tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-51760062683021837762024-03-13T11:29:16.669-04:00The Shipler ReportA Journal of Fact and OpinionDavehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305265860388931637noreply@blogger.comBlogger340125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5176006268302183776.post-84477946246765934252024-03-06T04:47:00.001-05:002024-03-06T04:47:04.913-05:00The War of Atrocities<p> </p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">By David K.
Shipler</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In a grisly coincidence, the UN
within 24 hours has documented two outrages of the Israel-Gaza war that will
permanently scar the lives of those who survive: Sexual crimes by Hamas, which
probably continue against young Israeli women who are still hostages. And severe
malnutrition among tens of thousands of Palestinian children, some at critical
stages of brain development. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">A team headed by the UN Special
Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict confirmed most earlier reports of
sexual assaults by Hamas fighters who invaded Israel from Gaza on October 7.
But in addition, the UN task force found “clear and convincing information that
sexual violence, including rape, sexualized torture, cruel, inhuman, and
degrading treatment occurred against some women and children during their time
in captivity and has reasonable grounds to believe that this violence may be
ongoing.” The team did not say, but everyone knows, that the deep trauma
suffered by such victims is likely to be ongoing as well, perhaps lifelong.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">In what might aptly be called divine
injustice, the hostages taken October 7, and evidently still being held, include
seven young female soldiers from the Nahal Oz military base, an intelligence
hub. Women agents there had picked up strong indicators of the coming Hamas
attack and repeatedly urged their male superior officers—in vain—to take
preventive action.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Whether the hostages are the same women
who sounded the alarm is not publicly known, but they are from the same unit. That
they should suffer such intimate brutality because they or their colleagues
were ignored ought to haunt the incompetent government of Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu and its somnolent security apparatus. Furthermore, Israeli
officials have reportedly worried that Hamas would rather kill the women than
release them to tell the world of their torment.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">At the same time, the UN’s World Health
Organization has warned that famine is “almost inevitable,” and reported this
week that 10 children in northern Gaza had died of starvation. Israel’s
retaliatory strategy of cutting off Gaza’s two million Palestinians from most
supplies of food, water, electricity, and medical care has taken a severe toll
on health, even as sporadic, inadequate aid shipments and air drops have been
permitted. Eventually, famine and disease are expected to cause at least as
many casualties as the 30,000 deaths Hamas has reported from Israeli bombing
and ground fighting.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Here, too, the unseen impacts are
inevitable. Just as post-traumatic stress disorder is a lasting condition for survivors
of sexual torture, the cognitive damage to children suffering malnutrition is
likely to be lifelong. (Why this is not a routine part of the mainstream
media’s war reporting is surprising: Neuroscientists have researched it
extensively.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">At critical periods of brain development—especially
in last two trimesters of pregnancy and the first two to three years of
life—the inadequacy of certain nutrients can inhibit the creation of neurons
and synapses, of myelin sheaths and the neurological connections that are
essential to reasoning, learning, memory, and behavior in adulthood.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">For at least half a century, scientists
have been documenting how the developing brain suffers from insufficient iron,
iodine, folate, zinc, calcium, magnesium, selenium, and various vitamins, all
found in balanced diets of fresh fruits and vegetables, meat, fish, eggs, and
dairy products. The finding is made in study after study, including the
succinct </span><a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28746059/"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">warning</span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"> in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Journal of Developmental & Behavioral
Pediatrics </i>that, after age two, “the effects of malnutrition on stunting
may be irreversible, and some of the functional deficits may become permanent.”
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Longitudinal studies have shown the
lifelong effects. Seventy-seven infants in Barbados, for example, hospitalized
with protein deficiency, then received nutritious food between the ages of one
and twelve. Nevertheless, in their thirties, they had </span><a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4131534/"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">compromised</span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"> “verbal fluency,
working memory, processing speed, and visuospatial integration” compared to a
healthy group from the same classrooms.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Iron deficiency during pregnancy can cause
serious damage to the fetus, even if the child gets adequate iron later.
Without enough meat, poultry, fish, spinach, or beans, the mother and child can
suffer from anemia, which decreases the formation of the myelin sheath, whose
fatty matter insulates nerve cells and helps accelerate nerve conduction.
Insufficient iron affects the metabolism in the hippocampus, critical for
memory, and can lead to low birth rate, which is associated with cerebral palsy
and other neurological problems.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Studies following children who were anemic
as infants found that years later, in school, they scored lower in math,
written expression, motor functioning, spatial memory, and selective recall.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Then, too, hunger—or even the fear of
hunger—creates an additional layer of anxiety on top of the terrors of war.
Learning disabilities and mental health problems result. “Learning is a
discretionary activity, after you’re well-fed, warm, secure,” said Dr. Deborah
A. Frank, who founded a malnutrition clinic at the Boston Medical Center.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Persistent, elevated stress hormones have
an impact on the size and architecture of the developing brain, </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">a group of scientists </span><a href="https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/pediatrics/139/Supplement_1/S23.full.pdf"><span style="color: #0563c1; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">reported</span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"> in 2016, “specifically the
amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex.” Mental health implications
abound: people experiencing food insecurity alone, even without warfare,
display depression, PTSD, hopelessness, and suicidality. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">All this is happening to innocent Palestinian children
in Gaza as a result of Israel’s draconian strategy. And that, in turn, is the
result of Hamas’s sadistic attacks on innocent Israelis, which struck the country
with a novel, pervasive fear of insecurity. And that, in turn is the result of
. . . You can spin back through the weary history of that tortured land and try
to find the original sin that caused it all. Or you can understand that every
effect there has a cause and no untanglement of cause and effect is feasible.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">Then, having been foiled by history, you can look to
the future and understand that what lies ahead, damaged by the present, will effectively
continue the war’s harm for a generation or more—even if a total cease fire
were declared today.</span><o:p></o:p></p>Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305265860388931637noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5176006268302183776.post-78507305720939340792023-12-30T17:07:00.003-05:002024-03-06T08:12:18.978-05:00Religious Absolutism: Isaac and Ishmael<p> </p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">By David K. Shipler </p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;"><i>Also published by <a href="https://momentmag.com/opinion-religious-absolutism-isaac-ishmael/">Moment Magazine</a></i><a href="https://momentmag.com/opinion-religious-absolutism-isaac-ishmael/"> </a> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">If you list the elements of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, you'll see that while most are subject to compromise, one is virtually non-negotiable: religion at its most dogmatic. It has grown more prominent over the decades as devout militants have gained power among both Israeli Jews and Palestinian Muslims.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Measuring its ultimate influence is
difficult, for the dispute is largely secular, and is seen that way by most
Israelis and Palestinians, polls show. In theory, the two sides’ overlapping territorial
claims, driven by the clash of two nationalisms, could be resolved by drawing
reasonable borders between Israel and a Palestinian state. West Bank Jewish
settlements could be dismantled and consolidated. Security concerns could be
addressed by humane, mutual protections. Jerusalem could be shared. Palestinians
could bargain away their “right of return” to former villages inside Israel. The
dueling historical narratives of grievance, so central to the conflict’s
psychology, might gradually fade as uneasy neighbors learn to coexist.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>That is
all eventually possible, but less likely when each of the issues is salted with
the absolutism of divine mission, as certain Israeli and Palestinian leaders
are doing. They merge the sacred and the temporal, combine faith with tribal
identity, and infuse piety into their peoples’ past grievances and present
longings.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The current example is the war in Gaza. At dawn
on October 7, a voice on the Hamas military frequency <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2023/11/17/how-hamas-breached-israel-iron-wall/">announced</a>
to the fighters: “Rocket barrages are being fired right now at the occupied
cities! May God empower and grace the holy warriors!” The man spoke in a pitch
of ecstasy, echoed by another’s exultant answer through the static: “The
resistance is now inside the occupied territories!”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">“<i>Allahu Akbar!”</i> (God is most
great!)<i> </i>the young Palestinians shouted as they streamed from Gaza through
breaches blown in Israel’s border fence, their body cameras recording their
fervent chants as they whooped in celebration over Israeli corpses. Each
terrorist who died for his faith would earn the honor of being called <i>shaheed</i>
(martyr).<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Thus began the worst day for Israel
in its 75-year existence, inflamed by religious slogans and symbols. Hamas wants
to replace the Jewish state with an Islamic state. It named its sadistic attack
“Al-Aqsa Flood,” after the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, the third holiest site
in Islam, now in Israel’s capital.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">In turn, after the Hamas slaughters
that day, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/15/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-war-rhetoric.html?searchResultPosition=1">embraced</a><span class="MsoHyperlink"> </span>a biblical analogy by likening the Palestinians to
Amalek, the ancient nomads whose complete extermination was ordered by God. This
seemed to consider the massive assaults on Gaza that followed as divinely
blessed. Other religious terms were tossed around. Israeli officials named the artificial
intelligence that picked its targets in Gaza <a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/12/14/1218643254/israel-is-using-an-ai-system-to-find-targets-in-gaza-experts-say-its-just-the-st">“the
Gospel.”</a> Netanyahu <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/unsatisfied-with-swords-of-iron-as-name-of-gaza-war-netanyahu-floats-alternatives/ar-AA1lFcjy">reportedly
proposed</a> naming this “the Genesis War.”<span></span></p><a name='more'></a><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Genesis.
There, in the first book of the Torah, zealous Israeli settlers find God’s deed
to the West Bank, which they call by its biblical names Judea and Samaria,
given through the Prophet Abraham and his son Isaac, the progenitor of the
Jewish people. For Arabs, however, the descent begins with Abraham’s son
Ishmael, born to his concubine Hagar. The putative cousins are now soiling and
rending the deed.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Terms of piety sound too grand for
a secular conflict, but they have gained resonance in recent decades as the
political power of religious fundamentalists on both sides has exceeded their
number in the Israeli and Palestinian populations.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Some polling has distinguished between
earthly antagonism and heavenly dictum. A significant <span class="MsoHyperlink">survey</span>
this December found that while 72 percent of a sample of Palestinians in the
West Bank and Gaza endorsed the October 7 attacks by Hamas, only 11 percent listed
the “first most vital Palestinian goal” as “a religious society, one that
applies all Islamic teachings.” Yet that is the precisely the goal pursued by
Hamas as it has ruled and armed Gaza, hijacking the Palestinian cause of
nationalism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">That nationalist cause generated
much higher percentages in the poll: 43 percent chose a Palestinian state and
an end to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as the primary goal; 36
percent picked a right of return to Arab towns vacated in Israel’s 1948 war of
independence.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">If the religious component finishes
a distant third in Palestinians’ priorities, how should it be assessed? Not
with complacency when it seems marginal, according to hard experience. Holy
ideology can have a stubborn appeal and demands respect.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Long before Netanyahu’s reference
to Amalek, in the early 1980s, I heard as much <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>from a group of teenage boys in the extremist
Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba, near Hebron. <span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">They were outliers four decades ago, taught by the most radical settler
movement at the fringes of Israeli thinking. But they were a cautionary tale
about the future as.their biblical absolutism moved to the center of Israeli
authority, right into the prime minister’s office. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">The boys</span> told me they were being taught in school that Arabs are
the Amalekites, who attacked the Israelites repeatedly during the exodus from
Egypt. “It says in the Torah that you have to destroy all the remnants of
Amalek,” said Oren, 13. Indeed, the command to Saul is found in I Samuel 15:2-3:
“Thus saith the Lord of hosts. I remember that which Amalek did to Israel . . .
Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them
not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and
ass.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Netanyahu, not a devoutly religious
man, said after the October 7 attack: “You must remember what Amalek has done
to you, says our Holy Bible. We do remember.”<a name="_Hlk154478996" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </a></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk154478996;">One
can rationalize away Netanyahu’s Amalek analogy as a spasm of fury, or a
politically opportunistic reference to preserve his standing with the religious
parties essential to his narrow governing coalition. But whatever he intended,
his citation strikes a chord that surely resonates--from ancient history into the
ranks of Israeli forces pummeling Gaza. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk154478996;"></span>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The holy imprimatur fits into the
religio-nationalist passion driving the most militant Jewish settlers who, with
government support, have turned the West Bank into a patchwork of Israeli
control, foreclosing the prospect of assembling contiguous land for a Palestinian
state. The Arabs could stay, explained a boy named Aharon at the Jewish
settlement back then, but “we have to be ruling over them and not them ruling
over us.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">That classroom lesson stands in
ironic parallel with the ideology of Hamas. Its <a href="https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/doctrine-hamas">Covenant</a> of 1988
allows Muslims, Jews, and Christians “to coexist in peace and quiet with each
other,” but only “under the wing of Islam,” according to Article 31. “It is the
duty of the followers of other religions to stop disputing the sovereignty of
Islam in this region, because the day these followers should take over there
will be nothing but carnage, displacement, and terror.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Religious strife is most distilled
on<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">the Temple Mount, as Jews call the manmade
plateau in the Old City of Jerusalem. To Muslims, it is the Noble Sanctuary,
the site of Al-Aqsa mosque and the golden Dome of the Rock, built around an
outcropping of bedrock that holds sacred meaning in both Judaism and Islam. It
was the place of the two ancient Jewish Temples and the spot from which Muslims
believe Muhammad ascended on his winged horse on his night journey to heaven.
Jewish extremists speak of building a third Jewish temple there, which the Israeli
government opposes, while many Palestinian Muslims harbor angry suspicions that
displacing their holy sites is Israel’s nefarious objective. Repeated clashes
erupt when radical Jews defy rabbinical orders and pray near Al-Aqsa. </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Islam and Christianity, which the
late scholar Bernard Lewis called the daughters of Judaism, need not be in
conflict over religious precepts and practices. The Quran, taken as God’s
revelation to Muhammad, reveres all the prophets, including Moses and Jesus. Early
Islamic ritual included prayer facing Jerusalem, a sabbath, the observance of a
fast day, and the old Jewish custom of bowing and prostration during prayer.
Muhammad initially looked to Jews as his followers, but because they rejected
him—causing a grievance still kept alive by some Muslims—Jews appear in the
Quran in passages of both respect and condemnation. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Some 40 years ago, Rabbi David
Hartman, who founded the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, tried to
initiate a dialogue with Muslim clerics. He did not succeed to the extent he
hoped. As ethical and compassionate as religion can be if you find the
appropriate texts and teachings, and as much as he wished for a Judaism
faithful to its fervent morality, he had no illusions about the impulses of
religious culture.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">“The Bible doesn’t teach you
tolerance; that I want you to know,” he told me then. “Religion is the source
of utopian dreams, and it is fundamentally reactionary, not pluralistic.”<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span></p>
<div style="text-indent: 48px;"><i> </i></div>Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305265860388931637noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5176006268302183776.post-16462233517675262802023-12-10T17:58:00.004-05:002023-12-30T17:19:48.643-05:00Lessons From the College Presidents<p> </p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">By David K. Shipler </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>During a
presidential debate in 1988, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis sank his presidential
campaign with a <a href="file:///C:/Users/dkshi/Documents/Shipler%20Report/Bing%20Videos">clinical,
legalistic answer</a> to a question about his wife from reporter Bernard Shaw: “Governor,
if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death
penalty for the killer?”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Instead
of reacting from his gut, Dukakis responded from his head. Instead of exploding
first with a vengeful desire to tear the man limb from limb himself, he jumped
right to the substantive answer on capital punishment: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“No, I don’t, Bernard, and I think you know
that I’ve opposed the death penalty during all of my life. I don’t see any
evidence that it’s a deterrent, and I think there are better and more effective
ways to deal with violent crime. We’ve done so in my own state. It’s one of the
reasons why we have had the biggest drop in crime of any industrial state in America
. . .” By that point, if not sooner, millions of voters were incensed by his
lack of passion, no matter how legitimate his policy.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It’s
not an exact parallel, but it’s instructive nonetheless in how the three
presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania made fools of
themselves in last week’s congressional hearing. Excessively prepared by the prominent
law firm of WilmerHale, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/08/business/dealbook/wilmerhale-penn-harvard-mit-antisemitism-hearing.html">according
to</a> <i>The New York Times</i>, they slipped catastrophically into procedural
answers during a sequence of prosecutorial questions on whether calls by
students for the genocide of Jews would constitute punishable harassment.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Again,
instead of the raw gut reaction of “Yes!” two of them in particular, Elizabeth
Magill of Penn (who has since been forced to resign) and Claudine Gay of
Harvard, tried to draw a line between speech and conduct. The first is usually
protected, the second, often not. They failed to recognize that verbal calls to
exterminate Jews, who make up part of their student populations, would at least
blur that line and probably erase it entirely.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">They may have been complacent about
antisemitism on their campuses, as some Jewish students have complained. Or they
may have been more sensitive than last week’s blundering made them seem. In any
event, cautionary lawyering apparently made them gun-shy about potential free-speech
lawsuits from students. The presidents acted as if they were in a courtroom
instead of a hearing room. And therein lie some lessons.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="margin-left: 0.75in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">1.<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->Never testify before Congress voluntarily. If you’re
not under subpoena, obligated as a government official to appear, or seeking
Senate confirmation for a position. Don’t naively imagine that the legislators are
inviting you because they are actually seeking information. The Republicans
especially want you as a foil to posture, perform, and promote themselves into
political orbit.<span></span></p><a name='more'></a> <o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 0.75in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">2.<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->If you can’t resist the honor of being a
witness, be prepared to push back on uninformed or hypocritical questioners. There
was no reason to accept brow-beating by failing to note the country’s rising
phenomenon of hateful speech in the country, fostered by certain political
leaders. Why not call out last week’s acerbic interrogator, the Republican Congresswoman
Elise Stefanik? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A former moderate turned
hard-right, she got on her high horse about antisemitism while supporting the
country’s chief enabler of white supremacists and neo-Nazis, Donald Trump.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 0.75in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">3.<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->Play the role of decent human being first, and
only second the role of considered academic, bureaucrat, policy wonk, or fund-raiser.
Say what you feel, not only what you think. Tucked into the presidents’
responses were the appropriate revulsions about antisemitism, but they were wrapped
in procedural scaffolding, making them seem bloodless. Remember, again, this is
a hearing room, not a classroom or a courtroom.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 0.75in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">4.<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->Address the perplexities of free speech head on.
Not all speech is protected, even under the First Amendment. Certain threats
are punishable in and of themselves. Further, the First Amendment restricts
what government may prevent or punish, not usually what non-state institutions such
as those three private universities may do. Well before coming to Washington, the
presidents must have—should have—thought through this question of how much speech
can legitimately be curbed without snuffing out intellectual freedom. It’s a
balancing act, because a college owes its members security from a hostile
environment. It also owes students an education, including what Stefanik and
her fellow Republicans vitriolically oppose: good diversity, equity and
inclusion programs to prepare students for the diverse world they will enter.
The college presidents surely know that the best protection for healthy freedom
of speech is not punishment. It is the internal moral compass of every student
who can learn to listen as well as speak, to agitate without threatening.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 0.75in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">5.<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->Don’t be afraid of your students. They are there
to learn, and you are there to teach and to model free intellectual inquiry.
Too many quivering administrators these days are cowed when students disrupt or
cancel speakers they disagree with, thereby narrowing the field of debate and
corrupting the university’s purpose.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="margin-left: 0.75in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">6.<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->Thoroughly familiarize yourself with the subject
at hand, in this case the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the slogans of
protest. The presidents should have been able to see immediately the logic of
Stefanik’s interrogation, which was designed to entrap.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">If you read more of the hearing’s
transcript than the brief clips on the news, you’ll see what Stefanik was up to:
corner the presidents into admitting that they had not acted to curb
antisemitism. She was trying to do that by conflating “intifada” (“uprising”) with
genocide. Here is a relevant excerpt from an exchange with Harvard’s President
Gay, who is Black:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">STEFANIK<b>:</b> Dr. Gay, a
Harvard student calling for the mass murder of African Americans is not
protected free speech at Harvard, correct?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">GAY: Our commitment to free
speech …<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">STEFANIK,<i> interrupting</i>: It’s
a yes or no question. Is that okay for students to call for the mass murder of
African Americans at Harvard? Is that protected free speech?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">GAY: Our commitment to free
speech extends …<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">STEFANIK <i>interrupting</i>: It’s
a yes or no question. Let me ask you this. You are president of Harvard, so I
assume you’re familiar the term intifada, correct?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">GAY: I’ve heard that term,
yes.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">STEFANIK: And you understand
that the use of the term intifada in the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict
is indeed a call for violent armed resistance against the state of Israel,
including violence against civilians and the genocide of Jews. Are you aware of
that? <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">GAY: That type of hateful
speech is personally abhorrent to me.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">STEFANIK: And there have been
multiple marches at Harvard with students chanting, quote, There is only one
solution intifada, revolution, and, quote, globalize the intifada. Is that
correct? <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">GAY: I’ve heard that
thoughtless, reckless and hateful language on our campus. Yes.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">STEFANIK: So based upon your
testimony,<i> </i>you understand that this call for intifada is to commit
genocide against the Jewish people in Israel and globally. Correct? <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">GAY: I will say again, that
type of hateful speech is personally abhorrent to me<i>.</i><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">STEFANIK: Do you believe that
type of hateful speech is contrary to Harvard’s code of conduct, or is it
allowed at Harvard?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">GAY: It is at odds with the
values of Harvard.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">STEFANIK: Can you not say here
that it is against the code of conduct at Harvard?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">GAY: We embrace a commitment
to free expression, even of views that are objectionable, offensive, hateful.
