Celebrity Apologies

The matter of institutional apologies is a subject that Normblog has commented on several times, most recently here. I broadly agree with Normblog’s views in this area and Norm’s posts save me from having to set out these various considerations (as I would certainly do less ably) in order to preface – by way of drawing a contrast – my remarks about this spectacle involving a pro golfer called Tiger Woods. But I do need to highlight one question regarding apologies, and that is the question of whether they are made publicly, privately, or both.

In the case of institutional apologies, there may well be value in both. Let us imagine that the current Pope decided to apologise on behalf of the Vatican and the entire Catholic Church for the child abuse first committed, and then covered up, by the Catholic hierarchy. It would be worth something were each victim to receive a personal and private letter of apology signed by the Pope on behalf of the Church. The value of such a direct, personal and private apology could not and would not be replaced by a general and public apology by the Pope, made (in order to be public) before international media. Yet such a public apology would also be of value – value of a different kind, and also important, and the need for it would not be removed by private and personal apologies.

And now to my point: I have always thought it inappropriate that celebrities are not only expected to make public apologies for private sins but seem almost eager to do so, and I think it is unseemly in the extreme.

I never wanted to know about Tiger Woods’ philandering in the first place, and now I don’t want to know how sorry he is. I don’t find any of it interesting in any way, and I’ve never understood why, apparently, so many people find such stories and the ensuing spectacles so endlessly fascinating. If anyone were to ask me what I think he ought to do, I’d say he ought to leave the celebrity circus alone; he ought to have the seriousness, remorse and humility to depart from the media spotlight; and he ought to go home, apologise privately and sincerely to his wife, and then show he means it by changing. Not that it would be any of my business to tell him that, except that he seems to be willingly complicit in having his sordid and unimportant story shoved in front of my face every time I want to see what, of real importance, is happening in the world.

Dubai and Double Standards

What was wrong with the Dubai hit? Strangely, many people seem to think that “assassinating” Mahmoud Mabhouh in his hotel room in Dubai was wrong in and of itself.

This, I must confess, I don’t get at all. Israel is at war with Hamas terrorists. They are mass-murderers who try to indiscriminately kill as many Israeli civilians, including children in schools and nurseries, as possible. In war, you kill your enemy – that’s just now it is.

What was wrong with the Dubai operation wasn’t the fact of killing (or “assassinating”, or “executing”, or whatever other term  you prefer) that bloodthirsty terrorist. What was wrong with it was that it was such a bumbling mess. Using faked copies of real passports issued by essentially friendly nations? Plastering the faces of the agents all over the CCTV records of a somewhat less friendly nation? The former angers the countries Israel needs most; the latter makes the Mossad look not only bad, but, more importantly, less of a threat. Israel has lost both diplomatic capital and deterrent value through this operation.

But what seems to upset people, instead, is that Israel killed an enemy that it was at war with. This reminds me of the outrage that erupted when Israel killed a Gazan racist mass-murderer of Jewish children known as Sheik Yassin. One cannot imagine a similarly outraged reaction were, for example, the US or any other country to ever succeed in killing Osama Bin Laden rather than capturing him and putting him on trial.

Double standards? You bet.

PAIJ Patrol, Courtesy of SOAS and the FT

It’s a delicious sport well known to editors at the Groan, the Indy and the New Hatesman: find someone with an unmistakably Jewish-sounding surname to say over-the-top-nasty things about Israel for publication. Whatever these people say must be true because, hey, they’re Jewish! Not that we’d ever be so crass as to point that out, obviously. It doesn’t matter to us! Of course not! (But it does shield our courageous writer against the inevitable charges of anti-Semitism.)

Looks like the FT’s got the hang of this game, too.

It’s not hard to play. First, find a good source of people who are falling over themselves to say over-the-top-nasty things about Israel. Hmm, let’s see…. SOAS! Yes! Even a place like LSE is practically a nest of greater-Israel-Zionism compared to SOAS! Then you just need to scroll through the names… let’s see… Sands… Shepherd… Siegman! Bingo! Henry, your turn to have a go at Israel today — knock yaself out!

