“Second Draft” spotlights Pallywood: watching sausage being made

The New Neo Posted on by

It’ll be like having a look behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz.
–Richard Landes, originator of Second Draft, in an interview at Solomonia.

By now you may have heard the buzz about Second Draft, a new media watchdog website (I was originally alerted to its existence by Daniel in Brookline).

Second Draft is a site that needs to be publicized and visited by as many people as possible, and so I’m trying to do my part. It shows what the internet can accomplish in opening up and expanding our ability to get at truth, and evaluating the honesty of what we read in the MSM and elsewhere, a topic I’ve discussed (perhaps ad nauseum) on this site.

Here’s a quote explaining Second Draft’s mission:

This website is devoted to exploring some of the problems and issues that plague modern journalism. In this age of globalization, the media has unprecedented influence on the way we see the world. And yet, whether out of misplaced good intentions, unconscious agendas and predispositions, or unwarranted faith in false information, they can get the story dramatically wrong. Therefore, we want to revisit and critique journalism’s “first draft of history”, and hopefully produce a more accurate second one. In our current investigations we present the story the way the mainstream media initially told it, introduce further evidence, and let you decide what you think really happened.

Right now, founder Landes, a professor of history at Boston University, has been concentrating on the work of what he calls “Pallywood.” It’s an ironic pun on India’s “Bollywood” film industry–but Pallywood, unlike Bollywood, is not for entertainment purposes.

Here is Second Draft’s explanation of Pallywood:

The material we show here constitutes a tiny fragment of a much larger phenomenon, raw footage from Palestinian photographers working for major western media outlets. From this material, our news agencies prepare news reports that shape our perceptions of what is happening in the Middle East Conflict.

We think that a close analysis of this material defies all expectations of what such footage should resemble, and suggest that Palestinian photographers do not at all share the same production and journalistic values espoused by a free press. We leave the experience and the judgment to you…

We feel that the material you are about to see bears witness to a failure of our MSM culture comparable to that of the Emperor and his court when he paraded naked in front of his public. Moreover, that error is kept from us only by our media’s refusal to let the public see their sources. Only the chance circumstances that brought this material to a few people’s attention, and the existence of an open internet where we can post the material, makes it possible for the public to consider this costly media embarrassment.

Future projects are to be announced; the site will not be limited to Pallywood and the Palestinians, or even the Middle East.

How and why did Landes take on this project? His background as a historian seems to be part of it, as well as in interest in the history of communications, and in the ability of experts to be duped by forgeries. Landes, who self-identifies as a leftist in this must-read Solomnia interview, sounds like a thoughtful man who doesn’t mince words when describing his current view of the MSM:

Look, everybody says that journalism is the first draft of history, but in this case, the first draft is so wrong that as a historian I feel like I need to step in and say Hey, wait a minute you guys. Even as a first draft, this stinks! [laughs] As a professor of history, I’ve got to say that if a graduate student wrote a first draft that was as credulous in its use of sources as the media has been in the case of the “second intifada,” then I’d say he wouldn’t make it through the first semester of grad school.

Solomon asks Landes whether, in his opinion, the the press was “duped, or did they play along with it? Were they willing participants?”

Here is Landes’ reply:

We want the web site to raise these questions and let people make their own judgments. Now, we think we have some answers, but we’re post-modern enough to think there isn’t only one answer. So for instance, in answer to your question, if we were to take a pie and slice it up, there would be a slice of journalists just out to make their living by providing their bosses in the West with action footage, another slice of people harboring some sort of bad faith or resentment — some kind of strong anti-Jewish feelings — then you’ve got another chunk of it who are people who really believe they are helping the Palestinians by recycling their propaganda. There’s this great line by Bob Simon [of 60 Minutes], ‘In the Middle East, one image can be worth 1000 weapons.’ I think that there’s a prevalent view in the press that since the Israelis have most of the weapons, the media can “level the playing field” by giving the Palestinians the media victory.

Solomon asks Landes whether he will be considered a conservative for the stance he’s taken on this issue, and Landes replies like an old-fashioned liberal, one of Norman Geras’ “principled leftists”:

No, it’s a liberal issue! Look it’s…the thing people don’t understand is that ‘our’ conservatives – the people like George Bush and Ariel Sharon – are so far to the left when you place them in the framework of say Arab politics that it’s a joke…OK? There’s no Arab leader that would tolerate the kinds of attacks that George Bush has tolerated without making sure that the people who did it were severely punished for their effrontery. The Arab Michael Moore who exposed the lies told by the Palestinian media that Arafat used to dupe the Palestinians into a losing war would never have survived long enough to show it.

Landes understands the potential for the blogosphere to change things. He turned to the internet because the MSM, not too surprisingly, wasn’t especially interested:

I teach the history of communications revolutions. I know the impact that the printing press had on the sort of imbedded manuscript culture that came before it. The internet will be in the 21st century to print media what the print media was to manuscript in the 16th. That’s why I’m going to the web, to the blogosphere. In the mainstream media, busy covering its naked ass, I can’t get the time of day. As one guy at ABC who admitted he was convinced by my material put it — “I’m not sure how much appetite there is for this stuff here.”

So I’m doing my best to show the ABC guy that the appetite is strong for viewing original sources and letting the reader be the judge.

Perhaps the MSM doesn’t understand the force of allowing the reader access to original footage and source material. Or perhaps it does, and that’s the problem. It could be that many in the MSM have the attitude that making news is like making sausage–they fear that if they let you see how it’s actually made, you might lose some of your taste for it.

