February 28, 2006

IT'S FRIENDSHIP, FRIENDSHIP, JUST A PERFECT BLEND-SHIP

        Horsefeathers is old enough to recall how the brutal Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, was transformed into benign "Uncle Joe" by our useful media idiots, during World War II. At home, our victrola played the Red Army Chorus singing its rousing martial anthems. After all, we were allies fighting Hitler, weren't we? All the while, Stalin's agents were infiltrating our government and scientific establishment, stealing whatever they could use in the struggle to impose global Communism. They played an often successful double game. However, they did so covertly; never did our highest government officials invite them to place their agents inside our most vulnerable locations.

        The United Arab Emirates, a collection of incestuous Emirs and Sheiks, who, were it not for oil, would have a hard time getting jobs bagging groceries, is the long term enemy--no matter how much they "cooperate" with us in hunting down others who also threaten them. They are part of the primitive world of Islamo-Nazis who envy and despise our Western civilization, and who scapegoat the Jews for their own failures. We don't recall President Roosevelt selling management of the Manhattan Project to Stalin's Soviet Union. Nor did Roosevelt trouble himself about sharing secrets with Churchill but not with Stalin. In fact he knew, despite our differences, Churchill was a real ally. Stalin had to use secret agents to get the important information. Roosevelt never felt compelled to explain that Nazism and Communism were really peaceful ideologies that had been regrettably hijacked by a few zealots.

        The clue, as always---the canary in the coal mine--is Israel. The Jew hatred that permeates Islam is manifest in the UAE, even as they cozy up to the United States. The Bush supporting conservative pundits, from David Brooks to William Kristol, glide over this inconvenient fact, explaining how grateful we should be for the friendship of any Arab. Grateful? If the UAE's rulers are helping us it is because they fear for their own lives and need us to shore up their cruel regimes. One wonders, if Russia in World War II worked openly to destroy England, would President Roosevelt have enthusiastically hailed them as our ally? Here's what our "friends" in the UAE are up to,:

"The parent company of a Dubai-based firm at the center of a political storm in the US over the purchase of American ports participates in the Arab boycott against Israel, The Jerusalem Post has learned.

The firm, Dubai Ports World, is seeking control over six major US ports, including those in New York, Miami, Philadelphia and Baltimore. It is entirely owned by the Government of Dubai via a holding company called the Ports, Customs and Free Zone Corporation (PCZC), which consists of the Dubai Port Authority, the Dubai Customs Department and the Jebel Ali Free Zone Area.

"Yes, of course the boycott is still in place and is still enforced," Muhammad Rashid a-Din, a staff member of the Dubai Customs Department's Office for the Boycott of Israel, told the Post in a telephone interview.

"If a product contained even some components that were made in Israel, and you wanted to import it to Dubai, it would be a problem," he said.

A-Din noted that while the head office for the anti-Israel boycott sits in Damascus, he and his fellow staff members are paid employees of the Dubai Customs Department, which is a division of the PCZC, the same Dubai government-owned entity that runs Dubai Ports World.

Moreover, the Post found that the website for Dubai's Jebel Ali Free Zone Area, which is also part of the PCZC, advises importers that they will need to comply with the terms of the boycott.

In a section entitled "Frequently Asked Questions", the site lists six documents that are required in order to clear an item through the Dubai Customs Department. One of them, called a "Certificate of Origin," "is used by customs to confirm the country of origin and needs to be seen by the office which ensures any trade boycotts are enforced," according to the website.

A-Din of the Israel boycott office confirmed that his office examines certificates of origin as a means of verifying whether a product originated in the Jewish state.

On at least three separate occasions last year, the Post has learned, companies were fined by the US government's Office of Anti-boycott Compliance, an arm of the Commerce Department, on charges connected to boycott-related requests they had received from the Government of Dubai.

US law bars firms from complying with such requests or cooperating with attempts by Arab governments to boycott Israel.

In one instance, according to a Commerce Department press release, a New York-based exporter agreed to pay a fine for having "failed to report in a timely manner its receipts of requests from Dubai" to provide certification that its products had not been made in Israel.

The proposed handover of US ports to DP World has provoked a political storm in Washington, where Republicans and Democrats alike have expressed hostility to the plan, citing national security concerns.

In an attempt to stave off opposition, DP World agreed over the weekend to a highly unusual 45-day second federal investigation of potential security risks..."
See the rest here.

        Perhaps the State Dept. can reassure our UAE "friends" that we truly appreciate their help, by complying with their boycott of Israel, and turning away any ships carrying goods from that infidel land.

February 25, 2006

HARVARD AND SUMMERS: WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN

Peter Berkowitz writes eloquently about the missed opportunities:

"...What should Summers have done? From the beginning he should have stuck to his guns, and failing that, he should have come to his senses after summer vacation last year and uttered words similar to those supplied by attorney Harvey Silverglate, writing in the Boston Phoenix two days after Summers's resignation:

This was about more than whether I speculated in an area in which I am not a recognized expert. It was about whether the modern American academy is any longer a safe haven for true diversity of thought and opinion, and whether some subjects are so toxic to a subsection of the academic left that they are taboo. We extol the virtues of diversity in a wide variety of programs--including mandatory freshman orientation and "sensitivity training" programs that come perilously close to being exercises in thought-reform--but we penalize diversity of knowledge and opinion. I was not immune to these forces, as exhibited in my shameful attempt to buy off my critics with a $50 million bribe for a laundry list of senseless initiatives compiled by two women's task forces that will do little more than further expand an already bloated administrative structure. I hereby declare that initiative dissolved. The unspent money will go to endow a much-needed and long-overdue chair in academic freedom at Harvard Law School.

The utterance of these or some such words might not have been the height of prudence. But Summers could have made himself a hero. Public opinion was with him last year when the story first broke after MIT biologist Nancy Hopkins told the Boston Globe that she walked out of the private, invitation-only session because, if she hadn't, "I would've either blacked out or thrown up." Imagine a no-nonsense Summers tactfully refraining from pointing out the 19th-century Victorian female stereotypes in which Hopkins was trafficking, while remarking on the oddity of a biologist protesting the consideration of biological factors as part of an explanation of human behavior..."
See the rest here.

