical truth. And the world should understand that this particular catastrophe, as distinguished from others like the Holocaust, could easily have been prevented had the Palestinians wanted their own state more than they wanted to see the destruction of the Jewish state of Israel.
The Germans don't celebrate the catastrophe resulting from their invasion of Poland. Japanese do not celebrate their catastrophe resulting from the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Why do Palestinians celebrate their catastrophe resulting from the Arab attack against Israel?
Dershowitz - Radicals can be defeated
Radicals can be defeated
YNet
By Alan M. Dershowitz
12 May 2012
Op-ed: Alan Dershowitz shares his insights on best approach to use against anti-Israel extremists
[...] The hatred for Israel in parts of Europe and on many university campuses has become so irrational that no evidence, regardless of how indisputable and powerful it may be, seems to be able to change closed minds hardened by years of unremitting falsehoods. These falsehoods take on an aura of undeserved credibility, particularly when espoused by people who identify themselves as Jewish or Israeli (or even formerly Jewish or formally Israeli.)
But whenever I get discouraged, I recall an incident several years ago at the University of California at Irvine, which is a hotbed of anti-Israel hate speech. This is the very same campus where radical Islamic students tried to prevent Israel’s moderate ambassador, Professor Michael Oren, from speaking.
About a year before that incident, I spoke to a full audience of students that included some of the same radicals that tried to shut Oren down. About 100 of them sat to my right. Another 100 or so students, wearing pro-Israel shirts and kipot, sat to my left. Several hundred additional students were in the middle - both literally and ideologically. I know that because I asked for a show of hands before I began my remarks.
I first asked for students to raise their hands if they generally support Israel. All the students to my left and several in the middle raised their hands. I then asked how many students supported the Palestinian side. All the students to my right and several in the middle raised their hands. I then posed the following question to the pro-Israel group: “How many of you would support a Palestinian state living in peace and without terrorism next to Israel?” Every single pro-Israel hand immediately went up. I then asked how many on the pro-Palestine side would accept a Jewish state within the 1967 borders, with no settlements on territory claimed by the Palestinians. There was some mumbling and brief conversation among the people to my right, but not a single hand was raised.
The debate was essentially over, as everyone in the middle now recognized that this was not a conflict between pro-Israel and pro-Palestine groups, but rather, a conflict between those who would accept a two-state solution and those who would reject any Jewish state anywhere in the Middle East. The pro-Israel view had prevailed because I was able to use the extremism of the anti-Israel group to demonstrate the ugly truth about Israel’s enemies to the large group of students in the middle with open minds.
I have now used this heuristic repeatedly on college campuses, and with considerable success. The lesson, I believe, is not to try to persuade irrational anti-Israel extremists, but rather, to use their extremism - which often includes anti-American and anti-Western extremism - against them and in favor of a reasonable and centrist pro-Israel position.
[More]
YNet
By Alan M. Dershowitz
12 May 2012
Op-ed: Alan Dershowitz shares his insights on best approach to use against anti-Israel extremists
[...] The hatred for Israel in parts of Europe and on many university campuses has become so irrational that no evidence, regardless of how indisputable and powerful it may be, seems to be able to change closed minds hardened by years of unremitting falsehoods. These falsehoods take on an aura of undeserved credibility, particularly when espoused by people who identify themselves as Jewish or Israeli (or even formerly Jewish or formally Israeli.)
But whenever I get discouraged, I recall an incident several years ago at the University of California at Irvine, which is a hotbed of anti-Israel hate speech. This is the very same campus where radical Islamic students tried to prevent Israel’s moderate ambassador, Professor Michael Oren, from speaking.
About a year before that incident, I spoke to a full audience of students that included some of the same radicals that tried to shut Oren down. About 100 of them sat to my right. Another 100 or so students, wearing pro-Israel shirts and kipot, sat to my left. Several hundred additional students were in the middle - both literally and ideologically. I know that because I asked for a show of hands before I began my remarks.
I first asked for students to raise their hands if they generally support Israel. All the students to my left and several in the middle raised their hands. I then asked how many students supported the Palestinian side. All the students to my right and several in the middle raised their hands. I then posed the following question to the pro-Israel group: “How many of you would support a Palestinian state living in peace and without terrorism next to Israel?” Every single pro-Israel hand immediately went up. I then asked how many on the pro-Palestine side would accept a Jewish state within the 1967 borders, with no settlements on territory claimed by the Palestinians. There was some mumbling and brief conversation among the people to my right, but not a single hand was raised.
The debate was essentially over, as everyone in the middle now recognized that this was not a conflict between pro-Israel and pro-Palestine groups, but rather, a conflict between those who would accept a two-state solution and those who would reject any Jewish state anywhere in the Middle East. The pro-Israel view had prevailed because I was able to use the extremism of the anti-Israel group to demonstrate the ugly truth about Israel’s enemies to the large group of students in the middle with open minds.
I have now used this heuristic repeatedly on college campuses, and with considerable success. The lesson, I believe, is not to try to persuade irrational anti-Israel extremists, but rather, to use their extremism - which often includes anti-American and anti-Western extremism - against them and in favor of a reasonable and centrist pro-Israel position.
[More]
Sunday, January 22, 2012
Class in Britain - the coalition vs Downton Abbey
Interesting article by Nick Cohen. Well, the interesting bit for me was the comparison of history and therefore class attitudes in Britain and elsewhere in the world, rather than the bits about Downton Abbey (which I haven't seen), most of which I clipped out.
----------
Different Class
Nick Cohen
Standpoint Magazine - November 2010
Britain, the only country in Europe with an electorate that would tolerate a return of the old ruling class to power, is also the only European country where a TV company could produce Downton Abbey. To the surprise of the critics, but not of those who have noticed that the National Trust has two million more members than all the political parties combined, this affectionate drama about the ancestors of today's aristocracy has become the hit of the autumn season.
You only have to imagine what a comparable German version set in Prussia in 1912 would have to deal with to grasp how different Britain is from the Continent. Without knowing it, the Junker family would have the weight of the defeat in the First World War, revolution and Weimar, the Nazis, the Second World War and the communist takeover of the East on its shoulders. The series would have to be condemnatory or doom-laden or it would be ridiculous. What applies to German drama applies equally to German politics. However tired Germans become of their stolidly bourgeois Social Democrat and Christian Democrat leaders, they cannot yearn for a return to the values of the old order even for a moment. It's not just that the old order was destroyed in two world wars and three revolutions — a large chunk of Prussia is now in Poland.
The British — or rather the English, for the Scots and the Irish have very different attitudes — can and on occasion do yearn for the values of their traditional rulers because the ruling class was not discredited or destroyed by the 20th century. It did not collaborate with Nazism or flee from communism, but retained its hold on the national imagination. Even my left-wing friends, who loathe the coalition government ideologically, admit to admiring its style. No more poisonous briefings from Charlie Whelan and Ed Balls. Noticeably fewer eye-catching initiatives to generate cheap headlines. After the frenetic ride on which the discredited new establishment of the baby-boomer Left took the country, the British had the option denied to so many others of turning to an old establishment. It has provided us again with a Cabinet of relaxed gentlemen who are slow to anger and slower to panic. In theory, I know the dangers of falling for the allure of aristocratic style. Its superficially attractive manner hides many injustices and hypocrisies. But it is a sign of how we are conditioned by the national culture that although I have tried to dislike the coalition, and will doubtless try harder, I cannot wholly despise it.
...
Downton Abbey nods towards the greater conflicts of the period, but only for form's sake. Women characters occasionally allow serious thoughts to trouble their pretty little heads. A chauffeur admits to be being a socialist with a chuckle in his voice. But these moments are fleeting. The plots remain insipid and the characters feebly drawn. This most conservative of dramas is an artistic failure, and its weakness points to wider tensions.
The old ruling class may not have been destroyed, but it is far from loved. We may want to see how an Edwardian kitchen worked, as Downton Abbey allows us to do, and to gawp at stately homes, but we lost the deferential respect for their owners long ago.
Our rulers know it. David Cameron, a descendant of William IV, calls himself Dave. Gideon Osborne, heir to the baronetcy of Ballentaylor in County Tipperary, changed his name to George. From their efforts to suppress the Bullingdon Club photograph of them wearing tailcoats and sneers, to their ostentatious attacks on the benefits of higher-rate taxpayers, they exhibit a desperate desire to show that the return of the aristocracy does not mean that privileged men will be helping their own kind.
They realise that an appeal to the virtues of hierarchy and noblesse oblige cannot sustain a government. Nor can it sustain a drama.
----------
Different Class
Nick Cohen
Standpoint Magazine - November 2010
Britain, the only country in Europe with an electorate that would tolerate a return of the old ruling class to power, is also the only European country where a TV company could produce Downton Abbey. To the surprise of the critics, but not of those who have noticed that the National Trust has two million more members than all the political parties combined, this affectionate drama about the ancestors of today's aristocracy has become the hit of the autumn season.
You only have to imagine what a comparable German version set in Prussia in 1912 would have to deal with to grasp how different Britain is from the Continent. Without knowing it, the Junker family would have the weight of the defeat in the First World War, revolution and Weimar, the Nazis, the Second World War and the communist takeover of the East on its shoulders. The series would have to be condemnatory or doom-laden or it would be ridiculous. What applies to German drama applies equally to German politics. However tired Germans become of their stolidly bourgeois Social Democrat and Christian Democrat leaders, they cannot yearn for a return to the values of the old order even for a moment. It's not just that the old order was destroyed in two world wars and three revolutions — a large chunk of Prussia is now in Poland.
The British — or rather the English, for the Scots and the Irish have very different attitudes — can and on occasion do yearn for the values of their traditional rulers because the ruling class was not discredited or destroyed by the 20th century. It did not collaborate with Nazism or flee from communism, but retained its hold on the national imagination. Even my left-wing friends, who loathe the coalition government ideologically, admit to admiring its style. No more poisonous briefings from Charlie Whelan and Ed Balls. Noticeably fewer eye-catching initiatives to generate cheap headlines. After the frenetic ride on which the discredited new establishment of the baby-boomer Left took the country, the British had the option denied to so many others of turning to an old establishment. It has provided us again with a Cabinet of relaxed gentlemen who are slow to anger and slower to panic. In theory, I know the dangers of falling for the allure of aristocratic style. Its superficially attractive manner hides many injustices and hypocrisies. But it is a sign of how we are conditioned by the national culture that although I have tried to dislike the coalition, and will doubtless try harder, I cannot wholly despise it.
...
Downton Abbey nods towards the greater conflicts of the period, but only for form's sake. Women characters occasionally allow serious thoughts to trouble their pretty little heads. A chauffeur admits to be being a socialist with a chuckle in his voice. But these moments are fleeting. The plots remain insipid and the characters feebly drawn. This most conservative of dramas is an artistic failure, and its weakness points to wider tensions.
The old ruling class may not have been destroyed, but it is far from loved. We may want to see how an Edwardian kitchen worked, as Downton Abbey allows us to do, and to gawp at stately homes, but we lost the deferential respect for their owners long ago.
Our rulers know it. David Cameron, a descendant of William IV, calls himself Dave. Gideon Osborne, heir to the baronetcy of Ballentaylor in County Tipperary, changed his name to George. From their efforts to suppress the Bullingdon Club photograph of them wearing tailcoats and sneers, to their ostentatious attacks on the benefits of higher-rate taxpayers, they exhibit a desperate desire to show that the return of the aristocracy does not mean that privileged men will be helping their own kind.
They realise that an appeal to the virtues of hierarchy and noblesse oblige cannot sustain a government. Nor can it sustain a drama.
Monday, November 14, 2011
The Narrative of Perpetual Palestinian Victimhood
Deeply impressive article. Shelby Steele argues that the (false) narrative of permanent victimhood is what unites black Americans and Palestinians, and is simultaneously both the source of their power and what holds them back. This is strikingly in accord with Bernard Lewis' thesis What Went Wrong?, but it's one thing to hear it from a Jewish historian, another thing to hear it from a mixed race American academic.
----------
The Narrative of Perpetual Palestinian Victimhood
Hudson NY
by Shelby Steele
November 14, 2011
Shelby Steele is Robert J and Marion E. Oster Senior Fellow, Hoover Institute, member of the Working Group on Islamism and the International Order. The following is excerpted from a speech delivered September 22, 2011 in New York City at the conference "The Perils of Global Intolerance: The UN and Durban III," sponsored by the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust and the Hudson Institute.
The Arab-Israeli conflict, is not really a conflict, it is a war – a war of the Arabs against the Jews. In many ways, this conflict has been a conflict between narratives. We who strongly support Israel have done a poor job in formulating a narrative which will combat the story spun by the other side. We can do better.
The Durban conferences, the request for UN recognition of a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood, and the general animus in the Middle East and elsewhere toward Israel and toward the Jews, what are they really about? Is the Durban conference and the claim that Israel is a racist nation really about reforming the people of Israel and curing them of their racism?
I think their real interest is to situate the Palestinian people within a narrative of victimization. This is their ulterior goal: to see themselves and to have others see them as victims of colonialism, as victims of white supremacy.
Listen to their language; it is the language of colonial oppression. Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas claims that Palestinians have been occupied for 63 years. The word oppressed is constant, exploited. In this, there is a poetic truth; like poetic license, in a poetic truth a writer will bend the rules in order to be more effective.
I will give you one example of a poetic truth that comes from my group, black Americans. We make the following claims: America is a deeply, intractably racist society. It may not be as conspicuous today as it was before. Nevertheless, it is still there today structurally and systemically, and it still holds us back and keeps us from achieving the American dream.
