Guanubian

An ongoing inquiry into politics and culture
by John-Paul Pagano

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Thursday, May 20, 2004

The Character of Its Democracy

A Palestinian boy sits next to several dead bodies ["most of them children" -- JPost] after they were killed during an Israeli raid at the Rafah refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip (news - web sites) May 19, 2004. Israeli tanks and helicopters fired on protesters in a refugee camp on Wednesday, killing 10 Palestinians and raising a two-day death toll to 33 in Israel's bloodiest Gaza raid in years, witnesses said. REUTERS/Suhaib Salem

I can't find the quote now, but Andrew Sullivan once said that Israel's protracted occupation of the Palestinian territories erodes the character of its democracy. He was right. And no amount of love for the Jewish state or sober appreciation of Palestinian crimes will change or obscure that fact.

Wednesday, May 19, 2004

Neocon Primer and the Dual-Loyalty Canard

I missed this article by Max Boot in last January/February's Foreign Policy Magazine. It gives a concise but comprehensive primer on who neoconservatives are, and the myths that bedevil them. It unfolds in the form of a catechism, with quoted assertions about neocons and Boot's responsa. A highlight:
"'Neocons Are Jews Who Serve the Interests of Israel'

A malicious myth. With varying degrees of delicacy, everyone from fringe U.S. presidential candidates Lyndon LaRouche and Patrick Buchanan to European news outlets such as the BBC and Le Monde have used neocon as a synonym for Jew, focusing on Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Eliot Cohen, and others with obvious Jewish names. Trying to resurrect the old dual-loyalties canard, they cite links between some neocons and the Likud Party to argue that neocons wanted to invade Iraq because they were doing Israel's bidding.

Yes, neocons have links to the Likud Party, but they also have links to the British Tories and other conservative parties around the world, just as some in the Democratic Party have ties to the left-leaning Labour Party in Great Britain and the Labor Party in Israel. These connections reflect ideological, not ethnic, affinity. And while many neocons are Jewish, many are not. Former drug czar Bill Bennett, ex-C1A Director James Woolsey, the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, social scientist James Q. Wilson, theologian Michael Novak, and Jeane Kirkpatrick aren't exactly synagogue-goers. Yet they are as committed to Israel's defense as Jewish neocons are--a commitment based not on shared religion or ethnicity but on shared liberal democratic values. Israel has won the support of most Americans, of all faiths, because it is the only democracy in the Middle East, and because its enemies (Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran, and Syria) also proclaim themselves to be the enemies of the United States."

Also, check out neocon Michael Rubin's interesting thoughts on the dual-loyalty aspect of the New Anti-Semitism. Among other things, he astutely observes Juan Cole's not uncommon flirtations with anti-Semitic (and hackneyed, for such an "Informed Commentator") analyses of Israel*. This is something that hasn't been noted enough, as Cole has an aura of (self-appointed) expertise and is often cited and published. But of more than passing interest is the conclusion of Rubin's article:
"The irony from my own experience is that Judaism is far less an issue for Iraqis and Iranians than it is for some Americans. While I receive hate mail from Americans and British, many in the Middle East, be they Arabs, Kurds, or Persians tend to support anyone who stands up for their human rights. They embrace Jews and mock al-Jazeera Islamists who remained silent in the face of Saddam's terrorism. On January 14, 2004, Sallah Issa, editor of the Egyptian weekly Al-Qahira, wrote an essay critical of the dissemination of anti-Semitic ideas in Egypt. In a translation provided by the Middle East Media Research Institute, Issa wrote, 'The problem is that these ideas cannot withstand any rational discussion.... It is not very smart to espouse the lies spread in the wave of persecution of the Jews in medieval Europe, when we — the Arabs and the Muslims — had no part in this....'

In 1996, I was living in Iran, studying Persian and working on my dissertation. I would sometimes visit a small historical center for assistance with documents and advice on navigating Tehran's labyrinthine bureaucracy. One day, an employee of the center came up to me and, after apologizing ahead of time for her question, asked whether I was Jewish. I confirmed I was. 'Good,' she said. 'A friend from elementary school is Jewish. Do you want her to show you the synagogue?'

It is disturbing when the backlash to anti-Semitic discourse comes from an Egyptian newspaper rather than the pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times. It is likewise troubling when the "Are you Jewish?" question is far more malicious in the United States than it is (sometimes) in Iran. But, then again, times are changing."

* Cole, unsurprisingly a Professor of Middle East Studies at one of the country's finest universities, recently wrote: "Just as the Israelis and their American amen corner helped drag the US into the Iraq war, so they also have inflamed Iraqi sentiment against the US by spectacular uses of state terror against Palestinians. Both the Sunni and the Shiite uprisings in Iraq in the past week in a very real sense were set off by Sharon's whacking of Yassin, a paraplegic who could easily have been arrested."

