Christopher Hitchens’s Jewish Problem

The fact that Christopher Hitchens has a problem with the Jews has been an open secret for years. No one much likes to talk about it, and for various reasons his journalistic peers have remained silent on the subject. But it is nonetheless the case, and there is little sense in denying it.

Continue reading at Jewish Ideas Daily.

Obama and Israel: What Now?

Since the Obama administration's major defeat in the American midterm elections, commentators have been wondering how the new constellation of forces in Washington will affect the president's Middle East peace initiative. Among hopeful partisans of the administration's efforts, the favored position is that little is likely to change. They point out that the executive branch, not the legislature, makes foreign policy, and that the party holding Congress, whether Republican or Democratic, tends to have little say in such matters. In support of this point, they cite the lessons of history, especially the experience of Bill Clinton after the GOP sweep in 1994.

Continue reading at Jewish Ideas Daily.

NPR and the Liberal Subculture that Worships It

Juan Williams’s recent firing from NPR has occasioned yet another in the perennial series of arguments about the public radio network and whether it should or should not continue to be government funded. The debate so far, it must be admitted, has not been an edifying one, consisting mostly of the regurgitation of clichés.

At The Daily Beast, itself a formidable organ of the liberal establishment, Peter Beinart provided an excellent example of this, writing that “NPR is elitist, and it’s a good thing too” before trotting out almost every cliché NPR’s defenders have ever employed in defense of the network. “The people who run the station,” he writes, “believe that Americans should know more about what is happening in China and less about what is happening to Britney Spears, which in today’s media makes them downright subversive.” As proof of this, Beinart claims that “NPR now has 17 foreign bureaus compared to four for CBS,” and “NPR devotes 21 percent of its airtime to international news compared to 1 percent for commercial talk radio.”Needless to say, these are not particularly helpful arguments. One is little more than openly acknowledged snobbery, and the other appears to make the bizarre claim that more coverage by definition equals better coverage, as if a patient were more likely to survive surgery with ten doctors in the operating room instead of one. Given the ready availability online of translated foreign media, moreover, one wonders why those interested would require their news filtered through an American radio network in the first place.

Continue reading at Pajamas Media.

Middle East Peace Talks Degenerate into Farce

At the moment, the Middle East peace process appears to have descended into a bizarre impasse, more akin to farce than tragedy. Both sides are announcing demands and possible concessions, none of which seem to last longer than a single news cycle.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refuses a renewal of the settlement freeze, then says it might be renewed in exchange for Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state. The Palestinians hint that they may be willing to recognize Israel as such, and soon after declare that it will never happen. Then they publicly declare that only a return to the ’67 borders will satisfy them, something that, given the facts on the ground, is impossible, as they are well aware.

Now, there is the controversy over Netanyahu’s issuance of building tenders in Jerusalem, which would normally not be a problem, but in the current atmosphere is generally being considered as yet another shot across the bow of the Palestinians.

Continue reading at Pajamas Media.

The J Street Scandal

The recent scandal involving the lobbying group J Street, a liberal organization founded in 2008 that bills itself as "pro-Israel and pro-peace," may seem to some like a tempest in a teapot. In fact it is very significant, especially to anyone concerned about Israel, its future, and its relationship to the United States.

The scandal broke on September 24 with the publication of a Washington Times article by the reporter Eli Lake revealing that one of J Street's largest donors was the billionaire financier George Soros. The fact that Soros was funding a liberal organization was hardly surprising, given his well-known political views; but his stance on specifically Jewish issues has been controversial at least since 2003, when he asserted that the rise in global anti-Semitism was the result of policies being pursued by Israel and the United States.

Continue reading at Jewish Ideas Daily.

Martin Peretz and His Critics

The pillorying of Martin Peretz continues apace these days, as the editor-in-chief of The New Republic continues to suffer the consequences of writing that “Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims” on his blog, The Spine. The charge of racism is, of course, the default reaction of most liberals to nearly anything, and certainly to anything they oppose; and, lest we forget, Islam is not a race, making the charge of racism in this case a blatant absurdity. Still, the opportunism of Peretz’s critics cannot be wholly held against them. It cannot be denied that what Peretz wrote is an ugly, crude, and in many ways inaccurate claim.

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

The Golem: Universal and Particular

The most famous and enduring of all Jewish legends is that of the golem, the artificial man. Indeed, with the possible exception of the demon Lilith, briefly pressed into service as a feminist icon, the golem remains the only post-biblical Jewish myth to be widely adopted by non-Jewish culture. Among its recent incarnations are a computer game that bears its name and the army of humanoids who populate James Cameron's film Avatar.

