We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Robert ‘I don’t blame them for hitting me’ Fisk makes a rare intelligent point in the UK daily newspaper, The Independent. He points out that the U.S. government’s proposal to finger-print certain Arabs and Muslims from a set of Middle East countries will not apply to people travelling from Saudi Arabia, despite the fact that the men who attacked the U.S. on September 11th were mostly Saudis.
He is right to point out the absurdity of this. While I detest much of Fisk’s reflexive anti-American, anti-Israeli rhetoric, on this point he is right. Saudi Arabia is the country which has contributed the lion’s share of terrorists waging their war against the West. The sooner that Western policy-makers recognize that fact and reduce our reliance on their oil, the better. (This is already starting to happen due to growing ties with oil-rich Russia). Of course, whether fingerprinting will make an iota of difference to catching would-be terrorists is another point entirely. Predictably, Fisk does not object to the U.S. government fingerprinting persons on a matter of principle, but mainly to use it as a stick to hit Bush.
Well that is certainly what the redoubtable Sarah Lawrence thinks and on the basis of his latest idiotic article I am inclined to agree. Now it is well known amongst regular Samizdata readers that I am not reflexively pro-Israel but the notion being peddled that Arafat is not part of the terrorist problem in the Middle East is so patently idiotic that I can only speculate that this is indeed what Sarah categorises it as… an example of The Big Lie technique from a person who sees the world in Chomskyist terms, i.e. devoid of any objective meaning at all.
Spiffy graphic by Scrofulous Steve!
There was I thinking it was looking like a slow news day when, apparently, Israel drops a political bombshell on the Palestinians by voting against the establishment of a Palestinian State.
Except it wasn’t quite the Israeli government but the Likud Party and, on second sight, it wasn’t quite such a bombshell either. However the development deserves comment if only for the brows it appears to be furrowing round the Blogosphere. General opinion seems to be that it is a serious blow to the prospects for peace and a snub to Washington. I beg to differ.
No, the vote by the Likud Central Committee (59% to 41%) was actually a re-affirmation of a long-time plank of the Likud manifesto that there shall be ‘no Palestinian State West of the Jordan and it is a posture that says far more about Likud in-fighting than it says either about the ‘Peace Process’ or Washington.
Ariel Sharon is in the peculiar position of riding high in the opinion polls whilst appearing as a dithering embarrassment to many within his own party. Sharon had actually abandoned the above-mentioned Likud principle whilst in power because that’s the kind of thing leaders have to do in the cut-and-thrust of diplomacy and compromise. But it is meat-and-drink for his arse-kicker-in-chief, Benyamin Netanyahu, Likud’s blue-eyed boy, who has made no secret of the fact that he has his sights firmly set on the cat-bird seat. It was Netanyahu that sponsored the motion and, to everyone’s surprise (maybe even his own) actually won it.
It makes little material difference to facts on the ground. Until there is a change of Palestinian leadership then all talk of a Palestinian State anywhere remains so much moonshine. Likud’s reaffirmation of its traditional hard-line stance does not represent a change of heart or policy but rather a formalisation of extant positions. It will make a material difference to the bit of ground on which Sharon is standing for it’s a humiliation that will remind him that he cannot take his own party’s support for granted nor ignore the theatrically ferocious Netanyahu snapping at his heels and every other part of his anatomy.
I have read that this shows that Netanyahu is even more hard-line than Sharon but that is a simplification. Netanyahu is not in the hot-seat so he has the licence to act as man-of-the-hour for the party faithful and play the firebrand. Were he to find himself back in the premiership again, he would have to play the International Statesman and that means confronting and making hard choices. The same kind of hard choices Sharon had to make.
President Bush may well be losing sleep tonight, but not over this.
Inspired by a call in Saudi Arabia for Jewish women to be enslaved, my very good friend in the USA, Ed Collins sent me this e-mail:
“I see on Instapundit and Damian Penny’s sites that a Saudi preacher has advocated enslaving Jewish women. I’m all for it. Since I read the articles, I’ve had visions of Rachel Weiss and Natalie Portman in harem costumes”.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hubba hubba!!
Many Jews in Israel want to make the lives of Palestinians intolerable so that they will wish to live elsewhere. Many Arabs in Palestine find the lives of Jews intolerable anywhere.
