Of Mouse Traps and Public Men

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that Conrad Black doesn’t get the big issue in the Wright-Duffy scandal and sees it as a media witch hunt. But I am.  Funny thing that: I used to take some heavy hits for defending Black with my lefty friends at the time of his troubles saying in effect that the case against him was a civil and not a criminal matter, and that the dossier against had a political odour –  in the Chicago of latter days one gets judged (evidently even in criminal matters) on whether one’s ‘values’  are those of the Second City. It is that which decides whether you can open a fried-chicken fast food joint, or whether you spend a few years in the joint.  My big point in Black’s defense was that one cannot apply standards of public conduct to Black merely because he has a public profile. He held no public office (in the US) and had no-one to answer to in financial dealings than to his investors and business partners if these did not involve defrauding public at large.  What he was convicted of might have looked bad but it was not a job for a prosecutor. Surprisingly, given the passions that Conrad Black stirs among complete strangers, I was able to make some headway with people who were able to grasp the issue of the requisites in public versus private conduct. 

Now, it seems Conrad Black himself has some difficulty deciding what is public business and what is not. In today’s National Post (18/5/2013), he calls for the end of harassment of Nigel Wright and Mike Duffy. He writes in operatic strokes of pen that it is an instance of unusual loyalty and generosity to a friend, but is not so unusual that it should be mistaken as a dishonest act between honest men.  Really ?  Is that what that was ?  Or is it just a sigh of Conrad Black realizing there is a Wright missing among his friends ?

 The problem is,  honesty or dishonesty, loyalty, generosity and friendship do not enter into the debate here.  Nigel Wright is a Chief of Staff in the Prime Minister’s Office;  Mike Duffy is a Canadian Senator.  Both are public figures who answer to the public for financial dealings they make in (and out of) their respective office.  If Mr Duffy admits to charging Canadian public for his senatorial expenses improperly and intimates he has repaid the excess claims, it is certainly big news item if it turns out he settled his debt with money that was not his and which he was obligated to declare as a senator.  If Mr Wright sends a cheque to a sitting member of the Senate it raises essentially unanswerable questions of the quid pro quo in the exchange – and again much as I would like to grant that it was an unselfish act of loyalty and friendship – I am not stupid to be put to sleep by self-interested babble even as artful as Conrad Black's.  The fact of the matter is that Mr Wright put himself in a position of conflict of interest and the only honourable recourse open to him is to resign to protect the integrity of the PMO.  Only then the charity to his friends will carry with it no risk of being mistaken for something else. 

So I am disappointed by Conrad Black’s take on this sordid little affair.  Going after the two gentlemen is not a way for ‘great nations’ to destroy ‘their public men with mouse traps ’ as he would have it.  It is simply insisting that public men keep their public nose clean.  I don't think anyone, least of all a journalist, should take an issue with that.

Beslan Comes to Boston

Ever noticed the difficulty the media has naming people and things connected to the Boston bombings and generally get anything right in that story ?   I guess the first prize for inanity in the non-stop twaddle the MSM delivered on Boston must go to Wolf Blitzer who described Dzhokar’s flight, running over his brother with a car and a hide-and-seek with the cops as an ordeal.  Close second:  has anyone (other than the news pros) not noticed that Zubeidat Tsarnayeva, the killers’ mother, is an emotionally unstable psycho and a classical portrait of enabler, someone whose judgmental posturing coupled with manifest sociopathic tendencies would be enough to explain her sons finally going nuts ?   And again, I find it interesting that no one in the chase for an improbable Armenian convert to Islam who poisoned Tamerlan’s (see my previous blog) sound mind, cares to observe the extraordinary contempt the Islamic people of the Caucasus hold the Armenians (for their alleged sycophantic and servile nature), and the utter improbability that ethnic Chechens (as perhaps the most warlike people in Caucasus) would take cues from an Armenian – in anything, let alone religious fervour !    

       But my focus in this blog is on the meaning of the strange overuse of the geographic term “Russia” in the reports. Both The New York Times and Washington Post now refer to the capital of Dagestan as Makhachkala, Russia a marked departure with the previous convention in mentioning the region's capital. The major networks refer in unison to the whereabouts of Anzor and Zubeidat as Russia, even though they inhabit the part of Russia that the US foreign policy considers land in which the Russians keep the natives in bondage.   It is as though Novosti and Pravda started to refer to San Juan as USA in connection to hypothetical bombing in Rostov in which Puerto Rican secessionists – for whom Russia was known to have a great deal of sympathy – were implicated.  Surely, this sudden misnaming would be seen as a veiled finger pointed at the US, especially if among the news US was being criticized for not cooperating with Russia as much as Russia would want.  Of course, the overt and covert criticism of Russia’s stance on terrorism that regularly crops up, is the ultimate irony of the Boston tragedy. 