The roots of the legend are ancient: the Talmud claims that Adam himself—and thus, theologically speaking, all of humanity—was a golem until God breathed a soul into his nostrils. But the creature as we know it today has a much later and remarkably precise genealogy. He was born in late-16th-century Prague under the auspices of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, known as the Maharal, who, using kabbalistic magic, is said to have created a humanoid creature out of mud or clay to defend the Jews from their enemies.

Continue reading at Jewish Ideas Daily.

Gideon Levy and Uncomfortable Truths

The political left in many countries has a long history of defending despicable acts of violence when they are committed by the right people. From Norman Mailer’s campaign to free murderer Jack Abbott, who upon release promptly went and murdered someone else, to Bernadine Dohrn’s effusive praise of Charles Manson, right up to today’s disgusting international campaign on behalf of cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, there are few crimes too vile and horrendous for the left not to defend should the perpetrator belong to the correct movement or a fetishized oppressed minority.

Israel recently saw a particularly egregious example of this in the case of Sabbar Kashur, a Palestinian convicted of raping a young woman under false pretenses. According to initial media reports, Kashur was accused because he had claimed to be Jewish and the woman would not have slept with him had she known he was an Arab.

The Israeli left immediately rushed to Kashur’s side, accusing the entirety of Israeli society of racism and denouncing its justice system as akin to Nazi Germany or apartheid South Africa. Much of the foreign press quickly followed suit. But without question the most fervent defender of the convicted rapist was Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy.

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

The Greatest Collection of Nightmares on Earth

Michael J. Totten interviews me on Israel, the Middle East, and other topics.

TEL AVIV — I learn most of what I know about the Middle East from the people who live here, and I was a bit shocked when I discovered, years ago, that many reporters—especially wire agency reporters—absorb most of what they know, think, and believe about the region from other journalists. I didn’t know anyone, local or foreign, in the Middle East when I first got here, and I initially had to rely on the people I met randomly in cafes and bars and in person via the Internet to teach me what’s going on and how the place works. All my information came from the street. Most of my understanding still comes from the street—not from on high, not from newspapers or press releases, and not from foreign reporters who do not live here. Eventually I worked my way up to the prime minister’s office in Lebanon, and I’ve almost gotten that far now in Israel, but my real education has taken place during long sessions in cafes and bars with Arabs, Kurds, and Israelis.

Benjamin Kerstein’s name will appear on the Acknowledgements page of my book when it comes out in the spring because he has taught me an enormous amount about Israel during the time I have known him. I met him five years ago when I first came here from Lebanon, when Israel was still a partially Arabized abstraction in my eyes. He was one of the first people who humanized the place for me, and he taught me more than he knows about the Israeli people and how they see themselves and their place on earth and in history. The parts of my book that take place here are better than they would be if I did not know him.

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

Tony Judt and Israel

When a man dies, especially when he dies of something uniquely horrifying and grotesque, people always tend to remember him well, if for no other reason than pity for his suffering. This seems to have been the case with historian and essayist Tony Judt, who died this month from the degenerative disease known as ALS. The sight of Judt reduced, and reduced very quickly, from an intellectual in late middle age to a wheelchair-bound invalid incapable of breathing on his own would give even the most cold-hearted some pause when penning his obituary. In those last months it was, no doubt, a terrible life and, in the end, a terrible death.

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

The Depredations of Roger Ebert

Armond White of the New York Press, detractors have noted, seems to think he is the only real film critic in America. They may well be right, but probably so is he, and the Press’ house contrarian deserves thanks from all self-respecting cinephiles for doing the one thing most (perhaps all) other American film critics either refuse to do or are incapable of doing. Whether one disagrees with White or not, and almost everybody does at one point or another, there is no question that, whatever he writes, he is always thinking about cinema. What it is. What is can do. What it means. This is not much in the tradition of American film criticism, which has mostly been the domain of frustrated literary or theater critics, and sometimes simply the cub reporter nobody knows what to do with. It is far more in line with the extraordinary legacy of French film criticism, especially the avatars of the nouvelle vague like Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, who later became groundbreaking filmmakers in their own right.

The great insight of the French film critics was that all cinema says something about cinema, even the usually dismissed movies like Hitchcock’s thrillers and Hollywood B-movies. But they did not hold simply that a B-movie could be great while an A-movie could be bad, but that all movies have something to say about cinema, and sometimes the B-movie can say something far more important and profound than an A-movie. White, it seems to me, writes according to this dictum, while most of his colleagues, if they ever encountered it, would probably have no idea what it means.