NEW YORK TIMES: HYPOCRISY/COWARDICE WATCH

        The NYTimes tiptoes up to the topic of the Religion of Pieces cartoon jihad, and urges others to be resolute. Do these self flatterers ever look in the mirror, other than to observe the quality of their hair pommade? If they possessed one ounce of the resoluteness they urge on others, they'd stop being self censoring Dhimmis and print the cartoons in full color on the front page. Until they do, all their self congratulatory moralizing counts for nothing.

"...With every new riot over the Danish cartoons, it becomes clearer that the protests are no longer about the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, but about the demagoguery of Islamic extremists. The demonstrators are undeniably outraged by what they perceive as blasphemy. But radical Islamists are trying to harness that indignation to their political goals and their theocratic ends by fomenting hatred for the West and for moderate regimes in the Muslim world. These are dangerous games, and they require the most resolute response..."
See the full editorial here.

        So who is closer to resolutely facing reality--the NYTimes editorialists with their endless prattle about "moderate" Islam, or the cartoonists who depicted Islam as a death cult?

February 24, 2006

SCHOOL NEWS

Horsefeathers contributer Rita Kramer has a fascinating article in today's Wall Street Journal, LOSING THE 'P' IN PTA

At a reader's request here's the full article:
Losing the 'P' in PTA

By RITA KRAMER
February 24, 2006; Page W13

The hand-lettered sign outside the door to P.S. 166 on Manhattan's Upper West Side said "PTA Meeting Thursday." To be exact, it was a parent group that would be meeting, not the PTA.

The sign was proof of the extent to which "PTA" has become a generic term, like "Kleenex" or "Xerox." Many parents are unaware of just how far the century-old National Congress of Parents and Teachers (known since 1924 as the PTA) has strayed from its origins in social uplift or from the classic 1950s-era image we may still have of it -- an organization devoted to school service, fund-raising (think of those bake sales) and wholesome parent-teacher relations.

In fact, the PTA has been losing members steadily for almost a half-century now, from a high point of more than 12 million in the early 1960s to a current membership of about half that. Today only about a quarter of K-12 schools in the U.S. have a PTA chapter. The reasons for this decline are familiar ones: money and politics.

The PTA had its beginnings in an era of women's clubs and settlement houses, when affluent, idealistic women went to work bettering the conditions of the urban poor. Although women still couldn't vote, they could exercise influence through thousands of civic organizations and social clubs around the country. Soon enough, they cast a critical eye on the conditions of children in the public schools. They sought to address such matters as nutrition and hygiene and to help Americanize the offspring of immigrants arriving in waves from southern and eastern Europe.

In 1897, the members of the first National Congress of Mothers -- the name of the group that would eventually become the PTA -- saw their mission as fostering "a love of humanity and of country...and the advantages to follow from a closer relation between the influence of the home and that of the school." The president of the national PTA declared at a recent convention: "We simply must change the country." What happened?

In "The Politics of the PTA" (2002), Charlene Haar explains that the PTA shifted its focus mainly because of its longstanding alliance with the National Education Association. Formed in 1857, the NEA once shared the parent group's concern for schoolchildren in such matters as school curriculum and the qualifications of public-school teachers. Indeed, in 1920, the National Congress felt so much in line with the NEA that it moved into the association's impressive Washington headquarters. Already allied with the teachers group on support for a "progressive" curriculum that would emphasize "life skills," the PTA would from then on curb its more general social programs and limit itself to matters directly affecting education.

Ms. Haar chronicles the major policies on which the two groups cooperated throughout the 20th century. Having begun as equals, the PTA gradually became the subservient partner. Both organizations refused to support the National Defense Education Act -- passed in 1958 in the wake of the Soviet's launch of Sputnik -- because, as Ms. Haar explains, it "provided funds for mathematics, science and other defense-related curricula but could not be used for teacher salaries."

By the 1960s, the PTA was known as "a coffee-and-cookies organization" -- unquestioningly offering its seal of approval to the newly unionized NEA. It was the issue of teacher strikes, though, that dealt the reputation of the PTA its final blow. In 1961 the AFT, representing New York City's teachers, staged the nation's first citywide strike, and in 1968 Florida teachers followed with the first statewide strike. To avoid conflict, the PTA abandoned any pretense of independence and supported the walkouts.

A few years later, the PTA tagged along with the NEA, lobbying for a cabinet-level federal department of education. What followed were a series of legislative victories for the teachers unions. Among their outstanding lobbying successes, backed by the PTA, was the defeat of a bill co-sponsored by Sen. Patrick Moynihan in 1978 proposing a tax credit for as much as half of private-school tuition. In the aftermath, many parents began their exodus from the PTA, including a large number of Catholics whose tuition fees for parochial schools would have become less burdensome under the plan.

Today the PTA supports all of the union's positions, including increased federal funding for education and opposition to independent charter schools, to vouchers and to tuition tax credits for private and religious schools. This "parent" group lobbies for teachers to spend less time in the classroom and to have fewer supervisory responsibilities like lunchroom duty. Moreover, they want a pay scale for teachers that is based on seniority, not merit. In November, the PTA even helped to defeat California's Proposition 74, which called for limiting teacher tenure by extending the probation period for new teachers from two to five years, a proposal designed to give administrators more time to weed out bad instructors.

With polls indicating that the union label is a liability with the public, an arrangement has developed whereby the NEA provides needed financial support for the PTA, which in turn bolsters union positions at the grass-roots level. As one union official put it: "[T]he PTA has credibility...we always use the PTA as a front."

Not only does the PTA support the NEA on issues that protect the public-school teachers' monopoly, the parent group also speaks up in favor of the NEA's more radical curriculum ideas, like sex-education programs that replace "don't" with "how to" and that propose the inclusion of a gay/lesbian unit starting as early as kindergarten.

Many parents have decided that they no longer want to fund this kind of nonsense: They feel that their dues money would be better spent close to home, on after-school programs, computers and school supplies. As the PTA becomes increasingly irrelevant to the lives of children in public schools and parents become less willing to pay its dues, it is gradually being replaced by alternative, mostly home-grown, organizations that may call themselves guilds or councils or associations but are generally known as Parent Teacher Organizations -- PTOs. These groups collect no dues and follow no political line.

