Cliff, there is a lot of truth in what you say. No one should weep for the pock-marked old drag queen’s vicious end. But, if ‘twere done, ‘twere better it had been done by the Americans after Lockerbie, or by the Brits after one of his diplomats shot and killed a London policewoman, Yvonne Fletcher, in St James’s Square, or by any other western nation after one or other of his many provocations twenty years ago. The post-Iraq Gaddafi of the last eight years was seen throughout the Arab world as a western ally. As recently as this spring, his son Khamis (a “reformer”, according to the State Department) was welcomed to this country and officially received at Nasa and the Air Force Academy. His visit to West Point was cut short only because the revolution broke out and he had to return to Tripoli to start shooting large numbers of people.
Bernard Lewis said a few years ago that, in the Middle East, America risks teaching the lesson that she is harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend. So far the score in the Arab Spring is pretty consistent: On the CIA rule, Gaddafi, Ben Ali and Mubarak were SOBs but perceived, to one degree or another, as the west’s SOBs. Baby Assad wasn’t our SOB, and he’s still in business, and getting aid and comfort from a supposed US client regime in Iraq. And the two most assiduous ideological exporters, Iran and Saudi Arabia, have vastly increased their influence. So has the Muslim Brotherhood.
On the other hand, it’s bad news for Ukrainian nurses. And for Beyonce, who won’t be getting any more million-dollar paychecks for playing the palace.
FP: Not risks it, that’s the lesson it has taught and is teaching. That’s why the Palestinians goes against it at the UN and Iran conducts terror attempts in Washington.Bernard Lewis said a few years ago that, in the Middle East, America risks teaching the lesson that she is harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend. So far the score in the Arab Spring is pretty consistent: On the CIA rule, Gaddafi, Ben Ali and Mubarak were SOBs but perceived, to one degree or another, as the west’s SOBs. Baby Assad wasn’t our SOB, and he’s still in business, and getting aid and comfort from a supposed US client regime in Iraq. And the two most assiduous ideological exporters, Iran and Saudi Arabia, have vastly increased their influence. So has the Muslim Brotherhood.
On the other hand, it’s bad news for Ukrainian nurses. And for Beyonce, who won’t be getting any more million-dollar paychecks for playing the palace.
Peter Berkowitz: The Importance of Being Experienced
Experience of course does not guarantee sound policy and execution. But its absence invites arrogance and foolhardiness.
President Obama’s belief in the supremacy of rhetoric has left him particularly incapable of drawing lessons from experience. His propensity to chalk up setbacks to deficiencies in explaining himself or, as he recently put it in an interview on Black Entertainment Television, “telling a story to the American people” is hardly surprising. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If you believe that the essence of politics is speech, then you will perceive failure as failure to communicate.
In 2008, Obama claimed—to the approval of an adoring and credulous media—that running his presidential campaign gave him the necessary experience to be president. He certainly was astonishingly successful in simultaneously appealing to progressives and moderates while obscuring his transformative goals.
But not all knowledge is equal and not all experience is fungible. Knowledge of branding and selling oneself differs from knowledge of the economy, of foreign affairs, and national security. And experience in manufacturing and manipulating words and images is no substitute for the experience of crafting wise policy and executing it responsibly.
So, with every passing day, confirms our speechmaker-in-chief.
FP: That Obama is an empty suit, full of talk and no substance is what I argued from the first time I set eyes on him.President Obama’s belief in the supremacy of rhetoric has left him particularly incapable of drawing lessons from experience. His propensity to chalk up setbacks to deficiencies in explaining himself or, as he recently put it in an interview on Black Entertainment Television, “telling a story to the American people” is hardly surprising. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If you believe that the essence of politics is speech, then you will perceive failure as failure to communicate.
In 2008, Obama claimed—to the approval of an adoring and credulous media—that running his presidential campaign gave him the necessary experience to be president. He certainly was astonishingly successful in simultaneously appealing to progressives and moderates while obscuring his transformative goals.
