Category: Politics (explicit)

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Civil Warland in Bad Decline

Official VM buddy Mitch Prothero recently filed a story on the underreported civil war in Gaza, explaining some aspects of journalism in the process:

Palestinians are the easiest people in the world to cover as a journalist. They respect the work, know journalists take risks to tell their story, and, frankly, know that stories of their suffering under Israeli oppression are good P.R. But it’s not just cynical and calculating; they’re Arabs and that stuff about Arabs’ respect for guests is very real and sincere.

Having said that, a lot of the goodwill toward the foreign journo dries up when it’s Arabs fighting each other. Suddenly, you’re not documenting a noble struggle against occupation, you’re just some foreigner. And if you’re in a hospital full of pissed-off Military Intelligence officials tending to their wounded, it’s a disaster. As I tried to take pictures, I was suddenly surrounded by a mob of armed men grabbing at my cameras. Luckily, the son of a wounded official jumped into the fray and dragged me to a side room. Once he checked my digital images, he informed the angry crowd I had done nothing wrong and I was free to take pictures outside the hospital.

I like the mention that Hamas would be all for peace if Israel would just return to its 1967 borders. It’s always funny how no one asks Jordan how they feel about going back to those borders. . .

And Mitch also had an article about how the Hariri assassination in Beirut may’ve also been tied to a bank scandal (still implicating the Syrian government).

In the name of all this investigative and life-risking journalism, I’ll cut him some slack for not being able to make it to our wedding. . .

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Big Sleazy

Going into this weekend, I wasn’t sure if the re-election of Ray Nagin as mayor of New Orleans would be tantamount to Marion Barry’s re-election in Washington, DC after being caught smoking crack cocaine.

Then the city’s member of the House of Representatives got caught on video taking $100,000 in cash to facilitate bribing Nigerian officials for an internet venture (evidently not this one), and I thought, “Well, at least Nagin’s not part of the political establishment.”

Will Collier at Vodkapundit has a good take on the need to revamp politics in New Orleans and Louisiana:

Louisianans in general and New Orleanians in particular made too many bad choices for too long. They acquiesced to governmental corruption and incompetence with a shrug and the inevitable, “that’s just Louisiana.” They allowed an unfettered criminal class to fester and thrive, until it literally took over the city. They put too much trust in luck and “the great elsewhere,” as local author Chris Rose puts it, to bail them out when things were at their worst.

And so they lived and died with those choices.

Now it’s time for them to choose again.

Read the whole shebang.

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Let them eat broadband!

If Eliot Spitzer has his way, someday we’ll all be able to download porno, regardless of race, color, creed or economic class. The NY state attorney general believes that universal high-speed internet access is a necessity for NY. (Presumably, this will allow him to utilize the Marshall Law to force phone and cable companies to make a deal to provide this at a loss, causing them to raise rates in other parts of their business.)

As one analyst quoted in the article points out, providing internet access doesn’t mean jack for families that can’t afford a computer:

That’s a much bigger reason for the lack of broadband penetration in low-income households than service accessibility, argues Bruce Liechtman, principal analyst with Liechtman Research Group and a former chair of the editorial board for the Cable & Telecommunications Marketing Assn. journal. “Broadband adoption really correlates directly with household income.” If Spitzer wants to solve the digital divide, Leichtman says, “he should be giving everybody a computer.”

Spitzer tells us that poor kids in NYC have it tough: “If you’re kid growing up in South Korea, your Internet access is 10 times faster at half the price than a kid growing up in the South Bronx,” he said.

On the flip side, kids in the South Bronx don’t share their northern border with a nuclear-armed country filled with bark-eating zombies.

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One Shot at History

I find the figure of Lee Harvey Oswald fascinating. The more facts we know, the less of a complete picture we get of the guy. Ron Rosenbaum has a neat essay on the JFK assassination theorists in his big collection, The Secret Parts of Fortune, that (to me) forms a sort of trilogy with essays on Danny Casolaro and Kim Philby.

