Dancer from the dance

The New Neo Posted on by


A while back, as I listened (or tried to listen) to the President’s State of the Union address, it struck me once again that I’m just not very good at listening to speeches. Unless it’s Winston Churchill, I much prefer to read them.

Even though I was always a good student, I rarely enjoyed classes. In retrospect, I think one big reason was the “sit in your seat and listen while we talk—and talk—and talk” format. In college, I was one of those people who sat at the very back of the room during lectures, swinging my leg restlessly, doodling and smoking.

Ah yes, kids: smoking. We used to be allowed to do that in classrooms. I was never much of a smoker—I really didn’t inhale—but I liked to light up, and to amuse myself by making perfect, long-lasting smoke rings, like the old Camel’s ad in Times Square (mine were much better than his).

The point of all this is that I’m most definitely not what is known as an auditory learner. A speaker has to be riveting—and, preferably, very, very funny—to catch my attention. I’ve been to several authors’ book and/or poetry readings, and despite my best intentions and resolve (and love of books and poetry), I find that I ordinarily drift off within five minutes or less of the moment the author opens his/her mouth, “coming to”—unaware of any lapse in time—only when the applause starts that signifies the reading has ended.

On the other hand, when I’m reading or writing, I concentrate hard. Time tends to pass very quickly, but my mind does not wander. I’ve been known to try to fix a problem with a single line of poetry for what I would estimate to be ten minutes–but then, when I look at my watch, two hours have somehow passed.

In the olden, pre-computer days, when I used to work at a word processor (and before that, an electric typewriter) in a room without a clock, I’ve been known to think it was about midnight and then to hear the birds chirping as a soft light slowly filled the room and I realized it was actually dawn. Now, with computers that have built-in clocks, that’s not going to happen. But I still experience the phenomenon of time passing extraordinarily quickly without my realizing it.

I used to experience the same sort of concentration back in my ballet dancing days. Classes usually involved an hour and a half of intense physical activity. But what isn’t commonly known is that dancing is a mental activity as well, although of an utterly different sort from that involved in writing or in listening to a lecture.

A ballet class consists of a series of graduated exercises that follow a certain strictly determined order, aimed at warming up all the major (and minor) body parts in a way that’s thought to be least likely to lead to injury. The first portion is boring but utterly necessary, the barre. It’s the equivalent of scales for the musician or singer, and it often used to go rather slowly, especially those long intervals of holding the leg up very high and still.

The only thing that got me through the barre was the music. Most of the time we had a live pianist playing classical music (most often Chopin), with the odd Scott Joplin rag thrown in to keep us on our toes (sorry, couldn’t resist). The music transformed the whole exercise into something other than an exercise; it became an art.

Next we took our positions away from the barre for what was known as “center work.” First, a port de bras; mostly arm movements and slowly changing body positions, nothing too difficult. Then, an adagio, or series of slow unfolding movements, ordinarily very very difficult, but lyrical. Then, turns in place. Then some faster movements in place, then small jumps in place. Then bigger jumps in place. And then what was the payoff, the raison d’etre for the whole thing: moving combinations, usually across a diagonal from corner to corner.

Big sweeping jumps that crossed an imaginary stage coupled with linking steps, a series of small ballets that the teacher would choreograph on the spot. Turns that covered space were incorporated into these combinations. Sometimes we’d revolve in a great big circle, faster and faster, until some of us had to stagger out of the group and rest on the sidelines.

The combinations were difficult, and they had to be memorized on the spot, one after the other. The teacher would tell us the steps, then we would “mark” them (do them in a sort of shorthand movement, not full blast). Then the music would start, and off we’d go. And it wasn’t just steps that we had to memorize; it was steps coordinated with arm movements, head movements, body positions, all set down for us in a few moments and then integrated into the body memory and performed full out.

Then, the same thing to the other side. Where the right leg had led before, now it was the left. Where the left arm had been raised during a certain leap, now it was the right. These changes had to be accomplished instantaneously and automatically, almost without thinking.

One of my favorite parts of all was when the teacher would say “reverse the combination.” This was not everyone’s favorite part, to be sure. It was like a tongue twister; the best way to describe it would be that we were required to turn the steps inside out. It was fiendishly difficult; if a jump had featured the back foot leading and ending in front, now the front foot led and ended up in back. If a one-legged turn had been an “inside” turn (that is, turning in the direction of the supporting leg), now it had to be an “outside” turn (turning away from the supporting leg).

We would usually end the big combinations with the largest of leaps on the diagonal, across the room. It was a totally ordered and controlled set of movements; every angle of each part of the body was dictated by tradition. But, within that structure, the utter sense of freedom and expansion—of soaring and flying and oneness with the music—was phenomenal. And, at the end, it was amazing that an hour and a half had passed with my hardly being aware of time at all.

There is nothing like it on earth. I miss it still.

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

[ADDENDUM: To end this piece, I want to describe how a ballet class always ends, with something called a reverence (it’s French, which is the language of ballet). A reverence is a stylized bow, very courtly in nature–which is only fitting, since the origin of ballet lies in court spectacles.

But the reverence that ends a class is very simple. After all the frenetic activity of the minutes before, the students assume their places in the center again. They may be huffing and puffing, they are almost certainly soaked in sweat and exhausted, but all calms down as the music changes to slow and lyrical. To its strains, the students bow in a prescribed manner: first to one corner, then swivel and bow to the other (the corner where the pianist is sitting, ordinarily). Then bow to the center, where the teacher stands, who bows back in return. Each bow is a thank you, and also a grounding.

