Mondoweiss

The Left Must Celebrate Progress in Iraq!

I don't think there's much question that there's been progress in Iraq. Some markets seem to be flourishing, American deaths are down. That phantasma-gory-a of suicide bombings one day after another may even be petering out. Hallelujah.

I remember a couple of years ago after the elections in Iraq, the purple-finger days, when a few of my leftwing friends and I were sitting around on the Upper West Side stunned by the news. It really did seem like burgeoning democracy there. Does this justify the war? we asked ourselves. More to the point: does the progress rationalize the U.S. policy of preemptively and violently determining that another society should go democratic?

We said No, and I still say No. I think most Americans would agree, this is a terrible policy, whether you call it unipolar or Wilsonian or visionary or elitist arrogance. (When will the neocons work on democracy in Jerusalem, where the U.N. confirms what I have seen: the Israelis have made "a mockery of religious freedom" by cordoning the holy sites) I can only imagine how many years it will be till Iraq has a functioning democracy, let alone a secular one...

That doesn't mean that we should not celebrate what is happening in Iraq, and pull with all our hearts for more tranquility there, so that our troops can come home, civil order will be established, and maybe freedom of the press, too. Human freedom is a wonderful thing.

Yes, Jews Are Smarter, But We're Undergoing an IQ Drop by the Minute

Here is a truly weird column about Jewish intelligence by Dana Milbank, the WP columnist who slagged Walt and Mearsheimer last year, labeling them blue-eyed and Teutonic, i.e., Nazis. (In this column he refuses even to dignify W&M by naming them, though he gives Abe Foxman's book a push.)

Milbank's column covers an event yesterday at the American Enterprise Institute all about Charles Murray's piece in Commentary on Jewish genius. There was a debate at AEI, and the funny thing is that no one took the opposite side. Murray said it's genetic, the respondent said, It's because Jews value learning. Well, she didn't disagree with the premise. I say Milbank's column is weird because he throws around Yiddish like "goyische kop"--the great old Yiddish expression for having a gentile mind, i.e., not the sharpest tool in the drawer--without explaining it to a larger readership, and suggests at one point that we shouldn't be talking about Jewish intelligence, it's a verboten subject. I find his point of view snaky and confusing. It feels like he's secretly bragging. Also: I bridle when people throw around Yiddish without doing readers the service of explaining it. It's as bad as old writers putting in a paragraph of German or French assuming you know what they're saying...

Myself, I applaud AEI for having the panel, as I give two cheers to Murray for his investigation. Jewish achievement is something a lot of people wonder about. My answer is that Jews are smarter, for now. Per Yuri Slezkine's great book, The Jewish Century, this moment in history has called on Jewish gifts. Yes, we value learning. Or valued it. I am reading the great Isaac Bashevis Singer's More Tales from My Father's Court. It's about his rabbi father's mediation in disputes among Jews in Warsaw between the wars. Beautiful. The father is constantly trying to return to his studies, and telling young Isaac to study harder. When a woman whose marriage the rabbi saves tries to give young Isaac a groschen, the father tells her not to, the boy will only spend it on sweets (and secular books!). The boy is angry.

But those were the values of my ancestors: learning above everything. When rich people come into the court, they are often treated with contempt. False values!

That's why I have the headline I do. Jewish history is changing before our eyes. Our entrepreneurialism and dedication to learning have made us wealthier than ever, and we have come to celebrate wealth. But it's corrupting. Look what privilege did to the WASPs, made them etiolated and entitled. Even more corrupting mentally is the intellectual burden on American Jews of arguing all the time that black is white: that The Palestinians are not oppressed, that a separate roadway system and checkpoints do not make apartheid. This is the prevaricating legalism to which great young minds are summoned by the Israel lobby!

Much of our intelligence was sharpened by outsider status. That's over. History is fluid. Human gifts are shared. Our ancient values are now being widely emulated by many other peoples--as they should be. And if is genetic, well, our genes are being shared because so many others want to marry us. Yes, I agree, right now we are smarter. Not for long...

'Commentary' Prints Slam of Homosexuality as Against God's Command

The November Commentary is not online yet, but I'm a subscriber, and it contains an article by a Christian theologian, R.R. Reno, that justifies the Jewish law against intermarriage--including Reno's own, for which his Jewish daughter is now paying a spiritual price, he relates in a solemn and regretful tone, as he is barred, rightly he says, from joining her on the bima during her bat mitzvah. The article includes an attack on "modern Christianity" over its approval of homosexuality: "[I]t had rejected the very idea that God's commandments can shape or control how we use our bodies."

