Will the new Pope go soft on clerical celibacy? (James Wimberley)

We seem to be living through significant revisions of the institution of marriage in the US and other western societies. So perhaps it's worth considering whether other populations previously excluded from the joys of matrimony might get the right to marry.

Is it possible, for example, that Pope Francis I might turn out to be soft on the question of clerical celibacy? In some characteristically erudite and thoughtful reflections, James Wimberley looks for straws in the wind ... and finds a few. (He might also have included this one.)  Wimberley concludes:

I’ll bet that this papacy will see movement on clerical celibacy, perhaps involving supervision of married priests by Eastern Catholic bishops, or an expanded married diaconate [i.e., deacons]. The Virgin Mary has her deknotting work cut out though.

I don't know whether or not that will prove correct.  (And, by the way, I sure he was right not even to raise the possibility that Francis I might consider female priests.)  But quite aside from the fact that this matter could have significant practical implications, direct and indirect, for more than a billion Catholics and for many of the rest of us, Wimberley's discussion also led me to some reflections of my own.

For many centuries, priestly celibacy has been one of the most distinctive and defining features of the Roman Catholic Church.  (The fact this this requirement has often been violated, evaded, or bent in practice—not infrequently in some times and places—doesn't change that.)  In Eastern Orthodox Christianity, monks are celibate, but ordinary priests (though not bishops) get married.  Most versions of Protestantism rejected the whole notion of clerical celibacy (and some varieties, like Quakers, don't even have clergy).  But the Catholic Church has held firmly to the principle of clerical celibacy.

However, it's worth bearing in mind that the Church has never regarded clerical celibacy as something absolutely required on the grounds of basic dogma.  It's essentially an institutional arrangement, and it could, in principle, be changed without profound theological upheaval—though the cultural and symbolic implications would be profound, of course.  Furthermore, priestly celibacy didn't get solidly established as a (more or less) universal rule in Catholic Christianity until about a thousand years ago.  Now, to most of us a millennium might seem like a long time.  But from the perspective of the Church, millennia come and go ... and sometimes it can be useful for the rest of us to remember that, too.

—Jeff Weintraub

P.S.  Someone commenting on Wimberley's post, who signed himself Stephen, added some useful and thought-provoking points, including these:

Possible, though the pioneering moves on this front were made by John Paul II and Benedict XVI in allowing married clergy from various Protestant groups to be ordained to the Catholic priesthood upon conversion. Benedict XVI’s “Anglican Ordinate” was the most dramatic move in this direction but was the culmination of a trend that had been building steam for a while. [....]

The unbelievable growth of the married Diaconate, which really took off under JPII (the permanent Diaconate having been restored by Vatican II) is now an important fact on the group in many regions of the world. But I’m not so sure how it will impact (indeed if it impacts at all) the phenomenon of married Priests. On the one hand it makes married men in the clerical state under Roman Catholic Canon Law a common and comfortable occurance. On the other hand – there are degrees of Holy Orders for a reason [....]

Maybe, maybe not.  But it's undoubtedly true that the dynamics involved here go beyond the personal predilections of Francis I.  So I can't help speculating about some of the larger socio-historical factors that might be playing some role in this process.

For example, while western Europe has been de-Christianizing, Catholicism has been losing ground in much of Latin America to Pentecostalism and other forms of evangelical Christianity, and Christian minorities throughout much of the Muslim world have been shrinking or disappearing, the numbers of Catholics have been increasing rapidly in some other parts of the world—and both of the last two Popes made it clear that they saw that growth as crucially important for the future of the faith.  One area of the world where Catholicism (along with other Christian denominations) has been growing explosively is sub-Saharan Africa.  And although the zeal of African Catholics is often red-hot, I gather from various things I've read that this does not necessarily include accepting the notion of clerical celibacy.  The Church might be looking for ways to detour around a head-on confrontation over this issue.  But all of this is no more than (highly non-expert superficially informed) speculation on my part ...

===================================
James Wimberley (at The Reality-Based Community)
March 29, 2013
Untier of Knots?

Wonkette points to Pope Francis breaking a tradition by washing the feet of two young women prisoners in the nice Maundy Thursday rite he shares (in a bowdlerised dry form) with Queen Elizabeth II. Wonkette doesn’t draw any conclusions, but I think it’s another straw in the wind.
Line up the other data points.

• The young Jorge Bergoglio had an major adolescent crush on a girl, Amalia Damonte, now 76. Later as a seminarian he fell for another girl seen at a dance. He seems to have sublimated desire on the positive route of troubadour idealisation rather than the more typical fearful misogyny.
• He is close to the Orthodox and the Eastern Catholic churches that sprung from them. He had a formative friendship with a saintly Ukrainian Catholic priest, Stefan Czmil, and speaks Ukrainian. These traditions – including those in communion with Rome – allow married parish clergy, but not bishops. (The term “Uniate” is no longer PC: you learn something every day from Wikipedia.)
• His statement as cardinal on clerical celibacy was a defence of the current Catholic line, couched in notably lukewarm and conditional language:
  

  For the moment, I am in favor of maintaining celibacy, with all its pros and cons, because we have ten centuries of good experiences rather than failures. What happens is that the scandals have an immediate impact. Tradition has weight and validity

  Francis clearly doesn’t find the idea of priestly sex icky.
• He is a Jesuit, skilled in threading doctrinal and practical needles, and a devotee of a rather sweet cult of Mary Untier of Knots. The founding image is a second-rate piece of German baroque:
  
  
  
  But the idea is from the estimable and first rate anti-Gnostic Church Father St Irenaeus of Lyons, whose theodicy is still the best Christian product on the market. It’s a comparatively sunny and optimistic approach to human dilemmas, and suggests a Yankee can-do spirit in the new Pope.

I’ll bet that this papacy will see movement on clerical celibacy, perhaps involving supervision of married priests by Eastern Catholic bishops, or an expanded married diaconate. The Virgin Mary has her deknotting work cut out though.

Qaddafi the Jew, BHL as persona non grata, and the logic of antisemitism

A key French supporter of the Libyan revolution that overthrew the Qaddafi dictatorship has been barred from a visit to post-Qaddafi Libya for being Jewish. The fact that this incident is not terribly surprising is the real point.  Here's one report, in the Independent:

The French celebrity philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy was banned from joining the former President Nicolas Sarkozy’s visit to Libya this week because he is Jewish.

Mr Lévy was a vocal advocate of the French and British-led military intervention which helped to topple the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. He is credited with helping to persuade Mr Sarkozy to send French warplanes to protect rebels from Gaddafi’s forces.

According to the French news website Rue89, Mr Lévy was banned from Mr Sarkozy’s visit to Libya earlier this week because the municipal authorities in Tripoli feared his Jewish background would make him a target for attacks by Islamist militia. Mr Sarkozy threatened to cancel the visit but Mr Lévy urged him to support “friends in Libya” who are “in a delicate situation because they need to watch  out  for the Islamists”.

=> It's also not surprising that foreigners visiting post-Qaddafi Libya often hear from Libyans that Qaddafi—a ruler whose policies and propaganda were, of course, rabidly anti-Zionist and anti-semitic—was Jewish himself.  (Like most other Arab countries, Libya once had a Jewish community whose roots went back to antiquity, but within a few decades after 1948 Libya was 100% ethnically cleansed of Jews. However, world history has repeatedly made it clear that anti-semitism doesn't require the presence of actual Jews.) As one of those visitors, Andrew Engel, wrote in November 2011:

Then, there was the Libyan guard booth at the crossing.

Among the first visuals to greet visitors, it was prominently graffitied with a large caricature of the ousted dictator Moammar Qaddafi, his wild hair sticking out from under a baseball cap. Emblazoned on the cap where a Yankees logo should have been was a large Star of David.

Later, after traversing the country as a freelance journalist, I would see this introduction to Libya as a supreme irony. Qaddafi, I came to understand, had spent decades conditioning his populace to hate Jews in a bid to build popular support for himself, as so many Arab dictators have done. And in the end, when his tyranny and misrule ultimately undid him, it was the hatred of Jews that he so successfully inculcated which was turned against him.

“Did you know that Qaddafi was a Jew?” the Libyan driver we hired to take us to Tripoli from Tunis smugly asked me somewhere on the road close to the Tunisian Island of Djerba, which still has a small Jewish population. “No,” I responded, though I had heard this claim before. “Yes, his mother was a Jew, and on his father’s side he was Italian,” the driver said matter-of-factly.

During the course of my six days hopscotching over the 1,000-mile-wide country, I had the opportunity to listen to scores of Libyans express themselves freely for the first time in 42 years, whether in person or through other media, such as music and graffiti. What I found, unfortunately, along with freedom of expression, was a virulent and ubiquitous anti-Semitism that looks likely to outlast the ruler who promoted it [JW: but certainly didn't create it].  [....]

