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The War of Ideas in the Middle East
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.
I thought that too until I encountered Peretz Kidron's testimony as the biographer of Ben Dunkelman, the officer in command of capturing Nazareth. Dunkelman simply refused to cleanse the city without written orders and arranged for his replacement to do the same.
It's real. They figure the parents would hide stuff on the kid or the kid's toys. And it's disgusting. When they did that with my son, who's a bit older, another guard was watching me in case I intended to screw the other guy's head off. Dimadok found his calling. You can do that job in every country and it feels just like Israel.
Very clever, Beinart, adding a cape:
what a nice instance of heavily overrating intellectuals.
then you should read Tintin in Africa, especially the old version. Herge was ashamed of it later on. He learned though. The Blue Lotus is from 1936 and very different.
there was also Tintin, but I never took to the little Belgian That's funny, neither did I. And I 've read a lot of comics. (Tuyzentfloot is named after a comic book character)
Did you know that Charles de Gaulle was a direct descendent of Asterix the Gaul?
I had in mind something very wicked, namely providing a constant feed of taunting comments and then monitoring the level of irritation of family and neighbors of username as the acquired hummus stock grows completely out of control. Oh and I would prefer to do this in summer.
[EDIT]Ha! Smoked him right out I did!
That's an interesting rule. What size container and what does it cost? We'll need proof btw.
Concealed? No there you're confusing with the smurfs.
It's true alright, if you don't look closely. The iranians are enriching uranium to 20%. The part that is missing is, they're only enriching the amounts they need for medical purposes, so they're not upgrading their stock from 5% to 20%.
Turkey and Brazil had helped broker an agreement to provide Iran with the needed 20% uranium without them performing this level of enrichment, but the US pulled out of that.
Ever notice how "Iran hasn't decided yet?" (..to build a bomb) sounds a lot more threatening than "Iran is not considering it". As if they're constantly on the brink of starting construction.
Teta Mother Me, the grand owner of the appeaser label was Chamberlain, for being a peacenik who let himself be fooled by the Nazis - at least that's the story - and this has been used as a warning on how to handle warmongers ever since. My point is, the main users of this argument have again been the warmongers. No, Hitler didn't actually accuse the opposition of being Chamberlains when he wanted to invade Poland. That would have been a bit surreal. But I hoped it would get the point across that with the Chamberlain story warmongers cashed in twice.
Concerning appeasement, you always know who'll be the first to use such accusations to their advantage. Not everyone knows that the first time people were accused of being Chamberlains was when Hitler silenced the skeptics about going to war against the Polish threat. Now that I think of it, probably nobody knows that.
In one of plato's books the greek philosopher Protagoras thought that 'good' or 'bad' is not something inherent but something that depends on context, an idea that was a bit lost on Plato.
Protagoras pointed out that manure was good for the roots but bad for shoots or leaves.
It would be unhealthy to use 'Israel firster' for any ordinary citizen.
For opinionmakers it becomes a matter of giving full disclosure. For people in key political positions it would sometimes be a reason for not allowing people in those positions.
A bit of honesty maybe, but I agree. The threat to Israel is not that brains and money are chased away by a nuclear theat. It's that the country goes from a strong threatened oasis to something irrelevant: no longer regionally relevant, no longer attractive to business and no longer attractive to live in. Not threatened either, but who cares. A nuclear iran wouldn't directly chase away people, but an assertive Iran would come at the cost of Israel influence and regional dominance is a big selling point for western support.
Imagine a vicious circle where less people think it's necessary to support Israel, less businesses are likely to invest there, and less brains and money inclined to stay there.
I partly agree. There is both deception at work but also people are suffering from a limited range of boxes to put Iran in . Either Iran has a weapons program or it hasn't.
One thing to keep in mind with descriptions as "is working on a bomb" or "has a nuclear weapons program" is that is that we learn that definitions are like boxes while we only use them as funnels where input as the response to the question "is this in some way true, even if a bit stretched?" while on the output we work with the cliche interpretation.
Example: If I tell you there are birds in your exquisite garden and I inquire if that doesn't don't bother you, your dismissive reply will be that it doesn't bother you, only to complain later on that I should have mentioned they were ostriches. Because you assumed I was talking about relatively small flying birds, which are the prototype of the bird category. That's normal thinking.
