Why do Turks claim to hate us so much (according to opinion polls)?

Speaking of Turkey (which I did earlier today) ... I recently noticed a guest post on the very interesting Ottomans and Zionists blog that raised some perplexing questions.  The writer of that post, Alexander Slater, asked the question "Are Turks and Americans Friends?", based on the Turkish results from the Pew Research Center's 2012 Global Attitudes Survey.  Of course, results from public opinion polls always have to be taken with a grain of salt and interpreted with caution.  Nevertheless, these results are striking enough, and odd enough, that they might be worth pondering.

A few months ago, in March, Slater spent two weeks traveling in Turkey as a participant in "an intercultural exchange run jointly by the Atlantic Council in Washington, DC, and Sabanci University’s Istanbul Policy Center. [....]  The Pew survey results paint a very different picture than what I saw and heard during our travels."

Let me just quote Slater's summaries of some of the findings (which you can double-check against the Pew Survey report, if you like).

According to the survey, only 15 percent of Turks have a favorable opinion of the United States. Even fewer—only 13 percent—indicated they have a “favorable view of the American people.” (This was the lowest score of people from any of the twenty-one countries surveyed. By contrast, 32 percent of Egyptians and 39 percent of Chinese—nationals of countries with arguably more contentious relations with the United States than Turkey—had a favorable view of Americans.)

What makes those Turkish figures especially striking is that in many countries where anti-Americanism runs rampant, respondents often tell pollsters that although they hate the US government and its policies, they think the Americans are OK as people. Whether or not they actually believe it, that's what they say when surveyed. Not only didn't Turkish respondents draw that distinction, but they actually expressed a less favorable opinion of the American people than of the US overall.

And in public opinion polls in numerous other countries over the years, respondents often claim to admire American democracy—42% of Egyptians in this Pew survey, for example—while disliking the people who actually run the American government.  (Many Americans feel that way, come to think of it.)  Not these Turkish respondents.

[A]ccording to the Pew survey, only 14 percent of Turks said they “like[d] . . . American ways of doing business.” (Like the results discussed above, this was the lowest score of people from any of the twenty-one countries surveyed.)  [....]  According to the Pew survey, only 13 percent of Turks said they “like[d] . . . American ideas about democracy.” (This was the second-lowest rating, ahead of only Pakistan.)  [....]

And so on.  If we believe the survey results, they don't like anything about America, Americans, American society, or the American way of life.

This is peculiar.  Of course, I appreciate that people in Turkey, like people in a lot of other countries, have a wide range of grievances against the US, real and imagined.  Many of them, for example, are still angry with George W. Bush about the 2003 Iraq war and its aftermath.  Turks have always tended to believe that the US unfairly sides with Greece regarding controversies between the two countries, just as Greeks have always tended to believe the opposite (and there are grains of truth in both attitudes, though both are overdone).  More religious and socially conservative Turks, the sort who support the Islamist AK Party, no doubt resent the long period of friendly alliance between the US government and the secular Kemalist establishment, whereas I know that a lot of secular Turks believe that the US government has (somehow) been promoting the coming to power of Erdogan and the AK.  Broad sectors of Turkish public opinion have become very hostile to Israel, for various reasons, and some of that hostility no doubt rubs off on the US by association.  Etc., etc.

But can any of those factors, or all of them put together, begin to explain why public attitudes in Turkey would be more thoroughly and pervasively anti-American than public attitudes in, say, Egypt??  (And that's ignoring the fact that it would also be easy to rattle off reasons that Turks might have for feeling more well-disposed toward the US.)

No, it doesn't make any sense.  And furthermore, various other bits of information and evidence make it hard for me to believe that the overwhelming majority of Turks are really that hostile toward America, American society, American democracy, the American people, and everything else about America.  And although I've only visited Turkey once myself, about a decade and a half ago, no American I've ever read or spoken to who visited Turkey has reported encountering the kinds of broad-based anti-American sentiments that the attitudes expressed in these survey results would suggest.  Frankly, my (highly non-expert and subjective) reaction is to suspect that many of these survey respondents didn't really mean it, or at least that they exaggerated the intensity of their anti-American feelings when talking to the pollsters.  But then why would they do that?

So as I said at the beginning, I'm totally perplexed.  But then what do I know?  For the moment, I will just report these survey results, whatever they might be worth, as a curious puzzle to consider.  More mysteries of public opinion polling ...

—Jeff Weintraub

Culture wars and the persistence of institutionalized intolerance in Turkey

From the perspective of someone with a long-time interest in modern Turkey but no claim to real expertise about the country (that's me), the piece below by a Turkish journalist, Semih Idiz, offers some intelligent, perceptive, and nicely thought-provoking reflections on the complex transition now going on in Turkey and the tensions it is generating.

The project of the Kemalist elite that founded the Turkish Republic after World War I and controlled it for the next 75 years or so was to pull Turkey out of what they considered social and economic backwardness and turn it into a modern, western-oriented nation-state.  And this modernizing project included a strong commitment to "secularism" understood on the model of the old French Jacobin-style republicanism, involving not a complementary relationship between republicanism and religion but a head-on collision between them.  For Jacobin republicanism and its offshoots—including many varieties of Latin American republicanism and, in some respects, Leninism—"secularism" never meant simply an institutional separation between religion and the state, on the US model, but an active struggle against the threats posed by clerical authority, religious orthodoxy, and cultural traditionalism.  While the Kemalist republic established and maintained what was for a long time one of the few systems of parliamentary representative government in the Islamic world, it also had significant authoritarian elements, including restrictions on cultural and political tendencies seen as threats to the Kemalist order (and, in the case of Turkey's Kurds, to unitary Turkish nationalism), along with occasional coups or quasi-coups by the Army and brief periods of direct military rule.  That particular modernizing project began to ossify decades ago, and eventually lost its grip on Turkish society and politics.

Turkey is now undergoing a historic shift from being dominated by the old secular Kemalist establishment—anchored not just in the formal political class and westernized cultural elites but in the armed forces and the rest of the institutional structure that Turks call the "deep state"—to being dominated by an Islamist, culturally conservative establishment centered on the AK Party.  Where this whole process is eventually taking the country remains uncertain.  So far, the AK government has proceeded cautiously in most respects, but in the process has been dismantling the remaining institutional restraints that may help to explain and maintain that caution; and it has been engaged in a range of judicial and political campaigns of prosecution and intimidation against its critics and opponents that may partly be justified, but that sometimes look a lot like McCarthyite witch hunts.  It's also possible that, in the future, the AK itself might get pushed toward less cautious policies by its popular base. Will this ongoing process eventually result in a transition from the authoritarian remnants of the old quasi-Leninist Kemalist Turkey to the new authoritarianism of a quasi-theocratic and socially reactionary Turkey, or will the eventual outcome be some sort of genuinely democratic political liberty and pluralism?

That remains to be seen.  Many Turkish democrats and members of the secular middle classes, as well as some Muslim sectarian minorities like Alevis, are worried—and they have grounds to be worried.  On the other hand, it's probably still too early to conclude that the worst-case scenarios are inevitable.

In his article, Idiz tries to capture one piece of this larger drama.  He argues that while control of Turkey may be passing from one dominant group to another, there is a basic continuity in one respect—the readiness to resort to institutionalized intolerance by whoever is in control.

In the past, insulting the founder of the republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, could land you in jail. In the same way, lifestyles contrary to Kemalist paradigms were shunned by the ruling elite with scant regard to freedom of conscience. For example, religious women were legally prevented from going to university or working in state jobs because of their headscarves. But the tables are turning in Turkey.

Previously the law was used to protect secular idols. Today it is being used to protect religion and its idols. The basic instinct to restrict freedom of expression, when the subject matter is considered sacrosanct, remains. Under the rule of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), freedom of expression is being increasingly restricted in the name of “protecting Islam and the Prophet Muhammad.”

On the other hand, I'm struck by the fact that, in the end, Idiz's prognosis is guardedly optimistic:  He's clearly aiming for a tone that is neither complacent or apocalyptic.

In other words, the institutionalized culture of intolerance is alive in Turkey. It is also beginning to show itself in other ways. Take the highly restrictive legislation the government is working on for the sale and consumption of alcohol.  [....]

Turkey, however, is a heterogeneous country with great diversity. This will ensure that [attempts to restrict freedom of expression and impose cultural intolerance will] ultimately fail, regardless of what legislation is introduced. Turks also have the right to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights, which Nisanyan says he will do. No doubt Say, whose case like Nisanyan’s has been appealed in Turkey, will do the same if his freedom of expression is not respected in his own country.  [....]

Meanwhile Ayse Kulin, Turkey’s best-selling author of historical novels, created a storm recently after saying during a television interview on the Turkish HaberTurk channel that Islam has to change.

“Islam cannot continue as it is. It is giving the impression of being a terrorist organization. When someone writes a book or makes a rude caricature, the reaction is too much. If the man has written a book, then don’t read it. Why try to kill him? The Quran has to be reinterpreted. Many concepts have lost their original meaning. The essence is gone,” Kulin said to subsequent howls, bordering on threats, from Islamist quarters.

Kulin, however, was only expressing what a growing number of secular Turks believe. She is therefore the harbinger of a looming clash of civilizations within Turkey, which will also have regional significance.

In the meantime, we know from the America of the 1920s that prohibition driven by religious zeal increases, not reduces, alcohol consumption as well as related criminal activity.  [....]  One does not need the wisdom of a Khayyam to know that forbidden fruit is always sweeter. There is no reason why the Islamic world should be an exception to the rule.

Will these assessments turn out, in retrospect, to be prescient analysis or wishful thinking?  I guess we'll see.

—Jeff Weintraub

==============================
Al-Monitor
May 24, 2013
Turkey's Clash of Civilizations
By Semih Idiz

Turkey is a secular republic, according to its Constitution. This means religion and state must be kept apart. It also means the state has to remain equidistant to all faiths, or lack thereof, and to protect the liberties enshrined in the international agreements the country is party to, if it is to be true to its claim of being a genuine democracy.

These liberties include the freedom of expression, which Turkey has never been good at protecting. They also include respect for diversity, which Turkey has never been good at protecting either.

