Politblogo

Liberal Party bloggers, gaze upon the zombie rictus grin of your party!

Once again, we are back on the My Blahg treadmill.  It's rare that I link to or even pay attention to the foul miasma that regularly belches forth from Warren Kinsella's virtual mouth, but his column today in the Notional Pest obnoxiously outdoes some of the worst that his slavish imitators have accomplished.  And it's even more rare that I link to the Pest, which, for my American readers, is the Canadian newspaperly equivalent of Faux News.

And we do not have to look far for signs of verbal putrefaction:

National Post - The NDP's blog blow-back [alliteration, how creative of the Pest headline writers!]:  One month ago, at an Ottawa gathering of the Canadian Council for Israel and Jewish Advocacy (CIJA), Ed Broadbent stood before the hundreds of Jews in attendance, and wept.

The former New Democratic Party leader was present to receive the first annual David Lewis Memorial Award on behalf of his deceased wife, Lucille. As current NDP leader Jack Layton stood by to give support, Broadbent cried, thanking CIJA for recognizing the work of Lucille on behalf of oppressed Soviet Jewry. He, and Lucille, received a long standing ovation.

It was an extraordinarily emotional moment, and one that signalled -- some hoped -- the beginnings of a rapprochement between Canada's political left and those who support Israel. In recent years, and as the National Post has reported many times, there has been an undeniable and yawning gap between Jews and the left. As prominent NDP supporter and lawyer Clay Ruby has observed, "Some critics of Israel conveniently focus on Israeli wrongdoings to mask their blatant anti-Semitism." Too often, these days, this sort of criticism has emanated from the left.

The emphasis is mine.  Take a look at the utterly dishonest slight of hand he demonstrates right there:  Lucille Broadbent worked laudably on behalf of oppressed Soviet Jewry.  She won a posthumous award for this.  To receive this award is presented without evidence is a sign that Ed Broadbent is reconciling with "supporters of Israel."    "The Left" is personified in the figures of Ed and Lucille. Since Ed and Lucille accepted an award for work on behalf of oppressed Jews, we are expected to indicate The Left is now "supporting Israel."

Of course, we can take this further, and in doing so, we see that this is merely a repetition of the Standard Calumny.  What is this "support Israel" thing, anyway?  Why, it presupposes, in the standard lawyerly have-you-stopped-kicking-cute-puppies way, that The Left, that great unified colossus, previously "opposed" Israel.  Of course, any rational person would recognize that one does not "oppose" or "support" a geographical demarkation, such as Israel---any more than one supports or opposes the North Pole.  Instead one supports or opposes a political position and/or state ideology.  So what could Mr. Kinsella mean by this obviously calculated presuppostion?

He means, of course, that The Left, this single nefarious body represented by Emperor Layton and symbolized in the Broadbent Caliphate, is a Nazi.  And in doing so, he delegitimizes any robust support of the Palestinians in their plight, a cause to which Lucille Broadbent's laudable work is more similar than to the cause of the Israeli state.

The rest of the article is a hatchet job on the Canadian left blogosphere, which Warren Kinsella has always hated, even as he promoted himself as an anti-racist activist and a punk rocker---hilarious given the fact that he helped Jean Chrétien, symbol of The Establishment, retain power by performing the hilarious but trivial task of squashing Stockwell Day like a bug in a wet suit.  What McLelland said was clearly offensive---abusing Holocaust imagery in the case of Jews---but Kinsella takes what is a heartfelt negative reaction to McLelland's words and mendaciously turns it proof that The Left is recovering from its previous evil ways and will henceforth cast the Palestinians under the bus.

Finally, he reveals the hatred that certain brands of political operatives have for self-publishing media like blogs.  First of all, he makes a snide reference to pseudonymous bloggers.  That's because Mr. Kinsella has a deep love of destroying people, and it annoys him when their identities aren't ready on hand to destroy.  And then he describes his desire for the blogosphere to be controlled by organizations (he is also clearly aware that most blogs aren't party-endorsed, but he loves to smear the NDP even more than he loves to smear the Reformatories):

The McClelland incident is a cautionary tale, for political parties and the media alike: Each of these cases testify to the need for increased reputational vigilance. As the popularity of blogs has exploded, many corporations and political parties have scrambled to ensure their presence in the blogosphere. But they have not been as watchful as they should be.

Finally, in case my American readers don't understand the ways in which him and his adoring groupies like Jason Cherniak (who repeats an old slander against Noam Chomsky) are a pustulent boil on the face of Canadian politics:

For example, John Edwards' presidential campaign recently endured a withering blow when two women who contributed to the Democrat's campaign blog -- Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan -- attacked Catholics, and referred to opponents as "Christofascists." Unfortunately, Edwards did not ask for Marcotte and McEwan's resignations, although both apologized.