Sometimes I would experience a feeling of relief as the strains of the reverence music began, relief that a very difficult class was over. Sometimes I’d feel regret, because the class had been so much fun it seemed to end all too soon.

But always, a feeling of gratitude would come to me in synchrony with the body language of the bow. And once in a while, tears would even spring to my eyes at the beautiful coming together of all these things: the movement, the feeling, the music, and the people gathered around me and dedicated to the pursuit of excellence and transcendence in this particular form.]

Those calcium pills–Emily Litella again?

The New Neo Posted on by

First it was low fat diets. Now it’s calcium supplements that have been tested and found somewhat wanting, according to the Washington Post and many other newspapers reporting on a recent study. What’s a woman to do?

First, a personal note. I’ve been taking those things for at least twenty years. And, you know what? I’ll continue to take them.

I’ve always detested milk, and couldn’t even drink it while pregnant, relying instead on those horse-pill-sized supplements. I’ve never had a kidney stone (the study reports that supplements slightly increase the risk of one); and, although there’s always a first time, I’ll take my chances on one. I try to eat other foods high in calcium, but there’s just no substitute for milk products in that respect. I’m part of a subgroup of women who probably get less calcium in the diet than is the norm.

And so far (although I don’t have a clone and therefore there’s no control subject in my own little study) those calcium pills appear to have done right by me. Or at least, something has. A year or two ago I had my first bone density test. Given my history with milk, I wasn’t looking forward to getting the results. So I was stunned when I was told the test showed that I had the bones of a healthy eighteen-year-old.

Now, that may just be the first time since–well, since about twenty-two–that I’ve been told I had the anything of a healthy eighteen-year old. Granted, there might be a few characteristics that would be higher on my list of coveted eighteen-year-old traits than bone density–but I’ll take it, I’ll take it.

However, I strongly suspect that I have the something else of an eighteen-year-old–namely, her bone density test results, which I suspect accidentally got switched with mine. Somewhere in my town there may be a terrified eighteen-year-old taking tons of (worthless?) calcium supplements because she’s been told she’s sporting the bones of a creaky fifty-something-year-old.

But I digress; back to that research. It was undertaken by the federally-funded Women’s Health Initiative, which found indications in the seven-year study of about 36,000 women aged 50-79 that calcium supplementation doesn’t appear to do all that much, except lead to a few extra kidney stones. There was a small increase in bone density at the hip, it’s true, and a significant reduction in hip fractures for the oldest group of women who took the full complement of supplements. But no significant reduction in fractures or in colorectal cancer was found for the group as a whole.

It wasn’t discussed in most of the newspaper reports, but if you go to the NIH website for a fuller report of the study, you’ll find that it had some very strong limitations in design, according to a Dr. Rebecca D. Jackson, who was in charge of the research:

The low rates [of fractures or change in their incidence] could be due to a number of factors, such as the high body mass index of participants (heavier people have stronger bones), the inclusion of relatively few women over age 70 years, and the fact that many participants were already using calcium and vitamin D supplements, or were on hormone therapy.

I find it quite astounding that a large and well-funded seven-year study of the benefits of calcium supplementation in reducing bone fractures could be conducted without including many women over seventy. That group is, after all, the population in which almost all such fractures occur.

I assume there are reasons for this lack–for example, it may be more difficult to recruit women of that age, more of them would be expected to die over the course of the study, and an intervention at that late stage might be considered too late to afford measurable benefit. Such long-term lifestyle/diet intervention studies are notoriously difficult to design, and therefore the results are often subject to criticism. But the relative lack of inclusion of such women makes the study almost worthless in studying the phenomenon, I’m afraid.

The cumulative effect of these “on again, off again” dietary recommendations and their Emily Litella-like findings can only be confusion and skepticism about all medical studies of this sort–and depression on the part of those who make and market low-fat food products and calcium supplements.

And today’s Hamas bulletin from the NY Times is…

The New Neo Posted on by

…this article, entitled: “Hamas leader faults Israel sanction plan.”

It’s not that the Times has become a mouthpiece for Hamas propaganda. Not exactly. Not precisely.

But it certainly comes uncomfortably close. Here are the first three paragraphs of the article (the part most people are likely to read):

The man many expect to become the new Palestinian prime minister, Ismail Haniya of the militant Islamic group Hamas, on Friday criticized Israeli proposals to restrict the movement of money, people and goods into and out of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank under a Hamas-run Palestinian Authority.

“These Israeli decisions are part of the policy of repression, terrorism and collective punishment against our people,” Mr. Haniya said after leaving Friday Prayer in Gaza City. “Hamas reflects the choice of our people, who will not be broken by a few measures taken by the Israeli occupiers.”

A new, Hamas-dominated parliament will be sworn in on Saturday at simultaneous, videoconferenced sessions in Gaza and the West Bank, and afterward, Israeli officials say, relations with the Palestinians will change.

Here, the Times somehow manages to write three entire paragraphs without an iota of context, merely reporting what the “Hamas leader” says. It’s an interesting moment for the Times to revert to “just the facts, ma’am, just the facts.”

Later, at least, there’s this (the only acknowledgement in the article of who and what Hamas is):

The [Israeli sanction] effort is intended to force Hamas to satisfy the three conditions imposed by Israel and other countries: to recognize Israel’s permanent right to exist, to forswear violence and to accept the validity of previous Palestinian-Israeli agreements, which are based on the concept of a two-state solution as the foundation stone for a peace treaty.