Tim Sullivan, a Massachusetts entrepreneur and former New York City public-school teacher, saw the need among the independent groups forming around the country for the kind of information and services once provided by the PTA. In 1999 he founded a company for independent parent-teacher groups. PTO Today publishes a magazine and maintains a Web site that provides opportunities for parent networking on its message boards. Both in print and online, PTO Today answers the kind of questions that parents of public-school children ask -- how to organize a family night, how to raise money for extras like arts-and-crafts supplies and what kind of insurance is necessary for field trips. With any luck, the PTOs will put the PTA out of business entirely.

Ms. Kramer's books include "Ed School Follies: The Miseducation of America's Teachers" and "Maria Montessori: A Biography."

February 21, 2006

SUMMERS VS. THE HARVARD RADICALS: HOW TO END A WAR

"The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it."
--George Orwell

        Last year Horsefeathers went to a Harvard alumni function to hear Larry Summers speak. Hoping for a vigorous defense of freedom of inquiry and the scientific method, instead we got pabulum, a weak kneed mea culpa, and a list of new and costly undertakings to raise the percentage of women on the science faculty. When he opened the floor for questions, two women scientists, graduates of Harvard, spoke out bravely against the lynch mob seeking to hang him from the P.C. rafters. One of them chastised Summers for not vigorously defending science and warned that if Summers instituted all his measures for achieving 'gender equity' he would create a dept. she wouldn't want to be a part of, while the other vigorously defended the training she received in a Harvard Math. dept. made up of primarily white males. The disappointment by many Summers supporters was palpable. After all, this was the man who fought the leftist anti-semites on campus as they sought to divest from and delegitimize Israel.
        Today's New York Sun reminds us of what is at stake in the Harvard struggle and pays tribute to the pre-emasculated Summers for his efforts against the herd of independent minds seeking his scalp. The Sun editorialist writes: "...Mr. Summers has shown flashes of brilliance since taking over in July 2001 as president of America's oldest, richest, and most famous university. We were among those who cheered his willingness to confront political anti-Semitism on campus; his speech in Memorial Church, where he said the signers of a petition to get the university to divest from Israel were anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent, is one of the most important ever given by a Harvard president. When Mr. Summers came under attack for remarks on gender differences, we observed - in an editorial called "The Soul of Harvard" - that Mr. Summers's travail could not be separated from his defense of Israel.
        Certainly his critics in the contretemps over his remarks on gender included many who participated in a movement that Mr. Summers proclaimed anti-Semitic in effect. And we have admired enormously a number of other gestures by Mr. Summers, including his attendance as recently as February 10 at an extraordinary Sabbath dinner that drew hundreds of students and faculty members and at which he drew a standing ovation. He showed his understanding of the role of Harvard in wartime, beginning with his appearance at a commissioning ceremony for the Reserve Officers Training Corps program that was kicked off Harvard's campus in the era of protest against the war in Vietnam..." See the rest here.
        The NYSUN reminds us that it wasn't only the radical feminists who were offended by Summers; it was the entire left utopian agenda that he challenged and whose supporters he outraged. Tragically, Summers has become a victim of his own assumption that he was dealing with reasonable people who had simply misunderstood him. He has turned into the Neville Chamberlain of academia, a bright, well meaning man, appealing to the good will of his adversaries and letting hope prevail over reality, who never realized that he was actually in a barroom brawl with two bit intellectual bullies.

February 20, 2006

MORE FRUITS OF APPEASEMENT

Larry Summers's effort to appease the leftist P.C. crowd on Harvard's faculty has not only failed to slake their thirst for his blood, but it has alienated his supporters. Why, they ask, should they defend him if he's unwilling to defend himself?

"...Summers’ problem, as many of his supporters see it, is that he has tried, unsuccessfully, to appease his critics—and in doing so, alienated his proponents.

“I think the problem now is he’s not making anyone happy,” said Pinker, the Johnstone Family professor of psychology. “He’s made his critics think he’s weak, and made it a little harder for his supporters to find anything to support.”

Pinker’s comments were striking because the psychologist had been so outspoken in his support of Summers during the thick of last winter’s women-in-science storm. In a late January 2005 interview with The New York Times, for example, Pinker hailed Summers as a “refreshing” change from past presidents.

But asked on Wednesday whether he still had confidence in Summers, Pinker hesitated, then qualified his response.

“Yeah, but—I’d like to see a little more positive leadership,” Pinker said.

Another well-known Summers supporter, Kenan Professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield ’53, also said he wanted the president to respond forcefully to his opponents.

“He needs to start defending himself,” Mansfield said, “and to answer and refute his miserable critics...”

See the rest here.

February 19, 2006

SUMMERS DEATH WATCH: FEEDING THE CROCODILES

Tradesports.com's bettors are saying it's a 74+% likelihood that Larry Summers resigns as President of Harvard.

February 12, 2006

"LIBERALISM IS ALWAYS BEING SURPRISED"

Horsefeathers contributor, Edward Alexander, elaborates on a theme we have touched on repeatedly: Liberalism's view of human nature. It should be read in conjunction with his earlier critique of Judith Butler.

