In some reading I was doing around the Mandela death, I came across a leading ANC communist figure, Arthur Goldreich, who was Jewish and a stern critic of Israel, one of those arguing that Israeli policy amounts to 'bantustanism'. Such a critique of Israel is obviously all the more stinging coming from a Jew, an anti-apartheid campaigner, a fighter in the Haganah, and a resident of Israel.
On a personal note, I visited South Africa several times in the 70s and 80s, and even as a kid, apartheid was brutally obvious, everywhere. I visited Israel in the 80s and saw nothing analogous whatsoever.
Anyway, I've just come across the article below, which suggests that integration of Arab Israelis has come a long way in the last generation.
A Real Arab Spring
By Normal Lebrecht
Standpoint Mag December 2013
Coming out of a movie last month in one of those edge-of-town malls that disfigure Israeli conurbations, I ran into a conga line of men, women and children shuffling their way into a McDonald's. The men wore T-shirts and jeans, the women flowery headscarves and varied outfits. Several danced along in silly conical hats. It was someone's birthday, by the look of it.
It took a second look to realise that the celebrants were a family of Israeli Arabs, descendants of the stubborn minority — some 150,000 Christians and Muslims — who refused to join the 750,000-strong Palestinian exodus in 1948. Today, by census, there are 1.6 million Israeli Arabs, some 20 per cent of the population. They enjoy full civic rights and a high level of prosperity. Beside the refugees, their lifestyle appears lavish.
As I drove through the Arab heartlands in Galilee, a hilly straggle of houses that I remember being blacked out at night for want of connection to the national grid has boomed into a noisy town with three-storey houses and an exclusive dealership in a European make of car much favoured by ultra-orthodox Jews.
Bars and restaurants on the Tel Aviv seafront are dotted with Arabs from Jaffa. On Friday night, the common day of rest, there are as many Israeli Arabs strolling along the promenade as there are Israeli Jews. When I remark on the phenomenon, young Israelis shrug as if my observation is too obvious to be worth mentioning. Integration has become a fact of life. Yet 25 years ago, Israeli Arabs were inconspicuous in Jewish towns and 45 years ago, as far as my memory extends, they were invisible.
In the first two decades of the state of Israel, until the Six Day War, Arab citizens were penned into pales of settlement, nervously watched by the security services. In the next two decades, they formed a no-man's-land between the Israeli state and the occupied Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, their resentful cousins. Torn between kinship and comfort, Israeli Arabs opted on the whole to put head over heart.
Over the past 25 years, normalisation has set in. Learning Hebrew at school as an obligatory second language, Israeli Arabs have made careers in most parts of the economy and in academic life. One of the most popular comedy series on commercial Israeli television is entitled Arab Labour. It makes merry with the tensions raised by a middle-class Arab family who move into an urban Israeli apartment block. In the episodes I have seen, Israeli Jews come off worst in the clash of cultures. One of the Arab actors, Mira Awad, has represented Israel at the Eurovision Song Contest. What could be more normal?
That is not to pretend that all is rosy. Israeli Arabs are subject to stringent airport and roadside security checks. Some complain of being treated as second-class citizens. A Jaffa driver told me his town had become overpriced and young men could not afford to buy a home. Economic progress and social participation, however, are positive indicators of how the country and the region might function if and when a peace agreement is reached. The Israeli Arabs serve, in this respect, as role models for a postwar utopia.
They also refute hostile clichés. The novelist Linda Grant drew attention in the Independent in March to a book by a French academic, Diana Pinto, arguing that Israel is functionally autistic-high-tech and tunnel-visioned, unable to see "the Other". The vastly increased visibility of Israeli Arabs gives the lie to that theory.
It also confounds the perpetual accusation that Israel is somehow an "apartheid state". If Israel were indeed a society founded on racial supremacy and separation, there would be no Arabs celebrating birthdays in shopping malls, no strollers on the Tel Aviv prom, no automobile millionaires in Galilee and no property boom in Jaffa. The apartheid libel, a propaganda ploy of the pro-Palestine lobby and the anti-Zionist Left, denies the blatant reality that Israel is a fast-evolving, multicultural society with more tolerance for minorities than any of its neighbours (and most European states). The casual confidence of its Arab citizens is testimony to a healthy society.
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
Israel's overlooked humanitarian role in the Syria conflict
Interesting.
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Good By Stealth
By Tom Gross
Standpoint Mag December 2013
The media is full of stereotypes and mistakes about many issues. Yet years of experience as a foreign correspondent has led me to the conclusion that the prejudices and biases against the state of Israel are in a league of their own. There are notable exceptions, of course, but for some news outlets Israel can do no right.
Which is one reason why one of the more remarkable stories coming out of the Middle East over the last two and a half years has been largely overlooked: the bravery of Israeli doctors and civilians who have gone into war-ravaged neighbouring Syria to treat the injured, and feed and clothe refugees from all ethnic backgrounds.
Thousands of Syrian doctors have fled the country and hundreds have been killed as the Assad regime continues to bomb medical clinics as a means of terrorising population groups who oppose his government. Where they can, Israeli medics have gone in to help those few Syrian doctors still working. Other Israelis have defied the Jordanian authorities by helping Syrian refugees in that country.
Although they work independently of the Israeli government, the Israeli army has quietly supported their humanitarian actions, sometimes helping ferry them across the border. In addition to setting up field hospitals, they have brought food. The Economist pointed out in September that in Dera alone, the southern city where the anti-Assad uprising began, Israelis have distributed 300,000 meals to Syrians, as well as medication, mobile phones and chemical protection suits.
The more severely injured Syrians — particularly children — have been brought to Israel for specialised treatment, all at the expense of the Israeli government and Jewish charities. Syrians are taking a risk even entering Israel: the Syrian government makes it a crime for its citizens to go there.
One or two American news outlets have reported on the medical treatment in Israel (though not on the help being given in Syria and Jordan). In July, Jim Clancy of CNN went to the Rebecca Sieff Hospital in Safed (named after a member of the founding family of Marks & Spencer), where he noted that half of all intensive care beds were occupied by Syrian civilians wounded during the previous week alone.
In May, the New York Times reported from Nahariya Hospital in northern Israel on a three-year-old girl being given skin grafts for horrific facial injuries she sustained during a government missile attack in Syria. In the next bed, the newspaper noted, a girl, aged 12, lay in a deep sleep, having been operated on for a severe stomach wound and a hole in her back. Next to her lay another Syrian girl, 13, recovering from over a month of operations for injuries to her face, arm and leg. In Wolfson Medical Center near Tel Aviv, the life of a four-year-old Syrian girl was saved by open-heart surgery. In another hospital, a Syrian mother gave birth last month, the first Syrian born in Israel.
Although there has been hardly any coverage in British media, one Palestinian website noted: "While the Arab countries make empty promises, the Israelis have crossed the border to provide assistance to the refugees, risking their lives without a word of thank you
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Good By Stealth
By Tom Gross
Standpoint Mag December 2013
The media is full of stereotypes and mistakes about many issues. Yet years of experience as a foreign correspondent has led me to the conclusion that the prejudices and biases against the state of Israel are in a league of their own. There are notable exceptions, of course, but for some news outlets Israel can do no right.
Which is one reason why one of the more remarkable stories coming out of the Middle East over the last two and a half years has been largely overlooked: the bravery of Israeli doctors and civilians who have gone into war-ravaged neighbouring Syria to treat the injured, and feed and clothe refugees from all ethnic backgrounds.
Thousands of Syrian doctors have fled the country and hundreds have been killed as the Assad regime continues to bomb medical clinics as a means of terrorising population groups who oppose his government. Where they can, Israeli medics have gone in to help those few Syrian doctors still working. Other Israelis have defied the Jordanian authorities by helping Syrian refugees in that country.
Although they work independently of the Israeli government, the Israeli army has quietly supported their humanitarian actions, sometimes helping ferry them across the border. In addition to setting up field hospitals, they have brought food. The Economist pointed out in September that in Dera alone, the southern city where the anti-Assad uprising began, Israelis have distributed 300,000 meals to Syrians, as well as medication, mobile phones and chemical protection suits.
The more severely injured Syrians — particularly children — have been brought to Israel for specialised treatment, all at the expense of the Israeli government and Jewish charities. Syrians are taking a risk even entering Israel: the Syrian government makes it a crime for its citizens to go there.
One or two American news outlets have reported on the medical treatment in Israel (though not on the help being given in Syria and Jordan). In July, Jim Clancy of CNN went to the Rebecca Sieff Hospital in Safed (named after a member of the founding family of Marks & Spencer), where he noted that half of all intensive care beds were occupied by Syrian civilians wounded during the previous week alone.
In May, the New York Times reported from Nahariya Hospital in northern Israel on a three-year-old girl being given skin grafts for horrific facial injuries she sustained during a government missile attack in Syria. In the next bed, the newspaper noted, a girl, aged 12, lay in a deep sleep, having been operated on for a severe stomach wound and a hole in her back. Next to her lay another Syrian girl, 13, recovering from over a month of operations for injuries to her face, arm and leg. In Wolfson Medical Center near Tel Aviv, the life of a four-year-old Syrian girl was saved by open-heart surgery. In another hospital, a Syrian mother gave birth last month, the first Syrian born in Israel.
Although there has been hardly any coverage in British media, one Palestinian website noted: "While the Arab countries make empty promises, the Israelis have crossed the border to provide assistance to the refugees, risking their lives without a word of thank you
Thursday, January 23, 2014
David Baddiel on Anelka's quenelle, and anti-semitism in British football
There's an excellent 5 minute Newsnight interview with David Baddiel at this BBC url, where he discusses Anelka's 'quenelle' gesture with his typical mix of astute commentary and gentle humour. As he says, Anelka's defence amounts to "oh no, it's not an anti-semitic gesture, it's a demonstration of support for my great friend (who is a tremendous anti-semite)", and as such is not a particularly coherent position.
Baddiel goes on to describe a Frenchman's response to his own Tweet on the subject, where Baddiel is told "you don't understand, [the quenelle is not anti-semitic, it is] just anti-French government. And anti the Zionist cabal".
He makes a number of other excellent points, definitely worth the time.
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Nicolas Anelka: West Brom striker defends "quenelle" gesture
BBC Sport
21 January 2014
Baddiel goes on to describe a Frenchman's response to his own Tweet on the subject, where Baddiel is told "you don't understand, [the quenelle is not anti-semitic, it is] just anti-French government. And anti the Zionist cabal".
He makes a number of other excellent points, definitely worth the time.
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Nicolas Anelka: West Brom striker defends "quenelle" gesture
BBC Sport
21 January 2014
Canadian PM Stephen Harper in Israel
Canadian PM Stephen Harper is visiting Israel, and I have never heard a Western leader make these kinds of statements of support. His three main points in a speech to the Knesset were:
1. Israel has a right to exist
2. Israel has a right to full participation in UN councils
3. He is not going to single out Israel for criticism
...and he fleshed out that last one as follows:
Some more detailed analysis:
1. Israel has a right to exist
2. Israel has a right to full participation in UN councils
3. He is not going to single out Israel for criticism
...and he fleshed out that last one as follows:
Harper to reporters: Ask some different questions about the Middle East
David Akin
Toronto Sun
21/1/14
[Harper explained to reporters] that there was no way he was going to single out Israel for criticism in any public forum [... H]e turned the tables: "Yesterday in the Palestinian Authority, no one asked me there to single out the Palestinian Authority for any criticism in terms of governance or human rights or anything else," Harper said, speaking about the press conference he'd held Monday in Ramallah side-by-side with P.A. President Mahmoud Abbas. "When I'm in Israel, I'm asked to single out Israel. When I'm in Palestinian Authority I'm asked to single out Israel and in half the other places around the world you ask me to single out Israel."
Some more detailed analysis:
Canada supports Israel 'because it is right'
20/01/14
Toronto Sun
Simon Kent reacts to Stephen Harper's historic speech in Israel, noting that Harper supports Israel 'because it is right'
Friday, January 03, 2014
Yahya Hassan - teen poet, Danish citizen, Muslim apostate
Interesting & brave guy. I first read about him here.
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Teen Poet Sparks New Debate on Islam in Denmark
November 6, 2013
Clemens Bomsdorf & Ellen Emmerentze Jervell
The Wall Street Journal
COPENHAGEN – Yahya Hassan was about 10 years old when cartoonist Kurt Westergaard attracted passionate criticism from Muslims world-wide with his cartoon depicting the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb as his turban. It ran in a Danish newspaper.
Hassan – the 18-year-old son of Palestinian immigrants who are Muslims – is now creating his own brand of controversy in Islamic circles and elsewhere with a new book of poetry that was published in Denmark last month. The writing student’s self-titled book contains around 150 poems, many of which are severely critical of the religious environment he grew up in.
His book has been a surprise strong seller since it hit the relatively small Danish market Oct. 17, with 32,000 copies being sold in about two weeks. The publisher, Gyldendal, says books of poetry in Denmark are lucky to hit 500 copies. In televised interviews, Hassan has been anything but tempered in his comments about what he views as a culture of hypocrisy underpinning Denmark’s Muslim population. His words have prompted arguably the largest debate on religion in the small Scandinavian nation since the Westergaard cartoon.
Like Westergaard, Hassan’s safety is on the line.
After reciting one of his poems, titled “LANGDIGT,” or “LONG POEM,” (he writes in capital letters only) on a Danish television station a few weeks ago, he received 27 death threats and police are investigating what they perceive as the most serious ones.
Speakeasy caught up with Hassan about a week after his book was published. His black hair tied back in a ponytail, the young poet discussed his work as he worked through a pack of cigarettes.
At first glance, Hassan looks like a typical Danish teenager of Middle East origin. His white T-shirt is covered by an elegant dark coat; his stylish blue pants are paired with brown leather shoes.
“There’s something wrong with Islam,” Hassan, a self-proclaimed atheist, says. “The religion refuses to renew itself.” It needs a “reformation.”
His poems carry titles like “CHILDHOOD” and “DISGUSTED,” dealing with issues like the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, child abuse, and the interplay between violence and religion. Profanity and vivid analogies help carry his work.
A translated excerpt from “LONG POEM:”
“You don’t want pork meat,
may Allah praise you for your eating habits,
you want Friday prayer till the next Friday prayer,
you want Ramadan till the next Ramadan,
and between the Friday prayers and the Ramadans,
you want to carry a knife in your pocket,
you want to go and ask people if they have a problem,
although the only problem is you.”
Hassan’s biggest complaint seems to be with his own peer group. “There is a massive group of Arabs – Muslims — – that commit crime on a big scale. They steal things, they sell stolen things, or they deal hash. But how can you call yourself a Muslim if all this is forbidden?”
He is careful to clarify the target of his criticism. “I speak about the lower class, the ghetto areas.”
Hassan is a product of this culture, born in what he refers to a “lower class place, a ghetto” in Western Denmark. He says his parents, who came to Denmark from a refugee camp in Lebanon but consider themselves Palestinian, would talk about the horrors they left behind in the Middle East.
He dropped out of school at 13 and soon ended up “living out of a duffel bag” travelling from institution to institution because of behavior problems, including theft. During long periods of isolation – imposed by authorities and his father – he took time to read and grew to love literature, he said.
Danish media have already lauded him as a role model for his generation. Critics such as Tue Nexo Andersen, a literature professor at the University of Copenhagen, said Hassan’s longer works are “almost Walt Whitman-like.”
Hassan, however, knew that publishing his unfiltered thoughts on the Muslims would create problems. “I knew when I would tell my story would break many taboos and many people would get offended and my parents would get angry. But my premise was that I would have to tell it as it is.”
Hassan’s book was published in mid-October, but his name became popular earlier in the month after one of his first big interviews became an online sensation in Denmark. Politiken published a piece titled “I F***ing Hate My Parents’ Generation,” which became the most shared story to ever run on the Danish daily newspaper’s website.
The writer is quick to blame his parents and their contemporaries as the reason he got involved in robberies and quit school. He says his father was physically abusive in his ways of “reprimanding” the family, and the experience shows up in his writing.
Hassan’s parents could not be reached for comment, and have stayed out of the media spotlight.
But Hassan says his poetry is only a generalization, and he wants to move past debates about whether he is a racist or role model. “People can say what they want to about my poems,” he says. “They can call them Islam-criticism, they can call them poetry, but that has nothing to do with the author; it has nothing to do with me.”
In addition to targeting hypocrisy, his poetry, he says, speaks to the problem of Muslims “exploiting the society they live in.” On free speech, Hassan says “Muslims love to take advantage of (it), and as soon as there is someone else saying something critical against them, they want to restrict it.”
Kassem Rachid, an Imam from the Danish city of Aabenraa, said he respects the poet’s right to air his views, but prefers Hassan take a different route.
“I can understand that he grew up in a problematic surrounding, but that does not have to do with religion…of course I know families like the one he describes in his book, but those you find among immigrants as well as native Danes.”
Hassan welcomes dialogue, saying he didn’t become a poet to “build a career” and has “no political agenda.”
As for his harsher critics who have threatened to hurt him, Hassan says “I know these people.” After stubbing out another cigarette, he leans forward putting his elbows on his knees, shivering slightly in response to the cold Scandinavian evening setting in. “They can’t handle criticism…they’re not interested in dialogue.”
------
Teen Poet Sparks New Debate on Islam in Denmark
November 6, 2013
Clemens Bomsdorf & Ellen Emmerentze Jervell
The Wall Street Journal
COPENHAGEN – Yahya Hassan was about 10 years old when cartoonist Kurt Westergaard attracted passionate criticism from Muslims world-wide with his cartoon depicting the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb as his turban. It ran in a Danish newspaper.