Similarly, I recall being assured back in the 1980s by an exile from then-Soviet Ukraine that while he himself had nothing against Jews, it was understandable that Ukrainians disliked Jews, since Stalin was Jewish. (In real life, Stalin was unequivocally non-Jewish and notoriously anti-semitic.) And this person, by the way, was someone who knew I was Jewish and was trying to be friendly.

=> That sort of thing is part of the typical logic of anti-semitic thinking in societies where anti-semitic world-views are a pervasive, deep-seated, routine, and taken-for-granted element of everyday culture, ideology, and social and political discourse.  Although some people would prefer to believe otherwise, most contemporary Middle Eastern societies fall into that category.

Of course, that's true with different degrees of intensity both within and between different countries, with considerable variations in detail, and with modulations and exceptions in some places. (Even in countries like Egypt, there are some people who not only avoid anti-semitism but publicly criticize and oppose it.) But fundamentally it needs to be recognized as an unpleasant fact of life, and a background factor that permeates and influences social and political developments throughout the region. It's better to face up to that honestly, and try to understand it and deal with its implications, rather than pretending otherwise or trying to ignore, evade, obscure, whitewash, or excuse it.

Yours for reality-based discourse,
Jeff Weintraub

P.S.  The Middle East is a complicated place—and different people draw its borders differently, too.  To avoid possible misunderstandings or distractions, it might be worth emphasizing some ways in which Iran, ironically enough, offers some partial exceptions to the patterns just outlined.  All available evidence suggests that among most sectors of the Iranian population, both anti-semitism and hysterical anti-Zionism are a lot less intense and hegemonic than in any Arab country (of course, we're speaking in relative terms here).  On the other hand, among the ruling elite and many of its strongest supporters, matters are very different.  Even apologists for the Iranian regime have trouble ignoring or whitewashing its noisy and  institutionalized anti-semitism. So it's not entirely surprising that the great bulk of Iran's Jewish community, which numbered over 100,000 a half-century ago, has left the country.  But it's also probably telling that there are still over 10,000 Jews living in Iran—far more than in any Arab country.

Gershom Gorenberg agrees that Obama's Jerusalem speech was a Big Deal

The enthusiastic reactions to Obama's Jerusalem speech and its potential implications by an increasing range of very tough-minded analysts in both Israel and the US (I quoted some of them here, and another one, by Gideon Levy, is here) add to the reasons for thinking that we should treat this speech as a genuinely significant event. As I said before, it seems to me that the most perceptive and illuminating analyses all come back, one way or another, to this crucial point:

It has long seemed clear to me that the only approach that can help promote a peaceful solution to the interconnected Arab-Israeli & Israeli-Palestinian conflicts (assuming that a peaceful solution remains a possibility, which I deeply hope is the case), the only approach that is both morally acceptable and practically realistic, has to be one that is simultaneously, and strongly, pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian. Obama's speech managed to deliver precisely that sort of message, and to do it convincingly.

By doing so, Obama tapped into some very deep yearnings shared by people in broad sectors of Israeli society. There are a lot of Israelis who feel distressed, disgusted, anxious, and depressed by the current situation and by the dangers into which current trends are taking the country, but who have come to feel increasingly hopeless and demoralized about the possibility of doing anything constructive to change them. As Bradley Burston and Gideon Levy both argue, Obama managed to dispel, for many people, this pervasive miasma of cynicism and demoralization. And that response is by no means confined to the Israeli "left".

Will it last? That remains to be seen. But I think Hussein Ibish caught the key point:

[I]f Obama was primarily trying to change the tone and the atmosphere in the region, and the way he is perceived by ordinary Israelis and Palestinians, it's hard to imagine how he could have been more effective than he has been over the past couple of days.

=> Now Gershom Gorenberg (author of several indispensable books, most recently The Unmaking of Israel) has joined the party. His analysis deserves to be read carefully and in full (see below), but this is the heart of it:

After a couple of days for careful reflection, it's clear: Barack Obama gave an amazing speech. The president of the United States stood in a hall in Jerusalem, and with empathy and with bluntness that has been absent for so long we forgot it could exist, told Israelis: The occupation can't go on. It's destroying your own future. And besides that, Palestinians have "a right to ... justice" and "to be a free people in their own land."

If you don't think this is a breakthrough, you are letting naïve pessimism overcome realism. Yes, it's true that one speech will be worth nothing if not followed by intense American diplomacy. That comment has become banal. A realistic assessment is that Obama's visit, and the speech, were the opening act of an American diplomatic effort—a near perfect opening.

The first breakthrough was in method: Obama started by negotiating with the Israeli public. [....] The venue was the message: The politicians have been too slow, so I'm stepping around them to talk to normal Israelis first.

The recognition that diplomacy takes place outside closed rooms, that the diplomats will offer only what they think the voters will accept or the public will demand, has come too slowly. [....]

Yet to continue to repeat all the reasons that a process can't work because it hasn't worked before is to take the naïve, pessimistic view that change never happens, that new methods never work, that people are trapped by history and can't resolve conflicts. If that naïve attitude were true, Barack Obama would never have had the opportunity to speak as the president of the United States.

One speech doesn't make a peace process. But as the beginning of a process, this speech was a revolution.

Whether this assessment turns out, in the end, to be prophetic or wishful thinking will depend on the workings on politics and diplomacy—not only by Israelis and by the US, but also (let us not forget!) by Palestinians and by governments and publics in the wider Arab world. There are sound reasons for feeling pessimistic. But pessimism is not the same thing as cynicism or despair, and this is a moment to appreciate the difference.

 —Jeff Weintraub

=============================
 The American Prospect
 March 25, 2013
Don't Be Naïve. That Speech Was a Revolution 
Obama told Israelis last week that the occupation is destroying their country's future.
By Gershom Gorenberg

After a couple of days for careful reflection, it's clear: Barack Obama gave an amazing speech. The president of the United States stood in a hall in Jerusalem, and with empathy and with bluntness that has been absent for so long we forgot it could exist, told Israelis: The occupation can't go on. It's destroying your own future. And besides that, Palestinians have "a right to … justice" and "to be a free people in their own land."

If you don't think this is a breakthrough, you are letting naïve pessimism overcome realism. Yes, it's true that one speech will be worth nothing if not followed by intense American diplomacy. That comment has become banal. A realistic assessment is that Obama's visit, and the speech, were the opening act of an American diplomatic effort—a near perfect opening.

The first breakthrough was in method: Obama started by negotiating with the Israeli public. The choice of venue, an auditorium full of university students rather than the Knesset, was not a glitch, as many people thought beforehand. The venue was the message: The politicians have been too slow, so I'm stepping around them to talk to normal Israelis first.

The recognition that diplomacy takes place outside closed rooms, that the diplomats will offer only what they think the voters will accept or the public will demand, has come too slowly. Had Bill Clinton thought of this before Camp David, had Obama himself thought of this before the failed effort in his first term to get Netanyahu and Abbas negotiating, we might be in a better place now. The past mistakes are worth pointing out—as evidence of how big the change is.

Obama really shouldn't have needed all the AIPAC-style professions of support for Israel in the first half of his speech.  [JW: Actually I think that's quite wrong, and unfortunately phrased. But Gorenberg partly corrects himself in the next paragraph.]  By the same measure, he shouldn't have had to publish his birth certificate. But just as the birther lie was out there, was getting in the way, the canard that Obama was anti-Israel was out there, cultivated by Benjamin Netanyahu and by Israeli journalists who got their stories on U.S.-Israel relations from the prime minister's office.

Yet even the first piece of the speech wasn't quite the shmaltz it seemed to be. Obama told Israelis that he understood their fears. That was necessary before challenging the fears. But when he said in Hebrew, "You're not alone," he was not just offering support. He was directly challenging the narrative of fear on which Benjamin Netanyahu's politics are built. "Chill," Obama was saying. "It's not 1938. You are not about to be wiped off the map." And therefore, he was saying, you can consider the internal threats to Israel's future, the damage done by occupation, and you can make peace.

The most direct, powerful part of the speech was when Obama said that the Palestinians' "right to justice must also be recognized," when he told Israelis that settlement, and roadblocks, and settler violence are unjust. No American president has dared state that stark message before an Israeli audience before—or before an American one. To underline it, he borrowed the line, "to be a free people in our land," directly from the Israeli national anthem. "Palestinians," he said, "have a right to be a free people in their land." The words that define your story of yourselves, that move you even when you are tired of them and think they are kitsch, Obama suggested to Israelis, are the words that should help you empathize with Palestinians.

That piece of the speech had another audience, not present in the hall. In the language of Palestinian politics, the word "justice" contains a world of hurt, shame, and hope. It is the shorthand for everything the world should recognize and has not. A U.S. president speaking to Israelis of the Palestinians' right to justice was an act of American recognition that Palestinians haven't heard before. Perhaps those few sentences were not enough to balance the rest of the speech as Palestinians heard it. But they announced a greater degree of balance than has been present before in America's attitude toward the conflict.

