In US public discourse, Finlandization is generally seen as a form of humiliating appeasement, and something to be avoided at even a very high cost. (Strange, then, that these same westerners have consistently been urging the Palestinians to accept a deal from Israel that gives them terms considerably less favorable than what Finland won from Moscow?)

Read the comments as well.

notes old wine in new bottles

Still waiting for someone to burn the flag of the secular Israeli state.
Still waiting for Blubba to take a stand on the Gaza and the occupied territories.

Tension About Religion and Class in Turkey. Which side are you on Bubba? John? Read the link for once before responding. Both of you.

The issue as I said above isn't religion but the metaphysical valuation of inanimate objects as anything other than themselves. Myers is a modernist and a Platonist. "A brick is a brick is a brick." as someone once said. "Whaddaya mean Love is a rose? Love is an emotion. A rose is a goddamn plant!!"
It's no longer an argument over delusions, but over whether its possible for a secularist to be delusional. It is, obviously.

There is no god. God is a McGuffin. [Look that one up. Learn something.] God, and the Host, are synecdoches for community.
Weinberg, a much more important figure in the movement to which Myers belongs, the self-described "Brights," is a self described Platonist and secularist. I have no idea how it's even possible to be both. I linked to his book Facing Up: Science and it's Cultural Adversaries and its Chapter 15. Zionism and Its Adversaries This is the Platonism and reason of a Nobel Prize winner. Racism.
I will not defend the politics of Platonism. That link is to a screed by another "Bight" quite famous in his field.

We exist as objects in the world of facts. We live as creatures in a world of perceptions. It's a mistake to pretend that as creatures we have unshaded access to the world of facts. Desire for unknown facts is not reason but desire. Falling in love with rocks and insects is not more valuable to our society than the articulation of the ambiguities of perception as they relate to justice and law in a community. The rule of law is not the rule of reason. In the rule of reason there are no laws. The doctrine of Stare Decisis has no place in science but is central to our political order.

It is always a mistake to assume. As I wrote on an old post at Myers' page

Scientists do tend to be optimists. But they also tend to use words like 'truth.' as in 'ultimate truth' but truth is a term of metaphysics, and science is not concerned with truth but FACTS; facts which are mundane until someone has the desire to discover them and then revert to it after the post coital glow of discovery has faded.

You defend assumption and desire. And in doing so you act to defend the crimes of those who share your assumptions.

Colin McGinn "Philosopher" and Bright

I myself see a close link between democracy as a dogma and the idea that everyone's opinion is as good as anyone else's: that is, between equality in respect of voting power and forms of relativism about truth. For if people's opinions do not have equal value, how can we justify giving their votes equal power?

And again

Well, if truth, reason, virtue, etc are not objective qualities that people exemplify to varying degrees, but are rather relative to each person, we have a way out: everyone is as smart and good as anyone else to himself. Then democracy rests on no lie, since everyone really is cognitively and morally equal. Relativism steps in to save democracy from its noble lie. Thus relativism finds a foothold. But relativism is rubbish; so where does that leave democracy?

Myers is small town pedant who doesn't even know what he's defending.

"Netroots: Reformers or bit-players in a shabby drama?"

Obama in Israel is difficult to stomach. For the appropriate response go here.

Meanwhile, Laura Rozen links to the Washington Post

"There is widespread apprehension in Israel that he would be more sympathetic to Palestinian interests than previous American presidents have been."

Regarding Tony Cordesman's Op Ed, today
July 22, 2008.

There is, however, one potential chance to move forward. It centers on an American-led mission, based in Jerusalem, that is trying to build new security forces on the West Bank that will support stabilization efforts by the Palestinian Authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, prevent a Hamas takeover there and end the corruption and abuse of the older intelligence forces, Yasir Arafat’s Mukhabarat.

It's been called "The Dayton Plan," a plan for the Palestinian Contras. It hit the American press last spring.

