-
-
- Two friends meet for 5 minutes in Jerusalem 10
- Video: Soldiers aim guns at fallen boy’s head outside West … 23
- Abulhawa declines to ‘balance out’ several Israelis in ‘Al Jazeera’ … 25
- Exile and the prophetic: The Jewish Identity Network 7
- Trauma begins at home 8
- CNN’s Tapper lends himself to claustrophobic discussion of unicorn– Israel’s … 10
- Church of Scotland’s revised ‘Promised Land’ report has softer edges … 23
- Guatemalan genocide got assist from US, Christian Right, and Israel 20
-
- Israeli airport sorts passengers with ‘Jewish stickers’ and ‘Arab stickers’ 782
- ‘Newseum’ folds under pressure, will not include Gaza cameramen in … 314
- Dershowitz calls Hawking an ‘ignoramus,’ a ‘lemming,’ and likely an … 205
- In photos: Gaza marches and rallies mark 65 years of … 149
- Glenn Greenwald brings facts and reason to ‘Real Time’, ruins … 145
- San Francisco bus ads condemn Israeli apartheid: backlash begins 120
- Washington Post’s racism map omits Israel 104
- Washington state bus-ad campaign dares to state: ‘Equal rights for … 100
-
- Dershowitz calls Hawking an ‘ignoramus,’ a ‘lemming,’ and likely an … 149
- International Criminal Court opens preliminary investigation into attack on Mavi … 89
- Glenn Greenwald brings facts and reason to ‘Real Time’, ruins … 88
- Washington Post’s racism map omits Israel 72
- Israeli airport sorts passengers with ‘Jewish stickers’ and ‘Arab stickers’ 69
- Barbara Boxer’s visa bill for Israel comes under concerted attack 68
- ‘Newseum’ folds under pressure, will not include Gaza cameramen in … 62
- Church of Scotland backs away from boycott call in the … 62
-
- RT @MhamdG: Two friends (@WalaaGh & @MahaIghbaria ) meet for 5 minutes in Jerusalem http://t.co/226bwrY48g via @Mondoweiss, 10 hours ago
- Story behind a photo - Two friends meet for 5 minutes in Jerusalem http://t.co/0UZkQMevP1, 10 hours ago
- Exile and the prophetic: The Jewish Identity Network http://t.co/UPuEQQgkjI, 15 hours ago
- Trauma begins at home http://t.co/on36d4DzxP, 15 hours ago
- CNN’s Tapper lends himself to claustrophobic discussion of unicorn– Israel’s survival as ‘a Jewish democracy’ http://t.co/GAK5ZiP9jt, 15 hours ago
-
Recent Comments
click link to see last 100 comments- International Criminal Court opens preliminary investigation into attack on Mavi Marmara (92)
- Hostage: First of all an advisory opinion removes nothing at all, and everything that you think to have built upon...
- Obsidian: @talknic ‘Theological ‘legal material’ is irrrelevant to International Law’ There are hundreds...
- Hostage: First. Your cites contradict each other. No they don’t, they reflect the fact that the various Arab...
- Two friends meet for 5 minutes in Jerusalem (10)
- DICKERSON3870: RE: “I can not fathom living like this. The lifestyle being imposed on Palestinians is a human...
- Guatemalan genocide got assist from US, Christian Right, and Israel (20)
- Talkback: “The Guatemalan regime had many supporters–the Reagan Administration, the Christian Right, and...
- Video: Soldiers aim guns at fallen boy’s head outside West Bank settlement (23)
- Abulhawa declines to ‘balance out’ several Israelis in ‘Al Jazeera’ forum on Nakba (25)
- Uncompromising hope inspired by Ghassan Kanafani (60)
- miriam6: ****************************** ***********************Mondo folks, this here is a small taste of what the...
- International Criminal Court opens preliminary investigation into attack on Mavi Marmara (92)
Our Writers
- Philip Weiss
- Adam Horowitz
- Allison Deger
- Annie Robbins
- Kate
- Today in Palestine
- Alex Kane
- Eleanor Kilroy
Blogroll
The War of Ideas in the Middle East
I tend towards the opinion that Obama's weakness is less a lack of understanding, and more his interpretation of pragmatism. Pragmatism means measuring actions in terms of their cash value, in terms of what their real world effect will be. When Obama says politicians won't move out of themselves, they need to be forced by the public ,then he's not only right. It should also be said out that politicians have good reasons to act like this. They're acting pragmatically.
But there is wiggle room. One person will be much more aggressive in making things happen, will be willing to take more risks and upset more people than the next person. And I feel Obama will not make things happen. He'll exhort other people to make things happen. I don't expect results from him.
