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The Second Time Around

February 21, 2007 08:22 AM

Updated 2/24/07 below

Meant to post this a little while ago. It's from an interview with Hungarian Nobelist Imre Kertesz, in which the author and Auschwitz survivor reflects on the persistence of European anti-semitism. There's no happy ending.

Am I right then, that you think of anti-Semitism as something persistent? That you do not keep the hope that this problem will disappear after some time...

As long as it is considered a problem, it will neither cease nor disappear. In any case, the Nazi death camps established for the extermination of European Jews, combined with the creation of Israel constitute a new development – a new problem, if you like – not only in the history of Jews but also in that of anti-Semitism. For instance, there is no fitting anti-Semitic response to Auschwitz – if not the denial of the very facts of Auschwitz and the Holocaust. At first this denial seemed to be an act verging on the ridiculous. Today, however, it counts as "serious academic pursuit" and if anti-Semitism is ever elevated to the level of the state, if it is considered a state programme, then the officially supported, institutional falsification of history will become possible once again, as we saw in single-party dictatorships.

In democratic states, criticism of Israel provides a new and effective avenue for anti-Semitism – particularly when Israel does something that prompts criticism, which by the way other states do, too, whether or not they have to fight for their existence. A language has developed that I would like to call Euro-anti-Semitism. For a Euro-anti-Semite, it is no contradiction to recall the victims of the Holocaust in mournful tones, and in the next breath, under the guise of criticism of Israel, to utter anti-Semitic statements. Such things have been repeated so often that they are almost cliches. Remembrance of the Holocaust is important to stop such things from happening again. But, in fact, nothing has happened since Auschwitz that would prevent another Auschwitz from happening. On the contrary. Before Auschwitz, the extermination camp was unimaginable. Today, it can be imagined. Because Auschwitz really happened, it has permeated our imagination, become a permanent part of us. What we are able to imagine – because it really happened – can happen again. [My emphasis]

I have not seen this perspective anywhere else, since discussion among those who foresee a "Second Holocaust" - see, for instance, Ron Rosenbaum - tends to take European moral revulsion at the "first" for granted. In this view, modern Europeans either don't recognize or fail to give due consideration to the signs that history is repeating itself - particularly in the demonization and gradual dehumanization of the Jews and, in the modern version, "Zionists." This view assumes that if Europeans really knew "what was coming" they would move to prevent it. But what if Europeans do see the direction things are headed and simply aren't troubled by the consequences that may await the Jews? What if Auschwitz numbed Europeans to the horror of genocide? Worse, what if it actually whetted the appetite, by revealing that such a completely insane goal - the entire elimination of this rootless, problematic clan - was achievable? These are the implications of what Kertesz' observes in modern Europe.

MORE: Read this piece by Anne Bayefsky and despair at our own government's financial contribution to the furtherance of Jew-hatred.

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Enter the Strawman

February 8, 2007 05:40 AM

Ian Buruma is starting to flail at his critics. Enter the strawman:

Professor Cliteur holds so dogmatically to his idea of secularism and the Enlightenment that any accommodation towards religious faith, specifically towards Islam, is tantamount to appeasement of religious extremism, or a form of self-hating nihilism. My objection is not to the Enlightenment as such, but to the ideological zeal of some of those who believe they are acting in its defence. If we wish to isolate and defeat religious extremism, we must must have mainstream European Muslims as our allies. The rather crude polemics spouted by Professor Cliteur will not be of much help in this endeavor.

Oh come on. There was nothing in Cliteur's essay to suggest that the defense of Enlightenment values demands the rejection of religious faith or practice. His point was only that critics such as Buruma are naive in their belief that "dogmatism" is the problem, rather than what people are dogmatic about. I'll go further. I'd wager that Cliteur would have little trouble with fundamentalism of the Christian kind, provided it made no purchase on his liberties - particularly the freedom to keep his head attached to his neck. He's keen to cite Spinoza as the "godfather of the Enlightenment," and Spinoza was no atheist. (If anything, he had too many gods - at least according to the Jewish elders who expelled him.)

Buruma, too, insists that he understands this difference. Really? As you can see above, he is quickly back to moaning about the "ideological zeal" of the world's Cliteurs. Then there's this:

I admire the achievements of the Enlightenment as much as Professor Cliteur appears to do, but I also believe that one of its greatest achievements is the rejection of dogmatism, of any kind.

So he's not a postmodernist, as Cliteur alleges; he's just fantastically enlightened - enlightened enough to see that one can be over-enlightened. This is a rejection of the "postmodernist" charge?

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The Battle is Joined

February 5, 2007 12:07 PM

NOTE: Updated with criticism from Paul Cliteur below.

