Almost-fall garden interlude

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When I moved to my present house I inherited a perennial garden.

That wasn’t my main concern. Just having a marginally affordable place to live was the important thing, because I managed to buy my house in a seller’s market (and I bet that, whenever I move, it will be a buyer’s market. Ah, well.)

The garden was an unintended responsibility, one I wasn’t sure I could meet. Actually, although the house is fairly small, there were three gardens–one in front, the sun garden; a terraced rock one on the side and one in the back, both shade gardens. I had to do a lot of reading and learning about growing flowers to rise to the occasion and do right by those gardens, since I knew virtually nothing on the subject when I first moved here.

But I think, all things considering, I’ve done rather well. Some plants died and I replaced them with others. Some thrived. I moved things around. I learned that what looks good in June or July can look crummy and bloomless in August. I learned my favorite garden joke, which I’ve written before but will repeat once more, with feeling:

Q: What’s the definition of a perennial?
A: It’s a plant that comes back every year, if it had lived.

It’s not always easy to get the garden to look good in September. But I will restrain my innate modesty to say that I think mine isn’t all that shabby right now. And, getting an even tighter grip on that innate modesty, I’m going to post a couple of photos of the front garden, taken just yesterday, when it wasn’t pouring rain, unlike today:



Beslan: second anniversary

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It’s the second anniversary of one of the worst terrorist acts in history, the Beslan kidnapping and massacre.

I wrote this post one year ago, on the first anniversary. Nothing much has changed since then. The sorrow of the parents who lost children has probably not eased much, although it has gotten a little older.

The main thrust of most articles written on this second anniversary (and there are relatively few, especially outside of Russia) focus on the rage the families feel at the Russian authorities for what is perceived as their negligent handling of the incident. This feeling has been fueled by a new and controversial report by a member of the State Duma, Yury Savelyev, who disagrees with the official findings that the first shots fired in the final confrontation were set off by the terrorists. He writes that the initial blasts came from the Russian authorities.

It’s impossible from this vantage point to even begin to evaluate who might be correct. Some accuse Savelyev of distorting the facts for political gain (sound familiar)? Whatever the truth might be, his report–and other articles about the anniversary–are definitely part of a trend that I’ve noticed before under similar circumstances, which is this: when terrorists attack, people often seem to direct the bulk of their anger at their own authorities, blaming them for failure to protect.

In this case, my guess is that the Russian authorities are indeed guilty of some sort of contributory negligence. Perhaps they didn’t fire at the school first, despite what Savelyev has said. But they may indeed have messed up in some way or other, perhaps even in several different ways.

But any negligence on their part is contributory only. There’s no question this was a terrorist attack of extreme and unusual coldbloodedness. The guilt and responsibility lie squarely with the terrorists themselves. They were the ones who chose a target with a predominance of children among the victims, they were the ones who subjected those children and others to great suffering both before and during their deaths, and they were the ones who had a chance to view that suffering and yet still did not relent (even shooting some of the children in the back as they fled the final conflagration).

But most of those terrorists–except one–are now dead. They are out of reach; the Russian authorities are not. It’s a normal human reaction to blame those close at hand, especially if they are perceived as having had a duty to protect and as having failed that duty.

But history only plays once; we don’t have an alternate universe in which the Russian military and police get another opportunity to do something different, something more effective, something that preserved more lives. Was there any chance of a more successful outcome, given the ferocity of the hostage-takers? I personally don’t think so, but I have no way of knowing. Neither does anyone else.

Many people in Russia criticize the fact that the terrorists were not stopped somewhere on the way to their target. This is similar to criticisms mounted in this country towards the CIA and FBI for not noticing and stopping the 9/11 hijackers long before they did their nefarious business.

A group calling itself the Mothers of Beslan speaks out:

“We are convinced that the difficult last two years have not brought us to the truth about the Beslan tragedy but to the covering up of the truth.”

That lack of trust means that even the trial of Nurpashi Kulayev, who officials say was the only hostage-taker not to die during the fighting, failed to bring closure to victims and their relatives.

