Why the Democrats should reclaim democracy (Jackson Diehl)

A column in the Washington Post with some news that sounds potentially encouraging:
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Though you'd never know it from surfing the Internet, there exists in the Democratic Party a substantial body of politicians and policymakers who believe the U.S. mission in Iraq must be sustained until it succeeds; who want to intensify American attempts to spread democracy in the greater Middle East; and who think that the Army needs to be expanded to fight a long war against Islamic extremism.

Their problem isn't only that some people (mostly Republicans and independents) don't believe they exist. Or that the flamers at MoveOn.org would expel them from the party if that were possible. They also face the formidable task of rescuing what they believe is a quintessentially Democratic policy agenda from the wreckage of the Bush administration, so that a future president can do it right. [....]

This is about a coalition of mostly younger foreign affairs professionals who held mid-level positions at the State Department and the National Security Council during the Clinton administration and who have spent the past several years formulating a distinctly Democratic response to the post-Sept. 11 era -- as opposed to a one-dimensional critique of President Bush or Iraq. [....] This month they published a fascinating book that lays out what the foreign policy of a winning campaign by one of those Democrats -- or perhaps Hillary Clinton -- could look like. Sponsored by the Progressive Policy Institute, which is an outgrowth of the Clinton-friendly Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), it's called "With All Our Might: A Progressive Strategy for Defeating Jihadism and Defending Liberty.

Like most of its authors, editor Will Marshall, a DLC founder who now heads the policy institute, sees himself as reviving the foreign policy of Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy, who formulated the Democratic response to the totalitarian menace of communism. Jihadism, Marshall says, requires a similar exercise of intellectual muscle. "Democrats have always been at our best when we have defended democratic values against illiberal ideologies," Marshall told me last week. "When we do that we can appeal to a broader public, not only at home but globally." [....]

Unfortunately, [Kenneth] Pollack and his fellow Democrats acknowledge, no liberal policy in the Middle East will work if Iraq fails. While Democrats differ over whether the invasion was right, notes an introduction by Marshall and Jeremy Rosner, both national interests and national honor demand that "we not abandon the Iraqi people to chaos and sectarian violence."

"The fact that President Bush and his team have mismanaged virtually every aspect of postwar reconstruction does not justify an immediate or precipitous withdrawal," they say. "Instead we should rally the American people for an extended and robust security and reconstruction presence."
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Absolutely right!

I will have to read the book to see how much I actually agree with it (and I have to admit that the initials DLC make me a little nervous). But so far, this sounds pretty good to me. And if the 2008 Presidential election should turn out to be a contest between Hillary Clinton and John McCain--something that doesn't look entirely impossible, though I wouldn't bet on it--then this program might even turn out to be a realistic option. (The rest of this column is here.)

Yours for democracy,
Jeff Weintraub

Michael Massing's curious apologetics for Mearsheimer & Walt (NYR)

Michael Massing has just published a piece in the New York Review, "The Storm Over the Israel Lobby" (Vol. 53, No.10 · dated June 8, 2006), dealing with Mearsheimer & Walt's recent polemic against the "Israel Lobby" and the controversy it has generated. (On this subject, see here and here and here.) One of my correspondents described Massing's piece as "odd," and indeed it is odd. I'm afraid that it is also a good illustration of the intellectual dishonesty that has marked many of the more self-consciously "responsible" and "mainstream" efforts to defend Mearsheimer & Walt's manifesto and to attack its critics.

=> Massing repeatedly describes critics of M&W's arguments as "hysterical," "scurrilous," and so on--but he is also forced to concede that most of their substantive criticisms are, in fact, valid.

It must be said, however, that "The Israel Lobby" has some serious shortcomings, and that these have contributed to the vehemence of the response. First, Mearsheimer and Walt have made some factual errors. [....] Mearsheimer and Walt have also used some quotes from David Ben-Gurion badly out of context. [....] This distortion of Ben-Gurion's statements comes in a section in which Mearsheimer and Walt lay out the "dwindling moral case" for supporting Israel. [....] This seems an unconvincing line of reasoning [....] [T]o minimize the violence against Israel is both dubious morally and vulnerable as an argument. The lack of a clearer and fuller account of Palestinian violence is a serious failing of the essay. Its tendency to emphasize Israel's offenses while largely overlooking those of its adversaries has troubled even many doves. [....] Benny Morris, whom Mearsheimer and Walt frequently cite, dismissed their work in The New Republic as "a travesty of the history that I have studied and written for the past two decades." [....] Another problem in Mearsheimer and Walt's essay is its thin documentation. In seeking to demonstrate the lobby's negative influence, they don't provide decisive evidence for their accusations. [....]

One of the most central and explosive claims made by M&W is that the so-called Israel Lobby played a "critical" role in manipulating the US into the 2003 Iraq war. Massing does not pretend that they have made even a half-plausible case for this contention.

Similarly, in advancing their claim that the Israel lobby pushed the US into the Iraq war, Mearsheimer and Walt offer several disparate bits of evidence [....] Maybe so, but there are many other contending explanations for the administration's action—ousting a regime seen as threatening to US interests, of which protection of Israel was one; overthrowing a tyrant who had brutally oppressed his people; projecting US power in the region with an eye to securing oil supplies in Saudi Arabia as well as Iraq; and setting off a process of democratization that, at least in neocon fancy, would transform the Middle East. In light of these other explanations, it would take a much fuller and richly sourced discussion than the one presented by the authors to make their case seem convincing.

And so on. As a assessment of Mearsheimer & Walt's substantive arguments, all this is actually pretty devastating.

=> But Massing then performs what I have come to recognize as a standard deceptive maneuver, which is to reframe M&W's position in a way that jettisons their most central and provocative claims and makes their arguments sound more plausible and common-sensical than they actually are. Critics of such common-sensical arguments then look pretty "hysterical." In other words, Massing suddenly shifts from the case that M&W actually made to the case that he, Massing, would have made instead:

Overall, the lack of firsthand research in "The Israel Lobby" gives it a secondhand feel. Mearsheimer and Walt provide little sense of how AIPAC and other lobbying groups work, how they seek to influence policy, and what people in government have to say about them. The authors seem to have concluded that in view of the sensitivity of the subject, few people would talk frankly about it. In fact, many people are fed up with the lobby and eager to explain why (though often not on the record). Federal campaign documents offer another important source of information that the authors have ignored. Through such sources, it's possible to show that, on their central point—the power of the Israel lobby and the negative effect it has had on US policy—Mearsheimer and Walt are entirely correct.

Massing then goes on to discuss "the power of the Israel lobby" and its effects on US policy toward Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict. What Massing says is partly right, partly wrong, partly questionable. But unfortunately, this is not Mearsheimer & Walt's "central point." Their claim, which Massing had previously cited, is that "unwavering support for Israel" has been the "centerpiece" of US Middle East policy in general--and that the "stranglehold" of the "Israel Lobby" over the US government explains American Middle East policy as a whole, including such incidents as the 2003 Iraq war.

The alternative argument that Massing would prefer to emphasize is certainly less outrageous and extreme than the one M&W really made. But for Massing to pretend that his revised version of the argument is actually M&W's argument--and that their critics are therefore being absurd and "hysterical"--is not just misleading but dishonest. I know that's a harsh term, but I'm afraid it's the only one that's accurate.

Can't you do better than this, guys?

Yours for reality-based discourse,
Jeff Weintraub

The perennial temptations of "progressive" dictator-worship (Ian Buruma)

Sadly, as this piece by Ian Buruma reminds us, the notion that people learn from experience seems to be mostly wishful thinking.

Of course--and I'm sure Buruma agrees--it is important to emphasize that the political pathologies he describes here are not at all restricted to "leftists" and "progressives." There are also well-established tendencies on the political right for people who should know better to become suckers and apologists for brutal dictators, flashy strongmen, and repressive authoritarian regimes (which allegedly make the trains run on time, impose "free market" policies, make themselves geopolitically useful, or whatever) But neither camp should try to absolve itself, and evade the real issues, by harping exclusively on the other's mistakes.

The left has a proud tradition of defending political freedoms, at home and abroad. But this tradition is in danger of being lost when western intellectuals indulge in power worship. Applause for autocrats undermines the morale of people who insist on fighting for their freedoms Leftists were largely sympathetic, and rightly so, to critics of Berlusconi and Thaksin, even though neither was a dictator. Both did, of course, support American foreign policy. But when democracy is endangered, the left should be equally hard on rulers who oppose the US. Failure to do so encourages authoritarianism everywhere, including in the West itself, where the frivolous behaviour of a dogmatic left has already allowed neoconservatives to steal all the best lines.

Yours for democracy,
Jeff Weintraub
===============
Sunday Times (London)
May 14, 2006

Thank you, my foolish friends in the West
Hugo Chavez of Venezuela is only the latest dictator-in-waiting to bask in adulation from western 'progressives', says Ian Buruma

When the Cuban novelist Reinaldo Arenas managed to escape to the US in 1980, after years of persecution by the Cuban government for being openly homosexual and a dissident, he said: “The difference between the communist and capitalist systems is that, although both give you a kick in the ass, in the communist system you have to applaud, while in the capitalist system you can scream. And I came here to scream.”

One of the most vexing things for artists and intellectuals who live under the compulsion to applaud dictators is the spectacle of colleagues from more open societies applauding of their own free will. It adds a peculiarly nasty insult to injury.