If you've been missing it, there's a fascinating debate continuing to unfold at signandsight.com over the recent Pascal Bruckner essay, excerpted below. Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash have each responded separately to Bruckner's allegations (i.e. that they withhold Enlightenment liberalism from those who try to escape oppressive cultural archaisms). Both are a tad puzzled - not to say alarmed - by Bruckner's suggestion that their views are shared by Bush and Blair, and somewhat amused by Bruckner's evidently indestructible reverence for the "French model." Now comes feminist Turkish-German author Necla Kelek with a rebuke for the respondents. Buruma and Ash overlook the sinister measure of conformity in the Muslim Ummah as they laud the "diversity" among Muslims, she charges. So here's the current state of play:

Buruma - Islamic practice is not monolithic; where it is extreme, it won't likely be reformed by a shrill apostate (and avowed atheist) like Ayaan Hirsi Ali; Bruckner is a French wanker who probably hasn't left the inner confines of Paris in awhile.

Garton Ash - "Pascal Bruckner is the intellectual equivalent of a drunk meandering down the road, arguing loudly with some imaginary enemies." No further description can improve on that.

Kelek - Buruma (mostly) and Garton Ash ignore the startling degree to which extremist Muslim dogmas, if not universally accepted, are nonetheless the status quo in the societies where most Muslims live.

I recommend you give all the essays a read-through. This is going to continue for awhile.

UPDATE: Dutch law professor Paul Cliteur joins the fray, with a very thoughtful piece. He argues that "postmodern" tendencies among Western intellectuals have created categories of equivalence that are in fact illusory and, at the furthest end, fundamentally dangerous, because they deny even the right of self-defense to the heirs of the Enlightenment. Buruma's book "Murder in Amsterdam," about the death of Theo Van Gogh, continues to lie at the center of the debate:

What remains a mystery is why many intelligent people stick to the postmodern frame of mind, even though so many intelligent writers - Terry Eagleton and John Searle, to name just two - have thoroughly deconstructed its tenets. I think this has to do with the postmodernist conviction that an attitude that they see as relativistic and pragmatic would help in the struggle against religious terrorism. They hope that, if we abstain from radical criticism of the terrorist mindset, we can pacify the most radical elements. This is a great delusion, as Buruma himself would have understood had he thought more deeply about the material in his own book. For Buruma profiles not only protagonists of radical Enlightenment but also Amsterdam alderman Ahmed Aboutaleb and the city's mayor, Job Cohen. Buruma writes that he met Aboutaleb - a Moroccan-born Muslim who advocates pluralism - "surrounded by bodyguards. Like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, he needed full-time protection." That should have stimulated Buruma to further reflection on the nature of religious terrorism. As for Cohen, he has a reputation of being much too soft. He never employs strong language against ethnic and religious minorities. He is a man of "dialogue" and "respect," refraining from almost any kind of critique that might disturb the sensitivities of religious minorities. Yet Cohen was criticized by name in the letter that was left on the body of Theo van Gogh.

More to come.

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Forgetting the Girl

January 26, 2007 10:41 AM

From the online Euromag signandsight.com, a very important essay from the great French philosopher and social analyst Pascal Bruckner, responding to Europe's shameful ostracism of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. He loses me a bit in suggesting a parallelism between the outlook of Bush and Blair, on the one hand, and the perspectives of Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash - two writers taken to task in the piece for enforcing intellectual segregation in the name of "multiculturalism." (The better criticism of Bush, at least, is precisely the opposite - i.e. that he believes some Western values are self-evidently universal, or ought to be.) But Bruckner knows his Europe, and is spot-on here:

Anyone with a mind to contend timidly that liberty is indivisible, that the life of a human being has the same value everywhere, that amputating a thief's hand or stoning an adulteress is intolerable everywhere, is duly arraigned in the name of the necessary equality of cultures. As a result, we can turn a blind eye to how others live and suffer once they've been parked in the ghetto of their particularity. Enthusing about their inviolable differentness alleviates us from having to worry about their condition. However it is one thing to recognise the convictions and rites of fellow citizens of different origins, and another to give one's blessing to hostile insular communities that throw up ramparts between themselves and the rest of society. How can we bless this difference if it excludes humanity instead of welcoming it? This is the paradox of multiculturalism: it accords the same treatment to all communities, but not to the people who form them, denying them the freedom to liberate themselves from their own traditions. Instead: recognition of the group, oppression of the individual. The past is valued over the wills of those who wish to leave custom and the family behind and - for example - love in the manner they see fit. ...

Out of consideration for all the abuses they may have suffered, ethnic, sexual, religious and regional minorities are often set up as small nations, in which the most outrageous chauvinism is passed off as nothing more than the expression of legitimate self-esteem. Instead of celebrating freedom as the power to escape determinism, the repetition of the past is being encouraged, reinforcing the power of collective coercion over private individuals. Marginal groups now form a sort of ethos-police, a flag-waving micro-nationalism which certain countries of Europe unfortunately see fit to publicly support. Under the guise of celebrating diversity, veritable ethnic or confessional prisons are established, where one group of citizens is denied the advantages accorded to others. ...

