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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Those points would all be correct, by the way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what can be done?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Jeff Weintraub

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Too true.

—Jeff Weintraub

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yours for reality-based discourse,
Jeff Weintraub

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I responded:

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

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

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

He elaborates later in the piece:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yours in struggle,
Jeff Weintraub

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

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

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

Jeff:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In your concluding remark on my piece you write:

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

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

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

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

Adam Rose

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

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

Hi Adam,

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

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

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

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

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

Yours for reality-based discourse,
Jeff Weintraub

The Jewish problem in Malmö, Sweden

This is a long-running story, mostly depressing.  And in some ways the case of Malmö, Sweden's third-largest city, exemplifies tendencies one can also see in other places around Europe—not everywhere, but in enough places to be worrisome.  So it deserves some attention, both for its own sake and for illustrative purposes.

The most intense and explicit expressions of anti-semitism in Malmö, including physical attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions, come mostly from a growing population of Muslim immigrants. But a pervasive atmosphere of hysterical anti-Zionism (i.e., systematic bias and hostility against Israel and Israelis, shading off into obsessive hatred and demonization) either blends into outright anti-semitism or, at the very least, makes anti-semitism seem excusable and 'understandable'.  Thus, anti-semitism is not taken seriously; or is explained away as a side-effect of poverty and social dislocation, which the Jews should just learn to live with rather than whining about it; or is blamed on the Jews themselves.

Sound familiar?  It should.

=> The Swedish lawyer and journalist Paulina Neuding published an informative report about Malmö in the Tablet in April 2012  Some highlights:

The store window had been smashed many times before. The shoe-repair shop is located in one of the rougher parts of Malmö, Sweden, and the Jewish owner, a native of the city, had gotten used to this sort of vandalism. But in the spring of 2004, a group of immigrants just under the age of 15—too young to be prosecuted by Swedish law—walked into the store yelling about “damn Jews.” The owner was hit in the face by one of the boys. Yasha, an 85-year-old customer and relative of mine, was struck in the back of his head. The doctor who received him at the emergency room concluded that he must have been hit with a blunt object. “I left Poland to get away from anti-Semitism,” he later told the police. “But at least there I never experienced any violence. That only happened to me here, in Sweden.”

The Jews of Malmö, a community of about 1,500 in a city of 300,000, are living through a new form of anti-Semitism. This kind does not stem from neo-Nazis or right-wing extremists—traditional perpetrators of European Jew-hatred—but has come to the city through immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East and is part of a larger, countrywide problem of failed integration. According to the 2011 census, one in 10 Malmö citizens comes from the Middle East and North Africa, and ethnic Swedes are no longer in the majority among 15-year-olds. In 2009, 60 hate crimes against Jews were reported in Malmö, ranging from hate speech to assault. The city’s Chicago-born Chabad rabbi, Shneur Kesselman, estimates that he alone has been the victim of 100 incidents during his few years in the city. A dozen families have already left Malmö for Stockholm, Israel, or the United States because of anti-Semitism, according to community leaders.

If only this were the whole problem. But Malmö’s mayor of 17 years, Ilmar Reepalu, has “Tourettes syndrome with respect to Jews,” according to Kvällsposten, a Swedish newspaper. Last week, Reepalu, a Social Democrat, made headlines across the country after I published an interview with him in which he said that Sweden Democrats, an anti-immigrant party with its roots in the Swedish neo-Nazi movement, had “infiltrated” Malmö’s Jewish community in order to turn it against Muslims. On Monday, he was publicly reprimanded by the head of his party.

Reeplau has promised that he is no anti-Semite, but this is far from the first time that he has put his foot in his mouth on the subject of Jews. When a journalist from the Malmö daily Skånska Dagbladet asked him in January 2010 about growing anti-Semitism in his city, he replied, “We accept neither anti-Semitism nor Zionism in Malmö.” His reaction to the fact that Jews are leaving his city because of anti-Semitism was to maintain that “there have been no attacks against Jews, and if Jews want to leave for Israel that is not a concern for Malmö.” In an interview with Danish television in March 2010, he described criticism about his statements regarding Jews and Zionism as an attack orchestrated by “the Israeli lobby.”  [....]