It’s when that speech crosses into conduct that violates our policies against
bullying, harassment, intimidation--<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">STEFANIK <i>interrupting</i>: Does
that speech not cross that barrier? Does that speech not call for the genocide
of Jews and the elimination of Israel?<i> </i>When you testify<i> </i>that
you understand that is the definition of intifada, is that speech according to
the code of conduct or not?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">GAY: We embrace a commitment
to free expression and give a wide berth to free expression, even of views that
are objectionable.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The word “context,” so integral to
providing students with due process if they’re charged with violations, proved
incendiary in this hearing. To Stefanik’s question on whether calling for
genocide violated Harvard’s rules against bullying or harassment, Gay answered,
“It can be, depending on the context.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">“What’s the context?” Stefanik
asked.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">“Targeted at an individual,” said
Gay.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">“It’s targeted at Jewish students,
Jewish individuals,” Stefanik shot back.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Evidently, Stefanik was not getting
exactly what she expected from the presidents: that calls for genocide violated
the codes of conduct. If they’d said yes, her next question would surely have
been: So, what punishments for that code were applied? And if the answers were
none--bingo, gotcha for tolerating antisemitism.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">There seems to be no evidence that
students have urged “genocide.” Rather, the entire line of interrogation relied
on Stefanik’s assertion that pro-Palestinian protesters were advocating
genocide against Jews by calling for an intifada. It‘s a questionable argument,
as Gay might have said had she been better prepared. The term intifada, as used
by Palestinians to describe two past episodes of violent “uprisings” against Jews
in Israel, has not been generally taken as a synonym for genocide against all
Jews everywhere, extending to Harvard’s campus. Even the slogan “globalize the
intifada” usually means global activism for the Palestinian cause, not mass
murder of Jews worldwide. Gay missed the opportunity to draw that distinction.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The clumsy retreat into procedural
language was sharply displayed in this exchange with Magill of Penn:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>STEFANIK: At Penn, does calling for the
genocide of Jews violate Penn’s rules or code of conduct? Yes or no.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">MAGILL: If the speech turns into
conduct, it can be harassment, yes. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">STEFANIK: I am asking specifically,
calling for the genocide of Jews, does that constitute bullying or harassment?
Yes or no?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">MAGILL-- if the speech becomes
conduct, it can be harassment, yes.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">STEFANIK, <i>her voice rising to an
incredulous tremor</i>: Conduct meaning, committing the act of genocide?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Ouch. Magill dug herself in deeper by
saying, “It is a context-dependent decision, Congresswoman.” Magill is a law
professor.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>With the benefit of the doubt, the
presidents could be seen as trying to be balanced and considered in their attempts
to defend freedom of speech on highly polarized campuses. Ironically, their
ineptitude is likely to accomplish the opposite, emboldening the hard-right groundswell
of contempt for higher education’s supposed leftist “elites” and “experts.” Under
pressure from donors and politicians, the scope of permitted protest and
debate, already eroded by the dogmatic left, is likely to be narrowed further,
just when the country desperately needs open, civil discourse. <o:p></o:p></p>Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305265860388931637noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5176006268302183776.post-32923113484803822032023-12-08T08:14:00.004-05:002023-12-10T20:54:13.348-05:00For Israel: A Blank Check or Tangled Strings?<p> </p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">By David K. Shipler </p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-size: 10pt;">First published by <a href="https://momentmag.com/opinion-shipler-west-bank-settlements/">Moment Magazine</a></span></i><a href="https://momentmag.com/opinion-shipler-west-bank-settlements/"> </a></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This is
an awkward time to attach conditions to the generous military aid that the
United States provides to Israel. But it should be considered, not only to curb
civilian casualties in Gaza, as some Democratic senators wish, but also to curb
Jewish settlements in the West Bank, which have long poisoned prospects for Israeli-Palestinian
reconciliation.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span> <span> </span></span>With the exception of the Trump White
House, which supported settlements, Republican and Democratic administrations
have declared Israel’s settlement policy an obstacle to peace. Yet the U.S. has
never used the leverage of the purse to restrain the practice. Since the Oslo
accords of 1993, the </span><a href="https://peacenow.org.il/en/30-years-after-oslo-the-data-that-shows-how-the-settlements-proliferated-following-the-oslo-accords" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">number</a><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
of Israeli residents on the West Bank has soared from 110,000 to more than
500,000, the number of settlements from 128 to about 300, now scattered
throughout Palestinian areas.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">American officials have done little
more than complain and wring their hands as Israelis have populated territory that
might have formed a Palestinian state, constructing government-subsidized
developments whose town houses, schools, synagogues, orchards, factories, and
swimming pools have an aura of permanence that belies the term “settlements.” They
are satellite cities and sweeping suburbs. They have created such a crazy-quilt
of jurisdictions that piecing together territory for Palestinian sovereignty
would now require the departure of tens of thousands of Israeli Jews. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Moreover, a thuggish minority of Israeli
settlers have tormented their Palestinian neighbors through home invasions and vandalism,
destruction of olive groves, and even murder with impunity. They are
religio-nationalist zealots operating in a free-wheeling environment of
self-righteous extremism. This is not new, just more widespread and
unrestrained. It has been going on for at least 40 years, recently escalating
to a level attracting international attention as settlers <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/11/09/west-bank-israel-settlers-violence/">try
to terrify</a> Palestinians into fleeing—with some success. At least 11 Arab communities
have been emptied so far this year, according to the West Bank Protection
Consortium, a monitoring group of non-governmental organizations funded by ten European
countries. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The problem may seem purely
political and humanitarian, but it has military consequences for Israel. What
happens on the West Bank resonates in Gaza, where Hamas ruled and armed itself
for the gruesome slaughters and kidnappings of October 7. The Palestinian prisoners
whose release Hamas is obtaining in exchange for hostages are virtually all West
Bank residents, arrested by Israeli forces there and often held without charge
or trial. By remote control, Israeli settlers and soldiers in the West Bank seem
to have contributed to radicalization in Gaza, at least to some degree.<span></span></p><a name='more'></a><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Furthermore, the more settlers, the
more targets of Palestinian violence, and the more military assets are needed
in the West Bank to protect them. Army resources are drawn from elsewhere,
including the border with Gaza, whose high-tech monitoring proved no match for
the thousands of Hamas fighters who pierced the security fence in some 30
places and ran freely for hours killing Israelis before Israeli troops arrived.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">So, if strings were tied to U.S.
aid, they should lead to West Bank settlements as well as to Palestinians’
suffering under Israel’s fierce military tactics. Reining in settlements might meet
less political opposition at this moment of struggle. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Israel’s immense retaliatory
assault on the Gaza Strip has been unprecedented, but so was the sadistic,
intimate terrorism perpetrated by Hamas. Virtually all Israelis have lost their
sense of sanctuary, even in the private depths of their own houses. Some
250,000 Israelis have fled their towns and kibbutzim near the northern and
southern borders. The callup of reservists is sapping Israel’s economy. Unsurprisingly,
the hard-right government is bent on obliterating the military and political
capacity of Hamas, whose Islamist-nationalist covenant calls for obliterating
the Jewish state.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Into this contest of mutual
obliteration step 26 senators, led by Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, who
are <a href="https://www.vanhollen.senate.gov/news/press-releases/van-hollen-murphy-schatz-and-reed-lead-majority-of-democratic-caucus-in-push-for-more-information-around-strategy-to-defeat-hamas-protect-civilians-in-gaza">implicitly
tying strings</a> to aid, including the $14.3 billion requested by President
Biden, by urging Israel to reduce civilian casualties in Gaza and crack down on
vigilante settlers in the West Bank. “We continue to support additional
assistance to Israel in the aftermath of the brutal Hamas attacks,” they said
in a statement, “but we are all in agreement that this assistance must be
consistent with our interests and values and used in a manner that adheres to
international humanitarian law, the law of armed conflict, and U.S. law. We
need to find a better path toward helping Israel achieve legitimate military
and security objectives. U.S. assistance has never come in the form of a blank
check – regardless of the recipient.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">This looks like a shot across the
bow.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">But Israel is good at ducking. Periodically,
as American administrations extracted promises to “freeze” settlements while
peace talks were underway, Israel’s governments evaded the pledge by merely
expanding existing settlements rather than building new ones. Authorities have
winked as small groups of Israelis have put house trailers illegally on West
Bank hilltops as embryonic settlements, unauthorized at first and then often
legitimized.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">That’s how it all began, in fact.
Shortly after the West Bank city of Hebron was captured in the 1967 war,
several nationalist Jews led by Rabbi Moshe Levinger checked into the Park
Hotel in the city’s center, owned by Fahd Kawasmeh, the future pro-P.L.O.
mayor.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Hebron, believed to be the burial
place of the prophet Abraham, had been home to a small community of devout Jews
for centuries, a presence interrupted by Arab attacks in 1929 and 1936.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now, in the flush of the 1967 victory, Levinger’s
group was determined to reconnect those roots. The Labor government, facing inflammatory
tensions with the Palestinian population, tried to get the Jews to leave, but
they refused until offered a site on the city’s outskirts.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">There, a makeshift encampment grew
into a substantial suburb of apartment buildings with the biblical name Kiryat
Arba. It is a centerpiece of the settlement movement’s dogmatic extremists.
Later, Levinger, his American-born wife, and his followers also established
residence in central Hebron, which remains a hotbed of Arab-Jewish friction.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Gradually over the decades, the
amalgam of religious and nationalist drives have moved closer and closer to the
center of power. No settlers were in the Cabinet of Prime Minister Menachem
Begin, despite his passionate pursuit of Jewish settlement in Judea and
Samaria, the biblical names the Israeli right uses for the West Bank. Today,
two hard-right settlers have key positions: Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich
and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. Smotrich urges discrimination
against Arabs and permanent Israeli control of the West Bank. Ben-Gvir, an
admirer of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane’s call for stripping citizenship from Arab
residents of Israel, supports their segregation in public spaces. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The extremes don’t represent the
whole, however. Most Israeli settlers are probably drawn more by subsidies and
lifestyle than by religio-nationalist zealotry. Many might leave willingly if
given adequate financial incentives, which Washington could provide as a carrot
if a peace plan were possible.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">On the other hand, there’s the
stick. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><a name="_Hlk152828995">The Biden
administration has announced that any settlers involved in the attacks, who are
not American citizens, would be denied visas to the U.S. But that’s not enough.<o:p></o:p></a></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk152828995;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span>Israel
has been America’s <a href="https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2023-10-10/how-much-aid-does-the-u-s-give-to-israel">largest
aid recipient</a>, at more than $260 billion total, plus additional funds for
the Iron Dome and other weapons systems. Technically, American aid isn’t used
directly to build the settlements’ roads, wells, electrical grids, or housing.
But money is fungible, and it’s worth asking what impact, over the years, the
U.S. might have had by deducting, say, two dollars of economic or military
assistance for every one dollar Israel spent on settlements. An unlikely
scenario, to be sure, given Washington’s intense pro-Israel politics. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Yet it’s due for consideration. The
aim would not be to cut aid, of course, but to influence Israeli behavior. Given
the hard ideology of most Israeli governments in recent decades, pitted against
the acute need for assistance, that would have been a tough choice in Jerusalem.
Even today, with the country’s booming economy making it less dependent, it
would be a wakeup call. With the Gaza war and West Bank clashes raging, the settlement
problem has grown visible enough to invite the U.S. to squeeze Israel with some
tough love.<o:p></o:p></p>Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305265860388931637noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5176006268302183776.post-10420768368268969912023-11-20T11:57:00.004-05:002023-12-08T17:08:43.854-05:00Israel's Mission Impossible<p> </p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">By David K. Shipler<span style="text-align: left; text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In
October 1953, two days after infiltrators from Jordan threw a grenade into an
Israeli home and <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2538005">killed</a> a
mother and her two small children, Israeli Unit 101, led by Col. Ariel Sharon,
took revenge in a deliberately disproportionate manner.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Crossing into Jordan, the Israeli
commandos <a href="https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/qibya-october-1953">destroyed</a>
some 50 houses and killed 69 civilians in Qibya, a town 5 kilometers south of
where the infiltrators’ tracks had led. Sharon claimed that he didn’t know any
people were in the houses he blew up, but property damage was hardly the point.
“The orders were utterly clear,” Sharon wrote in his autobiography. “Qibya was
to be an example for everyone.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>That
was, and remains, Israel’s basic strategy of deterrence: hold the neighbors
responsible for the misuse of their territory by hitting back exponentially. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
practice has worked, to an extent, as long as the neighbor has been in control.
Jordan eventually patrolled its side of the border closely, and the frontier
was fairly quiet for decades before the two countries signed a peace treaty in
1994. The same with Egypt for several years before its formal peace with Israel
in 1979. And even without a treaty, Syria has kept its heavily fortified border
mostly closed to attacks on Israelis until exchanges of fire recently, during
the Gaza war.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>But where
the state has been weak or virtually non-existent, as in southern Lebanon and
the Gaza Strip, only powerless civilians have a stake in preserving calm or
stability. Non-state forces have prevailed—first the Palestine Liberation
Organization, then Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza—and Israel’s strategy of
fierce retaliation has little effect except to radicalize residents and fuel
extremism.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>So it
is in Gaza today. Israel’s military withdrawal in 2005 opened a vacuum for Hamas
to govern, but its armed passion to obliterate the Jewish state provoked a
partial Israeli and Egyptian blockade, deepening poverty and leaving the
territory well short of autonomous statehood. Hamas used outside aid to construct
tunnels and build an arsenal of weaponry, not to foster prosperous independence
that it would want to preserve.<span></span></p><a name='more'></a> <o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Looking back over the 75 years of
Israel’s existence, it’s remarkable how little both sides understand about each
other and the nature of their confrontation. If the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict were a purely military struggle with a military solution, Israel would
have won decades ago. In today’s fighting, its intense bombardment to “soften
up” military targets for a ground assault would be right out of the handbook on
conventional warfare. But this conflict is hardly conventional, and military means
cannot be decisive.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It can
be argued, as Israeli officials are doing, that they are faced with an
immediate necessity: to eliminate the armed capacity of Hamas to repeat the sadistic
slaughters of October 7, more terrifying and traumatic than Israel has known in
most of its history. Hence, the Israeli bombing campaign of carnage and
pulverization, more catastrophic than Palestinians have known in most of their
history. About 1200 people of all ages were killed in Israel October 7—some raped,
mutilated, burned, and shredded with grenades in their “safe rooms.” Some 240
were taken into Gaza to be held hostage. At least 12,000 Palestinians have died
in return, including thousands of children, according to Hamas officials, and
swaths of residential neighborhoods have been mangled beyond recognition.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
casualties know no politics, of course. There are plenty of Palestinians who
dislike Hamas, and Israelis who died included those respectful of Palestinians’
aspirations. Vivian Silver, a leading peace activist killed October 7, was <a href="https://forward.com/fast-forward/570184/hamas-did-not-murder-your-vision-at-memorial-service-for-vivian-silver-grief-and-a-determination-to-pursue-peace/">mourned</a>
by a mixed gathering of Jews and Arabs, arms around shoulders, who swayed and
sang “We Shall Overcome.” <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Israel’s approach in Gaza has severe
tradeoffs. After a reporting trip there, the <i>Washington Post</i> columnist
David Ignatius detailed Israel’s coming tactics against Hamas’s deep tunnel
network, having been told that Israeli forces would use dogs, horizontal
drilling and maybe even flooding from the Mediterranean. But Ignatius <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/18/israel-gaza-war-planning-hamas-direction/">concluded</a>
that Israel’s initial “battlefield success was costly in the information war.” Pictures
of wounded, weeping Palestinian children, frail premature infants starved of
life-saving oxygen and incubator warmth, will be indelible stains on Israel’s
reputation.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">That might bolster the deterrent
effect, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/flipping-the-script-with-haviv-rettig-gur/id1539292794?i=1000634584195">countered</a>
a hawkish Israeli journalist, Haviv Rettig Gur of <i>The Times of Israel</i>. “Paradoxically,
the very fact that so much world opinion has turned against Israel serves Israel’s
purposes right now,” he said on a recent podcast. “One of the great ways that
you defeat this kind of warfare is to show that you are actually implacable, to
show that you are actually irremovable. In other words, Hamas brings to bear
everything it’s got, and once it’s brought to bear everything it’s got and
every ally has said everything they’re gonna say and done everything they’re
gonna do, Israel is still hunting them down because they stole and massacred
children.” It’s to Israel’s advantage, Gur continued, to demonstrate “that it’s
not gonna bend to world opinion, that it’s not gonna bend to pressure from the West
or from anyone, or from the Arab world, and once Hamas understands that, I think
this war changes.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Perhaps this war, but not this
conflict. This conflict is a clash of nationalisms, overlapping claims to land,
a miasma of hateful images, and a tangle of causes and effects. It should go
without saying that no cause justifies these effects. No assault can legitimize
the intimate atrocities by Hamas. No atrocity can validate the whirlwind of
devastation unleashed by Israel.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Yet on both sides of the
Israeli-Palestinian divide, the methodology is dictated by the
misinterpretation of raw experience and the dehumanizing image of the other: That
Jews understand only violent “resistance.” That Arabs understand only the
language of force. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">An Israeli taxi driver summed it up
in 1988, during the Palestinians’ first intifada: “<span lang="X-NONE" style="mso-ansi-language: X-NONE;">We should go to the Arabs with sticks in hand</span>,
<span lang="X-NONE" style="mso-ansi-language: X-NONE;">and we should beat them on
the heads; we should beat them and beat them and beat them, until they stop
hating us.</span>”<o:p></o:p></p>Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305265860388931637noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5176006268302183776.post-6133111356286201502023-10-19T07:28:00.004-04:002023-11-20T11:58:36.130-05:00The Arsenal of Memory<p> </p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">By David K. Shipler </p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-size: 10pt;">First published by <a href="https://momentmag.com/opinion-shipler-arsenal-of-memory/">Moment Magazine</a></span></i><a href="https://momentmag.com/opinion-shipler-arsenal-of-memory/"> </a></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>No
fabrication or suppression of history is needed in the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. Truths are enough to arm both sides. We are now witnessing additions
to the stockpile of weapons in an arsenal of memory that never gets depleted.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Victims
do not forget. Nor do their descendants. When the Palestinian movement Hamas invaded
Israel from Gaza to execute its monstrously planned slaughters and kidnappings,
the date, October 7, was marked indelibly. Going forward, probably for
generations, it will remind Israeli Jews of the grievance and rage that scar their
long road. And for Palestinian Arabs, Israel’s coming onslaught on Gaza will
reload the batteries of hatred--and what they call “resistance.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The two
peoples are imprisoned by history. When they argue for themselves and against
the other, the past looms. The pogroms in eastern Europe. The Holocaust. The scattered
violence by local Arabs against Jews who fled to Palestine. The Arab states’
rejection of a Jewish state, and the 1948 war that Jews had to fight to secure
Israel’s existence. The Arab-led wars that followed. The Palestinian terrorist
attacks and suicide bombings into the heart of daily life.<span></span></p><a name='more'></a><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
Jews from Europe settling on Palestinians’ land. The Jewish forces’ expulsion
of Palestinian Arabs from what became Israel during the 1948 war. The harsh Israeli
military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza after the 1967 war. The
humiliating Israeli army checkpoints. The imprisonment of Palestinian teenagers
without trial. The nighttime army raids into Palestinians’ homes, the shooting
deaths. The influx of Jewish settlements onto West Bank land, where Jewish
vigilantes harass, assault, and terrorize Palestinian residents.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>And on.
