We seem to have a populist revolt on our hands—in Tunisia

The New Neo Posted on by

This is stunning news:

After 23 years of iron-fisted rule, the president of Tunisia was driven from power Friday by violent protests over soaring unemployment and corruption. Virtually unprecedented in modern Arab history, the populist uprising sent an ominous message to authoritarian governments that dominate the region…

Ben Ali’s downfall sent a potentially frightening message to autocratic leaders across the Arab world, especially because he did not seem especially vulnerable until very recently.

He managed the economy of his small country of 10 million better than many other Middle Eastern nations grappling with calcified economies and booming young populations. He turned Tunisia into a beach haven for tourists, helping create an area of stability in volatile North Africa. There was a lack of civil rights and little or no freedom of speech, but a better quality of life for many than in neighboring countries such as Algeria and Libya.

Nobody seems to know what will happen next in Tunisia. The sense is of chaos, which can provide an opportunity for even more sinister and repressive forces to enter the scene. Let’s hope not—but think Iran when the Shah fell.

As in many recent populist movements in the Arab world, modern communications media seem to have played a large role [emphasis mine]:

The ouster followed the country’s largest protests in generations and weeks of escalating unrest, sparked by one man’s suicide and fueled by social media, cell phones and young people who have seen relatively little benefit from Tunisia’s recent economic growth. Thousands of demonstrators from all walks of life rejected Ben Ali’s promises of change and mobbed Tunis, the capital, to demand that he leave.

Tunisia is an Arab country, as well as a Muslim one–although, curiously, it is the only Arab country that bans polygamy.

And what a history! I didn’t know it until today, but Tunisia was the site of Carthage. Later it (or sections of it) was conquered by the Romans, the Vandals, the Byzantines, some Normans, the Almohad caliphs, the Berber Hafsids, pirates (remember the Barbary Coast?—it was in Tunisia), Spain, the Ottomons (are you still with me?), and the French. Tunisia became independent in 1956, and Ben Ali’s been in charge since 1987.

Until now.

Meanwhile…

The New Neo Posted on by

…back in the real world, Hezbollah marches on.

Here’s another article on the subject. And since we can’t seem to get away from the phrase “blood libel,” it would seem to be an exceedingly appropriate term to describe this accusation towards Israel made by Hezbollah leader Nasrallah:

In a speech that was broadcast in full by Al-Jazeera, [Nasrallah] set out to argue that Israel was behind the [2005] Rafik Hariri assassination. He presented video footage and apparently intercepted Israeli military communications, all of which captured wide Arab audiences. His starting point was something that many, maybe even most Arabs believe: that Israel is behind many of the events that intensify conflict and sectarianism in Arab and Muslim countries. Arabs are nothing if not open to this interpretation. His challenge was to present evidence that Israel was specifically behind the Hariri assassination. And while he presented little that can stand up in a court of law, he managed to convey enough doubt that, coupled with the Arab instinct to see Israel’s hand in every Arab problem, gives him some protection and a basis for argument when the tribunal releases its findings.

The UN tribunal investigating the assassination will probably end up implicating Hezbollah, but Nasrallah knows that won’t sit well with what used to be called the Arab Street. What to do? When in doubt, blame the Israelis.

Palin and the blood libel revisited

The New Neo Posted on by

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach thinks that Sarah Palin’s use of the term “blood libel” was both appropriate and justified.

I said it was, from the start. I also have made it clear that I believe she knew full well what the term meant.

But why would so many people—even some who supported her—think her unaware of the meaning of the phrase when she used it so pointedly (and accurately, I might add) in a major statement? It may be just another example of what George Bush might have called the misunderestimation of Sarah Palin’s intelligence; they really do think she’s stupid. But as a devout Christian and a friend of Israel and Jews, she just might be one of the very people most likely to know the history of the term she used, perhaps even better than those who Googled it hurriedly in order to excoriate her for saying it.

Ah, but that’s the problem, say others, the ones who credit her for at least knowing what she was talking about, but who criticize her for using the phrase as a “dog whistle” signal to evangelical Christians, who feel themselves to be a persecuted minority like the Jews.

It’s a wonder Palin’s critics don’t get whiplash when they talk about her.

