Between Useful Idiocy and Outright Quislingery: Three Stories, With Plenty More To Come

Addressing a bevy of protesters at the opening of the Met's revival of terror-sympathizing opera "The Death of Klinghoffer", former US Attorney General Michael Mukasey brilliantly eviscerated the Met's advertising tagline "See It, Then Decide":

"When something is a cesspool, you don’t need to swim in it yourself to decide what it is."

Similarly, when my New Yorker arrived and I noticed that the latest offering from David Remnick entitled "Israel's New Intolerance",  I didn't need to read it to know it was of a piece with his usual penchant for bashing the Jewish state, and, I was able to back up my assertion by questioning his entire premise in the following letter I sent to the New Yorker editors [my hunch is it won't be published]:


"Mr. Remnick might want to familiarize himself with the plethora of officially-sanctioned Judeophobic PA media propaganda publicly available for viewing on palwatch.org before suggesting that there is any moral equivalency between Israel and her declared mortal enemies with whom she is forced to negotiate with for the most trivial of political concerns, not least because while Israel attempts to grapple with "minority issues" even if they occasionally fail to resolve them to everyone's satisfaction resulting in excoriations from the likes of Mr. Remnick for her failures, her counterparts simply deny that "Jews" [again--"Jews", not "Israelis"] are deserving of any rights, if they deserve to exist at all, and are afforded free passes from Mr. Remnick and his ilk . Whether the author neglected to research the existence of streams of genocidal imprecations from the PA [never mind Hamas] and therefore exhibited journalistic incompetence, or was aware of said propaganda yet chose to ignore it and therefore exhibited moral Lilliputianism of the lowest sort is an open question. But it matters little: in either case it reflects poorly on the author and his editors."


Interestingly, someone must have made some headway with said editors, as the print headline "Israel's New Intolerance" became the web headline "Israel's One-State Reality".  With apologies to Bob Uecker, just a weeeeee bit less incendiary.

[It was pointed out to me on the facebook thread where I posted this letter than the opening sentence may run-on.  I admitted the possibility, and mused that some article headlines just make me "mouth-frothy".]

Then there was the news that a  proposed law to declare Israel the nation-state of the Jewish people was being shelved becauze Tzipi Livni had concerns about a conflict between "preservation of Israel's Jewish character [and] democratic values".  Someone should have pointed out to her that, aside giving credence to the canard that such values ipso facto conflict, she should ask the various European nations that employ various versions of "leges sanguinis", or "provid[ing] immigration privileges to individuals with ethnic ties" if they suffer any  such conflicts.  Twenty-five countries [including Israel] have some version of the law. Most are democracies. But none other than Israel has their national rights scrutinized.

What's that called kiddies?  Don't answer all at once.

Finally, let Rabbi Shmuley tell what happened when attempts were made to get Jewish groups at NYU to sign on to promote a panel refuting Palestinian genocide libels at Cooper Union:


"Unexpectedly, we met even more opposition from Jewish groups on campus than from Palestinian ones. Jewish groups would not send the simple ad to their mailing lists...[] one student leader told me exactly how he felt.  'Israel is political. Our job is to create a Jewish environment for the students and bring them closer to tradition. Why would I risk being divisive by standing up for Israel? We stay away from politics.'

"Another student leader told me, 'We have excellent relationships with Arab and Palestinian students here. Associating ourselves with your event will elicit the ire of the Palestinian students and put us in their crosshairs. Why do we need that?' [] ...

"NYU has more Jewish students than any other private university in America, but we had to fight with Jewish organizations to promote Elie Wiesel! ... [T]he non-Jewish mainstream and political organizations [] were only too honored to host Elie Wiesel, and helped to fill the hall to capacity. Cooper Union sent a mailing to every student...

"Jewish organizational leaders are afraid of being “divisive,” of being marginalized as defenders of an unpopular regime, and of being accused of defending human rights abuses. In their fear, they cede the campus to anti-Israel activists."



The Quadrangle is now Occupied Territory, bordered on one side by Useful Idiocy and on the other by Outright Quislingery.

Break Point?

I thought this started five years ago.  But I didn’t anticipate the actual level of open hostility of this administration to Israel and whether it would manifest itself during a war.

