Monthly Archives: October 2010

The utter failure of multiculturalism?

Germany: third place winners in 2010 World Cup

It wasn’t just Germans who were disappointed to see their team fail to win the 2010 World Cup in South Africa this summer. If this was the team that represented “multi-kulti”, for most of us who had the pleasure of watching their performance, the response was: let’s have more — not: this is an utter failure. Did Angela Merkel so quickly forget?

In The Guardian, Philip Oltermann writes:

Today, when I heard reports of Angela Merkel announcing that multiculturalism had “utterly failed”, my first thoughts were: who is she talking about? I am German, and I have a sister whose three boys are half-Peruvian. My brother’s children are part-Japanese. My partner is English. Were we all utter failures?

“Multi-kulti” covers a grey area somewhere between co-existence and co-operation, and one hopes the German chancellor was trying to speak in favour of team-play and against mere tolerance. My guess is that Merkel wasn’t talking about us, or about Poles, Italians or Greeks living in Germany, but about her country’s 4 million-strong Muslim population – in which case she has still chosen her words terribly badly. The result is a faux pas uncharacteristic of a politician who has won a reputation for treading quietly in matters diplomatic.

So what made her say it? The question over how to integrate Muslim migrants and the rest of German society is hardly new: politicians and commentators have been discussing it ever since the first wave of Gastarbeiter (migrant workers) arrived in the 1960s. If you look at the figures alone, there would be no particular reason to reheat the debate at this time: the number of Turkish immigrants into Germany in 2008 was as low as it had last been in 1983, according to Der Spiegel magazine, and the number of asylum applications is about a sixth of what it was in the mid-90s. More Turks returned to Turkey last year than came to live in Germany, which is actually bad news for the German economy, because with the population forecast to fall by 11.6 million by 2050, the country needs every qualified worker it can get its hands on.

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The decline of the West

Perhaps the clearest evidence of the decline of Western civilization is the example of those who now shout it its defense.

In the name of protecting civilization, a movement promoting racial supremacism is infecting Western consciousness with the notion that a set of values and cultural constructions is now in jeopardy when in fact our civilization’s corruption is already well advanced.

If the progress of Western civilization came about through the unfettering of the power of the people in egalitarian societies, that trend was quietly reversed as citizens became consumers. In recent decades, that decline further deepened as economic “advance” turned out to be a mask concealing expanding inequality.

In the hollow culture which this has created, beyond employing a stock of well-worn platitudes about freedom and liberty, civilization’s self-appointed protectors find it easier to spotlight purported threats than describe exactly what they are defending.

In this context we should note that American culture remains influenced by European culture more than any other and to the extent that Europe provides a cultural compass, we should be alarmed at the direction this now points. An ocean will not protect us from its influence.

Christian Science Monitor reports:

A new survey in Germany shows that 13 percent of its citizens would welcome a “Führer” — a German word for leader that is explicitly associated with Adolf Hitler — to run the country “with a firm hand.”

The findings signal that Europe’s largest nation, freed from cold-war strictures, is not immune from the extreme and often right-wing politics on the rise around the Continent.

The study, released Oct. 13 by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, affiliated with the center-left Social Democratic Party, revealed among other things that more than a third of Germans feel the country is “overrun by foreigners,” some 60 percent would “restrict the practice of Islam,” and 17 percent think Jews have “too much influence.”

The study’s overall snapshot of German society shows new forms of extremism and hate are no longer the province of far-right cohorts who shave their heads or wear leather jackets adorned with silver skulls – but register in the tweedy political center, on the right and the left. Indeed, the study found, extremism in Germany isn’t a fringe phenomenon but is found in the political center, “in all social groups and in all age groups, regardless of employment status, educational level or gender.”

The year 2010 is marking a clear shift toward extremist politics across Europe, analysts say. An uncertain economy, a gap between elites and ordinary Europeans, and fraying of a traditional sense of national identity has just in the past month brought more hard-line politics and speech, often aimed at Islam or immigrants – into a political mainstream where it had been absent or considered taboo.

On Oct. 10, the city of Vienna, a cosmopolitan and socialist stronghold since World War II, voted the far-right Freedom Party into a ruling coalition. The party, which ran on an “anti-minaret” platform in a city with only one mosque, was formerly associated with nationalist Jorg Haider, but has been reinvented by an animated former dental hygienist, Heinz-Christian Strache.

On Sept. 19, Sweden, long a Scandinavian redoubt of social tolerance and openness, put the far-right Sweden Democrats into parliament for the first time.

Further, this week the Netherlands saw the rise to influence, if not power, of the anti-Islam party of Geert Wilders, a social liberal who argues for gay rights – but whose main platform is to ban the Quran and the practice of Islam in the Low Countries. Mr. Wilders’ party will formally participate in the Dutch ruling coalition without specifically joining it.

Ian Buruma writes:

All these countries may soon be following the Danish model, in which the illiberal populist parties pledge their support without actually governing, thereby gaining power without responsibility. Denmark’s Conservative government could not govern without the support of the People’s party. Sweden’s recently re-elected conservative Moderate party will have to rely on the Democrats to form a viable government. And Wilders has already received assurances from the conservative and Christian Democrat parties that, in exchange for his support, the burqa will be banned in the Netherlands and immigration curbed.

The influence of these slick new populists, waging their war on Islam, goes well beyond their countries’ borders. Nativism is on the rise all over the western world, and Wilders, in particular, is a popular speaker at rightwing anti-Muslim gatherings in the US, Britain and Germany.

European populism focuses on Islam and immigration, but it may be mobilising a wider rage against elites expressed by people who feel unrepresented, or fear being left behind economically. They share a feeling of being dispossessed by foreigners, of losing their sense of national, social, or religious belonging. Northern Europe’s political elites, largely Social or Christian Democrats, have often been dismissive of such fears, and their paternalism and condescension may be why the backlash in those liberal countries has been particularly fierce.

The question is what to do about it. One possible solution is to let populist parties join the government if they get a sufficient number of votes. The idea of a Tea Party candidate becoming US president is alarming, to be sure, but European populists could only be part of coalition governments.

True, Hitler’s Nazis took over Germany almost as soon as they were voted into power, but the new European right are not Nazis. They have not used violence, or broken any laws. Not yet. As long as this is so, why not give them real political responsibility? They would then not only have to prove their competence, but also moderate their attitudes.

Buruma’s assumption that governance inherently imposes a moderating effect, seems very dubious. Look at Avigdor Lieberman and his Yisrael Beiteinu party in an Israel that prides itself on its Western identity. There’s little evidence that participation in government has forced them to turn away from extremism.

The underlying idea here is one that has guided the eviscerated Left for the last two decades: that the political challenges of the day can only be met by some form of reaction or accommodation through which the sacred political center can be reclaimed. The idea that the Left provides a genuine political alternative has — at least by mainstream politicians — been effectively abandoned.

This is the context in which an American underclass is expanding, ready to be corralled by rightwing, xenophobic opportunists.

The Guardian‘s Paul Mason went to Atlanta to see how economic decline is reshaping American society.

Unable to borrow or earn, a whole generation is being shut out of the American lifestyle.

Meanwhile, some states have begun a race to the bottom: slashing welfare, labour regulations and local taxes to attract investment. High-wage companies close and relocate to low-wage states, and foreign investment flows to the towns where labour costs are lowest. These states are being transformed by the arrival of low-waged Hispanic migrants even as the rightwing politicians who support the economics rail against the demographics.

As a result the so-called Sun Belt, identified by Republican strategist Kevin Phillips in the 1970s as the new political bedrock of conservatism, now feels like the unhappiest place in America. Median incomes in the south are, on average, $8,000 lower than in the northeast; poverty rates are higher than anywhere else in America — and so are the racial and religious tensions.

In the midterm elections politicians have promised to “do something” for the middle class. The kindest thing they could do is tell the truth: Americans have been living a middle-class lifestyle on working-class wages — and bridging the gap with credit. And it’s over.