To contradict this claim, one can come forward with evidence to suggest that racism in America today is about 25th on the list of problems facing black Americans. One can recount one of the great untold stories of America, namely, the moral growth and evolution away from that problem. This is not to say that racism is completely extinguished, but that it no longer prevents the forward progress of any black in the United States. There is no evidence to suggest that it does. Yet, this claim is still the centerpiece of black American identity – this idea that we are victimized by a fundamentally, incurably racist society.
Poetic truths like that are marvelous because no facts and no reason can ever penetrate. Supporters of Israel are up against a poetic truth. We keep hitting it with all the facts. We keep hitting it with obvious logic and reason. And we are so obvious and conspicuously right that we assume it is going to have an impact and it never does.
Why not? These narratives, these poetic truths, are the source of their power. Focusing on the case of the Palestinians, who would they be if they were not victims of white supremacy? They would just be poor people in the Middle East. They would be backwards. They would be behind Israel in every way. So this narrative is the source of their power. It is the source of their money. Money comes from around the world. It is the source of their self-esteem. Without it, would they be able to compete with Israeli society? They would have to confront in themselves a certain inferiority with regard to Israel – as most other Arab nations would have to confront an inferiority in themselves and be responsible for it.
The idea that the problem is Israel, that the problem is the Jews, protects Palestinians from having to confront that inferiority or do anything about it or overcome it. The idea among Palestinians that they are victims means more to them than anything else. It is everything. It is the centerpiece of their very identity and it is the way they define themselves as human beings in the world. It is not an idle thing. Our facts and our reason are not going to penetrate easily that definition or make any progress.
The question is, how do they get away with a poetic truth, based on such an obvious series of falsehoods? One reason why they get away with it in the Middle East is that the Western world lacks the moral authority to call them on it. The Western world has not said "your real problem is inferiority. Your real problem is underdevelopment." That has not been said, nor will ever be said – because the Western world was once colonial, was once racist, did practice white supremacy, and is so ashamed of itself and so vulnerable to those charges, that they are not going to say a word. They are not going to say what they really think and feel about what is so obvious about the circumstances among the Palestinians. So the poetic truth that Palestinians live by carries on.
International media also do not feel that they have the moral authority to report what they see. On the contrary, they feed this poetic truth and give it a kind of gravitas that it would never otherwise have.
Consequently, we need to develop a narrative that is not poetic, but literal and that is based on the truth. What would such a narrative look like?
It would begin with the presumption that the problem in the Middle East is not white supremacy but the end of white supremacy. After World War II, the empires began to contract, Britain went home, France went home, and the Arab world was left almost abandoned, and in a state of much greater freedom than they had ever known before.
Freedom is, however, a dicey thing to experience. When you come into freedom, you see yourself more accurately in the world. This is not unique to the Middle East. It was also the black American experience, when the Civil Rights bill was passed in 1964 and we came into much greater freedom. If you were a janitor in 1963 and you are still a janitor in 1965, you have all these freedoms and they are supported by the rule of law, then your actual experience of freedom is one of humiliation and one of shame. You see how far you have to go, how far behind you are, how little social capital you have with which to struggle forward. Even in freedom you see you are likely to be behind for a long time. In light of your inability to compete and your underdevelopment, freedom becomes something that you are very likely going to hate – because it carries this humiliation.
At that point formerly oppressed groups develop what I call bad faith. Bad faith is when you come into freedom, you are humiliated and you say, "Well you know the real truth is I am not free. Racism still exists. Zionism is my problem. The State of Israel is my problem. That is why I am so far behind and that is why I cannot get ahead."
You develop a culture grounded in bad faith where you insist that you are less free than you really are. Islamic extremism is the stunning example of this phenomenon. "I have to go on jihad because I am fighting for my freedom." Well you already have your freedom. You could stay home and study. You could do something constructive. But "No, I cannot do that because that makes me feel bad about myself." So I live in a world of extremism and dictators.
This is not unique to the Middle East. In black America we had exactly the same thing. After we got the civil rights bill and this greater degree of freedom, then all of a sudden we hear the words "black power." Then all of a sudden we have the Black Panthers. Then we have this militancy, this picking up of the gun because we feel bad about ourselves. We feel uncompetitive and this becomes our compensation. It is a common pattern among groups that felt abandoned when they became free.
This is the real story of the Palestinians and of the Middle East. They will never be reached by reason until they are somehow able to get beyond bad faith, to get beyond this sort of poetic truth that they are the perennial victims of an aggressive and racist Israeli nation.
Challenging their narrative with this explanation will enable us to be more effective. Until now, we have constantly used facts and reason and have not progressed.
Durban is a perfect example of bad faith because Durban is way of saying Israelis are racist and they are our problem. Durban really is a way of saying I am not free. I am still a victim. That is the real purpose of Durban. The Palestinian unilateral claim for recognition from the UN is also a perfect example of bad faith. If Palestinians proceed to the Security Council, they will very likely be turned down, and will respond by saying: "I told you we were victims. I told you the West is racist," and so on. It refuels the same sad identity.
The irony and the tragedy of all this is that it keeps these groups in a bubble where they never encounter or deal with the truth. This becomes a second oppression for all these groups. They have been oppressed once, now they are free and yet they create a poetic truth that then oppresses them all over again.
How are you going to have good faith if you are raised being told that the society in which you are trying to compete is against you, is racist? It is always the Palestinians who suffer, and will continue to suffer, because all of their energy is going into the avoidance of their situation rather than into being challenged by it and facing into it.
The strength of our argument is that it gives the Palestinians a way out. Development is the way out. The West can help you to compete. It may take a little while. But the alternative is a cycle of violence and hatred and poetic truths about constant victimhood.
The pattern of bad faith in certain places comes to embrace a kind of ethic of death. As Osama bin Laden claimed: in the West, you are all afraid of death, but we love death. Why would you love death? If you are not afraid of death then you are aggrandized; all of a sudden you are a big man. You are not a little, recently freed, inferior. Instead, you are somebody who manages, who conquers his world, who has power. For terrorism is power, the power of the gun. This poetic truth leads to a terrible, inconceivable fascination with death and violence and guns and bombs. It consumes a whole part of the world every single day – rather than the boring things that good faith requires, like going to school, raising your children, inventing software for instance, making money.
This is the way the narrative must be retold.
----------
The Narrative of Perpetual Palestinian Victimhood
Hudson NY
by Shelby Steele
November 14, 2011
Shelby Steele is Robert J and Marion E. Oster Senior Fellow, Hoover Institute, member of the Working Group on Islamism and the International Order. The following is excerpted from a speech delivered September 22, 2011 in New York City at the conference "The Perils of Global Intolerance: The UN and Durban III," sponsored by the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust and the Hudson Institute.
The Arab-Israeli conflict, is not really a conflict, it is a war – a war of the Arabs against the Jews. In many ways, this conflict has been a conflict between narratives. We who strongly support Israel have done a poor job in formulating a narrative which will combat the story spun by the other side. We can do better.
The Durban conferences, the request for UN recognition of a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood, and the general animus in the Middle East and elsewhere toward Israel and toward the Jews, what are they really about? Is the Durban conference and the claim that Israel is a racist nation really about reforming the people of Israel and curing them of their racism?
I think their real interest is to situate the Palestinian people within a narrative of victimization. This is their ulterior goal: to see themselves and to have others see them as victims of colonialism, as victims of white supremacy.
Listen to their language; it is the language of colonial oppression. Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas claims that Palestinians have been occupied for 63 years. The word oppressed is constant, exploited. In this, there is a poetic truth; like poetic license, in a poetic truth a writer will bend the rules in order to be more effective.
I will give you one example of a poetic truth that comes from my group, black Americans. We make the following claims: America is a deeply, intractably racist society. It may not be as conspicuous today as it was before. Nevertheless, it is still there today structurally and systemically, and it still holds us back and keeps us from achieving the American dream.
To contradict this claim, one can come forward with evidence to suggest that racism in America today is about 25th on the list of problems facing black Americans. One can recount one of the great untold stories of America, namely, the moral growth and evolution away from that problem. This is not to say that racism is completely extinguished, but that it no longer prevents the forward progress of any black in the United States. There is no evidence to suggest that it does. Yet, this claim is still the centerpiece of black American identity – this idea that we are victimized by a fundamentally, incurably racist society.
Poetic truths like that are marvelous because no facts and no reason can ever penetrate. Supporters of Israel are up against a poetic truth. We keep hitting it with all the facts. We keep hitting it with obvious logic and reason. And we are so obvious and conspicuously right that we assume it is going to have an impact and it never does.
Why not? These narratives, these poetic truths, are the source of their power. Focusing on the case of the Palestinians, who would they be if they were not victims of white supremacy? They would just be poor people in the Middle East. They would be backwards. They would be behind Israel in every way. So this narrative is the source of their power. It is the source of their money. Money comes from around the world. It is the source of their self-esteem. Without it, would they be able to compete with Israeli society? They would have to confront in themselves a certain inferiority with regard to Israel – as most other Arab nations would have to confront an inferiority in themselves and be responsible for it.
The idea that the problem is Israel, that the problem is the Jews, protects Palestinians from having to confront that inferiority or do anything about it or overcome it. The idea among Palestinians that they are victims means more to them than anything else. It is everything. It is the centerpiece of their very identity and it is the way they define themselves as human beings in the world. It is not an idle thing. Our facts and our reason are not going to penetrate easily that definition or make any progress.
The question is, how do they get away with a poetic truth, based on such an obvious series of falsehoods? One reason why they get away with it in the Middle East is that the Western world lacks the moral authority to call them on it. The Western world has not said "your real problem is inferiority. Your real problem is underdevelopment." That has not been said, nor will ever be said – because the Western world was once colonial, was once racist, did practice white supremacy, and is so ashamed of itself and so vulnerable to those charges, that they are not going to say a word. They are not going to say what they really think and feel about what is so obvious about the circumstances among the Palestinians. So the poetic truth that Palestinians live by carries on.
International media also do not feel that they have the moral authority to report what they see. On the contrary, they feed this poetic truth and give it a kind of gravitas that it would never otherwise have.
Consequently, we need to develop a narrative that is not poetic, but literal and that is based on the truth. What would such a narrative look like?
It would begin with the presumption that the problem in the Middle East is not white supremacy but the end of white supremacy. After World War II, the empires began to contract, Britain went home, France went home, and the Arab world was left almost abandoned, and in a state of much greater freedom than they had ever known before.
Freedom is, however, a dicey thing to experience. When you come into freedom, you see yourself more accurately in the world. This is not unique to the Middle East. It was also the black American experience, when the Civil Rights bill was passed in 1964 and we came into much greater freedom. If you were a janitor in 1963 and you are still a janitor in 1965, you have all these freedoms and they are supported by the rule of law, then your actual experience of freedom is one of humiliation and one of shame. You see how far you have to go, how far behind you are, how little social capital you have with which to struggle forward. Even in freedom you see you are likely to be behind for a long time. In light of your inability to compete and your underdevelopment, freedom becomes something that you are very likely going to hate – because it carries this humiliation.
At that point formerly oppressed groups develop what I call bad faith. Bad faith is when you come into freedom, you are humiliated and you say, "Well you know the real truth is I am not free. Racism still exists. Zionism is my problem. The State of Israel is my problem. That is why I am so far behind and that is why I cannot get ahead."
You develop a culture grounded in bad faith where you insist that you are less free than you really are. Islamic extremism is the stunning example of this phenomenon. "I have to go on jihad because I am fighting for my freedom." Well you already have your freedom. You could stay home and study. You could do something constructive. But "No, I cannot do that because that makes me feel bad about myself." So I live in a world of extremism and dictators.
This is not unique to the Middle East. In black America we had exactly the same thing. After we got the civil rights bill and this greater degree of freedom, then all of a sudden we hear the words "black power." Then all of a sudden we have the Black Panthers. Then we have this militancy, this picking up of the gun because we feel bad about ourselves. We feel uncompetitive and this becomes our compensation. It is a common pattern among groups that felt abandoned when they became free.
This is the real story of the Palestinians and of the Middle East. They will never be reached by reason until they are somehow able to get beyond bad faith, to get beyond this sort of poetic truth that they are the perennial victims of an aggressive and racist Israeli nation.
Challenging their narrative with this explanation will enable us to be more effective. Until now, we have constantly used facts and reason and have not progressed.
Durban is a perfect example of bad faith because Durban is way of saying Israelis are racist and they are our problem. Durban really is a way of saying I am not free. I am still a victim. That is the real purpose of Durban. The Palestinian unilateral claim for recognition from the UN is also a perfect example of bad faith. If Palestinians proceed to the Security Council, they will very likely be turned down, and will respond by saying: "I told you we were victims. I told you the West is racist," and so on. It refuels the same sad identity.
The irony and the tragedy of all this is that it keeps these groups in a bubble where they never encounter or deal with the truth. This becomes a second oppression for all these groups. They have been oppressed once, now they are free and yet they create a poetic truth that then oppresses them all over again.
How are you going to have good faith if you are raised being told that the society in which you are trying to compete is against you, is racist? It is always the Palestinians who suffer, and will continue to suffer, because all of their energy is going into the avoidance of their situation rather than into being challenged by it and facing into it.
The strength of our argument is that it gives the Palestinians a way out. Development is the way out. The West can help you to compete. It may take a little while. But the alternative is a cycle of violence and hatred and poetic truths about constant victimhood.
The pattern of bad faith in certain places comes to embrace a kind of ethic of death. As Osama bin Laden claimed: in the West, you are all afraid of death, but we love death. Why would you love death? If you are not afraid of death then you are aggrandized; all of a sudden you are a big man. You are not a little, recently freed, inferior. Instead, you are somebody who manages, who conquers his world, who has power. For terrorism is power, the power of the gun. This poetic truth leads to a terrible, inconceivable fascination with death and violence and guns and bombs. It consumes a whole part of the world every single day – rather than the boring things that good faith requires, like going to school, raising your children, inventing software for instance, making money.
