Andrew Sullivan’s Jew Obsession

It’s now beyond doubt that Andrew Sullivan has an issue about Jews. I’m not sure what exactly it is, but what I’ve observed is that “Jew” is a category he obsesses over.

In a recent overview of this problem I was still willing to conclude that he probably isn’t an anti-Semite, or that he is at least still worthy of the benefit of the doubt.

My doubt, unfortunately, is fast diminishing, as a result of posts like this one.

What bothers Sullivan here is not the thing that should be bothering him, namely that someone tries to build a defence of the Crusades in which it is, according to his own description of that defence, “fine and dandy to kill Muslims”  (a description which, however, he does not substantiate).

That should be a major scandal, if it is true as Sullivan describes it. But he just passes right over that because what really gets to him is something else altogether, namely that someone might be troubled by the fact that Jews were also killed during the Crusades. That — someone calling attention to the Jews in the story — is what Sullivan truly finds intolerable.

Yup, he’s got a serious Jew problem, Sullivan has, and it twists his mind.

The Gradual Dispersal of Euphoria

Candidate for quote of the week:

The big theme of 2009 was the gradual dispersal of the international euphoria that surrounded the election of Mr Obama. That euphoria probably peaked on the very day of his inauguration. It has been downhill all the way since then, as it has gradually become clear that, these days, no US president – however gifted and charismatic – can snap his fingers and change the world. From Iran to Afghanistan to the G20 and the failure of the Copenhagen summit, the year 2009 has offered a long tutorial on the intractable nature of global problems and the limits of American power.

Gideon Rachman

Britain’s Orwellian Government

It long ago ceased to be news that Britain, the modern world’s erstwhile cradle of liberty and democracy, is the place in the West where democratic norms and freedoms are eroding most rapidly. Video-camera surveillance covering every square inch of the major cities; free expression a thing of the past; and inexperienced, poorly educated, resentment-ridden “social” workers in their twenties taking children away from their parents are just a few manifestations of the Orwellian (and essentially totalitarian) spirit that lies coiled at the heart of British government.

So the latest assault by the British government on liberal civil society comes as no particular surprise, yet it probes new heights of absurdity and of sinister subversion of civil society. The government has decided that “hate crime” is under-reported and is therefore encouraging Her Majesty’s subjects to, please, tattle-tale a little more on your neighbours, colleagues and friends. Bring us anything you have, please. You don’t have anything? Look for something!

These methods were perfected by the Stasi.

Not only that, but the Government has created, parallel to the police and the justice system, a separate system of PC Panels to ensure that those traditional guardians of the rule of law (which must be suspect because they are not new) make politically correct decisions:

“Hate Crime Scrutiny Panels review completed hate crime cases, including domestic violence and rape cases, to see if they were dealt with appropriately and sensitively, from a community perspective.

So “appropriately and sensitively” is what matters today, not “according to the law”. Merely applying the law is far too established a principle not to be suspect to today’s paranoid, all-controlling, politically correct, tradition-and-establishment-hating British government. ”From a community perspective” is what’s important — not from a perspective of… say… the law of the land.

One wonders, then, who exactly the Crown Prosecution Service is referring to when it says, apparently without any intentional irony: “The under reporting of crime can sometimes be due to lack of confidence in the criminal justice system.”

Lack of confidence? Surely not! In a criminal justice system that produces things like the following? You jest:

In October, a study by the Manifesto Club found schools were reporting 40,000 incidents of racism a year involving children as young as five after everyday playground squabbles.

Earlier this month, two devout Christian hoteliers were cleared of insulting a Muslim guest after a judge heard that she had claimed Jesus was a “minor prophet” and the Bible was untrue.

In the summer, a grandmother was investigated by police for a ‘hate crime’ after writing a letter to her council objecting to a gay pride march.

David Green said these cases were likely to be the “tip of the iceberg”.

Mr Green said the CPS’s network of 42 “hate crime scrutiny panels” to sift through successful and unsuccessful hate crime prosecutions to see if any lessons can be learned were like a law firm going on an “fishing expedition for more business”.

He said: “The CPS is starting to resemble the law firms that advertise on television their ability to win compensation for people who tripped on the pavement.”

But if this next tidbit, from the you-couldn’t-make-it-up department, isn’t the purest Orwell, then I don’t know what is:

“While it may seem counter-intuitive to some, we believe that an increase in the number of hate crimes being reported can be a sign that we are starting to have a positive impact,” Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary, said.

