Once I began to notice that I was getting a certain relatively steady level of traffic, which I took to mean that I had a set of regular readers, I began to feel that didn’t want to disappoint them — or should I say you.  If you were going to be nice enough and appreciative enough to come back to my blog every day then I sure wanted to have something for you when you arrived.

Unfortunately, I’m finding I just plain don’t have the time for a post a day. Things are now happening in other areas of life that are making that pace — already leisurely enough by the standards of some bloggers — impossible.

I’m not going to announce a cessation of blogging. I’ll just say that I don’t know how often I’ll be able to post. I may get a couple of posts up per week, or maybe only a couple per month, or maybe not even that. I don’t want to say I’ll stop because I can well imagine that something will come along that I’ll just have to post about. By then, of course, I may well have no more readers. Pity, but oh well. If a tree falls in the woods and there’s no one around to hear it, the tree has still fallen.

The NAACP has sent a pathetic, moaning complaint to authorities after its headquarters received e-mails from nine-year-old children in an Alabama school calling its members “niggers”, saying that they were sub-human, genetically incapable of advanced culture, and should be used as slaves. The NAACP whinges that this is “racist”.

Although the e-mails had come from the school’s e-mail servers, the school’s Principal denied that there was any problem. “It is true that these e-mails were written by children at our school while they were in school, but we always try to teach the children to consider various points of view”.

Primavera itself is unable to take any position on the e-mails. We simply report the news and it is not up to us to evaluate whether calling black people “niggers” and saying they are sub-human and should return to slavery is in any way racist. One man’s racist is another man’s freedom fighter, after all. That is why the word “racist” in the headline is in inverted commas. If this blog used photos, here’s the one we’d use to accompany this article, because it’s important to underline that there is a possibility, after all, that those kids may be right and that niggers really are sub-human and would make good slave material. And anyway, to be perfectly honest, it just doesn’t suit Primavera’s own prejudices and priorities to show any concern over racism against niggers – on the contrary — which his why we need to distance ourselves from any such concern by the use of scare quotes.

What in the world am I on about? This.

Hat tip: Normblog

(Note: this post is satire.)

How long did the Dubai hit stay top, front and centre on the Google News home page? Well, it’s over six weeks now, and counting. It’s non-stop. The biggest story of the year. Seems like only yesterday — yet it happened just exactly one week after the Haiti earthquake.

When NATO takes out Taliban and Quaeda terrorists in Pakistan and Afghanistan via targeted killing, it’s a line in the news for one day. When Israel takes out a Hamas terrorist in Dubai via targeted killing, the whole world erupts and can’t get over it for months.

There’s a good op-ed about this in today’s FT. It’s a reply to the appalling anti-Israel smear-job that the FT ran last week, and a capable defence of of Israel’s right to defend itself. Andrew Roberts writes:

The intelligence agents of states – sometimes operating with direct authority, sometimes not – have carried out many assassinations and assassination attempts in peacetime without the legitimacy of those states being called into question, or their being described as “rogue”. In 1985 the French Deuxième Bureau sank Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior trawler, killing photographer Fernando Pereira, without anyone denouncing France as a rogue state. Similarly, in 2006, polonium 210 was used to murder Alexander Litvinenko without Putin’s Russia being described as “illegitimate”. That kind of language is only reserved for Israel, even though neither Pereira nor Litvinenko posed the danger to French and Russian citizens that was posed to Israelis by the activities of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.

The reason that such double standards still apply – more than six decades after the foundation of the state of Israel – is not because of the nature of that doughty, brave, embattled, tiny, surrounded, yet proudly defiant country, but because of the nature of its foes.

Indeed. Read the whole article — it’s not long and it’s very much worth a read.

Haiti is forgotten because nobody really cares. How much private satisfaction is to be gotten out of reading about a human catastrophe on an unimaginable scale? Gloating over the supposed mis-steps and supposed immorality and general all-around terribleness of the Jewish state, however — that’s something there’s a market for.

I blog because I have things I want to say, and some of those things strike me as being very important, and some of those require a bit of thought and care to put clearly and succinctly, but on most days I just don’t have time or only have time for brief, shoot-from-the-hip posts, and  so I often wind up leaving unsaid the things that are most important because I just don’t have time to say them as well as I want to. So it’s great to find just the thing I wanted to say very well formulated somewhere else. I can just quote it, link to it, and feel I’ve done what I really wanted to do, namely add my voice to those saying a certain important thing.

I found one of those things today on Harry’s Place. It’s been said before, but it needs to be said as many times as possible by as many people as possible. It’s this:

The familiar complaint that critics of Israel are being silenced or cowed by charges of antisemitism is in some ways the reverse of the truth. It’s people who call attention to antisemitism, and the enabling or papering over of antisemitism so vividly illustrated by Pilger’s rant, who are being dismissed as Zionist agents, Arab haters, people who can’t possibly be arguing in good faith. We’re not opposing bigotry, the logic goes; we’re employing “the usual tactic,” as Caryl Churchill said of Howard Jacobson when he condemned her ugly [and shockingly anti-Semitic -- Primavera] play Seven Jewish Children.