Yassin, the erstwhile "spiritual leader" of Hamas, was responsible for the deaths of more than 400 Jews.

Tuesday, May 18, 2004

Al Qaeda 2.0

The Weekly Standard gives us an anatomy of Abu Musab al Zarqawi, terrorist apostle and moonbat scumbag par excellence, the man the CIA says beheaded Nick Berg:
"Zarqawi exemplifies Sunni terrorism after 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, what some call 'al Qaeda 2.0.' The Western counteroffensive decimated al Qaeda's leadership, stripped the organization of safe havens and training camps, and disrupted its command and control. Former al Qaeda subsidiaries became franchises, receiving inspiration from bin Laden's occasional messages but operating independently. Historically speaking, the dynamic of revolutionary movements favors the most radical faction--the Jacobins, not the Girondists, the Bolsheviks, not the Menshiviks. If this dynamic prevails in contemporary Sunni terrorism, Abu Musab al Zarqawi represents the future."
He's the next big thing. Thanks to Jan Bonus for the link.

Monday, May 17, 2004

The French March Against Anti-Semitism

Very nice. Thousands decry anti-Semitic acts in France:
Thousands of people marched in eastern Paris on Sunday to protest against a recent increase in anti-Semitic acts in France.

A broad array of lawmakers and celebrities took part in the march organized by human rights groups and political parties after recent desecration by vandals of Jewish sites in eastern France with spray-painted swastikas and other anti-Semitic graffiti.

'A black, white, and Arab France against anti-Semitism,' read a street-wide banner at the front of the demonstration."

Of course, the powerful urge among many on the Left to pull the rug of any discrete victimhood from under the Jews (or perhaps to create a medium through which the "Zionism is racism" canard could be expressed) was felt:
"Organization of the protest was marked with controversy, however. Two anti-racism groups - MRAP and the Human Rights League - initially had sought to broaden the protest to denounce all forms of racism, but SOS Racisme and Jewish groups opposed that idea."
But overall, this is a positive thing.

The Password Mystery

It turns out the mystery link between Nick Berg and Zacarias Moussaoui is of little import:
During his detention in an Iraqi prison, Berg was interviewed three times by the FBI, which sent agents to question his family in Pennsylvania. It wasn't his first encounter with the bureau, which had investigated a possible link between him and Zacarias Moussaoui, the al-Qaeda follower awaiting trial for suspected ties to the Sept. 11 hijackers. In 1999, during the semester Berg spent at the University of Oklahoma, he let an acquaintance access his e-mail account. Berg's user name and password subsequently got passed around and was used by an associate of Moussaoui's, who in 2001 enrolled in the nearby Norman flight school. But when the FBI interviewed Berg in 2002, agents determined that he had no connection to Moussaoui's associate. 'It turned out to be a total coincidence,' says a Justice Department official. When notified that Berg had been picked up in Mosul, the FBI might have wondered if its original assessment was wrong. After conducting a 'thorough review of records,' the agents decided once again that he was harmless—and possibly in danger."
The temporary confusion over this striking coincidence, however, could explain the Berg's 13-day detention by Iraqi police.

Michael Berg also recently gave an explanation:

"'Some terrorist people - which no one knew were terrorists at the time; they were just going as students - were also taking that bus,' Berg said. "And someone asked him basically if he could use his computer. And he did. College kids did it all the time. And it turns out this guy was a terrorist and he used my son's e-mail address - amongst many other people's e-mail who he did the same thing to.

'He was not a friend of my son's, not even an acquaintance,' Berg said. 'Just a guy sitting next to him on the bus. The FBI was satisfied with that.'"

Friday, May 14, 2004

"The Spirit of Nick"

The Washington Post has two good articles on Berg. The first presents a good outline of what he did in Iraq up until the time of his execution. The second gives us a vivid and moving picture of who he was.

"Berg set off for Cornell after graduating from high school. He passed a few years there, doing well enough in classes. But friends heard in his voice a spirit sagging. One winter night he called his friend Lorenz and said: I'm biking your way. It was 100 miles away. Lorenz drove and picked him up halfway. 'I pulled over the car in northern Pennsylvania and I got out and said, "Nick, look at the Milky Way."'

The two friends stood there silently for half an hour. A few weeks later, Nick was off to Africa. He ended up in Uganda, a poor nation on a poor continent, taking soil samples, trying to develop a brick that would not require water. He wanted to build communications towers, to spread knowledge, so that all those kids he was befriending might have a chance at something better.