    That in the journalistic equivalent of a hunt for Sasquatch, the importance of  Putin’s statement on Boston would be buried among tall tales about Misha that the relatives are spinning is of course to be expected.  For the US media to admit the US policy toward Russia after the fall of the Soviets is mostly wrong-headed, and at times plain stupid, is as unthinkable as the Moscow editorials in the early eighties admitting that Brezhnev’s politburo was brain-dead.  Of course, Putin is spinning his own yarn but the fact remains he has pacified the Caucasus to a degree which would have not been possible under Yeltsin.  He has been criticized in the West as being heavy-handed. But has he ?  Has anyone actually looked at the way  Russia under Putin has been behaving in North Caucasus ?  And if so, who would be – from the US security point of view – the optimal dominant power in that region ?  US NATO ally Turkey under Erdogan ?  Ahmanidejad and Khamenei ?   Saudi Arabia via the Wahhabi colonies there ?   See what I mean by stupid ?   

    Being a Czech ex-pat I have no illusions about the Russians. But I know enough of Russia, its history and political culture to know that the colossus rarely offers the kind of stability and prospects, civility and realpolitik, that it has been in the last decade under the dynamic duo. There are some significant opportunities that Russia today has to offer in bolstering US security.  All the US has to do is to acknowledge Russia’s legitimate interests and understand where they intersect with their own.  Unfortunately, this perspective has never quite made it past the Cold War view of Russia as a dangerous usurper and a jail of nations (which it was under Soviets but is not any longer, at least not for the moment).  And it is not just the mainstream media or the academics who see themselves in the old war-horse  Zbig Brzezinski (who sees Putin as a Mussolini wannabe). 

       An alternative view of Russia seems to be missing also in the writings of thoughtful critics and people usually immune to popular nonsense.  Surprising that even someone as bright as Daniel Pipes, whose father was an eminent scholar of Russia to boot, does not seem to grasp the opportunity that the Boston bombing presents to Kerry and Obama, in finally – at long last - resetting, the bilateral relations with Moscow as advocated by one of the most knowledgeable people in the US foreign policy business, the former US ambassador to Moscow, George F.Kennan.  For Pipes the Boston tragedy should lead to outlawing burqas and niqabs in the US. Not a bad idea but I do not see a meaningful connection there.  Nor am I particularly impressed by Daniel’s next item on his blog, Education by Murder. My beef with it is not on the analysis side; I am convinced that he is correct in assessing the Islamic danger. It’s on the practical approaches and measures that I see him as coming up short.  It’s the lack of focus and as a result of coherent policy which besets the thinking about Islam,  sadly in both,  the White House and the conservative think tanks.  The  mujehaddin heros the US supported in Afghanistan against the Soviets and in Bosnia against the Serbs, re-appeared as  attackers on US soil unleashing insane mayhem on 9/11.  Is there any wonder that the Caucasian highlanders with a dream of a Caucasian emirate that the US eggs on against the Russians, would eventually appear in the US to do a demo of the insane mayhem that has become all but synonymous in Russia with the name Chechen ? 

    In the drool and drivel that the media has dished on the Boston tragedy,  The Truth About Chechen Threat op ed at the CNN website from early last week summarizes neatly the idiotic posturing that only encourages people and ideologies who wish to destroy the US.  The piece struggles with facts in the most horrendous way:  Shaefer writes – much in the same manner that Zubeidat Tsarnaeva speaks – that ‘the once secular, democratic Chechen independence movement is all but gone..’.  When was there a ‘secular, democratic Chechen independence movement ?’, may I ask.  Pray, it would not be like the secular, democratic movement known as the Arab Spring !  The fact of the matter is that In 1991 Dzhokhar Dudayev, a Dr Strangelove with an idee fixe to nuke Russia's cities, staged a coup and declared himself without any silly pretense of elections, the president of independent Ichkeria. Almost immediately the Islamic theme entered the post-Soviet Chechen politics, and the former Soviet general was attacked by the competing warlords for his lack of islamic fervour.  It is also not true that Chechnya was de-facto independent from Russia in 1996-1999.  In reality, Moscow signed a deal with the separatists in early 1997 under which Russia would withdraw its armed forces and let the locals run their internal affairs, in return – specifically – for Chechnya to remain in the Russian federation and subject to its laws.  The ink was not yet dry on the agreement when Sharia shootings and dismemberments began throughout Chechnya in violation of the treaty. The Russians looked the other way. They kept looking the other way when president Mashkadov proclaimed Sharia the law of the land in 1999. The only felt impelled to go in the second time in response to several bombings (with casualties in the hundreds !) and to Basayev's, Raduyev's and al-Khattab's horde attempting to annex Dagestan.  Shaefer admits that Putin’s 1999 campaign was brilliant but calls it brutal.  Well, it was not brutal or ham-handed as Pavel Grachev’s assaults on Grozny in 1995-96.  Actually, the second war is most remembered in Caucasus for the siege of Gudermes and the expulsion of the islamist warlords from there. It has been described as the battle for the hearts and minds even by people who don't like Russians.  Putin won over even some warlords and prominent political figures who fought against the Russians previously, notably Akhmad Kadyrov, Chechnya’s mufti and later president (assassinated by the Wahhabi allied Islamists in 2004).   