This is the way the narrative must be retold.
Saturday, November 05, 2011
The global anti-capitalist protests
Amidst the total incoherence that seems to characterise most of these "anti-capitalist" protests going on around the world (including here outside St. Paul's), Tim Harford brings a bit of sanity with this imagined dialogue.
-----
Capitalism can’t just be about money
Tim Harford
The Undercover Economist
05/11/2011
“So what do you reckon about the protests?”
“The occupation of the front doorstep of St. Paul’s Cathedral, you mean?”
“No, that’s a sideshow.”
“I hear you. Amazing the amount of fuss the media can make about a few people with tents, isn’t it?”
“Exactly. I’m talking about the issues, here.”
“Quite so. Well, I think we should overthrow capitalism and replace it with something nicer.”
“Don’t be daft. That’s the problem with this movement: no coherent proposals and no practical alternative to capitalism. Hello? Where were you when the Berlin Wall came down?”
“You’re the one who’s being daft. This is a false dilemma: schoolboy debating tactics. You’re trying to imply that either we swallow the existing system whole, or we stand shoulder to shoulder with Joseph Stalin. Well I’m not buying that.”
“You were the one who said he wanted to overthrow capitalism.”
“OK, I may have exaggerated for comic effect. But one of the problems is “capitalism” is pretty poorly defined, isn’t it?”
“I know capitalism when I see it.”
“Do you? Every successful economy in the world is a mixed economy: market forces plus hefty doses of government spending, redistribution and regulation. Plenty of room for sensible argument about how those mixtures should vary.”
“All horribly reasonable. It sounds like an attempt to distract from the fact that the rich aren’t paying their fair share of tax.”
“Aha, the 1 per cent, you mean?”
“Exactly, the 1 per cent.”
“How much tax do you think they should pay?”
“Um – well, more.”
“More than what?”
“More than they are doing now!”
“How much do you think they are paying now?”
“Well, not enough.”
“We’re going in circles here. We’ve established that you’d like the rich to pay more than a quantity of tax which you admit is entirely unknown to you. It’s 27.7 per cent, by the way.”
“What is?”
“The percentage of income tax paid by the top 1 per cent of earners in the UK. It’s 27.7 per cent. I looked it up. It’s on the revenue and customs website. It’s a little fact you might find useful next time you get into a discussion about whether it should be more than that.”
“Let’s go back to this something nicer business.”
“I’ve got a five point plan. Number one is more meaningful equality of opportunity. Left-wingers have been too interested in making sure people who make very different choices end up with similar amounts of money. Right-wingers have been too glib about levelling the playing field and accepting whatever outcome the market produces. We need much more attention to the quality of nurseries and schools.”
“More easily said than done.”
“Isn’t everything? Number two, raise more taxes from environmentally damaging activities. For some reason we seem to have decided that jet fuel and domestic heating deserve a tax break, yet simply being rich is regarded as the most profound of pollutants.”
“What about the banks? They’ve been doing toxic things.”
“They have, but the idea that the cause of the crisis was simply fat cat bankers is juvenile. The financial system – its regulations, risk management and ethics – is profoundly flawed. Fixing those flaws is a hugely technical problem as well as a political one. Fighting the banking lobby is going to be necessary but not sufficient. And that’s point three.”
“Point four?”
“We need to pay serious attention to our innovation system. Patents are useful in some circumstances but seem to be distorting the computing industry. There is far too little attention being paid to ideas that really matter, such as low-carbon technology or antibiotics.”
“And point five?”
“Point five is the most ambitious of all. We need a cultural shift in parts of business. Capitalism can’t just be about trying to make money – that’s the ethics of a used car salesman or a drug dealer. Capitalism has to involve a sense of creativity, boldness and pride in a job well done. The most successful companies have usually had this and many still do – from Apple to Brompton to Zipcar – but many financial companies seem to have long ago abandoned them.”
“None of this quite amounts to the overthrow of capitalism, does it?”
“No. I think it’s going to be rather more difficult than that – and a lot more useful.”
-----
Capitalism can’t just be about money
Tim Harford
The Undercover Economist
05/11/2011
“So what do you reckon about the protests?”
“The occupation of the front doorstep of St. Paul’s Cathedral, you mean?”
“No, that’s a sideshow.”
“I hear you. Amazing the amount of fuss the media can make about a few people with tents, isn’t it?”
“Exactly. I’m talking about the issues, here.”
“Quite so. Well, I think we should overthrow capitalism and replace it with something nicer.”
“Don’t be daft. That’s the problem with this movement: no coherent proposals and no practical alternative to capitalism. Hello? Where were you when the Berlin Wall came down?”
“You’re the one who’s being daft. This is a false dilemma: schoolboy debating tactics. You’re trying to imply that either we swallow the existing system whole, or we stand shoulder to shoulder with Joseph Stalin. Well I’m not buying that.”
“You were the one who said he wanted to overthrow capitalism.”
“OK, I may have exaggerated for comic effect. But one of the problems is “capitalism” is pretty poorly defined, isn’t it?”
“I know capitalism when I see it.”
“Do you? Every successful economy in the world is a mixed economy: market forces plus hefty doses of government spending, redistribution and regulation. Plenty of room for sensible argument about how those mixtures should vary.”
“All horribly reasonable. It sounds like an attempt to distract from the fact that the rich aren’t paying their fair share of tax.”
“Aha, the 1 per cent, you mean?”
“Exactly, the 1 per cent.”
“How much tax do you think they should pay?”
“Um – well, more.”
“More than what?”
“More than they are doing now!”
“How much do you think they are paying now?”
“Well, not enough.”
“We’re going in circles here. We’ve established that you’d like the rich to pay more than a quantity of tax which you admit is entirely unknown to you. It’s 27.7 per cent, by the way.”
“What is?”
“The percentage of income tax paid by the top 1 per cent of earners in the UK. It’s 27.7 per cent. I looked it up. It’s on the revenue and customs website. It’s a little fact you might find useful next time you get into a discussion about whether it should be more than that.”
“Let’s go back to this something nicer business.”
“I’ve got a five point plan. Number one is more meaningful equality of opportunity. Left-wingers have been too interested in making sure people who make very different choices end up with similar amounts of money. Right-wingers have been too glib about levelling the playing field and accepting whatever outcome the market produces. We need much more attention to the quality of nurseries and schools.”
“More easily said than done.”
“Isn’t everything? Number two, raise more taxes from environmentally damaging activities. For some reason we seem to have decided that jet fuel and domestic heating deserve a tax break, yet simply being rich is regarded as the most profound of pollutants.”
“What about the banks? They’ve been doing toxic things.”
“They have, but the idea that the cause of the crisis was simply fat cat bankers is juvenile. The financial system – its regulations, risk management and ethics – is profoundly flawed. Fixing those flaws is a hugely technical problem as well as a political one. Fighting the banking lobby is going to be necessary but not sufficient. And that’s point three.”
“Point four?”
“We need to pay serious attention to our innovation system. Patents are useful in some circumstances but seem to be distorting the computing industry. There is far too little attention being paid to ideas that really matter, such as low-carbon technology or antibiotics.”
“And point five?”
“Point five is the most ambitious of all. We need a cultural shift in parts of business. Capitalism can’t just be about trying to make money – that’s the ethics of a used car salesman or a drug dealer. Capitalism has to involve a sense of creativity, boldness and pride in a job well done. The most successful companies have usually had this and many still do – from Apple to Brompton to Zipcar – but many financial companies seem to have long ago abandoned them.”
“None of this quite amounts to the overthrow of capitalism, does it?”
“No. I think it’s going to be rather more difficult than that – and a lot more useful.”
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Gilad Shalit - one Israeli for a thousand Palestinians
Below are two bloggers who I thoroughly agree with; while of course I'm happy Shalit is out, the 1-for-1000 swap was a terrible idea, far worse than paying Hamas $1m for Shalit. But Israel has stupidly done this before, and will stupidly do this again.
Just as disturbing, though in a very different way, is The Guardian's Deborah Orr, who in her article Is an Israeli life really more important than a Palestinian's? managed to suggest that "Israel’s desire to get back one of its soldiers at such a high price is driven by some racist sense of valuing Israeli or Jewish life above all others". Yep, it's the Chosen People taunting the world at their superiority that is the real story here, apparently.
Credit to Honest Reporting for their expose - it's them I quote above:
The Guardian’s Anti-Semitic Explanation For Shalit Deal
Honest Reporting
October 24, 2011
Deborah Orr’s Disgusting Excuse For an “Apology”
Honest Reporting
October 27, 2011
-------
Doing Business with Terrorists
By Daniel Pipes
National Review
October 18, 2011
That Gilad Shalit has been released after five years of captivity by Hamas brings joy to anyone who watches the Israeli soldier’s reunion with his parents and the ecstatic welcome he received by his countrymen. It also reminds one of the Israel Defense Forces’ noble purpose in doing all it can to stand by its men.
But joy is tempered by the bitter realities of statecraft. First, the trade of one Israeli soldier for 1,027 Arabs, 477 of them convicted terrorists, offers huge incentives for the capture of more Israeli soldiers. Second, the trade releases hundreds of terrorists to their freedom, where they can resume their evil ways, targeting not just Israelis but civilized peoples everywhere.
This exchange points to the sentimentalization of strategy. Leaders who place the concerns of one individual over the interests of the country betray their mandate and poison its future. Israeli politicians have been making these lopsided swaps since 1982, releasing over ten thousand Palestinians serving prison sentences for terrorist or other hostile actions. Each time they do, they forsake principle and common sense for short-term benefits. Shame on them.
-------
"We Want More Shalits!"
by Khaled Abu Toameh
Hudson NY
October 21, 2011
The prisoner exchange in Israel has increased the prospects of another round of violence between Israel and the Palestinians. The deal has sent a message to Palestinians that if you kidnap a soldier you get much more than if you sit at the negotiating table with Israel.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is now expected to toughen even more his position regarding the resumption of the peace talks with Israel. The prisoner swap has made it almost impossible for him to return to the negotiating table with Israel, at least not in the near future.
The deal is a severe blow to Abbas who, at least in public, says he remains committed to a non-violent and peaceful solution with Israel. In light of Hamas's success to force Israel to free a large number of prisoners, Abbas and his team in Ramallah now look like incompetent and weak leaders who have failed to extract significant concessions from Israel at the negotiating table.
Like the withdrawals from the Gaza Strip and Lebanon, the prisoner swap has sent the same message not only to the Palestinians, but to the rest of the Arab world: that violence and kidnappings are the only language that Israel understands, and that the violent struggle against Israel must continue because negotiations do not lead to anything.
Sadly, it is hard to find anyone on the Palestinian side who sees the exchange deal as a sign of Israeli flexibility. On the contrary - Israel's concessions are almost always interpreted as a sign of weakness that eventually leads to more violence. The withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005 was seen as a sign of Israeli weakness in the face of increased rocket and suicide attacks. The withdrawal from southern Lebanon before that was also viewed as a sign of weakness in the face of Hizbollah's attacks on Israel.
Statements made by many of the released prisoners and several Hamas leaders don't bode well for the future. They view the deal as an Israeli capitulation to their demands and are now calling for the kidnapping of more Israeli soldiers to trade them for the remaining Palestinians in Israeli prisons.
Chanting "We want more Shalits!," thousands of Palestinians took to the streets in the Gaza Strip to greet the released prisoners and call on Hamas and other armed Palestinian groups to hurry up and launch more operations to kidnap Israeli soldiers.
Some of the released prisoners have even announced their intention to pursue the "struggle" against Israel until all the Palestinians' demands are met. One of them, Wafa al-Biss, has even told Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip that she wished they would become "martyrs" in the fight against Israel. Al-Biss had been sentenced to 12 years in prison for planning to blow herself up outside an Israeli hospital in 2005.
Some Western leaders and governments had expressed hope that the prisoner exchange agreement between Israel and Hamas would pave the way for a "new era" in relations between Israelis and Palestinians. Some Israelis have even expressed hope that the deal would lead to peace talks between Israel and Hamas.
In reality, the prisoner swap has achieved the exact opposite. It has once again created the impression understands. Those who see the deal as a sign of Hamas's "moderation" and "pragmatism" are deluding themselves. And those who think that the release of more than 1,000 Palestinians from Israeli prisons would have a moderating effect on the Palestinians are also living under an illusion.
Those who argue that the prisoner exchange is an indication that Hamas wants to negotiate with Israel are obviously living on a different planet. It is clear by now that it is only a matter of time before Hamas or any other Palestinian group try to kidnap another soldier or Israeli civilian in order to copy the Shalit example. The deal has given them a strong incentive to try once again to snatch a soldier or civilian to achieve that goal.
The deal will only strengthen Hamas's resolve to stick to its radical ideology and continue the fight "until the liberation of all of Palestine." If Hamas is going to change as a result of the deal, it will only be for the worse.
Just as disturbing, though in a very different way, is The Guardian's Deborah Orr, who in her article Is an Israeli life really more important than a Palestinian's? managed to suggest that "Israel’s desire to get back one of its soldiers at such a high price is driven by some racist sense of valuing Israeli or Jewish life above all others". Yep, it's the Chosen People taunting the world at their superiority that is the real story here, apparently.
Credit to Honest Reporting for their expose - it's them I quote above:
The Guardian’s Anti-Semitic Explanation For Shalit Deal
Honest Reporting
October 24, 2011
Deborah Orr’s Disgusting Excuse For an “Apology”
Honest Reporting
October 27, 2011
-------
Doing Business with Terrorists
By Daniel Pipes
National Review
October 18, 2011
That Gilad Shalit has been released after five years of captivity by Hamas brings joy to anyone who watches the Israeli soldier’s reunion with his parents and the ecstatic welcome he received by his countrymen. It also reminds one of the Israel Defense Forces’ noble purpose in doing all it can to stand by its men.