[JW:  This is an increasingly common rhetorical dodge, which my friend David Hirsh has labeled "The Livingstone Formulation" after one of its most notorious practitioners, former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone.  When someone says or does something anti-semitic and is challenged for it, or sometimes is just being asked about expressions of anti-semitism by others, he responds by changing the subject and claims that he is being attacked for bring critical of Israel, Zionism, or Israeli policies.  He may also claim to be a victim of targeting by the "Israel Lobby", the Jewish-controlled media, or some combination thereof.  Whatever the specific details, the basic premise is that criticisms of anti-semitism are never made in good faith, so they should invariably be dismissed and twisted into something underhanded and reprehensible.  For David Hirsh's careful and perceptive critical analysis of the Livingstone Formulation and its permutations, see here.]

[....] During Israel’s 2008-2009 war against Hamas in Gaza, there was a sharp increase in anti-Semitic violence in Malmö—but the mayor didn’t seem concerned. On Dec. 27, 2008, as Israel Defense Forces launched Operation Cast Lead, the Jewish community of Malmö held a demonstration in the city’s main square to express sympathy for “all civilian victims” in Gaza and the Jewish state. They were soon confronted by a much larger counter-demonstration, consisting mainly of immigrants from the Middle East. The Jews were singing hine ma tov, but was their song was overwhelmed by chants of “damn Jews” and “Hitler, Hitler, Hitler!” A glass bottle flew through the air and hit a Jewish girl in the back. When a homemade bomb was fired straight into the Jewish group, the police decided to evacuate them. The Jews fled from the square but were followed by kids who used cellphones to report back to the counter-demonstration with which direction “the Jews” were heading. Among those running were 85-year-old Yasha’s grandchildren, all born and raised in Malmö.

When Reepalu was questioned about these events, he chose to criticize the Jews of his city for not taking a firm stand against the policies of the state of Israel: “Instead they choose to have a demonstration at the main square, which can send the wrong signals,” he said, while referring in passing to Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza.

Two months after the Cast Lead demonstration, I went to Malmö on the occasion of a Davis Cup tennis match between Sweden and Israel. The city made the decision that no audience would be allowed at the match, marking the first time Sweden decided to subject a country to a sports boycott since barring South African athletes from entering the country during apartheid. “Don’t forget,” said Reepalu, “this isn’t a match against just anyone. It’s a match against the state of Israel.” Anarchists, feminists, Islamists, and left-wing extremists from around the country gathered in the city to protest against Israel. [....]

When I met with the mayor in February, he added: “I realize that this is a minefield, but I will happily enter it in order for this issue to get the right proportions. I get accused of being an anti-Semite when I say that Jews are actually not the only ones having a hard time, but that things are actually just as hard and sometimes even harder for other groups.”

It’s true—Jews aren’t the only residents of Malmö with safety concerns. Malmö’s high rates of crime have earned the city the moniker “Sweden’s Chicago.” In 2011 and early 2012, several people were killed in the city in what are believed to be gang shootings. When a teenage boy was shot dead on New Year’s Eve, more than a thousand people took to the streets to protest against the violence under the slogan “Enough, damn it.”

High crime rates, especially among certain immigrant communities, have caused deep anxiety for the people of Malmö—and yet politicians and pundits are reluctant to discuss the issue, partly out of a genuine fear of stirring up racism and Islamophobia. [....]

Consider the fate of Rosengård, a housing project originally built in the late 1960s as part of the government’s plan to provide affordable, modern homes for the working class. In 1969, when Yasha and his wife Nina moved into Rosengård, having fled the anti-Semitic Polish government of Wladyslaw Gomulka, Rosengård stood as a monument of the egalitarian society that was under way, planned and executed by the Swedish Social Democratic Party.

Today, Rosengård has become the symbol of ghettoization at the heart of the Scandinavian welfare state. Out of Rosengård’s 22,000 inhabitants, 89 percent are immigrants or children of immigrants. Only 39 percent of residents between the ages of 20 and 64 are employed. In the capital of Stockholm, you would have to take a subway ride to the suburbs to see an area characterized by poverty and lack of assimilation. But Rosengård lies just a 25-minute walk from Malmö’s city center. [....]

The claim that inequality is the root cause of violence in Malmö is not just absurd, it carries unacceptable implications: It means that Jews can do nothing but wait for society to become more equal, and for discrimination and unemployment to go away, before they can ask to feel safe in their own city.

