A guide for the perplexed II

In the last posting, I pointed to Britain as the new odd man out in the Euro-Trio. Again, what gives?

One sign is the surge of antisemitism that began in the late 1990s. Although far-left antisemitism and anti-Zionism are not new in western Europe - they first reappeared in the 1970s - they derive new power from their synergy with the Islamic radicalism now common in Britain's cities, among its second- and third-generation Muslims of south Indian extraction. The first signs appeared in popular culture (for example, Zadie Smith's novel White Teeth and Udayan Prasad's film, My Son the Fanatic). Next was the explosive growth of Afghanistan- and Pakistan-bound and trained terrorists living in or coming from Britain. Law enforcement officials in continental Europe and the US began to bitterly refer to "Londonistan" - indeed the name of Melanie Phillips' excellent book on the subject.

But there's more disturbing aspect to this sudden return of antisemitism. The phenomenon is historically most prominent and dangerous when a country or a whole civilization experiences an existential crisis of the first order. Antisemitism is a powerful outlet for an otherwise fractured society to direct its hatreds and problems outward to a ready scapegoat. Jews have unwillingly been thrust into this role before, and Europe seems unable to shake the habit. Today, the aftereffects of European imperialism (the sudden and unplanned jerking of the Islamic world into modernity; post-imperial immigration to the metropoles) and the inability of European countries to successfully integrate their Muslim populations have fractured these societies and destroyed their confidence - they're unable to live politically and culturally with Muslim immigrants, yet cannot live economically without them. Jews, both in Europe and in Israel, are again a convenient escape from reality: it's really all their fault. With Europeans unable to master their current difficulties in a workable and humane fashion, wacky conspiracy theories and irrational hatreds grow instead.

Britain also faces internal fracturing, as the central government in London negotiates with the regional Scottish and Welsh parliaments over federalism - a new and disorienting idea in Britain, one of Europe's oldest unified states. The peculiar evolution of the Western left in the face of its discrediting is also at play here. By the 1970s, classical Marxism of the old-fashioned kind was dead. The hard left mutated into new forms in the 1960s and 70s - cultural leftism, political correctness, the sorts of the things you see here in academia, Hollywood, and the news media. Outgoing Prime Minister Tony Blair's "New Labour" had the opportunity to defeat these forces for good in the 1990s and was supposed to have reoriented the party to toward the center and greater viability. He was the center-left's answer to Thatcher, much the same way Clinton was the Democrats' answer to Reagan. Blair carried it off, but the hard left didn't disappear in the UK. Instead, he and his allies were led into a compromise that has come back to haunt him and everyone else. The far left today doesn't care about the working classes - what it wants is control of the culture, so it can brainwash the next generation with its authoritarian mumbo-jumbo of political correctness and multiculturalism. Blair, not grasping their importance, gave control of cultural and educational matters to the hard left, while he took the apparently more important bits, politics and economic policy. The far left gave up class warfare and socialist economics. But while Blair was busy reforming the post-Thatcher welfare state, the far left got, in exchange, unchallenged control of Britain's official cultural life, its schools and universities, trade unions, and government-owned news media.

This is the origin of the recent attempts by Britain's unions (always farther to the left than America's) to boycott Israeli universities. These attempts were defeated, but only after a two-year effort. Of course, these are the equivalent of what we call public-employee unions - they're not your grandfather's unions and feature no sweaty proletarians. Drifting away from the Old Left, they have fully swallowed the "cultural" or "new" left identity politics and search for scapegoats for all imperial sins, real and imagined. Jews and Israel have now become, not for the first or last time, whipping boys for European extremist movements.

But Britain has a longer tradition of elite antisemitism that should not be neglected. The "new" antisemitism traces from the late 90s back to the 1973-74 oil embargo, the rise of "Palestinianism" (it won't do to call it nationalism), and the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and counterassault on the PLO. Until the late 90s, our view of this issue was shaped and perhaps warped by the Cold War. Further perspective is possible by looking farther back into the earlier twentieth century, the 1920, 30s, and 40s. Here we encounter the anti-Jewish prejudices of Britain's interwar upper classes (a phenomenon far more marginal before 1914, by the way). A figure like George Galloway, for example, cannot be understood apart from this modern tradition of elite antisemitism and strong affinity for foreign dictators and populist demagogues on the part of the educated classes and self-styled "radicals" - the same tradition that gave us Unity and Diana Mitford and Lord Haw-Haw.* Of course, people now have less shame and more incentive, given our media-driven exhibitionist culture, to let it all hang out, so to speak. In the 1930s, only those who had really gone around the bend put on such public displays. And we mustn't forget resentment over the accelerating loss of empire and displacement by the US (definitely found on the left as well, usually without the guts to admit it). The intellectual classes were hardly immune - exemplified by the once-important historian Arnold Toynbee and his antisemitism, opposition to Zionism, and extraordinary rationalizing for the Armenian genocide.

What's stunning about these developments, is how opinions and tendencies once (correctly) viewed as far-right and reactionary poison, have now become an everyday staple among the postmodern left. For more about the tangled origins of the "new" antisemitism, see here.

What's happening in Britain now is not at all like Germany in the 1930s or even Russia and Romania in the early 20th century. It's more like Austria and France in the late 19th century. Both countries had just been humiliated by Germany. While their economies boomed throughout that period, the growth was uneven in both time and in its effect on different social classes. Both countries experienced political and social turmoil. Today, the rise of the EU and the possible break-up of the United Kingdom have combined with the vicious political correctness of the far left and the radical muzzein's call to leave Britons' confidence in, not only their present institutions, but basic political principles, badly shaken. To follow the argument of English doctor Theodore Dalrymple, the "rebarbarization" of Britain is a real possibility. While the world wars and the end of empire left mid-century Britain materially damaged, middle-class decency and intellectual leadership were still solid. These apparently can no longer be counted on, although many in Britain are deeply unhappy about this.**

A few years ago, Richard Wistrich vividly spelled out the profound and accelerating shift in Britain:

None of this is to say that British culture is inherently or overwhelmingly hostile to Jews. Great Britain, which was the birthplace of liberalism in its modern political and economic senses, continues to be a liberal society today, with a healthy democracy, a free press, and an independent judiciary dedicated to protecting individual liberties. Indeed, in the last several centuries, and through World War II, Great Britain was, relative to the rest of Europe at least, a model of tolerance. Nor does it follow that the Jews of the United Kingdom are about to enter a dark era of persecution or the curtailment of basic individual rights.

What it does suggest, however, is that the widely held image of Britain as a realm uniquely hospitable to its Jewish citizens - similar in this regard to the United States, Canada, and other English-speaking countries - no longer seems accurate. In dry numbers, Great Britain has become home to a wave of anti-Semitic violence second only to France in all of Europe. Considered more substantively, anti-Semitic sentiments, motifs, symbols, and methods have gained a legitimacy in British public discourse that enjoys little parallel in the Western world.

Today the United Kingdom stands at a crossroads. Great ideological battles - over European unification, the effort to reassert elements of sovereignty in Scotland and Wales, and the future of long-standing traditions such as hunting and the monarchy - have brought about a profound erosion of the very idea of Britain. But when nations are so deeply unsure of the stability of their values and the security of their future, anti-Semitic sentiment often bubbles to the surface, as people deflect blame for a nation’s problems instead of addressing them head-on. For this reason, it is often said that the way a nation treats its Jews is a litmus test for its true character. As Britain’s subjects ponder their future among the community of nations, they would do well to keep these lessons of the past in mind.

These developments also give the lie - again! - to the absurd idea widely-held by American liberals that Europe is more sophisticated than the US or worthy of American imitation. The truth is very different. For an update on the situation, see here.

But - Europe's resurgent post-Cold War demons: that's another posting - or two, or three.

POSTSCRIPT: Some observers are struck by the fact that a significant number of the propagandists and leaders of the boycott movement are Jewish - but this should be no surprise. Pair them up with Islamic radicals, and inward-looking self-hatred meets outward-directed aggression. It's like one of those "high affinity" reactions you learned about in high school chemistry: acid-base, alkaline-halide: a violent encounter between sadism and masochism - and a strongly bound molecule emerges.

A people's vices are often related to their virtues. The rise of the self- and Jew-hating post-imperial left in Britain has been facilitated by the ingrained English sense of fair play and tolerance for eccentricity. (Something similar was at work in the 1930s appeasement era.) It is precisely because of Britain's long tradition of tolerance that far-left and radical-Islamic antisemitism have run so rampant there. But the rise of political correctness in Britain has not gone unresisted.† On the Tory side, the criticism of the Blair-era rampage of academic and media elites has been trenchant. These elites have more influence in Britain than do their opposite numbers here. But that does not mean their critics have disappeared.