But joy is tempered by the bitter realities of statecraft. First, the trade of one Israeli soldier for 1,027 Arabs, 477 of them convicted terrorists, offers huge incentives for the capture of more Israeli soldiers. Second, the trade releases hundreds of terrorists to their freedom, where they can resume their evil ways, targeting not just Israelis but civilized peoples everywhere.
This exchange points to the sentimentalization of strategy. Leaders who place the concerns of one individual over the interests of the country betray their mandate and poison its future. Israeli politicians have been making these lopsided swaps since 1982, releasing over ten thousand Palestinians serving prison sentences for terrorist or other hostile actions. Each time they do, they forsake principle and common sense for short-term benefits. Shame on them.
-------
"We Want More Shalits!"
by Khaled Abu Toameh
Hudson NY
October 21, 2011
The prisoner exchange in Israel has increased the prospects of another round of violence between Israel and the Palestinians. The deal has sent a message to Palestinians that if you kidnap a soldier you get much more than if you sit at the negotiating table with Israel.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is now expected to toughen even more his position regarding the resumption of the peace talks with Israel. The prisoner swap has made it almost impossible for him to return to the negotiating table with Israel, at least not in the near future.
The deal is a severe blow to Abbas who, at least in public, says he remains committed to a non-violent and peaceful solution with Israel. In light of Hamas's success to force Israel to free a large number of prisoners, Abbas and his team in Ramallah now look like incompetent and weak leaders who have failed to extract significant concessions from Israel at the negotiating table.
Like the withdrawals from the Gaza Strip and Lebanon, the prisoner swap has sent the same message not only to the Palestinians, but to the rest of the Arab world: that violence and kidnappings are the only language that Israel understands, and that the violent struggle against Israel must continue because negotiations do not lead to anything.
Sadly, it is hard to find anyone on the Palestinian side who sees the exchange deal as a sign of Israeli flexibility. On the contrary - Israel's concessions are almost always interpreted as a sign of weakness that eventually leads to more violence. The withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005 was seen as a sign of Israeli weakness in the face of increased rocket and suicide attacks. The withdrawal from southern Lebanon before that was also viewed as a sign of weakness in the face of Hizbollah's attacks on Israel.
Statements made by many of the released prisoners and several Hamas leaders don't bode well for the future. They view the deal as an Israeli capitulation to their demands and are now calling for the kidnapping of more Israeli soldiers to trade them for the remaining Palestinians in Israeli prisons.
Chanting "We want more Shalits!," thousands of Palestinians took to the streets in the Gaza Strip to greet the released prisoners and call on Hamas and other armed Palestinian groups to hurry up and launch more operations to kidnap Israeli soldiers.
Some of the released prisoners have even announced their intention to pursue the "struggle" against Israel until all the Palestinians' demands are met. One of them, Wafa al-Biss, has even told Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip that she wished they would become "martyrs" in the fight against Israel. Al-Biss had been sentenced to 12 years in prison for planning to blow herself up outside an Israeli hospital in 2005.
Some Western leaders and governments had expressed hope that the prisoner exchange agreement between Israel and Hamas would pave the way for a "new era" in relations between Israelis and Palestinians. Some Israelis have even expressed hope that the deal would lead to peace talks between Israel and Hamas.
In reality, the prisoner swap has achieved the exact opposite. It has once again created the impression understands. Those who see the deal as a sign of Hamas's "moderation" and "pragmatism" are deluding themselves. And those who think that the release of more than 1,000 Palestinians from Israeli prisons would have a moderating effect on the Palestinians are also living under an illusion.
Those who argue that the prisoner exchange is an indication that Hamas wants to negotiate with Israel are obviously living on a different planet. It is clear by now that it is only a matter of time before Hamas or any other Palestinian group try to kidnap another soldier or Israeli civilian in order to copy the Shalit example. The deal has given them a strong incentive to try once again to snatch a soldier or civilian to achieve that goal.
The deal will only strengthen Hamas's resolve to stick to its radical ideology and continue the fight "until the liberation of all of Palestine." If Hamas is going to change as a result of the deal, it will only be for the worse.
Saturday, August 27, 2011
Pinker - A History of Violence
Fascinating.
A History of Violence
by Steven Pinker
Edge.org
Once again, Steven Pinker returns to debunking the doctrine of the noble savage in the following piece based on his lecture at the recent TED Conference in Monterey, California.
This doctrine, "the idea that humans are peaceable by nature and corrupted by modern institutions—pops up frequently in the writing of public intellectuals like José Ortega y Gasset ("War is not an instinct but an invention"), Stephen Jay Gould ("Homo sapiens is not an evil or destructive species"), and Ashley Montagu ("Biological studies lend support to the ethic of universal brotherhood")," he writes. "But, now that social scientists have started to count bodies in different historical periods, they have discovered that the romantic theory gets it backward: Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler."
Pinker's notable talk, along with his essay, is one more example of how ideas forthcoming from the empirical and biological study of human beings is gaining sway over those of the scientists and others in disciplines that rely on studying social actions and human cultures independent from their biological foundation.
----
In sixteenth-century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted in a sling on a stage and slowly lowered into a fire. According to historian Norman Davies, "[T]he spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized." Today, such sadism would be unthinkable in most of the world. This change in sensibilities is just one example of perhaps the most important and most underappreciated trend in the human saga: Violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species' time on earth.
In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, and shortly after the century of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, the claim that violence has been diminishing may seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. Yet recent studies that seek to quantify the historical ebb and flow of violence point to exactly that conclusion.
A History of Violence
by Steven Pinker
Edge.org
Once again, Steven Pinker returns to debunking the doctrine of the noble savage in the following piece based on his lecture at the recent TED Conference in Monterey, California.
This doctrine, "the idea that humans are peaceable by nature and corrupted by modern institutions—pops up frequently in the writing of public intellectuals like José Ortega y Gasset ("War is not an instinct but an invention"), Stephen Jay Gould ("Homo sapiens is not an evil or destructive species"), and Ashley Montagu ("Biological studies lend support to the ethic of universal brotherhood")," he writes. "But, now that social scientists have started to count bodies in different historical periods, they have discovered that the romantic theory gets it backward: Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler."
Pinker's notable talk, along with his essay, is one more example of how ideas forthcoming from the empirical and biological study of human beings is gaining sway over those of the scientists and others in disciplines that rely on studying social actions and human cultures independent from their biological foundation.
----
In sixteenth-century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted in a sling on a stage and slowly lowered into a fire. According to historian Norman Davies, "[T]he spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized." Today, such sadism would be unthinkable in most of the world. This change in sensibilities is just one example of perhaps the most important and most underappreciated trend in the human saga: Violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species' time on earth.
In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, and shortly after the century of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, the claim that violence has been diminishing may seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. Yet recent studies that seek to quantify the historical ebb and flow of violence point to exactly that conclusion.
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Global Economic Downturn: A Crisis of Political Economy
Global Economic Downturn: A Crisis of Political Economy
By George Friedman
Stratfor
August 9, 2011
Classical political economists like Adam Smith or David Ricardo never used the term “economy” by itself. They always used the term “political economy.” For classical economists, it was impossible to understand politics without economics or economics without politics. The two fields are certainly different but they are also intimately linked. The use of the term “economy” by itself did not begin until the late 19th century. Smith understood that while an efficient market would emerge from individual choices, those choices were framed by the political system in which they were made, just as the political system was shaped by economic realities. For classical economists, the political and economic systems were intertwined, each dependent on the other for its existence.
The current economic crisis is best understood as a crisis of political economy. Moreover, it has to be understood as a global crisis enveloping the United States, Europe and China that has different details but one overriding theme: the relationship between the political order and economic life. On a global scale, or at least for most of the world’s major economies, there is a crisis of political economy. Let’s consider how it evolved.
ORIGIN OF THE CRISIS
As we all know, the origin of the current financial crisis was the subprime mortgage meltdown in the United States. To be more precise, it originated in a financial system generating paper assets whose value depended on the price of housing. It assumed that the price of homes would always rise and, at the very least, if the price fluctuated the value of the paper could still be determined. Neither proved to be true. The price of housing declined and, worse, the value of the paper assets became indeterminate. This placed the entire American financial system in a state of gridlock and the crisis spilled over into Europe, where many financial institutions had purchased the paper as well.
From the standpoint of economics, this was essentially a financial crisis: who made or lost money and how much. From the standpoint of political economy it raised a different question: the legitimacy of the financial elite. Think of a national system as a series of subsystems — political, economic, military and so on. Then think of the economic system as being divisible into subsystems — various corporate verticals with their own elites, with one of the verticals being the financial system. Obviously, this oversimplifies the situation, but I’m doing that to make a point. One of the systems, the financial system, failed, and this failure was due to decisions made by the financial elite. This created a massive political problem centered not so much on confidence in any particular financial instrument but on the competence and honesty of the financial elite itself. A sense emerged that the financial elite was either stupid or dishonest or both. The idea was that the financial elite had violated all principles of fiduciary, social and moral responsibility in seeking its own personal gain at the expense of society as a whole.
Fair or not, this perception created a massive political crisis. This was the true systemic crisis, compared to which the crisis of the financial institutions was trivial. The question was whether the political system was capable not merely of fixing the crisis but also of holding the perpetrators responsible. Alternatively, if the financial crisis did not involve criminality, how could the political system not have created laws to render such actions criminal? Was the political elite in collusion with the financial elite?
There was a crisis of confidence in the financial system and a crisis of confidence in the political system. The U.S. government’s actions in September 2008 were designed first to deal with the failures of the financial system. Many expected this would be followed by dealing with the failures of the financial elite, but this is perceived not to have happened. Indeed, the perception is that having spent large sums of money to stabilize the financial system, the political elite allowed the financial elite to manage the system to its benefit.
This generated the second crisis — the crisis of the political elite. The Tea Party movement emerged in part as critics of the political elite, focusing on the measures taken to stabilize the system and arguing that it had created a new financial crisis, this time in excessive sovereign debt. The Tea Party’s perception was extreme, but the idea was that the political elite had solved the financial problem both by generating massive debt and by accumulating excessive state power. Its argument was that the political elite used the financial crisis to dramatically increase the power of the state (health care reform was the poster child for this) while mismanaging the financial system through excessive sovereign debt.
THE CRISIS IN EUROPE
The sovereign debt question also created both a financial crisis and then a political crisis in Europe. While the American financial crisis certainly affected Europe, the European political crisis was deepened by the resulting recession. There had long been a minority in Europe who felt that the European Union had been constructed either to support the financial elite at the expense of the broader population or to strengthen Northern Europe, particularly France and Germany, at the expense of the periphery — or both. What had been a minority view was strengthened by the recession.
The European crisis paralleled the American crisis in that financial institutions were bailed out. But the deeper crisis was that Europe did not act as a single unit to deal with all European banks but instead worked on a national basis, with each nation focused on its own banks and the European Central Bank seeming to favor Northern Europe in general and Germany in particular. This became the theme particularly when the recession generated disproportionate crises in peripheral countries like Greece.
There are two narratives to the story. One is the German version, which has become the common explanation. It holds that Greece wound up in a sovereign debt crisis because of the irresponsibility of the Greek government in maintaining social welfare programs in excess of what it could fund, and now the Greeks were expecting others, particularly the Germans, to bail them out.
The Greek narrative, which is less noted, was that the Germans rigged the European Union in their favor. Germany is the world’s third-largest exporter, after China and the United States (and closing rapidly on the No. 2 spot). By forming a free trade zone, the Germans created captive markets for their goods. During the prosperity of the first 20 years or so, this was hidden beneath general growth. But once a crisis hit, the inability of Greece to devalue its money — which, as the euro, was controlled by the European Central Bank — and the ability of Germany to continue exporting without any ability of Greece to control those exports exacerbated Greece’s recession, leading to a sovereign debt crisis. Moreover, the regulations generated by Brussels so enhanced the German position that Greece was helpless.
Which narrative is true is not the point. The point is that Europe is facing two political crises generated by economics. One crisis is similar to the American one, which is the belief that Europe’s political elite protected the financial elite. The other is a distinctly European one, a regional crisis in which parts of Europe have come to distrust each other rather vocally. This could become an existential crisis for the European Union.
THE CRISIS IN CHINA
The American and European crises struck hard at China, which, as the world’s largest export economy, is a hostage to external demand, particularly from the United States and Europe. When the United States and Europe went into recession, the Chinese government faced an unemployment crisis. If factories closed, workers would be unemployed, and unemployment in China could lead to massive social instability. The Chinese government had two responses. The first was to keep factories going by encouraging price reductions to the point where profit margins on exports evaporated. The second was to provide unprecedented amounts of credit to enterprises facing default on debts in order to keep them in business.
The strategy worked, of course, but only at the cost of substantial inflation. This led to a second crisis, where workers faced the contraction of already small incomes. The response was to increase incomes, which in turn increased the cost of goods exported once again, making China’s wage rates less competitive, for example, than Mexico’s.
China had previously encouraged entrepreneurs. This was easy when Europe and the United States were booming. Now, the rational move by entrepreneurs was to go offshore or lay off workers, or both. The Chinese government couldn’t afford this, so it began to intrude more and more into the economy. The political elite sought to stabilize the situation — and their own positions — by increasing controls on the financial and other corporate elites.