“One person cannot be responsible for the deaths of more than 300. Those who allowed the fighters to travel unhindered to Beslan along federal roads should sit in his place. And those who allowed the bloody ending,” said Valery Karlov, who lost his father.

That last quote says a great deal. There is only one person left alive from among the perpetrators, hardly enough to bear the brunt of all the rage and grief the families–and much of Russia–still feel. The authorities, however, are alive and kicking, as well as numerous.

And no doubt there are plenty of reasons to blame them, as their response was far from perfect, as are most human responses to an unforeseen and unprecedented crisis. The basic human need to believe that, if the police and military and government had done their job correctly, no one need have died, is compounded by a traditional (and probably justified) distrust of the Russian government. Any official report from that source is already seen as a whitewash.

But we can all agree that Beslan was one of the saddest episodes yet in the annals of terrorism, and that many of the rescuers distinguished themselves that day. Here are some poignant photos, for remembrance (I have omitted any photos of the dead out of respect, although there are many at the website from which I got these pictures):



A trip back in time: Jimmy Carter and the Iranian Revolution (Part III)

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[Parts I and II.]

For anyone who was alive at the time and old enough to pay attention to the news, the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of Jimmy Carter and the Iranian Revolution is the hostage crisis that occurred less than a year after the installment of the Khomeini regime. We watched, impotently, as America was brought to its knees by a bunch of anti-American Iranian kidnappers and a US President who seemed powerless to do anything about them. And the incident wasn’t a short one, either, lasting a Biblical-sounding 444 days.

Carter did do a few things about the crisis, it’s true. He froze Iranian assets in the US and halted oil imports, as well as trying diplomacy. In desperation, about six months into the mess, he approved a half-baked and doomed rescue attempt that ended in tragedy and more humiliation for the US (see here for my post about this incident). In the final ignominy for Jimmy (but a relief for the nation), the hostages were freed on the day of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration.

Here’s more about Carter’s reasoning and the strategies behind it during the hostage crisis:

As winter turned to spring, and negotiations failed to produce a deal, frustrated Americans demanded stronger action. “No one can know how much pressure there was on Jimmy to do something,” Rosalynn Carter recalled. “I would go out and campaign and come back and say, ‘Why don’t you do something?’ And he said, ‘What would you want me to do?’ I said, ‘Mine the harbors.’ He said, ‘Okay, suppose I mine the harbors, and they decide to take one hostage out every day and kill him. What am I going to do then?'”

Based on that evidence, I’d prefer Rosalynn to have been in charge. Carter’s mindset was zero tolerance for even the possibility of a hostage being killed. His basic orientation was pacifist, and the hostage crisis revealed him to the world as an ineffectual and timid leader. By extrapolation, his role implied that the United States was the same. And, for the moment at least, it was.

It’s easy to pay attention to dramatic events such as the hostage crisis, which thrust themselves into nearly everyone’s consciousness in a way that could hardly be ignored. It’s much easier, however, to ignore the more subtle, far less widely-covered events that led up to the Shah’s downfall and Khomeini’s rise, events in which President Carter played a large role as well.

Perhaps, as I wrote yesterday, no policy of the Shah’s in his final years in power could have stopped the steamroller of discontent with his policies and the increasing support for the mullahs. After all, the Iranians knew what they disliked about the Shah, and there was something with which everyone could find fault. The Shah was brought down by an unholy and bizarre alliance, a trio made of three groups with beliefs that utterly contradicted those of the other two– civil libertarians, socialists, and totalitarian Islamists. Each group had reasons to dislike the Shah, and each of them calculated that they’d be the only ones left standing in the end. But there was room for only one winner, and that turned out to be the mullahs.

So maybe Carter’s pre-Revolutionary policies towards the Shah weren’t all that important in bringing about the latter’s downfall. Or maybe they were. What were those policies?