The weak point in the speech came when Obama told Israelis that Abbas and Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayad are partners for peace. This needed to be said. It challenges the success of Israeli politicians in convincing their voters that they'd make peace if only there was someone to talk to. The problem was that Obama didn't say it with the kind of repetition and emphasis needed for it to register strongly in memory.

At one point, Obama departed from his prepared text and inserted a few improvisational sentences about young Palestinians he'd met that morning in Ramallah. I suspect he hoped to make another insertion: a statement that he'd met that morning with Abbas, who said he was ready to sit down for negotiations, without delay. Abbas didn't give him that promise. He insisted on a freeze on settlement building as a precondition.

In principle, Abbas's demand is entirely justified. Building houses in settlements is a unilateral Israeli action aimed at undermining negotiations. If talks fail, the houses will still remain. But at this moment, whether he demands a freeze as a precondition or doesn't, the building will continue. Netanyahu has enough support in his coalition to resist a freeze as a precondition to talks. But if his government has to make decisions on borders, Jerusalem, and security arrangements for peace—if it actually has to negotiate—it is likely to disintegrate.

Netanyahu needs Naftali Bennnet's party of the religious right, Jewish Home, to keep a majority in parliament. But he needs the centrist Yesh Atid just as much, and there are Knesset members in that party who are committed to a two-state agreement. Trying to zigzag between center and right in his classic style, Netanyahu will satisfy neither. The collapse of his government and an election held as a referendum on peace are Abbas's best hope for stopping the bulldozers. He should help Obama seize the opportunity.

Yet to continue to repeat all the reasons that a process can't work because it hasn't worked before is to take the naïve, pessimistic view that change never happens, that new methods never work, that people are trapped by history and can't resolve conflicts. If that naïve attitude were true, Barack Obama would never have had the opportunity to speak as the president of the United States.

One speech doesn't make a peace process. But as the beginning of a process, this speech was a revolution.

Andrew Sullivan reflects on his road to gay marriage ... and ours

From today's Daily Dish:

Here’s Chris Geidner’s profile of Evan Wolfson and me – who were once the only two gay activists of our generation who, despite core philosophical differences, made the once ludicrous idea of gay marriage the cause of our lives. It was a thrilling time in a way – because it seemed simply impossible, yet to us, utterly irrefutable as a logical and legal argument. We used to joke, as we toured the country, went on every cable show, spoke on campus after campus, agreed to talk-radio grillings, and wrote essays and legal briefs and books and strategy sessions, how funny it was we were so busy fighting for marriage that we didn’t have time to have a boyfriend.

And then the big surprise. We both became the victims of our own arguments [....]

A generation ago, the legalization of same-sex marriage did indeed seem like an absurd utopian fantasy, more appropriate for sociological science fiction than for serious political discussion. Now, unless there is some dramatic reversal of the long-term trends in public opinion, the general acceptance and institutionalization of a right to same-sex marriage is probably just a matter of time.

This graph tells the story:



This pattern in the US goes along with the broad tendencies in a lot of other western societies. That's an astoundingly rapid change in cultural norms and ideology within such a short time. And it's part of a larger process by which active bigotry and discrimination against homosexuals and pervasive demonization of homosexuality, which were not just widespread but routine and taken-for-granted not so long ago, have become much less accepted and respectable. In fact, for significant proportions of people under 30, homophobic bigotry and the persecution of gays and lesbians have increasingly come to seem, not just wrong, but baffling and pointless—which is one more reason why these trends may well prove to be self-reinforcing in the future. (Even though one should always be careful about simply projecting unilinear trends into the future, since actual history is full of reversals and backlashes.) Again, all of this would have seemed inconceivable a generation ago. It's almost enough to make on believe in the possibility of moral progress.

—Jeff Weintraub

Mark Kleiman grapples with the Chomsky Problem

Back in 2006 I posted an item on The Chomsky problem that consisted mostly of reproducing, quoting from, or offering links to some critiques of Chomsky as a political analyst and polemicist, and of the characteristic modes of argument and analysis that Chomsky uses in those contexts, by Peter Beaumont, Brad DeLong, Michael Bérubé, and others. Those critiques differed in tone, ranging from troubled and ambivalent to disappointed and angry and exasperated, but in my view all of them were penetrating, illuminating, and ultimately devastating.

I began by noting the evolution of my own views on Chomsky in his role as an engaged public intellectual:

In my younger days, back in the early 1970s, Noam Chomsky was someone whose social and political arguments I often admired, and I was favorably impressed by books like American Power and the New Mandarins (1967). Over the years, I became increasingly disillusioned with Chomsky--I think it was his apologetics for the Khmer Rouge that first gave me serious qualms--and often appalled and disgusted. I'm not the only one.

=> Now I notice that Mark Kleiman is making his own attempt at wrestling with the Chomsky problem, which also requires dealing with the cult surrounding Chomsky. Kleiman's intervention was provoked by reading what he correctly describes as "a hagiographic study of Noam Chomsky and a denunciation of his critics as character assassins" by Glenn Greenwald.  So how did Greenwald deal with embarrassments like Chomsky's record on Cambodia?

If you wanted to write a hagiographic study of Noam Chomsky and a denunciation of his critics as character assassins committed to destroying a great man’s reputation to silence his dissent from “orthodoxies,” you’d have four options for dealing with Chomsky’s holocaust-denial about Cambodia (and denunciation of those who complained about it while it was happening):

1. You could deny that Chomsky said what he said.

2. You could claim that Chomsky was right on the facts.

[Chomsky's own strategy seems to be a combination of these two.]

3. You could admit that Chomsky was wrong on the facts but argue that he was justified in supporting the Khmers Rouges, and in doing some violence to the truth in the process, so as not to give aid and comfort to Kissinger.

4. You could admit that Chomsky was wrong on the facts and figure out some way to make that an excusable mistake.

Or, if you were really, totally, completely shameless, you could just pretend the whole thing never happened, passing it over entirely in silence.

Guess which strategy Glenn Greenwald chose? Twenty-six paragraphs, in which the word “Cambodia” does not appear.

Anyone familiar with Greenwald's own characteristic modes of political argument will not be surprised.

Then Kleiman reflects on some of his own history with Chomsky the public intellectual.

The first time I heard Chomsky speak was at the Philadelphia Moratorium rally October 15, 1968, which I’d done a tiny bit to organize. Chomsky gave one of the four most effective political orations I’ve ever heard live (the others were by Gene McCarthy, Cesar Chavez, and Andreas Panandreou). He had perfected the great rhetorical trick of seeming utterly unrhetorical; he simply recited a catalogue of facts, with citations, to show that the [Vietnam] war was a terrible idea.

Of course, the key “fact” was that the NLF was an entirely indigenous movement of the South Vietnamese, that the Southerners hated the Northerners, and that, therefore, the certain result of American withdrawal would be the establishment of an independent South Vietnam.

It was a great speech, though. No wonder Greenwald admires Chomsky!

=> The basic claim that Greenwald makes in his piece (on "How Noam Chomsky is discussed") is that critics of Chomsky never engage the substance of Chomsky's arguments, but instead focus on "more personalized, style-focused and substance-free" attacks. (Greenwald means personal style, not intellectual style or style of argument and analysis.) "That's because once someone becomes sufficiently critical of establishment pieties, the goal is not merely to dispute their claims but to silence them. [....] It's a sorry and anti-intellectual tactic, to be sure, but a brutally effective one."

"Substance-free"?  The kindest thing to say about that claim, and the sweepingly undifferentiated dismissal of Chomsky's critics that goes with it, is that it's simply bullshit. But that kind of bullshit is neither unusual nor surprising coming from Greenwald, so how and why does he largely get away with it? That question would lead us from the Chomsky Problem to the Glenn Greenwald Problem ... which we can leave for another occasion.

Yours for reality-based discourse,
Jeff Weintraub

The humanitarian legacy of George W. Bush

When Norman Geras used that title for a blog post in February, he probably figured that most readers would find it startling and counter-intuitive, and some might even take it as a kind of perverse joke.  But it's no joke.

A reminder might be useful - '5 million people are alive today because of it'; 'a titanic force for good over the past decade'; and 'Bush still enjoy[ing] high popularity ratings in Africa' - though I have posted about it before.

The very real Bush administration initiative being described there is worth knowing about—not only for its own sake, but because it might help remind us that life can be more complicated, morally and politically, than we're often inclined to assume.  For more details, see the article below.

