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There’s an interesting — well, interesting to me — contretemps going on between The New Republic’s long-time literary editor Leon Wieseltier and The Atlantic Monthly’s (and one-time TNR editor) Andrew Sullivan.  On Monday, Mr. Wieseltier unburdened himself of a four thousand plus word avalanche of a rant titled “Something Much Darker” and subtitled “Andrew Sullivan has a serious problem.” The outburst was seemingly triggered by, of all things, an obscure W. H. Auden quote Sullivan had posted on his blog a few days earlier: “Trying to explain the doctrine of the Trinity to readers of The New Republic is not easy.”

To make a long story short, Wieseltier’s delicate political instrumentation detected tell-tale traces of anti-Semitism in Sullivan’s throwaway Auden quote, and Wieseltier implied that was of a piece with stronger indications yet elsewhere in Sullivan’s writings.

To make it a bit longer, re Auden and the Trinity, Wieseltier presented himself at considerable length as just the kind of  “stiff-necked”, “rational,” and “Jewish” (his words) person who is proud neither to understand the doctrine of the Trinity nor to aspire to do so.*  And of course all right thinking folk who wish not to ponder arcane theological disputes say it’s a free country, more power to him, and why don’t we order lunch now.  Unfortunately, Wieseltier closes Section Roman Numeral One of his wrathful reflections with the ominous words

…when [Sullivan] piously implies that the orbit of The New Republic is immune, or hostile, to the eternal verities of Christianity, he is baiting another class of people, and operating in the vicinity of a different canard.

As blanching readers immediately suspected, Sections Roman Numeral II, III, IV, and V would prove to be considerably nastier bits of work, however tendentiously based on reeds as slender as the Auden quote.  Wieseltier’s next and primary exhibit was from a January 13 post by Sullivan in which Sullivan wrote that

Most American Jews, of course, retain a respect for learning, compassion for the other, and support for minorities (Jews, for example, are the ethnic group most sympathetic to gay rights).  But the Goldfarb-Krauthammer wing–that celebrates and believes in government torture, endorses the pulverization of Gazans with glee, and wants to attack Iran–is something else. Something much darker.

Wieseltier, primly: “I was not aware that they comprise a “wing” of American Jewry, or that American Jewry has “wings.” According to Wieseltier, Sullivan was “dividing the American Jewish community into good Jews and bad Jews–a practice with a sordid history.” Not only that, but

“…his assumption, in his outburst about “the Goldfarb-Krauthammer wing,” that every thought that a Jew thinks is a Jewish thought is an anti-Semitic assumption, and a rather classical one.” (emphasis added)

The thing is, of course, that Sullivan’s statement plainly didn’t assume any such thing.  (Indeed, it was a reaction to a far more sweeping claim by one Jennifer Rubin about why Sarah Palin is unpopular among Jews.)  Sullivan wasn’t suggesting something about every thought by every American Jew, but about many thoughts by two particular American Jews, and those who agree with them.  He was suggesting that Goldfarb and Krauthammer are two relatively well known (and in their own way powerful) American Jews who have attitudes he reasonably considers to be at odds with other, more tolerant attitudes statistically prevalent among American Jews.  Perhaps “wing” was not the very best choice of words, but it will do as shorthand for some other kind of political entity (cough AIPAC cough).

What’s especially irritating is that what Wieseltier saw as anti-Semitic sin in Sullivan (ascribing thoughts and motivations to Jewishness) was something Wieseltier did himself a scant two paragraphs earlier, in ascribing Krauthammer’s motives for supporting things like torture or the rocketing of Gaza to “deep and sometimes frantic concern” for, inter alia,  Israel’s security.**

Echoing Nixon’s dictum, Wieseltier seems to hold that it’s not anti-Semitism when Wieseltier does it.  Perhaps not, of course; after all — who knows — perhaps Wieseltier suspects Krauthammer’s “deep and sometimes frantic” concern for Israel’s security is based on its command of prime eastern Mediterranean fishing waters, or on his admiration for Knesset parliamentary procedures.

Sullivan has defended himself in dignified fashion.  For my part, I agree with the many writers weighing in on Wieseltier’s piece (see “19 Pundits on the Sullivan Wieseltier Debate” in AtlanticWire***) — many conservatives among them — that whatever else you think of Sullivan, he’s no anti-Semite.

But that faint praise will not do either.  Sullivan, to my mind, has been no weathervane, as the reliably and entertainingly acidulous Justin Raimondo would have it, but has instead moved away, step by painful, reasoned step from things he once said and political attitudes he once defended. And on the issue of torture, Sullivan has been one of the preeminent voices of well informed, persuasive and engaged opposition right from the start, all in the face of many readers and erstwhile allies howling their disapproval.