First, a bit of background. The Shah had been a staunch ally of the US for his lengthy reign (see this for some background. Yes, it’s Wikipedia, but it seems fairly straightforward and quite detailed). A particularly complex (and controversial) event in US-Iranian relations involved the Shah’s cooperation with the Eisenhower administration in a 1953 coup (or, to be technical, a counter-coup) against Mossadegh, the elected Prime Minister of Iran who was suspected at the time of being a Communist sympathizer .

The Shah lived in what’s known as a “rough neighborhood.” This meant that, in order to implement the modernization of Iran, he felt he needed to be harsh in dealing with the opposition. Jimmy Carter was dedicated to the cause of spreading human rights throughout the world, and he decided to put pressure to bear on the Shah to expand civil liberties and relax his policies towards those in his country who were against him.

Carter threatened the Shah with cutting arms shipments, and in response:

The Shah…released 357 political prisoners in February, 1977. But lifting the lid of repression even slightly encouraged the Shah’s opponents. An organization of writers and publishers called for freedom of thought, and 64 lawyers called for the abolition of military tribunals. Merchants wrote letters requesting more freedom from government controls. Some people took to the streets, perhaps less fearful of being shot to death, and they clashed with police. A group of 120 lawyers joined together to publicize SAVAK torture and to monitor prison conditions. Dissident academics formed a group called the National Organization of University Teachers, and they joined students in demanding academic freedom. Political dissidents started disseminating more openly their semi-clandestine publications.

As events spiraled out of control, there were demonstrations throughout Iran. Police reacted harshly, and many protesters were killed, which led to more demonstrations and more deaths, which led to–well, you get the idea.

A genie of dissent had been unleashed–a valid one, because there was much to protest. But as things escalated, and the Shah eventually lost the support of the army and the police (a turning point), few seemed to be prescient enough to predict what forces would replace his regime–not what was hoped for, but what was likely to do so. There were only three choices, and two of them–the mullahs and the Marxists–could reasonably be expected to be far more repressive than the Shah.

Jimmy Carter was probably sincere in wishing that his pressure on the Shah would lead to greater civil liberties, not fewer. But if so, it was one of the gravest miscalculations in history. Be careful what you wish for.

On New Years Eve of 1977:

President Carter toasted the Shah at a state dinner in Tehran, calling him “an island of stability’ in the troubled Middle East….Did the Carter administration “lose” Iran, as some have suggested? Gaddis Smith might have put it best: “President Carter inherited an impossible situation — and he and his advisers made the worst of it.” Carter seemed to have a hard time deciding whether to heed the advice of his aggressive national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who wanted to encourage the Shah to brutally suppress the revolution, or that of his more cautious State Department, which suggested Carter reach out to opposition elements in order to smooth the transition to a new government. In the end he did neither, and suffered the consequences.

Even after it became known that the Shah was suffering from cancer, President Carter was reluctant to allow him entry to the United States, for fear of reprisal against Americans still in Iran. But in October, when the severity of the Shah’s illness became known, Carter relented on humanitarian grounds. “He went around the room, and most of us said, ‘Let him in.'” recalls Vice President Walter Mondale. “And he said, ‘And if [the Iranians] take our employees in our embassy hostage, then what would be your advice?’ And the room just fell dead. No one had an answer to that. Turns out, we never did.”…

No, they never did. And soon the whole world knew it.

And Britain also hopes Santa will give it a pony for Christmas

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I don’t know about you, but this headline seems both absurd and tragic to me:

Britain says it hopes for negotiated deal over Iran’s uranium enrichment

The statement was actually by British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett, but I doubt she was speaking for herself only. This appears to be official British policy.

Perhaps Beckett’s statement was merely an example of “keeping the temperature down” (a strategy of the West mentioned in this post), and not really meant as a true reflection of the expectations of the Western powers vis-a-vis Iran.

But then again, perhaps it was exactly what it sounds like: a dreamy pie-in-the-sky reflection of a befogged and befuddled–and bewitched, bothered, and bewildered–state of mind on the part of people who should know better.

