Back in Madrid

But it's different this time. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia called a conference on interfaith dialog in Madrid, and the American Jewish Committee, after some initial hesitation, sent a rabbi as a representative.

There are times when I wonder whether all such things aren't really all about Iran. Stay tuned.

"A buffet of the spirit"

Here's more on religion, American-style, from the New York Times.

And, speaking of George McGovern, can we get one of him to run again? He's now publishing in ... oy! the Wall Street Journal :)

Nearly 16 years ago in these very pages, I wrote that "'one-size-fits all' rules for business ignore the reality of the market place." Today I'm watching some broad rules evolve on individual decisions that are even worse.

Under the guise of protecting us from ourselves, the right and the left are becoming ever more aggressive in regulating behavior. Much paternalist scrutiny has recently centered on personal economics, including calls to regulate subprime mortgages ....

Since leaving office I've written about public policy from a new perspective: outside looking in. I've come to realize that protecting freedom of choice in our everyday lives is essential to maintaining a healthy civil society.

Why do we think we are helping adult consumers by taking away their options? We don't take away cars because we don't like some people speeding. We allow state lotteries despite knowing some people are betting their grocery money. Everyone is exposed to economic risks of some kind. But we don't operate mindlessly in trying to smooth out every theoretical wrinkle in life.

This is miles and miles from our current crop of Democratic candidates. Notice the perspective gained "since leaving office."

(Hat tip to Instapundit.)

Reading Exodus

I almost forgot my comment on the parashat ha-shavua, last week's Torah portion, Parashat Va-era. Here it is.

The second portion of Exodus (covering 6:2-9:35), Va-era contains the first seven of the ten plagues and also happens to be my bar mitzvah parshah. The haftarah is Ezekiel 28:25-29:21.

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One of the most disturbing aspects of the plagues is the "hardening of Pharaoh's heart." This is often viewed as a paradox, contradicting free will. It also seems gratuitous: why can't G-d just free the Israelites, or let Pharaoh free them? The traditional commentators have wrestled with it, as have modern ones. The answers they come up with often seem vague: "heightening the drama" is the major theme of many approaches, both ancient and modern.

But a much more satisfying answer is in the text, if we examine it carefully. Hardening Pharaoh's heart was necessary, not just to heighten the drama, but to make Pharaoh release the Israelites for the right reason, not just to make himself look good to his subjects and courtiers, or as an emotional response to the devastation of the plagues. What is the right reason in this case? To acknowledge divine sovereignty as superior to his own and admit that he was not a god. Apparent inconsistencies fall into place if we follow the text carefully with this in mind.*

In response to those plagues which caused Pharaoh to temporarily give in (although he always changes his mind once the plague had passed), the text tells us that the king allowed us to "Go, sacrifice to your G-d" (8:24). Pharaoh's responses in the other cases, although varying in scope (sacrifice within Egypt, let only the men go, etc.), remained constant in style: It is your god whom you seek to worship, not mine. This attitude always limits and qualifies his temporary cave-ins.

And to sneak a peak at next week's portion (Parashat Bo): This is why the plagues end with the plague of the first born, something that the Egyptian wizards could not manage and could not be attributed to any Egyptian god. In response to this final plague (12:32), Pharaoh adds: u-veirakhtem gam-oti (And bring a blessing on me too!), which contains his whole capitulation by implication.

Pharaoh has to admit that neither he nor any other Egyptian god is really a god. But he also has to admit that it is G-d who is doing the freeing, not himself. Otherwise, Pharaoh would have viewed himself as their liberator - and, crucially, so would the Israelites. Instead, he, the Egyptians, and the Israelites are forced to see who is G-d, who frees the slaves, and why. This is why in the Haggadah on Pesach, we sing the praises of, not Pharaoh, not even Moses, but G-d.

The haftarah has a curious confirmation: Ezekiel's prophecy (29:6) against Egypt, delivered in the year (587 BCE) before the Babylonian exile, says that, again,

"Then all the inhabitants of Egypt shall know that I am YHVH."

But the parshah itself announces it at the beginning (6:7):

"And you shall know that I, YHVH, am your G-d who freed you from the labors of the Egyptians."
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* Cf. the comment of Sforno, the sixteenth-century Italian exegete, on Exodus 4:21 and 7:3: "And I will harden his heart": Since he will be unable to tolerate the plagues, he would certainly emancipate the people - not because he accepts the sovereignty of God and to do His will - therefore He hardened his heart to be able to withstand the plagues and not to free them.

It helps to know that "harden" is chazaq in Hebrew - literally, "strengthen."

Power and powerlessness in Jewish history

Chanukah is a holiday that can get one to thinking, about the Jews of antiquity, about Jewish survival - and about Jewish power or, for much of history, lack of it.