In the past, insulting the founder of the republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, could land you in jail. In the same way, lifestyles contrary to Kemalist paradigms were shunned by the ruling elite with scant regard to freedom of conscience. For example, religious women were legally prevented from going to university or working in state jobs because of their headscarves. But the tables are turning in Turkey.

Previously the law was used to protect secular idols. Today it is being used to protect religion and its idols. The basic instinct to restrict freedom of expression, when the subject matter is considered sacrosanct, remains. Under the rule of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), freedom of expression is being increasingly restricted in the name of “protecting Islam and the Prophet Muhammad.”

The latest victim is Sevan Nisanyan, the outspoken Turkish writer and intellectual of Armenian origin. Nisanyan is known for his biting tongue, which is common among Turkish writers and intellectuals, whether they are secularists or Islamists. He wrote tauntingly in his blog last year: “Making fun of an Arab leader who claimed he contacted Allah hundreds of years ago and received political, financial and sexual benefits is not hate speech. … It is an almost kindergarten-level test of what is called freedom of expression.”

The prosecutor brought charges against him for “insulting the religious beliefs held by a section of the society” and Nisanyan received a 58-week prison sentence from an Istanbul court on May 22. The court could not say he had blasphemed since this would be out of tune with Turkey’s claim to be a secular democracy. But he had blasphemed in the eyes of those who charged and convicted him.

Some may think Nisanyan’s Armenian ethnicity, a difficult identity to carry in Turkey at the best of times, is the reason he was hounded. But his case is not unique. The world renowned Turkish pianist, Fazil Say, was also convicted recently for “insulting the religious beliefs held by a section of the society.”

Say received a suspended 10-month prison sentence for re-tweeting words attributed to Omar Khayyam, the Persian philosopher, mathematician, astronomer and poet, who allegedly said: “You say its rivers will flow in wine. Is the Garden of Eden a drinking house? You say you will give two houris (angels) to each Muslim. Is the Garden of Eden a whorehouse?”

Such remarks have no chance of going down well in a predominantly Islamic and conservative country like Turkey, of course, despite its democratic aspirations. Turkish society has not attained the social maturity yet that would enable it to shun such remarks while tolerating them, to protect the freedom of expression.

Europe also had cases in recent history where religious sensibilities were ruffled. The Catholic reaction to the film “The Last Temptation of Christ” is an example that springs to mind. Whatever the reactions, though, freedom of expression was upheld. If Turkey is a secular democracy in the European mold, the same should be happening here.

In other words the state should not only protect Nisanyan’s right of free expression, no matter how unsavory his remarks may be for some, but also protect him from attacks that may result from his exercise of this freedom. That,however, is a pipe dream for today’s Turkey. It was so in the past, too, when the “sacred” entities and beliefs of the time, which had nothing to do with religion, were protected with religious zeal.

In other words, the institutionalized culture of intolerance is alive in Turkey. It is also beginning to show itself in other ways. Take the highly restrictive legislation the government is working on for the sale and consumption of alcohol. If passed, those who have a taste for a pre-meal aperitif or a glass of wine during a dinner out will find it very difficult to believe they live in a secular republic.

Those behind this legislation are shrouding it in arguments about “protecting youth” and “public safety” and using European examples to bolster their claims. But the zeal with which the campaign against alcohol is being conducted — in a country where alcohol consumption is below international averages — with the prime minister, Erdogan, throwing his full weight behind the campaign, has secular Turks wondering where their country is headed.

Turkey, however, is a heterogeneous country with great diversity. This will ensure that such bans ultimately fail, regardless of what legislation is introduced. Turks also have the right to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights, which Nisanyan says he will do. No doubt Say, whose case like Nisanyan’s has been appealed in Turkey, will do the same if his freedom of expression is not respected in his own country.

The only thing the Nisanyan and Say cases, as well as draconian restrictions on alcohol consumption, will achieve in the end is to add grist to the mill of those who argue the AKP has a secret Islamist agenda, thus casting a dark shadow over Turkey’s democratic credentials. Other initiatives, such as banning red lipstick for hostesses on Turkish Airlines, and trying to put them in what are considered to be more modest uniforms, are already the subject of much criticism at home and abroad.

Meanwhile Ayse Kulin, Turkey’s best-selling author of historical novels, created a storm recently after saying during a television interview on the Turkish HaberTurk channel that Islam has to change.

“Islam cannot continue as it is. It is giving the impression of being a terrorist organization. When someone writes a book or makes a rude caricature, the reaction is too much. If the man has written a book, then don’t read it. Why try to kill him? The Quran has to be reinterpreted. Many concepts have lost their original meaning. The essence is gone,” Kulin said to subsequent howls, bordering on threats, from Islamist quarters.

Kulin, however, was only expressing what a growing number of secular Turks believe. She is therefore the harbinger of a looming clash of civilizations within Turkey, which will also have regional significance.

In the meantime, we know from the America of the 1920s that prohibition driven by religious zeal increases, not reduces, alcohol consumption as well as related criminal activity. We also read about alcohol consumption in Iran, not to mention prostitution and drug abuse, despite heavy penalties. One does not need the wisdom of a Khayyam to know that forbidden fruit is always sweeter. There is no reason why the Islamic world should be an exception to the rule.

Moral illiterates rush to blame the West for acts of domestic terrorism (Terry Glavin & Andrew Sullivan)

 

By now most people have probably heard about Wednesday's terrorist attack in Woolwich, South London.  Two Islamist attackers, British men with family origins in Nigeria, murdered and mutilated an off-duty, out-of-uniform British soldier who had served in Afghanistan. They ran him over with a car and then, surrounded by horrified onlookers, hacked at him with with meat cleavers, almost beheading him, with occasional shouts of "Allahu Akbar!".  Presumably they had targeted the victim specifically.  According to the Telegraph:

After the killing, one of the men, believed to be a British-born Muslim convert, spoke calmly into a witness’s video phone.

 Speaking with a London accent, holding a knife and a meat cleaver and with his hands dripping with blood, he said: “We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you until you leave us alone. Your people will never be safe. The only reason we have done this is because Muslims are dying by British soldiers every day.  We must fight them as they fight us. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. I apologise that women had to witness this today but in our lands our women have to see the same. You people will never be safe. Remove your government, they don’t care about you.  [....]  So get rid of them. Tell them to bring our troops back so we, so you can all live in peace."

In reality, the great majority of Muslim civilians killed in Afghanistan have been killed by jihadist fanatics like themselves, not by western troops.  So the "eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" justification for this attack is not attack is not just disgusting but absurd. Let me repeat that:  When jihadists like these two murder people in the US or Europe, they claim to be killing them as revenge for the deaths of Muslim civilians ... who have been killed by other jihadists like themselves.  Anyone who finds that kind of justification plausible or convincing needs his or her head examined.  And endorsing such justifications, or even taking them seriously, is stupid and pernicious.

The attack was clearly meant to shock and terrify, and it did succeed in shocking.  (It also seems to have offered a pretext for some attacks on mosques by xenophobic bigots from the so-called English Defense League.)  What's the right response to a deliberately spectacular atrocity like this, and what are the wrong responses?

=>  Terry Glavin gets to the heart of the matter. Who really shares the blame for propagating the canard that "Islam" and "the West" are engaged in a violent "conflict of civilizations" that justifies endless reprisal killings?

It has become a disgusting habit of contemporary journalism that every time some deranged yob goes off the deep end with a carving knife shouting Allahu akbar, a battalion of television crews surrounds and lays siege to the local mosque until heartfelt on-air disavowals and loud declarations of civic loyalty are extracted from whichever hapless imam happens to answer the doorbell.

This really needs to stop.

It is not the fault of the Muslim mainstream nor any gruesome network of dingbat back street ayatollahs that a commonplace trope of the popular culture insists that the so-called West is at war with the so-called Muslim World, and that consequently anytime some lunatic who thinks he’s a Muslim goes on a shooting or kettle-bombing spree in any one of the NATO countries, we should take it as form of understandable retaliation.

It is that caste of moral illiterates among the celebrity opinion-arbiters of the popular culture that has established this imbecility as, like, central to the discourse. If it’s grovelling apologies and pledges of fealty we want, we should be dragging them out of that crowd and giving our harmlessly devout Muslim neighbours a rest for once.

I mean, I ask you. Before the blood of 25-year-old Royal Fusilier Lee Rigby had even dried on that street in the South London borough of Woolwich Tuesday, the grotesque American gasbag Michael Moore was trying to make a cheap laugh out of it by being facetious with his 1.5 million plus Twitter followers: “I am outraged that we can’t kill people in other counties without them trying to kill us!”

[JW:  Actually, both of the murderers were British.  Neither of them came from a country where "we" are killing people.]

Here’s former London mayor Ken Livingstone doing exactly the same sort of thing. Building himself an escape route out of all the usual preamble stuffing — of course we support the police in their investigations, our thoughts are with the family, of course we are all outraged — Livingstone gives us this: “In 2002, before the invasion of Iraq, the security services warned the prime minister, Tony Blair, that this would make Britain a target for terrorist attacks. We are still experiencing the dreadful truth of this warning.”

Ian Leslie, author of Born Liars, Why We Can’t Live Without Deceit, answered Livingstone’s obscenity by usefully noticing that the great Muslim revenge orgy that Livingstone and his type have been predicting for the past decade or so has never materialized. All we have seen are such deranged losers as the Boston Marathon bombers and cretins with Sarf London accents and machetes and a rusted gun that didn’t work.

“The simple reason is that most Muslims, like most everyone, are not potential terrorists just waiting to be activated by the action of a government,” Leslie pointed out Thursday. “It takes Ken-levels of parochialism and self-obsession to imagine that they are.”

In the Guardian newspaper, that once-sturdy clarion of robust left-wing analysis, the American pseudo-progressive Glenn Greenwald offers up harmony to Livingstone’s melody line in a column that exploits the fuzzy timidities around the definition and the common use of the term “terrorism,” and he does so in such a way as to completely normalize what he claims is not merely “Muslim” violence, but justifiable Muslim violence.

“It is very hard to escape the conclusion that, operationally, the term has no real definition at this point beyond ‘violence engaged in by Muslims in retaliation against western violence toward Muslims’.”