In that way, saying that Iran has a nuclear weapons program is not completely wrong, but it is very misleading. Many countries have nuclear capability, but a country like Belgium is different from Iran. Belgium can say "It's common knowledge that highly developed countries are nuclear capable. We have never investigated how long it would take us to make a bomb, but I'm sure we can do so fairly quickly". A country like Iran is different. They do want nuclear capability as a deterrence, even if the civilian program would proceed without it. They need to investigate what it takes to be nuclear capable and I think they did that before 2002, when they still perceived Iraq as a potential nuclear threat(ironically, I think mainly because of trumped up charges from the US, a problem we also have now with Iran's neighbors).
So as long as your only two boxes(funnels) are "has" or "doesn't have" a weapons program, Iran will end up in the first funnel. And then what they did in 2002 was 'put it on hold'.
Some will use the large funnels as means of deception, others just because it's all they have. We need smaller and different boxes than "has a nuclear weapons program". for instance:
- passive nuclear capability: sufficient dual use technologies are in place and functional to make creation of nuclear weapons possible
- verified nuclear capability : feasibility studies have been done, roadmaps exist, but no construction.
- nuclear threshold capability : everything is set up to create a bomb in minimal time.
- maintain the option: creating a bomb may be delayed infinitely but not denied.
It is valuable to distinguish threshold capability from the other two(and I've seen very knowledgeable people who don't), the option and verified capability, and this can be part of negotiations. As part of an agreement Iran can withhold from taking agreed upon steps that would bring them closer to the threshold. I suspect they can go along with that. It does make a difference because it increases the reaction time in the scenario that Iran would decide to withdraw from the NPT. So it does calm things down. Japan has an explicit threshold capability, and they work on being as close to the brink as possible - the build time has been brought down from 3 to 2 months.
I think the disagreement they have with Parsi is about the goal, not chiefly about the means. The Leveretts have in mind a negotiated solution that both the US and Iran can live with. Parsi doesn't. Therefore sanctions are necessary in order to ram an agreement down Iran's throat that normally Iran would not accept, one that includes regime change.
The Leveretts are very critical of Trita Parsi's book, even if he's advocating diplomacy. They're calling it neoconservatism without guns. They're saying he's pushing an agenda and that the agenda is wrong. They're not saying he messed up or that he compromized too much (faking agreement with an audience) in order to reach an audience, a common pattern that is a bit less honest than picking your fights carefully. Here is their introduction, their full review is linked to at the bottom of the article: link to raceforiran.com
.
Anyone may be excused for not recognizing an elephant when it's so big it's pressing up against their noses :)
Annie, I gave a link to a reaction by Paul Krugman where he claims it's politically and economically implausible that the choice of oil currency motivated the invation. I indeed didn't make the distinction between the Iraqis or the US putting oil on the market. But I don't know if it makes much difference. Note that I'm not claiming there's no advantage for the US if dollars are used. Just that it's not a major factor. Actually I'm not claiming much, I just trust Krugman on this.
I find it hard to imagine the americans doing otherwise than using dollars when they put oil on the market. I also find it hard to imagine the americans would delay putting oil back on the market.
Annie, when the americans put the iraqi oil back on the market they wanted to do it in dollars. That's indeed not a coincidence. That doesn't make it significant.
(Katleen)A fair amount written about Saddam threatening to trade in another currency
I also recall very well reading about the theory about a switch in oil currencies being a major motivation for the Iraq war - and I recall that Krugman dismissed that as well, not making sense.
link to pkarchive.org
. My intuition prefers Krugman.
We regret to inform mr Weiss that his application for the pedant's society has been rejected. The main reason is that the applicant was having too much fun writing it. Mr Seauton's application has been referred for further consideration. As is customary, we've included a hidden invitation for new applicants in this message.
SeafoidHe’s an outlier on the Zionist spectrum. But he still believes that Zionism can be redeemed.
Halper doesn't deserve the negative connotations of zionism. If you start with the word zionist carrying the whole negative load that we've come to associate with it,
then I disagree with interpreting it so broadly that Halper is a zionist.