Fredrik Sieradzski, 47, is a Jew from Malmö who got tired of waiting for the city’s politicians to take action against anti-Semitic threats and harassment. He recently initiated what he calls “kippah walks” through the streets of the city. Members of the community meet up after services on Saturdays and walk through town wearing visible Jewish symbols. [....] Last time around, his kippa walk gathered 20 people. Among them was one non-Jew who wanted to show his solidarity.

The kippah walks have become a way of dealing with a fear of anti-Semitism that permeates all aspects of Jewish life in Malmö. When Yasha passed away in 2010, as the mourners left the gates of the Jewish cemetery, his son-in-law warned the people who had traveled to Malmö to attend the service: “Take off your yarmulkes. Don’t forget that this is Rosengård.

=>  Since then, there have been both encouraging and discouraging developments, though the fundamental situation doesn't appear to have changed much. Here are some highlights from a March 2013 article in an English-language Swedish newspaper, The Local:

Video cameras and a heavy combination locked door greet visitors as they approach Malmö’s Jewish community centre. Once inside, appointments are made with a secretary who sits behind thick glass.

Security has been stepped up in the building, which is located in central Malmö, following an explosion last September that led to arrests and was classified as a hate crime by local police.

The attack was just the one in a long line of anti-Semitic incidents which have become increasingly common in Sweden’s third largest city. [....]

But Malmö’s small Jewish population is fighting back. Amidst the shattered glass and reports of persecution the incidents are being used as a catalyst for change involving not only local Jews but also the wider populace. [....]

[Jehoshua] Kaufman started organizing regular kippah walks in Malmö back in December 2011 as a reaction to persistent anti-Semitism.

"Wearing a kippah is not just a protest against anti-Semitism but also a revival of the Jewish self-confidence," he explains.

"Now people describe themselves in newspapers as Jewish and are active in the community. They are more conscious of their identity. It is not as bad as it could be."

A recent kippah walk in Malmö prompts a healthy turnout of people from all across the city. Many are motivated to show their support for local Jews following media reports of persecution and intimidation.

"I’m not Jewish but I'm a Christian and a teacher of history and we all know what happened in the past," says retired school teacher Britt-Marie Aspenlind.

"Jews have contributed greatly to Malmö but they haven’t been given enough support by politicians who aren't taking the anti-Semitism problem seriously enough."

Also along on the walk is Katarina Egfors, a Vicar in the Church of Sweden.

"It’s very important for all of us to come together and show solidarity with the Jewish community in Malmö. We are all entitled to have our beliefs respected," she says. [....]

Statistics released earlier this year by the Swedish Crime Prevention Council (Brottsförebyggande rådet, Brå) revealed that of the 44 anti-Semitic hate crimes reported in Malmö in 2010 and 2011 not a single one made it to a prosecutor.

And for the total of 480 hate crimes reported in Malmö during the same period, there were zero convictions.

[JW: Those figures appear to suggest that whereas Jews constitute half of 1% of the population of Malmo (1,500 out of 300,000 = .5%), anti-semitic hate crimes amounted to about 9% of all reported hate crimes.]

[....] For the Jews that choose to remain in Malmö, there have been attempts made to build bridges with the city’s large Muslim population. While Israel and its policies remain a hot topic of debate, both communities seem to have at least found some common ground.

Sieradski has met privately with a local imam who said afterward that "we should dance with the Jews in the streets".

"I was quite blunt with him," Sieradski says of his meeting with the imam.

"I said that if you don’t want to support Israel then hug us and make us feel welcome in Malmö. What is happening now is that many kids are becoming Zionists and see Israel as they only place where they can be.

"If you really want to achieve what you want then don’t hate us. Hatred just makes us stronger and more tied together. He agreed with me as many Muslim leaders see the problems too."

The efforts on the part of Malmö's Jewish leaders appear to be bearing fruit with a young Malmö Muslim, Siavosh Derakhti, who was given an award last autumn by the Swedish Committee Against Anti-Semitism.

Derakhti, a 21-year-old son of Iranian immigrants who has lived in Malmö his entire life, was recognized for setting up the organization Young Muslims Against Anti-Semitism to educate students about the Holocaust.