Instead, the message is that the American way of life is as good as ever — just so long as it can be protected from foreign threats: the economic threat from undocumented Latino workers and the cultural threat from dangerous Muslims.

A real alternative, however, would go much further than pointing out that most Americans have for too long been living beyond their means — it would spell out that the American dream is built on a false promise and our concern should not be reduced to who has access to its fulfillment and who does not. That false promise is that the good life flows from the good stuff.

In one of the tales of Mullah Nasrudin, his friend finds him in misery with bleeding lips as he chews on red hot chillies. “Why do you keep on biting into those chillies?” his friend asks. “I’m looking for the sweet one,” the Mullah answers as he digs deeper into his basket. We too find it difficult to abandon that futile quest for a sweet chili.

America now suffers less from the consequences of easy access to credit than the fact that we have virtually no conception of material sufficiency. Our fascination with the future is driven by an experience of the present as defined by unmet needs. Ours is a condition of perpetual insufficiency. The land of opportunity is populated by people who can never have enough.

Only when we discover we have enough can we pause, take stock and consider what is of real value. The defense of civilization consists not in thwarting foreign threats but recognizing the ways in which we value or devalue civilization’s core assets.

We are now warned of a dreadful “Japanification” of America if consumers refuse to consume.

Is that all that Americans are: the earthworms of the global economy? Or might we find some hidden wealth through material loss?

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Time to make national heroes out of those who steal secrets and publish them in the newspaper

Coleen Rowley, legal counsel to the FBI field office in Minneapolis from 1990 to 2003 and Bogdan Dzakovic, a special agent for the Federal Aviation Authority’s security division, suggest that had WikiLeaks existed in 2001, they might have been able to make public information that could have prevented the 9/11 attacks.

In the Los Angeles Times they write:

The 9/11 Commission concluded, correctly in our opinion, that the failure to share information within and between government agencies — and with the media and the public — led to an overall failure to “connect the dots.”

Many government careerists are risk-averse. They avoid making waves and, when calamity strikes, are more concerned with protecting themselves than with figuring out what went wrong and correcting it.

Decisions to speak out inside or outside one’s chain of command — let alone to be seen as a whistle-blower or leaker of information — is fraught with ethical and legal questions and can never be undertaken lightly. But there are times when it must be considered. Official channels for whistle-blower protections have long proved illusory. In the past, some government employees have gone to the media, but that can’t be done fully anonymously, and it also puts reporters at risk of being sent to jail for refusing to reveal their sources. For all of these reasons, WikiLeaks provides a crucial safety valve.

“Dr Ellsberg, do you have any concern about the possibility of going to prison for this?” Daniel Ellsberg was asked after he had leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971.

“Wouldn’t you go to prison to help end this war?” Ellsberg responded.

Since 9/11, how many employees or now former-employees of the US government have asked themselves whether actions they declined to take at the most opportune moment could have prevented a decade of war and the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives?

The idea that WikiLeaks could have facilitated such actions, seems to me, to have more to do with soothing troubled consciences than with a need to make whistle-blowing easier.

Ambassador Joe Wilson published his famous op-ed, “What I Didn’t Find in Africa,” in July 2003, once it was clear that weapons of mass destruction were not going to be found in Iraq. The day he should have gone public with what he knew was January 29, 2003 — the day after President Bush’s State of the Union speech in which Bush falsely claimed: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

What Wilson lacked was not WikiLeaks but the courage of a man like Ellsberg and the willingness to place the interests of others above his own.

Rather than looking for ways to make whistle-blowing safer, we might benefit more as a society if we more whole-heartedly celebrated those who risk their careers and even their liberty by following the dictates of their conscience.

While WikiLeaks can perform a vital function, we should not lose sight of the fact that the political impact of whistle-blowing can have more to do with the power of a public act of conscience than with the information that is revealed. When an individual in a position of authority takes a huge personal risk because of their allegiance to truth, the sheer power of their integrity calls the operations of government into question. The availability of WikiLeaks cannot make up for the shortage of Ellsbergs.

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Chas Freeman: Engaging the Middle East — after the Cairo speech

By Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.), Tufts University, October 15, 2010

As an American, I look at the results of U.S. policies in the Middle East and they remind me of the T-shirt someone once gave me. It said: “Sinatra is dead. Elvis is dead. And me, I don’t feel so good.”

The Middle East is a constant reminder that a clear conscience is usually a sign of either a faulty memory or a severe case of arrogant amorality. It is not a badge of innocence. These days, we meticulously tally our own battlefield dead; we do not count the numbers of foreigners who perish at our hands or those of our allies. Yet each death is a tragedy that extinguishes one soul and wounds others. This deserves our grief. If we cannot feel it, we may justly be charged with inhumanity.

All that is required to be hated is to do hateful things. Apparent indifference to the pain and humiliation one has inflicted further outrages its victims, their families, and their friends. As the Golden Rule, common – in one form or another – to all religions, implicitly warns, moral blindness is contagious. That is why warring parties engaged in tit for tat come in time to resemble each other rather than to sharpen their differences.

War is in fact not the spectator sport that the fans who watch it on television or on big screens in theaters imagine. Nor is it the “cakewalk” that its armchair advocates sometimes suggest it might be. War is traumatic for all its participants. Recent experience suggests that 30 percent of troops develop serious mental health problems that dog them after they leave the battlefield. But what of the peoples soldiers seek to punish or pacify? To understand the hatreds war unleashes and its lasting psychological and political consequences, one has only to translate foreign casualty figures into terms we Americans can relate to. You can do this by imagining that the same percentages of Americans might die or suffer injury as foreigners have. Then think about the impact that level of physical and moral insult would have on us.

Consider, for example, the two sides of the Israel-Palestine struggle. So far in this century – since September 29, 2000, when Ariel Sharon marched into the Al Aqsa mosque and ignited the Intifada of that name, about 850 Israeli Jews have died at the hands of Palestinians, 125 or so of them children. That’s equivalent to 45,000 dead Americans, including about 6,800 children. It’s a level of mayhem we Americans cannot begin to understand. But, over the same period, Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed 6,600 or so Palestinians, at least 1,315 of whom were children. In American terms, that’s equivalent to 460,000 U.S. dead, including 95,000 children.

Meanwhile, the American equivalent of almost 500,000 Israelis and 2.9 million Palestinians have been injured. To put it mildly, the human experiences these figures enumerate are not conducive to peace or goodwill among men and women in the Holy Land or anywhere with emotional ties to them.

We all know that events in the Holy Land have an impact far beyond it. American sympathy for Israel and kinship with Jewish settlers assure that Jewish deaths there arouse anti-Arab and anti-Muslim passions here, even as the toll on Palestinians is seldom, if ever, mentioned. But, among the world’s 340 million Arabs and 1.6 billion Muslims, all eyes are on the resistance of Palestinians to continuing ethnic cleansing and the American subsidies and political support for Israel that facilitates their suffering. The chief planner of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, testified under oath that a primary purpose of that criminal assault on the United States was to focus “the American people . . . on the atrocities that America is committing by supporting Israel against the Palestinian people . . . .” The occupation and attempted pacification of other Muslim lands like Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the shocking hate speech about Islam that now pervades American politics lend credence to widening Muslim belief in a U.S. crusade against Islam and its believers.

No one knows how many Iraqis have died as a direct or indirect consequence of the U.S. invasion and the anarchy that followed it. Estimates range between a low of something over 100,000 to a high of well over 1 million. Translated to comparable proportions in the United States, that equates to somewhere between 1 and 13 million dead Americans. Over two-and-a-quarter million Iraqis fled to neighboring countries to escape this bloodbath. An equal number found shelter inside Iraq. Few Iraqis have been able to go back to Iraq or to return to their homes. In our terms, that equals an apparently permanent flight to Canada and Mexico of 24 million Americans, with another 24 million driven into homelessness but, years later, still somewhere inside the country. I think you will agree that, had this kind of thing happened to Americans, religious scruples would not deter many of us from seeking revenge and reprisal against whoever had done it to us.