It leads everyone to the wrong conclusions.
If you emphasize a definition of zionism the way Jerry Haber for example chooses to define it,
see here link to jeremiahhaber.com
,
then you might call Halper a zionist but then the negative load doesn't apply.
Seafoid, if would be a much better fit if you would have attributed your point of view "The root of the problem is Zionism and 1948 " to Halper. He doesn't fit your idea of zionism.
Halper suggests to move towards a regional confederation. Do you dislike the idea in itself or because it will be derailed by Israel so that it will end up a regional confederation that absorbs the palestinians while leaving Israel as the isolated jewish state?
Thanks, Shmuel. And also this one link to israelpalestineforum.com
I'll see if I can find something that demonstrates the difference between Halper and Avnery - but not now.
I think he’s another one of these committed Israelis who is working for an Israel that is no longer salvageable. What kind of Israel is that? I quite like how Halper thinks in general and I suspect you're putting him in the wrong box.
[edit] I now see your followup post. I think you've got Halper all wrong.
Halper also wrote about this on +972 ( link to 972mag.com
) and there he described the recent demolitions as price tag attacks by the IDF. I interpret the choice of words as a challenge to a dominant perception of everything critical about Israel: the bad apple, or good cop/bad cop. The bad apple can be hilltop youth, or it can be the settlers. The IDF in those cases are still the good guys. The current rightwing government can be the bad apple. The far right can be, or the haredi fundamentalists who demonstrate in camp uniforms or who spit at a child on the street. My newspaper published an op-ed that defended the Haredim against the bad apples who abused nazi comparisons.
I wouldn't say the perceptions are wrong, but they're very limiting and safe.
All good blogs have a focus and without focus they disintegrate into nattering tedium. I applaud the new rules, they’ll make this site even stronger. I think the way the new rules are presented is as a form of censorship, while the problems they are trying to tackle can be mostly handled by policies that avoid discussions to veer off topic, that is, by keeping focus. So the rules are best reworked, if they're needed at all. Really a Holocaust denial comment on this forum is as good as threadjacking.
So, “just under half of Israel’s Jewish citizens are willing to abandon the narrative that “the Palestinians fled.” Well, it’s progress I guess, but that leaves approximately 51% who still are Nakba deniers. Beg your pardon, but there's a whole spectrum and all the way to one side is "they were called away". How many will accept the wording "ethnic cleansing"? A tiny minority.
3. Testing...
MRW and Danaa are sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G!
While I prefer Holocaust denial comments to go the way of crappy theories rather than banning them, I can see it would be a costly, painly and possibly counterproductive policy. In other words, it would be threadjacking. Hint!
Banning Nakba denial seems to be motivated by the desire to be evenhanded. It would be banning a majority viewpoint. Well, probably not in the middle east. But I think it would be a weird policy.
You can more or less ban 9/11 conspiracy theories by applying rules about threadjacking, or off-topic posts that divert the discussion from the main topic. You can even list the 9/11 subjects as an example of threadjacking.
Strictness about off topic posts is a neutral but powerful moderator policy.
And this is say nothing at all of the upcoming Israeli/Iranian proxy war to be fought at this year's Oscars! Well maybe you should :) I'm not convinced abut 'proxy war' they're talking about. So there's an israeli movie. The iranian movie can be regarded as anti-iran(censors, woman wants to leave the country), and there is a holocaust movie. So it's either 3-0 or 2-1 depending.
The exclusion of Israeli Arabs from political coalitions(and any other functions that matter) resembles something that has existed in Belgium between 1989 and 2004. It was an agreement called the "cordon sanitaire"(a french word for a security perimeter to contain an outbreak of a contagious disease ) and the parties agreed not to include the far right party "Vlaams Blok" in coalitions. Because of a political void on the right this far right party got a lot of votes. The agreement now no longer exists and the party has been renamed since to Vlaams Belang and its program was watered down a bit. Other parties - mainly the nationalist NVA have also filled the gap on the right and the importance of Vlaams Belang has dwindled.