Stalin was applauded by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Mao was visited by a constant stream of worshippers from the West, some of whose names can still produce winces of disgust in China. Castro has basked for years in the adulation of such literary stars as Jose Saramago and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Even Pol Pot found favour among several well-known journalists and academics.

Last year a number of journalists, writers and showbiz figures, including Harold Pinter, Nadine Gordimer, Harry Belafonte and Tariq Ali, signed a letter claiming that in Cuba “there has not been a single case of disappearance, torture or extra-judicial execution since 1959 . . .”

Arenas was arrested in 1973 for “ideological deviation”. He was tortured and locked up in prison cells filled with floodwater and excrement, and threatened with death if he didn’t renounce his own writing. Imagine what it must be like to be treated like this and then read about your fellow writers in the West standing up for your oppressors.

None of this is news, and would hardly be worth dredging up if the same thing were not happening once more. Hugo Chavez, the elected strongman of Venezuela, is the latest object of adulation by western “progressives” who return from jaunts in Caracas with stars in their eyes.

Chavez is not yet a Castro, let alone a Pol Pot. His fiery populist rhetoric is more in the line of Juan Peron, the Argentinian “caudillo”. Chavez, by the way, rather relishes this pejorative term. Neither quite left, nor quite right, he is a typical macho Latin leader, whose charisma is meant to stand for the empowerment of his people, mostly poor and darker-skinned than the urban elite.

Unlike many traditional caudillos, but like Silvio Berlusconi (who cut his coat from the same cloth), Chavez was democratically elected, in 1998, after having tried and failed to take the more traditional strongman’s route to power, by armed force in 1992. Chavez is the Latin American version of a new type of authoritarianism (Thailand’s Thaksin Shinawatra is the Asian version), built on a mixture of showbusiness, intimidation, paranoia, huge wealth, and public handouts to the poor. The ideal is democracy by referendum, stripped of messy party politics or independent courts.

As Ali, the ubiquitous applauder of Third World blowhards, put it: “Democracy in Venezuela, under the banner of the Bolivarian revolutionaries, has broken through the corrupt two-party system favoured by the oligarchy and its friends in the West.” But whether the corrupt two-party system will be replaced by a functioning democracy is the question.

Ali was lavish in his praise of Venezuela’s new constitution, which allows people to recall the president before he has completed his term of office. “A triumph of the poor against the rich,” he called it. In 2004 Venezuelans exercised their right to do just that by circulating a petition for a referendum. Chavez survived, but soon the names of the petitioners were made public, and anti-Chavistas were denied passports, public welfare and government contracts.

In 2004 a law was passed that would ban broadcasting stations on the grounds of security and public order. Chavez, as well as his cabinet ministers, appears on television to denounce journalists who dare to criticise the revolution. Most ominous, though, is the way Chavez has expanded the 20-seat supreme court by adding 12 sympathetic judges.

Worse causes have been served by western enthusiasts than the Bolivarist revolution, and worse leaders have been applauded than Chavez. One only needs recall the abject audiences at the court of Saddam Hussein by George Galloway, among others, who flattered the murderous dictator while claiming to represent “the voice of the voiceless”. Even now, such publications as the New Left Review advocate support for a global anti-imperialist movement that would include North Korea, surely the most oppressive regime on earth.

The common element of radical Third Worldism is an obsession with American power, as though the US were so intrinsically evil that any enemy of the US must be our friend, from Mao to Kim Jong-il, from Fidel Castro to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. And if our “friends” shower us with flattery, asking us to attend conferences and sit on advisory boards, so much the better.

Criticism of American policies and economic practices are necessary and often just, but why do leftists continue to discredit their critical stance by applauding strongmen who oppress and murder their own critics? Is it simply a reverse application of that famous American cold war dictum: “He may be a bastard, but he’s our bastard”? Or is it the fatal attraction to power often felt by writers and artists who feel marginal and impotent in capitalist democracies? The danger of Chavism is not a revival of communism, even though Castro is among its main boosters. Nor should anti-Americanism be our main concern. The US can take care of itself. What needs to be resisted, not just in Latin America, is the new form of populist authoritarianism.

That Chavez is applauded by many people, especially the poor, is not necessarily a sign of democracy; many revolutionary leaders are popular, at least in the beginning of their rule, before their promises have ended in misery and bloodshed.

The left has a proud tradition of defending political freedoms, at home and abroad. But this tradition is in danger of being lost when western intellectuals indulge in power worship. Applause for autocrats undermines the morale of people who insist on fighting for their freedoms Leftists were largely sympathetic, and rightly so, to critics of Berlusconi and Thaksin, even though neither was a dictator. Both did, of course, support American foreign policy. But when democracy is endangered, the left should be equally hard on rulers who oppose the US. Failure to do so encourages authoritarianism everywhere, including in the West itself, where the frivolous behaviour of a dogmatic left has already allowed neoconservatives to steal all the best lines.

Sign a PETITION to free Ramin Jahanbegloo

As the item from Eurozine indicates, the French journal Esprit "has launched a petition for the release of Ramin Jahanbegloo" and "Eurozine's Italian partner Reset has also issued an appeal for Jahanbegloo's release." Each of these petitions has been signed by a number of people from both sides of the Atlantic, including various luminaries.
My impression is that the procedure for adding one's signature to the Reset petition is more convenient and straightforward, and I urge everyone to consider signing it. To do this, send an e-mail message to reset@tuttopmi.it

=> There are also appeals for letter-writing campaigns on Jahanbegloo's behalf here and here and here.
(And for further information on Ramin Jahanbegloo, his arrest, and international reaction to it, see here and here.)

--Jeff Weintraub
===============
Eurozine
May 12, 2006

Eurozine News Item
Free Ramin Jahanbegloo

Esprit has launched a petition for the release of Ramin Jahanbegloo. The leading Iranian academic, philosopher, and contributor to international journals will be familiar to many of Eurozine's editors and readers. A list of publications can be found on his website.

Ramin Jahanbegloo was arrested at the Tehran airport on or around Friday 28 April 2006 as he was leaving for an international conference on Iran in Brussels. After several days silence, the Iranian authorities announced Jahanbegloo's incarceration in the notorious Evin prison on 3 May 2006. Since then, posts on a weblog for Dr Jahanbegloo's release set up by the Toronto Initiative for Iranian Studies quote official statements that he is undergoing "interrogation" and is suspected of crimes related to "security and spying".

A man of dialogue and non-violence, Ramin Jahanbegloo is the author of a work on Mahatma Gandhi as well as several conversations with European intellectuals such as Isaiah Berlin and George Steiner. The numerous initiatives he has undertaken, for example in bringing leading western intellectuals to Tehran, have been a precious source of mutual understanding between civilizations at a time when such understanding is of the utmost importance.

"Jahanbegloo's imprisonment could be the beginning of a new wave of repression against the lively Iranian intellectual scene," writes Jörg Lau in die Zeit on 11 May. "Ramin Jahanbegloo stands for an intellectual responsibility that does not stop at cultural, religious, or political boundaries. It is time to show him that he is not alone."

All his friends and colleagues are deeply worried about Jahanbegloo's welfare and demand his immediate release.
Eurozine adds its name to Esprit's list of signatories, which includes George Steiner, Richard Rorty, Toni Negri, Edgar Morin, Timothy Garton Ash, Bernard Cassen, Claude Lefort, Alain Ehrenberg, and many more. We urge our partners and readers to use whatever channels you can to spread awareness of Dr Jahanbegloo's situation as well as to make use of the opportunities to register your support provided by the weblog.

Update: Eurozine's Italian partner Reset has also issued an appeal for Jahanbegloo's release. He delivered a paper entitled Against the clash of intolerances in Cairo last March as part of the Reset Dialogues on Civilization.

Mass murder, political atrocity, & the failures of western moral imagination - "The Black Book of Saddam Hussein" (Gerard Alexander)

Norman Geras quotes from a perceptive commentary by Gerard Alexander about an important and insufficiently discussed French book, Le Livre Noir de Saddam Hussein (The Black Book of Saddam Hussein). Whatever one thinks about whether or not the 2003 Iraq war was a good idea, the nature and record of the Iraqi Ba'ath regime raise some fundamental moral and political questions which it is simply dishonest to try to avoid--but which many opponents of the war have done their best to ignore, whitewash, evade, or distort. (Boldings below are mine.)
--Jeff Weintraub

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The book's editor, veteran French journalist Chris Kutschera, concludes that while "the American war may not have been the ideal way to put an end to Saddam Hussein's dictatorship," there was no better one, because overthrow was simply no longer possible from within a savagely repressed society. So: No invasion, more Saddam. And that was an outcome these authors--an array of Middle Eastern, European, and American journalists, academics, and activists--could not bear.

This hefty volume includes almost three dozen substantive chapters chronicling the rise and record of Iraq's Baath party, the operations of Saddam's secret police, his cult of personality, his sanguinary wars against Iran and Kuwait, and his international suppliers of arms and diplomatic support. They show that Saddam's quarter-century in power was a virtually uninterrupted exercise in bloodletting in nearly every direction.

Soon after becoming president, he massacred personal opponents in and outside of his ruling Baath party. For the next two decades, he would subject critics and adversaries to a steady stream of torture, assassination, and terror, including the rape rooms, prison horrors, and executions that were regularly reported by Amnesty International and others. Fellow Sunni Arabs were not exempt, but the main categories of victims were Iranians, Kuwaitis, and Iraq's Kurds and Shiites.