That was written by David Adler of Lerterland, and I found it via Harry’s Place. Adler goes on to quote Huey Newton:

We realize that some people who happen to be Jewish and who support Israel will use the Black Panther Party’s position that is against imperialism and against the agents of the imperialist as an attack of anti-Semitism. We think that is a backbiting racist underhanded tactic and we will treat it as such.

In other words, we categorically refuse to discuss or acknowledge antisemitism, and we will greet anyone who attempts to do so with unthinking hostility.

And we will loudly (and dishonestly) complain that anyone who brings even the slightest criticism of Israel gets accused of anti-Semitism, and we will congratulate each other for being the brave ones who resist the strangely potent and dark and furtive powers that seek to silence us, even those of us who are experts on different kinds of Jews and openly have Jewish friends and use words like “goyim” and “mitzvah”.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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”.

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!

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.

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.

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…

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.

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.

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’.”

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.

There are two interesting takeaways from this experiment. The first is that music hijacks some very fundamental neural mechanisms. The brain is designed to learn by association: if this, then that. Music works by subtly toying with our expected associations, enticing us to make predictions about what note will come next, and then confronting us with our prediction errors. In other words, every melody manipulates the same essential mechanisms we use to make sense of reality.

The second takeaway is that music requires surprise, the dissonance of “low-probability notes”. While most people think about music in terms of aesthetic beauty – we like pretty consonant pitches arranged in pretty patterns – that’s exactly backwards. The point of the prettiness is to set up the surprise, to frame the deviance. (That’s why the unexpected pitches triggered the most brain activity, synchronizing the activity of brain regions involved in motor movement and emotion.) I wrote about this concept in Proust Was A Neuroscientist.

Lehrer then goes on, quoting from something else he’d written earlier, to cite the philosopher and musicologist Leonard B. Meyer in Emotion and Meaning in Music which Meyer published in 1956. I haven’t read that book (yet) but many years ago I read and never forgot an article Meyer had published in 1959, Some Remarks on Value and Greatness in Music. It’s far shorter than a book but gets across Meyer’s account of what makes great music great very effectively. Unfortunately it appears to still be under copyright so I can’t just post here the copy I have scanned from an old (1980) edition of Aesthetics Today, but I believe that under fair use rules I can send it to you if you e-mail me and request a copy. If you want to know why, for example, Mahler was great while another conductor-composer, Leonard Bernstein, was merely very talented, this’ll explain it.

So Meyer got this worked out half a century before the neuroscientists at Goldsmiths and UCL. I love and respect science, but this seems to suggest that sometimes you can figure something out just by thinking about it.

Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan

What I find baffling is that there seems to be a broad acceptance of the idea that Miles may have some scope or some reasonable grounds for defending his remarks. (I’m not speaking legally — legally of course they are well within what must be permitted under free speech principles.) It’s as if there might be an explanation of them that would somehow make them not racist.

There must be a reason for that. Here’s one hypothesis as to what the reason is: imputing to Jews an inability to think straight or function properly in regard to anything involving Israel at any level is a particular form of racism that has become so completely acceptable that it is no longer even seen as racist. Just one example: When David Miliband first became Foreign Minister, the BBC did a profile of him, and in that profile stressed the fact that he is Jewish and speculated that that might affect how he went about his duties where the Middle East was concerned.

Imagine someone saying publicly that the black judge in a particular high-profile court case ought to recluse herself because one of the parties to the case was also black and the judge would therefore not be able to be impartial. That would be a statement that black people had some sort of built-in “racial solidarity”, or something, that, whatever it was, was so strong as to render them incapable of carrying out their professional tasks with professional integrity. In other words, the judge’s sense of professionalism, and the priority and importance given by the judge to the maintaining of professional ethics and professional standards, would unavoidably be swept away by some supposed sense of race. Black judges, the message would be, cannot be counted on to maintain professional standards at all times.

That that message is incorrect — as in factually mistaken — is one thing, but it is key to note that it is also broadly — indeed universally, for all intents and purposes — considered unacceptable (as of course it should be).

Why then does it appear that many people in Britain, very much including the chattering classes, think that it at least might be acceptable to send what is essentially the same message, when it’s about Jews?

It matters not a jot whether Sir Martin Gilbert is an “ardent supporter of Zionism”. His job on the Chilcot panel isn’t to rule on Zionism or Israel. He has a brief, and the only question is: is Gilbert a man of professionalism and integrity who will complete his task to the highest possible standard, which includes respecting and meeting his brief as best he possibly can?

The answer of Sir Oliver Miles and others is “No, he isn’t and he can’t, because he’s Jewish, and there’s something strange and invisible that gets inside the brains of Jews and controls them and makes them unreliable, shifty, likely to act and speak not in the interests of their country but rather of Israel, to pretend to be doing their jobs while secretly pursuing a different agenda.”