It was around then, it seemed to me, that his support for conservatism as it is practiced today, and to our various wars as they are waged in reality, began to crumble.  It was similar (not the same, just similar) for me.  We all start from somewhere, and politics for most of us (as I am personally all too aware) is a process of mistakes and revisions in our political attitudes, decisions, and allegiances.  The issue is whether we try to honestly see what is going on and honestly revise our views to reflect the facts.  Sullivan has done that.  His notorious “fifth column” item after 9/11 remains a rather disgraceful episode he can’t undo. But it is past, and he has reconsidered and changed.  One can not ask more.  Wieseltier’s present screed, by contrast, is an embarrassment even to a declining, verbose, slack-witted writer such as himself,  and renews doubts about the magazine he continues to inhabit.

It will no doubt compound the defeat Wieseltier has earned in the eyes of the public and his colleagues that his or anyone’s next unwarranted, vague, nebulous charge of “anti-Semitism” will be tougher to sell: whether it’s for daring to question Israeli policies or America’s near-unconditional support for them, for criticizing writers like Krauthammer, for noting the ongoing undefeated streak at AIPAC, or for suggesting attacks on Iran might not be the best nonproliferation strategy.  “Something much darker,” I hope, will suffer the worst fate any writer can envision: it will have precisely the opposite effect its author intended.

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* Like Mr. Wieseltier, I suppose I find the doctrine of the Trinity somewhat difficult to grok in its divine entirety — that is, when I think about it at all, which has been roughly never.  I figure it’s (a) basically none of my business, (b) perhaps some kind of caterpillar/chrysalis/butterfly description of different forms of the same thing; as a layperson I hold this to be a nice thought, since I like baby Jesus, because I like babies, so that I think it’s touching and good that a god should be said to have taken form as one; however, perhaps terribly grave theological chain-of-divinity difficulties ensue, so that (c) mainly, again, it’s none of my business and of little concern to me.  So Auden got at least one former New Republic reader right.
** Remarkably, Wieseltier follows his “sometimes deep and frantic” description of Krauthammer by saying Sullivan merely “presents feelings as ideas”, while Krauthammer is “coldly clear, and may be engaged analytically.” I suppose there’s some way to be coldly clear, deeply frantic, and analytically engageable all at the same time, but it makes Krauthammer more of a curiosity than a writer to be very concerned about.
*** Links to Sullivan’s own responses are supplied in this article as well.

I admire people like Ezra Nawi, people with the cussedness and determination and confidence to just keep doing simple right things. In Nawi’s case, that means being an Israeli yet sticking up for Palestinians on the West Bank near Hebron — people who are being viciously and criminally (they’re really the only words that will do) harassed by nearby Israeli settlers.

To the right is a short video of the incident that has led to Nawi’s conviction for “assaulting” an Israeli officer. (Nawi is in the green jacket as the video begins.) As you’ll see, I think, if there was an assault it was pretty hard to spot. Be that as it may, the first point of this post is to ask you to go to FreeEzra.org and add your name to a petition asking the Israeli justice system to forego jailing Mr. Nawi.

But the real point is what was happening to the Palestinians. Writing for Ha’aretz in mid-June, David Shulman (who says he knows Nawi and is certain the charge is untrue) explains:

On February 14, 2007, the Israeli authorities sent army bulldozers to demolish several Palestinian shacks in a tiny place called Umm al-Kheir, 25 kilometers southeast of Hebron. Umm al-Kheir embodies the everyday reality of the Israeli occupation like no place else: The 100 or so impoverished Bedouin who call it their home, eking out a livelihood by grazing goats and sheep on the dry, stony hills, live in rickety structures of canvas, tin and stone. The land is theirs: Originally refugees from Tel Arad in the Negev in 1948, they bought it for good money from its Palestinian owners in the early 1950s. Israel, however, has put up a large settlement called Carmel right next to Umm al-Kheir, and like all settlements, Carmel (founded in 1981) is constantly expanding, encroaching on the lands of its Palestinian neighbors. As documented in detail in police records in Kiryat Arba, settlers also regularly attack these neighbors, whom they would like to remove altogether from this area.

House demolitions in the Palestinian territories are routine, and there have been several at Umm al-Kheir, too. The legal justification is always that the houses were built without a permit. But Palestinians living in Area C in the territories have almost no hope of getting a building permit. (To give some idea: on average, in all of Area C, only one building permit is granted to Palestinians each month, whereas some 60 demolitions orders are issued, of which 20 are carried out. Fewer than 5 percent of Palestinian applications for building permits in Area C are approved.)