– Tariq Bay (a Palestinian who married a Jew and moved to London)
Al-Ahram in Egypt interviewed one of the Islamic Jihad sappers who helped booby trap Jenin. “Omar” said:
“Of all the fighters in the West Bank we were the best prepared,” he says. “We started working on our plan: to trap the invading soldiers and blow them up from the moment the Israeli tanks pulled out of Jenin last month.”
Omar and other engineers made hundreds of explosive devices and carefully chose their locations.
“We had more than 50 houses booby-trapped around the camp. We chose old and empty buildings and the houses of men who were wanted by Israel because we knew the soldiers would search for them,” he said.
“We cut off lengths of mains water pipes and packed them with explosives and nails. Then we placed them about four metres apart throughout the houses–in cupboards, under sinks, in sofas.”
At least they are not trying to blow up civilians for once
I have had two e-mails asking what ‘our’ views are on the Jenin massacre/counter-terrorist operation (choose one), both of which seem to expect ‘us’ to reach diametrically opposed conclusions.
Firstly, there is no Samizdata editorial position per se on anything in particular. Our contributors write within a libertarian meta-context (i.e. a world view or frames of reference) but other than that, we all have separate views on many issues and air them as we wish on this blog.
My personal views on what did/did not happen in Jenin are… I really do not know. I regard the IDF as no more or less reliable a source of information than the Palestinians. Both lie through their teeth when it suits them. That is what all governments do.
I regard press accounts as something that need to be assessed on the basis of past performance and plausibility. Some bloggers have noticed that UK media reports are similar and have taken this as a sign of either collective hostility to Israel or collusion or whatever. I suspect the fact they were being herded around in a group by the Israeli authorities might have something to do with their similarity of reports and observations. However the mere fact Israel is not receiving collective songs of praise from the UK media is evidence enough for some people of all manner of sinister motives. Sorry but the entire UK media is not represented by Robert Fisk and I for one am far from reflexively supportive of what the State of Israel tends to do. Thus sometimes I think maybe the reason some people write that Israel did something bad was that Israel did indeed do something bad. Do I think the IDF is institutionally capable of wiping out hundreds of Palestinian civilians to get a much smaller group of terrorists as some have claimed? Yes, I don’t doubt they are capable but that is not the same as saying I think they actually did that in Jenin. I simply have no way of knowing one way or the other.
However, the fact Israel wants to control what the media sees and the fact this is going to upset the media is also no evidence that what the Palestinians have claimed the IDF have done is true either. Israel is conducting a military operation and in military operations, security is life. As I pointed out in a post yesterday regarding Antony Loyd’s rather daft remarks about the US and UK militaries keeping journalists in the dark in Afghanistan, there are sound reasons for doing just that which have nothing to do with hiding atrocities or failures. And just because Arafat is howling about atrocities, so what? Most of what the Palestinians do ‘militarily’ are criminal terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians and as Arafat is bottled up in a room by the IDF, I doubt he has any more idea of what really happened in Jenin than I do… thus anything he says can be safely ignored (plus the ‘minor’ fact history has demonstrated he is a pathological liar). High intensity urban street fighting is a messy business and sometimes innocent people get killed. That is not the same as a cold blooded massacre and professional journalists are just as capable of failing to understand what they are looking at as anyone else. Destroyed houses and the pitiable residue of shattered lives are not in and of themselves evidence of Israeli malfeasance. Maybe there was a guy with an RPG-7 leaning out of a window immediately before the Merkava tank put an H.E. shell into the building. Or maybe not. Context is everything.
And so I have no idea what the truth is about Jenin and really have no desire to venture much in the way of opinions on that. I am sure who is telling the truth will come out (if anyone) but not for a while yet in all likelihood.
According to the Washington Post:
“The cause of Israel drew a multitude of Americans yesterday to the historic West Front of the U.S. Capitol, where Israeli flags fluttered by the score, thousands of signs signaled support, and speakers at the podium and in the crowd voiced vigorous defenses of the country’s right to strike back against Palestinian bomb attacks aimed at its civilians,”
According to James Taranto in the Opinion Journal email newsletter:
Local officials estimated the size of the crowd at 100,000, with an estimated 1,200 charter buses carrying out-of-towners to the capital for the rally. The crowd was fired up; a few churls even booed Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, when he observed–accurately–that there are innocent Palestinians among the casualties of the war in the Mideast.
Given that politics is the act of finding the biggest parade and getting in front of it, I’m sure the Bush administration will soon enough get the point. The Israeli’s have every bit as much right to kick the crap out of the people supporting Kamikazi bombings in their cities as Americans do.