So whenever I hear that well-intentioned people join the Liberal Party in the belief that they are assisting progressive politics in Canada, I mentally welcome them to a front row seat at Warren Kinsella's lower intestine.

Pork, peace, and their discontents

I love that "...and their discontents" trope.  I should use it more often.

Via the Adorable Girlfriend at the Republic of Dogs, we come across this bit of cobaggery*, Peace Through Pork.  It's a cafepress store selling T-shirts that purport to bring about peace by confronting superstition.   The T-shirts have the slogan presumably translated to Arabic and Hebrew, a clear reference to the Middle East conflict.  Obviously, they mean to imply that the Mideast conflict emerges from religious differences among the inhabitants of the area, and by confronting a major cultural and religious taboo, they can efface those difference.

This absurdity would make more sense if it weren't for the following.  If there is any local historical cause for the problems in the Middle East, it certainly wasn't the religious, but rather secular nationalists, some of whom were willing to eat pork.  And then the conflict was fed and nutured by nations with allegedly Christian histories, most of whom did and do engage in wide-spread pork consumption. 

I know that Peace Through Pork is a joke, but it's still only funny if you suffer from the lazier forms of liberalism.  Or are a pork eater of Jewish or whatever-ethnicity-is-usually-Muslim extraction, but that's another story.

Oh, and, confidential to AG: I forgive you!  Honest!  That last "another story" applies to you because of UC.

*"cobag" is short for colostomy bag and a rather evocative epithet invented and used by a small group of US humour blogs, including the Republic of Dogs, in order to reduce the frequency of more common racist and sexist epithets in humour, I think.  Way to spoil a joke, eh?  But my Canadian readers would be confused or, for that matter, most US bloggers.

Am I supposed to feel sorry for them?

I don't get it. In the general case, most of those people moved there willingly and became willingly complicit in what the Israeli media euphemistically calls "creating facts on the ground."  This is the most self-indulgent sob story I've seen in Ha'aretz on the subject in a long time, although admittedly I haven't been keeping up with it lately.

Iraq: contaminated by girl cooties

A brief note: Brad R. at Sadly, No! finds this fascinating quote from Michael Ledeen in an article in Vanity Fair about how the neocon hawks feel about the problems in the prosecution of the war in Iraq.

Ask yourself who the most powerful people in the White House are. They are women who are in love with the president: Laura [Bush], Condi, Harriet Miers, and Karen Hughes.

Ledeen is the neocon known for using cartoonish concepts like "Terror Masters" (right from bad superhero comic, no?) in book titles.  Apparently, he's quite prominent.  The other quotes in the S,N! post are pretty good too.

I do note that I occasionally find people blame the flaws of empires on the associated seraglios.  I think that I am right to be skeptical.  But Ledeen is just funny.

Yes, Virginia, even Nobel Prize winners can be wingnuts

Apparently Israeli-American Nobel Prize winner in economics Professor Robert Aumann believes that Israel is doomed.   In Ha'aretz a few days ago:

"Too many Jews don't understand why they are here," said Aumann, who moved from the United States to Israel in the 1950s and helped found the Center for Rationality at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, an interdisciplinary research body that focuses on game theory.

Israeli-American Nobel Prize winner in economics and founder of a "Center for Rationality" Professor Robert Aumann believes it is important to understand metaphysical questions such as "why [we] are here" in order to survive.

Lest you think that Israeli-American Nobel Prize winner in economics Professor Robert Aumann is engaging is referring to some form of strategic consideration,

"If we don't understand why we are here, and that we are not America or just a place in which to live, we will not survive," he said in a speech at the College of Judea and Samaria in Ariel on Sunday. "The desire to live like all the nations will sustain us maybe another 50 years, if we are still here."

And it appears that this consideration meshes with his expertise in game theory to interesting effect:

Aumann, who lost his son Shlomo in the first Lebanon war, accused Israelis of being overly sensitive to casualties of war.

"We are too sensitive to our losses, and also to the losses of the other side," he said. "In the Yom Kippur War, 3,000 soldiers were killed. It sounds terrible, but that's small change."

It does sound terrible, no?  So, is that why Israeli-American Nobel Prize winner in economics Professor Robert Aumann is there?

"Looking at the other side is an important element of game theory," he said. "The Arabs' understanding in the wake of the expulsion was that they had succeeded, and that they have to continue on the same path. The expulsion, therefore, brought about the launching of Qassams on Israel and the abduction of the soldiers. The expulsion transmitted the message that we can be moved even from Tel Aviv, and not just from Gush Katif."

This is the most important thing that the Nobel Prize winner in economics Professor Robert Aumann has contributed in this Ha'aretz article: a very important discovery in game theory about which he must inform the deluded experts in international politics, Israeli and otherwise.  What is this discovery?