But some are not quite so wishful in their thinking. Some have taken the measure of the West and judged it to be exactly as they had hoped–which is to say, not up to the fight ahead. The last sentence of the article reads as follows:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Friday that his country would never give up its nuclear program and accused the West of lying when it claims Tehran is pursuing nuclear weapons.

Clear enough. So, let’s talk!

(What’s the relevance of the photo above? It’s from a production of the definitive work on false hope, “Waiting for Godot.” And it’s written by another Beckett–Samuel, rather than Margaret.)

A trip back in time: Bakhtiar and the Revolution (Part II)

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[Part I of this series can be found here. Part III is here.]

Shapour Bakhtiar took office as Prime Minister of Iran on Jan 6, 1979. He was appointed by the Shah in one of the latter’s final acts in Iran, a country from which the Shah departed on Jan 16.

But Bakhtiar was not the Shah’s man. He was a well-known dissident who was appointed in an effort to show that the Shah was ready to reform in ways that would satisfy those who were proponents of greater freedom and civil liberties in Iran.

The Shah is one of those figures in history who, like Ataturk in Turkey, was faced with the dilemmas common to those who would modernize and Westernize a third-world country, and especially one with a strong traditional Islamic clerical tradition. It is beyond the scope of this post to discuss why Ataturk was able to successfully buck the fairly substantial opposition of religious leaders and the populace in Turkey, and why the Shah’s effort ultimately failed in Iran. Some day I may attempt to tackle that one–but suffice to say for now that the Iranian Shah had the same goal of modernization as Ataturk, but the opposition to his rule was stronger, and his efforts to crush it far more Draconian.

The Shah’s secret police–SAVAK, usually referred to with an adjective such as “dreaded” or “hated” before the acronym–was active in Iran to stifle those who would oppose him. There is a great deal of controversy over just how dreadful SAVAK actually was in the larger scheme of things. Was it a wide-ranging and indiscriminate effort to track down, torture, imprison, exile and/or murder all those who dissented, or who even were thought to dissent, much like the operations of the Soviet KGB? Or was it far more benign, only dealing with those who would violently overthrow the government (such as Khomeini and his henchmen), and using torture only sparingly? If history is written by the victors–and, in this case, the victors so far in Iran have been the Khomeinists–then how can we know the truth about SAVAK?

What we do know, however, is this: there were many protests against the Shah’s modernizing changes, which especially threatened the religious establishment in Iran. For example, religious students demonstrated against land reforms that the Shah had instituted to try to offer the populace of Iran some economic benefits, with the goal (among other things) of increasing his popularity with them.

If that was the Shah’s intent, it backfired, because the land reforms imposed hardships on the Shiite clerical establishment (which had owned some of the land). Khomeini, who was still in Iran at the time, issued a fatwa. Protests were organized, the Shah’s government began to ridicule the clerics as old-fashioned, and more clerics took offense and joined the opposition. In addition, crackdowns on protesters became very brutal–for example, a group of theological students protesting against the opening of liquor stores were killed, and these deaths ultimately reached into the hundreds.

It appears that the Shah was already fighting the same extreme fanatics who were to take over the country in 1979. As often happens, his efforts to stop them had the paradoxical effect of making them martyrs, agitating their sympathizers, and ultimately making the movement against him grow stronger. Had his policies against his enemies–the enemies of modernization–been less heavy-handed, might the movement have died down? Or would it only have grown larger and more powerful more quickly? Unanswerable questions, I’m afraid.

History gave its own answer. I’ve written before about how the Shah had hesitated to have Khomeini executed in 1964 when the latter was imprisoned, because the Shah feared making the already popular and powerful cleric into a martyr. Perhaps if he’d done so others would have filled Khomeini’s shoes and carried on in his name, and history would have taken more or less the same course as it ultimately did.