“You just can’t trust them because they’re Jews.” And the media let Miles argue that he is being perfectly reasonable.

UPDATE: I highly recommend this article (yep, in The Guardian — go figure). In it, David Cesarani writes:

In 1876, an uprising of Bulgarian Christians against Ottoman rule provoked a murderous response from the Muslim Turkish authorities. William Gladstone, former prime minister and grand old man of the Liberal Party, was so enraged by the massacres of Christians that he published a pamphlet The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East. In it, he lambasted the then prime minister Benjamin Disraeli for abandoning the victims in preference for a pro-Turkish policy. Even though it had long been British policy to support the Ottoman Empire, Gladstone ascribed Disraeli’s stance to the fact that he was born a Jew and therefore sympathised with the Ottomans who had treated their Jews fairly – unlike the new Christian states in the Balkans.

Writing to a Jewish correspondent who questioned this response, Gladstone explained: “I have always had occasion to admire the conduct of the English Jews in the discharge of their civil duties; but I deeply deplore the manner in which, what I may call Judaic sympathies, beyond as well as within the circle of professed Judaism, are now acting on the question of the East; while I am aware that as regards the Jews themselves, there may be much to account for it.”

Gladstone’s peculiar reference to those “beyond” the community of observant Jews was a swipe at Disraeli who had been baptised into the Anglican communion aged 12. He believed that Disraeli was perversely motivated by some residual racial loyalty. Gladstone had more respect for Jews affiliated to their community, but they fared little better. Their dual loyalty was simply more obvious and explicable.

Within a short time, Gladstone’s tirade was being echoed by eminent intellectuals, including Professor AE Freeman, also a stalwart of the Liberal party, and Goldwin Smith, professor of history at Oxford. In addition to claiming that money-grubbing Jews exploited Christian guilt over past oppression (such as the Inquisition) and controlled the press, Smith declaimed that Jews could not be loyal citizens because “their only country is their race; which is one with their religion”.

While he would no doubt dismiss the comparison, 134 years later this is exactly what Sir Miles is banging on about. Either he thinks it is a problem that Jews are serving on the Iraq inquiry because they have a dual loyalty or he thinks that less enlightened folk than him in the Arab world might draw this conclusion. The first possibility is dismaying but the alternative is no cause for relief. His response to the existence of bigotry is not to pour scorn on prejudice and defend the integrity of public servants who happen to be Jewish, but to appease it.

Just a very brief post still this evening, to link to a very important one here regarding an academic at King’s College who has been treated very shabbily. In a nutshell, Shalom Lappin was offered a chair with tenure at Hebrew University. After conferring with his institutional superiors at King’s and receiving assurance that his position there was secure, and preferring to remain in London, he turned down the offer from Jerusalem. Little more than half a year later, he was informed that his academic position was being eliminated and he himself being made redundant. He writes:

I now find myself threatened with redundancy six years before scheduled retirement, with totally inadequate pension provisions, while at the height of my research career. This is grossly unfair, and violates statements often made by the Principal and other members of the administration to the effect that excellence in research is King’s priority. This threat is also a serious miscarriage of justice, given my level of productivity, and the fact that I was allowed to give up a very attractive offer on the basis of assurances that have turned out to be without foundation.

Normblog announces that a campaign is under way within the philosophy profession and among King’s students to obtain redress for Shalom Lappin and others. I hope that that campaign can be broadened (or a parallel one launched) to include others who may wish to support, in particular, Shalom, whose writing at Normblog and Engage will be known to many who may not be familiar with his scholarly output.

I nevertheless think that this article, which does make some important points about freedom of speech and does rightly argue that a corporation needn’t be considered a person for the purposes of absolutely everything, makes a mistake in belaboring the point that money isn’t speech. Because that isn’t the point. It’s not about money, it’s about advertising. The idea behind the free-speech argument and corporate campaigning in elections is that to limit corporate spending on political advertisements is effectively to muzzle the corporations’ ability to communicate their positions — i.e., to limit their ability to speak. That argument, as a self-contained point, is pretty hard to refute (however insistently one may rebut it). Efforts to show why the Supreme Court ruling is anti-democratic should not focus on that point, but should rather find effective ways to argue that the principle of freedom of speech neither need nor should be extended to corporations.

The Slate article goes some way in developing such arguments, as in this paragraph:

But some perspective: We limit speech—when it has nothing to do with wealthy people spending money—in many ways. (It wasn’t protected at all until the mid-1930s.) You famously can’t shout fire in a theater. You not-so-famously can’t break the theater’s rules, including rules about speaking, because you don’t really have any First Amendment rights in a privately owned theater or at work. The First Amendment limits only government. And even where it is fully protected, free speech has not been absolute; it’s subject to regulation when it undermines basic societal interests and functions, like voting and democracy. In the last few decades, the conservative justices dominating the court have also limited speech rights for demonstrators, students, and whistle blowers. They have restricted speech at shopping malls and transit terminals. Taken as a whole, the conservative court’s First Amendment jurisprudence has enlarged the speech rights available to wealthy people and corporations and restricted the speech rights available to people of ordinary means and to dissenters.