    Schaefer long-term historical memory is also faulty.  Stalin did deport the majority of Chechens from the region after the war in one of his nasty ethnic cleansing edicts. But he did not erase Chechnya from the map as it has never existed, as Schaefer claims. The Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic (established in 1936) continued to exist through the repression.  Shaefer predictably fails to mention the big picture  that overshadowed Russia’s invading in the region in the 18^th and 19^th century.  Turkey is not mentioned by the diligent truther , yet it was Russia’s struggle with the Ottomans for the hegemony in the region - and that above all other causes - that shaped Russia’s political and cultural view of the Caucasus.  The expulsion of the Circassians, Turkey’s allies in the region, is of course regrettable and a dark chapter of Russia’s history. But it needs to be understood in the context of the times and gauged against the brutality of the Ottomans against the Armenians and the Balkan Slavs.   It is a sad irony, that one of the great conquering hero of the early Caucasian campaign, general  Yermolov , was himself a rebel in his youth and a liberal supporter of constitutional monarchy. He and two of Russia’s great poets, Pushkin and Lermontov, believed in Russia’s mission in Caucasus, because they believed civilization must conquer barbarity. Even if Russia was not the model of civilization itself, its intelligentsia has always understood the importance of its window on Europe.   

Shaefer complains about Putin’s success in rebranding the Chechen separatist fighters as terrorists.  He admits that this was not without merit, and mentions a headline grabbing incident at a school in Beslan.  My jaw drops when I read vacuous babble of this kind. If Mr Schaefer can talk himself through the visceral disgust that should grip anyone confronted by the bestiality of the attack on the elementary school in North Ossetia, he deserves nothing but contempt. There is absolutely nothing – no cause under the sun - that can justify assaults on innocent humanity going about the business of living.  And that is the message of Beslan and Boston, if 9/11 did not deliver the message.   

To the New York Congressman Peter King: Instead of criticizing the Russians for what they should have done it would be better to adopt this simple and doable security policy: If you get the names of terrorists that the Bear watches, trust, they bear watching !
 

What's In A Couple of Names ?

      I suppose, completely gratuitously, I admit, that if two brothers in the deep South coming from a family with known connections to Aryan brotherhood beehives were to commit some racist outrage, no-one would be fooled by their front, if they had the wherewithal to keep one up.  Especially no one would be fooled  if their names were Siegfried and Adolf.  Their names would immediately give them up,  and the act itself would provide the clue to their names and vice versa.  The media talking heads would not twist themselves into knots in front of cameras agonizing over our lack of understanding of their motives. They would have a simple explanation: these guys were white supremacists. And everyone would understand what that meant instantly. Even those who take cues from Wolf Blitzer (who opined on camera that the 24-hour hunt last week must have been an 'ordeal' to Dzhokar). After all, the brothers were called Siegfried and Adolf. 

       Of course, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar are not names that most Americans, even the ones with degrees from a genuine university, would be able to connect to anything.  History is bunk in America, especially  history of people who are not Americans. (‘No history, no bullshit’, as Richard Holbrooke used to say to Milosevic in Dayton when the latter thought that a couple of drinks might soften the US Undersecretary’s view of the origin of ethnic tensions on the Drina).  And yet the question persists: why would any Chechen living in exile in Central Asia would want to name his first-born son after  the greatest mass murderer that part of the world has ever known ?   Evidently, papa Tsarnaev who pretends in front of  cameras that his two sons  were ‘framed’ for the Boston bombings, had his reasons for giving his son a name which is not really a name.  Tamerlane was the man who went from fighting as a mercenary hailing from a minor tribe to becoming a  ruler of an empire that stretched from the Volga and the Black Sea to Xinjiang in China.  His real name was Timur, which is fairly common among Turkic people. Tamerlane (russified as Тамерлан, or Tamerlan)  originated as a nickname for the great ruler, Timur the Lame.   Why would anyone want to give his healthy baby son a name that had physical disability in it ?  Any ideas ?   