The Home Office needs “to see a substantial level of proof before we conclude that hate crime is not a problem in a particular area”, Mr Johnson added.

Gone are the days when the accused was to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. Now everyone is guilty until proven innocent. In the cradle of mondern democracy.

Sometimes The Guardian Gets It Right

The Guardian is a paper that, like The Independent and The New Statesman, has shown itself willing to tolerate the use of anti-Semitic tropes by its writers in the context of its often quite vicious campaigning against the very legitimacy of the word’s only Jewish country, and in so doing contributes to the not only unmistakable but indeed rapid erosion of what had been, for some decades after the war, a taboo in Britain against open anti-Semitism. But fair is fair, and clearly at least some Guardian writers remain genuinely troubled by anti-Semitism.

What is Naomi Klein’s Carbon Footprint?

It has occurred to me to wonder about this. I’m no environmental Holy One but I bet Her Holiness Naomi’s carbon footprint is many multiples of mine. I mean, she flies around a lot, doesn’t she? So I googled “What is Naomi Klein’s Carbon Footprint”, exact phrase, and found just one hit. Well, now that’s two of us asking. Naomi?

Nine-O for Free Speech

Canada’s Supreme Court has made my day. In Canada, at least, the courts henceforth shall not be used, as they are in Britain, to shut down reporting on matters of public interest just because that reporting happens to be personally inconvenient to some rich or powerful individual. If all countries’ judiciaries were as clear-headed about this as Canada’s, there would be no need for Rachel’s Law (a beautiful name, by the way, for a beautiful law). Hat tip: Norm

Uh, You Mean Oslo, Mr. Mortished

Carl Mortished has an insightful article in The Times which, to anyone interested to know what really happened at Copenhagen, is well worth a read.

Mortished is the World Business Editor at The Times and his article on Copenhagen has the substance and level of analysis to justify that title.

All the more unexpected, then, for him to think, apparently, that Obama picked up his Peace Prize in Stockholm. Mortished writes:

The cheek of the Obama roadshow must baffle and irritate China’s political leaders. China didn’t threaten the world financial system with junk bonds; its army has not invaded other countries (although it has suppressed internal uprisings), but Mr Wen was not fêted in Stockholm. No Nobel for the Chinese Premier.

It’s bad enough that any editor at The Times doesn’t already know that the Peace Prize is awarded in Oslo. But this Obama-in-Oslo thing was only just all over the news!

Well, read the article anyway. (And it may get corrected, as I’m going to e-mail Mortished about this now.)

New Fiction by Naomi Klein

Top-tier PAIJ Naomi Klein has an article up on HuffPo about how, for Obama, no opportunity is too big to blow (which in my mind rather triggers the question of whether, for Obama, any Wall Street dick is too big to blow, but that’s another topic). According to Klein, the failure at Copenhagen was all Obama’s fault.

For people like Klein, it’s not about assessing what’s really going on or working with the world of actual reality; it’s about writing something that will please your market and be consistent with your carefully cultivated image.

She claims she understands that Obama is constrained by Congress and can’t promise more than he can deliver, and then in the same breath blithely ignores these factors and berates Obama for not having ignored them himself.

I noted the billing in her HuffPo byline: “award-winning journalist”. That must be why her account of what happened at Copenhagen has so little to do with reality.

What Obama’s Peace Prize Means to Me

The Nobel Committee never said it, but I am inclined to imagine (because I would like to believe it) that its awarding of the Peace Price to Obama was as much a repudiation of what George W. Bush represented as it was an endorsement of Obama himself.

I voted for Obama for two main reasons: 1. he promised to be everything that George W. Bush should have been and wasn’t, and 2. he promised not to be all the things that George W. Bush was.

What was Bush? Bush was reckless, irresponsible, foolish, foolhardy, extremely arrogant, uncurious, childish, nasty, provincial, and utterly unconcerned for the wellbeing of his country and its people.

Obama is none of those things. And so, in my imagination, his Peace Prize was the Nobel Committee’s way of saying to Bush: “We, the august Nobel Committee, do hereby, before the entire world, repudiate you and everything you have represented. May you live in shame and be remembered in infamy.”

Of course, the Nobel Committee could never have said what I here imagine it to have meant. And yet: is it not to be found between the lines of its announcement of the prize? Judge for yourself:

Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama’s initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened.

Jewish and Feeling Unimportant? Be a PAIJ!