In different ways, that is what happened in all three places — the United States, Europe and China — at least as first steps. In the United States, the first impulse was to regulate the financial sector, stimulate the economy and increase control over sectors of the economy. In Europe, where there were already substantial controls over the economy, the political elite started to parse how those controls would work and who would benefit more. In China, where the political elite always retained implicit power over the economy, that power was increased. In all three cases, the first impulse was to use political controls.
In all three, this generated resistance. In the United States, the Tea Party was simply the most active and effective manifestation of that resistance. It went beyond them. In Europe, the resistance came from anti-Europeanists (and anti-immigration forces that blamed the European Union’s open border policies for uncontrolled immigration). It also came from political elites of countries like Ireland who were confronting the political elites of other countries. In China, the resistance has come from those being hurt by inflation, both consumers and business interests whose exports are less competitive and profitable.
Not every significant economy is caught in this crisis. Russia went through this crisis years ago and had already tilted toward the political elite’s control over the economy. Brazil and India have not experienced the extremes of China, but then they haven’t had the extreme growth rates of China. But when the United States, Europe and China go into a crisis of this sort, it can reasonably be said that the center of gravity of the world’s economy and most of its military power is in crisis. It is not a trivial moment.
Crisis does not mean collapse. The United States has substantial political legitimacy to draw on. Europe has less but its constituent nations are strong. China’s Communist Party is a formidable entity but it is no longer dealing with a financial crisis. It is dealing with a political crisis over the manner in which the political elite has managed the financial crisis. It is this political crisis that is most dangerous, because as the political elite weakens it loses the ability to manage and control other elites.
It is vital to understand that this is not an ideological challenge. Left-wingers opposing globalization and right-wingers opposing immigration are engaged in the same process — challenging the legitimacy of the elites. Nor is it simply a class issue. The challenge emanates from many areas. The challengers are not yet the majority, but they are not so far away from it as to be discounted. The real problem is that, while the challenge to the elites goes on, the profound differences in the challengers make an alternative political elite difficult to imagine.
THE CRISIS OF LEGITIMACY
This, then, is the third crisis that can emerge: that the elites become delegitimized and all that there is to replace them is a deeply divided and hostile force, united in hostility to the elites but without any coherent ideology of its own. In the United States this would lead to paralysis. In Europe it would lead to a devolution to the nation-state. In China it would lead to regional fragmentation and conflict.
These are all extreme outcomes and there are many arrestors. But we cannot understand what is going on without understanding two things. The first is that the political economic crisis, if not global, is at least widespread, and uprisings elsewhere have their own roots but are linked in some ways to this crisis. The second is that the crisis is an economic problem that has triggered a political problem, which in turn is making the economic problem worse.
The followers of Adam Smith may believe in an autonomous economic sphere disengaged from politics, but Adam Smith was far more subtle. That’s why he called his greatest book the Wealth of Nations. It was about wealth, but it was also about nations. It was a work of political economy that teaches us a great deal about the moment we are in.
By George Friedman
Stratfor
August 9, 2011
Classical political economists like Adam Smith or David Ricardo never used the term “economy” by itself. They always used the term “political economy.” For classical economists, it was impossible to understand politics without economics or economics without politics. The two fields are certainly different but they are also intimately linked. The use of the term “economy” by itself did not begin until the late 19th century. Smith understood that while an efficient market would emerge from individual choices, those choices were framed by the political system in which they were made, just as the political system was shaped by economic realities. For classical economists, the political and economic systems were intertwined, each dependent on the other for its existence.
The current economic crisis is best understood as a crisis of political economy. Moreover, it has to be understood as a global crisis enveloping the United States, Europe and China that has different details but one overriding theme: the relationship between the political order and economic life. On a global scale, or at least for most of the world’s major economies, there is a crisis of political economy. Let’s consider how it evolved.
ORIGIN OF THE CRISIS
As we all know, the origin of the current financial crisis was the subprime mortgage meltdown in the United States. To be more precise, it originated in a financial system generating paper assets whose value depended on the price of housing. It assumed that the price of homes would always rise and, at the very least, if the price fluctuated the value of the paper could still be determined. Neither proved to be true. The price of housing declined and, worse, the value of the paper assets became indeterminate. This placed the entire American financial system in a state of gridlock and the crisis spilled over into Europe, where many financial institutions had purchased the paper as well.
From the standpoint of economics, this was essentially a financial crisis: who made or lost money and how much. From the standpoint of political economy it raised a different question: the legitimacy of the financial elite. Think of a national system as a series of subsystems — political, economic, military and so on. Then think of the economic system as being divisible into subsystems — various corporate verticals with their own elites, with one of the verticals being the financial system. Obviously, this oversimplifies the situation, but I’m doing that to make a point. One of the systems, the financial system, failed, and this failure was due to decisions made by the financial elite. This created a massive political problem centered not so much on confidence in any particular financial instrument but on the competence and honesty of the financial elite itself. A sense emerged that the financial elite was either stupid or dishonest or both. The idea was that the financial elite had violated all principles of fiduciary, social and moral responsibility in seeking its own personal gain at the expense of society as a whole.
Fair or not, this perception created a massive political crisis. This was the true systemic crisis, compared to which the crisis of the financial institutions was trivial. The question was whether the political system was capable not merely of fixing the crisis but also of holding the perpetrators responsible. Alternatively, if the financial crisis did not involve criminality, how could the political system not have created laws to render such actions criminal? Was the political elite in collusion with the financial elite?
There was a crisis of confidence in the financial system and a crisis of confidence in the political system. The U.S. government’s actions in September 2008 were designed first to deal with the failures of the financial system. Many expected this would be followed by dealing with the failures of the financial elite, but this is perceived not to have happened. Indeed, the perception is that having spent large sums of money to stabilize the financial system, the political elite allowed the financial elite to manage the system to its benefit.
This generated the second crisis — the crisis of the political elite. The Tea Party movement emerged in part as critics of the political elite, focusing on the measures taken to stabilize the system and arguing that it had created a new financial crisis, this time in excessive sovereign debt. The Tea Party’s perception was extreme, but the idea was that the political elite had solved the financial problem both by generating massive debt and by accumulating excessive state power. Its argument was that the political elite used the financial crisis to dramatically increase the power of the state (health care reform was the poster child for this) while mismanaging the financial system through excessive sovereign debt.
THE CRISIS IN EUROPE
The sovereign debt question also created both a financial crisis and then a political crisis in Europe. While the American financial crisis certainly affected Europe, the European political crisis was deepened by the resulting recession. There had long been a minority in Europe who felt that the European Union had been constructed either to support the financial elite at the expense of the broader population or to strengthen Northern Europe, particularly France and Germany, at the expense of the periphery — or both. What had been a minority view was strengthened by the recession.
The European crisis paralleled the American crisis in that financial institutions were bailed out. But the deeper crisis was that Europe did not act as a single unit to deal with all European banks but instead worked on a national basis, with each nation focused on its own banks and the European Central Bank seeming to favor Northern Europe in general and Germany in particular. This became the theme particularly when the recession generated disproportionate crises in peripheral countries like Greece.
There are two narratives to the story. One is the German version, which has become the common explanation. It holds that Greece wound up in a sovereign debt crisis because of the irresponsibility of the Greek government in maintaining social welfare programs in excess of what it could fund, and now the Greeks were expecting others, particularly the Germans, to bail them out.
The Greek narrative, which is less noted, was that the Germans rigged the European Union in their favor. Germany is the world’s third-largest exporter, after China and the United States (and closing rapidly on the No. 2 spot). By forming a free trade zone, the Germans created captive markets for their goods. During the prosperity of the first 20 years or so, this was hidden beneath general growth. But once a crisis hit, the inability of Greece to devalue its money — which, as the euro, was controlled by the European Central Bank — and the ability of Germany to continue exporting without any ability of Greece to control those exports exacerbated Greece’s recession, leading to a sovereign debt crisis. Moreover, the regulations generated by Brussels so enhanced the German position that Greece was helpless.
Which narrative is true is not the point. The point is that Europe is facing two political crises generated by economics. One crisis is similar to the American one, which is the belief that Europe’s political elite protected the financial elite. The other is a distinctly European one, a regional crisis in which parts of Europe have come to distrust each other rather vocally. This could become an existential crisis for the European Union.
THE CRISIS IN CHINA
The American and European crises struck hard at China, which, as the world’s largest export economy, is a hostage to external demand, particularly from the United States and Europe. When the United States and Europe went into recession, the Chinese government faced an unemployment crisis. If factories closed, workers would be unemployed, and unemployment in China could lead to massive social instability. The Chinese government had two responses. The first was to keep factories going by encouraging price reductions to the point where profit margins on exports evaporated. The second was to provide unprecedented amounts of credit to enterprises facing default on debts in order to keep them in business.
The strategy worked, of course, but only at the cost of substantial inflation. This led to a second crisis, where workers faced the contraction of already small incomes. The response was to increase incomes, which in turn increased the cost of goods exported once again, making China’s wage rates less competitive, for example, than Mexico’s.
China had previously encouraged entrepreneurs. This was easy when Europe and the United States were booming. Now, the rational move by entrepreneurs was to go offshore or lay off workers, or both. The Chinese government couldn’t afford this, so it began to intrude more and more into the economy. The political elite sought to stabilize the situation — and their own positions — by increasing controls on the financial and other corporate elites.
In different ways, that is what happened in all three places — the United States, Europe and China — at least as first steps. In the United States, the first impulse was to regulate the financial sector, stimulate the economy and increase control over sectors of the economy. In Europe, where there were already substantial controls over the economy, the political elite started to parse how those controls would work and who would benefit more. In China, where the political elite always retained implicit power over the economy, that power was increased. In all three cases, the first impulse was to use political controls.
In all three, this generated resistance. In the United States, the Tea Party was simply the most active and effective manifestation of that resistance. It went beyond them. In Europe, the resistance came from anti-Europeanists (and anti-immigration forces that blamed the European Union’s open border policies for uncontrolled immigration). It also came from political elites of countries like Ireland who were confronting the political elites of other countries. In China, the resistance has come from those being hurt by inflation, both consumers and business interests whose exports are less competitive and profitable.
Not every significant economy is caught in this crisis. Russia went through this crisis years ago and had already tilted toward the political elite’s control over the economy. Brazil and India have not experienced the extremes of China, but then they haven’t had the extreme growth rates of China. But when the United States, Europe and China go into a crisis of this sort, it can reasonably be said that the center of gravity of the world’s economy and most of its military power is in crisis. It is not a trivial moment.
Crisis does not mean collapse. The United States has substantial political legitimacy to draw on. Europe has less but its constituent nations are strong. China’s Communist Party is a formidable entity but it is no longer dealing with a financial crisis. It is dealing with a political crisis over the manner in which the political elite has managed the financial crisis. It is this political crisis that is most dangerous, because as the political elite weakens it loses the ability to manage and control other elites.
It is vital to understand that this is not an ideological challenge. Left-wingers opposing globalization and right-wingers opposing immigration are engaged in the same process — challenging the legitimacy of the elites. Nor is it simply a class issue. The challenge emanates from many areas. The challengers are not yet the majority, but they are not so far away from it as to be discounted. The real problem is that, while the challenge to the elites goes on, the profound differences in the challengers make an alternative political elite difficult to imagine.
THE CRISIS OF LEGITIMACY
This, then, is the third crisis that can emerge: that the elites become delegitimized and all that there is to replace them is a deeply divided and hostile force, united in hostility to the elites but without any coherent ideology of its own. In the United States this would lead to paralysis. In Europe it would lead to a devolution to the nation-state. In China it would lead to regional fragmentation and conflict.
These are all extreme outcomes and there are many arrestors. But we cannot understand what is going on without understanding two things. The first is that the political economic crisis, if not global, is at least widespread, and uprisings elsewhere have their own roots but are linked in some ways to this crisis. The second is that the crisis is an economic problem that has triggered a political problem, which in turn is making the economic problem worse.
The followers of Adam Smith may believe in an autonomous economic sphere disengaged from politics, but Adam Smith was far more subtle. That’s why he called his greatest book the Wealth of Nations. It was about wealth, but it was also about nations. It was a work of political economy that teaches us a great deal about the moment we are in.
UK Riots 2011
This is extraordinary stuff, and I would love to see tossers like Ken Livingstone or Darcus Howe (blaming this on the cuts, calling it an "insurrection" respectively) challenged to listen to these little shits and then stick by their views.
BBC correspondent Nick Ravenscroft spent the night in Manchester as police battled to keep control of the streets.
Looter: 'I'll keep going till I get caught'
Today Program
10/08/2011
The Manc scally stuff starts 1'00" in. Some choice parts are:
"Why are you gonna refuse the opportunity to get free stuff?"
"This is my first offence... I'll take a caution... the prison's are overcrowded. What are they gonna do, give me an ASBO? I can live with that".
Ravenscroft is virtually the only reporter who doesn't let these thugs' pathetic non-logic get off unchallenged. They blame the government - when Ravenscroft challenges, it turns out the only thing they can coherently blame the government for is... not being able to stop them looting.
Finally they answer the question of "if you know it's wrong, why are you doing it?" with the chilling "because everyone else is doing it".
Croydon riot girls boast that looting was 'good fun'
Metro
10/08/2011
Two teenage girls who took part in looting in Croydon boasted about grabbing ‘free things’ and said they hoped the riots would spread further.
The 17-year-olds were drinking stolen rosé wine at 9.30am yesterday as they laughed about the previous night’s disturbances in south London and made vague complaints about ‘rich people’.
One told the BBC: ‘Everyone was just on a riot, going mad, chucking things, chucking bottles – it was good, though.’
Her friend added: ‘Breaking into shops – it was madness, it was good fun.’
One of the girls bragged about ‘getting a couple of free things’, before insisting: ‘It’s the government’s fault. I don’t know. Conservatives, whoever it is. It’s the rich people who’ve got businesses and that’s why all this happened.’