[JW: I can't help reflecting that, according to all available evidence, Iranians in Iran—I mean the bulk of the population, not the lunatics who happen to be ruling the country—are significantly less anti-semitic, and less hysterically hostile to Israel, than almost any other population in the Islamic Middle East. That may well be true of Iranians in Sweden, too.]

"Jews in Malmö are subjected to everything from threats to harassment and it's our duty as Swedish citizens and residents of Malmö to react and stand up for human rights," Derakhti wrote in a recent opinion article in the local Sydsvenskan newspaper. [....]

Sounds good to me.

—Jeff Weintraub

Military stalemate and social meltdown in Syria

Here are three takes on the unfolding tragedy in Syria that come at if from somewhat different perspectives but converge on the same basic story.

=> Some reflections by Paul Danahar, the BBC Middle East bureau chief:

Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once said that in a guerrilla war the rebels only had to not lose to win; however, unless a regular army was clearly winning, it was losing. The Syrian crisis has, for the time being, turned that maxim on its head.

When the uprising began, the West and its allies in the Gulf expected it to last weeks or maybe months - but not years.

Now, by hanging on this long, the regime in Damascus increasingly thinks that by not losing it is winning.

That new confidence - along with what is believed to be a steady supply of arms from its supporters in Iran and Russia - is helping the regime to take back some areas which it had previously lost.  [....]

The situation in Syria is complicated. If you are not confused by what is going on there, then you do not understand it.  [....]

Having spent the last few days in Beirut and Damascus, talking to the international community, Western diplomats, FSA activists and Syrian regime supporters, it is clear that nobody knows how to end this crisis.

That's just about the only thing all sides agree on.  [....]

The only thing that is certain in Syria is who is losing: The Syrian people are losing. They are losing their lives, their homes, their wealth. Their children are losing their childhoods.  [....]

The Syrians are also losing Syria, because the longer this goes on the more society is losing what little sense of identity it has.

"The country is moving from a political crisis to a societal crisis," is how one of the few genuinely knowledgeable people trying to manage this crisis explained events here to me.

This societal crisis is manifesting itself in steadily increasing small acts of sectarian violence.

All across the country, every day, there are brutal events, none of which in itself is big enough to warrant the attention of international or local media, but each of which breaks another strand of this country's fragile weave of sects and religions.

Each one is an act of revenge for an offence committed by another member of the victim's religious community.

Women are being raped because they are Sunni or Alawite and their men are assumed to be involved in the fighting.

Christian women are being hauled off buses and attacked by Salafist fighters for not covering their hair.

Murders lead to revenge massacres. [....]

The Syrian war is turning into a sectarian conflict whose influence will spill beyond the country's borders.

There was the chance at the beginning to stop that being the case. That chance has been lost.

Whether or not that chance was there at the beginning is a major question, now difficult to answer confidently in retrospect.  But what's clear is that the longer this bloodbath goes on, the harder it becomes to imagine Syria's different communities trusting each other enough to live together comfortably in the foreseeable future—or ever.

=>  At the same time, it's important not to base our analyses of the present catastrophe in Syria on misleading pictures of Syrian society and politics before the current violence began in 2011.  Those misleading pictures come in various forms, peddled over the years and now recycled by both supporters and critics of the Assad regime.  But one common theme, shared by "anti-imperialist" fans of the Assad dictatorship and many gullible "realists" and "progressives" in more mainstream western circles, involved painting an excessively rosy picture of inter-sectarian co-existence, even cosmopolitan harmony, under the Assad regime.

Richard Spencer, a Middle East correspondent for the Daily Telegraph based in Cairo, asks the question bluntly:  Was Syria ever the secular, non-sectarian state we are led to believe it was? The quick answer would be no. The more extended answer still adds up to no, but in a somewhat complex way.

[....]  Throughout the conflict, I've read journalists and experts write about the Syria of "before" as a "secular" state, where people weren't particularly religious, where women wandered the streets at night alone, and hipsters drank in western bars and nightclubs. All sects and ethnicities mixed happily. There's a kernel of truth there but it's misleading, and it's aggravated by the fact that the worst offenders, whether pro- or anti-regime, or somewhere in the middle, are often those foreigners who know the country best:  after all, they lived and worked, studied Arabic and socialised, largely in smart areas of Aleppo and Damascus where those statements are more likely to be true. Even The Economist, which in the current edition has an excellent and gloomy overview of the mess Syria is in, falls into this trap, talking nostalgically of the time Muslims and Christians lived side by side in peace as church bells and muezzins filled the air over Damascus's Old City. Few of the original protesters were very devout, it says.