But this essay by James Piereson in Commentary contends that my Oswald-mosaic concept is bunk, and that LHO was set on killing JFK in response to U.S. attempts to kill Castro. More to the point, Piereson contends that most of the conspiracy-theorizing derives from the fact the LHO was a left-wing assassin:

Hence, when the word spread on November 22 that President Kennedy had been shot, the immediate and understandable reaction was that the assassin must be a right-wing extremist–an anti-Communist, perhaps, or a white supremacist. Such speculation went out immediately over the national airwaves, and it seemed to make perfect sense, echoed by the likes of John Kenneth Galbraith and Chief Justice Earl Warren, who said that Kennedy had been martyred “as a result of the hatred and bitterness that has been injected into the life of our nation by bigots.”

It therefore came as a shock when the police announced later the same day that a Communist had been arrested for the murder, and when the television networks began to run tapes taken a few months earlier showing the suspected assassin passing out leaflets in New Orleans in support of Fidel Castro. Nor was Lee Harvey Oswald just any leftist, playing games with radical ideas in order to shock friends and relatives. Instead, he was a dyed-in-the-wool Communist who had defected to the Soviet Union and married a Russian woman before returning to the U.S. the previous year. One of the first of an evolving breed, Oswald had lately rejected the Soviet Union in favor of third-world dictators like Mao, Ho, and Castro.

Informed later that evening of Oswald’s arrest, Mrs. Kennedy lamented bitterly that her husband had apparently been shot by this warped and misguided Communist. To have been killed by such a person, she felt, would rob his death of all meaning. Far better, she said, if, like Lincoln, he had been martyred for civil rights and racial justice.

Now that last paragraph is hearsay, as far as I’m concerned, but Piereson uses this idea of Oswald-denial as a springboard for the meltdown of liberalism. I find it pretty fascinating, but you know what I’m like.

Give it a read.

Or just write humorless comments about how big corporations are controlling our minds.

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It’s good to be the Shah?

Human Events runs a long and implausibly candid interview with Reza Pahlavi, son of the Shah of Iran, who seems to be campaigning for U.S. backing for a ‘peaceful’ overthrow of the mullahs. Highlights include:

I’m against developing any weapons of mass destruction. I work to see the world develop a process of disarmament because otherwise it will be madness. If we build it, tomorrow the Turks will build it, then the Saudis want to build it, then the Egyptians want to build it. Believe me, in that part of the world, there’s some track record how stable the world will feel having a whole bunch of nuclear warheads in the hands of all these people. Forget it. I’d be the first one proposing a plan to reverse the cycle of proliferation.

Since when has Israel been a threat to anyone? Israel just wants to be left alone and live in peace side by side with its neighbors. As far as I’m concerned, Israel never had any ambition to territorially go and invade, I don’t know, Spain or Morocco or anywhere else. And let me tell something else about Iran: Unlike the rest of the Islamic or Arab world, the relationship between Persia and the Jews goes back to the days of Cyrus the Great. We take pride as Iranians of having a history where Cyrus was the most quoted figure in the Torah, as a liberator of Jewish slaves, who went to Babylon and gave them true freedom for them to worship and in fact helped them build a temple. We have a biblical relation with Jews, and we have no problem with modern day Israel. As far as regional politics, I believe, I think many Iranians believe so, that as much as Israel has a right to exist, so should the Palestinians. They have to work the problem between each other. And we have no business interfering, and we need to help get as much stability in the region.

The reason the regime was using Khatami as the smiling face talking about a dialogue of civilizations was just to buy time. The same way that in the nuclear race they played the game of buying time by saying we’re going to negotiate with Russians or we’re not going to talk to them—buying time. Three years of endless negotiations has produced nothing. Why? The regime gained an extra three years. All I’m saying is that now, when you look at the future, we have a delicate time frame within which we can bring about change.

Q: In your Iran, Mahmoud Abdullah, the Afghan who converted to Christianity, would have every right to do that and the state would protect him from retaliation by radical clerics?