It may not have come to the forefront during Cast Lead—which was stopped cold for the first Obama inauguration—or Pillar of Defense, which, aside from the usual only-Israel-has-to-actually-follow-“rules”-of-war type restraint, was further hamstrung by considerations relating to the 2012 election.

This time it started almost immediately, with John Kerry’s probably deliberate hot mic comments, and the series of blackmail attempts with varying levels of nakedness, from the aborted FAA flight ban, to the $11B defense deal signed with the biggest financial and logistical backer of Hamas, to the “leaked non-conversation” between Obama and Netanyahu that was denied by the PM’s office and the NSC…but not the White House.

I think Netanyahu knows exactly where he stands with this President, given Obama’s general anticolonialist and Everybody-But-America-First ideology playing out in other arenas, especially pronounced in his dealings in the Middle East aside from the conflict between Israel and her neighbors.  He essentially kicked off his Administration when he performed the Grovel In Cairo in early 2009, and continues straight through his recent eid-al-fatr declarations [“Muslims built this country”--but I thought “you didn’t build that”?]

Further evidence: his unwillingness to even give a modicum of aid and comfort to the Greens in Iran as Madman-dinejad’s minions mowed them down; his banking on the ascendancy of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt which blew up in his face when the Egyptians got buyers’ remorse, turned the MB out of office and started shooting them in the streets; his backtrack in Syria [even if not sending troops is salient, you still lose a ton of credibility drawing “red lines” you have no intention of backing up]; his failure to even deign to address the ISIS massacres and borderline enslavement of Christians in Mosul; and his attempts to allow Iran to get the bomb while he gives himself political cover for what he likely considers an inevitability [if he doesn’t believe that it’s Iran’s sovereign right to have one.  It’s also possible that he believes the Israelis will somehow take out the reactors or attempt to, and then he gets to condemn the Israelis while they ironically do his dirty work for him.]

[Something like the non-response to Mosul actually has precedent in American political history: when the Vietnamese invaded autogenocidal Cambodia and overthrew Pol Pot in 1979, the US, still smarting from the Vietnam War, condemned Vietnam.   Here the administration is hamstrung between its reluctance to condemn anything Muslim, its belief that its real genesis is the reaction to Gulf War II and the illegitimacy of having committed to that theater, and the concomitant possibility that they’d have to admit that the precipitous withdrawal might be a proximate cause.  Even if Megyn Kelly and Glenn Beck now think the right got it wrong, the days that blaming Bush would carry any weight are long over, which is why some on the right can now safely beat their breasts publicly.]

I think—aside from the counter-blackmail the Israelis pulled with the FAA ban [“You want ‘restraint’ in Gaza—we get the airport back”]—Netanyahu might sit and take diplomatic opprobrium as long as he gets to operate as Israel sees fit in Gaza, since his public is more than solidly behind him, because he’s going to force Obama to publicly reveal his endgame and finally dispense with the illusion that he’s anything but hostile to Israeli interests.   He’s slowly bringing the President to that point— where his Jewish approval is at the levels that Jimmy Carter’s was.

As I've mentioned before, absent all other reasons for Israel’s safety and security being a particular American interest, there is one almost transcendental reason: the spectre of dead Jews resulting from Administration inaction during the Holocaust.   Netanyahu is basically daring Obama to make into policy what Kissinger and Nixon could only discuss on the tapes: that another Holocaust might be a humanitarian issue but not a policy matter.

I actually don't think Obama is an anti-Semite.  [It's documented that Nixon and even Truman were.  And, according to Andrew and Leslie Cockburn--no friends of Israel--Jimmy Carter said he'd "f*** the Jews" in 1980, more than a decade before James Baker said something similar.]  But--like the pundit who said when Eric Cantor lost his most recent primary "it's not that they don't like Jews, they just love Jesus more"--it's not that Obama doesn't like Jews, he just likes their sworn mortal enemies more.  And Netanyahu is going to make him publicly choose sides and say so, which might put Obama in a political bind the likes of which haven't been seen in a long time.

How To NOT Fight To The Death

After reading Adam Winkler's Gun Fight and reading the treatment of the debate by Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, I had further confirmation that there are certain issues in American life ostensibly infused with disproportionate moral import where the advocates for one side or the other, aside from the shrillness and sanctimony that accompanies said advocacy, usually conduct their debates in ways that result in their losing a considerable modicum of respect [which they might not have to let bother them] and, more importantly, credibility [which they might want to think about].