We haven't - still - gone far enough in analyzing the malignant mental disorder of antisemitism - how some Jews pick it up from antisemites; how it's not a mental illness in the strict sense, but a willful, obsessive irrationality; why Jews need political power, and why Jews have been so bad at it, to the point of often not being able to protect themselves.

The operational source of political antisemitism in the Western world today is the far left, which acts in part from its own destructive fantasies and in part as a conduit for radical Islamic ideas (repackaging them somewhat along the way). Mainstream liberals and the traditional Jewish organizations have been, first asleep, then confused, and finally, late in grasping the nature of these developments and responding to them. Some are still in a hypnotic semi-sleep. OTOH, things today are not as bad as in the 1930s: we have a state, allies, and a number of legitimate avenues of influence in democratic countries. It's also better understood, at least to an extent, how much of a danger political antisemitism poses to everyone else; so everyone else pays more attention.

Worship of powerlessness, the result of centuries of exile, is the key to understanding Jewish political weakness. Self-hatred is not the problem with most Jews; the problem is the embarrassment over having power, some power, any power. Many Jews consciously or unconsciously rationalize powerlessness as a higher morality, sharing with the ultraorthodox the belief that power is bad, at least for Jews. Among the religious, this tendency is wrapped up with messianic hope; among liberals and leftists, with utopianism and the belief that power is bad for everyone.

And all wrongly look within for the solution to the riddle of antisemitism, not realizing that antisemitism is really a gentile problem and not a Jewish problem at all. Antisemitism is a classic warning sign that something is wrong in the larger non-Jewish society, not the Jews. It is this hatred that is absorbed and transformed into self-hatred. In reluctantly and unwillingly modernizing societies, Jews are often targeted as symbols of modernity and forced into being the ultimate voodoo doll.

An essential antidote to this condition is Ruth Wisse's new Jews and Power. In it, she concisely puts down on paper the pathology and its solution. Her book is remarkable in its perspective, and short enough to read in one long sitting. Without so much as a by-your-leave, she turns Jewish history around - right-side up, so to speak - and takes having power as normal and powerlessness as abnormal. In Wisse's view, it was the Jews-as-tolerated-separated minority, the classical Old World Diaspora, that was the great experiment, not Zionism. It worked for a long time, but eventually failed: in one sense, with the rise of modern liberal political systems, liquidated peacefully; in another sense, destroyed, or murdered, really. Its success and eventual failure were closely bound up with the flourishing and ultimate fall of the great aristocratic-theocratic empires that controlled much of the Old World between antiquity and modern times.

Power is an expression of self-interest, which sometimes seems like a taboo concept in the Jewish world. Why is self-interest bad? Isn't it "right-wing," and doesn't it lead to war? Isn't it better if the Jews are always ready to sacrifice themselves? Not at all. Peace is certainly in one's interests - if it's real peace, not fake diplomatic-media nonsense. Even Israel's peace with Egypt and Jordan, limited as it is, is a good thing. Announcing to the world that one is always on call to sacrifice oneself makes war and conflict more, not less, likely.*

Once we get disentangled from the contortions of self-hatred and unearned guilt, we can keep clarity on the Israel issue by just remembering to keep it out of the colonialism box and keep it in the box marked, national self-determination, where it belongs. Power is essential for human and social life within civilization. But at the same time, power is limited and able to accomplish only certain things. In this vein, we should also stay clear of the neoconservative fallacy as well: having lacked power for so long, it was inevitable that some Jews, instead of viewing power as evil, would come to view it as magic.

POSTSCRIPT: If you don't think Jews need power any more, think again.
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* The novelist Ayn Rand used to say, in connection with this, that "it's earlier than you think." When someone asked her, isn't everyone selfish, she replied, in effect, if only. Obviously, Rand's conception of self and selfishness differs greatly from the common use of these terms.

Armenians, Turks, Israelis, and Jews: A final word

Someone left a lengthy comment on my first posting on Ottoman Turkey and the Armenian genocide, and I responded in the comments section. The larger issues raised by this history are worth returning to, briefly. I've reposed my response below, slightly edited. Apparently, this reader didn't read my second posting, which would have clarified some things he missed.

My response explains the wrongness of the such views and alludes to the reasons why people hold them. Denial of the bare facts is rare today; instead, there's a lot of dancing around the facts and refusal to label them honestly. Rationalizations based on the Ottoman-Russian war are equally flimsy and irrelevant; they fall into the same scapegoating that the Young Turks themselves engaged in at the time. Their "Armenian problem" preceded the outbreak of war in 1914 by decades. But my response also gets deeper into historical detail than most readers will want; and even greater detail is available in the works of Fromkin, Power, and Florence, among other places. Up here, let me just cut to the chase and answer the question of why this sad history is important today.