A: God, I hope so. I hope so. Because if we are basing our constitution on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that’s one of the most fundamental rights that any human being should have. I’m sick and tired of hypocrisy and all this dubious attitude that is so typical of our region. If you believe in something you say it, you don’t fool around. I mean, that’s where I’m coming from. I haven’t lived 45 years of my life to fool around with these things. If I’m willing to lose my life for it, hell I’m going to fight for these rights, otherwise it’s not worth it. Frankly it’s not worth it! I might as well forget about Iran and become a citizen and live my life in this country. No. I want to have the same rights you have over here over there. That’s what I’m fighting for! Otherwise why bother?

This ties into a link that VM reader Faiz K. sent over this weekend, about a Canada-based Iranian blogger’s experiences visiting Israel for the first time (and blogging about it):

Israel never existed except when Friday prayers would finish their “death to” chants with Israel. Everywhere else, even on maps, Tel Aviv was the capital of the “Zionist Regime” or “Occupied Palestine”.

I believed that Israelis saw no distinction between Mr Ahmadinejad and the former reformist president Mohammad Khatami of Iran, in the same way that Iranians could not differentiate Shimon Peres from Binyamin Netanyahu.

My biggest surprise was when I found myself with two other Iranians, completely randomly, on the same minibus from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. I had no idea that Israel had the world’s largest proportion of Iranians in its population, outside Iran itself.

It was only then I could digest the fact that Israel’s President Moshe Katsav and Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz, despite their hardline stances against the Iranian government, were originally from Iran.

I’m working on a longish post about Dubai, city-states and Jane Jacobs, but I’m not sure how that’ll turn out. I’ll let you know.

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Because they can

Robert Kagan has a longish column at the Washington Post today about why Russia & China support other dictatorships (instead of supporting liberal reform the way U.S. & Europe sorta do):

An irony that Europeans should appreciate is that China and Russia are faithfully upholding one cardinal principle of the international liberal order — insisting that all international actions be authorized by the U.N. Security Council — in order to undermine the other principal aim of international liberalism, which is to advance the individual rights of all human beings, sometimes against the governments that oppress them. So while Americans and Europeans have labored over the past two decades to establish new liberal “norms” to permit interventions in places such as Kosovo, Rwanda and Sudan, Russia and China have used their veto power to prevent such an “evolution” of norms. The future is likely to hold more such conflicts.

Read all about it.

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The L word

George Will blasts the GOP (collaterally damaging the Dems) with his apolcalyptic column about the move to restrict “527” political donations:

David Dreier (R-Calif.) explained, sort of. He said he voted against McCain-Feingold because “dictating who could give how much to whom” violated the First Amendment, but now he favors dictating to 527 contributors because McCain-Feingold is not violating the First Amendment enough: It is not “working as it was intended.” That is, it is not sufficiently restricting the money financing political advocacy.

[. . .] Oh, so that is what the First Amendment means: Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech unless speech annoys politicians.

That “L word” I mentioned? It comes up in the conclusion of Will’s column.

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You can’t fire me, I quit!

Fawaz Turki explains “How To Lose Your Job at a Saudi Newspaper”

What mattered was that I had committed one of the three cardinal sins an Arab journalist must avoid when working for the Arab press: I criticized the government. The other two? Bringing up Islam as an issue and criticizing, by name, political leaders in the Arab or Islamic world for their brazen excesses, dismal failures and blatant abuses.

[. . .] My first provocation was — horror of horrors — to criticize Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak after he cracked down on human rights activists several years ago. My second occurred soon after the failure of the Camp David accords when I called for the resignation of Yasser Arafat as head of the Palestinian Authority.

My last was to write about the atrocities Indonesia had committed during its occupation of East Timor from 1975 to 1999. For that transgression, my Saudi paper showed no mercy. I was out the door. No questions asked, no explanations given. You don’t write about atrocities committed by an Islamic government — even when they’re already documented in the history books — and hope to get away with it.

In other depressing news from the Islamic world, it appears my buddy the Brooding Persian is pulling the plug on his blog. I hope that’s not the case; while his posts could get insanely overlong, he offered me a vitally important perspective on life, politics and religion in Iran and on earth. And he also reminded me of the importance of The Iliad.