But then it’s followed by this:

Dov Weissglas, an adviser to the [Israeli] prime minister, was quoted by the Israeli news media as telling an official meeting: “It’s like a meeting with a dietitian. We need to make the Palestinians lose weight, but not to starve to death.” Mr. Weissglas was quoted in the past as saying that Israel would be ready to make peace with the Palestinians when they became as responsible as the citizens of Finland.

That last sentence, especially, is a remarkable one to place in this particular article. Bringing up this particular quote from the past seems to have the intent of making the Israelis sound as though they are asking for the moon from the Palestinians, rather than their rather reasonable request that Hamas quit talking about destroying Israel, and stop purposely blowing up their kids.

The fact that the Times gratuitously dragged it in, undated and unsourced (Weissglas “was quoted in the past”–could a blogger get away with that?), in an article that is minus a single Hamas quote about obliterating Israel or drinking the blood of the Israelis (oh, surely the Times wouldn’t have had too much trouble finding a few representative ones if it cared to look; for example, this and this), can only be interpreted as bias on the part of the Times.

I’m getting rather tired of this myself. Tired of reading it, tired of fisking it. No doubt you are, too. So I’m not planning to turn this Times-bashing into a daily event. But sometimes it just cries out to be done.

It appears that Rumsfeld reads neo-neocon

The New Neo Posted on by

According to Reuters (and who am I to doubt them?):

The United States lags dangerously behind al Qaeda and other enemies in getting out information in the digital media age and must update its old-fashioned methods, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Friday.

Let’s see, I post it on Tuesday, Rumsfeld says it on Friday–works for me.

Then he even cites blogs:

The Pentagon chief said today’s weapons of war included e-mail, Blackberries, instant messaging, digital cameras and Web logs, or blogs.

Here’s the text of Rumsfeld’s entire speech (at RealClearPolitics). Well, perhaps he’s not reading neo-neocon after all.

You’ll notice that, although the headline of the Reuters article is “US lags in propaganda war: Rumsfeld,” he does not actually utter the word “propaganda” during the speech. Instead, Rumsfeld speaks many times of “communication” and “communications,” and of truth. It’s not surprising that Rumsfeld is reluctant to use the “p” word; propaganda has gotten a bad name. But, as I wrote in my previous post on the subject, it by no means precludes telling the truth; on the contrary.

You may also notice that Rumsfeld’s speech deal entirely with foreign propaganda (“communications”) rather than domestic, which he ignores. Ah, well.

The pragmatic NY Times

The New Neo Posted on by

Right from the start–its very title–this NY Times article is a good example of what’s wrong with the paper.

Are there any incorrect facts in the piece? I doubt it. My guess is that, strictly speaking, it contains not a single lie. But the wording, the shading, and the placement of information are all quite stunning in their subtle bias.

To start with the title, “Pragmatic Hamas figure is likely to be next premier”–that’s a little bit like calling Goehring pragmatic as compared to Hitler. It’s true, but somewhat irrelevant. In this case, the Times offers not single example of Ismail Haniya’s “pragmatic” views. In fact, it doesn’t even identify who finds him so very pragmatic:

Hamas plans to nominate Ismail Haniya, viewed as one of its less radical leaders, for prime minister.

Does the Times see fit to report anything about the policies he advocates, his past, or his attitude towards certain little details such as the right of the state of Israel to exist, of the suicide bombers, and of the Second Intifada? Just this, which occurs towards the end of the lengthy article rather than the beginning (is the Times counting on the fact that its readership might not get that far?):

Mr. Haniya, 42, has good relations with other Palestinian factions. He was at the top of the Hamas election list and has been viewed as the most important Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip, the group’s stronghold, since the parliamentary election. While considered to be part of the more pragmatic side of Hamas, he endorses its fundamental positions.

So, he endorses all the fundamental (is that a pun?) Hamas postions. Boy, I’d dearly love to know what “pragmatic” could mean in that context. More willing to pretend to be reasonable, in order to get concessions, like the very pragmatic Mr. Arafat? I really don’t know what the Times means, and I read the article a few times in a vain effort to find out, since they saw fit to highlight the word in the headline.

There’s food for thought in almost every paragraph of the article, I’m afraid. But I’ll just highlight a few. The opening paragraph is a good example:

The militant group Hamas on Thursday appeared poised to name its candidate for Palestinian prime minister, while Israel’s Defense Ministry drew up sanctions likely to be imposed after the new Palestinian parliament dominated by Hamas is sworn in on Saturday.

So (from the headline) we’ve got the “pragmatic” (read: “reasonable?”) Prime Minister elect of the “militant” (surely if any group richly deserved the appellation “terrorist” instead, it would be Hamas) Hamas, and then the Israelis preparing those nasty sanctions, without even giving the pragmatic militant a chance! How vengeful of them!

The next few parapraphs focus on what form the sanctions will take, without giving further background about Hamas except that the Israelis consider it a terrorist group and say that they will not transfer money to terrorists. An example of what the Israelis are planning:

Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz held talks about possible restrictions to be imposed to reduce Israel’s already limited contact with the Palestinians. The measures would include preventing Palestinian workers from entering Israel and making it even more difficult for Palestinians and their goods to move between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Then there’s a delicately nuanced paragraph about Europe:

The European Union, the largest single donor to the Palestinians, prefers a wait-and-see approach before any punitive measures are imposed. That position was reaffirmed Thursday by Javier Solana, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, who met with Ms. Livni. After the Palestinians began an uprising against Israel in late 2000 their economy crashed, and they depend heavily on roughly $1 billion in annual aid.