Re:wooden benches
Just to spell out what everyone's thinking(but of course, shouldn't): I'd take a pot of paint , a brush, and pictures of a basic gothic font and start painting 'Nicht fur arabieren' on all of them.
Well there's this from jpost, so I think there are good reasons to apply the realist label.
link to jpost.com
I'm struggling to find where it's made clear that Hagel should be called a realist. His opposition to war with Iran doesn't say much. He does go a bit further saying that you shouldn't make threats that you're not willing to follow through on. How's his position on rapprochement with Iran?
It's also good to keep in mind there are large differences between progressives and realists. Kissinger is a realist. Stephen Walt and the Leveretts are. I appreciate the Leveretts a lot but their positions are often not as nice as people think. They wouldn't have overthrown Qaddhafi and they are in no hurry to overthrow Assad.
"Assuming you've all had it up to here with my scare stories, I will now proceed.."
..while the color markers of non-israeli children have already expired trying to fill this area.
Summarizing, our suggestion is to drop those oldfashioned laurel leaves and add this new top to the UN logo.
The traditional approach is to never fill it up to beyond the red line. Israeli inventiveness asks "why not flatten the bottom?"
Maybe I should put it this way: Ahmadinejad puts a lot of effort in raising goodwill from the arab world, and badmouthing Zionism is part of that. The purpose it not to incite people against Israel.
@quercus, I only read Ahmadinejad's speech just now and I think it's quite friendly. But when you say he always know precisely what to say to get Zionists shouting and screaming. I think that is often ment for Arab ears, not Zionist. (Different shapes I suppose.) I wouldn't draw parallels over all the line -for one thing he's not warmongering- but Ahmadinejad can be pretty populist.
I listened to an interview with Hooman Majd last week and he pointed out that the Palestine issue is not a big issue inside Iran and when Ahmadinejad talks about it it's normally for foreign consumption.
I don't take serious the idea that because Netanyahu uses bombastic scaremongering it proves that is how he thinks. It's more a shameless populist communication strategy that is not unlike Ahmadinejad's. If it works on the target audience, use it. With Ahmadinejad, the target audience is international and often Sunni.
Maybe Netanyahu found the imagery appealing because it reached two different audiences:
- there was bombastic scaremongering for a public that's receptive to this type of message, meaning it works
- and possibly to the west and very probably to himself there was a covert reference to the top of the bomb actually being Israel: the 'detonator' in Patrick Tyler's article in the LAtimes that was reviewed here today. This article focuses on the blackmailing aspect in relation to the west of the 'mad dog' policy, while usually it's interpreted in relation to the neighbors only.
Another nitpick would be
In the beginning, that's in 1978, Vlaams Blok indeed was the natural home for flemish nationalists who had collaborated with the Nazis. I don't know what the fraction was at the beginning, but by 2004, when the party was renamed, there sure were very few of them left.
eGuard, it's just a nitpick but Holland is indeed only the coast part of the Netherlands. And England is only part of the state called the United Kingdom.
Eli Valley just keeps hanging on, even if he is having to resort to rather desperate measures.
I recall his Israel Man and Diaspora Boy and the reaction to it Captain Israel.
This is definitely an assault on the very essence of Valley's profession. It is a determined effort to make parody impossible. Each time Valley tries to create a parody, his nemesis will ripost with something more outrageous, with the message "That's not parody, it's a weak imitation of reality! Get yourself a job kid".
Barry's not going to sleep tonight.
I think that the unfriendly expression (the wolf of Tambov is your comrade) originates from the large peasant uprising in Tambov against the Bolsheviks in 1920. The wolf could be the rebels, or one of the leaders named Antonov who in soviet history became the symbol of the uprising because they could compile a good shit sheet against him.
Russians obviously used this expression to assert their gullibility, which was a requirement for being a good citizen.
A while back Seymour Hersh gave an "off the wall" speech in Qatar that couldn't have done his reputation any good. There's a report on it here . Hersh talked about some funny goings on with the JSOC, how important people there were involved with the Knights of Malta and Opus Dei, and perceiving themselves as crusaders. Hersh's story sounds a bit less whacky now.
Juxtaposition just happens, but it's also tool to make a point, and often a tool to deceive. In this case, the 'writers being pressured' is juxtaposed with Coetzee not coming leading to a spontaneous suggestion that Coetzee was under pressure. I can't tell if that's deliberate. It could even be my dirty mind!
The mainstream press haven't been completely silent. I mentioned Amanpour on CNN here link to amanpour.blogs.cnn.com . I've seen a dutch program ( from the 'Tegenlicht' series) and there have been a few articles, notably in the NYTimes. This is not because the press was a driving force here, but because several players, including the intelligence people, were making enough noise about it, and then the press picked it up.