You may have skimmed past the “settlers also regularly attack these neighbors” part above, or imagined a shouting match or some scuffles.  Wrong.   Nir Rosem, writing about Nawi for Ha’aretz in 2005, reported nearby Israeli “settlers” poisoned livestock, destroyed olive orchards, plowed up fields, committed arson, and beat the Palestinian village children and foreign volunteers accompanying them to school badly enough that several needed hospitalization.

I don’t really know that much about the lay of the land over there.  So I wouldn’t usually have a feeling for whether what’s happening or happened in and around Umm al-Kheir is an outlier, or whether it’s as everyday as Shulman says it is.

Except for that video.  Because the worst thing about it isn’t the soldiers breaking in to the metal shack, it isn’t even the bulldozer demolishing the old house next to it while villagers cry and curse.  The worst thing was that the IDF soldiers laughed when they were done. Like it was no big deal at all.

You can also visit supportezra.net for ongoing news about the case and the cause.

There’s obviously a lot else going on, but I’ll post this because it hardly requires further comment.  From Al Kamen’s “In the Loop” column in the Washington Post this morning:

…House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) and Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) sent out a “Dear Colleague” e-mail Tuesday asking for signatures “to the attached letter to President Obama regarding the Middle East peace process.”

The letter says the usual stuff, emphasizing that Washington “must be both a trusted mediator and a devoted friend to Israel” and noting: “Israel will be taking the greatest risks in any peace agreement.”

Curiously, when we opened the attachment, we noticed it was named “AIPAC Letter Hoyer Cantor May 2009.pdf.”

Kamen’s title: “Now, that’s lobbying.”

You know, it’d be cheaper if we just set up a web site called, say, itsourcongress.com on an AIPAC server and populated it with 535 little avatars called “HoyerMD5,” “CantorVA7,” and so forth.  There’d be e-mail blasts, a “congressional record” blog, people could vote for their favorite avatar, the works.

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UPDATE, 5/15: Here’s the letter (posted over at itsourcongress.com); here’s what MJ Rosenberg and Yglesias have to say about it. Rosenberg: “not one word in the letter that calls on Israel to do anything, not one word about the settlements, the blockade of Gaza, the checkpoints that make it impossible for Palestinians to travel from one village to the next.”

Israel has now declared “all-out war” on the Gaza strip Hamas government for its continued rocketing of nearby Israeli towns and settlements.  The Washington Post’s Sudarsan Raghavan and Griff Witte report the death toll stood at 364 — including at least 57 civilians, according to a separate (and heartbreaking) report on the death of five sisters when a neighboring mosque was bombed.  The numbers and high civilian casualties are in large part because the aims of the Israeli government are broader than ever before:

While previous Israeli assaults on Gaza have pinpointed crews of Hamas rocket launchers and stores of weapons, the attacks that began Saturday have had broader aims than any before. Israeli military officials said Monday that their target lists have expanded to include the vast support network that the Islamist movement relies on to stay in power in the strip. The choice of targets suggests that Israel intends to weaken all the various facets of Hamas rather than just its armed wing.

“There are many aspects of Hamas, and we are trying to hit the whole spectrum, because everything is connected and everything supports terrorism against Israel,” said a senior Israeli military official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

“Hamas’s civilian infrastructure is a very, very sensitive target. If you want to put pressure on them, this is how,” said Matti Steinberg, a former top adviser to Israel’s domestic security service and an expert on Islamist organizations.

This is a formula for all-out, total war indeed.  But it presupposes you’re fighting people who’ll accept different leadership when it’s over — and by that measure, Israel’s war may well have the opposite effect.  In an op-ed for the Washington Post, Palestinian journalist Daouad Kuttab notes that Hamas had been increasingly unpopular in Gaza — its support stood at a Bush-like 17% level among Palestinians in November, with Hamas trailing Fatah even within the Gaza Strip.  As importantly, it had lost support around the Arab world, in part for scuttling Arab-sponsored talks with the rival Abbas government in the West Bank.  That’s all a thing of the past:

The disproportionate and heavy-handed Israeli attacks on Gaza have been a bonanza for Hamas. The movement has renewed its standing in the Arab world, secured international favor further afield and succeeded in scuttling indirect Israeli-Syrian talks and direct Palestinian-Israeli negotiations. It has also greatly embarrassed Israel’s strongest Arab neighbors, Egypt and Jordan. While it is not apparent how this violent confrontation will end, it is abundantly clear that the Islamic Hamas movement has been brought back from near political defeat while moderate Arab leaders have been forced to back away from their support for any reconciliation with Israel.

But the same poll showing low Hamas approval ratings showed Palestinians essentially uncommitted to the Hamas 6 month truce with Israel: a clear majority (41%) felt it had made no difference, with the remainder statistically tied between judging the truce had served or harmed the national interest.