In 1980, Saddam launched a needless and bloody war against majority-Shiite Iran and terrorized Iraq's own Shiites to ensure their quiescence. As that war wound down, Saddam was freed to turn his attention to the Kurds whose loyalty was, indeed, questionable. In the 1988 "Anfal" campaigns, his henchmen killed 100,000 or more Kurds (including through poison gas) and forcibly resettled thousands more in desolate regions elsewhere in Iraq--events that Human Rights Watch declared "genocide." [....]

Of course, even a book this size has omissions. Most obviously, it covers only sporadically the years from the first Gulf War to 2003, when the regime ruled by unconcealed gangsterism and reduced Iraqis to deepening penury.

But it also offers innovative contributions to the public debate. One section discusses Saddam's international supporters and suppliers, especially the Soviet Union and France. This could correct progressive commentators who seem to think that Saddam's closest ally was Donald Rumsfeld. A chapter describes how Arab regimes and intellectuals turned blind eyes and issued apologies. Others suggest how Saddam's policies sharpened the confessional and ethnic differences now so viciously on display in Iraqi politics.

For all that, Le Livre noir de Saddam Hussein represents an intellectual mystery. Journalists and authors have already extensively covered Saddam and his regime. It's true that this book provides some of the best discussions available on the persecution of the Marsh Arabs and the suppression of the 1991 Shiite uprising. But in the main, all these stories are familiar. And many of them are going to be dredged up in that Baghdad courtroom anyway. This borders on old news. It seems unnecessary to produce a Black Book about Saddam at all. Yet most of these writers have an urgent and indignant tone.

What gives? Kutschera, the editor, offers one answer: Many people, in fact, do not know the scope of Saddam's crimes, and many others don't know many details about them. Perhaps more important, Kutschera and his collaborators know that they live in a world in which some items are pushed out of people's moral imaginations, and off their moral agendas, with remarkable ease and speed. Specifically, they know they live in a world in which once the Holocaust has been addressed, moral blind spots about mass murder and abuse proliferate impressively. [....]

Iraq is not an exception. Intellectual imaginations immediately grasp the importance of the widely covered website "Iraq Body Count," tabulating Iraqi civilians reported killed after the 2003 overthrow of Saddam. But the researcher-activists who created that site don't run a similar count of Iraqis killed by Saddam before April 2003, or one of bodies as they emerge from his mass graves, and they can't even be bothered to link to neglected websites publicizing those graves, such as afhr.org and the austerely powerful (and graphic) massgraves.info.

In the same spirit, institutions as diverse as Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, the University of California at Santa Cruz, Bryn Mawr and Amherst colleges, and Florida State University have already offered courses that discuss Abu Ghraib as a place where U.S. soldiers committed abuses, not as a place in which Saddam's secret police tortured thousands to death.

It's no coincidence that the Black Book of Saddam Hussein has been received with what Kutschera describes as a "chill" by the French commentariat, has been ignored by the reviewers in the leading French newspapers--Le Monde, Le Figaro, and Libération--and was reviewed only snidely by Le Monde Diplomatique.

This is the real virtue of the Black Book and other volumes like it. They offer the details that most news media and college classes won't. They memorialize those who otherwise might be forgotten. And they are the raw materials for an alternative storyline, one that takes all peoples seriously enough to say that they are moral agents, both for evil and for good.

====================
Norman Geras (Normblog)
May 19, 2006

Those who might be forgotten

Last December I posted this excerpt from an article by Rebecca Weisser about Le Livre Noir de Saddam Hussein (The Black Book of Saddam Hussein). There's another discussion of it here by Gerard Alexander. After giving some account of the book's content, Alexander wonders why a book collecting such 'familiar' material was necessary. He writes:

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Kutschera, the editor, offers one answer: Many people, in fact, do not know the scope of Saddam's crimes, and many others don't know many details about them. Perhaps more important, Kutschera and his collaborators know that they live in a world in which some items are pushed out of people's moral imaginations, and off their moral agendas, with remarkable ease and speed. Specifically, they know they live in a world in which once the Holocaust has been addressed, moral blind spots about mass murder and abuse proliferate impressively.

The pattern is plain: Over and over again, perceived abuses by Western societies - colonialism, the Vietnam war - are revisited in conversation and thought until they are part of our mental furniture. What happens to the crimes of others is very different. Some of them get sucked down the memory hole. Those of us of a certain age remember that the very independent Idi Amin was far worse, but it is Joseph Mobutu - portrayed as a U.S. ally, if not puppet - who has emerged as the durable symbol of abusive African rule.

More often, crimes committed by non-Westerners are blamed on Westerners. As in: America provided Saddam with chemical weapons; Palestinians mimic Israeli brutality; the Khmer Rouge was driven to madness by U.S. bombing. It was Belgian colonialism that taught Rwandan Hutu génocidaires to be tribal and to kill. And the CIA created Osama bin Laden, while U.S. excesses created his followers.

The soft bigotry here is not of low expectations but of no expectations. This suggests that only Westerners have moral agency. To deny a person the capacity to initiate evil is to deny them the capacity to initiate good, or anything in between.

The result is a vicious cycle in which many educated people engage easily with the storylines they already know, and are unsure what to do with the unfamiliar. Most infamously, members of the world's intellectual and journalistic classes have a habit of not denying Communist atrocities but of knowing almost no details about them and never volunteering the topic.

Let's not even bother with the Great Terror and the Ukrainian famine and, instead, go straight to something recent. Ask yourself: When was the last time you saw, read, or heard anyone discussing the estimated one million civilians killed during the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan during 1979-89? People old enough to have lived through that aren't reminded of it. And younger ones have almost no opportunity to learn about it. Such acts of forgetting are why the Black Book of Communism was still needed so many years after Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and why the tales it told were greeted as foreign all over again.

Iraq is not an exception. Intellectual imaginations immediately grasp the importance of the widely covered website "Iraq Body Count," tabulating Iraqi civilians reported killed after the 2003 overthrow of Saddam. But the researcher-activists who created that site don't run a similar count of Iraqis killed by Saddam before April 2003, or one of bodies as they emerge from his mass graves, and they can't even be bothered to link to neglected websites publicizing those graves, such as afhr.org and the austerely powerful (and graphic) massgraves.info.

In the same spirit, institutions as diverse as Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, the University of California at Santa Cruz, Bryn Mawr and Amherst colleges, and Florida State University have already offered courses that discuss Abu Ghraib as a place where U.S. soldiers committed abuses, not as a place in which Saddam's secret police tortured thousands to death.

It's no coincidence that the Black Book of Saddam Hussein has been received with what Kutschera describes as a "chill" by the French commentariat, has been ignored by the reviewers in the leading French newspapers - Le Monde, Le Figaro, and Libération - and was reviewed only snidely by Le Monde Diplomatique.

This is the real virtue of the Black Book and other volumes like it. They offer the details that most news media and college classes won't. They memorialize those who otherwise might be forgotten. And they are the raw materials for an alternative storyline, one that takes all peoples seriously enough to say that they are moral agents, both for evil and for good.

(Thanks: SdeW.)
Posted by Norm at 12:00 PM | Permalink

Iran - Further support for Ramin Jahanbegloo

Via Norman Geras (Normblog), here are letters protesting the imprisonment of the Iranian scholar and public intellectual Ramin Jahanbegloo from the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and from York University in Canada. The AAUP letter is below.
[Update: The American Sociological Association (ASA) has also sent a strong letter to the Iranian government urging the release of Ramin Jahanbegloo. --JW]

--Jeff Weintraub
===============
Norman Geras (Normblog)
May 15, 2006

Ramin Jahanbegloo 6

Further to my earlier posts about the imprisonment of Ramin Jahanbegloo, here is the text of a letter to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei from Roger Bowen for the American Association of University Professors:
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Your Excellency:

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has learned of the arrest and detention of Professor Ramin Jahanbegloo, chair of the Department of Contemporary Studies at Tehran's Cultural Research Bureau. I write on behalf of my colleagues across the United States to protest this wrong and to urge the Government of Iran to release him immediately.

The AAUP is the oldest professional organization of university and college faculty in the United States. For nearly 100 years we have advocated for academic freedom as fundamental to the securing of the common good which itself depends on the free search for truth and its free exposition. It is our view that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as well as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights protects the academic freedom of scholars everywhere to write, teach, and comment without fear of government censorship or punishment.

The AAUP further recognizes that academic freedom is a right of scholars everywhere. For this reason the AAUP has, among other actions, contested the US Government's denial of a visa to Swiss scholar Tariq Ramadan, the Chinese government's arbitrary arrest of prominent scholars, and the suppression of academic exchange between American and Cuban universities by the US Government.

The arrest of Professor Jahanbegloo offends international standards of academic freedom; and suggests that the Government of Iran is intolerant of competing ideas and insensitive to democratic standards. We call upon you to release him from detention without delay.
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Has anything been sent from the AUT? If not, it would be good if they could follow the AAUP's lead. See also this statement from Amnesty International Canada; this letter-writing appeal from the University of Toronto; and this one from English Pen. (Hat tip: in turn, AL, TC, JQ, and DavidT.)