April 2008
Vanity Fair: The Gaza Bombshell

After failing to anticipate Hamas’s victory over Fatah in the 2006 Palestinian election, the White House cooked up yet another scandalously covert and self-defeating Middle East debacle: part Iran-contra, part Bay of Pigs. With confidential documents, corroborated by outraged former and current U.S. officials, David Rose reveals how President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy National-Security Adviser Elliott Abrams backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever.

Begin one year earlier

April 2007
Conflicts Forum: "Document details ‘U.S.’ plan to sink Hamas"

On April 30, the Jordanian weekly newspaper Al-Majd published a story about a 16-page secret document, an “Action Plan for the Palestinian Presidency” that called for undermining and replacing the Palestinian national-unity government.

The document outlined steps that would strengthen Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, build up Palestinian security forces under his command, lead to the dissolution of the Palestinian Parliament, and strengthen US allies in Fatah in a lead-up to parliamentary elections that Abbas would call for early this autumn.

Then here and here, and here
On Dahlan, read As'ad AbuKhalil

There has never been any discussion by Josh Marshall or Laura Rozen, or the "reality based community"

Scroll down to my post on Wednesday beginning: "Ali Abunimah writes a letter" or click the link. Then read the following:

The NY Times Letters section today is titled: "In the Mideast, a Sobering Contrast." The first letter begins:

"What a sobering contrast between the celebrations in Lebanon and the mood in Israel! Here, we all stand in tears together, one people, united in our sadness ..."

etc. etc...
As'ad AbuKhalil posts a photograph. His post begins

"These are 197 dead bodies delivered by Israel to Lebanon in the prisoner exchange."

Also in the Times, in an Op-Ed, across the page from the letters above, Benny Morris writes

ISRAEL will almost surely attack Iran’s nuclear sites in the next four to seven months — and the leaders in Washington and even Tehran should hope that the attack will be successful enough to cause at least a significant delay in the Iranian production schedule, if not complete destruction, of that country’s nuclear program. Because if the attack fails, the Middle East will almost certainly face a nuclear war — either through a subsequent pre-emptive Israeli nuclear strike or a nuclear exchange shortly after Iran gets the bomb.

Nuclear blackmail.

Both As'ad AbuKhalil and Helena Cobban caught this. Where are Josh Marshall, Laura Rosen and the rest of the righteous Zionists? Where is the rest of the "reality based" community?
Nowhere. Because no reality based community has ever existed, or ever will. Those who claim to represent one, who claim to represent "reason" against "unreason" are hypocrites of the worst sort. Or they would be, if they didn't believe their own lies.

Arguing from reason, evidence becomes irrelevant.

Ali Abunimah writes a letter

"Dear Mr. McCarthy, On what basis do you write that:
"Five Lebanese prisoners, including the notorious murderer Samir Qantar, crossed free out of Israel today in a prisoner swap after the Hizbullah militant group handed over two black caskets containing the remains of two Israeli soldiers"?
Is it on the basis of the claims of the Israeli government that you refer to Mr. Quntar as a "notorious murderer"? I agree that if the Israeli account is true, then he would be a murderer. But Israel lies at every turn and its claims can never be believed without independent verification, as you should well know.
The New York Times reports today: "Mr. Kuntar, who was formally pardoned by Israel on Tuesday as part of the swap agreement, gave a different version of the night of the attack in his court testimony in 1980, excerpts of which were published for the first time on Monday in Yediot Aharonot, an Israeli newspaper. He told the court that Israeli gunfire had killed Mr. Haran as soldiers burst in to free him and that he did not see what happened to Mr. Haran’s daughter."
So by Mr. Quntar's account, the deaths of the Israeli victims was what military people call "collateral damage" from "friendly fire" in all three cases. Since you are apparently relying only on Israeli official propaganda for your reporting -- which has already been found to be false in a key respect by other media, you should be much more careful. For example, the Washington Post website, posted this correction today: "CORRECTION TO THIS ARTICLE Due to incorrect information on the Web site of Israel's Foreign Ministry, earlier versions of this story misstated the number of Israeli police officers killed by Samir Kuntar during the 1979 kidnapping and slaying of an Israeli man and his young daughter. Kuntar killed one police officer." Also, the term "notorious" is clearly subjective since the celebrations in Lebanon at his release suggest he is "famous" and not "notorious" in that country. Some more circumspect reporting please.
Yours
Ali Abunimah"