        "If liberalism has a single desperate weakness," wrote Lionel Trilling in 1943, "it is an inadequacy of imagination; liberalism is always being surprised." Although the revelation of human depravity has been one of the chief enterprises of the human mind for over four centuries, its discoveries have never been sufficiently conclusive to dislodge liberalism from its entrenched belief in human and social goodness, its dogmatic attachment to the belief that human wickedness is invariably "caused" by an unjust or unequal or anomalous society. Every modern calamity--German death factories, Soviet gulags, Islamic suicide bombings--that did not fit into liberalism's Marxist categories caught it by surprise.
        The recent horrors of the Palestinian elections that brought to power a Nazi-style regime of crazed religious fanatics and the Cartoon War that has turned the ever combustible Muslim mob against the Danish infidel have also caught liberals by surprise.Liberal optimism, epitomized in the solemn idiocies of the New York Times editorial columns and the sophisticated confusion of the New Yorker, quickly concluded that the electoral victory of Hamas, despite the suicide bandanas and swastika armbands worn by its blood-stained bands of ruthless killers, was really a popular mandate for less graft and more efficient garbage recycling than the Palestinian Authority had delivered. The globe-trotting Jimmy Carter stopped by to pronounce it "a beautiful election" and assured Larry King that Hamas would soon turn from terror: "they told me they want...a peaceful administration."
        Since the liberal view of the world is daily confuted in Iran, in Gaza, in Europe, by the tenacity of Muslim rejectionism--of Israel, of America, of free expression, of women's rights--ever more desperate "explanations" of what is happening must be contrived. Thus the violence occasioned by the "blasphemous" cartoons is being explained by liberals as a reaction to, among other sore grievances and "root causes," the Danish government's having recently (and of course too late) imposed limits on immigration and declared advocacy of terrorism a criminal offense. All over the world, including Israel, the liberal intelligentsia are debating (for the very first time!) whether it is "wrong" to insult someone's religion. Ha'aretz, the Women's Wear Daily for Israeli liberals, wailed about the need to "understand the feelings of insult among Muslims," excoriated the "offensive publications," and insisted that "freedom of expression...requires limits."
        The allliance of recent years between liberals and Islamic terrorists has been likened to the Soviet-Nazi pact of August 1939, in which two ostensibly opposed extremes joined together. By now we are familiar with the paradox whereby liberals who oppose every other "faith-based initiative" give their blessing to distinctly illiberal (indeed fascist) Islamicist suicide bombers acting in the name of religious faith. For the truth is that most liberals do not believe that anybody is motivated by faith; as a result, the more barbaric the actions of terrorists the more certain are liberals to "explain" them as a reflective measure of their mistreatment by--their victims. Thus each new act of terror--beheadings, lynchings, suicide bombings, butchery that would shame animals--is interpreted by liberalism's angelic sociology as further proof of just how oppressive are the Jews, the Christians, the Hindus, the Danes, the Norwegians, the Americans. The more savage the terror, the greater the guilt of its victims. To this precipice has liberal philosophy brought us, and if we do not pull back from it, it will prove as fatal to us as the bombs and bullets of our declared enemies. As the famous liberal John Stuart Mill wrote, "philosophy, which to the superficial appears a thing so remote from the business of life and the outward interests of men, is in reality the thing on earth which... in the long run overbears every other influence."

Edward Alexander

Edward Alexander is co-author, with Paul Bogdanor, of THE JEWISH DIVIDE OVER
ISRAEL, forthcoming from Transaction Publishers.

February 11, 2006

WAR OF IDEAS: EDWARD ALEXANDER VS. JUDITH BUTLER

        Judith Butler is a superstar of academia. She is known primarily for her role in the development of ‘Queer Theory’. She has led the Post-Modern attempt to undermine the significance of the biological difference between the sexes. Butler proposes as attainable a utopian world in which gender identity—male or female—is disconnected from biology and therefore infinitely malleable. These bizarre ideas have had real world consequences. Butler and her allies are part of the leftist assault on reality—the reality of Capitalism, freedom and America as a force for good in the world. Once the basic biological bedrock is no longer determinative of who we are, anything becomes possible through proper social engineering. The unfairness of life, the existence of differences—of talent, character, looks, and accomplishment---can be abolished and egalitarian paradise achieved. Thus is the failed dream of Communism kept alive, by grafting onto Marxism a biological fantasy. Of course, reality stands in the way of utopian yearnings, and scapegoats are needed to explain the failure. It is not enough to blame “the patriarchy” or Capitalism. To really get the juices flowing, blame the Jews, Zionism and the state of Israel. Even better, have a self loathing Jew, a Chomsky or a Judith Butler do the blaming.
        We are in a war of ideas, ideas with real world consequences. Professor Edward Alexander has been a courageous warrior in the struggle to bring reason and sanity back to our universities. His scholarly efforts have exposed frauds and psychopaths, from the rock throwing Edward Said to Hillary Clinton's guru, Michael Lerner, and now he does the same with Judith Butler. Professor Alexander is the author of many scholarly books, among them, Irving Howe--Socialist, Critic, Jew (Indiana University Press, 1998) and Classical Liberalism and the Jewish Tradition (Transaction Publishers, 2002). He has recently written on the literary friendship between Irving Howe and Lionel Trilling. Our own friendship with Professor Alexander goes back to the days in Trilling’s and F.W. Dupee’s classes when we were introduced to the great novels, now disdained as the product of mostly dead white patriarchal males. Professor Alexander has continued ever since, defending civilization from encroachments by the new intellectual barbarians. Horsefeathers strayed from the battlefield into the field of psychoanalysis, another way of trying to apply reason to the irrational, only to return these many years later to find our old friend still at the ramparts. The creed of Horsefeathers: Fighting Folly, Ignorance and Cant, is the most apt description of the following essay on Judith Butler.
--Stephen M. Rittenberg