The Enlightenment belongs to the entire human race, not just to a few privileged individuals in Europe or North America who have taken it upon themselves to kick it to bits like spoiled brats, to prevent others from having a go. Anglo-Saxon multiculturalism is perhaps nothing other than a legal apartheid, accompanied - as is so often the case - by the saccarine cajolery of the rich who explain to the poor that money doesn't guarantee happiness. We bear the burdens of liberty, of self-invention, of sexual equality; you have the joys of archaism, of abuse as ancestral custom, of sacred prescriptions, forced marriage, the headscarf and polygamy. The members of these minorities are put under a preservation order, protected from the fanaticism of the Enlightenment and the "calamities" of progress. Those termed "Muslims" (North Africans, Pakistanis, Africans) are prohibited from not believing, or from believing periodically, from not giving a damn about God, from creating a life for themselves far away from the Koran and the rites of the tribe.

Multiculturalism is a racism of the anti-racists: it chains people to their roots. Thus Job Cohen, mayor of Amsterdam and one of the mainstays of the Dutch state, demands that one accept "the conscious discrimination of women by certain groups of orthodox Muslims" on the basis that we need a "new glue" to "hold society together." In the name of social cohesion, we are invited to give our roaring applause for the intolerance that these groups show for our laws. The coexistence of hermetic little societies is cherished, each of which follows a different norm. If we abandon a collective criterion for discriminating between just and unjust, we sabotage the very idea of national community. A French, British or Dutch citizen will be prosecuted for beating his wife, for example. But should the crime go unpunished if it turns out that the perpetrator is a Sunni or Shiite? Should his faith give him the right to transgress the law of the land? This is the glorification in others of what we have always beaten ourselves up about: outrageous protectionism, cultural narcissism and inveterate ethnocentrism!

Read the whole thing, as they say.

[ht: aldaily.com]

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Day Zero for NATO

January 15, 2007 04:18 AM

Various pro-Russia forces here in Ukraine are hoping to compel a referendum on NATO membership this year, on the assumption that voters will overwhelmingly reject entry. They've already got the signatures they need to put the issue on the ballot. Luckily for president Viktor Yushchenko and others who support entry, the decision on scheduling the vote may rest in the hands of a government body that no longer exists.

Another expert quoted by Segodnya ["Today"], former parliament deputy speaker Viktor Musiyaka, pointed to a discrepancy between the constitution and the 1991 law on referenda, which obliges parliament’s presidium -- a body scrapped more than a decade ago -- rather than the president to set the date for a referendum.

The way the politics are moving here, that presidium could be back sooner than anyone expects.

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The Devil's Advocate

November 27, 2006 02:44 AM

Always available to vouchsafe a tyrant, Pat Buchanan acquits Vladimir Putin in the murder of Sasha Litvinenko in London last week.

What benefit could Putin conceivably realize from the London killing of an enemy of his regime, who had just become a British citizen? Why would the Russian president, at the peak of his popularity, with his regime awash in oil revenue and himself playing a strong hand in world politics, risk a breach with every Western nation by ordering the public murder of a man who was more of a nuisance than a threat to his regime?

How quaint. Putin jails his critics, silences the free press, bullies his Western-leaning neighbors, supplies Iran with missiles, prevents sanctions against North Korea and blocks efforts to stop the genocide in Darfur - and Pat wonders why he would now risk a "breach" with the West! And just when things were going so smoothly....

Well, I would never presume to challenge Pat's expertise on the authoritarian mindset, but it seems to me that he's over-estimated Putin's desire to ingratiate himself with Europe. He's also overlooked the obvious Kremlin windfall from the murder: Even if Putin's goons weren't responsible, Putin's critics will get the message. How better to intimidate opponents than to demonstrate that there is no safe haven safe for them? The inscrutability of the act only enhances the effect.

Yet Pat considers it more plausible that the Kremlin's enemies - Litvinenko's friends - cooked up this entire scheme in an effort to "embarrass" Putin, the former KGB man, who comes across here as a Chaplinesque figure, charmingly oblivious as his opponents are murdered around him. Uh huh.

It is fitting here to mention a book review posted recently on the CIA's Web site. The volume explores the KGB files (translated memos, actually - the files were destroyed) on Andrei Sakharov, the late dissident. It sheds light on the absurdity and paranoia that once governed the KGB [Hat tip: aldaily.com].