Now that is a strong paragraph. The current Supreme Court is indeed activist, utterly inconsistent, and ideologically driven. Its decision even to hear Bush v Gore was a historic low. The ruling itself sunk still deeper. But this last landmark ruling really takes the cake. What is happening to the American system of state under the current Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority is nothing short of disastrous.

Andrew Sullivan also makes, I think, at least the beginnings of an effective case — which complements the above passage from Slate, when he says:

But the notion that there is no difference between an individual’s inviolable right to speak or publish his or her own views and a corporation’s right to flood the marketplace with advertizing to advance its own economic interests and to effectively buy off politicians’ votes seems willfully perverse to me in the real world. I see the principle. But I’m pragmatic enough to believe this can be balanced by some good faith attempts to avoid the wholesale purchase of democratic speech by moneyed interests.

What is the point, after all, of free speech? The point is liberty. And liberty is protected by democracy. Using freedom of speech, therefore, as an argument for removing laws that are themselves designed to protect democracy — and for instating a set of circumstances that are a threat to democracy — is not coherent and cannot be principled or right.

But the attempt by the Slate article to set up an argument on the premise that the ruling was based on a theory that money equals speech is bound to fail.

As a result, some comments have been coming in, and I’d like to highlight a few:

On Andrew Sullivan (too many posts to link to), Snoopy The Goon says…

If it quacks like a duck…

I am not sure one needs to meet a person to come to a conclusion about the person’s “real” thoughts. Sullivan for most of us is that disembodied spirit of his blog. You may conclude that this spirit is (or isn’t, I am not to be the judge) anti-Semitic, but there is no necessity to meet the body behind it. I think so, at least.

…and Inna says:

I too appreciate Andrew Sullivan’s blogging and frankly agree with him on many issues. And it pains me when he says stuff that frankly may well end in people being hurt. His is one of the most widely read blogs out there and so when he starts spouting anti-Semitic stuff, it’s going to get into the mainstream conversation. And that will, in turn, validate the feelings of some jerk who was just thinking about maybe hitting some Jew (or Zionist) or spray-painting a synagogue with a swastika or three.

I personally doubt Andrew is himself anti-Semitic. But I do think that if he doesn’t start taking responsibility for his words, he will continue to make this world a much worse place.

Regarding the Freedom of Anti-Semitic Speech post, Terry Glavin says:

I’m afraid you don’t understand me, Primavera. My point is that I’m normally an abolitionist on the matter of free-speech codes, but sometimes, I despair. I’ll admit to having despaired before, and to having come around. But a case like this is such a grotesque incitement, built upon an earlier incitement (the Aftonbladet libel), ad naseum, and it is producing real-world, horrific consequences, that I honestly don’t know which is worse – state intervention or something, em, else.

Part of the problem may be that a well-regulated “marketplace of ideas” (i.e. wiht free speech laws) doesn’t really exist in much of the Arab world, and barely exists in the Ukraine.

On the taking and granting of offence post, Lorenzo says:

Part of what is going on is an implicit or explicit denial of agency. When you write “It’s not that the cartoon gave offence so the offended man got angry and attacked (even if that’s what the attacker himself honestly believes). It’s that the cartoon offered the opportunity to construct a pretext for violence and intimidation, and the taking of offence is part of that construct”, you are treating those involved as full moral agents. Quite correctly.

Those who finds ways of blaming the West are, in effect, denying the agency of those offended while postulating a sort of uber-agency to those “did the offending”. This seems to be one of the “discoveries” of post-colonialism: that Western imperialism somehow permanently redistributed causal (and thus moral) agency in the world. (I have a related post on blaming the West first here.)

The latter post also got a much-appreciated incoming link from Martin in the Margins.

Last but not least, a strongly dissenting comment from Eric Blair (no url available) on Why Education is Not a Priority for Republicans:

Don’t be [expletive deleted] ignorant.

You obviously don’t know the first thing about US public schools.

Where do you think the Democrats went to school? Especially all the urban blacks who voted for Obama?

I guess they’re all ignorant too?

A fair enough point (if inelegantly made) and not one that I have an immediate answer to. Just two remarks. The first is that, as a broad generalisation, urban blacks seem to have a better feel for where their interests lie, in terms of voting, than do the rural white poor. (I will concede right away, however, that, in this context, that is a question-begging argument.) The second is that if you grow up poor and go to low-quality schools in a big city, you are still likely to be exposed to more worldliness and savvy than if you grow up poor and go to low-quality schools in the middle of nowhere. That’s an advantage the urban poor have over the rural poor, and might at least partly explain why the urban poor seem more able to vote in their own true interests than the rural poor.