—Jeff Weintraub

==============================
Foreign Policy
February 14, 2013
What George W. Bush Did Right
The 43rd president of the United States did a great thing for humankind -- but most Americans have no idea.
By Christian Caryl

Which United States president will go down in history as the greatest humanitarian to have served in the office? The Republican Herbert Hoover is often known as the "Great Humanitarian" for his work administering famine relief in post-World War I Europe (and Bolshevik Russia) in the 1920s -- but he did all that before he actually became president. Others might make the case for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Democrat who succeeded Hoover in the White House, whose New Deal initiatives relieved poverty and sickness on a grand scale within the United States.

But I'd suggest that there's one president whose contribution dwarfs all the others. Unlike Hoover, he launched his program while he was in office, and unlike FDR, he received virtually no votes in return, since most of the people who have benefited aren't U.S. citizens. In fact, there are very few Americans around who even associate him with his achievement. Who's this great humanitarian? The name might surprise you: it's George W. Bush.

I should say, right up front, that I do not belong to the former president's political camp. I strongly disapproved of many of his policies. At the same time, I think it's a tragedy that the foreign policy shortcomings of the Bush administration have conspired to obscure his most positive legacy -- not least because it saved so many lives, but because there's so much that Americans and the rest of the world can learn from it. Both his detractors and supporters tend to view his time in office through the lens of the "war on terror" and the policies that grew out of it. By contrast, only a few Americans have ever heard of PEPFAR, the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which President Bush announced in his State of the Union address in 2003.

Fast forward a decade later, and in his own State of the Union address on Tuesday night, President Barack Obama only briefly mentioned the goal of "realizing the promise of an AIDS-free generation" -- an allusion to the long-term aim of PEPFAR. Yet President Obama's most recent budget proposals actually propose to cut spending on the program. That's a pity. This might have been a good moment to celebrate ten years of an unprecedented American success in fighting one of the world's most pernicious and destructive diseases.

In his 2003 speech, President Bush called upon Congress to sponsor an ambitious program to supply antiretroviral drugs and other treatments to HIV sufferers in Africa. Since then, the U.S. government has spent some $44 billion on the project (a figure that includes $7 billion contributed to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, a multilateral organization). By way of comparison, America's most recent aircraft carrier -- which will join the 10 we currently have in service -- is set to cost $26.8 billion. One medical expert calls PEPFAR the "largest financial commitment of any country to global health and to treatment of any specific disease worldwide."

It's impossible to tell exactly how many lives the program has saved, though Secretary of State John Kerry recently claimed that 5 million people are alive today because of it. That's probably as good an estimate as any.

Just to give you an idea of the scale, here are some headline figures from a recent op-ed by U.S. Global AIDS coordinator Eric Goolsby:

In 2012 alone, PEPFAR directly supported nearly 5.1 million people on antiretroviral treatment -- a three-fold increase in only four years; provided antiretroviral drugs to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV to nearly 750,000 pregnant women living with the disease (which allowed approximately 230,000 infants to be born without HIV); and enabled more than 46.5 million people to receive testing and counseling.

So it's safe to say this one program has been a titanic force for good over the past decade. The number of deaths from AIDS has been steadily declining over the past few years, and PEPFAR has certainly been a big help. But ask an American -- or a Western European -- if they've ever heard of the program, and they're almost certainly to draw a blank. That's partly because the United States has done very little to publicize the success of PEPFAR, and partly because the Bush presidency was overshadowed by much more high-profile aspects of his foreign policy (such as the invasion of Iraq). Indeed, Bush still enjoys high popularity ratings in Africa, where he's widely regarded as one of the continent's great benefactors. (Meanwhile, the Obama administration's proposed PEPFAR cuts have triggered protests around Africa -- even in Kenya, where the president's family ties have ensured him plenty of favorable coverage.)

"Bush did more to stop AIDS and more to help Africa than any president before or since," says New York Times correspondent Peter Baker, who's writing a history of the Bush-Cheney White House that's due to appear in October. "He took on one of the world's biggest problems in a big, bold way and it changed the course of a continent. If it weren't for Iraq, it would be one of the main things history would remember about Bush, and it still should be part of any accounting of his presidency."

And yet no good turn goes unpunished. PEPFAR has also come in for criticism due to certain stipulations imposed on the program by conservative members of the U.S. Congress, who have pressured its administrators to promote abstinence and exclude prostitutes from treatment. But sources close to PEPFAR tell me that those restrictions have proven little hindrance on the ground.

In some ways, indeed, such complaints obscure the larger point. In an age of continuing partisan gridlock in Washington, what's really astonishing about PEPFAR is the way that it has continued to enjoy brought-based support from both Republicans and Democrats. Jack Chow, who served as special representative of U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell on Global HIV/AIDS, notes that the idea of placing the United States at the forefront of the global war on AIDS was one area where both religious conservatives and socially active liberals managed to find common ground.

[JW:  That's right, and it's important to emphasize that this was not the only such issue.  The Darfur genocide was another.  On the other hand, I can't help reflecting that if PEPFAR were not an already-existing legacy from the Bush II administration, and instead Obama proposed it as a new initiative tomorrow, it would certainly be filibustered to death by Senate Republicans even before it could be killed off by a solid phalanx of opposition from Tea Party Republicans in the House, and for months thereafter it would be ridiculed, denounced, and demonized non-stop on Fox News and the rest of the right-wing propaganda apparatus. That's another example of life's ironies & complications.]

"Bush wanted to do the right thing by fulfilling this humanitarian impulse," says Chow. "He didn't really do it for political purposes, in my opinion. I think he genuinely felt that the American response was slipping behind what was needed."

In so doing, Chow contends, Bush paved the way for an era in which global health assistance has become a prominent new instrument of U.S. statecraft. After all, spending so much money hasn't just boosted America's image among Africans; rolling back the widespread scourge of AIDS has protected social institutions in these countries from degradation and collapse, thus contributing to security and effective governance.

Surely this is the sort of business that America should be in. Yet the Obama administration is aiming to slash our commitment to this most potent form of smart diplomacy just at the moment when the possibility of wiping out this horrific disease is finally in sight. This is not the time to retreat.

Christian Caryl is a senior fellow at the Legatum Institute, a contributing editor at Foreign Policy, and a senior fellow at the MIT Center for International Studies. He is also the author of the book Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century, which is coming out in May.

Some engineer jokes

Posted by Jeffrey Malashock on Facebook:

 Understanding Engineers #1

Two engineering students were biking across a university campus when one said, "Where did you get such a great bike?" The second engineer replied, "Well, I was walking along yesterday, minding my own business, when a beautiful woman rode up on this bike, threw it to the ground, took off all her clothes and said, "Take what you want." The first engineer nodded approvingly and said, "Good choice: The clothes probably wouldn't have fit you anyway."

Understanding Engineers #2

To the optimist, the glass is half-full. To the pessimist, the glass is half-empty. To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

Understanding Engineers #3

A priest, a doctor, and an engineer were waiting one morning for a particularly slow group of golfers. The engineer fumed, "What's with those guys? We must have been waiting for fifteen minutes!" The doctor chimed in, "I don't know, but I've never seen such inept golf!" The priest said, "Here comes the greens-keeper. Let's have a word with him." He said, "Hello George, What's wrong with that group ahead of us? They're rather slow, aren't they?" The greens-keeper replied, "Oh, yes. That's a group of blind firemen. They lost their sight saving our clubhouse from a fire last year, so we always let them play for free anytime!." The group fell silent for a moment. The priest said, "That's so sad. I think I will say a special prayer for them tonight." The doctor said, "Good idea. I'm going to contact my ophthalmologist colleague and see if there's anything she can do for them." The engineer said, "Why can't they play at night?"

Understanding Engineers #4

What is the difference between mechanical engineers and civil engineers? Mechanical engineers build weapons. Civil engineers build targets.

Understanding Engineers #5

The graduate with a science degree asks, "Why does it work?" The graduate with an engineering degree asks, "How does it work?" The graduate with an accounting degree asks, "How much will it cost?" The graduate with an arts degree asks, "Do you want fries with that?"

Understanding Engineers #6

Three engineering students were gathered together discussing who must have designed the human body. One said, "It was a mechanical engineer. Just look at all the joints." Another said, "No, it was an electrical engineer. The nervous system has many thousands of electrical connections." The last one said, "No, actually it had to have been a civil engineer. Who else would run a toxic waste pipeline through a recreational area?"

Understanding Engineers #7

Normal people believe that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Engineers believe that if it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet.

Understanding Engineers #8

An engineer was crossing a road one day, when a frog called out to him and said, "If you kiss me, I'll turn into a beautiful princess." He bent over, picked up the frog, and put it in his pocket. The frog spoke up again and said, "If you kiss me, I'll turn back into a beautiful princess and stay with you for one week." The engineer took the frog out of his pocket, smiled at it and returned it to the pocket. The frog then cried out, "If you kiss me and turn me back into a princess, I'll stay with you for one week and do anything you want." Again, the engineer took the frog out, smiled at it and put it back into his pocket. Finally, the frog asked, "What is the matter? I've told you I'm a beautiful princess and that I'll stay with you for one week and do anything you want. Why won't you kiss me?" The engineer said, "Look, I'm an engineer. I don't have time for a girlfriend, but a talking frog - now that's cool."