At the time of Sakharov’s first public expression of dissent—the publication in the West in 1968 of his essay “Reflections on Progress, Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom”—the KGB did not know what to make of him. Sakharov was, after all, one of the Soviet Union’s leading physicists, and he had been showered with honors. The KGB, not realizing that Sakharov’s essay was the result of a gradual disillusionment with Soviet society rather than an impulsive act, at first hoped to bring him back to orthodoxy. “To prevent him from committing politically harmful acts, we believe it would make sense of one of the secretaries of the Central Committee to receive Sakharov and conduct an appropriate conversation with him,” recommended KGB Chairman Yuriy Andropov in June 1968. (90)

The reluctance to condemn Sakharov, however, brought problems of its own, as the KGB noted that “government circles in the USA” might misread the Kremlin’s silence as an endorsement of his views and wrongly assume that Soviet foreign policy was shifting. (94) In 1970, with Sakharov becoming more radical and building contacts with other dissidents, Andropov recommended the installation of listening devices in his apartment to “discover the contacts inciting him to commit hostile acts” and prevent “individuals hostile to the Soviet state” from exploiting his name. The monitoring, which eventually included physical surveillance, break-ins and thefts, and reporting by informers, continued until Sakharov’s death in 1999. (99)[3]

The KGB, continually unable to comprehend Sakharov’s dissent, could only view his actions through the prism of its Bolshevik and Chekist past. As a result, KGB officials not only saw him as the tool of foreign conspiracies but often managed to detect multiple plots working together. In December 1975, Andropov reported that “bourgeois propaganda is actively exploiting [Sakharov’s statements] for purposes of subversive activities against the Soviet Union and other socialist countries.” (207) Soviet anti-Semitism reinforced these themes, as when Andropov declared in 1973 that Sakharov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn were “offering their services to reactionary imperialist and especially Zionist circles.” (166) Shortly after President Jimmy Carter sent a letter of support to Sakharov, Andropov claimed that “ideological centers and Zionist organizations have involved the new Carter administration” in Sakharov’s subversion. (223) The KGB also often ascribed Sakharov’s dissent to the malign influence of Elena Bonner. Her views, wrote Andropov in 1980, “not only are based on her hostile attitude toward the Soviet system but also conform to the recommendation of intelligence services in the USA.”

This is the universe Putin emerged from.

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The Big Chill

October 27, 2006 06:21 PM

NOTE: If you are reading this report, it's because you have been authorized to receive transmissions on my encrypted samizdat network.

America shares 53rd place with Botswana, Croatia and Tonga in the latest "press freedom" index, compiled by Reporters Without Borders and released this week.

The United States (53rd) has fallen nine places since last year, after being in 17th position in the first year of the Index, in 2002. Relations between the media and the Bush administration sharply deteriorated after the president used the pretext of “national security” to regard as suspicious any journalist who questioned his “war on terrorism.” The zeal of federal courts which, unlike those in 33 US states, refuse to recognise the media’s right not to reveal its sources, even threatens journalists whose investigations have no connection at all with terrorism. [My italics]

Yup, that sounds accurate. I'm sure they're anxiously shredding files over at Salon and The Nation as they wait for the FBI's elite anti-criticism squad to raid. That'll teach them not to place scare quotes around "War on Terror"! (Nice touch: "[H]is 'war on terrorism.'" It's like "His Lionel train set hobby-kit with scale-model villages in the basement.")

According to RSF, journalists would be much better off in Finland, which ranked at the top of the survey. The downside, I guess, is that they'd be limited to reporting about wood crafts and suicides. In terms of your country's press freedom score, it helps if the country doesn't have much that is pressing for the press to report. Not to take anything away from Finland, of course - or Iceland (tied at No.1), which also appears to have discovered the correct balance between press freedom and national security.

And of course there's always France.

France (35th) slipped five places during the past year, to make a loss of 24 places in five years. The increase in searches of media offices and journalists’ homes is very worrying for media organisations and trade unions. Autumn 2005 was an especially bad time for French journalists, several of whom were physically attacked or threatened during a trade union dispute involving privatisation of the Corsican firm SNCM and during violent demonstrations in French city suburbs in November. [My italics]

Sounds ideal. What's a few government raids, when you might otherwise be suspiciously regarded in the U.S.? But remember, when you travel to Europe, bring along due respect for the The Prophet:

A French high school philosophy teacher and author who carried out a scathing attack against the Prophet Muhammad and Islam in a newspaper commentary says he has gone into hiding under police protection after receiving a series of death threats, including one disseminated on an online radical Islamist forum.

The teacher, Robert Redeker, 52, wrote in the center-right daily Le Figaro 10 days ago that Muhammad was “a merciless warlord, a looter, a mass-murderer of Jews and a polygamist,” and called the Koran “a book of incredible violence.”

The Redeker case is the latest manifestation in Europe of a mounting ideological battle that pits those who believe Islam and the Prophet Muhammad can be criticized in the name of free speech against those in the Muslim community who believe no criticism can be tolerated...

