Surprise, Surprise!

It wasn't long after the Hariri assassination that Juan Cole began questioning the likelihood of Syrian complicity. Middle East intelligence "expert" Justin Raimondo (where do they get these names?) took the good professor one further, intimating that this might somehow be a joint Israeli-al-Qaida operation. After all, it just wasn't in Syria's interest to off the anti-Syrian former prime minister. And besides, Raimondo was able to easily dismiss US accusations as a front for the "neocon" plot to attack Syria saying: "Evidence? Who needs it? The White House just makes this stuff up as they go along...."

Well, it appears that there is, indeed, some evidence - or at least enough has been uncovered by German independent prosecutor, Detlev Mehlis, sent by the UN to investigate the murder, to begin arresting pro-Syrian generals in Beirut.

So what's the lesson here?

Well, first it's about time that people stop with their ridiculous "look who benefits" arguments to back up far-fetched conspiracy theories, as Raimondo did immediately following the July 7 London bombings. (Judging by the $2 billion promised to them by Tony Blair on July 8, I'd say it was the Palestinian Authority that benefitted!)

But more important is that one should be careful about applying Western political logic to incidents in other parts of the world. Sure, it might not seem to have been in Syria's interest to blow up a popular Lebanese leader, thereby highlighting their brutal occupation of that country. That makes perfect sense in a Western political context. But Syria's long term plans for Lebanon include total domination and absorption of that country into a Greater Syria. This is the reason that Damascus has never deemed it necessary to establish a political border with Lebanon, nor has the Ba'ath leadership ever felt obliged to appoint an ambassador. Within this context, it makes perfect sense that Syria needs to remind the errant Lebanese occasionally who's boss - particularly when the Ba'ath and its Allawi minority junta appear to have suffered a blow from the forces of democracy following successful elections in Iraq.

When you look at it that way, I don't think it's so surprising that some pro-Syrians are sitting in Beirut jails. I won't be particularly surprised either if the connections continue getting closer to the presidential palace in Damascus as the investigation into Rafik Hariri's murder continues.

Someone So Confused Apparently Needs to Come up with Simple Answers

Quaker columnist Helena Cobban reminds us on her blog justworldnews.org (is that “just” pause “world-news” or “just-world” pause “news”?) that the Gaza settlers are not the first “colons” to be forcefully evacuated from their homes.

“In 1962, a million French citizens who, as colons rooted in Algeria for many generations had considered that territory was just one other departement of Mother France, realized that Paris had changed its mind: Algeria was being summarily [sic] over to the FLN.”

Lest we forget (or are simply ignorant of history) a good many of those million pied noir who felt the need to flee were Algerian Jews and Qabyli Berbers who, in many cases, had a far better argument that they were “indigenous” than did many Algerian Arabs. Further, while the French took over Algeria in the mid-nineteenth century with the expressed purpose of colonizing the country (mainly to enhance the metropolitan’s grain production capacity), no reasonable or rational historical investigator looking at the facts can make anything near the same claim concerning Israel’s conquest of Gaza and the West Bank.

But this aside, it is not quite clear – to me at least – what Ms. Cobban is going on about in her posting. She seems to be upset that the French fleeing certain slaughter in Algeria did not get the same “slaveringly [sic] attentive media coverage” that the settlers in Gaza and the northern West Bank are getting. In all fairness, I think that she should take into account that there were no satellite feeds in 1962, no cable news networks and that, on the whole, reporting global events was much more sober four decades ago.

Cobban then gets her rant around to the “racial” issue, that is that the colonists are of European origin while the colonized are “indigenous” populations. Just a casual observation. From what I’ve seen daily on local (Israeli) TV, I’d say that a good percentage of the Israeli settlers in Gaza are not at all European in origin (and I’d be willing to bet that there are some descendents of those very same pied noir whose families had lived in Algeria for centuries and who fled after Algeria started to become more “egalitarian”, and the “democratic forces” informed them, quite openly, that they should leave while they could do so carrying their baggage, rather than while occupying coffins.)