They said further crimes would ‘hopefully’ follow.
BBC correspondent Nick Ravenscroft spent the night in Manchester as police battled to keep control of the streets.
Looter: 'I'll keep going till I get caught'
Today Program
10/08/2011
The Manc scally stuff starts 1'00" in. Some choice parts are:
"Why are you gonna refuse the opportunity to get free stuff?"
"This is my first offence... I'll take a caution... the prison's are overcrowded. What are they gonna do, give me an ASBO? I can live with that".
Ravenscroft is virtually the only reporter who doesn't let these thugs' pathetic non-logic get off unchallenged. They blame the government - when Ravenscroft challenges, it turns out the only thing they can coherently blame the government for is... not being able to stop them looting.
Finally they answer the question of "if you know it's wrong, why are you doing it?" with the chilling "because everyone else is doing it".
Croydon riot girls boast that looting was 'good fun'
Metro
10/08/2011
Two teenage girls who took part in looting in Croydon boasted about grabbing ‘free things’ and said they hoped the riots would spread further.
The 17-year-olds were drinking stolen rosé wine at 9.30am yesterday as they laughed about the previous night’s disturbances in south London and made vague complaints about ‘rich people’.
One told the BBC: ‘Everyone was just on a riot, going mad, chucking things, chucking bottles – it was good, though.’
Her friend added: ‘Breaking into shops – it was madness, it was good fun.’
One of the girls bragged about ‘getting a couple of free things’, before insisting: ‘It’s the government’s fault. I don’t know. Conservatives, whoever it is. It’s the rich people who’ve got businesses and that’s why all this happened.’
They said further crimes would ‘hopefully’ follow.
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Palestinians Cannot Accept Less than 100%
Palestinians Cannot Accept Less than 100%
by Khaled Abu Toameh
Hudson NY
July 12, 2011
The Palestinians are divided today into two camps – one that is radical and another that is less radical -- or "moderate" in the words of the West.
The radical camp is headed by Hamas and other extremist groups such as the Islamic Jihad organization.
This camp's message is: We want 100% of everything and we will not make any concessions to Israel. We want all the land, from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River. We want to replace Israel with an Islamic state where Jews who wish to could live as a minority.
There is no point in talking about the possibility of negotiating with this radical camp about peace, especially as its declared goal is to eliminate Israel -- not make peace with it. The only thing Israel could talk to the radicals about is how and when to dismantle the Jewish state and send Israelis to Europe, Russia, the US and their Arab countries of origin.
The less radical camp, headed by the PLO and a minority of secular Palestinians, is also saying that it wants 100%, but only of the pre-1967 lines -– meaning the entire West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem. Like the radicals, the "moderate" camp is also saying that it will not and cannot make any concessions to Israel on its territorial demands.
With such positions, it is hard to see how the peace process could lead to anything positive. The radicals do not want to negotiate with Israel because they do not recognize its right to exist and believe it should be wiped off the face of the earth. The so-called moderates say they are ready to return to the negotiating table, but only if Israel agrees in advance to give them 100% of their demands.
Yet the central problem is that even if Israel does accept all their demands, neither camp is willing to commit to ending the conflict. This is basically why the 2000 Camp David summit failed – because Yasser Arafat was not prepared to sign any document that called for end of conflict even after a peace deal were reached between Israel and the Palestinians.
Further, no "moderate" Palestinian leader would dare to sign such a document out of fear of being denounced by his people -- and the rest of the Arab and Islamic countries -- for having "sold out" to Israel by giving up the claim to all of the land.
more...
by Khaled Abu Toameh
Hudson NY
July 12, 2011
The Palestinians are divided today into two camps – one that is radical and another that is less radical -- or "moderate" in the words of the West.
The radical camp is headed by Hamas and other extremist groups such as the Islamic Jihad organization.
This camp's message is: We want 100% of everything and we will not make any concessions to Israel. We want all the land, from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River. We want to replace Israel with an Islamic state where Jews who wish to could live as a minority.
There is no point in talking about the possibility of negotiating with this radical camp about peace, especially as its declared goal is to eliminate Israel -- not make peace with it. The only thing Israel could talk to the radicals about is how and when to dismantle the Jewish state and send Israelis to Europe, Russia, the US and their Arab countries of origin.
The less radical camp, headed by the PLO and a minority of secular Palestinians, is also saying that it wants 100%, but only of the pre-1967 lines -– meaning the entire West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem. Like the radicals, the "moderate" camp is also saying that it will not and cannot make any concessions to Israel on its territorial demands.
With such positions, it is hard to see how the peace process could lead to anything positive. The radicals do not want to negotiate with Israel because they do not recognize its right to exist and believe it should be wiped off the face of the earth. The so-called moderates say they are ready to return to the negotiating table, but only if Israel agrees in advance to give them 100% of their demands.
Yet the central problem is that even if Israel does accept all their demands, neither camp is willing to commit to ending the conflict. This is basically why the 2000 Camp David summit failed – because Yasser Arafat was not prepared to sign any document that called for end of conflict even after a peace deal were reached between Israel and the Palestinians.
Further, no "moderate" Palestinian leader would dare to sign such a document out of fear of being denounced by his people -- and the rest of the Arab and Islamic countries -- for having "sold out" to Israel by giving up the claim to all of the land.
more...
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
The Divided States of Europe
More fascinating analysis from Stratfor.
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The Divided States of Europe
Stratfor
June 28, 2011
By Marko Papic
Europe continues to be engulfed by economic crisis. The global focus returns to Athens on June 28 as Greek parliamentarians debate austerity measures imposed on them by eurozone partners. If the Greeks vote down these measures, Athens will not receive its second bailout, which could create an even worse crisis in Europe and the world.
It is important to understand that the crisis is not fundamentally about Greece or even about the indebtedness of the entire currency bloc. After all, Greece represents only 2.5 percent of the eurozone’s gross domestic product (GDP), and the bloc’s fiscal numbers are not that bad when looked at in the aggregate. Its overall deficit and debt figures are in a better shape than those of the United States — the U.S. budget deficit stood at 10.6 percent of GDP in 2010, compared to 6.4 percent for the European Union — yet the focus continues to be on Europe.
That is because the real crisis is the more fundamental question of how the European continent is to be ruled in the 21st century. Europe has emerged from its subservience during the Cold War, when it was the geopolitical chessboard for the Soviet Union and the United States. It won its independence by default as the superpowers retreated: Russia withdrawing to its Soviet sphere of influence and the United States switching its focus to the Middle East after 9/11. Since the 1990s, Europe has dabbled with institutional reform but has left the fundamental question of political integration off the table, even as it integrated economically. This is ultimately the source of the current sovereign debt crisis, the lack of political oversight over economic integration gone wrong.
The eurozone’s economic crisis brought this question of Europe’s political fate into focus, but it is a recurring issue. Roughly every 100 years, Europe confronts this dilemma. The Continent suffers from overpopulation — of nations, not people. Europe has the largest concentration of independent nation-states per square foot than any other continent. While Africa is larger and has more countries, no continent has as many rich and relatively powerful countries as Europe does. This is because, geographically, the Continent is riddled with features that prevent the formation of a single political entity. Mountain ranges, peninsulas and islands limit the ability of large powers to dominate or conquer the smaller ones. No single river forms a unifying river valley that can dominate the rest of the Continent. The Danube comes close, but it drains into the practically landlocked Black Sea, the only exit from which is another practically landlocked sea, the Mediterranean. This limits Europe’s ability to produce an independent entity capable of global power projection.
However, Europe does have plenty of rivers, convenient transportation routes and well-sheltered harbors. This allows for capital generation at a number of points on the Continent, such as Vienna, Paris, London, Frankfurt, Rotterdam, Milan, Turin and Hamburg. Thus, while large armies have trouble physically pushing through the Continent and subverting various nations under one rule, ideas, capital, goods and services do not. This makes Europe rich (the Continent has at least the equivalent GDP of the United States, and it could be larger depending how one calculates it).
What makes Europe rich, however, also makes it fragmented. The current political and security architectures of Europe — the EU and NATO — were encouraged by the United States in order to unify the Continent so that it could present a somewhat united front against the Soviet Union. They did not grow organically out of the Continent. This is a problem because Moscow is no longer a threat for all European countries, Germany and France see Russia as a business partner and European states are facing their first true challenge to Continental governance, with fragmentation and suspicion returning in full force. Closer unification and the creation of some sort of United States of Europe seems like the obvious solution to the problems posed by the eurozone sovereign debt crisis — although the eurozone’s problems are many and not easily solved just by integration, and Europe’s geography and history favor fragmentation.
CONFEDERATION OF EUROPE
The European Union is a confederation of states that outsources day-to-day management of many policy spheres to a bureaucratic arm (the European Commission) and monetary policy to the European Central Bank. The important policy issues, such as defense, foreign policy and taxation, remain the sole prerogatives of the states. The states still meet in various formats to deal with these problems. Solutions to the Greek, Irish and Portuguese fiscal problems are agreed upon by all eurozone states on an ad hoc basis, as is participation in the Libyan military campaign within the context of the European Union. Every important decision requires that the states meet and reach a mutually acceptable solution, often producing non-optimal outcomes that are products of compromise.
The best analogy for the contemporary European Union is found not in European history but in American history. This is the period between the successful Revolutionary War in 1783 and the ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1788. Within that five-year period, the United States was governed by a set of laws drawn up in the Articles of the Confederation. The country had no executive, no government, no real army and no foreign policy. States retained their own armies and many had minor coastal navies. They conducted foreign and trade policy independent of the wishes of the Continental Congress, a supranational body that had less power than even the European Parliament of today (this despite Article VI of the Articles of Confederation, which stipulated that states would not be able to conduct independent foreign policy without the consent of Congress). Congress was supposed to raise funds from the states to fund such things as a Continental Army, pay benefits to the veterans of the Revolutionary War and pay back loans that European powers gave Americans during the war against the British. States, however, refused to give Congress money, and there was nothing anybody could do about it. Congress was forced to print money, causing the Confederation’s currency to become worthless.
With such a loose confederation set-up, the costs of the Revolutionary War were ultimately unbearable for the fledgling nation. The reality of the international system, which pitted the new nation against aggressive European powers looking to subvert America’s independence, soon engulfed the ideals of states’ independence and limited government. Social, economic and security burdens proved too great for individual states to contain and a powerless Congress to address.
Nothing brought this reality home more than a rebellion in Western Massachusetts led by Daniel Shays in 1787. Shays’ Rebellion was, at its heart, an economic crisis. Burdened by European lenders calling for repayment of America’s war debt, the states’ economies collapsed and with them the livelihoods of many rural farmers, many of whom were veterans of the Revolutionary War who had been promised benefits. Austerity measures — often in the form of land confiscation — were imposed on the rural poor to pay off the European creditors. Shays’ Rebellion was put down without the help of the Continental Congress essentially by a local Massachusetts militia acting without any real federal oversight. The rebellion was defeated, but America’s impotence was apparent for all to see, both foreign and domestic.
An economic crisis, domestic insecurity and constant fear of a British counterattack — Britain had not demobilized forts it held on the U.S. side of the Great Lakes — impressed upon the independent-minded states that a “more perfect union” was necessary. Thus the United States of America, as we know it today, was formed. States gave up their rights to conduct foreign policy, to set trade policies independent of each other and to withhold funds from the federal government. The United States set up an executive branch with powers to wage war and conduct foreign policy, as well as a legislature that could no longer be ignored. In 1794, the government’s response to the so-called Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania showed the strength of the federal arrangement, in stark contrast to the Continental Congress’ handling of Shays’ Rebellion. Washington dispatched an army of more than 10,000 men to suppress a few hundred distillers refusing to pay a new whiskey tax to fund the national debt, thereby sending a clear message of the new government’s overwhelming fiscal, political and military power.
When examining the evolution of the American Confederation into the United States of America, one can find many parallels with the European Union, among others a weak center, independent states, economic crisis and over-indebtedness. The most substantial difference between the United States in the late 18th century and Europe in the 21st century is the level of external threat. In 1787, Shays’ Rebellion impressed upon many Americans — particularly George Washington, who was irked by the crisis — just how weak the country was. If a band of farmers could threaten one of the strongest states in the union, what would the British forces still garrisoned on American soil and in Quebec to the north be able to do? States could independently muddle through the economic crisis, but they could not prevent a British counterattack or protect their merchant fleet against Barbary pirates. America could not survive another such mishap and such a wanton display of military and political impotence.
To America’s advantage, the states all shared similar geography as well as similar culture and language. Although they had different economic policies and interests, all of them ultimately depended upon seaborne Atlantic trade. The threat that such trade would be choked off by a superior naval force — or even by North African pirates — was a clear and present danger. The threat of British counterattack from the north may not have been an existential threat to the southern states, but they realized that if New York, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania were lost, the South might preserve some nominal independence but would quickly revert to de facto colonial status.
In Europe, there is no such clarity of what constitutes a threat. Even though there is a general sense — at least among the governing elites — that Europeans share economic interests, it is very clear that their security interests are not complementary. There is no agreed-upon perception of an external threat. For Central European states that only recently became European Union and NATO members, Russia still poses a threat. They have asked NATO (and even the European Union) to refocus on the European continent and for the alliance to reassure them of its commitment to their security. In return, they have seen France selling advanced helicopter carriers to Russia and Germany building an advanced military training center in Russia.