... “I can’t work, I can’t come and go and am obliged to hide,” Mr. Redeker told Europe 1 radio in a telephone interview from an undisclosed location on Friday. “So in some way, the Islamists have succeeded in punishing me on the territory of the republic as if I were guilty of a crime of opinion.”

Mr. Redeker, who has kept in contact with news agencies by cellphone and e-mail, said that his wife and their children had also been threatened with death. He told Europe 1 that his wife was in hiding with him, but he was less clear about his three children, saying that one of them had been forced to move and that another was in a boarding school.

Asked to describe the sort of threats he had received, Mr. Redeker replied, “You will never feel secure on this earth. One billion, three hundred thousand Muslims are ready to kill you.” [NYT]

Unbelievable. A high school with a philosophy teacher? Only in France....

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Amen

October 3, 2006 06:03 AM

Victor Davis Hanson despairs of modern Europe. Who doesn't? But his piece today is still worth quoting at some length for the clarity it brings to the present circumstances.

But now all that hard-won effort of some 2,500 years is at risk. The new enemies of Reason are not the enraged democrats who executed Socrates, the Christian zealots who persecuted philosophers of heliocentricity, or the Nazis who burned books. No, they are a pampered and scared Western public that caves to barbarism — dwarves who sit on the shoulders of dead giants, and believe that their present exalted position is somehow related to their own cowardly sense of accommodation....

Note also the constant subtext in this new self-censorship: fear of radical Islam and its gruesome appendages of beheadings, suicide bombings, improvised explosive devices, barbaric fatwas, riotous youth, petrodollar-acquired nuclear weapons, oil boycotts and price hikes, and fist-chanting mobs.

In contrast, almost daily in Europe, “brave” artists caricature Christians and Americans with impunity. Why?

For a long list of reasons, among them most surely the assurance that they can do this without being killed. Such cowards puff out their chests when trashing an ill Oriana Fallaci or Ariel Sharon or beleaguered George W. Bush in the most demonic of tones, but prove sunken and sullen when threatened by a Dr Zawahri or a grand mufti of some obscure mosque....

So the present generation of Europeans really is heretical, made up of traitors of a sort, since they themselves, not just their consensual governments or some invader across the Mediterranean, have nearly destroyed their won freedoms of expression — out of worries over oil, or appearing as illiberal apostates of the new secular religion of multiculturalism, or another London or Madrid bombing.

Europe boldly produces films about assassinating an American president, and routinely disparages the Church that gave the world the Sermon of the Mount, but it simply won’t stand up for an artist, a well-meaning Pope, or a ranting filmmaker when the mob closes in. The Europe that believes in everything turns out to believe in nothing....

Those in an auto parts store in Fresno, or at a NASCAR race in southern Ohio, might appear to Europeans as primordials with their guns, “fundamentalist” religion, and flag-waving chauvinism. But it is they, and increasingly their kind alone, who prove the bulwarks of the West. Ultimately what keeps even the pope safe and the continent confident in its vain dialogues with Iranian lunatics is the United States military and the very un-Europeans who fight in it.

We may be only 30 years behind Europe, but we are not quite there yet. And so Europe has done us a great favor in showing us not the way of the future, but the old cowardice of our pre-Enlightenment past. [author's italics]

Can't add much to that.

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Court of Resort

August 30, 2006 03:25 AM

I've never spared much thought for the European Court of Human Rights. And who could, with such competition to consider from so many other institutions of preening European forwardness? But if this court can return ownership of a major steel mill to the crooked Ukrainian billionaires who not long ago stole it through plainly illicit insider dealing - well then, in that case it will have shown itself to be a meddlesome agent of corruption to be manipulated by venal European elites. And therefore deserving of very close attention.

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Cat Nips

August 19, 2006 06:19 PM

Jimmy Carter is hawking a book, and that means reconnecting with his core constituency - Europe. Recently he sat for an interview with Der Spiegel - and, from the sounds of it, Der Spiegel sat on his lap, nuzzling its wet little nose against the former president's neck and purring softly, as they shared an understanding known only to effete Europeans and our creepiest ex-president. A sampling of the, uh, questions:

SPIEGEL: You also mentioned the hatred for the United States throughout the Arab world which has ensued as a result of the invasion of Iraq. Given this circumstance, does it come as any surprise that Washington's call for democracy in the Middle East has been discredited?

SPIEGEL: What makes you personally so optimistic about the effectiveness of diplomacy? You are, so to speak, the father of Camp David negotiations.

SPIEGEL: One main points of your book is the rather strange coalition between Christian fundamentalists and the Republican Party. How can such a coalition of the pious lead to moral catastrophes like the Iraqi prison scandal in Abu Ghraib and torture in Guantanamo?

SPIEGEL: You've been called the moral conscience of your country. How do you look at it yourself? Are you an outsider in American politics these days or do you represent a political demographic that could maybe elect the next US president?