Gabriel Ash actually, here link to jewssansfrontieres.blogspot.com
(edit: I now notice you also included the link Leander, but it doesn't work)
Pluto Books, that's the same publisher as Jonathan Cook's "Blood and Religion", about the same theme(and recommended). I recall reading something about it being very hard to find publishers willing to take this on.
Actually this is an outright dishonest statement and nothing more than a debating trick in order to score points. Whether the JNF has 93% direct ownership or only 13% has little impact on the overall picture. I'm not going to spell out the details. It wouldn't even be necessary that it controls the 93% - which it does. The main point is that 93 is carefully monitored to remain under full jewish control, and everything is done to make it grow.
It's worth looking closer at those numbers. Here link to jkcook.net
Jonathan Cook points out that the 3% in palestinian hands are severely constrained in other ways. To put it plainly, it's yours but we don't allow you do do anything with it.
Hey if I dennisrossify the title it becomes Beyond the Pail. Chew on that! Buying the Pail? No, that would be overstretching.
(hostage)I don’t think Donald or Phil are doing anything other than suggesting that we attempt to be more civil.
I disagree. The emphasis is on jewish sensitivities, which for a part have been adopted by many europeans and americans. It's not a symmetrical situation and there's room for improvement. I'm not going to complain about the glass not being full though. A lot has been achieved on here.
I'm not quite up to date with Witty's posts but from past experience culling his posts can be counterintuitive at times. For example I'm generally annoyed when he thanks people. Go figure. Btw, thanks for not inciting to violence against Witty.
I agree with the title but apart from the last one the suggestions don't fit the title.
The suggestions fit better with not offending the sensitivities(justified to a varying degree) of a jewish target audience that is still lurking out there.
And I think that is an audience Phil very much wants to reach.
The title applies to many comments on this site, the suggestions cover only few of them.
I imagine there would be a use for a neutral sounding(not confrontational) acronym that would mean something along the lines of "There are a lot of redundant statements right now about how bad the bad guys are. There's a lot of testosterone and competition in strong statements. They're not necessarily wrong but they fit better with patterns such as group behaviour, ganging up, and flaunting credentials. Please consider toning them down."
Give me a first, TDAZT(tone down the antizionist testosterone).
Here's another one. Ardent antizionist on mondoweiss slowly sees the light and is slowly converted to liberal zionism, providing a guiding example for the others. Not cheap, but highly effective. Contact me through Adam/Phil.
(Avi)The Leveretts’ writing reads like Everyone sucks rhetoric. It seeks to whitewash Israel’s culpability by muddying the waters and surfacing feeble arguments.
In addition, their writing cherry picks information to fit their agenda.
I could agree that their writing cherrypicks information to fit their agenda. Their agenda is that of a policymaker and it's at the bottom, it's pushing a favorite theme, and the example that keeps returning is that of Nixon taking a fairly radical step of calling off the dogs before starting negotiations with China to signal that he was serious about negotiating. The concept is effectiveness, which is best contrasted with efficiency. With efficiency you're afraid to invest more than necessary in order to achieve an effect, so you'll invest just enough. With effectiveness you'll throw in a good margin and take the risk to bevery wasteful in order to make sure the effect is achieved. That is what they advocate with Iran.
Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett say it's likely that the killing of the Iranian scientist was carried out by an Iranian extremist group, Jundallah, with the support of the U.S. government.
I would put it differently. I think they're saying that the story about Israeli false flag operations masks a very real past involvement of the US with Jundallah. So they're just pointing out a good cop/bad cop pattern. They're only warning about possible false conclusions. It's well possible that the US is not involved in the last attack.
I would turn the story around and make the memos self-incriminating. It was easy for Israel to pose as US agents with Jundallah because Jundallah was familiar with such US contacts.
Sadly, Iran itself has decided to blame the CIA for the killingsAnother tack: remarkably, Iran chose to react not with retaliation but using diplomatic channels.
Dum vitae est spes est - I didn't see that coming. I'm not telling what to do, just telling what happens. It is sensible to adapt to your environment, part of the adaptation is explicitly taking in account the rules of the game, while part of the system is internalized. There's always a degree of freedom but at least one needs to be aware of the problem in order to use it. Someone who doesn't take in account the rules of the game at all, drops out of the system.