THE REGIONALIZATION OF EUROPE
The eurozone crisis — which is engulfing EU member states using the euro but is symbolically important for the entire European Union — is therefore a crisis of trust. Do the current political and security arrangements in Europe — the European Union and NATO — capture the right mix of nation-state interests? Do the member states of those organizations truly feel that they share the same fundamental fate? Are they willing, as the American colonies were at the end of the 18th century, to give up their independence in order to create a common front against political, economic and security concerns? And if the answer to these questions is no, then what are the alternative arrangements that do capture complementary nation-state interests?
On the security front, we already have our answer: the regionalization of European security organizations. NATO has ceased to effectively respond to the national security interests of European states. Germany and France have pursued an accommodationist attitude toward Russia, to the chagrin of the Baltic States and Central Europe. As a response, these Central European states have begun to arrange alternatives. The four Central European states that make up the regional Visegrad Group — Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary — have used the forum as the mold in which to create a Central European battle group. Baltic States, threatened by Russia’s general resurgence, have looked to expand military and security cooperation with the Nordic countries, with Lithuania set to join the Nordic Battlegroup, of which Estonia is already a member. France and the United Kingdom have decided to enhance cooperation with an expansive military agreement at the end of 2010, and London has also expressed an interest in becoming close to the developing Baltic-Nordic cooperative military ventures.
Regionalization is currently most evident in security matters, but it is only a matter of time before it begins to manifest itself in political and economic matters as well. For example, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been forthcoming about wanting Poland and the Czech Republic to speed up their efforts to enter the eurozone. Recently, both indicated that they had cooled on the idea of eurozone entry. The decision, of course, has a lot to do with the euro being in a state of crisis, but we cannot underestimate the underlying sense in Warsaw that Berlin is not committed to Poland’s security. Central Europeans may not currently be in the eurozone (save for Estonia, Slovenia and Slovakia), but the future of the eurozone is intertwined in its appeal to the rest of Europe as both an economic and political bloc. All EU member states are contractually obligated to enter the eurozone (save for Denmark and the United Kingdom, which negotiated opt-outs). From Germany’s perspective, membership of the Czech Republic and Poland is more important than that of peripheral Europe. Germany’s trade with Poland and the Czech Republic alone is greater than its trade with Spain, Greece, Ireland and Portugal combined.
The security regionalization of Europe is not a good sign for the future of the eurozone. A monetary union cannot be grafted onto security disunion, especially if the solution to the eurozone crisis becomes more integration. Warsaw is not going to give Berlin veto power over its budget spending if the two are not in agreement over what constitutes a security threat. This argument may seem simple, and it is cogent precisely because it is. Taxation is one of the most basic forms of state sovereignty, and one does not share it with countries that do not share one’s political, economic and security fate.
This goes for any country, not just Poland. If the solution to the eurozone crisis is greater integration, then the interests of the integrating states have to be closely aligned on more than just economic matters. The U.S. example from the late 18th century is particularly instructive, as one could make a cogent argument that American states had more divergent economic interests than European states do today, and yet their security concerns brought them together. In fact, the moment the external threat diminished in the mid-19th century due to Europe’s exhaustion from the Napoleonic Wars, American unity was shaken by the Civil War. America’s economic and cultural bifurcation, which existed even during the Revolutionary War, erupted in conflagration the moment the external threat was removed.
The bottom line is that Europeans have to agree on more than just a 3 percent budget-deficit threshold as the foundation for closer integration. Control over budgets goes to the very heart of sovereignty, and European nations will not give up that control unless they know their security and political interests will be taken seriously by their neighbors.
EUROPE’S SPHERES OF INFLUENCE
We therefore see Europe evolving into a set of regionalized groupings. These organizations may have different ideas about security and economic matters, one country may even belong to more than one grouping, but for the most part membership will largely be based on location on the Continent. This will not happen overnight. Germany, France and other core economies have a vested interest in preserving the eurozone in its current form for the short-term — perhaps as long as another decade — since the economic contagion from Greece is an existential concern for the moment. In the long-term, however, regional organizations of like-minded blocs is the path that seems to be evolving in Europe, especially if Germany decides that its relationship with core eurozone countries and Central Europe is more important than its relationship with the periphery.
We can separate the blocs into four main fledgling groupings, which are not mutually exclusive, as a sort of model to depict the evolving relationships among countries in Europe:
1. The German sphere of influence (Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Czech Republic, Hungary, Croatia, Switzerland, Slovenia, Slovakia and Finland): These core eurozone economies are not disadvantaged by Germany’s competitiveness, or they depend on German trade for economic benefit, and they are not inherently threatened by Germany’s evolving relationship with Russia. Due to its isolation from the rest of Europe and proximity to Russia, Finland is not thrilled about Russia’s resurgence, but occasionally it prefers Germany’s careful accommodative approach to the aggressive approach of neighboring Sweden or Poland. Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia are the most concerned about the Russia-Germany relationship, but not to the extent that Poland and the Baltic states are, and they may decide to remain in the German sphere of influence for economic reasons.
2. The Nordic regional bloc (Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia): These mostly non-eurozone states generally see Russia’s resurgence in a negative light. The Baltic states are seen as part of the Nordic sphere of influence (especially Sweden’s), which leads toward problems with Russia. Germany is an important trade partner, but it is also seen as overbearing and as a competitor. Finland straddles this group and the German sphere of influence, depending on the issue.
3. Visegrad-plus (Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria). At the moment, the Visegrad Four belong to different spheres of influence. The Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary do not feel as exposed to Russia’s resurgence as Poland or Romania do. But they also are not completely satisfied with Germany’s attitude toward Russia. Poland is not strong enough to lead this group economically the way Sweden dominates the Nordic bloc. Other than security cooperation, the Visegrad countries have little to offer each other at the moment. Poland intends to change that by lobbying for more funding for new EU member states in the next six months of its EU presidency. That still does not constitute economic leadership.
4. Mediterranean Europe (Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Cyprus and Malta): These are Europe’s peripheral states. Their security concerns are unique due to their exposure to illegal immigration via routes through Turkey and North Africa. Geographically, these countries are isolated from the main trade routes and lack the capital-generating centers of northern Europe, save for Italy’s Po River Valley (which in many ways does not belong to this group but could be thought of as a separate entity that could be seen as part of the German sphere of influence). These economies therefore face similar problems of over-indebtedness and lack of competitiveness. The question is, who would lead?
And then there are France and the United Kingdom. These countries do not really belong to any bloc. This is London’s traditional posture with regard to continental Europe, although it has recently begun to establish a relationship with the Nordic-Baltic group. France, meanwhile, could be considered part of the German sphere of influence. Paris is attempting to hold onto its leadership role in the eurozone and is revamping its labor-market rules and social benefits to sustain its connection to the German-dominated currency bloc, a painful process. However, France traditionally is also a Mediterranean country and has considered Central European alliances in order to surround Germany. It also recently entered into a new bilateral military relationship with the United Kingdom, in part as a hedge against its close relationship with Germany. If France decides to exit its partnership with Germany, it could quickly gain control of its normal sphere of influence in the Mediterranean, probably with enthusiastic backing from a host of other powers such as the United States and the United Kingdom. In fact, its discussion of a Mediterranean Union was a political hedge, an insurance policy, for exactly such a future.
THE PRICE OF REGIONAL HEGEMONY
The alternative to the regionalization of Europe is clear German leadership that underwrites — economically and politically — greater European integration. If Berlin can overcome the anti-euro populism that is feeding on bailout fatigue in the eurozone core, it could continue to support the periphery and prove its commitment to the eurozone and the European Union. Germany is also trying to show Central Europe that its relationship with Russia is a net positive by using its negotiations with Moscow over Moldova as an example of German political clout.
Central Europeans, however, are already putting Germany’s leadership and commitment to the test. Poland assumes the EU presidency July 1 and has made the union’s commitment to increase funding for new EU member states, as well as EU defense cooperation, its main initiatives. Both policies are a test for Germany and an offer for it to reverse the ongoing security regionalization. If Berlin says no to new money for the newer EU member states — at stake is the union’s cohesion-policy funding, which in the 2007-2013 budget period totaled 177 billion euros — and no to EU-wide security/defense arrangements, then Warsaw, Prague and other Central European capitals have their answer. The question is whether Germany is serious about being a leader of Europe and paying the price to be the hegemon of a united Europe, which would not only mean funding bailouts but also standing up to Russia. If it places its relationship with Russia over its alliance with Central Europe, then it will be difficult for Central Europeans to follow Berlin. This will mean that the regionalization of Europe’s security architecture — via the Visegrad Group and Nordic-Baltic battle groups — makes sense. It will also mean that Central Europeans will have to find new ways to draw the United States into the region for security.
Common security perception is about states understanding that they share the same fate. American states understood this at the end of the 18th century, which is why they gave up their independence, setting the United States on the path toward superpower status. Europeans — at least at present — do not see their situation (or the world) in the same light. Bailouts are enacted not because Greeks share the same fate as Germans but because German bankers share the same fate as German taxpayers. This is a sign that integration has progressed to a point where economic fate is shared, but this is an inadequate baseline on which to build a common political union.
Bailing out Greece is seen as an affront to the German taxpayer, even though that same German taxpayer has benefited disproportionally from the eurozone’s creation. The German government understands the benefits of preserving the eurozone — which is why it continues bailing out the peripheral countries — but there has been no national debate in Germany to explain this logic to the populace. Germany is still waiting to have an open conversation with itself about its role and its future, and especially what price it is willing to pay for regional hegemony and remaining relevant in a world fast becoming dominated by powers capable of harnessing the resources of entire continents.
Without a coherent understanding in Europe that its states all share the same fate, the Greek crisis has little chance of being Europe’s Shays’ Rebellion, triggering deeper unification. Instead of a United States of Europe, its fate will be ongoing regionalization.
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The Divided States of Europe
Stratfor
June 28, 2011
By Marko Papic
Europe continues to be engulfed by economic crisis. The global focus returns to Athens on June 28 as Greek parliamentarians debate austerity measures imposed on them by eurozone partners. If the Greeks vote down these measures, Athens will not receive its second bailout, which could create an even worse crisis in Europe and the world.
It is important to understand that the crisis is not fundamentally about Greece or even about the indebtedness of the entire currency bloc. After all, Greece represents only 2.5 percent of the eurozone’s gross domestic product (GDP), and the bloc’s fiscal numbers are not that bad when looked at in the aggregate. Its overall deficit and debt figures are in a better shape than those of the United States — the U.S. budget deficit stood at 10.6 percent of GDP in 2010, compared to 6.4 percent for the European Union — yet the focus continues to be on Europe.
That is because the real crisis is the more fundamental question of how the European continent is to be ruled in the 21st century. Europe has emerged from its subservience during the Cold War, when it was the geopolitical chessboard for the Soviet Union and the United States. It won its independence by default as the superpowers retreated: Russia withdrawing to its Soviet sphere of influence and the United States switching its focus to the Middle East after 9/11. Since the 1990s, Europe has dabbled with institutional reform but has left the fundamental question of political integration off the table, even as it integrated economically. This is ultimately the source of the current sovereign debt crisis, the lack of political oversight over economic integration gone wrong.
The eurozone’s economic crisis brought this question of Europe’s political fate into focus, but it is a recurring issue. Roughly every 100 years, Europe confronts this dilemma. The Continent suffers from overpopulation — of nations, not people. Europe has the largest concentration of independent nation-states per square foot than any other continent. While Africa is larger and has more countries, no continent has as many rich and relatively powerful countries as Europe does. This is because, geographically, the Continent is riddled with features that prevent the formation of a single political entity. Mountain ranges, peninsulas and islands limit the ability of large powers to dominate or conquer the smaller ones. No single river forms a unifying river valley that can dominate the rest of the Continent. The Danube comes close, but it drains into the practically landlocked Black Sea, the only exit from which is another practically landlocked sea, the Mediterranean. This limits Europe’s ability to produce an independent entity capable of global power projection.
However, Europe does have plenty of rivers, convenient transportation routes and well-sheltered harbors. This allows for capital generation at a number of points on the Continent, such as Vienna, Paris, London, Frankfurt, Rotterdam, Milan, Turin and Hamburg. Thus, while large armies have trouble physically pushing through the Continent and subverting various nations under one rule, ideas, capital, goods and services do not. This makes Europe rich (the Continent has at least the equivalent GDP of the United States, and it could be larger depending how one calculates it).
What makes Europe rich, however, also makes it fragmented. The current political and security architectures of Europe — the EU and NATO — were encouraged by the United States in order to unify the Continent so that it could present a somewhat united front against the Soviet Union. They did not grow organically out of the Continent. This is a problem because Moscow is no longer a threat for all European countries, Germany and France see Russia as a business partner and European states are facing their first true challenge to Continental governance, with fragmentation and suspicion returning in full force. Closer unification and the creation of some sort of United States of Europe seems like the obvious solution to the problems posed by the eurozone sovereign debt crisis — although the eurozone’s problems are many and not easily solved just by integration, and Europe’s geography and history favor fragmentation.
CONFEDERATION OF EUROPE
The European Union is a confederation of states that outsources day-to-day management of many policy spheres to a bureaucratic arm (the European Commission) and monetary policy to the European Central Bank. The important policy issues, such as defense, foreign policy and taxation, remain the sole prerogatives of the states. The states still meet in various formats to deal with these problems. Solutions to the Greek, Irish and Portuguese fiscal problems are agreed upon by all eurozone states on an ad hoc basis, as is participation in the Libyan military campaign within the context of the European Union. Every important decision requires that the states meet and reach a mutually acceptable solution, often producing non-optimal outcomes that are products of compromise.