Posted by Norm at 02:00 PM | Permalink

Ayaan Hirsi Ali & the Netherlands (PeakTalk)

Norman Geras alerted me to some commentaries on the Ayaan Hirsi Ali affair by a Dutch blogger named Pieter Dorsman who lives in Vancouver (and blogs in English on PeakTalk). He has a series of posts on the matter that are worth reading, including these ...

Hirsi Ali's Fall
Hirsi Ali, Released
Hirsi Ali: Not Dutch
Then and Now
Emergency Debate
Verdonk Retreats

... and Dorsman's analyses strike me as perceptive and illuminating. In particular, I think this is almost certainly right:

Leon de Winter points out in his blog that the left may have been down but hardly out, and is now in full swing to restore the Dutch age of politically correct consensus by publicly executing Hirsi Ali. That is a correct assumption. But what has not been discussed in detail is that the Dutch right, and notably Hirsi Ali’s own liberal party (VVD) may have decided that it is time to get shot of her. [....]
The other aspect that should be underlined here is the deep resentment that success and ambition usually generate in The Netherlands. Dynamic careers, success, outspokenness, standing out in the crowd are things that have always been frowned upon, although that has changed a bit in recent years I guess.Still, the Dutch coined the phrase “act normal, that is strange enough” and a very ambitious black Muslim woman who built up a spectacular political career with international allure by holding a mirror in front of the complacent and politically lethargic Dutch was of course not something that would be rewarded with eternal gratitude. Intelligent as she is, Hirsi Ali must have been keenly aware that she was bound to get into real trouble and by that I do not mean a jihadist ready to kill her. No, her once receptive hosts and former friends will now have the honor of wielding the knife.
Coming so quickly after the court ruling in the case that seeks to evict her from her house it is hard not to escape the conclusion that some sort of concerted effort is under way to get rid of her. As it stands, I believe that both the left and the right have a vested interest in bringing this about [....]

=> Apparently, "A group of Dutch celebrities published an open letter yesterday in which they stated 'we are embarrassed about our own country' [....]." They should be.

=> Dorsman has also posted the full text of Hirsi Ali's statement resigning from Parliament ("Hirsi Ali's Farewell Note"). See below.

--Jeff Weintraub
===============
PeakTalk
Tuesday, May 16, 2006

HIRSI ALI'S FAREWELL NOTE

For posterity, in its entirety:

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I came to Holland in the summer of 1992 because I wanted to be able to determine my own future. I didn’t want to be forced into a destiny that other people had chosen for me, so I opted for the protection of the rule of law. Here in Holland, I found freedom and opportunities, and I took those opportunities to speak out against religious terror.

In January 2003, at the invitation of the VVD party, I became a member of parliament. I accepted the VVD’s invitation on the condition that I would be the party’s spokesman for the emancipation of women and the integration of immigrants.

What exactly did I want to achieve?

First of all I wanted to put the oppression of immigrant women -- especially Muslim women – squarely on the Dutch political agenda. Second, I wanted Holland to pay attention to the specific cultural and religious issues that were holding back many ethnic minorities, instead of always taking a one-sided approach that focused only on their socio-economic circumstances. Lastly, I wanted politicians to grasp the fact that major aspects of Islamic doctrine and tradition, as practiced today, are incompatible with the open society.

Now I have to ask myself, have I accomplished that task?

I have stumbled often in my political career. It has sometimes been frustrating and slow. However, I am completely certain that I have, in my own way, succeeded in contributing to the debate. Issues related to Islam – such as impediments to free speech; refusal of the separation of Church and State; widespread domestic violence; honor killings; the repudiation of wives; and Islam’s failure to condemn genital mutilation -- these subjects can no longer be swept under the carpet in our country’s capital. Some of the measures that this government has begun taking give me satisfaction. Many illusions of how easy it will be to establish a multicultural society have disappeared forever. We are now more realistic and more open in this debate, and I am proud to have contributed to that process.

Meanwhile, the ideas which I espouse have begun spreading to other countries. In recent years I have given speeches and attended debates in many European countries and in the United States. For months now, I have felt that I needed to make a decision: should I go on in Dutch politics, or should I now transfer my ideas to an international forum?

In the fall of 2005 I told Gerrit Zalm and Jozias van Aartsen, the leaders of the VVD, that I would not be a candidate for the parliamentary elections in 2007. I had decided to opt for a more international platform, because I wanted to contribute to the international debate on the emancipation of Muslim women and the complex relationship between Islam and the West.

Now that I am announcing that I will resign from Dutch politics, I would like to thank the members of the VVD for my years in parliament – to thank them for inviting me to stand for parliament, and -- perhaps more importantly -- for putting up with me while I was there, for this has been in many ways a rough ride for us all. I want to thank my other colleagues here in parliament for their help, although some of our debates have been sharp. (Femke Halsema, thank you especially for that!). I would also like to thank the 30,758 people who in January 2003 trusted their preference vote to a newcomer.

But why am I not remaining in parliament for my full term, until next year’s election? Why, after only three and a half years, have I decided to resign from the Lower Chamber?

It is common knowledge that threats against my life began building up ever since I first talked about Islam publicly, in the spring of 2002. Months before I even entered politics, my freedom of movement was greatly curtailed, and that became worse after Theo van Gogh was murdered in 2004. I have been obliged to move house so many times I have lost count. The direct cause for the ending of my membership in parliament is that on April 27 of this year, a Dutch court ruled that I must once again leave my home, because my neighbors filed a complaint that they could not feel safe living next to me. The Dutch government will appeal this verdict and I grateful for that, because how on earth will other people whose lives are threatened manage to find a place to stay if this verdict is allowed to rest? However, this appeal does not alter my situation: I have to leave my apartment by the end of August.

Another reason for my departure is the discussion that has arisen from a TV program, The Holy Ayaan, which was aired on May 11. This program centered on two issues: the story that I told when I was applying for asylum here in Holland, and questions about my forced marriage.

I have been very open about the fact that when I applied for asylum in the Netherlands in 1992, I did so under a false name and with a fabricated story. In 2002, I spoke on national television about the conditions of my arrival, and I said then that I fabricated a story in order to be able to receive asylum here. Since that TV program I have repeated this dozens of times, in Dutch and international media. Many times I have truthfully named my father and given my correct date of birth. (You will find a selection of these articles in the press folder). I also informed the VVD leadership and members of this fact when I was invited to stand for parliament.

I have said many times that I am not proud that I lied when I sought asylum in the Netherlands. It was wrong to do so. I did it because I felt I had no choice. I was frightened that if I simply said I was fleeing a forced marriage, I would be sent back to my family. And I was frightened that if I gave my real name, my clan would hunt me down and find me. So I chose a name that I thought I could disappear with – the real name of my grandfather, who was given the birth-name Ali. I claimed that my name was Ayaan Hirsi Ali, although I should have said it was Ayaan Hirsi Magan.

You probably are wondering, what is my real name?

I am Ayaan, the daughter of Hirsi, who is the son of a man who took the name of Magan. Magan was the son of Isse, who was the son of Guleid, who was the son of Ali. He was the son of Wai’ays, who was the son of Muhammad. He was the son of Ali, who was the son of Umar. Umar was the son of Osman, who was the son of Mahamud. This is my clan, and therefore, in Somalia, this is my name: Ayaan Hirsi Magan Isse Guleid Ali Wai’ays Muhammad Ali Umar Osman Mahamud.

Following the May 11 television broadcast, legal questions have been raised about my naturalization as a Dutch citizen. Minister Verdonk has written to me saying that my passport will be annulled, because it was issued to a person who does not hold my real name. I am not at liberty to discuss the legal issues in this case.

Now for the questions about my forced marriage. Last week’s TV program cast doubt on my credibility in that respect, and the final conclusion of the documentary is that all this is terribly complicated. Let me tell you, it’s not so complex. The allegations that I willingly married my distant cousin, and was present at the wedding ceremony, are simply untrue. This man arrived in Nairobi from Canada, asked my father for one of his five daughters, and my father gave him me. I can assure you my father is not a man who takes no for an answer. Still, I refused to attend the formal ceremony, and I was married regardless. Then, on my way to Canada -- during a stopover in Germany -- I traveled to the Netherlands and asked for asylum here. In all simplicity this is what happened, nothing more and nothing less. For those who are interested in the intimate details of my transition from a pre-modern society to a modern one, and how I came to love what the West stands for, please read my memoir, which is due to be published this fall.

To return to the present day, may I say that it is difficult to live with so many threats on your life and such a level of police protection. It is difficult to work as a parliamentarian if you have nowhere to live. All that is difficult, but not impossible. It has become impossible since last night, when Minister Verdonk informed me that she would strip me of my Dutch citizenship.

I am therefore preparing to leave Holland. But the questions for our society remain. The future of Islam in our country; the subjugation of women in Islamic culture; the integration of the many Muslims in the West: it is self-deceit to imagine that these issues will disappear.

I will continue to ask uncomfortable questions, despite the obvious resistance that they elicit. I feel that I should help other people to live in freedom, as many people have helped me. I personally have gone through a long and sometimes painful process of personal growth in this country. It began with learning to tell the truth to myself, and then the truth about myself: I strive now to also tell the truth about society as I see it.

That transition from becoming a member of a clan to becoming a citizen in an open society is what public service has come to mean for me. Only clear thinking and strong action can lead to real change, and free many people within our society from the mental cage of submission. The idea that I can contribute to their freedom, whether in the Netherlands or in another country, gives me deep satisfaction.