Aren’t those Europeans kind and forgiving compared to the punitive Israelis? But it’s the last sentence in the paragraph that is especially masterful in what it says–and what it doesn’t say. Yes, after refusing the offers made at Camp David and launching the murderous and repellent Intifada (oh, I forgot, let’s just use the Palestinians’ own definition of the Intifada: “uprising”–they’re just freedom fighters), the Palestinian economy fell on hard times. But let’s not explicitly blame that on the Infitada and what it did to relations with Israel.

And then there’s this (still with me?), the next to last paragraph of the piece. Note that the Times finally calls Hamas a terrorist organization, perhaps long after most people have stopped reading:

Israel, the United States and the European Union regard Hamas as a terrorist organization. Israel, which has been hit by dozens of Hamas suicide bombings, is seeking to isolate the group internationally.

Oops, my error. I guess the Times doesn’t call Hamas a terrorist organization after all. It reports that Israel, the US, and the European Union regard Hamas as a terrorist organization. At least the Times does acknowledge that Hamas is responsible for suicide bombings–almost at the end of the lengthy article.

This may all seem needlessly picky, a fuss about semantics. But as a former believer in the NY Times as the paper of record, I can attest to the power of such subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) shadings to shape opinion. There is no doubt that, whatever faults they may have, the writers and editors of the Times know the meaning of words. I cannot believe that they are not purposeful in their choice of exactly which words to use, and how and when to use them–and which ones to leave out.

The Saddam WMD tapes: smoking gun or cap pistol?

The New Neo Posted on by

The WMD tapes story that aired last night contained no smoking gun. In fact, as presented on Nightline, it was almost a nonevent. Sandwiched between Dick Cheney’s hunting accident and another feature, the story was given short shrift.

So, how are we to evaluate whether the tapes have any meaning or not? The people behind the release of the tapes–a former weapons inspector named Bill Tierney and attorney John Loftus–have both been labeled as having a few skeletons in the closet.

Loftus’s official bio, found on the website of the group with which he’s affiliated (“The Intelligence Summit”), seems on the up and up. But then again, so did Ramsey Clark’s–for a while. A quick Googling of Loftus reveals only vague charges of sketchiness from various critics on the left (if you have something more specific, please let me know).

As for Bill Tierney, the situation is similar, although there’s a bit more to go on there. He’s been fingered as a demonstrator on the right during the Schiavo affair (oh, no![/sarcasm off]), and as a believer in his own ESP. His biography seems otherwise rather impressive, but that doesn’t really tell us much about the man.

So I’ll just stick to what I heard on Nightline. Brief though the presentation was, it indicated the following (assuming the tapes are authentic, which they so far appear to be):

(1) Saddam had the will, determination, and ability to reconstitute his WMD programs, just as the Duelfer Report alleged.

(2) Saddam had the will, determination, and ability to deceive the weapons inspectors.

Most reports on these tapes are short, and emphasize the fact that they contain no information about events immediately prior to the Iraq War. That is certainly true. Nightline indicated (without being extremely precise on the matter) that the tapes were made mainly during the mid-90s. And this very short Newsweek piece emphasizes the age of the tapes. However, the Intelligence Summit website states that the tapes continue into the year 2000, which certainly would make some of them far more relevant to the question of later events.

I will be interested in knowing whether there is anything further these tapes will end up revealing. According to the Intelligence Summit website, there will be an unveiling and discussion this coming Saturday. But don’t expect that event to be covered by the MSM in any more depth than the original Swift Vets’ news conference was.

I have no idea how this will pan out. It may wind up like so many previous WMD “smoking guns”–a cap pistol.

But if all that the tapes ever reveal is what was shown on Nightline last evening, I think they still tend to bolster the WMD argument rather than negate it. Certainly, they substantiate the Duelfer report’s conclusions about the dangers of the fact that Saddam could easily reconstitute his weapons programs.

For me, this is actually enough. For me, the combination of the human rights benefits of liberating (yes, I do still use that word) the Iraqi people from Saddam’s violent and tyrannical regime, coupled with his clear intent to restart his weapons programs as soon as his European friends helped the sanctions to be lifted, coupled with his clear violations of UN resolutions and inspections, were enough to justify the invasion.

But hey, that’s just me–and after all, what would you expect? I’m a neocon.

Let’s hear it from those moderate Palestinians

The New Neo Posted on by

A while back, I speculated on how many Palestinians who voted for Hamas in the recent elections were playing a voting game.

An article from the Telegraph had quoted a young Palestinian voter as experiencing post-election regret:

Like many others, a young Fatah activist wished yesterday he could go back in time and replay the Palestinian elections all over again.

“I voted Hamas so that my own Fatah Party would be shocked and change its ways,” he said, giving his name only as Mohamed, in the Palmeira cafe in Gaza City. “I thought Hamas would come second.

“But this is a game that went too far. Nobody thought Hamas would win – even them. I know lots of people who voted Hamas, who regret it now. If I could vote again, I would vote for Fatah.”

At the time I wrote, “I wonder how large a group he represents.”

I still wonder. And I still haven’t read anything that would allow me to answer the question with anything approaching authority.