It is an arms race of memory. Not every one carries equal weight. The Holocaust
cannot be balanced by the Israeli bombing of Gaza, which cannot be balanced by
a suicide bomber at a café. Yet it’s important to understand that the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not only a clash of two nationalisms with
overlapping claims to territory. It is also a clash of histories, whose wounds resist
healing. It is a mismatch of historical narratives, none so acute as the two
competing stories of the birth of modern Israel.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This I
encountered soon after arriving in Israel for <i>The New York Times</i> in
1979. Yitzhak Rabin, then in the opposition, had written his memoir. His
English-language translator, Peretz Kidron, was outraged that a censorship
committee had deleted Rabin’s description of how he and Yigal Allon, on the
orders of David Ben-Gurion, had forced Arabs from the towns of Lod and Ramle. Kidron
gave me the manuscript, and I went to see Rabin to confirm its accuracy.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">He said he couldn’t talk about it,
because of the censorship ban. But when I asked why he thought it had been
deleted, he said that he didn’t know, he was surprised. That was the
confirmation. He went on to note wryly that he had given the censors something
to do by mentioning Israel’s nuclear weapons, which he knew they would delete.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">At the time, Israeli textbooks did
not mention the expulsions. Nor did the Israeli media pick up on the story,
even after we ran the banned excerpt in <i>The Times</i>. The Israeli version,
taught in schools, held that Palestinians were coaxed by their leaders to flee
and would return after an Arab victory. But Palestinians knew of the expulsions,
which were later documented from declassified Israeli archives by the Israeli
historian and journalist Benny Morris, in <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Palestinian-Refugee-Problem-1947-1949-Cambridge/dp/05213"><i>The
Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949</i></a>. He named villages and
numbers of Palestinians who were ousted deliberately, and others whose
residents fled to avoid the fighting, as civilians always do in war.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">They ended up in refugee camps in
Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan’s West Bank. Three-quarters of a century
later, many of their descendants keep alive the impossible dream of returning
to long obliterated villages inside Israel proper. Some still keep the keys to
their old houses. Demonstrators display posters of an old-fashioned key. A huge
key is carved into the entrance of a refugee camp near Ramallah. Community
center rooms in another camp near Bethlehem are named after vanished villages.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">And so, while Israelis celebrate
their independence day each year, Palestinians mark it by mourning the <i>nakba</i>,
the “catastrophe.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">To this secular dimension has been
added history’s ultimate weapon: religion. Once secondary to the basic
Israeli-Palestinian dispute, the religious component was always present, but it
has gained influence in recent decades, giving the most extreme positions on
both sides a kind of divine imprimatur, a rationale both comprehensive and nonnegotiable.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">After the 1967 war, a minority of
Jewish settlers who called the captured West Bank of the Jordan River by its
biblical names, Judaea and Samaria, cited Genesis in claiming the land as
deeded to the Jews by God through Abraham. The belief took root in the
government under Prime Minister Menachem Begin.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">In those early years after 1967,
and then while I was reporting there from 1979-1984, I never heard a
Palestinian utter a doubt that Jewish temples had stood on what Muslims call
the Noble Sanctuary, and Jews call the Temple Mount. Now the site of al-Aqsa
mosque, it is a manmade plateau whose retaining wall, the Western Wall, is holy
to Jews and a place of Jewish worship.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">But in the early 1990s, a high
school student in Ramallah, told me categorically that no Jewish temple had
ever existed there. She called the story a fabrication by Israelis to lay title
to Jerusalem. I noticed that she wore a small cross around her neck. So,
summoning my background as a fallen Protestant, I asked whether she thought
that the New Testament was wrong in describing Jesus throwing money changers
from the temple. That stopped her; she said that she’d have to think about it.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">I don’t know how many Christian and
Muslim Palestinians, have embraced that temple denial, but on subsequent
reporting trips I heard it more and more widely until it seemed virtually
ubiquitous.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Historical truths are powerful
enough. But perhaps this suppression of history is one that is needed, after
all, to deny Jews their authenticity in the Holy Land, to remove their
belongingness. The denial supports the Palestinian judgment that Jews are
aliens, interlopers, colonists, a temporary presence that will also be erased.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">If October 7 was conceived as a
step toward that end, it will fail. But it has added to the arsenal of memory.<o:p></o:p></p>Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305265860388931637noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5176006268302183776.post-8523856583927133682023-10-11T09:47:00.004-04:002023-10-11T10:14:06.349-04:00Predicting the Mideast: Prophets and Fools<p> </p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">By David K. Shipler </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
most obvious prediction this week, after Hamas fighters rolled easily from Gaza
into the stunned villages and kibbutzim of Israel, would be this: The
sputtering hope for a Palestinian state has been finally extinguished.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Having seen their children, women,
and elderly bathed in blood and taken to Gaza as hostages, Israelis will never
countenance Palestinian statehood anywhere nearby, not in Gaza and least of all
on the West Bank, which is even closer to the heart of the country--literally
just down the street from the capital, Jerusalem, and many other towns.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Since Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from its military
occupation of Gaza in 2005, and the subsequent election of Hamas to rule the
densely populated territory, the sporadic rockets and infiltrations have undermined
Israel’s peace movement’s central concept. That’s been “land for peace,” a belief that once
Palestinians had their own territory, they would accept Israel as a neighbor. Well,
Gaza residents got their land, but Israel got no peace. That’s been the
simplistic equation.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Of
course it can be argued—and usually is, on the political left around the
world—that Palestinians didn’t really possess their land, that they were
suffocated and radicalized by Israel’s imposition of tight border controls that
restricted imports and hemmed people into what some call an open-air prison.
Wages are low in Gaza, and better-paying jobs in Israel are inaccessible
without a permit to cross the border. Even after Israel increased the number of
permits in recent years, the Gaza unemployment rate stood at nearly 50 percent:
a prescription for smoldering desperation and explosive fury.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>But the
partial blockade was itself a reaction--supported by Egypt along its border
with Gaza—aimed at impeding Hamas from building an arsenal whose disastrous
scope was displayed to Israel this week. In turn, that militarization of Gaza was
a reaction to Israel’s “colonial” oppression, as many Palestinians see it. And Israel’s
tough posture was itself a reaction to radical Palestinians’ ideology of
obliteration, which dreams of a final end to the Jewish state.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>And so
on, one reaction to another to another ad infinitum. Untangling the causal
relationship depends on how far back in history you’re willing to go before
stopping and deciding that you have found the original sin.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It’s
not so hard to look backward. It’s harder to look forward. In that part of the
world, only prophets and fools are inclined to use the future tense. Prophets
have been scarce for quite a while. Fools have been in plentiful supply. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Unexpected
consequences seem to be the rule. Israel’s lightning victory in the six-day war
of 1967, celebrated tearfully by Jews able at last to pray at Jerusalem’s
Western Wall, saddled the country with the unending dangers of containing hostile
Palestinian populations in the captured West Bank and Gaza. Israel’s near
defeat in the 1973 Yom Kippur war gave President Anwar Sadat of Egypt the
stature, he thought, to make peace with Israel. Some have speculated that Hamas’s
monstrous assault will give Palestinians the swagger to make eventual
compromises. I wouldn’t put money on it, but you never know.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">You never know, that should be the
motto. And you need to be careful what you wish for. In 1981, it came to my
attention that the Israeli government, confident in its ability to manipulate
Arab politics, was funneling money to the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza, a
precursor of today’s Hamas. That startling miscalculation was confirmed by
Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, Israel’s military governor of Gaza, who explained
that he was under instructions from the authorities to build up the Brotherhood
as a counterpoint to the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Communists, whose
goal of Palestinian statehood was seen as more threatening than Muslim fundamentalism.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
Brotherhood was doctrinaire religiously but also deep into social welfare
services for the impoverished Gaza population. I suppose the movement seemed
benign to Israeli officials whose hubris led them to think they understood the
Byzantium of Gaza’s politics. A year later, Israelis made the same mistake in
Lebanon, where they went to war to succeed in expelling the PLO but fail dramatically
at realigning Lebanese politics in a pro-Israel direction.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Significantly,
an architect of both the Gaza and Lebanon schemes was former general Ariel
Sharon, then defense minister. Later, as prime minister, he ordered the army’s
unconditional withdrawal from Gaza, with no agreement or international
structure to keep some modicum of peace. Hamas rockets followed.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Palestinians have a rich history of
miscalculation as well, and this Hamas attack seems destined to mark history with
an indelible turning point. Israelis, it has been said, became complacent in
their material comforts and relative security in recent years. True, masses took
to the streets against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to emasculate
the judiciary, but Jewish-Arab violence precipitated by Palestinians and vigilante
Jewish settlers, was mostly confined to the West Bank, with little terrorism
inside Israel proper. The “situation,” in the anodyne euphemism, did not occupy
everyday worries.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">In Gaza, Hamas lobbed occasional
rockets, which were mostly intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile
system. As radical as the group’s objectives were—Israel’s annihilation—it seemed
contained, the two sides standing off in a hostile equilibrium. The Arabs’ conventional
order of battle had been practically dismantled by peace treaties with Egypt
and Jordan, internal disarray in Syria, and the aftermath of the US war in
Iraq.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The remaining threats came from non-state
actors—Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza—but they seemed manageable. Then
came the latest day of infamy.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">What shift will this bring? “Hamas
was once a tolerable threat,” <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/a-wounded-weakened-israel-is-a-fiercer-one/">wrote
Haviv Rettig Gur</a> in the <i>Times of Israel</i>. “It just made itself an
intolerable one, all while convincing Israelis they are too vulnerable and weak
to respond with the old restraint. . . . These heirs of a collective memory
forged in the fires of the 20th century cannot handle the experience of
defenselessness Hamas has imposed on them. Hamas seemed to do everything
possible to shift Israeli psychology from a comfortable faith in their own strength
to a sense of dire vulnerability.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">“And it will soon learn the scale
of that miscalculation. A strong Israel may tolerate a belligerent Hamas on its
border; a weaker one cannot. A safe Israel can spend much time and resources
worrying about the humanitarian fallout from a Gaza ground war; a more
vulnerable Israel cannot. A wounded, weakened Israel is a fiercer Israel.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">It seems a reasonable prediction.
The page will be turned from heart-rending pictures of Israelis massacred and kidnapped
to heart-rending pictures of Palestinians bombed and mangled in Gaza. Woe to
the fools who see only one page.<o:p></o:p></p>Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305265860388931637noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5176006268302183776.post-75101085252047457312023-09-23T09:41:00.002-04:002023-10-12T16:04:56.063-04:00Vietnam, Israel, Ukraine, and the Fluidity of Global Politics<p> </p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">By David K. Shipler </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>We have
entered a period of flux in international alignments. After decades of relative
stability in the so-called “world order,” interests are being recalculated and
affinities revised. It is a risky, promising, uncertain time.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Vietnam and the United States, once
enemies, have just announced a comprehensive strategic partnership, whatever
that might mean. Israel and Saudi Arabia are on the cusp of putting aside their
longstanding antagonism in favor of diplomatic and commercial ties. The Saudis
and Americans <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/19/us/politics/biden-saudi-defense-treaty.html?searchResultPosition=2">are
exploring</a> a mutual defense treaty. Russia seems poised to swap technology
for artillery shells from its problematic neighbor, North Korea, once kept at
arm’s length. Russia and China are making inroads in some mineral-rich African
countries, at the West’s expense. A rising China has adopted a forward military
posture, threatening Taiwan more acutely than in decades. Ukraine is lobbying
anxiously for its survival against Russian conquest as doubts about continuing
aid arise from a wing of Republicans in a party once hawkish on national
security.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Upheavals such as these will
require deft statesmanship. Both Beijing and Moscow are bent on denying
Washington what they call the American “hegemony” that has mostly prevailed
since World War Two. The Chinese and Russian leaders, Xi Jinping and Vladimir
Putin, proselytize for a multipolar world, which appeals to developing
countries resentful of post-colonial hardships. (Don’t they realize that Russia
is the more recent colonial power, fighting to reimpose its historic colonialism
on Ukraine?)<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The global turmoil has tossed up a
key choice for Americans: How engaged or how withdrawn shall we be? How
entangled? How aloof? This will be an unwritten question on next year’s
ballots. Both Putin and Xi will be watching. They surely hope for victory by
the American neo-isolationism represented by hard-right Republicans—including
Donald Trump. No such administration would stand astride the shifting tectonics
of the emerging globe.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Ukraine is a litmus test. No matter
the obscenities committed by Russia against helpless civilians. No matter Russia’s
martial expansionism in the heart of Europe. No matter the mantle of democracy
and freedom proudly worn by the United States. The extreme Republican right is playing
on the ethnocentrism of its base and a weariness of foreign involvements.<span></span></p><a name='more'></a><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">It seems that Americans are fair
weather fighters in war. As long as things are going well, they’re in it. But moral
purpose takes second place to the likely outcome. Progress on the battlefield is
essential to enthusiasm at home. That was true in Vietnam, where most Americans
favored the war until it was not being won. It was true in Iraq and Afghanistan,
whose wars garnered initial support until they dragged on inconclusively.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">If Ukraine had succeeded in a blitzkrieg
summer offensive this year, if Russian troops were being driven back on their
heels, Biden’s additional aid package might draw less opposition. When defeat
looms or a stalemate descends and victory seems elusive, passionate commitment
wanes. It’s like a losing baseball team that can’t fill its stadium.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">One pillar of policy that has
remained solid is the NATO alliance, bolstered by the war, with few serious fault
lines so far. That would change with an American retreat, however, as Hungary,
at least, would probably hedge by tilting toward a resurgent Russia. And
perhaps Turkey, which has been a wild card in the NATO deck, meeting Putin and straddling
sides by serving as a conduit for Russia to trade in sanctioned goods. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Putin likes to talk about history,
so he and his Kremlin colleagues have surely not forgotten that isolationist
impulses have long run through American sentiment. While isolationism would
delight them today, it caused suffering as the Soviet Union fought Hitler during
World War Two. The US stood aside for more than two years--even as Nazi Germany
pummeled Europe and marched deep into Soviet territory—and entered the war only
after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Before that, Moscow had hoped the Americans
would open a “second front” of combat on the west. Instead, the US sent convoys
of supplies across the Atlantic. Among the goods were cans of beef stew, which
Russians sardonically called “the second front,” a sly slur against America that
I heard in Moscow more than three decades after the war.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The threat of postwar isolationism
in the Republican Party, led by Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, alarmed former General
Dwight Eisenhower enough to persuade him to accept pleas, which he’d repeatedly
resisted, to run for president in 1952. He did not want his country to retreat.
As Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, he had experienced the
critical essence of alliances. It is a concept disdained by Trump but well understood
by Biden, who has spent much of his term shoring up old alliances and cultivating
new ones.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Biden has also proved hard-headed
and more pragmatic than principled—unless you see principle as a chessboard of security
interests. Rhetorically, he pursues a global campaign for democracy against autocracy.
But in the real game, he cooperates with authoritarian or semi-democratic
nations when convenient: Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, and possibly a
future Israel. Human rights get mentioned, then take second place. The square’s
location on the board is more important than its color.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">There are exceptions to this rule
of pragmatic fluidity. One is the barely-shifting adversity with Communist-run Cuba,
still under decades-long, futile American sanctions, even as diplomatic ties
and tourism have opened. It is a stubborn, anachronistic position that makes sense
only to Cuban emigres in Florida, a state that Biden is going to lose next year
anyway.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Israel, too, is becoming more of an
unfortunate example of democratic values and human rights cast aside for expedient
political and security interests. Biden has given lip service to concerns over Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s upcoming limits to judicial restraints on the executive
and legislative branches; the plan has drawn vast opposition from Israelis who
believe it will undermine the checks and balances central to democracy.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">But in practice, Israel pays no
price in US relations. Despite the explicit racists in the Israeli government,
this week Biden assured Netanyahu of steadfast support. The President appears
unlikely to exact serious concessions as his administration brokers the
potential Israeli relationship with Saudi Arabia; whether the Saudis will do so
remains to be seen.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">In any case, Israel has been
brushing off American reprimands for decades. A few words of criticism about
the judicial “reforms,” the harsh treatment of Palestinians, and the expanding
Jewish settlements on land that might otherwise constitute a Palestinian state
someday, are easily ignored in Jerusalem. Washington’s complaints about
settlements have never been reinforced by any consistent policy of pain or
punishment, such as withholding significant aid.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">That’s partly, but not only, the
product of domestic American politics. Even as the destructive judicial changes
loom, fawning Congressional delegations have been making pilgrimages there. But
in addition, Israel is useful to US national security as a reliable military partner,
technological wizard, and fellow gatherer of intelligence in a dangerous
neighborhood. So, the hand-wringing about anti-democratic steps undermining
American support appears seems unjustified.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Vietnam, too, has emerged as a convenient
partner for the US, no matter its authoritarianism and miserable record on
human rights. The Communist leaders in Hanoi are skillful navigators among the
powers—China, an ancient rival and enemy and overwhelming neighbor; Russia, an
old friend during the “American War,” and the US, now bidding for an increasing
role in the Pacific.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not long after the United States lost its war
against North Vietnam, Americans who traveled there were stunned to be received
with grace, friendliness, and a lack of any obvious grievance—even in Hanoi,
which US planes had bombed mercilessly as an <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Vietnam-War">estimated</a> two to three
million Vietnamese had died in the fighting. Whatever resentment persisted was
usually—not always—cloaked by courtesy. After a war, magnanimity comes more
easily from the victors.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Earlier
this month, nearly a half century after the American defeat, the Vietnamese again
demonstrated their marksmanship, this time with a compliment. When the
80-year-old President Biden, attacked at home as too old for the job, visited
Vietnam earlier this month to upgrade the relationship, he heard this flattery
from the Communist Party General Secretary, Nguyen Phu Trong, who had seen
Biden some eight years earlier:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">“You have nary aged a day, and I
would say you look even better than before.” Such is the fluidity of global politics.<o:p></o:p></p>Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305265860388931637noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5176006268302183776.post-26366756064481596092023-09-04T15:08:00.004-04:002023-09-23T14:11:06.974-04:00How Strong is Putin?<p><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span> <span style="text-align: center;">By David K. Shipler</span><span style="text-align: center;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> We
don’t know. That’s the honest answer.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">In the bad old days of the Soviet
Union, Kremlinologists could estimate the pecking order of the grisly men (almost
always men) who made up the governing Politburo by observing how they lined up
atop Red Square’s Lenin mausoleum for the parade on November 7, the anniversary
of the Bolshevik Revolution. Or their positions as they walked into a
ceremonial hall. Or whose name adorned one or another declaration. Physical proximity
to the General Secretary of the Communist Party was a clue to influence and a
possible successor—and was watched closely by scholars, diplomats, and
journalists.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> Inner
politics was encrypted then. Kremlinology was like a puzzle with only a few
visible pieces. But looking back, the Soviet Kremlin seems less opaque than
Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin today. There are no puzzle pieces now, only misfits or
blanks filled by deduction, guesswork, and wishful thinking.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> Since Russia’s
invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Putin’s political standing at home has
been an obsession in the West, where conventional wisdom has ricocheted back
and forth. At first, he was a formidable foe, a canny calculator of military
and diplomatic maneuvers. Then, when his army stalled in the face of Ukrainian
resistance, he became a monstrous blunderer whose humiliation would surely
bring him down. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> But as
he wielded his dictatorial powers to obliterate the remaining freedoms Russians
had gained since the Soviet collapse in 1991, Putin was the ruthless strongman,
unconquerable in the moment. As the war ground into a bloody stalemate, however,
and criticisms of the military escalated from the right, his pedestal showed
cracks.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Then, he was pronounced weakened
and vulnerable when units of Wagner, the private militia, slipped from under
his thumb and launched an abortive mutiny by marching toward Moscow. “How
Revolt Undermines Putin’s Grip,” said the lead <a href="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2023/06/26/nytfrontpage/scan.pdf"><i>New
York Times</i> headline</a> on June 25. The appraisal flipped two months later,
after the (presumably non-accidental) plane crash that killed Wagner’s leader,
Yevgeny Prigozhin. The lead <a href="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2023/08/26/nytfrontpage/scan.pdf"><i>Times</i>
story</a> declared: “Mutineer Dead, Putin Projects Image of Might.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">So, which is it? A Russian
president in peril or in command?<span></span></p><a name='more'></a><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">It could be both. Dictatorships
rarely erode gradually. They are brittle, so they break without bending. They
are invincible until suddenly they are not. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Putin’s case is hard to judge partly
because of his one-man rule. No formal political structure exists either to
support him, undermine him, or groom a successor and provide a transition. At
least the Soviet Communist Party ruled through a Politburo whose head, the
General Secretary, operated in the context of political consensus. Even the
authoritarian structure—in the years after Stalin—was governed by broader
interests than those of a single man.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Kremlin politics played out of
sight, for the most part, bursting into the open only on occasion. Nikita
Khruschev was ousted as Soviet leader by the Politburo (then called the
Presidium) in 1964. Dmitri Polyansky was <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1976/03/06/archives/polyansky-up-from-farm-to-politburo-and-down-after-a-harvest.html?searchResultPosition=3">kicked
off</a> the Politburo in 1976 after catastrophic failures in agriculture, his
portfolio. There was no announcement, of course; Polyansky’s name was merely
omitted from the list of the new Politburo read to a Communist Party Congress. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Today, though, Putin answers to no
official body. Who keeps him in power? The military? The FSB secret police? And
who checks his authority? What restrains him, if anything? Does anyone hold him
to account? Who would oust him? Who would choose his successor?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">“Putin has created, in effect, his own protective army and
praetorian guard, which are loyal to him,” said Kenneth Yalowitz, former US
ambassador to Belarus and Georgia. “As long as that does not change, his
position seems strong.” <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The other uncertainties in
calculating Putin’s power are the war and the economy, a military adventure
marred by volatility and an economy hobbled by Western sanctions. Together they
might foster instability on high, but the opposite down below: an iron fist
that suppresses dissent and purges disloyalty. So, Putin acts strong, perhaps
because he feels weak.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">This anxiety at the top and control
at the bottom is a chronic symptom of Russian paranoia, from the communist
period onward. It’s a paradox that fuels oppression. The pinnacle of power
feels like an unsteady perch. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">It was assumed, when Putin did not
immediately move against Prigozhin after the half-baked mutiny, that the
Russian president had lost his aura of invincibility, and that whatever sharks
swam in the political class sensed blood in the water.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">But it’s possible that instead of
weakening Putin, the Wagner maneuver strengthened his hand for a high-level
crackdown to match the low-level crackdown he has been executing against ordinary
citizens. With a sweep of his hand, he has turned the clock back to before the
late Soviet period. In the 1970s and 80s, it took more persistent and vociferous
recalcitrance to get arrested that it does today, when mild dissent can land
you in prison. On social media, at workplaces, in classrooms, people are afraid
to question the war—or even to say the word “war.” <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">While the anti-war whispers have
been stifled, the loud, pro-war dissent on the right has enjoyed immunity from the
oppression. Pro-military bloggers have freely condemned the army’s performance,
and Prigozhin was vitriolic in his criticisms. His mutinous caper might have
given Putin the opportunity to put the brakes on the right as well. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Since it’s widely believed that
Putin ordered the efficient disposition of Prigozhin and his top lieutenants
who were on the downed plane, the Russian leader got what any dictator needs: a
fearsome posture intolerant of any self-enhancing figure who seeks independent influence.