Foremost among these is unquestionably Chicago Sun-Times columnist, longtime television star, and all around face, voice, and personification of American film criticism, Roger Ebert.

Continue reading at Pajamas Media.

Max Blumenthal’s World

As anyone who has ever lived in a New York apartment will tell you, when you suddenly turn on a bright light in a dark room, you find out very quickly where the cockroaches are hiding. The Gaza flotilla incident was just such a bright light, giving us an unprecedented glimpse of just how low many politicians, activists, and reporters are willing to sink in order to disparage the State of Israel. Without question, one of those most uncomfortably trapped in this spotlight was liberal pseudo-journalist Max Blumenthal.

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

The Imaginarist

Terry Gilliam, the former member of Monty Python and celebrated filmmaker, now nearing seventy, has spent much of the last few decades fighting a long and, one must admit, bruising battle against the real world. And while he has not always enjoyed success—indeed, he has tasted outright disaster several times—Gilliam has nonetheless earned his place as one of the great cinematic avatars of the imagination. If his return to form with the fascinating, frustrating, utterly original The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is anything to go by, the cult of realism has never had a more avowed and passionate enemy.

The imagination is not much in style nowadays, as the fetish of realism appears to have overwhelmed all other styles of filmmaking, bleeding into even such fantastical genres as fantasy and science fiction. The enormous success of Christopher Nolan’s rebooted, hyper-realist Batman series is a case in point. While the gritty Batman has enjoyed renewed box office domination, Bryan Singer’s attempt at restarting the far more inherently fantastical—that is, imaginative—Superman character was considered an embarrassing failure. Singer’s Superman Returns, it must be admitted, does suffer from serious flaws, but it is a far better film than it is given credit for, and the real reason behind its relative lack of success would seem to be its utter failure to capture the zeitgeist—the same zeitgeist which propelled Nolan’s The Dark Knight into the financial stratosphere.

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

International Community and the Transnational Establishment

One of the strangest terms in common use today is “the international community.” It is used endlessly, invoked as a moral arbiter, and proclaimed a transcendent ideal. But no one seems to have the slightest idea what it actually means, and it is regularly employed in so many different ways that arriving at a meaning would probably be impossible. It is probably long since time for the term to be retired, since it is essentially undefinable, and thus inherently misleading, but it is useful in that it points us toward the existence of a phenomenon which has been remarked upon before but never fully defined. Put simply, without anyone really intending to, and in some cases against the better judgment of all involved, we now find ourselves living in a world that is profoundly guided and influenced by an “international community” of a certain kind, one that would perhaps be better described as a Transnational Establishment.

“The Establishment,” like “the international community,” is a supremely popular and much abused term, but it is based on a fairly insightful analysis of power and the way power manifests itself. It was coined by a pugnacious British journalist Henry Fairlie, who wrote in 1955,

By the “Establishment,” I do not only mean the centres of official power—though they are certainly part of it—but rather the whole matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised. The exercise of power in Britain (more specifically, in England) cannot be understood unless it is recognized that it is exercised socially.

Fairlie realized something that goes beyond the British context he was describing. Namely, that power and the exercise of it is not merely a political and economic phenomenon, but also—perhaps primarily—a social phenomenon. Quite often, he realized, power is achieved, maintained and exercised socially, and not politically and economically. One need not be rich, titled, smart, or elected in order to be part of the Establishment and thus to take part in its power. One simply had to be socially accepted within its ranks.

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

The Paper Greenwald

The fallout from the Gaza flotilla incident has occasioned some of the most reprehensible writing that the anti-Israel establishment – which specializes in such things – has ever produced. Beyond question, however, one of the most egregious examples of this is the work of Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald, whose comically overwrought pseudo-jeremiads on the subject constitute a case study in the kind of intellectual corruption that now appears to be the inevitable result of the bigoted hatred of Israel typical of today’s American progressivism.

Greenwald himself is one of those bizarre figures who occasionally bobs to the surface of American intellectual life, someone who so encapsulates the dementia of a specific subculture that he seems to be more a satirical literary creation than a human being. Indeed, Greenwald is such a quintessentially anti-American, pseudo-pacifist, pro-terrorist, self-hating Jewish liberal that he essentially constitutes a living cliche. Nonetheless, his qualifications for the part are unquestionably excellent.

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

The March for Gilad Shalit

“Leave no man behind” is a motto adopted by many armies around the world, but in Israel it has an emotional and political influence that often reaches unique extremes. Over the past month or so, while the establishment that refers to itself as the international community has gone on yet another of its regular episodes of anti-Israel psychosis, most of the world has forgotten that Gilad Shalit exists. Israel, however, most certainly has not. And the country remains painfully aware that the young soldier, who was kidnapped in 2006 and has been held illegally by Hamas ever since, remains somewhere in the Gaza strip, no closer, apparently, to release.

