s against Tony Blair’s backing for George Bush over Iraq and Blair’s failure to rein him in over his support for Israel. Their letter speaks volumes for the rancid prejudice which animates so much of the British foreign policy mandarinate, and has now unfortunately influenced the attitude of so much of the population.
I get the feeling she wasn’t very impressed.
Palestinian conflict?
With over 900 articles on this conflict emerging on an average day from English-language media outlets, Israel ― a tiny nation the size of the state of New Jersey ― receives approximately 75 times more coverage than other areas of equal population. In comparison to other nations involved in armed conflict (where world media attention increases), Israel receives over 10 times more coverage by population. […]
The over-reporting of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an important element of anti-Israel bias for two reasons:
● DISTORTION OF GEOGRAPHIC REALITY ― The prominence granted to Israeli power though massive news coverage distorts the geographic reality: Israel is a tiny nation surrounded by Arab states that, at best, coldly tolerate Israel’s existence. To the average news consumer, this key strategic reality is lost behind the barrage of Israel headlines that give one the impression Israel has a large physical presence in the Mideast.
In fact, one could jog from the West Bank to the Mediterranean Sea in little over an hour. Israeli leaders communicate this point to foreign diplomats by taking them on a helicopter ride from Tel Aviv, flying east toward the West Bank. After a few short minutes, they turn to guests and say: ‘I’ll let you know when we’ve crossed into the West Bank…We already did.’ This, to disabuse foreign guests of the notion that Israel is much larger than their regular news providers suggest.
● EXCESSIVE SCRUTINY OF ISRAEL ― Israel’s conscientious anti-terror effort is scrutinized by the world press in a manner no other nation is forced to confront.
For example, while tens of thousands have been massacred and gross human rights violations have struck African nations such as Congo and Sudan, the over-reporting of Israel focuses far more concern on alleged IDF insensitivity to Palestinians. As Harvard’s Zuckerman finds himself asking, ‘How many Congolese would need to be slaughtered to make the front page of the New York Times?’
After the Iran-Iraq war ended, the tactic was adopted in other wars — in particular, by Hezbollah, the Iranian-supported Shia fighters in southern Lebanon. The first and most spectacular demonstration came on October 23, 1983, when a yellow lorry approached the US Marine barracks in southern Beirut. Instead of stopping when challenged, the driver accelerated, smashed straight into the building and detonated a huge bomb that killed 241 American troops. Later, the only surviving American eye-witness said that the driver “looked right at me and smiled . . . As soon as I saw the truck over there I knew what was going to happen.”
The review, and to judge by it the book being reviewed, are strangely emotionless in their descriptions. We’re used to the most appalling cruelty being visited on enemies: that’s as old as history. And those in power sending the young to their death – as in the First World War – is sadly familiar. But children of 13 or so being sent to their deaths “with a plastic key for their entry into paradise” is surely about as low as it is possible to go.
In the Observer magazine, an article on one of the female Palestinian suicide bombers (“shahidas”), Wafa Idris, makes the point that these women are generally outcasts from their society in one form or another: in Idris’ case a divorcee and a “troubled young woman who was prone to bouts of melancholy and depression”.
Knowing this, the point that Reuter wishes to make, about the “compelling example” of the martyr, is rather vitiated. There’s nothing compelling or noble about sending children or vulnerable women to their death. Despicable is a more apt description.
Binyon closes his review:
Despite the worries of some Palestinian leaders at the global condemnation, Reuter sees no let-up by Islamist radicals; indeed, he scorns Bush’s claim that al-Qaeda is on the run. But he believes that no society can sustain suicide bombings in the long run. In the main non-Muslim conflict where the tactic has been copied, by the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, the use of child bombers has fallen. And in Iran itself there is now total disillusion; the child martyrs are no longer celebrated, and families openly question the point of the sacrifice.