Hassan – the 18-year-old son of Palestinian immigrants who are Muslims – is now creating his own brand of controversy in Islamic circles and elsewhere with a new book of poetry that was published in Denmark last month. The writing student’s self-titled book contains around 150 poems, many of which are severely critical of the religious environment he grew up in.
His book has been a surprise strong seller since it hit the relatively small Danish market Oct. 17, with 32,000 copies being sold in about two weeks. The publisher, Gyldendal, says books of poetry in Denmark are lucky to hit 500 copies. In televised interviews, Hassan has been anything but tempered in his comments about what he views as a culture of hypocrisy underpinning Denmark’s Muslim population. His words have prompted arguably the largest debate on religion in the small Scandinavian nation since the Westergaard cartoon.
Like Westergaard, Hassan’s safety is on the line.
After reciting one of his poems, titled “LANGDIGT,” or “LONG POEM,” (he writes in capital letters only) on a Danish television station a few weeks ago, he received 27 death threats and police are investigating what they perceive as the most serious ones.
Speakeasy caught up with Hassan about a week after his book was published. His black hair tied back in a ponytail, the young poet discussed his work as he worked through a pack of cigarettes.
At first glance, Hassan looks like a typical Danish teenager of Middle East origin. His white T-shirt is covered by an elegant dark coat; his stylish blue pants are paired with brown leather shoes.
“There’s something wrong with Islam,” Hassan, a self-proclaimed atheist, says. “The religion refuses to renew itself.” It needs a “reformation.”
His poems carry titles like “CHILDHOOD” and “DISGUSTED,” dealing with issues like the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, child abuse, and the interplay between violence and religion. Profanity and vivid analogies help carry his work.
A translated excerpt from “LONG POEM:”
“You don’t want pork meat,
may Allah praise you for your eating habits,
you want Friday prayer till the next Friday prayer,
you want Ramadan till the next Ramadan,
and between the Friday prayers and the Ramadans,
you want to carry a knife in your pocket,
you want to go and ask people if they have a problem,
although the only problem is you.”
Hassan’s biggest complaint seems to be with his own peer group. “There is a massive group of Arabs – Muslims — – that commit crime on a big scale. They steal things, they sell stolen things, or they deal hash. But how can you call yourself a Muslim if all this is forbidden?”
He is careful to clarify the target of his criticism. “I speak about the lower class, the ghetto areas.”
Hassan is a product of this culture, born in what he refers to a “lower class place, a ghetto” in Western Denmark. He says his parents, who came to Denmark from a refugee camp in Lebanon but consider themselves Palestinian, would talk about the horrors they left behind in the Middle East.
He dropped out of school at 13 and soon ended up “living out of a duffel bag” travelling from institution to institution because of behavior problems, including theft. During long periods of isolation – imposed by authorities and his father – he took time to read and grew to love literature, he said.
Danish media have already lauded him as a role model for his generation. Critics such as Tue Nexo Andersen, a literature professor at the University of Copenhagen, said Hassan’s longer works are “almost Walt Whitman-like.”
Hassan, however, knew that publishing his unfiltered thoughts on the Muslims would create problems. “I knew when I would tell my story would break many taboos and many people would get offended and my parents would get angry. But my premise was that I would have to tell it as it is.”
Hassan’s book was published in mid-October, but his name became popular earlier in the month after one of his first big interviews became an online sensation in Denmark. Politiken published a piece titled “I F***ing Hate My Parents’ Generation,” which became the most shared story to ever run on the Danish daily newspaper’s website.
The writer is quick to blame his parents and their contemporaries as the reason he got involved in robberies and quit school. He says his father was physically abusive in his ways of “reprimanding” the family, and the experience shows up in his writing.
Hassan’s parents could not be reached for comment, and have stayed out of the media spotlight.
But Hassan says his poetry is only a generalization, and he wants to move past debates about whether he is a racist or role model. “People can say what they want to about my poems,” he says. “They can call them Islam-criticism, they can call them poetry, but that has nothing to do with the author; it has nothing to do with me.”
In addition to targeting hypocrisy, his poetry, he says, speaks to the problem of Muslims “exploiting the society they live in.” On free speech, Hassan says “Muslims love to take advantage of (it), and as soon as there is someone else saying something critical against them, they want to restrict it.”
Kassem Rachid, an Imam from the Danish city of Aabenraa, said he respects the poet’s right to air his views, but prefers Hassan take a different route.
“I can understand that he grew up in a problematic surrounding, but that does not have to do with religion…of course I know families like the one he describes in his book, but those you find among immigrants as well as native Danes.”
Hassan welcomes dialogue, saying he didn’t become a poet to “build a career” and has “no political agenda.”
As for his harsher critics who have threatened to hurt him, Hassan says “I know these people.” After stubbing out another cigarette, he leans forward putting his elbows on his knees, shivering slightly in response to the cold Scandinavian evening setting in. “They can’t handle criticism…they’re not interested in dialogue.”
Monday, December 30, 2013
The mysteries of Azerbaijan - a Shiite nation embraces its Jews
Wow - I had no idea. Fascinating.
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The mysteries of Azerbaijan: A Shiite nation embraces its Jews
Jewish Journal
December 18, 2013
by Rob Eshman
Red Village rises up along the Qudiyal River like a Jewish Brigadoon.
To get there, you fly 13 hours from Los Angeles to Istanbul, then catch a three-hour flight to Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan — a former Soviet country of some 9 million people on the Caspian Sea. From Baku, you take a bus past churning oil derricks and miles of empty desert, up into the Caucasus, through tiny villages surrounded by apple orchards. After two hours, you arrive in Quba, the capital of Azerbaijan’s northeast region. About a mile past an attractive central mosque, a simple steel bridge spans a wide, mostly dry riverbed and leads directly into Red Village.
One of the first things you see is a large brick building atop which sits — improbably, impossibly — a Jewish star.
About 4,000 people live in Red Village, every one of them Jewish. That makes Red Village the largest all-Jewish settlement outside the State of Israel.
This entirely Jewish town exists in an almost entirely Muslim country — ancient, placid, prosperous. It is also completely unknown to the majority of the world’s Jews. I had to see Red Village to believe it. I had to figure out: What’s the deal with Azerbaijan?
Earlier this month, Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev convened 750 journalists, scholars, activists and scientists from around the world to participate in the annual Baku International Humanitarian Forum.
The invitation offered a chance to see for myself a country that, from what I’d heard over the years, has never quite fit the standard American perception of Muslim = Fanatic and Shiite = Really Fanatic.
After all, Iran, also a Shiite nation, lies just across Azerbaijan’s southern border. But while Iran is the Jewish state’s mortal enemy, Azerbaijan is Israel’s largest supplier of oil and a major purchaser of Israeli defense technology. The Shiites of Iran would treat me, an American Jew with a passport full of Israeli stamps, as an enemy. In Azerbaijan, I was an honored guest.
My visit was personally arranged through Azerbaijan’s Western Region Consul General, Nasimi Aghayev. I’m not the first journalist lured to explore Azerbaijan’s incongruities, but I do seem to be the first in my crowd. Few people I talked to about my travel plans beforehand had heard of Azerbaijan, and even fewer of its Jewish connection.
You could fault Azeris for not getting the word out, but in the 22 years since it gained its independence, Azerbaijan has had to focus on rebuilding, not rebranding.
What struck me first when I arrived in Baku is that Azerbaijan is in the midst of a fast transition. Now that its tremendous oil and gas wealth isn’t being siphoned off to feed the Soviet empire, the country’s GDP (gross domestic product) has soared.
For most of the 19th and early 20th centuries, Azerbaijan was under the rule of the Russian empire, which exploited its resources. When the tsar fell in 1918, Azerbaijan quickly formed a secular republic, the first Muslim majority country in the world to do so. Its parliament immediately granted women the right to vote — a year before the United States did. But the flowering of democracy, commerce and art was brief. The Bolsheviks arrived just 22 months after Azerbaijan declared independence, attacked what they called liberal and decadent Baku Muslims, crushing a rebellion and absorbing Azerbaijan into the USSR.
When Hitler invaded Russia, his brass ring was Baku’s oil, which provided more than 80 percent of the fuel for the Soviet war effort. In 1942, Hitler’s general staff gave him a cake in the shape of the Caucasus. Hitler ate the slice with “Baku” written on it. “Unless we get Baku oil,” Hitler said, “the war is lost.”
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Baku finally won its independence in 1991. Its first president, Heydar Aliyev, who died in 2003, and his son and successor, Ilham Aliyev, have managed to negotiate lucrative long-term oil and gas contracts that, for the first time, keep Azerbaijan’s money at home and have tilted the former Soviet satellite westward.
Oil money has enabled a modern, busy city with cutting-edge architecture and luxury stores to grow up around the well-preserved walls and narrow cobblestone streets of the Old City. Baku is a cleaner Tel Aviv surrounding a smaller-walled Jerusalem.
What’s even more surprising about Baku is its people. The majority are traditional but secular. Few women wear headscarves — the look is skirts and heels, more Westwood Boulevard than Riyadh.
But Azerbaijan’s tolerance is not a Western import. It’s homegrown, even ancient.
“The multinational, multiconfessional society is one of our assets,” President Aliyev said in the conference’s keynote address. “All nationalities see their religion respected. … This contributes to the building of a civil society.”
For the Jews, that is remarkably true.
“There has never been anti-Semitism in Azerbaijan,” Arye Gut, the Azeri-born founder of the international association Israel-Azerbaijan (AZIZ), told me. Like many Azeris who have immigrated to Israel, he maintains strong personal and business ties to his home country.
In a meeting at his office, Ambassador Elshad Iskandarov, chairman of the State Committee for Work With Religious Organizations, pointed out with some understatement that Azerbaijan has resisted the increasing anti-Semitism in the Muslim world.
Iskandarov, an urbane graduate of Columbia University, theorized that Azerbaijan’s location on the Silk Road international trade route long ago encouraged its people to accept all kinds of cultures.
Or, as a Cambridge-educated Azeri told me later in my week there, “Our philosophy is, ‘Why fight when you can trade?’ ”
Like many Azeri officials I met, Iskandarov could rattle off the names of famous Azerbaijani Jews — who are pretty much the most famous Azerbaijanis, period — among them pianist Bella Davidovich, Nobel Prize physicist Lev Landau, Israeli singers Sarit Hadad and Yaffa Yarkoni, pioneering physician Gavril Ilizarov and chess master Garry Kasparov, who is half Armenian.
There is also writer Lev Nussimbaum, aka Essad Bey and Kurban Said, author of the most famous Azeri novel, “Ali and Nino.”
“The magic of this town lies in the mystical bond between its races and its people,” the book’s narrator said. “The race of a peaceful Caucasus is forged on the anvil of Baku.”
Iskandarov wondered aloud whether the nation didn’t share a lineage with the eighth-century Khazars who converted en masse to Judaism. Perhaps, the ambassador posited, Azerbaijani Shiites have Jewish blood.
“When we are talking about Jews,” he said, “this is tolerance of our own past.”
I asked how the government keeps extremist Islamic ideologies from taking root in Azerbaijan. Iskandarov pointed to his bookshelf, where there were thick tomes of sermons prepared by government-appointed imams and distributed to mosques — local imams were encouraged not to veer from these more liberal teachings. There is freedom of religion — but not too much.
Many countries, including Iran, say they love the Jews — it’s just Israel they can’t stand. Azerbaijan is different. It has strategic defense partnerships with Israel, and the two countries conduct $5.5 billion in trade annually.
Last year, Iran protested and even threatened “consequences” after the Azerbaijan foreign minister announced an official visit to Israel. President Aliyev refused to back down.
“I know who my friends are,” Aliyev said, “and who my enemies are.”
During the tsarist regime, Jews were not permitted to buy land in Baku. But a local Muslim stepped up and bought the property for what became one of the city’s two synagogues. On Friday night, as Sabbath services concluded, I went there to meet Milikh Yevdayev, chairman of the Religious Community of Mountain Jews.
About 10,000 of Azerbaijan’s 15,000 Jews live in Baku. The synagogues serve different groups — one is Ashkenazi style, staffed by a Chabad rabbi, and the other, the one I visited, is well-appointed and known as the New Synagogue, for the Mountain Jews.
The Mountain Jews trace their lineage to ancient Persia. They speak Juhuri, a blend of Farsi and Hebrew; if you close your eyes, you’re back again on Westwood Boulevard. Historians believe the Mountain Jews first settled in the Caucasus in the fifth century. It is their descendants who settled Red Village.
“We live like brothers,” Yevdayev assured me.
On the wall of the synagogue are photos of the stout, middle-aged Yevdayev and other synagogue leaders alongside President Aliyev, as well as the country’s leading imam and the head of the Armenian church.
The $2 million it took to build the synagogue last year came directly from President Aliyev. Some 60 people attend Shabbat services weekly, and 300 on the holidays. Two schools, entirely paid for by the government, serve 300 students. The sanctuary has some local touches — a central pulpit, Oriental carpets, stacks of the local Jewish newspaper, which is printed in Russian.
Yevdayev is originally from Red Village. His daughter now lives in Brooklyn. I ask him if Jews are leaving Red Village and Baku for Israel and elsewhere.
“They go; they come back, they go — it’s not a trend,” he said. “You’ll see.”
The next day, I saw. Our bus of some 30 conference participants followed a new highway north from Baku into the foothills of the Caucasus.
Quba is a medium-sized city, surrounded by pear and apple orchards. In 1730, the Khan Huseyn Ali decreed that Jews could own property in his district. Their settlement, Red Village, resembles a more prosperous version of the many small towns we had passed en route.
“There are many Jewish billionaires,” our tour guide informed us on the way up.
He wasn’t kidding. Since independence, Azeri Jews have flourished in business, especially in Russia, and they have spent millions restoring the old village, even buying up properties there as a link to their past. The soccer field and park look new, the stone, brick and wood homes refurbished. It was quiet — we arrived on Shabbat, when the cafes, restaurants and small businesses were closed. Azerbaijan’s Jews are as traditional, and as secular, as its Muslims.
Inside Red Village’s main synagogue, services were just letting out. There was a cacophony of kids and young men. The only sign that we were in the exotic East: Visitors are asked to remove their shoes, as in a mosque. The floor of the shul’s rich wooden interior is covered in Persian carpets.
Boris Simanduyen, chairman of the community, told us that until the Bolshevik Revolution, the town had 13 synagogues. Back then, the village was called Krasnaya Sloboda (Red Settlement) in Russian and had 18,000 residents. Now, Red Village has a Hebrew school with 60 students and three synagogues. President Aliyev’s administration pays for the heating oil for them all.
Simanduyen is a serious elderly man who speaks not a word of English or Hebrew. Through an interpreter he told me the town receives many visiting Jewish groups, people like me who can’t quite believe such a place exists. As if to offer more evidence, he called over a teenage boy who opened a prayer book and recited a Hebrew prayer at a breakneck pace.
Outside the synagogue, we ran into a group of high-spirited boys, most wearing kippot. They posed for pictures, and shouted back “hello,” and “Shabbat shalom!” to our own greetings.
“Our neighbors say, ‘Why do you send oil to Israel,’ ” our guide, a Shiite, said, summarizing the Azeri attitude toward the Jewish minority. “We say, ‘The Jews are our brothers. They make a big contribution to the economy and culture of Azerbaijan.’ ”
That contribution is beginning to extend beyond the historic. A subtext of every speech we heard and visit we made was that Azerbaijan is seeking international support for its ongoing conflict with Armenia, which, in 1992, fought a brutal war with Azerbaijan over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh and has occupied that region since, in contravention of United Nations resolutions.
The continued occupation by force of some 20 percent of Azerbaijan’s territory consumes Azeri political discourse.
Near Quba, we pulled into a brand-new memorial complex of angular concrete and polished granite. Just beside it lay mounds of human skulls, recently excavated at the site of a massacre in 1918 of Muslim and Jewish residents by Bolshevik, Armenian and Christian forces. About 600 people were slaughtered by what our guide referred to as “Armenian gangsters.” The exhibit looked as if it had been airlifted directly from Yad Vashem.
In a meeting with Yevda Abramov, Azerbaijan’s sole Jewish parliamentarian, a big, deep-voiced Mountain Jew, we asked what message he wanted us to convey to American Jews.
“Please present the Armenian holocaust against us,” he said, then launched into a tirade on the “double standard” in how the world only cares about Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory and ignores Armenia’s occupation of Azeri land.
Abramov raised his considerable voice. “The Armenian lobby prevents a just solution!” he said.
Of course, as in any tribal-religious-political conflict, the Armenians level their own accusations of land grabs and massacres. Azerbaijan, a country suffering from occupation, has allied itself with Israel, a country trying to extricate itself from being an occupier. The situation is not as ironic as it seems when you look at a map. Squeezed between Vladimir Putin’s neo-imperialist Russia to the north and Iran’s mullahs to the south, Azerbaijan sees in Israel a natural ally also ringed by enmity.
Israeli military technology and know-how is helping the once-poor Azerbaijan develop an army that can credibly threaten to take Nagorno-Karabakh back by force. In exchange, one expert told me, Israel gets to park drones and perhaps even launch operations right at the edge of the Iranian border.
“The Almighty presented us with oil, but not with neighbors,” Abramov said with a sigh.
And, just like Israel, Azerbaijan’s historic feud with its neighbor constantly threatens to keep dragging it into the bloody past, even as it carves out a uniquely promising future.