Counterboycotts have been proposed, but they need to be painted with a finer brush and properly directed. General boycotts of Britain are not warranted.†† These are not, after all, government policies. In fact, instead of drawing the boundaries around countries, we can understand and fight these ideas and these people better if we draw boundaries around "the media," "academia," and "far-left activist organizations." Then all those people in Britain who are irritated by political correctness end up on the right side of that boundary. And the boundaries are international - we can see all of these same PC tendencies at work here as well - they just lack the concentrated clout they have in Britain.
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* Familiar to any student of British politics and foreign policy in the 1930s and echoed, for example, in Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Remains of the Day and the movie based on it.

** As suggested by the striking success of Conn and Hal Iggulden's anti-PC The Dangerous Book for Boys, written to counter the simultaneous dumbification and couch-potato-ization of at least half of the West's adolescents. Listen here to an interview.

† A British book published recently, Robert Irwin's Dangerous Knowledge, is a comprehensive and irrefutable critique of Edward Said and his noxious influence on Orientalism (study of the Middle East). It's the most important book on the subject in decades.

Strikingly, while Irwin is sympathetic to the Palestinians, he goes out of his way to point out the large contributions to modern Oriental studies by Jewish scholars (German, British, American, Israeli, and Ottoman/Middle Eastern). Irwin firmly rejects the attempt to annex the intellectual life of our or any society to "political correctness." However you come down on some burning current issue, the forming of meaningful opinions and of successful policies for the Middle East by outsiders is impossible without real knowledge. What "Middle East studies" needs is more - not a Edwardian ban on - free inquiry and discussion. While knowledge alone can't make our decisions for us, what's dumber than a willfully uninformed opinion?

Since Said was educated at elite Christian boarding schools and came from an Anglophile family, he was himself a personal link between the snobbish Christian and bourgeois antisemitism of the pre-war decades and the new-style anti-Zionism of the radical left - once he doctored his autobiography and reinvented himself as an oppressed noble savage.

†† Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg recently canceled appearances at a number of British schools because of the attempted boycotts. He hasn't engaged in or called for a general boycott of Britain, however.

A guide for the perplexed I

There is a great deal of ruin in any country.

- Adam Smith

The new French president, Nicholas Sarkozy, recently visited the US and gave an exceptionally fine speech to a joint session of Congress. You can find it here, translated. (Although Sarkozy can understand English, his speaking and writing are shaky. So he spoke in French.) It's certainly one of the best speeches a foreign leader has given in the US in many years. Many liberals were nonplussed by it, since it contradicts their fantasies about Europe. Conservatives were pleased, but confused - after all, he's French.

What gives? It's explained here, but I'll add something else: the critical problem with France, from the mid-1960s on, was the dominant Gaullist dispensation that did not view France as part of the West. Instead, it was supposed to constitute its own realm, with a foreign policy often divergent from Western interests vis-a-vis the Soviet Union and the Middle East. Although the Socialists brought French foreign policy back in a more sensible direction in the 1980s, the Gaullist approach dominated through the end of Chirac's presidency this year. This, in spite of the fact that since the early 1990s, France has been becoming a "normal" country, sharing more and more culturally and socially with the rest of Western Europe and - quel horreur! - the US. Its foreign and economic policies were the late in reflecting this evolution and often seemed stuck in another era. "Official" France did not view itself as being in the same boat as other Western countries, even though, in fact, it has been continuously since the industrial revolution and the rise of Germany and Russia in the late 19th century.

All of that has changed in the last few years. One reason is economic-demographic: France, like the rest of western Europe, can no longer afford its welfare state. Over a third of the country, in effect, doesn't work, while the rest support them. And it does not have enough younger workers to pay for generous retirements (starting at age 53 or so) or for students to remain in school until their mid-30s. Its labor market rigidity, however, also prevents younger French Arabs from entering, or from entering at a high enough level to contribute their full economic potential to the French economy and tax coffers. No doubt, French politicians of the last two generations thought they were being clever by buying off these "youths" (as they're often called when they riot) with welfare, instead of doing the harder but better thing of integrating them into the work force. Much of social integration is economic: when you work in a country's economy, you've taken some big steps towards integrating into that society. Of course, there's more to it than work and money, which don't capture the political and social dimensions of integration. But still, it counts for a lot. When it's missing, disaster results.

Which brings up a second reason: the French are now fully awake to the problem of unassimilated Muslim enclaves growing in their cities. This development poses the most serious threat to France's social cohesion and political sovereignty since the decline and collapse of the Third Republic before and during World War Two. What's more, it's not a matter of defeating a foreign army and pushing them out. The younger Muslims are French citizens, but they are frequently far less assimilated than their parents and grandparents, who originally immigrated to France. Western Europe's post-1945 cultural-religious-political vacuum leads these restless "youths" to look elsewhere for moral and intellectual guidance - with radical Islam being the most popular choice. The French of European culture and descent are frightened of what's grown up in their midst, and their governments until recently were reluctant to talk about the problem in public. Although France has a tough system of antiterrorist laws, courts, and police that has been successful in stopping Islamic terror attacks in the last 15 years, the reality of this problem - like so many of Europe's problems - has been carefully hidden from the public by political elites and the media. A variety of substitute hate objects - Israel and the US prominent among them - fill the void. Only in the last few years, with the problems now so serious that elites can no longer hide them, has the French public begun to wake from its welfare-state narcosis. The formerly high-handed and somewhat secretive French elite was forced to turn to the public at large and run a competitive politics for the first time in decades. The last elections featured four major parties; Sarkozy and his followers in the center-right party (the old Gaullist coalition) swept the field, in part by acknowledging realities that everyone sees but often refused to admit.

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When we look at Europe's three most important countries - Britain, France, and Germany - a curious spectacle presents itself. France, a frequent irritant to the US in the last 40 years, has swung around to a position of broad agreement with the US, in spite of conflicting views about Iraq. Germany also now has a leader of the center-right, Angela Merkel, an "Atlanticist" of the Kohl-Adenauer type, broadly similar to Sarkozy. But Germany is in a strange position. Unlike France and for obvious reasons, it has not been allowed or allowed itself to exercise an aggressive policy of national interests. While the French have done this vigorously since the 1960s, they often pursued misguided policies - but at least they pursued something. The commitment of Germany's political elites to Western democratic values is real, and they are consistent in opposition to Muslim antisemitism in ways often not true of their French or British counterparts. But such an orientation is essentially reactive and defensive, and it's unclear if that is enough to halt the spread of Islamic radicalism among Germany's growing Muslim population. A weak national government and power decentralized to the German laender (states) and cities, imposed by the Allies in 1945, is the price of a defanged Germany no longer threatening to its neighbors.

The odd man in this trio is now, strangest of all, Great Britain, once America's most dependable ally in western Europe and creator of the original Jewish National Home in Palestine. The long shadow of post-1945 American dominance of the English-speaking world, the end of the Cold War, and Britain's loss of its empire have left it politically hollowed out. While Tony Blair and his government were strongly pro-American and firm on the need to oppose Islamic radicalism, the political elites of Britain have been headed in a different direction since the early 1990s. Britain's official culture of politics and education have been overrun with particularly noxious form of political correctness. It would be reversing cause and effect to say that PC has weakened Britain's national identity. But the rapid and unchecked growth of Islamic radicalism in London and other British cities has created as serious a crisis there as in France; the difference is that Britain, unlike France and the US, lacks clearly articulated and universal liberal and democratic values. Its political culture and national identity have depended historically far more on the unwritten and even unspoken. It seems odd that this should be so; after all, Britain is the cradle of modern liberty, constitutionalism, and democratic practice. The triumph of liberal, democratic, and market-economic values in the modern world is due largely to Britain and its former colonies.

Nonetheless, the weakness of Britain's domestic culture and politics, its inability to face down Islamic radicals, and the spread of intellectual and moral corruption in the face of such challenges are unmistakable. The next posting will explore why.

Peering into the liberal sandbox

"I was in Dorchester not long ago," Mitt Romney said in his closing statement in the fall of 1994 debate for Senator against incumbent Ted Kennedy. "Someone said, `This is Kennedy country.' ... "And I looked around and I saw boarded-up buildings and ... jobs leaving, and I said, `It looks like it.' "

And Dorchester (South Boston) hasn't changed much since then.

Friends sometimes ask me about Massachusetts politics, especially since former governor Romney is running for President. Here's the stuff they leave out of the Boston Globe.

It's a strange state: the country's most left-wing in some respects, much of its Democratic base consists of "yellow dogs," not liberals. But the state's political cultural is dominated by bleeding hearts and has been seriously dysfunctional for decades. The worst excesses of Kennedy-Johnson era liberalism were checked in a modest way in the 1980s by Dukakis, then later, in a more serious way, by a series of reasonably good liberal Republican governors. But Romney's early departure from the state for national politics left the Republicans without a viable candidate for 2006, and the governorship was captured by outsider Deval Patrick, the Democratic nominee.