It didn’t matter that Prigozhin aimed his mutinous maneuver not at Putin but at
the defense minister and the chief of staff, both blamed for failures in
Ukraine. Putin called it treason nonetheless.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Then he waited two months while
Prigozhin traveled around freely. We can speculate about the pause in
retribution. Perhaps Putin had to get his own military and secret police in
line, to continue bringing most Wagner troops into the regular army, to
diminish the chance of rebellion. In any event, just before the plane went
down, he sidelined a general who had cozied up to the Wagner militia, and whose
military prowess failed to protect him.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The trouble for Putin is the war,
obviously. He is stuck with it. He has rationalized the assault on Ukraine with
such sweeping appeals to mystical Russian history and national destiny that
retreat or compromise would be taken as unfaithful to his country’s cause—and
his own.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">So, the war’s fate is to be Putin’s
fate. Therefore, he has every motivation to continue, certainly past the 2024
American election in case his admirer Donald Trump wins the White House and
makes good on his campaign pledge to abandon Ukraine. Like it or not, a vote
next year will be a vote for or against Putin—look for intensive Russian
interference in the campaign. If Trump wins and cuts aid, NATO will fracture
and Ukraine’s formidable resistance will wither over time. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> Another factor in Putin’s strength and
longevity is the level of popular discontent in Russia. That is hard to measure
in a semi-closed society. Polls are suspect, because people give safe answers. Correspondents
experienced in Russia try to take the temperature of the public, but citizens
are circumspect, and journalists who get to close to the pulse become targets. <i>Wall
Street Journal</i> reporter Evan Gershkovich, fluent in Russian and deeply conversant
with Russian society, has been in jail since March on trumped-up charges of
espionage. Most Western correspondents now try to cover the country from
outside.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">During Russia’s fruitless war in
Afghanistan, popular resentment bubbled up, driven by relatives whose sons and
grandsons and brothers and husbands were coming back in body bags. The reformist
Mikhail Gorbachev was propelled to power in part by disaffection over that
failed foreign adventure. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">“Putin is relying on the very strong Russian propensity to
support the leader in time of war even if they have doubts about him. This is
particularly true in the villages,” said Yalowitz, the former ambassador who knows
Russia well from four years as a diplomat in Moscow. Still, he added, “The
economic sanctions are doing serious damage to the Russian economy, and that
plus the brain drain will cost Russia for years to come.” That could be a
source of weakness for Putin.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Even if discontent over the current
war grew enough to overcome the jingoistic propaganda that now saturates
schools and media, the Russian non-democracy has no mechanism to translate
citizens’ attitudes into political policy. The lines of cause-and-effect are
blurred and indirect. The change of mind has to happen at the top, inside the enigma
of Kremlin politics, which could very well produce a post-Putin regime even
more hawkish and reckless.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">How strong is Putin, and what will come after? We don't know. That's the honest answer.<span face="Calibri, sans-serif" style="font-size: 14.6667px;"> </span></p>Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305265860388931637noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5176006268302183776.post-87288499977185192662023-08-27T11:48:00.002-04:002023-08-27T13:26:31.723-04:00Florida Bans Scary Trump Mug Shot from Schools<p> </p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">By David K. Shipler </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
Florida Board of Education, citing a state law’s prohibition against student “discomfort,”
has instructed public school teachers to refrain from “showing, displaying,
distributing, discussing, mentioning, or making implicit gestures or facial
expressions during class regarding” the mug shot that Donald Trump posed for during
his booking in Atlanta last week.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">A member of the Board, requesting
anonymity, explained: “The fierce, angry, vengeful look that Trump carefully
adopted would terrify small children and bring immense discomfort to teenagers.
He looks as if he’s about to trash them on social media or sign them up as
false electors.”</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi6lc8TcLgPsLPp8mzHdulcwlFBK9iBg6T979ePH-GeGn5EsE6hLbcnkfi5PtxlXMDNSPIDBXq0Egz8g9jkpjtTujpeuKoR8TDitr3WKXpzBZcO9WdYuTjrFprYjEZxxgrY58eoYveih44dbpHwqeq-rucST2uNQSN3AHeP4Pntm-PtmEuDgL1vlJfeIR9E" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1280" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi6lc8TcLgPsLPp8mzHdulcwlFBK9iBg6T979ePH-GeGn5EsE6hLbcnkfi5PtxlXMDNSPIDBXq0Egz8g9jkpjtTujpeuKoR8TDitr3WKXpzBZcO9WdYuTjrFprYjEZxxgrY58eoYveih44dbpHwqeq-rucST2uNQSN3AHeP4Pntm-PtmEuDgL1vlJfeIR9E" width="320" /></a></div><br /><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The decree is an expanded
application of the statute on curriculum, Section 760.10 (3)(f), which Florida
enacted last year to restrict how racial issues are taught. The code states: “<span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none; padding: 0in;">An individual should not be made to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or
any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none; padding: 0in;">Even where race is not
explicitly involved, the Board member said, “Discomfort is not an emotion we
want any of our children ever to experience until they’re old enough to go into
a voting booth.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none; padding: 0in;">Florida’s Governor Ron
DeSantis, asked for comment by a reporter in Iowa, said nothing. He just gave
his once-a-week smile.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none; padding: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">This is satire. It’s all made up (except for the text of the law), a
disclosure made necessary by the absurdity of current reality, which prevents
lots of people from telling the difference between truth and fiction.</span></i></p>Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305265860388931637noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5176006268302183776.post-78699440255293752142023-08-20T21:06:00.004-04:002023-08-20T21:06:29.105-04:00Democracy: The Political Right's Alarming Lack of Alarm<p> </p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">By David K. Shipler </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Right-wingers
who tamper with democracies should be careful what they wish for. They might
hold positions of power today, but as they undermine the checks and balances
that stabilize and restrain, they hand formidable tools to their opponents who
might take over tomorrow.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">This is poorly understood in both
Israel and the United States, two democracies now imperiled by extreme agendas
that would weaken longstanding mechanisms designed to protect minority rights
and moderate governmental authority. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">The political right ought to take
note: If Israel’s religio-nationalist government dismantles the separation of
powers by emasculating the judiciary, what’s to prevent some centrist or more
liberal government from driving unencumbered through the same gaping holes? After
all, the right-wing governing coalition has only a four-seat majority in a
120-member parliament.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">In the US, similarly, if Republican
“conservatives” regain the White House and disempower independent agencies by
transferring power to the president, as Trump’s team plans—and if they continue
dismantling the non-partisan machinery of elections in swing states they
control—what’s to prevent Democrats from doing the same where they hold or gain
majorities? When you destroy the careful balances in a pluralistic system, the
new structure is available to everyone, not just to you.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">A case in point is Donald Trump’s anti-constitutional
argument that Vice President Mike Pence, as President of the Senate, could have
rejected slates of electors from some states that went for Joe Biden in 2020. But
if Pence had that power, so would every vice president: Vice President Al Gore could
have thrown out Florida’s Bush electors in 2000, where the popular vote was
razor close and justifiably contested. And Vice President Kamala Harris could do
it in 2024 if she doesn’t like certain states’ results.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">Why don’t reporters interviewing
avid Trump supporters ever point this out and ask for reactions?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">It could be that Trump and his spellbound
flock don’t grasp the universality of the powers they seek to acquire. Perhaps
they think that only they will benefit by eroding the professional integrity of
vote-counting, for example, not imagining that their opponents might use the
same tactic. Perhaps they don’t see how a Democratic president could use the
immense authority they seek for Trump should he be re-elected. In a society still
largely subject to the rule of law, which carries with it a respect for precedent,
consistency, and equal protection, systemic changes are just that: systemic. They
flow through the entire system, no matter which faction is in charge, now or in
the future.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">It could also be that Republicans—privately—don’t
really think Democrats are nefarious. Maybe right-wing politicians don’t
believe what they say about liberals and progressives. Perhaps, in their heart
of hearts, Republicans recognize that the “radical left” is not so devoid of
civic and moral virtue that it would threaten democracy with the tools the Republicans
are forging for themselves.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">Indeed, that’s the flaw in this
doomsday scenario: The Democrats are not the same, at least not now. Gore didn’t
throw out Florida’s electors, and neither will Harris. Democratic state
legislatures are not rushing to curtail voting rights or politicize
vote-counting. There is no moral equivalency between Republicans and Democrats.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">But will that be forever? Power is
an aphrodisiac. The judicial system is growing more sharply partisan on both
sides. Gerrymandering is a time-honored tradition by both parties. Imperious
moves to stifle speech come from the left as well as the right. The danger of
concentrating authority in too few hands, without sufficient checks, remains as
acute today as when James Madison warned at the Constitutional Convention: “All
men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">So it also is in Israel, which has
no constitution but a set of Basic Laws that are supposed to set the standards
for governmental action. Without a constitutional text, the Supreme Court has overturned
some statutes and practices as “unreasonable,” a squishy concept that Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has just outlawed. (The Court itself will
hear a case requesting that it overturn that new ban on its authority, setting up
what Israelis loosely call a “constitutional crisis.”)<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">In addition, Netanyahu has proposed
giving government officials a majority on the commission that appoints judges,
and granting the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, the power to overturn any
Supreme Court ruling with a simple majority vote. The specter of emasculating
the courts—the only check on executive/legislative power—has ignited vast street
demonstrations, disinvestment, protests by respected former intelligence and military
officers, and refusals to serve by numerous military reservists. At least the
center and left are alarmed, even if the right is not.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">Ironically, Israel’s Supreme Court
has moved somewhat to the right as new justices have been appointed during
years of conservative government. So, if the judiciary is weakened and the rightist
coalition loses its narrow majority in the future, a more centrist or
left-tilting government could presumably overturn conservative Supreme Court decisions.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">These might include rulings limiting
the rights of Arab citizens, for example, or allowing more Jewish West Bank settlements
on Palestinians’ land, or permitting gender discrimination by Haridim, the ultra-religious
Jews who increasingly demand the separation of men and women in public
transportation and elsewhere. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">In fact, for many Israelis on both
sides of the conflict over the judiciary, the very nature of the country is at
stake—whether it remains a secular and pluralistic state or becomes increasingly
theocratic, run by extensively by religious law. A centrist or slightly liberal
government, empowered to overrule the Supreme Court, could conceivably sweep
away judgments that uphold an expanded religious authority in domestic life, open
the door to Israeli annexation of the West Bank, and other policies favored by
the hard right. That is the risk that Netanyahu and his extremist partners run
by changing the rules of the game.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">Ultimately, citizens in both Israel
and the United States will decide the momentous question, which is much larger
than the personalities or slogans or temporal policies of the candidates. All
democracies contain the built-in mechanism of their own destruction: the
popular vote, which can elect those who will slice away the protections,
usually little by little, until the citizens wake up one morning to find that
their precious freedoms to choose how they are governed have disappeared. In a well-informed
citizenry, the alarm sounds long before, across the entire political spectrum.<o:p></o:p></p>Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305265860388931637noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5176006268302183776.post-32981471534586555852023-08-13T14:20:00.002-04:002023-08-13T14:20:15.823-04:00The Republicans' Ideology of Ignorance<p> </p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">By David K. Shipler<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
Earth is on fire. And Republicans, led by Donald Trump, are poised to dismantle
all the funding and regulations to combat global warming. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">Racial bigotry runs rampant in
plain view. And Republicans bar the topic from classrooms, emasculate the
Voting Rights Act, and move to ban the military’s anti-discrimination programs.
<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">The COVID pandemic triggers rapid,
ground-breaking vaccine development. And Republican officials demonize scientists,
fight protective measures, and hound numerous public health specialists out of
their jobs. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">And so on. The Republican Party has
led the United States into a peculiar era of contempt for knowledge, disdain
for the experts who have acquired it, and suspicion of fellow Americans who
revere learning. “Expert” has become a dirty word.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">From Republican-controlled state
houses to public universities, secondary schools, so-called “news”
organizations, and libraries, a concerted campaign is on to create deserts of
ignorance where no fruits of accumulated understanding can grow. These blank
landscapes are devoid of the conscientious research and reasoning gathered over
decades. In the empty patches, weeds grow—the weeds of fabricated conspiracies
and dogmatic thinking. They are producing a harvest of contempt for any truth
that violates a predilection. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">There is a class element to this, a
bottom-up sense that the elites with all their schooling really know nothing about
the real world and care nothing for those whose names are not followed by letters
signifying advanced degrees. This phenomenon of disparagement is a symptom of
powerlessness, marginalization, and alienation. It was accelerated by the Great
Recession of 2007-08—triggered by elite wheeler-dealers in finance. Lower
middle-class families lost equity in their homes, jobs that had seemed secure,
and confidence in their futures—a logical sequel to the decline of
manufacturing and the stability it had provided. People’s foundations were
shaken.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">One outcome has been fear,
particularly among whites without a college education. Not just fear of
personal economic vulnerability, but also anxiety about change in demography
and society: rising<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>numbers of non-whites,
shifting social attitudes on sexual orientation and other issues, declining trust
in such big institutions as government. That perspective sees an America
drifting from some idyllic essence. Make America Great Again—<i>Again</i>.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">That idyl is a myth, of course, picturing
a supposedly homogeneous United States—white, Christian, socially traditional,
heterosexual, family-based—a comforting Norman-Rockwell culture with
non-accented English and red-blooded “American” names. It’s no surprise that it
is nurtured mostly in rural areas where the myth is closer to reality, and
where the new Republican Party finds ready voters.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">Fear is convenient to certain
brands of politicians, especially those aspiring to autocracy. As we have seen,
fear has been cynically stoked by Trump and his fellow co-conspirators in the
great takeover of a once-responsible political party. Where Republicans once
garnered <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/10/26/what-the-2020-electorate-looks-like-by-party-race-and-ethnicity-age-education-and-religion/">more
electoral support</a> than Democrats from voters with college degrees, it’s now
the opposite. Democrats have largely lost their appeal among the white working
class, where Republican fear mongering has gained ground.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">That is not to say that a thirst
for knowledge—and its delightful ambiguities and contradictions—is monopolized
by the college-educated. Smarts and curiosity are widely distributed up and
down the socio-economic scale, blessing those without university diplomas and
also skipping many of those who have them. But informing yourself these days takes
more time and skill than long working hours and defective schooling usually
allow, a handicap for those who lack leisure and luxury.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">Republicans have profited from the
deep inadequacies of the country’s education systems, which mostly neglect to
teach students how to check facts, discern truth from propaganda, and filter
through the internet maze of reports and claims. (The <a href="https://newslit.org/">News Literacy Project</a> has developed <a href="https://www.buzzsprout.com/1757953/12515256">curricula</a> and online
tools to help teachers do just that.) Under the guise of awarding parents
control over their kids’ schooling, Republican lawmakers in Florida, Texas, and
elsewhere are moving aggressively to erase honest history and relevant
contemporary discussion from classrooms, and to remove books on race and sexual
orientation from courses and libraries. The objective, it seems, is to create
pockets of abject ignorance in the rising generations. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">That will work to the advantage of
a party that wants to manipulate instead of educate. Even more troubling than
the Republican schemes to fool the public is the capacity of large parts of the
public to be fooled.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge
wrote of the “willing suspension of disbelief” as an aesthetic component of readers’
acceptance of literature’s plausibility. But he meant it as a conscious,
creative process. In American politics, the willing suspension of disbelief allows
mendacious actors room for mischief.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">Hence, the Republicans’ ideology of
ignorance. It is easier to convince citizens to ignore racial bias if you
obliterate its history from classrooms. It is easier to foster contempt for
your political opponents if you impugn their support for transgender people as
morally harmful to children. It is easier to frighten people that they are
losing parental authority if you brand relevant books and classroom discussion on
race and gender as self-blaming, pornographic, or perverted.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">It is a cleverly constructed
strategy at the heart of Trump’s spellbinding appeal and his intellectual
corruption of the Republican Party, once a responsible bastion of tempered
governance. Trump and his copycats create areas of ignorance with their perpetual
tempests of lies. They conjure up a mirage of candor but obliterate knowledge.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">I am reminded of a day off the
coast of Maine, sailing through a heavy rainstorm. The radar, unable to
penetrate the downpour, displayed a screen entirely lit up in vivid orange,
blotting out all traces of nearby boats, buoys, and treacherous land—the reality
that I needed to see. Thankfully, the storm soon passed.<o:p></o:p></p>Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305265860388931637noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5176006268302183776.post-2838474974375714292023-03-19T10:59:00.003-04:002023-03-19T10:59:11.249-04:00The Mixed Human Rights Record of Israel's Judiciary<p> </p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">By David K. Shipler </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
right-wing Israeli government’s plan to eviscerate the powers of the country’s
courts has generated massive demonstrations in the streets, worries by foreign
investors, and boycotts of military service by hundreds of reservists in elite
special forces and air force units. But the “independent judiciary” the
protesters are defending does not have a sterling record on civil rights,
especially those of Palestinian Arabs.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
Supreme Court has refused to rule against the government’s inflammatory strategy
of settling Jews in the occupied West Bank, a practice <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2019/01/chapter-3-israeli-settlements-and-international-law/">barred
by</a> the Fourth Geneva Convention. It has generally <a href="https://en.idi.org.il/articles/25615">permitted</a> the army to demolish the
family homes of Arabs accused of terrorism, a form of collective punishment that
the Geneva Convention also forbids. (Demolition is never used against Jews
charged with terrorism against Arabs.) Inside Israel, the court <a href="https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-admissions-committees-ruling/">has
upheld</a> a form of segregation by allowing rural villages and kibbutzim to
reject would-be residents for “incompatibility with the social-cultural fabric
of the town.” <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">The justices have only tinkered
around the edges of the government’s tough practices. They have occasionally <a href="https://supreme.court.gov.il/sites/en/Pages/FullCase.aspx?&CaseYear=2006&CaseNumber=8887">ordered</a>
a small Jewish settlement dismantled for taking Palestinian land. For similar
reasons, they have <a href="https://www.btselem.org/separation_barrier/beit_surik_ruling">required
minor changes</a> in the route of Israel’s security wall built on the border of
the West Bank. They have <a href="https://www.lawfareblog.com/house-demolition-israeli-supreme-court-recent-developments">ruled
against</a> demolishing a house where the accused did not actually live, and
where a family tried to prevent the terrorist act. But the justices have typically
avoided sweeping judgments on major policies affecting Palestinians’ rights, deferring
to security concerns and gradually reducing the influence of international law.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Over
the years,” <a href="https://www.btselem.org/supreme_court_of_occupation">says
B’Tselem</a>, an Israeli civil liberties organization, “the Supreme Court has
permitted nearly every kind of human rights violation that Israel has committed
in the Occupied Territories.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">Why, then, is the extreme political
right so intent on emasculating the judiciary? First, the Supreme Court has
gone the other way in a few important areas. It struck down a law exempting the
state from liability for damaging civilian property during security operations
in the West Bank. It limited the length of time that “infiltrators,” namely
illegal immigrants from Africa, could be held in a desert prison camp that was designed
as a deterrent to further arrivals.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">And, most politically charged, the
court overturned, as discriminatory, the exemption of ultra-Orthodox men from
the military service that all other Israeli men and women must perform. (Although,
with ultra-Orthodox parties giving governing coalitions their parliamentary
majorities, governments have repeatedly obtained the court’s permission to
extend the exemption.) <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Second,
if Israel annexes the West Bank as many on the political right desire, the military’s
authority there would presumably end, along with the military courts that have
tried Palestinians on both security and criminal charges since the territory
was captured in the 1967 war. It is conceivable that the Supreme Court would
grant Palestinian residents access to the same rights in the same criminal
justice system as Israelis. That would not be welcomed by the virulent
anti-Arab members of the current government.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Last
but certainly not least, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would like to stay
out of prison if his endless trial on corruption charges, which began in May
2020, ever ends with a conviction. An independent judicial system is such an
inconvenience to authoritarian-minded leaders, as former president Donald Trump
might soon discover. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">Nevertheless, Israel’s Supreme
Court seems less of a threat to some of the right-wing agenda than the protests
in its favor might suggest. It has grown more restrained and more conservative
in recent decades, especially since the retirement in 2006 of its president,
Aharon Barak, a jurist revered both in Israel and abroad for his capacity to
apply human rights to the exigencies of security interests.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">In 2011, for example, the court <a href="https://www.btselem.org/settlements/20120116_hcj_ruling_on_quarries_in_wb">essentially
reversed</a> a 1983 judgment by Barak against ten Israeli-owned quarries that
were extracting building materials from the occupied West Bank. Citing the
Geneva Convention and the Hague Regulations, Barak’s court had ruled, “An area
held under belligerent occupation is not an open field for economic
exploitation.” He reaffirmed the judgment in 2004. But in 2011, Supreme Court
President Dorit Beinisch found that the long period of occupation “requires the
laws be conformed to meet reality on the ground,” which she said included “the
right to utilize natural resources in a reasonable manner.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
retirement, former Justice Barak <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/ex-top-judge-barak-put-me-before-a-firing-squad-if-itll-stop-move-to-tyranny/">recently
called</a> the Netanyahu government’s judicial overhaul plan “a string of
poison pills” that would be “the beginning of the end of the Third House,”
meaning the third historical period of Jewish sovereignty after the eras of the
ancient First and Second Temples.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">Barak’s warning was airily
dismissed by Justice Minister Yariv Levin, who declared that the former Supreme
Court president “does not understand the essence of democracy,” endangered, in
Levin’s view, because “all power rests with the judges, and they decide what’s
proportionate and reasonable. That’s not democratic.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">But it is the Justice Minister who
does not understand the essence of democracy, which relies on the separation of
powers, a cardinal principle recognized by the hundreds of thousands of Israelis
who have taken to the streets. Israel’s Supreme Court is the only institution
standing in the way of unfettered political diktat. With a parliamentary system
whose majority always controls the executive branch, no other check or balance
exists.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">The country has no constitution; a failed
constitutional assembly after Israel’s creation in 1948 led to the enactment by
the Knesset, the parliament, of what’s called <a href="https://www.ilo.org/dyn/natlex/docs/ELECTRONIC/39134/97918/F1548030279/ISR39134.pdf">Basic
Law</a>, a dozen principles on “human dignity and liberty” derived from the
Israeli Declaration of Independence. The Basic Law figures in the Supreme
Court’s rulings on the “constitutionality” of statutes passed by the Knesset. Yet
the court has been cautious, overturning <a href="https://en.idi.org.il/articles/48034">only 22 laws</a> since the power of
judicial review was established in 1992, an annual rate lower than the United
States, the United Kingdom, and Canada.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">It appears that even as the authority
to annul laws has been rarely used, its existence has restrained the executive
and legislative branches in the past. Not so much today, as the government has
shifted to the right, and “elected officials have become less likely to accept
legal advice to amend or withdraw bills that are constitutionally problematic,”
<span class="MsoHyperlink">according to</span> Yuval Shany and Guy Lurie of the
Israel Democracy Institute.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">Ironically, given all the protests,
the Supreme Court has suffered <a href="https://en.idi.org.il/articles/37858">a
decline</a> in public trust, from 80 percent in 2000 to 49 percent in 2010 to
41 percent in 2021. “While the words ‘there are judges in Jerusalem’ used to
put an end to public debate, today they provoke it,” wrote Yedidia Z. Stern,
former dean of the law faculty at Bar-Ilan University, back in 2010.