Helena Cobban
Bushists Fund Lebanon Army; Lebanon Embraces Hizbullah

Sometimes the sheer depth of the ignorance of the people directing the Bush administration's foreign policy manages, yet again, to amaze me.

Evidently, the Bushists don't realize the gravity of the change that overcame Lebanese politics back in May, when the Emir of Qatar was finally able to conclude the Doha Agreement, a resolution to Lebanon's longstanding governance crisis that involved, essentially, caving to Hizbullah's core demands.

Evidently, the Bushists don't understand that-- as I noted here last week-- the main quality displayed by their man in Beirut, Fouad "Turn-on-a-dime" Siniora, is his ability to, um, turn on a dime... Or the fact that, since May, he has represented the pro-Hizbullah coalition's interests in Lebanon, more than Washington's.

Hence, the national holiday announced for Lebanon today, to celebrate Hizbullah's success in gaining the return of the five Lebanese detainees still held in Israel and the remains of a couple of hundred more.

And the Bushists' attitude to the Beirut government's new orientation? Why, just yesterday, the US Central Command's Director of Strategy, Plans, and Policy, who was visiting Lebanon, "announced that the US government has increased its support to the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) by $32.5 million."

Don't get me wrong. I support the Doha Agreement, judging that it was a realistic step that reflects the political balance in the country far better than the previous, heavily polarized and pro-US order did and gives its people a chance to de-escalate their tensions and reconstruct their country. But no-one should misunderstand the true political impact of the agreement.
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And again. Note-taking. record-keeping. boredom

You're pretending there's a right answer when there isn't. There's no universal definition of what actions can be described as "demeaning." But there are ways to argue it:
"Rather the point is this: the a ban on head covering, or religious symbols more generally, in public schools carries different meanings in some cultures as compared to others."

That's a cop out. The ban is grotesque if we define a country as modern according to the common understanding of the term. Are you aware of the politics of contemporary Turkey? The secularists are more reactionary than the Islamists, and more corrupt. From the NYT: "Tension About Religion and Class in Turkey"

You're trying to create a logical system to do the work for you. That's what liberals like to do. It removes them and the rest of us from responsibility. You should be arguing cases and values, and not only rules but principles and morality. That's the best you can do in a crisis. Rules will follow. Try reading this. Read the last sentence.
You cheapen the debate in Turkey and France as others have cheapened it for the US over FISA.

Blacks can be racist of course. But when you grow up with the effects of racism -as its victim- what else do you expect? Jews -Israelis- are allowed their paranoia. Why aren't blacks? Why of course aren't Iranians? [Palestinians would be the obvious choice, but Iran was on my mind at the moment I guess]

But then the question becomes one of "special cases," and that's a problematic category. Israel is a "special case." At least that's what we're told. This country is based on it's own nationalist exceptionalism. America itself is a "special case."
This is how you argue against people who call you "PC."

What do you say about the de facto affirmative action for white people?: "I got my cousin Jimmy a job at the plant." So it becomes "I couldn't get my cousin Jimmie a job at the plant. They're only hiring blacks." Not the best fix, but maybe the only one, for a time.

Rules are blunt instruments. They're no replacement for understanding complexity... Complex bureaucracies are never absolutely fair, so stop pretending you can build one that is.

The public debate of values and principles over time. This is how blunt instruments are come to be and this is how they're changed. The argument itself is more constitutive of democracy than whatever those instruments may be at any point.