Retaliation? Of course, the throat-clearing, the obligatory concession that “highlighting this causation doesn’t remotely justify the acts.”

Well, how nice to have that cleared up. But it is nonetheless “the causation” that Greenwald slips in without having the courage to make the case for it. The problem, the root cause, indeed the proximate cause is “western violence against Muslims.” There it is. It’s our fault.

Can you imagine some imam getting away with saying something like that? Of course you can’t. [....]

Glavin goes on to cite more examples, but let's just stop with the increasingly annoying and indefensible Glenn Greenwald.

Greenwald's characteristic knee-jerk response to acts of terrorism in the US or other western countries, which has now become almost boringly predictable, is to "explain" them by parroting the justifications offered by jihadist propaganda, making excuses for the perpetrators, denying that they're even terrorist attacks ... and then trying to pretend that he's not really justifying these terrorist attacks as acts of legitimate retaliation for "western violence against Muslims", only explaining their "causation".  This deeply dishonest pretense is starting to wear thin, even for some people who have admired Greenwald.

=>  Andrew Sullivan is one of those people.  He's always been sympathetic to Greenwald, despite recent qualms, but Greenwald's apologetics for the near-beheading in Woolwich finally drove Sullivan over the edge.  His response to Greenwald's misleading, fallacious, and morally reprehensible drivel says what needs to be said, so I don't feel the need to say it myself:

Greenwald refuses to label the beheading in London “terrorism,” calling it just another attempt to stir paranoia against Muslims:

[T]he term at this point seems to have no function other than propagandistically and legally legitimizing the violence of western states against Muslims while delegitimizing any and all violence done in return to those states …

I really have to try restrain my anger here. First off, Glenn’s adoption of the view that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan amounted to “continuous violence by western states against Muslim civilians” seems a new step toward the memes of Islamist propaganda. Does Glenn really believe that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, however flawed, were deliberate attempts to kill Muslim civilians, in the way al Qaeda deliberately targets and kills Muslim civilians?

If he does, then I beg to differ. The reason we invaded Afghanistan was not because we decided to launch a war on Islam. It was because wealthy, Islamist, hypocritical bigots launched an unprovoked Jihadist mass murder of Western innocents from a cell based in a country run by a regime that specialized and specializes in the mass murder of other Muslims.

Before 9/11, America had saved Muslims in the Balkans from Christianist fanatics. We helped liberate Muslims in Afghanistan from Soviet oppression. We continue to give vast amounts of money to Muslim countries like Egypt, and, because of our economic development and need for oil made multi-billionaires out of Saudi clerics. And the war against Saddam, though a criminal enterprise and strategic catastrophe, nonetheless removed one of the most vicious mass murderers of Muslims on the planet. And the sectarian murder of Muslims that followed, however the ultimate responsibility for the occupying forces, was not done by Westerners. It was done by Muslims killing Muslims. The West, moreover, is committed to removing its troops from Afghanistan by next year and is fast winding down drone strikes.

How can that legitimize a British citizen’s brutal beheading of a fellow British citizen on the streets of London? If we cannot call a man who does that in the name of God and finishes by warning his fellow citizens “You will never be safe” a terrorist, who would fit that description, apart, of course, in Glenn’s view, Barack Obama?

The barbarian with the machete was not born in a Muslim country or land. He was born in Britain, educated at Marshalls Park school in Romford and Greenwich University.

He does not have a history of concern with foreign policy – or even sensitivity toward the mass murder of Muslims. There is no record of his protest against the mass murders by the Taliban – because those kinds of murders of Muslims he approves of. He is a convert to the Sunni Islamism of Anjem Choudary, whose street thugs were involved in a melee in a London street only last week as they attacked and scuffled with Shi’a Muslims. Choudary’s group wants Sharia law imposed on the UK, a war against Shiites everywhere, the brutal subjugation of women, and suppression of every freedom Glenn cares about. The idea that this foul, religious bigotry – when it provokes its adherents to the kind of barbarism we saw two days ago – is some kind of legitimate protest against a fast-ending war is just perverse.

I want the war in Af-Pak to end. I agree that blowback is a real problem. I was horrified by the Iraq war. I remain appalled by GTMO and the legacy of torture. But I cannot defend any analysis of what happened in London as some kind of legitimate protest against Western foreign policy rather than terrorism in its most animal-like form, created and sustained entirely by religious fanaticism which would find any excuse to murder, destroy and oppress Muslims and non-Muslims in the name of God.

They did this before 9/11 and before our invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. They are doing it now in Syria in the name of the same God. These genocidal theocrats did not need to be spurred by the US and UK’s actions – although they can view those as a further inflammation.  [....]

I have to say I have always respected the sincerity and clarity of Greenwald’s critique of the war on terror. But his blindness to the savagery at the heart of Salafism is very hard to understand, let alone forgive.  [....]

—Jeff Weintraub

Pope Pius IX's "Syllabus of Errors" in retrospect

Earlier this month Cardinal Angelo Scola of Milan called called for the world-wide repeal of laws against blasphemy.  He was delivering the opening address at a conference in Milan commemorating the edict of the Emperor Constantine in 313 that granted official tolerance to Christianity (which soon became the state religion and embarked on a long career of persecuting and suppressing other religions).  Scola is no run-of-the-mill Cardinal, but someone who was considered among the front-runners to be chosen Pope at the last papal election.  That alone would be enough to make this event worth noticing.

Part of the context for Scola's condemnation of blasphemy laws is the fact that in many parts of the world today, especially in some Muslim-dominated societies, blasphemy laws are frequently used to target and persecute Christians, including Catholics.  (The remaining blasphemy laws in Europe, by contrast, tend to be vestigial.)  But there is more to it than that.  What was striking was that Scola linked his call for abolition of blasphemy laws to a generalized defense of freedom of conscience and commitment to the principles of religious liberty and "religious pluralism".  In fact, he described religious freedom as “a true litmus test” of a civilized society.

"In those countries still dominated by state religion ... protecting religious freedom means above all encouraging religious pluralism and opening to all forms of religious expression, for example eliminating laws that criminally punish blasphemy,” the cardinal said May 8.

In some ways, what is most remarkable about Scola's statements is the extent to which they're unremarkable.  For a major Catholic prelate to defend religious freedom and religious pluralism in principle is no longer as remarkable as it once would have been.  Over the course of the past century, and especially since Vatican II in the early 1960s, there has been a dramatic shift in the Church's official doctrine regarding these matters.  Scola's declaration marks one more milestone in that long-term evolutionary process.

Even some recent Popes who have worked hard to tighten up authoritarian control and suppress dissent within the Church, like John Paul II and Benedict XVI, have defended the general principles of freedom of religion and freedom of conscience, both individual and collective, in sweeping and forceful terms.  Some people may see a tension there, even a certain amount of hypocrisy, and I'm not entirely unsympathetic to that reaction.  But very existence of that tension is significant.  And the Church's turn toward a strong public commitment to the principles of religious liberty and freedom of conscience, which really does mark a historic shift, is a phenomenon too important to be casually dismissed.

In an address that Pope Benedict XVI delivered in September 2012—during a visit to the Middle East, which was undoubtedly not coincidental—he went so far as to say the following:

Religious freedom is the pinnacle of all other freedoms. It is a sacred and inalienable right. It includes on the individual and collective levels the freedom to follow one’s conscience in religious matters and, at the same time, freedom of worship. It includes the freedom to choose the religion which one judges to be true and to manifest one’s beliefs in public.  [....]  Religious freedom is rooted in the dignity of the person; it safeguards moral freedom and fosters mutual respect.  [....]

Benedict went on to draw a very significant distinction.  Even in countries where religious tolerance exists, "There is a need to move beyond tolerance to religious freedom."

Furthermore, he embraced the principle of separation between religion and the state:

A healthy secularity [....]  frees religion from the encumbrance of politics, and allows politics to be enriched by the contribution of religion, while maintaining the necessary distance, clear distinction and indispensable collaboration between the two spheres.

So why should any of that seem so surprising?  Well, only a few centuries ago—which not a long time, from the perspective of an institution that has been around almost two millennia—the dominant views of the Catholic Church on these issues were sharply different. For example, in Pope Gregory XVI's 1832 encyclical Mirare Vos, the Pope denounced

that absurd and erroneous proposition which claims that liberty of conscience must be maintained for everyone. It spreads ruin in sacred and civil affairs, though some repeat over and over again with the greatest impudence that some advantage accrues to religion from it. "But the death of the soul is worse than freedom of error," as Augustine was wont to say.  [....]

And for good measure, Gregory warned against the catastrophic evils that flow from "immoderate freedom of opinion" and "license of free speech".

Here We must include that harmful and never sufficiently denounced freedom to publish any writings whatever and disseminate them to the people, which some dare to demand and promote with so great a clamor. [....]  Nor can We predict happier times for religion and government from the plans of those who desire vehemently to separate the Church from the state [....]

And so on.

These anathemas were reiterated more systematically, and just as emphatically, as part of the famous "Syllabus of Errors" issued by Pope Pius IX in 1864.  As my friend Mark Gerson remarked when we were discussing Scola's speech, "The Church has come a long way since the Syllabus of Errors!"  I had the same reaction.

=>  So in order to help put these matters in historical perspective, this might be a good moment to revisit Pius IX's "Syllabus of Errors" and ponder it a bit.

For those of you who aren't already familiar with it, let me assure you that it's worth some attention, because it's a very important and illuminating historical document—quite fascinating, actually.  It's a declaration of intransigent anti-modernism, principled dogmatism, and explicit opposition to "liberalism" and to any suggestion that (in the words of proposition #80)  "The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization".

Nor is it relevant exclusively to the 19th century.  In many ways, it continued to exemplify a whole world-view of pre-Vatican II anti-modernist and ultramontane Catholicism well into the 20th century.  In terms of many of the issues addressed by Pius X, the Church has indeed come a long way—with a lot of wider social, cultural, and political consequences.

(On the other hand, in some ways the spirit of Pius IX is not completely dead, either.  Both Pope-Emeritus Benedict XVI and US Senator Rick Santorum, just to pick two random examples, help illustrate that in certain respects.)