Honoring Commodore Levy: Jews in the military

The New Neo Posted on by

When I studied history in grade school and high school, it was my least favorite subject. Dry and dull, a parade of disjointed dates and battles, all the juice had been squeezed out of it–which is a shame, because it needn’t be that way. History is not only exciting, it’s essential to know if we are to have even a hope of avoiding a repetition of our mistakes. What’s more, history features real–and usually very fascinating–people.

You wouldn’t think reporters would make the same errors as my old history texts. But sometimes, it seems they do.

Take this, for example, a rather ordinary article I spotted today in the Boston Globe. Originally written for the Washington Post, it’s a serviceable but uninspired piece about the opening of the Commodore Uriah P. Levy Center and Jewish Chapel at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis. The gist of the story is that although it took quite a while–longer than it should have–now

..Jewish midshipmen finally will have their own place on the campus to express their faith…The 35,000-square-foot center includes the 410-seat chapel, which will be used only for Jewish services, as well as a character learning center and fellowship hall for midshipmen of all faiths…With today’s dedication of the center, the Naval Academy will become the last of the three US military academies to provide Jews with their own worship space.

Later in the story the following sentence appears:

The chapel’s architect, Joseph Boggs, led visitors on a tour Thursday, showing them a pavilion at the chapel’s entrance that was modeled after Thomas Jefferson’s home at Monticello and a nearly 45-foot-high wall that is a replica of the Western Wall of Jerusalem.

Sounds nice; Monticello and the Western Wall. The Western Wall part makes sense–but what about that Monticello reference? That one’s a bit mysterious, is it not? After all, it’s not as though Jefferson had all that much to do with the Navy or with Judaism–although he did champion the cause of religious freedom.

The key to Monticello’s presence in the chapel lies in the background story the Globe/Post article leaves out, that of Commodore Uriah Levy, the man after whom the new building is named. Therein lies a colorful tale; Levy is a character well worth knowing about.

It turns out that Commodore Levy (1792-1862) (“Commodore” being the highest rank in the US Navy at the time Levy held the title) was, among other things, a Jefferson buff, and was responsible for buying and restoring Monticello, which had fallen into disrepair after Jefferson’s death. And, in fact, one of Jefferson’s well-known letters concerning religious freedom was penned to Mordecai Noah, who just happened to have been a cousin of Levy’s (they shared maternal grandfather Jonas Phillips, a Revolutionary War soldier of some renown. The Levy family in general appears to have had a propensity for distinguished military service).

The initial saving and restoration of Monticello was only one of Commodore Levy’s claims to fame. Another was that he was the man most responsible for the Navy’s abandonment of the practice of flogging.

The irrepressible Levy’s life reads like something out of a picaresque novel. One of my favorite details is that he ran away from home at the age of ten to become a cabin boy, returning a few years later to Philadelphia, his home town, for his Bar Mitzvah (when Levy made the traditional declaration “now I am a man” to the congregation, I would imagine they were inclined to agree with him rather more than is usual at a Bar Mitzvah). He shipped out again a few years later and spent most of his life in the Navy, rising up in the ranks in a career not without its setbacks, although he took a few years out to amass a generous fortune in real estate.

Among Levy’s setbacks were what may have been a record number of court-martials for a single person: six. Levy was hot-headed and proud, and some of these court-martials concerned fights, many of them occasioned by insults to his religion (in fact, in one of these duels he killed a man). Whether or not he was a Dreyfus-like figure being persecuted for religious reasons is not entirely clear, although he apparently thought so. At any rate, he had a phoenix-like ability to rise from each court-martial to even greater heights than before, and spearheaded the successful anti-flogging drive.

Here’s one of my favorite incidents in a life loaded with them:

In March of 1825 Levy joined the “Cyane” as the second lieutenant. While on the “Cyane,” Levy became very popular after saving the life of an American who had been impressed into the Brazilian Navy. The Emperor of Brazil, Dom Pedro, was struck by Levy’s courageous act and ordered that no U.S. citizen ever again be impressed into the Brazilian Navy. Pedro then offered him the rank of captain in the Imperial Brazilian Navy. Levy declined, exhibiting his patriotism by stating, “I would rather serve as a cabin boy in the United States Navy than hold the rank of Admiral in any other service in the world.”

Here’s another chapter in an improbable life:

…Levy returned to America, and, with the start of the Civil War, Levy offered his military services as well as his entire fortune to save the Union. Instead, Lincoln installed him on the Court-Martial Board in Washington, despite his six courts-martial.

Six court-martials, and he ends up on the other side of the bench.

Levy’s life is fascinating. But Levy was just one man who served proudly in the US Navy. Levy is not alone, of course. It turns out that Jews have long had a significant presence in the Navy and in the military. You may be surprised (as I was) to find that at times their participation has been slightly higher than their percentage in the US population as a whole:

Block [a 1961 Annapolis graduate] said the Jewish chapel’s presence will correct “the general perception that we don’t serve in the military. People think that all Jewish boys do everything they can to avoid going into the service.” In fact, out of 16.3 million U.S. military personnel who served in World War II, an estimated 550,000 were Jewish. Today, there are about 100 Jews out of 4,000 midshipmen at the academy.

