normblog

I guess it doesn't matter any more

Things can take a surprising turn. 'Not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic' is a truth that has been often stated. To which it has just as often been pointed out in reply that this truth doesn't license the inference that all criticism of Israel is not anti-Semitic; for it yields only the proposition that some criticism of Israel is not anti-Semitic, and this is compatible with some other criticism of Israel being indeed anti-Semitic. In fact, there is such other, anti-Semitic, criticism of Israel, and not merely criticism but also downright hostility and hatred. None of that should by now surprise anyone, I know. The logical relationships are pretty straightforward and the relevant facts of the matter are all easy to come by.

What is surprising is something else. Those of us who have been pointing out the logical compatibility between 'Not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic' and 'Some critical attitudes towards Israel nonetheless are anti-Semitic' have perhaps rather too much taken it for granted that emphasis on this latter thought might put anti-racist liberals and leftists on their guard - on their guard against countenancing, associating themselves with, giving a free pass to, attitudes towards Israel of an anti-Semitic kind. It would seem to be an important concern for anti-racist liberals and other people of progressive outlook to have, for reasons of a quite general kind which I hope I don't need to explain. Yet this may have been a naïve and too sanguine expectation on our part.

For there is a third proposition that increasingly captures, I will not say the spirit of the times, but the spirit of a significant sector of contemporary opinion. This third proposition may be formulated as follows:

It doesn't matter if criticism of and attitudes to Israel are anti-Semitic, so long as they are also anti-Zionist.

In other words, racist animus against Israel is getting an easy ride from more and more commentators just on condition that it chimes in with the narrative of Israel as a usurper-colonialist and racist state. It's as if the taint of anti-Semitic racism isn't strong enough to worry the easy-riders (much less to put a question in their minds about anti-Zionism itself); instead the 'truths' of anti-Zionism are taken as, so to say, cleansing in their effects, so that Jew-hatred is not allowed to deflect anyone from the proper business of denouncing Israel.

This thought was prompted, following Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's recent speech at the Geneva conference (which I have characterized here), by a letter to the Guardian from Ghada Karmi, in which (scroll down) she says:

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's UN speech on 21 April struck many as obnoxious, but in terms of understanding the 1948 roots of the Middle East conflict he was spot on. Vilifying him may feel good, but it is a diversion [from] the real issue.

Got that? 'Vilifying' him. And not the real issue. You couldn't ask for anything clearer. The guy can deny the Holocaust and look forward to wiping Israel from the page of history, he can give out Jews-controlling-the-world talk, but to react against this is vilification and a diversion from the real issue. Karmi is perhaps unfamiliar with the circumstance of there being more than one real issue.

Take a look next at Martin Jacques in the New Statesman. After warming up with the irony of 'a people who suffered from racism on such an enormous scale... themselves display[ing] the same kind of attitude towards the Palestinians' (my italics) - Jacques expresses himself nonplussed by, he can't think of a good reason for, the boycott of and the walkout at the Geneva conference. Just think about that walkout: it's not enough for Jacques that a guy with Ahmadinejad's Holocaust-denying record is a keynote speaker at this conference and that his speech, as both prepared and delivered, contains clear anti-Semitic tropes. If it can be fitted into an anti-Zionist narrative, this doesn't matter.

The same 'balance' of considerations is to be found in the column by Seumas Milne and the Guardian leader to which I drew attention last week: Ahmadinejad's speech may have been repugnant and inflammatory; but justifying a walkout when the speech is contextualized by reference to the colonialist-settler story that is Israel? It would seem not. Declining to sit and listen to a Holocaust-denier is in those circumstances, for Milne, itself the symptom of racism. Meanwhile, the newspaper for which he writes is careful to observe that the speech of Ahmadinejad, displaying 'the views of a crude anti-semite', might colour how his remarks on the establishment of Israel are taken. Never lose sight of the main thing, hey? Israel, not anti-Semitism - even if and when there is anti-Semitism. As the man said, I guess it doesn't matter any more.

The Guardian, let it be remembered, now opens its opinion pages and its opinion website to the spokesmen of Hamas, an organization that propagates hatred of Jews and endorses the poisonous myths of 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion' in its charter. It might be said in the paper's defence that Hamas is the political representative of a section of the Palestinian people and the Guardian is simply fulfilling its journalistic duty in reporting the views of leading members of that organization. But this is not reporting; it is providing a platform - for the views of an organization with 'crude' Jew-hatred in its founding documents - and that is something different.

On Saturday, to bring the story up to date, Mark Brown let it be known that the Guardian was making available a reading of Caryl Churchill's Seven Jewish Children. He noted that the play has been controversial and that part of the controversy centres on whether it is anti-Semitic. Readers will now be able to 'make their own judgment'. One wonders whether the decision to make the play available in this form reflects a judgement by the paper itself that Seven Jewish Children is not anti-Semitic. I mean, if it either is or even just might be anti-Semitic (I've put forward seven reasons here for thinking that it is), you'd hope the Guardian would have some qualms about helping to put it about. Things are now such, however, that it's impossible to form a view about whether Churchill's play has been judged by those concerned not to be anti-Semitic, or whether the possibility of its being so is thought not to matter because... so long as it's anti-Zionist, who cares whether it's anti-Semitic? Given the emerging track record at the Guardian, how could one tell?