The "Syllabus of Errors", which sums up the animating spirit of the whole Pontificate of Pius IX, represents only one kind of response by the Catholic Church to the challenges of modernity. But for much of the 19th and 20th centuries, this kind of circle-the-wagons, defend-every-inch, make-no-concessions rejectionist and ultramontane approach was the dominant one in the Church, even though there were some countervailing currents. In a larger historical perspective, I suppose, this intransigent circle-the-wagons reaction against the dangers of modernity can be seen as a 19th- and early 20th-century century analogue to the circle-the-wagons reaction embodied in Counter-Reformation Catholicism four centuries earlier.

One striking feature of the "Syllabus" is precisely its form. It is a list of "errors" and "condemned propositions". Instead of propounding positive claims, it lists and condemns a set of (widely held, frequently advocated) beliefs that all good Catholics are prohibited from holding, expressing, or even treating with sympathetic indulgence. (In this respect, it is reminiscent of the condemnations of ideological errors and "deviations" that later became a standard feature of totalitarian regimes and movements.) So the view of the world underlying this document is built up by the gradual accumulation of positions it rejects.

In light of the issues discussed earlier, one substantive point worth noticing and emphasizing is that this document rejects the idea of religious liberty or freedom of conscience (for non-Catholics) in principle. Of course, the Church always recognized that in countries where Catholics are in a minority, or where the state is dominated by non-Catholic forces--Protestant, Muslim, secular, or otherwise--it is important to protect the faith of believers and to defend the Church as an institution from interference or oppression by the state. In those unfortunate circumstances, one has to make pragmatic compromises. But in countries where Catholicism is socially and politically dominant, it is the duty of believers to assure the privileged institutional position of the Catholic Church, the supremacy of the Catholic religion, and the suppression of heretical tendencies (e.g., Protestantism).

In connection with this principled rejection of the idea of religious freedom or toleration in the "Syllabus of Errors", we might note for example the following condemned propositions:

15. Every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true. [....]

16. Man may, in the observance of any religion whatever, find the way of eternal salvation, and arrive at eternal salvation. [....]

17. Good hope at least is to be entertained of the eternal salvation of all those who are not at all in the true Church of Christ. [....]

18. Protestantism is nothing more than another form of the same true Christian religion, in which form it is given to please God equally as in the Catholic Church. [....]

77. In the present day it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the State, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship. [....]
78. Hence it has been wisely decided by law, in some Catholic countries, that persons coming to reside therein shall enjoy the public exercise of their own peculiar worship. [....]

79. Moreover, it is false that the civil liberty of every form of worship, and the full power, given to all, of overtly and publicly manifesting any opinions whatsoever and thoughts, conduce more easily to corrupt the morals and minds of the people, and to propagate the pest of indifferentism. [....]

And to sum it all up, it is utterly wrong and prohibited to believe that

80. The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization. [....]

(Each item refers to previous Church documents that spell out the reasons for the condemnation, but I've deleted those references and elaborations here.)

 In these respects, as we can see, the official position of the Catholic Church has changed quite dramatically since the time of Pius IX (especially in the wake of Vatican II). In intra-Catholic debates, by the way, the notion that freedom of conscience might be a good thing in principle was often described as part and parcel of part of the more general heresy of "Americanism" (a term used by Pope Leo XIII in an admonition he sent to the Archbishop of Baltimore in 1899).  And perhaps those accusations weren't entirely incorrect, since the American Church did adapt to the distinctively American system of religious "denominationalism", and over time American Catholics did help promote tendencies toward acceptance of the notion that religious freedom and religious pluralism might actually be good ideas in principle.

(Of course, one should not assume that this transformation in outlook has been complete or irreversible.  There are still ultramontane traditionalists who are convinced that the Church took a comprehensive wrong turn with Vatican II, and who still reject the heresy of "Americanism".)

=> It is worth noting that positions similar or analogous to the ones expressed by Pius IX in his "Syllabus" remain pervasive and consequential today in much of the Islamic world (except, of course, for those elements in the "Syllabus" pertaining to the Church as a centralized institution with a single ruler, which has no precise equivalent in Islam). Those positions are by no means universal or uncontested, but they're widespread, they enjoy considerable popular support, and they're often codified in law.

For example, there are few majority-Muslim countries where it is not legally condemned or, at least, legally problematic to convert from Islam to a non-Islamic religion—though conversion from non-Islamic religions to Islam is fine. (There are some exceptions—in the Arab world, Lebanon is the most striking—but they're exceptions.) Prohibitions against "apostasy" are enforced with greater or lesser severity in different places, but in many countries the dominant trend right now is for those restrictions to get strengthened, not weakened. Legal penalties for "blasphemy" are also in force in most Muslim-majority countries, and they have teeth. In fact, for some years Islamic governments have been campaigning systematically to get prohibitions against "blasphemy"—in other words, restrictions on freedom of expression—smuggled into international "human rights" documents under the guise of condemning "defamation" of religion as hate speech. (Ann Mayer's Islam and Human Rights includes a careful and systematic critical analysis of that campaign.) And so on.

To be sure, one would need to complicate that historical analogy a bit. For over a thousand years the Catholic Church, wherever it was predominant, tried to impose monolithic religious uniformity by suppressing or expelling all non-Catholic religions, and in many cases it succeeded. It is well known that one big difference between the historical records of Catholicism and Islam is that, on the whole, Islamic law generally prescribes that some non-Muslim religions, though not all, should be tolerated and accorded a "protected" status as long as they remain subordinate, deferential, and subject to certain special burdens and restrictions. There are striking exceptions to that toleration—Saudi Arabia, for example, prohibits any form of public worship or religious expression by non-Muslims, and in other countries sects are that considered heretical or apostate, like the Baha'i in Iran and Ahmadis in Pakistan, are subject to ferocious persecution—but that pattern of (qualified) toleration remains common.

(Though it should be added that in much of the greater Middle East, Christian minorities have been steadily shrinking or disappearing from the 20th century through the present.  The ones that still remain are almost all under threat.  In Egypt, for example, one demographically significant Christian minority still remains, the Copts; but they are under heavy pressure and have been rapidly shrinking though emigration. And since the middle of the 20th century the whole area has been almost completely ethnically cleansed of Jews, except of course in Israel. A lot of this tendency toward ethno-sectarian "simplification" has to do with the interplay between religious/sectarian tensions and the rise of modern nationalism ... but that's another story.)

However, there are very few Muslim-dominated countries that make even a pretense of according legal and cultural equality to non-Muslim religions. All forms of available evidence, from opinion polls to public discourse to the results of the recent Egyptian elections, make it clear that the majority of Muslims in those societies continue to find the idea unacceptable and even offensive. And in some places where the principle of legal equality between different religions began to get introduced into the formal legal codes during the liberal-reformist era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there has been a strong reaction against them, and the legal codes have been modified accordingly. (Again, there are some exceptions.)

In these respects, it seems fair to say that most of the Islamist world is still highly reluctant to come to terms with what Pius IX identified and condemned as the forces of "progress, liberalism and modern civilization". (One might add that this is also true for the dominant tendencies in, say, the Russian Orthodox Church and the Chinese Communist Party.)  Nor can we assume, in the manner of what used to be called "Whig history", that the triumph of those forces is simply a matter of time. It's an ongoing drama.

=> By the way, apropos of another issue that has remained timely, the "Syllabus" also condemns the notion that any system of universal non-sectarian public education ("freed from all ecclesiastical authority, control and interference") is acceptable. Holding any of the following beliefs is strictly condemned and prohibited:

45. The entire government of public schools in which the youth of a Christian state is educated, except (to a certain extent) in the case of episcopal seminaries, may and ought to appertain to the civil power, and belong to it so far that no other authority whatsoever shall be recognized as having any right to interfere in the discipline of the schools, the arrangement of the studies, the conferring of degrees, in the choice or approval of the teachers. [....]

47. The best theory of civil society requires that popular schools open to children of every class of the people, and, generally, all public institutes intended for instruction in letters and philosophical sciences and for carrying on the education of youth, should be freed from all ecclesiastical authority, control and interference, and should be fully subjected to the civil and political power at the pleasure of the rulers, and according to the standard of the prevalent opinions of the age. [....]

48. Catholics may approve of the system of educating youth unconnected with Catholic faith and the power of the Church, and which regards the knowledge of merely natural things, and only, or at least primarily, the ends of earthly social life. [....]

=>  Before leaving this subject, might be worth emphasizing one last point to help avoid superficial misunderstandings. The social doctrines of the Catholic Church have never mapped very neatly into the divisions between "left" and "right" in US politics—or in a lot of secular European politics, either.  That was true in the 19th century, and it continues to be true today.

Pius IX's main concern in the "Syllabus" has to do with rejecting and resisting various aspects of what might be termed cultural, religious, and political "liberalism" (including the principles of religious liberty, freedom of conscience, separation of church & state, etc.). In those areas, as I said, Church doctrine has made some significant accommodations (which I applaud).

However, it's important to add that the Church has never really accepted the moral and ideological claims of economic liberalism in the (historically and theoretically correct) 19th-century sense of that term—that is, laissez-faire economics, free-market-fundamentalism, Social Darwinism, the notion that untempered individual selfishness should be regarded as acceptably "rational" action, etc.  On the contrary, Catholic social doctrine has consistently rejected the radical self-interested individualism and moral indifference embodied, according to a long series of papal documents, in the vision of laissez-faire capitalism.  (At the same time, of course, the official doctrine of the Church has also rejected most historically available forms of socialism.)

With respect to this principled rejection of economic liberalism, the paradigm 19th-century statement is Pope Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum.  The sentiments expressed there remain very much part of official Catholic social doctrine (Pope John Paul II restated them quite strongly in Laborem Exercens and Centesimus Annus) ... though it's worth noting that many American Catholics seem largely unaware of this in practice.

American Catholics who vote Republican and oppose the idea of universal health care, for example, often don't seem to appreciate the tensions involved there. I'm not saying that they should necessarily agree with the Church's position on these matters, any more than they agree with the Church's prohibition of "artificial" contraception, which the vast majority of American Catholics ignore in practice. But the interesting point is that so many of them appear to be be unaware that they are in deep disagreement with Catholic social doctrine on many economic issues.  In fact, on a very wide range of important issues including income inequality, health care, unions, social justice, war, and the death penalty, the official social doctrine of the US Catholic Church would strike most Americans as wildly left-wing ... if they took those positions seriously, or even knew about them.  The same is true, of course, for most political journalists and pundits, Catholic or non-Catholic.