There are some broad issues of critical importance that the Armenian genocide and the collapse of the Ottoman empire touch on and illuminate: the incompatibility of empire and modernity; the crisis that every modernizing empire has faced with the rise of chauvinistic and racist movements (like pan-Turkism), often confused with nationalism. Countries with strong Christian-liberal-enlightenment traditions were able to keep these forces at bay or marginalize them - plus they had the alternative of liberal and democratic nationalism, a powerful basis for rejecting racist and class-warfare ideologies. Eurasia's great empires could not; while they all went through liberalizing and reformist phases in the 18th and 19th centuries, these forces were shallow and short-lived, expressed as brief episodes of "enlightened despotism." Both czarist Russia and Ottoman Turkey entered their final, post-liberal phases in the late 19th century, while Germany and Austria-Hungary didn't feel the full impact of such trends until after 1918. The whole subject - empire, nations, modernity, self-rule versus autocracy, aristocracy, monarchy, and theocracy - deserves and will get a posting of its own. I'll just say again: Ataturk, the founder of the modern republic of Turkey, understood these points very well, better than rationalizers of the Young Turks and Ottomans do today. All of the Ottoman minorities - even those, like the Jews, who did well for much of the empire's history - came around to this view by 1918. The Armenian genocide of 1915-17 played a large role in their change of view.

For us today, there is a weirder irony. Contrary to what Libby says, few Armenians (at least none that I know) "wallow" in this history. (There's no business here like Shoah business :) This is a far more crucial issue precisely for modern Turkey itself, a basic question that touches on just how modern it is, and how ready it is to join Europe. It's an unavoidable bridge the Turks will have to cross if they are to join. Imagine if Germany were still having fundamental difficulties facing the Nazi period. Obviously, Jews would be outraged. But forget about that for the moment: What would Germany's neighbors think? Would NATO or the EU have ever have been possible, or the Cold War come to an end, with such a fundamental and ominous question mark hanging in the air? This issue is not about Armenians, Jews, or Israel: it's about Turkey.

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This is my response to the commenter at the first posting.

[snip]

What you're doing is what a lot of Ottoman-Young Turk apologists do, which is to essentially admit the Armenian massacre of World War One, then rationalize by playing with words, teasing readers with a seductive historical amnesia, or tell Jews in particular that they did well under the Ottomans or that modern Turkey is a good ally of Israel. I didn't compare the Armenian genocide directly to the Holocaust. In certain respects - its Teutonic thoroughness, the irrational paranoia of antisemitism - the Holocaust was unique. But by that standard, the Holocaust would be the only genocide in the book, and that's certainly not right either. I also don't want to stoop to genocide card-trading: you know, I'll swap your Holocaust for two genocides and 20 pogroms, hold the mustard.

As I wrote, the most damning evidence on the genocide was precisely the reaction of the German, Austrian, and American ambassadors, allied to Turkey or neutral. All three diplomatic missions quickly concluded in 1915 that the Young Turks (Enver and Talaat) were trying to exterminate the Armenians within the Ottoman Empire. Enver and Djemal admitted as much to the Germans. That's genocide, period.

Nor was there any military reason for extermination. While apologists try to claim the Ottoman Armenians were rebelling, there's no evidence of such rebellion. The real reason was that Turkey's offensive against Russia in the winter of 1915 was a disastrous failure, and the Young Turks needed someone to blame. The Armenians had already been such targets in the past, and they were near the Russo-Turkish border. So they were convenient scapegoats for [terrible bungling]. Outside the universe of rationalizers and apologists (like Toynbee), historians and observers at the time understood that the Young Turks' program in 1915-17 was continuous with past Ottoman behavior toward their Christian minority subjects - it was NOT about winning the war with Russia. If wiping out the Armenians was so critical to the Turkish war effort, why did the German and Austrian ambassadors protest it? After all, they had a large stake in Turkish success against Russia.

Nor is it true that the Christian minorities "flourished" under the Ottomans, at least not in the Empire's last century. Much of it was in steep long-term decline in any case. But the Ottomans' contradictory efforts to liberalize and modernize their empire, while still keeping the dhimmis in some kind of subordinate status, created an impossible situation, one that could only be resolved in one of three ways: convert all Ottoman subjects into equal citizens (which ran against Islamic law and Turkish dominance), relinquish Turkish rule over the dhimmis (which is what ended up happening), or genocide. This problem was not unique to the Ottomans. Next door, the Russian empire went through a similar cycle, during the same period, and for similar reasons: liberalization and reform earlier in the 19th century, followed by violent reaction (pogroms etc.) aimed at preserving the older imperial-feudal-theocratic structure before it disintegrated. These governments in part created this dilemma by their earlier efforts at reform. The Ottoman Christian subjects suffered in the last couple generations before the war because either granting them full rights or accepting their growing demands for independence would mean the end of the Ottoman empire as traditionally constituted. Once the Ottoman authorities accepted this, they began (in the 1890s, a decade after the pogroms started in Russia) a series of anti-Christian massacres. Something similar happened in German-speaking lands, but not until after 1918. Until then, Germany and Austro-Hungary retained many liberal features.