Assessing the flu risk

Are you finding it difficult to get your bearings with respect to how worried we should be about swine flu? Join the club. Three views...

From the WHO:

The UN's World Health Organization has raised the alert over swine flu to level five - indicating human-to-human transmission in at least two countries.

It is a "strong signal that a pandemic is imminent", the WHO says.
.....

Announcing the latest alert level after an emergency WHO meeting in Geneva, Director General Margaret Chan urged all countries to activate their pandemic plans, including heightened surveillance and infection-control measures.

She said action should be undertaken with "increased urgency".

She added: "It really is the whole of humanity that is under threat in a pandemic."

But she also said the world was "better prepared for an influenza pandemic than at any time in history".

Then here's a view that the world is not facing a pandemic. And Ben Goldacre says that while it's right to 'raise the possibility of things really kicking off', we 'don't have brilliantly accurate information'. Unpredictable therefore.

Sacred fact

Patrick Wintour reports:

Gordon Brown yesterday scaled back UK strategic goals in Afghanistan, saying the objective was no longer to create a western-style democracy but simply to help set up a functioning state.

Looks like he's giving us a fact there. Later he adds, freely:

This represents a downgrading of the original neocon vision of setting up a democratic state.

If you hoped that democracy might come to Afghanistan with the overthrow of the Taliban, you've been in the grip of a neocon vision. Shucks.

Romance was worn

Having been to Venice and acquainted myself with the work of Roberto Capucci, I feel I'd like to draw attention to the creations from Romance Was Born in this video about Australian Fashion Week. I was struck by their sobriety. Wonder what The Thoughtful Dresser thinks.

More cooked-up XIs

Riffing on the theme of cricket in the US, Alex decides to pick an XI of American presidents. He has George Washington as an 'obdurate opening batsman' and Truman as a 'nagging, easily under-estimated medium-pacer'. Alex wonders if the exercise is silly. I can assure him that it is not. (What I would take issue with, though, is his uncritical view of Joseph O'Neill's Netherland.)

Talking of cricket XIs, I'd also like to note that what normblog brings - thanks to the researches of Bob Borsley - to the reading public in early 2008, others only get to more than a year later (scroll to the bottom).

Two minds about two states

Antony Lerman it is who is in two minds but in the confused rather than the deliberative sense.

Lerman begins a post at Comment is Free by acknowledging that a one-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict is not favoured by either Israelis or Palestinians, and he refers, without saying whether he endorses this or not, to the view that a one-state solution denies the right of Jewish self-determination. So... as things currently stand a one-state solution would be undemocratic, not supported by either population, and it would, arguably, also be unjust, in violation of the right of the Jews to self-determination, though we don't yet know whether Lerman agrees with this point.

Next up, he spends some time explaining that, regardless of the rights or wrongs of the case, one state already exists de facto. Only thing is (it is plain from the detail) this one state is neither just nor democratic; it is under Israel's all-controlling hegemony.

Therefore, what? Turn the unjust and undemocratic one-state reality into a just and democratic one-state reality? Well, no. Lerman isn't pushing this; he 'believe[s] that it could only ever happen from a position of two states first and only with the consent of both peoples'. From which one is bound to infer that the just and democratic two-state solution must continue to be pursued, against the de facto one-state realities on the ground and whatever the difficulties. Yet though a proponent, consequently, of the two-state solution, Lerman deems it necessary to end by castigating those who engage in 'debates full of righteous indignation over the secular, democratic one-state idea' - which are, he says, 'just a distraction'.

Understand it who can. There are people, as Lerman knows, 'now calling for a "one-state" solution'; this wouldn't be democratic, and many would say that it wouldn't be just either; Lerman himself isn't calling for it, believing it would require the consent of both peoples. Engage, however, in debate with partisans of the democratic one-state idea, and you're being distracted as well as righteously indignant. He isn't righteously indignant, he's just massively more subtle than other people. Subtly confused.

A reprehensible hardness

Further on the same subject, here's something from Josh Marshall:

There's a 'tough enough to make the tough calls' conceit behind almost all the pro-torture advocacy. Put in Dick Cheney terms, the courage to go to the dark side. But this conceit seems wholly belied by the unwillingness of the torture advocates to actually call it 'torture', as opposed to the various euphemisms about 'harsh' or 'enhanced' interrogation methods?