SPIEGEL: Does America need a regime change?

Just keep the hat out, Jimmy. They'll keep cranking the organ.

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The Grass Grows and Grows

August 19, 2006 05:58 PM

It has emerged that the "conscience of Germany" served in the Waffen SS as a teen - a secret he had managed to hide for more than 50 years. Who would have believed it? Okay, other than me, who would have believed it? Okay....

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Heavy Weighs the Crown (of Thorns)

August 19, 2006 09:47 AM

In an otherwise almost perfectly unhelpful review of European hostility toward Israel, the Economist magazine did include one detail that caught my attention:

It is also often the right in Europe, linked with anti-Semitism in the past, that is most supportive of Israel today. Britain's Conservative Party, for instance, not always known for its admiration of Jews or Israel, is now the most pro-Israel party. In Italy, which invented fascism, Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia and Gianfranco Fini's formerly neo-fascist National Alliance, are more pro-Israel than the government. In Spain, the centre-right opposition was highly critical of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the Socialist prime minister, when he donned an Arab headscarf to show solidarity during the Lebanon war. [My emphases]

Is this guy for real? Sheesh.

And I don't know what to make exactly of this next bit.

Emanuele Ottolenghi, an expert on Israel and Europe at Oxford University, argues that “Europeans see Israel as the embodiment of the demons of their own past.” The European Union is supposed to have traded in war, nationalism and conflict for love, peace and federalism. But Israel now reminds Europeans of darker forces and darker days.

Ottolenghi is a well-regarded and widely published scholar. I doubt the quote is meant - or that the author intended - to suggest that, in the image of Israel, the European elites see a reflection of their vulgar past and are repulsed by it.

Rather, I think it's meant to suggest that, in today's "progressive" Europe, Israel is a pesky reminder of their culpability in genocide, and Europeans resent that.

So how does that account for the hostility toward Israel? Why can't the Europeans just feel guilty for their betrayals and resolve never again - well, from here on out, at least - to allow genocide in their midst?

Because the oversized moral vanity of today's European progressives cannot allow it. The acceptance is too painful. The Europeans therefore seek to rationalize their culpability by reference to the putative culpability of Israel - Jews, that is - in comparable crimes.

This is not precisely - or rather, exclusively - a matter of antisemitism. It is not a conscious or unconscious wish that someone will "finish the job" that Europe started. The impulse can best be expressed as: If only the Jews would stop provoking, people wouldn't see the need to slaughter them every so often. In this view, people who seek explicitly to kill Jews - let's say, Hamas or Hezbollah - are cast as the original victims, as people who can't be held responsible for their actions because they've been driven to extremes by Jewish aggression.

European antisemitism is a factor, without a doubt. The Economist suggests that attitudes toward Israel have shifted across Europe as Israel has transformed, becoming more powerful and more aggressive. Maybe so. But Israel has nothing on Iran, or North Korea, or China, or even Russia, when it comes to extraterritorial threat - and yet a solid majority (60 percent) of Europeans consider little Israel to be the greatest threat to world peace? Guilt alone cannot account for an outlook that ridiculous.

I'm reminded of a conversation I had with a Polish acquaintance recently. She was lecturing me on the need to understand why someone would strap explosives to himself, walk into a pizza parlor, and blow up a bunch of strangers. I told her that there is no way to understand this - that nothing could be "understood" to induce someone to do something so depraved. It is the act of someone too sick with purposeful hatred to act otherwise. Yet I couldn't budge her. She steadfastly maintained that one shouldn't be too quick to reach judgments - this failure to "understand" is what starts wars etc. At least this appeared to be her attitude... until she told me (in order to reveal her ecumenism) about a visit she had made at some point to a women's social event at a synagogue. All was fine there until one woman evidently felt moved to suggest that Jews were the "chosen" people of God. Yeah, I know. It's not like that's explicitly stated in the Torah or anything, right? Still, this was evidently the first time she (a Catholic) had encountered this perspective. And it was traumatizing. According to her, she suddenly felt physically ill, disgusted, disoriented to the point she had to flee the premises lest she make a scene. Now, if you're asking me whether I believed her story, my answer is no. Maybe she was at a synagogue; maybe this business about the Chosen People arose; but beyond that I'm skeptical. (For that matter, I don't think I've ever heard a Jew utter the words "Chosen People" without the accompaniment of an ironic smirk. History demands irony in such instances.) Nevertheless, I couldn't help being struck by the contrast in attitude. Here she was, almost perfectly ambivalent about suicide bombing - but undone by what she took to be the suggestion that Jews were somehow superior in the eyes of God. (She better not read the Koran!) I wondered whether this dichotomy might have something to do with the fact that Poland contributed the greatest share of Jews to the gas chambers. They were The Chosen, alright.