Ladies and Gentlemen, as of today, I resign from Parliament. I regret that I will be leaving the Netherlands, the country which has given me so many opportunities and enriched my life, but I am glad that I will be able to continue my work.

I will go on.

Darfur - What the UN can and can't do (Nick Kristof)

Nick Kristof, who has been making steady and admirable efforts to bring the Darfur atrocity to public attention, offers a useful dose of reality in the column below. Some highlights:
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For those of us who admire the United Nations, there is an uncomfortable reality to grapple with:
The U.N. has put barely a speed bump in the path to genocide in Darfur. The U.N. has been just as ineffective there for the last three years as it was during the slaughter in Rwanda, Bosnia and Cambodia. Once again, it rolled over. It's no wonder that anti-genocide campaigners have barely bothered protesting at the U.N. and have instead focused their pressure on the White House.
The sad fact is that the U.N. is a wimp. It publishes fine reports and is terrific at handing out food and organizing vaccination campaigns, but the General Assembly and the Security Council routinely doze through crimes against humanity. [....]
My guess is that the recent peace deal in Darfur will fall apart. [....] All that said, this peace agreement is the best hope we have to end the genocide, and the U.N. needs to back it up by dispatching an international force to Darfur. If the U.N. fails that test in the coming weeks, it will have disgraced itself again.
Frankly, the U.N. has regularly failed abysmally in situations like the one in Darfur, when military intervention is needed but a major power (in this case China) uses the threat of a veto to block action.

[....] U.N. agencies do a fine job in humanitarian operations. The World Food Program and Unicef are first-rate; they jointly run the U.N. operation I most admire, the school-feeding program. [....] And without the World Food Program organizing food shipments to Sudan and Chad, hundreds of thousands more people would have died. Those U.N. field workers are heroic — just this month, a 37-year-old Spanish woman working for Unicef was shot and critically injured in Chad. People like her redeem the honor of the U.N.
There's also an ounce of hope that the U.N.'s senior officials will learn how to use one tool they have neglected: their bully pulpit.
The best example of this approach is the work by Jan Egeland, the U.N.'s under secretary for humanitarian affairs — one of the real (and rare) heroes of Darfur. Mr. Egeland is Norwegian, but I wish he could quickly become an Asian and thus have a chance to be the next secretary general.
Mr. Egeland has led the way on disasters by being undiplomatic about horrors like the slaughter in Darfur and the catastrophe in Congo. Perhaps it helps that Mr. Egeland is so evenhanded that he offends everybody. After the tsunami, he correctly called many rich countries "stingy" with their foreign aid, thus touching off a useful debate in the U.S. about our aid levels.
If other U.N. officials followed Mr. Egeland's undiplomatic example and spent more time being offensive, devoting less energy to diplomatic receptions and more to dragging journalists through the world's hellholes, the globe would be a better place — and the U.N. would be more relevant. [....]

[Having] the U.N. is far better than the alternative of having no such institution. But take it from this disillusioned fan of the U.N. system: let's also be realistic and drop any fantasy that the U.N. is going to save the day as a genocide unfolds. In that mission, the U.N. is failing about as badly as the League of Nations did.
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=> Of course, the UN as an institution acts in accord with the will of its member governments, especially those with seats on the Security Council. And governments are unlikely to take serious action on an issue like Darfur unless they are pressed by public opinion.

In this respect, one of the most scandalous and devastating failures of the so-called "international community" has been the almost complete failure of European public opinion, with the partial exception of Britain, to become at all aroused about the ongoing atrocity in Darfur. As far back as August 2004, Howard Dean argued that Europe must act on Darfur:

Europeans cannot criticize the United States for waging war in Iraq if they are unwilling to exhibit the moral fiber to stop genocide by acting collectively and with decisiveness. [....] Every day that goes by without meaningful sanctions and even military intervention in Sudan by African, European and if necessary U.N. forces is a day where hundreds of innocent civilians die and thousands are displaced from their land. Every day that goes by without action to stop the Sudan genocide is a day that the anti-Iraq war position so widely held in the rest of the world appears to be based less on principle and more on politics. And every day that goes by is a day in which George Bush's contempt for the international community, which I have denounced every day for two years, becomes more difficult to criticize.

That was correct then, and it remains correct now.

And in the current issue of the New Republic, much of which is devoted to Darfur, Samantha Power (author of A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide) ends her piece, "The Void," which includes some sharp criticisms of US government policies, by putting the inadequate US response in an even more depressing wider perspective.

But, at this juncture, U.S. pressure is not sufficient to do the job, and other countries must be brought around. And, for that to happen, the burgeoning endangered people's movement must spread beyond U.S. shores.
Walking away from the [Save Darfur] rally in Washington, a British friend of mine shook his head and said, "You'll never hear me say this again, but today made me want my kids to grow up American." When I asked why, he said, "What happened today could never, ever happen in Europe." Europeans fond of denouncing both the Rwandan genocide and American imperialism had better prove him wrong.

--Jeff Weintraub
===============
New York Times
May 16, 2006

Dithering Through Death
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

For those of us who admire the United Nations, there is an uncomfortable reality to grapple with:

The U.N. has put barely a speed bump in the path to genocide in Darfur. The U.N. has been just as ineffective there for the last three years as it was during the slaughter in Rwanda, Bosnia and Cambodia. Once again, it rolled over. It's no wonder that anti-genocide campaigners have barely bothered protesting at the U.N. and have instead focused their pressure on the White House.

The sad fact is that the U.N. is a wimp. It publishes fine reports and is terrific at handing out food and organizing vaccination campaigns, but the General Assembly and the Security Council routinely doze through crimes against humanity.

Sure enough, to the extent that there is now a ray of hope in Darfur, what has changed is not that the U.N. has awakened, but that President Bush has shown greater initiative.

My guess is that the recent peace deal in Darfur will fall apart. It is fragile on the rebel side, and Sudan is probably lying once again when it promises to disarm the janjaweed militia. All that said, this peace agreement is the best hope we have to end the genocide, and the U.N. needs to back it up by dispatching an international force to Darfur. If the U.N. fails that test in the coming weeks, it will have disgraced itself again.

Frankly, the U.N. has regularly failed abysmally in situations like the one in Darfur, when military intervention is needed but a major power (in this case China) uses the threat of a veto to block action.

The U.N. has done better in organizing security for elections. The U.N. effort to help Mozambique out of its civil war in the early 1990's was a huge success, and the U.N. also helped greatly in the run-up to the birth of East Timor in 2002.

But by and large, victims of war and genocide are served about as well by the U.N. as earlier generations were by the Kellogg-Briand pact to outlaw war. Granted, when the U.N. fails, that simply means that its member states fail — but the upshot is still that when genocide alarm bells tinkle, the places to call are Washington, London and Paris, not New York.

Does this mean I buy into the right wing's denunciations of the U.N.?

No, partly because the U.N. agencies do a fine job in humanitarian operations. The World Food Program and Unicef are first-rate; they jointly run the U.N. operation I most admire, the school-feeding program. For 19 cents a day per child, they provide meals in impoverished schools, and those meals hugely increase school attendance (see www.wfp.org).

And without the World Food Program organizing food shipments to Sudan and Chad, hundreds of thousands more people would have died. Those U.N. field workers are heroic — just this month, a 37-year-old Spanish woman working for Unicef was shot and critically injured in Chad. People like her redeem the honor of the U.N.

There's also an ounce of hope that the U.N.'s senior officials will learn how to use one tool they have neglected: their bully pulpit.

The best example of this approach is the work by Jan Egeland, the U.N.'s under secretary for humanitarian affairs — one of the real (and rare) heroes of Darfur. Mr. Egeland is Norwegian, but I wish he could quickly become an Asian and thus have a chance to be the next secretary general.

Mr. Egeland has led the way on disasters by being undiplomatic about horrors like the slaughter in Darfur and the catastrophe in Congo. Perhaps it helps that Mr. Egeland is so evenhanded that he offends everybody. After the tsunami, he correctly called many rich countries "stingy" with their foreign aid, thus touching off a useful debate in the U.S. about our aid levels.

If other U.N. officials followed Mr. Egeland's undiplomatic example and spent more time being offensive, devoting less energy to diplomatic receptions and more to dragging journalists through the world's hellholes, the globe would be a better place — and the U.N. would be more relevant.

John Bolton, now the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., once suggested it wouldn't matter if the U.N.'s top 10 floors were lopped off. But let's not do that — the U.N. is far better than the alternative of having no such institution. But take it from this disillusioned fan of the U.N. system: let's also be realistic and drop any fantasy that the U.N. is going to save the day as a genocide unfolds. In that mission, the U.N. is failing about as badly as the League of Nations did.

