Category: Politics (implicit)

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Gaza into the Abyss

In the Washington Post yesterday, Charles Krauthammer had a column on the poor Palestinian family that got blown up on a beach in Gaza. After explaining that the explosion could not have been due to an Israeli shell fired in response to nearby rocket launches into Israeli neighborhoods, he writes,

Let’s concede for the sake of argument that the question of whether it was an errant Israeli shell remains unresolved. But the obvious question not being asked is this: Who is to blame if Palestinians are setting up rocket launchers to attack Israel — and placing them 400 yards from a beach crowded with Palestinian families on the Muslim Sabbath?

Answer: This is another example of the Palestinians’ classic and cowardly human-shield tactic — attacking innocent Israeli civilians while hiding behind innocent Palestinian civilians. For Palestinian terrorists — and the Palestinian governments (both Fatah and Hamas) that allow them to operate unmolested — it’s a win-win: If their rockets aimed into Israeli towns kill innocent Jews, no one abroad notices and it’s another success in the terrorist war against Israel. And if Israel’s preventive and deterrent attacks on those rocket bases inadvertently kill Palestinian civilians, the iconic “Israeli massacre” picture makes the front page of the New York Times, and the Palestinians win the propaganda war.

Krauthammer then goes on to ask exactly why terrorists in Gaza are bothering to launch rockets into Israel, since, y’know, Israel pulled out of Gaza and withdrew behind pre-1967 borders. He sums it up as the same mindset that I always ascribed to Arafat: it’s a lot easier to be a terrorist/victim than a statesman.

In my opinion, one of the key functions of the Israel’s withdrawal from the territories and construction of a wall — besides keeping Palestinians from homicide-bombing inside Israel’s new borders — is to force the Palestinian people to look at themselves as citizens of their own state. Quite early in the withdrawal, we began hearing stories that Palestinians were not happy that Yasser’s cousins had all the good jobs.

My buddy Mitch Prothero commented in a recent article that the foreign press isn’t interested in covering the civil war going on in Palestinian society. He doesn’t say explicitly that this is because it goes against the accepted narrative of the Palestinians as the oppressed victims of the Zionist conspiracy, but I think that’s a big part of it (another big part is that journalists don’t want to get shot at).

Just as Brendan O’Neill has brought up some very-difficult-to-stomach aspects of the genocides in Rwanda and Sudan in his recent columns, there are parts of every story that we gloss over to keep from facing the messiness of reality, or to keep from sullying the purity of our outrage.

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Hot ticket

Here’s an article from Forbes about the roots of corrupt behavior. It explores the matter via the parking tickets unpaid by UN diplomats in NYC:

Scandinavian countries, which perennially rank among the least corrupt in the corruption index, had the fewest unpaid tickets [between 1998 and 2005]. There were just 12 from the 66 diplomats from Finland, Norway, Denmark and Sweden. Almost all of these tickets went to one bad Finn.

Chad and Bangladesh, at the bottom of the corruption index, were among the worst scofflaws. They shirked 1,243 and 1,319 tickets, respectively, in spite of the fact that their UN missions were many times smaller than those of the Scandinavians.

The last time I heard about Chad and cars was when they fought with Libya and used Toyota pickups instead of tanks or APCs.

Find out what Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer decided to do about the problem.

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The varieties of diversity, or something

Timothy Garton Ash on the stultification of Europe:

In the great age of Renaissance Florence, diversity was indeed the dynamo of Europe’s extraordinary creativity. There’s a marvellous book called The European Miracle, by the economic historian EL Jones, that explores why Europe rather than China – scientifically and technologically more advanced than Europe in the 14th century – produced the scientific, agrarian and industrial revolutions that led the world into modernity. In brief, his answer is: Europe’s diversity.

But this was the diversity of a restless, often violent competition between cities, regions, states and empires. Florence and Siena, England and France, Christian Europe and the Ottoman empire – they did not resolve their differences by coalition agreements and endless negotiations in airless committee rooms on the Rue de la Loi in Brussels. To reverse Churchill’s post-1945 adage: they made war-war not jaw-jaw.

Many readers will remember the speech that Orson Welles put into the mouth of the gangster Harry Lime, in the film of Graham Greene’s The Third Man: “In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed – they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” Has Europe today entered its age of the cuckoo clock?

Sorry to have been so light on the posts, dear reader. I’ve been pretty busy with the magazine. Have a good holiday weekend.

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Effluent Society

George Will takes down the legacy of John Kenneth Galbraith as an excuse for condescension, while making time to bash John McCain:

Advertising, Galbraith argued, was a leading cause of America’s “private affluence and public squalor.” By that he meant Americans’ consumerism, which produced their deplorable reluctance to surrender more of their income to taxation, trusting government to spend it wisely.

If advertising were as potent as Galbraith thought, the advent of television — a large dose of advertising, delivered to every living room — should have caused a sharp increase in consumption relative to savings. No such increase coincided with the arrival of television, but Galbraith, reluctant to allow empiricism to slow the flow of theory, was never a martyr to Moynihan’s axiom that everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts.

Enjoy.

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Because they can’t

John Kenneth Galbraith died this weekend. The NYTimes has a long obit, including the entertaining caveat:

He strived to change the very texture of the national conversation about power and its nature in the modern world by explaining how the planning of giant corporations superseded market mechanisms. His sweeping ideas, which might have gained even greater traction had he developed disciples willing and able to prove them with mathematical models, came to strike some as almost quaint in today’s harsh, interconnected world where corporations devour one another.

Make with the read-read.

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Breathe with me

I’ve long contended that conspiracy theories are a substitute-religion for the disillusioned; it gives them the opportunity to believe in a Greater Power, even if it’s just a power for evil. I think this ties into that Orwell passage I quoted a few weeks ago.

Brendan O’Neill at Spiked has a great piece on the mainstreaming of paranoia:

The rise of the conspiracy theory points to an important shift in journalism and public debate. There has been a move from debating the substance of someone’s beliefs or behaviour to focusing myopically on the motivations behind them; from challenging individuals over their words or actions to trying to uncover some deep, dark ulterior motive. This has had a deadening effect on public debate. It replaces a critical engagement with political developments with a destructive neverending search for the secret agenda. And it means that no one is ever truly held to account for what they say or do. After all, if Blair is merely the puppet of dark neocons forces when it comes to Iraq, then how can we hold him up to public ridicule for what has happened there?

This is not investigative journalism; it is gossip.

Read more, if you dare.

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What Would Brian Boitano Do?

I don’t write about the winter Olympics because I don’t give a crap about any of the events, except the sublimely named Super G.

Still, I had to follow this link from Drudge about some knucklehead U.S. figure skater who wore a throwback USSR warmup jacket during a practice session today. He claims to be a major Russophile, and what better way to celebrate it than to have the good ol’ CCCP across your chest?

Of course, if he’d been wearing a throwback German jersey (c. 1936), it’d be a much different story.