This leads Reuter to the book’s thought-provoking conclusion: suicide bombers cannot be defeated by Western military might or the threat of reprisals. That only confirms their zealotry. “Global manipulators of resentment and fear like bin Laden can be defeated only from within, by their own societies and cultures,” he says. As events in the troubled Muslim world show, that is likely to take a very long time.
This is not a thought-provoking conclusion: it’s so obvious that it’s barely worth stating. Of course the ultimate defeat of terrorism will only come when attitudes within those societies that nurture it have changed. But force can have a considerable effect on these attitudes, particularly the belief that suicide bombing works: an attitude that gained some credence with the perceived success of Hezbollah in driving the Israelis out of Southern Lebanon.
Another step towards the end of suicide bombing would be a clear condemnation of this practice from the Western societies these attacks are aimed at: in particular an end to the fatuous notion that these crimes are understandable, or in any way justified.
Omar at Iraq the Model quotes an e-mail he received:
“I want to take this opportunity to personally thank you. I am an American who “knows” why her country has invaded Iraq. Your personal reaction to this invasion of your country has left me overwhelmed and therefor I need to thank you.
Thank you for helping my country become richer and more powerful from the riches of your country. Thank you for accepting that your country’s oil gets stolen in order for us to have a steady source of oil for many years to come. Thank you for insuring that the world oil prices are controlled by us and not by any other region and power. Thank you for ignoring the fact that the US helped Sadam Hussein remain in power until he too wanted to becoming too powerful and attacked Kuwait (afterall, we do not like competition, but I am sure you understand this). Thank you for supporting Israel, our number one ally in the Middle East, I’m sure you understand that the murder of women, children and militants alike is necessary for the survival of a terrorist state, you have a very believing heart, so thank you for understanding the tactics of this military state of Israel.
Lastly, thank you for pretending to be blind while the reports of the US military purposely disregarding Iraqi’s lives leak out in mass amounts in the world press, while the US spokespersons constantly deny it. (I am sure such things remind you of your days under Sadam, sorry for this).
Lastly, thank you for believing that your situation and the situation of your fellow Iraqis will improve.
Thank you for being so innocent and so foolish.”
Hmmm…charming, eh?
The Religious Police, a new Saudi blog that Normblog linked to the other day, has a nice line in dry humour:
The thing we should face up to as Saudis is that Public Executions are “showbiz”. So we should do them properly. If we were the USA, with their “by invitation only” executions, we could afford to be low-key about the whole thing. But we’re not ashamed of having ours in public, so let’s do it with style.
At the moment what happens is that a couple of guys put down a big polythene sheet. Then the executioner arrives. Then the van arrives with the prisoner and his guard. They lead the prisoner to the center of the sheet and make him kneel. If the relatives of his victim want to pardon him, now is the time for them to shout, and he’s released, pays blood money instead. Otherwise the sword swings, head comes off, lots of blood, people faint, someone pukes. Body and head are taken away. Polythene sheet rolled up. All over.
That’s not really showbiz, is it? It’s obviously a ceremony designed by civil servants. It needs more “pazazz”. It needs to be more “Hollywood”.
Read his suggestions.
going torments and sufferings of the sons of Christ, especially in Palestine where he preached. They are crucified every day at the hands of the American and Jewish-Zionist executioners. Even suckling babes are not safe from crucifixion…
“What kind of exoneration are these criminals, who continue to shed sacred blood, talking about?… Now the Iraqi people are facing the same ordeal and walking the same Via Dolorosa. [This means] that the carnivorous beast does not always come from among the Jews – otherwise, how could we classify people like Bush, Rumsfeld, and Cheney, if we did not classify them as Zionists? What is the torment of Christ if not the anguish of his sons?… The lesson that we are learning from reexamining the sufferings of Christ must make us [sympathize] with his tormented sons regardless of their color and creed, against the carnivorous beasts regardless of their color and creed. What is the story of the life of Christ if not the story of the Palestinian Intifada against oppression and corruption, and against the oppressor and the corrupt? The Palestinian Intifada is nothing but a return to the Intifada of Christ by his sons…” […]
The film has stirred religious controversy in Kuwait, where the authorities have not yet decided whether to approve its screening. While the Sunni majority in the country opposes the film because parts of it contradict the Muslim faith, the Shi’ites are calling for showing it. Kuwait’s leading Shi’ite cleric Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir Al-Muhri said there was nothing wrong with showing the film. He argued, “It’s a good opportunity to reveal the crimes committed by Jews against the Christ and many other prophets.”