On the other hand, if they're clueless about so many dimensions of Catholic social doctrine, it's not entirely their fault.  One reason for this widespread lack of awareness is that when it comes to election time, most of the US Catholic hierarchy focuses exclusively on the very narrow range of issues where they happen to be in tune with the Republican right—above all, abortion. And who appointed those Bishops and Cardinals?  In an awful lot of cases, John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

—Jeff Weintraub

Henri Barkey suggests that, on Syria, Turkey should put its money where its mouth is

In an interview with NBC News a few weeks ago, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared quite explicitly and emphatically

that his country will support a US-enforced no-fly zone in Syria.

[Erdogan added] that President Bashar al-Assad's alleged use of chemical weapons against his opponents meant that the Syrian regime had already crossed US President Barack Obama's so-called red line "a long time ago".

"Right from the beginning ... we would say 'yes'," Erdogan told NBC when asked if Turkey, a NATO member that shares its longest border with Syria, would support a no-fly zone.  [....]

Since the Assad regime has an air force and the rebels have none, grounding that air force would be a tremendous blow to the regime's military strength and a tremendous boon to the rebels.

=>  A friend of mine had this reaction, which he sent me via e-mail:

Did you see Erdogan saying that he would support a US-led no-fly zone in Syria?  I believe that he leads a very large country with a top-tier military that is next door to Syria and directly affected by the conflict.  Why doesn't Turkey lead the no-fly zone?  Talk about chicken hawks...

There are two possible answers to my friend's question.  First of all, while it's certainly correct that Turkey's military power far outweighs Syria's, enforcing a no-fly zone is a tricky matter.  Syria's anti-aircraft system is pretty sophisticated, and it could pose a significant risk to Turkish planes flying over Syria.  It's true that the Israelis have managed to neutralize or evade it several times over the years, but it's unlikely that the capacities of the Turkish air force come close to matching those of the Israeli air force in this respect.  The US air force is a different matter.  And for the Turkish government to take this initiative on its own, without collaboration with the US and its European allies, would involve considerable political and diplomatic risks.

Those points would all be correct, by the way.

On the other hand, one could also argue that, despite all that, my friend was basically right.

=>  It so happens that Henri Barkey, an acute analyst of Middle Eastern politics in general and of Turkey in particular, argued in a recent piece that "Turkey must lead the way on creating safe havens in Syria". As Barkey points out, governments and publics in the Middle East have often complained that the US invariably makes a mess of things when it gets involved in the region, with disastrous consequences, and have insisted that regional powers should be allowed to find regional solutions instead. If they really mean that seriously, Barkey observes, this might be a good time to start putting those slogans into practice. The US government should invite them to take the initiative in dealing with the Syrian crisis, while offering to provide effective but strictly limited assistance for any regional solution they put together.

On the eve of the Iraq war in 2003 many regional powers - including the Turks who went out of their way to organise conferences of like-minded states - tried to dissuade the United States from invading by arguing that Saddam Hussein was a regional problem, to be dealt with by the regional countries. There was no need therefore for US boots on the ground.

The Obama administration could now learn from that time and argue that it is willing to support and help any action that the regional states - Turkey would be essential to any such project - might undertake against the Assad regime.  [....]

This approach is not only relatively safe for the Obama administration, but it is reasonable. If this crisis is directly affecting the regional powers, they need to share the burden of solving it.  [....]

If the regional powers did not step up their response under those conditions, they would still have to face the consequences of the civil war on their own populations, security infrastructure and resources. They would not, however, be able to put the blame on the United States and its western allies.

That last point strikes me as a bit optimistic (and perhaps Barkey meant it to be taken with a touch of irony?). However the Syrian catastrophe turns out, "the United States and its western allies" will probably wind up getting blamed, somehow or other.

But that's a secondary matter.  Barkey's analysis is worth reading—and pondering—in full. Here's most of it:

[....]  Pressure on America to do something is mounting, not just from within the US but also from regional powers.

King Abdullah of Jordan, who recently visited the White House and whose country is feeling the enormous strain caused by Syrian refugees, implored the United States to take the lead.

And the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is scheduled to meet President Obama on Thursday, and is likely to use the occasion to make the same kind of plea. The visit comes on the heels of twin car bombings in southern Turkey on Sunday, attacks linked to Syria that will serve as a reminder of the risks Turkey faces from the Syrian conflict.

The Obama administration has so far refused to engage in Syria militarily although the signs are that it may now consider changing its policy, moving towards providing the rebel side with lethal ordnance and related material.

Syria, however, is not an American problem but first and foremost a regional one. The human suffering in more than two years of war has been and is horrific, and is likely to get a lot worse before it is over.

So far the crisis is affecting countries in the region primarily by causing an outflow of refugees. This has increased Sunni-Shi'a tensions, undermined traditional borders, and given rise to new actors, most notably Al Qaeda-linked ones such as the Jabhat Al Nusra.

The regional balances are also being turned upside down: Turkey and Qatar seem to be working together against a coalition composed of Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates. [JW: That is, those two blocs seem to be supporting different factions within the anti-regime forces.] All of those countries are nominally on the same side against Iran, Iraq and the Lebanese armed activists of Hizbollah.

While American domestic critics heap much scorn on the administration's reluctance to intervene unilaterally and militarily in Syria, no one has put together a working plan about how exactly America could best intervene - and what the US exit strategy would be.

Instead, the argument that is often advanced is that doing nothing is riskier than doing something. The critics assume (or, to be more accurate, they hope) that things will somehow work out well in the end. But in complex societal breakdowns and civil wars such as Syria's, this is never the case.

We all know that if the United States were to take the lead and intervene, it would end up "owning" Syria and would be committed to rebuilding it.

In the words of former US secretary of state Colin Powell, the proverbial Pottery Barn rule would apply: "If you break it you buy it." Never mind that Syria is beyond broken already.

Interventionists also underestimate the unwillingness of the ordinary people in the region to countenance yet another American military adventure in their midst. More importantly, they vastly overestimate how thankful the Syrian public will be once Mr Al Assad is removed; anti-Americanism is an ingrained phenomenon across the whole region.

So what can be done?

On the eve of the Iraq war in 2003 many regional powers - including the Turks who went out of their way to organise conferences of like-minded states - tried to dissuade the United States from invading by arguing that Saddam Hussein was a regional problem, to be dealt with by the regional countries. There was no need therefore for US boots on the ground.

The Obama administration could now learn from that time and argue that it is willing to support and help any action that the regional states - Turkey would be essential to any such project - might undertake against the Assad regime.

This could entail air attacks on Syrian air defence installations and airbases, in support of a Turkish and allied attempt to create safe havens at both ends of Syria. This could be undertaken on the understanding that under no circumstances would there be any US military units on the ground. At the same time, Sunday's violence demonstrates that Turkey is not insulated from possible Syrian meddling.

This approach is not only relatively safe for the Obama administration, but it is reasonable. If this crisis is directly affecting the regional powers, they need to share the burden of solving it.

It is likely that the Turks and others would recoil at the idea of sending in their own troops; they too have public opinion to heed. It has been easy for them so far to put the onus on the Obama administration.

Were the US to offer its support to a Turkish-Arab intervention in this way, before long the regional powers would have to seriously reconsider their options for acting to end the crisis.

If the regional powers did not step up their response under those conditions, they would still have to face the consequences of the civil war on their own populations, security infrastructure and resources. They would not, however, be able to put the blame on the United States and its western allies.

—Jeff Weintraub

(P.S. Incidentally, if anyone is wondering whether I think that, back in 2002-2003, there actually was no realistically available "regional solution" to the problem posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq ... the answer is yes, that is what I think. In many respects, though, Saddam Hussein's Iraq was a Very Special Case. The current Syrian crisis also poses complex and difficult problems, but they're not precisely the same problems. Maybe this time around the regional powers, many of whom are already deeply involved in Syria's civil war, can make constructive contributions toward finding a solution, or at least avoiding the most cataclysmic worst-case scenarios. I'm not optimistic, but I guess we'll see.)

Tom Carew sums up what "true friends" of the Arabs and of Israel each owe their side

For reasons that I don't pretend to understand, anti-Zionism has long been even more pervasive and intense in Ireland than in many other European countries. By "anti-Zionism", of course, I don't mean "intellectual disagreement with actual Zionism" or "criticism of Israeli policies", but systematic bias and hostility against Israel and Israelis, shading off into obsessive hatred and demonization.

Symptoms?  Well, just at random ...  The Republic of Ireland did not formally recognize Israel until 1963, refused to establish diplomatic relations until 1975, and did not send an ambassador to Israel until 1996.  In April 2013 the Teachers Union of Ireland voted to blacklist Israeli academics, and I believe it is now the only academic association in Europe that formally supports the world-wide campaign for an academic blacklist (usually referred to, misleadingly and dishonestly, as an "institutional boycott").  The tone of public discourse about Israel and the intertwined Arab-Israeli & Israeli-Palestinian conflicts is consistently and exceptionally one-sided in its hostility toward Israel.

And a few years ago there were these findings from a public opinion poll in Ireland:

The depth of anti-Israel and antisemitic feeling in Ireland has been revealed in a new study into pluralism in the country.

The report found that not only would one in five Irish people bar Israelis from becoming naturalised Irish citizens - but 11 per cent would stop all Jews taking up Irish citizenship.

The report, Pluralism and Diversity in Ireland, compiled by Father Micheál Mac Gréil, a Jesuit priest and sociologist, revealed that antisemitic sentiment was strongest in the 18 to 25 age range, with 46 per cent of the population claiming that they would not be willing to accept a Jewish person into their family.

The figure was higher than the "all ages" category, in which 40 per cent of Irish people said they would not want a Jew in their family. Only 48 per cent would accept an Israeli.

Collectively, Israelis had one of the lowest "favourable" ratings among Irish people, ranking 44th out of 51 categories including homosexuals, alcoholics and travellers.