It was America who had had to come in, twice in a space of less than thirty years, to save Europe from itself, and then America who shielded Western Europe from the Soviet threat for almost half a century and, ultimately, America, and not Western Europe, into whose arms Eastern Europe rushed as soon as the Soviet prison fell apart. It will take more generations than have passed so far for the proud Western Europeans to forgive America for all of that – for having been so desperately needed, and for having been so great a benefactor and protector.

In today’s FT, Philip Stephens writes:

The US is throwing its weight around. Such was the accusation hurled by a French minister as Washington assumed control of the humanitarian effort in Haiti. It was a silly thing to say, but inadvertently it provided a glimpse of a helplessly conflicted view of the US. Of course, America must do the heavy lifting in global affairs; but woe betide if it does not afford due respect to the Europeans trailing in its wake.

In his remarks upon accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, President Obama mentioned a “reflexive suspicion of America”. He was being politic. It’s not really suspicion; it’s resentment.

Back to Stephens:

You could say there is nothing new in this. The strains were visible during the cold war. Europe sheltered from the Soviet threat under the US nuclear umbrella, but insisted all the while that it be free to treat with Moscow on its own terms. Britain was less inclined than most to challenge Washington. Many others thought it supine.

Did they really think Britain supine? I bet they had a hunch as to the real reason for Britain’s less complicated cooperation with the US: Britain didn’t have the Continent’s complexes. Britain had been, with the US, one of the two victorious powers in the war on the Western front (Canada was valiant and noble, but not a power). Britain had not been occupied; Britain had not needed to be saved; Britain had helped do the saving. Britain had more in common with the US at the end of the war than it had with the Continent. Still self-confident, then, in the second half of the Twentieth Century, Britain calmly saw to its own interests, and its own interests happened to be pretty much exactly aligned with those of the US. Britain just simply didn’t have the prickly needs that, for example, France had — and has.

Still, Philip Stephens’ column is very much worth a read.

That’s surprising, but this is worrying: The pilot didn’t even know what they are! The flight attendant, okay, but the pilot? Aren’t the officers at the controls of these mammoth machines hurtling through the sky filled with hundreds of people at practically the speed of sound supposed to be, you know, with-it types?

I mean, as Toby Ziegler might have said,

You’ve got all kinds of atmospheric pressure up there. You’ve got wind sheer, down draft, massive turbulence, not to mention four giant engines burning jet fuel at galactic temperatures. It’s a flying death tube!

And the hero flying it, out of New York, had never before seen so much as a photo of tefillin. Comforting.

Mr. Yamaguchi, the double survivor, was among the advocates of a simple plan to end nuclear war, Mr. Pellegrino writes. That plan went like this: The only people who should be allowed to govern countries with nuclear weapons are mothers, those who are still breast-feeding their babies.

From The New York Times.

The Next Liberal Cause: Could it be Education?

First, most obviously, and most trivially, this was not meant literally. Few, if any, of these people are unable to read and write. What I meant, of course, was poorly educated.

My main concern here, however, is to make it clear that I do not mean what I wrote to contain any element of scorn. In large parts of the US, the public-sector school system isn’t nearly as good as it should be. It falls well short of the standards that can and should be expected of state education in any wealthy and democratic country, not to mention the world’s wealthiest and most advanced. I have no reason not to believe that, for the most part, poorly educated Americans are good people and merely people who, relative to other sections of the country’s population, have received a bum deal. It is true that they are poorly educated, but it is not their fault.

Moreover, the people who emerge from these inferior state school systems are probably not, on average, any less natively intelligent than the more fortunate ones who get better schooling. But, though it sounds brutal, and though it is not their fault at all, they are ignorant.

The Republicans count on this. This relatively ignorant population is the Republican base. It’s this underprivileged population’s lack of education that allows the Republicans to dupe them, every single time, into voting into power a party that serves the interests of the privileged and powerful.

Her shortcomings, certainly for a former Governor of one of the United States and a former candidate for the Vice Presidency of that country, are significant and well documented. So well documented that I almost feel sorry for her. The only thing, indeed, that keeps me from feeling sorry for her is the fact that it was her own unbridled ambition and moxie (or what self-appointed philosemite and taxonomer of Jews Andrew Sullivan would leap at the chance to call “chutzpah”) that got her into such a harsh public light in the first place.

Where the ridicule of her has been for the vapidity and ignorance displayed by her words, it has been justified. But she has also been ridiculed for being borderline illiterate, utterly at sea with the English language, and that is most decidedly not the case.

On the contrary, she has a command of English — of syntax and grammatical logic — that is unusual in general and even unusual in politicians. And that command of English allows her to string together as well as any other politician highly verbose sentences that say almost nothing but involve so many words that her desperate ignorance of issues and facts is covered from the sight of those who truly are illiterate and are hence impressed by verbiage: her voters.