All this will no doubt cheer Mel no end. There’s a problem, however:
Hani Naqshabandi, editor in chief of the Saudi family magazine Sayyidaty, criticized the notion of the Jews’ extraordinary powers: “The real irritation in the film is that it revealed a lie that we, the Arabs, tell ourselves everyday. This lie is that we are hated in the world because the Jews control Hollywood, the film industry, and the entertainment industry in America. We say that this control has distorted the Arabs’ image everywhere, causing us to be hated by everyone. However, ‘The Passion of the Christ’ has revealed the exact opposite: It revealed that we are hated in the world because we hate each other and we don’t know how to conduct our business… The Jews have nothing to do with it at all. They are innocent of the accusation of harming our image in the world… If the Jews had ultimate control over Hollywood and what happens there, as our fathers, grandfathers, writers, and books say, a film against them would not be produced by the hub of the world’s film industry…”
“I am not saying that they [the Jews] have no impact or influence. They do indeed, but not as we think or claim, and not as we imagined when we accused the Jews, Hollywood, and the Zionist lobby here and there for our failure to communicate with others. This is not a defense of the Jews or a promotion for the film, but an attempt to reveal that we must stop accusing others for our mistakes… We shouldn’t make Hollywood and the Jews the excuse for our backwardness. It goes deeper than that…”
Who’d have thought? The film has actually made someone question their deepest prejudices. Truly, God moves in mysterious ways.
To anyone who’s studied the history of US involvement in Central America in the Eighties, the name of John Negroponte will be familiar. As ambassador to Honduras he became known for his willingness to turn a blind eye to the death squads operating there, while he helped organise the Contra rebels who did such a wonderful job of bombing schools and hospitals inside the Sandinistas’ Nicaragua. In short, a man with a past, closely associated with some of the worst excesses of recent US foreign policy.
So this is not good news:
President Bush named John Negroponte yesterday as the first US Ambassador to Iraq since 1991. He will head what will become the largest American embassy in the world.
David Adesnik at Oxblog provides a comprehensive summary, with links.
ollective movements cannot be met with words alone, but must also be met with force. As one disgusted by the convenient patience and wishful thinking of European statesmen before and during the holocaust, Arendt would undoubtedly urge us to rid ourselves of our “common-sense disinclination to believe the monstrous” and make all necessary sacrifices to guard against chemical attacks, dirty bombs, and other atrocities that our imagination can hardly dare to broach.
Well okay: isn’t that what Bush and Blair have been attempting? But Powers then goes on to ignore completely what she’s just written:
Origins shows that Arendt would not be satisfied with a policy that aimed to violently crush today’s threat without seeking to understand it. In the preface to Origins , she set out “to discover the hidden mechanics by which all traditional elements of our political and spiritual world were dissolved….”
So it goes, as she bemoans our stupid leaders aiming to “violently crush” the terrorists without understanding them. So she’s not serious then. All this talk about force doesn’t really mean force: it’s just words. Against the Nazis, against Stalinism, force was justified, but that was then. It’s stuff you read about in books. [Or is she saying that, according to Arendt, Churchill and Roosevelt should have waited till she’d written her book and had a better understanding of Nazism before they started fighting back?]