That they should look at the other side.

No.  Kidding.

And looking at the other side, well, from the perspective of the great scientist, it yields exactly the image he wanted to see.  Give the man a Nobel Prize!

"Last summer we set back peace and understanding with our neighbors by at least 10 years," said Aumann. "After the expulsion, no words will convince them that we intend to stay here forever."

Peace and understanding meaning, of course, the plopping down of a mass of odious and ignorant suburbanites-from-hell in the middle of mass prison.  Who intend to stay there forever.

But that is game theory.  According to Professor Robert Aumann---who already holds a Nobel Prize.

(And for the record, I do, in fact, think that game theory is worth studying.)

A dragon's tooth

In Ha'aretz, a plea from Bradley Burston for prisoner exchange:

Free the monster Samir Kuntar - Haaretz - Israel News: Samir Kuntar is a monster. He may never have deserved a life.

It's time we let him out of prison.

Not for his sake. For ours.

...

We owe it to their families to get them back. We owe it to their brothers in arms, as well, to do everything it takes to get them back. Soldiers and their families have to know that their leaders will risk their very political careers, if need be, to pay the price to get them back.

The price will be awful. The price to families will be awful. In the case of Gilad Shalit, kidnapped on June 25, the price may be 1,000 or more Palestinian prisoners, some guilty of having tried to murder Israelis, some perhaps guilty of having succeeded. The families of Israeli victims of terrorism will fall victim to a new phase of torture.

I won't comment on Burston's particular attitude towards the conflict.  I'm willing to believe that Kuntar is guilty of all that the article accuses him of doing, and, if so, I'm willing to call him a monster as well, not that it does anything.

But an observation that is missing from this is how such situations so easily generate petty monsters.

I don't entirely believe Burston when he says,

In the West, allegiance to the concept of the nation is the bedrock on which society is built. But for Israelis, for Palestinians, and for Lebanese as well - even for the nouveau hippies among them , the family is the cornerstone of society. It is the strength and primary allegiance of all segments of the population, to an extent that cannot be comprehended in the West.

Anchor of the young and buoy of the old, the family is the primary forge of political orientation. The family itself is the court of public opinion.

in that I don't really believe that there are parts of the world in which family relationships aren't the primary relationships people have.  The politics of Western countries, examined sufficiently closely, suggest that the opposite is true.

In fact, it may even be precisely this reason why petty monsters are so easy to come by in conflicts like these.

Brief quasi-vacation; hello Pandagonians!

Hello, Pandagonians!  For those who don't know, this post has been added as a guest post on Pandagon right here.  So welcome to any new readers!

I have been on a reduced posting schedule due to travel and the preparations for it.  I'll try to get back in business when I get home again.

Boston Globe article on the cartoon riots

Via a commenter on Brad DeLong's blog, this excellent opinion piece in the Boston Globe re the Danish cartoon violence and its overall context:

Boston Globe - Misunderstanding Muslims: The economics of oil, including the creation of an oppressive local class of Western-sponsored oligarchs, locked the grievous insult in place. As if to be sure it was more sharply felt than ever, Europe imported ''guest workers" from the Islamic world, openly consigning them to an underclass that is as religiously defined as it is permanent.

And then the United States launched its wars. One of the major disconnects in the present conflict is the way in which European and American analysis obsesses with the apparently anarchic outbursts of violence in the ''Arab street" without taking in how brutally violent the post-9/11 ''coalition" assault has been, not only physically but psychologically.

Mobs throw stones through the windows of European consulate offices, and the legion of CNN watchers recoils with horror. Meanwhile, unmanned drones fly across stretches of desert to drop loads of fire on the heads of subsistence farmers in their villages; children die, but CNN is not there.

Billions of dollars are being poured each month into the project of imposing an American solution on an Arab problem, and increasingly the solution looks, from the other side, like annihilation. Muslims, that is, understand the new reality far better than non-Muslims do -- the state of open cultural warfare that ''the West" imagines is a narrowly targeted war against ''terrorism." Muslims, as Muslims, experience themselves as on the receiving end of a savage -- but, alas, not unprecedented -- assault.

Are they wrong? In the argument over ''Enlightenment" values, sparked by the cartoons, some champions of free expression have fallen into the deadly old mistake that led, in the 20th century, to a grotesque betrayal of those very values -- the over-under ranking of human beings, with the lives of some being counted as cheap.

Why are we killing them? As with multiple problems today, this one comes back to the misbegotten American war. It threatens to ignite the century, and must be stopped.

Like I've been saying---abstract worries over Free Speech are a luxury that is, in any case, a red herring. 