Here is a recent summary of Primavera’s take on Sullivan:

Several things make Andrew Sullivan a great blogger. One is his immediate, visceral approach: he says what he thinks about something in any given moment. Another is his intellectual honesty: he will say “I was wrong” when new information prompts him to correct or adjust something he’d said. A third (and by no means the last) is his human touch: he lets his emotions show, he comes across as a real person and not a calculated media persona.

Add to this the fact that I also agree with him on just about every substantive issue and it’s no wonder he’s one of my favourite bloggers. What are those issues? The Media. Iraq. Sarah Palin. President Obama. Health Care. Torture. Gay Rights. Israel. And many others.

Whoah, wait a minute — Israel? Absolutely. And why not? As far as I can make out, Sullivan thinks that all of the West Bank and Gaza should become a proper, independent Palestinian state, and so do I. As far as I can make out, Sullivan doesn’t think that Israel has any business building anything at all on territory it conquered in 1967, and neither do I.

No, I don’t have any problems with Sullivan’s positions on Israel/Palestine.

…

But sometimes I’m bothered by some of his symbolism and language.

I would like to note that now I appear to have moved, without having announced it, from giving Sullivan the benefit of the doubt regarding whether or not he has become anti-Semitic to basically now feeling that, yes, he has. But that’s not in fact really the point. Primavera doesn’t need to try to peer into the heart of Andrew Sullivan. All I need to do is read what he writes, and he is now writing anti-Semitic material. The question isn’t in fact whether he himself is anti-Semitic, but whether what he writes is, and, yes, he now writes things that, quite objectively, are.

Sullivan has already been preparing his defence against accusations of anti-Semitism, having evidently known they would be forthcoming. His tactic is not to deal with the accusations at all, but to employ the Livingstone manoeuvre.

He must be called out on that, and it must not be permitted, but at the same time I would like to underline that most of what Sullivan has written that could be seen as anti-Semitic has been about Jews qua Jews, not about Israel per se. See: His patronising self-declared philosemitism, his good-Jews-vs-bad-Jews taxonomy, his invoking of the “darkness” trope, his some-of-my-best-friends-are-Jews moments, his wrapping Anne Frank in a kefiyeh, his use of “neocon” as code for “Jew” and with it his insinuation of divided loyalty and untrustworthiness, and probably more.

So the Livingstone trick doesn’t even apply to much of what is at issue here.

Nevertheless it must be headed off, for some of what Sullivan does is demonisation — not criticism, but demonisation — of Israel. Comparing Israel to the Nazis, for example, as he did when he called Gaza a ghetto. Or: his repeated claims that Israel wants to go to war with Iran, as if Iran weren’t, quite openly and declaredly, threatening Israel’s very existence, and the potential of an Israeli strike against Iranian nuclear facilities were from sheer lust for violence and blood on the part of Israel. Or, similarly, his frequent references to Israel “crushing” or “pulverising” Gaza, as if there were no reason in the world for Israel’s strikes against Hamas. The latter two examples constitute not only demonisation; they are also an extension of the age-old blood libel against Jews, portraying them as an incorrigibly bloodthirsty. None of this is negated in the slightest by Sullivan’s hedging moves in which he patronisingly mentions those acceptable Jews who manifest the officially-approved Jewish qualities of gentleness or whatever have you (go read Sullivan’s blog to figure out exactly what Jewish qualities he approves of). On the contrary, that simply has the effect of layering anti-Semitism over more anti-Semitism.

But I’ve already digressed. Read the Dishwater — it does an important job well. Sullivan is a great blogger — one of the greatest. All the more important to call attention to, and protest, that part of his writing that is objectively anti-Semitic.

There’s a lot of stuff in my mind that I would like to cover and this was originally intended to be a more ambitious post but no time right now so I’ll just give an extremely brief summary.

A recent post of Sullivan contains not one but two anti-Semitic tropes. Here they are:

1. Good Jews vs Bad Jews:

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.

Gotta love that little “of course”, eh? Who the hell is Andrew Sullivan to start classifying and evaluating Jews? A patronizing little prick, that’s who. With self-declared philosemites like these, who needs anti-Semites? Go fuck yourself, Sullivan. Do us a favour and start hating us properly like the Ron-Paul-loving pratt you really are.

2. Shadows and darkness: not enough that the “neocons” Andrew disagrees with are, according to his learned opinion as expert taxonomer of Jews, betraying what Jews really ’should’ be like. No, there must also be “something much darker” about them. This is classic anti-Semitism.

UPDATE: there is an excellent post at The Daily Dishwater about yet a further anti-Semitic post by Sullivan, and as it does the job of dissecting his particular form of patronising racism very well, I’ll just leave you with the link, as I have to run.

Similarly but differently, I’m also finding myself often linking to Normblog, albeit in a very different style, not with criticism but rather commentary (Primavera’s Talmud to Normblog’s Torah?).

Here’s one of the latter class of links. Norm explains that a state’s duty to take external threats extremely seriously does not arise from the fear, in and of itself, that its citizens may have of such threats, and is not dependent upon the degree of that fear. That is of course both correct and very important.