Political strife has challenged Azerbaijan’s journey to full-fledged democracy. Earlier this year, the government announced the results of its presidential election before it was held, making the country a punch line on “The Daily Show.” But in their 21 years at the helm, the Aliyevs have transformed a communist police state into a catpitalist, struggling semi-democracy — all the while negotiating a treacherous neighborhood.
“Don’t write off Azerbaijan just yet,” Matthew Bryza, former United States ambassador to Azerbaijan, told CNN last month.
Indeed, the country’s long history of tolerance may yet ensure its success.
In Baku, I told Ambassador Iskandarov how much I’d enjoyed the local food, a blend of Persian and Turkish cuisines. He told me I should really visit the best Azerbaijani restaurant in the United States — Baku Palace, in Brooklyn. Its owner, he said, is a Jew.
---------
The mysteries of Azerbaijan: A Shiite nation embraces its Jews
Jewish Journal
December 18, 2013
by Rob Eshman
Red Village rises up along the Qudiyal River like a Jewish Brigadoon.
To get there, you fly 13 hours from Los Angeles to Istanbul, then catch a three-hour flight to Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan — a former Soviet country of some 9 million people on the Caspian Sea. From Baku, you take a bus past churning oil derricks and miles of empty desert, up into the Caucasus, through tiny villages surrounded by apple orchards. After two hours, you arrive in Quba, the capital of Azerbaijan’s northeast region. About a mile past an attractive central mosque, a simple steel bridge spans a wide, mostly dry riverbed and leads directly into Red Village.
One of the first things you see is a large brick building atop which sits — improbably, impossibly — a Jewish star.
About 4,000 people live in Red Village, every one of them Jewish. That makes Red Village the largest all-Jewish settlement outside the State of Israel.
This entirely Jewish town exists in an almost entirely Muslim country — ancient, placid, prosperous. It is also completely unknown to the majority of the world’s Jews. I had to see Red Village to believe it. I had to figure out: What’s the deal with Azerbaijan?
Earlier this month, Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev convened 750 journalists, scholars, activists and scientists from around the world to participate in the annual Baku International Humanitarian Forum.
The invitation offered a chance to see for myself a country that, from what I’d heard over the years, has never quite fit the standard American perception of Muslim = Fanatic and Shiite = Really Fanatic.
After all, Iran, also a Shiite nation, lies just across Azerbaijan’s southern border. But while Iran is the Jewish state’s mortal enemy, Azerbaijan is Israel’s largest supplier of oil and a major purchaser of Israeli defense technology. The Shiites of Iran would treat me, an American Jew with a passport full of Israeli stamps, as an enemy. In Azerbaijan, I was an honored guest.
My visit was personally arranged through Azerbaijan’s Western Region Consul General, Nasimi Aghayev. I’m not the first journalist lured to explore Azerbaijan’s incongruities, but I do seem to be the first in my crowd. Few people I talked to about my travel plans beforehand had heard of Azerbaijan, and even fewer of its Jewish connection.
You could fault Azeris for not getting the word out, but in the 22 years since it gained its independence, Azerbaijan has had to focus on rebuilding, not rebranding.
What struck me first when I arrived in Baku is that Azerbaijan is in the midst of a fast transition. Now that its tremendous oil and gas wealth isn’t being siphoned off to feed the Soviet empire, the country’s GDP (gross domestic product) has soared.
For most of the 19th and early 20th centuries, Azerbaijan was under the rule of the Russian empire, which exploited its resources. When the tsar fell in 1918, Azerbaijan quickly formed a secular republic, the first Muslim majority country in the world to do so. Its parliament immediately granted women the right to vote — a year before the United States did. But the flowering of democracy, commerce and art was brief. The Bolsheviks arrived just 22 months after Azerbaijan declared independence, attacked what they called liberal and decadent Baku Muslims, crushing a rebellion and absorbing Azerbaijan into the USSR.
When Hitler invaded Russia, his brass ring was Baku’s oil, which provided more than 80 percent of the fuel for the Soviet war effort. In 1942, Hitler’s general staff gave him a cake in the shape of the Caucasus. Hitler ate the slice with “Baku” written on it. “Unless we get Baku oil,” Hitler said, “the war is lost.”
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Baku finally won its independence in 1991. Its first president, Heydar Aliyev, who died in 2003, and his son and successor, Ilham Aliyev, have managed to negotiate lucrative long-term oil and gas contracts that, for the first time, keep Azerbaijan’s money at home and have tilted the former Soviet satellite westward.
Oil money has enabled a modern, busy city with cutting-edge architecture and luxury stores to grow up around the well-preserved walls and narrow cobblestone streets of the Old City. Baku is a cleaner Tel Aviv surrounding a smaller-walled Jerusalem.
What’s even more surprising about Baku is its people. The majority are traditional but secular. Few women wear headscarves — the look is skirts and heels, more Westwood Boulevard than Riyadh.
But Azerbaijan’s tolerance is not a Western import. It’s homegrown, even ancient.
“The multinational, multiconfessional society is one of our assets,” President Aliyev said in the conference’s keynote address. “All nationalities see their religion respected. … This contributes to the building of a civil society.”
For the Jews, that is remarkably true.
“There has never been anti-Semitism in Azerbaijan,” Arye Gut, the Azeri-born founder of the international association Israel-Azerbaijan (AZIZ), told me. Like many Azeris who have immigrated to Israel, he maintains strong personal and business ties to his home country.
In a meeting at his office, Ambassador Elshad Iskandarov, chairman of the State Committee for Work With Religious Organizations, pointed out with some understatement that Azerbaijan has resisted the increasing anti-Semitism in the Muslim world.
Iskandarov, an urbane graduate of Columbia University, theorized that Azerbaijan’s location on the Silk Road international trade route long ago encouraged its people to accept all kinds of cultures.
Or, as a Cambridge-educated Azeri told me later in my week there, “Our philosophy is, ‘Why fight when you can trade?’ ”
Like many Azeri officials I met, Iskandarov could rattle off the names of famous Azerbaijani Jews — who are pretty much the most famous Azerbaijanis, period — among them pianist Bella Davidovich, Nobel Prize physicist Lev Landau, Israeli singers Sarit Hadad and Yaffa Yarkoni, pioneering physician Gavril Ilizarov and chess master Garry Kasparov, who is half Armenian.
There is also writer Lev Nussimbaum, aka Essad Bey and Kurban Said, author of the most famous Azeri novel, “Ali and Nino.”
“The magic of this town lies in the mystical bond between its races and its people,” the book’s narrator said. “The race of a peaceful Caucasus is forged on the anvil of Baku.”
Iskandarov wondered aloud whether the nation didn’t share a lineage with the eighth-century Khazars who converted en masse to Judaism. Perhaps, the ambassador posited, Azerbaijani Shiites have Jewish blood.
“When we are talking about Jews,” he said, “this is tolerance of our own past.”
I asked how the government keeps extremist Islamic ideologies from taking root in Azerbaijan. Iskandarov pointed to his bookshelf, where there were thick tomes of sermons prepared by government-appointed imams and distributed to mosques — local imams were encouraged not to veer from these more liberal teachings. There is freedom of religion — but not too much.
Many countries, including Iran, say they love the Jews — it’s just Israel they can’t stand. Azerbaijan is different. It has strategic defense partnerships with Israel, and the two countries conduct $5.5 billion in trade annually.
Last year, Iran protested and even threatened “consequences” after the Azerbaijan foreign minister announced an official visit to Israel. President Aliyev refused to back down.
“I know who my friends are,” Aliyev said, “and who my enemies are.”
During the tsarist regime, Jews were not permitted to buy land in Baku. But a local Muslim stepped up and bought the property for what became one of the city’s two synagogues. On Friday night, as Sabbath services concluded, I went there to meet Milikh Yevdayev, chairman of the Religious Community of Mountain Jews.
About 10,000 of Azerbaijan’s 15,000 Jews live in Baku. The synagogues serve different groups — one is Ashkenazi style, staffed by a Chabad rabbi, and the other, the one I visited, is well-appointed and known as the New Synagogue, for the Mountain Jews.
The Mountain Jews trace their lineage to ancient Persia. They speak Juhuri, a blend of Farsi and Hebrew; if you close your eyes, you’re back again on Westwood Boulevard. Historians believe the Mountain Jews first settled in the Caucasus in the fifth century. It is their descendants who settled Red Village.
“We live like brothers,” Yevdayev assured me.
On the wall of the synagogue are photos of the stout, middle-aged Yevdayev and other synagogue leaders alongside President Aliyev, as well as the country’s leading imam and the head of the Armenian church.
The $2 million it took to build the synagogue last year came directly from President Aliyev. Some 60 people attend Shabbat services weekly, and 300 on the holidays. Two schools, entirely paid for by the government, serve 300 students. The sanctuary has some local touches — a central pulpit, Oriental carpets, stacks of the local Jewish newspaper, which is printed in Russian.
Yevdayev is originally from Red Village. His daughter now lives in Brooklyn. I ask him if Jews are leaving Red Village and Baku for Israel and elsewhere.
“They go; they come back, they go — it’s not a trend,” he said. “You’ll see.”
The next day, I saw. Our bus of some 30 conference participants followed a new highway north from Baku into the foothills of the Caucasus.
Quba is a medium-sized city, surrounded by pear and apple orchards. In 1730, the Khan Huseyn Ali decreed that Jews could own property in his district. Their settlement, Red Village, resembles a more prosperous version of the many small towns we had passed en route.
“There are many Jewish billionaires,” our tour guide informed us on the way up.
He wasn’t kidding. Since independence, Azeri Jews have flourished in business, especially in Russia, and they have spent millions restoring the old village, even buying up properties there as a link to their past. The soccer field and park look new, the stone, brick and wood homes refurbished. It was quiet — we arrived on Shabbat, when the cafes, restaurants and small businesses were closed. Azerbaijan’s Jews are as traditional, and as secular, as its Muslims.
Inside Red Village’s main synagogue, services were just letting out. There was a cacophony of kids and young men. The only sign that we were in the exotic East: Visitors are asked to remove their shoes, as in a mosque. The floor of the shul’s rich wooden interior is covered in Persian carpets.
Boris Simanduyen, chairman of the community, told us that until the Bolshevik Revolution, the town had 13 synagogues. Back then, the village was called Krasnaya Sloboda (Red Settlement) in Russian and had 18,000 residents. Now, Red Village has a Hebrew school with 60 students and three synagogues. President Aliyev’s administration pays for the heating oil for them all.
Simanduyen is a serious elderly man who speaks not a word of English or Hebrew. Through an interpreter he told me the town receives many visiting Jewish groups, people like me who can’t quite believe such a place exists. As if to offer more evidence, he called over a teenage boy who opened a prayer book and recited a Hebrew prayer at a breakneck pace.
Outside the synagogue, we ran into a group of high-spirited boys, most wearing kippot. They posed for pictures, and shouted back “hello,” and “Shabbat shalom!” to our own greetings.
“Our neighbors say, ‘Why do you send oil to Israel,’ ” our guide, a Shiite, said, summarizing the Azeri attitude toward the Jewish minority. “We say, ‘The Jews are our brothers. They make a big contribution to the economy and culture of Azerbaijan.’ ”
That contribution is beginning to extend beyond the historic. A subtext of every speech we heard and visit we made was that Azerbaijan is seeking international support for its ongoing conflict with Armenia, which, in 1992, fought a brutal war with Azerbaijan over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh and has occupied that region since, in contravention of United Nations resolutions.
The continued occupation by force of some 20 percent of Azerbaijan’s territory consumes Azeri political discourse.
Near Quba, we pulled into a brand-new memorial complex of angular concrete and polished granite. Just beside it lay mounds of human skulls, recently excavated at the site of a massacre in 1918 of Muslim and Jewish residents by Bolshevik, Armenian and Christian forces. About 600 people were slaughtered by what our guide referred to as “Armenian gangsters.” The exhibit looked as if it had been airlifted directly from Yad Vashem.
In a meeting with Yevda Abramov, Azerbaijan’s sole Jewish parliamentarian, a big, deep-voiced Mountain Jew, we asked what message he wanted us to convey to American Jews.
“Please present the Armenian holocaust against us,” he said, then launched into a tirade on the “double standard” in how the world only cares about Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory and ignores Armenia’s occupation of Azeri land.
Abramov raised his considerable voice. “The Armenian lobby prevents a just solution!” he said.
Of course, as in any tribal-religious-political conflict, the Armenians level their own accusations of land grabs and massacres. Azerbaijan, a country suffering from occupation, has allied itself with Israel, a country trying to extricate itself from being an occupier. The situation is not as ironic as it seems when you look at a map. Squeezed between Vladimir Putin’s neo-imperialist Russia to the north and Iran’s mullahs to the south, Azerbaijan sees in Israel a natural ally also ringed by enmity.
Israeli military technology and know-how is helping the once-poor Azerbaijan develop an army that can credibly threaten to take Nagorno-Karabakh back by force. In exchange, one expert told me, Israel gets to park drones and perhaps even launch operations right at the edge of the Iranian border.
“The Almighty presented us with oil, but not with neighbors,” Abramov said with a sigh.
And, just like Israel, Azerbaijan’s historic feud with its neighbor constantly threatens to keep dragging it into the bloody past, even as it carves out a uniquely promising future.
Political strife has challenged Azerbaijan’s journey to full-fledged democracy. Earlier this year, the government announced the results of its presidential election before it was held, making the country a punch line on “The Daily Show.” But in their 21 years at the helm, the Aliyevs have transformed a communist police state into a catpitalist, struggling semi-democracy — all the while negotiating a treacherous neighborhood.
“Don’t write off Azerbaijan just yet,” Matthew Bryza, former United States ambassador to Azerbaijan, told CNN last month.
Indeed, the country’s long history of tolerance may yet ensure its success.
In Baku, I told Ambassador Iskandarov how much I’d enjoyed the local food, a blend of Persian and Turkish cuisines. He told me I should really visit the best Azerbaijani restaurant in the United States — Baku Palace, in Brooklyn. Its owner, he said, is a Jew.
Wednesday, December 25, 2013
The real story of Christmas: from sun-worship to Sinterklaas
Interesting history. Love the bit about Jews at Chinese restaurants.
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The real story of Christmas: From sun-worship to Sinterklaas
Haaretz 24/12/13
By Elon Gilad
The first Christians wouldn't recognize today's Santa-centric holiday, let alone figure out what that tree is doing in the living room.
History doesn’t record when the first Christmas was celebrated, but it was probably sometime in the fourth century CE, in the Roman Empire. What's sure is that the first historic record of the holiday is a calendar dating from 354 CE, belonging to a rich Roman Christian named Philocalus.
That calendar tells us that on the same date - December 25 - another holiday was celebrated, marking the birth of Sol Invictus, “the Unconquered Sun.” That was a new pagan cult, worshiping a new sun deity.
Both these holidays coincided with the Roman festival of Saturnalia, which had been celebrated from December 17 to December 24th. That was a festival celebrating the god Saturn, which – as we will see - contributed heavily to latter-day Christmas traditions.
Why December 25?
Scholars differ on why December 25, was chosen as the birthday of Jesus, since it apparently wasn't. Hippolytus, in the second century, was probably the first to propose this date. The New Testament doesn’t tell us when the birth took place: and the only clue the text gives us - "some shepherds staying out in the fields keeping watch over their flock by night" (Luke 2:8) actually implies that the birth took place in the spring or summer, as sheep would have been kept indoors during the cold winter nights.
Most probably that date was based on the birth-date of Sol Invictus, which is marked on the Winter Solstice - when the sun overcomes darkness and the days begin to get longer.
The sun is born
Early Christian symbolism would often liken Jesus with the sun. As Christianity developed, becoming the official religion of the Roman Empire, many pagan traditions were assumed . This is blatantly clear in the case of Christmas, which took on many of the traditions of Saturnalia, most notably the traditions of gift-giving and merrymaking.
When the Germanic tribes adopted Christianity and with it the holiday of Christmas, they too contributed to the traditions of the holiday by incorporating aspects of the pagan winter festival Yule into the Christian holiday. Most notable of these are the veneration of evergreens, which would with time morph into the Christmas tree; the traditions of holly and mistletoe decoration; and a wild hunt of flying creatures led by the long-bearded god Odin, who is believed to have been the prototype of Santa Claus.
A Greek bishop merges with Odin
Another aspect that Christmas adopted from the Germanic Yule is heavy drinking. Though this is not associated with Christmas anymore, during the Middle Ages drinking was a major part of the holiday. In general Christmas during the Middle Ages would have been very foreign to a modern-day observer - it was mostly a festival of drinking and revelry, much closer to Saturnalia than our modern Christmas.
It was during the Middle Ages when the veneration of Saint Nicolas, a third to fourth-century Greek bishop living in what is today Turkey, developed into the holiday figure of Sinterklaas in the Netherlands.
St. Nicolas was said to have given gifts to children and thus was considered the patron saint of schoolchildren. According to tradition, Sinterklaas would come from Spain on a steamboat accompanied by a mischievous Moorish helper called Zwarte Piet. This helper would kidnap bad children and report to Sinterklaas on good children, who would then receive gifts on Dece,ber 6th, which was Sinterklaas' feast day.
Later, during the Reformation, many Netherlanders stopped celebrating the saints’ feast days, and the gift-giving associated with Sinterklaas migrated from December 6 to Christmas.
Christmas is banned, the people are unimpressed
In the English-speaking world, the Protestant Reformation was even more radical, abolishing not only saint feasts but going as far as banning Christmas itself.