Dissatisfaction reigns on both the right and the left of the political and
religious spectrums.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">Yet for the sake of democracy, large
numbers of Israelis seem to realize, the center has to hold. If Netanyahu and
his justice minister looked around the world or into history, they would see
how every dictatorship subverts and expropriates its judiciary. In the Soviet
Union, pro-democracy dissidents used to speak of “telephone justice,” delivered
by judges who first called Communist Party officials for instructions. In today’s
Russia, supine courts mostly do the Kremlin’s bidding. Hungary’s semi-autocrat
Victor Orban has emasculated the courts, which are also lapdogs of the regimes
in Iran, China, and other authoritarian systems.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Netanyahu
and his extremist, anti-Arab cabinet are ramming through legislation that would
require an 80 percent majority on the Supreme Court to invalidate a law, and
would empower the Knesset to annul that ruling or any other with just a
one-vote majority of legislators. Justices would be appointed mainly by governing
politicians in a restructured Judicial Selection Committee, instead of the one
currently dominated by nonpartisan judges and lawyers.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>That
would set the stage for a kind of elected autocracy, placed in office by the
voters but unchecked by the rule of law—or of any law other than the one
enacted at the whim of the legislature, the executive, and their hand-picked
judges, all three branches flowing into a single stream of authority.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The sad
question is whether Palestinians would notice much difference. Maybe not, since
they haven’t had much success anyway, through Israel’s independent courts, fighting
discriminatory laws and regulations. <o:p></o:p></p>Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305265860388931637noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5176006268302183776.post-59650343199972891012023-03-08T15:39:00.004-05:002023-03-08T17:15:39.329-05:00World War II According to Tucker Carlson<p> </p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">By David K. Shipler </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>A
reliably uninformed source has revealed that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s
staffers, desperately bored without any significant national problems they’re
allowed to address, have collected 41,000 hours of newsreel footage from 1939-45
and turned it over to Fox News host Tucker Carlson.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Reels
of film are unreliably reported to be stacked in his reception area, in his
office, and around his venerable desk. One pile, which swayed dangerously in a
puff of Carlson’s bloviations, finally toppled over onto his favorite saying,
etched into a plaque carved from a Mar a-Lago palm tree:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“What
you see with your own eyes is a rumor.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>According to inside misinformation, Our Boy
Tucker is preparing a show of the most telling, iconoclastic clips hidden for
decades. They will definitively rebut the assertions by elitist “historians”
that certain “events” and “attacks” and “battles” occurred.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Tucker’s
show is to begin with a scene from Pearl Harbor at sunrise on Dec. 7, 1941.
Contrary to the fabrication about a Japanese attack, the camera pans across the
beautiful harbor, where U.S. Navy ships lie quietly in their berths, sailors
lounging on deck or going about their peacetime chores of swabbing, painting,
and wielding nothing more dangerous than an occasional screwdriver.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>An
advance copy of Carlson’s narration for this bit has been smuggled out of the
Fox digital files, which as we know are full of revealing texts and e-mails. Tucker
is itching to declare: “The socialist President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s
approval rating had tanked, so he mobilized his propaganda resources to invent
a Japanese attack, just to boost his poll numbers. And it worked.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Film of
London during the so-called “blitz” shows a pub-filled city of merry-makers. How
come no V-1 “buzz bombs” are heard? Tucker plans to ask. How come there are no
explosions? How come there’s nothing but the clinking sound of beer mugs and
happy chatter? Carlson will tell us why, and you probably already know the
answer.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>A
particularly affecting scene will show a ship sailing placidly along in an open
ocean. “Worried about U-boats?” Tucker will sneer. “Please. Look closely. We’ll
freeze the frame here. See the passengers out on deck enjoying the sun and the
sea? It’s a pleasure cruise, folks, right there in the middle of 1943. Gimme a
break.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Then, a startling new clip of the so-called
D-Day landing is sure to galvanize audiences. It is a beach scene, all right,
but instead of helmeted soldiers in camouflage and belts of grenades, we will
see a bunch of obviously American guys with their obviously French girlfriends playing
volleyball on the sand and frolicking in the surf.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">This momentous report will surely
bring relief to all of us who have worried about the danger of a new war, World
War Three. We didn’t even have World War Two, so relax.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Many reels have yet to be examined,
according to our misinformed source, so we will just have to wait and see what long-suppressed
scenes of benign German concentration camps the great Tucker Carlson will
discover. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><i><span face=""Arial",sans-serif" style="background: whitesmoke; color: black; font-size: 9pt;"> This is satire. It’s all made up, a disclosure made necessary
by the absurdity of current reality, which prevents lots of people from telling
the difference between truth and fiction.</span></i><span style="font-size: 9pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305265860388931637noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5176006268302183776.post-75540387174452465712023-03-04T08:19:00.006-05:002023-03-04T08:19:55.322-05:00Israel's Forever War<p><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span> <span style="text-align: center;">By David K. Shipler</span><span style="text-align: center;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> Forty-three
years ago this month, the United States voted for a United Nations Security
Council resolution condemning Jewish settlements in Arab territories captured
by Israel in the 1967 war, and demanding that they be dismantled. After an
immediate outcry by Israel and its American supporters, President Jimmy Carter
backtracked, saying an affirmative vote had been authorized only if all
references to Jerusalem were deleted, which they were not. He blamed
miscommunication within his administration.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">The Israeli cabinet didn’t buy the
story, <a href="https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1980/03/05/121009072.html?pageNumber=13">saying</a>
the vote “gives rise to deep resentment.” Vice President Walter Mondale was
booed at a meeting of American Jewish leaders. And it didn’t help President Carter
in his re-election bid that November, although his landslide loss to Ronald
Reagan had numerous other causes, including the American diplomats being held
hostage in Iran.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> Decades
later, it’s clear that Carter was right about settlements being “obstacles to
peace,” in the official phase that was used through several administrations.
But the U.S. never took concrete action to stop their expansion. It pressed occasionally
for construction freezes but never dared to use economic or military aid as
leverage. President Trump even supported the settlements; his ambassador, David
Friedman, endorsed their annexation by Israel.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">The years of negligence have
allowed a dangerous sore to fester. At the time of that U.N. vote in 1980, there
were about 11,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank; today there are some
450,000. Then, a small and marginal assortment of zealous Jewish vigilantes
harassed and attacked Palestinians; today, a widening crusade of armed Israeli
thugs holds sway in many areas, as witnessed last week when hundreds of
settlers, in retaliation for the murder of two young Israeli men, rampaged
through four Palestinian villages, burning cars and houses, vandalizing homes,
and terrorizing children—children, who will never forget.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">The arsenal of memory is reinforced
by the cycle of terrorism and revenge. Its weaponry is ready for deployment by
both sides at any hint of compromise. So, as long as clashes on the ground
occur between Israeli settlers and Palestinians, no high-level peace agreement
can succeed, in the unlikely event that one should be negotiated. Furious
hatreds have long been generated at the level of everyday life.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">That doesn’t mean that Arabs and
Jews have universally hostile relations on the West Bank. Palestinians work on
construction crews building settlements, in Israeli-owned businesses, inside
Israel itself if they have permission to commute through the border wall that
now cuts off the West Bank. Some Arab-Jewish friendships exist.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">Nor are the militant settlers the
only cause of conflict, obviously. Palestinian leaders have a long history of
missing opportunities to move toward reconciliation. Years ago, Israeli
proposals were spurned or ignored. The Israeli left’s call of “land for peace” evaporated
after Israel unilaterally withdrew its troops from Gaza in 2005 and—instead of
peace—got rocket fire as Hamas, the radical Palestinian movement, took power.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">And yet, settlements on the West
Bank have played a poisonous role in the unending war. Combined with stepped-up
Israeli army raids against terrorist cells, settler violence has embittered ordinary
Palestinians, with growing numbers promoting armed resistance, <a href="https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2023/02/israels-raids-grow-west-bank-so-does-palestinian-support-armed-groups">polls
show</a>. Even though the West Bank is far from a functioning democracy, no
Palestinian leader can negotiate fruitfully without the population’s support.
It is too easy to strike the match that will light the tinder of outrage.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">In a perfect world, anybody of any
religion, race, or nationality would be free to live peacefully anywhere, of
course, unmolested by those of a different identity. But the Holy Land is far
from perfect. It is a place where land is idolized, dogmatism is prized, and
history is corrupted. The settlements, then, become instruments of politics and
conquest.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"> Israelis who move to the West Bank generally go
for the subsidized housing, the semi-rural setting, or the religio-nationalist
belief that God gave the Jews the deed to that land. But some bent on violence
are drawn there by the conflict itself. They have usually been allowed to act against
Palestinians with virtual impunity. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">Mixing biblical certainty with
anti-Arab bigotry has made some settlements incubators of extremism. It has not
been countered by any Israeli government, and won’t be by the current
coalition, which includes ideological settlers in the cabinet. As a result, Israeli
settlers have become both targets of terrorism and perpetrators of vigilantism.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">This isn’t brand new. In 1983, settlers
planted bombs in cars owned by the Arab mayors of Nablus and Ramallah; one lost
both legs, the other, part of his left foot. A third mayor escaped after the
Israeli army got a tip and warned him.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">Later that year, a yeshiva student
was stabbed to death in the West Bank city of Hebron, sparking a rampage by
settlers who trashed and burned stalls in the Arab market. Then six settlers,
including three who had been involved in the mayors’ bombing, dressed as Arabs
and sprayed automatic gunfire into groups of students at the Islamic College in
Hebron, killing three. Three of those settlers were sentenced to life in prison
but were released only seven years later.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">In 1994, a settler named Baruch
Goldstein stormed into Hebron’s Tomb of the Patriarchs and killed 29 Muslim
worshipers; survivors beat him to death. He was made a heroic martyr by the
radical settler subculture and an inspiration to Prime Minister Yitzhak’s
assassin, Yigal Amir, a frequent visitor to settlements. Though not a resident
himself, Amir identified with the hard-core settlers’ movement.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">Until recently, Goldstein’s picture
hung on the wall of Israel’s new Public Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, an
extremist settler who had distributed a flyer of Rabin in an SS uniform and <a href="https://washingtonmonthly.com/2022/11/25/have-i-just-met-the-jewish-hitler/">declared</a>,
after stealing an ornament from Rabin’s car, “We got to his car, and we’ll get
to him too.” <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">Aside from the misdeeds of settlers
themselves, their communities have multiplied and fragmented West Bank territory
into disjointed enclaves impossible to forge into contiguous areas under
Palestinian rule. By explicit design over decades, Israel has essentially
slammed the door on a two-state solution.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">That was the goal, the former
general Ariel Sharon told me back in 1979, when he was Agriculture Minister
facilitating new settlements by building roads, pipelines, and electrical
grids. “Security is not only guns and aircraft and tanks,” he said then, years
before he became Defense Minister and later Prime Minister. “If people live in
a place, they have the motivation to defend themselves, and the nation has the
motivation to defend them. As long as these settlements are built, a
Palestinian state will not be established in this area.” <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">Like the term “refugee camp,” “settlement”
conveys a misleading sense of impermanence. Both have become perpetual. Refugee
camps are now tightly-packed slums where generations have lived. Many Jewish
settlements began as tents or mobile homes on Arab villages’ common
agricultural land but are now established semi-suburbs of town houses and
apartments, schools and synagogues—“facts on the ground,” Sharon used to call
them.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><o:p></o:p><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Each side has radicalized the
other. Whatever harmony some once imagined being possible between the two
peoples in two neighboring states is being soured into discord every day.
Nobody is trying any more to end the forever war.</span></p>Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305265860388931637noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5176006268302183776.post-2141803471288776512023-02-24T07:34:00.006-05:002023-03-04T08:26:59.732-05:00In Ukraine, Both Sides Are Losing<p> </p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">By David K. Shipler </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>A year
into Europe’s largest land war in nearly 80 years, the prospect of “winning”
remains not only elusive but—more telling—defined by wishful thinking rather than
military reality.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Neither Russia nor Ukraine seems
capable of achieving its ambitious aims. Perhaps, looking far into the future,
Russia will succeed in taking over all of Ukraine. Or perhaps Ukraine will
manage to expel Russian forces from its entire territory, including Crimea and
the eastern Donbas region that Moscow grabbed in 2014. Perhaps. But so far, neither
scenario looks possible.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Instead, Russia and Ukraine are
locked in a conflict of mutual loss. Russia is losing its soldiers and weapons,
its global standing, its economic vitality, its modicum of cultural and
political freedom, and hundreds of thousands of talented citizens who are
fleeing abroad. Convicted prisoners, freed to fight, are coming home, along
with traumatized troops bearing shame and emotional scars. Russian society is
being wounded.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Ukraine is losing population to
death and migration, its houses and bridges and factories and farms, its energy
grid, its medical system, and its reliable independence. If it survives, it
will be hobbled by neediness and severe militarization. The coming generation
will not easily erase the terrors endured in childhood. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Yet there is talk of “victory.”
What that means today is certainly not what will be claimed eventually in
whatever compromise may be reached, for this war—unlike Vietnam and the two
World Wars—is not susceptible to the categorical defeat of either side. Both
portray it as a clash of virtues and values, a colossal contest over the entire
international order. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> <span></span></span></p><a name='more'></a><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The grand argument was first launched
by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has repeatedly projected the limited “special
military operation” onto a big screen of righteous purpose and noble Russian
history. In his emotional reasoning, Ukraine is an ersatz country. It is
essentially Russian by culture and tradition, hijacked by pro-Western neo-Nazis
with designs on Mother Russia herself. Moreover, he <a href="http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/70565">declared this week</a>,
“the West seeks unlimited power” in an imperious quest to block the emergence
of a more just, multipolar world. He has adopted Iran’s epithet “Satanism” to
describe American policies.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">“Over the long centuries
of colonialism, diktat and hegemony,” Putin said, “they got used
to being allowed everything, got used to spitting
on the whole world. It turned out that they treat people living
in their own countries with the same disdain, like a master.