The numbers in Afghanistan aren’t quite as frightful but they make the same point. We’re accumulating a critical mass of enemies with personal as well as religious and nationalistic reasons to seek retribution against us. As our violence against foreign civilians has escalated, our enemies have multiplied. The logic of this progression is best understood anecdotally.

I am grateful to Bruce Fein (a noted constitutional scholar in Washington, DC) for calling attention to the colloquy of convicted Times Square car bomber Faisal Shahzad with United States District Judge Miriam Cederbaum. She challenged Shahzad’s self-description as a ‘Muslim soldier’ because his contemplated violence targeted civilians,

“Did you look around to see who they were?”

“Well, the people select the government,” Shahzad retorted. “We consider them all the same. The drones, when they hit …”

Cedarbaum interrupted: “Including the children?”

Shahzad countered: “Well, the drone hits in Afghanistan and Iraq, they don’t see children, they don’t see anybody. They kill women, children, they kill everybody. It’s a war, and in war, they kill people. They’re killing all Muslims.”

Later, he added: “I am part of the answer to the U.S. terrorizing the Muslim nations and the Muslim people. And, on behalf of that, I’m avenging the attack. Living in the United States, Americans only care about their own people, but they don’t care about the people elsewhere in the world when they die.”

No amount of public diplomacy, no matter how cleverly conducted, can prevail over the bitterness of personal and collective experience. The only way to reverse trends supporting anti-American violence by the aggrieved is to reverse the policies that feed it. That means finding alternatives to military intervention as the principal instrument of U.S. foreign policy, and it means returning to the American tradition of respect for the sovereignty and ways of life of other nations.

That perspective was best stated by John Quincy Adams in his speech to the U.S. House of Representatives of July 4, 1821. Adams said, with pride, that: “America . . . has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, [even] when the conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart . . . She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. . . . She might become the dictatress of the world: she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.” In my view, Adams was right in both his prescription and his prognosis.

We are now a nation with unmatched military capabilities. Perhaps that is why we are the only country in the world to have proclaimed that our conflict with terrorists is a “war,” or to have dismissed civilian victims of our violence as “collateral damage.” Other nations have joined us in Afghanistan to demonstrate their solidarity with us, not because they see the piecemeal pacification of the Muslim world as the answer to the extremist non-state actors in its midst. It is not simply that terrorism is a tactic, not a cause against which one can wage war. Weapons are indeed tools with which to change men’s minds, but to do this they must be employed with care, otherwise they can entrench animosity and justify reprisal against the nation that wields them. No other people has so powerful a military establishment that it could even begin to persuade itself, as many Americans have, that guns can cure grudges or missiles erase militancy.

If you view the world through a bombsight, everything looks like a target. Yet the lesson of 9/11 is that if you drop bombs on enough people – even on people with no air force – the most offended amongst them will do their best to bomb you back. Security challenges far from our shores now challenge domestic tranquility. The lesson of Iraq and Afghanistan is that there are some problems for which invasion and occupation are not appropriate or effective responses. Far from demonstrating the irresistible might of the United States, as their neo-conservative champions intended, these wars have revealed the considerable limits of American power. Over-reliance on military instruments of statecraft has become a major problem for us. It is one we need to address.

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Gilad Atzmon joins forces with Robert Wyatt

Yaron Frid writes:

In 1963 a baby was born in Israel. In 1972 a man fell from the third floor (or the fourth – views are divided ) in England in the middle of the night. Both of them took off on the wings of music, and life would one day organize a surprising encounter between them.

This is a sad story with a jolting soundtrack made of the howl of a saxophone and the wail of a clarinet. It’s a story of displaced persons who have no other country, featuring war criminals, Nazi-hunters and God in a cameo role, tempered by large daubs of irony and a few crumbs of hope.

Morning. Rain. Rail strike. Soho, London. Who is the huge chuckling fellow in the Italian cafe who is polishing off a schnitzel sandwich (washed down with tea ) and welcomes me with comments like “There is no light at the end of the Israeli tunnel”? Or, “I think there is something untenable, simply untenable in the fact that the Jews, who suffered so much racial discrimination, should establish a state that is founded on race laws.” And, topping the charts, “I am dead against the existence of the Jewish state.” It’s still early in the morning, let me remind you. I-am-dead-against-the-existence-of-the-Jewish-state-and-pass-the-sweetener-please. Good morning to you, too, Gilad Atzmon.

The fact that the cafe is across from Ronnie Scott’s famous jazz club offers a subtle hint about Atzmon’s identity. He is one of the most acclaimed and in-demand jazz musicians in the world and he only enhances his glory – or totally destroys it, it depends whom you ask – when his mouth isn’t otherwise occupied with a saxophone (or a schnitzel ).

Atzmon says he is dealing not with politics, but with ethics. Maybe in his case it really isn’t just a matter of semantics. Or cosmetics. But we’re here to talk about music. And about beauty. “This beauty which simply spills out of you,” he says, “effortlessly, unconsciously, in the most wonderful moments of creativity, and when that happens you understand that you are only the carrier of the spirit, of something bigger than you, over which you have absolutely no control. I have no connection with that beauty, I just eat schnitzels. I am only the messenger. I don’t look for the beauty, the beauty finds me and through me finds its way into the world.”

And plenty of beauty finds its way into the world in “For the Ghosts Within,” the new album by Atzmon and his musical partners, which has already earned rave reviews in the British music press, with praise such as “the surprise of the year” and ecstatic descriptions of angels entering the listener’s heart. On the album Atzmon joins forces, as performer, composer, arranger and musical producer, with Ros Stephen and Robert Wyatt.

This is the great Robert Wyatt himself. Cult figure, one of the fathers and pioneers of progressive rock. The one calls the other a genius (“We have a mutual genius pact,” Atzmon chuckles ), while Wyatt says, “It’s a huge honor for me and not at all self-evident that Gilad agreed to work with me. He is an amazing musician, amazing.” But judging by the people Wyatt has worked with – Jimi Hendrix, Mike Oldfield, David Gilmour, Paul Weller, Syd Barrett, Brian Eno, Bjork (a “heavenly creature,” Wyatt sighed ) among others – it’s clear that the honor is also definitely Atzmon’s. He has performed with Paul McCartney, but the collaboration with Wyatt, 65, a unique object of admiration who cuts across tastes, generations and categories (just ask Radiohead’s Thom Yorke ), is something of a step up and a certificate of honor that further cements Atzmon’s status in the British music industry.

Wyatt is the hippie enfant terrible who became a white-bearded guru, a kind of secret national treasure, a genuine survivor who is almost unclassifiable. A drummer in Soft Machine (from which he was thrown out – to this day he maintains “there is nothing worse in life than humiliation” ) and in Matching Mole, he was reborn as a singer-songwriter after falling out of that London window during a drinking binge that lurched out of control. (Pink Floyd immediately rallied to the cause and organized a benefit concert for him. ) The fall left him in a wheelchair for life.

Few musicians have done all he has done – psychedelic, punk, post-punk, avant-garde, fusion and now “clean” jazz with his own twists.

Wyatt is married to Alfreda (Alfie ) Benge, who came to England from Poland as a childhood war refugee. She does the artwork for his album covers, once wrote a searing song about his alcoholism (he has since kicked the habit, or maybe not ) and calls him an “overgrown baby,” while he calls her “the dark side of my moon.” He records his albums, which are like nothing else and are always received as an “event,” in a studio in his home. He has a distinctive tremulous voice (a kind of trademark ), which the composer and musician Ryuichi Sakamoto called “the saddest sound in the world.” Wyatt has survived periods of bottomless, suicidal depression, and for entire decades avoided performing live. (“I think it’s stage fright,” Atzmon says. )

In an interview with the Guardian in June 2009, Wyatt selected Atzmon as the “greatest living artist” and noted that he was “born in Israel, which I prefer to call occupied Palestine.” Atzmon, for his part, says Wyatt is “a genius of the kind that Kant described so well – a genius who seemingly has no part in his own genius, who creates beauty as though ex nihilo. Everything he touches sounds new and completely different and utterly his own. He is totally transparent and through him you see the light.”