What this neglects is that a large part of Syria – largely the parts that have driven the revolution – were not so visible to the outsider. From my experience (even much earlier in the war) of provincial towns and villages, they were often divided by faith, with "shia villages" separate from "Sunni" and "Christian" ones. That doesn't mean they didn't get on, but everyone knew who was who. Likewise, in these places, you certainly don't see young women "hanging out". A general form of segregation is observed in Sunni areas – male journalists put up in local houses kept well apart from the women – and young men pray diligently and regularly.

[JW: And here is a crucial and perceptive point. My bolding:]

Moreover, while few talked openly about the sectarian divide before the revolution, that may have been because it was so important, not because it was unimportant. Nearly half a century of Baath party had totally inverted the historic sectarian order, in which Alawites (the sect of the Assads) were at the bottom of the pile, with the sect's leaders now occupying the key positions of state, and controlling much of its wealth. The effects of the Alawites' change of fortune were felt particularly in places like Homs and Hama, where poor Alawites were given land and encouraged to move, setting up the horrible sectarian clashes that have emerged in these areas.

Moreover, the regime, while claiming to be "secular", played a strange game of footsie with radical Islamists, not only allowing al-Qaeda to operate from and through the country in its highly sectarian attacks in neighbouring Iraq, but also allowing and encouraging some Islamist groups that it thought could be a counterweight to its great historical enemy, the Muslim Brotherhood. Of course, that bizarre hypocrisy has now turned round to bite. Jabhat al-Nusra's core is Syrian men who fought with al-Qaeda in Iraq. Among the revolution's most powerful leaders on the ground, Abdulqader Saleh al-Hajji, known as "Hajji Marea", head of the most powerful Brigade in Aleppo, the Tawhid, and vice-head of the revolutionary command council, was before the war a missionary for Dawa, a state-backed Sunni evangelical group, and travelled widely, including to Islamist-full Dagestan. ("Tawhid" itself, which means Unity, in a religious context refers to the "Oneness" of God and, in politics, to the importance of an Islamist, not secular state – division of religion and state clearly being an offence to Oneness.)

There is no doubt that the jihadists of Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham are sponsored by salafis in the Gulf and full of foreign fighters, and it serves both pro- and anti-regime forces well to emphasise this, the former to cast the revolution in the most hideous light it can, the latter to say that the revolution's Islamism is imported from Saudi Arabia and other fundamentalist places. It's also true to say, with the latter, that the "Islamism" is growing, and to a considerable extent because of the West's failure to back the rebels with weapons and other military support. But in fact the demand for a more religious society is indigenous to large parts of Syria, as it is to Egypt and other Middle Eastern states that have been in the grip of "secular" (actually, just hypocritical) dictatorships. For provincial types, "secular" has come to mean flashy, worldly, corrupt and finally brutal, and for them Sharia means a more honest and decent society, as much as anything else. This is not a good thing – I wouldn't want to be an ambitious young woman growing up in Syria today, or one of the many perfectly decent, god-fearing middle-aged Muslim men I know who like a quiet tipple of Scotch before bedtime – but they will be victims of the dictators' dishonesty and refusal to reform as much as of Saudi fundamentalists.

This does not of course help the outside world, whether the "West" or Russia or Iran or the UN, decide what it wants to do about the mess. The White House is said to be reconsidering its opposition to arming the "good rebels", though what that means when Hajji Marea, officially a "good" rebel, is in open alliance with the "bad" Jabhat al-Nusra, is hard to say. But it is worth recalling once again that both Washington and Moscow might never have faced this dilemma were it not for years of support for horrible regimes that it mistakenly thought were at least non-sectarian and secular.