In theory, it sometimes doesn't matter which side of a debate is right. It's more satisfying to watch insufferably sanctimonious advocates for one position or another--sometimes, it's both sides in a particular debate--try not to have their brains explode when confronted with serious paradoxes.  These are especially endemic to the gun, death penalty, gay marriage, abortion and immigration debates.  Something having to do with Eros and Thanatos, perhaps; but these are more pronounced in the US than anywhere else.

The recent botched execution of Clayton Lockett further amplified the capital contradictions.  From the left, they had to deal with the fact that if there ever was a poster child for the death penalty, Lockett was it; aside from the fact that clamoring for violation[s] of his rights invariably meant that the rights of his victims were ignored or deemed less important, he continued to present a clear and present danger to numerous individuals--both inside and outside--even while on death row.

From the right, the attempts to pretend that the process is humane while state governments chase their own tails trying to purchase the needed drugs and the added Keystone Kops-like attempts to revive Lockett just made them look ridiculous. The truly honest ardent death-penalty proponents might have had to own up to the fact that somebody might figure out they actually WANT the process to be painful: the same Supreme Court that declared that executions violate the 8th Amendment when they are "nothing more than the purposeless and needless imposition of pain and suffering; or [] grossly out of proportion to the severity of the crime"--aside from implying that some pain and suffering is not "purposeless and needless", and can be administered in "proportion to the severity of the crime"--went even further when it declared that "the expectation of pain and terror on the part of the defendant" was such a part and parcel of the death penalty that it therefore, ipso facto, could not be cruel and unusual.

[I've been told by various medical professionals that if states wanted to truly dispatch the condemned quickly and painlessly, 15 well-placed fentanyl patches would do the trick, the whole process running its course in 5 minutes.]

Now to keep my brains from exploding, and just in case people may have missed my previously stated positions on execution and gay marriage--and since I don't remember writing about abortion and had just a fleeting treatment of guns--here they are in a nutshell:

Guns: the 2nd amendment does allow for individually-owned weaponry AND for serious regulation of firearms [just ask Justice Scalia], even to the point that we should have a federal registry.

Death Penalty: the death penalty needs to be kept on the books for, as Rabbi Aharon Soloveitchik put it, "extraordinary threats to public order". [Clayton Lockett and Malik Nidal Hassan qualify.] But the process needs to be transparent [which states make a mockery of when they render attempts at drug procurement and compounding to be "state secrets"] and equitable [cue the associated racial/socio-economic imbroglios. Either way the system stinks.]

Abortion:  as far as government involvement goes, it should be safe, legal, and rare.  I would call its employment as contraception without mitigating circumstances [economics don't count] morally dubious at best, but there are cases beyond even rape, incest and threats to the mother's life that I think mandate that the process be allowed even up to crowning.   Personhood legislation is ridiculous; it is never equivalent to infanticide.  And any attempt to ban contraception is not even worthy of consideration.  The left has its own special paradoxes to deal with in this arena [Kristen Powers especially nails it] but basically, they are easy to explain: conservatives want small government,  less regulation and more privacy, except here; liberals want to government to protect the disadvantaged [they would sooner protect endangered animals than human fetuses, and--I won't say someone--something is getting hurt], except here.

Gay marriage: restating what I wrote in 2008--my religious principles as I understand them preclude me from full-on advocacy, but that's theology, and other than the purely theological, there is no truly logical reason to morally oppose homosexual relations between consenting adults.  Conservatives have failed to make any salient secular case for themselves in this arena and should stop pretending that it can be anything but a religious issue.  All other arguments are ontological.

Oh, and immigration: we should take a cue from Mexico's laws--2 years in the clink and deportation for the first offense, 10 years in the clink and deportation for the second offense.  And a really big wall on the Southern border.  Plus, this will have the added bonus of keeping the private prison lobby happy if they're forced to release everyone convicted of low-level drug offenses, with a much bigger pool to draw from.  Or--we could just annex the rest of Mexico and finish the job[s] we started in 1836 and 1848.