A further update on the continuing normalization of anti-semitic imagery

It may seem boringly repetitive to keep pointing out that unmistakeably anti-semitic imagery—for example, hook-nosed Jews crucifying Christ-like victims, their hands dripping with the victims' blood, etc.—is routine and pervasive in Arab (and Iranian) treatments of Israel, Israelis, and actual or imaginary "Zionist" conspiracies.  It's not really news, is it?  But the fact that the routine use of anti-semitic imagery is so ordinary, unremarkable, and taken-for-granted in some parts of the world is precisely what's worth noticing.

This cartoon from Al Jazeera (included in a roundup of Arab media responses to Obama's trip to Israel) is one interesting recent example.


Al Jazeera: Obama sympathizes with Israel, gives aid

Actually, as David Hirsh of Engage has pointed out in some previous cartoon roundups, the ongoing resurgence in the pervasiveness and respectability of anti-semitic imagery is not a tendency confined to Arab and Islamic societies but is a phenomenon of world-wide scope—including western countries—though obviously it takes different forms and reaches different levels of virulence in different areas. And it may be worth noting that, in some ways, this particular cartoon is tastefully restrained.  At least there are no Jews cutting up babies in butcher shops, Jews wallowing in vats of non-Jewish blood, Nazi-like caricatures of Jews as puppet-masters ruling the world, and that sort of thing.

—Jeff Weintraub

Hussein Ibish and others explain why Obama's speech in Jerusalem was a Big Deal

Some further reactions, from the US and Israel, to Barack Obama's speech in Jerusalem (transcript here.)


The more I think about this speech, the more impressive and potentially important it looks. Here's the crucial point, in my opinion. It has long seemed clear to me that the only approach that can help promote a peaceful solution to the interconnected Arab-Israeli & Israeli-Palestinian conflicts (assuming that a peaceful solution remains a possibility, which I deeply hope is the case), the only approach that is both morally acceptable and practically realistic, has to be one that is simultaneously, and strongly, pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian.  Obama's speech managed to deliver precisely that sort of message, and to do it convincingly.

And I'm not the only one with that reaction. I've been struck by how many analyses of Obama's speech and its implications come back, one way or another, to that central fact.

=>  First some Jewish examples, American and Israeli.

Jonathan Chait:

Here is the progression of his speech. Having demonstrated empathy for Israel, Obama then asked Israelis to feel empathy for Palestinians.

Of course there is only so much Obama can do. He can’t make Netanyahu negotiate peace, nor can he make Palestinians accept one. But as much as he could do with a speech, Obama did today. He probably wishes he gave it a long time ago.

Jeffrey Goldberg:

The speech was, overall, quite eloquent and strong, and very moving from the Jewish perspective (there were bits that were too naive for me, but more on that later). It is the setting, though, that made it brilliant: Standing ovations from young Israelis for an endorsement of a Palestinian state by an enthusiastically Zionist African-American President whose middle name is Hussein. How, exactly, did he pull that one off?

Yossi Klein Halevi

Barack Obama came to Jerusalem to win over the Israeli people, and with a single speech he did. It happened when he addressed an audience of several thousand young people in Jerusalem and delivered what may have been the most passionate Zionist speech ever given by an American president.

Of course, his embrace had an explicit message for Israelis: Don't give up on the dream of peace and don't forget that the Palestinians deserve a state just as you do. But as the repeated ovations from the politically and culturally diverse audience revealed, these are messages that Israelis can hear when couched in affection and solidarity. After four years of missed signals, Obama finally realized that Israelis respond far more to love than to pressure.  [....]

[F]or Israelis, the least credible part of his talk was when he tried to convince us that Mahmoud Abbas is ready to make peace—or that the Arab Spring has created an opening for reconciliation with the Middle East. That's hardly the reality we see emerging around us. [....]

[But in] one sense Obama did succeed. Next time the Israeli government announces a settlement expansion, there will likely be widespread opposition, rather than indifference, among the public. Obama has reminded us that, even in the absence of peace, we have a responsibility not to take steps that will make an eventual peace all the more difficult.

Bradley Burston (in Ha'aretz):

For Barack Obama to come to Jerusalem, and speak to Israeli students and talk persuasively of the possibility of a secure and peaceful future, for him to do that and garner a roaring ovation of approval, he would have to have given one hell of a speech.

He did.

This was the speech that these young Israelis not only needed but wanted to hear. [....]

This was not the student crowd that Obama is used to. These students are Israelis. This is a crowd that is world-weary, hair-trigger volatile. They have come by it honestly. In comparison to their American counterparts, they are, by and large, older by several years – some would say, several lifetimes. They enter college after years in the military, often followed by the escape-valve rehab of a marathon trek to remote continents.

They know a snow job when they hear it. And the rare times when someone makes a sincere and enormous effort to understand them, to see things from their point of view, and to bring them a message that no leader in Israel has managed to bring them, they know that too. [....] They roared approval for Obama's view of security, which was hard-edged and unapologetic, and they roared approval for his vision of a two-state solution that allows Palestinians to enjoy the freedoms and self-determination Israelis know.

This will not be the same country after this speech.

Not soon. Perhaps not in many years. But this is one way that change happens. An event like this, inspiration like this, does not in the end go to waste. It gives new strength to the world-weary and the habitually trashed. It changes momentum. It creates momentum. It does good. It makes way for better.

Maybe.  David Horovitz, editor of the Times of Israel and one of those former peaceniks traumatically disillusioned a decade ago by the violence of the Second Intifada and everything that followed, put it this way:

Barack Obama, widely perceived by Israelis before this visit as a cold president, a leader dutifully supporting Israel but lacking any real empathy for it, transformed that image in the course of the powerhouse central address of his visit here on Thursday afternoon — for the 1,000 ecstatic young Israelis in Jerusalem’s International Conference Center, and doubtless for many, many Israelis watching on live television nationwide.

He also, deftly and subtly, unveiled a vision for Israel that all Israelis would love to realize — an Israel at peace, in a region at peace, thriving financially, admired morally, no longer at physical risk.

But the route he set out to that glorious future — don’t be daunted by the risks or deterred by the extremists, work assiduously to build trust with the Palestinians and those many in the region who he said seek the very same future as young Israelis do — that’s where his utopian vision became anything but consensual. Indeed it resonated as an unmistakable challenge to the skepticism of the Israeli political leadership under “my friend Bibi.” For this was the address of a passionate, pro-Israel advocate, a true friend, a Zionist. A left-wing Zionist, employing his charisma, his authority and his oratory to try to shift Israelis into his camp.  [JW: That's "left-wing" in the idiosyncratic sense that the terms "left" and "right" have in Israeli political discourse, where they refer overwhelmingly to perspectives on the Arab-Israeli & Israeli-Palestinian conflicts.]

It was a deft, brilliantly conceived speech. He told Israelis how moral they are, how admirably creative they are, how smart with those 10 Nobel prizes, how democratic, how prosperous, and how mighty — the most powerful country in the region. He told them that the world’s strongest nation stood unshakably with them. “So long as there is a United States of America, Atem Lo Levad” — you are not alone.

And having built them up, convinced them of their near-invincibility, he showed them a theoretical future that he insisted could be realized if they would only trust in their strength sufficiently to take risks for peace. A future in which the security threats will recede. The prosperity will increase. The moral stain of occupation will disappear. All it takes is that determined, constant push for peace. How could they refuse him?  [....]

Danny Ayalon, Israel’s former deputy foreign minister, said immediately afterwards that the speech was “no problem” for Netanyahu because Obama hadn’t specified border lines. Which rather missed the point. The speech is no problem for Netanyahu unless Israelis buy into its core premise — that if Israel only pushes harder for reconciliation, regional hostility to Israel will gradually melt. On that, as the elections proved in January, Israelis are thoroughly divided.

Emotionally, Obama’s speech was profoundly affecting, and will likely have moved many Israelis, shifting their opinion of him, winning them over. Shifting them politically? That’s something quite different.

=> And then there is the assessment offered by the Arab-American political analyst Hussein Ibish. Ibish is consistently intelligent and insightful, not to mention exceptionally sane and balanced, so his reaction to Obama's speech deserves careful attention.  I recommend reading the whole thing (below), but here are some highlights:

U.S. President Barack Obama's speech in Jerusalem was without question the strongest ever made by a senior American politician on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was plainly designed to speak directly to the Israeli and Palestinian peoples [JW: and to the larger Arab world, as Ibish mentions a little later] over the heads of their political leaderships. It was an exercise in public diplomacy par excellence, intended to change the tone and atmosphere, and public perceptions of Obama himself, presumably as an adjunct to actual diplomatic efforts to lay the groundwork for eventually resuming negotiations.