After all, they cynically deceived them too, tricked them with tall stories
about the search for peace . . . <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Indeed, the Western elites have become
a symbol of total, unprincipled lies.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">In Putin’s pageant, Russia is the eternal
victim. “They plan to finish us once and for all,” he said. “In other words,
they plan to grow a local conflict into a global confrontation. This is how we
understand it and we will respond accordingly, because this represents an
existential threat to our country.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>President
Biden has countered with a grand argument of his own, that Ukraine is a
battleground over the broad future of autocracy vs. democracy. “President Putin
is confronted with something today that he didn’t think was possible a year ago,”
Biden <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2023/02/21/remarks-by-president-biden-ahead-of-the-one-year-anniversary-of-russias-brutal-and-unprovoked-invasion-of-ukraine/">said
this week</a> in Warsaw. “The democracies of the world have grown
stronger, not weaker. But the autocrats of the world have grown weaker,
not stronger.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It’s a
debatable point, given the surge in ultra-right, anti-democratic movements from
Israel to Hungary to the United States itself. Yet Biden’s cause is as sweeping
as Putin’s. “This struggle will define the world,” Biden declared, quoting
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, “and what our children and
grandchildren—how they live, and then their children and grandchildren.” Biden
added: “Democracies of the world will stand guard over freedom today, tomorrow,
and forever. For that’s what — that’s what’s at stake here: freedom.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>That’s
about as large a purpose as you can find. More accurately, Biden might call it
an anti-colonial war by Ukraine against the centuries of periodic rule by
Russia. That’s what it really is. And it would be a nice rebuttal to Putin, who
rails against the West’s historic colonialism to woo former colonies in Africa
and elsewhere, an attack with some traction. It would be interesting to see the
reactions if Biden turned the tables.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">It's possible to get trapped by
your own propaganda. Wars always carry rhetoric to rally citizens and allies,
but hyperbole can also narrow your own options. Currently, the grand arguments
by the two superpowers have walled off whatever common ground might be found.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">That leaves military means for
Russia to seize and hold blood-soaked Ukrainian ground, or for the West to batter
Russian forces into submission. Neither prospect looks likely. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Putin shows no opening to negotiate
down from his maximalist and messianic dreams. Zelensky and Biden and NATO are
just as unyielding. All wait and hope for battlefield advantage that will be
reflected in a moderation of the enemy’s position.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Meanwhile, the losses mount. The
physical repair of Ukraine, which is being pummeled into ruins, will cost
trillions of dollars over decades. The skills of Ukraine’s citizens killed and
scattered will create vacuums of expertise not easily restored. To guard its
sovereignty, the country will need to grow into a military “porcupine,” as
strategic planners say, bristling with weaponry that Russia will see as
threatening—maybe a deterrent, maybe a provocation, probably destabilizing. If
that happens, there will eventually be another war, and another.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">While Putin works to destroy
Ukraine, he campaigns against Russia itself. Aside from its nuclear weapons,
Russia no longer strides the earth as a formidable military power but rather a
bumbling, poorly trained, badly equipped, desperate force of convicts and
conscripts who doubt their mission as they are fed into the maws of a Ukrainian
citizen army acutely motivated to avoid renewed Russian domination. His soldiers,
who have tortured and raped and murdered innocents, who have forcibly deported
thousands of children to Russia, who have tried to freeze civilians into
submission this winter, have generated international hatred.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">At home, the fledgling freedoms
Russians enjoyed in the post-Soviet era are being stripped away. The
independent press is gone. Art is once again compromised for the sake of
propaganda: The director of the esteemed Tretyakov Gallery <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/02/09/russia-tretyakov-gallery-director-ousted/">is
replaced</a> by the daughter of a secret police official. Honest history is
snuffed out, as human rights institutions are closed, most recently the
respected organizations Memorial and the Sakharov Center. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Even low-level dissent is treated
more brutally than in the late period of the Soviet Union. Then, a Russian might
lose a trip abroad, a promotion, or a job but to trigger imprisonment, dissent usually
had to be public and persistent. Now, even a couple in a restaurant, talking in
low voices to each other in dismay about the war, are reported by an
eavesdropper and “arrested, handcuffed, and forced to the floor” by police, <i>The
Washington Post</i> <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/02/20/putin-czar-with-no-empire-needs-military-victory-his-own-survival/">reports</a>.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">“An older woman on a bus,” the <i>Post</i>
continues, is “<a href="https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1607473776173752321" target="_blank">dragged</a> from her seat, thrown to the floor and roughly
pushed out the door by passengers because she called Russia an empire that sends
men to fight in cheap rubber boots.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Mobilizing citizens to enforce
orthodoxy is an old technique of both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
Combined with the atrocities being committed in Ukraine, it creates a specter of
Russia and Russians that is likely to infiltrate Western books, films, popular suspicions,
and official policy. As we saw in the villainous images of Japanese and Germans
after World War II, they can take decades to fade.<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Although it hasn’t been popular to
quote Neville Chamberlain since his posture of appeasement in 1938, on the eve
of World War II, he was right <a href="https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780191826719.001.0001/q-oro-ed4-00002794;jsessionid=41FF703C4B786EDA3785141834D6AD28">on
one point</a>: “In war, whichever side may call itself the victor, there are no
winners, but all are losers.”<o:p></o:p></p>Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305265860388931637noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5176006268302183776.post-51020222927921006352023-02-10T12:07:00.002-05:002023-02-24T07:45:45.171-05:00The Rise of Black Quarterbacks<p><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span> <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; text-align: center;">By David K.
Shipler</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; text-align: center;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"> At Sunday’s Super Bowl, the United
States will congratulate itself on another racial milestone, the first time two
Black quarterbacks have played in the culminating game of the country’s most
popular sport. “Jalen Hurts and Patrick Mahomes will make history on Sunday,” </span><a href="https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/complete-history-of-black-qbs-in-the-super-bowl-from-doug-williams-to-historic-2023-matchup/"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">crowed</span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"> CBS News. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">But the history is a lesson in bigotry,
illustrating how devious stereotypes can be.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">The latest “first” is a cause for
celebration, to be sure. It is no exoneration of American society, however, for
the racial assumptions that have made this so long in coming still whirl around
Blacks, whether professional athletes or ordinary mortals. Tangible barriers
that are broken often leave a strong residue of bias—in this case, about the interactions
of the mind, the body, and the power of Blacks on the field or off. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">Americans love to chart progress. We have
had the first Black president, the first Black vice president, the first Black
defense secretary, the first Black secretary of state, the first Black Supreme
Court justice, the first Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and on.
And now “the first Black House Minority Leader in history” as President Biden said
in his State of the Union Address, congratulating Representative Hakeem
Jeffries.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Whether
Jeffries was pleased or displeased by the label was hard to tell by the neutral
expression on his face. Not every Black or Muslim or woman or gay person who gets
past the obstacle loves being defined primarily that way. Jeffries and the rest
of us might reasonably wonder if the day will ever come when the phrase “the
first Black [fill in the blank]” can be relegated to a distant past.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"> The first Black quarterback to start
in the Superbowl was Doug Williams, who led the Washington Redskins to victory
in 1988. He won the Lombardi Trophy and was named the game’s most valuable
player. But he hadn’t been the team’s starter at the beginning of the season, when
Black quarterbacks overall started </span><a href="https://www.footballperspective.com/the-history-of-black-quarterbacks-in-the-nfl-2023-update/"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">fewer than 10
percent</span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">
of NFL games. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Several years later, for my book </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Country-Strangers-Blacks-Whites-America/dp/0679734546"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">A Country of
Strangers</span></i></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">,
I looked into the patterns of prejudice that was keeping Black players out of
the quarterback position. A system of tracking was putting high school athletes
on career-changing detours, especially if they came from mostly Black schools,
according to Richard L. Schaefer, former attorney for the National Football
League Players Association. On college teams, he said then, talented Black
quarterbacks were being bumped to other positions considered more physical than
mental. “I think it’s a subtle, perhaps even subconscious, kind of bigotry.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"> The bigotry pairs two of the society’s
longest-standing stereotypes of Blacks as both physically strong and mentally
weak. Since at least the days of Thomas Jefferson, who codified those images in
his book <i>Notes on the State of Virginia</i>, there has been a tendency in
white America to see the body and the mind as opposite poles, perceptions that persisted
and shaped college and NFL coaches’ decisions centuries later.<span></span></span></p><a name='more'></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">Sportscasters used to call a good play by
a Black an “athletic move” and by a white a “smart move.” You don’t hear that distinction
much anymore, but the assumptions once took their toll. “There is a tradition
in sports of saying that when the Black guy succeeds, he’s a great natural ” Schaefer
observed in the 1990s. “When the white guy succeeds, it’s due to hard work and
perseverance and his own dedication to his sport.” This implied “that it’s just
a physical versus a mental thing.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">The practice of sorting Blacks players out
of so-called thinking positions was documented by the Players Association in a
1980 report: “The ‘Black Positions’—running back, defensive back, and wide
receiver—were rated by the coaches as demanding physical speed, physical
quickness, and high achievement motivation.” Blacks were shunted away from
quarterback, center, and linebacker, who “tend to have the greatest opportunity
to have a controlling influence on the outcome.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">The positions long denied to Blacks were leadership
and decision-making roles requiring “frequent social interactions calling for
interpersonal acceptability,” the Players Association observed. Those were also
the spots from which players could graduate after retirement to managerial jobs
in professional football.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">But Blacks in power have long stirred discomfort,
ambivalence, or outright resentment among a swath of white America, as if the
natural order of society were being disrupted. Witness the backlash to Barak
Obama achieving the presidency, a much more visceral revulsion among rightwing
whites than policy differences alone could explain.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">“In pro football’s portion of the civil
rights struggle, the last positions to be desegregated were center, middle
linebacker and quarterback,” </span><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2018/02/02/the-quarterback-who-paved-the-way-for-colin-kaepernicks-protests/"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">Samuel G. Freedman</span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"> once wrote. “Those
three spots, not coincidentally, required the greatest intellectual acumen,
because they involved calling the blocking assignments (center), defensive
alignment (middle linebacker) and the entire offense (quarterback). In the late
1960s, white supremacist perceptions still kept Blacks from quarterbacking an
NFL team. No Black player could possibly be smart enough, have the required
strength of character or possibly give orders to white teammates.” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Bias was self-defeating, of course, in
sports as in every area of life, by excluding whole reservoirs of talent. In
fact, Southern resistance to school desegregation eventually eroded partly
because of Black students playing on integrated teams. The white chairman of B,
E & K Construction Company in Birmingham, Alabama, put it this way to me back
in the late 1990s. “The first thing that caught the attention of the whites in the
South, in my view, was that they started realizing that they could win football
games with black athletes. I really believe, when I think back, that that’s
what turned them around.” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"> College and pro football took the
same lesson eventually, and the roster of Black quarterbacks has grown to
include impressive, quick-minded readers of complex field positions and precise
executors of intricate plays.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">Mahomes, of the Kansas City Chiefs, is
biracial and identifies as Black. He will meet Hurts, of the Philadelphia Eagles
Sunday in the dazzling spectacle that is bound to blind most of the country to
the continuing prejudices that have shaped American society, football included.
Both men played quarterback in college, a big change from decades past.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"> That
doesn’t mean that the biases have disappeared, especially outside the stadium.
If only the game were the template for the country as a whole.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span>“It is the only place in life where it doesn’t
matter anymore who your daddy was or how much money you have or whether you’re
white or black,” said Schaeffer years ago. “It is literally the even playing
field we’re always metaphorically searching for in this world.”</span>Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305265860388931637noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5176006268302183776.post-86070948604061292072023-01-31T18:25:00.007-05:002023-02-10T12:35:06.159-05:00Policing in Black and Blue<p> </p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">By David K. Shipler </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
murder of Tyre Nichols in Memphis has opened a window onto the complexity of
race as a factor in policing. A conventional assumption has been disrupted—that
racism alone drives police brutality against Black citizens. Yet it would be a
mistake to use the tragedy as an excuse to discount racial bigotry’s role in
police behavior nationwide, and perhaps even in this case. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Unlike many other police killings
of unarmed Black men, there was no frightened, trigger-happy white cop. There
was no white-dominated “law enforcement” apparatus structured to keep Blacks
down. Nichols was a young Black man beaten to death after a traffic stop by
five Black officers in a mostly-Black police department headed by a Black
police chief in a Black-majority city.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">It’s a rare lineup of elements, and
it has forced questions that seem to have nothing to do with race: about how
police recruits are screened, how they are trained, how they are socialized once
they’re in uniform, and how rules governing the use of force are designed and
enforced.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Yet none of those areas is
impervious to insidious racial stereotyping. They are all vulnerable to subtle
interactions between race and power. Even Blacks, in keeping with a pattern
seen broadly in multiracial settings, may internalize the negative stereotypes
of themselves that are taught by the larger, white society.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Therefore, when America’s
longstanding images of the Black man as aggressive, violent, and dangerous are
lodged in any officer’s expectations, high anxiety can provoke preemptive
force—by Black cops as well as white. The nervousness is enhanced during
traffic stops, which cops are trained to believe are more life-threatening than
the data show.<span></span></p><a name='more'></a><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">From 2016 to 2021, about 60
officers were killed by drivers they’d pulled over, a rate of less than 1 death
per 3.6 million stops, according to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/31/us/police-traffic-stops-killings.html"><i>The
New York Times</i></a><i>.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As
Kalfani Ture, a Black criminologist and former Georgia cop, told <i>The Times</i>,
“Police think ‘vehicle stops are dangerous’ and “Black people are dangerous,’
and the combination is volatile.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Police officers tend to encounter
the worst of humanity, which naturally shapes their perceptions of the citizens
they confront. So in high-crime neighborhoods where officers expect to see drug
dealers, thieves, and other miscreants, conclusions are easy to jump to,
especially when racial stereotyping is added to the mix.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Cops are also empowered to expect
compliance with their instructions. A good number of police killings occur when
someone defies an officer’s order to get out of the car, lie on the ground, give
his hands up for cuffing, or the like. It takes a cool head for a cop not to
take it personally; anger can quickly translate into violence. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Because Blacks’ power in America
has been so restricted historically, and because they’re sometimes resented
when they do have authority, Black officers don’t necessarily react better than
whites to a civilian’s disobedience. As James Baldwin wrote in 1955, “In
Harlem, Negro policemen are feared more than whites, for they have more to
prove and fewer ways to prove it.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">We don’t know what was going on
inside the minds of the five Memphis officers who have been fired and charged
with second-degree murder. They were part of a tough anti-crime unit with the <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>unfortunate name Scorpion; it has now been
suspended. We saw them on video slashing and pummeling Nichols long after he
was helpless and limp, suggesting some deep spasm of rage. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The tough-guy policing posture has been
widely adopted in the U.S., even as some departments are now trying to teach
de-escalation techniques. American police in some cities have been militarized,
with camouflage uniforms and olive-drab personnel carriers, taking them far from
the benign Norman-Rockwell image of the friendly neighborhood cop.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Indeed, a white Los Angeles
probation officer, Jim Galipeau, saw the police as little more than a gang. “Cops
and gang members are much more alike than they are different,” <a href="https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-12-17-me-2635-story.html">he
said</a> thirty years ago. “If you could get them together, they can relate to
each other. L.A.P.D. is the baddest gang in L.A.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Are Black cops different? Yes and
no. An O.G. (original gangster) in L.A. nicknamed Snoop (alias Fred Hill) <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Country-Strangers-Blacks-Whites-America/dp/0394589750#customerReviews">told
me this story</a> while Galipeau listened and contradicted nothing:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On several occasions, Black officers
participated in a scheme to get drug dealers and gang leaders rubbed out when
there wasn’t enough evidence to convict them. “They arrests the guy on a trump charge
and take him to the police station. Impounds his car,” said Snoop. “He’s in the
station waiting to bail out. During the time he’s in the station, two officers,
all Black, put on a black beanie, some local gloves, and get their weapons and
drive through his rival gang area, drop the windows out of his car, shoot
somebody down, take it back to the lot, put it back. In the morning the
youngster bails out of jail, gets in his car, and soon as he drives in that
area and stops at a gas station, he gets killed.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="text-transform: uppercase;">A
16</span>-year-old drug dealer in South Central L.A. gave me this observation
about Black cops back in the 1990s: “When you’re driving in a car and there’s
three people or maybe four people in the car, you always up to something, in
the police eyes. They’re telling us, ‘Too many black heads together. You-all
are gonna do something.’ . . . Sometimes Black police try to show off for the
white cops—you know, frisk you all hard, and you’re like, ‘Damn, brother, what’s
going on?’ . . . When there’s two blacks, they be cool. Sometimes, not all
white police is like that, though. Some white police is just as cool as the
next.”<span style="text-transform: uppercase;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">No reliable national data exist on
the behavior of Black and white police officers. The <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/">Washington
Post database</a> on police killings by gunfire (about 1,100 people annually,
the vast majority armed) contains the race of the victims but not of the cops.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">One difficulty in making
comparisons is that Blacks tend to be assigned to higher crime Black
neighborhoods, where they would be expected to make more stops and more arrests.
Correcting for that bias, <a href="https://policingresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Role-of-Officer-Race-and-Gender.pdf">a
study</a> found that Black officers in Chicago tended to make fewer stops,
fewer arrests for minor crimes, and to use force less than whites. And the
force they used was less likely to cause injury.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The researchers examined police records
of 1.6 million “enforcement events” involving 7,000 officers from 2012 through
2015. Blacks used force 32 percent less frequently than whites. They stopped 17
percent fewer white citizens than white officers did, and 39 percent fewer
Black citizens. “Most of the differences,” the authors wrote, “involved discretionary
stops for ‘suspicious’ activity or minor violations.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>There
has been reasonable speculation that if the Memphis officers who beat Tyre
Nichols to death had been white, they would not have been fired and criminally
charged so quickly. And if Nichols had been white, he wouldn’t have been beaten
so brutally, or at all. These are guesses, but their credibility testifies to a
fact of American life: that race is often present, even invisibly. The question
is what weight it has in a particular circumstance.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Precisely because the racial element
in Memphis is ambiguous, the tragedy presents an opportunity for new thinking,
free from the dogmatic polarization that has shaped the country’s debate.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Neither extreme in that debate can
fix the problem. Adherents of neither “Defund the Police” nor “Blue Lives
Matter” have practical answers. They have played to a stalemate that ensures
only continued misdeeds and abuse. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The police can be reformed, but not
defunded, i.e., abolished. The blue lives that matter need protection by
redefining their tasks to conform with their skills, not as psychologists or
social workers or traffic clerks putting themselves and motorists in danger to
write up broken tail lights.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The common ground is there. It just
has to be mapped.<o:p></o:p></p>Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305265860388931637noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5176006268302183776.post-47228330631811339212023-01-14T10:58:00.009-05:002023-01-31T18:53:37.140-05:00The Curse of Classified Documents<p> </p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">By David K. Shipler </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Many
years ago, the Communications Officer on the US Navy destroyer where I was
stationed went into a panic. He had misplaced a booklet, marked “SECRET”
containing encryption keys. He scoured the radio shack where the document was
usually kept, went through the officers’ wardroom where we ate, and ravaged his
desk in the stateroom we shared. Nothing.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>He was
a young ensign and was sure he was going to prison. I helped him look. We both
had Top Secret clearances, so there was no risk of my seeing something I
shouldn’t. We overturned our mattresses. We emptied drawers and lockers.
Finally, on a whim, I fished around in the narrow slot between a desk and a
bunk and—voila! There it was. My roommate was saved.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Would
that all officials were as terrified of classified documents going astray. But
no, as Donald Trump and Joe Biden have demonstrated, and as countless lower
functionaries have surely done out of sight, carelessness seems as ubiquitous
as classification itself.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">There are two main reasons for
this. One is overclassification of material that needn’t be kept secret, or
whose need for secrecy has expired. The other is a decentralization of
authority over the reams of classified documents that flow across some
government desks. Those in certain positions are so used to shuffling papers
with one of the three basic classification levels—Confidential, Secret, or Top
Secret—that they evidently get too casual. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">“Misplacing classified documents is
very common—happens all the time,” <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64256465">the BBC was told</a>
by Tom Blanton, head of the National Security Archive at George Washington
University. He added that certain information, such as a president’s travel
schedule, is classified beforehand but need not remain secret afterwards. Yet
those documents are often never put through the declassification process.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">In addition, virtually every
communication sent by an embassy to the State Department in Washington is
classified, at least at the low Confidential level, even including reports of
news stories that everybody can read in the local media. It’s too bad that Ben
Franklin didn’t come up with some proverb for this like, “Absurdity numbs the
conscience.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Nevertheless, mishandling
classified information either intentionally or in a grossly negligent way can
be charged as a felony. And knowingly removing classified information from
appropriate systems or storage facilities is a misdemeanor.<span></span></p><a name='more'></a> <o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">When Hillary Clinton was discovered
as having used several private, personal email servers when she was Secretary
of State, the FBI sifted through digital files and, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghph_361wa0">according to FBI Director
James Comey</a>, found fifty-two email chains containing classified information:
eight Top Secret, thirty-six Secret, and eight Confidential. Upon review by
various government agencies, he said, some 2,000 additional emails, not classified
when they were sent, were later “upclassified” to Confidential.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">“Although we did not find clear
evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws
governing the handling of classified information,” Comey concluded, “there is
evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive
highly classified information.” Seven email chains were classified “Top
Secret-Special Access Program,” so sensitive that only minimal distribution is
permitted on a need-to-know basis. “An unclassified system was no place for
that conversation,” Comey declared.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Whether any of these emails were
intercepted the FBI couldn’t determine. There was no such evidence—it would be hard
to find—but Comey raised that possibility, because the FBI discovered that
Clinton had used her personal email for work-related matters when she was
outside the US “in the territories of sophisticated adversaries.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Nevertheless, she was not charged.
The facts failed to rise to the level required for a prosecution, Comey said.
And there was a broader problem, he claimed: “The security culture of the State
Department . . . was generally lacking in the kind of care for classified
information that’s found elsewhere in the US government.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Comey was roundly criticized for
making this statement, and for his subsequent disclosure, shortly before the 2016
presidential election, that Clinton emails had been found on the computer of a
disgraced former congressman, whose ex-wife had worked on the Clinton campaign.