Gilad Atzmon writes:

Netanyahu, Barak and many other Israelis are often ‘outraged’ by FM Lieberman. I guess that Israelis grasp that their senior diplomat exposes the Israeli ploy: when Israelis talk peace — what they really mean is war with no end. When Israeli government spokesmen insist that Lieberman “misrepresents Israeli Government’s policies” — what they really mean is that he fails to repeat the Israeli official lies. As it stands, Lieberman’s UN speech few days ago, conveys not only Israeli cabinet vision, it is also a devastating glimpse into the Israeli mindset, worldview and spirit. Lieberman is a transparent image of the Israeli desire for racial and cultural homogeneity. Many Israelis claim to detest him and his ideas: but my guess is that they grasp that Lieberman is actually their true mirror. Otto Weininger wrote in “Sex & Character” that people hate in others that which they detest in themselves. Many Israelis ostensibly oppose Lieberman because he reminds them of the bigot whom they can’t stand in themselves. Some people do not like to look in the mirror; others are devastated when the mirror gazes back at them with pity.

Musical genius rarely accepts the confinement of a genre — or even a restrictive definition of music. In “Little Red Riding Hood Hit the Road,” Robert Wyatt takes a sound that generally remains on the periphery of most people’s consciousness when they hear it, and turns it into a song. It’s a sound probably unfamiliar to many Americans: the sound of a high speed train as it passes into the distance, heard from the platform of a station at which the train didn’t stop. The airborne noise of the engine and carriages are long gone but continue being telegraphed down the tracks in steel-shaped frequencies.

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Obama’s escalating robot war in Pakistan is making a terror attack more likely

Johann Hari writes:

Imagine if, an hour from now, a robot plane swooped over your house and blasted it to pieces. The plane has no pilot. It is controlled with a joystick from 7,000 miles away, sent by the Pakistani military to kill you. It blows up all the houses on your street, and so barbecues your family and your neighbors until there is nothing left to bury but a few charred slops. Why? They refuse to comment. They don’t even admit the robot planes belong to them. But they tell the Pakistani newspapers back home it is because one of you was planning to attack Pakistan. How do they know? Somebody told them. Who? You don’t know, and there are no appeals against the robot.

Now imagine it doesn’t end there: These attacks are happening every week somewhere in your country. They blow up funerals and family dinners and children. The number of robot planes in the sky is increasing every week. You discover they are named “Predators,” or “Reapers” — after the Grim Reaper. No matter how much you plead, no matter how much you make it clear you are a peaceful civilian getting on with your life, it won’t stop. What do you do? If there were a group arguing that Pakistan was an evil nation that deserved to be violently attacked, would you now start to listen?

This sounds like a sketch for the next James Cameron movie — but it is in fact an accurate description of life in much of Pakistan today, with the sides flipped. The Predators and Reapers are being sent by Barack Obama’s CIA, with the support of other Western governments, and they killed more than 700 civilians in 2009 alone — fourteen times more than the 7/7 attacks in London. Last month there was the largest number of robot plane bombings ever: 21. Over the next decade, spending on drones is set to increase by 700 percent.

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Michael Vlahos: Chilean transcendence

By Michael Vlahos*

Miners. Trapped. No way out. Miraculously rescued. Happy end. End of story.

Not so fast.

The resurrection of Chile’s lost miners is a testament to the power of belonging and meaning in human life.

We humans live singularly evanescent lives. Our consciousness is like to the Moth: Done in the flicker of candlelight on a summer night. Gone in an instant.

Yet we live on because eternal hope lives in our collective self. We draw meaning from the river of humanity. Only in this way can we take comfort from the desperate enterprise of life — because our life is eternally shared. Because we belong to a river of life that must go on, our single summer night has meaning. In the end it is all right — because we go on together.

We know this is true. We know this is our prime directive because the shadows of our forgotten ancestors are still there to remind us. They proclaim the river of us in the cave paintings of Lascaux and at the seat of celebration that was Stonehenge.

We all have the same deep-wired drive to make our lives make sense joining ourselves to the river of sacred identity.

My work focuses on how “civilization” — complex post-Neolithic groups of societies — created a celebratory ritual we call war. In history war has always served to create identity, to celebrate identity, and to help identity migrate and transform. War is perhaps our most special human vehicle for framing and reframing consciousness, and for helping consciousness to change.

Since about 1800 war has served the nation-state, and since about 1800 our vision of the “nation” has been our collective benchmark of sacred identity. Peg the U.S. at 1776, France at 1789, and Latin America at 1810-1821. Then the rest followed.

Like it or not we in the West still inhabit a world where the nation is sacred. Our world, tarnished as it is, is still a realm ruled by religious nationalism. We are the reluctant inheritors of a tradition that once corralled hundreds of thousands of young men into a place so that they might selflessly clamber out of trench lines to certain death. We framed and wove for them the most perversely grand human sacrifice in all of humanity’s religious experience: All for the sake of our nations’ transcendence. All for us.

The West blindly drove through two world wars before it could truly see how self-destructive and primitive was its terrible blood ritual. War can celebrate identity and it can also kill it. But thankfully war is not our only ritual of identity.

Chile tells us that. The nation in modernity no longer needs battle to clear our pathways for collective meaning and national transcendence. In fact it never did. Blame Napoleon. His answer to the dispiriting bloodbath of Robespierre revolution was the gloriously bloodbath of battle where the whole nation might transcend.

But Napoleon’s vision brought European civilization to its knees — to its very last gasp — by 1945.

Latin America, Western twin of European Modernity in the early 19th century, never fully embraced Napoleon’s victory-or-death vision. Sure there were skirmishes and scraps like the “War of the Pacific” between Chile and Peru, and of course the notorious Chaco War, but in retrospect these seem like outlier flare-ups compared to European civilization’s drive to self-immolation. Latin America still enshrines the passion of religious nationalism — but without its death-march wars.

So uniting a nation in the rescue of its lost miners makes perfect sense.

Look at the awful contrast. In the wars of religious nationalism the nation would be renewed by the sacrifice of its most precious children on the field of battle. It was an unimaginable blood-sacrifice — a collective ritual that demanded the most horrifying sacrifices for the nation to transcend.

But the miners offer an alternative ritual venue — and an alternative take on nationalism and sacred identity.

If the sacrifice of millions to shrapnel and machine guns in the world wars was for nothing, it was always, always lovingly conveyed and compared to a barely-disguised imagery of Jesus on the Cross.

Like him they died for us. Our own, our beautiful boys died so we might live and ascend as a nation.

But consider the Chilean alternative in the same sacral Christian-national context.

Jesus also came back from the dead out of a tomb in stone. Buried, the miners have come back to Chile — to the body of the nation — from a Stygian sarcophagus. Moreover the lingering and overhanging evil that may have placed them there — Latin America’s daunting legacy of racism and iniquity and latifundial-corporate evil — was instantly expunged by a Presidential commitment to Chile’s buried own.

Ancient legacies can be cast off. The nation can find celebration and renewal without war — and create that sacred moment when the people are one and whole again. The President — with his badge of office signifying the body of the nation — ritually embraces each miner as he emerges into the light of resurrection: Reclaiming them to the body of the nation.

The miracle that ties Chileans to the deep currents of their river is not in blood-sacrifice but rather the promise of a nation transcendent in new life.

*Michael Vlahos is Professor of Strategy at the United States Naval War College. This article first appeared at Huffington Post and is republished here with the author’s permission.

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Israel’s identity problem

Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, is calling for an end to Israel’s invisibility.

Whatever Israel suffers from, invisibility is not among its problems. A country like Lesotho might wish for greater visibility, but Israel already claims a share of the world’s attention that vastly outsizes its importance.