[JW: "Travellers" are a marginalized ethno-cultural minority, originating in Ireland but now also found in Great Britain, whose wandering mode of life resembles that of traditional Gypsies.]

Fr Mac Gréil told the Irish Catholic newspaper: "There is a real danger that the public image of 'Israeli' can lead to an increase in antisemitism." [....]

As always, survey results like this have to be interpreted with caution. By all accounts, Irish Jews (there are a small number) generally feel quite comfortable and welcome in Irish society (though I suspect that expressing politically incorrect views about the Middle East can make their life less comfortable). There was even a Jewish Lord Mayor of Dublin.

So it would appear that this pervasive and taken-for-granted anti-Zionist bias in Ireland doesn't necessarily translate into anti-semitism. Nevertheless, the depth and intensity of anti-Zionism in Ireland is indisputable. And the generational patterns do suggest that an atmosphere of  intense and obsessive anti-Zionism can help promote anti-semitism, in Ireland as elsewhere. That's a widespread and characteristic phenomenon in today's world.

=> There are exceptions, though the most prominent of them stand out precisely for swimming against the tide. The late Conor Cruise O'Brien was one. A present-day example is Tom Carew of Dublin, Chairman of the Ireland-Israel Friendship League, who is clearly not someone easily discouraged by a hostile environment.

Earlier today Carew shared the following thoughts as a series of Facebook posts ... which I (mostly) reproduce below, with his permission:

Why the increasing hostility to Israel in recent years in Europe ? I suspect there are 3 factors at work - not 1.

 {A} There is definitely a submerged but re-emerging Anti-semitism, now disguised as anti-zionism, as if every nation on earth were entitled to national sovereignty and self-determination in their own homeland - except the Hebrew People.

 {B} There is, obviously rampant in Ireland, but probably influential elsewhere, an uninformed, unthinking gut reaction which sees on TV an Arab teenager firing a stone at a huge IDF Merkava Mk 4 tank, and automatically jumps to the *conclusion* that *Strong is wrong* but never asks about Context or History. And similarly with shots of a slum-like *refugee camp* but with no explanation or awareness that they are inflicted by cynical Arab tyrants, or that far MORE Jews  (nearly 1m) have fled the Arab/Muslim world since 1947 than the (0.711m) Arabs who fled Israel in 1947-49 (most of whom moved elsewhere WITHIN Palestine).

 {C} There is also, since 1967, a growing suspicion that some Jews are ruthless colonialists intent on erecting their Settlements anywhere they choose in the Occupied Territories, and also intent on permanently dominating Arabs who live there as of RIGHT. And that for the past 35 years, since Begin became PM, that Settler Movement has become more and more powerful and unchallenged in Israeli politics . That perception is sadly all too well-founded, and indeed more so since the last Israeli election, and is the one morally legitimate ground for increasing hostility to the State of Israel.

The only true friends that Arabs have in Europe are those who tell them unambiguously and consistently that Israel exists as of right, will continue to thrive, and that either Boycott or direct aggression are both self-destructive for Arabs as well as morally indefensible, and that Recognition, Negotiation and Peace with their Jewish neighbor will unleash immense benefits for them also.

But equally the only true friends of Israel are those who tell them directly that Perception C above will not go away, is totally valid, and that their ABSOLUTE duty to secure their national security, whether against terrorist or state threats, does not demand or warrant either Annexing or Settling one inch of Arab land.

I was born into and grew up in an Ireland where the dangerous and inciting nonsense of the ballad *4 Green Fields* was uncritically sung - not least at closing time in bars. But in reality Ireland had only 3 Green Fields and 1 Orange Field, and not until the Belfast Agreement was that clearly recognized, and also enshrined in the amended Irish Constitution and also as a binding international treaty with UK. The future of Ulster is now entirely a matter for its own people to decide - free from force or from any threat of force, as they may choose. As part of a people who were slow learners for so long, I am now very conscious that any Arab who sings *12 Green Arab Fields* (about the former 12 Districts of British Palestine) or any Jew who sings *12 Blue Fields*, is as daft and as lethally dangerous - and equally inciting and facilitating endless war - as the Irish who thoughtlessly sang *12 Green Fields* for so long. The 10,000 Square Miles of Palestine belong to those now living there - not to the dead generations, be they Jew or Arab - and it is the RIGHT of EACH Nationality to enjoy their own sovereignty and national self-determination in THEIR OWN PART of that small land.

The Hamas line of *From the River Jordan to the Med Sea* is precisely as evil (and for the very same reason - of a focus only on land and not on the rights of living people) as the identical line when chanted by ultra-nationalist Jews. I fear and loathe each set of fanatics - both are the enemies of their own future as well as enemies of peace. [....]

Too true.

—Jeff Weintraub

Josh Barro - John Boehner accidentally explains why his deficit position is phony

("The orange bars show the net debts of Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. [....] The white line shows Wal-Mart’s ratio of debt to earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization.")

There are a small but significant number of dissident conservative Republicans writing on issues of political economy and public policy whose work is consistently interesting, intelligent, informative, and worth taking seriously.  (To borrow a phrase that an earlier generation of conservative intellectuals liked to use, we might call them a "saving remnant".)  Among these hardy few,  Josh Barro is one of the best, along with Bruce Bartlett and David Frum.

For some time now the rhetoric of the national Republican Party and the wider right-wing propaganda apparatus, ranging from the Wall Street Journal editorial page through Fox News and talk radio, has been dominated by hysterical obsession with the federal deficit and claims that deficit reduction should be an urgent and overriding priority.  This rhetoric has been all too influential in shaping the political debate, with real and damaging consequences.  But as Barro cogently explained in a recent column, there are two big problems with this message.  First, although it may sound convincing or even common-sensical to a lot of people, it doesn't actually make sense.  Second, it is naive and misleading to take this deficit-hysteria rhetoric at face value, since that's not really the central agenda for the people who peddle it, and getting suckered by their rhetoric only distracts from the more crucial issues at stake.

Here are the key passages from Barro's May 8 column in Bloomberg View, Boehner Accidentally Explains Why His Deficit Position Is Phony:

Yesterday, in an interview with Bloomberg Television, House Speaker John Boehner warned that the U.S. government must balance its budget. After all, he said:

We have spent more than what we have brought into this government for 55 of the last 60 years. There’s no business in America that could survive like this. No household in America that could do this. And this government can’t do this.

It’s hard to think of better evidence for the sustainability of budget deficits than the fact that we have run them for 55 of the last 60 years. If our fiscal practices haven’t caught up to us after 60 years, when will they?  [....]

Of course, budget deficits work because the government is different from a household.  A government does not have a life cycle, does not ever expect to stop generating income to support itself, and, therefore, does not ever have to retire its debt. It must keep its debts at a manageable size relative to the economy, which the U.S. has done over that 60 year period. If the economy is growing over the long term, that means the government can run a deficit and grow the debt every year -- sustainably.

Boehner is right that no household could keep borrowing like that. He’s not quite right about a business though. Look at the accompanying chart. The orange bars show the net debts of Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. They have soared -- up 5,760 percent since 1987. By comparison, the roughly 600 percent rise in the U.S. public debt over the same period looks restrained. Is Wal-Mart mad? How long can it go on just borrowing and borrowing and borrowing?

The answer is “as long as Wal-Mart keeps growing.” The white line shows Wal-Mart’s ratio of debt to earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. And what that shows is that Wal-Mart’s debts have been rising to keep pace with its growing earnings. Similarly, for six decades U.S. government debt has been rising roughly in line with the growth of the economy. Over the last few years, it’s grown a lot faster because of cyclical economic weakness. The proper matter for debate is whether recent deficits are too large -- not whether six decades is too long to run them.

In fact, any large business that never borrowed—that is, took on debt—to make long-term investments, and didn't distinguish between investments and other expenditures, would be considered crazy, not prudent.  The same applies to public investment.  We need more of it right now, not less.  For example, at a time when there are a lot of unemployed construction workers and the US government can borrow money practically for nothing, the obvious conclusion is that we should be taking serious measures to maintain, repair, and improve our crumbling and often outdated national infrastructure.  The fact that doing this is politically out of the question, to the extent that these ideas barely come up in everyday political discourse, is one striking symptom of how dramatically dysfunctional our political system has become.

Furthermore, there is a big difference between how we should be thinking about deficits in the long run and in the short run.  In the long run, we should certainly be concerned about keeping the public debt within bounds (as a percentage of GDP)—and that also holds for the overall level of private debt, incidentally.  In the short run, when the economy is still struggling to recover from a major recession, the federal government should be running deficits.  The time to pay down the debt is when the economy is booming again (as it did under Carter, for example) and doesn't need this fiscal stimulus.  During a recession, slashing government spending and cutting government deficits too abruptly and prematurely—the bundle of policies commonly referred to as "austerity"—will only sabotage economic recovery from and help keep unemployment higher than it could be.  The most harmful consequence of this deficit-hysteria discourse is that it has been used effectively to help justify contractionary economic policies.  But there is something peculiar about the Republicans' response to this deficit menace they claim is so urgent and terrifying.

Boehner’s position on short-term debt is confused, too. If the recent expansion of the public debt is a matter of overriding economic concern, why is Boehner so resolutely opposed to tax increases to pay it down? America’s economy has thrived under a variety of tax policies, including much higher top marginal tax rates than are in effect today. Shouldn’t Boehner be willing to accept tax increases, or perhaps even be eager for them, in order to fight the debt menace he cites?

Well, here is the really crucial point.  Again, it should be obvious, but it seems to be deeply mysterious to most pundits and political "journalists", along with too much of the general public.  Pardon me if I bold the key sentences for emphasis:

Boehner doesn’t really care about the public debt, as he made clear when he repeatedly supported debt-expanding measures under a Republican president. What Boehner and House Republicans really want are excuses to cut federal spending, particularly on programs such as Medicaid and food stamps that support low-income Americans. But those cuts are unpopular, so Republicans frame fiscal debate to make such cuts appear necessary to avoid disaster. If you can’t borrow or tax more, and can’t cut old-age entitlements or the military, which command the majority of federal spending, you’re not left with many options but to soak the poor.