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Roses

Until last night, I hadn’t watched The Colbert Report on Comedy Central (myriad reasons, centering on lack of time & disinterest). Over dinner, Amy & I caught the broadcast, which included a profile of Congressional District 29. As part of the segment, Colbert interviewed Rep. Adam Schiff, which included this priceless exchange:

Schiff: Well, it was the most expensive race for the House in history.

Colbert: How much did it cost?

Schiff: We raised about $4.3 million and there were about $5 million in independent expenditures.

Colbert: After you were elected, did you pass legislation banning the very sort of unregulated donations that helped you win?

Schiff: Yes.

Colbert: Isn’t that the political equivalent of . . . sleeping with a prostitute and then strangling her to hide your shame?

Schiff: I wouldn’t want to say that.

Colbert spent the rest of the interview trying to get Rep. Schiff to accept a $100 bill.

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Moon Over Malaysia

Check out the Virtual Memories Podcast!

I’m headed to the BIO conference in a few weeks. It’s in Chicago this year, a city that I haven’t seen much of. I had a parenteral drug conference there in the spring of 2000, and enjoyed the environs and architecture. I’m hoping for a little more time to get out and explore this time. This trip will unfortunately be contrasted by another conference two weeks later in Anaheim.

The BIO conference is dominated by regional economic development councils, which are intent on bringing biotech companies and their manufacturing facilities into their areas. These EDCs have a lot of incentives to offer and different ways of enticing companies to set up shop. I wrote all about it in the April issue of my magazine; I’ll post a link to that piece when it’s available, in case you’re interested in the stuff I spend my days working on.

A lot of these EDCs want trade magazine editors to visit during BIO, so they can explain to us what their region has to offer. Sometimes this evolves into a trip to that region; that’s how my Sweden/Denmark trip in August 2004 happened. I’ve been to a few other sites as part of this process: Puerto Rico, Spokane, WA, Phoenix/Scottsdale, and probably some others that I’m forgetting. Generally, I’m too busy to travel on some many junkets, so I make the rounds at BIO and learn what I can about the regions.

Which leads me to the invite I received from a PR firm by e-mail today. They’d like me to sit down for an interview with the CEO of the Malaysian Biotechnology Corp., the government agency devoted to building a biotech industry in that country. It was a pretty gracious invite, and it’s flattering that the firm considers my magazine worth the interview-time.

But I looked at the invite for a few moments, thinking, “Malaysia . . . Malaysia . . . Oh, that’s right! They won’t let you into the country if you have an Israeli passport!”

I spent a few minutes researching to make sure that was the case (which led me to the previous Prime Minister’s anti-semitic comments from 2003). Yup! Malaysia doesn’t recognize Israel’s existence (but does recognize Palestine’s: whew!).

I was prepared to write off the invite then and there, but it occurred to me that Israel might have the exact same policy. You never know. I’d hate to be more of a hypocrite than I already am.

I ended up having to call the Israeli consulate to clear up the issue: Malaysians aren’t treated differently than any other nationality coming to visit Israel; they just need a visa like anyone else. I told the young lady on the phone about Malaysia’s policy. She said, “Ooh. That’s not nice.” We agreed that my mother wouldn’t be happy about it, either.

After that, I struggled to write the e-mail to the PR rep. I didn’t want to take on an adversarial tone, or imply that she was morally compromised by helping represent Malaysia. But I did want to express my point of view about what I wouldn’t meet with them. I went with

I know this is going to sound terrible, but I can’t in good conscience discuss the attractions of a biotech base in a country that would turn away most of my family at the border because of the passports they carry.

As near as I can tell, Malaysia has a blanket ban on entry by Israeli nationals (with case-by-case exceptions), and I’m afraid that I can’t publicize/promote a country with that policy.

If I have my facts wrong, please let me know ASAP.

Thanks,

Gil Roth

Now there’s only a problem if the MBC decides to start advertising. Still, it wouldn’t be as bad as taking an 8-page ad insert from Sudan, like the NYTimes did. I was hoping it would open with the banner: “Sudan: More than Genocide and Civil Wars!”

Check out the Virtual Memories Podcast!