Only later did the FBI announce that those emails contained no classified
material, but the political damage was done. The revelation probably
contributed to her loss.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Secrets have wandered into other strange
places. In 1977, the last US ambassador to South Vietnam, Graham Martin, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1979/03/31/graham-martin-wont-be-prosecuted/b58580db-9afd-44e7-9c48-e5d61797e522/">stashed
Top Secret intelligence-related documents</a> in the trunk of his car. The car
was stolen, and when it was recovered, the documents were missing—a fact he
failed to report. In 1979, the Justice Department cited “serious questions of
criminal liability” but decided not to prosecute Martin, then 67, because of
his poor health. He lived another eleven years. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Having watched him in Saigon, I have
no doubt that if the tables had been turned, he would have campaigned for the
imprisonment of any other US diplomat so careless with classified material. His
hawkish, dogmatic fantasies led him to crush accurate military assessments and fiercely
deny that the North Vietnamese were on the cusp of victory in 1975. He obstinately
rejected orderly evacuation plans for Vietnamese who had worked with Americans,
forcing other officials to evade him surreptitiously in getting people out to
safety.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">But he was given a free pass for
letting Top Secret information be stolen by—who knows? So it typically goes for
high officials. A series of slaps on the wrist were administered to retired General
David Petraeus, who as CIA director <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-20276786">gave eight binders</a>
of classified material to his mistress and biographer. He had to resign from
the CIA in 2012, serve only two years’ probation, and pay a $100,000 fine.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Given that context, what are the
chances that a president or former president will sit behind bars for this? Since
nefarious intent and gross negligence must be proved to get convictions, it
seems a foregone conclusion that the special counsel just appointed will not
see a case against President Biden <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>for the documents found in his private office,
private house, and home garage. Biden said he was surprised and didn’t know
what was in the material, whose discovery was reported immediately to the
National Archives.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">But not reported to the public
before last November’s elections, which makes the matter more political than
criminal. And politically, given the incapability of this country’s public
discourse to be factual and discerning, the Biden mishandling appears to
neutralize the Trump mishandling. That, despite the hundreds of documents that
Trump kept as he stonewalled and lied about them to the National Archives and
the Justice Department. Trump defied a subpoena, provoking the FBI to obtain a
warrant and conduct a search of his Florida residence, Mar-a-Lago.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Whether Trump will be indicted for having
the material or for obstruction of justice is an open question as of this
writing. It seems possible but unlikely.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Most officials who suffer
punishment are lower-level whistleblowers who disclose classified misdeeds to
the American public through the press. The wrongs they expose have included
illegal surveillance of Americans and the murder of civilians and prisoners by
US troops. When it comes to embarrassing information, security classifications
take on the stature of holy writ. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The Obama administration prosecuted
more such leakers than any other administration in US history—or threatened
prosecution in ways that ruined the careers and livelihoods of those who saw their
patriotism in the broadest sense, as a call to protect their country from its
own malfeasance.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The lesson may be that the system
of classification is no “system” at all, but a helter-skelter, inconsistently
managed, often chaotic tangle of legitimate secrets mixed with speculation by
intelligence agencies, outdated information, and self-serving censorship of
inconvenient truths. It needs extensive reform, which probably won’t come unless
it truly endangers those at the heights of government.<o:p></o:p></p>Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305265860388931637noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5176006268302183776.post-87379322448194094312022-12-16T17:54:00.006-05:002023-02-06T13:39:16.724-05:00The Dying Constitution, Part II<p> </p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">By David K. Shipler<o:p></o:p></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-size: 10pt;">See Part I </span></i><a href="https://shiplerreport.blogspot.com/2022/06/the-dying-constitution.html#more"><i><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Here</span></i></a><i><span style="font-size: 10pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Like a
broken clock that tells the right time twice a day, former President Donald
Trump’s recent call for the Constitution to be terminated was a fleeting moment
of honesty. He never honored the Constitution in practice, despite his oath to “preserve,
protect, and defend” it. He sought to undermine its foundational separation of
powers, and of course its mechanism of electoral democracy. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Still
raging and lying about the 2020 election, he wrote in early December, “A Massive
Fraud [sic] of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules,
regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” His post
appeared on his media platform, Truth Social, whose title aptly echoes the paradoxical
name the Soviet Communist Party gave to its newspaper: “Truth” (<i>Pravda</i>
in Russian). Need we cite Orwell yet again?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This
prominent a dismissal of the Constitution was a break from a long, modern
American tradition. By and large, all sides in the most acrimonious debates
ritually cite the document in reverence. They interpret it variously to suit
their own arguments, to be sure, sometimes with convoluted sophistry. But they
rarely hope to cast it aside. Even the January 6 rioters hailed the
Constitution as they violated it by storming the Capitol to disrupt the sacred
process of counting Electoral College votes.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>So,
what is the significance of Trump’s remark? He has been sneered at for years
whenever he utters absurdities, with much of the public thinking that he has
finally crossed the line into a territory of his own demise. But for millions
of his spellbound supporters, that line is as imaginary as the horizon,
receding as he approaches it.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>After
his comment on “termination,” only a bare majority (51 percent) of registered
voters <a href="https://poll.qu.edu/poll-release?releaseid=3863">polled by
Quinnipiac University</a> said it disqualified him from running again for
president. A substantial 40 percent said it was not disqualifying. The figures
among Republicans were troubling: Disqualified—just 17 percent. Not
disqualified—72 percent. Democrats, predictably, were the opposite: 86 percent
said he was disqualified, 12 percent said not disqualified. <span></span></p><a name='more'></a><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Is this
simply a matter of tribal politics? Of misplaced hero worship? Or does it
reveal something deeper, an eroding respect for the Constitution as a bulwark
of freedom and a manual of pluralistic liberty? If a new constitutional
convention were held today, what kind of document would emerge? <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Would white supremacists find their
seats through the Republican Party? Would freedom of the press (“enemies of the
people,” according to Trump) be abandoned? Would adverse speech be outlawed?
Would state-sponsored religion be codified? Would voting rights be curtailed?
Would the three branches’ balance of power be tilted one way or another? Would
due process, the right to counsel, the
right against self-incrimination, the right of security against unreasonable
search and seizure, equal protection under law, and the constitutional building
blocks of racial justice survive? It’s hard to be confident.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">No longer is the Republican Party a
dependable defender of the constitutional system. Even after some losses in the
mid-terms by their election-denying candidates, most leading Republicans
reacted to Trump’s “termination” demand with silence or equivocation, hardly
the way to preserve a functioning democracy. They still fear crossing Trump and
losing primaries.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Republican officeholders continue
riding the currents of popular discomfort with the hurly burly of pluralistic
politics. The grievances he manipulates will surely survive him: impatience
with the cacophony of multiple voices, distaste for “other” Americans who are
not white or Christian or heterosexual, resentment toward experts who appear
condescending, a sense of alienation and powerlessness against the bigness of
governmental and corporate and academic authority. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Dragging the Constitution into raw
politics is nothing new. Nor is the American reflex defending individual
autonomy, which has been an asset as a deep aversion to autocratic government.
Yet individualism has also been mobilized against the welfare of others, fueling
an imperious social and religious agenda on the right. If the Constitution were
read to permit all citizens to do whatever suits them, it would be deemed a
threat to decent order. That would spell its death as a vibrant set of principles
just as surely as if its protections are diluted by excessive judges and
legislators. The Constitution stands in the central square of liberty and
order, a ground that is eroding.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">In every country where freedom has
been threatened, the alarmists are usually a small minority, the activists only
a fraction of the population. They might eventually mobilize the broader
conscience of their nation, but initially they tower above the crowd, figures
against the sky. They are inevitably vilified and ridiculed and demonized, as
they are now by the extremists who have captured the Republican Party.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Once upon a time, the invasion of
the Capitol would have ignited outrage across the full range of both major
political parties. Liz Cheney would have been the darling of rock-ribbed
conservative Republicans instead of the villain swamped in a primary by Wyoming
voters who were unmoved by her lonely defense of constitutional democracy. This
is not such a time.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The fragility of a system built on
words and operated on shared values was understood by the fifty-five white men
who labored, bargained, and sweated through the steaming Philadelphia summer of
1787. They carried parochial and territorial interests into Independence Hall,
and they were far from flawless. Some were slaveholders. All were privileged.
Their number excluded women and Blacks, and so were radically unrepresentative.
Their debates were tense, and their nerves were edgy.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Yet they managed a set of
principles larger than themselves, transcending their personal foibles and self-serving
concerns. That remarkable achievement by imperfect human beings is often
blanked out by those at each extreme of today’s political spectrum.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">On the right, the Framers are seen
as god-like oracles to justify the pinched “originalism” that narrows the
Constitution’s empowerment of individual liberty and practically denies its
application to evolving society. On the left, the Framers are denigrated for
their demography, and for their unseemly compromises with Southern slave states
to win ratification of the controversial document.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">When either extreme is blind to the
majesty of the result, when the right diminishes its scope and the left
discounts its universality, the Constitution’s viability flags. Among all the
damages that Trump has caused this beloved country, this latest can become the
most sinister—unless decisively repudiated.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The Constitution is only alive in a
stormy society that uses it wisely. As a piece of parchment, it is much like
the nautical chart in the poet Philip Booth’s <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=27023">hard
and luminous account</a> of sailing in fog. Not only must the depths and reefs marked
on paper be observed, he writes, but also the “set of tide, lost buoys, and breakers’
noise on shore where no shore was.” Booth's final line, a caution to the sailor, also speaks to those who love the United States Constitution: “The chart is not
the sea.”<o:p></o:p></p>Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305265860388931637noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5176006268302183776.post-38960535257252889492022-11-22T17:18:00.000-05:002022-11-22T17:18:00.089-05:00Trumpism is not Dead<p> </p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">By David K. Shipler </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Despite
Donald Trump’s political wounds from the mid-terms, his strategy of hateful polarization
and autocratic assaults on democracy have not been defeated. They no longer
depend on his personal demagoguery but have been woven into the fabric of the
Republican Party. No true cleansing seems likely without a much more thorough drubbing
at the ballot box than Republicans just experienced a week ago.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">There is good reason for the relief
that prevailed on the American left after Republicans failed to sweep the
mid-term elections “as expected.” But expectations are figments of prediction,
not reality. The Democrats held the Senate, yes, and few of Trump’s endorsed candidates
achieved high enough office to rig vote counts, thankfully. Subverting democracy
is not so easy.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">But a glass half full is also a
glass half empty. Many races were infinitesimally close, with millions of
Americans ignoring Republicans’ dangerous campaign to undermine faith in elections,
whose integrity is the pillar of government by the people. And the Republicans
are still at it: gerrymandering upheld by rightwing judges, voter suppression
laws, intimidation at the polls, threats scaring honest election workers to
resign, and their biased replacements infiltrating local electoral systems. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">According to much of the
post-election analysis, the voting seemed less about Republicans vs. Democrats than
about Democrats vs. Expectations. The expectations lost, mainly because they
were so excessive.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">Who was expecting what? Pundits,
speculators, politicians, and reporters engaged in an orgy of expectations: the
expectation that history would win by overrunning the party in power, as usual
in mid-terms. That inflation would win by blaming the party in power. That
crime would win by indicting the party in power. The word “expect” in all its
parts of speech should be banned from political coverage.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>But did
the Democrats win? If getting through a stalemated war without getting killed
is winning, sure. But this war is far from over, and the bad guys are still at
the gates.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">On the one hand, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2022/11/politics/election-deniers-winners-losers-midterms-2022/">none
of the Republican candidates</a> who called the 2020 presidential election
fraudulent won office to supervise the next elections in swing states,
including Nevada, Michigan, Arizona, and Pennsylvania. That removed part of the
threat that the accuracy of future vote counts would be undermined by partisan
secretaries of state and governors. On the other hand, election deniers won as
secretaries of state in four states, and eight were elected as governors.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">The mainstream of the Republican
Party remains a conduit for the once-fringe white supremacist theories of
social grievance and calls to political violence. Republicans swept Florida,
the epicenter of school censorship, book banning, immigrant-bashing, and other
assaults on liberty. The party retains its anti-democracy desires.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">And while Democrats cheered the
narrowness of Republicans’ takeover of the House of Representatives, it is
precisely that razor thin majority that will give leverage to the radical Freedom
Caucus and its most demented members, such as Lauren Boebert and Marjorie
Taylor Greene. Ironically, a larger majority might have given the Republican
leadership space for some moderation. Depending for votes by the likes of
Boebert and Greene will make the chamber into a platform for slander, character
assassination, guilt by association, wild fabrications, and other do-nothing cacophony.
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">Conventional interpretations of political
developments reveal two chronic problems of journalism. One is short-term
memory. The other is the personification of policy.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">The first is imposed by tight news
cycles, which tend to create fads of interest. Topics and analyses flare and
disappear like shooting stars. “News” is defined as something “new.” Therefore,
events comprising both the changing and the unchanging—as most significant events
do—are distorted by a lens that puts newness into focus and blurs the rest.
What is different is emphasized; what remains constant is not. The midterm
elections were a classic example, for much in the body politic remained basically
unchanged.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">The second defect—personification--comes
from journalism’s limits of time and space, and its need to catch and appeal to
the fleeting attention of the public. Attributing policy to personality—"Biden’s
agenda,” “Trump’s candidates”—isn’t all wrong, obviously, but it’s too easy
when it ignores the society’s contributing faults and virtues. Maureen Dowd had
it right when she wrote that Trump had opened the Pandora’s Box of American
demons. For years he was pictured as the cause when he was in fact the symptom,
the facilitator. Now, it’s clear that Trumpism has taken root and can grow
without him.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">Therefore, while Trump’s political
stature has been a central topic of coverage, and he remains the object of our
obsession as he runs again for president, his malice has been
institutionalized.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">The same can be said of Vladimir
Putin, by the way. Our concentration on him as the wellspring of all Russian evil
misses the broader historical patterns of yearning that have transcended Russian
governments since before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Even if Putin were
toppled, Russia’s thin-skinned sense of humiliation, its messianic impulses, and
its lust for respect through territorial expansion would not necessarily be
toppled as well. His replacement might be as bad or worse.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">So might Trump’s. In the White
House, he was crude and sloppy, incurious about how to pull the levers of
government and cultivate alliances within law enforcement, military, and
intelligence agencies. There are potential Republican challengers who are smarter
and equally malicious: Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, for example, and Florida
governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, who just won election in a 19-point
landslide.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">In rallies, though, Trump is a
marksman, hitting the targets of resentment. Perhaps a Trumpist successor would
lack the rhetorical skill to incite mobs of hateful white Americans to channel
their sense of powerless and marginalization. Perhaps. But Trump has been a
model of demagoguery, so emulation can be expected. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">There are those of us looking
forward eagerly to a Trump political failure. But it would be no guarantee of
salvation. Pandora’s Box has been opened. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305265860388931637noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5176006268302183776.post-30827149423691057102022-11-13T17:33:00.004-05:002022-11-22T18:15:49.352-05:00Putin's War Shrinks and Widens<p> </p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">By David K. Shipler </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Russia’s
war in Ukraine might be one of the strangest in history. Even while his army is
being pummeled into retreat, President Vladimir Putin expands the goals of the
conflict into a messianic campaign against the entire West. As his military holdings
shrink on the ground, his strategic ambitions spread into a miasma of
self-delusion. It is a dark comedy with monstrous effect.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Not
only does Russia aim to retake the Ukrainian part of the lost Soviet empire, according
to Putin. Not only must Russia parry American military threats to preserve its very
existence, he claims. But also, more deeply, Russia must fulfill its mission, borne of its
thousand-year history, to lead toward a multipolar world: to defeat the arrogant
West’s “faltering hegemony”; its “neo-colonial system”; its “enslavement” of the
less wealthy; its “pure Satanism,” its “radical denial of moral, religious, and
family values.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>That is
a tall order for a country with a limping economy, few international friends,
and an army that looked formidable until the first shot was fired. It also
suggests a war in search of an ideology—or at least a rationale trying for resonance
in both Russia and developing countries that feel exploited. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">In a way, it seems a lame throwback
to the communist era of Russian evangelism for worldwide social justice. But it
also reveals something more significant. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Putin seems to fancy himself a
brilliant global analyst. He has been holding forth in various writings and several
long speeches, most notably on <a href="http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/69465">September 30</a>
in annexing Ukrainian territory that his troops didn’t entirely hold, and then
on <a href="http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/69695">October 27</a>
in a three-hour session at the Valdai International Discussion Club—an annual
gathering of fawning Russian and foreign guests who lob softball questions
after he pontificates at length. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Several conclusions can be drawn
from this disconnect between solid ground and atmospherics. First, Putin is not
stupid and he is not unaware. He is Donald Trump with a sheen of
sophistication. He is a cunning wordsmith who weaves lies and truths together into
webs of alternative reality.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Second, he is a chess player with
the long view, cognizant of historical trends and able to think several moves
ahead. But he does not play well when he is emotional; emotion is not helpful in
the logic of chess. And despite his steely pose, Putin reveals his emotions with
a mystical reverence for Russian destiny. It has thrown him off his game.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">And that leads to the third
conclusion, perhaps the most important. Whether in sincerity or opportunism,
Putin is tapping into a strain of ethno-nationalism that has endured through upheavals
of state rule from czarist monarchy to Soviet communism to transitory pluralism
to post-communist autocracy.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Call it Russianism, the label I settled
on when I first encountered the phenomenon under Soviet rule in the late 1970s.
A liberal writer saw it as the country’s only mass movement, and the most
dangerous.<span></span></p><a name='more'></a><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">It was a form of quiet dissent then,
its adherents sometimes imprisoned by Soviet authorities but most often tolerated
as they circulated their underground <i>samizdat</i>—self-published essays—condemning
Marxism and the Bolsheviks, the country’s non-Russian influences, and the
restrictions on the Russian Orthodox Church. They regarded Russians, the
dominant ethnicity among a very diverse population, as the most pure and
enlightened and entitled, carrying the nostalgic honesty and simplicity of
rural peasantry. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Unlike the pro-democracy movement
of Andrei Sakharov, however, Russianism’s ethnic nationalism embraced autocracy.
As its main apostle, the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, prisoner and then chronicler
of the Stalinist prison camps, thundered in a 1973 letter to Soviet leaders: “Russia
is authoritarian. Let it remain so.” Then, with the publication abroad of <i>The
Gulag Archipelago</i>, he was exiled to the United States.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">He was quoted approvingly two weeks
ago by none other than Putin, who cited Solzhenitsyn’s sneering denunciation, <a href="https://thesaker.is/alexander-solzhenitsyns-harvard-address/">delivered at
Harvard’s 1978 commencement</a>, of the West’s “persisting blindness of
superiority, [which] upholds the belief that vast regions everywhere
on our planet should develop and mature to the level
of present-day Western systems.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Solzhenitsyn also infused the
Russianists’ anti-communism with ethnic-cultural resentment, describing Marxism
as a “dark, un-Russian whirlwind that descended on us from the West.” His
disciples in Moscow wrote acerbically of the Jewish and non-Russian genealogies
of Trotsky and some other Bolsheviks in the original Politburo, including Lenin’s
Kalmyk father and his German (perhaps Jewish) mother. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">If you diagramed those Russianist
sympathies, they would not have formed limited circles like the Sakharov movement
for democracy or the Jewish push for free emigration. Instead, Russianism would
have made a vertical line reaching from outcasts vulnerable to arrest, up into
the Soviet hierarchy, which tolerated some well-placed figures who shared the
views.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Indeed, since Putin was a KGB agent
and Communist Party member in those Soviet days, it is worth noting that Communist
officialdom and Russianism overlapped in key areas of belief: in
authoritarianism and political unanimity, in chauvinistic insularity, and in
social conservatism averse to Western permissiveness. Soviet Communists outlawed
homosexuality, for example, as Putin’s government does today. Here is what Putin
said at the September 30 ceremony annexing parts of Ukraine:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">“Do we want to have here,
in our country, in Russia, ‘parent number one, parent number two
and parent number three’ (they have completely lost it!) instead
of mother and father? Do we want our schools to impose
on our children, from their earliest days in school, perversions that
lead to degradation and extinction? Do we want to drum into
their heads the ideas that certain other genders exist along with women
and men and to offer them gender reassignment surgery? Is that
what we want for our country and our children? This is all
unacceptable to us. We have a different future of our own.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Sound familiar? Putin could win a
Florida election in a landslide. Indeed, he speaks of “two Wests,” one “of traditional,
primarily Christian values, freedom, patriotism, great culture and now
Islamic values as well – a substantial part
of the population in many Western countries follows Islam. This
West is close to us in something. We share with it common, even
ancient roots. But there is also a different West – aggressive, cosmopolitan,
and neocolonial. It is acting as a tool of neoliberal
elites. Naturally, Russia will never reconcile itself to the dictates
of this West.” The word “cosmopolitan” has often been used as code for
Jewish.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Since Putin sees such affinities, it’s
no big leap to think that he has been influenced by his supporting ideologue, the
historian Aleksandr Dugin, who has urged that Russia “destabilize internal
political processes in the U.S.” Hence, the fake social media sites created by
Russian operatives posing as Americans to exacerbate divisions.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">What is the impact of Putin’s
Russianism internally? Does it resonate enough among his citizens, and especially in Moscow’s elite, to shape long-term
policy toward the West? It’s hard to assess amid the clampdown on Russians’
ability to speak their minds. Will it counter the growing disaffection with the
reverses on the battlefield, the doubts about the war’s purpose, the fear of
being drafted that has propelled an estimated 200,000 men to flee abroad? Will Putin’s
call for vitriolic chauvinism keep his country’s will intact? Will it keep him
in power? And if he is deposed, what then?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Whatever the answers to the
immediate questions, Russianism coincides with a longer global retreat into ethno-nationalism,
seen in Italy and Israel, Hungary and France, and in right-wing streams of
American politics. These trends have momentum, not easily reversible.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The fundamentals of Russianism have
proved durable enough to outlive Putin, as they have his predecessors. That
suggests a post-Putin Russia as still testy, wounded, and confrontational, with
a hawkish posture toward the U.S. and its democratic allies—a dangerous
scenario.<o:p></o:p></p>Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305265860388931637noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5176006268302183776.post-38000666002393417032022-10-09T20:43:00.002-04:002022-11-07T15:30:33.187-05:00A Race to Extinction: Right Whales or Maine Lobstermen?<p> </p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">By David K. Shipler </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>A significant
struggle, invisible to most Americans, is occurring along the northern New England
coast to save both an endangered species of whale and an endangered way of
life. It is a clash of priorities, values, and even basic facts, that could
leave both North Atlantic right whales and Maine lobstermen as victims. You can
see the high stakes when tough men of the sea have fear in their eyes.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>New federal
regulations, enacted and in the works, are being challenged by Maine officials
and lobstermen as unjustified. And the private sector has now escalated the
conflict with a call to boycott lobsters. Issued from the other side of the
country by the Monterey Bay (California) Aquarium’s Seafood Watch, it is based on
information that is far from conclusive about the danger posed to the whales by
ropes used in lobstering. The move seems wildly excessive, has undermined the
conservationists’ credibility, and has further polarized the players in an
effort that cries out for sensible solutions.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Also, by the way, boycotting lobsters
won’t save the whales. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
problem looks clearcut on its face. The estimated number of North Atlantic
right whales has declined precipitously from about 480 in 2010 to under 350 today.