Thus Commentary's conservatism on intermarriage puts it in the company of fundamentalist Christians.

Reno's interfaith relationship began at Yale in 1985, he says. Two achievers, thrown together--"our lives as students were full of common experiences and common aspirations...in that bastion of American liberalism." Much more unlikely, he says, would be a union between "a young Republican and a Women Studies major."

True indeed. The new sociology of America has made Jews and Episcopalians peers in elite launching pads, the Ivy League. Yes: why not roll that back, and feminism, and gay rights while you're at it.

CAMERA Director: 'Many, Many Times We Have Urged' Israeli Gov't to Take Action Against American Publications

Last Sunday I went to the CAMERA conference on "Jewish defamers of Israel" and it took me a day or two to recognize what the news was: a speech in which CAMERA president Andrea Levin said that the pro-Israel lobbying group has "an unwritten contract" with the American media to watch their step when writing about Israel. Having listened to my recording of the event, I wanted to set out Levin's comments in full.

Levin's speech was about Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper whose bleak portrayal of the occupation has helped to brief the world on the horrifying conditions there. Levin said that after Haaretz ran an opinion column describing the separate roads in the West Bank as "apartheid" roads, CAMERA members wrote letters to Haaretz publisher Amos Schocken saying this was a false charge. She then read from Schocken's responses. In one he said "the term 'roads for Jews only,' which may be mathematically incorrect, is fine with me.. because it describes the true nature and purpose of the roads." In another reply, Schocken wrote, "Your legalistic response is exactly the type that is used to blur reality, rather than clarify it. It is utterly ridiculous not to call these roads apartheid roads because the entire presence of Jews in the Occupied Territories is of an apartheid nature..."

This was distressing, Levin said, because Haaretz calls itself "the New York Times of Israel." The audience groaned and jeered.

Levin said, "The fact is, you know, we may be unhappy with the New York Times from time to time, and we at CAMERA have been, but I have to say we are fortunate. The American media is much, much more geared to understanding that there is an unwritten contract between them and us, and that is, that things should be factually accurate, and we get corrections all the time. Those corrections are very meaningful sometimes. We can prevent the repetition of serious errors... So there is that give and take here in the States."

Someone in the audience asked if the Israeli government couldn't take action. "Good question," Levin said. "Many many times we have urged in regard to American coverage-- to really, really serious defamatory reports in the American media--we have urged the Israel government, whether it was the IDF or some other components of officialdom, to be involved. Times that we thought that legal actions could be taken." But evidently that couldn't happen in Israel, where they have a "very free press."

Wow. An Israel lobbyist turns over some of her cards! Urging the Israeli government to take legal action against American publications over controversial reports? An unwritten contract with the American media not to say apartheid? A give-and-take with the New York Times?

Amos Schocken's lordly indifference to this sort of bullying makes me proud to be a Jew; his is the unassailable authority of a journalist who says what he says because he believes it, and will not be moved...

P.S. A few days ago I blogged about Jerome Slater's article contrasting Haaretz's coverage of the occupation and the New York Times's coverage. Slater argues that the Israel lobby is not the cause of the difference in coverage. I think he's wrong, for any number of reasons. Certainly he has not heard Levin describe her activities. 

Does Giuliani See Neocon Braintrust as a Means of Raising $?

Giuliani's dangerous assembly of neocon advisers suits his temperament. Giuliani is hotheaded and operatic. I wonder if it also doesn't serve his fundraising interests. Neoconservatism is a largely Jewish movement, and a large amount of political giving is now Jewish. Over half of Democratic Party giving is Jewish, according to trusted estimates, and as I reported in The American Conservative, the new pro-Iraq lobbying group would appear to be largely funded by Jews (notably Sheldon Adelson, who gives $60 million to birthright's don't-marry-gentiles-avoid-the-West-Bank-free-trip-to-Israel program). Just now on Meet the Press, Bill Safire predicted that Obama and Hillary would choose Rahm Emanuel and Dianne Feinstein, respectively, as VP nods. Both Jews; is that where the money is in the meritocratic establishment?

Of course Jewish money tends to be liberal. Yes; but is that changing? Emanuel, Safire notes, is liberal in domestic matters but a "hawk" in foreign policy. Last year the Forward reported that when Lieberman lost to Lamont, a lot of Lieberman's big Democratic Jewish supporters were going to stick with him, out of foreign-policy considerations. I suspect that big Jewish money, typically flowing from Jews in their 50s and older, would tend to be more hawkish than Jewish opinion generally. I don't know. (Someone should assign me to do some reporting on the question.) But to go out on a limb here, I do think money's a big factor in politics.  Lately the Family Research Council had some important conference and everyone in the media was talking about the right wing Christian influence on the Republican party. What about the rightwing Jewish one?