      Dzhokhar explains it.  Anyone in born in Chechnya (or to Chechens abroad) between 1990-1996 named that way can be rightfully suspected of owing his prenom to  his mom or dad’s fascination with the self-styled president of the Republic of Ichkeria ( as Chechnya is known locally), the one time Soviet general in the strategic bomber command,  Dzhokhar Dudayev.  What distinguished him among the ambitious new breed of post-Soviet politicians seeking freedom from Moscow, was not as much his hostile animus to Russia (this was in many places part of the necessary political credentials).  It was two things which were relatively unique.  Chechnya introduced a pattern of destabilization in the region which alarmed the Kremlin as it threatened its strategic interests, to wit,  securing its energy supply routes from the Caspian basin. Far from consolidating his power, Dudayev soon faced implacable internal opposition.  Because of the mass exit of technical and managerial resources who were non-Chechen, the economy was fast becoming derelict and was being replaced by large scale criminal enterprise. The decline soon reached catastrophic proportions. On top of this, since the breakoff, Dudayev’s Ichkeria had become the breeding ground for Islamic militancy with open threats to spread jihad to the neighbouring regions in Caucasus and beyond.   Dhzokhar Dudayev was a flamboyant figure with a penchant for heated rhetoric, repeatedly threatening the burn Russian cities to the ground.  This feature endeared him to the hard core of a traditional warlike culture of Chechen highlander tribes. His fanaticism was reassuring both to many of the locals and to the mujehaddin who started to drift into Chechnya after the Russians pulled out of Afghanistan.   Dudayev of course did not burn down any Russian cities. (Though he did have his underlink, by the name of Basayev, bury a dirty nuclear canister in a Moscow park, the only such terrorist attack on the planet to date !) When his Tsarnaev namesake was still in diapers, a Russian missile caught with him as he was barking orders on his cell phone.  A fatal mistake in his plan for world domination ? Contempt for his adversaries coupled with lack of understanding of surveillance technology !   Hmmm….

Elena Kagan Playing Silly Buggers

Justice Kagan, had something up her sleeve for Charles J. Cooper, the lawyer defending Proposition 8 in the Supreme Court last week. She said to him: “It seems as though your principal argument is that same-sex and opposite -- opposite-sex couples are not similarly situated because opposite-sex couples can procreate, same-sex couples cannot, and the State's principal interest in marriage is in regulating procreation. Is that basically correct?”   

“Your Honor, that's the essential thrust of our position, yes”, replied Mr Cooper .   “Well, suppose a State said, Mr. Cooper, suppose a State said that”, Kagan attacked, “Because we think that the focus of marriage really should be on procreation, we are not going to give marriage licenses anymore to any couple where both people are over the age of 55. Would that be constitutional?”.  To which  Mr Cooper truthfully replied, “No, Your Honor, it would not be constitutional

         Those of us who have followed the debates over gay marriage for some time  know intimately this ploy.  You say, yes, of course, marriage is an institution to regulate human procreation, one recognizing the unique role of the union of two members of opposite sex in establishing and enlarging human kinship.  But - the answer goes - if that were true than the state would also , to be fair and equitable, have to refuse to marry hetero couples which are known to be infertile, either because of age or a medical condition of one or both partners.  This is deemed to take care of the objection to gay marriage, in certain quarters, especially among those not in the habit to think too deeply about things.
 
        The problem of course is that this is a very weak argument based solely on the equality of procreative incapacity, regardless whether it's cause is a medical condition or partner's sexual identity.  The proposition stands or falls on the suggestion that medical incapacity to procreate in heterosexual  couples is by virtue of effect equivalent to lack of issue in same-sex couples. But that is most certainly an illogical way to argue.   On this test, one ahould be able to be married to a reclining chair.   

     That this motion is defective becomes instantly clear  when one considers the obverse situation, i.e. one in which both partners are procreatively healthy.   There of course, the reproductive inequality of the two types of relationships comes out clearly.  While heterosexual couples can procreate within the bond of marriage, exclusive of  the involvement of a third party (as required in monogamous marriage in Western society)  the same sex couples cannot and must - if they wish to claim parenthood - enter into contractual partnerships with outsiders to the marriage bond. 

The competent jurist would then have to answer the poignant questions of the state's  interest in the institution or semantics of marriage.  It seems absurd the think that the fathers of the Constitution would have thought of the opportunity to overcome natural reproductive defects and age limits in married couples as a pressing command to redefine the procreative union and biological kinship in favour of a legislated definition that seeks to obfuscate the natural basis of human families. Does the fact that infertile couples may adopt children in any way invalidate the finding that all children are born in a genetical join of a man and a woman.  Judge Scalia's question when it became unconstitutional to exclude gay people from the institution of marriage is very much at the cutting edge here.   

Does the state have then  any interest in recognizing marriage as a type of relationship capable of producing offspring exclusively within the union (, regardless of actual outcome) ?   Does the state have any interest in promoting the idea that children (if they are born) are born to biological parents who are married to each other? Does the state have any interest in promoting the idea that those parents care for their offspring ?  Does it benefit the state for the children to know and acknowledge both parents and their kinship ties ?  Have any of the answers to these questions substantially changed since 'We, the people' went out of the printer's office ?  I think not. 

Having said that I emphatically underwrite same-sex unions being recognized and registered as civil partnerships with rights of inheritance, proxy and tax benefits analogous to married couples.  That too is common sense to me.  It is just that we cannot change who we are and where we come from. The idea that somehow we can redefine our nature and invent for ourseves bonds that describe who we are as humans is as naive in its intent as it will be disastrous in its effects. 