Here's Seymour Hersh, he's a friend of Chomsky I believe
link to youtube.com
from 21:30 min to 22:40min he talks about how to fix journalism.
- get rid of the top 70% of the editors
- points out the overall timidity and risk aversion
- he also says journalism is not a special case and it's common in any organisations that you want to promote people that aren't going to make you uncomfortable.
(Donald)That’s pretty much what his model amounts to. To a large extent yes. At least it's a good entry point. Now Chomsky has been fighting for years to correct the misunderstandings. The examples where orders are given should come at the end of the story to avoid putting people on the wrong foot.
I think that Chomsky's propaganda model would have been received differently if he'd presented it as an instance of the domestication that happens in any job environment. People adapt and take on sensible behaviour in their environment. For journalists we have this additional(..) demand to disregard the environment and act in a strictly principled manner instead. Now the model is too much treated as some conspiracy theory. Those who buy into it also tend to underestimate the amount of conformism, selection and adaptation that happens in say, a corporate environment.
Osama Bin Laden was an indignado sent by Iran to occupy the World Trade Center but his Farsi wasn't too good.
Geller can wilt spoons by talking to them. Randi denies.
(@Citizen) Those could be pro-palestinian effects yes. All assuming someone with such policies could get elected and a president with such policies would be able to implement them.
Maybe Paul is only giving away part of his position. From a Libertarian point of view Israel is free to make its own decisions. One can emphasize that. The other shoe would be that Israel has to fend for itself and not expect the US to cover for it or support it in any way. The US will also put its own interests first. The effect could be pro-palestinian but the motivation is not.
guiding legal principles laid down at Nuremberg in 1945 Oh but there are indications the guiding legal principles were immediately implemented in the war of 1948. The principles were "don't put anything in writing that might be used against you later on." Here's Peretz Kidron on the matter link to groups.yahoo.com
I know, the site doesn't need extra sarcasm.
The top image at the arabist link to
shows a scene in Cairo and it is from a rather anglophile belgian comic from around 1950. The atmosphere in Egypt is quite colonial. The protagonist is also accompanied by a trusty indian servant.
The book probably was my first encounter with Egypt as a kid.
This one: link to amazon.com
I am only talking about what Panetta was saying really. Normally the west obfuscates the difference between nuclear weapons capability and building nuclear weapons when they talk about Iran. 'cues' is about cues to what Panetta is trying to say. If he is saying the US is fine with Iran having nuclear weapons capability that is potentially an explosive position. I prefer not getting into the whole nuke subject.
It is confusing because there are several cues pointing in the opposite direction.
- while the US officially is worried about Iran working on nukes, it wants to keep Iran weak and not nuclear capable, which is in line with Israel's position
- The Panetta quote has "And that’s what concerns us" putting emphasis on the nuclear capability.
- The article claims the Israelis are not upset by Panetta's statement
“Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No. But we know that they’re trying to develop a nuclear capability. And that’s what concerns us. And our red line to Iran is: do not develop a nuclear weapon. That’s a red line for us.”
This is a very confusing line. Is Panetta fine with developing nuclear capability but not with developing nuclear weapons? That would be an explosive statement and it should not go down well at all with the Israelis. Iran on the other hand would sign for that because nuclear capability is good enough a deterrence for them.
Hello again folks.
You can't stop at four. It'll be that 42nd attempt that does it. The one you wished you had thrown away because it was mediocre.
Alliterations are a promising theme but I doubt if 'otiose' has got what it takes to conquer the world.
I wonder if one reason the military are so passive is, that their position is not threatened.
Tweets and blogs: This reminds me a bit of the lesson the CIA had trouble learning: they relied a lot on hightech at the expense of people of the ground, leading to a very inaccurate view of the situation because missed a lot of what was going on .
From here it seems like the internet makes a big difference but maybe that's mainly for communication to the outside.
I have a 64bit win7. Updating to the latest quicktime fixed the problem for me.
I recall reading that during Cast Lead they couldn't even demonstrate against that in the westbank.