It would be hard to imagine a more appropriate choice than that of Commodore Uriah Levy for the name of the new Annapolis chapel. Levy was dedicated to the Navy, his country, the Jewish faith, and the cause of religious freedom, and this chapel combines them all.

One year* anniversary

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s my one-year blog anniversary. Sort of. Kind of.

Why the asterisk? Although the first day I ever posted on this blog was nominally almost exactly a year ago–September 16, 2004–I wrote very little for the first five months.

To tell the truth, starting the blog wasn’t even my idea. I’d been reading blogs and commenting on them for about two years, and that was more than enough for me. But when my son was up for a visit he suggested I start a blog of my own, since I was already spending so much time writing comments and letters to other blogs.

My first reaction was a vehement “No way.” I craved neither the spotlight nor the amount of work it would take. But my son said it was really easy to set one up; he’d even do it for me. And I didn’t have to ever actually post on it–but it would be there waiting for me, just in case.

He went to Blogger and showed me the templates, and to humor him (and to shut him up) I chose one. It was all done in a minute or two, and when he asked me what I wanted to call it I thought of “neophyte neocon.” But he pronounced that too long (I agreed) and suggested “neo-neocon.” So “neo-neocon” it was.

I didn’t much care. It was all quite irrelevant, since of course it would only be seen by me and by him and perhaps one or two other people on earth.

Here’s my first post, in its entirety: A test to see whether everything’s in order, blogwise. I didn’t post again for twelve days, and in those first few posts I’d not even figured out how to do a link. In September there were a grand total of two posts, in October a whopping four, then one in November and two in December (the election had exhausted me). I had a huge surge in January with six.

Then in February something happened. I’m not sure why, but suddenly I was writing more. I had installed a sitemeter during the last week of January, and it was sobering to see the tiniest of trickles. In late February it occurred to me that if I was doing this anyway, why not experiment and see if I could actually get some readers?

Despite the casualness of my start, I did have an idea for my blog, even from the first. I was determined to tell the story of my political change, the tale that my friends and family didn’t want to hear. I wanted to provide a forum for people who had similar stories to come and compare notes. I wanted to write about whatever else I wanted to write about.

So in late February I sent out a couple of e-mails introducing myself and my blog to a very small group of bloggers I considered simpatico.

I immediately was on the receiving end of kindness and got a couple of links. The traffic started climbing, the links kept coming, and the rest is history, of a sort. There are so many people to thank along the way that it’s probably easier to say thanks to 75% of my blogroll rather than to list them all–but a special thanks to Dr. Sanity, Vietpundit, and Norm Geras, who, whether they know it or not, I consider my original blogmother and blogfathers. Then there are Roger Simon and Austin Bay and and Michael Totten and Clive Davis and Dean Esmay and Dymphna and the Baron and…well, as I said, take a look at my blogroll.

And of course I want to thank all of the readers and commenters here. I’ve been very gratified at the uniformly high caliber of the comments–I think it’s worth coming just for those alone. After all, I know I’m not everybody’s cup of tea–for one thing, I tend to specialize in the long essay rather than the short and snappy, and for another thing, well–I’ll just reiterate that I’m not everybody’s cup of tea (or, as one commenter here famously wrote, “one of the most painfully boring blogs of all times”).

Writing this blog has been hard work, but it’s been wonderful.

One of the best things about blogging is seeing readers come here from all over the world. I hadn’t known what tales a sitemeter could tell until I had one of my own, so it was wondrous to me when I first saw sights such as this typical one, representing a random snapshot of the time zones of recent readers :

or this one, of the countries of recent visitors:

So welcome to my blog, and welcome to my first anniversary party. The cake will have to be virtual, but at least it won’t be fattening:

On the kindness of strangers: the aftermath of Katrina

The New Neo Posted on by

I know Bush must have given an excellent speech last night because a liberal friend of mine pronounced it “moving” and “inspiring” in somewhat awed and surprised tones. Something he said, or perhaps the way he said it, touched her as nothing he’d ever done before.

My friend is also a barometer that tells me that the media may have overplayed its Bush-bashing hand on Katrina, big time, because she added that it’s unreasonable to expect Bush could have done much to have changed things; she thinks the local authorities were most at fault. And all this from a women who until now has not had a kind word to say about the man.

So first there was Katrina itself, and then there was the reporting on Katrina. Now there is the initial aftermath of Katrina as the actual facts are becoming more widely known, and the more slowly-evolving secondary aftermath. In these later aftermaths there are some stories that can only be described as heartwarming.

Betsy’s Page led me to this article that appeared in yesterday’s Washington Post. It is a tale of renewal and hope for three men made homeless by Katrina:

For Henry, Smith and a third evacuee, Vylandrus Dupree, who is now being housed at a resort in Arkansas, the unimaginable disaster has led to an unimaginable gift. Through a series of chance encounters and random decisions made by relief workers, these young African American men find themselves in parts of the country they had never seen before, and each believes there is no going back.

In the Tenessee Williams play “A Streetcar Named Desire,” set in New Orleans, the character Blanche Du Bois, abused and driven to madness, utters her famous line “I’ve come to rely on the kindness of strangers” as she is taken away to an insane asylum. The line is powerfully ironic in the play, but in post-Katrina reality it is delivered straight:

[Katrina evacuees] just got on a plane only knowing they were going to be taken somewhere for shelter, and they ended up happening to come to Battle Creek,” said Capt. Aaron Jenkins, a spokesman for the Michigan National Guard. “That’s what happened to a lot of people.”