Over the four years that Shalit has been held, rumors of his impending release have swept Israel with unfortunate regularity. The anniversary of his kidnapping on June 25 occasioned new rumors, new complaints, and new demands; most especially on the part of Gilad’s parents, who are quite understandably determined not to allow their son’s plight to slip below the radar. Over the past few days, Shalit’s father, Noam, has led a march across Israel to the border with Gaza, the purpose of which is both to keep Gilad’s name on all our minds and to put pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to agree to a prisoner exchange deal with Hamas.

The problem, of course, is that Netanyahu has no particular wish to pay the price Hamas is demanding. It will require the release of approximately a thousand prisoners being held in Israeli jails, many of them for very serious crimes, including terrorism.

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

The Blockade Blunder

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has achieved one of those rare political feats at which he is surprisingly and sadly adept – taking a difficult situation and turning it into an unmitigated disaster. Barely more than a week after the mob attack on a squad of Israeli commandos by the passengers of a flotilla bound for Gaza to break the siege, Netanyahu announced that the blockade would be partially lifted, and promptly declared to the Knesset that “Today, after we lifted the civilian blockade of Gaza there is no reason or justification for further flotillas,” as if there had been a justification for them in the first place. Or, for that matter, as if reason or justice made any difference to those who organize and participate in them. Moving from obtuse to embarrassing, the PM elaborated, “These flotillas are organized by those who oppose peace, not those who support it. These people just want to break the security blockade,” as though we were not already well aware of this.

Needless to say, Netanyahu’s words, as they usually do, failed completely to mitigate the obvious consequences of his actions. These became clear almost immediately, as those with Israel’s worst interests at heart rushed to announce their victory.

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

The Inevitable Nuclear Iran

It is now all but certain that the American administration has more or less resigned itself to a nuclear Iran. At the very least, it appears to have decided to take no military action against the Iranian nuclear program, nor even to support or encourage – publicly or discreetly – the Iranian popular opposition to the Ahmadinejad regime. The Obama administration will likely continue to pursue its policy of promoting engagement, either out of cynicism or naiveté, while simultaneously busying itself with the diplomatic give and take of arranging international support for sanctions which are unlikely to be effective. It is entirely possible, moreover, that American exhaustion from a decade of war and its public’s concentration on pressing domestic problems will effectively vitiate any political damage that might result from the emergence of a nuclear Iran. This, at any rate, is likely what Obama and the doves in his administration are counting on.

At first glance, this appears to be a disastrous state of affairs. But it need not be so. A nuclear armed Iran may be considered the lesser of possible evils by the United States, but it cannot be seen this way by others. To many Americans, the Iranian threat appears to be comfortably distant. This is something of a willful illusion, of course, but it is a politically influential and perhaps decisive one. For Iran’s neighbors, however, as well as many nations on their periphery, the threat is far more immediate.

Israeli concerns are naturally the most intense, given the Iranian president’s openly racist and genocidal attitude toward the Jewish state. But Israel is hardly alone in its concerns. If, as many suspect, the ultimate goal of the Iranian theocrats is the establishment of Iranian hegemony in the Middle East and thus the de facto seizure of the leadership of the Muslim world, then almost everyone in the region and many beyond have an interest in preventing such an outcome.

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

Israel’s Silver Lining

Over a hundred years ago, the Zionist writer Ehad Ha’am wrote that the one silver lining to the blood libel was that it provided conclusive and irrefutable evidence that it was entirely possible for the Jews to be right and the world to be wrong. He was right then, of course. And he is right now. I think it is safe to say, however, that the blood libel is no longer necessary. Hateful, demented, conspiratorial, psychotic, and outright murderous lies are being told about the Jews on a fairly regular basis nowadays, and if there is any comfort to be taken in this fact, it is not so much the certainty as the irrefutable surety that the world not only can be, but usually is wrong when the Jews are concerned.

Unfortunately, last week’s incident on the high seas – in which the Israeli navy intercepted a flotilla of vessels attempting to run the blockade of Gaza, resulting in a vicious and unprovoked attack on the commandos involved by a gang of racist thugs – was not merely a case of the world being wrong. The reaction to the incident in media and political circles around the world exposed Israel’s critics, once and for all, as a sadistic, pathologically lying, morally bankrupt, and intellectually corrupted establishment whose attitude toward the Jewish state is not only unjust, but cowardly, hypocritical, racist, defamatory, delusional, inhuman, and at times simply sickeningly evil.