This article smacks too much of 'confirmation science' overshoot: mainstream ignores theory X > end up by overusing theory X because you're collecting everything that fits in. Israel matters in US policy towards the Egyptian events, but would the policy be that much different without Israel? There is a pragmatic preference for dictatorships: they provide stability and reliability. I would even claim that reasoning is valid for Gaza as well.
And if anyone is thinking of calling up Occam, tell him he needs a shave.
Dov Weissglass' quote about putting Gaza on a diet dates from 3 weeks after Hamas won the elections, which is begin 2006. Implementation was through gradual incrementation as pretexts arose.
Grand apartheid not ethnic cleansing. I think that's already a better description.
I also think
- the proposal about shifting borders would somehow be followed by a proposal to shift the complete Little Triangle.
- the idea of transferring the nationality of Israeli Arabs deep inside Israel is different, and it would pop up at some point, eg in the form of 'your children will not have Israeli citizen status but permanent resident status', to be downgraded further as time passes, with the intent to achieve a large scale gradual fadeout of the Israeli arab population. Or a fast transition "now that there's a palestinian state all Israeli Arabs shall be Palestinians. But because we're nice people you get residence permits - for now."
Now you are suggesting that they should join the fun Who, me?
Annie, I'm talking about the content of Livni's proposal about the four or so villages. I'd also point out that the number of people involved is not large. So go on thinking I'm in denial. Then consider that the PA would have accepted it. That would lead to this:
"Fine, now that we're agreed on the principle, let's talk about Umm Al Fahm".
Sorry, I misunderstood the word 'functionally'.
Well, in the case of moving borders it's still possible you can keep living in your own house, in the other not. It would put people on the wrong foot if you call both ethnic cleansing after which some smooth hasbarista (a barista is an expert in presenting things nicely geddit?) explains it away as nothing more than a simple change of passport.
I can see that. It's not a question about moral difference.
I'm trying make sure I don't mix up the ethnic cleansing bit , moving people out, and the nationality change, moving the border but keeping the people in the same place. There is Barta ash Sharqiya/Baqa al-Sharqiyeh which is near the wall, so in principle they could move the wall. I don't know yet.
I was thinking more of this link to emilypothast.files.wordpress.com
:) with clipons and pockets for your bible tools. An Apple-style belt should be nice.
The Netherlands have their own little bible belt (link to en.wikipedia.org
, as any selfrespecting western country should I suppose. I wonder if there's money in making bible belts.
Amanuensis... That's your fault Phil. Kathleen Christison has used that word too lately.
Trimble is one of the founders of the "Friends of Israel Initiative".
I would advise her not to ask the public for advice but make a decision and then announce it.
Undoubtedly. This is a case of totally out of control communication where she ends up upsetting everyone. First Macy Gray decides to ask her facebook group - a questionable choice - using honest and undiplomatic language - also debatable. Then she probably mistakes the aggressive posters as boycotters, and responds again, speaking her mind in a very undiplomatic manner. Sounds like a nice person really, who is by now astonished by the mess a few honest remarks caused.
Oh I wouldn't go to Israel now if I were Macy Gray. She's not wanted. Might be dangerous. I propose to extend BDS to BIDS, with a new I for Insult. The nice thing about the I is you don't have to take the blame for ruining a lucrative deal which, in business, is an attractive feature.
A touch weird though.
(followup on Shmuel's post)
We don't need to find out first where rationality ends and hate begins. I think hate is often a bad focus for understanding.
I could take Herzl as an example. A man with a plan. He didn't hate Palestinians, they were just a small problem to solve: move the original population somehow.
He realized it wasn't very pretty but it was minimal in comparison with the grand plan which was so clearly good. And it should be solved in the most humane way possible.
The racism of the time made the problem even smaller in Herzl's perception of the situation.
There's no evil there, or hate. just an ambitious feelgood plan with a few small problems.
I could associate that with extreme tribalism too: those outside the tribe don't register. They don't count. How could you hate them then?
At most they're a nuisance. And how can acts be very evil when you do them unto people who mean so little?
Someone could have said, look, here's what the little blemish on your plan means for the people who live there.
And if the locals don't like your plan and resist it, how much blood are you willing to have on your hands to get rid of them?