But I have read two more articles that would indicate–if the Palestinians they feature are at all representative of the majority–that the Mohamed quoted above may in fact be extremely typical of Palestinian voters, and not just in his name. An awful lot of them–at least the ones who seem to find their way to journalists to be interviewed, agree with him on the reasons they cast their precious votes for Hamas.

Case in point: an article that appeared one week ago in the Boston Globe, entitled “They voted for Hamas but were surprised by its victory.”

Here are some excerpts:

Muayad Abu Ghazaleh, 36, is the ultimate Palestinian swing voter. A lifelong backer of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah party, he grew so disgusted with its cronyism and corruption that in parliamentary elections on Jan. 25 he cast his ballot for Hamas, never suspecting the militant group would actually win.

What he wants from Hamas now, he said, is good government, plus something that the group’s charter says it can never deliver — a peace deal with Israel.

Swing voters such as Abu Ghazaleh — who doesn’t share Hamas’s vision of Islamic rule and unending war with Israel — handed Hamas its surprise victory in Palestinian parliamentary elections. Now those voters are confronting the confusing reality of the day after.

Many say they voted with specific and sometimes contradictory hopes — for a government that won’t let Israel push it around but will ultimately make peace — that they now have to square with Hamas’s uncompromising record. While these voters say they believe Hamas will turn more pragmatic as it moves from violent outsider to governing party, Hamas leaders so far have not given any indication that they plan to abandon their more fiery tenets.

Whether or not Hamas will abandon these “fiery tenets” is a question I’ve answered here (and my answer is “probably not”). But the intentions and hopes of the Palestinian voters who actually cast their lots with Hamas are another thing.

The Globe article is, unfortunately, quite mum on how its author, Anne Barnard, selected her pro-Hamas but relatively reasonable-sounding Palesinian voter interviewees. It’s even more silent on whether we should consider them to be representative of anything more than the particular point of view the writer wishes to promote. And I haven’t seen any polls on the matter.

So it may be a case of quote selection by Ms. Barnard. Or it may be a real phenomenon: that the Palestinian support for Hamas itself is much less than the vote would indicate, and that a huge number of voters were voting as a protest against the corruption of Fatah, never expecting that Hamas would actually win a majority, much less the solid majority it now owns.

According to the article, many of these voters have the (somewhat delusional, IMHO) hope that Hamas–perceived by them as a sort of “strong horse”–might actually be able to get results if they could ever be convinced to enter into negotiations with the Israelis. How they might thus be persuaded is left rather vague–and rightly so, since, as the article points out, there is absolutely no sign that this might be the case.

But that doesn’t stop some–such as the following Hamas voter–from hoping:

”We want peace,” he said. ”I have children. I want to live. I don’t want the Israel Army to come in here. The extremists [in Hamas] are very few. I love Jews and Israel, I just don’t like their politicians.”

The article makes the excellent point that, even if it were theoretically open to moderation, Hamas now is riding high, and therefore has little to no incentive to listen to such voters.

Some voters realize this, including a man named Zakaria, who actually ended up as campaign manager for a Hamas-backed candidate. Now he is experiencing a sort of “buyer’s remorse;” he sounds rather worried:

Ameed Zakaria, a lifelong Fatah member who dresses in the uniform of Palestinian secular nationalists — leather jacket, jeans, no beard — broke from the party to manage the campaign of a Hamas-backed independent candidate. He wanted Hamas to win a solid opposition bloc; the competition, he felt, would shock Fatah into reforming corruption, while the burdens of office would make Hamas more pragmatic.

”I want Hamas to get into the heart of the event, rather than shouting from the sidelines,” he said. ”They will have to admit reality. It’s not good for Hamas to keep saying, ‘We want Palestine from the river to the sea’ ” — its demand for a Palestinian state that would not only include the West Bank and Gaza but also replace Israel on the map.

But when Hamas won outright, taking five of the six district seats in Nablus, Zakaria began to fear for the secular order — and for the prospects for a pragmatic deal with Israel.

”They use religion for political purposes,” he said last week.

As I wrote earlier, it’s always dangerous to vote for someone in whom you don’t believe, thinking it will register only as a protest. If enough people do the same thing, you may find that you’ve actually voted the bums in. To the voters, it probably seemed impossible that Hamas could win, and that therefore a vote for Hamas would be a relatively harmless protest. A miscalculation, and perhaps a fatal one.

The following is the only indication I could find in the article of how many of these protest votes there might have been:

Yasser Mansour, who ran Hamas’s Nablus campaign and won a parliament seat, now spends much of his time offering reassurances. Nearly half of Palestinians are independents without strong loyalties to Hamas or Fatah, he said. ”These are the people who gave us the victory.”

So, it’s those swing voters again. If Mansour is correct, there may be a great many of them among the Palestinians. And one can’t really say they had much of a choice, either: Fatah hatred and proven corruption vs. Hamas ultra-hatred and promises (most likely empty) of ending corruption.

If we can trust the article, there doesn’t seem to be a groundswell of popular support for an Islamic state among the Palestinians. Note the article’s conclusion, from brokerage manager Numaan Khosrawi, who voted for a secular party:

“But if [Hamas members] start trying to control Palestinians’ lifestyles,” he added, “it will be their grave.”

I’m afraid this is bluster; Hamas would have even less hesitation than Fatah did about killing off the opposition. But it seems, at least, that there may be more internal opposition than originally thought. And that–if we can believe the sincerity of the people quoted–does offer some hope that there is more than a small chink in the seemingly monolithic Palestinian support for those who would like nothing better than to blow all Israelis to kingdom come.