The psychological, communication and political skill that was marshaled to give the speech its maximum impact with public opinion was quite extraordinary, and stands in contrast to some miscalculations Obama made about Israeli and Palestinian perceptions during his first term. By systematically downplaying expectations for his trip, Obama made the power of his speech and the boldness of some of the language and positions he staked out -- particularly regarding the realities Palestinians face under Israeli occupation -- surprising and therefore all the more striking.

Obama made the first day of his trip an extended exercise in telling the Israeli public everything it could possibly want to hear from an American president, ranging from "undying bonds of friendship" to robust reiterations of security commitment and a much yearned-for acknowledgment of the long Jewish history in the land. In retrospect, it's clear that what looked like public outreach bordering on pandering was, in fact, designed to transform Israeli perceptions of Obama himself in order to prepare them for some of the hard truths he was preparing to deliver the next day.

What Obama has done is to reassure and challenge Israelis and Palestinians alike. To Israelis, he reiterated America's undying support and commitment to Israel's security. But he confronted them with the fact that "the only way for Israel to endure and thrive as a Jewish and democratic state is through the realization of an independent and viable Palestine." He reassured Palestinians that the United States is not walking away from the effort to create an independent Palestinian state. But he told them they must recognize that "Israel will be a Jewish state" and challenged them, and the rest of the Arab world, to begin to normalize their relations with Israel. [....]

Diplomacy without sufficient outreach may have proven to be a failure in Obama's first term. But this kind of bravura performance of public diplomacy will have to be backed up with significant real diplomacy or it may be remembered as yet another inspiring Obama Middle East speech that ultimately produces more disappointment than tangible achievement. Still, if Obama was primarily trying to change the tone and the atmosphere in the region, and the way he is perceived by ordinary Israelis and Palestinians, it's hard to imagine how he could have been more effective than he has been over the past couple of days.

Now we'll see how things go from here.

Hoping for the best (skeptically, but not despairingly),
Jeff Weintraub

[UPDATE:  Gershom Gorenberg and Gideon Levy also agree that Obama's Jerusalem speech was a Big Deal, for essentially the same reasons outlined above.]

===================================
Foreign Policy
Crowdsourcing Peace
By going over the heads of Israeli and Palestinian leaders, Obama is demanding that their people step up.
By Hussein Ibish

U.S. President Barack Obama's speech in Jerusalem was without question the strongest ever made by a senior American politician on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was plainly designed to speak directly to the Israeli and Palestinian peoples over the heads of their political leaderships. It was an exercise in public diplomacy par excellence, intended to change the tone and atmosphere, and public perceptions of Obama himself, presumably as an adjunct to actual diplomatic efforts to lay the groundwork for eventually resuming negotiations.

The psychological, communication and political skill that was marshaled to give the speech its maximum impact with public opinion was quite extraordinary, and stands in contrast to some miscalculations Obama made about Israeli and Palestinian perceptions during his first term. By systematically downplaying expectations for his trip, Obama made the power of his speech and the boldness of some of the language and positions he staked out -- particularly regarding the realities Palestinians face under Israeli occupation -- surprising and therefore all the more striking.

Obama made the first day of his trip an extended exercise in telling the Israeli public everything it could possibly want to hear from an American president, ranging from "undying bonds of friendship" to robust reiterations of security commitment and a much yearned-for acknowledgment of the long Jewish history in the land. In retrospect, it's clear that what looked like public outreach bordering on pandering was, in fact, designed to transform Israeli perceptions of Obama himself in order to prepare them for some of the hard truths he was preparing to deliver the next day. What Obama has done is to reassure and challenge Israelis and Palestinians alike. To Israelis, he reiterated America's undying support and commitment to Israel's security. But he confronted them with the fact that "the only way for Israel to endure and thrive as a Jewish and democratic state is through the realization of an independent and viable Palestine." He reassured Palestinians that the United States is not walking away from the effort to create an independent Palestinian state. But he told them they must recognize that "Israel will be a Jewish state" and challenged them, and the rest of the Arab world, to begin to normalize their relations with Israel.

From a Palestinian point of view, it was already highly significant that Obama was not just going to Israel but also Ramallah and Bethlehem for significant talks with both President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. This communicated several important messages: that the Palestinians are still an important factor in the equation, and that they have a leadership, including both Abbas and Fayyad, that is to be engaged with seriously. And by specifically and repeatedly citing the Palestinian Authority's institution-building and security measures led by Fayyad, Obama was sending a clear signal that he wants to continue to deal with the present Palestinian prime minister, who has been under considerable political pressure in recent months.

But the speech itself gave the Palestinians a much deeper recognition, and one they've never fully received from American officials in the past. Obama went to enormous lengths to humanize the Palestinians, comparing them to his own daughters and to the young people of Israel. He did not simply reiterate the American commitment to a two-state solution, he spoke of the "Palestinian people's right to ... justice." This can only be seen as a clear, albeit implicit statement that the status quo of occupation is an ongoing injustice. He challenged his Israeli audience to "look at the world through their [Palestinian] eyes," which speaks to the Palestinian need to be acknowledged as fully equal human beings by the Israelis. And Obama admonished Israel that "neither occupation nor expulsion is the answer," directly addressing the two main Palestinian historical traumas and ongoing anxieties.

The effectiveness of Obama's careful political and psychological preparation for these unprecedented statements with his Israeli audience was demonstrated by the sustained, and otherwise unimaginable, applause he received for almost all these remarks. He clearly went a long way in assuaging Israeli skepticism. Palestinians will be harder to win over, as they require more than words given the onerous conditions of the occupation and their repeated disappointment with successive American governments, and in particular with Obama's first term.

There is no question that Obama's extraordinary speech will have a significant impact on how he is perceived by both Israelis and Palestinians, although how long that lasts and what kind of political or diplomatic impact it will have very much remains to be seen.

One of the more remarkable aspects of this outreach was how it stood in stark contrast to his diplomacy with political leaders. He explicitly told the Israeli and Palestinian publics that he was directly addressing them, not only over the heads of their political leaders, but in order to challenge them to confront those leaders. If entrenched politicians have become an obstacle to peace -- and they may indeed have -- why not go around them? "Political leaders will not take risks if the people do not demand that they do," he said, adding, "You must create the change that you want to see."

Essentially, Obama was saying, "If you like what you've heard today, you have to help me because your leaders aren't going to cooperate without significant pressure from you. I can't do this alone, as I discovered in my first term. I need your help."

In his first term, Obama essentially tried dealing with the leaderships directly and barely engaging with the Israeli or Palestinian publics. One subliminal message of his speech might be that he discovered this approach is a dead end, and that to get beyond the present impasse requires more robust public engagement. Whether he's done enough to promote or sustain that will have to remain to be seen.

Diplomacy without sufficient outreach may have proven to be a failure in Obama's first term. But this kind of bravura performance of public diplomacy will have to be backed up with significant real diplomacy or it may be remembered as yet another inspiring Obama Middle East speech that ultimately produces more disappointment than tangible achievement. Still, if Obama was primarily trying to change the tone and the atmosphere in the region, and the way he is perceived by ordinary Israelis and Palestinians, it's hard to imagine how he could have been more effective than he has been over the past couple of days.

Barack Obama's speech in Jerusalem

Barack Obama just gave a very good speech in Jerusalem, in which he was clearly trying to speak directly to the Israeli public.  Not a great speech, and not without problematic moments and some noticeable omissions and evasions, but a strong, serious, and substantial speech that made some important and difficult points effectively and, with luck, may even have some constructive impact.

You can read the text of Obama's speech here and watch it on video here.

   I may (or may not) say more about the speech and its possible implications later, but in the meantime I will just quote some quick reactions from Jeffrey Goldberg (who is not always right about everything, but tends to be right more often and more reliably than most of the rest of us, so his reactions and reflections are always worth taking seriously):

I'm off to do a couple of interviews, but I thought I would just jot down a few early reactions to the president's speech in Jerusalem. It was a very strong speech -- there were a couple of flat, campaign-like moments -- but overall it was strong. The President was a bit more blunt than I thought [expected?], but his bluntness was rewarded by loud cheers from his youngish audience when he talked about the need to create a Palestinian state. (On the other hand, I was sitting near the head of the settlers' council, who seemed ready to explode with anger.) I'm imagining that the Israeli reaction to Obama's call will come as a pleasant surprise to at least some Palestinians.

The President answered the kishka question -- the gut question -- pretty well. Some people won't be satisfied, but the president conveyed, over and over again, that he stands with Israel, he believes in Israel, and so long as there is a United States, there will be an Israel. He spoke well about the Jewish connection to the land, and made it abundantly clear he believes that Zionism is a genuine and justified national liberation movement rooted in ancient history and tradition. And he spoke well of his appreciation for Judaism, exploring its relationship to his own tradition [....]