Actually, during the roughly three decades that Syria has been ruled by the Ba'athist regime headed by the Assad family, many analysts sympathetic to that regime—and there have been quite a few, ranging from sober scholars to shameless apologists—put this argument the other way around:  the Assad dictatorship may have been brutal and repressive, but only a brutal and despotic regime could keep the lid on such an explosive society.  I never sympathized with those analyses, though they did have a grain of truth, as we can see now that the lid has blown off.  But the two major problems with that perspective were (a) that it was always unrealistic to imagine that this 'solution' of despotic multi-culturalism could be maintained indefinitely under conditions of modern mass politics and ideology and (b) that the Assad regime, like many other despotic regimes, maintained and intensified the very conditions that made its despotic rule 'necessary'.  We can see the results.

=>  And to sum things up, here are some passages from a New York Times article on Thursday whose title captures the gist of the story: "Syria Begins to Break Apart Under Pressure From War".

One intriguing suggestion, put forward by analysts quoted in this article, is that Assad and his regime have largely given up trying to regain control over significant portions of Syria, at least for the moment—but the result is that they actually feel more, not less, secure about their position in the parts of the country they do control.

The black flag of jihad flies over much of northern Syria. In the center of the country, pro-government militias and Hezbollah fighters battle those who threaten their communities. In the northeast, the Kurds have effectively carved out an autonomous zone.

 After more than two years of conflict, Syria is breaking up. A constellation of armed groups battling to advance their own agendas are effectively creating the outlines of separate armed fiefs. As the war expands in scope and brutality, its biggest casualty appears to be the integrity of the Syrian state.

[JW:  What the writer really means is the coherence of Syria as a nation.  It is often misleading to conflate the concepts of  "state" and "nation", too easily yoked together in the term "nation-state", and in situations like this it's especially misleading.]

On Thursday, President Obama met in Washington with the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and once again pressed the idea of a top-down diplomatic solution. That approach depends on the rebels and the government agreeing to meet at a peace conference that was announced last week by the United States and Russia.  [....]  But as evidence of massacres and chemical weapons mounts, experts and Syrians themselves say the American focus on change at the top ignores the deep fractures the war has caused in Syrian society. Increasingly, it appears Syria is so badly shattered that no single authority is likely to be able to pull it back together any time soon.

Instead, three Syrias are emerging: one loyal to the government, to Iran and to Hezbollah; one dominated by Kurds with links to Kurdish separatists in Turkey and Iraq; and one with a Sunni majority that is heavily influenced by Islamists and jihadis.

“It is not that Syria is melting down — it has melted down,” said Andrew J. Tabler, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and author of “In the Lion’s Den: An Eyewitness Account of Washington’s Battle with Syria.”

“So much has changed between the different parties that I can’t imagine it all going back into one piece,” Mr. Tabler said.

Fueling the country’s breakup are the growing brutality of fighters on all sides and the increasingly sectarian nature of the violence. [....]

As the momentum seesaws back and forth between rebels and the government, the geographic divisions are hardening.

After steadily losing territory to rebels during the first two years of the conflict, government forces have progressed on a number of key fronts in recent weeks, routing rebel forces in the southern province of Dara’a, outside Damascus and in the central city of Homs and its surrounding villages.

These victories not only reflect strategic shifts by government forces but also could further solidify the country’s divisions.

Since mass defections of mostly conscripted soldiers shrank the government’s forces earlier in the uprising, it has largely given up on trying to reclaim parts of the country far from the capital, said Joseph Holliday, a fellow with the Institute for the Study of War in Washington.

Instead, the government has focused on solidifying its grip on a strip of land that extends from the capital, Damascus, in the south, up to Homs in the country’s center and west to the coastal area heavily populated by Mr. Assad’s sect, the Alawites.

Other than hitting them with airstrikes or artillery, Mr. Assad has made little effort to reclaim rebel-held areas in the country’s far north and east.

The character of those fighting for Mr. Assad has changed, too. As the uncommitted defected, the loyalists remained. “All of these defections and desertions basically created a more loyal and therefore more deployable core,” said Emile Hokayem, an analyst with the International Institute for Strategic Studies, who is based in Dubai. “At least you know who is fighting for you."

Mr. Assad has also come to rely more heavily on paramilitary militias that draw largely from his Alawite sect and other minorities who consider him a bulwark against the rebels’ Islamism. More recently, fighters from Lebanon’s Shiite militant group Hezbollah have added extra muscle, especially in the border region near the town of Qusair, an area dotted with Shiite and Sunni villages that has seen intense fighting in recent months.  [....]