Nick traveled to Africa at least twice, returning each time with only the clothes he wore. He had given everything else away. He told stories of standing in a village market in northern Uganda, talking local politics in his impassioned way with a Muslim cleric. Are you a Christian, the cleric demanded. No, Nick said, I'm Jewish.

The cleric stared at him -- and returned to their discussion."

I wish I had known him.

Conspiracy Fodder

For the What The Fuck Files:
Initially, Berg's murder seemed to be a case of an eccentric young American who was in the wrong place at the worst possible time -- just as the revelations of American mistreatment of iraqi prisoners were coming to light.

But CBS News National Security Correspondent David Martin reports on what is turning into a bizarre mystery with a connection to 9/11.

U.S. officials say the FBI questioned Berg in 2002 after a computer password Berg used in college turned up in the possession of Zaccarias Moussaoui, the al Qaeda operative arrested shortly before 9/11 for his suspicious activity at a flight school in Minnesota.

The bureau had already dismissed the connection between Berg and Moussaoui as nothing more than a college student who had been careless about protecting his password.

But in the wake of Berg's gruesome murder, it becomes a stranger than fiction coincidence -- an American who inadvertently gave away his computer password to one notorious al Qaeda operative is later murdered by another notorious al Qaeda operative."

Now, you don't have to be a Unix admin at a Fortune 500 conglomerate, which I happen to be, to know that "a computer password Berg used in college turned up in the possession of Zaccarias Moussaoui" is a maddeningly vague and basically meaningless statement. Nonetheless, this is just about as weird as it gets. And man is it going to be fodder for far-Left and far-Right wingnuts to dishonor this poor kid's memory. How long will it take before some evil idiot starts talking about Mossad and asking whom Berg's death really benefits?

Thursday, May 13, 2004

Snapshot of an Era

Because my posts on Nick Berg were indexed by Yahoo, MSN and a couple of other search engines, FWG's traffic has increased by an order of magnitude. Many others have reported the same. How weird. We live in an age in which people are sitting in their living rooms sipping coffee and downloading video of a 26 year-old idealist being decapitated by capering savages.

Wednesday, May 12, 2004

Nick Berg and the Nouveau Conservatism

Yesterday, Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs, made a couple of posts about the savage slaughter of Nick Berg. One of the posts, Berg Family Angry with US Government, illustrated that Michael Berg had made some statements inculpating US officials in Iraq in part for his son's murder. Berg also made the following statement:
"'I think a lot of people are fed up with the lack of civil rights [the War on Terror/Iraq] has caused,' he said. 'I don’t think this administration is committed to democracy.'"
Now, as I mentioned yesterday, I watched the mujahideens' video. Johnson, whose interpretations of events I am not always fond of, deserves a lot of credit for describing in laconic, horrid terms the nature of the film. It conveys a sadness and barbarism that defies abstraction. Beset by the awesome emotions it bestirs, you can imagine my horror after reading several comments at LGF in which visitors began to bash Michael Berg for being a "Leftist"!
"The LLL [Loony Liberal Left] are amazing even after having his sons head literally choped off by these Radical Muslims the loyal anti-war dad finds the time to blame his own country in the form of Bush and the Military holding him."

"I can understand Mr. Berg's outrage and anger over the death of his son; therefore, I'll forgive him for his stupid, moronic, politically-motivated, un-American, ignorant, un-Patriotic, brainless, dim-witted, foolish, idiotic, reckless, careless comments about how it twas the fault of the U.S. Government for the killing."

So I posted some vituperative comments, my main one being, in excerpt:
"What I'm shocked by are the several execrable moral idiots here who watched the video, harvested the kid's slaughter for the orgy of righteous rage it bestirs, and then denounced Berg's father for being "LLL", for expressing bland anti-Bush sentiment because his kid was massacred. Do you have any clue how classless that is? Do you think Nick Berg would want that? Is it possible to be this fathomlessly unaware?"
An LGF visitor named Ron rebutted me, saying in part:
"If he [Michael Berg] makes a public statement, he gets answered. You get a free pass for your personal life if it's in the realm of personal. But you do not get a free pass when it affects everyone else."
Then, he was kind enough to come here and leave a thoughtful comment elaborating on his views. I decided to post what he wrote and my response here for two reasons. One, the free version of the Haloscan commenting system sucks. Two, I'm getting rather tired of the elements on the Right, which, as events in Iraq seem to degenerate more and more, are devolving into a complimentary state: intellectual chaos borne out of a wooden inability to appreciate mistakes and evolve. I call this nouveau conservatism. It is the New Right's answer to its own concept of idiotarianism.

This strain is exceedingly important to notice and combat as we approach the election that will make or break the War on Terror.