In the end, Cobban does get around to something that resembles a point. That is that although the retreating settlers are receiving compensation, the Palestinians of Gaza are not. More to the point, she maintains that these same settlers (“pampered” she calls them) were subsidized for 38 years by her tax money, and that the Palestinians should “be given a chance to pursue her [sic] dreams on a quite egalitarian basis. That is, including the provision of a fair degree of reparations for the extensive damages of the past.”

Well, let’s look at this more closely.

I’m not sure what reparations have to do with “egalitarianism”, but just to get things straight, it hasn’t been your tax money that’s subsidized the settlers, Ms. Cobban, it’s been mine. That is one of the many reasons that I have opposed government settlement policies for years. The US government, on the other hand, has been very clear about aid money and loan guarantees not being used on the other side of the Green Line (simply deducting any amounts at source that are deemed to be in violation). If Helena Cobban is concerned about her tax money being put to bad use, she should probably have been out there asking some very serious questions when the PA began funding the intifada, rather than putting those tens of millions to productive use for the population as intended. I think that there’s a fair chance that more of her tax money was tied up in the cargo holds and on the decks of the Karin A then there was in, say, Kfar Darom!

Again, it’s my, tax money that’s compensating the settlers for loss of home and livelihood as a result of a policy of disengagement that I fully support (and advocated long before Ariel Sharon thought of it). That’s pretty clear, I think.

But what are the “damages” that have been done to the Palestinian population that require payment of reparations? Since the “brutal occupation” began in 1967, the Palestinian population experienced extensive improvement in almost every facet of its economic and social existence, including massive improvements in education, health care and overall standard of living. Efraim Karsh details the statistics in his book Arafat’s War (pp. 43-45). Most notable is the phenomenal population growth rate of roughly 3.5% between 1967 and the start of the first intifada. (By way of comparison, the Jewish population in Europe declined by nearly 50% between 1933 and 1945, which seems a much more understandable basis for reparations!)

So here we have it. A confused (and frankly somewhat mean) attack on the settlers because they had the temerity to receive reportage on television; a totally irrelevant and inappropriate comparison with a different group of “settlers”; and a demand for reparations based on an extremely weak and factually questionable argument. Ms. Cobban not only appears to be confused about history and the facts, she also fails to examine her own arguments below the level of very superficial comparison and simple repetition of propaganda. This would, however, appear to fit in quite well with her simplistic world view of good vs. bad, native vs. settler and Third-World victim vs. European-American victimizer. And if the simplistic answers work, why bother to ask difficult questions?

Hypocrisy?

King Abdullah II of Jordan was off to Russia this week. But before he left, His Majesty had some important words for members of parliament and the cabinet. According to the AP, as reported in Ha’aretz, the monarch declared that the issue of Palestinian refugees will not be settled “at the expense of Jordan”. (Read the report here: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/613469.html.) According to the article,

“Jordan already hosts 1.8 million Palestinian refugees and their descendants displaced in two wars with Israel since 1948. The government argues that accepting more refugees may disturb this country's fragile economy and its demographic balance.” [emphasis added]

As with Lebanon, Jordan has expressed its opposition to settling Palestinian refugees on the grounds that doing so would disturb a fragile “demographic balance”. In Lebanon, this means an increase in the number of Sunni Muslims. In Jordan, it means not rocking the ethnic boat where Palestinians already outnumber the Bedouins who form the core of Hashemite support.

This is all very interesting. Let Israel express opposition to accepting a wholesale “right of return” for Palestinian refugees and their offspring because of its effect on the Jewish nature of the state, and the world cries “racism” and “theocracy”. Yet not a word of criticism is heard about Jordanian expressions of the need for ethnic balance, or Lebanese ecumenical concerns.