And Siegman had a go alright. The failure to withdraw from the West Bank — Israel’s fault. No mention of the fact that Olmert was elected by a majority of Israelis to do precisely that, but then was prevented from doing so by Iran, who, with rocket attacks from South Lebanon (via Hizbollah) and the Gaza Strip (via Hamas) after Israel withdrew from the latter, ensured that further withdrawal from Palestinian territories would become utterly impossible.

But Siegman doesn’t stop there; he goes for the nuclear button: Apartheid state! Again, no intelligent discussion or analysis of this at all. He speaks of treating “citizens” unequally but provides not one ink-molecule of substantiation. Does he really mean citizens? If so, he ought to produce at least one example of where Israeli law provides for differing treatment respectively of, say, Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel. Or is he really talking about West Bank residents who don’t have Israeli citizenship? We’ll never know because this isn’t what actually matters to Siegman. What matters to him is that his little specialty line of business — as-a-Jew Israel bashing — has netted him another piece in another prestigious (relatively) publication. He’s a reasonably successful PAIJ.

A Deserved Nightmare

TechCrunch says that this story will be “a PR nightmare for Citibank”. That nightmare would be richly deserved and so I’m doing my small bit to help make it as nightmarish for Citibank as possible, by spreading the word.

Apparently, somebody at Citibank thinks that gay content is “objectionable content”:

In a bit of strange and disturbing news, fabulis discovered today that someone(s) at Citibank had decided arbitrarily to block fabulis’ bank account due to what was described to us on the phone as “objectionable content” on our blog. In fact, the account — it turns out — was blocked a few days ago without anyone letting us know about it by phone or email.

Huh?

Mind you, fabulis is a serious business, backed by some serious players, and for the life of us we can’t find anything “objectionable” on our blog besides some good humor, some business insights, and some touching coming out stories from some great and fabulis gay people.

Pick it up and post it, people!

Culture of Complaint Leaps the Channel

Quick is a private company, not a public-sector organisation. If it has restaurants in areas where the population is largely Muslim and it sees an opportunity to increase sales by making those restaurants conform to Halal requirements, then it ought to be free to do so. People who want to eat pork will then just have to go somewhere else.

It occurs to me that even if Quick were a service run by the state, it may have the right to make certain of its restaurants Halal. I’m not sure about this – I’ve not taken the time to think it through completely – but starting from the consideration that the ability to eat pork is not some kind of universal right, it’s at least not obvious that the state would be doing something discriminatory in such a case.

Discriminatory would  be, for example, a public swimming pool having “Muslims only” or “ethnic minorities only” hours. At issue in such cases isn’t whether or not having access to a public swimming pool per se is some kind of right (it isn’t; if it were then councils or municipalities that didn’t have public pools would be human rights abusers for that reason) but rather the fact of giving access to some people while denying it to others, and this on the basis of ethnicity, religion, or some other such grouping.

Quick didn’t make certain of its restaurants Muslim-only, denying entry — or access to certain menu items — to non-Muslims. Anyone can walk into any Quick restaurant and order anything they like from the choice available at that restaurant.

Five-Day Break

I won’t be able to post anything for the next five days but I hope to get something up this coming Tuesday. Please do come back next week!

How Many Andrew Sullivans Are There, Anyway?

Via this post at Harry’s Place I came across this post at Andrew Sullivan that I’d missed. I was struck by this statement of Sullivan’s: “Having any view of ‘Jews’ is silly.”

Personally I don’t know why having any view of Jews need be silly (nor why Sullivan puts the word Jews in inverted commas), but Sullivan says it is, which means he would think it silly to say something like this:

Most American Jews, of course, retain a respect for learning, compassion for the other, and support for minorities (Jews, for example, are the ethnic group most sympathetic to gay rights.) But the Goldfarb-Krauthammer wing – that celebrates and believes in government torture, endorses the pulverization of Gazans with glee, and wants to attack Iran – is something else.

So who was the silly person who wrote that? Imagine the coincidence — it was someone with the exact same name as Andrew Sullivan!

But we know it’s a different Andrew Sullivan, because this other one doesn’t put Jews in inverted commas.

Nudge-Nudge-Wink-Wink Anti-Semitism

Nick Cohen is almost always worth a read and this column, appearing though it does in the Daily Groan, is no exception. It’s about Lord Hoffmann and his defense of a British legal system that helps wealthy individuals and organisations silence any voice that displeases them.