The best analogy for the contemporary European Union is found not in European history but in American history. This is the period between the successful Revolutionary War in 1783 and the ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1788. Within that five-year period, the United States was governed by a set of laws drawn up in the Articles of the Confederation. The country had no executive, no government, no real army and no foreign policy. States retained their own armies and many had minor coastal navies. They conducted foreign and trade policy independent of the wishes of the Continental Congress, a supranational body that had less power than even the European Parliament of today (this despite Article VI of the Articles of Confederation, which stipulated that states would not be able to conduct independent foreign policy without the consent of Congress). Congress was supposed to raise funds from the states to fund such things as a Continental Army, pay benefits to the veterans of the Revolutionary War and pay back loans that European powers gave Americans during the war against the British. States, however, refused to give Congress money, and there was nothing anybody could do about it. Congress was forced to print money, causing the Confederation’s currency to become worthless.
With such a loose confederation set-up, the costs of the Revolutionary War were ultimately unbearable for the fledgling nation. The reality of the international system, which pitted the new nation against aggressive European powers looking to subvert America’s independence, soon engulfed the ideals of states’ independence and limited government. Social, economic and security burdens proved too great for individual states to contain and a powerless Congress to address.
Nothing brought this reality home more than a rebellion in Western Massachusetts led by Daniel Shays in 1787. Shays’ Rebellion was, at its heart, an economic crisis. Burdened by European lenders calling for repayment of America’s war debt, the states’ economies collapsed and with them the livelihoods of many rural farmers, many of whom were veterans of the Revolutionary War who had been promised benefits. Austerity measures — often in the form of land confiscation — were imposed on the rural poor to pay off the European creditors. Shays’ Rebellion was put down without the help of the Continental Congress essentially by a local Massachusetts militia acting without any real federal oversight. The rebellion was defeated, but America’s impotence was apparent for all to see, both foreign and domestic.
An economic crisis, domestic insecurity and constant fear of a British counterattack — Britain had not demobilized forts it held on the U.S. side of the Great Lakes — impressed upon the independent-minded states that a “more perfect union” was necessary. Thus the United States of America, as we know it today, was formed. States gave up their rights to conduct foreign policy, to set trade policies independent of each other and to withhold funds from the federal government. The United States set up an executive branch with powers to wage war and conduct foreign policy, as well as a legislature that could no longer be ignored. In 1794, the government’s response to the so-called Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania showed the strength of the federal arrangement, in stark contrast to the Continental Congress’ handling of Shays’ Rebellion. Washington dispatched an army of more than 10,000 men to suppress a few hundred distillers refusing to pay a new whiskey tax to fund the national debt, thereby sending a clear message of the new government’s overwhelming fiscal, political and military power.
When examining the evolution of the American Confederation into the United States of America, one can find many parallels with the European Union, among others a weak center, independent states, economic crisis and over-indebtedness. The most substantial difference between the United States in the late 18th century and Europe in the 21st century is the level of external threat. In 1787, Shays’ Rebellion impressed upon many Americans — particularly George Washington, who was irked by the crisis — just how weak the country was. If a band of farmers could threaten one of the strongest states in the union, what would the British forces still garrisoned on American soil and in Quebec to the north be able to do? States could independently muddle through the economic crisis, but they could not prevent a British counterattack or protect their merchant fleet against Barbary pirates. America could not survive another such mishap and such a wanton display of military and political impotence.
To America’s advantage, the states all shared similar geography as well as similar culture and language. Although they had different economic policies and interests, all of them ultimately depended upon seaborne Atlantic trade. The threat that such trade would be choked off by a superior naval force — or even by North African pirates — was a clear and present danger. The threat of British counterattack from the north may not have been an existential threat to the southern states, but they realized that if New York, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania were lost, the South might preserve some nominal independence but would quickly revert to de facto colonial status.
In Europe, there is no such clarity of what constitutes a threat. Even though there is a general sense — at least among the governing elites — that Europeans share economic interests, it is very clear that their security interests are not complementary. There is no agreed-upon perception of an external threat. For Central European states that only recently became European Union and NATO members, Russia still poses a threat. They have asked NATO (and even the European Union) to refocus on the European continent and for the alliance to reassure them of its commitment to their security. In return, they have seen France selling advanced helicopter carriers to Russia and Germany building an advanced military training center in Russia.
THE REGIONALIZATION OF EUROPE
The eurozone crisis — which is engulfing EU member states using the euro but is symbolically important for the entire European Union — is therefore a crisis of trust. Do the current political and security arrangements in Europe — the European Union and NATO — capture the right mix of nation-state interests? Do the member states of those organizations truly feel that they share the same fundamental fate? Are they willing, as the American colonies were at the end of the 18th century, to give up their independence in order to create a common front against political, economic and security concerns? And if the answer to these questions is no, then what are the alternative arrangements that do capture complementary nation-state interests?
On the security front, we already have our answer: the regionalization of European security organizations. NATO has ceased to effectively respond to the national security interests of European states. Germany and France have pursued an accommodationist attitude toward Russia, to the chagrin of the Baltic States and Central Europe. As a response, these Central European states have begun to arrange alternatives. The four Central European states that make up the regional Visegrad Group — Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary — have used the forum as the mold in which to create a Central European battle group. Baltic States, threatened by Russia’s general resurgence, have looked to expand military and security cooperation with the Nordic countries, with Lithuania set to join the Nordic Battlegroup, of which Estonia is already a member. France and the United Kingdom have decided to enhance cooperation with an expansive military agreement at the end of 2010, and London has also expressed an interest in becoming close to the developing Baltic-Nordic cooperative military ventures.
Regionalization is currently most evident in security matters, but it is only a matter of time before it begins to manifest itself in political and economic matters as well. For example, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been forthcoming about wanting Poland and the Czech Republic to speed up their efforts to enter the eurozone. Recently, both indicated that they had cooled on the idea of eurozone entry. The decision, of course, has a lot to do with the euro being in a state of crisis, but we cannot underestimate the underlying sense in Warsaw that Berlin is not committed to Poland’s security. Central Europeans may not currently be in the eurozone (save for Estonia, Slovenia and Slovakia), but the future of the eurozone is intertwined in its appeal to the rest of Europe as both an economic and political bloc. All EU member states are contractually obligated to enter the eurozone (save for Denmark and the United Kingdom, which negotiated opt-outs). From Germany’s perspective, membership of the Czech Republic and Poland is more important than that of peripheral Europe. Germany’s trade with Poland and the Czech Republic alone is greater than its trade with Spain, Greece, Ireland and Portugal combined.
The security regionalization of Europe is not a good sign for the future of the eurozone. A monetary union cannot be grafted onto security disunion, especially if the solution to the eurozone crisis becomes more integration. Warsaw is not going to give Berlin veto power over its budget spending if the two are not in agreement over what constitutes a security threat. This argument may seem simple, and it is cogent precisely because it is. Taxation is one of the most basic forms of state sovereignty, and one does not share it with countries that do not share one’s political, economic and security fate.
This goes for any country, not just Poland. If the solution to the eurozone crisis is greater integration, then the interests of the integrating states have to be closely aligned on more than just economic matters. The U.S. example from the late 18th century is particularly instructive, as one could make a cogent argument that American states had more divergent economic interests than European states do today, and yet their security concerns brought them together. In fact, the moment the external threat diminished in the mid-19th century due to Europe’s exhaustion from the Napoleonic Wars, American unity was shaken by the Civil War. America’s economic and cultural bifurcation, which existed even during the Revolutionary War, erupted in conflagration the moment the external threat was removed.
The bottom line is that Europeans have to agree on more than just a 3 percent budget-deficit threshold as the foundation for closer integration. Control over budgets goes to the very heart of sovereignty, and European nations will not give up that control unless they know their security and political interests will be taken seriously by their neighbors.
EUROPE’S SPHERES OF INFLUENCE
We therefore see Europe evolving into a set of regionalized groupings. These organizations may have different ideas about security and economic matters, one country may even belong to more than one grouping, but for the most part membership will largely be based on location on the Continent. This will not happen overnight. Germany, France and other core economies have a vested interest in preserving the eurozone in its current form for the short-term — perhaps as long as another decade — since the economic contagion from Greece is an existential concern for the moment. In the long-term, however, regional organizations of like-minded blocs is the path that seems to be evolving in Europe, especially if Germany decides that its relationship with core eurozone countries and Central Europe is more important than its relationship with the periphery.
We can separate the blocs into four main fledgling groupings, which are not mutually exclusive, as a sort of model to depict the evolving relationships among countries in Europe:
1. The German sphere of influence (Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Czech Republic, Hungary, Croatia, Switzerland, Slovenia, Slovakia and Finland): These core eurozone economies are not disadvantaged by Germany’s competitiveness, or they depend on German trade for economic benefit, and they are not inherently threatened by Germany’s evolving relationship with Russia. Due to its isolation from the rest of Europe and proximity to Russia, Finland is not thrilled about Russia’s resurgence, but occasionally it prefers Germany’s careful accommodative approach to the aggressive approach of neighboring Sweden or Poland. Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia are the most concerned about the Russia-Germany relationship, but not to the extent that Poland and the Baltic states are, and they may decide to remain in the German sphere of influence for economic reasons.
2. The Nordic regional bloc (Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia): These mostly non-eurozone states generally see Russia’s resurgence in a negative light. The Baltic states are seen as part of the Nordic sphere of influence (especially Sweden’s), which leads toward problems with Russia. Germany is an important trade partner, but it is also seen as overbearing and as a competitor. Finland straddles this group and the German sphere of influence, depending on the issue.
3. Visegrad-plus (Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria). At the moment, the Visegrad Four belong to different spheres of influence. The Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary do not feel as exposed to Russia’s resurgence as Poland or Romania do. But they also are not completely satisfied with Germany’s attitude toward Russia. Poland is not strong enough to lead this group economically the way Sweden dominates the Nordic bloc. Other than security cooperation, the Visegrad countries have little to offer each other at the moment. Poland intends to change that by lobbying for more funding for new EU member states in the next six months of its EU presidency. That still does not constitute economic leadership.
4. Mediterranean Europe (Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Cyprus and Malta): These are Europe’s peripheral states. Their security concerns are unique due to their exposure to illegal immigration via routes through Turkey and North Africa. Geographically, these countries are isolated from the main trade routes and lack the capital-generating centers of northern Europe, save for Italy’s Po River Valley (which in many ways does not belong to this group but could be thought of as a separate entity that could be seen as part of the German sphere of influence). These economies therefore face similar problems of over-indebtedness and lack of competitiveness. The question is, who would lead?
And then there are France and the United Kingdom. These countries do not really belong to any bloc. This is London’s traditional posture with regard to continental Europe, although it has recently begun to establish a relationship with the Nordic-Baltic group. France, meanwhile, could be considered part of the German sphere of influence. Paris is attempting to hold onto its leadership role in the eurozone and is revamping its labor-market rules and social benefits to sustain its connection to the German-dominated currency bloc, a painful process. However, France traditionally is also a Mediterranean country and has considered Central European alliances in order to surround Germany. It also recently entered into a new bilateral military relationship with the United Kingdom, in part as a hedge against its close relationship with Germany. If France decides to exit its partnership with Germany, it could quickly gain control of its normal sphere of influence in the Mediterranean, probably with enthusiastic backing from a host of other powers such as the United States and the United Kingdom. In fact, its discussion of a Mediterranean Union was a political hedge, an insurance policy, for exactly such a future.
THE PRICE OF REGIONAL HEGEMONY
The alternative to the regionalization of Europe is clear German leadership that underwrites — economically and politically — greater European integration. If Berlin can overcome the anti-euro populism that is feeding on bailout fatigue in the eurozone core, it could continue to support the periphery and prove its commitment to the eurozone and the European Union. Germany is also trying to show Central Europe that its relationship with Russia is a net positive by using its negotiations with Moscow over Moldova as an example of German political clout.
Central Europeans, however, are already putting Germany’s leadership and commitment to the test. Poland assumes the EU presidency July 1 and has made the union’s commitment to increase funding for new EU member states, as well as EU defense cooperation, its main initiatives. Both policies are a test for Germany and an offer for it to reverse the ongoing security regionalization. If Berlin says no to new money for the newer EU member states — at stake is the union’s cohesion-policy funding, which in the 2007-2013 budget period totaled 177 billion euros — and no to EU-wide security/defense arrangements, then Warsaw, Prague and other Central European capitals have their answer. The question is whether Germany is serious about being a leader of Europe and paying the price to be the hegemon of a united Europe, which would not only mean funding bailouts but also standing up to Russia. If it places its relationship with Russia over its alliance with Central Europe, then it will be difficult for Central Europeans to follow Berlin. This will mean that the regionalization of Europe’s security architecture — via the Visegrad Group and Nordic-Baltic battle groups — makes sense. It will also mean that Central Europeans will have to find new ways to draw the United States into the region for security.
Common security perception is about states understanding that they share the same fate. American states understood this at the end of the 18th century, which is why they gave up their independence, setting the United States on the path toward superpower status. Europeans — at least at present — do not see their situation (or the world) in the same light. Bailouts are enacted not because Greeks share the same fate as Germans but because German bankers share the same fate as German taxpayers. This is a sign that integration has progressed to a point where economic fate is shared, but this is an inadequate baseline on which to build a common political union.
Bailing out Greece is seen as an affront to the German taxpayer, even though that same German taxpayer has benefited disproportionally from the eurozone’s creation. The German government understands the benefits of preserving the eurozone — which is why it continues bailing out the peripheral countries — but there has been no national debate in Germany to explain this logic to the populace. Germany is still waiting to have an open conversation with itself about its role and its future, and especially what price it is willing to pay for regional hegemony and remaining relevant in a world fast becoming dominated by powers capable of harnessing the resources of entire continents.
Without a coherent understanding in Europe that its states all share the same fate, the Greek crisis has little chance of being Europe’s Shays’ Rebellion, triggering deeper unification. Instead of a United States of Europe, its fate will be ongoing regionalization.
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