HM King Abdullah II would do well to remember when expressing his concerns about delicate “ethnic balances” that his kingdom was carved out of the proposed Palestine Mandate, and that his mother, Princess Muna (formerly Antoinette Gardiner), was the daughter of a British innkeeper. Further, at about the same time that his great-grandfather and namesake was traveling the 800 miles from his native Mecca to impose his kingdom in Amman, the parents and grandparents of Ariel Sharon were on their 1,000 mile journey from Azerbaijan – also a former Ottoman province – to Palestine. There is, however, one thing that the monarch doesn’t have to worry about. Jordan is legally judenrein, it being illegal for a Jew to be granted citizenship in the Hashemite Kingdom.

All in all it seems that the concept of “indigenous” is highly relative in the Middle East. It has one meaning for Arabs and Muslims and, apparently, quite a different meaning when it comes to Israelis and Jews. And in the Hashemite case, it all depends on which side of the river you happen to be standing.

It's the Challenged Masculinity, Stupid (or is it?)


A recent article is making the rounds of leftwing blogs and forums. It’s based on a press release from Cornell University, and you can read it here:

http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Aug05/soc.gender.dea.html

The researcher is a Ph.D. candidate by the name of Robb Willer, and he summarizes his study by claiming to have found that

“…if you made men more insecure about their masculinity, they displayed more homophobic attitudes, tended to support the Iraq War more and would be more willing to purchase an SUV over another type of vehicle”.

Interesting. Opposition to same-sex marriage, support for the war in Iraq, and even the popularity of gas-guzzling SUVs are all symptomatic of overcompensation for challenged masculinity. One wonders what causes US “soccer moms” to prefer SUVs over used Volvos and Toyota hybrid cars presumably favored by whiny Cornell faculty members who are secure in their masculinity. Perhaps the suburban women are trying to be more masculine? And what about all those women who oppose gay marriage, support the war and voted for George W. Bush – maybe they’re simply suffering from hormone imbalances?

The other thing that one is led to wonder is if the phenomenon applies cross culturally. For example, what do practices toward homosexuals in Muslim countries have to say about the state of masculinity among Muslim men? And is the propensity for certain men to carry around RPGs wherever they go and to fire AK-47s in the air when they get excited also a symptom of “challenged masculinity”. Is beheading a captive masculine behavior? Perhaps the war on terror could be more efficiently fought and won by sending out an army of hot women to the Middle East who would simply go up to the enemy and say “My God you’re sexy and masculine Ahmed!”

Well, it would be nice if we could reduce all our problems to such simple causes. Sadly, we can’t. There are other factors that lead to support for the war in Iraq. Like, for example, the fact that Saddam and Zarqawi are dangerous men (perhaps because of threats to their masculinity?) and a threat to civilized society. But sadder still is the fact that Willer’s research will probably become the basis for his being granted a Ph.D. which, in turn, will enable him to train another generation of young people in this ridiculous excuse for scientific inquiry.

How Quickly We Forget

ABC News White House correspondent Terry Moran apparently has a very short memory. While standing at the border crossing separating Gaza and Israel, he reported on the commencement of the disengagement, which began yesterday with the sealing off of the border and the distribution of evacuation notices to the remaining Israeli settlers. Apparently eager to feel himself witness to a historic event, Moran declared that this was the first time that Israel had ever given up territory conquered in war to the Palestinians as the basis of their future state.

Sorry Terry, you really don’t need to look back too far to see that this assertion is grossly false. Just over 10 years ago Israel began handing over all major Palestinian Arab population centers in the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinian Authority.

How Big is Your State?

We repeatedly hear about the population density and paucity of land in the West Bank and Gaza. I decided to take a look at the statistics and see what the situation is really like.

The population of Gaza is around 1,100,000 living on 365 square kilometers of land. That is, indeed, crowded at about 2,980 per square kilometer, although not as crowded as, say, Hong Kong with more than double that density.