The reason Jews did so well for so long under the Ottomans was that, being small in number and having no state or political power, they were not a threat. While Enver and Talaat were anti-Christian, they were not anti-Jewish. But the Jews just came late to nationalism, and the Ottomans didn't get the chance before 1918 to persecute them on a large scale. BTW, Djemal did understand this; while not anti-Christian, he did start persecution of Jews during the war. By 1918, almost all the Jews in the empire wanted an Allied victory - among other things, they had seen what happened to the Armenians. [The Jews of Palestine also suffered greatly under wartime Young Turk rule.]

Finally, I don't want to sound as if I'm being mindlessly anti-Turkish. I've been to Turkey and find a lot to admire about it. Ataturk was a great man, for his military brilliance and his political acumen. Everyone chatters about his master stroke of making Turkey a secular republic, abolishing the caliphate/sultanate. (The Sultan was already a prisoner of his own government in any case, before the war.) What people should admire at least as much is that Kemal also understood that Turkey could not become a modern republic unless it abandoned its rule over non-Turkish and non-Muslim subjects. Unlike the Young Turk triumvirate, Ataturk was a great military commander, one with real victories under his belt - and no need to commit genocide to achieve them.

It's more clear in my second posting, but I'll spell it out: why does the modern Turkish republic feel the need to rationalize for what the collapsing Ottoman Empire did? After all, modern Germany is constituted by a very different political regime from the Nazis or even the Kaisers (not that I want to equate the two). This is what baffles a lot of foreign observers otherwise sympathetic toward, and admiring of, modern Turkey.

The age of babble

For an example of what once-respected institutions - in this case, National Geographic - have twisted themselves into so they can play media whores, read this about the Gospel of Judas.

This non-canonical gospel was made famous in last year's media-sensational, PC-tinged, and seriously flawed mistranslation of the original Coptic/Greek text from the 3rd century Gnostics of Egypt.

Chanukah sameach

Tonight is the first night of Chanukah.

Mostly, we tend to think of Chanukah as an obvious and positive holiday. But it's a subtle holiday too, sometimes a little too subtle for some people.

It's the second century BCE, in Judea and Jerusalem, around 167. Since the demise of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE, the Judeans (Jews) had lived peacefully and alternating under Alexander's military successors, the Egyptian Ptolomies (who ruled from Alexandria, in Egypt) and the Syrian Seleucids (who ruled from Damascus), dividers of his empire after his death. In that year, a crazy new Syrian Greek ruler named Antiochos IV Epiphanes decided that he was a god and demanded that his subjects worship him. This was a not-unknown expression of mental illness among the Hellenistic rulers, from inbred families, who reigned between Alexander and the arrival of the Romans.* It's not clear if all his subjects complied, but we know of one group who refused.

The Hashmonai'im (Hasmoneans), a Jewish priestly family, revolted against Antiochos and waged a guerrilla war of several years before recapturing Jerusalem and restoring the Temple (chanukat ha-Bayit) that had been defiled by the Greek idols and pig sacrifices earlier forced on the priests. But it's not historically right to overinterpret this moment, although from it have come some hoary myths that never die. It's disturbing to see someone as smart as Christopher Hitchens (a self-styled atheist who is Jewish on his mother's side) repeat them.

It's not true that Jews rejected all that Greek stuff when they defeated the Seleucids, or that their struggle was one of "Hebraism versus Hellenism." The pre-exilic Israelites had already had centuries of sustained, pre-Alexander contact with the Greeks, first from the islands (the Kittim), then later from Asia Minor (the Yavanim).** After Alexander's spreading of urban Greek culture in the late fourth century BCE, Jews had become significantly Hellenized in many ways. In fact, they were Hellenized before, and they were Hellenized after, the 167 revolt. What they were rejecting was religious coercion, as well as reasserting their political independence. The former has had far more and much better impact in the long run than the latter, which just installed the Hasmoneans and later Herod. The Hasmoneans became so Hellenized that they started calling themselves things like Alexander and Jason, which have remained Jewish names ever since. One of the first rabbis listed in the Mishnaic tractate Pirkei Avot has the utterly Greek name of Antigonos, male form of Antigone - as in the daughter of Oedipus and protagonist of the famous play by Sophocles.