Like Lousiana, Massachusetts is one of the last states in the country governed by a long-lived one-party machine not far removed from the days of patronage corruption. The once-fabled Massachusetts liberalism was really just an attempt to expand the list to include those, like blacks and Hispanics, once excluded from the patronage gravytrain. The more fundamental challenge, frontally attacking the lavish spending and burdensome regulation that makes Massachusetts one of the country's most expensive places to live in, has largely been avoided. But facing it would do far more good for everyone - the overtaxed middle class, working class folks facing an almost-impossible cost of living - than yet more spending. Patrick has attacked older forms of patronage, but he is a big friend of the newer types of pork, like his unnecessary billion-plus-dollar biotech initiative. And it's not even aimed at poor people any more; now it's the political class splurging on itself and its friends - because, you know, they deserve it. Exhibit A is the 16-year-long saga of the Big Dig, which will probably never be finished and still doesn't work properly. Its price: enough money to build twice over enough public housing for every poor person in the state.

No one knows the foibles of Massachusetts' weird upper-crust liberalism - making the "classes" feel good about themselves, while making life nearly impossible for the "masses" - than Jon Keller, author of The Bluest State: How Democrats Created the Massachusetts Blueprint for American Political Disaster. His blog for local broadcaster WBZ is a must-read for anyone interested in Massachusetts politics and the Democratic Party.

Recent Democratic electoral successes in no way invalidate his analysis: those are entirely due to the Republicans' own mistakes, not to any Democratic strength. Keller, himself left-of-center, knows as only an insider can what's wrong with the Democratic party: it's lost touch with ordinary voters in a frenzy of trendy causes, generational vanity, and hypocritical paternalism. Everyone else gets stuck with the bill. And then the voters: Massachusetts voters lack serious alternatives, yet react timidly when they appear. Not that there aren't signs Massachusetts is restless.

Geek love

Once upon a time, music was packaged and sold to people on flat, flexible discs made of hard vinyl. The music was encoded (this was way before anything digital) by being converted to grooves etched on the vinyl surface. People played the music back on what were called "record players," which required hard needles made of diamond to run through the grooves and convert their bumps and wiggles back to music. You didn't download the music or order it on Amazon; you had to go to something called a "record store," where crates and crates of these vinyl discs were carefully stored in cardboard and plastic.

Along the way, some pretty strange vinyl "records" were made. Frank's Vinyl Museum collects them, at least virtually, for your amusement or, depending on your age, nostalgia.

Speaking of nostalgia, some of you might be old enough to remember another pre-digital device, the Etch-a-Sketch. It all lives again on the Web, as MyDrawings.com.

And, the Thanksgiving, was good, no? I mean, for you, not the turkey.

Brother, can you spare a call plan?

Kavanna reporting from San Francisco:

The Bay Area is "home" to many homeless. They are, no doubt, attracted by the mild climate, as well as the tolerant populace willing to soothe its collective conscience by tossing change into a beggar's empty latte cup. Lately, I've noticed that the street guy near the freeway entrance, the obese woman parked in front of the Safeway, and other such independent contractors chat on cell phones in between their "Spare some change - God bless you" pitches. So now those quarters and dimes divested from the working class support not just Thunderbird and meth habits, but also Verizon plans!

What are the street denizens chatting about? One can imagine: "Hey, Darrell, my market research shows that the soccer moms exiting Chez Bebe are a sure thing. They want to show their little Joshua's and Brianna's the 'value of giving.' You can have this corner after my shift ends."

On a related note, Mayor Gavin Newsom has described Wi-Fi as a basic human right. Not a luxury, but a necessity. Based upon that solid Constitutional foundation, and the City's desire to bridge the "digital divide," San Francisco wants to provide free wireless Internet access to all. Is free cell phone service for the poor and homeless next?

Kavanna joins the Pajamas Media Blogroll

It's true - click the button above, and you'll be whisked to Pajamas Media, the Web's major aggregator of blog commentary. It's an honor to be here - and there.

POSTSCRIPT: We're up on the Blogroll now, in the Other Groovy Blogs page linked off their main page.

I guess this means I can now say, "Groovy, baby!" or something like that :)

Life at the tip

When I visited Jerusalem this summer, like previous times in the last 20 years and like many tourists before me, I had the usual encounter (you always have at least one) with a Palestinian offering his services as a tour guide in the Old City. His name was Hamid. He showed me around the Zion Gate area, including the grave of Oskar Schindler, who is buried nondescriptly in the Old City's main Roman Catholic cemetery. Hamid then offered to drive me to see Bethlehem, which I hadn't seen since the late 80s, when I was younger and it was safer. I declined. He said he was from Ramallah and a man without a country, which is true. The Israeli security "fence" and checkpoints have made it hard for Palestinians living in the West Bank to work in Israel, and the flow of workers from Gaza has stopped altogether. The only thing worse than being exploited by the Capitalist Man is, I guess, not being exploited by the Capitalist Man.

This got me to wondering about the whole issue and why the Palestinians, of all the large number of refugees the last century has produced, still live in political limbo. After all, next year will be 60 years since Israel's war of independence, which produced the first and larger wave of these refugees; while this year is 40 years since the Six Day War, which produced a smaller but still significant wave. The 1990s Oslo "peace process" was supposed to lead to a semi-state, run by Arafat and his Fatah organization (the core of the PLO), and then to real political independence. But the events of the last 15 years has produced nothing of the sort. Instead, whatever there were of state-like functions in the West Bank and Gaza were weak and rotten with corruption. With the triumph of Hamas in Gaza and its impending victory in the West Bank, even the pretense of a state has disappeared. These places are now satellites of Iran, if they have any political orientation at all. Recent proposals by its mayor to redivide Jerusalem provoked bitter complaints from the Arabs of East Jerusalem, who simply don't want to live in a Hamas- or Fatah-ruled statelet. They saw the future, and it didn't work.

Palestinianism: What it is, and isn't. The Arabs of Palestine are not a people by the usual criteria (language, religion, geography) and "Palestinianism" is not a form of nationalism. Palestinian terror against Israelis and Jews is not resistance in the service of nationalism - it's pseudo-nationalism in the service of terror. The Palestinian Arabs have been used as a proxy army, in classic Middle Eastern fashion, for much of the last century. The goal of this proxy army has always been destroying Israel, not making a state for the Palestinians to rule themselves. Individual Palestinians occasionally wake up and understand this, especially if they're Christian or better educated.*

Almost everything about this conflict and Palestinian political behavior, otherwise a mystery, becomes understandable once you see this. Palestinians are in the conflict, but it's not about them. The rise of non-Palestinian proxies for use against Israel - the Lebanese Hizbollah especially - demonstrates this fact in a different way. The Palestinians "never pass up an opportunity to pass up an opportunity" because opportunities of that type are not what they're looking for. Neither are they looking for a constructive politics of the nation-building type. Arafat was not a Washington, a Garibaldi, a De Valera, or a Ben Gurion - that is, "father of his country." It would be best to think of him as a glorified bandit who managed to extort many billions of dollars for himself and his organization (the PLO, or Fatah) from Arab governments and later Israeli and Western governments. Of course, the PLO's replacements, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, are openly theocratic and oriented to pan-Islam. The PLO was indifferent to nationalism; the theocrats are actively hostile.

The scandal of the refugee camps. On top of this is the six-decade disgrace of the Palestinian refugee camps, which continue to exist only because Arab governments and the UN want them to. Even in cases where Palestinian Arab refugees could or could have returned to the villages they fled from during 1948-49 and 1967 Arab-Israeli fighting, Arab governments won't let them. They're not supposed to; that would spoil their role. Instead, in the 1950s, the Arab League extorted from the UN a special refugee agency (UNRWA) just for the Palestinian Arabs, separate from the regular UN refugee organization (UNHCR). No Arab government (with one exception) allows Palestinians to become citizens. These governments typically allow only Muslims as citizens in any case. (The Gulf kingdoms further restrict citizenship to members of the majority tribe.)

The anomaly of Jordan. The one exception to the inability of Palestinians to become citizens in Arab countries is Jordan, Israel's next-door neighbor, ruler of the West Bank from 1949 until 1967 and still claiming it until 1988. When the Arab governments rejected the UN partition of western (cisjordanian) Palestine in 1947, they rejected a potential Arab state in western Palestine - the same entity under discussion today as a "Palestinian state." Lost in the confusion was the fact that "Palestine" is a geographic, not an ethnic or national, term and that it covered areas both east and west of the Jordan River. Carved out of eastern (transjordanian) Palestine, the kingdom of Jordan was created by Britain in 1922 as a consolation prize for the Hashemite dynasty after it was kicked out of Mecca and Medina by the ibn Sa'ud family. The ruling Hashemite family are Arabian Beduin, and the kingdom today remains about half Bedu. The other half are "Palestinian" - that is, Arabs (some Christian, most Muslim) living in towns and villages. Rather than converting the new Jordanian kingdom into "the" Palestinian Arab state (which it manifestly was already), British colonial and foreign affairs officials repeatedly and stupidly encouraged the growth of extremist, rejectionist leaders and groups in Arab Palestine - above all, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, collaborator with Hitler, and reputedly Arafat's maternal uncle - and then reacted with bafflement when such groups and leaders instigated riots and pogroms against Jews, even in places like Jerusalem and Hebron, where they had been living since antiquity.** When the Arab-Jewish conflict over Palestine sharpened into its current form in the 1930s, the British Peel Commission recommended partition of western Palestine into Jewish and Arab parts, with the Arab part awarded to these rejectionist leaders - who didn't want it anyway. These "divide-and-rule" policies of encouraging the wrong people were a central part of what was wrong with colonialism.