Why We Need Capital Punishment

The following open letter was sent to Andrew Coyne in response to his June 12, 2001 column titled "Opposed: It weakens our collective safety", published by the National Post.  The letter was not published and I received no response from the columnist.  I am posting here as it provides good summary of why I support the intelligent use of capital punishment.
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Ottawa Jun 13, 2001

I have a long-standing intellectual interest in the subject of capital punishment and would like to comment on your June 12, 2001  column (Opposed: It weakens our collective safety) in the National Post.

 

First, let me make a personal observation on the heading chosen for your short essay. When I arrived in Canada thirty some years ago, I learned about the mystical belief of the locals in their gendarmes which struck me strange because where I came from the cops had generally bad reputation. The local lore which said that 'the Mounties always get their man' implied a sense of security about the country's law enforcement such that I had not known. The Mounties had exemplified professional state force, tough, implacable and yet disciplined and fair. 'Getting their man' did not imply that he was going to be hacked to pieces or even mistreated once they had him in custody. Their job was to deliver their man to the justice system. The people who were telling me about with pride about the Mounties were sighing, or flushed with anger when talking about the Liberal government which suspended executing the country's most depraved criminals. It seemed to me then as it seems to me now that for the common man or woman on the street having the death penalty on the books (and used, from time to time), confers a distinct sense of security. So, difficult as it may be for the pony-tailed lawyer or the psychiatrist with a facial tick to understand, the simple-minded folks understand justice as 'what comes around'. The most sobering comment about our collective psyche is that 78% of Americans supported the state euthanazing Timothy McVeigh.

To answer your 'important' question about the surgical needles which were used to kill Mr McVeigh: yes, you are probably right, they were sterilized. If that seems absurd to you, perhaps you should allow that the sterilization in this case was for the benefit of the staff administering the euthanasia. Strange that you would not think of that.

I have a problem with the train of your reasoning here. I am in favour of capital punishment but I belong to those who advocate a restricted use of it in exemplary cases of wanton destruction of life. I believe that the form of execution that MrVeigh underwent is the correct one, and that while the state has the obligation to execute death warrants for crimes such as his it also has the duty to do so in a most humane way at its disposal. I don't understand your complaint.

If it must, the state should dispatch the prisoner by inflicting minimum of physical suffering on him or her. This principle hes been scrupulously observed since the dawn of civil society. Inspired by the Enlightement philosophes, Catherine the Great prohibited the scourging of captured Emmelian Pugachev, her great rival and an exceptionally brutal mass murderer and terrorist. The chivalry codes, both Occidental and Oriental, expressly denied the knight 'the pleasure in killing'. It was an act of necessity, which should be executed without anger or glee. The code of honour also forbade the killing of fools. From this moral dictum the 'insanity plea' has arisen. Interestingly, it was first sucessfuly argued in England in a case of attempted regicide.

G.B.Shaw's view that capital punishment equals the murder it sanctions is obviously flawed both logically and morally. I have already observed that killing humans does not imply derogation of them as human beings. Indeed the law, in its painful slowness, is coming to realize that unauthorized euthanasia cannot be equated with murder, since murder implies hostility towards the victim and euthanasia does not. Whatever Dr Kworkian is, he is not a murderer. All cultures around the world recognized in the past the need for the state to kill dispassionately in order to prevent acts of spontaneous revenge which almost always carry a risk of escalating violence. On the moral side, I simply do not understand a posture which equates the act of lethal aggression with a desire for the destruction of the one who has inflicted it. The aggressor's act is that of volition, motivated specifically by malevolence, or reckless disregard for life. It is that act which has been "tabooed" by all moral codes. The Old Testament makes it clear that "Thou shalt not kill' means "woe to the aggressor !" (e.g.Exodus 21:12). In contrast, the state's lawful killing in response is a defensive measure, one uniquely concerned with discharging justice as a means of restoring peace in the community. An ancient legal principle states that the killing of a tyrant is not a crime. That would give the friends or kin of a slain victim the legal grounds to kill the perpetrator but these must be routinely ceded to the state, if a society is to remain civilized. The state then has an obligation to act on the complaint, i.e. to examine the act in order to determine if the offence was capital. If it decides beforehand that no matter what happened, a capital crime was not committed, then it is not a just state. As long as people kill each other, the state has a duty to consider a capital punishment an option. It should be used correctly, that is to say with restraint, but must be used for the system to retain credibility as an even-handed, competent arbiter.

In one of the most moving essays on capital punishment George Orwell observed a condemned prisoner nimbly side-stepping a puddle on his way to the gallows. The idea of killing a healthy human being, of course, can be maddening. I do not accept the argument which says that because capital punishment is non-reversible, it is unjust. We drive cars and fly planes knowing full well that we are taking risks with our lives. Yet the anguish of the condemned man needs to be grasped and contemplated, and the risks of inflicting such agonies on innocent people properly weighed. Such exercise will reduce the margin by which Justice prevails over Pity.