It triggered the following further thought.

What is it that is most to be feared about terrorism? Camos and Drum discuss, on the one hand, the fear of, in effect, getting blown up, crushed or incinerated, and, on the other, the difference between fear of harm from unpredictable events of nature and fear of harm from malicious groups of people who are intentionally and very persistently seeking to cause that harm. Me, when it comes to terrorism, it’s not the physical harm I’m worried about in the first place. I’m worried about what’s happening to our once wonderfully liberal and free systems of society, law and state.

Tony Blair was a leader whose personal instincts were liberal and enlightened. But as a head of government, responsible for seeing to it that the British state performed its duties toward its citizens responsibly, he came to say this: “Traditional civil liberty arguments are not so much wrong as just made for another age.”

Free speech, the right to privacy, freedom of assembly, freedom of movement, and other cornerstones of democracy are all being curtailed by Western, democratic, liberal states as they respond to the threat of terrorism.

It seems to me that the terrorists may not need to actually succeed in blowing up all that many people in order to achieve an important part of their aims: the destruction of democracy and liberal society.

For me, that’s not a difficult question to answer. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of people I dislike quite intensely without ever having come within spitting distance of them.

One of them is the prominent PAIJ Tony Judt. It would matter little to me how charming and engaging and warm he might be in person, his political views aside. I cannot leave his political views aside.

Judt advocates the destruction of Israel. Under the thoroughly disingenuous formulation of the “one-state solution”, Judt argues for a scenario in which the Jews become once again a vulnerable and persecuted minority, a nation without land or country.

Advocates of the so-called “one-state solution” always claim to have the good of everyone in mind and that a properly democratic, human-rights-and-civil-liberties-respecting multi-ethnic and multi-cultural state could be formed on the territory that is today Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, and that everyone would live happily ever after. It’s a lie and they know it.

Olivier Kamm calls Judt’s stance terribly mistaken. Well, Kamm’s a bigger man than I am. I can’t find it in myself, I’m afraid, to call this campaign of Judt’s anything other than terribly nasty and terribly mendacious, and probably self-serving (as a highly “respected” PAIJ, he’s got a nice little niche going in places like the New York Review of Books).

I must say I find it worrying that such a post is even necessary. It really ought to be clear to every democratically-minded person these days why free speech needs to be protected, and that it’s got nothing to do with the accuracy or inaccuracy of religious beliefs or any others. (It further ought to be clear, although I am painfully aware that it isn’t, that, as Eve with customary eloquence demonstrates, the factual mistakenness of religious belief doesn’t render religion in and of itself, in sum, a force for evil in the world.)

But the observation I want to make here is a different one. Eve mentions the importance of getting across to people that no-one, including deeply committed religious believers, has the right not to be offended. That is indeed an extremely important point, and the degree to which the opposite seems to be believed by the political and other chattering classes is horrifying and does not bode well. But I would add something else, too, which is that we shouldn’t, either, be too quick to accept one of the main premises of that particular debate (the debate about whether people should be protected from being offended). I’m talking about the premise that someone like Westergaard’s would-be-axe-murderer was really doing what he did because he was offended (which he may nevertheless have considered himself to be). Or, for that matter, that the whole world-wide eruption of violence over the original Mohammed cartoons was really all just because people felt offended.

I’m of the point of view advocated by Paul Berman and others: these attacks, this violence – all this is not happening because a Danish paper published some depictions of Mohammed (which it did, and which there was nothing wrong with) or because Israel is building settlements on Palestinian land (which it is and which there is a great deal wrong with) or because the United States props up the ruling family of Saudi Arabia (which I gather it does and which it probably shouldn’t). Rather the terrorism and the constant protests and the intimidation and the violence are driven by a simultaneously nihilistic and totalitarian agenda to attack the Occident (or what my father used to call, with great affection, the Abendland) and, ultimately, take over parts of it, as much indeed as possible. This does not need to mean that, say, Westergaard’s attacker had that particular ideology and big-picture agenda in mind when he attacked. The foot soldiers of a movement needn’t have a true understanding of the big picture in order to do their job and are often merely brainwashed fools. Westergaard’s attacker (his name, it seems, is not being published – why not?) may well have felt offended, or thought he felt offended. But why is it that, at this particular juncture in history, some Muslims, or at least some Islamists, respond to feeling offended by becoming violent, while, by and large, people of other persuasions don’t? Is it in the nature of Islamic belief itself? I don’t think that it is, and I say that not by way of hastening to insert the politically correct disclaimer (I don’t care whom I offend and if I thought  it was inherent in Islam I would be happy to say so). Rather, it’s because the totalitarian, anti-Occident movement that Berman identified is indoctrinating its foot soldiers to behave this way. It’s not that the cartoon gave offence so the offended man got angry and attacked (even if that’s what the attacker himself honestly believes). It’s that the cartoon offered the opportunity to construct a pretext for violence and intimidation, and the taking of offence is part of that construct. There is a deeply dishonest and sinister, and extremely broad and radical, agenda behind the attack on Westergaard. And that is true even if the attacker, in his foot-soldier childishness, really thinks that he was acting alone and purely out of his own personal anger. If he thinks that, then he is simply unaware of the degree to which he had already been taught and conditioned to do violence.