Right now, looking at the categories on the right sidebar of my blog, I notice that when this one is published I will have written 58 posts about Palin since she burst on the national scene two and half years ago. That an awful lot about a person who hasn’t even held elective office for quite some time. I would wager that, if I were to go back and glance at them all, the vast majority would be concerned not with Palin herself, but with analyzing the depth of the hatred so many people harbor for her, and what gives it such remarkably vitriolic force.

[NOTE: Barry Rubin has some good commentary and historical background on blood libel (hat tip: Bob from Virginia).

What is the modern incident that comes to my mind on hearing the phrase “blood libel?” Why, Mohammed al Durah, of course. Richard Landes has used the phrase many times in connection with the allegation that al Durah was killed by Israeli soldiers (for example, here), and quite correctly at that (Landes is a historian, by the way).

Another occasion of blood libel that comes to mind (although I haven’t heard the phrase used in connection with it) is something I read many years ago, as I was just beginning on the long road toward my “change.” I initially believed it and was horrified by it. It’s the well-known piece “A Gaza Diary” that appeared in the October 2001 Harper’s, written by Chris Hedges and alleging that Israeli soldiers—well, you read the passage for yourself:

Hedges, in one passage in the 11-page article in Harper’s, said that he was at the refugee camp on Sunday afternoon, June 17, when a voice came over the Israeli loudspeaker saying, “Come on, dogs, where are all the dogs of Khan Younis? Come! Come!”

Boys, most no more than 10 or 11 years old, according to Hedges, responded to the taunts by throwing rocks over an electric fence at two armored Israeli jeeps.

The fence separates the camp from a Jewish settlement where the “whitewashed villas and manicured lawns and gardens look as if they have been lifted out of a southern California suburb.” A percussion grenade scattered one group of boys, writes Hedges.

The soldiers, shooting with M-16 rifles equipped with silencers, sent bullets that “tumble end-over-end through the children’s slight bodies,” killing 11-year-old Ali Murad and seriously wounding four more, three of them under 18, according to Hedges. On the previous day, he writes, eight were shot under similar circumstances, six of them under 18.

Hedges writes he has seen children shot in El Salvador, Guatemala and Sarajevo, and mothers with infants lined up and massacred in Algeria, “but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.”

Here’s a lengthy refutation of many of the “facts” in Hedges article. But the blood libel had worked its magic and the damage had been done, as Hedges well knew; many more people read Harper’s—and believe it—than read CAMERA.]

The hard left in action: the ends justifies the means

The New Neo Posted on by

The hard core left is pragmatic about truth, but you don’t often see that fact revealed as honestly as it was in a comment I found at TNR, made by “Virginia Centrist” at 10:17 AM on 01/12/2011, in response to Jonathan Chait’s surprising defense of Sarah Palin’s use of the term “blood libel” to describe the attacks on her after the Tucson shooting:

Good lord, Jon! Who cares if it’s intellectually dishonest to attack her and pin this on her. I admire your honestly and lack of cynicism here, but the teaparty has crossed the line of good taste in their vile and violence-laced attacks and rhetoric aimed towards politicians in BOTH PARTIES. I should think that all elites would agree that they deserve this and that this will calm them down and reinforce the temporarily forgotten social norm that over the top rhetoric is inappropriate.

If you’re trying to argue that this won’t work, then you’re wrong. John Boehner has every incentive in the world to quiet these nuts down before a presidential election. Their usefulness is limited to base turnout elections (midterms).

Most Americans will buy these attacks on Palin, by the way, regardless of the facts. Why? Because they don’t like her.

Not everyone on the left acts this way; Chait, for example, certainly didn’t. But many do. I’m just surprised to see someone—even an anonymous commenter—admit it so openly.

Why has the left’s mask slipped recently?

The New Neo Posted on by

In the wake of the Tucson shooting, commenter Occam’s Beard made these remarks:

The question is why they’re letting the mask slip now, instead of doing the Walter Cronkite and continuing to hide their true views. Perhaps [they] are doing so because they think they’re on the verge of winning, and are overplaying their hand, Luxemburg/Liebknecht style. Or perhaps they are doing so because they see their historic chance slipping away, thanks to their assorted betes noire (sp?) ”“ Limbaugh, Beck, Fox News, and most especially, Palin ”“ publicly disputing what leftists try to portray as received wisdom, undaunted by the vituperation of the left, and striking a resonant chord with many people.