Oren’s appeal for attention however, is not directed at the world — the pining for acceptance that he articulates is that the Palestinians should recognize Israel as a Jewish state. Isn’t it strange that Israelis could prize the opinions of Palestinians so highly while treating their lives so harshly? (Yes, I’m being sarcastic.)

Affirmation of Israel’s Jewishness… is the very foundation of peace, its DNA. Just as Israel recognizes the existence of a Palestinian people with an inalienable right to self-determination in its homeland, so, too, must the Palestinians accede to the Jewish people’s 3,000-year connection to our homeland and our right to sovereignty there. This mutual acceptance is essential if both peoples are to live side by side in two states in genuine and lasting peace.

As the saying goes, possession is nine-tenths of the law, so Oren’s claim that Israel already accords the same level of recognition to Palestinians that it now demands from them, doesn’t mean much. The Palestinian homeland (which he posits not as their homeland but its homeland), is clear in only one respect: it is located some place else than “our” homeland. And this of course denies any conventional notion of a homeland which would likely include the place ones grandparents or great grandparents lived — the place where ones ancestral roots trace back centuries.

Oren cherry-picks part of the Balfour Declaration noting that it “called for the creation of ‘a national home for the Jewish people’ in the land then known as Palestine,” but neglecting that part of the very same sentence which says “it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” Had a national home for the Jewish people actually been established on those terms, it’s hard to see how it could have been established as a Jewish state. Certainly three quarters of a million Palestinians could not have been driven out of the homes and off their land.

“The core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been the refusal to recognize Jews as a people, indigenous to the region and endowed with the right to self-government,” Oren claims, yet could have much more reasonably asserted: “The core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been the refusal to recognize Palestinians as a people, indigenous to the region and endowed with the right to self-government.”

What’s Oren and the Israeli government’s agenda here? Having fully grasped the fact that they now have a desperate sucker in the White House batting for them, they’re going for gold: push the Palestinians to relinquish their right of return in exchange for a momentary continuation in the slight slowdown of colonial expansion in the West Bank. What a deal! Except of course they know full well that even Mahmoud Abbas is not going to make a concession like this, so, as has happened so many times before, Israel makes an impossible demand so that once it is refused the Palestinians can be portrayed as intransigent.

It’s a game that Israel will continue to play for as long as it believes that it has more to lose than it has to gain from a peace agreement.

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Israeli forces train for Arab transfer riots

Jonathan Cook reports:

Israel secretly staged a training exercise last week to test its ability to quell any civil unrest that might result from a peace deal that calls for the forcible transfer of many Arab citizens, the Israeli media has reported.

The drill was intended to test the readiness of the civil defence units, police, army and prison service to contain large-scale riots by Israel’s Arab minority in response to such a deal.

The transfer scenario echoes a proposal by Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s far-right foreign minister, for what he has called a “population exchange”. Mr Lieberman proposes land swaps that would force many of Israel’s 1.3 million Arab citizens into a future Palestinian state in return for annexation into Israel of most of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank. The scheme has been widely criticised as a violation of international law.

He outlined his proposal to the United Nations General Assembly last month. Although Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, said he was not consulted about the speech, he did not admonish Mr Lieberman. The training exercise has fuelled fears among Israel’s Arab minority that the government might be hoping to pressure Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority (PA), to agree to land and population swaps as part of US-sponsored peace negotiations, which have stalled.

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Ahmadinejad in Lebanon

While the Iranian president’s visit to Southern Lebanon is being portrayed in the Western media largely in terms of an act of provocation directed at Israel by an antagonist and intruding regional power, the historical ties between that part of Lebanon and Iran span centuries.

Nicholas Blanford writes:

When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad tours Lebanon’s border with Israel today, he may pause a moment to consider that Iran owes its existence as a Shiite nation to the ancestors of those living in these rural hilltop villages.

Iran wasn’t always the center of Shiite scholarship

In the early 16th century, the center for Shiite scholarship was in an area known as Jabal Amil, a rugged hill country that conforms closely to the geographical perimeters of modern-day south Lebanon. When Shah Ismael I, the Safavid ruler of Iran, introduced Shiism as the state religion in the 16th century, he turned to the scholars of Jabal Amil to help promulgate the new faith.

Dozens of scholars traveled to Iran, settling there, marrying, learning Persian, and involving themselves in the rivalries and intrigues of the Safavid court. It was the beginning of a linkage of families and learning between two Shiite communities lying at opposite ends of the Middle East that remains today.

Reports that Ahmadinejad received a hero’s welcome are put in perspective by Nussaibah Younis, who writes:

The support that Ahmadinejad enjoys in Lebanon’s Shia heartlands can be compared to the support that a corporate sponsor might expect from Manchester United fans: bored gratitude. The biggest cheer that Ahmadinejad’s speech managed to raise out of the crowd came when he thanked Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, as a “dear warrior and scholar”.

Nasrallah was the real star of the show. Rumours that he might appear in person at the rally drew large expectant crowds. Though there was a sigh of disappointment when Nasrallah only appeared via video link, the forceful and impassioned clarity with which he spoke whipped the crowd into a flag-waving and slogan-chanting frenzy. Nasrallah spoke mindfully of his larger audience in Lebanon, and tried the novel approach of presenting Iran’s foreign policy as “unifying”. He praised Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, for issuing a fatwa forbidding Muslims to react to the Qur’an burning-fiasco in the US with “similar acts”, claiming that Iran was acting in the best interests of Christian-Muslim unity.

He also congratulated the Iranian cleric for his handling of a highly controversial London conference in which a little-known Shia activist disparaged Aisha, the wife of the prophet Muhammad, who is highly revered by Sunnis but considered a traitor by many Shias. Iran’s supreme leader Khamenei had responded with a statement forbidding insulting talk about the wives of the prophet, thereby – according to Nasrallah – acting as a force for unity between Sunnis and Shias.

Many Lebanese would have a lot to say about claims that Iran is a “unifying force in the region”, but the speech did make clear that Nasrallah’s crowd appeal is unmatched and that his power among many Shias does not need to be enforced by Iran. If anything, Hezbollah deftly staged a welcome for Ahmadinejad designed to encourage the Iranians to dig deeper and give more generously to Hezbollah’s cause.

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How did 1938 turn out to be such a long year?

“It’s 1938 and Iran is Germany and it’s racing to arm itself with atomic bombs,” Benjamin Netanyahu declared four years ago.

By 1942, Germany had snared itself in the disastrous Battle of Stalingrad — but let’s allow Netanyahu some latitude with his metaphor and assume that it’s still 1938 and that Iran’s race has merely suffered a few interruptions.

So, it’s still 1938 and Iran’s Hitler has come to Israel’s border to survey the nation he intends wiping off the map.

In anticipation of this historic moment, Aluf Benn wrote last month:

Netanyahu will have a one-time opportunity to stop the new Hitler and thwart the incitement to genocide. Ahmadinejad will pay his first visit to Lebanon and devote an entire day to a tour of the southern part of that country. He will visit sites where Hezbollah waged battles against Israel and, according to one report, he will also pop over to Fatima Gate, just beyond the border fence at Metula. The route is known, the range is close and it is possible to send a detail across the border to seize the president of Iran and bring him to trial in Israel as an inciter to genocide and Holocaust denier.

The media effect will be dramatic: Ahmadinejad in a glass cage in Jerusalem, with the simultaneous translation earphones, facing grim Israeli judges. In the spirit of the times, it will also be possible to have foreign observers join them (David Trimble of the Turkel commission was a leader of the “try the Iranian president” initiative ).

There are also operational advantages: Iran will hesitate to react to its president’s arrest by flinging missiles, out of fear for their leader’s life. It will also be possible to capture Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who will no doubt emerge from his hiding place and accompany Ahmadinejad. Israel will have high-ranking hostages it will be able to exchange for Gilad Shalit.