And the notion of the Jews, at least that late in antiquity, being "primitive" or "tribal" is preposterous. The Israelites had once been tribal - a thousand years earlier, in the late Bronze Age, when they conquered Canaan. But by the time Alexander arrived in 332 BCE, the Jews had been through tribal federation, centralized monarchy, exile, and the destruction of clan distinctions. By the Roman period, there was little left of tribalism, apart from the caste distinctions of the priests (Levites and Kohanim). By late antiquity, the Jews became predominantly urban, probably the first people in history to be so.

Of course, these Hellenized Jews were observant and didn't participate in the Hellenized pagan religions of the gentile peoples around them. But Greek culture nonetheless permeated everyday life in Alexander's empire (later the eastern Roman Empire). Greek words (like synagogos, sanhedrin or synhedrion, qolar, kan-kan or can, epikomon or dessert, karpas or parsley, kalonymos = kalos nymos or good name, etc.) run to the many thousands in rabbinic Hebrew. We know of many Greek-speaking Jewish authors from that period, although the works of only two - Josephus and Philo - survive more or less intact, mainly because Christians preserved them, for their own reasons.

I am thinking of adding a large naked statue of Zeus to my living room, but that's beside the point :)

It would be silly to deny the influences, in both directions, and the religion of those Hellenized Jews, while different from ours in some respects, in no way contradicted their functioning in a predominantly Greek world, even under later Roman rule. How far they were aware of the Greek high culture is unclear. They knew about Homer and the dramatists; how much they knew about the Greek philosophical schools (the Platonists, the Aristotelians or Peripatetics, the Stoics, and the Epicureans) is less clear. The word Apikoros (Epikoros - Latinized, Epicurus) survives as an epithet for a skeptic or religious scoffer.

Rabbinic Judaism as we know it today comes mainly from Babylonia (Mesopotamia), where Aramaic-speaking Jews lived semi-autonomously under the Zoroastrian Persians. Even there, Hellenistic influences were significant. But those Jews did not have the intimate contact with Greek culture that the Roman-ruled Jews had. The rabbis were impressed most by the beauty and flexibility of the Greek language. Alluding to the Septuagint (the first complete translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, done in the third century BCE), they recalled the blessing† to "beautify Yephet, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem."

The rabbis also had a subtle point to the way they bequeathed Chanukah to us. They deliberately de-emphasized the military and political aspects of the Hasmonean victory, as these proved ephemeral: within a few years, the Hasmoneans had usurped the priesthood and become quite corrupt. It was the religious significance they emphasized instead, as if to say, this is what's really important, the recovery and rededication of the Temple. The military victory was just a means to that end. After the two great Jewish revolts against Rome in the first and second centuries, the rabbis were in no mood to stoke more messianic hopes and military heroics in any case.

Chag sameach!

POSTSCRIPT: Sources?! You want sources, we got sources :)

~ Pseudo-biblical: The Scroll of Antiochus: widely read by Jewish congregations at Chanukah until modern times. It's in Aramaic, which points to composition in Eretz Israel or Babylonia in late antiquity; it is probably based on earlier sources, either Aramaic or Greek. The scroll's nature and provenance have been controversial since it first appeared in the 8th century.

~ Rabbinic: Megillat Ta'anit, a list of days when Jews are supposed to fast and not fast. It's part of the Mishnah, which was originally composed, memorized, and recited orally. Composed in Hebrew some time between the arrival of the Romans in 37 BCE and the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, it's also sometimes called Megillat Hashmonai'im and is mostly about matters related to the Hasmoneans.

~ Apocrypha: The two Books of the Maccabees (the nom de guerre of the Hasmoneans), composed in Hebrew and Greek in the late second century BCE. They were rejected for the Jewish canon, but are recognized in the Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Anglican Bibles as "deuterocanonical"; i.e., not in the Hebrew canon, but added by Christians at a lower level of authority. The first (probably the earlier) is straightforwardly historical, while the second has a stronger pious tinge but tells a more complex story.

There are some later books under the same name, but with much less authenticity and importance.

~ Josephus: The first-century Jewish commander who defected to the Romans during the Jewish war (66-73 CE) and wrote four extant works in Greek, including Antiquities of the Jews and The War of the Jews.

~ Aramaic, Greek, and Latin: These were major languages of the Persian, eastern Roman, and western Roman empires, respectively. Aramaic is a Semitic tongue closely related to Hebrew. Because rabbinic literature was composed mainly in Eretz Israel and Babylonia, it's in a mix of the two Semitic languages. Aramaic is still spoken by a few Christians in Lebanon and Iraq.
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* The Romans themselves had a number of such mentally ill rulers, the most famous being Caligula (ruled 37-41 CE), who also demanded that his subjects worship him as a god. He made the mistake of insulting the Roman Senate by elevating his horse to Senator, and a conspiracy of republican-minded Senators assassinated him.