When Henry got off the bus at the base, people were holding signs saying “Welcome” and “I love you.”

Henry said he was glad to have been given a way out of New Orleans. He talked about the violence and drugs that had surrounded him there, the “harassment by police” and “false promises” by politicians.

“The Lord was telling me it was time for a change,” he said. “I am going to take this opportunity to change my life and start a new beginning.”

Henry has found a new life in Michigan, a place to which he’d never been before. Another New Orleans resident, Cash Smith, found himself whisked off to another far-off place he’d never imagined going:

Chad Ladov and two of his friends in Denver had watched the unfolding disaster in New Orleans as had millions of other Americans. One of the friends, Andrew Hudson, worked at Denver-based Frontier Airlines, and asked his company whether it could fly New Orleans evacuees to Denver free. When the company agreed, the trio immediately left for Houston, where thousands of evacuees were being housed at the Astrodome…The three friends canvassed the Astrodome, putting up signs and posters about their Denver proposal. That’s when they came by Cash Smith.

“Hey, dude, do you want to come to Denver?” Smith recalled them asking…

“I have no money,” Smith replied.

The group told him the airline ride to Denver was free. They promised him help in finding a job and getting on his feet.

“Why not give it a try?” Ladov said.

Smith decided to take a chance. After all, he was surrounded by strangers in the stadium; why not trust these three?

“I have lost everything else,” he said he thought to himself. “What do I have to lose?”

Smith and his family will stay in Denver.

And another man who fled New Orleans in the path of Katrina, Vylandrus Dupree, found himself in another unexpected and undreamt-of place:

Volunteers helped Dupree enroll at the University of Arkansas. “It’s a big opportunity,” he said. “I would have been a fool not to take it.”

Dupree said a clergyman he had met at the Red Cross facility had helped him find a job at a Walgreens drugstore.

There was no question of going back to New Orleans, Dupree said. “It’s beautiful up here.”

Some telling statistics: for two-thirds of those people whom Ladov and his friends flew to Denver, it was the very first time they’d ever been on an airplane. And all of those evacuated to northwest Arkansas were given the following choice: stay in that part of Arkansas, move back to New Orleans, or relocate elsewhere. Ninety-five percent chose to stay in Arkansas, an extraordinary percentage.

Sometimes relying on the kindness of strangers seems a good bet.

[ADDENDUM: Apparently these three are hardly the exceptions; many evacuees do not plan to return. Via Captain’s Quarters, the Washington Post reports the following poll results:

Forty-three percent of these evacuees planned to return to New Orleans, the survey found. But just as many — 44 percent — said they will settle somewhere else, while the remainder were unsure. Many of those who were planning to return said they will be looking to buy or rent somewhere other than where they lived. Overall, only one in four said they plan to move back into their old homes, the poll found.]

The Palestinians: the more things change, the more they…..

The New Neo Posted on by

A reader recently alerted me to an astounding article by Martha Gellhorn which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in October of 1961, forty-four years ago.

Gellhorn was quite a story in herself. Beautiful, brilliant, brave, she was the third wife of Hemingway (a fact she wanted biographers to omit when writing about her) and a well-known journalist and author.

The article is entitled “The Arabs of Palestine,” and it was the result of a series of interviews Gellhorn had with residents of Palestinian refugee camps, and talks with Israeli Arabs, as well. The article is long, but well worth reading in its entirety, although it is available by paid subscription only. I will quote some excerpts, but I suggest you try to obtain it and read it to get its full flavor.

At the time of Gellhorn’s article, the various refugee camps she visited were under the jurisdiction of Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon. Keep in mind, also, that she was describing conditions that existed long before the 1967 war that resulted in Israel having jurisdiction over some of the areas Gellhorn visited. Therefore nothing Gellhorn writes about Palestinian attitudes towards Israel could possibly be the result of an “occupation” that hadn’t yet occurred.

Here are some of her opening salvos:

Although no one knows exactly how many refugees are scattered everywhere over the globe, it is estimated that since World War II, and only since then, at least thirty-nine million non-Arab men, women, and children have become homeless refugees, through no choice of their own….The world could be far more generous to these unwilling wanderers, but at least the world has never thought of exploiting them. They are recognized as people, not pawns. By their own efforts, and with help from those devoted to their service, all but some six million of the thirty-nine million have made a place for themselves, found work and another chance for the future. To be a refugee is not necessarily a life sentence.

The unique misfortune of the Palestinian refugees is that they are a weapon in what seems to be a permanent war. Alarming signs, from Egypt, warn us that the Palestinian refugees may develop into more than a justification for cold war against Israel…today, in the Middle East, you get a repeated sinking sensation about the Palestinian refugees: they are only a beginning, not an end. Their function is to hang around and be constantly useful as a goad.

They have certainly preserved that function, haven’t they? Over forty years after Gellhorn wrote these prescient words, the Palestinians are still hanging around as refugees, and still a goad.

The camps, then as now, were administered by UNRWA. Gellhorn visited eight, along with a Palestinian translator, and talked to many of the residents.