“No, It’s Not Antisemitic”: Judith Butler Vs. Lawrence Summers
        Few contemporary literary critics have placed so much emphasis on the power of language as Judith Butler, professor of rhetoric and literature at the University of California at Berkeley. She has insisted that “Language plays an important role in shaping and attuning our common or ‘natural’ understanding of social and political realities.” Invoking Marxist thinkers, she has asserted that critics of “postmodern” style understand “only the word coined by commerce,” the “commodified” truisms of the capitalist system.
        It is against this background of Butler’s intensely political approach to language as well as her general attitude (often complained of by other feminists) that linguistic gestures are an adequate substitute for, if not actually a form of, political action, that we should examine her recent forays into the campus struggles against Israel.
        Prior to the autumn of 2003 she was, like many members of Berkeley’s “progressive” Jewish community with which she habitually identifies herself, somebody who defined her “Jewishness” (not exactly Judaism) in opposition to the State of Israel. She was mainly a signer of petitions harshly critical of the Jewish state. She was, for example, one of the 3,700 American Jews opposed to “occupation” (Israeli, not Syrian or Chinese or any other) who signed an “Open Letter” urging the American government to cut financial aid to Israel; later she expressed misgiving about signing that particular petition - it “was not nearly strong enough... it did not call for the end of Zionism.” In autumn of 2002 she requested honorary membership in the Campus Watch organization’s listing of Middle East specialists polemicizing in their classrooms on behalf of Radical Islam and against Israel and America. In June 2003 her name could be found on the ubiquitous “Stop the Wall Immediately” petition. The wall, signatories alleged, was “supposed to block ‘terrorist attacks’ but certainly won’t prevent missiles and helicopters from hitting their human target.” Suicide bombings, lynchings, pogroms, and roadside shootings were not terrorist attacks but only “terrorist attacks,” whereas Israeli response to those so-called “terrorist attacks” injured real human targets.
        But deeper currents were also stirring in Butler. She had undertaken some research into the history of Zionism and discovered that there had been “debates among Jews throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries as to whether Zionism ought to become the basis of a state.” From this she swiftly concluded that demanding an end to Zionism in 2003, that is, calling for politicide, was no different from taking a debater’s position against Zionism fifty years before the state existed.
        By August 2003 Butler was belatedly moved to a classic utterance by a speech given at Harvard a year earlier, a speech that touched in her a raw nerve of anger that not even Ariel Sharon’s attempts to keep suicide bombers from blowing up Israelis had been able to inflame. Lawrence H. Summers, Harvard’s president, delivered to the Harvard community on September 20, 2002 a speech deploring the upsurge of antisemitism in many parts of the globe: he included synagogue bombings, physical assaults on Jews, desecration of Jewish holy places, and (this with special emphasis) denial of the right of “the Jewish state to exist.” But his most immediate concern was that “at Harvard and... universities across the country” faculty-initiated petitions were calling “for the University to single out Israel among all nations as the lone country where it is inappropriate for any part of the university’s endowment to be invested.”
        One of the Harvard faculty, Ruth Wisse, described the divestment petition as “corrupt and cowardly” in offering its reasons for calling on the U. S. government to stop military aid and arms sales to Israel and upon universities to divest both from Israel and from American companies selling arms to Israel. “The petition,” wrote Wisse, “requires that Israel comply with certain resolutions of the UN - the terms of which it distorts to say what those resolutions do not mean”; she also pointed out that the petition says nothing of the fact that all the Arab states remain in perpetual violation of the entire UN Charter, which is based on the principle of mutual respect for the sovereignty of member states, which are to settle disputes by peaceful means.
        Butler had herself signed the same divestment petition at its place of origin, Berkeley, where it had circulated in February 2001. She therefore found Summers’ remarks not only wrong but personally “hurtful” since they implicated Judith Butler herself in the newly resurgent campus antisemitism. She could hardly have failed to notice that the Berkeley divestment petition had supplied the impetus for anti-Israel mob violence on her own campus on April 24, 2001, a few weeks after it had been circulated, and for more explicitly anti-Jewish mobs at San Francisco State University in May of the following year. Slander of Israel has provoked physical violence on many campuses, especially those (like Wayne State in Detroit or Concordia in Montreal) with a large Arab presence.
        Summers, aware of how ubiquitous in anti-Israel discourse is the straw man called “the defender of Israel who decries any criticism of Israeli policy as antisemitism,” went out of his way in his address to separate himself from this (conjectural) figure: “I have always throughout my life been put off by those who... conjured up images of Hitler’s Kristallnacht at any disagreement with Israel.” Nobody has ever discovered just who these conjurors might be, but if Summers thought he would separate himself from them by this disclaimer he was mistaken.
        Despite the large role played in promoting the divestment campaign by people like Noam Chomsky, Summers chivalrously went out of his way to say that “Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent.” To annihilate this distinction between intentional and effective antisemitism is the primary aim of Butler’s counter-attack. Her strategy is what logicians call the tu quoque (i.e., you too, or you’re another) argument: Summers’ accusations, says Butler, are “a blow against academic freedom, in effect, if not intent.” His words have had “a chilling effect on political discourse.” No evidence is (or could be) adduced for the allegation. Of one thing we can be sure: the chill did not take hold at Harvard itself, which would soon (in November) play host to Oxford’s Tom Paulin, who had urged (in yet another “criticism of Israeli policy”) that Jews living in Judea/Samaria “should be shot dead,” or at Columbia, where Paulin continued merrily through autumn semester as a visiting professor, or at the New York Review of Books, which in October 2003 would publish Professor Tony Judt’s “Israel: The Alternative,” a call for an end to the state; neither did Summers dampen the fires of Israel-hatred at the London Review of Books itself, which in January 2003 published another 133 lines of Paulin doggerel called “On Being Dealt the Anti-Semitic Card,” a versified rehearsal of Butler’s “No, It’s Not Anti-Semitic.” If Summers’ speech had a chilling effect on antisemitic clarion calls, including incitement to raw murder, one would not want to know what the fully heated versions would sound like.
        Butler perfunctorily assented to Summers’ recommendation that - as she artfully restated it - “every progressive person ought to challenge anti-semitism vigorously wherever it occurs,” but she seemed incapable either of recognizing it in such (to her) mild “public criticisms” as economic warfare against the Jewish state or calls for its dismantling or assaults on Zionism itself or opposing any effort Israel might make to defend her population against suicide bombers. Indeed, she made it clear that she saw no difference between Jews intentionally murdered by suicide bombers (and their sponsors and despatchers) and Arabs accidentally killed by Israeli efforts to repel would-be murderers. She presented herself as offering Jews a salutary warning against crying wolf: “if the charge of anti-semitism is used to defend Israel at all costs, then its power when used against those who do discriminate against Jews - who do violence to synagogues in Europe [synagogues and Passover seders in Israel are not mentioned], wave Nazi flags or support anti-semitic organizations - is radically diluted.”