Given Hoffmann’s enthusiasm for libel prosecutions, it was certainly impossible for Cohen to call him an anti-Semite in the pages of the Guardian and would be unwise for me to do so here.

But sometimes it’s possible to say what needs to be said without running too much risk of making oneself vulnerable to the anti-democratic campaigning of anti-free-speech goons like Hoffmann, Eady, et al. Voilà Cohen, alors:

[Hoffmann] went for [Ehrenfeld] by pretending she was the inspiration of the libel reform campaign, when he should have known that the case of Simon Singh is the rallying point for English liberals, and then by painting her as a monster from beyond pale. Richard Perle, who supported the second Iraq war and advised the “Israeli right-wing Likud party”, was on the board of her “neoconservative” thinktank, he intoned. Ehrenfeld had “firm views on the Palestinian question” and just in case anyone had missed his laboured point, he rubbed it in by saying that she “was born in Israel but lives in the United States”.

No, we haven’t missed Hoffmann’s point, and neither did his audience, whom Hoffmann had, as Cohen very plausibly puts it, “purring with approval”.

No It’s Not About Victimhood and Identity Politics

As Primavera regulars will know, I am horrified but not surprised at Amnesty International’s persecution of human rights campaigner Gita Saghal (sorry people, no time for links — Google is your friend!), and I support what Ms. Sahgal has done. Furthermore I am extremely sympathetic to her for the fact that her nightmare has now deepened because she is, apparently, unable to find a human rights lawyer to take up her case against Amnesty. Human rights law firms and lawyers are declining her case citing conflict of interest. Well, that’s easy enough to understand (which doesn’t mean it’s right — just easy to understand): if they have to choose between Sahgal and Amnesty, they will choose the latter. Amnesty is their market.

But here is one thing Sahgal has said that I think is very unhelpful:

Although it is said that we must defend everybody no matter what they’ve done, it appears that if you’re a secular, atheist, Asian British woman, you don’t deserve a defence from our civil right firms.

Come on. There is no evidence for this whatsoever and Sahgal is just weakening her case (not to mention her attractiveness as a cause célèbre) with this sort of thing. Why does she now go and throw this kind of tired, discredited, victimhood-and-identity-politics nonsense into the mix?

This comment has immediately reduced her stature in my eyes. The UK is ridden with use of this bad-faith tactic and it is one of the things that is preventing clear debate and clear perception of many of society’s problems. For goodness’ sake!

I Never Could Stand Goodie-Goodies

Coming back, as I promised I would, to the unexpected (at least by me) question of whether or not anti-Semitism is racism, it would be instructive to have a look once again at that Engage comments thread. I’d like to pick out two things being said there that strike me as useful — one useful because its glaring mistakenness serves to illustrate an important point; the other useful because it’s true yet rarely said.

The first is by one of the participants advocating the view that not all anti-Semitism is necessarily racist. N Friedman appears to genuinely believe that all those poison-spitting “anti-Zionists” to be found on today’s Left really don’t have any problem at all with Jews as such; that they are not racist (and apparently can’t be — see below), and that their burning hatred really is “limited to” Israel. I will leave aside here the obvious question of what it could possibly be about Israel that would give rise to such violently emotional involvement with the international politics of a far-off region, and focus for now on this statement by N Friedman:

If the Jewish community outside Israel turned en masse against Israel, they would not much be the target of hatred.

And this is supposed to be an argument as to why today’s anti-Semitism isn’t racist. Where does one even begin? Quite apart from the fact that there is absolutely no evidence this is even true? It’s not racist to isolate an entire religio-ethnic group, qua that religio-ethnic group, and make its social acceptability contingent upon conformity to this or that standard of right thinking?  Who is the Left to tell “the Jewish community outside of Israel” what it may and may not think; what political views it may or may not hold?

Secondly, isn’t this just another example of the good-Jew-vs-bad-Jew dichotomy that is a classic of the anti-Semitic repertoire? Oh yes, of course, sorry — anti-Semitic, sure. But not racist.

But the worst is this: N Friedman clearly fails, completely and utterly, to see what is in front of his nose, which is that his statement serves merely to underline that all these non-Israeli Jews are being targeted as Jews. (But that wouldn’t be racist, either, in Friedman’s view, because the Jews aren’t a “race”. To which, all I have to say is here.)