Their mortality rate is high, mostly because of interaction with humans: many
are struck by ships, and many others are entangled in rope from both gillnets
and lobster gear, which can open wounds and lead to lethal infection. The
demise of females has led to a decline of newborn calves below the 50 per year <a href="https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/national/endangered-species-conservation/north-atlantic-right-whale-calving-season-2022">needed</a>
for the population to recover. Fifteen have been born so far in 2022.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>From
here, the problem gets complicated. Climate change contributes, because as the
Gulf of Maine warms faster than any other part of the earth’s oceans, the
whales have followed their main food source—the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/23/science/right-whales-endangered.html?searchResultPosition=4">tiny
shrimplike calanus finmarchicus—</a>northward into Canadian waters, notably the
Gulf of St. Lawrence, a shipping area where collisions are likely.<span></span></p><a name='more'></a> <o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">A speed limit of 10 knots in
certain areas has been imposed on vessels over 35 feet by both Canada and the
United States. Right whales are notoriously slow—and maybe a little dumb—one reason
they were easy targets for whalers in the old days: the “right whales” to harpoon
and also pick up, since they float after death. I once watched several swimming
so ponderously off the Canadian island of Grand Manan that they’d obviously have
no chance of getting out of the way of a big cargo ship or a fast boat.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">In full disclosure, this is an
appropriate place to confess my competing biases. I love to go whale-watching.
When the Gulf of Maine was cooler, I occasionally took my boat out to Mt.
Desert Rock, about 18 miles offshore, where minke and humpback whales liked to
roam before they mostly moved north.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">I’ve watched whales from Alaska to
Antarctica, from offshore near Washington State down to the coast of
California, from eastern Canada down to Cape Cod Bay. So, like everyone else—including
lobstermen, I might add—I’m partial to whales. There might be nothing on this
planet as majestic as two gargantuan humpbacks out in the Gulf of Maine breaching
together in the early twilight, propelling themselves completely out of the water
in unison, dancers in an ancient pageant.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">I’m also partial to the lobstermen
I’ve grown friendly with during the part of each year I live on an island off
the coast of Maine. They are flinty individualists—about 5,000 altogether in
the state—who own their own boats, go to sea hours before the rest of us know
that a new day is dawning, and take on weather that should make a mortal
tremble. The gender walls are gradually breaking down, with some men
encouraging their daughters to go lobstering, and more and more women setting
out.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Like farmers, they’re at the mercy
of elements they don’t control. Some years are good, and they make big bucks.
Some are lean. The catch rises and falls, and the market is fickle. Last year,
in a post-pandemic surge of demand, lobstermen were getting $7 to $8 a pound at
the boat; this summer, it was down to $3.25 or so. The costs of bait and diesel
fuel have soared, so just to break even each day, they have to haul a lot of
traps with a lot of pounds. Some fishermen were taking days off to save on the
expenses.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The gear is expensive, too. A three-foot
trap goes for nearly $90, a buoy around $10, plus swivels, bait bags, and thin rope
(called “pot warp,” priced by the pound), all adding up to some $150—more if
you have multiple traps on each trawl, as the federal government is now
requiring. So losing all that to a whale is no delight for either party.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Lobster traps sit on the bottom, and
the pot warp that runs up to buoys on the surface is the alleged culprit. Those
vertical lines can entangle whales, including those that spend summers in
Canadian waters but migrate south along the Maine coast to breeding grounds off
the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The dispute is this: When a whale
is found dragging rope, or with scars showing a past entanglement, whose rope
is it? Where did it come from? Canada? Maine? Massachusetts? Maine was not a
location of any observed incidents of death or serious injury from 2017 to the
present, listed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Twenty-one of the 33 dead right whales
in that period <a href="https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/national/marine-life-distress/2017-2022-north-atlantic-right-whale-unusual-mortality-event">were
found</a> in Canada, and the remaining 12 scattered in waters off
Massachusetts, Virginia, New York, New Jersey, North and South Carolina, and
Florida. The same with seriously injured whales: eight in Canada and 12 from
Massachusetts to Georgia.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The lack of solid proof of Maine involvement
is cited by the Maine Lobsterman’s Association, backed up by Maine’s governor,
two senators, and two House representatives—Democratic, Republican, and Independent—to
assert that not a single death of a right whale has ever been attributed to
Maine lobster gear, and that no entanglements with rope from Maine waters have
been documented in the last 18 years. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Yet the lobster fishery has been
hit with a series of federal regulations aimed at reducing the prevalence of
those lines and to require breakaway rope that releases more easily, at 1700
pounds, with more restrictions to come that will make lobstering even more
difficult, risky, and costly. Areas offshore totaling 1,000 square miles are
being closed from October 1 to January 31, and 5, 10, 15, 20, or 25 traps per
trawl are <a href="https://media.fisheries.noaa.gov/2021-10/ZoneELobJCMin.pdf">being
mandated</a> in various Maine areas to reduce the amount of vertical line.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Splicing in breakaway line is labor
intensive, and large numbers of traps on a trawl are expensive, since it’s too
dangerous to have 25 traps aboard at once without extra hands. When the traps
are cast off and sink fast, the line whips out with them; a lobsterman can get
an ankle caught and be dragged overboard; it happens. So, where a captain once
hired a single sternman, he would now need two for safety, and sternmen get a
percentage of the take. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Then, there is talk of ropeless
technology to be used in areas otherwise closed. It is not yet perfected: The
trap would have a buoy bound to it on the bottom, to be released when the lobsterman
activates a coded sonar signal.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">This sounds clever, but lobstermen give
lots of reasons why it won’t work. One explained to me the other day that buoys
tell him where other traps are located; without them, he might set his on top
of somebody else’s: a reasonable concern, since multiple lobstermen tend to set
traps near one another in promising areas. Also, who will pay the added cost of
the gadgetry?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">These regulations make many Maine
fishermen feel as entangled as the whales, and as threatened. One of my friends,
out on his boat this summer while I came alongside to talk, told me how glad he
was that his son was not following in his footsteps.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">But what are the facts? I put the question
to NOAA—citing the lack of hard data—and got an interesting answer from a
spokesperson, Katie Wagner.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">First, she said in an email, “in
most years, only one third of right whale mortalities are observed,” according
to a Duke University <a href="https://seamap.env.duke.edu/models/Duke/EC/">mammal
density model</a>. So the causes of death are not known.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Second, when dead or injured whales
are spotted, determining who owned the rope has been nearly impossible. “Entanglement
injuries are often observed without gear remaining on the whale,” Wagner wrote,
noting that 85 percent of all right whales have scars from the lines. “When
gear is remaining it is rarely retrieved. In those rare cases when gear is
retrieved, it usually carries no area-specific marking and can only be
identified to a geographic area fewer than half the time.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>NOAA’s conclusion? <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">“We cannot dismiss the likelihood
that Maine buoy lines, which make up the majority of buoy lines in waters where
right whales occur, are responsible for some of the serious injuries and
mortalities.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Not dismissing the likelihood is
not proof. It’s what a court might call circumstantial evidence, which is sometimes
used to convict someone of a crime—but sometimes produces wrongful convictions.
<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Wagner went on to provide a
significant fact that strengthens the case, though. In the last two years, Maine
lobstermen <a href="https://media.fisheries.noaa.gov/2021-10/ALWTP%20Summary%20of%20Changes%2010192021.pdf">have
been required</a> to use purple and green line inserts or paint to identify
their trawls. Since then, although no right whales have been found entangled in
such rope, other large species have been.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">“In 2021, a humpback whale was
disentangled from gear fished by a Maine fisherman in Federal waters (purple
and green marks),” she said. “In 2020 and 2021, two dead minke whales in rope
with purple marks, and two disentangled minke whales in rope with purple marks
were documented. Given the low number of right whales, documented entanglements
are more rare, but even one serious injury or mortality exceeds” the level at which
eventual extinction can be avoided.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
Seafood Watch boycott has so infuriated Maine’s congressional delegation that
Sen. Angus King and Representative Jared Golden have introduced a bill to block
federal funding to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which has received almost $197
million since 2001. My requests to the aquarium for detailed evidence to
support their position on lobstering went unanswered.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In the
end, though, global warming might kill lobstering before boycotts or
right-whale regulations do. Lobsters like cold water. South of here, lobstering
has declined. Several years ago, when an environmental lawyer lectured at the
local library on right-whale regulations, he ended by warning that the
lobstermen in the audience should be more worried about climate change. That is
where I saw fear in their eyes.<o:p></o:p></p>Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305265860388931637noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5176006268302183776.post-11927551378946146832022-09-24T19:40:00.001-04:002022-10-09T21:00:13.394-04:00The Age of Absurdities<p> </p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">By David K. Shipler </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In the
last week, both Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump have treated the world to fantasies
and fables so pernicious in their implications for global freedom and security
as to defy satire. Both men, aided by sycophants, have anchored us firmly in an
era practically unmatched in modern times, where completely fabricated narratives
cause wars and shape governments. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">In a televised speech, Putin
declared the West guilty of designs on Russia’s very existence, implicitly
threatened nuclear war if Russian territory is attacked, then made sure it
would be attacked by orchestrating a forced “referendum” to annex Ukrainian territory
in the Donbas region, thereby converting it into Russian land worthy of the
ultimate defense!<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Trump told Fox News that he could
declassify the nation’s most sensitive secrets just by thinking to himself that
they are no longer secret, and that the FBI—in its raid on his luxury club Mar
a-Lago—was really after Hillary Clinton’s emails! And, of course, elections
should not be trusted (unless he wins), because the 2020 election was stolen.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Late-night comedians cannot laugh
away this parallel universe, because millions of Russians believe Putin, and
millions of Americans believe Trump. We are on the brink of a wider war between
Russia and the West because of Putin’s imaginary tale of American and European
preparations for attack. We Americans are on the brink of losing our precious
democracy because of Trump’s imaginary tale of election fraud and his Republican
Party’s calculated program of placing partisans in official positions to create
actual fraud next time around.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">It almost doesn’t matter whether Putin
and Trump are convinced of their own lies, or whether they are just clever
manipulators. Enough of their citizens are spellbound by their rhetoric and
charisma to intoxicate the two men with the illusion of broad and righteous support.
Neither the recent cracks in Russia’s enforced unanimity nor the polarized hostility
of American politics has induced moderation in either of the fabulators. Each
has doubled down into his manufactured world of unreality.<span></span></p><a name='more'></a><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Dogmatic fictions are endemic to human
foibles, of course, and some have impeded knowledge, inflamed hatreds, and
produced warfare. The earth is flat. The sun revolves around the earth. This or
that ethnic or racial or religious group controls, schemes, exploits, corrupts,
rapes, or betrays and must be imprisoned, expelled, or exterminated. Witness
China, Myanmar, Rwanda, and on.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Nazi Germany’s phantasmagoria about
Jews as the clandestine, all-powerful force behind the country’s interwar
hardships defied all facts. But many people—including Germans then, Russians
and Americans now—have efficient fact-filters to purify their perceptions according
to their predilections. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Russian families have fractured
because relatives in Russia have refused to believe what relatives in Ukraine
have seen with their own eyes. Americans enthralled with Trump are unwavering
in their devotion even as his wrongdoing is documented by the January 6
committee and his unlawful possession of classified documents.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/22/upshot/donald-trump-approval-poll.html?searchResultPosition=4">Polls</a>
show Trump’s 44 percent favorable and 53 percent unfavorable ratings stable as
the investigations unfold. The testimony of his own Republican aides that he
was told clearly that he had lost the election, and the carefully reasoned
rejection of his fraud cases by more than three score judges—including some of Trump’s
own nominees—have not shaken the conviction by about <a href="https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2022/70-percent-republicans-falsely-believe-stolen-election-trump/">70
percent of Republicans</a> that they were cheated out of a presidential win.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">Acceptance of such enormous fictions is the product of careful methodology. </span>In both Russia and the United States, the groundwork
for the people’s credulity is laid by contaminating the sources of information
with chronic lies and censorship.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">One of Putin’s first acts after his
February 24 invasion of Ukraine was to threaten and close the remaining
independent (hence skeptical) news media, block certain truth-telling websites,
and enact a 15-year prison sentence for disputing the virtue of the “special
military operation.” Russians and foreigners in the country risk prison time for calling
the war a war. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">In the United States, where
government doesn’t control the press, private businesses have undermined the modern tradition of fair journalism. The profits are in the polemics, and
Fox News has been the most successful in reaping the bounty of aggrieved
alienation, tribalism, and powerlessness among the mostly white working class. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Trump seems to understand, perhaps
instinctively, that to cultivate credulity for his fantasies he must dislodge
Americans from connections to the truth. He calls the mainstream media by the
Stalinist term “enemies of the people,” incites supporters to jeer and menace the
news crews covering rallies, and cultivates a miasma of skepticism about traditional
(read: elite) sources of accuracy. When you’re adrift, you hang onto whatever
flotsam you can grab.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Every demagogue surely knows that controlling
information is a key to power. And if you can make people feel good in the
process, if you can make them feel as if they are really streetwise and smart
enough see through the pretenses and self-serving deceptions of the powerful,
you’ve got them.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">So, the mass media are first. Then come
the schools. The Russians have imposed a Russian curriculum in the Ukrainian
schools they have occupied. Ukrainian national history is taboo. The rightwing
Republicans are imposing <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>curricula in
bright-red states where teachers are being silenced by new laws barring
discussions of sexual orientation and the legacy of racism. The stains of
American history are being scrubbed clean. Books that don’t fit the dogma are
being removed from school and public libraries.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Anyone who has watched the working
of autocratic systems can see the pattern clearly. Ignorance is taught, and into
ignorance flow fantasies. And now, on the surge of Putin-Trump fantasies, ride
the peril of war and the fragility of democracy. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305265860388931637noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5176006268302183776.post-47442069853281798212022-09-19T14:37:00.004-04:002022-09-24T20:56:04.076-04:00The Democratic Party's Cynical Caper<p> </p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">By David K. Shipler</p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><o:p> </o:p><span style="text-align: left;"> </span><span style="text-align: left;">Now that
the mid-term primaries are over, the cynical wing of the Democratic Party can
tally its “wins.” Those are the radical right-wing election deniers and Pro-Trump
fans of autocracy whose victories in Republican primaries were owed in part to
Democratic-funded ads.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Six of thirteen such candidates won
and are headed to the November election, where Democrats hope their extremism
will be repulsive enough to the broader universe of voters that their Democratic
opponents will prevail. That could happen, but it would be a sordid
achievement.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>First, as
some leading Democrats have warned, it’s a risky proposition. Some of those crazies
could get elected, as Trump himself did after Hillary Clinton’s campaign ran as
if Trump’s own flaws would defeat him.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Second, even where Democratic
candidates prevail in the general election, the Republican radicals and their
nonsensical conspiracy slanders will have been given more of a platform
courtesy of Democratic money.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">“Many of these candidates develop a
much larger following, even if they lose the current race,” <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/democratic-groups-spend-money-on-republican-primaries-to-nominate-less-appealing-opponents">said
Mike Madrid</a>, a Republican strategist. “What we have seen is, they come back
and win for school board or state legislative race or for city councils because
of this new awareness and this new recognition.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Third, spending $53-million in nine
states has broken faith with Democratic donors who thought their contributions
to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee would be going to—duh—Democratic
campaigns.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Fourth, and perhaps most important
in the long run, to work against principled Republican House members who had the
courageous patriotism to vote for Trump’s impeachment after January 6, is to help
undermine the prospects for a reformation in the Republican Party. The country
needs two responsible political parties, and the Democrats have now helped enhance
the dangers of embracing decency.<span></span></p><a name='more'></a><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For example, Democrats spent $435,000 to
advertise the rightist credentials of election-denier John Gibbs in Michigan—“too
conservative for West Michigan,” <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/2022-live-primary-election-race-results/2022/08/03/1115168787/meijer-gibbs-trump-michigan-gop-primary-results">one
ad said</a>—which surely helped him defeat Peter Meijer, who had voted for Trump’s
impeachment after the Capitol riot. Gibbs has defended anti-Semites and accused
Democrats of satanic rituals; the Democratic contributions far outweighed his
own fundraising.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">“You would think that the Democrats
would look at John Gibbs and see the embodiment of what they say they most
fear,” <a href="https://www.commonsense.news/p/why-the-democrats-are-funding-my?r=cfom&s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email">Meijer
wrote</a> the day before his defeat, “that as patriots they would use every
tool at their disposal to defeat him and similar candidates that they've said
are an existential threat.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In California, Democrats tried to defeat David
Valadao, another Republican who voted for impeachment, by spending $200,000 promoting
his opponent, Trump loyalist Chris Mathys, whose own campaign spent just
$80,000. Valadao beat Mathys, but just barely, giving Mathys a case for continuing
in politics.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The political risks of extremism
seem to be grasped by some of the radicals supported with Democratic money. As
they face the wider spectrum of voters, they are trying to foil the Democrats’ game
plan by looking less extreme. Some have downplayed their adoration of Trump and
their anti-abortion zealotry. And their election denials.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Retired general Don Bolduc, who benefited
from Democratic ads attacking his moderate opponent as “another sleazy
politician,” <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/15/us/politics/don-bolduc-nh.html">underwent
an epiphany</a> after winning the New Hampshire Republican primary for the Senate.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Before: “I signed a letter with 120
other generals and admirals saying that Trump won the election, and, damn it, I
stand by my letter,” <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2L5HuUO2B7U&t=4346s" target="_blank">he
said</a> in a primary debate. “I’m not switching horses, baby. This is it.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">After, on Fox News: “I’ve done a
lot of research on this, and I’ve spent the past couple weeks talking to
Granite Staters all over the state from every party, and I have come to the
conclusion — and I want to be definitive on this — the election was not stolen.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Whether enough
New Hampshire voters will be fooled by Bolduc’s conversion is an open question;
the DCCC obviously hopes not. But embedded in the Democrats’ strategy is a kind
of quaint faith in the good sense of the country’s citizens, despite the millions
more who voted for Trump in 2020 than in 2016, after four years of political
ugliness and damage to the nation’s global standing, democratic norms, and national
security.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Some of the extremists might have
won without Democratic money. But the races were picked carefully to tip the
balance in districts where radicals were in close contests, and where the
general electorate seems averse to Trumpism.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The strongest argument for boosting
the right-wingers over more moderate Republicans rests on the legitimate fears for
democracy. With a majority in Congress, this newly radicalized Republican Party
could raise havoc with voting rights and electoral procedures nationally, as
Republican-led state legislatures are doing. Blocking that outcome, according
to the rationale, is worth sacrificing some upstanding Republican legislators.
They have negligible influence anyway in a party not only beholden to Trump, but
increasingly infiltrated by champions of vote manipulation, autocracy, and
white supremacy.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">It’s probably correct that only if
the Republican Party is obliterated at the polls can it be shocked into
remaking itself in the image of Liz Cheney instead of Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis.
If that ever happens, the Democrats who thought up this unsavory means to an
elusive end will crow in vindication.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">To be fair, there are more leading
Democrats who have decried this tactic than Republicans who have assailed their
party’s Trumpist fetishism. But going forward, watch for Republicans to play
the same game by supporting unelectable far leftists in Democratic primaries.
Can they grit their teeth and work against their principles as well as Democrats
have? Oh, of course they can.<o:p></o:p></p>Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305265860388931637noreply@blogger.com0