The West Bank is far less densely populated. Today there are about 1.9 million people living on 5,640 square kilometers, with a population density of 333 people per square kilometer. Now, let’s assume that the Palestinians would have accepted the Camp David and Taba proposals (without any adjectives, such as “generous” or “stingy”). That would include roughly 97% of the net land of the West Bank (5,626 square kilometers) and 100% of Gaza, for a total of 5,991 square kilometers, for the total population of 3,019,637 Palestinians on the West Bank and in Gaza. A very liberal estimate of the refugees, assuming they all wanted to come back to the new Palestinian state, is about 3,500,000. The total is, therefore, about 6.5 million. I’m not including the 1.2 million Israeli Arabs, because all surveys and polls indicate that, while they feel part of the Palestinian nation, on the whole they show no inclination to participate in a Palestinian state. At any rate, this yields a population density of 1,084 people per square kilometer. (By way of comparison, Los Angeles County has a population density of 960 people per square kilometer. And LA is a pretty comfortable place to live, density-wise.)

“But,” our antizionist friends are saying, “How much of the land is arable?” Well, I maintain that that is a moot point. In fact, it is the crux of the problem.

For 57 years the dream of the Palestinian refugee has been to return to his house, and land with its bustan and grape arbor, and to, again, till the soil with his trusty turiyya. Considering that, despite the purported “genocide” of the Zionists, the Palestinians have one of the highest population growth rates in the world (around 3.5%), there probably isn’t enough arable land to support all 7.7 million Palestinians (including the 1.2 Israeli Arabs) for very long based on their “traditional” subsistence farming. Most Palestinians today are urban, and that is probably the way they will have to remain in the future to support themselves economically.

By way of comparison, I decided to look at the Republic of Ireland. Ireland has always interested me, particularly because of its economic explosion of the past decade. Today, for example, many of the common laborers are brought over from the UK! Ireland has a population density of 58 people per square kilometer. Around 20% of that land is arable. That’s much more favorable than all Palestinians on all of Mandatory Palestine. Despite this fact, Ireland, as an agrarian economy was a basket case a few short decades ago. Large families and primogeniture resulted in extreme poverty, and horrible urban slums (but a thriving clergy). If you’ve ever visited Limerick, it’s not too hard to imagine what it was like! The turnaround came in the late 70s and early 80s when the Irish abandoned their reliance on farming and began as offshore production plants for multinational companies. They invested in education and developed a generation of IT professionals. (They also removed the ban on selling condoms!) Today, Ireland has a vibrant economy. The population growth rate is steady at about 1%, and they are ranked number 8 in GDP per capita (the UK is 23 and Israel 43).

Let’s look at another country: Syria. Syria’s population density is a meager 95 people per square kilometer. Fully 26% of their 184,000 square kilometers of land is arable, so they can grow a lot of olives. Syria is the poorest country in the region - poorer than Jordan and Egypt – and ranked 144 in world GDP per capita.

There are a lot of people who get upset at people who drive gas-guzzlers and people who waste water and other resources. Land is also a scarce resource. Why encourage people to waste it? I think that in the twenty-first century we can’t really afford to preserve “quaint” traditional societies that are based on outmoded tribal ideals, particularly those that bundle honor and power together with economic considerations such as land holdings.

I have been looking for a way to start blogging for some time now. Some entry point that will allow me to create an initial posting that expresses some of my basic premises on life and politics.

Well, Sam Harris has given me such an opportunity with his article “Widespread Ignorance” (http://www.alternet.org/story/23964/). For those who aren’t familiar with Sam Harris, he recently published a book titled The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. You can read all about this book on Mr. Harris’s Web site, http://www.samharris.org/, where, of course, you will find ample praise of the book as well as links to where you can buy a copy.

The article in question – which bears an Indy Media copyright – is headed with the following teaser:

“Only 28 percent of Americans believe in evolution; 68 percent believe in Satan. And since Bush's endorsement of 'intelligent design,' the battle between faith and reason is growing stronger.”