UNRWA is running a world, simply, a little welfare state. It makes villages, called camps, and keeps them clean and free of disease, feeds, educates, trains teachers and technicians and craftsmen, operates clinics and maternity centers, sends out visiting nurses, encourages small private enterprises with small loans, distributes clothing, soap, kerosene, blankets, provides hospitalization, footballs, youth clubs, mosques…

Gellhorn describes an UNRWA camp in Lebanon which was inhabited by Christian Arabs:

The camp consisted of little cement or frame houses rambling over the hillside, a village of poor people, disorderly and beflowered and cheerful. School was letting out for lunch; troops of children, dressed in the pinafore uniform that small boys and girls wear in Italian schools, meandered home, shouting bye-bye at friendly, giggling length. They are Roman Catholics here, but the young teachers are refugees, not priests. They have to teach the children about Palestine, since most of them have never seen the country and even the oldest cannot remember it. The children are taught hate, the Garden of Eden stolen from them by murderers; their duty is to live for Return and Revenge.

Gellhorn speaks to the camp leader there and has one of the first of what she calls “Mad Hatter conversations”:

It went like this:

“The Arab countries invaded Israel in 1948 to save the Palestine Arabs from being massacred by the Jews.”

“Were there massacres? Where?”

“Oh, yes, everywhere. Terrible, terrible.”

“Then you must have lost many relatives and friends.”

This, being a tiresome deduction from a previous statement, is brushed aside without comment.

“Israel overran the truce lines and stole our country. We left from fear. We have a right to our property, which brings in 47 million pounds a year in income. If we had our own money, we would need nothing from UNRWA. Our own money is much more. We do not have to be grateful for the little money spent on us. We should have our own.”

“Then, of course, you want to return to your property and to Israel?”

“Not to Israel. Never to Israel. To our own country, to our own part.”

“But didn’t the Jews accept Partition, while the Palestine Arabs and the Arab governments refused?”

“Yes, yes. And England protected the Jews. An Arab was arrested if he carried a pistol only to defend himself, but Jews could go through the streets in tanks and nothing happened to them. Also, England told the Arab states to attack Israel.”

The principal of the school then spoke up. “In our school, we teach the children from their first year about their country and how it was stolen from them. I tell my son of seven. You will see: one day a man of eighty and a child so high, all, all will go home with arms in their hands and take back their country by force.”

When Gellhorn and her guide leave the meeting, the guide astonishes her by showing surprising reasonableness–in private (he seems to have possibly been one of those mythical “moderate Palestinians” about which we’ve argued so much):

“It can all be solved with money,” he said. “Now the people have nothing in their mouths but words, so they talk. Money fills the mouth too. If every man got a thousand dollars for each member of his family, for compensation to have lost his country, and he could be a citizen in any Arab country he likes, he would not think of Palestine any more. Then he could start a new life and be rich and happy. And those who really do own something in Palestine must be paid for what they had there. But those are not many. Most had nothing, only work.”

Gellhorn describes Gaza almost forty-five years ago, when it was administered by Egypt:

The Egyptian government is the jailer. For reasons of its own, it does not allow the refugees to move from this narrow strip of land. The refugees might not want to leave at all, or they, might not want to leave for good; but anyone would become claustrophobic if penned, for thirteen years, inside 248 square kilometers. A trickle of refugees, who can prove they have jobs elsewhere, are granted exit visas. The only official number of the departed is less than three hundred, out of 255,000 registered refugees. It seems incredible. Rumor says that more refugees do manage to go away illegally, by unknown methods.

These locked-in people–far too many in far too little space–cannot find adequate work. Naturally, there is less chance of employment than in the other “host countries.” Meantime, they are exposed to the full and constant blast of Egyptian propaganda. No wonder that Gaza was the home base of the trained paramilitary bands called commandos by the Egyptians and Palestinians, and gangsters by the Israelis–the fedayin, whose job was to cross unnoticed into Israel and commit acts of patriotic sabotage and murder. And having been so devastatingly beaten by Israel again, in 1956, has not improved the trapped, bitter Gaza mentality; it only makes the orators more bloodthirsty.

When one reads that passage, the previous speaker’s point becomes even more poignant: if the Palestinian “could be a citizen in any Arab country he likes, he would not think of Palestine any more.” Ah, but Palestinians can’t become such citizens–and there’s the rub.

Gellhorn has an interview with the Palestinian leader of a camp in Gaza:

First the camp leader told me how rich they had all been in Palestine and how miserable they were now and how much land they had all owned. I do not doubt for one minute how much land some of them owned, nor how rich some of them were, and I did not point out this subtle distinction: if everyone owned the land claimed, Palestine would be the size of Texas; if everyone had been so rich, it would have been largely populated by millionaires…

Then he spoke of Jaffa, his native town. The Jews surrounded the city, firing on all sides; they left one little way out, by the sea, so the Arabs would go away. Only the very old and the very poor stayed, and they were killed. Arab refugees tell many dissimilar versions of the Jaffa story, but the puzzler is: where are the relatives of those who must have perished in the fury of high explosive the infallible witnesses? No one says he was loaded on a truck (or a boat) at gun point; no one describes being forced from his home by armed Jews; no one recalls the extra menace of enemy attacks, while in flight. The sight of the dead, the horrors of escape are exact, detailed memories never forgotten by those who had them. Surely Arabs would not forget or suppress such memories, if they, too, had them.

As for those Arabs who remained behind, they are still in Jaffa–3000 of them–living in peace, prosperity, and discontent, with their heirs and descendants.

“The Jews are criminals,” the camp leader continued in a rising voice. “Murderers! They are the worst criminals in the whole world.”

Had he ever heard of Hitler?

He banged his table and said, “Hitler was far better than the Jews!”

“Far better murderer? He killed six million Jews as a start,” I observed.