        In trying to confute Summers’ distinction between intentional and effective antisemitism, Butler calls it wildly improbable that somebody examining the disinvestment petitions signed by herself and her co-conspirators might take them (as hundreds on her own campus already had done), as condoning antisemitism. She therefore poses this conundrum: “We are asked to conjure a listener who attributes an intention to the speaker: so-and-so has made a public statement against the Israeli occupation, and this must mean that so-and-so hates Jews or is willing to fuel those who do.” But Summers was perfectly correct in stating that one need not “hate Jews” in order to perform actions or utter words that are “antisemitic in their effect if not their intent.”
        Let us take a well-known case: when Dickens wrote Oliver Twist he harbored no hatred of Jews and had no programmatic or conscious intention to harm them. Indeed, he said of his character Fagin that “he’s such an out and outer I don’t know what to make of him.” The reason for Dickens’ puzzlement was that, in an important sense, he did not indeed “make” Fagin, and therefore didn’t know what to make of him. Fagin was ready-made for Dickens by the collective folklore of Christendom, which had for centuries fixed the Jew in the role of Christ-killer, surrogate of Satan, inheritor of Judas, thief, fence, corrupter of the young; to which list of attributes Butler and her friends would now add “Zionist imperialist and occupier.” Has Oliver Twist been antisemitic in its effect? Of course - or does Butler think that it is for their interest in Bill Sikes and Nancy and the plight of the homeless in early Victorian England that Arab publishers have long kept cheap paperback translations of the book in print?
        Butler also uses the tu quoque “argument” in rebutting the charge of selectivity that Summers had made. Why, among all the nations on earth, has Israel alone been singled out for punishment and pariah status by the advocates of disinvestment and academic boycott? Where was their advocacy of disinvestment in China until China withdraws from Tibet, or from Morocco until that country ceases to occupy Western Sahara, or from Zimbabwe until it ceases persecuting its white citizens, or from Egypt until it stops building tunnels for the smuggling of arms to Palestinian killers? Could the singling out of Israel possibly have anything to do with the fact that it is a Jewish country? Despite the inordinate length of her essay, Butler cannot find space to answer this question. Instead, she accuses Summers himself of biased selectivity. “If we say that the case of Israel is different, that any criticism of it is considered as an attack on Israelis, or Jews in general, then we have singled out this political allegiance from all other allegiances that are open to public debate. We have engaged in the most outrageous form of ‘effective’ censorship...”
        Her ultimate use of the tu quoque strategy is to make Summers, the critic of antisemitism, himself guilty of what he attacks. Why? Because he assumes that Jews can only be victims, conflates “Jews” with Israel, and writes as if all Jews were a single, undifferentiated group.
        Apparently the 1,135 Israelis murdered and the nearly 10,000 mutilated (in a Jewish population of under five million) by Arab terrorists between September 27, 2000 and the time Butler published her essay were not sufficient to meet her stringent requirements for (Jewish) victim status. But if Israelis are not the victims of Palestinian aggression in the latest round of the Arab nations’ 56-year old war to eradicate the Jewish state, why is it that Jewish schools in Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem must be protected by armed guards while Arab schools in Nazareth or Ramallah require no such safeguards? Why is it that getting on a bus in Jerusalem or going to a cafe in Haifa is a form of Russian roulette, a far more dangerous activity than prancing about as a “human shield” for Yasser Arafat?
        As for the argument that nothing is antisemitic which does not explicitly target every single Jew in the world, it is jejune. After all, insists Butler, not all Jews are committed to Israel: “Some Jews have a heartfelt investment in corned beef sandwiches.” But does she really think that when Josef Pfefferkorn, whose distinction between “good” and “bad” Jews became the paradigm for Jewish self-haters, urged his countrymen (in the 1520s) to “drive the old Jews out [of Germany]” he had himself in mind? When Karl Marx excoriated Jews as “the filthiest of all races,” did he really mean to include himself? Do the operators of Nazi websites have trouble making “exceptions” for the writings of Chomsky or Norman Finkelstein? Indeed, Butler’s requirement of total inclusiveness would have allowed Hitler himself to say (had he so wished) of his racial policy: “No, it’s not antisemitic.”
        Although Butler’s essay is a loose, baggy monster, what it leaves out is even more blatant than what it includes. It omits history altogether, torturing a text and omitting context. Did it never occur to Butler that the divestment effort is the latest installment of the 50-year old Arab economic boycott of Israel, one prong in the endless Arab campaign to destroy the Jewish state? Equally egregious is the omission of context that is de rigueur among all those who have made the “Palestinian cause” the touchstone of campus progressivism. The “occupation” which they constantly bemoan did not precede and cause Arab hatred and violence; it was Arab hatred and violence that led - in 1967 as in 1993 - to the occupation.
        But the crucial omission from this essay by somebody who has relentlessly insisted on the political implications of language is - the political implications of the language of the advocates of divestment. Josef Joffe, editor of the German weekly Der Zeit, has succinctly defined the linguistic difference between “criticism of Israeli policy” and antisemitism:
Take this statement: “Demolishing the houses of the families of terrorists is morally wrong because it imputes guilt by association, and politically wrong because it pushes more people into the arms of Hamas.” Such a statement is neither anti-Israel nor anti-Semitic; it might even be correct. By contrast, “the Israelis are latter-day Nazis who want to drive the Palestinians from their land in order to realize an imperialist biblical dream” inhabits a very different order of discourse, ascribing evil to an entire collective and, in its equation of Israelis and Nazis, revealing an obsessive need for moral denigration."
        The Harvard/MIT divestment petition that Butler champions against Summers was promoted at MIT by Noam Chomsky, a person who would be rendered almost speechless on the subject of Israel if deprived of the epithet “Nazi”; it was promoted at Harvard by Professor Paul Hanson, who called Israel the “pariah” state. Butler was herself one of the “first signatories” of a July 28, 2003 petition that uses the Israeli-Nazi equation beloved of nearly all denigrators of the Zionist enterprise (going back to British official circles in Cairo in 1941) in asserting that “concrete, barbed wire and electronic fortifications whose precedents... belong to the totalitarian tradition” were transforming the Israel “‘defense forces’” (again the rhetorical quotation marks) and indeed “Israeli citizens themselves into a people of camp wardens.”
        And so it would seem that, for Butler, “Language plays an important role in shaping and attuning our... understanding of social and political realities” except when it happens to be the antisemitic language that demonizes Israel as the Devil’s own experiment station.
---Edward Alexander