In the wake of the English Civil War, Christmas was abolished in 1647, though many outright acts of protest followed, with people defying the Puritans and continuing to celebrate the holiday, albeit in a less public manner.
Even after the restoration of the Monarchy in 1660, celebration of Christmas wasn’t completely restored to its former glory.
At roughly the same time, the tradition of setting up a tree in one’s home and lighting candles began to spread in Germany. The concept spread among European nobility during the 18th and 19th centuries, reaching the lower classes only in the late 19th century.
The huge success of Charles Dickens’ "A Christmas Carol" in 1843 greatly contributed to popularizing Christmas, and gave it much of the qualities we associate with it today: a holiday centered around the family, as opposed as a community holiday celebrated in church.
The book also contributed to the popularity of the phrase “Merry Christmas,” which appears many times throughout it. That very same year the first commercially printed Christmas cards were printed and sold, bearing that wish - "Merry Christmas".
Meanwhile in 1823, "A Visit From St. Nicholas" (that’s the poem starting with “'Twas the Night Before Christmas”) by Clement Clarke Moore was published in the United States. This contributed to the spread of Santa Claus, at this point merging the serious Dutch Sinterklaas with the jolly English personification of Christmas known as Father Christmas, and gift-giving in the English-speaking world.
Come the Chinese restaurant
This emphasis on gifts led merchants and manufactures to decorate their stores and ads with Christmas themes, hoping it would be their products that would be bought and gifted. By the mid-19th century people began to complain that the holiday was losing its “true meaning” in face of commercialization.
In 1870, President Ulysses S. Grant signed a law that officially made Christmas a secular federal holiday.
This coincided with a mass influx of Eastern European Jewish immigrants into America. Finding shops closed on this day and not celebrating Christmas themselves, they found themselves going to Chinese restaurants that stayed open because their owners didn’t celebrate Christmas either. Moreover, the Chinese restaurants were located nearby, as Jewish, Chinese and other poor immigrants tended to live in the same slums.
This is the origin of the Jewish-American tradition of eating at Chinese restaurants on Christmas.
Many of the most popular Christmas carols were written and composed in the 19th Century: “Silent Night,” originally in German in 1818, “O Holy Night,” originally in French in 1847, “Joy to the World,” originally in English in 1839, “Jingle Bells,” also originally in English, in 1857, and “Deck the Halls,” originally in Welsh in 1877, to name a few.
These began to be superseded after the advent of the radio and the phonograph by popular Christmas songs especially during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Many if these were written by Jews, among them: “Sleigh Ride,” written by Mitchell Parish, originally Michael Hyman Pashelinsky, in 1948, Let It Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow!" was written and composed by Sammy Cahn (b. Samuel Cohen) and Jule Styne (b. Julius Kerwin Stein) in 1945. Irving Berlin (b. Israel Isidore Beilin) wrote “White Christmas”, and Johnny Marks wrote both “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree."
Christmas broadcasts began in earnest during the second half of the 20th century, most notably Frank Capra’s “It's a Wonderful Life” from 1946 and “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” which first aired in 1965.
In recent years Christmas has become a battleground for the opponents of the separation of church and state, who oppose the public endorsement of the Christian holiday by government and public companies and conservative Christians, who believe a “War on Christmas” is being waged. The liberals claiming the worship of Jesus shouldn’t be forced on them and the conservatives claiming that their right to worship freely is being infringed upon. But if the Protestant Reformation with all its power couldn't manage to stamp out the holiday spirit, grousing in the op-eds section of the press isn't likely to either.
-----------
The real story of Christmas: From sun-worship to Sinterklaas
Haaretz 24/12/13
By Elon Gilad
The first Christians wouldn't recognize today's Santa-centric holiday, let alone figure out what that tree is doing in the living room.
History doesn’t record when the first Christmas was celebrated, but it was probably sometime in the fourth century CE, in the Roman Empire. What's sure is that the first historic record of the holiday is a calendar dating from 354 CE, belonging to a rich Roman Christian named Philocalus.
That calendar tells us that on the same date - December 25 - another holiday was celebrated, marking the birth of Sol Invictus, “the Unconquered Sun.” That was a new pagan cult, worshiping a new sun deity.
Both these holidays coincided with the Roman festival of Saturnalia, which had been celebrated from December 17 to December 24th. That was a festival celebrating the god Saturn, which – as we will see - contributed heavily to latter-day Christmas traditions.
Why December 25?
Scholars differ on why December 25, was chosen as the birthday of Jesus, since it apparently wasn't. Hippolytus, in the second century, was probably the first to propose this date. The New Testament doesn’t tell us when the birth took place: and the only clue the text gives us - "some shepherds staying out in the fields keeping watch over their flock by night" (Luke 2:8) actually implies that the birth took place in the spring or summer, as sheep would have been kept indoors during the cold winter nights.
Most probably that date was based on the birth-date of Sol Invictus, which is marked on the Winter Solstice - when the sun overcomes darkness and the days begin to get longer.
The sun is born
Early Christian symbolism would often liken Jesus with the sun. As Christianity developed, becoming the official religion of the Roman Empire, many pagan traditions were assumed . This is blatantly clear in the case of Christmas, which took on many of the traditions of Saturnalia, most notably the traditions of gift-giving and merrymaking.
When the Germanic tribes adopted Christianity and with it the holiday of Christmas, they too contributed to the traditions of the holiday by incorporating aspects of the pagan winter festival Yule into the Christian holiday. Most notable of these are the veneration of evergreens, which would with time morph into the Christmas tree; the traditions of holly and mistletoe decoration; and a wild hunt of flying creatures led by the long-bearded god Odin, who is believed to have been the prototype of Santa Claus.
A Greek bishop merges with Odin
Another aspect that Christmas adopted from the Germanic Yule is heavy drinking. Though this is not associated with Christmas anymore, during the Middle Ages drinking was a major part of the holiday. In general Christmas during the Middle Ages would have been very foreign to a modern-day observer - it was mostly a festival of drinking and revelry, much closer to Saturnalia than our modern Christmas.
It was during the Middle Ages when the veneration of Saint Nicolas, a third to fourth-century Greek bishop living in what is today Turkey, developed into the holiday figure of Sinterklaas in the Netherlands.
St. Nicolas was said to have given gifts to children and thus was considered the patron saint of schoolchildren. According to tradition, Sinterklaas would come from Spain on a steamboat accompanied by a mischievous Moorish helper called Zwarte Piet. This helper would kidnap bad children and report to Sinterklaas on good children, who would then receive gifts on Dece,ber 6th, which was Sinterklaas' feast day.
Later, during the Reformation, many Netherlanders stopped celebrating the saints’ feast days, and the gift-giving associated with Sinterklaas migrated from December 6 to Christmas.
Christmas is banned, the people are unimpressed
In the English-speaking world, the Protestant Reformation was even more radical, abolishing not only saint feasts but going as far as banning Christmas itself.
In the wake of the English Civil War, Christmas was abolished in 1647, though many outright acts of protest followed, with people defying the Puritans and continuing to celebrate the holiday, albeit in a less public manner.
Even after the restoration of the Monarchy in 1660, celebration of Christmas wasn’t completely restored to its former glory.
At roughly the same time, the tradition of setting up a tree in one’s home and lighting candles began to spread in Germany. The concept spread among European nobility during the 18th and 19th centuries, reaching the lower classes only in the late 19th century.
The huge success of Charles Dickens’ "A Christmas Carol" in 1843 greatly contributed to popularizing Christmas, and gave it much of the qualities we associate with it today: a holiday centered around the family, as opposed as a community holiday celebrated in church.
The book also contributed to the popularity of the phrase “Merry Christmas,” which appears many times throughout it. That very same year the first commercially printed Christmas cards were printed and sold, bearing that wish - "Merry Christmas".
Meanwhile in 1823, "A Visit From St. Nicholas" (that’s the poem starting with “'Twas the Night Before Christmas”) by Clement Clarke Moore was published in the United States. This contributed to the spread of Santa Claus, at this point merging the serious Dutch Sinterklaas with the jolly English personification of Christmas known as Father Christmas, and gift-giving in the English-speaking world.
Come the Chinese restaurant
This emphasis on gifts led merchants and manufactures to decorate their stores and ads with Christmas themes, hoping it would be their products that would be bought and gifted. By the mid-19th century people began to complain that the holiday was losing its “true meaning” in face of commercialization.
In 1870, President Ulysses S. Grant signed a law that officially made Christmas a secular federal holiday.
This coincided with a mass influx of Eastern European Jewish immigrants into America. Finding shops closed on this day and not celebrating Christmas themselves, they found themselves going to Chinese restaurants that stayed open because their owners didn’t celebrate Christmas either. Moreover, the Chinese restaurants were located nearby, as Jewish, Chinese and other poor immigrants tended to live in the same slums.
This is the origin of the Jewish-American tradition of eating at Chinese restaurants on Christmas.
Many of the most popular Christmas carols were written and composed in the 19th Century: “Silent Night,” originally in German in 1818, “O Holy Night,” originally in French in 1847, “Joy to the World,” originally in English in 1839, “Jingle Bells,” also originally in English, in 1857, and “Deck the Halls,” originally in Welsh in 1877, to name a few.
These began to be superseded after the advent of the radio and the phonograph by popular Christmas songs especially during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Many if these were written by Jews, among them: “Sleigh Ride,” written by Mitchell Parish, originally Michael Hyman Pashelinsky, in 1948, Let It Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow!" was written and composed by Sammy Cahn (b. Samuel Cohen) and Jule Styne (b. Julius Kerwin Stein) in 1945. Irving Berlin (b. Israel Isidore Beilin) wrote “White Christmas”, and Johnny Marks wrote both “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree."
Christmas broadcasts began in earnest during the second half of the 20th century, most notably Frank Capra’s “It's a Wonderful Life” from 1946 and “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” which first aired in 1965.
In recent years Christmas has become a battleground for the opponents of the separation of church and state, who oppose the public endorsement of the Christian holiday by government and public companies and conservative Christians, who believe a “War on Christmas” is being waged. The liberals claiming the worship of Jesus shouldn’t be forced on them and the conservatives claiming that their right to worship freely is being infringed upon. But if the Protestant Reformation with all its power couldn't manage to stamp out the holiday spirit, grousing in the op-eds section of the press isn't likely to either.
Thursday, December 12, 2013
Iran nuclear deal - pro & con
Interesting pro & con juxtaposition.
-------------
Iran deal: should we embrace it?
Jewish Chronicle
28/11/2013
Part 1 - YES by Lawrence Freedman
It is possible to imagine a better deal — it always is in a negotiation — but, in practice, this outcome exceeded expectations.
The expert consensus is that its key elements — no extra centrifuge activity, existing stockpile of 20 per cent enriched uranium neutralised, work on the Arak heavy water reactor suspended — will add significantly to the time it would take Iran to produce the fissile material needed to produce nuclear weapons, even if there is no further deal after six months.
The verification measures are intrusive and will give inspectors access to all the key facilities.
The sanctions relief is also not trivial and could be worth some $7 bn.
By itself, however, this is not going to make much difference to Iranian national wealth, especially in the absence of more fundamental reforms of the Iranian economy.
This creates a breathing space, providing the time to see if a comprehensive settlement can be negotiated. If the provisions of the interim agreement are honoured, there should be a growth of confidence and trust on both sides. These final negotiations will, however, be hard to conclude in the time available.
If diplomacy does fail, those who believe that any negotiations with this regime are doomed to failure must not assume that military action offers a reliable alternative. It could also well fail, especially if attempted by Israel alone. Iran has a distributed and defended nuclear infrastructure that cannot be taken out with one “surgical” blow. Sustained strikes might set the programme back a number of years, but the short-term costs could be extremely high — Iran’s regional supporters would exact revenge.
For some the details of the agreement are almost irrelevant because the real objection is to the mere fact of diplomatic engagement with such an obnoxious regime. On this view, Iran has been given an undeserved legitimacy which will encourage it to continue to follow its malign foreign policy. This critique tends to include a routine reference to Munich and appeasement.
Against this, all we can note is that some sort of shift has been taking place in the Iranian power structure, marked by the election of President Hassan Rouhani last June.
It is too early to say whether this will lead to a more moderate course in Iranian foreign policy. Hardliners in Tehran are unhappy and may well try to derail further negotiations while urging continuing strong support for Iran’s regional allies, such as Hizbollah and President Assad of Syria. This is not an argument to abandon diplomacy, but it does warn against overselling the agreement. It is by no means clear where and how this process will conclude. All we can say is that it has not started with a sell-out.
Sir Lawrence Freedman is Professor of War Studies at King’s College London
Part 2 - NO by Saeed Ghasseminejad
Last Friday, Iran was on the verge of economic collapse. It was suffering from high unemployment, high inflation and negative growth. It was totally isolated and running out of cash as it fought a Vietnam-type war in Syria.
In a word, it was desperate.
Despite their immensely strong bargaining position, the US and the West accepted a deal that neither stops Iran’s nuclear programme nor rolls it back.
In fact, by failing to address the entirety of the programme, leaving the capacity to build a bomb intact and opening the flood-gates for Iran to return to international markets, the agreement actually facilitates the country’s nuclear ambitions.
Of the three parts to Iran’s military nuclear programme — uranium enrichment (creating the fissile material), weaponisation (constructing the bomb) and building the delivery system — the deal addresses neither the second nor the third phases, and is not tough enough on enrichment. Uranium enrichment above 5 per cent will be temporarily halted, but Iran can keep its 5 per cent-enriched stockpile, which can easily be used to create 20 per cent-enriched uranium — the level required for a nuclear weapon — at a later date. And although Iran cannot add new centrifuges, it will keep around 19,000 centrifuges intact and in working order.
The agreement gives the International Atomic Energy Agency better access to the operations at Iran’s known nuclear facilities and therefore makes it easier for the world to detect an attempt at nuclear break-out. This is a significant concession, but there is barely any reference in the deal to Iran’s past military nuclear activities, which effectively leaves the weaponisation and delivery system programmes free to steam ahead over the next six months.
Barack Obama’s administration estimates that the sanctions relief is worth around $7bn. This is likely to be a wild underestimate. Iran expert Mark Dubowitz has calculated that through the repatriation of frozen assets, gold transfers to Iran in exchange for its oil and natural gas sales, petrochemicals exports and the lifting of sanctions on the Iranian auto sector, the value relief will come closer to £20bn.
With Western companies now scrambling to do business with Iran, President Hassan Rouhani is correct to have said that, thanks to this deal, the wall of sanctions will collapse in the near future.
All of this means that in six months, Iran’s economy will no longer be collapsing. If Mr Obama could not stop Iran when the country was on the rack, why we should believe he can do it when Iran is up and running again?
Over the next six months, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei will respect the deal that his foreign minister has signed, but he will not go further.
He will come back with a stronger hand and will not need to offer any more than what has just been offered.
Despite the official rhetoric, it appears that US does indeed accept a nuclear-capable Iran and its efforts now are focused on preventing a nuclear-armed Iran. This is a very dangerous road.
Many say that the cold war between Iran and US has just ended. They are wrong: it has just started. The mullahs in Tehran will use their nuclear capability to blackmail the West. The first installment is worth at least $7bn and a free hand in Syria — in six months’ time we see what the second installment looks like.
Saeed Ghasseminejad is co-fonder of the Iranian Liberal students and Graduates and PhD student in Finance at City University of New York.
-------------
Iran deal: should we embrace it?
Jewish Chronicle
28/11/2013
Part 1 - YES by Lawrence Freedman
It is possible to imagine a better deal — it always is in a negotiation — but, in practice, this outcome exceeded expectations.
The expert consensus is that its key elements — no extra centrifuge activity, existing stockpile of 20 per cent enriched uranium neutralised, work on the Arak heavy water reactor suspended — will add significantly to the time it would take Iran to produce the fissile material needed to produce nuclear weapons, even if there is no further deal after six months.
The verification measures are intrusive and will give inspectors access to all the key facilities.
The sanctions relief is also not trivial and could be worth some $7 bn.
By itself, however, this is not going to make much difference to Iranian national wealth, especially in the absence of more fundamental reforms of the Iranian economy.
This creates a breathing space, providing the time to see if a comprehensive settlement can be negotiated. If the provisions of the interim agreement are honoured, there should be a growth of confidence and trust on both sides. These final negotiations will, however, be hard to conclude in the time available.
If diplomacy does fail, those who believe that any negotiations with this regime are doomed to failure must not assume that military action offers a reliable alternative. It could also well fail, especially if attempted by Israel alone. Iran has a distributed and defended nuclear infrastructure that cannot be taken out with one “surgical” blow. Sustained strikes might set the programme back a number of years, but the short-term costs could be extremely high — Iran’s regional supporters would exact revenge.
For some the details of the agreement are almost irrelevant because the real objection is to the mere fact of diplomatic engagement with such an obnoxious regime. On this view, Iran has been given an undeserved legitimacy which will encourage it to continue to follow its malign foreign policy. This critique tends to include a routine reference to Munich and appeasement.
Against this, all we can note is that some sort of shift has been taking place in the Iranian power structure, marked by the election of President Hassan Rouhani last June.
It is too early to say whether this will lead to a more moderate course in Iranian foreign policy. Hardliners in Tehran are unhappy and may well try to derail further negotiations while urging continuing strong support for Iran’s regional allies, such as Hizbollah and President Assad of Syria. This is not an argument to abandon diplomacy, but it does warn against overselling the agreement. It is by no means clear where and how this process will conclude. All we can say is that it has not started with a sell-out.