But not all knowledge is equal and not all experience is fungible. Knowledge of branding and selling oneself differs from knowledge of the economy, of foreign affairs, and national security. And experience in manufacturing and manipulating words and images is no substitute for the experience of crafting wise policy and executing it responsibly.
So, with every passing day, confirms our speechmaker-in-chief.
Israel Matzav: Where we went wrong
Giulio Meotti has a reminder for Israelis about where we started to lose the battle against terrorism.
The Israeli strategy on terrorism began to fail when Rabin and Peres cut a deal with Arafat and when Israel adopted a defensive strategy of retreating behind walls. It began to fail when the misbegotten, ill-fated Oslo peace accord led directly to the suicide-bomb slaughter of Israelis, young and old. Since Israel allowed the PLO and its terror armies to move their bases from Tunis to Judea, Samaria, and Gaza in 1994, nearly 2,000 Israeli families have involuntarily paid the ultimate price in the “peace process.” The Shalit deal is a moral defeat most especially for these families of the victims of terrorism: Israel just cancelled more than 900 life sentences to embrace again one soldier. Meir Schijveschuurder, who lost his parents and three of his siblings in the suicide bombing in the Sbarro restaurant in Jerusalem in 2001, yesterday declared against the deal: “We feel like a man who woke up in Germany a day after World War II.”
The victory of seeing Gilad Shalit come home last week is Pyrrhic at best.
I can still hear Yitzchak Rabin referring to all those Israelis killed in terror attacks in 1993-94 as korbanot hashalom (sacrifices for peace) as if dying in that way, God forbid, has a nobility to it. It doesn't.
FP: Just as I have been arguing that this is the logical conclusion of Oslo. And Israel continues to make strategic blunders to which it is oblivious.I can still hear Yitzchak Rabin referring to all those Israelis killed in terror attacks in 1993-94 as korbanot hashalom (sacrifices for peace) as if dying in that way, God forbid, has a nobility to it. It doesn't.
CAMERA: An Answer to Jeffrey Goldberg's Question
Since Snapshots is in the question-answering mood — see our most recent post, "An Answer to the New York Times' Question" — let's take a stab at a question posed by Jeffrey Goldberg on his blog today.
Responding to a stunningly surreal article on the Guardian website about the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange, Goldberg asks the Guardian: "Shouldn't your editors do a better job of masking prejudice on your website?"
The piece he's talking about, by Deborah Orr, slams Netanyahu, and Israel, and Zionists, and implicitly Jews, for trading over a thousand prisoners for Gilad Shalit. Why? Because, Orr argues, it is evidence that those guilty parties believe the "obscene idea that Israeli lives are more important than Palestinian lives." Later in the piece, she substitutes "the lives of the chosen" for her earlier reference to "Israeli lives."
Hamas's hard-line negotiating position is proof of "Zionist" racism? What can one really say about an idea so obviously shaped by blind hatred rather than rationality? It is, in Goldberg's words, "almost-comical nastiness."
So turning back to his question: Shouldn't Guardian editors do a better job at masking prejudice?
No. The Zeitgeist that produces Orr's piece is the same one that colors the newspaper's distorted treatment of Israel in general, and its better for people know it.
Modern haters tend to realize that masked prejudice has more power to influence than the unmasked variety. And if an observer tries to remove the mask, or even just tries to rebut a hateful slur, they're frequently attacked for "using the anti-Semitism card." Better, then, for the hater to remove his or her own mask. If Guardian editors want to make their anti-Israel bigotry more apparent, let them. Hopefully the reasonable public will take note.
FP: It is the fact that now anti-Semitism can be in the open, tolerated and published, that should be of major concern, but isn’t. We’re back to the 1930’s (see next).Responding to a stunningly surreal article on the Guardian website about the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange, Goldberg asks the Guardian: "Shouldn't your editors do a better job of masking prejudice on your website?"