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Learning to Love the Bomb

May 11, 2006 06:18 AM

While the regime in Iran openly flouts the Anti-Nuclear Proliferation Treaty, to which it is a signatory, and flirts with the destruction of Israel, the Beeb wonders: "Would An Attack on Iran Be Legal?"

Probably not, I'd say. Expect us to be arrested and thrown in jail, where we'll spend our days pacing the cell murmuring about "loose nukes" and posting urgent manifestos to European media. Occasionally the lone guard posted outside will grow tired of listening, and will enter and beat us until, bloody and whimpering, we will once more forswear any further mention of weapons or ayatollahs or world destruction. Shamed, disfigured and ignored, we will gradually lose our faith in humanity or justice, until one day we meet this nun from Singapore who will devote her remaining days to winning our freedom. As trust grows between us, we will reveal to her our willingness to be redeemed, and she will teach us to "heal." Working in tandem, our international legal team will make a plausible human rights case from the fact that our prison is within "blast distance" of Tel Aviv and will likely be incinerated in a nuclear exchange. The matter will be taken up by a crusading Spanish judge who believes that "even the world's worst terrorist" (us) should be treated humanely. Eventually a European court will agree to move the prison 20 kilometers West, just outside the blast zone, where radiation from the subsequent detonation will hit the cheek like the warm breath from a toaster oven and the view of the mushroom cloud will be marvelous.

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lindbergh et al

April 12, 2006 09:01 AM

Yesterday, James Taranto of Opinion Journal noted [first item] that the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette had published a defense, by former ambassador Edward Peck, of the much-disparaged Mearsheimer-Walt "working paper." That document, as you will recall, argues that insidious Jews and the Israel Lobby control the U.S. government and have steered policymaking away from American interests in order to serve Israel's. So it should come as no surprise that a "Holocaust revisionist" named Mark Weber, the author of an anti-Semitic flyer posted recently on Harvard's campus [second Taranto item], says its content "makes some of the same points as are made in the 81 page paper by [Kennedy School Academic Dean M. Stephen] Walt and [University of Chicago professor John J.] Mearsheimer."

All of which leads me to ask: Is there anything to the fact that all these gentlemen have Germanic surnames?

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Truth to be told

April 6, 2006 06:19 AM

There's so much sound wisdom and pure common sense in this piece from Timothy Garton Ash in today's Guardian of London newspaper that, for just one moment, you may wonder if he's secretly American. This point is especially well taken:

Roughly one in three Ukrainian voters, mainly in the more Russian-oriented east of the country, chose Yanukovich. That's about 10% less than he probably got in the rigged presidential election of 2004 that sparked the orange revolution. The so-called orange vote was split between the now feuding leaders of the orange revolution, Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Timoshenko, but their combined vote exceeded that for Yanukovich. Voters, except in the pro-western western end of the country, punished Yushchenko for disappointed hopes, economic mess, continued widespread corruption, dealing badly with the Russian gas squeeze at the beginning of the year, and falling out with Yulia. Fair on some counts, less so on others. But the essential point remains: the people could choose in a free and fair election. They can bring an old rogue back, if they want; then they can chuck him out again. It's democracy, stupid.

Ash also touches on an issue that had likewise occurred to me in the days following Ukraine's vote, when a Ukrainian friend noted that some political parties were alleging fraud at the polls. This was her way of suggesting that Ukraine had relapsed into its customary, non-democratic ways. Let's leave aside the issue of whether it's possible to have 45 political parties on a ballot without any of them claiming improprieties after the vote -- and we'll even concede that various types of fraud may have occurred here or there throughout the country, though not on any scale that should compromise the result. The fact is, the vote itself was probably less susceptible to fraud and manipulation than the balloting in any typical American election. And I say that as a certified jingoist! Granted, we Americans are always to expect a certain amount of chicanery because of the premium on turnout -- that is, parties can't take it for granted -- as well as the wide variability in ballot types and voting procedures. That's not to excuse it, but only to suggest that Western countries might strive to achieve "Ukrainian standards" in something, for a change.

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echo of yesteryear

February 25, 2006 12:35 PM

On the 50-year anniversary of Khruschev's "secret speech," which began the de-Stalinization of Soviet Russia, Seamus Milne of London's Guardian newspaper revives the voice of the useful idiot.

But in any case, none of this explains why anyone might be nostalgic in former communist states, now enjoying the delights of capitalist restoration. The dominant account gives no sense of how communist regimes renewed themselves after 1956 or why western leaders feared they might overtake the capitalist world well into the 1960s.

True, you don't hear much these days about how we once hilariously believed the Soviet Union would pose an economic threat to the West. Ten minutes here in Kiev would have dispelled that nonsense. Some of us no longer fear the Cuban economic miracle, either.