I offer as a companion piece this article from the NY Sun. It gives more background on the vote for Hamas. The article features interviews with two Palestinian expatriates, Khaled Abu Toameh and Nonie Darwish–the former was a Palestinian reporter, and the latter grew up in Gaza City as the daughter of a man who was head of Egypt’s fedayeen.

Here’s what they have to say:

Mr. Abu Toameh’s views are shaped by what he has seen as a reporter – not so different from what the Palestinian Arabs who voted for Hamas have seen. He sees former Arafat officials like Jibril Rajoub and Mohammed Dahlan – “icons of corruption, warlords” – depicted by some Western Arabists as a “younger generation, reformists.”

“The Palestinians don’t buy it,” Mr. Abu Toameh said. Mr. Dahlan, with no official government position, moves around Gaza in a 12-car convoy with 70 bodyguards. “People look at him and say, ‘This is all the CIA money.’ I think Mohammed Dahlan is one of the main reasons why people in Gaza voted for Hamas.”

Much of what Mr. Abu Toameh and Ms. Darwish have to say is unconventional. “A lot of times we hear, ‘Is America going to pressure Israel for peace?'” Ms. Darwish said. “I don’t hear the media asking, ‘When are the Arabs going to pressure the Palestinians for peace?'”

Mr. Abu Toameh said American policy in advance of the Palestinian elections can be summed up as “If you don’t vote for the same thieves who have been stealing your money for ten years, we are going to punish you.”

He said that the linkage between Gaza and the West Bank is more in the minds of Western diplomats and even Israelis than in the culture of the Palestinians. The West Bank feels more Jordanian, Gaza more Egyptian. They are “two separate entities,” Mr. Abu Toameh said…

Both Ms. Darwish and Mr. Abu Toameh emphasized the limits to free speech and freedom of the press in the Middle East. “If I speak in the Arab world, I will be shot,” Ms.Darwish said. Mr. Abu Toameh notes that an independent free press does not exist in the West Bank or Gaza. “They burn it down. They beat you up,” he says. “The media there is controlled by the PLO.”

So we cannot discount the existence of those “moderate Moslems,” those “moderate Arabs,” and those especially elusive “moderate Palestinians.” But with their voices quite understandably muted, we have no way of knowing how many there actually are.

Nightline tonight?

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t often recommend watching Nightline, but this should be–interesting.

Prediction: if in fact this is what it purports to be, it will be countered with the following arguments from the left:

(1) who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?

(2) Saddam was delusional

(3) It doesn’t matter, because Cheney is a killer

Problems posting

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m having some fairly severe technical problems with the blog. The previous post was published even though Blogger said it wasn’t. It has some errors (typos, and a couple of sentences I wanted to change and qualify). I cannot seem to get back to Blogger to change it; I get an error message when I try. Nor can I seem to comment.

So I’m trying to correct it his way–perhaps I will be able to post a new message.

For example, in the old one, I mean to change, “In fact, they in have become de facto propagandists…” to “In fact, they have often become de facto propagandists…” I’m not sure whether the problem with access to Blogger is a Blogger problem, or some glitch with my new and spiffy computer. So, please bear with me.

I’m going to be away from my computer for a number of hours, till later in the evening, and I’m not sure when I’ll be able to correct the original.

Odd.

[ADDENDUM: All better now. Apparently it was a Blogger problem, which is a relief to me. I’d hate to think my brand new computer was on the fritz.]

The West–reluctant self-propagandists

The New Neo Posted on by

Belmont Club’s Richard Fernandez has written this thought-provoking post on the enlistment of Batman–yes, you heard me right, Batman–in the fight against Al Qaeda.

Batman, of course, is not real–I assume that at least we can all agree on that. But he is nevertheless entering the arena of public opinion–otherwise known as propaganda–in this war.

The author of a planned book featuring the Batman character fighting modern-day terrorists is far from apologetic about this development:

Miller doesn’t hold back on the true purpose of the book, calling it “a piece of propoganda,” where ‘Batman kicks al Qaeda’s ass.”

The reason for this work, Miller said, was “an explosion from my gut reaction of what’s happening now.” He can’t stand entertainers who lack the moxie of their ’40s counterparts who stood up to Hitler. Holy Terror is “a reminder to people who seem to have forgotten who we’re up against.”

It’s been a long time since heroes were used in comics as pure propaganda. As Miller reminded, “Superman punched out Hitler. So did Captain America. That’s one of the things they’re there for.”

“These are our folk heroes,” Miller said. “It just seems silly to chase around the Riddler when you’ve got Al Qaeda out there.”

Belmont Club writes:

Like politics, to which it is related as much as to war, terrorism is a vehicle for the propagation of ideas…Foad Ajami, writing in the Toronto Star understands that al-Qaeda has nothing whatsoever in common with the classical Islam of his memory. It’s a made for television psychodrama, a comic-book scam…And what we need, apart from robotic fighting platforms, laser gunships and networked battlefields is something that can reach into the realm of ideas and engage Osama Bin Laden — and Khomeini too for that matter — on their own level of reality. It sounds like a job for Batman.

Or, I might say, for Ymarsakar, frequent commenter here on the subject of propaganda.

As usual, the Belmont Club post raises an important and complex subject: the use of propaganda by the terrorists and their supporters, vs. the use (or lack of use) of propaganda on the other side.