If things really get nasty and escalate how much suffering would you be willing to cause before you change your plan?
Are you going to blame everything on the escalations and reactions from the other party and just keep on going?
Do you realize how it is going to change you when all this happens?
This is not looking at how good the plan feels, and how sincere you are, but looking at the consequences.
It wouldn't have stopped him.
I know that when I use 'rationality' it means reasoning inside a subjective perception of the world, and feelings and values are part of that.
It's a bit different from the traditional ratio vs feeling model. There's still plenty of rationalization(Israel could use a slogan "Denial can last forever!")
but there's more room to acknowledge that people can live in a very different subjective truth without the need to cheat.
So part of europe's xenophobes see a reality of rishing crimerates without fooling themselves, and see a real chance of losing their culture and identity, without the need rationalizing.
There is also the legitimacy of some feelings such as fear, for example fear of losing your identity and culture. Such a fear can be acknowledged without dismissal. But I don't have the time now to go into this further - earliest tonight.
Extreme tribalism is genocidal at its core given material scarcities and inequalities that exist in the world, which would otherwise be indefensible. This is related to something I've mentioned before although I doubt I got the point across. Genocide is strongly associated with hate. I want to associate it with rationality(which unfortunately is usually considered a goody word). If the consensus is such that group x needs to be removed - but you'll do it as nicely as possible - then this can become a very dangerous situation. If group x turns out to be very difficult to remove then more resolute and firm people will stand up and decide that unfortunately more radical measures are needed. "Hate" then becomes an implementation detail.
This is a simplistic model though and reality is much more flexible. For one, the context has a huge impact. In Israel there is the threat of expulsion and permanent warehousing, and genocide may be relevant only only in its most technical interpretation(not in the sense of killing everyone).
In a country without 'demographic threat' you might have a paradoxical situation of 'genocidal tribalism that is not cause for any major concern'.
Naming your company Sabra is about as zionist as it gets if you ask me.
Call me prejudiced - but not shirley.
I stopped buying the Sabra stuff long ago. It was a sacrifice. I liked it and the shop didn't have another brand. Now they have.
I prefer to start from the reference point of someone with the ambition to have a meaningful career in congress. Even if the congressman is aware of the situation and (probably that's a requirement)progressive enough to be bothered by oppression she/he will perceive the situation as a choice between burning your career by taking a -useless- principled stand versus compromising on the I/P issue and making a difference in other areas. That doesn't mean this person isn't bothered by that choice. Some won't be bothered. If you're palestinian it might feel terrible. But within this person's perception it's a necessary choice if you want to make a difference.
link to youtube.com
1:10minutes in the clip Tony Judt explains some of the logic.
Jeffrey Blankfort's article suggests that Justin Amash isn't bothered.
In 'Defamation' there is a meeting between the ADL and some georgian officials, and it was exactly a copyright discussion. The ADL objected to the Georgians using the term 'Holocaust' for the genocide under Stalin because that word was reserved. An agreement was made where Georgia would no longer use the word Holocaust and the ADL would use its influence to get some US favors.
JSF has caught on as well link to jewssansfrontieres.blogspot.com
. So apparently the next step, now that censorship no longer works and rightwing zionism becomes a target for satire, is a preemptive unilateral attack on satire itself. And indeed one should ask if after this it is still possible to satirize this stuff.
Eli Valley's career is over, I'm telling ya!
an Iranian nuke might discourage Jews from moving to Israel, or encourage Jews living in Israel to leave. I don't believe that argument.
Here's another one: a large Iranian role in the region would diminish the israeli role, and thereby affect the concentration of wealth as well as the clout to get its policies vis-a-vis the palestinians accepted. And if the country becomes less wealthy people leave.
Iran is a threat to US corporate, military and political elites because it seeks to maintain genuine national independence — and that is unthinkable for our long term imperial goals. Iran is a threat to Israel because it seeks to end Israel’s unchecked policies of expansion, settlement, and ethnic cleansing; policies characteristic of colonial-settler states in general and of Israel’s protector in particular. Trita Parsi had another explanation. Iran was a threat to Israel from the 90's on because Israel was afraid that Iran might take its place in the hierarchy. Israel wanted to stop Iran from getting along with the US.