I spoke to several members of the audience, who confirmed my impression that Israelis just wanted to know that he liked them. It's hard to understand this from the U.S., but the idea really did take hold here that Obama genuinely hated Israel. So this whole trip is a bit of a revelation for ordinary Israelis.

On the other hand, I've run into people who were surprised President Obama took it too strong [so strong?] to Bibi (one conservative-leaning Israeli I just ran into suggested that Obama was interfering in Israeli politics as payback for Netanyahu's alleged meddling in the American election). Obama pleaded with his audience to challenge their leaders on the question of peace and compromise. I guess the whole Bibi-Barack love festival has an expiration date.

One more note: the President spoke most feelingly, I think, when he asked Israelis to imagine the lives of Palestinian children, and asked Israelis to put themselves in the shoes of Palestinians. This seemed reasonable to me, but it probably caused Netanyahu, watching on television, to say, "Well, yes, but first the Palestinians have to understand what it's like to be an Israeli." I've very seldom run into Palestinians and Israelis who can imagine what life is like on the other side without quickly resorting to demands that the other side do so first. Which is part of the problem.

More to come.

–Jeff Weintraub

Guilt, projection, and the psychology of resentment in Freud, Tolstoy, and the Bible

In a recent post, Norman Geras quotes a passage from Tolstoy that expresses a brilliant insight into human nature:

In the footsteps of both Tacitus and Jane Austen, Tolstoy. This is a passage from his Hadji Murad:

[Czar] Nicholas frowned. He had done much evil to the Poles. To justify that evil he had to feel certain that all Poles were rascals, and he considered them to be such and hated them in proportion to the evil he had done them.

Norm drew that quotation from a piece in the Forward by Austin Ratner.  After quoting Tolstoy, Ratner continues with the following reflections:

Tolstoy’s inspiration for this idea may have come from the great Roman historian and psychologist Tacitus, who said, “Proprium humani ingenii est odisse quem laeseris,” or, “It is characteristic of human nature to hate the man you have wronged.”  [....]

In other words, the motivations for feeling resentment and doing evil can include, paradoxically, "a rather surprising element of misguided conscience."  As Ratner correctly observes, "the psychology of guilt management" can be dangerous and harmful, "not only to ourselves, but also to others."

Sigmund Freud would not have been surprised to see conscience behind bad behavior. He spent his career studying the ways that conscience causes us to avert our eyes from certain of our own thoughts, and the ways that this sort of “repression” can sometimes do more harm than good — not only to ourselves, but also to others. In his 1916 paper “Some Character-Types Met With in Psycho-Analytic Work,” Freud describes one type, to which he gives the name “Criminals From a Sense of Guilt.” While that short segment does not cover Tacitus’s or Tolstoy’s ground — it doesn’t touch on bigotry at all — it does supply a useful title to a general principle of psychology that’s highly relevant to bigotry: the notion that guilt can cause crime in addition to preventing it. What an idea!

And our mental processes are sufficiently ingenious that we don't necessarily have to project our guilt onto the ones we've harmed.  There may also be all sorts of other possible targets for deflecting guilt (and shame, and even embarrassment) away from ourselves.

The term “scapegoat,” which is by now a commonplace in explanations of racism, has to do with, of course, guilt — what else? It furthermore derives from the traditions of the ancient Jews — who else? Today, we use the term to mean a person or a people blamed for something he/they didn’t do. It’s invoked almost in a sense of mistaken identity or sloppy detective work. Yet the origins of the word itself in the book of Leviticus point directly back to the psychology of guilt management. What William Tyndale translated as a “scapegoat” in 1530 was a reference to an actual goat in primitive Jewish atonement ritual; the goat was magically bestowed with the sins of the Jewish people and then shooed into the wilderness to carry away the sins. In one of Leviticus’s creepier dalliances with paganism, the Lord decreed that the scapegoat should specifically be dispatched to an angry demon of the wilderness named Azazel (who is thenceforth scarce in the Bible but does turn up in Marvel Comics as an ancient mutant enemy of the X-Men).  [....]

Such magic acts derive from a condition of blindness, a refusal to look with the rational mind. The Freudian irony is that the courage to look upon and acknowledge a sense of guilt instead of invoking goats and demons to dispel it, helps forestall criminality of a much more damning kind. [....]

Then again, projection and displacement are often less painful, more attractive, and more emotionally satisfying responses.  Facing reality, including emotional realities, is often tough and unpleasant.

—Jeff Weintraub

Conservative Republicans file a brief with the Supreme Court supporting gay marriage

More signs of the times? Ted Olson, John Huntsman, Rob Portman, and Charles Murray are not the only prominent conservative Republicans to break publicly with the homophobic agenda that has been dominant in national Republican politics for the past few decades.  The Supreme Court is about to hear several high-profile cases dealing with same-sex marriage, beginning with a challenge to California's Proposition 8 (which banned gay marriage) that has been working its way through the federal courts.  And more than a hundred active Republicans, most of whom describe themselves as conservative (or "libertarian", which is what liberal-individualist pro-marketeers on the right tend to call themselves in US politics), have signed on to an amicus curiae brief asking the Court to rule in favor of marriage equality.

The signatories include some fairly prominent figures, with no less than seven former Republican governors—though it's worth noting that they're all former governors, and most of them would be classified as Republican "moderates"—as well as several former members of Congress and two current ones, Florida Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinin (whose right-wing credentials are impeccable) and New York Representative Richard Hannah.  There are also "members of John McCain’s presidential campaign and Mitt Romney’s 2008 presidential campaign, members of the Bush administration," a former Republican National Committee Chairman, lawyers, economists, businesspeople, and Clint Eastwood.  (You can see the list here, and more signatures are being collected before the brief gets filed.)

Yesterday I discovered that the signatories include a good friend of mine, Mark Gerson.  (I should probably make it clear that Mark is a long-time supporter of marriage equality, not a recent convert.)

35. Mark Gerson, Chairman, Gerson Lehrman Group and Author of The Neoconservative Vision: From the Cold War to the Culture Wars and In the Classroom: Dispatches from an Inner-City School that Works

This intervention may or may not affect the immediate outcome of the upcoming Supreme Court case. But from a broader political perspective, the very fact that this brief is getting filed, and attracting a lot of high-profile Republican signatures, is probably significant enough to be worth noting. This very public gesture appears to signal at least the beginnings of a public split on this issue among Republican elites. And thus it may represent one more step in the long-term process by which support for same-sex marriage, and a more general rejection of bigotry and discrimination against gays and lesbians, are becoming mainstream consensus positions. I hope so.
—Jeff Weintraub

Paul Ryan's Freudian slip

We all misspeak occasionally, and if all of our statements were being recorded round the clock, they would frequently be embarrassing.  So we shouldn't fixate obsessively on every mistaken, confused, careless, or unintentionally comical statement by a public figure.  But some Freudian slips are just too striking, and too revealing, to ignore.

Paul Ryan recently provided an irresistible example.  This comes from the Washington Post 's Dana Milbank, reporting on the public rollout of the latest Ryan Budget:

CNN’s Dana Bash asked whether Ryan was being “disingenuous” by including new taxes that he opposed.

“We’re not going to refight the past,” he explained.

If Ryan is “not going to fight the past,” Fox News’s Chad Pergram asked, why is he still trying to repeal Obamacare?

“This to us is something that we’re not going to give up on,” Ryan answered, “because we’re not going to give up on destroying the health-care system for the American people.”

Well, he got that right. Here it is on video:



—Jeff Weintraub

Personal experiences & political positions – A P.S. from Kevin Drum

Kevin Drum notices some interesting correlations:

Responding to Rob Portman's change of heart on gay marriage after he learned his son is gay [JW: see here], Anil Dash tweets:

Eventually one of these Republican congressmen is going to find out his daughter is a woman, and then we're all set.

Actually, this does make a difference. Remember this chart, showing how members of Congress vote on women's issues?  [....]

Sure, the effect is small, but among both Democrats and Republicans, members of Congress tend to vote better on women's issues if they have more daughters. [....]

The graph is intriguing, but it's hard to know how to assess it without knowing which "women's issues" are being identified and how they're being evaluated.  But then there's this:

Along the same lines, it's instructive to look at which Republicans in the Senate voted for the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. Personal experience makes a difference even here.

Bingo!  The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act (closing a loophole that helped employers to escape legal accountability for discriminating against their female employees) passed the Senate in January 2009 with 61 votes in favor and 36 against (see here).  Basically, all the Democrats voted in favor (except for one abstention) and almost all the Republicans voted against.  But four Republican Senators did vote for the bill.  All of the Republican Senators who voted in favor were women ... and as far as I can tell, those four Senators were the only Republican women in the Senate in January 2009.  (It's also worth noting that the two Republican Senators from Texas split along gender lines: Kay Bailey Hutchison voted yea and John Cornyn voted nay.)  Coincidence?