The question was whether even an eye for an eye — let alone many, many eyes for an eye — was the right way to go under these circumstances. It’s interesting and a little sad to note that the “original intent,” as it were, of the “eye for an eye” phrase may be quite different from what it’s assumed to be.*  Exodus 21:23-25, in the King James Version, reads as follows, with emphasis added:

23 And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life,
24 Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot,
25 Burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.

To be sure, other biblical passages (e.g. Lv 24:19-20, Dt 19:21) are more clearly about punishment to be exacted, and there’s apparently room for debate with this one, since other translations replace the “give” with “take.” But this discussion suggests that the original Hebrew for this Exodus passage amounts to “being in place of being” — i.e., it actually comes closer to suggesting proportional, functional substitution of something new for that which was lost, by you, for your own misdeeds rather than narrowly equivalent penalties on someone else for theirs; the writer proposes that a person blinded by your fault would be compensated by a seeing servant.

But in any case, the fundamental idea is “proportional” — and also in any case, these biblical passages aren’t the end of all wisdom on the topic.  It’s all too easy for me to sit here in safety and pontificate, but I think hilzoy is right:

I imagine what people on both sides are thinking is something more like: do you expect us to just sit here and take it? Do you expect us to do nothing? To which my answer is: no, I expect you to try to figure out what has some prospect of actually making things better. Killing people out of anger, frustration, and the sense that you have to do something is just wrong. For both sides.

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* In case it’s not obvious, I’m no biblical scholar; I’m just following up on leads from the Wikipedia “eye for an eye” entry.

The Sunday Times Online reported today that…

…foreign intelligence agents had enlisted the support of US officials to acquire a network of moles in sensitive military and nuclear institutions. [...]

…one well-known senior official in the US State Department was being paid by Turkish agents in Washington who were selling the information on to black market buyers, including Pakistan…

“He was aiding foreign operatives against US interests by passing them highly classified information, not only from the State Department but also from the Pentagon, in exchange for money, position and political objectives.”

– For Sale: West’s deadly nuclear secrets Sunday Times Online, 1/6/08

The source is Sibel Edmonds, an FBI translator fluent in Farsi and Turkish, who was assigned to a backlog of untranslated documents and wiretaps in 2002. Following what she saw as an unsuccessful effort in late 2001 to enlist her in espionage similar to that reported above, Edmonds reported the Americans involved to the FBI — and was fired for her trouble in March 2002.* In his 2005 Vanity Fair piece “An Inconvenient Patriot,” David Rose described what came next:

But being fired is one thing. Edmonds has also been prevented from proceeding with her court challenge or even speaking with complete freedom about the case.

On top of the usual prohibition against disclosing classified information, the Bush administration has smothered her case beneath the all-encompassing blanket of the “state-secrets privilege”—a Draconian and rarely used legal weapon that allows the government, merely by asserting a risk to national security, to prevent the lawsuits Edmonds has filed contesting her treatment from being heard in court at all. According to the Department of Justice, to allow Edmonds her day in court, even at a closed hearing attended only by personnel with full security clearance, “could reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to the foreign policy and national security of the United States.”

Using the state-secrets privilege in this fashion is unusual, says Edmonds’s attorney Ann Beeson, of the American Civil Liberties Union. “It also begs the question: Just what in the world is the government trying to hide?”

Now we have a better idea.

Remarkably, Ms. Edmonds couldn’t get any major American news organization to agree to publish her allegations naming names. It’s really a bit of a shame the story is getting crushed by ObamaNewHampshireIowaEdwardsClintonHuckabeeRomney, and one may wonder why Ms. Edmonds took so long to go to foreign media with her story, which even as reported in outline form before now seemed like a huge scandal. The answer may have to do with libel laws abroad, or at least in the U.K., that are more protective of public figures than they are in the United States. Certainly no names were named in the Times Article.

However, Ms. Edmonds has now published a “State Secrets Privilege Gallery” on her own web site (”Just A Citizen“) with unlabeled photographs of well known Defense Department and intelligence figures like Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Brent Scowcroft, and Congressmen Dennis Hastert, Richard Livingston, Stephen Solarz, and Art Lantos, to name a few — the full list is spelled out by lukery (”Let Sibel Edmonds Speak”). The intent appears to be to imply names to put to the allegations in the Times story, without taking the legally fraught step of connecting every dot in writing.

Whoever the weak links in the American chain turn out to be, the nexus of espionage that Edmonds’ story describes is unsettling indeed:

The Turks and Israelis had planted “moles” in military and academic institutions which handled nuclear technology. Edmonds says there were several transactions of nuclear material every month, with the Pakistanis being among the eventual buyers. “The network appeared to be obtaining information from every nuclear agency in the United States,” she said.