There is of course another, much more powerful element, that assures me that the pro-capital stance is moral and necessary. Strangely, important as the 'self-inclusive morality' in the debate is, it does not get discussed much. In saying that I believe in death penalty I am saying that if - God forbid - I ever was to kill unlawfully, then I know I could forfeit my own life. So, what I am saying is that I know that the life of another human is as precious as my own. In my stated belief in capital punishment then there is a pledge to respect human life and the collateral here is my own license to breathe. Now I often wonder how the abolitionist moralists fly past this one ! Help me out, will you ? Are you saying that you could never murder yourself, that there is no such possibility ? Or are you simply saying: 'you could not possibly do unto me as I would do unto others' ? Now, I would admit I am terribly mistaken if you can show me that this is not the ethical crux of the matter !

Confusion Reigns

In the good old days of the Cold War things were simpler. There were two superpowers each had enough nukes to wipe out each other, allies and the non-aligned fakers included, several times over. Noone doubted the reality of  MAD, a mutually assured destruction.  Everyone understood and was prepared to tolerate bad jokes, such as when Ronald Reagan in 1984 publicly announced he "outlawed Russia forever", or when Brezhnev told the visiting president Pompidou of France that he had "just destroyed Paris" after pressing a button on a panel at a space centre in Baikonur.   In neither case were there large demonstrations, and attacks on embassies with cries for the statesmen to be tried for crimes against humanity, or killed outright. Everyone understood they had the power to destroy the life on the planet. In that context everyone was relieved they were only kidding.  You might say that the context of a nuclear threat gave us a sense of reality which sorted out the substantive ideas in political speech from bad jokes. Even if the posturing was sometimes hostile, the politics of both sides were deeply rooted in the common interest of survival. 

     No such luck today. When ayatollah Khamenei or president Ahmanidejad threaten Israel with annihilation, it cannot be taken as a tasteless joke.  They are religious fanatics believing themselves to be have been appointed in a God-ordained commission to usher in the reign of the Mahdi. They live in the end of times and read the political events of the day as unravelling to fulfil prophecies of the Twelfth Imam's return. Their spat with Israel is not a regional rivalry like that of India and Pakistan. Since the revolution of 1979, Iran does not recognize Israel as a state.  Its leaders refer to a sitting member of the United Nations as a Zionist entity which must be destroyed.  Iran denies Israel the right to exist. The rhetoric duplicates Nasser's threats of 1963 which immediately preceded hostilities.  None of the bloggers scoffing at Netanyahu's UN address yesterday lives in Tel Aviv or Haifa. They can afford the luxury of waxing philosophic over the cartoonish shape of the bomb used by the Israeli PM to drive home his point. It's not their bacon that is going to get fried.  They are not within the range of the Shahab 3 missiles paraded through Tehran promising to wipe them off from history.

     In the blogosphere and the western MSM, the hostility towards Israel has never been greater.  It is now generally believed that if not for this shitty little country, we would live in a paradise on Earth. To such mindset,  it naturally appears that it is Bibi Netanyahu is a nuke-mongering maniac who wants to restore greater Israel from the Pyrenees to the Himalayas.  It is he who is crazy or wacky.  Justin Raimondo has convinced himself that Israel is just as medieval in its political system and world outlook as the ayatollahs.  In his idiocy, he thinks that the belief of some religious Jews in the imminent coming of the Messiah directs Israeli politics the same way that the theocratic regime manages the return of the Mahdi.  Somehow, the fact that in hundred-fifteen seat Knesset, the messianists seem to be terribly absent, doesn't seem to faze Raimondo. Shas, the strongest of Israel's religious parties (currently fifteen seats) and member of the Likud-led coalition in fact does not base its programme and politics in any way on religious speculations about the future. As for a Jewish state right to be where it is, Raimondo only needs to pickup a 101-history of the region, to grasp that there has been a Jewish presence there well before any other modern national entity such as the Palestinians.

Failure of US Foreign Policy in the Region 

    That Israel is a lynchpin of US foreign policy in the region cannot be a point of contention, if  the United States are to retain any influence in the Middle East. Israel as America most trusted ally must not be deprecated in the plain view of the fact that the existence of the Jewish state does not threaten anyone. The carefully staged laments over the mistreatment of the Palestinians, are in reality a smokescreen for the intent to annihilate Israel.  The Israelis know that they are not negotiating with an entity (or two) who are on the level and who have accepted the existence of Israel as a bona-fide state.  It is because of this that a political solution eludes the region.  One cannot accept to make deals with people who feel justified in double-dealing. There is no other reason that I can see for the failure of the peace process.  I am sure the Israelis would have found a solution to the offending settlements (as they had done in Sinai) and come to a reasonable terms on East Jerusalem (see eg here).   The Palestinians would have to waive the right of return (perhaps for compensation) which ought to be no problem for a party sincere about its intentions vis-a-vis its one-time adversary.  Problem is that currently is that any Palestinian politician sincerely wishing peace with Israel and open to realistic, mutually acceptable terms, is thereby signing his or her political death warrant.  