North, Women, South, Media

Twisty Faster writes:

I Blame the Patriarchy - European Honky Dudes Whacking Wives At Alarming Rate: I say this because our racist conceits are more thoroughgoing than we care to admit. As I have oft opined, Americans display a notably high tolerance for the suffering of others, especially when those others are brown. Like white dudes and their birthright of male privilege, Westerners are indoctrinated from birth with a sort of first-world entitlement. This allows us to keep “exotic” cultures at arm’s length, to luxuriate in a cavalier unfamiliarity with their strange, primitive ways, and ultimately, to think of them as ideas rather than people, as less real than we are, and therefore less important. My own unscientific, blog-centric survey, based on the much-lower-than-average number of comments generated by posts that focus on violent misogyny in “third-world” countries, is that even seasoned patriarchy-blamers are rather less outraged by ritual stonings in Pakistan or mass rapes in Rwanda than they are by Dove soap’s attempt to pass off skinny white models as fat girls.

A lot of very good comments ensue about how women are represented in developing countries and the relation to women's rights in the West and matters of imperialism, colonialism, and violence.  Most of the commenters understand why Western feminists commenting on developing countries can be a bit of a minefield.  I'd like to point one very important thing out, though, at least regarding the usual subject of Western handwringing.

Someone pointed out earlier that women's rights are a point of conflict between the West and the Muslim world.  I'd like to emphasize that this is very much a two-way street.  Hypocritical Western powers/media/etc use women's rights as a bludgeon against extraneous interests of the Muslim world.  This has caused a lot of the Muslim world to regard women's rights as an instrument of Western domination---a totally predictable effect.  A lot of progress that might have been made has been retarded by this perception. 

In the media, women's lives in the Muslim world are treated like some form of prurient horror show---in relation to the lives of Western women.  I mean, we see an unrelenting parade of misery.  All of my family comes from that part of the world, and, truth be told, there isn't much more misery there as far as I can tell as there is here.  Not THAT much more misery, that's for sure, and in some cases perhaps less (options for women vary a lot by class and geography).  And, unfortunately, even Western women who consider themselves feminists contribute to this, such as, for instance, people like Irshad Manji. 

What it does is provoke resentment about the West, even for women.   Women in my family can do nothing but shout at the TV in frustration when the plight of women in their countries is used essentially for propaganda.  I remember in a CBC TV report about Pakistan (perhaps more than one), some of the women were speaking Urdu, but the translation captions were deliberately skewed to make things sound much closer to Western stereotypes than what was actually said, and some important sentences were simply glossed over.  It's hard to see this as anything but propaganda, and a lot of the Muslim world resents the hypocrisy and associates feminism with it.  And, in any case, it necessarily obscures the search for solutions.

Of course, I am not denying that there aren't problems.  Big problems.  But I can presently count few successes brought about by foreigners, even women, in addressing these concerns.  The best successes are typically brought about by the women who live there, on the ground.  That doesn't mean necessarily that successes can't come from outside, or at least support and honest advice can't come from outside.  But we haven't really seen it that often.

Spitting in eyes

I was going to write my own post on the Danish matters, but a number of other bloggers have written posts that are better than mine, despite their relative distance (relative to me) from the focus of the conflict.  In particular, Steve Gilliard's view:

Refusing to meet with the Arab ambassadors was a serious mistake. The Syrians showed how seriously

I have been amazed at the way people, first, refuse to understand that depicting Muhammad in any form is a grave insult, second, this was done by a right wing newspaper to piss people off, and third, how shocked Europeans are at the way Muslims feel about a grave insult to their religion.

Now, the Europeans play the innocent party, and people suggest that Muslims should leave if they don't like being insulted in the West.

I am somewhat uncomfortable with the occasional bit of American triumphalism that creeps into the rest of his post, but by and large he is correct---perhaps even including European models of social integration of immigrants.  His coblogger Jen intercedes with some of the shallower criticisms of the riots, but he deals with them quite effectively.

Now, as a Muslim myself, I am perhaps somewhat closer to the focus of this conflict, as I said above. It's clear that the Danish paper was intending to slap people when they were down.  But a lot of Muslim negative reaction to Western media has a history with which Western commentators are often totally unwilling to deal: Israel.  Namely, saying certain things about Israel are rightly or wrongly considered taboo in the West, but saying analogous things about the reasons for opposing Israeli policy (and, frankly, the legitimacy of the Israeli state) are not.  Rightly or wrongly.  This is considered a cosmic double standard, because Israel is quite frankly the prism through which most of the Muslim world sees global politics.  To make use of the Prophet Muhammad himself in this double standard would widely be considered one too many injuries to bear.

(And, of course, some people are suggesting that certain interested second-and-a-half parties are actually instigating this.  We'll see if such suggestions pan out.)