If the Israeli angle is true as well, it seems plausible that they were trying to get information about how to build “better” nukes of their own, though I suppose there are Israelis who’d sell nuclear plans to Pakistan. The Times provides a timeline of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons development at the end of the story, and most reactions understandably focus on that country.* Jim Henley (”Unqualified Offerings”) writes, “The thing that most struck me is how much, over the decades, Pakistan has acted not at all like a client state of the US.”

The Turkish Connection
True. I’d add, though, that most of the article tends to point our good friend Turkey’s way in that respect. The Congressional involvement implied by Ms. Edmonds’ photo gallery is certainly all connected to Turkey; sometimes the worthy Congressmen involved were impressed that Turkey has been willing to work with Israel diplomatically and militarily, sometimes they’ve been impressed with Turkish money (Livingston’s lobbying firm is on an annual $1.8M retainer by the Turkish government), and sometimes both. Edmonds says Mr. Hastert may not have been willing to wait to get out of office before pocketing his payoffs. Rose:

[Edmonds] reported hearing Turkish wiretap targets boast that they had a covert relationship with a very senior politician indeed—Dennis Hastert, Republican congressman from Illinois and Speaker of the House since 1999. The targets reportedly discussed giving Hastert tens of thousands of dollars in surreptitious payments in exchange for political favors and information.

What sort of political favors? In an interview with Amy Goodman, Rose says that in secret testimony, Edmonds told Congressional investigators that Speaker Hastert may have sold out his support for the Armenian Genocide Resolution in 2000, withdrawing it just before a final vote:

One of the Turkish targets of these wiretaps claimed that the price for getting Dennis Hastert to withdraw the resolution would be $500,000. Now, I do emphasize there’s no evidence at all that he received such a payment, but that is what is said to have been recorded in one of the wiretaps.

Thus, it’s not all about nukes; denial of the Armenian Genocide is a centerpiece of Turkish policy, since acknowledging it would invite reparations claims — and might undermine the political legitimacy of a Turkish republic that has long and strenuously denied many of its founders’ responsibility for that genocide.

But it is likely very much about money in any case. Since 9/11, Turkey is the 7th largest recipient of military “aid” from the United States,** and Turkish military officials — who wield constitutional power in that country as designated arbiters of the secular tradition in that country — are both well placed and not reluctant to profit from sidelines, or recycle some of that largesse in ambitious ways. Entrepreneurism being universal, and absolute power notoriously corrupting absolutely, it would be little wonder if Turkish military and intelligence might go into all kinds of unexpected business sidelines.

We’ll just have to hope that responsible, upstanding people in Islamabad — and not Al Qaeda — were the final destination for any nuclear secrets said entrepreneurs got their hands on.

CROSSPOSTED TO “American Street”

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* Indeed, I wonder if Benazir Bhutto’s assassination was an additional reason Edmonds went to the Times. The stated reason, however, was that she “approached The Sunday Times last month after reading about an Al-Qaeda terrorist who had revealed his role in training some of the 9/11 hijackers while he was in Turkey.” Joseph Cannon (”Cannonfire”) writes the story was probably this one about Louai Sakka (or Sakra), an Al Qaeda operative now jailed in Turkey. The “hall of mirrors” feeling about the story deepens in that Sakka is apparently linked to many Western intelligence services, according to a CooperativeResearch.org article citing the 9/11 Commission and media reports.
** $1.325 billion from 2002-04, according to PublicIntegrity.org. Countries receiving more aid — or “aid” — were Israel, Egypt, Pakistan, Jordan, Afghanistan, and Colombia, with figures ranging from $9 billion to $2 billion over the same time period.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I’d be remiss not to mention that I’ve often written often about the Armenian Genocide and the struggle to have it acknowledged as such. (See, e.g., 90 years ago: Armenian Genocide Begins and Another Day, Another Turkish New Lira for the Washington Post) While I like to think I’d feel this way in any case, I’m married to an Armenian American.

I am a Jew (NYCEve, Daily Kos diarist); I am a Muslim (Aziz Poonawalla, “City of Brass”) — Eve and Aziz write from the heart about the Israel/Lebanon crisis, being Americans, and the importance of homelands. Excerpts from NYCEve’s post:

That Israel is aligned with the people I most despise forces me to recognize that Jews are at best tolerated, mostly unwanted by pretty much everyone–except that is, Christian evangelicals who voice support for their own misguided and nefarious reasons.

This sad reality is still true many years after eight million were murdered. Anti-semitism is flourishing throughout the world. We escape the sting of it in the United States. But to deny its existence and that American Jews are blessed to live in a country that still treats us with relative decency, is to ignore the obvious

I live in New York, a city where I don’t feel as if I need to conceal my identity. But when I leave New York–an hour in any direction, even in the United States of America–I often recognize that though I am an American, being openly Jewish might engender an unwelcome encounter [...]

