What happened in recent days will significantly change how governments manage information and also the ways through which we citizens get a hold of it. But also — let’s not fool ourselves — those regimes that are based on silence and the lack of transparency, will reinforce the protection of their secrets, or avoid putting them in writing. Meanwhile, the exposure of the cables, memorandums and correspondence between diplomats and departments of state is being noted by authoritarians everywhere, and they are learning not to leave written evidence of their orders to silence, suppress or kill.
Read the brilliant Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez’s take on Wikileaks here.
Over at The Propagandist, Jonathon Narvey confronts a brand new, and decidedly stinky, conspiracy theory: that those shadowy Zionists, and not Islamist terrorists, were behind the shocking massacre of 58 Iraqi Christian worshippers at the Sayedat al-Najat Cathedral in Baghdad on October 31. Writes Jonathon: “This is a useful example of a larger phenomenon that makes brokering peace between Islamic states and Western ones, or dealing with Islamist terror, state-sanctioned or otherwise, so much more difficult. A broad swathe of humanity throughout the Islamic world, particularly their political leaders and intellectual class, believes in blood-curdling fairy tales. And they project the worst aspects of Islamism’s brutalities upon its victims.”
Solomonia rightly draws attention to this remarkable lecture by Robert Bernstein, the founder of Human Rights Watch. Bernstein, you’ll remember, published an op-ed in the New York Times in October 2009 in which he eviscerated HRW for “helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.”
Jonathon Narvey of The Propagandist has written a compelling, if sadly nauseating, series on the effort by Adbusters - a Vancouver-based alternative media network - to associate the State of Israel with the crimes of Nazi Germany through a photo essay comparing Gaza with the Warsaw Ghetto. Sounds like that would win some awards in Tehran, at least. Read Jonathon here, here and then here.
In the 1930s, the exiled Trotsky began to take an interest in both the Arab-Jewish conflict and Zionist colonization in Palestine. Unlike the orthodox Stalinists, he was distrustful of the “reactionary Muslim” and “anti-Semitic pogromist” elements in the Palestinian Arab national movement. Unlike the Trotskyists of today, he did not uncritically whitewash the Palestinian riots of 1929 as a revolutionary “liberation” struggle. Indeed, by 1937, though he never became a Zionist, Trotsky had come to radically revise his earlier standpoint on the “Jewish question.” He recognized, for example, that his earlier belief in the inevitability of assimilation was unfounded; that there was a Jewish nation, which required a territorial base; and that the Soviet regime was shamelessly encouraging anti-Semitism to deflect attention from its own failures.
The always insightful Robert Wistrich describes the evolution of Leon Trotsky’s thinking on that topic of discussion known as “The Jewish Question.” Read it all here.
Wistrich adds:
In the West, his legacy is kept alive by the amorphous Fourth International - a motley crew of Trotskyite groups whose sectarianism, internal dissension, sterile scholastic disputes and personal rivalries are legendary.
You know what’s coming now, don’t you…
And if you just can’t sit through that scene again, remember this jaunty little number?
Some of you will have seen this splendid effort to think outside the box on Israel’s delegitimization by Yoram Hazony of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. If you haven’t, I really urge you to read it. And once you’ve done so, please have a look at my essay on The Propagandist; as you’ll see, I have differences with Yoram, particularly over the use of Kant’s ideas on international politics, but these are expressed in a constructive spirit. We owe Yoram a huge debt of thanks for reframing a debate that was becoming extremely sterile.
Indeed, it is probable that Hamas’ future will be largely determined in the West Bank, rather than in Gaza. Its role as a spoiler cannot be underestimated, but Hamas’ long-term fortunes depend on an irrevocable failure of the national strategy of negotiations and of the PA state- and institution-building program. If either or both of these policies succeed, Hamas’ single-minded promotion of the strategy (though certainly not always the practice) of violent resistance and insistence on the non-recognition of Israel - even in the context of Palestinian independence - will become increasingly hollow and unappealing. If the PLO and PA strategies unequivocally fail, however, there is little to prevent Hamas from inheriting practically uncontested the leadership of the Palestinian movement and transforming it from a nationalist to an Islamist one.
Hussein Ibish’s reading of the stakes involved in the battle between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, here.
The Propagandist’s editors put it better than I can in describing themselves: “The Propagandist magazine is for political junkies, thinking conservatives and the anti-fascist left. We see the public space being taken over by an unholy alliance of unrepentant Marxists, 9/11 Truthers and thuggish religious fanatics…We’ve had enough. Our underground conservatives and counter-revolutionary propagandists are waging a war of words against the resurgent enemies of democracy and modernity.”
More power to ‘em. Especially as they are publishing our good friend Terry Glavin.
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.
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?
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.
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.”
Ron Radosh takes apart this ridiculous article by Adam Horowitz and Phillip Weiss from The Nation, which is rapidly emerging as the house journal of the BDS Movement here in America. Inter alia, Radosh notes:
In essence, in identifying the “Arab revolt” approvingly and as a precedent that informs their work today, Weiss and Horowitz are supporting a Nazi inspired terror which took place against the Jews and other Arab Palestinians who did not support the Mufti’s agenda. It’s not only chilling that American students are being subjected to distortions of American history with fallacious analogies, but also that journalists, who purport to be serious about their craft, would distort the truth about the history of boycotts and general strikes during the “Arab revolt” in Palestine.
Phillip Weiss whitewashing the allies of the Nazis? In The Nation? Surely not…
But let us look beyond the Mavi Marmara. Though Israelis and Palestinians get most of the limelight, much of the script is written elsewhere. The newest entrant in the larger drama is Turkey, where the flotilla was financed and put to sea. Ankara’s fierce response to the incident was a rallying cry to the region.
Next to Iran, Nato member Turkey is now the biggest headache for the west. With Egypt sinking into torpor and Riyadh firmly ensconced on the fence between Washington and Tehran, Turkey has seen the leadership of the region up for grabs - and is going for it. It has drawn Syria into its orbit and has reached a nuclear deal with Iran, its rival for hegemony.
What better way to pursue this end than to lead a crusade against the Jewish state? Going after the “Little Satan” is the card that trumps them all, and it embarrasses the “Great Satan” to boot. The real game is about dominance at the expense of America, which US President Barack Obama has yet to grasp. Neither has Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister. Sailing into the Turkish trap was a blunder worthy of General Custer at Little Big Horn.
A provocative, brilliantly-argued piece by Josef Joffe from the Financial Times, which in publishing it has done something to mend its growing reputation for Robert Fiskesque editorials on the Middle East.