    The shift in the US standing in the conflict from Jimmy Carter to Barack Obama could be succintly described as the upgrade from chicken salad to chicken shit.  After Camp David and Carter managing to convince Egypt to normalize its relations with Israel only debacles followed. Khomeini was allowed to get away with humiliating the US internationally in 1979, and - unbelievably - in a brazen attack on the US peacekeepers in 1983 Beirut via Hezbollah.  That the US could not find a way to smash dead the vile bare-assed Tehran proxy in Lebanon and assert itself in the region via its democratic ally Israel (nota bene : at a time that the Soviet decay became manifest) will be the stuff of nightmares for true Americans in ages to come.  Over the circa thirty years the US foerign policy in the Middle East has become so aimless and incoherent and plain dumb that it will take a miracle to put it back together again.  I am saying that in the view that the political prostitutes in Washington who used to do the bidding of US Steel or General Motors might these day work for clients in the Chinese Politburo and the members of the Saudi royal family who are not overtly hostile. I may not be the greatest fan of Michael Moore but I found his account of Bush and prince Bandar dining two nights after September 11, 2001 a good summary of the morass and plutocratic corruption the US has become. 

   It has also become obvious over the last presidential term that Barack Obama is just as clueless as his predecessors.  Not only the rhetoric with leftist shibboleths of peace-loving, gay-loving, Netanyahu-noise-ignoring, anti-Islamophobic America solve nothing, they only further exarcebate the problem.  As the Australian historian Keith Windschuttle observed in mid-nineties,

[The cultural relativists] endorse as legitimate other cultures that do not return the compliment. ...Islam will have no truck with relativism of any kind. The devout are totally confident of the universalism of their own beliefs which derive from dictates of God, an absolute authority who is external to the world and its cultures.  They regard a position such as the post-modern cultural relativism as profoundly mistaken and , moreover, debasing. Relativism devalues their faith because it reduces it to merely one of many equally valid systems of meaning. So, entailed within cultural relativism is first, an endorsement of absolutisms that deny it, and, second, a demeaning attitude to cultures it claims to respect.   (in Killing History, Free Press, Toronto, p 272)

President Obama does not know this. This is why he tries to placate the Muslim angry mobs all over the world, and the politics that feed off them.  It will not work. Appeals to logic assume that the addressees understand, or that at any rate, are willing to underwrite, the sentiments of the U.S. Constitution which places "We the people" above any authority, secular or religious. Muslims will not do that. They will not do that because ~80% of mosques in the United States are preaching a seditious, radical version of Islam which denies the very liberty under which American Muslims are allowed to practice alongside other religions. It will not work because the radical Islamists the world over sense a fatal weakness in the foreign policies of the United States, above all an intelligent articulation of self-interest in a way that is understandable to them.

If Obama is serious about what he said in the UN the other day, he will get together with Congress on a legislation prohibiting the preaching of doctrines on US soil which advocate a single ideology or religious schemas replacing traditional American governance .  There are strong constitutional grounds for such a bill.  Muslims understand well the term "sedition".  It also needs to be made clear - crystally clear - Israel is the closest ally in the Middle East !  If a Turkey ship runs a Gaza blockade, US will have to make nasty noise to make sure Erdogan gets the message.  Forget about harrassing Putin; he is not a disguised Soviet imperialist. Take off the ABM-shield from Eastern Europe in exchange for his agreement on containing the Tehran lunatics. The Russians are more worried about them than they let on.   But nothing that the next prez does abroad will resonate unless he and the Congress shows willingness to deal with the problem on the home front first ! 

Cui Bono ?

        Two nights ago, CNN published the picture of Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, which I presume was out of a deeply-felt sense of public duty, in order to prevent an indiscriminate massacre at the filmmaker's house.  It is obviously necessary to publish the pictures of those who are under multiple fatwas, threats and summons by foreign jurisdictions lest innocent people and American diplomats get hurt by the Muslim multitudes and its legally appointed leaders. Evidently  CNN doesn't want Americans who did not have anything to do with DaVideo to suffer through a case of mistaken identity.  By publishing the pictures of the culprits, and disclosong the hideouts of the miscreants who dare to mock Islam and its prpphet they ensure that in the righteous indignation of one and a half billion offended, the wrong people do not get beheaded. Makes sense, right ?