February 09, 2006

THE CROCODILES ARE HUNGRY AGAIN

"It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation,
    To puff and look important and to say:—
“Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
    We will therefore pay you cash to go away.”

And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
    But we’ve proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
    You never get rid of the Dane."
--Rudyard Kipling

         Once again, we are learning the lesson that appeasement, masking as tolerance and empathy, doesn't work. Once again we learn that totalitarians want to suppress freedom, not just of speech but of thought.
         No we're not talking about the cartoon Jihadis, crying 'death to the infidels'; we're speaking of the totalitarian P.C. leftists on the Harvard faculty. Now we're seeing the results of President Larry Summers's groveling, self-flagellating apologies of last year. Did it calm his foes or merely whet their appetites? The answer is clear:

"The Faculty’s elected governing body asked professors yesterday to consider completely excluding University President Lawrence H. Summers from the search for a new dean—in what might be an even more direct challenge to Summers’ authority than last year’s no-confidence vote.

The proposal was one of three plans outlined by the Faculty Council to ensure that professors exert substantial power in the appointment of outgoing Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby’s successor.

And a day after professors blasted Summers at a heated Faculty meeting, at least one council member said yesterday that she is “quite seriously considering” placing a vote of no confidence on the agenda for the next meeting of the full Faculty on Feb. 28.

“It does appear to be something of an emergency situation,” said Weary Professor of German and of Comparative Literature Judith L. Ryan, who said she may decide to place the motion on the agenda as early as today.

The Faculty already expressed their lack of confidence in Summers with a 218-185 vote last March, and a second successful vote would seriously undermine an already-troubled presidency.

“I’m sure it would pass,” Ryan said, adding that this new motion could receive even broader support than last year’s vote.

And Professor of the History of Science Everett I. Mendelsohn said yesterday that even in the absence of a no-confidence vote, the Harvard Corporation­—the University’s highest governing body, which has sole power to remove Summers­—may take action against the president.

“There is some probability that the Corporation will push the president out,” Mendelsohn said..."
See the rest here.

February 05, 2006

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY CHANCELLOR HITLER

This week is the 73rd anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in democratic Germany. For those sour, doubt-ridden skeptics who track these things, it was on January 30th 1933 that Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, and less than three months later all other political parties, labor unions, and the basic freedoms of speech, press, and associations disappeared in Germany’s post-World War I Republic; democracy was dead.

“Democracy is the worst form of government; unfortunately, it is the only one that works,” said Winston Churchill, in one of his epigrammatic moods. Even Churchill, the great statesman and historian, didn’t get it quite right. What he should have said was “Democracy is the worst form of government; unfortunately, it is the only one that sometimes works.”

Now that America has begun a new diplomatic crusade—to export freedom and democracy to those countries of the world which are democratically impoverished, it is well to take into account some facts of political life.

The first is that there is a big difference between democracy and a crusade for democracy. The former is a political process rooted in life and quotidian exigencies, the latter a religious activity unhinged from reality.

Anybody who understands a bit about the history and geography of democracy knows that democracy (and its impure form republicanism) exists and can exist only under certain specific circumstances.

It might be worth a few moments to reflect on how it was possible for a highly civilized nation—land of Beethoven, Goethe, Thomas Mann—a free country with democratic institutions to lose its freedom and civility in the blink of an eye. How did Hitler do it?

Although there were many shaky political moments between the time in 1919 when a new constitution for Germany created the Weimar Republic, and the Reichstag (parliamentary) elections of 1928, economic and political stability seemed to have returned to Germany in the years preceding that election. The anti-republican parties of the left and right together received only 13 percent of the total vote, with the Communists receiving about 10 percent and the Nazis taking only 3 percent.

And things seemed to be looking up on the international front as well, when, in 1929, the Allied Reparations Commission recommended that German reparations be reduced to 37 billion gold marks, less than one-third of the amount originally scheduled in 1921, and that these payments be stretched out for sixty years to make them easier to pay. It also called for the dissolution of the Reparations Commission and for an immediate end to what remained of the Allied occupation of the Rhineland.

Although members of the German government welcomed these changes and accepted the new terms, right-wing opposition parties saw the plan as nothing less than a renewal of Germany's post-war humiliation. Led by Alfred Hugenberg, the press and movie-industry lord, the nationalist opposition tried to force the government to repudiate the reparations debt completely as well as the war guilt clause of Versailles upon which the debt rested. To run the opposition's campaign, Hugenberg engaged Hitler, the leader of the apparently moribund Nazi Party.

Fortunately, the bitterly fought national plebiscite that followed found only 13.8 percent of the voters favoring the objectives of the right wing. But an unintended effect of Hugenberg’s campaign was to give widespread public exposure to Hitler, who used his access to the Hugenberg-owned press empire and to its weekly movie newsreels to give himself and his Nazi movement national publicity.
Within a few months the Wall Street crash brought an end to German and world-wide prosperity. The crash had an immediate effect in Germany as American investors, anxious about their financial position, began withdrawing their loans to Germany. Prices on the German stock exchanges fell drastically during the last month of the year. Business failures multiplied. Unemployment rose to three million during the course of the year, and by the winter of 1932 it reached six million.

The first critically important political effect of the economic crisis came in March 1930 when the government coalition fell apart over the rising cost of maintaining the unemployment program. The Social Democratic Party, representing labour, and the Peoples' Party, representing business, were unable to agree on the size of the government's contribution to the fund, and their coalition dissolved. When a new coalition could not be formed, parliamentary democracy in Germany came to an end.

Political instability forced President Hindenburg to invoke his emergency powers, which he used to appoint Heinrich Bruning of the Catholic Centre Party as Chancellor. Moreover, his fateful decision to call for Reichstag elections in September 1930, inadvertently opened the door to the enemies of democracy. Together the Nazis and Communists gained nearly one of every three votes cast. Although bitterly opposed to each other, during the next two years the Nazis and Communists succeeded in mobilizing the political and economic resentments generated by the depression. Hitler's charismatic appeal and the youthful energies of his movement were attractive to large segments of a populace fearful of being ruined by economic and social disaster. Hitler was without a doubt a genius, albeit an evil genius. He had an extraordinary capacity to remain in tune with the grievances of the lower-middle classes. To an embittered Germany he offered crude solutions and false hopes: He would unilaterally end reparations and refuse to repay debts incurred by others; he would crush the Jews who were to blame for the defeat of 1918 and the hyper-inflation, and whose greed was the source of every economic ill; he would provide every German with a job and food. He promised a Germany without partisan politics and a country to be proud of.

The power of Hitler's appeal was reflected in the party's growing membership lists—from 170,000 members in 1929 to 1,378,000 in 1932—and in the swelling ranks of the Nazi Party's paramilitary wing, the infamous storm troopers.

The depression reached its depths in the winter of 1931–32. Unemployment was still rising; as was the succession of business failures. Some hope of breaking the political impasse came with the presidential election required at the expiration of Hindenburg's first term in 1932. Hitler's opponents recognized that the 84-year-old Hindenburg, now physically weak and politically apathetic, represented their only hope of preventing Hitler from winning the presidency, and, with great difficulty, they convinced Hindenburg, who wanted to retire, to seek a second term.