At the NYTimes they are fully aware that the story changed and they adapted, but not in a way that the reader catches on. At the daily I'm reading (De Morgen) they aren't even fully aware, even though they read the NYTimes, and I told them. Maybe my mail was lost. Happens.
Note the shift from "they're working on a bomb" to "they're working on nuclear capability so they become able to make a bomb" all maintaining the same threatening feeling.
The reader, who sometimes is editor for another paper, will hardly notice the shift on the information level, and even less on the perception level, the feeling of threat.
For comparison I imagine a feedback system where the paper takes responsibility for some of the news the reader receives through the paper, and it polls the reader about the understanding on some issues, and then the paper communicates clearly where it thinks the reader's understanding is lacking. Eg there was a CNN poll a few years back, I think Annie reported on it, indicating that 70% of americans thought Iran already had a bomb. It would have made a fine pairing if the poll had been followed up right away with the kind of documentary Amanpour made recently.
An odd example, considering the record of CNN.
Well that was fun. It should be possible to pull more of this stuff out of him before he catches on :)
It's a normal interview with the people you're normally supposed to be interviewing on the subject. Remarkable. She did a decent documentary on the Iran nuclear issue as well (link to amanpour.blogs.cnn.com). Which was nice.
I can't find it on Haaretz but google cache still has the editorial recounting how Amos Malka declared that in the first weeks , the IDF fired 1.3 million bullets in the West Bank and Gaza.
It would be more appropriate if the holes were the islands in the Archipelago, but the cartoon wouldn't work as well.
Flynt Leverett describes the efforts and successes of the Israel Lobby as "pushing on a door that is largely open", because he puts them against a background of a long tradition of hegemonic thinking in US foreign policy - and he constrasts it with the realist, or primacy strain of thinking. It's a valuable angle because on here the Chomsky hegemonic foreign policy hypothesis is often considered incompatible with pro-israel lobbying hypothesises. I think they are not all that incompatible and the discussion could be shifted a bit. For one, I disagree with the idea that "If it weren't for the Israel lobby US foreign policy would be a lot less counterproductive and self-damaging." (Quantify "a lot"...)
The neoconservatives have a very hegemonic style of thinking.
Stronger even, I have noticed that people think because they grew up in Israel that they understand the conflict better than those who didn't.
.. someone should make a list of such cases . US soldiers on why they wer in Iraq? More than 80% of US soldiers thought Saddam was involved in 9/11.
I think Seymour Hersh was taking the same position as Krugman a few years ago, as recounted here link to mondoweiss.net by Bruce Wolman. Someone should take Hersh up on that btw :) But of course he didn't actually commit to anything..
I think Krugman describes his compromises and his priorities honestly and accurately. I like the guy. Of course, he also explains why he has contributed so little to the I/P issue, and Philip's right to doubt whether Krugman has much to offer there anyway. He has other priorities, and tackling the I/P issue would have hurt these priorities. This is annoying but it's very reasonable.
Aha! I found an old article by Jonathan Cook that discusses Israeli treatment of Palestinian Christians. link to electronicintifada.net
If the story gets some traction at all it will be in the version of one of the interviewees(Ari Shavit from Haaretz): the collateral damage version. Christians became the unintended victim of the tension between Muslims and Jews. This is the preferable approach for the press because it's the safest. No agents, no intent, stuff happens. Look, we're impartial!
I actually think the Christians were maybe targeted more in the process of reducing/minimizing the palestinian (economical/political/social/real estate)footprint. They had a relatively large footprint with on average better education, more money, and they were better able to set up an organized opposition. But it was also easier for them to start a new life elsewhere.
There is an aspect of the wall that is rarely mentioned, namely that it mainly works through magic.
The terrorist attacks stopped as soon as the first segments of the wall were cast. Coincidence? I think not!
And it's highly selective: even today, as thousands of illegal laborers cross it every day, terrorists can't get through.
Only jewish magic can be that powerful.
BTW, the numbers always confused me. The number that keeps coming up is "40000 laborers cross the wall every day". I suspect there are 40000 laborers, but they don't cross the wall every day. They sleep over at work. And maybe they don't work every day either.
Clearly if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck,and looks like a duck, it must be an antisemite.
Finkelstein dishonest? That doesn't really fit. If I were to criticize Finkelstein I wouldn't use those words. I hope to look into this later but here's two modifiers to stretch his comment so it becomes more plausible.