Quantifying Genocide in Darfur - Part 2 (Eric Reeves)

The latest update on the horrifying realities of the Darfur atrocity, from Eric Reeves.
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Part 1 of this mortality assessment (April 28, 2006), surveying all relevant extant data, concludes that since the outbreak of major conflict in Darfur (February 2003), over 450,000 people have died from violence, disease, and malnutrition [....]
Moreover, despite the “peace agreement” reached in Abuja (Nigeria) last week, there is little reason to believe that the current mortality rate for disease and malnutrition (based on UN data) will decline from a level of almost 7,000 deaths per month (see Part 1). Indeed, this rate will likely soon rise dramatically [....]
A wholesale implosion of humanitarian operations also remains a distinct possibility, one highlighted in a recent interview offered by Jan Egeland [UN Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs]:

“Everybody now discusses the optimal kind of UN mission---for next year for nine months from now. This whole thing could unravel in nine days or nine weeks because we have no money to continue lifesaving humanitarian work.” (Interview with The New Republic [on-line], May 12, 2006)

Jan Egeland’s record is one of singular honesty among UN officials who were in senior positions two years ago, when the genocide in Darfur was so clearly before the eyes of the world. His retrospective glance in a recent Wall Street Journal op/ed gives us all too clear an image of our failure:

“I first spoke to the UN Security Council on Darfur two years ago, calling it ethnic cleansing of the worst kind. Today, I could simply hit the rewind button on much of that earlier briefing. The world’s largest aid effort now hangs in the balance, unsustainable under present conditions. If we are to avoid an imminent, massive loss of life, we need immediate action---from the Government of Sudan, the rebels, UN Security Council members and donor governments.” (May 5, 2006)

Such “action” is nowhere in prospect, and we must accept the terrible truth that “imminent, massive loss of life” has already begun. “The worst form of ethnic cleansing”---and here even those who cannot pronounce Darfur and the “g-word” together must find a near synonymous phrase for “genocide”---proceeds apace.
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Some further highlights follow.
--Jeff Weintraub
===============

QUANTIFYING GENOCIDE IN DARFUR: May 13, 2006 (Part 2)
Current data for total mortality from violence, malnutrition, and disease

Eric Reeves
May 13, 2006

Part 1 of this mortality assessment (April 28, 2006), surveying all relevant extant data, concludes that since the outbreak of major conflict in Darfur (February 2003), over 450,000 people have died from violence, disease, and malnutrition (see Quantifying Genocide in Darfur: April 28, 2006 (Part 1) ). Moreover, despite the “peace agreement” reached in Abuja (Nigeria) last week, there is little reason to believe that the current mortality rate for disease and malnutrition (based on UN data) will decline from a level of almost 7,000 deaths per month (see Part 1). Indeed, this rate will likely soon rise dramatically: such a conclusion seems inevitable in light of a wide range of humanitarian indicators (including rising acute malnutrition rates), insecurity that paralyzes many aid operations, and general debilitation within a conflict-affected population that reaches to almost 4 million in Darfur and eastern Chad. Violent mortality will also explode upwards if no robust international force deploys to Darfur in order to protect civilians and humanitarian operations. [....]

[The materials to have been included in additional appendices may be found at various points in fourteen previous mortality assessments: see especially “Darfur Mortality Update, June 30, 2005,” as well as articles appearing here and here.]

PROSPECTIVE MORTALITY IN DARFUR

In assessing prospective mortality in Darfur, the most important indicators are not purely statistical, though a raft of grim statistical indicators is at hand, auguring immense human destruction in the weeks and months to come. Even more important than the complex calculus of humanitarian supplies, logistics, and funding are the unrelenting genocidal impulses of the Khartoum regime. Here it cannot be stressed often enough that the National Islamic Front, which now fully controls the nominal “Government of National Unity,” has for over two and a half years relentlessly and remorselessly obstructed humanitarian relief efforts.
This obstructionism, noted yet again in recent days by UN humanitarian aid chief Jan Egeland, as well as in his April 20 report to the Security Council, has seriously attenuated the delivery and efficiency of humanitarian operations. This in turn has cost thousands of lives, and may soon cost tens of thousands of lives. This is deliberate human destruction; and given the keen understanding by Khartoum that those who perish for lack of humanitarian assistance are overwhelmingly from the non-Arab or African tribal populations of Darfur, this destruction must be seen as intentional---in short, as genocidal.
As the UN World Food Program has been forced to cut food rations by 50% (to half what is required to sustain human life), and as acute malnutrition has risen to 15% in South Darfur (a terribly certain harbinger for much of the rest of Darfur), it is important to understand that the food crisis could be averted if Khartoum were to make humane use of the 300,000-500,000 metric tons of grain within its strategic food reserve. [....] This enormous quantity of grain---which could save many tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Sudanese lives---is sitting idly at various locations in Sudan. Khartoum’s National Islamic Front regime refuses to disperse it, or even to sell it at a reasonable price to the UN’s World Food Program. According to the US Agency for International Development, Khartoum sets a price so high that it is actually cheaper to procure food elsewhere and transport it to Darfur and other places of need.
To deny Sudanese civilians access to Sudanese food at time of critical need offers a powerfully revealing glimpse of what the National Islamic Front represents---and of what, most fundamentally, it means to be “marginalized” in Sudan.

PROSPECTS FOR SECURITY

There is no evidence to date that the signing of the Abuja accord will improve the security situation on the ground in either Darfur or eastern Chad (see my May 10, 2006 analysis in The New Republic). On the contrary, there have been numerous reports of extremely serious violence in connection with the large-scale military offensive launched by Khartoum in the Gereida area (South Darfur) just days before the deadline for the Abuja draft agreement. Reports of violence along the Chad/Darfur border are also increasingly serious, and large numbers of civilians have been moved away from the border area.
Certainly there are no signs that Khartoum intends to end the “climate of impunity” remarked well over a year and a half ago by UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour. [....]

UN INTERVENTION TO HALT THE KILLING IN DARFUR?

The latest reports from the UN suggest that the US has encountered serious difficulties in passing a Security Council resolution authorizing deployment of a meaningful peacekeeping force to Darfur. The situation will become clearer following Monday’s (May 15, 2006) meeting in Addis Ababa of the African Union Peace and Security Council. But even prior to that meeting---in which the AU may continue to cleave to a shamefully belated September 30, 2006 handover to the UN---there are signs that the Security Council will balk at providing anything remotely adequate to the security needs of civilians and humanitarians. An especially well-informed Associated Press dispatch reports:

“The US has run into strong resistance in its bid for a Security Council resolution that would give the United Nations immediate control over peacekeepers in Darfur, diplomats said Friday [May 12, 2006]. Objections from China, Russia and several African nations have forced the United States to strip out much of the most powerful language of the draft, possibly delaying the deployment of UN peacekeepers in the troubled Sudanese region.” (May 12, 2006)

Indeed, a close look at the revised US draft reveals a thoroughly gutted document, one that commits the UN in no meaningful way. This will have the effect of further emboldening Khartoum, which had disingenuously suggested before the conclusion of the Abuja accord that it would admit UN peacekeepers once a peace agreement had been signed. Now, with the “peace agreement” in hand and international murmurs of approval, Khartoum has begun to renege on its commitment to permit UN peacekeepers. Notably, the regime is still denying visas to an assessment team from the UN Department of Peacekeeping operations. Moreover, various senior officials in the National Islamic Front regime insist that no decision has been made on whether to admit UN forces, and that in any event, the decision will be entirely Khartoum’s. This means, at the very least, that the regime will demand it be allowed to dictate the size and mandate of any UN force---another way of ensuring that there is no meaningful UN force. [....]

HOW SERIOUS IS THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION ABOUT CONFRONTING KHARTOUM’S GENOCIDAIRES?

A telling story appears in today’s Washington Post and reports on the US State Department decision to grant an extended personal visa to one of Khartoum’s most vicious genocidaires. If we want to understand why Khartoum remains emboldened in its conduct of genocide in Darfur, why a “climate of impunity” continues to reign in Darfur, why the voice of the US is so compromised, we must see the implications of admitting to this country Ali Ahmed Karti, former head of the notoriously brutal Popular Defense Forces (PDF), paramilitary militias organized and funded by Khartoum, and recently often fighting alongside the better known Janjaweed militia forces. Indeed, many Janjaweed have been recycled into the PDF.
Beyond its depredations in Darfur, the PDF was a key military instrument in the scorched-earth clearances in southern Sudan during the most brutal phase of the north/south conflict in the oil regions of Upper Nile Province, as well as in neighboring Bahr el-Ghazal Province. [....]
Certainly the feeble and exceedingly short list of those sanctioned on April 25, 2006 (per Security Council Resolution 1591, March 2005) does not begin to touch any of the senior NIF genocidaires, including Gosh, Abdel Rahim Mohamed Hussein (current defense minister and former minister of the interior), Elzubeir Bashir Taha (current minister of the interior), and Major General Ismat Zain al-Din (director of military operations of the Sudanese Armed Forces). Here again, the most important consequences of moral and political cowardice take the form of emboldened political calculations in Khartoum. Far from being an action that will change the regime’s thinking, such a painfully weak sanctions resolution signals only that there is no international political ability or diplomatic will to punish those most directly responsible for genocide in Darfur.