“Oh, that is all exaggerated. He did not. Besides, the Jews bluffed Hitler. They arranged in secret that he should kill a few of them–old ones, weak ones–to make the others emigrate to Palestine.”

“Thirty-six thousand of them,” said the Secret Service man, proving the point, “came here, before the war, from Central Europe.”

“It’s amazing,” I said. “I have never before heard anywhere that the Jews arranged with Hitler for him to kill them.”

“It was a secret!” the camp leader shouted. “The documents have been found. Everyone knows. It was published. The Jews arranged it all with Hitler.”

Everywhere Gellhorn goes she has similar “Mad Hatter” conversations. At the time these talks must have seemed most odd indeed, but these are ideas with which we have now become all too familiar. The rot in the Palestinian world apparently set in long before the “occupation,” long before Arafat became its corrupt and corrupting leader.

I disagree with a few things Gellhorn says (in particular, she accepts in its totality the Palestinian version of Dir Yassin), but I think she gets the big picture right.

Back then, the outlook actually seemed marginally more hopeful–for one thing, the Palestinians had only been in this situation for thirteen years. It is far worse now that time has passed, and after Oslo allowed Arafat to drain the Palestinian coffers while preaching ever more hatred.

But any quibbles I have with the article are minor; Gellhorn’s piece could practically have been written today in terms of the conversations and the patterns of thought she describes.

Here is part of her summation of the situation as she saw it then:

I had appreciated and admired individual refugees but realized I had felt no blanket empathy for the Palestinian refugees, and finally I knew why…It is hard to sorrow for those who only sorrow over themselves. It is difficult to pity the pitiless. To wring the heart past all doubt, those who cry aloud for justice must be innocent. They cannot have wished for a victorious rewarding war, blame everyone else for their defeat, and remain guiltless….

Arabs gorge on hate, they roll in it, they breathe it. Jews top the hate list, but any foreigners are hateful enough. Arabs also hate each other, separately and, en masse. Their politicians change the direction of their hate as they would change their shirts. Their press is vulgarly base with hate-filled cartoons; their reporting describes whatever hate is now uppermost and convenient. Their radio is a long scream of hate, a call to hate. They teach their children hate in school. They must love the taste of hate; it is their daily bread. And what good has it done them?

There is no future in spending UN money to breed hate. There is no future in nagging or bullying Israel to commit suicide by the admission of a fatal locust swarm of enemies. There is no future in Nasser’s solution, the Holy War against Israel; and we had better make this very clear, very quickly.

Well, it’s way too late to make this very clear very quickly. Forty-four years have gone by. Nasser is long dead, and even Arafat; but the Holy War against Israel lives.

But it’s still not too late to make it very clear–if only the world agreed to do so.

So what’s in it for me?–making political hay out of disaster

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s a world of difference between skepticism and cynicism. Skeptics doubt and question in an attempt to get at the truth. Cynics doubt because they think that, by definition, every player has bad (or at least selfish) motives.

What happens when journalists are cynics rather than skeptics? One result is that every event and every action is rated and spun as though its sole purpose is either to enhance or detract from a political party or a politician. It is assumed that whatever stands politicians may take, they are always based only on self-interest rather than even a consideration of such old-fashioned and outdated virtues as principle.

A recent New Republic features an article by Ryan Lizza that is an example of this noxious genre. Lizza manages to deal with two of the most dreadful events of recent years–9/11 and Hurricane Katrina–and evaluates them only in terms of which political party is helped/hurt by each disaster, and how both parties are using them to “position” themselves into power.

I believe that Lizza may be one of the New Republic‘s political writers, and if so it would be natural for him to focus on the political aspects of the disaster, I suppose. But there still seems to me to be something unusually cynical in what he has written here–dealing with 9/11 and Katrina as though they were solely opportunities for politicians to score points.

Lizza writes that the Democrats can gain from the Katrina disaster by promoting themselves as people who handle humanitarian crises properly. He then compares that to the political advantage the Republicans received post-9/11 when they were perceived as the party that could best handle a security crisis.

I don’t recall any of the newspapers of my youth ever taking a Katrina-like tragedy or an attack and analyzing either of them in terms of how they affected the rise and fall of each party, and how each party was deciding to use the disaster/attack to its political advantage. It seems to be something that has cropped up in the last few decades only. When did we become so strategic in our thinking; when did journalists begin to resemble sports commentators, concentrating on ongoing play-by-play analyses of who is going to win the game?

It’s been particularly in evidence in the coverage of Katrina, as anyone who’s been paying even a particle of attention has no doubt noticed. And it’s not that I think politicians don’t use events to further their own careers. I just think that the MSM has gotten to the point where this is often the primary story, and everything else is secondary. I am not willing to ascribe to that level of cynicism, and I don’t think it does our society any good for the media to constantly take such an intensely cynical point of view.

At any rate, Lizza’s arguments in the New Republic article are also marred by some rather large flaws. If the Republicans are perceived as being better able to handle a security crisis, it is because they actually were engaged in handling a major security crisis post-9/11. It is logical to assume that the perception of Republicans as tough on national security was predicated at least in some part on their actual performance in a shaky situation that represented a demanding challenge– one that many people give them credit for handling at least somewhat well–rather than on mere rhetoric and promises.