What We Talk About When We Talk About the Arms Dealer's $8 Million Bat Mitzvah

The feds have arrested David Brooks, the New Yorker who made a fortune selling body armor for the troops in Iraq, on fraud charges. There's always been a Jewish angle on this story. Brooks lavished money on horses but it was his $8 million bat mitzvah that became a scandal. The feds' indictment says Brooks wrote off as corporate expenses $20,000 in "leather bound invitations" to his son's Bar Mitzvah in 2000--which I suppose might be excused, taking place in the Clinton era, when we all got leatherbound invitations--but five years later, during the Iraq war, when his daughter had her famous Bat Mitzvah, $122,000 in ipods and digital cameras that he gave out as gifts.

I assume that Brooks's children have not thought for an instant about serving in Iraq.

No, O.J. does not represent the blacks and Brooks doesn't represent Jews, but his grotesque detachment leaves me as a Jew embarrassed. As I've reported, Jews are greatly under-represented in the armed forces. When I tell my mother that Jews have  a new place in American society, she tells me she will take me to the homes of poor Jews in Philadelphia. I'm sure she's right. But this golden moment in the bifurcated life of our society has a Jewish component. Jews have been included and done very well. Brooks's shameless extravagance, or alleged fraud, are not typical, but his privilege is. The great Yiddish writers I.L. Peretz, Aleichem and I.B. Singer all wrote about the dangerous effects of wealth. I see the danger in democratic terms, as the privileged losing touch with the experience of others...

Time Mag Website, and Condi, Broach 'One-State' Solution

Here is a wonderful blog item by Scott MacLeod of Time Magazine, about Condoleezza Rice's testimony before the House yesterday. The perspicacious MacLeod notes Condi's words doubting the two-state solution.

Our concern is growing that without a serious political prospect for the Palestinians that gives to moderate leaders a horizon that they can show to their people that indeed there is a two-state solution that is possible, we will lose the window for a two-state solution.

Amazing. MacLeod lards this revelation with some politically-correct handwringing about Israel's "death warrant" but his general attitude is thoughtful and considerate, I believe he even uses the a-word (apartheid).

Why is this wonderful? 1, Right now Israel is a state of mind as much as anything. A state of the American Jewish mind. The reality of Israel is a country struggling to fit as "western" into a very different geography. This is an ancient problem, and the reason that Richard Cohen of the Washington Post called Israel's creation "a mistake" last year. The more Israel adjusts to the reality of its Arab milieu, rather than western identity and support, the better for everyone. I'm not saying one-state or two-state, I'm saying Middle Eastern country. 2, Israel is becoming every American's business. Yesterday I blogged that Haaretz reports that Condi has likened the situation of Palestinians to blacks in the south under Jim Crow. Good for her; she is bringing her own personal lens to bear on the situation. We will only find a solution here when All Americans feel that this problem is their business and they can bring their experience to bear on it. From my background as a Jewish kid growing up in the boomtime of American liberalism of civil rights and feminism and gay liberation. To John Mearsheimer's military realism. To Condi's black perspective. To MacLeod's apparent revision of Time Magazine's Arabism. To my liberal Protestant mother-in-law smuggling sheets into a hospital in Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, cordoned off by the hateful security fence. America is our country! Let us think as Americans about this problem! As it is, only Jews are licensed to review Walt/Mearsheimer. It is a form of intellectual apartheid.

3, Condi has great political insight. She is the silver lining of the cloud of the Bush Administration. Her statement is wise. For years we on the left were pushing for a two-state solution. The center and right said this was preposterous. Finally they have accepted the reality, but it is usually an "entity." A non-viable state. Forclose the two-state possibility, and it ebbs away into a different reality: the one-state solution that leftwingers (Tony Judt, not Walt/Mearsheimer) are beginning to flock to.