And if the world has any complaints, it will be reminded that the Americans invaded Panama in order to arrest its ruler Manuel Noriega – and only for dealing drugs, a far smaller offense than incitement to genocide.

Of course, the idea also has disadvantages. Ahmadinejad might be killed in the action and Iran would embark on a cruel war of revenge. The precedent of arresting leaders would endanger Israeli personages suspected abroad of crimes against humanity or murder (according to the Goldstone report and the flotilla report ). Ahmadinejad could be acquitted and make Israel look like a bully and Netanyahu a fool.

Nevertheless, how can Netanyahu refrain from an action to stop Hitler’s heir, when the year is already 1939, if not 1940? According to Netanyahu’s reasoning, if he refrains from acting history will condemn him for “not preventing a crime,” as with Margalit Har-Shefi, who didn’t stop Yigal Amir from assassinating Yitzhak Rabin.

Benn’s point was not to advocate a reckless course of action but to underline the difference between rousing rhetoric and statesmanship.

For all those inside and outside Israel who swallowed Netanyahu’s rhetoric however, this is a telling moment to reflect on the proposition that the clown from Tehran — provocative as he might be — can seriously be compared to Hitler. Anyone who still clings to this notion must now consider its corollary: that if Ahmadinejad is Hitler, then Netanyahu — through his inaction — turns out to be a Chamberlain not Churchill.

So how truly significant is it that Iran’s president is currently now enjoying all the honors of a visiting head of state (even though he isn’t one)?

Rhami Khouri puts the drama in perspective and says:

[Ahmadinejad’s] visit represents a blow to Washington’s strategy of bringing Lebanon firmly into its orbit.

For most Arab governments, the Iranian-Hizbullah connection represents everything they fear for their own incumbency: armed Shiite movements inside countries where mostly Sunni Muslim Arabs dominated public life; popular resistance movements that do battle according to their own strategic calculations; Iranian meddling in Arab affairs; and, Arab mass movements that connect with compatriots across the region in their common opposition to and defiance of conservative Arabs, Israel and the US itself.

So at some levels it is understandable why so many people in the region and abroad are making a lot of noise about the Iranian president’s visit to Lebanon. At another level, though, that of substance vs. symbolism, this is a pretty routine event that does not necessarily break new ground, but mainly reflects and emphasizes existing political realities that generate frenzied, nearly hysterical, reactions on both sides.

The irony is that by elevating his importance on the international stage while his real challenges come from home, no one serves Iran’s president as more effective publicists than do Israel and the United States.

As Meir Javedanfar notes:

Ahmadinejad has never been more unpopular in Iran, not only with the public but also his conservative allies and the clergy. By going to Lebanon, he is going to one of the last places where the Islamic Republic still has genuine support. When he speaks in Bint Jbeil, unlike in Iran, schools won’t be closed and civil servants won’t be threatened with dismissal unless they attend the president’s speech. People will voluntarily turn up because they genuinely support the Islamic republic and will pay respect to almost any senior Iranian politician.

By going to Lebanon, Ahmadinejad will primarily be using the occasion to try to strengthen his support back home with the public, and with the Revolutionary Guards, whose support is important to him. He will also be trying to outshine his rivals such as Ali Larijani and Hashemi Rafsanjani by using the trip to say that he is the true face of Iran abroad, and not them.

This development will also benefit supreme leader Ali Khamenei, who is most probably very concerned about Ahmadinejad’s flagging popularity.

What is important to note is that such a visit did not take place when Khatami was president. If anyone deserves to be in southern Lebanon, it is him, and not Ahmadinejad. Israel evacuated southern Lebanon in May 2000 on Khatami’s watch, not Ahmadinejad’s.

However, Khamenei did not send Khatami to southern Lebanon because he was not worried about his unpopularity. In fact, compared with Ahmadinejad, he was far more popular. The opposite is true about Ahmadinejad and this is why Khamenei, for the sake of his regime, is sending him there.

The RealNews Network has an interesting report on Ahmadinejad’s posture as an anti-capitalist.

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Might the US be holding a fugitive Mossad agent in secret detention?

Eight months after the murder of the Hamas commander, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, in Dubai, two reports in the last few days present intriguingly contradictory pictures.

First came a Wall Street Journal report on Friday with the headline, “In Global Hunt for Hit Men, Tantalizing Trail Goes Cold.”

The Journal has followed this story more closely than any other US newspaper and this report contained some interesting new information — such as that one of the key suspects, recently using the name Christopher Lockwood, had previously used the identity of a young Israeli soldier, Yehuda Lustig, who was killed during the Yom Kippur War in 1973.

Still, as the headline suggested, investigators were no closer to tracking down Lockwood or any of the other suspects widely assumed to be Israeli Mossad agents. An Israeli who had been arrested in Poland, extradited to Germany and then released on bail in August, swiftly returned to Israel.

The trail has gone cold — but not according to Lt Gen Dahi Khalfan Tamim, the Dubai chief of police. He told The National on Monday that in fact a major suspect was arrested two months ago by a Western country but authorities in that country have requested that no information about the arrest should be made public.

The Abu Dhabi newpaper reported: “The country that arrested the suspect two months ago is not believed to be European.”

So which Western countries do we already know are involved in the case? The only non-European Western country that suspects are known to have traveled to after the murder is the United States.

A suspect traveling as an Irishman, Evan Dennings, entered the US on January 21, the day after Mabhouh’s body was found. And another suspect traveling with a British passport under the name, Roy Allan Cannon, casually entered the US on February 14, right in the middle of the period when the story was receiving global media attention.

The Journal now reports on these suspects that:

Their passport details showed up in a U.S. border-control system that collects electronic manifests of international flights and screens them against passenger watch lists, according to people familiar with the probe and to investigation documents reviewed by the Journal. That suggested the suspects had boarded planes bound for the U.S. The information was passed to international investigators involved in the case, raising hopes of a capture.

But the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has since said it doesn’t have records of the two suspects in its system.

It doesn’t have the records — meaning the records have vanished? Been handed over to a different agency, such as the FBI? Or what?

Something doesn’t add up here.

If it turned out that a suspected murderer who belonged to Mossad was arrested in the US, there’s no doubt that the Obama administration would be in a quandary about how to proceed. The one thing we can sure of is that it would guard its actions with the utmost secrecy.

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Israel is ceasing to be a Jewish state and turning into a state for some Jews

Carlo Strenger has an interesting op-ed in Haaretz. It’s worth reading the whole piece (part of which appears below). Comments of mine follow.

There is nothing left to say about how bad, harmful and useless the new citizenship law is: Labor Party Minister Isaac Herzog has warned that it is another step towards fascism; legal experts like Mordechai Kremnitzer have pointed out that it doesn’t serve any identifiable purpose except making Arabs feeling even less at home in Israel. Likud Ministers Benny Begin and Dan Meridor have pointed out how harmful the law is for the relation with Israeli Arabs and for Israel’s standing in the world.

Both Shas and Yisrael Beiteinu have already declared that they see this law as just a first step in a general attempt towards ensuring loyalty to the state by legislation. The time has come to ask what really stands behind this rising tide. The obvious answer seems to be that it is directed against both Israel’s Arab citizenry, whom Avigdor Lieberman is alienating and insulting almost every day, and Palestinians who want to gain Israeli citizenship.

But I think that this is not the whole story. Consider this strangest of alliances between Yisrael Beiteinu and Shas; one is a completely secular, ultra-nationalist, the other an ultra-Orthodox party. What do they have in common? Why are they lately so effectively cooperating with each other, together with other extreme-right parties?

I believe that what unites them is less a fear of Israel’s enemies (and Israel does have enemies). It is a visceral hatred for the Western values and the liberal ethos. They all hate freedom; they all hate the idea of critical, open discourse, in which ideas are discussed according to their merit. They keep criticizing what they see as the liberal bias of the media and academia, and they have made sustained attempts to curtail freedom of speech at the universities.