I can't imagine why in this context anyone would make the tough-enough claim with pride. It has a notorious pedigree, and if those making the claim are unfamiliar with this, too bad. I refer to a speech by Heinrich Himmler in October 1943 and to this passage from it in particular:

And none of them ['upright Germans' - NG] has seen it, has endured it. Most of you will know what it means when 100 bodies lie together, when there are 500, or when there are 1000. And to have seen this through, and - with the exception of human weaknesses - to have remained decent, has made us hard and is a page of glory never mentioned and never to be mentioned.

Thus: we who have actually seen it, seen what had to be done, were or became hard enough (while remaining decent!) to do it.

Now, I take care to emphasize what I do not mean in invoking this verbal precedent. I hope I've said enough on this blog about inappropriate comparisons with the Nazi experience for it to be clear that I intend no general pejorative association between the US and the Third Reich, between the Bush presidency and Hitler's regime, between the practices of torture at Guantanamo and elsewhere and the levels of criminality of the Nazis in mid-20th-century Europe. That would be an egregious slander on one of the world's great democracies, and regular readers know that it is a trope I hold in contempt.

My point is a different and more limited one. It is that the claim of courage in the commission of deeply immoral acts is to be deplored and not admired - and my reference to the Himmler speech is offered to highlight just that. Whether courage in the pursuit of wrong is even to be called courage would be questioned by some people. For my own part I think it sometimes can still be called courage - though I would hesitate before recognizing any courage in the authorization or practice of torture. Be this as it may, courage in doing evil is not at all admirable, for the simple and obvious reason that the evil done cancels the merit such courage would otherwise have, and the admiration it might draw, when used for better ends. Pernicious ends disfigure what purports to be the virtuous quality exercised in pursuit of them.

Us because of them

From the ongoing debate in the US about torture, here's a view - Richard Cohen's:

America should repudiate torture not because it is always ineffective... or because others loathe it but because it degrades us and runs counter to our national values.

This is echoed by Kathleen Parker:

When we ask if something is torture, the answer is another question: What kind of people should we be?

It's a point worth making, no question about it, but in terms of where the primary emphasis should be it gets things the wrong way round. It is important not to be a nation that tortures. But that is because of what torture is and what it does to people; it is because human beings have some rights from which there can be no derogation, not in any circumstances. It is because to torture is to violate a human right that is absolute and to violate a human being. For its own sake America - like every nation - should not want to be one that tortures, but the most fundamental reason for this is the violation of humanity that torture is. The nation that does it is degraded, but it is degraded through how others have been treated at its hands. While, for any 'us', it is about us, this is so because of what it does to some them.

There's another point than pedantic accuracy in noting the direction of the normative conceptual relationship. If you make this question one exclusively about 'us', it is that much easier to trade off aspects of our moral character against our safety - to argue that in extremis we may have to be worse in order to be protected against threats. But the barrier against resorting to torture is not about computing costs and benefits in this way. It is a peremptory norm of civilized law and morality, and may not be traded.

The proper concerns of the WHO

In the context of current fears about swine flu, Anne Applebaum trains her eye on the World Health Organization. Her assessment of it - as of its director general, Margaret Chan - is mostly positive. Applebaum writes:

With more than 60 years' experience, and real achievements under its belt - it led the successful campaign to eliminate smallpox in the 1970s - the WHO may well be the only international organization that we cannot live without. When infectious diseases are spread rapidly across borders, WHO is expected to coordinate the scientific response of national public health officials, from France to Malaysia, as well as the global information campaign needed to explain it. No national government can do the same.

But she has some worries nonetheless: that, because it is afflicted by some of the same problems as the UN, the WHO might 'drift into irrelevance'. At least two of Applebaum's criticisms strike me as contestable.

She argues that a focus on social and economic factors connected to people's health is 'beyond the scope of an organization that should primarily be concerned with infectious diseases'. That is mere assertion unsupported by anything at all. Even if the problem of infectious diseases were agreed to be the most important priority of the WHO, this wouldn't establish that, or why, the focus upon what is and isn't conducive to health more generally should not be a significant one for the WHO.

Second, and in the same area, Applebaum speaks of 'unnecessary time' being spent producing 'papers on legally dubious notions such as the "Right to Health"'. Philosophically, it is true, there is a debate about whether the concept of rights can be extended from so-called negative rights - rights, roughly, against being attacked, interfered with, harmed, in one way and another - to entitlements of a positive kind, such as to food, education, health care and so on. Some people contend that only negative rights can truly be rights. I think that they're wrong about this but I won't argue the case here. Legally, however, there's nothing dubious about encoding rights to health, so long as this is given concrete definition - in terms of trying to guarantee some minimum conditions in people's life circumstances and the provision of health care. Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirms, after all, that 'Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family[.]' That is not a meaningless commitment.

Foot in mouth disease

I'd like to have a better grasp on this guy's logic - this guy being Yakov Litzman. He wants swine flu renamed 'in deference to Muslim and Jewish sensitivities'. The item here explains that 'Judaism and Islam consider pigs unclean and forbid the eating of pork products'. So where's the problem? No one is thinking (are they?) that swine flu is either clean or to be eaten by Jews and Muslims. (Via B&W.)