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

Over 1,000 Sign Petition in Support of Israel

Over 1,000 people have already signed! Stand up and be counted!

To: Politicians, Media, NGOs, and Citizens of All Nations

We the undersigned, Jews and non-Jews, left and right, Israelis and citizens of many countries, hereby express our sympathy and solidarity with the State of Israel in regard to the May 31, 2010 Gaza flotilla incident for the following reasons:

BECAUSE the Gaza flotilla was organized, funded, and manned by—among others—anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, anti-democratic, and pro-terrorist organizations.

BECAUSE these organizations support the genocide of Israeli Jews and the destruction of the State of Israel.

BECAUSE the participants were armed with lethal weapons and prepared to use them against Israeli soldiers.

BECAUSE the participants were solely responsible for the violence that occurred, including grievous bodily harm to several Israeli soldiers.

BECAUSE the flotilla was in open violation of international law.

BECAUSE Israel is the victim of a global public campaign of racist incitement and hatred.

BECAUSE the portrayal of the incident by the world media thus far has been inaccurate, untrue, and clearly biased against the State of Israel.

For all these reasons, we the undersigned hereby demand the following:

WE DEMAND an immediate, fair, and unbiased investigation into the organizations behind the flotilla and their role in the violence that ensued as a result of their actions.

WE DEMAND the immediate prosecution and conviction of those participants in the flotilla responsible for the violence and especially those responsible for the injuries to Israeli soldiers.

WE DEMAND an immediate, open, and fair investigation into the role of various national governments in funding, equipping, and facilitating the flotilla and the ensuing violence.

WE DEMAND an immediate end to anti-Israeli incitement in the media and in the political arena.

WE DEMAND an immediate and unequivocal statement of support for Israel’s actions from world leaders and organizations, especially President of the United States Barack Obama, including an acknowledgement of the legality of these actions.

WE DEMAND that the media cease and desist its biased and misleading reporting of this incident and confine themselves to the facts at hand.

WE DEMAND an immediate public apology to Israel from the organizations involved in the incident and the governments that supported them.

We hope and believe that this time truth will win out over lies, and that those behind this incident will be exposed and prosecuted for their actions.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

Sign the Petition Here.

Some Useful Addresses for Angry Israelis and Pro-Israelis Alike

If you are appropriately outraged by the current treatment of Israel regarding the Gaza flotilla incident, here is some good contact information for expressing your sentiments (politely and stridently, of course).

Contact the British Prime Minister's office at https://email.number10.gov.uk/ or snail mail him at

10 Downing Street,
London,
SW1A 2AA

or use the contact page Email the Prime Minister’s Office.

To let Turkey know how you feel about their collaboration with the flotilla, the PM's office can be reached here webinfo@byegm.gov.tr.

To let France feel a little heat, the president himself can be reached at http://www.elysee.fr/ecrire/

Of course, there's no one quite like the United Nations for Israel-hating. Let them know they can't get away with it anymore by writing to http://www.un.org/en/contactus/

The president of the United States can be reached through this page http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact, while American citizens can contact their representatives easily through this page http://www.house.gov/, while senators can be located here http://www.senate.gov/.

The president of the European Union, which has already weighed in on the side of the flotillists, long before all the facts were in, can be contacted through its president web@eu2010.es or its ombudsman http://www.ombudsman.europa.eu/shortcuts/contacts.faces. EU citizens can find addresses for their MEPs through the site as well.

To criticize media coverage of the incident, there is always the venerable NY Times letters page letters@nytimes.com. Some of the nastiest anti-Israel coverage has come from The Times and The Guardian, two of Britain's largest newspapers. Give them a piece of your mind to the Times at letters@thetimes.co.uk and the Guardian at letters@guardian.co.uk. Nastier still is the Guardian's sister publication, The Observer letters@observer.co.uk. By far the vilest American reporting on the incident has been at Salon.com. Let them know how you feel about this here http://www.salon.com/about/letters/.

Again, be polite, be strident, be strong. And thank you.

Petition in Support of Israel

Please read and, if you agree, sign and send to others. Many thanks.

To: Politicians, Media, NGOs, and Citizens of All Nations

We the undersigned, Jews and non-Jews, left and right, Israelis and citizens of many countries, hereby express our sympathy and solidarity with the State of Israel in regard to the May 31, 2010 Gaza flotilla incident for the following reasons:

BECAUSE the Gaza flotilla was organized, funded, and manned by—among others—anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, anti-democratic, and pro-terrorist organizations.