Lieberman’s disdain for these ideas breaks through at every possible moment: lately he has insulted French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner and Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Moratinos, telling them they should take care of their own problems in Europe before they come to advise Israel. This has been typical of him for a long time: Lieberman thinks that Israel should turn east; that it should no longer define itself as a Western country, and should finally shake off Israel’s original commitment to be part of the Western world.

Shas has made clear for decades that it just plays along with democracy; that it doesn’t believe in the idea of citizens thinking critically: they believe that only their spiritual leader, Ovadia Yossef, must determine what is right and what is wrong. Other ultra-rightists have been feeling for a long time that the commitment to universal values is undermining their program for the greater Israel in which Palestinians should have no political rights.

They cannot stand the idea that a liberal democracy should be based on rational legislation and is open to criticism by all. They are furious that tribal loyalty is not above criticism. Just lately, national religious rabbis have claimed that studying at universities is a danger for young religious people, because they internalize too many enlightenment values.

We are really talking about a right-wing anti-liberal coalition united by an instinctive hatred against the idea that there are universal standards of rationality and of morality. They do not want to hear criticism of their worldviews that relies on ideas that have, for a long time, been common to the free world. What we are seeing is a fight about Israel’s cultural and political identity.

For many liberal Israelis, the proposed new citizenship law represents a red line which once crossed will lead inexorably to the end of Israeli democracy. The foundation of that fear is the conviction that Israel has a democracy to lose.

Point out the contradictions inherent in the idea of a Jewish democracy, which by its nature grants preferential rights to Jews, and the liberal-Zionist shrug is to say, it’s a work in progress. No democracy is perfect.

Still, a real threshold has emerged and it consists above all in matters of perception: Israel is becoming a state which no longer serves and is instead threatening the needs of liberal Jewish identity — an identity in which neither half is meant to subvert the other.

Israel is ceasing to be a Jewish state and turning into a state for some Jews.

One could argue that this has long been the case, since for most Jews Israel is either an imaginary life insurance policy or of no particular relevance to their own lives. Even so, what has sustained Israel is the importance of the idea of a Jewish state in the minds of most Jews, irrespective of where they choose to live.

In this context, the Palestinians are irrelevant. They are peripheral to a conversation that has less to do with contested rights than it has to do with contested Jewish identity.

No wonder the peace process has gone nowhere. The wrong parties have been engaged in negotiations.

There is no Israeli consensus because there is no Jewish consensus. The tribe no longer exists (if it ever did) but rather than confront that fact, it has been hidden behind a veil: the unquestionable need for a Jewish state.

As the need for a Jewish state becomes untethered from Jewish identity, no wonder there is a drive to chain it to the law.

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Pamela Geller’s English friends — Islamophobes united

(Update below)

Pamela Geller — “hate monger and anti-mosque queen bee,” as she has been dubbed by Charles Johnson at the conservative blog where she got her start — has “helped bring into the mainstream a concept that after 9/11 percolated mainly on the fringes of American politics: that terrorism by Muslims springs not from perversions of Islam but from the religion itself,” write Anne Barnard and Alan Feuer in a New York Times profile.

Geller’s profile is twice the length of a piece Barnard wrote on Park51’s Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf in August. That’s presumably because Geller is now “a media commodity.”

Not until we get close to the end of the Geller profile do we hear mention of her connections to the notorious fascist group, the English Defence League.

Ms. Geller went on to champion as patriotic the English Defense League, which opposes the building of mosques in Britain and whose members have been photographed wearing swastikas. (In the interview, Ms. Geller said the swastika-wearers must have been “infiltrators” trying to discredit the group.)

In March, when the EDL held a rally in support of the visiting Dutch politician and anti-Islam leader, Geert Wilders, Geller wrote:

How I wish I could be there to stand with the English Defense League.

The EDL’s notoriety has no doubt been fueled by its more photogenic members and their drunken behavior, but the movement is not only attracting disaffected white skinheads.

In May, The Guardian (see also the accompanying video) recounted meeting an EDL leader who alluded to the group’s growing links to the US.

On a chilly evening in early March, Alan Lake settles into his seat in a cafe in central London. This smartly dressed man in his mid-40s has emerged as a key figure in the organisation and is quickly into his stride — warning that the UK will have Sharia law in the next 40 years “unless something is done”.

A London-based IT consultant, Lake has spoken at several EDL rallies and sees himself as one of the organisation’s thinkers. “The middle-class intellectuals are coming forward and also American speakers – some of them quite famous, although I can’t give you names yet … they love the fact that we can have people that can go on the streets.”

Addressing a far-right anti-Islam conference in Sweden last year, Lake told delegates it was necessary to build a united “anti-Jihad movement” and spoke of the need for “people that are ready to go out in the street”, boasting that he and his friends had begun to build alliances with “more physical groups like football fans”. Lake says he is opposed to violence or confrontation but regularly returns to the importance of the EDL’s physical presence.

In a post at the 4Freedoms Community website, Lake described his vision of segregation in the UK in the coming decades:

In 20 or 30 years the UK will start to fragment into Islamic enclaves and non-Islamic areas around them. Its time we decided who will be allowed in the non-Islamic areas. These are the people who we will force into the Islamic enclaves (and who we will execute if they sneak out).

By forcing these liberal twits into those enclaves we will be sending them to their death, at worst, and at best they and their families will be subjected to all the depredations, persecution and abuse that non-Muslims worldwide currently ‘enjoy’ in countries like Pakistan, Iran and Egypt. It will be great to see them executed or tortured to death…

Please everyone, start to contribute the names of all those we will send with their wives and children to enjoy the religion of peace. We are taking away the middle ground for sympathisers and appeasers. Sure, they can say they support the gangsters of Islamism if they want, it’s their choice! But we will not let them just stand in the middle and say it, hanging back from actually BEING WITH those Hamas and Hizbullah endorsing gangs. If they like that so much, they can be with them, lock, stock and barrel.

Here’s some names to start off. Please note this is a discussion, we need to work it out before sending them to their sordid end.
1. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury
2. David Cameron [Britain’s prime minister]
3. Nick Clegg [Britain’s deputy prime minister]

After this post caught the attention of Indymedia, Lake made some revisions and wrote: “I said execute the leftists that left the Islamic enclaves — yes that was a bit provocative, but I was trying to be brief.”

In a further indication of the blossoming relationship between America and Britain’s anti-Islam movements, the EDL has announced an upcoming event, welcoming Rabbi Nachum Shifren who is a candidate for California State Senate District 26.

“The English Defence League Event @ Embassy of Israel” has this description on Facebook:

The English Defence League will be holding an event in London on Oct 24th in support of Israel, we have an orthodox Rabbi joining us from Los Angeles who is fighting Sharia in L.A and running for state congressman there, we sympathise with what Israel are going through, it’s the only country in the west that is tackling the issues we highlight, we have seen members of the Islamic community hold anti-Israel marches in England which the country is in disgust over but still no action from the government, our four [sic] fathers fought a Nazi regime and won to protect our god given human rights, we cannot allow such fascist ideologies try to rule our streets once again using the same racist tactics, the English Defence League ignited the flame that has awoke this whole world, we are at the fore front of this movement, we have to support our brothers and sisters worldwide the way they are supporting us.

A spokesman at the embassy told me they have nothing to do with the event and will be issuing a statement shortly.*

Lastly, back on Geller, the New York Times made no reference to her possible connections with organized crime.

In 2007, the New York Post reported on a murder that took place at a Long Island auto dealership where Geller was reported to be a co-owner. A car salesman, Collin Thomas, had been murdered outside the showroom of Universal Auto World. In the course of the investigation, detectives also uncovered evidence of an alleged million dollar scam.

As part of the homicide probe, Nassau County police raided the dealership, owned by auto czar Michael Oshry [Geller’s former husband], and Oshry’s Hewlett Harbor home and seized business records.

Cops found banking records were sent to the house, though the state requires such files be kept at businesses, according to court papers filed in a civil forfeiture action by the Nassau district attorney.