O.K., let's talk about Israel's "death warrant," per MacLeod. Go to Tel Aviv. See the amazing buildings, see the amazing economy and restaurants. See the gay men, see the fruit stands. They will always be there. Read the amazing newspapers. We won't let this be pushed into the sea. Jews will always be in the Holy Land. The Israel created by the yishuv and European emigration is a great fact. The political structure they have created, in which Jews control the holy sites of Jerusalem (and make the birthplace of Jesus a no man's land), and will forever in Olmert's belief, is repugnant. Liberal Americans have to help Israel get to the next place, to accept the presence of Arab Muslims and Christians. Right now the discourse on this issue, in liberal America, is dominated by 19th-century ideals of ethnic separation that border on the racism of ethnic cleansing. Here is Henry Kissinger, given space in the Washington Post, to promote "transfers" of Arab and Jewish land to maintain a Jewish majority in Israel.

Israel will face this demographic crisis again and again. So long as Jews find a comfortable place in America and Europe and decline to emigrate to the Jewish state--which is the great reality of the liberal western world--Israel will require more hateful gerrymandering and wall-building and you-can't-marry-her-ism to preserve her from her surroundings. Let's follow Condi to a better place...

Haaretz Strikes Again; Condi Likens Palestinians to Southern Blacks

Again I wonder why we're not seeing this story in the U.S. press, but Haaretz reports that Condoleezza Rice regards the system of bizarre and freakishly discriminatory laws that govern Palestinian life in the West Bank as being like Jim Crow--and sees Palestinian leader Abbas as a potential Martin Luther King. This is of course true. Spend any time in the West Bank and you will see repugnant sights. Boulders heaped in front of village roads so that Palestinians can't sneak on to the Israeli settlers' roads. Settlers in Hebron throwing rocks at European girls trying to document the apartheid conditions in the old market. Settler girls throwing rocks at Palestinian girls trying to go to school. Etc. Your gorge rises and you want to do something about it.

The other day Andrea Levin of CAMERA rationalized all this stuff, in the Park Avenue Synagogue, as being perfectly reasonable. And Giuliani adviser Daniel Pipes finds the southern-blacks analogy "bizarre." The segregationists in the south mounted similar righteous indignant defenses...

How Israel's Press Prophets Would Have Profited the U.S.

Here's a link to a powerful article (in the Harvard/MIT journal International Security) on the tremendous damage done to the U.S. by faulty press coverage of Israel/Palestine, by Jerome Slater, a scholar at SUNY Buffalo. Apropos of my posts on the Camera conference, Slater says that the Israeli press has provided a true picture to its readers of the moral crisis that Israel is in due to the occupation while the American press has provided a "mythology." This mythology has had dangerous consequences: it has deeply affected our politics, made Americans think that Israel is the good guy and Palestinians are the bad guy, cast an unfair offer at Camp David (a "water-starved" state without the Muslim holy sites) as generous, and so sharply narrowed American policy choices, resulting in disaster for the U.S. in the Arab world.

Titled "Muting the Alarm Over the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict," the article's deeper point is that the many prophetic voices in the Israeli press--generally leftwingers who have cried out against the horrors of the occupation--have served a vital political function there of ringing alarm bells. But they have been completely redlined out of the American discourse, so that we have little idea how desperate matters are. Slater specifically compares Haaretz and the New York Times, and notes that while editorial writers and Thomas Friedman routinely scored the settlements, they looked away from the larger rot: 

Until recently...the Times was largely silent about the overall Israeli occupation—of which the settlements are but one manifestation—and it repeatedly downplayed the devastating consequences of the occupation on the Palestinians. The most important consequence, of course, has been the killing and wounding of thousands of innocent Palestinians. Beyond that are the political costs to the Palestinian people of being ruled by others, the psychological costs of the daily humiliation and harassment associated with the occupation, and, of course, the economic costs. 

Slater's article is further evidence of the Walt and Mearsheimer effect. Though no newcomer to this field, he owes some of his thinking re the Israel lobby to Walt and Mearsheimer, whose huge impact he acknowledges. Yet he also thinks that W&M went too far in the powers they ascribe to the lobby. I think Slater is unpersuasive here; and that for all the achievements of his moral/journalistic investigation, he is blind to the sociological/religious component of the lobby's presence in American elite life. (Do you notice all the coverage of the Christian right on TV lately? What about the Jewish right? Zilch). Yet there is nothing defensive or obstructionist in Slater's response to Walt and Mearsheimer. He has worked hard to expand our field of knowledge on a crucial issue. There is something breathtaking about an independent intellectual...   

      
       
      

Why I'm Bored by California Wildfire Story

I had a brilliant mentor in journalism in Zachary Stalberg, the former editor of the Philadelphia Daily News. He hated natural disaster stories. "No villain."

(Of course the global warming angle does bring back the good-and-evil narrative. )