But if Democrats were to get credit for handling a humanitarian crisis better than Republicans based on Katrina, wouldn’t the Democrats have had to have actually performed better than Republicans during Katrina? Can a perception of better performance simply come from criticizing the performance of others? Somehow I don’t think so; I don’t think most people are that naive. Merely to say “I could do it better, trust me!” isn’t usually enough.

It’s easier to get people’s attention and trust by actually doing something effectively as opposed to criticizing someone else for not doing it. If there are Democrats who fail to realize this, perhaps it relates to differences (discussed in some previous threads here) between conservatives and liberals as to their relative focus on objects (the real) vs. abstractions (the theoretical). Democrats and liberals, because they often emphasize words over acts and the abstract over the concrete, may tend to think that one thing is just as good as the other–that saying it is just as good as doing it.

But, ordinarily, it is not. It would be much better if Democrats could point to some sort of huge humanitarian crisis that they actually handled well recently.

Oh, you say that there actually was a humanitarian crisis recently in which Democrats were involved? Which one was it?

Well, as it turns out, it was Katrina itself. Both Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin were (drum roll here) Democrats!!!

That Lizza fails to take note of this little fact in his article declaring how Democrats can position themselves, post-Katrina, as the party to turn to in a humanitarian crisis is just–well, it’s just strange. He seems to believe that rhetoric can trump reality. I hope he’s not correct–because, if he is, we’re in even greater trouble than I think.

Thoughts on Palestinian “wilding”

The New Neo Posted on by

The Israeli withdrawal from Gaza (which I supported, by the way, as the best alternative among all the lousy “choices among crazinesses” available to the Israelis at the time) has had some disheartening results.

First we had the inevitable but sorrowful spectacle of Israeli soldiers forcing weeping Israeli settlers from their homes. And now we have another inevitable spectacle, this one of destructive fury: a Palestinian wilding that is annihalating what’s left of the settlements, including the synagogues and the greenhouses.

The article from the Scotsman that I linked describes the festivities. It’s an example of what I called the Martin Higby phenomenon (see here for an explanation) run amok. Imagine a society that nurtures rage in its children, feeding it and watering it like a precious crop. This is the harvest: a society in which those who would be moderates, those who would just like to get on with the sober and hopeful business of building a just and decent society, are overwhelmed by the explosion of carefully fostered rage.

It’s not surprising, of course, that people are helping themselves to what’s there, a sort of recycling. What should be surprising, however, is that they are even destroying their own potential livelihood, the flourishing greenhouses the Israelis had built, and which the Palestinians themselves had hoped to make the basis of their post-withdrawal economy.

But somehow it’s not surprising. Why? In certain situations, rageful crowds can be as hard to contain as the force of a ferocious hurricane spilling water over and through inadequate levees. Not only has Palestinian culture long been in the business of whipping up destructive rage for its own propaganda purposes (not to mention keeping its citizens in weakened economic conditions the better to further those very same purposes), but it’s a society in which the restraints on violence are not at all strong. Among the Palestinians, their sheepdog protectors–both of the herding and the guard variety–are extremely weak or even non-existent. In many cases the sheepdogs are probably even wolves in sheep’s clothing. Without police as effective brakes on the impulse to destroy, and without the will to apply these brakes, that impulse can expand unchecked and, in the end, feed on the society itself.

I have no doubt that moderates–or at least would-be moderates–exist among Palestinians. How many there are I cannot tell. Are they rare? Or are they numerous but silenced into invisibility by the fact that speaking out would get them killed in short order? I do not know. But I don’t think that they have a chance right now.

Part of the terrible calculus of the Israeli withdrawal was a hope that the world might finally see the Israelis as doing the right thing this time, and see that the resultant Palestinian response would either be to finally make a decent society for themselves or to show themselves to be hopelessly at war with each other. The latter–a vicious civil war–is the one I’d bet on at the moment, I’m afraid.

As for how the world sees the Israelis, articles such as this one from Reuters are not exactly what you’d call sympathetic to them. Reuters continues to subtly–and sometimes not so subtly–present what amounts to the Palestinian point of view.

The Reuters article, as well on another from the London Times discussed here by Wretchard of Belmont Club, uncritically present the Palestinian accusation that the Israelis left the synagogues intact as a way to make the Palestinians look bad when they destroyed them.

Well, of course–the Israelis are the evil puppeteers, as usual. The Palestinians have been raised on the idea that they themselves are responsible for nothing and that their endless victimhood entitles them to endless revenge, and much of the world has reinforced them in that perception. So this blaming of the Israelis for the acts of Palestinian crowds in destroying the synagogues comes as no surprise, either, although it bodes ill not only for the Israelis, but for the Palestinians, too–and for the world.

And speaking of those Iraqi Jews…

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a movie dealing with the subject of the departure of the Jews from Arab and Moslem lands in which they had lived for centuries–and, in some cases, millennia.

If you scroll down, you will read an interesting piece by Magdi Allam (Allam, as best I can tell from perusing several articles automatically translated from the Italian–which means that reading them is somewhat like reading tea leaves–is a Coptic Christian Egyptian journalist who writes in Italy and Italian). Allam’s thesis is that Arab communities lost a good deal of their own previous identity when their Jewish populations fled:

Seeing Pierre Rehov’s documentary film ‘The Silent Exodus’ about the expulsion and flight of a million Sephardi Jews helped me gain a better understanding of the tragedy of a community that was integral and fundamental to Arab society. Above all it has revealed to me the very essence of the catastrophe that befell it, a catastrophe which the mythical Arab nation has never once called into question. In a flash of insight I could see that the tragedy of the Jews and the catastrophe of the Arabs are two facets of the same coin. By expelling the Jews who were settled on the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean centuries before they were arabised and islamised, the Arabs have in fact begun the lethal process of mutilating their own identity and despoiling their own history. By losing their Jews the Arabs have lost their roots and have ended up by losing themselves.