It was famously said by Robert Frost, of all people, that “a liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.” These days, however, we can see by the evidence on the liberal side of the blogosphere that this problem has been remedied, and perhaps even overcorrected–today’s liberals certainly don’t seem to be shy about sticking up for their point of view in an argument.

But in the larger sense, as a liberal (read: pro-Enlightenment) society, we have indeed somewhat lost the ability to take our own side in the rather intense argument with extreme and violent Islamicists. They, in the meantime, have become master propagandists who are not the least bit hesitant to enlist every tool of the trade to further their cause, including lies.

This reluctance on our part was certainly was not present during WWII against the Nazis, even though we were fighting foes who had a master propagandist in Goebbels. And Radio Free Europe, in my youth, had a similar effect–on Europe, that is. In those days, domestic propaganda was taken care of, at least partly, by what has now become known as the MSM.

I’ve taken a lot of time to write about how and why this changed during the Vietnam/Watergate era. Some of the impetus behind the change was good, I am certain: the idea that blind and simplistic rah-rah support of country can lead to wretched excesses and wrongdoing. But, like most corrections, this one was an overcorrection. The pendulum has swung so far the other way that our press sometimes appears to effectively function as propaganda for the other side, although I don’t believe this is intentional.

Am I guilty of hyperbole here? I don’t think so. But, as I said, it’s a complex dilemma. We are all behind the idea of a free press, and a free press will always speak some unpleasant truths that go against our own interests. But it’s a question of balance, and I think the balance at the moment is skewed in such a way as to be counterproductive to our own ability to defend ourselves in the marketplace of ideas.

This is another post that could turn into a book if I tried to trace just why and how this has happened, and I don’t intend to do that here. But I think one of the reasons I’ve labored so long and hard (and in such picayune detail) on criticizing media such as the NY Times is to make it clear that, not only are such sources no longer acting as supporters for our side, they are doing so with slipshod methods and with a decided lack of devotion to the truth. In fact, they have often become de facto propagandists–if not exactly for the other side, then certainly against ours.

There is some history of this in the Times going back even before Vietnam. One famous example that comes to mind is that of Walter Duranty, Stalin apologist who wrote for the paper back in the Thirties. He was a particularly egregious but fairly unique case at the time.

Now, however, it appears to be a relatively common point of pride for journalists to refuse to jump on the bandwagon of our present war, and to emphasize instead the errors we have committed. Again, this is all well and good, up to a point–we very much need what Socrates called “gadflies” to point out errors, and this should be one of the functions of a press. But it is not the only one, and if the gadflies predominate (and especially if they play fast and loose with the truth), we become weakened in our ability to prosecute this war effectively. Propaganda is part of the prosecution of this or any other war, and we ignore that fact at our peril.

Thanks to Goebbels and others, the word “propaganda” has become synonymous in many people’s minds with “lies in the service of a political cause.” But propaganda need not be lies. It is simply information spread to influence a populace towards a certain opinion (see definitions here; most of the definitions make no mention whatsoever of deception).

Propaganda, by its very nature, is of course not a reasoned and leisurely debate in which both sides are given equal time and equal measure. Neither is it an academic exercise in politically correct fairness, nor a well-intentioned effort in being kind to the other side. It is most-decidedly one-sided. But the best propaganda is truthful, especially in this day of internet fact-checking. The best propaganda understands the arguments of the other side and counters them effectively. But all propaganda does have one thing in common: a conviction that it is acceptable to use it.

I believe the West, to some degree, has lost that conviction–or, at least, its press has. I’m not totally sure of the reasons behind this, although I’ve explored the historical details in my Vietnam “change” posts. Some of it is mere habit, no doubt. Some comes from an entrenched belief that the press should function more in opposition to the government than in lockstep with it. Some of it, I’m afraid, stems from the fact that it’s a Republican administration that so far has been in charge of this particular war, and most journalists are Democrats. Some of it is a real denial of the seriousness of the foe we face. Some of it is a repugnance towards war itself. Some is a lack of understanding of the military, stemming partly from the fact that a smaller percentage of journalists have served there as compared with earlier conflicts.

But this doesn’t account for the government‘s lack of ability to get into the propaganda business, as opposed to the press. There have been a few recent efforts at the foreign market, but domestic propaganda is not very effective at present (although some would say that bloggers and Fox News are taking up the slack).

One problem is Bush himself as orator. But in fact, oration has become a dying art in the last few decades. One way that domestic propaganda has always been delivered is through Presidential (or Prime Ministrial) speeches: think, if you will, of Roosevelt’s fireside chats and Churchill’s stirring and somber words. They both were masters of domestic propaganda at a time when the Western world had not yet turned its back on it, and both realized its great importance in the fight against Nazism.

Let me repeat: propaganda should not consist of lies. This is true both for ethical reasons (although some would say–especially today, on Valentine’s Day–that all’s fair in love and war) and for practical ones. I believe that truth is a far more effective weapon than lies, because it is much harder to discredit, and far less likely to backfire, especially in our modern world of sophisticated communications.

Somehow many of us have become convinced of the idea that patriotism is identical with chauvinism, and that both are identical with bigotry; also, that propaganda is equal to lies. None of this is the case. And, in fact, we need to reclaim both patriotism and propaganda, or we may find ourselves in a struggle similar to the one described by that master of propaganda, Winston Churchill (which I hereby offer without a hint of apology):

Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, and still yet if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not so costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you, and only a precarious chance for survival. – There may be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no chance of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.