While the Peel Commission's 1937 partition lived on in the UN's 1947 partition and the more recent "Palestinian state" idea and seems reasonable on the surface, it evades the big question of the Arab world's lack of democracy. Awarding political sovereignty means "awarding to whom?" and in the Arab world, that means authoritarian monarchy, brutish usurper dictatorship (think Saddam), or no one (think semi-anarchy, like Iraq and Gaza). In the case of western Palestine, it's always meant "radical, rejectionist groups and people" - like al-Husseini, Arafat, the PLO, and now Hamas and Iran. At the heart of their radicalism is a blend of rejection of outside rule (anticolonialism), rejection of outside influences (once anti-Western, now again anti-infidel), and oppression of national and religious minorities (such as the Egyptian Copts, the Kurds, Jews, black Sudanese Christians and Muslims, etc.). Since the latter sometimes had European powers and later the United States as protectors and champions, resentment of these minorities and of infidel outsiders became intertwined, both viewed as threats to Islamic supremacy.

Defeating the rejectionists. Progress toward conflict resolution in the Middle East has historically been possible only when rejectionist forces are weakened, discredited, knocked out, or "turned." Modern Middle East history demonstrates this principle without exception: local progress toward peace in Palestine is enabled when radical forces in the larger region are defeated: 1974-79 (Sadat) and 1988-1994 (end of the Cold War, Iraqi defeat in the Gulf War, followed by Oslo and the Israel-Jordan peace). These regional rejectionist forces are the ones who use the Palestinians (and now the Lebanese Shi'ites) as proxies, and they are the "root cause" of the conflict. The Palestinian conflict is the tail, not the dog; the ultimate effect, not the cause. The Palestinians are important in the Middle East to the extent they're useful as tools to these forces. Torrents of fallacies, big lies, and clichés to the contrary can't change this fact. The end of this month (November 29th) is the 60th anniversary of the UN resolution partitioning western Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, which the Arab states then rejected. Clearing away some of the charter myths of the modern Middle East is an important step toward regional peace.

The main rejectionist force today is Iran and its proxies Hamas and Hizbollah. Defeating Iran, isolating it, "turning" it, or some combination of the three is now the key. Anyone serious about peace in the region needs to recognize this. Thinking otherwise is to reverse cause and effect and misidentify the prime movers of the Middle East's regional conflicts. There is no ground-up politics in the Middle East; it's all "sponsored proxyship" inspired, funded, and armed by bigger players. It's essential again to get over the idea that radical groups in the Middle East represent the mythical "Arab street" or any bottom-up politics. All Middle Eastern politics is top-down; factions become powerful when they're someone's proxy, organized, funded, and armed as such.†

The next steps can include abolishing UNRWA and merging its functions back into the main UN refugee agency, together with pressuring Arab governments to drop discriminatory measures against Palestinian Arabs (although that still leaves the problem of Palestinian Christians).

This is not a question of Palestinians as individuals or families. Political identity is a collective question, with a collective answer. It's not clear what could serve as a political identity for the Palestinians, or even if one is possible. Confusion here is due to misuse of "national" language: the PLO as the "sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people" - but is there such a people, and is the PLO "representative" in any meaningful sense? It was created as a proxy instrument by Egypt and Syria in 1964. Egypt has since abandoned the cause, and Syria has moved on to Hizbollah. Fatah is certainly incapable of functioning as a government - it was never set up or intended to be such.

The Arabs of Palestine have been used for eight decades as the tip of someone else's spear, held by successive rejectionist states and groups in the Middle East. They're organized as a proxy army and a form of "human shield" politics. These conditions are the root of the sick nihilism that has been normalized among Palestinians. No one is born that way; they have to be brainwashed into it. And they have been, as a part of being used as someone else's tools of violence.

POSTSCRIPT: In the last 30+ years, the Western media has turned away from its once forthright pro-Israel stance toward the fake "noble savage" claptrap of the New Left, with disastrous effect on journalistic standards. Occasionally, the "open secrets" of postmodern journalism in the Middle East come into sharp focus. One such recent case was the al-Dura trial in France, an example of the pervasive irrationality of contemporary journalism and the ease with which it can turn into a postmodern blood libel, a deadly mix of propaganda and ignorance. PajamasMedia covered it extensively; plus don't miss this essay by Melanie Phillips.

ANOTHER POSTSCRIPT: This posting was inspired, in part, by Haim Harari's wonderful book, a fine analysis, on this and other topics, done by someone who still believes in progress and truth - liberal in the correct, older, and almost forgotten meaning. Thinking like this is often called "conservative" nowadays, but only because the right word has been usurped by the wrong people.

Earlier I mentioned Amos Oz's novel-like autobiography of growing up in Jerusalem in the 1930s and 1940s. Many regard it as his best book. People have asked me, if Edward Said was a fraud, are there real Palestinian authors worth reading? Indeed there are, for example: Sari Nusseibeh and Anton Shammas, one Muslim, the other Christian. Agree with them or not, they are actual Palestinians.

All four books are enhanced by another, Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul, a memoir of the novelist's youth in the former capital of a once-great empire.
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* Until recently, there was a large overlap between the two groups, and Palestinian Christians have always had strong incentives, both "push" and "pull," to just get up and leave. (OTOH, Arab Christians played a disproportionate role in secular Arab nationalism, having the most to gain from it - and having the most to lose from the Islamic revival.) As the conflict has moved back toward a Muslim-Jewish religious struggle and Arab Christians have felt increasing pressure from Muslims to subordinate themselves or convert, the "push" reasons have gotten stronger. The main "pull" is the fact that Palestinian Christians have always had an easier time integrating into Western societies.

And apologies to Antonio Prohías! :)

** Thereby demonstrating that the crux of the conflict is one of political sovereignty, not just Jewish presence. After spending the war in Berlin and trying to recruit Bosnian Muslims for the SS, al-Husseini was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death in absentia by the Nuremburg War Crimes Tribunal. After the war, he fled to Syria and later died in Lebanon. He was also a probable participant in the successful 1951 assassination plot against King Adbullah of Jordan.

Because they share common enemies, the ruling Jordanian Hashemites and the Israeli government secretly cooperated for many decades (long before the formal peace between the two countries) to defeat what I have called here "rejectionist" forces threatening both of them. The most famous instance was the Israeli offer to help the late King Hussein stop the attempted PLO coup in 1970 ("Black September"), which set off a brief civil war in Jordan and led to the PLO's forced removal to southern Lebanon.

† A different example, with more direct impact on Americans, is the multifaceted al-Qa'eda network, germinated by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. It might seem strange that governments technically friendly to the United States and other Western countries would sponsor such dangerous organizations, but they're useful to countries - like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan - that lack political legitimacy and promote religious radicalism as a substitute for nationalism. Not that they fit traditional Islamic criteria of legitimacy either: they're not successors of Muhammad. The simplest way to satisfy that is to be one of Muhammad's descendants - which the monarchs of Jordan, Morocco, and the smaller Gulf states are, but not the rulers of Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. They're usurpers by traditional Islamic standards and, at the same time, fail to meet modern criteria for democratic legitimacy.

I'm not with Barack

OK, ANOTHER PRESCRIPT: The Onion says it all :)
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Earlier this summer, I wrote something about being with Obama, but I was being partly facetious. As long as he doesn't act like a candidate, he's perceptive (especially observing the Baby Boomers) and worth listening to. As soon as he switches to candidate mode, he starts to flounder and seems like a man drowning in two feet of water. It's makes Hillary look all the more serious.

Not that Hillary isn't in growing trouble now. People are starting to get reminded what they didn't like about the Clintons the first time around. If the fog of Clinton-gaga-media could be lifted, people might even remember that Clinton was elected as a minority president both times and would not have won without Perot draining away votes from the Republicans. (The Republicans have learned that lesson and have made keeping populist voters a touchstone of their strategy.) Hillary the presidential candidate is operating in an environment far less forgiving than the 1990s.

Hillary remains the Democrats' only candidate who is both serious and viable. The party in general still has no serious ideas and remains disconnected from serious issues. Instead, we continue to get Bush Derangement Syndrome and bogus Congressional investigations, epitomized by dim-bulb weirdo Kucinich.

Earth from space

Everyone's seen the Apollo pictures of Earth from space, including the famous "Earthrise" of Apollo 8. A new generation of high-definition digital cameras is producing amazingly sharp pictures of Earth and the Moon. Check out these pictures from the Japanese Kaguya spacecraft now orbiting the Moon.