One big problem I have in this whole area, this whole debate about the giving and taking of offence and how much of it should be allowed or tolerated or whatever, is the apparently unlimited credence given, in the first place, to those claiming to be offended. I think we all ought to move quite decidedly away from the automatic assumption that, in any case, the feeling of being offended, whatever else we might come to say about it, is at least real in and of itself and worthy of discussion as being the thing it claims to be.

UPDATE: Terry has clarified. Happily it turns out I didn’t understand him correctly. His remark in the comments. Thanks Terry.

What a contrast. Here we have someone who doesn’t limit herself to merely describing an “urge” to hold all Jews responsible for what she sees as Israel’s transgressions, but actually goes ahead and does it, and… nothing. Inna asks:

Has Tonge been kicked out of her party for making these remarks? Had she made these remarks about any other people (e.g., Muslims) do you think she would have been?

Well, she certainly would have been scolded, and probably disciplined in one form or another. As it is, though, she’s likely to get off scott free.

The fact is that, broadly speaking, some two-thirds of our parliament, presumably representing some two-thirds of our public, wants to realize that vain hope Blair expressed a decade ago. Israel wants an accord with Syria and the rest of the Arab world if, but only if, that means lasting peace and does not expose Israel to heightened security risk. We want the regime in Iran that relentlessly seeks Israel’s destruction to be prevented from achieving a nuclear weapons capability and, preferably, to be removed from power altogether by its oppressed and betrayed populace. Internally, we want to maintain the near-miraculous status quo which somehow reconciles the modern State of Israel with the religious code that has sustained our people’s very existence through the generations.

And with far more clarity than a decade ago, we recognize that we want to be a Jewish, democratic state, which necessitates a separation from the Palestinians. We don’t want to be forced back to the pre-1967 lines – from where we were attacked relentlessly in the preceding 19 years and which rendered us untenably vulnerable. But we also know, most of us, that we cannot expand Jewish sovereign rule deep into Judea and Samaria, however legitimate our historical claim.

Our goal has become clearer, and our leadership more united around it. But that does not make its attainment more straightforward.

Arafat’s departure did not pave the way for dramatic progress. Neither did Assad’s replacement by his unexpectedly tenacious son. And Iran has spent the past decade radicalizing the entire region and beyond.

Protecting the relative security we enjoy today, furthermore, has become ever more complicated, as our enemies impose confrontations in civilian theaters of conflict where the nature of the consequent battle challenges our morality. And even as we strive to disarm our attackers in wars that quite plainly erupt because of their aggression, we are misrepresented and unfairly judged – with that promised international support slipping ever further away.

Yet while the delegitimization of Israel intensifies, the rapacious, bloodthirsty ambition of the Islamists calls into ever more unavoidable question the spurious assertion that Israel lies at the root of Middle East friction and Islamic grievance.

In 2001, America saw 9/11 for the fundamentalist declaration of war and challenge to Western freedoms that it so clearly was. By contrast, Britain, in 2005, refused to believe that the July 7 bombings of the London public transport system represented the smaller scale equivalent. And many nations around the world are still similarly intent on ignoring their Islamist threats within, ducking the obvious, seeking to place blame elsewhere, anywhere, including on Israel.

But sooner or later, even the likes of Britain – many of whose academics and union activists and clergymen and politicians and teachers and reporters apparently consider Islamic extremism an understandable response to the very fact of Israel’s existence – will no longer be able to maintain the myopia. They will no longer be able to talk away the obvious fact that murderous young zealots such as Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, former president of the Islamic Society at University College London, did not become the would-be Christmas Day bomber of Northwest Airlines Flight 523 from Amsterdam to Detroit because the Middle East peace process stands unfinished.

Read the rest here.

Likewise, even in the widespread and frequent public discussions, in the media and at high political level, between opponents and proponents of sections against the dictatorial regime in Iran, no one has objected on the basis that such sanctions would somehow be a vicious attack on the population of Iran. Why not? Because that is just not the intent and everyone, on both sides of the debate, knows it. The potential effects of sanctions on a population are important to consider and are always a factor in the debate, but nobody (except, mendaciously, the target government, of course) claims that the point of sanctions is to attack the people of a country.

So why is Andrew Sullivan stating on his blog that Michael Oren has called for sanctions “against the Iranian people”? Has Oren suddenly broken new ground in the area of sanctions, and called for a whole new approach, namely to target the population of a country instead of its government?

He has done no such thing. Here’s what Oren suggested: “targeting the financial activities of the government, curbing the import of refined petroleum and limiting the ability of Iranian leaders to travel around the world”. 

Andrew Sullivan has posted a blatant lie.

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 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

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.