Although the Obama administration and its allies share the rebels’ goal of removing Mr. Assad from power, they have little else in common with the many rebel brigades that define their struggle in Islamic terms and seek to replace Mr. Assad with an Islamic state. Among them is Jabhet al-Nusra, or the Nusra Front, the local branch of Al Qaeda, which the United States has blacklisted as a terrorist group.

The war’s duration and the competition for resources have left the rebel movement itself deeply fractured. Few effective links exist between the rebels’ exile leader, Gen. Salim Idris, and the most powerful groups on the ground.

And recent months have seen increasing fights among rebels, diminishing their ability to form a united front against the government. [....]

In Syria’s northeastern Hassakeh Province, the country’s largest Kurdish majority area, residents have taken in Kurds fleeing violence elsewhere, expanded the teaching of the Kurdish language in schools and raised militias that have clashed with rebel brigades. Many local Kurds are linked to groups in Turkey and Iraq and hope to use the uprising to push for greater autonomy.

These spreading fissures leave little optimism that Syria can be stitched back together under one leadership in the near future.  [....]

That assessment doesn't seem implausible, though it's still to early to say for sure.  And if the dynamics of ethno-sectarian polarization and fragmentation in Syria really have passed the point of no return, that still doesn't tell us what the form the practical consequences will take.  They could range from merely terrible to horrifyingly catastrophic, with various possibilities in between.  We'll see.

Meanwhile, I want to emphasize that none of these complexities and forebodings necessarily add up to a case for just wringing our hands and doing nothing.  There are good reasons to be cautious and careful, but it's also important to bear in mind that the longer this goes on, the worse the outcomes are likely to be—for Syrians, for the region, and probably for the rest of us.

—Jeff Weintraub

Peggy Noonan goes Krugman (Hendrik Hertzberg)

I rarely pay much attention to Peggy Noonan, the one-time White House speech-writer who is now a Wall Street Journal columnist and talk-show pundit.  In my (possibly fallible) opinion, her stuff is almost always fatuous blather, occasionally enlivened by a clever turn of phrase.  But some people apparently take her seriously, and I have occasionally been startled to hear otherwise intelligent individuals tell me that they find her columns plausible and illuminating.  Noonan clearly has a flair for churning out relentlessly partisan hack propaganda while making it sound moderate, reasonable, and even thoughtful.  That's a real skill.

If one takes the trouble to look carefully at the substance of her arguments (when they have substance, rather than consisting entirely of atmospherics), they often turn out to be factually inaccurate, logically fallacious, or both.  And it's not uncommon to see her make assertions that turn reality completely upside-down.  Rather than waste time wondering what is going through her mind when she does this or how she thinks she can get away with it—is she really that clueless, or is she being cleverly hypocritical?—we should begin with the fact that she generally does get away with it and consider what Noonan's inversions of reality might tell us, symptomatically, about current political discourse.  Perhaps they represent coded, or half-conscious, recognitions of politically inconvenient realities from the very heart of right-wing conventional wisdom?  If so, maybe they're significant signs of something?

That seems to be a hypothesis that Hendrik Hertzberg is toying with, at least, in his recent evisceration of a column by Noonan that went on and on with her standard anti-Obama rant and then, in the process, slipped in this startling admission:  "It’s not a debt and deficit crisis, it’s a jobs crisis."

Why is that a startling admission, why is Noonan's framing of this admission so misleading and hypocritical, and why might it nevertheless be significant?  Let Hertzberg explain:

[....] The column tries to disguise itself as yet another right-wing attack on the Journal’s default punching bag, President Obama. Under a pugnacious headline and subhead—

THE ANTI-CONFIDENCE MAN
Just when America needs a boost, we’re stuck with Dr. Doom in the White House

—Noonan takes some mock-mournful jabs at the President (he’s “aloof,” his efforts are “cosmetic,” he “speaks constantly, endlessly, but always seems to be withholding his true thoughts and plans”), at what she calls “the mood of his governance” (“full of warnings, threats, cliffs and ceilings, full of words like suffering and punishment and sacrifice”), and at “the President’s people” (their “whole approach” is “stoke and scare—stoke resentment and scare the vulnerable”).