BECAUSE these organizations support the genocide of Israeli Jews and the destruction of the State of Israel.

BECAUSE the participants were armed with lethal weapons and prepared to use them against Israeli soldiers.

BECAUSE the participants were solely responsible for the violence that occurred, including grievous bodily harm to several Israeli soldiers.

BECAUSE the flotilla was in open violation of international law.

BECAUSE Israel is the victim of a global public campaign of racist incitement and hatred.

BECAUSE the portrayal of the incident by the world media thus far has been inaccurate, untrue, and clearly biased against the State of Israel.

For all these reasons, we the undersigned hereby demand the following:

WE DEMAND an immediate, fair, and unbiased investigation into the organizations behind the flotilla and their role in the violence that ensued as a result of their actions.

WE DEMAND the immediate prosecution and conviction of those participants in the flotilla responsible for the violence and especially those responsible for the injuries to Israeli soldiers.

WE DEMAND an immediate, open, and fair investigation into the role of various national governments in funding, equipping, and facilitating the flotilla and the ensuing violence.

WE DEMAND an immediate end to anti-Israeli incitement in the media and in the political arena.

WE DEMAND an immediate and unequivocal statement of support for Israel’s actions from world leaders and organizations, especially President of the United States Barack Obama, including an acknowledgement of the legality of these actions.

WE DEMAND that the media cease and desist its biased and misleading reporting of this incident and confine themselves to the facts at hand.

WE DEMAND an immediate public apology to Israel from the organizations involved in the incident and the governments that supported them.

We hope and believe that this time truth will win out over lies, and that those behind this incident will be exposed and prosecuted for their actions.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

Sign the Petition Here.

The Man Who Stares at Other People’s Writing

Jon Ronson is a noted British journalist, documentarian, and author of The Men Who Stare at Goats, which was adapted into a film by George Clooney. As far as I can tell from his latest article in theGuardian, he is also prone to using the words and ideas of others without attribution, a habit usually referred to as plagiarism.

I happened upon the article (“Whodunnit?”) by chance and would not have noticed anything untoward had its opening not rung a distant bell. The article deals with criminal profiling and its discontents, in particular a noted scandal of British justice from the 1980s. The opening section, however, which describes the founding of criminal profiling, is clearly lifted without attribution from Malcolm Gladwell’s article “Dangerous Minds,” published by the New Yorker in 2007 — albeit with some minor changes. The most striking similarities appear below.

Continue reading at Pajamas Media.

Allowing Chomsky into Israel is much more than a free-speech issue

The recent fracas over Israel’s refusal to grant entry to Noam Chomsky, an MIT professor, leftist cult figure, and fervent opponent of the Jewish state, has revealed something far beyond the debate over free speech in Israel and who should and should not be a persona non grata. It reveals that an enormous amount of people, inside and outside Israel, have no real idea of who Chomsky is and what he stands for.

In a sense, this should not be surprising. Chomsky’s admirers regard him as something of a semi-divine figure, and they promote him as a relatively apolitical sort of liberal, a fervent partisan of peace and human rights, who has no interests or beliefs other than simple human justice. For the most part, this image has been accepted by those whose acquaintance with his career is, at best, casual.

The truth, however, is far uglier. Chomsky has been, throughout his long career, a consistent and dedicated supporter and/or apologist for tyranny, terrorism, political violence of all kinds, and sometimes horrifying acts of mass murder.

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2010/05/18/allowing-chomsky-into-israel-is-much-more-than-a-free-speech-issue/#ixzz0p48L4Uo9

Liberalism and Zionism

Early in World War II, George Orwell wrote that pacifism “is only possible to people who have money and guns between them and reality.” Much the same could be said of modern American liberalism, especially Jewish liberalism; that is, if Peter Beinart’s new article in the New York Review of Books, “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment” is anything to go by.

Beinart’s missive is the latest in what is swiftly becoming a literary subgenre in its own right, in which liberal Jews express their agonizing moral struggle with Zionism and Israel in deeply emotive and despairing language. This is not, quite frankly, a particularly new genre, as liberally inclined Jews have always had a somewhat awkward relationship with Zionism; whose partisans have, generally speaking, come from either the socialist left or the nationalist right, both of which have found a certain kinship with Zionism’s recognition of the limits and drawbacks of traditional liberalism.