       No it does not make sense to someone who understands the word civilized.  The media (not sure it was CNN first) did reveal the identity of  Nakoula as the producer and director of The Innocence of Muslims. Fine, so far so good. Not so fine was the outing of his address. It added nothing to the story.  But the CNN's self-advertized caper removing Nakoula's burqa for all to see his face is nothing if not bad and incivil.  Surely, the news network's people know full well that this news increases the probabibility of a lethal assault on him. In view of this knowledge, the publishing of the picture was motivated by malice.

      There is very little that I agree with in the commentaries on the video, its intents and effects.  Both the President of the United States and the Secretary of State denounced the film as an attempt to "denigrate religious beliefs of others",  a phrase which more or less describes an offence under the present Turkish criminal code.  In view of this to say in the next breath that nothing justifies the attacks on US diplomats and our sovereign territory, is like saying 'but we protest being beaten too much !'   The Left generally sees the incident as a loony conspiracy of the Right to unseat Obama in  the upcoming election by stirring up trouble with Muslims.  Max Blumenthal writing in the Guardian professes to belief in a mystical connection of Nakoula to Anders Breivik, via the known "Islamophobes"  of the ultra-conservative strand of the American Copts, and the omnipresent spectre of the two-headed avenger of the Twin Towers, Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer.  Alas, Blumenthal thesis of a American Coptic conspiracy to destabilize "post-Mubarak Egypt" is now in tatters as the chief logistical support in the melodrama, Joseph Nasrallah, revealed he was deceived by Nakoula about the project and pointed to the clean record of his org, Media for Christ, in respecting Islam's religious symbols.
   
     For its part, most of the commentary on the Right is stuck on the image of Nakoula as a martyr for free speech unjustly harrassed by authorities.  Pamela Geller expressed the opinion that if Nakoula is sent to prison for violating terms of his parole he will be a political prisoner.  The ever-clever Mark Steyn noted that Nakoula was rushed to a midnight interview mere 72 hours after Morsi demanded the arrest of the film principals, he was 'rounded up at midnight by brownshirted men [spare me !] for making a movie that embarrasses El Presidente'.   Hell no ! Mr. Nakoula is a convicted meth manufacturer and fraudster, who is on parole. His parole contract prohibits him, among other things, to use false identities. He used a new identity of Sam Bacile and claimed to be an Israeli Jew for the purposes of this movie. If I understand correctly he still denies he is Bacile, even though this moniker resembles half a dozen other aliases he used and even a portion of his real name (Basseley). So if this guy violated his parole he should be in jail, irrespective what Mohammed Morsi wants or David Horowitz does not want done.  Mr. Nakoula has the right to free speech, true. His rights however do not free him from his legal obligations just because someone thinks he is a hero.

     It is interesting to observe that because of the opposing partisan obsessions the real story of Nakoula is not getting out.  The single most important factual item about his project is that he is the only one known to be responsible for the content of the video (purporting to be a trailer of a movie). None of the other named actors, and promoters of the drama had any input into writing or editing or creating Arabic subtitles or posting the trailer on Youtube.  On what we know, the movie appears to be Nakoula's own idea and product. He is the architect, editor, and production manager.  He obtained the logistical support of Nasrallah's organization under false pretenses, and sought support for his earth-shattering portrait of Mohammed from bumbling bugs like Terry Jones only when the deed was done.   To this advanced date of  demolition of US diplomatic facilities around the world, no-one has yet had the idea to inquire into the financing of his pathetic amateur movie.  How strange !  How strange no-one has yet asked (or at any rate, informed us) if it is true that imaginary Jew Bacile had a hundred Jewish sponsors doling out five million dollars as Nakoula apparently told Steve Klein.  Huh !  Surely there would be some records for revenue sharing in the anticipated world-wide distribution of the smash hit. No ?

      You see, what gets me about this is not as much that there are no hundred Jewish investors in the film. (I'll bet you my life savings on that.) What gets me is that no-one sees that the fictional Sam Bacile and his hundred Zionist mischiefmakers look suspiciously like a clumsy conspiracy ripoff of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion which we know enjoys undying popularity in the Muslim world, especially in Egypt.  Now the question of all questions here is : cui bono ?  Who would find political comfort in an incendiary anti-Mohammed collection of skits which obligingly identifies Jews, Copts and Terry Jones as a stand-in for all Catholics and Protestants as perpetrators of a heinous crime against Islam on the territory of the U.S.A. ? Any ideas ?  

       I don't say that I know the answer to that question. I simply want the media asking it.  Maybe, Mr. Nakoula is just a lone straggler, whose idiocies are innocent of a design and unconnected to anyone. But maybe, just maybe, he is touch too dumb to be so clever that he or his handlers can play everyone for fool in his latest fraud.

      Now if you thinking what I am thinking: i.e. that The Innocence of Muslims is a nasty provocation by the Muslim Brotherhood, do not be scared off by their love for the prophet. It would not be an impediment to a devout Muslim to orchestrate hatefests of Jews, Copts and Americans any more than for the Nazis to use Van der Lubbe to accuse his fellow communists of burning down the Reichstag.