Arendt, then, seems fairly robust in her belief that totalitarianism must be countered with force. Powers however reaches this conclusion:
It simply has to be true, given the human costs and nuclear stakes of the contemporary showdown, that we can never know too much about terrorist movements, and that we can never try too hard to alleviate the indignities and inequalities that may help fuel the threat.
It has to be true that for Powers, Arendt is saying what she wants her to be saying, because she can’t countenance any other view, but it doesn’t seem to me that that’s what Arendt’s saying at all. Arendt is arguing that we need to understand why people support totalitarianism: what makes people do these awful things. She’s not arguing that in each case we need to understand why that particular totalitarianism has arisen, and try to ameliorate those particular root causes. How would you have done that in the case of the Nazis? Give them some of what they wanted? – Czechoslovakia say? You can’t deal with totalitarianisms; you oppose them. The attempt to understand the root causes in Powers’ sense is precisely the kind of wishful thinking that so disgusted Arendt about European statesmen in the Thirties.
t edition of the journal Counselling in Education, Hodge said that she hoped counselling would one day ‘be delivered in mainstream settings, like schools’, and added that ‘counselling for pupils and students who are having emotional difficulties both inside and outside school can be a lifeline, a turning-point in their lives’.
Hodge’s comments follow the publication of a survey showing that depression will be second only to heart disease as the biggest global health burden by 2020.
According to a new charity, the Depression Alliance, one in five people will be affected by depression at some stage. More than 2.9 million people in Britain are diagnosed as having depression at any one time, the alliance said last week.
‘All too often, it seems that there is no one to talk to, that there is no one who will understand what they are going through,’ Hodge writes.
She goes on to suggest that there is a need to encourage the development of multi-disciplinary teams of workers consisting of trained counsellors and other professionals who will work alongside teachers and also called for a debate on where the funding should come from.
The purpose of education, it seems, will in the future be to identify which particular syndromes each child suffers from, and then to provide the necessary therapies to alleviate these syndromes. Since psychology, like gas – or work – will expand to occupy whatever space is available to it, there can never be an end to this process.
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto is an Oxford academic, with a number of books to his name including “Civilizations: Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature“, which I acquired a year or so ago when it had been remaindered, in the belief that it might be something along the lines of Jared Diamond’s “Guns Germs and Steel“. It didn’t take me long to abandon it. The underlying theme is that the West is always the problem. He imagines a man from Mars coming to Earth: what would he make of it? According to Fernandez-Armesto he would be struck most of all by the overwhelming contributions of Chinese civilsation. Um, yeah right: if he happened to land on Guy Fawkes night.
A new edition of De Tocqueville’s classic “Democracy in America” provides an excuse for Felipe Fernandez-Armesto to look at the current state of America:
Until now, democracy always had one big advantage over other systems. It made wars hard to start. Democracies got involved in wars reluctantly — usually when despotisms attacked them — and only under severe necessity. Now, even this virtue seems spent. America’s lengthening list of bombings and invasions in its tough, unenviable role as global policeman has included some indefensible mistakes. More recently, American governments — with British complicity — have launched three morally deplorable wars: first, against peaceful Serbs in their own homeland, where almost all of them were entirely innocent of the abominations of Kosovo; then against Afghanistan, on the pretext that the invasion was part of a justifiable war against terrorists; and now against Iraq, which, however objectionable the regime at the time, threatened no one and had virtually no means of making war much beyond its own borders. It is hard to imagine a government doing anything more evil than starting an unjust war. We used to think democracy indemnified us against such evil. We know better now.
A “morally deplorable” war “against peaceful Serbs in their own homeland, where almost all of them were entirely innocent of the abominations of Kosovo”? Presumably then Fernandez-Armesto would regard the war against the Nazis as morally deplorable, where almost all the Germans were innocent of the abominations carried out across Europe.
“The world is under threat”, he continues, “from two great American role-models favoured by the current Administration”. I’m almost embarrassed to quote further. The two role models? The Lone Ranger and Donald Duck. We’ve certainly come a long way from De Tocqueville.