Sir Lawrence Freedman is Professor of War Studies at King’s College London
Part 2 - NO by Saeed Ghasseminejad
Last Friday, Iran was on the verge of economic collapse. It was suffering from high unemployment, high inflation and negative growth. It was totally isolated and running out of cash as it fought a Vietnam-type war in Syria.
In a word, it was desperate.
Despite their immensely strong bargaining position, the US and the West accepted a deal that neither stops Iran’s nuclear programme nor rolls it back.
In fact, by failing to address the entirety of the programme, leaving the capacity to build a bomb intact and opening the flood-gates for Iran to return to international markets, the agreement actually facilitates the country’s nuclear ambitions.
Of the three parts to Iran’s military nuclear programme — uranium enrichment (creating the fissile material), weaponisation (constructing the bomb) and building the delivery system — the deal addresses neither the second nor the third phases, and is not tough enough on enrichment. Uranium enrichment above 5 per cent will be temporarily halted, but Iran can keep its 5 per cent-enriched stockpile, which can easily be used to create 20 per cent-enriched uranium — the level required for a nuclear weapon — at a later date. And although Iran cannot add new centrifuges, it will keep around 19,000 centrifuges intact and in working order.
The agreement gives the International Atomic Energy Agency better access to the operations at Iran’s known nuclear facilities and therefore makes it easier for the world to detect an attempt at nuclear break-out. This is a significant concession, but there is barely any reference in the deal to Iran’s past military nuclear activities, which effectively leaves the weaponisation and delivery system programmes free to steam ahead over the next six months.
Barack Obama’s administration estimates that the sanctions relief is worth around $7bn. This is likely to be a wild underestimate. Iran expert Mark Dubowitz has calculated that through the repatriation of frozen assets, gold transfers to Iran in exchange for its oil and natural gas sales, petrochemicals exports and the lifting of sanctions on the Iranian auto sector, the value relief will come closer to £20bn.
With Western companies now scrambling to do business with Iran, President Hassan Rouhani is correct to have said that, thanks to this deal, the wall of sanctions will collapse in the near future.
All of this means that in six months, Iran’s economy will no longer be collapsing. If Mr Obama could not stop Iran when the country was on the rack, why we should believe he can do it when Iran is up and running again?
Over the next six months, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei will respect the deal that his foreign minister has signed, but he will not go further.
He will come back with a stronger hand and will not need to offer any more than what has just been offered.
Despite the official rhetoric, it appears that US does indeed accept a nuclear-capable Iran and its efforts now are focused on preventing a nuclear-armed Iran. This is a very dangerous road.
Many say that the cold war between Iran and US has just ended. They are wrong: it has just started. The mullahs in Tehran will use their nuclear capability to blackmail the West. The first installment is worth at least $7bn and a free hand in Syria — in six months’ time we see what the second installment looks like.
Saeed Ghasseminejad is co-fonder of the Iranian Liberal students and Graduates and PhD student in Finance at City University of New York.
Tuesday, November 05, 2013
The Greatest Enemy of Privacy Is Ambiguity
Superb article.
---------
The Greatest Enemy of Privacy Is Ambiguity
If we can't define what it means to be left alone, don't be surprised when the government comes knocking.
J.M. Berger
31/10/2013
Foreign Policy Mag
The details of who is listening to what and who knew may be decidedly unclear, but it's hard to escape the clamor over one of our most cherished possessions: privacy.
But that word, and the concept behind it, is fluid, subjective, contextual, and self-referential -- shifting sands that have come to the forefront in our torturous public debate about NSA surveillance.
In their formative years, most people discover the dictionary game -- in which you look up a word and then look up all the words used in the first word's definition.
Properly executed, this exercise teaches us something important about the power and challenge of language -- how some of our most important words drift into meaninglessness because their definitions are circular, while others bloat into unmanageable complexity due to the number of additional, definable terms needed to describe them.
Depending on what dictionary you choose, the word "privacy" has multiple definitions, and the border between one and another is not always clear. Random House provides the following three definitions that are relevant to our current national drama:
1. the state of being private; retirement or seclusion.
2. the state of being free from intrusion or disturbance in one's private life or affairs: the right to privacy.
3. secrecy.
"Intrusion" and "disturbance" are highly subjective, and privacy as the state of being private or in reference to one's private affairs immediately invokes the circular problem. As an adjective, "private" offers up five more definitions, four of which are relevant to this discussion:
1. belonging to some particular person: private property.
2. pertaining to or affecting a particular person or a small group of persons; individual; personal: for your private satisfaction.
3. confined to or intended only for the persons immediately concerned; confidential: a private meeting.
4. personal and not publicly expressed: one's private feelings.
There is a long road from "belonging to a particular person" to "personal and not publicly expressed." The definitions of intrusion and disturbance take on a similarly wide range. We don't have to take this game to its invariably frustrating conclusion to grasp the point.
Countless volumes have documented the history of privacy as a concept, from open-air latrines to individual bedrooms. The idea of privacy many of us grew up with -- the proposition that people are entitled to locks on a door -- has few precedents in the long history of mankind, and it has mutated considerably in my lifetime.
Locks are devices that protect our physical selves, our belongings, and our "privacy" -- the idea of secrecy pertaining to what actually goes on behind those closed doors. But within a generation, many of our most cherished secrets have migrated from the physical realm to the immaterial.
Our secrets are now represented as data, in an unfathomably complex infrastructure of servers and lines of communication (and we didn't need the NSA leaks to let us know that the locks on those doors are not deadbolts).
But secrets are no longer something we scrupulously hoard. They have become currency. We barter personal data for convenience on a near continual basis, whether by using a bank card, providing an email address in exchange for a coupon, applying for a mortgage, managing a Facebook page -- or supporting a phantasmagoric government mandate of zero-tolerance for terrorism.
The ethereal web of our intertwined personal currencies has now reached a tipping point, and it's time to start making tough choices.
Unlike paper money, each datum we spend is not a discrete, anonymous unit. It is collected, stored, aggregated, and analyzed to create a set of increasingly accurate inferences about personal thoughts and preferences that people never intended to disclose.
The debate is arguably already out of control, the product of a media and social media machine that chews up issues, spits them out in wads on the sidewalk, and proudly points at them, saying "Look what I did!"
But it's still worth trying to nail down concrete definitions that can enable us to talk about exactly what it is that we want and what we fear.
The most relevant definition of "privacy" at play in current events -- debates over NSA surveillance, stop-and-frisk, the NYPD's massive intelligence apparatus, and the FBI's widespread use of informants -- is this: "the state of being free from intrusion or disturbance in one's private life or affairs," with "private" defined as "personal and not publicly expressed."
This sets up three basic questions we need to answer, just to get started:
1) What is public expression?
2) What is intrusion?
3) What is disturbance?
Let's look at each in turn.
Public Expression
Almost everyone agrees that our personal information -- whether thoughts, views, or phone numbers -- is entitled to some sort of protection. But we engage in a wide variety of transactions in which the line between public and private is ambiguous or inconsistent.
The cell phone is the exemplar of the spiraling complexity of this question. Although it is by no means the only place where privacy transactions occur, the tradeoffs one accepts in carrying and using a cell phone in a typical manner are breathtaking.
Your cell phone number is "private" by default -- which is to say unlisted. This protects you from the most gross and unsubtle level of intrusions and disturbances -- unsolicited calls and texts from total strangers.
But you continually barter your cell phone's information in exchange for services, and the information you offer is increasingly comprehensive.
For starters, your service provider unavoidably has access to your number, which means they can (and do) call and text you with sales pitches, surveys, and billing reminders. That's the tip of the iceberg.
If you keep GPS and WiFi turned on, enabling a host of services, your carrier has access to your precise location at virtually all times -- and not just longitude and latitude. This data is easily and automatically correlated to the kind of places you visit -- what grocery store you use, which restaurants you visit, what bookstores you patronize.
If your email and social media accounts flow into the phone, that's a whole new level of information for barter: the books you order online, the news sources on which you rely, who are your friends and where do they live and what are their phone numbers, email addresses, and social media accounts.
Each piece of data by itself is relatively limited in what it says about you, and each feels innocuous when you give it up. Of course, you provide an email when ordering from Amazon.com. Why wouldn't you? And checking Facebook or Twitter on your phone is just so convenient. All it costs is your account information.
For the most part, we presume, this information just dumps into an anonymous sea of data, disassociated from our individual lives, or at least from any important aspect. But regardless of whether this is true, simply owning and using a cell phone represents a continual disclosure of information -- an expression of thoughts, views, and preferences.
Is this expression public? Not exactly, but it's not private either.
Each vendor of convenience requires you to express something about yourself -- sometimes individually, such as when you type in an address for GPS navigation, or in aggregate, such as when you use the Google Now phone app, which scans a broad spectrum of your data in order to inform you what restaurants are nearby, the gate from which your next flight will depart, and when your packages will arrive.
Based on the privacy settings you have selected (or failed to select), you disclose information so rich that it's hard to truly appreciate how much it says about you.
You also allow certain groups of companies to share that data with other companies and services. Each time you do anything with your phone, you give up a little shred of data, or perhaps a whole bucketful. Few people are rigorous about tracking where that data goes and what a company does with it.
Intrusion
You have expressed information by using your phone, and while it's not exactly public, it's also not secret. It's been given to a third party on the basis of an explicit contract that dictates how the information can be used -- even though you probably haven't read it.
When you agree to the terms of service for Google Now, for instance, you explicitly agree to let it analyze your life and draw inferences about you. It then serves those inferences back to you in the form of reminders and helpful prompts, such as how long it will take you to get home from your current location using your normal mode of transportation.
This situation gets dicier when you agree to share information with companies that share with third parties. If you spend a few minutes Googling information about where to buy widgets and click onto a few promising sites, you will probably notice that ads for widgets miraculously start displaying on other websites you visit.
This feels intrusive, at least depending on how you parse the definition, but you agreed to this, either explicitly by okaying a terms-of-service contract, or implicitly by enabling cookies in your web browser.
If you're not careful about settings and practices, you might later find emails about widgets in your inbox, or tweets and Facebook posts about widgets in your timeline, a higher degree of intrusion. If you're extraordinarily careless, you might get robotic phone calls about widget bargains in your area.
Most people tolerate a certain amount of intrusion in exchange for convenience, a fact that is cited by some defenders of the NSA's massive data collection program, who argue that American citizens have consented to this collection by voting, or failing to vote -- in the same way that they may or may not read the terms of service for Google Now.
While there is some validity to this argument, democracy is a very indirect form of consent, full of complications and considerations. And consent to intrusion is not the only issue at play.
Disturbance
Where the NSA differs substantially from Google or the phone company is its potential for disturbance -- which is almost never consensual. One might support stop-and-frisk as a policy, but nearly everyone would opt out for themselves, given a choice.
No one disputes that telecommunications and Internet service providers can and do use your data in intrusive ways. But they have neither a compelling motive nor a commercial interest in disturbing your private life.
In contrast, government surveillance is entirely predicated on an intent to disturb.
One of the primary reasons for surveillance is to determine whether the government should actively interfere in your life -- by arresting you, infiltrating your social circles, freezing your assets, taking away your security clearance, prohibiting you from air travel, or even targeting you for death.
For the vast majority of people, government data collection is used to rule out such disturbances. For a much smaller number, that data will be used to justify hostile action.
And for a smaller number still, the data will be used to justify that which is unjust -- disturbances of people who have been wrongly identified as a threat. This can mean anything from an intrusive investigation to a wrongful arrest, or even a targeted killing.
The government is not simply collecting data, it's using that data to judge the people represented therein, whether as potential targets for military action overseas or for a referral to the FBI.
Collecting data -- the focus of most NSA debates -- carries different considerations than using that data to judge people.
For many, the act of collection is enough to constitute an intrusion. But judgment is inextricably tied to disturbance, a much more serious issue.
For nearly everyone in the world, the NSA's judgment is "we're not interested." But when the stakes are so high, who wants to be judged at all?
All of this takes place in deep secrecy, which is also reasonable cause for concern. Complicating matters further still is the method by which the vast majority of such judgments are rendered. Here, we veer into entirely new and largely untested waters.
Judgment by Inference
There are two reasons the NSA wants so very much data. The first reason is prosaic. If the data has already been collected, it can be searched almost instantaneously, as opposed to starting with a phone number or email, obtaining a warrant, then waiting for one or several service providers to return the requested information days or even weeks later.
The second reason is exotic and far more problematic.
If someone picks up your cell phone and reads everything on it, they will likely come away with a rich portrait of your life and personality. But -- law and conscience aside -- it's physically impossible for the NSA or Google or anyone to manually read each subscriber's content.
It's different when you collect a massive amount of data. Even when the content of communications is not reviewed, an analyst can use complicated mathematical techniques to draw inferences about individual users.
These algorithms are difficult for non-mathematicians to understand, but not necessarily difficult to employ. It's not totally clear what the NSA is doing with the data it collects, but it is clear this type of analysis is part of the agency's toolkit.
The tools that allow Amazon.com to accurately guess what books you would like can also be used to infer your race, religion, sexual orientation, and political party, even though you have never provided that information to the company.
It's possible to do the same thing with the largest source of data the NSA collects (as of the latest disclosures). Known as metadata, this information ignores the content of your communications -- such as an audio recording of a phone call -- and instead focuses on who you call, when, where, and for how long.
On the face of it, this seems less intrusive than listening to the content. But content-free metadata can be used to make inferences about your religious or political views -- even if you never explicitly stated them during the call. Metadata is currently being used to determine whether callers are probably terrorists.
In theory, the massive quantities of data collected should make these inferences pretty accurate, but the degree of certainty will never reach 100 percent. More troubling, there are no public records about exactly what the success rate is. Ninety-nine percent? Sixty-five percent? Twenty? Does the NSA itself even know?
Instead, we're asked to have blind faith in the power of math and the integrity and competence of a government that all too often disappoints us in spectacular fashion.
Where do we go from here?
So far, the privacy debate sparked by the NSA's surveillance program has foundered in a morass of emotional reactions, bad and incomplete information, and personality-driven analysis. On Twitter and on TV, heated reactions fly as each nugget of new information emerges, and theses are rewritten each time the picture changes.
But the discussion is equally hobbled by the rapidly changing landscape of privacy definitions and expectations, layered onto a woefully outdated legal framework.
The Fourth Amendment's guarantee against "unreasonable searches and seizures" is more ambiguous by the day, setting an extremely subjective standard (reasonableness) for searches of what the Constitution's authors certainly understood as material things.
A concept that would have been foreign to our forefathers now dominates the debate over privacy. Who owns our personal data?
Ownership is crucial to both the legal and philosophical questions raised by the development of social media and by the NSA's surveillance collection, much of which is informed by a 1979 Supreme Court ruling, Smith v. Maryland, which in its most simplistic dimension ruled that companies own most of the data we share with them.
When Smith v. Maryland was written, "metadata" consisted mainly of paper sheets listing phone calls that had been dialed, which typically had to be correlated with subscriber information through manual searches of large printed directories. The contents of a phone call were ephemeral if not purposefully recorded, compared to the contents of an email, which persist indefinitely on servers.
Today's metadata is richer and more informative, and it can be processed using instantaneous analytical techniques that were only science fiction in 1979. Even today, we can barely grasp how much personal information metadata reveals.
Rather than embark on a new round of laws and court rulings that cover the current technologies and will require revision in another 10 or 30 years, it's time to start thinking about underlying principles.
The answers to these questions will determine the direction of policies. If we want broad changes to government surveillance practices that protect as many people as possible, we have to focus on intrusion. If we want narrower changes designed to protect most people while preserving the utility of these techniques for law enforcement and counterterrorism, we need to focus on disturbance.
This question will only become more pressing. While mass collection of data is still primarily the province of counterterrorism, it is almost impossible to imagine that it will not find applications in more ordinary law enforcement -- the war on drugs, gun control, fraud detection, drunk driving, and more. It would be foolish to defer dealing with this issue until local police are using predictive algorithms to search car trunks and correlate high school truancy patterns with the likelihood of drug use.
In an age of reactionary politics and infamous gridlock, it may be too much to expect that the U.S. government can tackle these issues in a responsible and comprehensive manner, but if we fail to do so, we are only delaying the moment of truth. These questions will continue to return, in murkier and more complex forms.
It may be satisfying to demand quick fixes in reaction to specific programs, policies, and technologies, but such correctives do little to address the underlying ambiguities that stem from our loose definition of privacy, and our urgent but as yet inchoate expectations of control over our personal information.
For those who worry about government power, ambiguity is a far greater enemy than any individual or institution, even if corrupt. We will never have a government entirely free from honest mistakes and intentional overreach. But when we fail to define our expectations, we invite abuse and make accountability next to impossible.
If we can't clearly articulate what we want and need, don't be surprised when the government takes full advantage of the gaps.
---------
The Greatest Enemy of Privacy Is Ambiguity
If we can't define what it means to be left alone, don't be surprised when the government comes knocking.
J.M. Berger
31/10/2013
Foreign Policy Mag
The details of who is listening to what and who knew may be decidedly unclear, but it's hard to escape the clamor over one of our most cherished possessions: privacy.
But that word, and the concept behind it, is fluid, subjective, contextual, and self-referential -- shifting sands that have come to the forefront in our torturous public debate about NSA surveillance.
In their formative years, most people discover the dictionary game -- in which you look up a word and then look up all the words used in the first word's definition.
Properly executed, this exercise teaches us something important about the power and challenge of language -- how some of our most important words drift into meaninglessness because their definitions are circular, while others bloat into unmanageable complexity due to the number of additional, definable terms needed to describe them.