HUMANITARIAN MORTALITY INDICATORS

There is no simple way to capture the extraordinary urgency conveyed by increasingly numerous dispatches from UN and nongovernmental humanitarian organizations. But Kofi Annan, who has done more than his share of posturing on Darfur, offers a blunt assessment of the current funding crisis for Darfur and eastern Chad (where only 16% of total funding needs have been met, even as food needs are skyrocketing because of the insecurity deriving mainly from Khartoum-backed violence): “Without massive and immediate support, the humanitarian agencies will be unable to continue their work, which means that hundreds of thousands more will die from hunger, malnutrition, and disease” (UN News Service, May 9, 2006).
“Hundreds of thousands more will die.” With a grim irony, given his role at the time, Annan went on to declare that “Darfur was potentially the [UN Security] council’s biggest test since the 1994 genocide in Rwanda” (The Guardian [UK], May 11, 2006). To Annan’s credit, there is very little more that can be said either about prospective mortality in Darfur and eastern Chad---or about the implications of our ongoing failure to respond with a robust humanitarian intervention.
Amidst this overwhelming crisis, it is important to recall again that the Khartoum regime controls a national food stockpile of 300,000 to 500,000 metric tons of grain, according to officials at the US Agency for International Development. Instead of releasing this grain for humanitarian purposes, Khartoum keeps grain prices artificially high, thus making it impossible for the UN’s World Food Program to buy food in-country. This adds enormously to the cost of food, and these increased costs ultimately diminish humanitarian capacity---and thus translate into human death through malnutrition and related diseases.
A wholesale implosion of humanitarian operations also remains a distinct possibility, one highlighted in a recent interview offered by Jan Egeland:

“Everybody now discusses the optimal kind of UN mission---for next year for nine months from now. This whole thing could unravel in nine days or nine weeks because we have no money to continue lifesaving humanitarian work.” (Interview with The New Republic [on-line], May 12, 2006)

It was Egeland who also highlighted in an April 20, 2006 report to the Security Council 14 categories of Khartoum’s obstruction, impeding, and harassment of humanitarian workers and operations---obstructionism that severely attenuates humanitarian efficiency and thereby also increases costs (see “Fact Sheet on Access Restrictions in Darfur and Other Parts of Sudan,” UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, April 20, 2006). At a time of such desperate financial shortfall, such obstructionism is a tool of genocide.
Jan Egeland’s record is one of singular honesty among UN officials who were in senior positions two years ago, when the genocide in Darfur was so clearly before the eyes of the world. His retrospective glance in a recent Wall Street Journal op/ed gives us all too clear an image of our failure:

“I first spoke to the UN Security Council on Darfur two years ago, calling it ethnic cleansing of the worst kind. Today, I could simply hit the rewind button on much of that earlier briefing. The world’s largest aid effort now hangs in the balance, unsustainable under present conditions. If we are to avoid an imminent, massive loss of life, we need immediate action---from the Government of Sudan, the rebels, UN Security Council members and donor governments.” (May 5, 2006)

Such “action” is nowhere in prospect, and we must accept the terrible truth that “imminent, massive loss of life” has already begun. “The worst form of ethnic cleansing”---and here even those who cannot pronounce Darfur and the “g-word” together must find a near synonymous phrase for “genocide”---proceeds apace.

Juan Cole condemns the proposed blacklist of Israeli academics

Juan Cole, currently President of the Middle Eastern Studies Association, has a consistent record of support for academic freedom and of opposition to academic blacklisting (or "boycotts"). He now calls for academics to "stand up" and oppose the proposed blacklist of Israeli academics by the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE) in Britain.

Yet another attempt is being made to institute an academic boycott in Europe of Israeli professors. Academics, please sign this petition and stand up [my emphasis --JW]. Israeli academics as a class have not done anything wrong and it is not right to subject them to a blanket ban.

See the Committee for Academic Freedom letter from the Middle East Studies Association on this matter last year this time. See also my Chronicle of Higher Education piece on this issue.

=> And see also this roundup from infotainment rules, "stand up against the blacklist of israeli academics":

Juan Cole has asked his academic readers to sign the petition in support of Israeli scholars: [....]

Bravo to Cole.

Jeff Weintraub is also urging his readers to sign the petition.

Al Quds University president Sari Nusseibeh is urging his Palestinian colleagues to oppose the blacklist on Israeli scholars.

And there is an extraordinary cri de coeur by David Hirsch [Hirsh], of the University of London, against the blacklist. [....]

As Juan Cole properly says: Academics (and other scholars), stand up!

Yours for academic freedom & political sanity,
Jeff Weintraub

Ayaan Hirsi Ali driven out of the Netherlands

In an astonishing turn of events, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born Dutch Member of Parliament, feminist activist, and secularist former Muslim, has apparently been driven out of Parliament, and out of the Netherlands, through a combination of Islamist death threats, political vendettas, and civic cowardice. There are various pretexts, but in the end this is a shameful and depressing story that reflects no credit on the Netherlands. She is moving to the US, so their loss is our gain.

=> For some details, see:
Christopher Hitchens, "The Caged Virgin: Holland's Shameful Treatment of Ayaan Hirsi Ali" (Slate - May 8, 2006)
"Critics Want Dutch Lawmaker Deported" (AP - May 13, 2006)
"Hirsi Ali to Quit Parliament and the Netherlands" (Radio Netherlands - May 15, 2006)
"Hirsi Ali - reactions" (Expatica.com - May 15, 2006)

=> For some further background, see also here and here and here and here.

--Jeff Weintraub
===============
New York Times
May 16, 2006

A Critic of Muslim Intolerance Faces Loss of Dutch Citizenship

By Marlise Simons

PARIS, May 15 — The Dutch government on Monday abruptly threatened to revoke the citizenship of one of the country's most prominent members of Parliament, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born woman who arrived as a refugee 14 years ago.

The minister of immigration, Rita Verdonk, said Ms. Hirsi Ali had provided inaccurate information when applying for political asylum in 1992 and seeking Dutch citizenship in 1997. As a result, the minister said, both applications were invalid. Ms. Hirsi Ali has been given six weeks to respond.

The move is likely to provoke a widespread reaction because Ms. Hirsi Ali, 36, has faced repeated death threats since 2002, when she became well known because of her outspoken criticism of conservative Islam and of the mistreatment of Muslim women, even in The Netherlands.

She was the writer of a short television documentary on violence against Muslim women made by the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who was murdered in an Amsterdam street in 2004 by a Dutch-Moroccan who said his victim had insulted Islam. The killer pinned a note to the body of Mr. van Gogh saying that Ms. Hirsi Ali would be next.

Long before Mr. van Gogh's death, Ms. Hirsi Ali had been provided with full-time bodyguards by the Dutch government and had been living in a series of safe houses. Despite that, she continued speaking and writing on abuse of women in Islam and her view that the religion promotes intolerance.

"I'm speechless," Ms. Hirsi Ali said in a telephone interview from The Hague after she had received a call from Ms. Verdonk on Monday night. Ms. Hirsi Ali said she considered the move to take away her citizenship, leaving her stateless, as an attempt to silence her. "I have been fully committed to my work in Parliament, and I have taken many risks," she said. "This will make others think harder before they speak out."

She said she was baffled by the unexpected uproar over her asylum procedure because she had told the story numerous times in interviews and in her own essays about how she changed her last name from Magan to Ali and changed her date of birth when she arrived in the Netherlands at age 22, escaping from an arranged marriage.

She tried to hide at first "in case my father or my brother or my husband looked for me with bad intentions," she said. "I'm now being picked on for lying, but I have admitted this for years." She said she discussed the matter with the leaders of the conservative political party VVD when they invited her to run for Parliament.

Her difficulty began over the weekend after a television documentary retraced her steps and she once more said on camera that she had changed some facts on arriving in The Netherlands.

As elections approach, the debate about immigration in The Netherlands has become increasingly tense, with Ms. Verdonk taking an ever harder line and recently expelling would-be immigrants who failed to meet the criteria for political asylum. Ms. Hirsi Ali has also come under criticism. Opponents say she has polarized the immigration debate, and some have called for her to be deported.

She said she would resign from Parliament on Tuesday and speed up her intended departure for the United States, where she has applied for a job at the American Enterprise Institute. She had intended to serve out her mandate, she said. But in April she was notified that she would have to vacate her secure government apartment because her neighbors won a lawsuit complaining that her presence exposed them to risk.

David Hirsh on the NATFHE blacklist proposal

David Hirsh is one of the British academics who started up the Engage website in May 2005 to help coordinate opposition to the blacklist of Israeli academics instituted by the Association of University Teachers (AUT). The Engage group played a major role in getting the AUT blacklist repealed. Now Hirsh argues against the newest version of this idiocy, a blacklist proposal introduced by members of the other major British academic union, the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE).

--Jeff Weintraub
===============
Engage
May 15, 2006

David Hirsh replies to Steven Rose - Vote No to the Blacklist

Jacqueline Rose, at a conference last September became exasperated by patient logical arguments against boycotting Israeli academics. In the end she fell back on the desperate exclamation, "We have to do something!"

Never mind that a blacklist of Israeli academics will do nothing to help Palestinians or Palestinian universities. Never mind that a blacklist will do nothing to help unite all those who oppose the Israeli occupation in a campaign for a free and democratic Palestine. Never mind that the proposal to draw up a blacklist of Israeli Jewish academics, and no other academics in the world, fails every conceivable test of consistency.

In his recent Comment Is Free piece, Steven Rose, it seems, can do no better than his namesake Jacqueline. He argues that staying silent about the occupation of the West Bank, and the daily Israeli violence that is necessary to sustain it, is one option. The only other option is that academics should draw up a blacklist of Israeli Jewish colleagues and refuse to debate with them, refuse to invite them to conferences, refuse to engage in joint research with them; Israeli Jews must be excluded from the global academic community.

That is the false choice he offers. Either stay silent or boycott Israeli academics.

Perhaps Steven Rose has been playing tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum for too long with Melanie Philips on the Moral Maze. Melanie says Israel never does anything wrong; Steven denounces Israel as a "racist apartheid state".