Although Hindenburg was eventually reelected, a runoff was necessary, and Hitler won 37 percent of the popular vote. His larger aim, however, had been to make himself the leading, or only, candidate for Brüning's position as chancellor. (The President, in the Weimar Republic, as in many European democracies, was head of state with the power to appoint the Chancellor, or head of government—Prime Minister.) Hindenburg did choose to replace Brüning in May 1932 but named the political dilettante Franz von Papen rather than Hitler. Desperate to find a base in parliament, Papen called for Reichstag elections in July. The result was a disaster for Papen and another triumph for the Nazis, who again took 37 percent of the vote, the largest total they were ever to acquire in a free election. The Communists won 15 percent of the vote. Thus the two parties dedicated to destroying German democracy held a majority in the Reichstag.

After six months with no relief or improvement in the situation Papen was replaced by another weak, stop-gap Chancellor, Schleichen, and when Hitler finally became chancellor, two months later, on January 30, 1933, it was not on the crest of a wave of popular support but as the result of backroom political intrigue by Schleicher, Papen, and the president's son, Oskar von Hindenburg. Only Hitler, they believed, could bring together a coalition with Hugenberg's DNV Party and possibly the Centre Party that could command a majority in the Reichstag. They assured the reluctant president that Hitler's radical tendencies would be checked by the fact that Papen would hold the vice-chancellorship and that other conservatives would control the crucial ministries, such as those of war, foreign affairs, and economics. The Nazis themselves were restricted to holding the chancellorship and the insignificant federal ministry of the interior.

Whether the Nazis would ever get a chance to implement their ideological objectives depended, when Hitler became chancellor, upon whether they would be able to tighten their initially tenuous hold on the reins of power. Liberals, socialists, and communists remained bitterly opposed to Hitler; important segments of business, the army, and the churches were to varying degrees suspicious of the measures he might take.

It was a combination, finally, of Hitler's daring and brutality, of the weaknesses of his opponents, and of numerous instances of extraordinary good luck that allowed him to establish his totalitarian dictatorship. He was able to take advantage of the Reichstag fire (probably the work of a lone and deranged Dutch communist) of February 27 to suspend civil liberties and arrest communist as well as other opposition leaders.

When the Centre Party refused to join the Nazi-DNVP coalition in January 1933, Hitler demanded elections for a new Reichstag. The elections of March 5, 1933, were preceded by a brutal and violent campaign in which Nazi storm troopers figured prominently. Despite this campaign of terror, the Nazis did not win a majority, gaining only 44 percent of the total, but the 8 percent acquired by the DNVP, was sufficient for the two parties to wield a majority in the Reichstag. At its first meeting on March 23 the new Reichstag—under great pressure from the storm troopers and the SS (Schutzstaffel; “Protective Wing”), the elite corps of Nazis headed by Heinrich Himmler—voted in favor of the Enabling Act that allowed Hitler to ignore the constitution and to give his decrees the power of law.

The decree powers were the pseudolegal base from which Hitler carried out the first steps of the Nazi revolution. Within two weeks of the passing of the Enabling Act, Nazi governors were sent out to bring the federal states into line, and a few months later the states themselves were abolished.

The final step in Hitler's seizure of political power came on August 2, 1934, when, upon the death of President Hindenburg, he appropriated the powers of the presidency and combined them with his own as chancellor.

In this fashion, the Nazis established the regime they called the Third Reich, the presumed successor of the Holy Roman Empire (the First Reich) and of the German Empire ruled by the Hohenzollerns from 1871 to 1918 (the Second Reich).

Thus, through a combination of various factors, it was possible to transform a civilized nation with a democratic government into a dictatorship that was acceptable to a large segment of the population which would remain loyal through twelve years of peace and war.

What were the factors that made this possible? In summary they were:

A constitution in which there was insufficient separation and distribution of power. The executive branch of the government was the creature of the legislative branch.

A parliamentary government with many factions which makes governing difficult and gives rise to a greater degree of extreme political values.

A young democratic government without political traditions and conventions to appeal to in crises.

An economic crisis of major proportions leading to unemployment and loss of property and hope.

An aggrieved and embittered population looking for relief from a strong leader.
Lack of strong traditional leadership

A charismatic antidemocratic leader who instills hope for the future and identifies a scapegoat for peoples’ troubles.

A weak media which is capable of being manipulated.

These then are the factors which led to Hitler’s rise and his acquisition of power. None of these factors is a rare occurrence in weak nations and young democracies. In fact one or more of these conditions almost always exists in states in which democracy is untried—weak constitutions, few democratic traditions, anti-democratic demagogues, a class of wealthy reactionary power-holders who want to maintain the status quo, and a hopeless and discontented populace.

The fact is that democracy is a sometime thing, and American democracy, strong and solid as it is today, didn’t get that way overnight but only after a civil war and two hundred years of evolution.

Is it wise then to go chasing after chimerical democracies in the Arab Middle East, throwing American tax-payer dollars at diplomatic illusions only to end in supporting and financing Hitlerian despots who hate America?

February 02, 2006

NY TIMES CORRECTS ITSELF

Two corrections from those super diligent editors at the NYTimes: In the first, we learn that someone in the editorial dept.is making sure they don't mislabel computer hard drives. Whew what a relief! We guess that's a lot more important than mislabeling 'terrorists' as 'militants', because the latter standard deception is not mentioned in correcton #2.

1)A picture in the Circuits pages of Business Day last Thursday with a brief report about a 160-gigabyte portable hard drive from Seagate was published in error. It showed a model holding 120 gigabytes, not 160. (Except for the capacity designation on the case, that model looks identical to the 160-gigabyte version.)

2)Because of an editing error, an article on Saturday about the Palestinian election victory by Hamas, the radical Islamic group, misidentified the young militants causing tensions with the old guard in the Fatah group, which Hamas defeated. They are from Fatah, not Hamas

February 01, 2006

HORSEFEATHERS MOMENT AT THE SOTU

        The Groucho highlight of the State of the Union address had to be the moment when the sullen, petulant, sneering and sniveling Democrats rose as one to cheer when the President noted: "...Congress did not act last year on my proposal to save Social Security -- (applause)..."

        Groucho knew he was being funny; these clowns don't have a clue.

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