The other useful thing that gets said in that thread — this one useful because it’s true but rarely pointed out — is that the widespread notion that Leftists, even if they sometimes get it wrong, perhaps even badly wrong, at least always mean well, is naive and mistaken. Here, commenter Paul says:

My main point here actually would be that I have a broad issue with approaches like Postone’s where the broad effect of it seems to be “they mean well but they’re mistaken and misguided”. I just don’t think that today’s left anti-Semites (or any other racists) should get that much credit. They DON’T mean well. They DON’T attempt a nuanced and real understanding of the Israel-Palestine conflict. They’re not interested. They’ve got what they’re after, which is a moral stick to beat Jews with. It’s the most delicious thing that’s ever happened in their lives.

Another version of this “they mean well but they’re misguided” type of analysis is to ascribe left anti-Semitism to a general opposition to nationalisms of any sort; because of this, so the analysis goes, the left must be anti-Zionist because Zionism is a nationalism, and this unfortunately (but, by implication, understandably) deforms into anti-Semitism. (Though, interestingly, Palestinian nationalism is exempt, which shows up the argument’s falseness.)

I think that this “they mean well but they’re misguided” type of analysis comes from people to whom it is unimaginable that the left doesn’t at least mean well. That Postone falls into that category is shown by his “Racism is rarely a danger for the left”. That statement is not only historically not supportable; it is quite shockingly naive. And, as Bill puts it rather eloquently, “Whenever you make something ‘not our problem’ you’re begging for it to come and stay awhile”.

I must say I have thought this about common attitudes toward the Left, and about common analyses of why the Left is so anti-Israel, for a long time, but have almost never — if indeed ever — seen it said by someone else. It is absolutely key that Leftists be disabused of this self-flattering self-understanding, and that others be disabused of this naive credulity with regard to Leftists.

I want to make it absolutely clear that I am not anti-Left (nor am I Right-wing) nor do I, by any means, think that all or even most Leftists are malevolent or in any other way bad, or worse than human beings on average. I just don’t think they’re any better, on average, and I don’t think that relatively more of them are well-meaning than the human population at large. The factors and dynamics that go into determining that a person will define herself as Leftist are, I am sure, numerous, complex, and very difficult to elucidate. But I doubt that somehow one broad political orientation selects disproportionately for “good” or “well-meaning” people. That idea is just nonsense.

Before I close I want to repeat part of the Engage comment I quoted above, because I think that, while not really explaining very much, still makes an accurate observation that is very important and far too rarely made:

[Today's Leftist anti-Semites] DON’T mean well. They DON’T attempt a nuanced and real understanding of the Israel-Palestine conflict. They’re not interested. They’ve got what they’re after, which is a moral stick to beat Jews with. It’s the most delicious thing that’s ever happened in their lives.

Quite.

How Words Mean Things and Remain Useful

There’s an interesting discussion going on in the comments thread of a post at Engage. The part that I find interesting (as well as worrying) concerns the question of whether or not today’s anti-Semitism is racist. Some are arguing that it isn’t.

I’m going to come back to this later because I have more to say about it, but for now (for lack of time) just this: I think that trying to make a case that anti-Semitism, or some anti-Semitism, or today’s anti-Semitism, isn’t racist because Jews are not a “race” is about as accurate and helpful as arguing that no Arab can possibly be anti-Semitic because, hey, Arabs are a Semitic people, too.

Orwell and Uncle Joe at Amnesty International

Amnesty is going from strength to strength. After doing more than its bit to launch the Jenin libel in 2002, after comparing Guantánamo Bay to the Gulag in 2005, Amnesty has now sided with brutal human rights abusers against one of its own. Mazel tov!

Others are commenting on that story; here I merely want to flag up something truly wonderful that I just found:

Amnesty International is being accused in a media article today of putting the human rights of some people above those of others. This is not, and has never been, true. Implicit in the accusation, [sic] is the view that we should choose those whose rights we promote.