** There's no distinctive Hebrew word for the Greeks of mainland European Greece, like the Athenians (Attica), the Spartans, or the Thracians. Kitti is cognate to Kition (modern Larnaca), the capital of Cyprus; Yavan (pronounce it Yawan), to Iowon, archaic for Ionia (Asia Minor).

† Genesis 9:27. A Hebrew pun: "beautify" is yaf't, sometimes translated as "enlarge."

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.

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.

More on resurgent conspiracism

PRE-POSTSCIPT: Follow the saga of the Saudi-sponsored school in northern Virginia by starting here. The Washington Post, normally sensible on such questions, has inexplicably gotten lost on this one. They ask, what about parochial schools? Indeed: what if Catholic schools didn't just teach Catholic doctrine, but advocated religious war against Protestants or forcible conversion of Jews? Or if Protestant schools taught that Catholics should lose all of their civil and political rights?
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First, a follow-up to the earlier posting on Walt and Mearsheimer's book, which reviewers have mostly panned. What's amazing is that the book fails to even mention the Saudi lobby or the effect of oil money in buying influence in Washington. Having now looked at the book myself, I also cannot believe how much it uses recycled mythology about Israel and its supporters pushing for the Iraq war. Walt and Mearsheimer themselves register these facts in their book, but it strangely leaves their argument unchanged, showing how disconnected from reality they are (and from Israel's real concern, Iran). Clearly, they're in the obsessive "Jews-on-the-brain" zone, à la Pat Buchanan. Whether you want to call that "antisemitism" is a fine semantic point up to you.

Remember: the 9/11 and other al Qaeda attacks - from 1990's assassination of Rabbi Kahane in New York City through the two attacks on the WTC, and on down the list, including the present mayhem in Afghanistan and Iraq - could and would not have happened without Saudi money, Saudi pressure for accelerated normalization of travel and visa requirements, and Saudi wacko ideology. Saudi Arabia is the cause of those attacks in two senses, for you Aristotelians out there: "first" cause (the basic driving ideology) and "efficient" cause (enabling the means).

For a book to seriously discuss these effects without mentioning their cause is a farce.

A book-length counter to the myth-spinning of Walt and Mearsheimer is Abe Foxman's new book, The Deadliest Lies. (Foxman is the head of the Anti-Defamation League of the B'nai B'rith.) The ADL is a problematic organization and routinely misses the mark in their strategy by not understanding the real purposes of antisemitism, wrongly thinking that it's fundamentally about the Jews. (The ADL's serious flaws are a topic for another day.) Nonetheless, the book is on target with its analysis of the archetypical antisemitic fantasy: secret cabals, the secret cause of wars and financial panics, etc. The patterns of Walt and Mearsheimer's book and its cruder cousins are striking and, to any student of classical antisemitic theorizing, very familiar. Yale University's Charles Hill blurbs Foxman's book this way: "Conspiracy theories are a measure of a society’s mental health; when on the rise, trouble lies ahead. In The Deadliest Lies, Abraham Foxman diagnoses the ‘Israel Lobby’ conspiracy theory and reveals how sick it is." Even in the 1930s, people had a vague sense of conspiracism as a mental disorder, but we're more sharply aware of this now and have fewer excuses for tolerating it.

Finally, the new issue of Foreign Affairs contains an important review by Walter Russell Mead. He points to one of the realities that Walt and Mearsheimer keep colliding with but never understand: the ways in which foreign policy elites intersect with broad democratic norms and the assumption, natural to American political culture, that broad democratic norms should influence foreign policy - an concept alien in most other countries, even other democracies. And Mead perceptively identifies the way in which Walt and Mearsheimer use classical antisemitic tactics, including the attempt to put American Jews in a bind over criticizing their book - so they can appear outraged that American Jews should be provoked by what is so clearly intended as a provocation. As Mead says, Jimmy Carter is the past master of this tactic, but Walt and Mearsheimer give Carter stiff competition.

But Mead also lets his fellow academics off the hook too easily, in my view. It's hard to believe they're unaware that most American Jews voted against Bush both times and that most American Jews (and most American Jewish organizations) were neutral on or opposed to the Iraq war. The recycling of discredited mythology is only superficially about pseudo-facts; such myth-spinning always serves some other and normally unstated purpose. And while they might be naive about American politics, they are not naive about the Middle East. Like many so-called experts, they hide much of what they really know, even from themselves, and peddle oil-realism as a higher morality. Walt and Mearsheimer cannot not know the truth about the Middle East, its oil regimes, Islam, etc. They also cannot not know the truth about the Arabs of Palestine, an important topic to consider next.