Depending on what dictionary you choose, the word "privacy" has multiple definitions, and the border between one and another is not always clear. Random House provides the following three definitions that are relevant to our current national drama:
1. the state of being private; retirement or seclusion.
2. the state of being free from intrusion or disturbance in one's private life or affairs: the right to privacy.
3. secrecy.
"Intrusion" and "disturbance" are highly subjective, and privacy as the state of being private or in reference to one's private affairs immediately invokes the circular problem. As an adjective, "private" offers up five more definitions, four of which are relevant to this discussion:
1. belonging to some particular person: private property.
2. pertaining to or affecting a particular person or a small group of persons; individual; personal: for your private satisfaction.
3. confined to or intended only for the persons immediately concerned; confidential: a private meeting.
4. personal and not publicly expressed: one's private feelings.
There is a long road from "belonging to a particular person" to "personal and not publicly expressed." The definitions of intrusion and disturbance take on a similarly wide range. We don't have to take this game to its invariably frustrating conclusion to grasp the point.
Countless volumes have documented the history of privacy as a concept, from open-air latrines to individual bedrooms. The idea of privacy many of us grew up with -- the proposition that people are entitled to locks on a door -- has few precedents in the long history of mankind, and it has mutated considerably in my lifetime.
Locks are devices that protect our physical selves, our belongings, and our "privacy" -- the idea of secrecy pertaining to what actually goes on behind those closed doors. But within a generation, many of our most cherished secrets have migrated from the physical realm to the immaterial.
Our secrets are now represented as data, in an unfathomably complex infrastructure of servers and lines of communication (and we didn't need the NSA leaks to let us know that the locks on those doors are not deadbolts).
But secrets are no longer something we scrupulously hoard. They have become currency. We barter personal data for convenience on a near continual basis, whether by using a bank card, providing an email address in exchange for a coupon, applying for a mortgage, managing a Facebook page -- or supporting a phantasmagoric government mandate of zero-tolerance for terrorism.
The ethereal web of our intertwined personal currencies has now reached a tipping point, and it's time to start making tough choices.
Unlike paper money, each datum we spend is not a discrete, anonymous unit. It is collected, stored, aggregated, and analyzed to create a set of increasingly accurate inferences about personal thoughts and preferences that people never intended to disclose.
The debate is arguably already out of control, the product of a media and social media machine that chews up issues, spits them out in wads on the sidewalk, and proudly points at them, saying "Look what I did!"
But it's still worth trying to nail down concrete definitions that can enable us to talk about exactly what it is that we want and what we fear.
The most relevant definition of "privacy" at play in current events -- debates over NSA surveillance, stop-and-frisk, the NYPD's massive intelligence apparatus, and the FBI's widespread use of informants -- is this: "the state of being free from intrusion or disturbance in one's private life or affairs," with "private" defined as "personal and not publicly expressed."
This sets up three basic questions we need to answer, just to get started:
1) What is public expression?
2) What is intrusion?
3) What is disturbance?
Let's look at each in turn.
Public Expression
Almost everyone agrees that our personal information -- whether thoughts, views, or phone numbers -- is entitled to some sort of protection. But we engage in a wide variety of transactions in which the line between public and private is ambiguous or inconsistent.
The cell phone is the exemplar of the spiraling complexity of this question. Although it is by no means the only place where privacy transactions occur, the tradeoffs one accepts in carrying and using a cell phone in a typical manner are breathtaking.
Your cell phone number is "private" by default -- which is to say unlisted. This protects you from the most gross and unsubtle level of intrusions and disturbances -- unsolicited calls and texts from total strangers.
But you continually barter your cell phone's information in exchange for services, and the information you offer is increasingly comprehensive.
For starters, your service provider unavoidably has access to your number, which means they can (and do) call and text you with sales pitches, surveys, and billing reminders. That's the tip of the iceberg.
If you keep GPS and WiFi turned on, enabling a host of services, your carrier has access to your precise location at virtually all times -- and not just longitude and latitude. This data is easily and automatically correlated to the kind of places you visit -- what grocery store you use, which restaurants you visit, what bookstores you patronize.
If your email and social media accounts flow into the phone, that's a whole new level of information for barter: the books you order online, the news sources on which you rely, who are your friends and where do they live and what are their phone numbers, email addresses, and social media accounts.
Each piece of data by itself is relatively limited in what it says about you, and each feels innocuous when you give it up. Of course, you provide an email when ordering from Amazon.com. Why wouldn't you? And checking Facebook or Twitter on your phone is just so convenient. All it costs is your account information.
For the most part, we presume, this information just dumps into an anonymous sea of data, disassociated from our individual lives, or at least from any important aspect. But regardless of whether this is true, simply owning and using a cell phone represents a continual disclosure of information -- an expression of thoughts, views, and preferences.
Is this expression public? Not exactly, but it's not private either.
Each vendor of convenience requires you to express something about yourself -- sometimes individually, such as when you type in an address for GPS navigation, or in aggregate, such as when you use the Google Now phone app, which scans a broad spectrum of your data in order to inform you what restaurants are nearby, the gate from which your next flight will depart, and when your packages will arrive.
Based on the privacy settings you have selected (or failed to select), you disclose information so rich that it's hard to truly appreciate how much it says about you.
You also allow certain groups of companies to share that data with other companies and services. Each time you do anything with your phone, you give up a little shred of data, or perhaps a whole bucketful. Few people are rigorous about tracking where that data goes and what a company does with it.
Intrusion
You have expressed information by using your phone, and while it's not exactly public, it's also not secret. It's been given to a third party on the basis of an explicit contract that dictates how the information can be used -- even though you probably haven't read it.
When you agree to the terms of service for Google Now, for instance, you explicitly agree to let it analyze your life and draw inferences about you. It then serves those inferences back to you in the form of reminders and helpful prompts, such as how long it will take you to get home from your current location using your normal mode of transportation.
This situation gets dicier when you agree to share information with companies that share with third parties. If you spend a few minutes Googling information about where to buy widgets and click onto a few promising sites, you will probably notice that ads for widgets miraculously start displaying on other websites you visit.
This feels intrusive, at least depending on how you parse the definition, but you agreed to this, either explicitly by okaying a terms-of-service contract, or implicitly by enabling cookies in your web browser.
If you're not careful about settings and practices, you might later find emails about widgets in your inbox, or tweets and Facebook posts about widgets in your timeline, a higher degree of intrusion. If you're extraordinarily careless, you might get robotic phone calls about widget bargains in your area.
Most people tolerate a certain amount of intrusion in exchange for convenience, a fact that is cited by some defenders of the NSA's massive data collection program, who argue that American citizens have consented to this collection by voting, or failing to vote -- in the same way that they may or may not read the terms of service for Google Now.
While there is some validity to this argument, democracy is a very indirect form of consent, full of complications and considerations. And consent to intrusion is not the only issue at play.
Disturbance
Where the NSA differs substantially from Google or the phone company is its potential for disturbance -- which is almost never consensual. One might support stop-and-frisk as a policy, but nearly everyone would opt out for themselves, given a choice.
No one disputes that telecommunications and Internet service providers can and do use your data in intrusive ways. But they have neither a compelling motive nor a commercial interest in disturbing your private life.
In contrast, government surveillance is entirely predicated on an intent to disturb.
One of the primary reasons for surveillance is to determine whether the government should actively interfere in your life -- by arresting you, infiltrating your social circles, freezing your assets, taking away your security clearance, prohibiting you from air travel, or even targeting you for death.
For the vast majority of people, government data collection is used to rule out such disturbances. For a much smaller number, that data will be used to justify hostile action.
And for a smaller number still, the data will be used to justify that which is unjust -- disturbances of people who have been wrongly identified as a threat. This can mean anything from an intrusive investigation to a wrongful arrest, or even a targeted killing.
The government is not simply collecting data, it's using that data to judge the people represented therein, whether as potential targets for military action overseas or for a referral to the FBI.
Collecting data -- the focus of most NSA debates -- carries different considerations than using that data to judge people.
For many, the act of collection is enough to constitute an intrusion. But judgment is inextricably tied to disturbance, a much more serious issue.
For nearly everyone in the world, the NSA's judgment is "we're not interested." But when the stakes are so high, who wants to be judged at all?
All of this takes place in deep secrecy, which is also reasonable cause for concern. Complicating matters further still is the method by which the vast majority of such judgments are rendered. Here, we veer into entirely new and largely untested waters.
Judgment by Inference
There are two reasons the NSA wants so very much data. The first reason is prosaic. If the data has already been collected, it can be searched almost instantaneously, as opposed to starting with a phone number or email, obtaining a warrant, then waiting for one or several service providers to return the requested information days or even weeks later.
The second reason is exotic and far more problematic.
If someone picks up your cell phone and reads everything on it, they will likely come away with a rich portrait of your life and personality. But -- law and conscience aside -- it's physically impossible for the NSA or Google or anyone to manually read each subscriber's content.
It's different when you collect a massive amount of data. Even when the content of communications is not reviewed, an analyst can use complicated mathematical techniques to draw inferences about individual users.
These algorithms are difficult for non-mathematicians to understand, but not necessarily difficult to employ. It's not totally clear what the NSA is doing with the data it collects, but it is clear this type of analysis is part of the agency's toolkit.
The tools that allow Amazon.com to accurately guess what books you would like can also be used to infer your race, religion, sexual orientation, and political party, even though you have never provided that information to the company.
It's possible to do the same thing with the largest source of data the NSA collects (as of the latest disclosures). Known as metadata, this information ignores the content of your communications -- such as an audio recording of a phone call -- and instead focuses on who you call, when, where, and for how long.
On the face of it, this seems less intrusive than listening to the content. But content-free metadata can be used to make inferences about your religious or political views -- even if you never explicitly stated them during the call. Metadata is currently being used to determine whether callers are probably terrorists.
In theory, the massive quantities of data collected should make these inferences pretty accurate, but the degree of certainty will never reach 100 percent. More troubling, there are no public records about exactly what the success rate is. Ninety-nine percent? Sixty-five percent? Twenty? Does the NSA itself even know?
Instead, we're asked to have blind faith in the power of math and the integrity and competence of a government that all too often disappoints us in spectacular fashion.
Where do we go from here?
So far, the privacy debate sparked by the NSA's surveillance program has foundered in a morass of emotional reactions, bad and incomplete information, and personality-driven analysis. On Twitter and on TV, heated reactions fly as each nugget of new information emerges, and theses are rewritten each time the picture changes.
But the discussion is equally hobbled by the rapidly changing landscape of privacy definitions and expectations, layered onto a woefully outdated legal framework.
The Fourth Amendment's guarantee against "unreasonable searches and seizures" is more ambiguous by the day, setting an extremely subjective standard (reasonableness) for searches of what the Constitution's authors certainly understood as material things.
A concept that would have been foreign to our forefathers now dominates the debate over privacy. Who owns our personal data?
Ownership is crucial to both the legal and philosophical questions raised by the development of social media and by the NSA's surveillance collection, much of which is informed by a 1979 Supreme Court ruling, Smith v. Maryland, which in its most simplistic dimension ruled that companies own most of the data we share with them.
When Smith v. Maryland was written, "metadata" consisted mainly of paper sheets listing phone calls that had been dialed, which typically had to be correlated with subscriber information through manual searches of large printed directories. The contents of a phone call were ephemeral if not purposefully recorded, compared to the contents of an email, which persist indefinitely on servers.
Today's metadata is richer and more informative, and it can be processed using instantaneous analytical techniques that were only science fiction in 1979. Even today, we can barely grasp how much personal information metadata reveals.
Rather than embark on a new round of laws and court rulings that cover the current technologies and will require revision in another 10 or 30 years, it's time to start thinking about underlying principles.
- What is privacy? Do we define privacy in its strictest sense as "secrecy," or broadly, as being free from intrusion and/or disturbance in our individual lives?
- When we share information with a third party, do we automatically forfeit secrecy? Is providing information to a company a limited form of public expression? And if so, does that mean the information is no longer private?
- Who owns the data we provide to companies? Can we take our data back after bartering it for a service?
- Companies like Amazon and Google use algorithms to make inferences about our preferences -- what we like to read, where we like to go, and where we get our news and information. Can the government access these inferences, along with the data that lies beneath them?
- Are such inferences an acceptable pretext for starting an investigation?
- How do we define intrusion and disturbance, legally speaking?
- How much intrusion are we willing to tolerate when there is no unjust disturbance? Regardless of how one defines it, most people tolerate intrusion on a nearly continuous basis, in exchange for services or simply due to thoughtlessness. When the government intrudes on our privacy, is that the same kind of barter on a society-wide basis? Should we require a more explicit form of consent?
- Regardless of where we fall on the question of intrusion, should we focus government oversight more intensely on disturbances, such as wiretaps, physical surveillance, arrests, and investigations? Isn't that where the harm is most imminent and grievous?
- If our data is fair game, what about the government's? Shouldn't we force the government to disclose in broad numbers how many conversations it actually listens to, how many of those conversations involve American citizens, how many investigations are opened as a result of mass surveillance, and how many of those leads ultimately prove pertinent to national security?
The answers to these questions will determine the direction of policies. If we want broad changes to government surveillance practices that protect as many people as possible, we have to focus on intrusion. If we want narrower changes designed to protect most people while preserving the utility of these techniques for law enforcement and counterterrorism, we need to focus on disturbance.
This question will only become more pressing. While mass collection of data is still primarily the province of counterterrorism, it is almost impossible to imagine that it will not find applications in more ordinary law enforcement -- the war on drugs, gun control, fraud detection, drunk driving, and more. It would be foolish to defer dealing with this issue until local police are using predictive algorithms to search car trunks and correlate high school truancy patterns with the likelihood of drug use.
In an age of reactionary politics and infamous gridlock, it may be too much to expect that the U.S. government can tackle these issues in a responsible and comprehensive manner, but if we fail to do so, we are only delaying the moment of truth. These questions will continue to return, in murkier and more complex forms.
It may be satisfying to demand quick fixes in reaction to specific programs, policies, and technologies, but such correctives do little to address the underlying ambiguities that stem from our loose definition of privacy, and our urgent but as yet inchoate expectations of control over our personal information.
For those who worry about government power, ambiguity is a far greater enemy than any individual or institution, even if corrupt. We will never have a government entirely free from honest mistakes and intentional overreach. But when we fail to define our expectations, we invite abuse and make accountability next to impossible.
If we can't clearly articulate what we want and need, don't be surprised when the government takes full advantage of the gaps.
Tuesday, October 01, 2013
On Pilgrimage with the Hasids
I had never heard of the Hasidic pilgrimage to Usan in the Ukraine, the "Hasidic Mecca", before reading this article, and it's a fascinating topic. But over & above that, this is a truly magnificent bit of writing.
The Hasidim travel to the burial site of Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, who in the hours before he stopped breathing, shouted in the presence of two witnesses that if when the Moon says it is Jewish New Year, a man should come to his grave in Uman and repent, he, Nachman, would pull him out of Hell by his sidelocks..
Intense religious madness. Read & enjoy.
---------
On Pilgrimage with the Hasids
Ben Judah
Standpoint Mag October 2013
...
In death the Rabbi was a tragic figure. Blinking out of a broken body, he saw his minions dancing around him. Nachman believed he had the soul of the Messiah. But he had achieved for his people — both socially and politically — precisely nothing.
He left behind obsessive writings about the dangers of masturbation, but also fables so enchanting when read in lilting Yiddish they can even induce a state of trance. He left the cryptic, frightening idea that we live in the universe of an "absent God". Nachman's writings are so fresh, yet so obscure. Read in a certain light, it would seem the Rabbi died knowing that the innermost secret of the mystical Kabbalah was that there is no God at all — he is merely what they call a "social construct", that God must constantly be created through chanted confessions and ecstatic prayer.
But then, read from another direction, his texts read like the ramblings of a medieval madman who believed he was the reincarnation of Moses, who lay sobbing, banging on the tomb of his great-grandfather in Medzhybizh, the holiest tzaddik of all, the Baal Shem Tov, demanding he reveal himself and all the secrets.
It doesn't even matter who the Rabbi really was. What matters is that in the hours before he stopped breathing, he shouted in the presence of two witnesses that if when the Moon says it is Jewish New Year, a man should come to his grave in Uman and repent, he, Nachman, would pull him out of Hell by his sidelocks.
What matters is that Hasidic Jews never stopped coming on that day to Uman. Hasids are the mystical Amish of Judaism. They go to extreme lengths to live the Torah's 613 commandments. Hasids still follow dynasties founded by charismatic Eastern European rabbis whose descendants guard specific traditions. Nachman's Hasids are different. They have no dynasty. Their tradition is coming to Uman.
Lenin sealed the city to foreigners in 1917; Hasids smuggled themselves in. The NKVD political police banned them; Hasids refused to listen. NKVD commissars were not used to being ignored. So in 1934 its agents laid a trap. They granted Hasids 34 visas. They killed half of them on the spot; the rest were deported to Siberia.
But Stalin could not stop them. Hasids kept smuggling themselves into Uman. Then Hitler invaded in 1941. The 20,000 Jews of Uman were drowned in the lake under the Rabbi's tomb. This did not stop the Hasids. Rabbis crept in incognito. Soviet refusenik Jews systematically aided the secret pilgrims coming every year. Gorbachev reopened Uman in 1988.