And we’d better support them because this time around the Nazis* have someone higher on their killing agenda than those of the Jewish faith.
*= Mein Kampf sales are said to be skyrocketing in Arab communities; Arab newspapers are pulling out 60 year old Nazi disinformation; Arab pundits are saying Hitler didn’t finish the job of the Final Solution. I do not mean Nazi in a figurative term. I mean it absolutely and literally.
It feels crude, offensive even, to refer to events on the West Bank as a sideshow, yet that is exactly what they might have been. Shortly after September 11th, I predicted that Israel and Syria would come to blows. The tension had been brewing for some time and while homicide-bombers were wreaking havoc in Israel and the Israelis wreaking havoc on the West Bank, rockets were being fired into Northern Israel from Lebanon. Lebanon is Syria’s wholly-owned subsidiary.
Well, it looks like the Syrians are expecting trouble and my money says that they are going to get it. The ‘accidental’ explosion at the Syrian missile factory at Homs ten days ago was no accident. It removed Syria’s ability to replace or refuel its existing missile stock. With Syria’s forces concentrated around the Bekaa Valley (deja vous?) they are the only thing standing between the Israelis and Damascus.
How was your appetizer, ladies and gentlemen? Ready for the main course?
I have not written about the Middle East before (and have not written much lately at all due to excessive demands on my time), as I do not feel very qualified to address many of the issues there. In some ways the interesting thing to me about Israel and the Palestinians is not so much what is happening but the strange way people report what goes on there.
Both sides seem to view Israel as somehow ‘special’. Its detractors point out its lousy human rights record and the ethnic nature of its definitions of nationality as if somehow that made Israel worse than the vast majority of other non-Anglosphere countries in which these facts also apply. I wonder why so much is said by the detractors about Israel’s beastly treatment of non-Jews and yet so little is said about Belorus or Burma or China’s beastly treatment of everyone within their borders.
Its supporters on the other hand seem extraordinarily sensitive about negative remarks, reacting with ‘shock’ when even reasoned criticism about Israeli behaviour is made. Some months back I recall seeing a harrowing film clip of a young Palestinian child being shot dead by Israeli troops whilst he cowered next to his terrified father and yet the murmur from the usual talking heads in the Western media amounted to a shrug and saying ‘shit happens’. I recall seeing a blog (I forget which one) which said in its sidebar that it was writing about US and Israeli ‘exceptionalism’. Well frankly I don’t buy the notion of American ‘exceptionalism’ let alone that of some dusty Middle Eastern quasi-socialist quasi-religious ethnically defined state. The world is full of dusty quasi-socialist quasi-religious ethnically defined states.
And so if you detect an air of indifference in me, well I suppose I care as much about the conflict between Jews and Arabs as most Jews care about the conflict between Croats and Serbs. Which is to say, not much. Perry shares my lack of enthusiasm about the subject but he at least knows a bit more about it than I do.
And so the reason I find myself writing about the Middle East, at least indirectly, has less to do with the rights and wrongs of what Israel is and is not doing than with my own subjective perceptions and emotional baggage. I was watching CNN in a hotel in Zagreb earlier to day whilst waiting for a business appointment. As I watched, I heard a report from a female reporter near Jenin who said that Israeli tanks and armoured personnel carriers were moving through the area instructing all Palestinian males between the ages of 15 and 50 to come out of their homes and wait for transport to a place where they can be ‘questioned’.
Now I have no idea what the Israeli military actually has planned for these people but I felt a sudden surge not unlike panic inside me when I heard the reporter say that. In my part of the world many times within the last ten years, powerful armies have moved into a community and taken away entire male populations based on the simple fact of their ethnic background. I found myself desperately hoping that those Palestinian men would find some dark cellar or attic to hide in rather than be bused off somewhere, their fate entirely dependent on the wishes of armed men who by and large feel no commonality of community with them.
I am not on anyones side in that conflict. Israel (and the Palestinians) did not help or hinder Croatia in its recent war and I feel much the same about them, yet I cannot help but pray that my feelings when I heard that report were baseless and irrational. There are already enough communities in the world with no young men in them.
I’ve just signed the petition to take back Arafat’s “Peace Prize” since we all now know he won’t settle for just a piece of Israel. He’d kill them all if the Jews hadn’t learned a hard lesson in the previous century about what happens when you don’t shoot back.
Now they can’t actually take it back, and the Nobel committee is solidly on the side of the Kamikaze killers anyway… but it’s the thought that counts.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
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