But this issue is too important to decide in the manner of a Radio 4 game show.

We should neither stay silent about Israel's systematic violence, nor should we be satisfied by the counter-productive, passive, moralistic gesture politics of the academic boycott.

The President of Birzeit University, Nabeel Kassis, was in Britain last October telling how hard conditions were for academics and students under the occupation. He asked for our support, he demanded an end to the Israeli occupation, he asked for UK pressure on the Israeli government; he did not call for a boycott of fellow academics. Some serious and brave UK academics teach part of the year in Birzeit. That is positive support, that is solidarity. Some UK academics bring Israeli and Palestinian students to the UK, build bridges and educate young people. Some people in Britain send books, material support and equipment to Palestinian universities. That too is solidarity; solidarity rather than denunciation; solidarity rather than weaving fantasies of a simple world where there are only goodies and baddies.

The President of Al Quds University in East Jerusalem, Sari Nusseibeh speaks clearly and eloquently against the campaign to boycott his Jewish colleagues on the other side of his city. Nusseibeh asks for academics to come to Al Quds to teach, to help, to show solidarity. Nusseibeh asks for help for the Al Quds medical school that is short of funds, expertise and specifically dialysis machines. Al Quds university needs books. Don't stay silent, don't boycott Israeli Jews, do something to help Palestinians.

Steven Rose recycles a number of libels and half-truths from last year's failed and rejected boycott campaign in the AUT but he is smart enough to leave out the specifics this year. Last year when his campaign accused Haifa University of being a racist institution, this sorry package of libels nearly bankrupted our union; when the boycott campaign falsely accused the Hebrew University of building its new dorm block on occupied land it exposed AUT to an equally serious libel threat. Israeli higher education is not segregated. Both Haifa University and Hebrew University have about 20 per cent Arab students and have significant numbers of Arab faculty members. This is a rate of inclusion of minorities that would shame many elite British institutions.

Another of Steven Rose's misrepresentations is that "Israeli academics as a community - with some brave exceptions - are at best silent and at worst open in their advocacy" on Israel's immoral and illegal acts. The truth is that the universities are spaces in Israel where conflict is pursued through words and ideas rather than guns and bombs. They are amongst the most anti-racist spaces in Israel, spaces where ideas for peace are forged, taught and practised. Some academics will indeed be right wing, some may be profoundly reactionary. That is the nature of an open, democratic and free education system. It is a system that also guarantees a safe tenured chair for the extreme anti-Zionist Ilan Pappe, even when he calls upon the world to boycott his own colleagues and his own institution. This is a list of hundreds of Israeli academics - hardly Rose's "brave exceptions" - that publicly support those of their students who refuse to serve in the Israeli army in the occupied territories. The Oslo peace process, destroyed by Israeli and Arab extremists, was forged by links between Israeli and Palestinian academics.

Last year there were debates in the universities up and down the UK in which academics seriously considered proposals for a boycott of their Israeli colleagues. Not one AUT branch backed the boycott. Not one. This year there have been only one or two discussions at NATFHE branches; the current proposals to draw up a blacklist of Israelis are pushed by a small coterie of activists who have not been mandated by the academics they claim to represent. The NATFHE Israel boycotters never bothered to ask their members what they think.

And make no mistake, a blacklist is what is proposed. "Conference invites members to consider... the appropriateness of a boycott of those that do not publicly dissociate themselves" from "Israeli apartheid policies...". It is another half-truth in Steven Rose's piece when he claims that this is a boycott of Israeli institutions rather than individual academics. This boycott would be directed against Israeli Jewish individuals. Arab and Christian academics at Israeli institutions would be exempted under the political test. A handful of anti-Zionist Jews who chose to jump through the hoops held up by the boycott campaign would be exempted. Jews would be challenged to demonstrate their political cleanliness. An academic boycott would mean that UK based academic journals would refuse to publish papers from Israelis researching or teaching in Israel. Israelis would be excluded from academic conferences. Israelis would be disbarred from taking parts in joint projects with UK academics. Israeli Jews that refused to identify themselves as anti-Zionists would be punished for the actions of their government in a way that no other academic on the planet is punished - at least by people claiming to be antiracists and on the left.

What does Steven Rose mean when he says that "the academic boycott movement is growing as a personal moral and political act"? He means that he has given up the campaign for a collective, democratic, openly organised and regulated boycott by our trade unions and he is now satisfied by encouraging secret squalid little acts of discrimination against Israeli Jews. Mona Baker, an academic in Manchester, sacked her "friends" Dr Miriam Shlesinger and Professor Gideon Toury from the editorial board of an academic journal because they worked for Israeli universities. Both have long track records of publicly campaigning against racism and human rights abuses. Is Rose claiming that there is a growing number of similar individual exclusions that are being carried out in secret? This is the antithesis of the proud, open and public tradition of solidarity in the trade union movement. But it is exactly what his website is encouraging when it suggests that people email for advice on how to discriminate against Israelis "by private actions without wishing to be publicly identified." (Click on "Advice" after entering the BRICUP website.)

AUT and NATFHE are currently at the sharp end of a dispute. When the government demanded fees from our students it did so by arguing that this was the only way to pay university staff properly. So we are currently refusing to take part in examinations in order to insist that some of that money goes into our salaries. We don't know how long it will hold or whether we will win. We need unity. The "academic Intifada" does not bring unity to our unions and it does not help us to win this important dispute. Some academics are less willing than they might have been to take a lead from our unions because they think that AUT and NATFHE are posturing, Israel-hating organisations rather than real trade unions in which we collectively defend ourselves. The Israeli academic union is supporting us in this dispute.

The campaign for our unions to boycott Israel does damage to our unity and our strength. If this proposal was passed in NATFHE, it would do damage to the current dispute and it would put into doubt the merger of the two academic unions. Many members would simply resign in order to have nothing to do with the squalid policy. Some AUT members would resort to breaking up the unity of the new union.

Not only is our union damagingly split by this moralistic and posturing gesture politics, so is the Palestine Solidarity movement in general. There ought to be a strong and united movement around the world to campaign for a free and democratic Palestine. Most decent people are alienated from the movement that exists by the feeling that it hates Israel more than it loves Palestine. We need to build on the basis of a new kind of language - we need to argue for peace and mutual recognition, not for war against the "oppressors". The boycott campaign gives up on building a Middle East peace movement and replaces it with a lame and symbolic politics of despair and anger.

Steven Rose refers to the election of the Jew-hating, woman-enslaving, gay-murdering, democracy-drowning socialist-loathing Hamas as an act of "audacity". Where are his political bearings as a socialist and as a democrat? Hamas promised war against Israel but is unable either to fight or to win such a war. Instead it sits and watches the people who voted for it suffer. It refuses to renounce its principle that Israel must be made into an Islamic state; it refuses to renounce its view that Jews are responsible for every evil that has ever happened in the world; it responds to the murder of Israelis at a falafel bar by applauding it as a 'martyrdom operation'; and it blames everyone else for the misery of Palestinians.

Steven Rose would not live under a Jihadi Islamist government but he thinks that it was an audacious decision for Palestine. There is a significant stream of contemporary 'anti-imperialism' that routinely adopts this imperialist double-standard: liberty, womens' emancipation and human rights are 'western' inventions, good enough for 'us', but not important for 'the other'. Europe, Israel and the US now have an obligation to make sure that the Palestinians do not starve - and they should take that obligation seriously. Israel needs to withdraw its troops and its settlers from the West Bank and Palestine needs to stop attacking Israelis and to recognise Israel's right to exist. But Steven Rose's faux support for Hamas should make it clear to us where his priorities lie. He is more interested in a collective punishment for Israelis than in doing something positive that might work towards a decent future for Palestine.

As well as punishing Israelis, the boycott has the added bonus of exonerating 'us'. It is a 'not in my name' policy. It appeals to people who have an impossible need to feel themselves to be morally pure even though they live in a dirty world of complexity, conflict and injustice. They want to be able to feel that the corruption of the existing world is not their responsibility. Choosing to punish Israeli academics does not commit them to doing the hard work of changing the world, of building bridges, of making links; it does not take up any time or effort; it saves them from a feeling of complicity in the bad things that go on in the world. The fact that it does worse than nothing for Palestine is neither here nor there.

Steven Rose is contemptuous of those who disagree with him: those fellow academics, trade unionists, socialists, liberals and Jews who oppose his blacklist. He delegitimises any opposition with the buzzword of the moment, 'Israel lobby'; he characterises those who disagree with him as "pathetic groupuscules of Zionist fellow travellers". How seamlessly Rose slips into the language of the McCarthyite blacklist. It doesn't seem to have occurred to him that academics know how to spot a lousy argument. Instead, he smears those that oppose him as a "lobby", convinced that his own case is so devastating that his defeat can only be explained by the intervention of an unstopposable and demonic conspiracy.

Rose says that "to achieve peace with justice must be the goal" but his proposal hinders both peace and justice. His proposal does nothing positive, it splits people campaigning against the occupation, it divides those fighting for peace and justice, it licenses a visceral hatred of Israel, it legitimates discrimination against Israelis and it hinders solidarity with the Israeli and Palestinian peace movements. It also damages our unions and our current dispute. I hope that delegates reject motion 198c at NATFHE conference.

David Hirsh
Lecturer in Sociology,
Goldsmiths College, University of London

This piece is also posted on Comment is free. (Guardian)