Here is Ron's comment. These prefatory remarks are not meant to set Ron up as an example of this element of the Right. Look to the quotes about Michael Berg above for that. I am merely trying to provide context.

JP, I'm glad I came to your website.

I saw your post on LGF re: Berg and it enraged me. Why? Because every time one of these outrages is perpetrated, I am convinced that I cannot take any more, and then I am told some preachy blah. As well as seeing the people who attempting to defend me get attacked in a very opportunistic way. Read the New York Suns May 10th, James Tarantino [Taranto] re: Eleanor Clift to get an idea of what I'm discussing.

She considered Abu Grhaib to be the biggest news story of the war, and Tarantino asks "bigger than the lightning fast victory? Bigger than the battle in which Udai and Kusai were killed? ... the reason it is so big for her is b/c it gives her a chance to demolish the war effort". the people you were posting to are not idiots or moral cretins. They are decent people who are getting fed up. Please remember that they are human. They have human reactions. Such as fear, anger, and guilt.

Guilt, that we are in some way responsible for this atrocity. Lets face it, we were the ones who propped up that sick bitch Hussein to begin with. So really, the deaths of many Iraqis are on our hands.

Anger over what was done to an innocent man. He [Nick Berg] was a good man who meant only well to others.

Fear that it will be done to us.

These are all perfectly reasonable reactions to an insane situation.

I'm glad I didn't jump all over you, b/c looking at your site, I see that you are sincere and intelligent. But I felt that I have to explain what happened, not b/c I don't think you can figure it out.

Ron,

For what it's worth, I would like to say that I feel it's perfectly legitimate to have feelings of rage in response to obscenities like Berg's slaughter. When I watch shit like that, my thoughts run from inarticulate disbelief to profane and barbaric revenge fantasies. I'm hardly beyond reproach.

That said, I was making a simple argument at LGF: it is utterly classless to use Nick Berg's massacre as a jumping-off point for crapping on his father as a stand-in for some "Leftist" strawman. I use Reuters-style quotes and the term "strawman" here because Berg's father has done barely anything to merit the calumnies some "patriotic fundamentalists" are throwing at him. He merely made a couple of bland anti-Bush pronouncements. Now, it may turn out that he is indeed a Leftist, some ANSWER guy, for instance. I say, who fucking cares? I will not spit on Nick Berg in the wake of his death by spitting on his father. Doing so is disgusting and morally idiotic.

You implied that because Michael Berg made a public statement, then it is ok -- no, mandated -- to respond to him publicly. This is a more pragmatic argument, although it is ideological too: Michael Berg's rhetoric needs to be combatted lest he vitiate the war effort. Short of his becoming a career apologist for terror, like Rachel Corrie's parents are doing, I exhort you, with all due respect, to get a grip. The guy was suffering paroxysms of rage, and he had a covey of media vampires bustling in his yard, shoving microphones in his face while he learned that a video of his son's decapitation was playing on porn-loop across the world. He did not seek to make a public statement, he got brutally suckered into giving one at the worst possible time. Give the guy a break.

This is the gist of what I was saying over at LGF. Some posters there truly are idiotic moral cretins, and this bashing of Berg Senior was a good example of that, but hardly the only one. There is something I call "nouveau conservatism", a cheap, distilled ideology that grew out of post-9/11, pop neoconservatism, and which is often on display at LGF. Inevitably, all organic and powerful movements produce a shallow, gestural simulacrum of themselves. The hippies of the late '60s eventually became a smelly cotillion of kids at a Phish show. The culture of nouveau conservatism, like that of the nouveau riche, is obnoxious and noisome, a parody of its progenitor. And it is doing a lot more damage to the neocon undertaking in Iraq and elsewhere than any despairing statements by Nick Berg's father.

Memorial

Nick Berg

I watched the video of Nick Berg's massacre by mujahideen savages. It is baleful and fathomlessly sad.

"Berg was a small-business owner who went to Iraq independent of any organization to help rebuild communication antennas, his family said Tuesday. Friends and family said he was a 'free spirit' who wanted to help others — working in Ghana, in one example — and that his going to Iraq fit with that ideology. They said he supported the Iraqi war and the Bush administration.

...

Berg attended Cornell University, Drexel University, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Oklahoma, where he got involved in rigging electronics equipment while working for the maintenance department, his father said. He helped set up equipment at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia in 2000

While at Cornell, he traveled to Ghana to teach villagers how to make bricks out of minimal material. His father said Berg returned from Ghana with only the clothes on his back and emaciated because he gave away most of his food."

...

Berg's family said they were informed by the State Department on Monday that he was found dead.

...

'I knew he was decapitated...' Michael Berg said. 'That manner is preferable to a long and torturous death. But I didn't want it to become public.'"

This thing must be destroyed.