If you’re a Jew with a need to make yourself more important than you really are, here’s one career option with a relatively high chance of success: become a PAIJ – a Public Anti-Israel Jew. Editors of the Guardian, the Independent, the New Statesman and the BBC will flock to you like flies to shit. They need PAIJs as a cover for their Israel-hating agendas. “Obviously”, so the thinking goes, “whatever we’re putting out can’t be called anti-Semitic if the people who are saying it are Jewish”. So they find some Jews who are willing to do their saying for them, and voilà, they’ve got themselves provably non-anti-Semitic hate campaigns against Israel! Now, as a random PAIJ you may never become as big as a Noam Chomsky or a Tony Judt — indeed chances are you’ll have to settle for being a very minor figure. But still — you’ll get published, your name will be out there, you’ll get some attention. Worth considering, no? Hundreds of your fellow MOTs are already well-established in this trade, but there is plenty of room for more!

An Anthropology of the BBC

Nick Cohen describes a phenomenon:

We have been at war since the autumn of 2001. Our intelligence services spend virtually all their time countering Islamist plots. Yet Islamist violence barely features in thrillers. Whether the public gets what the public wants or the public wants what the public gets is always an open question, but the spy dramas that have won the largest audiences and greatest critical praise all daintily step around the jihadist in the room.

…

For connoisseurs of the issue-avoiding thriller, nothing beatsSpooks. The real MI5 deals with radical Islam almost to the exclusion of all other threats. The BBC’s fictional MI5 deals with every threat except radical Islam. I appreciate there are better ways to spend my time, but every week I am transfixed by the effort the corporation puts into steering clear of al-Qaeda. In 2005, when real Islamists were bombing London, Spooks seemed to be a truly contemporary drama. Alas, the terrorists it had plotting to destroy London weren’t the followers of Sayyid Qutb but anti-technology Greens, who, say what you will about them, are on the whole a peaceful lot. In 2006, an Islamist cell was once again threatening to commit a crime against humanity. Inevitably, the writers could not confront the existence of actual terrorists and the Islamists turned out to be Mossad agents in disguise. For the BBC, as for the European and Arab far-Right, all Islamist atrocities were the work of the international Jewish conspiracy, that manipulates its dupes like a puppet-master jerking his strings. In the opening episode of the current series, the Sacred Army of Righteous Vengeance staged a mock execution of Harry Pearce, the head of MI5′s Counter-Terrorism Department. But, initiates wondered, why would they want to kill him when the BBC has already made it clear that there are no Islamist terrorists for MI5 to counter? True to form, the Sacred Army of Righteous Vengeance turned out to be yet another front organisation attempting to besmirch the good name of al-Qaeda, this time run by Hindu extremists.

First the Greens, then the Jews, then the Hindus-baffled viewers will be expecting the English Quakers and Burmese Buddhists next. Maybe the BBC will get round to them, but as the eighth series of Spooks draws to its conclusion, we know that for the time being at least, the scriptwriters have identified the real enemy. Episode by episode, Harry and his team have learned about a conspiracy of awesome power. As with Bourne and Bond, it is a cabal that has established itself at the highest levels of Western intelligence services. Once again, the good guys must fight the real menace that comes from the enemy within.

And then explains the reasons for it:

1) Fear. Ever since the Rushdie affair, British editors have feared that criticism of radical Islamists will lead to attacks on their staff and, more pertinently, on themselves. Suppressed panic explains why British newspapers did not follow European and indeed Middle Eastern newspapers in running the Danish cartoons of Muhammad. Although it is absurd to believe that a weak joke about bin Laden would provoke jihadis into bombing Channel 4′s glass and steel headquarters in Westminster, cowards die many times before their deaths and once cowed editors have killed one story, they will kill hundreds more.

2) Racism. Although few television executives say so explicitly, most believe that the bulk of British Muslims support al-Qaeda in an inchoate way. Offending the enemy therefore means offending multiculturalism. If the accusation of “Islamophobia” carries any meaning, it must condemn the assumption that all Muslims are terrorist sympathisers. Although they say they don’t accept the calumny in theory, most in television behave as if they do in practice.

3) Conformism. Once small bands of people have established a prohibition, it is ferociously difficult to shake them out of it. British TV managers are indistinguishable in class, beliefs and tastes. They socialise with each other and swap information and jobs. As any anthropologist will tell you, taboo-breakers in a closed society risk the censure of the tribe.

Hat tip: Harry’s Place