I’d like to deny it, but I know my destiny is linked to the survival of Israel. When an El El 747 touches down at Ben Gurion Airport, the tradition is for the cabin to be filled with the plaintive, mournful sound of the Israeli national anthem. Even, nyceve, a very assimilated American Jew, sheds a tear or two when I hear that music and I am reminded of our terrible history.

… from Aziz’s responding post:

So what is it to be an American muslim? NYCeve speaks of rising anti-semitism in the world, and of how “being openly Jewish might engender an unwelcome encounter.” I am not a victim - but I think that muslims in America have more to fear than Jews do. Do you think that the attitudes at LGF are fringe? I surf the red-sphere every day; I contribute at RedState; I live in Texas and listen to the callers on talk radio. Muslims are the new Jews in the US. How much longer can I say that the religious freedom which permits my faith to flourish here as no where else, will persist? [...]

But Jews do have Israel, a strong (nuclear-armed) state supported by a superpower. They are well and truly safe there, a safety that no Katyusha or suicide bomber can really threaten - those are the tools of fear alone and the Jews have long ago learned that fear can be overcome. I wish the American public faced the fear of terrorism with half the composure that Israelis do - we might be sacrificing fewer of our own society’s basic principles of liberty were it so.

Muslims in the middle east have nothing like Israel. Ordinary muslims are always caught between terrorists, tyrants, mullahs, and madmen, and now - the wrath of Israel as well. Lebanese people, who have no control over Hizbollah, who have just escaped decades of civil war, and only recently in the Cedar Revolution thrown off the yoke of Syrian dominance and seized their destinies for themselves - are being killed. Why?

… and from the comments to Aziz’ identical post at Daily Kos:

azizhp, really excellent diary . . . (94+ / 0-)
I hope it gets the attention it deserves.
You raise some extremely important issues.
Thank you.
– by nyceve on Tue Jul 18, 2006 at 07:14:38 AM PDT

* I almost didnt post this (104+ / 0-)
I really dont want you to feel I am attacking you at all. I cant express how hesitant I am nowadays. It seems like every sentence - no matter how carefully crafted, only delivers pain. You really eased my mind a bit with your comment - thank you.
– by azizhp on Tue Jul 18, 2006 at 07:16:28 AM PDT

Bloodthirsty Children or Media Missiles (Michael Shaw, “Bag News Notes”); Emily Litella Speaks Out on the Situation in the Middle East (Jonathan Schwarz, “A tiny revolution”) — The photo on the right is among a series by several news agencies taken near an artillery position in the northern Israeli town of Kiryat Shamona. (A Guardian reporter writes about the circumstances here.*) The two posts address its implications in different ways.

In keeping with his blog’s focus, Shaw is fascinated with the propaganda and visual implications of this and other photos of these children signing artillery shells. He also investigates the photojournalism involved, culminating with the discovery of this less well known photo, more clearly showing the staged, exploited nature of what happened — for whatever that’s worth. In the process, he cites Schwarz’s post — but rather misses its point, I think, claiming Schwarz “analogizes” Arab and Israeli kids as “sick killers.” Schwarz had written:

…Sadly, until the Arabs let go of their culture of incitement and rage, I’m afraid there’s no concession Israel can ever make that will bring peace with these people.

What’s that?
Those aren’t Lebanese girls writing on Hezbollah rockets, but Israeli girls writing on Israeli shells?
Oh.
Never mind.

As I wrote at Bag News Notes, there is (or was, it’s been a while since I’ve looked) a frequent feature on the right wing Little Green Footballs (LGF) blog site called “Palestinian child abuse.” It involves showing photos — and, sadly, authentic ones — of West Bank, Gaza, etc. kids dressed in suicide bomber mockups, or in military garb, etc. I think Schwarz was simply pointing out that the impulse to indoctrinate kids with hatred and/or use them for propaganda purposes is not as one-sided as sites like LGF imply.

Syria, the Model (Jim Henley, “Unqualified Offerings”) — Henley observes that the two most dangerous places to be in the Arab world right now are democracies the Bush administration was once pleased to take credit for. While Iraq is clearly failing to secure its borders and maintain order,

…[t]he Lebanese lesson is even more dire: American speech and action since Israel began retaliating for Hezbollah’s prisoner grab announces that democracy gains an Arab state exactly no leverage when Arab and Israeli interests collide. [...]

People would, literally, rather be in Syria. It’s where everyone from Lebanon that can afford to leave is trying to get. [...]

The bomb them free crowd has made the work of liberalizing the Middle East much harder than it needed to be.