Soaking the poor is a policy option. It is not, as Boehner would have it, a policy necessity dictated by the inability of the federal government to borrow or tax sustainably. But if the debate instead becomes about tax and spending priorities -- is it more important to provide universal health care or keep tax rates low on high earners -- it shifts to turf unfavorable to Republicans. So they pretend.

This picture is complicated a bit, but only slightly, by the fact that since the 1970s many Republicans have also been committed to a "starve the beast" fiscal strategy which promised that single-minded tax-cutting, and the deficits it predictably generated, would eventually provoke a fiscal crisis that would force deep reductions in federal spending.  But that strategy is equally disingenuous, and in practice has turned out to be deeply irresponsible and corrupting. Among other things, it has provided many Republicans with a rationale for fiscal irresponsibility, since they've concluded, in the words of Dick Cheney, that "Reagan proved deficits don't matter"—except, of course, when Democratic presidents are in office and Republicans temporarily go back to hyperventilating about out-of-control deficits for purposes of partisan propaganda.

The central thrust of Barro's argument is entirely on-target.  And it applies to just about all the most prominent figures in the national Republican Party right now, including not just Boehner but Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor and the rest.  When they repeat the orthodox party line about economic policy, claiming that deficit reduction is their highest priority and insisting that deficit reduction must be the most
urgent, overriding national priority, they're mostly pretending.  And to the extent that they actually believe their own rhetoric about this, it doesn't really make sense.

Yours for reality-based discourse,
Jeff Weintraub

"The Truth of Mohammed al-Dura" – If iconic imagery makes for powerful propaganda, should we treat questions of historical truth or falsehood as irrelevant?

(One of many stamps in the Arab world commemorating the martyrdom of Mohammed al-Dura.  For more, see here.)

Some people have argued, explicitly or in effect, that we should indeed treat those factual questions as mere distractions from the 'deeper truth' conveyed by such images. I disagree. I think that kind of perspective is both mistaken and pernicious.

I happened to be reminded of an e-mail exchange on these issues that I had with someone named Adam Rose back in 2003. The focus of that discussion was a world-famous incident during the Second Intifada in 2000, the explosion of violence that erupted after the breakdown of the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks between Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat. A Palestinian boy, Mohammed al-Dura, was allegedly killed by sustained fire from Israeli troops at a Gaza checkpoint while he cowered for protection behind his father against a wall, eventually dying in his father's arms. A televised portrayal of his death, filmed by a Palestinian cameraman and broadcast by the French news service France2, inflamed public opinion across the Arab world and beyond.



That passionate reaction was understandable, since this looked like the deliberate and gratuitously sadistic murder of a helpless and totally unthreatening child by Israeli soldiers. As James Fallows pointed out at the beginning of a careful analysis of this incident that he published in 2003, "Who Shot Mohammed al-Dura?":

The image of a boy shot dead in his helpless father's arms during an Israeli confrontation with Palestinians has become the Pietà of the Arab world. [....] The name Mohammed al-Dura is barely known in the United States. Yet to a billion people in the Muslim world it is an infamous symbol of grievance against Israel and—because of this country's support for Israel—against the United States as well.

Al-Dura was the twelve-year-old Palestinian boy shot and killed during an exchange of fire between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian demonstrators on September 30, 2000. The final few seconds of his life, when he crouched in terror behind his father, Jamal, and then slumped to the ground after bullets ripped through his torso, were captured by a television camera and broadcast around the world. Through repetition they have become as familiar and significant to Arab and Islamic viewers as photographs of bombed-out Hiroshima are to the people of Japan—or as footage of the crumbling World Trade Center is to Americans. Several Arab countries have issued postage stamps carrying a picture of the terrified boy. One of Baghdad's main streets was renamed The Martyr Mohammed Aldura Street. Morocco has an al-Dura Park. In one of the messages Osama bin Laden released after the September 11 attacks and the subsequent U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, he began a list of indictments against "American arrogance and Israeli violence" by saying, "In the epitome of his arrogance and the peak of his media campaign in which he boasts of 'enduring freedom,' Bush must not forget the image of Mohammed al-Dura and his fellow Muslims in Palestine and Iraq. If he has forgotten, then we will not forget, God willing." [....]

As Fallows explained in his article, it was already clear in 2003 that however Mohammed al-Dura died, he was almost certainly not killed by gunfire from the Israeli checkpoint.  Fallows correctly observed:  "The evidence will not change Arab minds—but the episode offers an object lesson in the incendiary power of an icon."

Since then, a long series of legal proceedings in France, during which France2 was compelled to divulge significant portions of the raw footage from which the televised broadcast was edited, have raised even more troubling questions. It turns out that many of the claims made by France2 about that raw footage were dishonest and misleading, and the footage itself looks very fishy. In the end, it is not even clear whether Mohammed al-Dura (or another boy) actually died in that incident, and no solid evidence has ever been produced to confirm that this occurred. It seems possible, at least, that the whole thing was a brilliantly effective hoax. (If so, that would leave open the question of whether France2 consciously participated in this hoax or else—which I suspect is more likely—was taken in along with everyone else, in part because the version of the story that they televised fit their preconceptions.)

These and other factual issues remain highly contentious. But many people are not even aware that the original version of the story has been effectively debunked, and continue to assume that it is true. And for other people, pursuing these factual questions is ultimately irrelevant and even unseemly, since it can only distract attention from the truly fundamental point—the unjust and oppressive Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, and Israel's brutal and repressive treatment of the Palestinians more generally.

=> Are those people right? In August 2003, via the e-mail list of Chicago Peace Now, I was alerted to a piece which made that argument explicitly: "The Truth of Mohammed al-Dura: A Response to James Fallows".

An interesting perspective regarding the death of Mohammed al-Dura from Adam Rose for all of you.

I responded:

Thanks for passing along this piece by Adam Rose, but I cannot resist one comment.

Rose sums up the thrust of his argument well at the beginning of his piece:

Whether or not a particular 12-year-old boy died at the hands of Israeli soldiers, the image of Mohammed al-Dura is an authentic symbol of the Israeli occupation.

He elaborates later in the piece:

This points to the second and larger problem with Fallows's argument: his narrow and incomplete understanding of "truth". From Fallows's perspective, the truth that matters is who shot Mohammed al-Dura and the truth is either that he was shot by Israelis or that he was not and the Israelis were framed. And, of course, in one sense this is right and important. But there is another, even more important truth of the matter connected to its symbolic nature. And it is this symbolic truth that Fallows completely misconstrues.

This is indeed an "interesting perspective," but it is hardly new or original. In fact, it's quite familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of 20th-century politics. It's a typically Stalinist position on the question of historical and political "truth," which received its most notorious "philosophical" justification in Merleau-Ponty's appalling book Humanism and Terror, and was expressed (and applied) in more vulgar practical forms by people like Zhdanov and legions of hardworking ordinary propagandists. That is, petty and superficial questions of empirical "truth" or "falsehood" are meaningless or trivial by comparison with the "deeper" truths of the basic, overriding struggle between revolution and counter-revolution. In fact, obsessing about these supposed "factual" questions (rather than focusing on the "more important truth of the matter connected to its symbolic nature," as Rose forthrightly puts it) is not just trivial and misleading, but "objectively" reactionary or even fascist.

Thus, Comrade Fallows's mistake is clear. He has fallen into the typically petty-bourgeois fallacy of what used to be called "empiricism". As Lukacs would have explained to poor Fallows, his thinking needs to be more "concrete"—that is, whether or not Mohammed al-Dura happened to be brutally murdered by Israeli soldiers in some narrow "factual" sense has no bearing on the "more important truth" that this image (not the image of his death, but the image of his deliberate murder by Israeli soldiers) is nevertheless an "authentic" symbol of the Israeli occupation. Since this image is "authentic" (in the sense of its larger "symbolic truth," which is obviously the "more important truth of the matter"), it's absurd to get hung up on whether or not the event in question actually happened.

As Leszek Kolakowski once argued in a penetrating essay on "Totalitarianism and the Virtue of the Lie", the real innovation of Stalinist political culture in this regard was not its tendency to base politics on lies (which is, alas, a very widespread and ordinary practice with a long history), but rather its systematic effort to undermine the whole sense that there was any meaningful or legitimate distinction between "truth" and "lies" in any empirical sense. (Some non-Stalinists who grasped this innovation, such as Goebbels, praised and admired it.) This effort was embodied most powerfully in the everyday operations of totalitarian political regimes, but it also required more sophisticated justifications by people like Lukacs and Merleau-Ponty and a host of less prominent thinkers and propagandists (many of whom were not Stalinists themselves, but rather fellow-travelers, admirers, and/or imitators).

(And by the way, to head off a rather common straw man in advance: This goes well beyond the important and illuminating recognition that our understandings of the world are unavoidably shaped by differing perspectives informed by different conceptual and symbolic frameworks, often rooted in different experiences and influenced by different interests. All of that is profoundly true and important, but it does not necessarily mean that we should give up any effort to distinguish in principle between trying to tell the truth and deliberate lying.)

I don't know whether you ever happened to see an interesting mid-1960s movie by Godard, "La Chinoise". The protagonists are a small cell of student "Maoists" in France. In one episode of the film, one of them recounts, with great admiration and enthusiasm, a news story about some Chinese students who had recently returned from Moscow to China, against the backdrop of the intensifying Sino-Soviet ideological conflict. They came off the plane with their heads wrapped in bandages–the result, they explained to waiting journalists, of the brutal beatings they had received from Soviet police (which in turn were the result and expression of the anti-revolutionary "revisionism" of the Soviet regime). The Chinese students talked about these beatings, and their injuries, at some length. Then they unwrapped the bandages, which revealed that they actually had no injuries. The French student telling the story commented that the journalists, who were startled by this, were too stupid to understand the point. They were hung up on the superficial fact that there were no injuries–and thus, presumably, no brutal beatings. As Adam Rose could have explained to them, they had entirely missed "the more important truth of the matter connected to its symbolic nature." The question of whether or not these particular beatings occurred was quite beside the point. Even if they hadn't taken place, the "more important truth" was that these beatings—and the whole imagery of the Chinese students' injuries, their bandages, etc.—nevertheless constituted "an authentic symbol" of the revisionism and counter-revolutionary brutality of the Soviet regime.