As has often happened in history, the Jews were the first victims of hatred and intolerance. All the “others” had their turn soon enough, specifically the Christians and other religious minorities, heretical and secular Muslims and finally, those Muslims who do not fit exactly into the ideological framework of the extreme nationalists and Islamists. There has not been a single instance in this murky period of our history when the Arab states have been ready to condemn the steady exodus of Christians, ethnic-religious minorities, enlightened and ordinary Muslims, while Muslims plain and simple have become the primary victims of Islamic terror.

The birthmark: an identity is a difficult thing to change

The New Neo Posted on by

Just recently I received an e-mail from a thoughtful reader who asked:

For most of my friends, being progressive is part of their identity. Changing their minds requires reevaluating who they are…Why do you think identity is so tied up with political beliefs?

In the post entitled “Beginnings” (part of my “A mind is a difficult thing to change” series), I tried to describe the process of formation of a political identity. A great influence is the political affiliation of a person’s family. Although some people certainly break away and forge a different political identity than that of parents and relatives, there is definitely a tendency to stick with whatever is the ideology in which we are raised.

Here is a picture of the identity-forming process as a whole:

Memberships in organizations or collectives that serve as reference groups are typically emphasized as integral to the process of identity formation. These socially based identities provide potential sources of identity for the individual… Most findings suggest that identity is seldom restricted to one group…individuals may have a variety of identities or subidentities, each supported by group memberships.

So, the groups to which we belong–social, ethnic, religious, racial, class, professional, recreational, familial, political–all are pieces in the puzzle that creates our sense of identity. The majority of people are probably most comfortable when they perceive the elements within them as cohesive, and are uncomfortable when they see them as clashing with each other. But all sides–Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, “progressives” and anarchists and libertarians–take on an affiliation which becomes a basic part of personal identity and is consequently often very difficult to give up.

An excellent illustration of this phenomenon is Democrat Zell Miller, who gave a speech nominating G.W. Bush at last year’s Republican convention. This earned him the enmity of most of his fellow Democrats, who considered him a traitor to the party.

Many people wondered aloud why Zell Miller had not switched parties in light of his strong alignment with the Republicans and his staunch opposition to the Democrats. A “conservative Democrat” seemed to be a sort of oxymoron.

Miller’s answer? That he was born into the Democratic Party and considers his party label to be “like a birthmark”–innate, and difficult to eradicate.

Miller’s not the only one who feels that way in his neck of the woods:

“We’re a little bit different than the Washington Democrats,” said state Rep. Charles F. Jenkins (D-Blairsville), who represents Miller’s home county of Towns as well as Rabun, Union and White counties.

Jenkins said he understands why Miller refuses to join the Republican Party.

“You’ve got people up here who just will not switch from the Democratic Party because they’ve been Democrats since they were born,” Jenkins said. “They’re hard-headed mountain people. And hard-headed mountain people don’t switch for anybody.”

Well, most people are pretty hard-headed in that respect. But it’s my impression that liberals may even be more hard-headed than most about changing their political identities.

That’s because a liberal political identity tends to be so much more than a political identity–it’s also a moral and personal identity. Liberals tend to equate their own position with such abstract (and non-political) qualities as goodness, kindness, lack of bigotry, intelligence–oh, a host of wonderful virtues. Any identity that is so identified is going to be particularly difficult to shed. Do some conservatives feel this way about their identity? Of course. But my impression is that it is a feeling even more basic to the political identities of liberals–at least the ones I know, and I know quite a few.

My sense is that this is one of the main reasons that my attempts to talk to my friends have so often been met with rage: to many of them, my espousing of any conservative causes means 1) I must be a bad (i.e.: selfish, racist, classist) person; and 2) if I ever were to convince them of the rightness of my arguments, they would be faced with leaving the fold, also, and becoming a bad person, too. Much better to let the whole edifice remain in place than to remove one little brick and risk the whole thing toppling down.

Japan votes for a reformer

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m not particularly conversant with Japanese politics, but this seems like an important story. Japanese voters answered the call of Prime Minister Koizumi with a strong vote to return him to power on a platform of reforming and streamlining the Japanese government to deal with the next few decades of change there.

By returning Koizumi to power (which looks on the surface like “no change”), the Japanese people are voting for enormous change, at least potentially. Koizumi has plans to scale down government by privatizing the post office and insurance industry, as well as changing the pension system.

Looks like the Japanese are encountering something similar to what Europe is facing as the population ages over the next few decades. Many Europeans seem to be more or less in denial, not wanting to abandon their free lunches, but Japan seems to be trying to tackle the problem head on.

It’s also a vote for a Bush supporter in foreign policy:

The win would keep a staunch ally of President Bush in power. Koizumi is expected to stand by his dispatch of troops to support the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq over opposition objections, and he strongly supports the continued presence of 50,000 U.S. military personnel in Japan. Tokyo also is a U.S. negotiating partner in efforts to disarm North Korea of its nuclear weapons.

Koizumi has his work cut out for him, especially in the economic sphere. I wish him the best of luck; he’ll need it.