The piece he's talking about, by Deborah Orr, slams Netanyahu, and Israel, and Zionists, and implicitly Jews, for trading over a thousand prisoners for Gilad Shalit. Why? Because, Orr argues, it is evidence that those guilty parties believe the "obscene idea that Israeli lives are more important than Palestinian lives." Later in the piece, she substitutes "the lives of the chosen" for her earlier reference to "Israeli lives."
Hamas's hard-line negotiating position is proof of "Zionist" racism? What can one really say about an idea so obviously shaped by blind hatred rather than rationality? It is, in Goldberg's words, "almost-comical nastiness."
So turning back to his question: Shouldn't Guardian editors do a better job at masking prejudice?
No. The Zeitgeist that produces Orr's piece is the same one that colors the newspaper's distorted treatment of Israel in general, and its better for people know it.
Modern haters tend to realize that masked prejudice has more power to influence than the unmasked variety. And if an observer tries to remove the mask, or even just tries to rebut a hateful slur, they're frequently attacked for "using the anti-Semitism card." Better, then, for the hater to remove his or her own mask. If Guardian editors want to make their anti-Israel bigotry more apparent, let them. Hopefully the reasonable public will take note.
Ben Cohen: John Mearsheimer and the scandal that wasn’t: Antiemitism & the most bizarre book blurb around
This conclusion, sadly, contains a good deal of merit. As far as large swaths of academia and the media are concerned, the victims of anti-Semitism are no longer Jews, but those unjustly accused of being anti-Semites.
The Atzmon episode takes this inversion one step further. So long as the target is Israel, or Zionism, or even Judaism as a set of ideas, anything goes; equally, any invocation of anti-Semitism on the part of critics is simply a smear to be dismissed.
…
Who, then, qualifies as an anti-Semite in John Mearsheimer’s world? One has to assume the bar is set very high: you would have to explicitly declare your hatred of Jews as individuals, for instance, or advocate that Jews should sit in separate subway cars. But if you use the Holocaust as a stick with which to beat the Jews, or slyly undermine its “narrative,” or assert that conspiracy theories bear some correspondence to reality, or argue that Jewish government officials are more suspect than others because of their dual loyalty to Israel, that’s not anti-Semitism, he would say — just an honest expression of legitimate opinions.
It’s worth remembering that when the term “anti-Semitism” was coined in 19th-century Germany, its authors were not Jews, but Jew-haters. They wore the badge of anti-Semitism with pride, creating political parties with such names as the “League of Anti-Semites.” The word was owned not by the victims, but by the perpetrators.
In that sense, nothing much has changed. The torrid controversies around anti-Semitism today indicate that the Jewish community has claimed neither the ownership nor the definition of the word. That’s why John Mearsheimer thinks his understanding of anti-Semitism is far superior to yours or mine. And that, you might say, is the greatest scandal of all.
FP: See what I mean?
The Atzmon episode takes this inversion one step further. So long as the target is Israel, or Zionism, or even Judaism as a set of ideas, anything goes; equally, any invocation of anti-Semitism on the part of critics is simply a smear to be dismissed.
…
Who, then, qualifies as an anti-Semite in John Mearsheimer’s world? One has to assume the bar is set very high: you would have to explicitly declare your hatred of Jews as individuals, for instance, or advocate that Jews should sit in separate subway cars. But if you use the Holocaust as a stick with which to beat the Jews, or slyly undermine its “narrative,” or assert that conspiracy theories bear some correspondence to reality, or argue that Jewish government officials are more suspect than others because of their dual loyalty to Israel, that’s not anti-Semitism, he would say — just an honest expression of legitimate opinions.
It’s worth remembering that when the term “anti-Semitism” was coined in 19th-century Germany, its authors were not Jews, but Jew-haters. They wore the badge of anti-Semitism with pride, creating political parties with such names as the “League of Anti-Semites.” The word was owned not by the victims, but by the perpetrators.
In that sense, nothing much has changed. The torrid controversies around anti-Semitism today indicate that the Jewish community has claimed neither the ownership nor the definition of the word. That’s why John Mearsheimer thinks his understanding of anti-Semitism is far superior to yours or mine. And that, you might say, is the greatest scandal of all.
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