Hahahahahahaha! Awesome! Hahahah! HAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAhahah! Haha…. Hahahahaha… That’s so fucking great… Hahaha… Here’s another one:

Baseball umpires have been accused in the media of unfairly calling strikes against batters who chew gum. Implicit in the accusation is the view that baseball umpires should unfairly call strikes against certain categories of batters.

Okay, I made the second one up. But the first one, which is honestly better, comes straight from George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth in his novel 1984 a press release of Amnesty International UK. Check it out — it’s right at the beginning.

Now read the rest of that Amnesty press release. You could read it twenty times and not know it was about Gita Sahgal. Her name is mentioned not once. Nowhere. No Gita. No Sahgal. No way. Not at Amnesty.

Who was it, again, who used to have people airbrushed out of photos and deleted from official histories? Oh yeah…

Going Against the Norm

Normblog asks:

Since God seems to be conceivable as a foundation for morality without further ado, why can’t certain moral principles (respect for life, justice, the right to liberty) be conceived as normatively fundamental without further ado?

Let me start with the simplest of the observations I have to make about this: Normblog itself has God-like powers in that something can be made normative merely by virtue of Mr. Geras’ propounding it. That leaves things a little unfair. But one must soldier on regardless.

A couple more observations, then. First, I wouldn’t say that God is conceivable as a foundation for morality – I would say that God’s being a foundation of morality is part of the very definition of who or what God is. It’s the very raison d’être of God, or at least a key part of it. According to the Abramic tradition, God is eternal, God is omnipotent, God is good (there’s the morality, built right in) – and it’s God’s commandments that all people must obey. The distinction is in the timing: it’s not that the idea, notion or concept of God was already there, and then at some point someone conceived it also as a foundation for morality: its being a foundation for morality was part of its very beginning.

Here’s a less subtle point: this conceiving of God as a foundation for morality did not happen ‘without further ado’. If Freud’s ideas about how God (meaning here of course the concept of God) came into being are correct, well, that was a process of thousands of years at least, perhaps more. If, on the other hand, God never came into being at all because He’s always existed, well then, in that case He really exists and ‘conceiving of Him as a basis for morality without further ado’ hardly captures the process by which He revealed Himself and his moral will and law to Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and apparently also Jesus and Mohammed and lots of others on the way along in there.

But most importantly, the concept, idea, notion, or, if such be the case, reality of God is a very different thing from a moral principle. God, if He exists as commonly understood, is an agent (and, according to ancient reports, an extremely powerful one). God, according to the tradition that has Him as a basis for morality in the first place, has created the world and He has created us, and He has done so that we might obey and please Him, and should we fail to do so He may punish us. God wills, God commands, God even threatens. In the God scenario, it’s not that we took the concept of God and conceived it as a foundation for morality; that was never our choice to make. We can take or leave principles – we can make them a basis for morality, or sneeze at them. But we don’t decide or choose whether or not God exists, and if He does then it’s He who decides the basis for morality and not we.

The idea of God as a basis for morality is the idea that an eternal and omnipotent agent has willed and commanded us to live a certain way. I’m not sure there’s anything obvious that this has in common with the idea of principles as a basis for morality, in which we choose certain abstract principles that we decide we’re going to live by.

I surmise that Norm came at his post from the point of view of an atheist writing for atheists, assuming a shared understanding that obviously this God business is just another human construct. It might well be that, too. But if you take God as the basis for your morality then you don’t share that understanding — you actually believe He exists. Which makes your basis for morality a rather different kind of thing than a principle or a collection of principles. And if you don’t believe that God exists, then you’re not going to be arguing that He might be a basis for morality.

The European Voice on Baroness Ashton

Further to my comment on Baroness Ashton, there is an article in this week’s European Voice that addresses the criticism Ashton has received for, in essence, not travelling enough. There is a symbol next to the headline that indicates that a subscription is required to read the article, but I did not encounter a password wall. Perhaps the publication’s website is recognising my company’s IP address (we do have a subscription). Just in case, here’s the key bit:

Javier Solana served ten years as the EU’s foreign policy chief but he waited in vain for the Lisbon treaty, which would have enhanced his powers, combining the role of high representative of the Council of Ministers with that of a European commissioner – the double role that Ashton enjoys.

Solana’s performance provides the main template for Ashton’s job – and she is refusing to follow it.