- the lobby: W&M consider it a loose decentralized set of groups that don't always have the same agenda, although they all have Israel's interest in mind. So they can claim the lobby had a large impact on the Iraq war as well as claim AIPAC didn't do much about Iraq while the neocons did the bulk of the work there. If Finkelstein uses a tighter , more 'core' definition of the lobby, namely AIPAC, then they agree.
- influence. Saying the lobby shapes a policy is a lot stronger than saying it has a lot of influence, or saying it has influence. So let Finkelstein say the lobby doesn't shape the policy.
And because W&M came 5 years earlier. They helped prepare the ground. Taboos have been broken since - or at least weakened.
My point was that there is a change from suspecting(without proof) that Iran is secretly working on a bomb, to suspecting that Iran will in the future work on a bomb - while keeping the same feeling of threat.
This way the intelligence assessments of US and Israel, and now also Europe link to reuters.com are accepted and at the same time neutralized.
A few other reasons have been given why an attack on Iran could come before Obama's reelection
- because Obama can be bettrer controlled before reelection
- Iraq is currently without air defenses now the americans have left
- The retaliation might well be manageable. That's Barak's reasoning. He could well be right - from a military and short term standpoint. Iran's offensive power is limited, as is Hezbollah's , if they would be willing to participate at all.
- I would add that I doubt that Iran would react by making a bomb. But they would become more assertive.
Streetcred? The doctrine to maintain the freedom to strike anything anytime anywhere for no reason at all. What Zappa called AAAFNRAA. Recently Larry Derfner gave two instances of this doctrine here link to 972mag.com, see what he recalls of his interview with Yiftah Shapir about the attack on the syrian 'reactor' and on Irak's Osirak.
Bronner's article link to nytimes.com about the alliance between Netanyahu and Barak is rather interesting - for one it doesn't have thedismissive attitude towards Barak as someone who's just tagging along.
Bronner has adapted to the news about Iran's nuclear program.
It's easily skipped because it looks just like the standard phrase.
But, no mention about a secret nuclear program or any weaponization related work.
There is just a civilian program but that civilian program can't be allowed
because the west believes the "goal" is to make weapons.
(Annie ) I post here the question that he was asked
I was thinking of it as "preaching from the pilpulpit" but then considered that would be slightly odd :)
(Roha)
Ok, I'll have 'Yes', 'No' and 'It depends'.
Sounds like textbook conspiracy thinking to me.
Oh I have missed that news. That's the maraschino cherry to top it off. I fully agree with your assessment, that means the people at the outpost get the time to establish facts on the ground, and the outpost will not relocate at all.
Who me? That's what the article said. Legal. And "De Morgen" is an independent newspaper, it says so on the front.
This is a week late but I'd still like to share it. It was announced on the site of my newspaper "de Morgen" that the largest illegal settlement was being dismantled. Upon further reading it turned out it was the largest illegal settlement in the Jordan corridor. Then it turned out this largest illegal settlement is Migron. And the people who lived there were moving 2km to a another settlement that was legal. This is art.
I think Phil's summary is excellent as it is. They come up short in the end. I still have to see whether Jon Stewart's ideas on the subject are worth anything.
I'm grateful. It's a matter of quota you see, since renewal of my membership of the Pedants' Society is up. As for "lede", that spelling goes back to middle english, old english, and uh, beyond that I think.
Ah, dogbreath issues.
(Phil):huh. not where i come from
Burying the NYTimes blog here are we :)
Dickerson/Merriam-Webster :First Known Use: 1976
That'll be the first known use of "bury the lede", not "lede". "Lede" itself is a few hundred years older.
A key problem there is what does one understand by nuclear weapons programme. There is little reason to doubt that Iran wants to be capable of making nuclear weapons as part of their deterrence strategy, and Mohammad Javad Larijani said on Charlie Rose that having civilian nuclear energy qualifies as nuclear capability. But how does he know that? You need research to confirm that you are really capable of making a bomb, that your deterrence strategy is credible. You want to know how much time it would take you to build a bomb and you need to decide how far short of a bomb you are going to stop. And then it helps a lot to start comparing with other countries so that you can say "wait a minute, if you call that a nuclear weapons program then a lot of countries have one of those".
Agreed. I'd like to use a variant of the 'not trying' bit though, that distinguishes between short term and long term. Short term not-trying can often be reversed. Long term not-trying leads to a context where it's not enough to suddenly start trying again. There's a body of understanding that has its own internal consistency that is hard to dislodge. It's similar to talking about causes. You can identify a cause of a war but removing the cause will not cause the war to stop. A lot of extra measures are needed for that.