And don't miss NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day - it's a Web favorite.

The other eleventh day revisited

Here's an interesting article by Richard Rubin about America's last surviving Great War veterans (requires registration). What was it all about?

Just rediscovered: Michael Totten's prescient essay on Turkey, from several years ago. His point about the differences between Europe and America is well-taken: America has a big hammer and tends to think of everything as a nail. Europe ignores nails, even when staring at them. Europeans (not their governments, but their populations) overwhelmingly oppose Turkey's entrance into the EU, because it puts the border of Europe, not at the old Cold War line, but well into the Middle East. As Totten puts it, Turkey is a nail. And, as Yugoslavia proved, Europe lacks hammers.

Don't miss out on Totten's recent, superb reportage-essays from Kurdistan and Iran. His policy advice is deeply informed and worth more than most of the chatter in Western capitals. And I wish I could write like that.

Another home run from Ken Burns?

Ken Burns knows how to do it, it seems. In his new series aired this fall on PBS, The War, he seems to have hit another home run, like his previous series on the Civil War, baseball, and jazz. The series is short and best described as World War Two from the everyday American street level. It's a compressed snapshot of why America and the world are what they are today.

World War Two was the largest war ever - it killed 60 million people.* It was one of the few events that qualifies as a cataclysm, dividing history in two in such a way that everyone counts it as before and after. It was the second part of an event that started with World War One and that in a sense continued until the end of the Cold War. What's happening now in the Middle East is part of the same stream.

There have been some complaints about the series. It jumps around too much and leaves context hanging, some people say, and they're right. But there's something else that bothered me about it: the lack of domestic political context. Contrary to the pap sometimes fed to viewers and readers, no American war has lacked controversy, and each was preceded by intense debate and dissent that often extended into the war itself, then was followed by decades of "bitter-enders" who held on to weird political ideas and theories long after the event. World War Two was the only American war to lack significant dissent during the war, but did not lack for intense debate beforehand. Everyone knew it would be a watershed in both American and world history. It's only in long retrospect that the Civil War became non-controversial throughout the United States (including in the South). Political consensus formed more rapidly during and after World War Two, but the bitter conflict of interventionists and isolationists - after the 1930s, America's only true isolationist decade - left a strong residue of distrust of executive power and skepticism about foreign involvements that appeared in the 1950s, again in the late 1960s and 1970s, again in the 1990s, and again after the Iraq war. The "great debate" of 1939-41 spawned America First, the largest peace movement in American history. Only the ignorant think what's happening now is unprecedented or even that big by historical standards.

But one thing Burns carefully avoids, and that's the mythology of the "good war." Each episode gives a small taste of what war is really like. Viewers learn why war, sometimes necessary, occasionally just, is never "good." Wise statesmen try to avoid it and, if they can't, find ways to limit it in time, space, and scope.
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* The Russo-German war alone killed half of those people, about 30 million, and itself counts as the largest war in history.

The other eleventh day

It's still not over - World War One, that is. On the western front, the fighting ended with the armistice that took effect this morning, 89 years ago, at 11 o'clock. The fighting that touched Russia and Turkey did not end until 1922. In some respects - the Balkans, the Middle East, remains of overseas European empires - it's never stopped. Treaties - Versailles, Triannon, and Brest-Litovsk for western, central, and eastern Europe, Sèvres and Lausanne for the Middle East - were supposed to formally settle the conflict. In fact, they settled much less than that.

Europe is - or at least, once was - quite conscious of the war's significance, while it has never sunk as deeply into American awareness. The US lost a somewhat more than a hundred thousand dead. But the 20th century was simply a consequence: understand it, and the century following becomes crystal-clear. The British empire lost almost a million; the continental powers many more: Italy, half a million; France, almost two million; Germany, over two million; Austria-Hungary, a million and a half; Russia and Ottoman Turkey, several million - no exact number was ever determined in the postwar chaos.

Earlier in 1917 saw the March revolution in Russia, the April entry of the US into the war, and the May "strike" of the French army. This month in 1917 saw the Bolshevik coup in Saint Petersburg, the arrival of the first American units in France, and the Balfour Declaration regarding a Jewish national home in Palestine. December 1917 saw the capture of Jerusalem by the British, Australians, and New Zealanders under Allenby. October 1917 saw the Italians' catastrophic defeat at the hands of the Austrians and Germans at Caporetto. Even this late in the war, things were not going well for the Allies, at least in Europe: Russia had dropped out, and France and Italy were effectively finished as great powers.

The 1914-18 conflict saw not only the emergence of the US as a world power; it saw the beginning of the end of Europe's four-century domination of the world, its status as the center of civilization, and its mastery of its own fate. Today, Europe is in long-term economic and demographic decline relative to the rest of the world, and neither master of its own destiny nor the center of civilization. Those facts have far more to do with post-Cold War developments there than anything the Bush-obsessed here would have you believe.

It also saw the end of empires. The British and American colonial systems began their "soft landing" toward self-liquidation; the French faced slow but inexorable withdrawal; others - like the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman - ended with a sudden bang. The rise of Hitler, and more generally of fascism - including the Islamic kind - was a direct result of World War One and the poisonous residue of resentment in nations that felt cheated by its outcome. The spread of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and terror dates from that time. America and Britain, technically victors, faced disillusionment followed by intense isolationism in one case and appeasement in the other.

But how did it happen in the first place? The conflict between Austria and Serbia was clear enough, and Russia got into it as a matter of course, to defend its little Slavic cousin. But the real linchpin was Germany - how did that happen? It wasn't the Kaiser, who, in spite of his sometimes bellicose rhetoric and fixation on the British Navy, nervously attempted to diffuse the crisis and coax Austria into getting war against Serbia over with quickly. What converted a Balkans war into a world war was Austria's dithering and the determination of the German General Staff to use the Sarajevo crisis to provoke a larger war with Russia and France - they saw it as their last opportunity to do so, lest Russia become too strong. And the temptation to finish their humiliation of the French was just too overpowering to resist.

And how did the combatant countries endure it? A few years ago, on a trip to Germany, I flew into Hamburg directly over the trench lines of Flanders, which are still visible from the air, marked out by the British garden cemeteries. I thought about them, 90-odd years ago, hunkered down in trenches with their packs, their gas masks and rifles, rats scurrying about. Many more years ago, I flew over the remains of the Verdun battlefield, now marked by a giant ossuary and cemetery containing the bodies and fragments of a quarter million French and German soldiers: death industrial. How did they endure four years of that? It was world's first total war: whole nations and empires were emptied of manpower and treasure, and many did not survive; others came out badly mauled. In spite of well-intentioned efforts to stimulate economic recovery in the 1920s, the Great Depression hit as the ultimate bill for the destruction and loss of life. Governments stupidly compounded that crisis with misguided trade and monetary policies.

The loveliest Great War cemeteries of are those constructed by the British War Graves Commission and maintained all over the world, but concentrated mainly in France and Flanders. Other nations have not done as much or so lovingly - while there are many local monuments scattered around the country and an "Unknown Solider" is buried at Arlington, the United States lacks a national World War One memorial. Especially in eastern Europe and in the Middle East, many of the dead were never properly counted or buried. Even on the western front, too many were blown to bits by the innovation of exploding artillery shells, or buried in collapsing trenches and foxholes, to ever be recovered or identified. In all, about ten million soldiers perished, by far the largest conflict in history until that time. Around a million Ottoman Armenian civilians died, while the Spanish flu epidemic that started near the end of the war killed more than 20 million.

The Great War, or the World War, as it was once called, was old-fashioned in this respect: it was still a war in which it was generally safer to be a civilian than a soldier. The next war changed all that, and the killing found new pools of life for the taking. These are the sorts of events that make you wonder whether humanity will survive, or even deserves to. The dead don't have to contemplate that question. Historians and the rest of us can ponder the mystery of a civilizational suicide that began on a warm June day, 93 summers ago, at a street corner in Sarajevo.

Και την ποθεινην πατριδα παρασχου αυτοις,
Παραδεισου παλιν ποιων πολιτας αυτους.

And grant them the Fatherland of their desire,
make them again citizens of Paradise.

Tolerating the intolerant

Tolerance is a personal virtue, but it's not a political principle. Freedom or rights - that's a principle. Tolerance is too fragile to bear the weight that people sometimes lay on it. Earlier this summer, the father of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter killed in Pakistan by Islamic fanatics in 2002, wrote this moving and pointed essay on tolerance and what's wrong with it. Unfortunately, it's behind a subscription wall, but here are some essential passages.

I used to believe that the world essentially divided into two types of people: those who were broadly tolerant; and those who felt threatened by differences. If only the forces of tolerance could win out over the forces of intolerance, I reasoned, the world might finally know some measure of peace.

But there was a problem with my theory, and it was never clearer than in a conversation I once had with a Pakistani friend who told me that he loathed people like President Bush who insisted on dividing the world into "us" and "them." My friend, of course, was taking an innocent stand against intolerance, and did not realize that, in so doing, he was in fact dividing the world into "us" and "them," falling straight into the camp of people he loathed.

