Aisha is an 18-year-old Afghan woman whose nose and ears were cut off by a Taliban butcher for the “crime” of running away from the beatings she routinely suffered at the hands of her husband’s family. Aisha’s picture appears on the cover of Time magazine this week, provoking controversy.
So begins a characteristically brilliant piece by Terry Glavin in which he subjects the Wikigeeks at Wikileaks to a blistering critique. Read it in its entirety here.
Many of the grand myths of our own time - Israel as the ultimate rogue state, U.S. policy as a hostage of the “Israel Lobby,” the Palestinians as the iconic symbol of human suffering - draw on a much older tradition that, just twenty years ago, most people regarded as a matter for historians, not chroniclers of the present. It was these myths which effectively licensed Oliver Stone’s remarks. If there is a lesson to be drawn from L’Affaire Stone, it is that he did not - and this is why his apology is really by the by - act alone.
From my latest piece for The Huffington Post.
If you take a look here you’ll find a report by the Oxford Research Group about the possibility of an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. The report opposes any such action on Israel’s part but I, like you, knew that before reading it. It’s well worth a read though, in spite of its adherence to the bien pensant received wisdom on the matter in question. There are, however, a couple of questions about it that I’d like to bring up:
Israel is so extraordinarily beyond the pale that its behavior does not even merit comparison with states like China, which brutally occupies Tibet, or India, which occupies Kashmir, or Poland, which stands on parts of what used to be eastern Germany, or Sri Lanka, which recently extirpated the secessionist Tamil Tiger movement after a brutal three-decades long civil war, or the United States of America, which annihilated the Native American peoples. Indeed, the only states that resemble Israel are Nazi Germany and South Africa’s apartheid regime, neither of which exists any longer. Get it?
A small taste of Lee Smith’s brilliant response to his critics, which you can read here.
Actually, he doesn’t so much exonerate himself of it as offer himself as a candidate for recognition as being righteous among the gentiles:
But my own diligence against anti-Semitism, in all its forms, in my own church in particular, is well-documented and has gone back decades.
Continue reading ‘Andrew Sullivan Exonerates Himself of Antisemitism’
Hugo Chavez’s obedient Hollywood poodle told London’s Sunday Times that “Jewish domination of the media” is to blame for what he says is the excessive focus on Hitler’s Jewish victims, as opposed to Hitler’s Russian ones.
Though Deputy Alcira Argumedo is not a member of the governing party, today’s Pagina/12, the Izvestia of the government of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, generously donates space to her in today’s edition of the paper. Deputy Argumedo is superficially concerned with the current spat between Venezuela and Colombia but what’s really on her mind is something else; the Jews.
Continue reading ‘It’s The Jews! Another Comforting Signal to Iran From Buenos Aires’
El País today runs yet another of its habitual anti-Israel opinion pieces. Today’s example of the genre is by Javier Valenzuela, who says that:
In the 1948 Israel was founded in more than three quarters of what had been that [British] mandate…
Abbas is not only avoiding direct talks, but seems reluctant even to continue proximity talks, turning again for cover to his Fatah Party leadership, to the PLO and even to the Arab League. Not difficult: Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa recently called the proximity talks “a comprehensive failure.”So, only two months after Mitchell began his shuttle diplomacy, Abbas is upping the ante. In addition to demanding a total Jewish construction freeze in the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem, Abbas now wants the U.S. to obtain from Israel written guarantees on the final borders for a Palestinian state.
From my latest column on Townhall, here.
Over at the consistently excellent CST blog, Mark Gardner reports on a telling moment at the Palestine International Festival in Ramallah. When 70s disco icons Boney M got up to do their thing, organizers of the festival asked them not to perform their traditional floorfiller, a cover of The Melodians number, “By the Rivers of Babylon.” Why? Because the song contains the words of Psalm 137: “Yea we wept/When we remembered Zion.”
Mark writes:
Its not a sex thing or a sexism thing because “Bang Bang Lulu”, “Baby do You Wanna Bump”, “Gloria, Can you Waddle” and “Love for Sale” were ok.
Its not a colour thing or a nationalist thing, because “Brown Girl in the Ring”, “White Christmas” and “Ra Ra Rasputin” were ok.
Its not a Christian or even a Voodoo thing, because “Mary’s Boy Child”, “Hark the Herald Angel” and “Voodoonight” were ok.
It’s not an artistic merit thing, nor a flares thing, nor a…I could go on…but lets cut to the serious bit. It was a Jewish thing. Not a political thing, nor even an anti-Zionist thing, but a Jewish thing: or rather, an anti-Jewish thing.
It is one thing to demand a boycott of Israel, but it is quite another to demand a boycott of popular cultural references to the historical Jewish longing for Israel, or Zion.
Interestingly, the Jewish longing which Mark refers to, with its motifs of captivity, exile and redemption, has resonated powerfully with many black artists down the years. I have an extensive vinyl collection of classic roots and dub reggae albums from the 1970s; go through the track listings on any one of them and you are more than likely to find a song title containing the word “Zion.” Sadly, this music is apparently now verboten for the Palestinians, courtesy of their culture guardians, who are obsessed with purging anything that might legitimize the Jewish connection to the land of Israel.
Here, then, is the original version of “By the Rivers of Babylon,” by The Melodians. Enjoy.
The final and most important factor behind the Uncle Napoleon complex is Iran’s failure to reconcile itself with its own history. That history-viewed broadly and with a few exceptions here and there -amounts to 2,500 years or so of gradual imperial decline. Iranians have yet to forgive themselves for this decline. Take, for example, their view of the political geography of Central Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. Like Greeks and Italians, Iranians are heirs to an ancient tradition of imperial conquest. Yet only modern-day Persians seriously lament the passing of the glorious days when far more territory and many more peoples were subjected to their beneficent imperium. In the Uncle Napoleon complex, then, they seek a way to relinquish their historical agency and avoid taking responsibility for the present.
Read the rest from Sohrab Ahmari, an occasional contributor to this blog, on Commentary.
“Walt is a throwback to the 1930s,” says Goldberg. “In the ’30s the isolationists rode the Jews as a hobby horse. They tried very hard to marginalize American citizens of the Jewish faith by questioning their loyalty. These guys don’t even understand what ancient terror they’re tapping into. What’s original, what makes this period alarming, is that The Washington Post Company would give a Jew-baiter a platform.”
From a must-read piece by Lee Smith on Tablet.
(H/T: Michael G.)
The whatboutery dispute, therefore, comes down to this. One side subscribes to the universality of human rights and urges two conclusions. Firstly, more equitable distribution of popular concern across the myriad human rights crises in the world. Secondly, greater awareness that the internal character of a regime - whether it’s a democracy or a tyranny - will tell you a great deal about how responsive it will be to human rights complaints.The other side filters everything through the idea of Empire - including the ICC. If you regard the ICC as a tool of a sinister global conspiracy, there is no need to examine its status as a “court of last resort,” and therefore particularly appropriate for those states which lack robust, transparent judicial systems.
From my latest article for The Huffington Post.
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