But perhaps not. Perhaps there was something especially charismatic about Khomeini that would have been lost to the clerics’ cause without his particular presence. Once again, we’ll never know; what we do know is that Khomeini’s life was spared, he was ultimately exiled, and he lived to return to Iran in triumph and take over the government. As unrest and discontent with the Shah was brewing in the late 1970s, Khomeini became the de facto head of the opposition, which was a strange amalgam of restrictive clerics, liberals who supported human rights, and socialists–each with an agenda, each jockeying for position:

Anti-Shah intellectuals, secular and Islamic, moderate and leftist misread developments. They believed that they were using the popular Khomeini and that he could be shunted aside as democracy was established. It was believed that with the success of the revolution the ulama (official community of scholars of Islam) and Khomeini would return to their mosques and schools and perhaps advise the government on Islamic matters.

Such hubris is misplaced. The moral of the story is to never underestimate the power of a demagogue fully bent on acquiring it (the same mistake was made, by the way, by Franz von Papen and Hindenberg. In the waning days of the Weimar Republic, they thought they could “control” that silly-looking upstart, Hitler.)

Which brings us to Bakhtiar. On Bakhtiar’s appointment as the new Prime Minister, Khomeini condemned him, of course, from his exile in France. But Khomeini continued to live his charmed life; Bakhtiar allowed him to return to Iran shortly thereafter. The reason? A combination of Bakhtiar’s own devotion to freedom of speech, and the Shah’s old conundrum: Khomeini was so popular that to try to ban him would cause such public unrest in Iran that it seemed counterproductive. In essence, Bakhtiar, although a far different ruler than the Shah, faced the same dilemma; he resolved it in favor of not suppressing the opposition.

So who was Bakhtiar? Like many Iranians, he’d spent many formative years in France, acquiring graduate degrees in political science, law, and philosophy. But he was also a man of action; residing in France during the Nazi occupation, he fought for the Resistance. Returning to Iran after WWII, he continued his resistance, becoming an opponent of the Shah, who imprisoned him for many years.

Thus Bakhtiar had his bona fides–no patsy of the Shah, he had been one of the leaders of those who were against the Shah’s regime because of its human rights abuses, and he himself had suffered greatly for his bravery. But by the time Bakhtiar came to power it was most decidedly too late, both for him and for the Shah’s modernization program, as well as for the civil rights that Bakhtiar championed. Perhaps the only beneficiary of that campaign for civil rights was Khomeini himself, ironically enough.

Bakhtiar’s regime lasted about two weeks before Khomeini and the clerics took over, establishing the primacy of Sharia law, abolishing most of the rights women had enjoyed, banning alcohol and gambling and a host of other un-Islamic pursuits as well as newspapers, and instituting his own murderous crackdown to stifle all opposition. Khomeini didn’t have to worry about making martyrs of his enemies, nor about whether to allow them to remain in Iran and exercise freedom of speech. Tyranny doesn’t struggle with the same sort of philosophical questions about how much toughness is too much, questions with which its opponents wrestle mightily:

It was announced that any spreading of corruption would be punished by death. A variety of the Shah’s former friends, colleagues and generals were seized, and after trials of a few minutes they were executed immediately – to prevent news spreading to the others who were detained – the executions lasting without stop for several weeks. The bodies of the prisoners were loaded into meat containers and dumped into mass graves. Khomeini dismissing international protests, saying that criminals did not need to be tried, just killed.

Bakhtiar, however, was not one of them–at least, not right away. He left Iran and settled in Paris again. From that venue he organized another resistance–a movement to fight the Islamic Republic of the mullahs. For his pains, he was almost assassinated in 1980; a policeman and a neighbor died, but Bakhtiar lived to fight another day.

In 1991, however, the number of this brave man was finally up. The assassins got their man; Bakhtiar and his secretary were murdered in his home. The assailant later was captured and tried in France. At his trial he admitted to having been sent by the Iranian government.

What lessons can we draw from the life of Bakhtiar? The first is that one can be both committed to freedom and personally courageous, and yet lose the battle against repression and tyranny. The second is more of a question: is it sometimes acceptable (or perhaps even necessary) to use greater ruthlessness, to be willing to use oppressive tools against an enemy that–if successful–would not hesitate to abolish all the civil liberties and the advances for which you are fighting?