This is a political version of a famous paradox formulated by Bertrand Russell in 1901, which shook the logical foundations of mathematics. Any person who claims to be tolerant naturally defines himself in opposition to those who are intolerant. But that makes him intolerant of certain people - which invalidates his claim to be tolerant.

Shall we be tolerant of the intolerant? The recent movie about Daniel Pearl's life and death, A Mighty Heart, brought this question into sharp focus.

The political lesson of Russell's paradox is that there is no such thing as unqualified tolerance. Ultimately, one must be able to expound intolerance of certain groups or ideologies without surrendering the moral high ground normally linked to tolerance and inclusivity. One should, in fact, condemn and resist political doctrines that advocate the murder of innocents, that undermine the basic norms of civilization, or that seek to make pluralism impossible. There can be no moral equivalence between those who seek ... to build a more liberal, tolerant world and those who advocate the annihilation of other faiths, cultures, or states.

.... Thanks to the release of A Mighty Heart, the movie based on Mariane Pearl's book of the same title, Danny's legacy is once again receiving attention.... At the same time, I am worried that A Mighty Heart falls into a trap Bertrand Russell would have recognized: the paradox of moral equivalence, of seeking to extend the logic of tolerance a step too far.

The founders of modern liberal democratic thought understood this point well, particularly in connection with religion, since that was the great burning issue of the Western world a few centuries ago, when modern liberal societies first took form around the north Atlantic coast. They could consistently apply rights even to religious sects they didn't like or thought were a little crazy. Some of them (like Voltaire, Jefferson, and Hegel) had ambiguous feelings about Christianity and negative views of Judaism. But their commitment to rights and to freedom of religion was unequivocal.

A more recent example was H. L. Mencken, the famous libertarian journalist from Baltimore. To his diary, he confided sometimes negative views of blacks and decidedly mixed feelings about Jews - even though, in his case, it was literally true that some of his best friends and closest colleagues were Jews. Nonetheless, he was a consistent critic of antisemites and one of the few national journalists to criticize Woodrow Wilson (originally from Virginia) for imposing southern-style segregation on the District of Columbia and the federal government when he became president in 1913.

These dead white gentlemen understood that political principles aren't just about immediate personal feelings. Rights or freedom as a political and legal concept has a precision and a solidity intrinsic to it that's not a necessary component of tolerance. Rights are not a unilateral indulgence, but a reciprocal recognition and a consistent principle. Tolerance is essential for common social life, but trying to make it a political principle turns it to mush - a lazy conformism that the "professional obscurers of moral clarity" slip into like a pair of comfortable but ratty old jeans.

Indeed, following an advance screening of A Mighty Heart, a panelist representing the Council on American-Islamic Relations [a Saudi-sponsored front group] reportedly said, "We need to end the culture of bombs, torture, occupation, and violence. This is the message to take from the film." The message that angry youngsters are hearing is unfortunate: All forms of violence are equally evil; therefore, as long as one persists, others should not be ruled out.

Danny's tragedy demands an end to this logic. There can be no comparison between those who take pride in the killing of an unarmed journalist and those who vow to end such acts - no ifs, ands, or buts.... My son Danny had the courage to examine all sides. He was a genuine listener and a champion of dialogue. Yet he also had principles and red lines. He was tolerant but not mindlessly so. I hope viewers will remember this when they see A Mighty Heart.

Welcome to the club

They haven't discovered an Earth-like planet yet, but astronomers are getting closer every year. 55 Cancri A, the larger member of a nearby binary star in Cancer (41 light-years away), now has a confirmed five planets, including a large outer giant, as well as four inner medium-sized giants. The system might have Earth-like (rocky) planets with thin atmospheres, but those still lie below the threshold of detectability. It's also possible that these planets have Earth-like moons (bigger versions of Saturn's Titan) with atmospheres. OTOH, keep warm oceans in mind too, if you're looking for life.

The parent star is 0.61 as luminous as our Sun. Thus the distance for Earth-equivalent light flux from 55 Cancri A is (0.61)^1/2 AU = 0.78 AU, roughly the Sun-Venus distance (0.72 AU). (One astronomical unit, or AU, is the Sun-Earth distance, 93 million miles = 150 million km.) One of the 55 Cancri A planets is about that close to the star, so a rocky moon is a contender for Earth-like conditions.

Armenians, Turks, Israelis, and Jews II

It would better if Turkey had continued its pre-1990s attitude of ambiguity towards the Ottoman empire and its final decades as "the sick man of Europe." That would at least make a good starting point towards recognition of what the wartime Ottoman government attempted and partly succeeded in doing, and why.

But that was not to be. In the last 15 years, Kemalism has suffered not only attacks from the outside (from the Islamic forces that deny nationalism, secularism, and republicanism), but also from an internal identity crisis. Instead of reaffirming Ataturk's basic commitment of Turkey toward a European future, Turkey's secular elites have fallen into a powerful Ottoman nostalgia, lamenting the empire's final days as a vanished golden era of Turkish power. It is not Kemalism that is the problem, but the abandonment of it. Turkey's elites are now in the grips of a romantic swoon - like Gone with the Wind - with the usual highly selective historical memory.

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What about the Kurds? The Kurds are a Muslim, but Indo-European, people who speak a language closely related to Farsi (Persian). They live mainly in the mountainous areas of northern Iraq, a tip of Syria, part of Iran, and a large chunk of mountainous eastern Anatolia. They have never had a unified state, although they have produced famous Muslim leaders such as Saladin, who defeated the Crusaders in Jerusalem in 1187.

The Kurds were vaguely promised a homeland of some sort after 1918. But the facts on ground defeated them. Iran remained independent and neutral. The largest group of Kurds, in eastern Anatolia, came under the rule of the new Turkish republic, and in a strange status, as Muslims but not Turks. The second-largest group of Kurds, centered around Mosul and Kirkuk, were reluctantly herded by Britain, the new Mandatory power under the League of Nations, into what became Iraq. The Kurds of Turkey have suffered from second-class status ever since. The Kurds of Iraq, in recent decades, suffered not just from second-class status, but savage persecution under Saddam, including chemical gassing toward the end of the Iran-Iraq war in the late 1980s.*

The more radical Kurds in Turkey formed a Marxist-oriented guerilla movement (the Kurdish Workers Party, or PKK) that started to revolt against the Turkish state in the 1970s. After the Cold War ended, the PKK lost its old sponsor (the Soviets) and needed a new one. There is circumstantial, but strong, evidence that this new sponsor is - no surprise - Iran. The recent PKK incursions into Turkey (clearly modeled on Hizbollah's attack on northern Israel in June 2006) are designed to provoke Turkey into invading northern Iraq the same way that Israel invaded Lebanon in 2006. In this view, which is probably right, Tehran has an opportunity to create a new international crisis, not only for the US, but to divert attention from its nuclear weapons program - not that different from the Cartoon Jihad of early 2006.

The Turkish Kurds still have grievances, although the post-Cold War period did see a large improvement for them. They were allowed some degree of linguistic and cultural autonomy, although not self-government. That liberalization has petered out, because it ran into more and more resistance from Turkish elites and ordinary Turks in the street.

One final twist: the Kurds and the Armenians hate each other.

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What to do? Look at the Israeli attitude. At a human level, free of official obligations, everyone in Israel knows what happened to the Armenians: you merely have to walk around the Armenian quarter of Jerusalem and talk to descendants of survivors. It's a ritual Israelis know well in another context. The newspapers certainly have no difficulty talking about it. But the Israeli ambassadors have a tougher job. Turkey is a key ally of Israel, while the present country of Armenia has formed a strange alliance with Syria and Iran. So on a official level, Israeli governments maintain a careful ambiguity whenever this issue comes up.

Successive American governments have to do the same: Turkey is a key ally in the Middle East and a member of NATO. The US officially backs Turkey's membership in the European Union. Hence the manifesto from the Secretaries of State and Defense. This in spite of the fact that, over the last 15 years, Turkey has developed some nasty new strains of anti-Americanism and antisemitism and is facing apparently insuperable obstacles to its full membership in the EU.

But that doesn't mean people can't know what they know on an everyday level, even if they oppose something as in-your-face as the recent Congressional resolution. There are other ways to work on this problem without turning it into diplomatic high explosive. David Harris, the American Jewish Committee's executive director, explains:

From my experience in tackling difficult relationships, I believe that engagement, not avoidance, is the best strategy. In a perfect world, Armenian and Turkish historians would sit together and review the archival material, debate differences, and seek a common understanding of the past. To date, that hasn’t happened in any meaningful way. I continue to hope that it will. It should. We at AJC have offered our services, if needed, to help facilitate such an encounter. Ninety years of distance ought to allow for the creation of a “safe” space to consider contested issues.