Good question: why now? I think it’s that, with the 2008 election of Obama and the heavily Democratic composition of both House and Senate, they thought they had it made. They truly believed that they had defeated the conservative monster forever and could do a permanent victory dance in the end zone.

It turned out to be otherwise, and rather quickly at that. And on some deep and perhaps still-unacknowledged level, they know it’s they themselves who blew the golden opportunity, by trying to go too far too fast.

If only they had been more careful and more incremental, they could have had it all. But somewhere between the election of 2008 and that of 2010—probably around the time of the long hard drive to ram through HCR—the mask slipped as to their intentions, and now they don’t care if it slips a bit more if it can get ultimately them where they want to go, and where they fully thought they should have succeeded in going by this time.

After all, demonizing their opponents through the use of Orwellian accusations worked in the past, didn’t it? It can work again, right? The Two Minutes Hate has a venerable function, doesn’t it?

But they may be underestimating the intelligence of the American people once again (at least, I think and hope they are). Fifty-seven percent of Americans polled are not buying the idea that political rhetoric had anything to do with the Tucson shootings. As Democrats lose more and more Americans, they become more and more frantic to win them back.

Last night the president avoided this trap. It is no accident; he reads the polls, too. He knew what he had to do, and he did it. But notice that he waited from Saturday till Wednesday evening to make his statement, allowing the vicious dogs to bark all that time and to deeply plant the accusations that have increased the ire on all the left-wing blogs and discussion boards.

The Anchoress Elizabeth Scalia, insightful as always, has an explanation for the particular form the left’s post-Tucson accusations have taken. She believes the left is desperately racing to its end-game of “putting into place…their long-desired restrictions on speech, gun-control measures…[and] the so-called ‘Fairness Doctrine.'”

In their minds, a massacre such as the one on Saturday in Tucson represented a golden opportunity to promote those goals. But in order to do so, the link between the right and the shooting needed to be made. Jared Loughner didn’t oblige by being an actual Tea Party member, as they’d originally hoped. Nor was he even sympathetic to the right—or, as it turns out, especially politically interested at all. That did not stop them, but it made the strategic and amoral nature of their charges more transparent. Let’s hope the American people remember this lesson in 2012.

[ADDENDUM: Jennifer Rubin thinks that one of the big mistakes the left made was jumping the gun, as it were, and making their accusations before they knew the facts about Loughner, which proved them wrong and made them look foolish.

I agree that’s the way it turned out for the majority of people. But I don’t think the left’s early response was an oversight at all. I think it was a gamble, one they thought worth taking. They were hoping facts would prove them right, and thinking they might. They also didn’t want the facts to get in the way of a good argument. That required an early response, and would fire up the base, always a good thing. They just didn’t count on most people in the country paying enough attention to discredit them.]

Give Jonathan Martin the Spin of the Week award: again with the all-about-Palin

The New Neo Posted on by

In Politico, Martin makes Obama’s speech all about Palin.

I kid you not. It goes like this: why couldn’t Palin have given such a fine and healing speech on the subject? Obama did. She just can’t rise about it.

I guess I missed the part where the MSM and a huge bunch of Republican pundits had accused the president of motivating the killer through his inflammatory rhetoric. I missed the part where he had to defend himself against—yes, a blood libel mounted by an opposition that wasted hardly a moment for the bodies to get cold before making the charge.

Martin writes:

At sunrise in the East on Wednesday, Sarah Palin demonstrated that she has little interest ”” or capacity ”” in moving beyond her brand of grievance-based politics. And at sundown in the West, Barack Obama reminded even his critics of his ability to rally disparate Americans around a message of reconciliation.

As of this moment there are over 1700 comments to Martin’s post, and counting. The first one has a slightly different tone than what I’ve written here, but I kinda like it:

Wow. Martin is spewing some world class sycophantic BS today!

Obama’s Tucson speech pitch-perfect

The New Neo Posted on by

I neither watched it nor listened to it, but I read the full text of Obama’s speech, and it seems that the orator who was heard at the 2004 Democratic Convention has returned.

We always knew that this Obama existed, along with this sort of speechwriter. Obama has decided to go back to being the great peacemaker, with a minister’s message of love and togetherness.