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* Pointed out by Nell Lancaster in a comment at Bag News Notes.

For a short while last week, before I understood the scope of the Israeli attacks, I supported them. The attack on and kidnapping of Israeli soldiers was an act of war by Hezbollah, an organization (or elements of it) that had no business sticking out the rest of Lebanon’s neck for it. Despite hopeful signs in Lebanon, this was also but the latest in a string of serious provocations by Hezbollah since the “Cedar Revolution” that only failed to be lethal by good luck, Israeli resistance, and/or poor execution.

So I felt that striking back at Hezbollah military targets — their rockets, headquarters, and so forth — was legitimate, and I even thought wrecking Beirut Airport runways and some bridges in South Lebanon was not an outrageous way of both slowing the kidnappers and of getting the rest of Lebanon’s undivided attention, so long as civilians were not injured.

But it’s clear to me now that Israeli government does not care enough about minimizing collateral damage, probably never was merely aiming to slow kidnappers, and is waging a wholly disproportionate war on Lebanon as a whole. From the Irish Times, via Juan Cole (”Informed Comment”):

The civilian toll continued to mount in Lebanon yesterday as Israeli planes struck dozens of targets. Nine civilians, including two children, were killed when they were hit by a missile that struck a bridge in the southern port city of Sidon. In the southern city of Tyre , rescue workers pulled nine more bodies from the civil defence building that was hit on Sunday in an Israeli strike.

Close to 200 civilians have been killed in Lebanon since the Israeli offensive began last week, when Hizbullah attacked an Israeli border patrol, killing three soldiers and capturing two. Five more soldiers were killed when they gave chase into Lebanon .

I understand and support Israel’s efforts not to be subjected to missile barrages or border raids, but what they’re doing is grossly excessive collective punishment. Ehud Olmert is writing a shameful chapter in Israel’s history.

Gil Shterzer, quoted in full:

This is what a suicide bombing really looks like. Warning, uncensored gruesome hard to watch photos.

No prescriptions or wannabe smart forecasts here — or balance or “balance.” It just makes me understand the fury Israelis must feel, I feel some of it myself.

Sad to say, I lost track, there have been so many terrorist attacks in Israel in the last week. Israeli blogger Imshin provides links to brief bios of each victim in a bus bombing in Jerusalem that left 7 dead, not counting the shithead who did it. The contrast between the apparently relatively affluent teenage engineering student bomber and the 5AM shift workers he murdered was striking. Imshin writes,

Why are the cold-blooded murders of these people seen by so many as fitting revenge of the weak? Why is this young, good looking, physically strong and economically secure kid perceived as being more desperate than a 67 year old economics lecturer making his way in the soft early morning light to his dead end job as a guard in a car park?

Gil Shterzer (”Israeli Guy”) posts a devastating photo of two victims of the attack. I think one victim in the photo is Mr. Ostinsky, the car park guard.

It’s hard to disagree with Imshin’s (apparent) support for the security wall, or Gil Shterzer’s angry call to “waste” Hamas leaders like Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi or Mahmoud Al-Zahaar in retaliation. May be easier said than done, though.

I continue to support ending the West Bank/Gaza settlements, and think the “road map” or the Nusseibeh/Ayalon agreement could be ways out of the conflict. But I read (via Imshin) that Arafat is insisting on “right of return” again, which together with non-stop suicide bombings makes either peace plan seem like it should be in your bookstore’s “fantasy” section. What does Abu Mazen say? If that matters.

Meanwhile, consider helping Israeli terror victims by supporting NAVAH.

Once upon a time, a long, long time ago — well, in November 1998– the London Sunday Times printed a report* titled “Israel Developing an Ethno-Bomb,” by former Israeli intelligence officer Uzi Mahnaimi and war correspondent Marie Colvin. The report claimed that researchers at an institute in Nes Tziyona — “the main research facility for Israel’s clandestine arsenal of chemical and biological weapons” — were attempting to develop deadly micro-organisms that would attack only people with distinctive genes carried by some Arabs.

I’m not qualified to assess whether such a weapon could be successfully developed.*** I merely point out that this report features a number of people — reporters, politicians, scientists — who were or seemed respected, knowledgeable, Jewish, or combinations thereof, and who said the idea was conceivable and/or that Israelis were researching it. In addition to the reporters, the report features Knesset member Dedi Zucker and former Defense Secretary William Cohen (quoted on feasibility only; Israel’s pursuits were raised by a second anonymous defense official). That doesn’t mean they were right, of course.

I imagine Mahnaimi and Zucker — now an ex-Knesset member who has left the Meretz party to form an Israeli Green Party — may be dismissed as the usual “Peace Now” suspects by many, and perhaps even their non-self-hating-Jewishness will be in question for some.