And here is another example. It is how Churchill appealed to his fellow-citizens in the first speech he made as their new Prime Minister, during the dark days of 1940:

You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy.

You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.

A different situation, of course. Certainly a different man, and a different time.

But one thing is quite the same, and that is his thought: without victory, there is no survival. I believe that we are actually fighting for the survival of the Western world of the Enlightenment, of the protection of human rights, and of respect for all of humankind. If those ideals are sometimes violated by the West–and there is no doubt whatsoever that they are–these are nothing as to what would occur if jihadist Islamicists were to be triumphant instead.

And to that end–the survival of the Western world of the Enlightment–and towards that victory, I’m willing to enlist Batman, as well as other propagandists such as Churchill–Winston, that is, not Ward.

Your mother (or grandmother, or great-grandmother) should know: gloves and the flu

The New Neo Posted on by

An article appeared in this Sunday’s NY Times advising us that our relations with our neighbors may need to change if the much-feared bird flu pandemic ever arrives. This is what will be necessary if we want to protect ourselves from contagion:

To the pantheon of social arbiters who came up with the firm handshake, the formal bow and the air kiss, get ready to add a new fashion god: the World Health Organization, chief advocate of the “elbow bump.”…If the avian flu goes pandemic while Tamiflu and vaccines are still in short supply, experts say, the only protection most Americans will have is “social distancing,” which is the new politically correct way of saying “quarantine.”

But distancing also encompasses less drastic measures, like wearing face masks, staying out of elevators ”” and the bump. Such stratagems, those experts say, will rewrite the ways we interact, at least during the weeks when the waves of influenza are washing over us….the social revolution is likely to focus on the most basic goal of all: keeping other people’s cooties at arm’s length. The bump, a simple touching of elbows, is a substitute for the filthy practice of shaking hands, in which a person who has politely sneezed into a palm then passes a virus to other hands, whose owners then put a finger in an eye or a pen in a mouth. The bump breaks that chain. Only a contortionist can sneeze on his elbow.

It’s a sobering prospect indeed. But everything old is new again, and as I read the article, an image from childhood came to my mind: the top drawer of my mother’s bureau, fully one-third of which was filled with gloves.

No, not gloves like those we wear today: bulky, thinsulate, or fleece, made to shield from the cold and wet. Her gloves were fashion statements: the thinnest and supplest of leather (kid, I suppose), soft and silky materials, a rainbow of colors, short and medium and long.

The longest were actually the best: gloves meant to be worn with sleeveless ball gowns. In addition to being elegant, they did the double duty of hiding any jiggling imperfections of the upper arm (although, of course, as a child, such things never occurred to me). They sported a row of tiny buttons that opened them up in the middle as they stretched their seemingly endless way from fingertip almost to armpit.

Oh, the glamour, and the fun I had as a little girl rooting around in there and trying them on! Even then, I suppose, the fad for gloves was fading, and many of these were already relics, from my mother’s young womanhood during the 30s and 40s.

But gloves as proper fashion statement were still around; I myself was outfitted as a tiny girl with short, white (and, one memorable year when I was four, little pink) gloves for dress-up occasions, making me feel sophisticated beyond belief. Oh yes, and hats, too, with bows on them.

I never for a moment stopped to think that these glorious gloves (now gone the way of the dodo) might have had a protective function, as well–after all, what did grownups or old people know that we didn’t? Much as the parasols and sunhats of those fussbudget Victorians ended up having an actual purpose (as some of us discovered, much to our surprise, when skin began to collect the debt owed for all those year of sunbathing coated with baby oil)–so, perhaps, did the lowly glove. Might it not have acted to prevent the spread of illness through hand-to-hand contact, when contagious disease was so prevalent and difficult to treat?

I couldn’t find too much on the subject when I researched the role of the glove, but my guess is that slowing down the spread of disease has always been one of its functions. At the very least, wearing gloves may have given people the reassuring idea that they were protecting themselves, whether they actually were or not.

On the latter point, my mother tells a story that occurred when she was in her twenties, during the 1930s. She and a friend were traveling from New York to California on a cruise ship that made the journey via the Panama Canal. They were two attractive women–my mother’s friend, in fact, was exceptionally beautiful–and they received a certain amount of attention from the ship’s crew and the officers, who were a rather handsome bunch themselves.

The evening before the ship was to dock for a day visit in Havana,Cuba (isn’t this story quaint?), my mother and her friend were talking with some of the officers when my mother mentioned that one thing she’d really love to see was a Cuban house.

“Really?” asked the officer, raising an eyebrow. My mother nodded.

“Well, it can be arranged,” he said, with a charming and mysterious smile.

The next day several of the officers escorted my mother and her friend to a Cuban house, and started showing them around. The place seemed a bit strange; there were a number of women lazing about, and the officers explained that there were rooms decorated in the fashion of different countries of the world: would they like to view them?

The truth dawned on my mother and her friend at around the same time: they were actually in a Cuban brothel. They two young women made eye contact and then, both minds with a single simultaneous thought, opened their purses, took out their white gloves, and put them on for the remainder of the tour, satisfied that they were protected from whatever dreadful diseases might be swirling around the place.

So I advocate the return of the glove: it might work even better than an elbow bump in the event of the feared pandemic. Your mother–or perhaps your grandmother, or even your great-grandmother–should know.