“The dealership knew what was going on,” an investigator said.

Oshry’s lawyer, William Petrillo, said his client “has not engaged in any criminal activity.”

His ex-wife, Pamela Geller, former associate publisher of the New York Observer and a conservative blogger, burst into tears when told her ex is under criminal investigation.

Although listed in business records as a Universal co-owner, she denied it. “I have nothing to do with this,” Geller said.

Thomas’ fiancée, Cindy Heron, 21, said he was popular and successful. “All his customers loved him,” she said.

Universal shut its doors June 22 and liquidated its assets.

The New York Times does mention:

Ms. Geller got nearly $4 million when the couple divorced in 2007, and when Mr. Oshry died in 2008, there was a $5 million life-insurance policy benefiting her four daughters, said Alex Potruch, Mr. Oshry’s lawyer. She also kept some proceeds from the sale of Mr. Oshry’s $1.8 million house in Hewlett Harbor.

*Update: The Israeli embassy in London issued a brief statement today, Tuesday, saying that it “wishes to disassociate itself from next Sunday’s event, and from any attempts to link Israel to the EDL.”

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Tea Party teaming up with English fascists

The Observer reports:

The English Defence League, a far-right grouping aimed at combating the “Islamification” of British cities, has developed strong links with the American Tea Party movement.

An Observer investigation has established that the EDL has made contact with anti-jihad groups within the Tea Party organisation and has invited a senior US rabbi and Tea Party activist to London this month. Rabbi Nachum Shifren, a regular speaker at Tea Party conventions, will speak about Sharia law and also discuss funding issues.

The league has also developed links with Pamela Geller, who was influential in the protests against plans to build an Islamic cultural centre near Ground Zero. Geller, darling of the Tea Party’s growing anti-Islamic wing, is advocating an alliance with the EDL. The executive director of the Stop Islamisation of America organisation, she recently met EDL leaders in New York and has defended the group’s actions, despite a recent violent march in Bradford.

Geller, who denies being anti-Muslim, said in one of her blogs: “I share the EDL’s goals… We need to encourage rational, reasonable groups that oppose the Islamisation of the west.”

Devin Burghart, vice-president of the Kansas-based Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, said: “Geller is acting as the bridge between the EDL and the Tea Party. She plays an important role in bringing Islamophobia into the Tea Party. Her stature has increased substantially inside the Tea Party ranks after the Ground Zero mosque controversy. She has gained a lot of credibility with that stuff.”

Details of the EDL’s broadening aspirations came as about 1,000 supporters yesterday gathered to demonstrate in Leicester, which has a significant Muslim population. Home secretary Theresa May banned marches in the city last week but the EDL said its protest would proceed, raising fears of violence. Parts of Leicester were cordoned off to separate a counter-protest from Unite Against Fascism. Officers from 13 forces were on hand to maintain order.

At the end of August, EDL members converged on Bradford (which has a large British Muslim population) for a demonstration they promoted as “The Big One”.

This is their promotional video and beneath it is a video of the actual demonstration. In an apparent effort to fend off accusations that the EDL is a band of fascist, racist thugs, they have adopted as one of their rally symbols the Israeli flag (see 1 min 30 seconds into the second video) — even while they use the Nazi salute.

EDL rally in Bolton, March, 2010:

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The Jewish Republic of Israel

Haaretz reports:

Israeli Arab MK Ahmed Tibi was quick Sunday to condemn the Cabinet’s approval of a controversial proposal requiring non-Jews seeking citizenship to pledge allegiance to Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.

“The government of Israel has become subservient to Yisrael Beiteinu and its fascist doctrine,” said Tibi. “No other state in the world would force its citizens or those seeking citizenship to pledge allegiance to an ideology.”

“Israel has proven that it is not equal and is a democracy for Jews and not for Arabs,” he added.

The amendment is one of the promises Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made to Yisrael Beitenu in the coalition agreements. Since coming into government Yisrael Beitenu has advanced a long list of “loyalty” laws, which many consider to be discriminatory against Israel’s Arab citizens.

Gideon Levy writes:

Remember this day. It’s the day Israel changes its character. As a result, it can also change its name to the Jewish Republic of Israel, like the Islamic Republic of Iran. Granted, the loyalty oath bill that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is seeking to have passed purportedly only deals with new citizens who are not Jewish, but it affects the fate of all of us.

From now on, we will be living in a new, officially approved, ethnocratic, theocratic, nationalistic and racist country. Anyone who thinks it doesn’t affect him is mistaken. There is a silent majority that is accepting this with worrying apathy, as if to say: “I don’t care what country I live in.” Also anyone who thinks the world will continue to relate to Israel as a democracy after this law doesn’t understand what it is about. It’s another step that seriously harms Israel’s image.

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Israel’s human shields and live bait

Sharmine Narwani writes:

Logic dictates that the physical presence of half a million Jews in illegal settlements and outposts – connected through a maze of Jewish-only roads – has stealthily destroyed the possibility of a land-for-peace compromise. And Israel’s government has spent $17 billion on settlements since occupation began.

But here’s something we don’t talk about readily. Why would consecutive Israeli governments heavily subsidize and incentivize the relocation of young families – women and children – into hostile environments? Why would Israel – which claims security dangers wherever there are Palestinian populations – deliberately and systematically place its Jewish civilian population in “harm’s way?”

The settlers are Israel’s human shields and live bait.

“Naatzi! Naaaatzi!” This word, amazingly enough, is a settler favorite. “Nazis!” they screech at foreign TV crews, while waving their infants around. “Nazi, Nazi, Nazi,” they chant as they provocatively try to stop Palestinians from harvesting their olive crops. And the IDF soldiers wait and watch – occasionally intervening to push a frustrated and humiliated Palestinian objector away from a taunting, threatening Jewish settler.

Eventually, a half-crazed Palestinian will fight back, even kill some settlers. Israeli authorities immediately step in and claim the “Security Risk” has increased and more Palestinian land has to be confiscated to ensure Israel’s security. More Palestinians are detained, harassed, punished. More Palestinian homes are occupied or demolished. See how that works? Unleash your craziest Jews onto a Palestinian civilian population until someone blows a fuse and hits back. Then use that as the pretext to encroach further into the lives and onto the land of Palestinians.

Jewish settlers. Half a million of them in 121 illegal settlements and 102 illegal outposts. Human shields and live bait for Israel. The Jewish state’s frontline army for depopulating Palestinian land.

International law recognizes the right of a person living under occupation to resist or retaliate against occupying forces – nobody would question a Palestinian lashing out at an Israeli soldier. But kill a Jewish settler, and the lines get blurred fast. Under the Fourth Geneva Convention, the “occupier” (Israel) may not settle its populations (Jewish settlers) in occupied areas (West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem), but these laws also do not permit the harming of civilians except in the case of self-defence during an act of violence. In other words, although Israel flagrantly violates the former law by incentivizing Israeli citizens to move into occupied Palestinian territory, these same international conventions do not allow Palestinians to willy-nilly defend their lives and property from Jewish settlers – except during actual hostilities, when they are usually at a considerable disadvantage.

But are settlers really “civilians” as intended by the protective language of the Fourth Geneva Convention? This is debatable on at least one score, as the language dealing with “protected persons” is often prefaced with “civilian persons who take no part in hostilities…”

“The Hilltop Youth consist of hundreds of young settler boys and girls who have become protectors of the illegal outposts pitched on Palestinian-owned land throughout the West Bank. Traumatized by Israel’s desettlement of Gaza, they have vowed to resist a similar fate, and heeding only the “law of God” and the religious-nationalist action calls from the likes of Judeo-fascist high-priestesses Daniella Weiss and Nadia Mattar, these kids have unleashed the newest waves of settler vigilantism: “Price-Tagging.”

Every time authorities act against the perceived interests of the settlers, the latter will exact a “price tag” by carrying out reprisals against nearby Palestinians and their property.

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