For my part, although the story and its sources seemed reasonably credible at first, I’ve come to be skeptical. First, there’s Dedi Zucker — or rather, how he’s used in the Times article:

Dedi Zucker, a member of knesset [sic], the Israeli parliament, denounced the research yesterday. “Morally, based on our history, and our tradition and our experience, such a weapon is monstrous and should be denied,” he said.

At first glance, Zucker’s statement seems to corroborate the report (although “denied” is an odd choice of words). But on re-reading the article, I think he’s just reacting to it. I’m trying to reach Mr. Zucker about this. It’s possible that Mr. Zucker had some knowledge about Israeli research via his participation in the Knesset’s “Committee for Scientific and Technological Research and Development.” The committee concerns itself with research institutes, but probably not with military research, which I’d guess is overseen by a different committee. On the other hand, although (admittedly) judging by a Google search, Mr. Zucker’s interests have seemed to lie elsewhere over the years.

Second, the Times story quotes a South African scientist named Goosen; he’s popped up again recently in a Washington Post story about black-market bioweapons, so that I’m provisionally tagging him with my “shady?” and “joker?” mental magic markers.

The anonymous scientist at Nes Tziyona is the key to the story, of course. His anonymity is “convenient” if you dismiss the story, and understandable if you don’t: Mordechai Vanunu has been in jail since 1986 since claiming Israel has nuclear weapons. The anonymous source “confirming” that Cohen meant Israel with his remarks is secondary. It seems fair — and will hopefully not remain embarrassing — to point out many of us have assumed Iraq had WMD on similarly unsubstantiated (albeit presidential) claims. (For what it’s worth, it seems Mahnaimi’s byline also appears on stories claiming Iraq developed nuclear weapons before 1991, and managed to keep a small stockpile after the Gulf War.)

So what’s this all about? Only that it seems to me that Mr. Aziz Poonawalla had a reasonably good faith basis for believing such weapons were being developed — especially because he relied on the WiredNews abridged version of the story, where Mr. Zucker’s comment seems quite authoritative, at least to non-Israelis. Aziz stumbled into a hornet’s nest of anti-Semitism charges of “blood libel” and the like for daring to repeat the story.** Given the Times article itself, I’d say that’s not justified unless you also level the charge at Mahnaimi, Zucker, and possibly Secretary Cohen as well.*** Furthermore, although I’m not Jewish, nothing I’ve ever seen by Aziz justifies the charge.

One objection commonly raised about the story is that you couldn’t keep such a weapon from affecting the many citizens of your own country who have “enemy” ancestry to one degree or another. That seems easy to counter. You somehow (1) tailor a disease virus or bacterium like smallpox or anthrax to be more lethal or contagious for people with a given genetic makeup. That’s the hard part, of course. You then also (2) vaccinate your population, perhaps especially the susceptible members, against the disease. Step (1) wouldn’t necessarily make existing vaccines useless; at any rate, you might also develop a custom vaccine. The motive for tailored bioweapons-plus-vaccination over regular bioweapons-plus-vaccination would be to limit the “collateral damage” outside the vaccinated population, and inside it as well if the vaccine were known or suspected to not be completely effective.

Here’s something we may all agree on, though: I’d certainly prefer to believe that Israel would not even research such a weapon. The sheer volume of angry reactions to merely reviving the suggestion tells me it would be tremendously controversial among Israelis, and among Jews around the world.

Look at it this way: either Mahnaimi and Colvin were right, or they weren’t. If it ever turns out they were right, shame on the Israelis responsible. If they lied or were wrong, shame on them, and the discussion was unnecessary — but it may also have a small deterrent effect of its own.

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* The story is widely reproduced on the Internet. That doesn’t make it true, but the texts copied seem to match up, so I’m reasonably confident my link is an accurate copy of the Times item itself, for which subscriber access is required.
** As the controversy about Aziz’s post grew, he edited a sentence to read “Israel may be developing” instead of “Israel is developing,” which seemed obvious anyway, but worth stating clearly.
*** I found indirect but credible evidence supporting the Cohen part of the London Times report in a very interesting SIPRI report by Malcolm Dando, where footnote 6 reads:‘Cohen warns of new terrors beyond CW’, Jane’s Defence Weekly, 4 June 1997, p. 27; and Starr, B. and Evers, S., ‘Interview: US Secretary of Defense, William Cohen’, Jane’s Defence Weekly, 13 Aug. 1997, p. 32.; I don’t have access to JDW to follow that further. On the subject of Mahnaimi/Colvin items that more or less check out, they also mention that the British Medical Association was to consider the possibility of genetically tailored bioweapons. This seems to be the 1999 BMA report Biotechnology, Weapons & Humanity.