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

Noam Chomsky and Israel

It’s nice to know that my country of residence still has its head on its shoulders in certain cases, especially when it comes to admitting entrance to pseudo-intellectual antisemites and apologists for genocide. I owe this cheerful realization, ironically, to Amira Hass, a dedicated partisan of the Palestinian cause who has just announced in Haaretz that MIT professor of linguistics and radical leftist cult figure Noam Chomsky has been denied entry at the Allenby Bridge and thus far prevented from appearing at Bier Zeit University in Ramallah.

I have no doubt that legions of the liberal (some of them, no doubt, Israeli) will shortly be descending upon us to denounce the decision and to sing the praises of this perennially worshiped leftist icon, who wrote himself into the history of intellectual infamy by denying the Khmer Rouge genocide and then spending the next four decades denying his denial. Chomsky’s reputation was further burnished by signing a petition in support of French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson. When French critics pointed out that the petition referred to Faurisson’s position that the Holocaust did not happen as historical “findings,” and that this was, needless to say, monstrous, Chomsky promptly accused them all of being agents of totalitarian oppression.

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

The Banality of Evil and Anti-Semitism

By far the most terrifying thing about encountering evil in real life is how innocuous it appears. Hannah Arendt may have gone a bit too far in her theory of the banality of evil, but there is no doubt that the phenomenon is quite real, and all the more terrifying for it. Put simply, once one has looked evil in the eye once or twice, the most striking aspect of it is how ordinary it is. Monsters quite rarely appear to be so, and monstrous things often seem terrifyingly meaningless and empty when witnessed first hand. Perhaps this is simply a defense mechanism, a way for our perceptions to minimize the potential emotional damage of horror, but whatever its origins, it remains a chilling and undeniable paradox.

This video of an appearance by conservative activist and ex-leftist David Horowitz at USC San Diego brought this home to me, thankfully at second hand. Challenged by a member of the Muslim Students Association, the following exchange ensues

Horowitz: Okay, I’ll put it to you this way. I am a Jew. The head of Hizbollah has said that he hopes that we will gather in Israel so he doesn’t have to hunt us down globally. For or against it?

MSA member: For it.

Perhaps others will see it differently, but for me there is a quiet terror in watching this moment. Perhaps it is the calm politeness, the terrible ordinariness, with which the student expresses her sentiments; as though she were voting “aye” on a question of raising municipal property taxes or repealing a law requiring dog leashes. Perhaps it is the despairing knowledge that the apologetics and excuses will be short in coming, and hundreds of the credentialed, intelligent, and liberal will shortly be explaining to us that she didn’t actually mean what she said or, if she did, it is nonetheless an understandable and relatively innocuous thing to say. Perhaps it is the realization that saying this sort of thing about essentially any other group of people would arouse a storm of institutional protest and censure which most certainly will not ensue in this case. And, of course, there is the undeniable fact that many will shortly be blaming Horowitz for the whole thing.

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

Human Rights Watch: Their Master’s Voice

Having just returned from being locked for almost an hour in Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Center mall while a surprisingly large robot fired three 12-gauge shotgun shells into a suspicious package, which was then disposed of by a man in a Kevlar body suit, I was not, I confess, in a mood to indulge those who make light of Israel’s security concerns. Shortly after, my feelings were compounded by reading Benjamin Birnbaum’s excellent piece in The New Republic on the non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch and its treatment of Israel. It is doubtful that a better, or more important, piece of classic muckraking journalism will be published in the coming months.

The piece takes as its impetus the recent controversy between the organization’s staffers and some of its board members, in particular, its founder Robert Bernstein, who recently published a New York Times op-ed denouncing the organization’s attitude toward Israel. Its real value, however, is its exposure of the personalities behind the organization; the faces behind the impersonal reports and press releases that constitute the public face of HRW.

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

Israel’s Independence Day

Sometimes it seems as if the world suffers from a collective case of schadenfreude in regards to Israel. Not only does the media evince an obsessive fascination with the minutest details of everything violent, horrifying, and depressing that occurs in this country, but often appears to feel the need to inject the violent, horrifying, and depressing into Israel’s more sanguine moments. Waking up from an evening of fireworks, music, and general enjoyment on the part of thousands at Rabin Square to celebrate Israel’s Independence Day, I was presented—along with many others—by Ethan Bronner’s recent missive, “Mood Is Dark as Israel Marks 62nd Year as a Nation”.

From his post in the Anglo-American Jerusalem bubble, in which most reporters for major English-language newspapers sequester themselves during their required tenure on the Middle East beat, Bronner informs us,

There is something about the mood this year that feels darker than usual. It has a bipartisan quality to it. Both left and right are troubled, and both largely about the same things, especially the Iranian nuclear program combined with growing tensions with the Obama administration.