Two important Turkish writers, the novelist Orhan Pamuk and the historian Taner Akcam, have written and spoken at length about the Ottoman empire's final agony and what happened to its Armenians; both now face official prosecution and freelance death-threats for their pains. And it's important to recognize that the problem, while exacerbated by the Iraq war, is not American: Turkey's strange drift and regression result from an internal crisis. The Armenian genocide of 1915-17 is a fact; acknowledgment by Turkey of that fact won't happen unless the more basic crisis of Turkish national identity is constructively resolved. Otherwise, Congressional resolutions will mean nothing. The ruling Justice and Development Party, suspected by many of being crypto-Islamist, is a better bet here than the bankrupt Kemalist elite. Although supporting the JDP involves some risks, better a moderate religious party committed to democracy than decayed imperial stench and a heavy whiff of fascism.

Hrant Dink, an Armenian-Turkish journalist, one of the few Armenians left in Turkey, was assassinated earlier this year by a pan-Turkish fanatic. His funeral was attended by tens of thousands, mostly Turks. He once said he'd rather live in a democratic Turkey that had a hard time admitting the truth about the Armenian genocide, than in an autocratic Turkey that pushed some kind of "official line" on the subject, even if it happened to be the truth.

What Dink was saying was that "official history," like "official science," is a dangerous business. History, like science, works from the bottom up, not from the top down. To acknowledge facts on an individual level is one thing; to manufacture history like a political platform is a dead-end. It serves neither historical truth, nor the dead, nor the living.**

POSTSCRIPT: The national ADL's position has always been to avoid the word "genocide" in discussing the Ottoman Armenians and try to avoid the subject altogether. The New England ADL, facing criticism from local Jewish, Armenian, and human-rights groups, rejected the view of the national ADL, which then fired its New England regional director. (The Boston area has a significant Armenian diaspora, partly from those who fled the Ottomans during and after the Great War.) Eventually, the national ADL changed its view somewhat, but only under intense pressure.

The ADL's national director, Abe Foxman, later complained bitterly about what he viewed as the mistaken "idealism" of other Jewish groups, their refusal to play realpolitik. Undoubtedly, Foxman has a point, and he seems to view himself as the only adult in the room, so to speak. Some have tried to portray this as a conflict between promoting "interests" versus promoting "values." And really, given that choice, who wants to be on the side of "values" - politics is about interests, not values, right?

But the deeper issue here does involve Jewish interests. A world in which genocide is practiced, then ignored and denied - and the ignoring and the denial are essential to the practice - is a dangerous world for Jews, any ethnic or religious minority, and anyone who cares about freedom and human life. As the AJC's David Harris put it,

... as the issue once again heats up in the United States, it’s important to be clear. In a book entitled Holocaust Denial, published by the American Jewish Committee in 1993, the author, Kenneth Stern, an AJC staff expert on the subject, noted: “That the Armenian genocide is now considered a topic for debate, or as something to be discounted as old history, does not bode well for those who would oppose Holocaust denial.”

He was right. Picture a day when a muscle-flexing Iran or Saudi Arabia seeks to make denial of the Holocaust a condition of doing business with other countries. Sound far-fetched? It shouldn’t.

We have many interests as a Jewish people. Protecting historical truth ought to be right up there near the top of the list.

Final thoughts from Victor Davis Hanson.

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References

Some standard references in English in print today on the Ottoman Empire, the Armenians, and World War One. Fromkin and Power make extensive use of contemporary and pre-war documents, both published and unpublished, which are not lacking on these topics.

~ Winston S. Churchill, The Aftermath (1929; supplementary volume to The World Crisis: 1911-1918), covers the period 1918-24 in connection to British policy and the Anglo-Greek war against the Turks in great detail. He includes the unforgettable story of how a monkey's bite killed the King of Greece and many more besides. Churchill was both a participant in and an important historian of these events. It covers much else as well, such as the Russian Civil War and the Anglo-Irish and Irish Civil Wars of the same post-1918 period.

~ Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia (1941). Published the week Italy and Germany invaded Yugoslavia in April 1941, this monumental treatment of the Balkans and modern Yugoslavia is the greatest English-language work of contemporary history of the last century. Along the way, West is detailed and damning about the Ottoman and Hapsburg empires, their final decades of rapacity and oppression, and the huge mess they left behind when they imploded. Her book has had no equal since, but Robert Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts is a fitting sequel, paying repeated tribute to its model, and, like West's book, informs its readers of far-off places of which they knew nothing.

~ David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (1989), covers the period 1912-1924, with the greater Middle East (including Turkey and Central Asia) as the geographic frame. Best recent one-volume treatment; indispensable.

~ Samantha Power, "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide (2002), covers the major genocides of the last century, from the Armenians in the First World War to Kosovo in the late 1990s; also indispensable.

~ Accounts devoted to the Armenian genocide itself include the books of Graber, Melson, and Balakian. There is also the once-famous novel of Franz Werfel, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (1934), still worth reading and still shocking.

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* This episode is also covered in Power's book.

Even the Arabs, Muslim but not Turkish, got a nationalist movement in World War One, although ironically, they were the last Ottoman group to do so - undoubtedly because they were Muslim and the majority and thus had the least incentive to revolt.

** Bush complained recently, in connection with the Congressional resolution, that he can't be put into the position of sorting through the Ottoman empire's history. It's hard not to sympathize - that's too much homework for anyone. Clinton had Yugoslavia, and Bush lept half-blindfolded into Iraq. One leftover Ottoman mess per presidency is enough.

Armenians, Turks, Israelis, and Jews I

Maybe I should have blogged this earlier ... and added the Kurds as a fifth to the list. Suddenly, it's blown up in our faces.

The recent uproar over the ADL's flip-flop on the Armenian genocide was a hot topic in the Israeli newspapers when I was in Israel at the end of the summer. All of them - left, right, religious, secular - found the flip-flop bizarre. What happened to the Ottoman Armenians during World War One is common knowledge, and genocide-denial is not a business Israelis or Jews should want to get into. But that was just the beginning.

More recently, the US Congress considered a non-binding resolution endorsing the facts of what happened and labeling it genocide. The resolution has triggered an internal political and external diplomatic crisis for Turkey. Congress had passed earlier resolutions about this, going back to the 1980s, but they were not as emphatic and didn't use the word "genocide."

But it's not just a change in Congressional resolutions. A lot has changed since then in Turkey, and the resolution could not have come at a worse time for Turkish politics or US-Turkish relations. That's why the resolution was opposed by President Bush, former Presidents Clinton and Bush Sr., and by all currently living Secretaries of State.

Since the end of the Cold War, Turkey has drifted farther and farther away from its secular-republican ideology of Kemalism, formulated by the founder of the modern Turkish republic, Mustafa Kemal. Also known as Ataturk ("Father of the Turks"), he organized both critical Great War victories for Turkey: the defeat of the 1915 Anglo-French landings at Gallipoli and of the Anglo-Greek offensive of 1920-22.* While the Ottoman empire's fragments became the pieces later assembled into the modern Middle East, Ataturk retrenched in Anatolia and regenerated Turkey as a national republic, free of its old imperial superstructure. When the Greek-Turkish war ended in 1922, over a million Greeks were expelled from Anatolia, where they had lived since the days of Homer; almost a million Turks were counterexpelled from mainland Greece into Turkey. Alas, no one ever said nation-building would be pretty - but it's not half as ugly as empire collapse.

Ever since, Turkey has been a secular-nationalist republic protected its military. Everyone's heard of the Islamist Refah (or Welfare) Party that arose in the early 1990s and how it was prevented from taking power by the Turkey military. While radical and pan-Islamic thought has gained a foothold in Turkey in the last generation, and Turkey's ruling secular elites have been in a state of corruption and decline for decades, many Turks (not just the army) are devoted to Ataturk's ideal and now view it as their passport to EU membership and becoming a truly Western country.

The Refah party re-established itself as the Justice and Development Party, without an overt Islamic component, and went on to win successive later victories in Turkish elections. They currently run Turkey's elected civilian government. But something else has happened that is less known in the West, something directly related to the present crisis.

The attitude of Kemal and his followers toward the Armenians and the events of 1915-17 was ambiguous. The Turks consistently distanced themselves from Ottoman persecution of Christian minorities (which went on repeatedly all through the empire's final century: Serbs, Greeks, Romanians, Bulgarians, as well as Armenians), while simultaneously denying that the massacre of Armenians in 1915-17 was a deliberate attempt at extermination. Ataturk's military government even prosecuted a few of the final Ottoman government's high offficials for war crimes in 1919-20. The general attitude was that what the Ottoman government did in its final death throes had nothing to do with the modern Turkish republic that arose from the ruins.