=> Yes, this is an "interesting perspective," which has often been used with great ingenuity and even perverse brilliance—often with good intentions and idealistic agendas, too. But I think the political history of the past century shows that it has some serious drawbacks as well. For this and other reasons, it's not a perspective that I find convincing or attractive ... and, to be perfectly honest, I tend to find its current manifestations (often presented in "post-modern" or "post-structuralist" guises) ridiculous and/or alarming ... and sometimes despicable and morally irresponsible as well.

Yours in struggle,
Jeff Weintraub

P.S. On balance, I mostly disagree with the substance of what Rose has to say in this piece, but he does bring up some valid (or partly valid, or potentially valid) points. However, they could have been developed more usefully and effectively without putting them in the overall framework of a perspective which argues that the "artistic truth" of images that vividly confirm what you already "know" (i.e., that represent and reinforce widely held prejudices) is more important than trying to figure out what actually happened.

--------------------------------------------------
Adam Rose replied (and I should let him have his say):

Subject: Re: [peacenowchicago] "The Truth of Mohammed al-Dura"
From: Adam Rose
To: Jeff Weintraub , Peace Now
Date: Thu 7 Aug 2003 09:19:46 -0500

Jeff:

As the author of the piece in question, I read your comments with great interest and would like to offer the following response.

1) Whatever the possible connections with Stalinism, etc., the distinction between symbolic and historical truth has both an honorable pedigree and excellent reputation in many modern circles. With respect to the former, I tried to show, for example, that Aristotle (who I presume is still in high standing--or at least not to be simply tarred and dismissed as a Stalinist) both recognized the distinction and held symbolic (or "poetic") truth in higher esteem in historical truth. I further tried to show that this distinction is commonly found useful in considering works of art. After all, how is one to think about the "truth" of "fiction" (works that are absolutely false in the historical sense)?

From this perspective, a representation of an event can have one of four possible "truth values":

symbolic     historical
1) TRUE    TRUE
2) TRUE     FALSE
3) FALSE   TRUE
------------------------
4) FALSE   FALSE

In cases 1 and 3, there is a historically-true representation--the event depicted "really happened". In cases 1 and 2, there is a symbolically-true representation--the event depicted "commonly/typically/always happens" and the representation is not so much of an event as of event-type and the event-type is true even if the specific event is not.

As I tried to show, these distinctions are commonly (and reasonably, I think) invoked in analyses of "historically-dubious" representations. Thus, truth of Shakespeare's Macbeth is generally acknowledged not to be its historic truth (whatever connection it may have to the historic truth about the historic figure Macbeth). Rather, the truth of Shakespeare's Macbeth -- like all tragedy -- is generally considered to be its symbolic truth, the sense that it conveys that "there but for the grace of God go I (or perhaps: "I'm never going to fall into THAT trap!").

Although I didn't mention it in the essay, such distinctions are also commonly used in considerations of the Bible and other scriptures. After all, it turns out that many of the events depicted may not be historically-true, starting with Creation and running through Moses and the exodus to the resurrection of Jesus. Rather than dismiss a historically-false Bible as a fraud of no value, many people (including many non-Stalinists) consider the symbolic truth of the events depicted to be of great value. From this perspective the Moses in the Bible is seen as akin to the Macbeth in Shakespeare's play.

2) As I said in my essay none of this is to say that I (or Aristotle or anyone else) deny the importance of historical truth. Of course it matters what "really happened". On the other hand, it is also important to keep the relevance of historical truth in perspective -- just as it is important to keep the relevance of symbolic truth in perspective.

In the case of Mohammed al-Dura, I think it is fair to say that most people exercised by the image/incident don't give a damn about the actual boy. And in some ways, rightly so. One individual tragedy is just one individual tragedy and the world is full of those--too full for people to empathize with all of them. Moreover, if such an event were believed/known to be unique or unusual--like a freak earthquake or a child falling down a well--it would not have resonated so strongly on all sides.

Rather it is the symbolic truth--the belief / knowledge that the al-Dura image depicts an event-type--that exercises everyone (including the Israelis bent on disproving the historical truth of the incident). But because of widespread misunderstanding, almost everyone THINKS it is the historical truth that is critically important. Thus all the energy to prove or disprove the historical truth of the incident. In short, in the wider sense of world politics, etc., harsh as it may sound, the historical truth of the death of one boy is meaningless--however it occurred--to everyone on all sides of the issue.

What matters is whether the depiction of al-Dura's death represents a genuine event-type--an event-type of small Palestinian boys armed with rocks at most being killed by larger Israeli boys armed with the most sophisticated weaponry available. And as I argued in the essay, there is a wealth of valid historically-true evidence (from B'Tselem and many others) that this event-type exists. Thus I think the case here is quite different from "La Chinoise" as you describe it.

Although I am generally wary of invoking the Holocaust, I think the case of Anne Franks is instructive here. On some brutal level, nobody gives a damn about the terrorization and death of one girl. What make her story so compelling is that it is taken as representative of the terrorization and deaths of thousands and millions and it is the system designed and implemented to create thousands and millions of Anne Franks that is truly horrifying. Now suppose the Diary of Anne Frank had been written as a work of fiction or that it turned out her father or others tinkered with the text or even fabricated it outright, would it tell us less about the horror of that system? Would it make the diary any less a "Tomb of the Unknown Jewish Children" who died invisibly (in contrast to "Anne Frank" whose death has been made visible to us)? In short, would it have anything to do at all with whether or not there was or was not a genuine "Anne Frank event-type" and whether the Diary was an authentic symbol of that event-type?

In some ways, of course, the answer is "yes". But in many, many ways, the answer is "no". And I think it is important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

(FOR THE RECORD: I AM NOT SAYING HERE THAT THE OCCUPATION IS THE EQUIVALENT OF THE HOLOCAUST IN ANY WAY. JUST THAT IT PROVIDES A PARALLEL EXAMPLE THAT JEWS AND THOSE SYMPATHETIC TO THEM ARE LIKELY TO EMPATHIZE WITH.)

From an opposite perspective, the assassination of JFK is equally instructive. In this case there really is no symbolic truth of the matter. JFK's death does NOT represent the death of many others. People really mourn the particular, individual man and the historical facts of who killed him are critical--including whether or not shots were fired from the "grassy knoll".

The revisionist analysis of Mohammed al-Dura tries to treat the event a JFK-type event, when it is really an Anne Frank-type event.

3) All of this seems to come to a head in the issue of what it takes to make "the Arabs" believe that "the Israelis/Jews" are "boy-killers". Fallows's piece suggests that "the Arabs" have no good reason for thinking this. On the contrary, he suggests they think what they want to think regardless of the evidence. Yet as I tried to show, they DO have the evidence. We all do, if we want to see it.

In your concluding remark on my piece you write:

P.S. On balance, I mostly disagree with the substance of what Rose has to say in this piece, but he does bring up some valid (or partly valid, or potentially valid) points. However, they could have been developed more usefully and effectively without putting them in the overall framework of a perspective which argues that the "artistic truth" of images that vividly confirm what you already "know" (i.e., that represent and reinforce widely held prejudices) is more important than trying to figure out what actually happened.

As I have argued in my essay and here, what the Arabs "know" is NOT simply widely-held prejudice (though of course it may be reinforced by that). And it is the blithe dismissal / delegitimization of this knowledge that I object to first and foremost.

If there is a de facto Israeli policy of creeping annexation,
If there is a de facto Israeli policy of "breaking" the Palestinians,
If there is a de facto Israeli policy of predation,
If Israel has both killed over 366 Palestinian minors and given every indication that such deaths are important only insofar as they contribute to the achievement of Israeli policy --

If all of this is true then the event-type depicted in the image of Mohammed al-Dura is also true. And on the world-historical level, it is the truth this event-type that really matters and that attention should be focused on. Everything else is smoke and mirrors. (Something that I understand Stalin was quite good at.)

Adam Rose

P.S. If you or others are interested, a formatted copy of the essay, complete with pictures, can be downloaded and printed from www.supportsanity.org (PDF 1.2 MB).

----------------------------------------
I responded in turn:

Hi Adam,

Thanks for your response to my remarks, which was serious, thoughtful, and (under the circumstances) quite temperate. I am getting at my e-mail only intermittently these days, so I just saw your message, and I can offer only a quick and incomplete counter-response.

You will probably not be surprised to learn that I am not really convinced, but let me restate some of the reasons why I feel that way.  To put it too briefly: I have no problem, in principle, with recognizing some kind of distinction between "historical" and "poetic" truth (for reasons that Aristotle, Kenneth Burke, and various others have suggested in various ways). (Despite my harsh words about Lukacs, I even think there is something insightful and potentially illuminating about his notion of "typical" as opposed to merely "average" or "naturalistic" representations.) The key question is how these concepts are used, or misused.  In particular, artistic representations that present themselves as fiction should be judged by different standards from stories, arguments, images, and other forms of communication and representation that claim to be factually true.

As for those pieces of "knowledge" that you list toward the end of your message ("If there is a de facto Israeli policy of creeping annexation" etc.) ... I think someone who "knows" those things is in fact correct, and absolutely nothing I said implies "blithe dismissal / delegitimization of this knowledge". In my opinion, that's a red herring.

On the other hand, if someone "knows" that the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories is defined fundamentally and essentially by the deliberate and gratuitously sadistic murder of unarmed civilians, including the murder of helpless and completely unthreatening children "for sport"—the supposed "truth" that you say is conveyed by the image of Mohammed al-Dura's martyrdom and the way it has been interpreted—then I would submit that they're wrong ... and that reinforcing and endorsing that particular belief is not just mistaken but pernicious and destructive.  In my opinion, that crosses the line between legitimate (or plausible) criticism and condemnation of Israeli policies and actions to hysterical and indiscriminate demonization of Israel and Israelis.  That kind of demonization is all too common in the world today, and endorsing and reinforcing it is both and unwise and reprehensible.  The results, in practice, have been disastrous for both Israelis and Palestinians.  At least, that is my strong and considered opinion.

In that crucial sense, "the image of Mohammed al-Dura" is not "an authentic symbol of the Israeli occupation."  And if the specific story conveyed by that particular image isn't even factually accurate, then that's an additional problem.

Yours for reality-based discourse,
Jeff Weintraub