This is the dilemma faced not just by Bakhtiar, but by all those who would oppose the likes of Khomeini. How much of a crackdown is too much? How little is too little? At what point do you compromise your own principles so much that you become too much like the enemy you are fighting?

There are no easy answers. Only the questions–and Khomeini’s regime, in its present-day manifestation, Ahmadinejad– remain.

Podcast time again

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The latest Sanity Squad podcast is now playing at Politics Central at Pajamas Media. We discuss the kidnapping and release of the Fox News correspondent and cameraman–both the psychological effects of such kidnappings and the phenomenon of forced conversion.

My headset has been generating some weird audio effects, from low volume to hissing and popping and otherwise strange carryings-on. The very patient and kind audio guy at Pajamas did some troubleshooting yesterday, and has decided that the problem is one of microphone placement. So next time I think that my voice will sound more as it actually does in real life. Stay tuned.

Oh, and the following has nothing to do with the podcast (at least I hope it doesn’t!), but it’s a photo of Keith Richards I found at the PJ website. Be afraid, be very afraid.

A trip back in time: Khomeini and the Revolution (Part I)

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One of my favorite verses from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (the Fitzgerald translation of the Persian original) is this:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

Ah, but if only we could go back, to wash out a few of the most terrible words! That’s the deep desire that propels most time travel fantasy: to undo some event that you know led to untold suffering.

The answer given by science fiction—and life—is that it just can’t be done. Even if it could, doing so might cause a cascade of other unforeseen effects. But the wish remains, especially for those happenings that seem to have been unmitigated tragedies for humankind.

One of those events was the triumphal return of Ayatollah Khomeini to Iran from his long exile in Iraq and his short sojourn in France (and Khayyam is an especially apt source to quote for the occasion—since modern day Iran is, of course, ancient Persia).

I was around when Khomeini made his return trip, one that propelled Iran’s own trip back in time to some horrific amalgam of the Dark Ages crossed with the tools of a modern totalitarian state. I noticed Khomeini’s arrival in Iran, although I had no idea of its significance. Neither did most.

He seemed and dark and brooding figure from some stern and gloomy ancient past. Or the sorcerer from Disney’s “Sorcerer’s Apprentice:”


It was difficult to understand the veneration the Iranian people seemed to have for him. In this photo, taken on his return, he looks as though he’s already become a statue:

Here’s an article that chronicled the event. Reportedly, “up to” five million people lined the streets of the capital to witness it. The revolution he had helped orchestrate from Paris (how apropos!) was in motion; its Reign of Terror was about to begin.

The Iranian revolution took almost everyone by surprise, including many of its participants. It was an amalgam of several of the strangest bedfellows in the world—a religious movement to impose a theocracy of strictest Islamic law, a group dedicated to Westernization and classical liberal human rights, and an active Marxist contingent.

All in all, a heady concoction that couldn’t fail to explode. The only question at the beginning was which faction would win out, because they certainly couldn’t all coexist. Khomeini was pretty sure he had an answer to that question. While in exile he had carefully played to the crowd that believed in human rights, but he made it crystal clear once he had consolidated his power that he had no intention whatsoever of following through on that score. Au contraire.

Khomeini addressed the assembled crowd at the Cemetery of Martyrs a few miles south of Tehran on February 1, 1979:

I will strike with my fists at the mouths of [the current Iranian] government. From now on it is I who will name the government.

Khomeni had learned his French lessons well: L’etat, c’est moi.

Shapour Bakhtiar, the newly-minted and ineffectual Prime Minister of Iran at the time–he had less than two weeks to go in that position—replied as follows:

Don’t worry about this kind of speech. That is Khomeini. He is free to speak but he is not free to act.

I almost wrote, “the ineffectual and clueless Bakhtiar.” But I’m glad I didn’t, because when I started to do some research on Bakhtiar himself, I found a man of rare courage and no small prescience, a tragic figure in history who made at least one fatal error.

[Part II.]