Mother Jones: Iran Panic? Talk About It With the Experts

Mr. Safdari,
As I just wrote you off list, you understand, this is not a debate about what the panelists personally advocate or would wish about their countries' policies to Iran. After all, none of them have policymaking power.
It is about what they think is likely to happen or not and why. That's the way I framed it.
It's important to recognize the difference.
It's not about what they think would be nice, or what would be preferable, but
what they think will happen. None of them- us have real policymaking power. Therefore, in some ways, what they would like to happen is not as relevant as the insights they can provide about what they think is likely to happen and why.
Posted by: Laura Rozen on 06/29/08 at 8:43 PM

My precise point is the way you framed the question is the problem, and the experts unquestioning participation in this framing contributes to this problem.
Let me explain it more simply:
Instead of asking "Whether Israel will bomb Iran" why not ask "Why should Israel bomb iran"?
We tend to skip right over the "why" and go straight to the "when" or "whether" question. The requirement of bombing Iran is therefore taken as already established, taken for granted, not open to discussion.
We have seen this before. It was precisely this sort of endless and mindless speculation by experts that connected Osama to Saddam in the public mind, for example.
Posted by: Cyrus Safdari on 06/29/08 at 9:48 PM

"It's not about what they think would be nice, or what would be preferable, but what they think will happen. None of them- us have real policymaking power."

So Laura Rozen defends the paradigm of journalism as sports page, because after all we can't change anything. So much for the responsibilities of citizenship in a republic.
I posted 4 comments. One made it. Cyrus Safdari made my point.
I've added Iran Affairs to my link list.

AA

The New York Times: "when television cameras captured a startling image of Mr. Mugabe holding hands with the smiling South African president, Thabo Mbeki, a professed champion of African democracy." Angry Arab Times: when television cameras captured a startling image of King `Abdullah holding hands with the smiling American president, George W. Bush, a professed champion of global democracy.

As'ad AbuKhalil


and...


Sinan Antoon [not Charlie Rose] or...



Josh Marshall and Matthew Yglesias.

Tell me it's a hard choice.



Just to make it harder I'll add in Henry Farrell and Dan Drezner.

Watch them all as performance. It's not that Marshall, Farrell et al. are unaware of being on stage, self-consciousness is the baseline. But for all of them self-consciousness is connected to the fact that they're posing for and with their friends - literally "narrowcasting" their opinions to a small community- and the poses and the friendships are more important than the issues being discussed. They may as well be apes picking lice out of each others' fur. But unaware that social roles are constitutive -for them as well as others- they imagine themselves very serious people. Turn the sound down and watch. Then compare any of them to Antoon and AbuKhalil.

We pay lawyers to be biased. A self-important press is not an engaged one. Claims to objectivity become the rhetoric of narcissism.

"And for the record (don't post this), Yglesias as an individual has a great, self-aware sense of humor
and is much more starkly honest (if also unapologetic) about his own elitism
than most liberals. Take him out for a beer and I think you'd find that."

And Marshall and Yglesias started out pro-war.

Badger
And a guest post at Patrick Lang's Sic Semper Tyrannis

Gaza/Sadr City/Beirut

Syria Comment
As'ad AbuKhalil
Badger
Land and People. Linked by both AA and one of Josh Marshall's flacks, who may not know that the author, Ramy Zurayk also wrote this.

Gaza, Beirut, and Sadr City.

Badger

As'ad AbuKhalil - The Legacy of Rafiq Hariri: Dahlan Plan for Lebanon.

Jimmy Carter - On Gaza

The world is witnessing a terrible human rights crime in Gaza, where a million and a half human beings are being imprisoned with almost no access to the outside world. An entire population is being brutally punished.

This gross mistreatment of the Palestinians in Gaza was escalated dramatically by Israel, with United States backing, after political candidates representing Hamas won a majority of seats in the Palestinian Authority parliament in 2006. The election was unanimously judged to be honest and fair by all international observers.