Solana’s first month in office set the tone for the entire decade that he served as foreign policy chief. In the week after he was appointed in October 1999, he travelled to Helsinki for a summit with Russia, to Strasbourg to address the European Parliament’s foreign affairs committee, and to Kosovo for a two-day trip. The following week, he met Middle East leaders in Oslo and travelled to Algeria. He gave a speech in Paris and then took off for Washington.

In the remaining three weeks of November, he took trips to Paris (an additional three times), The Hague, Helsinki, Berlin (twice), Strasbourg, Istanbul, Florence, Luxembourg, London (twice), Madrid, Lisbon and Vienna. He kept up that frantic pace through much of his tenure.

Solana gave the EU far more visibility on the international stage than the mandate of his post, or the EU’s policies on many matters, would have suggested. But his effectiveness is more difficult to assess.

He was instrumental in preventing all-out civil war in Macedonia in 2001, for example – something he could not have done from Brussels. But his absences from Brussels also meant that he did not spend much time building a foreign-policy bureaucracy, leaving the task to others.

Nominally, he was secretary-general of the Council of Ministers. In practice, Pierre de Boissieu, the deputy secretary-general, ran the secretariat. The November summit that appointed Ashton to the post of high representative recognised this reality and made de Boissieu secretary-general in title as well as deed.

Ashton, by contrast, has been focusing on the mechanics of foreign policy. Mainly, this means working on the European External Action Service, the EU’s new diplomatic service. But she has also forced re-assessments of the fundamentals of current and future EU missions in a way that Solana never found time for in between his trips.

For more than a week, Ashton suspended planning for the EU’s future training mission for Somali security forces. She wanted greater clarity on the political strategy behind the mission. Similarly, she forced military and political planners to sit down together to discuss the future of EU peacekeeping in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a matter that Solana could not be bothered with.

Looks like the Baroness may not be as hapless as I’ve made her out to be.

Anti-Semitism on the Google News Home Page

A couple points up front:

1. Google is a private company and as such should be permitted to say — or post online, which is the same thing really — pretty much anything it wants. Anti-Semitism, other racism, sexism, whatever. If it offends people, tough luck. (I’m not saying this would be smart or clever of Google. I’m just saying it must be legal.)

2. The “Google News” home page is an automated compilation (or “aggregation”, as Interweb types prefer) of news from all over the Internet. People at Google don’t select and then post stories; some software does.

Nevertheless it’s disturbing to go to the Google News homepage and see a headline like “Blood Lust: Israelis back new strike on Gaza amid calls to prosecute ‘war criminals’”. This headline appeared just now (approximately 18:00 GMT+1) as a link to a YouTube video from something called RussiaToday.

It would be difficult for Google to make absolutely sure that no racist slurs ever appeared on its home page. How, after all, do you teach software about racism and how to recognise its tropes? On the other hand, the software behind Google News is selective. It doesn’t just grab any old crank’s content and throw it up on its multi-million-reader home page. It compiles (or “aggregates”, as afficionados of the Intertubes like to say) content from well-known, high-traffic, presumably “reputable” sources. Or at least, that is the theory.

So when we see blatantly anti-Semitic tropes on the home page of Google News, we know that open anti-Semitism is now being peddled by established, high-traffic, “reputable” organisations. (UPDATE February 4: Please see the comment by Snoopy below, and my reply.)

But then, we knew that already. As Harry’s Place points out, all the way back in 1996 the Telegraph was willing to publish this, about Anthony Julius:

“It became clear almost immediately that the incompatibility of the Prince and Princess of Wales stretched even to the solicitors they had employed.

“The prince, as expected, had chosen the bridge-playing Fiona Shackleton, 39, of Farrer and Co, who had also represented the Duke of York in his separation agreement.

“One of the country’s most respected family law specialists, much of Shackleton’s career has been geared to arranging favourable divorce settlements for her clients. She adopts a conciliatory approach.

“Unfortunately, her softly-softly approach is at odds with the more bullish attitude of the princess’s solicitor. Anthony ‘Genius’ Julius, 39, is not a divorce lawyer but a specialist in media law, acting for Robert Maxwell and once employed by the Daily Mail.

“His background could not be further from the upper-class world inhabited by his opposite number. He is a Jewish intellectual and Labour supporter and less likely to feel restrained by considerations of fair play.