Uman is a Hasidic magnet. When Ukraine first reopened, 250 made the pilgrimage to the Rebbe's tomb. By the late 1990s, more than 5,000 were making the trip. Now almost 30,000 pilgrims come every New Year. Since Ukrainian independence 400,000 single pilgrimages to Uman have taken place. This has made Nachman's tomb Europe's largest — and only — Jewish mass pilgrimage. I had to see it for myself.
...
I woke up to the sound of bugling rams' horns. These were hundreds of ritual shofars, blown by Jews since they were Mesopotamian nomads. The Talmudist stopped chanting. He sighed: "Everybody is tripping the fuck out."
I closed the door. Electricity was dead in the stairwell. The stairs had turned into a health hazard. Hasids were leaving litter everywhere, from food packaging to popped juice cartons. Little boys etched Stars of David into the wall, blind to the Russian message scratched above them: "When You Litter Our Home Don't Forget To Honk, Piggies."
I was shocked to see Jews — whom I knew as lovers of degrees and certificates, accountancy courses and MBAs — rejecting every piece of modernity. I had always thought Jews a people who would do almost anything to send their daughters to Harvard. These men would disown their sons for wanting a degree.
Nightfall in Uman. The orange glow around the street lamps was brought out by the drizzle. I stumbled, psychologically. Uman hit hard, like time travel. The Yiddish child-beggars darting around my legs. The white-haired and wild-eyed Kabbalists mumbling magic incantations as they shuffled to the synagogue. The wild, rippling excitement filling the hour before Rosh Hashanah — our New Year.
The walls were plastered with Hebrew posters and Yiddish notices in the antique script that Babylonian rabbis called "the alphabet of flames". Fools hawked madman's literature on street corners while tubby rabbis threw out cartons of chocolate bread for the poor.
The hour was coming. I felt tingly and I felt lost. Under the bare bulbs of a makeshift prayer house I tried to ask what texts were being whispered. "Yiddish, Yiddish . . . Speak no Yiddish?" I shook my head. They shook theirs back in disgust. For a calming half-second I thought I had found another rationalist. Samuel was a watch salesman from Florida wearing cryptic Levantine amulets. His beard was a ketchup red. He stank of weed. But he gasped: "Uman is a taste of Messiah."
I tried to talk to a portly Hasid with a skin disease about his utter rejection of modernity but all he wanted to talk about was the exchange rate. I strode, sweating and confused, towards a stream. Hundreds of tents crammed its edge like a Jewish refugee camp. Someone tugged at my jacket pocket. It was a child, visibly disturbed. He wore a white dressing-gown. He shrieked: "Are you . . . Jewish? Are you . . . Jewish?"
I nodded.
"Can you . . . kick me in the stomach! I want to fight . . . Karate!"
Ringing laughter rushed past me. Little boys with shaved heads and shoulder-length blonde sidelocks raced their fathers to the synagogue. I struck up conversation with two Yiddish-speaking hoodies from Brooklyn's most fanatical enclave, the dominant one comically thin, his friend grotesquely overweight. They let me in on the subtext in exchange for a promise to help them track down 60 cartons of Marlboro Lights.
"This whole fucking thing is the most fun a Hasid gets all year. It's the furthest he gets from his wife he was forced to marry at 18. It's the furthest he gets out from his community. It's the furthest we get from our moms." The fat one butted in. "Is this what a festival is like?"
They swore me to anonymity before a Canadian neurologist engaged me. Between answering calls from his clinic in Toronto he made it clear it was time I faced up to "the Rebbe". We passed giant corrugated-steel warehouses turned into mega-synagogues lined with hundreds, thousands of plastic garden chairs laid out for pews. The three of them together, fleetingly, turned into the biggest synagogues in the world.
The neurologist was exulting: "Not since the Temple have so many Jews prayed in one place." The hour was here and he left me at the gate. Hebrew letters curled round the curved arch one must pass through to the Rebbe's tomb. Inside, the believers were speaking rapidly to each other as if the Rebbe was still alive: "The Rebbe is to the left." "The Rebbe is waiting for you." "May the Rebbe help you, my friend."
...
They began to scream — deep male, ungodly wails. Before sound left my mouth I imagined a hook inside my head and called it my reason. I pulled onto it. Screwing up my face, I tried not to let go, then ripped myself into the next room — the tomb itself.
The Sephardic wail of the silver-bearded cantor rushed through me. A hundred or more men crammed into small pews rocked back and forth. These were Aramaic prayers. I saw a man with pupils horrifically dilated. I saw a man in such ecstasy I thought he was convulsing. I saw a man collapse back, overcome, from the tomb. I saw sobbing men rip each other back by their shoulders just to touch it.
I tried to imagine who they were in their everyday lives in Baltimore or Eilat. But they had ceased to be those things. Behind the wall, behind the tomb, the men in white were thumping and wailing and howling out through the stone to the Rebbe. Howling that could wake the dead. Trance overcame me. Then the name of the Rebbe. In the enormity of that space I found inside me I named every family name for-whatever it was— to bless them. Then, red-eyed and tearful, I pulled myself outside. Terrified of collective hysteria. This was not my Judaism.
An old friend was sitting unfazed on the bench outside — a miserable and depressed sacked Russian diplomat. He liked to remind people he had "worked with the President himself", but I knew his attaché position in the Delhi embassy had mostly involved dealing with the visa problems of mad Russian Hari Krishnas refusing to leave ashrams.
"This is nothing compared to India. Very mild."
...
The Hasidim travel to the burial site of Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, who in the hours before he stopped breathing, shouted in the presence of two witnesses that if when the Moon says it is Jewish New Year, a man should come to his grave in Uman and repent, he, Nachman, would pull him out of Hell by his sidelocks..
Intense religious madness. Read & enjoy.
---------
On Pilgrimage with the Hasids
Ben Judah
Standpoint Mag October 2013
...
In death the Rabbi was a tragic figure. Blinking out of a broken body, he saw his minions dancing around him. Nachman believed he had the soul of the Messiah. But he had achieved for his people — both socially and politically — precisely nothing.
He left behind obsessive writings about the dangers of masturbation, but also fables so enchanting when read in lilting Yiddish they can even induce a state of trance. He left the cryptic, frightening idea that we live in the universe of an "absent God". Nachman's writings are so fresh, yet so obscure. Read in a certain light, it would seem the Rabbi died knowing that the innermost secret of the mystical Kabbalah was that there is no God at all — he is merely what they call a "social construct", that God must constantly be created through chanted confessions and ecstatic prayer.
But then, read from another direction, his texts read like the ramblings of a medieval madman who believed he was the reincarnation of Moses, who lay sobbing, banging on the tomb of his great-grandfather in Medzhybizh, the holiest tzaddik of all, the Baal Shem Tov, demanding he reveal himself and all the secrets.
It doesn't even matter who the Rabbi really was. What matters is that in the hours before he stopped breathing, he shouted in the presence of two witnesses that if when the Moon says it is Jewish New Year, a man should come to his grave in Uman and repent, he, Nachman, would pull him out of Hell by his sidelocks.
What matters is that Hasidic Jews never stopped coming on that day to Uman. Hasids are the mystical Amish of Judaism. They go to extreme lengths to live the Torah's 613 commandments. Hasids still follow dynasties founded by charismatic Eastern European rabbis whose descendants guard specific traditions. Nachman's Hasids are different. They have no dynasty. Their tradition is coming to Uman.
Lenin sealed the city to foreigners in 1917; Hasids smuggled themselves in. The NKVD political police banned them; Hasids refused to listen. NKVD commissars were not used to being ignored. So in 1934 its agents laid a trap. They granted Hasids 34 visas. They killed half of them on the spot; the rest were deported to Siberia.
But Stalin could not stop them. Hasids kept smuggling themselves into Uman. Then Hitler invaded in 1941. The 20,000 Jews of Uman were drowned in the lake under the Rabbi's tomb. This did not stop the Hasids. Rabbis crept in incognito. Soviet refusenik Jews systematically aided the secret pilgrims coming every year. Gorbachev reopened Uman in 1988.
Uman is a Hasidic magnet. When Ukraine first reopened, 250 made the pilgrimage to the Rebbe's tomb. By the late 1990s, more than 5,000 were making the trip. Now almost 30,000 pilgrims come every New Year. Since Ukrainian independence 400,000 single pilgrimages to Uman have taken place. This has made Nachman's tomb Europe's largest — and only — Jewish mass pilgrimage. I had to see it for myself.
...
I woke up to the sound of bugling rams' horns. These were hundreds of ritual shofars, blown by Jews since they were Mesopotamian nomads. The Talmudist stopped chanting. He sighed: "Everybody is tripping the fuck out."
I closed the door. Electricity was dead in the stairwell. The stairs had turned into a health hazard. Hasids were leaving litter everywhere, from food packaging to popped juice cartons. Little boys etched Stars of David into the wall, blind to the Russian message scratched above them: "When You Litter Our Home Don't Forget To Honk, Piggies."
I was shocked to see Jews — whom I knew as lovers of degrees and certificates, accountancy courses and MBAs — rejecting every piece of modernity. I had always thought Jews a people who would do almost anything to send their daughters to Harvard. These men would disown their sons for wanting a degree.
Nightfall in Uman. The orange glow around the street lamps was brought out by the drizzle. I stumbled, psychologically. Uman hit hard, like time travel. The Yiddish child-beggars darting around my legs. The white-haired and wild-eyed Kabbalists mumbling magic incantations as they shuffled to the synagogue. The wild, rippling excitement filling the hour before Rosh Hashanah — our New Year.
The walls were plastered with Hebrew posters and Yiddish notices in the antique script that Babylonian rabbis called "the alphabet of flames". Fools hawked madman's literature on street corners while tubby rabbis threw out cartons of chocolate bread for the poor.
The hour was coming. I felt tingly and I felt lost. Under the bare bulbs of a makeshift prayer house I tried to ask what texts were being whispered. "Yiddish, Yiddish . . . Speak no Yiddish?" I shook my head. They shook theirs back in disgust. For a calming half-second I thought I had found another rationalist. Samuel was a watch salesman from Florida wearing cryptic Levantine amulets. His beard was a ketchup red. He stank of weed. But he gasped: "Uman is a taste of Messiah."
I tried to talk to a portly Hasid with a skin disease about his utter rejection of modernity but all he wanted to talk about was the exchange rate. I strode, sweating and confused, towards a stream. Hundreds of tents crammed its edge like a Jewish refugee camp. Someone tugged at my jacket pocket. It was a child, visibly disturbed. He wore a white dressing-gown. He shrieked: "Are you . . . Jewish? Are you . . . Jewish?"
I nodded.
"Can you . . . kick me in the stomach! I want to fight . . . Karate!"
Ringing laughter rushed past me. Little boys with shaved heads and shoulder-length blonde sidelocks raced their fathers to the synagogue. I struck up conversation with two Yiddish-speaking hoodies from Brooklyn's most fanatical enclave, the dominant one comically thin, his friend grotesquely overweight. They let me in on the subtext in exchange for a promise to help them track down 60 cartons of Marlboro Lights.
"This whole fucking thing is the most fun a Hasid gets all year. It's the furthest he gets from his wife he was forced to marry at 18. It's the furthest he gets out from his community. It's the furthest we get from our moms." The fat one butted in. "Is this what a festival is like?"
They swore me to anonymity before a Canadian neurologist engaged me. Between answering calls from his clinic in Toronto he made it clear it was time I faced up to "the Rebbe". We passed giant corrugated-steel warehouses turned into mega-synagogues lined with hundreds, thousands of plastic garden chairs laid out for pews. The three of them together, fleetingly, turned into the biggest synagogues in the world.
The neurologist was exulting: "Not since the Temple have so many Jews prayed in one place." The hour was here and he left me at the gate. Hebrew letters curled round the curved arch one must pass through to the Rebbe's tomb. Inside, the believers were speaking rapidly to each other as if the Rebbe was still alive: "The Rebbe is to the left." "The Rebbe is waiting for you." "May the Rebbe help you, my friend."
...
They began to scream — deep male, ungodly wails. Before sound left my mouth I imagined a hook inside my head and called it my reason. I pulled onto it. Screwing up my face, I tried not to let go, then ripped myself into the next room — the tomb itself.
The Sephardic wail of the silver-bearded cantor rushed through me. A hundred or more men crammed into small pews rocked back and forth. These were Aramaic prayers. I saw a man with pupils horrifically dilated. I saw a man in such ecstasy I thought he was convulsing. I saw a man collapse back, overcome, from the tomb. I saw sobbing men rip each other back by their shoulders just to touch it.
I tried to imagine who they were in their everyday lives in Baltimore or Eilat. But they had ceased to be those things. Behind the wall, behind the tomb, the men in white were thumping and wailing and howling out through the stone to the Rebbe. Howling that could wake the dead. Trance overcame me. Then the name of the Rebbe. In the enormity of that space I found inside me I named every family name for-whatever it was— to bless them. Then, red-eyed and tearful, I pulled myself outside. Terrified of collective hysteria. This was not my Judaism.
An old friend was sitting unfazed on the bench outside — a miserable and depressed sacked Russian diplomat. He liked to remind people he had "worked with the President himself", but I knew his attaché position in the Delhi embassy had mostly involved dealing with the visa problems of mad Russian Hari Krishnas refusing to leave ashrams.
"This is nothing compared to India. Very mild."
...
Monday, September 02, 2013
Steyn on Obama on Syria - "An Accidental War"
Excellent from Steyn. "In the Middle East, the enemy of our enemy is also our enemy."
-----
An Accidental War
National Review
August 30, 2013
By Mark Steyn
Perfunctory and ineffectual war-making in Syria is worse than nothing.
I see the Obama “reset” is going so swimmingly that the president is now threatening to go to war against a dictator who gassed his own people. Don’t worry, this isn’t anything like the dictator who gassed his own people that the discredited warmonger Bush spent 2002 and early 2003 staggering ever more punchily around the country inveighing against. The 2003 dictator who gassed his own people was the leader of the Baath Party of Iraq. The 2013 dictator who gassed his own people is the leader of the Baath Party of Syria. Whole other ball of wax. The administration’s ingenious plan is to lose this war in far less time than we usually take. In the unimprovable formulation of an unnamed official speaking to the Los Angeles Times, the White House is carefully calibrating a military action “just muscular enough not to get mocked.”
...
The problem with the American way of war is that, technologically, it can’t lose, but, in every other sense, it can’t win. No one in his right mind wants to get into a tank battle or a naval bombardment with the guys responsible for over 40 percent of the planet’s military expenditures. Which is why these days there aren’t a lot of tank battles. The consummate interventionist Robert Kagan wrote in his recent book that the American military “remains unmatched.” It’s unmatched in the sense that the only guy in town with a tennis racket isn’t going to be playing a lot of tennis matches. But the object of war, in Liddell Hart’s famous distillation, is not to destroy the enemy’s tanks (or Russian helicopters) but his will. And on that front America loses, always. The “unmatched” superpower cannot impose its will on Kabul kleptocrats, Pashtun goatherds, Egyptian generals, or Benghazi militia. There is no reason to believe Syria would be an exception to this rule. America’s inability to win ought to be a burning national question, but it’s not even being asked.
Let us stipulate that many of those war-weary masses are ignorant and myopic. But at a certain level they grasp something that their leaders don’t: For a quarter-century, from Kuwait to Kosovo to Kandahar, the civilized world has gone to war only in order to save or liberate Muslims. The Pentagon is little more than central dispatch for the U.S. military’s Muslim Fast Squad. And what do we have to show for it? Liberating Syria isn’t like liberating the Netherlands: In the Middle East, the enemy of our enemy is also our enemy. Yes, those BBC images of schoolchildren with burning flesh are heart-rending. So we’ll get rid of Assad and install the local branch of al-Qaeda or the Muslim Brotherhood or whatever plucky neophyte democrat makes it to the presidential palace first — and then, instead of napalmed schoolyards, there will be, as in Egypt, burning Christian churches and women raped for going uncovered.
So what do we want in Syria? Obama can’t say, other than for him to look muscular without being mocked, like a camp bodybuilder admiring himself in the gym mirror.
Oh, well. If the British won’t be along for the ride, the French are apparently still in. What was the old gag from a decade ago during those interminable U.N. resolutions with Chirac saying “Non!” every time? Ah, yes: “Going to war without the French is like going hunting without an accordion.” Oddly enough, the worst setback for the Islamic imperialists in recent years has been President Hollande’s intervention in Mali, where, unlike the money-no-object Pentagon, the French troops had such undernourished supply lines that they had to hitch a ride to the war on C-17 transports from the Royal Air Force and Royal Canadian Air Force. And yet they won — insofar as anyone ever really wins on that benighted sod.
Meanwhile, the hyperpower is going to war because Obama wandered off prompter and accidentally made a threat. So he has to make good on it, or America will lose its credibility. But he only wants to make good on it in a perfunctory and ineffectual way. So America will lose its credibility anyway.
Maybe it’s time to learn the accordion . . .
-----
An Accidental War
National Review
August 30, 2013
By Mark Steyn
Perfunctory and ineffectual war-making in Syria is worse than nothing.
I see the Obama “reset” is going so swimmingly that the president is now threatening to go to war against a dictator who gassed his own people. Don’t worry, this isn’t anything like the dictator who gassed his own people that the discredited warmonger Bush spent 2002 and early 2003 staggering ever more punchily around the country inveighing against. The 2003 dictator who gassed his own people was the leader of the Baath Party of Iraq. The 2013 dictator who gassed his own people is the leader of the Baath Party of Syria. Whole other ball of wax. The administration’s ingenious plan is to lose this war in far less time than we usually take. In the unimprovable formulation of an unnamed official speaking to the Los Angeles Times, the White House is carefully calibrating a military action “just muscular enough not to get mocked.”