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Why did the massacre happen? Did it happen? For the bare facts of the case, consult Samantha Power's classic history of 20th century genocide, "A Problem From Hell:" America in the Age of Genocide. The first chapter of her book covers this, the first of the 20th century's great "race-murders," as US ambassador to Turkey Henry Morgenthau, Sr., labeled it while it was happening: about 800,000 to a million Armenians dead. The word "genocide" was coined in the 1940s, by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer struggling to capture the intent and the act in a single word that could be written into laws and treaties that would ban it. Power accepts Lemkin's narrow but unconditional definition: a deliberate attempt, successful or not, to exterminate a national, ethnic, or religious group. It doesn't include fuzzier notions of "imperialism," "cultural genocide," and so on: it's nothing but plain physical extermination. Lemkin struggled with this concept before Hitler's planned and largely completed genocide of European and Middle Eastern Jews; Lemkin was thinking of the Armenians when he did so, not the future fate of his own people.**

To understand why the massacre happened, it's better to turn to David Fromkin's comprehensive The Peace to End All Peace, the most useful modern book covering the end of the Ottoman empire and the rise of the modern Middle East. Fromkin treats the "greater Middle East," which includes Turkey and Central Asia. This larger perspective is essential to understanding the Ottoman empire, why it collapsed, and what happened when it collapsed.

The modern Middle East is often traced, not back to 1918, but to 1798, when Napoleon invaded Egypt, which at that time was loosely attached to the Ottoman empire. His intent was to make Egypt modern, by force, in the same way that the French revolutionary armies were marching all over Europe under the banner of Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality. Napoleon was defeated by the British, and Egypt passed into the control of reforming local rulers such as Muhammad Ali. The Ottomans themselves later adopted such reformist approaches, much like the "enlightened despots" of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia in the same period. To some extent, they were forced to do so by the system of capitulations that European powers had forced on the Turks, by which European powers became protectors of Ottoman minorities and which was widely resented in the empire. The Ottoman realm included Turkish Muslims, but also non-Turkish Arabs, as well as a confusing array of Christian minorities and Jews. These latter were the dhimmis, the subordinated and second-class groups that were tolerated under Islamic law with large legal and political disabilities. The Ottoman empire did not have citizens in any case, but subjects - an important distinction.

The Ottoman reformers attempted to remake their empire into a modern, secular, and liberal polity, but collided with basic realities that eventually defeated them. The largely illiterate rural population, along with urban religious leaders, was firmly attached the institution of dhimma, with women, slaves, and infidels viewed as subordinate groups, while all Muslim males were theoretically equal. Furthermore, the secular-national concept itself was explosive in the Ottoman context, because, setting religious status aside, the empire contained numerous conquered non-Turkish peoples whose interpretation of Enlightenment ideas naturally led toward national independence and self-rule. It did not naturally lead toward equal citizenship under Ottoman rule, which turned out to be an oxymoron anyway: subjects and dhimmis in the end could not become citizens. Thus, starting with the Serbs and the Greeks, later extending to the Bulgarians, the Romanians, the Armenians, and finally the Jews (who came late to the nationalism party), the Ottoman ethno-religious minorities demanded and in most cases, with the backing of various European powers and later the United States, got their independence - but not without a price.†

That price was strong suspicion and eventual persecution by Ottoman authorities. While the Serbs and Greeks, with British backing, won their independence during the Napoleonic era, groups attempting to assert their rights later were savagely massacred by the last generation of Ottoman governments, when they lurched from reform toward violent reaction. The final ruling faction in Istanbul, the "Young Turks" of the 1908 revolution (Committee for Union and Progress), failed in their last reform attempts. Turkish elites were then led to a new solution to their minorities problem - extermination. Under the sway of a super-national, racial idea (pan-Turkism), the government that led Turkey into alliance with Germany in 1914 looked forward to a new, wholly Turkish empire that would encompass the Turkic peoples of central Asia (the "stans" familiar to us today). What would happen to the non-Turkish minorities was up for debate. Some thought they should be killed; others, that they should be kicked out; still others, that Turks should relinquish rule over them. The similarity to the super-national racial idea of pan-Germanism is not accidental: that idea was the seed of the Nazi movement, which, contrary to myth, was not a nationalist movement, but a pan-European racial movement dedicated to the destruction of the European nation-state system and its replacement by a purified racial empire. In this Aryan-surpemacist empire, "inferior races" would be expelled, enslaved, or eliminated. What's critical to understand is that, before Nazism, this "pan" racial idea had an earlier instance in the final days of the Ottoman empire.

While the entire apparatus of Ottoman rule was not redirected toward exterminating the Armenians, it was the policy of part of the wartime Ottoman government, as Ottoman leaders admitted to their German allies once the massacres were underway. The Ottoman Armenians had cousins across the border in Russia, Turkey's historic enemy. (There was no independent Armenia then; Russian Armenia was ruled by the Czar.) Those Armenians were fervently pro-Russian, and the Ottoman government had reason to suspect the loyalty of its Armenians. The Russians and the Russian Armenians tried to set up an independent Armenian government when they conquered part of Turkey. But the Ottoman Armenians remained resolutely non-political and did not rise to the bait. Contemporary accounts - from then-neutral Americans and from Austrian and German observers stationed in Turkey to help their ally - show rare unanimity on the situation in Ottoman Armenia in 1915: it was quiet.

Some (including many in Turkey) try to use the Russian attempts to get the Ottoman Armenians to rebel as a rationale for the massacre. And if the Turks had merely interred or expelled the Armenians, it would be easier to rationalize. But to see that motive as the basis for the forced deportation and starvation that ensued in 1915-17 is to miss the point. The Ottoman government wasn't just trying to prevent an Armenian "fifth column." It was left by 19th century Ottoman reformers with an impossible dilemma and found a dazzling modern solution - genocide. The war just accelerated the genocidal tendency of Ottoman minorities policy already latent in the preceding generation; the genocide was not a strategy for Turkey to defeat Russia, anymore than the Holocaust was a strategy for Germany to defeat its enemies 30 years later. In both cases, genocide was a goal in its own right.

It also marked a large break in the nature of governmental persecution of minorities - one that shifted from the millennial focus on religion to the apparently "scientific" basis of race. The technological and organizational powers available to the modern state had opened up new vistas of mass murder unavailable and unimaginable to previous eras. The lesson was not lost, especially on Hitler.
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* This is a reminder that, while World War One ended on November 11, 1918 in the West, in the East, with regards to Russia and Turkey, it didn't really end until 1922, after the Russian Civil War, and after Ataturk drove the Greeks out of Anatolia and established the Turkish Republic. Along the way, he abolished the Ottoman caliphate and renounced Ottoman claims over the defunct empire. The 1922 settlement was formalized by the Treaty of Lausanne, which replaced the Treaty of Sèvres, signed in 1919, that had been far more favorable to both the Christian minorities and the European victors.

Among other things, the earlier, harsher Treaty of Sèvres required the Ataturk government to try the Young Turks responsible for the Armenian atrocity - which it did. Several were even executed. The Armenian massacre left a strong impression among the Allied governments that Turkey could not be trusted with rule of non-Muslim minorities or even non-Turkish Muslim Arabs.

** Power's own book is, in part, a contemporary continuation the original human rights movement in the 19th century. Its main early manifestation was abolitionism, and Americans tend not to be familiar with its later development - under the influence of Christian missionaries in the Middle East and Africa - into the immediate ancestor of the "human rights lobby." It is the fruit of a characteristic liberal-Protestant and Anglo-American ethos of the 19th and early 20th centuries, exemplified by such figures as Lincoln, Gladstone, Lloyd-George, and Wilson. More recent examples - such as Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush - mark the later decay of this tradition.

† The entire relevant chapter from Churchill's memoir, The Aftermath, is worth reading (chapter 18, "The Greek Tragedy"), as Churchill was a contemporary observer, helped to instigate the failed Dardanelles campaign of 1915-16, and tried to correct the pro-Ottoman apologetics already then spreading in the 1920s that attempted to rationalize the Armenian massacre. Enemies in the Great War, Britain and Ottoman Turkey had been allies in the nineteenth century, and, in 1914, a significant residue of support for Turkey remained in Britain, especially in the Conservative Party. OTOH, the Liberals, led earlier by Gladstone, had been a thorn in the side of the Ottomans as they launched a final wave of massacres against their Christian subjects in the 1890s.

The first major English-language apologist for the Ottomans was British historian Arnold Toynbee, who was also an antisemite. Toynbee claimed that the Armenian massacre was merely wartime Allied propaganda. While it is true that the Allies made effective use of the Armenian massacre in their propaganda, the distrust and horror of Ottoman minorities policy was real and deeply-rooted, and for good reasons. The most damning evidence on the massacre is precisely the records of the German and Austrian missions in Istanbul, not publicly available until after 1918. The ambassadors were convinced by mid-1915 that the Young Turk government meant to exterminate the Ottoman-ruled Armenians. Without guidance from Berlin or Vienna on the issue, they protested verbally but made only feeble attempts to stop it and publicly rationalize for their ally. Individual Germans and Austrians did undertake some attempts to save the surviving Armenians.

Churchill's First World War memoirs are not read much here in the US. They're far more relevant to what we're seeing now - in Turkey, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan - than his better-known Second World War memoirs.