—Jeff Weintraub

Why did Rob Portman flip on gay marriage?

Senator Rob Portman of Ohio is a nationally prominent conservative Republican—prominent enough that he was seriously considered as a vice-presidential running mate by the Romney campaign last year. Over the course of his political career, Portman had a consistent record of opposing same-sex marriage, legislation protecting gays and lesbians from discrimination in work and employment, the rights of gay and lesbian couples to adopt children, and so on. Then a few days ago Portman very publicly announced that he has changed his mind and now supports gay marriage. (You can read his op-ed on the subject here.)  That makes him the first, and so far the only, sitting Republican Senator to support gay marriage.

(There do seem to be two other Republican now in Congress who publicly supports marriage equality for gay people, Florida Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and New York Representative Richard Hannah.)

So why did Portman reverse his position on same-sex marriage, and what should we make of his reasons for doing so?

=> As Brad DeLong correctly noted, The Onion cut to the heart of the matter:

GOP Senator Flips On Gay Marriage After Son Comes Out

Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH), a leading conservative who was on Mitt Romney’s shortlist for vice president, announced the reversal of his longstanding position against same-sex marriage, saying he had a change of heart after his son came out to him two years ago. What do you think?

The responses from "the public" are presumably fictitious, but one of them is very much on-target:

“Let’s hope his kid has a tough time finding affordable health care.”
Lee Swart – Wharf Worker

The Onion is a satirical publication, but their factual account happens to be straightforwardly accurate.  Sometimes satire doesn't have to stray very far from reality. 

=> To be sure, Portman's op-ed also offered a principled justification for his current position, which he was careful to frame in conservative terms:

British Prime Minister David Cameron has said he supports allowing gay couples to marry because he is a conservative, not in spite of it. I feel the same way. We conservatives believe in personal liberty and minimal government interference in people’s lives. We also consider the family unit to be the fundamental building block of society. We should encourage people to make long-term commitments to each other and build families, so as to foster strong, stable communities and promote personal responsibility.

One way to look at it is that gay couples’ desire to marry doesn't amount to a threat but rather a tribute to marriage, and a potential source of renewed strength for the institution.

As a matter of fact, a conservative (or conservative/libertarian) case for gay marriage along these lines is both coherent and plausible. (A number of people have been making that case for decades—Andrew Sullivan is one conspicuous example—and in February they were joined by none other than John Huntsman, who argued in print that "Marriage Equality Is a Conservative Cause".) But it's interesting that Portman never found such arguments convincing, or even worth taking seriously, until the political turned personal in this connection. And Portman's own account of his conversion process emphasized the personal element as crucial:

As a congressman, and more recently as a senator, I opposed marriage for same-sex couples. Then something happened that led me to think through my position in a much deeper way.

Two years ago, my son Will, then a college freshman, told my wife, Jane, and me that he is gay. He said he’d known for some time, and that his sexual orientation wasn’t something he chose; it was simply a part of who he is. Jane and I were proud of him for his honesty and courage. We were surprised to learn he is gay but knew he was still the same person he’d always been. The only difference was that now we had a more complete picture of the son we love.

At the time, my position on marriage for same-sex couples was rooted in my faith tradition that marriage is a sacred bond between a man and a woman. Knowing that my son is gay prompted me to consider the issue from another perspective: that of a dad who wants all three of his kids to lead happy, meaningful lives with the people they love, a blessing Jane and I have shared for 26 years.

=> One might argue that all this leaves the Onion's basic reading of the situation intact. But, by itself, their account of the matter is a bit too quick and simple. For a more extended reflection on the issues involved, we can turn to Jon Chait:

Rob Portman’s dual revelations that his son is gay and that he has decided to support gay marriage are both a touching story of familial love and another signpost in the astonishingly rapid success of the gay-rights revolution. Just over eight years ago, when Republicans gleefully seized on the gay-marriage issue to mobilize their base in Portman’s own state, it was inconceivable that a statewide Democrat would endorse gay marriage, let alone a Republican. The triumph of the issue relies upon the changing of minds — some thanks to force of argument, others to personal contact with gay friends, colleagues, and neighbors. From that standpoint, Portman’s conversion is a Very Good Thing.

That's a very important paragraph, which is worth stopping to read twice.  But Chait is right to add that it doesn't capture the whole story.

And yet as a window into the working of Portman’s mind, his conversion is a confession of moral failure, one of which he appears unaware.

Here is the story Portman tells, in a Columbus Dispatch op-ed, of how he came to change his mind:

At the time, my position on marriage for same-sex couples was rooted in my faith tradition that marriage is a sacred bond between a man and a woman. Knowing that my son is gay prompted me to consider the issue from another perspective: that of a dad who wants all three of his kids to lead happy, meaningful lives with the people they love, a blessing Jane and I have shared for 26 years.

By Portman’s own account, in other words, he opposed gay marriage until he realized that opposition to gay marriage stands in the way of his own son’s happiness.

Wanting your children to be happy is the most natural human impulse. But our responsibility as political beings — and the special responsibility of those who hold political power — is to consider issues from a societal perspective.  [....]

Portman ought to be able to recognize that, even if he changed his mind on gay marriage owing to personal experience, the logic stands irrespective of it: Support for gay marriage would be right even if he didn’t have a gay son. There’s little sign that any such reasoning has crossed his mind.  [JW: Well, there are some signs that it has crossed his mind now, but it doesn't seem to have crossed his mind before.]

In a CNN interview, Dana Bash repeatedly prodded Portman to reconcile his previous opposition to gay rights (which extended not only to marriage but also to not getting fired for being gay). He repeatedly confessed that it all came down to his own family:

But you know, what happened to me is really personal. I mean, I hadn't thought a lot about this issue. Again, my focus has been on other issues over my public policy career....

What would Portman say to gay constituents who may be glad he's changing his position on gay marriage, but also wondering why it took having a gay son to come around to supporting their rights?

"Well, I would say that, you know, I've had a change of heart based on a personal experience. That's certainly true," he responded with a shoulder shrug.

But he also repeated a reality. His policy focus has been almost exclusively on economic issues.

"Now it's different, you know. I hadn't expected to be in this position. But I do think, you know, having spent a lot of time thinking about it and working through this issue personally that, you know, this is where I am, for reasons that are consistent with my political philosophy, including family values, including being a conservative who believes the family is a building block of society, so I'm comfortable there now."

It’s pretty simple. Portman went along with his party’s opposition to gay marriage because it didn’t affect him. He thought about gay rights the way Paul Ryan thinks about health care. And he still obviously thinks about most issues the way Paul Ryan thinks about health care.

That Portman turns out to have a gay son is convenient for the gay-rights cause. But why should any of us come away from his conversion trusting that Portman is thinking on any issue about what’s good for all of us, rather than what’s good for himself and the people he knows?

=> That sounds right to me. And Matthew Yglesias does a good job of spelling out some concrete implications that go beyond this specific example:

Remember when Sarah Palin was running for vice president on a platform of tax cuts and reduced spending? But there was one form of domestic social spending she liked to champion? Spending on disabled children? Because she had a disabled child personally? Yet somehow her personal experience with disability didn't lead her to any conclusions about the millions of mothers simply struggling to raise children in conditions of general poorness.  [....]

It's a great strength of the movement for gay political equality that lots of important and influential people happen to have gay children.  [JW: Dick Cheney, for example.]  That obviously does change people's thinking. And good for them.

But if Portman can turn around on one issue once he realizes how it touches his family personally, shouldn't he take some time to think about how he might feel about other issues that don't happen to touch him personally? Obviously the answers to complicated public policy questions don't just directly fall out of the emotion of compassion. But what Portman is telling us here is that on this one issue, his previous position was driven by a lack of compassion and empathy. Once he looked at the issue through his son's eyes, he realized he was wrong. Shouldn't that lead to some broader soul-searching? Is it just a coincidence that his son is gay, and also gay rights is the one issue on which a lack of empathy was leading him astray? That, it seems to me, would be a pretty remarkable coincidence. The great challenge for a senator isn't to go to Washington and represent the problems of his own family. It's to try to obtain the intellectual and moral perspective necessary to represent the problems of the people who don't have direct access to the corridors of power.

Senators basically never have poor kids. That's something members of Congress should think about. Especially members of Congress who know personally that realizing an issue affects their own children changes their thinking.

Amen.

—Jeff Weintraub

P.S. Of course, people who agree with Pope Francis I that legalizing same-sex marriage is "a strategy to destroy God's plan" and an act of injustice against future children who will be "deprived of their human development given by a father and a mother and willed by God" (as he put it in 2010, when he was still Cardinal Bergoglio) could make a complaint similar to Chait's about the reasons underlying Portman's reversal on this issue:  Was Portman thinking about "what’s good for all of us, rather than what’s good for himself and the people he knows?"