For all its brutalities and failures, communism in the Soviet Union, eastern Europe and elsewhere delivered rapid industrialisation, mass education, job security and huge advances in social and gender equality. It encompassed genuine idealism and commitment, captured even by critical films and books of the post-Stalin era such as Wajda's Man of Marble and Rybakov's Children of the Arbat. Its existence helped to drive up welfare standards in the west, boosted the anticolonial movement and provided a powerful counterweight to western global domination....[snip]

So you're telling me I can learn to read, hold a job, experience "social and gender equality" and strike a blow against western hegemony -- and all I need to do is submit to the whims of the state, live in permanent terror of denunciation and maybe lose half my family in one misguided social experiment or another? Where do I sign up?

Part of the current enthusiasm in official western circles for dancing on the grave of communism is no doubt about relations with today's Russia and China. But it also reflects a determination to prove there is no alternative to the new global capitalist order - and that any attempt to find one is bound to lead to suffering and bloodshed....[snip]

Of course. That must be what They really want. As Stalin himself might say, that's why they must be killed.

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Dog Dane Afternoon

February 10, 2006 07:25 AM

Who knew there were Iranians in Kiev? I didn't, until I ran into my Danish friend Lars on the street this morning. Half tongue-in-cheek, I asked Lars, who handles security issues between Ukraine and the Scandinavian countries, whether the Danish embassy was still intact. Yes, he told me, but as a matter of fact the embassy saw its first cartoon protests just this morning. (They've had police protection out front since Monday.) He said the 30-odd protestors included representatives from a local Islamic Association and some Iranians who are students at some of the local universities. No major disruptions, but the Danes decided to close for the day, just in case.

I was curious to see what practicing Muslims looked like in Ukraine -- I had never seen one here, and let's just say that Ukraine is not the safest place on earth for non-whites, if there were to be any (non-whites) in this crowd. Since the embassy is only a couple of blocks from my flat, I quickly headed home, grabbed my notebook and camera, and headed for the site. Unfortunately, by the time I reached the embassy the crowd had already left, though I did spot one woman in hijab buying a coke at a nearby kiosk. But what struck me anyhow was one minor detail that remainded: the Danes had taken down their flag, as well as the EU flag that customarily flies beside it. I could not imagine that the United States -- or even France -- would respond similarly. What an awful capitulation in the face of such cretinous incitement. Even if you close for the day in the interests of staff safety (fair enough), you don't let them take down your flag. I headed back to my apartment, wondering what I might see at the Swedish embassy, which is across the street. Sure enough....

It's easy for me to judge, though. The Danes and the Swedes don't imagine themselves as provocatuers; they can't make sense of the strange hatred and violence directed at them; they aren't accustomed to the rent-a-mobs that are routinely sent to pester U.S. consulates for the pleasure of satellite viewers. Part of the privilege of being American is in feeling a perverse exhilaration, not fear, when I see the mob burning my flag in the streets of Tehran or Damascus. It is the exhilaration of knowing that my flag represents everything the busily benighted are fighting against: liberty, tolerance, robust dignity. Until they can get their grimy little hands on me, they're just going to have to settle for the flag. And they couldn't possibly face a tougher adversary. The flag will hate them back; it will never stand for cynical neutrality between opposites, like the Swiss flag. But what happens when you replace pride with modesty, and still they burn your flag? When do you stop surrendering if you can't possibly comprehend the source of the grievance? At some point, Denmark, you just have to let the flag fly.

UPDATE: Do not miss Michael Kinsley's ruminations on the cartoon riots in today's Washington Post.

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The battle is joined

February 6, 2006 07:39 AM

I'm so outraged by this, I might just go draw a picture of Mohammed. Don't push me!

P.S. In the Arab World, the blood libel against Jews is endlessly repeated in the mainstream press; translations of Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are bestsellers, and the latter even "inspired" (is that the right word?) a TV miniseries broadcast in Egypt and Syria; Imams compare Jews to monkeys and pigs and call for God to destroy them (the Jews, not the monkeys and pigs). And I'm supposed to be offended by a cartoon depicting a Jew with actual human emotions? Puhleez.

P.P.S. From a sociological perspective, it is interesting to see what comes out of the Islamic world when the mask slips. A Danish newspaper runs a bunch of cartoon depictions of Mohammed... must be time to attack the Jews! Someone more clever than myself is going to have to connect these dots.... Message to Europe: Stop drawing Mohammed or the Jew gets it! (...Did you hear me, Europe? Europe? Hello? Europe, are you still there?... )

P.P.P.S. This reminds me of an incident that occurred at Harvard a while back. A young woman from Virginia had hung the Confederate flag in her dormroom window. Responding to this offense, an African-American woman displayed a Nazi flag in her window. Which raised some interesting questions: 1) Where on earth did she find the Nazi flag? 2) Hitler was an especially effective... cracker? 3) How much does a Harvard eductation cost? 4) Isn't a protest supposed to suggest that its target is the idiot?

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