POSTSCRIPT: Regional cooperation in the Middle East is possible, once you get outside the context of the UN and spectacles like the ridiculous Ahmadinejad. Israel and Oman just marked 10 years of cooperation on regional water conservation.

Not what you thought

I'll let the Wall Street Journal do the talking:

Every Monday night at 10 o'clock, Iranians by the millions tune into Channel One to watch the most expensive show ever aired on the Islamic republic's state-owned television. Its elaborate 1940s costumes and European locations are a far cry from the typical Iranian TV fare of scarf-clad women and gray-suited men.

But the most surprising thing about the wildly popular show is that it is a heart-wrenching tale of European Jews during World War II.

The program has an undercurrent of very mixed messages regarding Jews, Judaism, and Israel. (They're still struggling with the fact that Zionism is not imperialism, just a nationalism.) It also has a funny allusion to Descartes and his skeptical "I think, therefore I am - but I'm not sure about anything else" line. In the context of Iran's theocracy, that has a clear implication.*

You can watch part of the first episode here. It's in Farsi, but has English subtitles.

POSTSCRIPT: For more about Iran, read the irrepressible Michael Totten again. His work is getting more exposure in the conventional media, which is a Good Thing.

A somewhat different point of view is provided by Abbas Milani, professor at Stanford and Hoover Institution fellow. A counterforce strike against Iran might yet prove necessary. But no one should be under any illusions that it has any other purpose than just that. It can't lead by itself to political change. Counterviolence can stop or prevent violence. It cannot produce constructive change by itself. Other forces have to be at work.
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* Not that there are no sources of religious doubt and philosophical skepticism in Iranian history. Just read Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat, written about nine hundred years ago, but banned in Iran after the 1979 Islamic revolution. The West has a long history of such things, but surely no monopoly.

When "realists" attack

Do not answer fools according to their folly, lest you be a fool yourself. Answer fools according to their folly, lest they be wise in their own eyes.

- Proverbs 26

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PRE-POSTSCRIPT: An interesting sidelight on this issue from Jeff Robbins (a former Clinton administration UN rep) at the Wall Street Journal. Pay particular attention to his encounters with the anti-Israel lobby, the extensive and lucrative business it does here, and its claims about the "pro-Israel media" - claims both laughable and disturbing.
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No better motto could be imagined to introduce the continuing scandal of Walt and Mearsheimer's attack on the "Israel lobby" and their new book on same. They, their book, their publishers, and their schools (Harvard and Chicago) are a disgrace. Answering them is a necessity, yet fraught with danger - it gives them the attention they crave, but don't deserve.

For a start, former Secretary of State George Schultz has responded with this short piece, which is in turn a selection from a longer preface to a new book on the ongoing saga of conspiracy theories about Jews and politics that always mutate but never seem to die. (Apparently, they're too useful.)

Schultz is one of the most important living American diplomats and one of the most important Secretaries of State ever. (And there's more to Schultz than you think.) He brings that weight and his direct experience on the side of reason in helping dispel a pernicious myth. Groups that advocate on behalf of Israel could only have the impact they have because of the strong pre-existing support for Israel in Congress and the general public. Otherwise, they would be like what Walt and Mearsheimer portray: a semi-secret cabal having a questionable influence on America's foreign policy counter to its best interests. But their influence on that policy would also be all the weaker.

Dissecting the argument and the book. The real beef that Walt and Mearsheimer and people like them have is with American voters and political culture in general. They're aggrieved that not all of American foreign policy is up for sale to oil-producing countries, and this striking fact is what stimulates the irrational obsession that otherwise lives in the darker corners of modern politics. The book itself has been examined and critiqued, following earlier criticism of the authors' original notorious "working paper" and article in the London Review of Books. See here, here, here, and here. And here's a handy summary suitable for talking points.

Careful examination of the book reveals a situation similar to that found with Jimmy Carter's recent book: selective misuse of documents, frequent inversions of reality, careful omission of crucial facts and developments that undercut their argument, and a general failure to talk with the very people they're writing about, who would have also undercut their argument. They make full use of discredited mythology concerning the Iraq war and the Palestinians. Moving from the obvious (Jewish and non-Jewish Americans advocate for Israel) to the libelously malicious in spinning a fantasy of an evil conspiracy, Walt and Mearsheimer emerge with arguments that bear disturbing similarities to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the rantings of Henry Ford.

The real danger. Typical of conspiracists like Walt and Mearsheimer is the phenomenon of psychological projection.