I’m sure you get the point. Americans are ignorant. What’s more they’re religiously irrational, and George W. Bush is leading this national lack of reason straight to.... Well, I guess it can’t be hell within this context.

To Mr. Harris’s credit, he does recognize elsewhere that it isn’t just Christianity that produces such irrationality. I would suspect that very few Iranians, for example, have access to courses on evolutionary theory. What’s more, the majority of Iranians apparently not only believe in one Satan, but two: the Great Satan and the Little Satan.

Harris also acknowledges that it is not just belief in God that results in beliefs that defy rationality. Had a poll been conducted in the Soviet Union 60 years ago, for example, the vast majority of the adult population would undoubtedly have acknowledged their firm belief in evolution – Lamarckian evolution as revisited by Lysenko under the “gentle persuasion” of Josef Stalin.

But, on the balance, Harris blames what we normally call religious faith for the irrationality. He goes even further claiming that the “contest between faith and reason is zero-sum” and advocates lifting the “taboo…[on] criticiz[ing] a person’s religious beliefs”. (Presumably he advocates removing this taboo only in America. Similar taboos do not seem to exist in most parts of the Muslim world.)

So what’s the alternative to faith that Harris offers? Well, it’s a world of facts supported and substantiated by evidence presented by sane individuals. That is, as Harris states:

“Whether a person is religious or secular, there is nothing more sacred than the facts. Either Jesus was born of a virgin, or he wasn't; either there is a God who despises homosexuals, or there isn't. It is time that sane human beings agreed on the standards of evidence necessary to substantiate truth-claims of this sort.”

If we were to only accept that side of the “zero-sum” game that stood up to reasonable evidence needed to substantiate “truth-claims”, I fear that we would be inevitably drawn to the conclusion that human existence boils down to eating, defecating and fornicating. Not a very meaningful existence, is it? Yet this is precisely what many “progressives” and “rationalists” like Harris must ultimately accept as truth. (Well, blogging may also be our purpose in existing.) When push comes to shove, we all hearken back to R. Crumb’s 1960s comic character Mr. Natural who, when asked what it all means simply replied: “Don’t mean shit!”

No wonder so many of those “progressives” whom I have known throughout my adult life have been overly concerned with eating, defecating and fornicating and in deriving the maximum pleasure out of each. And as we baby-boomers get older, it gets harder and harder to do any of these three things well.

Just to make things clear, I’m not religious, although I do take quite a few things on faith. Like there being some kind of meaning in human existence. On the other hand, I don’t insist that fornication lead to procreation, nor do I believe in a God that despises homosexuals. Further, I’m not sure that there is really a “soul” or that, as Harris asserts, that it is an obviously irrational thing to believe that this “soul” enters the zygote making “blastocytes…the moral equivalents of persons”. I just don’t think that abortion is simply a trivial matter between a woman and her body, or that there aren’t consequences of this action. (By way of comparison, you might want to take a look at Harris’s abovementioned Web site and check out the forum discussion on circumcision. It’s interesting that many who are so eager to vacuum out a “blastocyte” are equally adamant about retaining a couple of millimeters of skin on a baby’s penis. But then getting in the way of culinary, digestive or sexual pleasure is always problematic in a progressive, rational world.)

So where does all this lead me. Actually, Harris has helped me understand something that has alluded me for some time. That is the question of what it is that allows so-called “progressives” to identify so strongly with the most reactionary force on the planet today: radical Islam. It certainly isn’t rationality or reason, and that is what the article was so clear in pointing out, and why I am so grateful to Harris. Indeed, I now see that it is the inherent nihilism that must result from standing on the “rational” side of the zero-sum divide between reason and faith that is so attracted to the fatalism – the ma sh’allah – of radical Islam, creating, as a result, the current climate of terrorism and its apologists.