Another thing that captured my interest is this:
If you switch away from the "evil adversary" perception from a moment, you can see the link with what some turkish official who was involved in negotiations with the Iranians said. He compared talking to the Iranians with talking to US. Power is distributed, and you're never sure you've found the best person to talk to, so you have to talk to very many people. That makes it very different from an autocratic system.
Risen previously wrote this
, which is a significant step forwards. So this is a bit of backpedaling, which is to be expected. The Washington Post did the same thing .
When a newspaper for years publishes a constant stream of alarming reports about Iran, then this forms the background of their thinking and it can not be reversed in one step.
So the first reaction is "yes but what about all the other stuff then?". It's perfectly normal from a newspaper position that the intelligence report must be outdated or something, or must too conservative. I think the intelligence estimate does take in account all the other stuff, including everything the IAEA is doing. Of course there will be pressure to minimize the impact of Risens previous article, but even without the pressure such an article can be expected.
I also have serious doubts about whether the iranian activities pre 2003 amount to something that can be called "a nuclear weapons program" without seriously overstating things(apart from the problem with fabricated evidence).
But that's a bigger challenge for a newspaper.
Well maybe he was pissed because he keeps making the wrong choices that are bringing us all closer and closer to war.
Belgium is a bad example. Its use as an example is mostly inspired by a very difficult formation of government. But the country has a successful history of 180 years . So is that proof that binational states work or that they don't work?
Obviously, since someone is either a jew or an antisemite. Still one has to point out that the majority of antisemites are latent antisemites, and these people really say or do nothing wrong. For all purposes these people are perfectly alright. Still , you have to watch out with them.
Then there are sublimated antisemites, they have turned their antisemitism into a positive force, such as support for human rights all over the world. This sublimation doesn't always work well, because sometimes these people will still turn against Jews - only they'll deny their antisemitism.
Maybe you won't entirely agree with my classification - prove me wrong though.
But you mention Mearsheimer and Walt, and the explanation may be that Lobe uses a similar approach. They define the Israel Lobby as a rather loose association of groups and they emphasize that they don't always agree amongst themselves. One can consider this as "avoiding the trap of thinking they're all the same". For one thing they consider the Iraq war a neocon design and not an AIPAC/Israeli design, which is what Lobe does as well.
Probably neither of them would use the metaphor "an arm of the lobby" because it suggests an internal structure they believe is not there.
It's all very nice to demand from politicians they take a principled stance, but if I were to advise an american politician I'd make very clear that if they want to get anything done, even completely unrelated to Israel, it will be very much harder if they deviate from the standard pro-israel positions. From a pragmatic point of view it makes sense to pick your fights wisely, and not take a principled position that is a losing game anyway. Warren has valuable things to offer for regulation of the financial sector. Do you want her to compromise that?
Now there is still a big difference between internalizing this pro-israel stance and being aware and prepared for making a switch when the opportunity arises(what we call 'opportunistic'). The first opposes change, the second requires a kind of threshold beyond which things start moving. I suppose she's in the first category.
I have the impression Kelley was a bit easy on the report, considering the other valid criticisms about the report being politicized(going beyond the authority of the IAEA) and about their rehashing, even if they do so by a thorough fleshing out, of previously discarded claims.
But concerning the press, there were spinned leaks before the report came out and this has an effect of (deliberate or not) setting up the perceptions. These perceptions then tend to stick around till they're dislodged by a blatant mismatch, both at the level of the editors and at the level of the reader at the end. With a press that already mostly copies summaries rather than going through the report themselves, the effect can be remarkable.
I don't have additional facts, Benny Morris refers to the information that Kidron provided. It's just that the interpretation Kidron gives makes more sense. I should say, the emphasis, because there is no big difference. 'time to reconsider' is a weak interpretation. The arguments are valid, but they ignore the things had changed between the order and its cancellation: the city had fallen and both the officer in command and his successor required a written order. Kidron's emphasis is on the latter(see here link to cosmos.ucc.ie for lack of the actual article), saying that Ben Gurion was very careful not to put down criminal orders in writing. Remember that in the case of Lydda and Ramla the order was not even verbal, it was a hand movement. I don't think that should be interpreted as a sign of callousness. Rather, cautiousness.
I would like to see old Stasi experts to make a comparative analysis of the police state practices in the DDR and Israel, the way South Africans have done with Apartheid. It's hard to make a well grounded statement, but I think the case with the Palestinians is much worse. In the DDR there are estimates that 1/7 of the population were informants. Recruiting informants is easy if you need a permit for everything, but collaborating is more than playing informant of course. Working on the wall is also collaborating. I recall that during the intifada there was about one recorded case per day in Gaza of a child being 'recruited' as informant by the Shin Bet.