Israel and the US refused to accept the right of Palestinians to form a unity government with Hamas and Fatah and now, after internal strife, Hamas alone controls Gaza. Forty-one of the 43 victorious Hamas candidates who lived in the West Bank have been imprisoned by Israel, plus an additional 10 who assumed positions in the short-lived coalition cabinet.

On Israel's 60th birthday, things to remember:

If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been antisemitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?

David Ben Gurion
---

We cannot celebrate the birthday of a state founded on terrorism, massacres and the dispossession of another people from their land. We cannot celebrate the birthday of a state that even now engages in ethnic cleansing, that violates international law, that is inflicting a monstrous collective punishment on the civilian population of Gaza and that continues to deny to Palestinians their human rights and national aspirations.
---

But I can't do it. Whenever I try to mouth these words, a remembered smell fills my nostrils. It is the smell of shit. Across the occupied West Bank, raw untreated sewage is pumped every day out of the Jewish settlements, along large metal pipes, straight onto Palestinian land. From there, it can enter the groundwater and the reservoirs, and become a poison.

Last two links, from As'ad AbuKhalil

A note on a note: the previous post.
Dowd is lectured on moral responsibility by those who claim to represent it, but don't. "Enlightenment" is an ongoing process, and we all live in glass houses, and always will. That's why the opinions of outsiders will always be important.
Dowd is a tabloid writer, exhibiting the ticks and tropes of the Catholic lower middle class. And as a voting democrat you'd think perhaps the intellectual elite of her party would want to consult her on how to approach a segment of the voting population. But instead they waste their time accusing her of misrepresenting herself as one of them. But she's never referred to herself as an intellectual.
The attacks on Dowd are launched from positions of an assumed, but specious, moral superiority. Her sort of pop psychology has it's limitations, but the refusal to engage it and her is akin to the refusal of the American intellectual elite as a whole to engage with anyone, inside or outside this country, who does not see the world through the lens of a dry academicism, an academicism that masks an equally dry and self-serving provincial nationalism. Where is this enlightenment in discussions of Palestine and Gaza? Where is it in discussions of the US and Iraq, when it's the elite, and the elite only, who fidgets about when to leave; as if the continuing growth of facts on the ground, of the construction of new and larger bases and the gargantuan embassy complex didn't imply that leaving is out of the question?
The list goes on. Neoliberalism sees and recognizes only itself, it's own rules and values. Everything else is illogic and irrationalism.

Helena Cobban on Khaled Meshaal
And on Tzipi Livni. Funny
Even more humor here:
"The bloggers will receive briefings on Israel's perception of the security situation and will tour the area between Gaza and the West Bank, known as Israel's "narrow waistline," to illustrate the "true meaning of a return to the borders of June 4th 1967."

One

The proposal that is sure to attract the most attention, and possibly objections, is one to impose the $8 fee on car drivers, and $21 for truck operators, to drive in Manhattan south of 86th Street.

For all the discussion of it before and after it failed no one seems to have commented on the fact that it was a regressive tax. Private vehicles in Manhattan are a luxury, delivery vans driven by small businesses a necessity. A tax only on private vehicles and limousines might well have passed.

Two

Under the heading "Standing with Israel against terrorism," Clinton's official policy paper, released last September and currently touted on her campaign website, states, "Hillary Clinton believes that Israel's right to exist in safety as a Jewish state, with defensible borders and an undivided Jerusalem as its capital, secure from violence and terrorism, must never be questioned." With the phrase "an undivided Jerusalem as its capital," Clinton seems to take a hardline position on a deeply contested facet of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a position like this should have garnered at least passing interest from the mainstream media. So how come nobody's paying attention?"

Three

I had some comments on this post but I removed them. Here's the same author, Patrick Deneen, on Stanley Fish.

Stanley Fish is nearly always half-right about things. Reading this essay, I found myself in agreement with his argument against the high-Enlightenment belief that reason, logic and science were the means to a final and authoritative knowledge of the world. Much political mischief has resulted from this belief that reason and logic could be relied upon to design political societies - starting with the guillotines and likely not ending with the Gulags.