[JW: Coming from a Republican propagandist, this complaint about constant "warnings, threats, cliffs and ceilings" and a general atmosphere of scare-mongering and gratuitously manufactured crises is pretty rich.]

But her heresies are too big for such fig leaves, and they begin with her startling opening line:

It’s not a debt and deficit crisis, it’s a jobs crisis.

Say what? The biggest argument in Washington is about which is more urgent, the unemployment problem or the deficit and debt problem. Democrats say it’s unemployment and therefore advocate stimulus, which causes an increase in the deficit (though not necessarily in the long-term debt). Republicans say it’s the deficit/debt and therefore advocate austerity, which causes an increase in unemployment. (To be fair, Republicans are willing to swallow a bit of stimulus as long as it takes the dubious form of lowering taxes on the rich.)

Noonan, despite a quick “to be sure” aside in which she avers that things like deficits, regulations, and “the federal tax code” are “part of” the problem, is clear about which side she’s on:

But it’s a jobs crisis that’s the central thing. And you see it everywhere you look.

For Noonan, “everywhere you look” is a hotel she stayed at in Pittsburgh, which was so understaffed there was no bellhop to walk her up to her room in case a criminal was lurking. Nevertheless, about “the central thing,” she, like Paul Krugman, is right (i.e., left).

She’s also right about what Obama should have done about it:

He should have seen unemployment entering a crisis stage four years ago, and he did not. At that time I was certain he’d go for public-works projects, which could give training to the young and jobs to the experienced underemployed, would create jobs in the private sector and, in the end, yield up something needed—a bridge, a strengthened power grid. He instead gave his first term to health care.

Here’s where I started getting dizzy. Noonan is describing exactly what Obama did do. He did see a jobs crisis four years ago. As a major part of his eight-hundred-billion-dollar stimulus package (which he pursued in addition to, not instead of, health care), he did go for public-works projects, specifically including bridges and a strengthened power grid. The only opposition to all that bridge-building and grid-strengthening came from Noonan’s party. In the House, zero Republicans voted yes. In the Senate, three did. Afterwards, Pennsylvania’s Arlen Specter jumped from the G.O.P. before he was pushed. (Repackaging himself as a Democrat did not keep him from landing with a splat.) Olympia Snowe, citing hyperpartisanship and legislative dysfunction, retired. Her Maine colleague Susan Collins, the last RINO in the Senate zoo, may or may not seek a fourth term.

[JW: And let us not forget—as Noonan and many other pundits seem to have completely forgotten—that in September 2011, in a speech to a joint session of Congress, Obama once again proposed a serious and substantial jobs plan that included major spending on public works.  Predictably, this proposal ran into a stone wall of opposition from Congressional Republicans and went nowhere.]

From Peggy’s peroration:

Mr. Obama is making the same mistake he made four years ago. We are in a jobs crisis and he does not see it…. But the real question is whether the American people will be able to have jobs. Once they do, so much will follow—deficits go down a little as fewer need help, revenues go up as more pay taxes. Confidence and trust in the future will grow. People will be happier.

Noonan is with Obama, or Obama is with Noonan, on the substance of jobs vs. deficits. “We don’t have an immediate crisis in terms of debt,” the President said last week in an interview on ABC, adding: “My goal is how do we grow the economy, put people back to work, and if we do that we’re going to be bringing in more revenue.” I guess she has to say it’s all Obama’s fault. It’s the Wall Street Journal. It’s Chinatown.

OK, Noonan is being deceptive and hypocritical. But as de Rouchefoucauld pointed out long ago, hypocrisy is often the homage that vice pays to virtue. So we should take what we can get and go on from there.

The policy recommendation that Noonan is offering here—and has intermittently alluded to over the past few years—is basically on-target, even if Noonan feels compelled to bury it in such a dishonest and misleading rhetorical package: "It’s not a debt and deficit crisis, it’s a jobs crisis." We should be taking serious measures to help pull the economy out of the Great Recession and to bring down unemployment—rather than following the contractionary economic policies pushed by the Republicans in the US and their counterparts in Europe, which have sabotaged the economic recovery and continue to do so. And one major element in a constructive program would be to employ (or re-employ) construction workers, engineers, and lots of other people to start rebuilding, repairing, updating, and otherwise strengthening our national infrastructure. Republicans, you heard it from Peggy Noonan!

—Jeff Weintraub