“‘I’d be very worried if I were the royal family,’ says a Cambridge don who taught him. ‘He’ll get lots of money out of them’.”

Will The Lancet Now Get Back to its Brief?

The Lancet has had to retract the study that it published linking the MMR jab to autism. This is a severe — and deserved — blow to the credibility of The Lancet. Perhaps it will motivate the board and staff of the journal, who are evidently politicised to an unseemly degree, to get back to basics and stick to their brief, which is to publish medical research, and not use their (now tarnished) scientific pedestal for Israel-bashing.

It’s Not Poor Baroness Ashton’s Fault

Catherine Ashton has recently been blasted in the press for many things, and apparently is the subject of some ‘controversy’ (scare quotes because I suspect it’s just a media thing and nobody else cares at all).

One of the things she has been criticized for is her “failure” to fly to Haiti after the earthquake. I have no particular interest in Ashton one way or the other, but this business about her not going to Haiti seems to me quite inexplicable.

Writing in the Times, Agnès Poirier says:

It would seem that the Labour peer spends more time on the Eurostar commuting home to London than in her office, where nobody answers the phone after 8pm.

Too bad when the caller is Hillary Clinton saying that she’s on her way to Haiti. Was Catherine en route? No. On Friday January 15, she had cancelled all appointments to go home earlier. José Manuel Barroso had to send Karel De Gucht, the Development Commissioner.

A few days later, Lady Ashton tried to defend herself. Her arguments fell decidedly flat: “I’m neither a doctor nor a fireman.” Indeed, but surely she must know that diplomacy at this level implies symbolic gestures and fast action. The EU has committed four times more in aid to Haiti than the US, so it would have been logical, if not crucial for Europe’s image that its Foreign Affairs Minister stood alongside the Secretary of State.

It’s not clear how Poirier came to the determination that Ashton’s arguments fell flat. I find them entirely reasonable. Of course diplomacy requires symbolic gestures, but that does not mean it always requires the symbolic gestures suggested by a commentator in the Times. It is not obvious how a visit by Ashton would have helped anything or anybody – Haiti or Haitians, or the EU or Europeans, via symbolic gesture or otherwise.

Poirier’s argument (to use the term loosely) is that because the EU donated more money than the US, Ashton should, by “logic”, have “stood alongside” Clinton. Poirier would need to develop that argument a little, it seems to me – fill in the many missing steps of “logic”. Poirier evidently believes that an Ashton photo-op in Haiti would have done the “image” of the EU some good. I very much doubt that it would have had any impact at all.

Hillary Clinton is an international political star. Everybody knows who she is. If she goes to Haiti, it means something. It means, to Haitians, that their plight is being taken seriously. It means, to the world, that the US is on the case. It’s comforting to Haitians, and it’s reassuring to governments and private people donating their own money all over the world.

Catherine Ashton is, and came into office as, a nobody – at least by the standards that apply at this level of things.

All the more reason, one might perhaps say, for her to start getting herself seen in the right place at the right time.

But it wouldn’t help. Who, outside of Brussels and governments in national capitals, knows who Javier Solana is? He was Ashton’s predecessor. For ten long years he was the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy; before that he’d been the Secretary General of NATO – during the Balkan war, which was a very high-profile moment for NATO – and before that he’d been Foreign Minister of Spain. Not exactly a nobody to begin with and, as I happen to know from a friend of mine who worked very closely with him on a daily basis at NATO, a highly image-conscious and almost compulsive publicity-seeker.

At NATO, during the Balkan war, he’d been a global player, right up there with President Bill Clinton. But by the time his tenure as High Representative of the EU came to an end, he’d become a nobody.

No, it’s not Ashton, and a Haitian publicity stunt would turn neither her nor the EU into players. Poirier writes that a diplomat “confided” that Ashton had killed the job. (Diplomats talk all the time and at great length. It’s always in confidence, and if the confidence were broken, they’d simply deny having said whatever it was.) Well, that diplomat’s assessment is quite mistaken. Ashton didn’t kill the job; it was dead on arrival. It was killed by the Member States of the EU, who underlined just how dead they wanted the High Representative job to be by creating a competing position, President of the European Council, and then putting nobodies into both.