Actually it "ends" in neoliberalism. And Deneen's answer is the Catholicism of Augustine, which

represents the "middle way" ...holding that culture, language, history, tradition, law, interpretation, community, discourse, and finally, politics is the medium of human knowing - but holding simultaneously that there is something to be known. We "see through a glass darkly," but there is something to be seen, even if we can't be positive of its precise outlines and exact dimensions. Mediation is the means to truth and knowledge, not its obstacle, on the one hand, or all that there is, on the other. It is, finally, a sacramental vision, holding that through earthly and corporeal media we gain an access - if indirectly and still imperfectly - of the Divine.

There is no divine, and there is no need for one. But yes if there is to be foundationalism it is better to be based on texts and textualism which allow individuals to think and imagine themselves and their own lives, than on logical mechanism which creates nothing but imperatives, straightjacketing the imagination.
And he argues that libertarians and liberal fellow travelers are cosmopolitan, when they oppose it (uncomprehending). It's silly. Cosmopolitanism is conservative and pessimistic. Deneen is a faux regionalist arguing with pseudo-cosmopolitan technocrats.
oy.

Henry Siegman reviews The Accidental Empire by Gershom Gorenberg and Lords of the Land by Idith Zertal.

Grab more hills, expand the territory

The title of Gershom Gorenberg’s book is somewhat misleading in its suggestion that the establishment of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza was ‘accidental’. While Gorenberg, an American-born Israeli journalist, notes that no Israeli government ever made a formal decision about the future of the West Bank, his account of the first decade of Israel’s occupation leaves no doubt that the settlements were deliberately founded, and were intended to create a permanent Israeli presence in as much of the Occupied Territories as possible (indeed, the hope was for them to cover all of the Occupied Territories, if the international community would allow it). No Israeli government has ever supported the establishment of a Palestinian state east of the 1949 armistice line that constituted the pre-1967 border. At the very least, the settlements were designed to make a return to that border impossible.

It is clear from Gorenberg’s account, and from Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar’s comprehensive survey of the settlement project, Lords of the Land, that the issue dividing Israeli governments has not been the presence of settlements in the West Bank. Shimon Peres of the Labour Party played a key role in launching the settlement enterprise. Their differences have been over what to do with the Palestinians whose lands were being confiscated.

...The most influential supporter of a vigorous settlement policy was Yigal Allon, the legendary commander of Israel’s Palmach, an elite force established before the founding of the state. ‘A peace treaty,’ he said at a government meeting on 19 June 1967, ‘is the weakest guarantee of the future of peace and the future of defence.’ Zertal and Eldar report that he warned against returning even a single inch of the West Bank, and told the cabinet that if he had to choose between ‘the wholeness of the land with all the Arab population or giving up the West Bank, I am in favour of the wholeness of the land with all the Arabs.’ Allon’s views, which shaped the strategic thinking of Israel’s political and security elites for decades, were deeply influenced by his mentor Yitzhak Tabenkin, one of the founders of the Yishuv. Tabenkin believed that partition was a temporary state of affairs and that the ‘wholeness’ of the land would eventually be achieved, whether peacefully or through war.

I've pointed this out before, but I'll do it again: Yigal Allon?
Gorenberg has written at TPM.

When Israel was established in 1948, most of the indigenous Palestinian inhabitants were driven out or fled from the area that became Israel. Approximately 150,000 Palestinians remained behind. Until 1966, these Palestinians lived under martial law. Today, having increased in number to approximately 1.3 million or about one fifth of Israel's population (not including the Palestinian population of Occupied East Jerusalem), they are citizens of the State of Israel and can vote in elections for the Knesset. Despite this, most view themselves as second-class citizens. As indigenous non-Jews in a self-described Jewish state, they face a host of systematic social, legal, economic and educational barriers to equality. Israel lacks a constitution and has no other basic law guaranteeing equal rights to all citizens regardless of religion, race, ethnicity or national origin.
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