It used to be easier to believe in this Obama, before we saw his behavior as president and heard his unscripted rhetoric. I expected to hear him use this peaceful and healing tone tonight in his speech, if only for strategic reasons. It’s impossible to know what’s in the man’s mind, but his past does not make me optimistic.

But wouldn’t it be wonderful if he—and everyone in Congress, and Obama’s successor, whomever he or she might be—could fulfill the wish he gave voice to tonight, speaking of Christina Taylor Green:

I want us to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it. All of us ”“ we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children’s expectations.

I’ll leave it at that.

Sarah Palin and the blood libel

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s all over the blogosphere. Look at memeorandum’s top articles, and you’ll see they’re all about Sarah Palin’s video defense of herself in which she calls the attacks blaming her for the Giffords shootings a “blood libel.”

Even some on the right consider her choice of words unfortunate. Jonah Goldberg suggests that her use of the phrase in this context “is not ideal.” After all, it’s historically been employed as an anti-Semitic accusation against Jews, alleging that they murder Christian children in order to employ their blood in rituals. The goal of the blood libel is to incite pogroms and reprisals against Jews.

And at Harry’s Place the question of whether Palin even understands the term has been raised.

But what phrase would have been better? I actually can’t think of one. Yes, “blood libel” is not exactly correct. No one is accusing Palin of being a Jew who has killed a child to use its blood in making matzos. But, as I pointed out in my recent piece for PJ, most normal people understand figures of speech, and Palin is using an analogy here that is actually rather apt.

Sarah Palin is known for many things. One of them is that she doesn’t pull her rhetorical punches. We saw that in particular when she trotted out the phrase “death panels” to describe the direction in which she thought HCR was inevitably headed.

I believe that, like her or hate her (and I’ve gone on record saying I don’t think she’s a good candidate for the 2012 presidency), Palin chooses her phrases carefully and knows what she’s doing. And I would guess that, as a religious Christian and strong supporter of Israels and Jews, Palin knows exactly what the blood libel is and has an awareness of the history behind the use of the phrase.

I am wondering how it would feel to be reeling from hearing the dreadful news of the Tucson assassination/massacre, and then almost immediately to find oneself accused of inciting it by press and an opposition solemnly and sanctimoniously intoning the charge in transparently hypocritical hope of elevating the tone of political discourse while simultaneously pointing the finger of bloody guilt at their hated opponent. You know, the phrase “blood libel” might just come to mind.

What the left has done to Sarah Palin has been disgusting right from the start. But the accusation that she is responsible for the Tucson killings might just be a new low. So let’s see how the term “blood libel” might apply:

(1) The charge stems from irrational and long-term hatred of Palin for what and who she is.

(2) They are saying she is an accessory before the fact to an assassination attempt and several cold-blooded murders, including that of a child.

(3) The goal of the charge is to provoke a hateful backlash against her.

(4) It is part of a long-term pattern of stirring up irrational hatred towards Palin.

Fearless though Palin appears to be, it’s actually possible that, when she heard of the Giffords shooting, the thought passed through her mind that she’s similarly at risk from crazies stirred up by the hatred directed towards her from the other side.

Would I have used the term “blood libel?” Probably not. But I’m not Sarah Palin. I haven’t been the target of the most vicious campaign against a politician in modern memory. Within hours, death threats against Palin began to pop up on Twitter. I think Sarah Palin’s earned the right to use the term “blood libel” to describe what’s going on:

[NOTE: Instapundit’s Glenn Reynold used the term first to describe what’s been happening to Palin in the wake of the Giffords shooting, and he got only a little bit of flak for it.

(Am I still allowed to say “flak?”)

Here Reynolds points out previous political uses of the term “blood libel.” But they didn’t elicit a peep of protest because, as he also points out, the speaker wasn’t Sarah Palin.]

[ADDENDUM: Support for Sarah from a surprising source. Good for him.

Another surprise.]

[ADDENDUM II: Ace has more. (Hat tip: commenter “rickl.”) Some of the comments at Ace’s are pretty clever, too, like this one:

Did you know Palin wrote her speech in Tucsonese blood? True story.

Well, that’s actually not true… but she wanted to. Prove she didn’t!]

[ADDENDUM III: The Anchoress is spot on in her assessment.]

[ADDENDUM IV: This piece by Dr. Sanity is a few days old, but still relevant and well worth reading.]