And Iran interfered with Israel's settlement and expansion in the context of that competition.
The NIE said the the Iranian nuclear program had been on hold since 2003 . This is actually quite ambiguous because it says nothing about the size and intent of that program. If the intent is to have a deterrence in the form of being capable to build a nuclear weapon , then I think it's well possible that some people got permission to do research on the subject of feasibility. And opinions may have differed on what 'enough' research would have meant.
For what's called 'real-time computing', which is needed when driving apparature directly, windows has long been a no go, because you were never sure your signal would be processed at the right time. But I suspect that argument is no longer valid.
Here are just two ways to interpret Dagan's statement.
1. the nuclear weapons program is real but we defanged it and it's going nowhere. It's time to start working on other things
2. We should be working on other things than the iranian weapons program. I can't say we should have done so a long time ago because that will raise too much resistance. You can only conquer one myth at a time. So you put people at ease, confirm their other less important beliefs and use that to convince them of the one thing that matters most. So whatever the success of stuxnet, there's an opportunity to call it a victory and quit.
What you get is, whatever your belief is you can incorporate the new data in it . It can be spectacular how far one can stretch beliefs when the attitude is "I'm right until you can prove I'm wrong".
The second interpretation fits nicely with my belief that when Iraq was conquered whatever Iran had of nuclear weapons related activities no longer had reason for existing while at the same time it became risky.
If you want the actual content it's better to save the page as html, but if you want a screenshot: there should be a button called Prnt Scrn on your keyboard. If you press it (and sometimes you need to use an extra modifier button CTRL or Fn) then the screenshot is in your clipboard. Then open mspaint, paste the screenshot and save.
Adding one more thing on Wilders and dangerous thinking.
Wilders is populistic and in some things extreme. Here's Daniel Pipes (link to danielpipes.org
appearing moderate next to Wilders.
But once the theme is set, once the questions are thrust onto the people, they start to discuss and accept certain 'facts' like conclusions from statistics. They won't take his answers, but they will take his questions.
I don't want to minimalize their thinking as always being driven by ugly emotions. It is often also a willingness to think rationally,
possibly with a different set of values, but often with little control over the framing and the perceptions on which the logic operates.
You don't need to be driven by bad feelings in order to think about rational question questions over whether subgroup X of the population is problematic in some way:
living off the work of others, being responsible for more violence, weak in sorting their garbage, take less care of pets, less educated and so on,
then you are working within a certain framing: identify the problem group and figure out what should be done about it.
People can sense that the thinking is going in a bad direction and they react by claiming that there are no statistical differences.
But this doesn't often change the momentum and it can be intellectually shaky too. And still no need for dark feelings driving things.
On the subject of dreck and turds it might be interesting to some that at home we use two fake french words , a 'touppetiere' for a turd with a certain spiralling motion in it, and when the turd is particularly well-formed it becomes a 'joliette'. Expand your vocabulary!
(Shmuel said..) Maybe hate is not exactly the right word, but the point of departure is inevitably racism/xenophobia,
looking for “respectable” excuses. I think that's still too limiting.
I tend to worry more about dangerous thinking than about dangerous feelings and I think the underbelly check isn't good enough.
Maybe I should refer to Popper's 'open society' here, although it's more about ideologies. It talks about when perfectly well-meaning ideologies become dangerous.
(Shmuel said..)...and it was not my intention to compare Shahak to Wilders (although Tuyzentfloot suggested that Shahak’s work might be useful in standing up to Wilders). At least I did think you put Shahak's analysis somehow in the same ballpark as Wilders and I was quite surprised.
And I defended(maybe not recommended) those who counter Wilders by claiming they could do the same exercise on Judaism - because there the intention is to conclude it was a pointless exercise.
Die zelbe drek mit andere dekoratzye. Well for me the difference is important, because people have a blind spot right there. There are intellectuals who take an honest look at themselves and conclude there's no hate, and they look at Wilders' reasonling and they conclude it's not racism. And they think the critique is wrong and they're sold. And it's different from hate that's just hiding behind reasonable arguments.