There is, of course, some truth to this. Given that Iran’s psychotic leader regularly threatens to annihilate us, our anxiety on that count is fairly understandable; add to this the American president’s unwillingness to acknowledge that a man who threatens to annihilate an entire country will probably have to be confronted with the threat of force at some point, and that anxiety is compounded several fold. And certainly, the current impasse between Obama and Netanyahu is worrisome to anyone who thinks that the United States is the only country is the world that tends to treat Israel with anything resembling fairness or even sanity.

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

Avatar’s Worldview

I resisted seeing Avatar for as long as humanly possible, as much out of sheer contrarianism as anything else, but ultimately I too succumbed to the phenomenon, and got my eyeful of James Cameron’s latest mega-blockbuster, now the highest-grossing film of all time. Cameron, I must confess, is one of those directors I have never known quite what to do with. His technique is impeccable; his technological innovations known to all; and his capacity for tapping into the collective cinematic unconscious, somehow knowing what people want to see before they do, undeniable. And yet, I have always felt that there is something missing from Cameron’s films. He is a Spielberg without the sense of wonder; Kubrick without the burning, uncompromising intelligence; Scorsese without the pervasive sense of Catholic pity. Often, he seems to be a mere sketch of a great director, calculating, obsessive, utterly in control, and yet oddly and persistently empty. Avatar, it must be admitted, is no exception to this.

Everything its admirers and its detractors have said about it is more or less true. The visuals are extraordinary, the action scenes stunning, the special effects flawless, and the pure splendor of it all at times transporting. At the same time, the story is absurdly derivative, the characters stick figures at best, the dialog lamentable, and its politics painfully didactic. There is no doubt that it is enormously effective on its own terms, but one cannot help feeling that everything about it except its special effects is oddly cursory and even amateurish.

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

Nuclear Security and the Church of Obamaism

Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent decision to avoid President Barack Obama’s much-hyped Nuclear Security Summit has been met with irritation and dismay by many. Given that Netanyahu’s motivations are reasonable enough, namely the fear that the Arab and Islamic nations attending would turn the conference into a public referendum on Israel’s ambiguous nuclear status, one would expect that his absence would not have raised many eyebrows, especially among the ostensibly worldly chattering classes.

That this was not the case, however, says a great deal less about Netanyahu and the issue of Israel’s decision to avoid a confrontation over its nuclear ambiguity, and far more about the rather desperate lengths to which Obama’s supporters will go in order to maintain the aura of transformative omnipotence that they have built around their hero. The intensity with which they do so would seem to indicate that they are not only trying to prop up the faith of others, but also their own.

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

Alice in Wonderland: Feed Your Head

One can almost see the meeting of studio executives that preceded the production of Tim Burton’s new film of Alice in Wonderland. A half dozen cocaine-addled Bard graduates blinking through the aftereffects of yet another night of silicone implanted satyriasis and quietly musing on the possibilities inherent in Lewis Carroll’s century-old fairy tale. “What,” says one, “if instead of being a little girl, Alice is, like, a hot girl-power feminist teenager?” “Cool!” says another, “and what if like, everything that happened in the book happened, like, before.” “Yeah!” says another, “and what if, instead of just wandering around seeing weird things, she has to go Lord of the Ringson, like, something…?” “Awesome!” says a third, “and what if, like, at the end, the Mad Hatter dances like Michael Jackson? That would be so cool.” At this point, someone calls to find out if Johnny Depp is available.

And so it went, one imagines, until the big budget, 3-D, Dolby Sensurround travesty of one of the most beloved pieces of British whimsy literature was completed; leaving the Walt Disney studios a great deal richer and its viewers considerably poorer in every sense of the word.

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

Obama’s Israel Crisis

Now that the rift between the Obama administration and the Netanyahu government has acquired the status of “crisis,” it is worth stepping back from the details of the spat and looking at the big picture. While the Ramat Shlomo announcement and its immediate aftermath were the immediate cause of the Obama administration’s ire, this was a crisis that was waiting to happen and was probably inevitable. The primary reason for this is the fundamental disconnect between Obama and Netanyahu, not only as personalities but, more importantly, in terms of their long term goals for Israel and the Middle East.

To a certain extent, Obama and Netanyahu deserve each other. As I have written before, they are, ironically, remarkably similar in many ways. They are both charismatic, articulate, extremely image conscious politicians whose capacity for visionary rhetoric often far outstrips their competence. Both have been accused of being essentially empty and shallow personalities, which is true in both cases to some extent, but ignores the fact that they are also ideologically driven idealists with very clear visions of the future they are striving toward.

Continue reading at The New Ledger.