The fascinating thing is that this sinister characterization does fit someone: not the so-called "Israel lobby," which operates in the full light of publicity and mainly through Congress, but what might be called the "oil lobby" or the "Middle East petro-dictatorship lobby." Unlike Israel's supporters, it is semi-secret, interacts almost exclusively with the Executive branch, generally stays out of the spotlight, and usually avoids public or Congressional examination. Behind it lie six decades of "Arabism," "oil realism," and so on, including influential and moneyed investment groups.* This is the other half of the problem, one that Schultz is too polite to mention and is rarely discussed at all, and it's what should be the focus of scrutiny.

Apart from funding the politically-correct academic pseudo-discipline of "Middle East studies," the most sinister part of this lobby is its Saudi component and its spin-off front groups like CAIR. The consequence has been a gradual takeover of world and American Islam by Saudi-funded and Saudi-inspired religious extremists. When a catastrophe like the 9/11 attacks happen, media attention temporarily turns to these groups. But it doesn't take long for this lurid light to get turned away on to something else, like another one of those Britney crises, or maybe a Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction.

The Arabists: The rise and fall of a bad idea. The origins of these groups and their influence (in the US) go back the 1940s. Ever since the Lebanese civil war and the overthrow of the Shah of Iran in the 1970s, they and their ideas have suffered one blow after another: first the the Iran-Iraq war, then the almost-fatal blow of Saddam's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, followed by the relentless post-1990 rise of radical Islamist groups in precisely the Sunni countries (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan) that are supposedly our "allies" and "friends."

The oil-driven "Arabist" idea and the policies based on it now lie in ruins. This is the real background to "when 'realists' attack." The perversion of classical foreign policy realism by the need for oil (on our part) and the need for oil revenue (on the part of oil-producing countries) has led American policy into a dead end. It's probably been the biggest foreign policy scam of the last century. Walt and Mearsheimer and people like them can't take this truth. So they idle away their hours in Cambridge and elsewhere with poisonous fantasies.

The curse of Midas. There's a final irony to this worth mentioning. Oil revenue was supposed to make the backwards petro-nations rich, able to leap into modernization at a single bound with enormous pools of capital that countries not blessed with abundant oil did not have. Except that it failed to work out as planned: as economists have learned, when a country becomes dependent on nothing more than a natural resource monopoly for its revenue, and all that revenue is controlled by the government, it has a strong tendency to become a corrupt, stagnant backwater. Far from becoming modern, a petro-government turns into a dictatorship and tries to buy off its population with oil wealth. This is the well-documented predicament of the Arab oil countries and the Arab-Iranian world in general. While the larger Muslim world does not suffer as much from this condition, the ability of governments like Saudi Arabia to promote radical Islamic doctrine is enabled by that flow of oil dollars.

OTOH, a country like Israel, with limited natural resources, has had, like Hong Kong and Singapore, to make the most of its human resources. For a society to be modern doesn't require wealth to showered on it, unearned, from an oil well. It requires a modern society and modern social and political practices. A modern society's wealth is its people, not what's in the ground.** Having just returned from Israel, I can testify from first-hand experiences that the same miracle that happened in those Far Eastern city-states has happened in Israel. Not having oil or other significant natural resources has been a blessing for all those places.†

Dependency on oil revenue, from the Persian Gulf to Venezuela, has produced little more than wasted decades, squandered wealth, political stagnation and oppression, and radical religious and political reaction. These countries now have little to show for it.

Allies, friends, and ... ? As for who's an ally of America, and who's not, consider the result of this recent Harris poll. Americans were asked to rank countries in terms of closeness as allies, and they responded with this revealing list, in rank order: Great Britain, Canada, Australia, Israel, followed by Japan, Italy, South Korea, and Germany. These are all democracies with whom we share values, history, and extensive commercial, cultural, and human ties. For a great democratic power like the United States, that says it all: allies like this arise from what you are, not just something you buy or sell.

So-called "experts" like Walt and Mearsheimer don't understand this, but ordinary voters do.
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* These actually have far more political influence than the oil companies, which have more limited impact in Washington than many people think. The goal of these consulting and investment groups, which operate in all wealthy, oil-consuming countries, is to recapture the oil money flowing into the oil-producing countries by selling those countries large public works projects, military systems, etc. They also sell political influence in a fairly crass, if discreet, way.

** An interesting implication is that the main division in the globalizing world is not between those have and those who don't have, but between those who know and those who don't know.

† There's a lot of business now between Israel and Asia, especially China. Tel Aviv has a significant flow of Chinese and Indians doing just that. Even stranger, some of them speak Hebrew.

People often think that such benefits should be immediate, instant-gratification things, like finding oil in your backyard. Real blessings are not easy-come, easy-go: they're are difficult things that take longer to come to fruition, but are unassailable.