Must-read: on Israel, chosenness, supercessionism

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Richard Landes of Second Draft and Augean Stables has written what just might be the definitive answer to those who–like Norwegian writer Jostein Gaarder–accuse Israel of heinous crimes and intents based (among other things) on the accusers’ complete misunderstanding of certain principles of Judaism such as the knotty problem of “chosenness.” There’s also a clear and concise discussion there about what’s known as “supersessionism,” and how various religions stack up on that score.

One of the many problems with discussions on these topics is that people of good will often feel they are starting with a basic agreement on concepts. They are not. A phrase such as “chosen” is one that people often think they intuitively understand. Because Christians and Jews have a common history that goes way back, it’s easy to jump to the conclusion that the religions have more in common than they actually do.

The problem is compounded by the fact that many–if not most–Jews in this country and elsewhere consider themselves secular and have very little grounding in the tenets of their own nominal religion. Therefore even most Jews probably share the misconceptions common among non-Jews about some basic Jewish concepts such as that of having been “chosen.”

So, please read.

We are all investigative reporters now–or should be

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David Frum has summarized some of the hoaxes perpetrated on and by the media in recent weeks. From Reutergate to counterfeit bills passed by Hezbollah, from Green Helmet guy doing photo ops at Qana to the Ambulance Hoax, the MSM has been at the very best disingenuous and at the very worst complicit in the spread of lies and fraud. If not for bloggers, none of this would have been exposed.

Also, please check out Richard Landes’s latest efforts at Second Draft, entitled “The Birth of an Icon.” As you watch more of the footage of the alleged death of the boy Mohammad al Durah (“caught in the crossfire”), it becomes ever more likely that the entire thing was a hoax–and a very influential one at that, especially in Europe, where al Durah’s death became a rallying cry for sympathy with the bloody Second Intifada.

So, what’s up with the media? Frum lists the possibilities: they are gullible, they are biased, they are in collusion, they are frightened of retaliation, they are some of the above, they are all of the above.

Here is my call to the MSM: put the “investigative” back into reporting. Traditionally, investigative reporting–in which the writer deeply questions the obvious, and brings an attitude of skepticism and critical thinking to the story, almost like a detective researching a case–has been limited to local scandals and corruptions. But it needs to be more broadly applied these days. What used to be a straight news story of war reportage–a photographer comes upon a bombed vehicle, is told by the locals what happened, and takes a photo–is no longer so straightforward. Perhaps it never was. And local stringers, who are often used as photographers and reporters in war torn areas–even those who’ve worked a long time with a news agency– might be found to have their own political agendas that distort coverage.

It makes for a lot more work, to be sure. And if the reporter isn’t ideologically inclined to doubt the sources, the healthy skepticism that’s a prime requirement of all investigative reporting is going to be especially hard to bring to the story. But at this point it couldn’t be more clear that it’s necessary to do so. No, not just necessary; it’s absolutely vital.

The Palestinians: loving death, loving life

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It’s been said before in parts of the Arab world, by Hezbollah leader Nasrallah and others: “We are going to win because [the Israelis] love life and we love death.”

Loving death: what an amazing thing to brag about. It’s a boast that’s meant to make the listener cower in awe of the bravery of the speaker, and to feel as though opposing such a person would be futile.

How can one deter or fight an enemy with such determination, one who’s not even wary of death? And this love of death is not just a macho pose or hyperbolic rhetoric (although it’s at least partly that); suicide bombers have definitely put their money where their mouths are in that respect. The Palestinian indoctrination of children has been an education in the veneration of death, and has borne fruit in this desire for martyrdom.

It goes without saying that such an attitude isn’t healthy for a society. In a less looking-glass world, it would in fact be a sign that such a culture was about to get its wish–that it was on the brink of extinction. Why? In the past, self-preservation and the desire to live, both as individuals and as a group, was one of the basics for societal survival.

It’s true that all societies require a certain amount of sacrifice, as well. For example, in order to keep both internal law and order, as well to defend the group against attacks by outsiders, there always needs to be a certain number of people who are willing to give their lives in order to protect the others (these people can be conceptualized as sheepdogs, in a metaphor that was discussed previously, here).