...
The problem with the American way of war is that, technologically, it can’t lose, but, in every other sense, it can’t win. No one in his right mind wants to get into a tank battle or a naval bombardment with the guys responsible for over 40 percent of the planet’s military expenditures. Which is why these days there aren’t a lot of tank battles. The consummate interventionist Robert Kagan wrote in his recent book that the American military “remains unmatched.” It’s unmatched in the sense that the only guy in town with a tennis racket isn’t going to be playing a lot of tennis matches. But the object of war, in Liddell Hart’s famous distillation, is not to destroy the enemy’s tanks (or Russian helicopters) but his will. And on that front America loses, always. The “unmatched” superpower cannot impose its will on Kabul kleptocrats, Pashtun goatherds, Egyptian generals, or Benghazi militia. There is no reason to believe Syria would be an exception to this rule. America’s inability to win ought to be a burning national question, but it’s not even being asked.
Let us stipulate that many of those war-weary masses are ignorant and myopic. But at a certain level they grasp something that their leaders don’t: For a quarter-century, from Kuwait to Kosovo to Kandahar, the civilized world has gone to war only in order to save or liberate Muslims. The Pentagon is little more than central dispatch for the U.S. military’s Muslim Fast Squad. And what do we have to show for it? Liberating Syria isn’t like liberating the Netherlands: In the Middle East, the enemy of our enemy is also our enemy. Yes, those BBC images of schoolchildren with burning flesh are heart-rending. So we’ll get rid of Assad and install the local branch of al-Qaeda or the Muslim Brotherhood or whatever plucky neophyte democrat makes it to the presidential palace first — and then, instead of napalmed schoolyards, there will be, as in Egypt, burning Christian churches and women raped for going uncovered.
So what do we want in Syria? Obama can’t say, other than for him to look muscular without being mocked, like a camp bodybuilder admiring himself in the gym mirror.
Oh, well. If the British won’t be along for the ride, the French are apparently still in. What was the old gag from a decade ago during those interminable U.N. resolutions with Chirac saying “Non!” every time? Ah, yes: “Going to war without the French is like going hunting without an accordion.” Oddly enough, the worst setback for the Islamic imperialists in recent years has been President Hollande’s intervention in Mali, where, unlike the money-no-object Pentagon, the French troops had such undernourished supply lines that they had to hitch a ride to the war on C-17 transports from the Royal Air Force and Royal Canadian Air Force. And yet they won — insofar as anyone ever really wins on that benighted sod.
Meanwhile, the hyperpower is going to war because Obama wandered off prompter and accidentally made a threat. So he has to make good on it, or America will lose its credibility. But he only wants to make good on it in a perfunctory and ineffectual way. So America will lose its credibility anyway.
Maybe it’s time to learn the accordion . . .
Tuesday, June 04, 2013
Riots in Turkey
Excellent.
--------------
The Good News in Turkey
by Daniel Pipes
Los Angeles Times
June 4, 2013
How to interpret the recent unrest on the streets of Istanbul and about 65 other Turkish cities? Specifically, is it comparable to the Arab uprisings over the last 2½ years in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Yemen and Bahrain?
On one level, they appear unrelated, for Turkey is a far more advanced country, with a democratic culture and a modern economy. But two connections — autocracy and Syria — do tie them together, suggesting that the Turkish demonstrations could have a potentially deep importance.
The rebellion did not come out of nowhere. I was in Istanbul last fall, and it was clear then that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's dictatorial tendencies worried Turks more than his Islamic aspirations. I heard unceasing criticisms about his being "intoxicated with power," an "informal caliph" and "Turkey's elected chief social engineer."
Turks enumerated to me a lengthy list of authoritarian symptoms they suffered from the decade-long rule by Erdogan's Justice and Development Party, or AKP: suppression of political criticism, crony capitalism, manipulation of the judiciary, unjust imprisonment, show trials and a disregard for the separation of powers. In particular, they evinced annoyance at the way Erdogan seeks to impose his personal tastes on the country.
The demonstrations since Friday are protesting these actions and more. What began as a localized dispute over the uprooting of a small park at Taksim Square in the heart of modern Istanbul has rapidly grown into a national statement of defiance.
Erdogan is no Moammar Kadafi or Bashar Assad, and he will not massacre peaceful demonstrators, but heavy-handed police operations have reportedly led to 2,300 injured and, according to Amnesty International, two deaths. Further, the prime minister has reacted defiantly, not just insisting on his original plan for the park but announcing he can do whatever he pleases.
Rival die-hard football fans do the unthinkable and join forces against Erdogan.
As paraphrased by Hürriyet Daily News: "A mosque will be built in Taksim, Erdogan said. He added that he did not have to take permission from the main opposition leader or a 'few marauders' for the projects, noting that the authority had already been given by people who voted for the AKP."
Erdogan is saying, in other words, that having voted the AKP into office, Turks have given him authority to do anything he wants. He is the elected, unaccountable padishah. Well, the demonstrators and those hitherto eager foreign investors have something to say about that, perhaps putting the country's China-like economic growth at risk.
Significantly, Abdullah Gül, the president of Turkey and increasingly Erdogan's rival, adopted a very different approach to the protests. "Democracy does not only mean elections," he said. "The messages delivered with good intentions have been received." By distancing himself from the prime minister, Gül exacerbated Erdogan's isolation.
As for Syria, after a charmed near-decade in power, Erdogan made his first major miscalculation by intensely involving Turkey in the Syrian civil war. He acted with pique when Assad, the Syrian despot and a onetime buddy, ignored his (sound) advice to make reforms. Not one to take well to being rebuffed, Erdogan responded emotionally and thrust his country into the civil war, hosting the rebels, provisioning and arming them and trying to guide them.
The results have been close to disastrous from Turkey's viewpoint. The country has experienced new hostilities with Moscow, Tehran and Baghdad, lost both overland trade routes to the Persian Gulf and trade with Syria, suffered terrorism on Turkish soil (in Reyhanli) and — perhaps most ominous — witnessed tensions surge between its stridently Sunni government and the country's heterodox Muslim populations.
Thanks to the Syrian imbroglio, Turkey has lost its enviable position of strength and popularity — its "zero problems with neighbors" policy that brought with it real accomplishments — in favor of a sense of being surrounded by foes. If President Obama once bragged of his "close working relationship" with Erdogan, last month's White House meeting between the two showed neither the personal chemistry nor the practical results vis-à-vis Syria that Erdogan had sought.
In short, it appears that a decade of electoral calm, political stability and plentiful foreign investment has come to a halt and a new, more difficult era has begun for the AKP government. The moribund opposition parties may find their voice. The antiwar faction may feel emboldened. The secularists may be able to tap the wide unhappiness with the regime's efforts to corral citizens into becoming more (Islamically) virtuous.
This is excellent news. Turkey has been heading in the wrong direction under the AKP. Although a democracy, the AKP government has jailed more journalists than any other state in the world. Although secular, it has with growing urgency imposed arrays of Islamist regulations, including last week's rushed limitation on alcohol as well as warnings against public displays of affection.
Although a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Turkey engaged in 2010 in a joint air exercise with China. Although an applicant to the European Union, it plays footsie with the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, founded in 1996 by Russian and Chinese leaders as an anti-NATO grouping. Although supposedly an American ally, Turkey has humiliated Israel, called Zionism a "crime against humanity," and acclaimed the terror-listed Hamas organization.
Thanks to the demonstrations, we can be newly hopeful that Turkey may avoid the path it had been on, that of despotism, Islamification and increasingly rogue foreign relations. Perhaps its secular, democratic and pro-Western heritage can be revived.
--------------
The Good News in Turkey
by Daniel Pipes
Los Angeles Times
June 4, 2013
How to interpret the recent unrest on the streets of Istanbul and about 65 other Turkish cities? Specifically, is it comparable to the Arab uprisings over the last 2½ years in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Yemen and Bahrain?
On one level, they appear unrelated, for Turkey is a far more advanced country, with a democratic culture and a modern economy. But two connections — autocracy and Syria — do tie them together, suggesting that the Turkish demonstrations could have a potentially deep importance.
The rebellion did not come out of nowhere. I was in Istanbul last fall, and it was clear then that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's dictatorial tendencies worried Turks more than his Islamic aspirations. I heard unceasing criticisms about his being "intoxicated with power," an "informal caliph" and "Turkey's elected chief social engineer."
Turks enumerated to me a lengthy list of authoritarian symptoms they suffered from the decade-long rule by Erdogan's Justice and Development Party, or AKP: suppression of political criticism, crony capitalism, manipulation of the judiciary, unjust imprisonment, show trials and a disregard for the separation of powers. In particular, they evinced annoyance at the way Erdogan seeks to impose his personal tastes on the country.
The demonstrations since Friday are protesting these actions and more. What began as a localized dispute over the uprooting of a small park at Taksim Square in the heart of modern Istanbul has rapidly grown into a national statement of defiance.
Erdogan is no Moammar Kadafi or Bashar Assad, and he will not massacre peaceful demonstrators, but heavy-handed police operations have reportedly led to 2,300 injured and, according to Amnesty International, two deaths. Further, the prime minister has reacted defiantly, not just insisting on his original plan for the park but announcing he can do whatever he pleases.
Rival die-hard football fans do the unthinkable and join forces against Erdogan.
As paraphrased by Hürriyet Daily News: "A mosque will be built in Taksim, Erdogan said. He added that he did not have to take permission from the main opposition leader or a 'few marauders' for the projects, noting that the authority had already been given by people who voted for the AKP."
Erdogan is saying, in other words, that having voted the AKP into office, Turks have given him authority to do anything he wants. He is the elected, unaccountable padishah. Well, the demonstrators and those hitherto eager foreign investors have something to say about that, perhaps putting the country's China-like economic growth at risk.
Significantly, Abdullah Gül, the president of Turkey and increasingly Erdogan's rival, adopted a very different approach to the protests. "Democracy does not only mean elections," he said. "The messages delivered with good intentions have been received." By distancing himself from the prime minister, Gül exacerbated Erdogan's isolation.
As for Syria, after a charmed near-decade in power, Erdogan made his first major miscalculation by intensely involving Turkey in the Syrian civil war. He acted with pique when Assad, the Syrian despot and a onetime buddy, ignored his (sound) advice to make reforms. Not one to take well to being rebuffed, Erdogan responded emotionally and thrust his country into the civil war, hosting the rebels, provisioning and arming them and trying to guide them.
The results have been close to disastrous from Turkey's viewpoint. The country has experienced new hostilities with Moscow, Tehran and Baghdad, lost both overland trade routes to the Persian Gulf and trade with Syria, suffered terrorism on Turkish soil (in Reyhanli) and — perhaps most ominous — witnessed tensions surge between its stridently Sunni government and the country's heterodox Muslim populations.
Thanks to the Syrian imbroglio, Turkey has lost its enviable position of strength and popularity — its "zero problems with neighbors" policy that brought with it real accomplishments — in favor of a sense of being surrounded by foes. If President Obama once bragged of his "close working relationship" with Erdogan, last month's White House meeting between the two showed neither the personal chemistry nor the practical results vis-à-vis Syria that Erdogan had sought.
In short, it appears that a decade of electoral calm, political stability and plentiful foreign investment has come to a halt and a new, more difficult era has begun for the AKP government. The moribund opposition parties may find their voice. The antiwar faction may feel emboldened. The secularists may be able to tap the wide unhappiness with the regime's efforts to corral citizens into becoming more (Islamically) virtuous.
This is excellent news. Turkey has been heading in the wrong direction under the AKP. Although a democracy, the AKP government has jailed more journalists than any other state in the world. Although secular, it has with growing urgency imposed arrays of Islamist regulations, including last week's rushed limitation on alcohol as well as warnings against public displays of affection.
Although a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Turkey engaged in 2010 in a joint air exercise with China. Although an applicant to the European Union, it plays footsie with the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, founded in 1996 by Russian and Chinese leaders as an anti-NATO grouping. Although supposedly an American ally, Turkey has humiliated Israel, called Zionism a "crime against humanity," and acclaimed the terror-listed Hamas organization.
Thanks to the demonstrations, we can be newly hopeful that Turkey may avoid the path it had been on, that of despotism, Islamification and increasingly rogue foreign relations. Perhaps its secular, democratic and pro-Western heritage can be revived.
Thursday, May 23, 2013
Top 10 warning signs you may be a ‘Guardian Left’ anti-Semite
Top 10 warning signs you may be a ‘Guardian Left’ anti-Semite
CiFWatch
22/05/13
The Guardian’s associate editor Seumas Milne – who, in case it needs reminding, worked for the pro-Stalinist communist publication ‘Straight Left’ earlier in his career – was kind enough to Tweet a link to a piece in Foreign Policy Magazine by Stephen Walt.
The piece is titled ‘Top 10 warning signs you are a liberal imperialist‘.
The essay itself, written by the co-author of a book widely condemned for its shoddy scholarship and for arguing that Jews wield too much power in Washington, D.C., is unintentionally quite comical – a kind of ‘Western Guilt-Driven Guide to the Universe for Dummies’ – and includes, as #1, the following:
So, in the spirit of Walt’s mockery of those who ‘unknowingly’ are compromised by a deep-seeded imperialism lurking in their subconscious, here is CiF Watch’s own ‘Top 10 warning signs you may be a Guardian Left anti-Semite‘ – a list, per the links below, inspired by real life Guardianistas!)
1. You claim the mantle of human rights yet find yourself running interference for anti-Semitic world leaders and helping to spread the propaganda of Islamist extremists - and even terrorist leaders who openly call for the murder of Jews.
2. You claim to condemn racism at every opportunity yet are strangely silent or seriously downplay even the most egregious examples of antisemitic violence.
3. You claim to be a champion of progressive politics yet often use terms and advance tropes indistinguishable from classic right wing Judeophobia - such as the argument that Jews are too powerful, use their money to control politics, and are not loyal citizens.
4. You support nationalism, and don’t have a problem with the existence of more than 50 Muslim states, yet you oppose the existence of the only Jewish state in the world.
5. Even when putatively condemning antisemitism you can’t help but blame the Jews for causing antisemitism.
6. You condemn the Holocaust yet also obsessively condemn living Jews for their alleged ‘inhumanity’ and even argue that Jews haven’t learned the proper lessons from the attempt to annihilate their co-religionists from the planet.
7. You not only support Palestinian rights, but support their “right” to launch deadly terrorist attacks on Israeli Jews, under the mantle of anti-imperialist ”resistance”.
8. You characterize extremist reactionary Islamist movements as “progressive“.
9. You accuse Jews of cynically misusing the charge of antisemitism to “stifle” debate about the Jewish state.
10. You champion diversity and multiculturalism of all kinds, yet suggest that Jewish particularism represents an inherently tribal, ethnocentric and racist identity.
CiFWatch
22/05/13
The Guardian’s associate editor Seumas Milne – who, in case it needs reminding, worked for the pro-Stalinist communist publication ‘Straight Left’ earlier in his career – was kind enough to Tweet a link to a piece in Foreign Policy Magazine by Stephen Walt.
The piece is titled ‘Top 10 warning signs you are a liberal imperialist‘.
The essay itself, written by the co-author of a book widely condemned for its shoddy scholarship and for arguing that Jews wield too much power in Washington, D.C., is unintentionally quite comical – a kind of ‘Western Guilt-Driven Guide to the Universe for Dummies’ – and includes, as #1, the following:
You frequently find yourself advocating that the United States send troops, drones, weapons, Special Forces, or combat air patrols to some country that you have never visited, whose language(s) you don’t speak, and that you never paid much attention to until bad things started happening there.Whilst I don’t speak fluent academic-ese like the esteemed Harvard professor, I have become adept at deciphering an even more obscure dialect – the language of the Guardian Left.
So, in the spirit of Walt’s mockery of those who ‘unknowingly’ are compromised by a deep-seeded imperialism lurking in their subconscious, here is CiF Watch’s own ‘Top 10 warning signs you may be a Guardian Left anti-Semite‘ – a list, per the links below, inspired by real life Guardianistas!)
1. You claim the mantle of human rights yet find yourself running interference for anti-Semitic world leaders and helping to spread the propaganda of Islamist extremists - and even terrorist leaders who openly call for the murder of Jews.
2. You claim to condemn racism at every opportunity yet are strangely silent or seriously downplay even the most egregious examples of antisemitic violence.
3. You claim to be a champion of progressive politics yet often use terms and advance tropes indistinguishable from classic right wing Judeophobia - such as the argument that Jews are too powerful, use their money to control politics, and are not loyal citizens.
4. You support nationalism, and don’t have a problem with the existence of more than 50 Muslim states, yet you oppose the existence of the only Jewish state in the world.
5. Even when putatively condemning antisemitism you can’t help but blame the Jews for causing antisemitism.
6. You condemn the Holocaust yet also obsessively condemn living Jews for their alleged ‘inhumanity’ and even argue that Jews haven’t learned the proper lessons from the attempt to annihilate their co-religionists from the planet.
7. You not only support Palestinian rights, but support their “right” to launch deadly terrorist attacks on Israeli Jews, under the mantle of anti-imperialist ”resistance”.
8. You characterize extremist reactionary Islamist movements as “progressive“.
9. You accuse Jews of cynically misusing the charge of antisemitism to “stifle” debate about the Jewish state.
10. You champion diversity and multiculturalism of all kinds, yet suggest that Jewish particularism represents an inherently tribal, ethnocentric and racist identity.
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