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.
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.
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.
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.
Remember how, on the eve of the Iraq war, thousands upon thousands of protestors chanted - in addition to “Free Palestine” - that no blood should be shed for oil, or any other commercial transaction?
I wonder how the “anti-war” movement feels now about the resistance of certain banks and corporations to the implementation of sanctions against Iran. Here’s a disturbing example from Benny Weinthal:
I gave an interview to broadcaster RT based on my recent Huffington Post article, in which I argued that the Libyan regime’s decision to dispatch a ship to Gaza is the political equivalent of money laundering; instead of washing dirty notes, you wash a bloodstained reputation in the name of humanitarianism.
Periodically, I’ve written about the loathsome Holocaust denial outfit Press TV (see here and here and here, for example,) a mouthpiece for the Iranian regime that masquerades as a legitimate broadcaster.
In the Jerusalem Post, Benny Weinthal reports the following:
Executives from two public TV channels last week hosted Ezzatollah Zarghami, the president of Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, who allegedly has ties to the Revolutionary Guards, prompting criticism on Monday.
“You never listened to a word that I said…” Thus did John Lydon, with his muezzin-like wail, kick off one of the greatest songs he ever wrote, “Public Image,” by his post-Sex Pistols group Public Image Limited (PiL to you and me.)
The Israel boycott crowd would be well advised to listen to what Lydon has to say now. And they can listen to him telling the BBC that, as far as he’s concerned, politics everywhere are terrible, not just Israel, and that he’s against all government - “I have been all my life,” he says. You may not agree with Lydon’s trenchant loathing of authority qua authority, but at least he’s morally consistent. And that logic means that the recently-reformed PiL will play in Tel Aviv, unlike Santana, Elvis Costello, The Pixies and others who bowed to the pressure of those who reserve their hatred for Israel alone, and have expressed it by sending Lydon hate mail.
Here, then, are PiL with “Public Image.” Yesher koach, Mr. Lydon.
(Via Engage)
UPDATE: Davem on Harry’s Place, where this piece is cross-posted, points out that Hezbollah has declared its solidarity with al-Bashir.
Over at savedarfur.org, Megan Flemming explains the arrest warrant issued yesterday against the Butcher of Khartoum, Omar Hasan al-Bashir:
The judges found that there are reasonable grounds to believe al-Bashir is responsible for three counts of genocide committed against the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups.
Here are some good suggestions of action you can take to assist the process of bringing al-Bashir to a prison cell. Why should you? Here’s the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Louis Moreno Ocampo:
Continue reading ‘“It’s Not Possible for a Muslim to Commit Genocide…”’
‘Bloody Jews,’ he said. ‘Bloody Jews, bugger the Jews, I’ve no sympathy for them.’I gazed at him, aghast. Where had this suddenly come from?
The encounter I’m here describing took place very recently, in the course of a large academic dinner at a University in another city, not my own one. It was a pleasant occasion, and the people at my table were innocuously and comfortably talking about sociological issues connected with the economic crisis, all completely harmless and (relatively) uncontentious. And then I heard the academic on my right hand side say to the person opposite him, ‘Bloody Jews.’
When he saw my appalled stare, he said impatiently, ‘Oh well, I’m sorry, but really…!’
‘I’m glad you’re sorry,’ I replied politely, collecting myself together for a fight. But then he asked, ‘Are you Jewish?’ When I nodded, this academic - whom I’d met for the first time that day - put his arm around me and said, ‘I’m sorry, but really Israel is terrible, the massacres, Plan Dalet, the ethniccleansing, they’re like the Nazis, they’re the same as the Nazis…’
Read more from Eve Garrard at Normblog. And then prepare for the usual whining about how it’s unfair to call these people antisemitic, they’re just critics of Israel…
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