But in most societies, these protectors are far from eager to give up their lives. As General Patton famously said, “The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.”

Exactly and precisely. Patton was one of the least PC military men who ever lived. He was controversial even back in WWII, when political correctness was hardly a gleam in the Left’s eye. But now even the military is far more PC than it ever was; in recent decades, the military has become more reluctant to make “the other bastard” die for his. Like it or not (and Jacksonians don’t like it), the gloves are on when we’ve fought the wars of this century, at least so far.

One can only conclude that if the Palestinians, Hezbollah, and Iran had the weaponry the US has, they would not hesitate to obliterate anyone they perceive as having wronged them, shamed them, or gotten in their way. Their love of death is not limited to seeking their own deaths; they definitely embrace the deaths of their enemies.

And in a more Darwinian and less PC world, the Palestinians’ love of death, their lack of advanced weaponry, and their aggressiveness towards an enemy who does possess that weaponry would long ago have resulted in their getting their wish: death. Their own deaths, and the death of their society.

But in a strange ironic twist, such a culture can continue to exist if it faces an enemy that has such a love for life that it refuses to unleash its own arsenal on those who would seek to destroy it. So Palestinian society is protected by the reticence of its enemy, even as it declares that enemy to be ruthless and evil. It counts on that reluctance, that “love of life”–even the life of the Palestinians–to allow Palestinian society to live to fight another day.

The picture is a dismal one, to be sure. So I’m going to clutch at a tiny ray of light; I’ll take it wherever I can find it. This time it’s from Hamas spokesman Ghazi Hamad, of all people (hat tip: Captain Ed.)

An article in the Jerusalem Post quotes Hamad as complaining that Gaza is “caught in anarchy and thuggery.” What’s new about that? Simply this: Hamad isn’t blaming the Israelis, he’s blaming the Palestinians themselves.

This is different, especially for a Hamas spokesman. Those in Israel who advocated the withdrawal from Gaza hoped this would be one of the benefits: Palestinians taking responsibility for their own failures. Without the convenience of being able to blame the occupation, the Palestinians would have to face their own flaws (I wrote about this previously, here)

Here’s a quote from Hamad:

“We’re always afraid to talk about our mistakes,” he added. “We’re used to blaming our mistakes on others. What is the relationship between the chaos, anarchy, lawlessness, indiscriminate murders, theft of land, family rivalries, transgression on public lands and unorganized traffic and the occupation? We are still trapped by the mentality of conspiracy theories – one that has limited our capability to think.”

It’s not that Hamad has suddenly become an Israelophile (if he had, it might be his own ticket to death). Perhaps he just wants Palestinian society to reform, the better to attack its old enemy.

But perhaps not; I like to think not. And this final quote from Hamad lends credence to that possibility. It sounds to me as though it might even be a crie de cour, his reassertion of the energy of life rather than death:

Addressing the various armed groups in the Gaza Strip, Hamad concluded: “Please have mercy on Gaza. Have mercy on us from your demagogy, chaos, guns, thugs, infighting. Let Gaza breathe a bit. Let it live.”

Dr. Sanity channels Elton

The New Neo Posted on by

My esteemed colleague Dr. Sanity is at it again.

Here’s another wonderful song parody of hers, this time of Elton John’s “I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues.”

To refresh your memory (and to better appreciate Dr. Sanity’s–dare I say it–yes, her genius), here are the words of the chorus of the Elton John original:

And I guess that’s why they call it the blues
Time on my hands could be time spent with you
Laughing like children, living like lovers
Rolling like thunder under the covers
And I guess that’s why they call it the blues.

And here’s Dr. Sanity’s version:

And I guess that’s why they all hate the Jews;
Blame them for their failures; and kill them for news
Blow up their children, bask in confusion
Believe that their strengths are just an illusion–
And I guess that’s why they all hate the Jews.

Read the rest, and sing along.