The Search for a Progressive Reagan. By Chrystia Freeland.

The Search for a Progressive Reagan. By Chrystia Freeland. Politico, July 15, 2014.

There’s Something Very Ugly In This Rage Against Israel. By Brendan O’Neill.

There’s something very ugly in this rage against Israel. By Brendan O’Neill. spiked, July 15, 2014.

Is the Left anti-Semitic? Sadly, it is heading that way. By Brendan O’Neill. The Telegraph, July 27, 2014.

O’Neill [rage against Israel]:

In the virtual world, too, the line between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism has become blurrier during this latest Gaza conflict. When a Danish journalist published a photo of what he claimed to be a group of Israelis in Sderot eating popcorn while watching Israeli missiles rain on Gaza, it became a focal point of fury with Israelis – every newspaper published the pic and Amnesty tweeted about it – and it generated the expression of some foul views. Israelis (not Israel in this case) are “disgraceful”, “murderous, racist”, “inhuman scum”, “pigs”, etc, said angry tweeters. It wasn’t long before actual bona fide anti-Semites were getting in on this rage against Israeli people, with one racist magazine publishing the Sderot picture under the headline “Rat-Faced Israeli Jews Cheer and Applaud Airstrikes on Gaza Strip.” The speed with which what purported to be an anti-war sentiment aimed at Israel became a warped fury with Israeli people, and the ease with which demonstrations against Israeli militarism became slurs against or physical attacks on Jews, suggests there is something extremely unwieldy about fashionable anti-Israel sentiment, something that allows it to slip, sometimes quite thoughtlessly, from being a seemingly typical anti-war cry to being something much uglier, prejudiced and ancient in nature.

Such is the visceral nature of current anti-Israel sentiment that not only is the line between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism becoming harder to see – so is the line between fact and fiction. As the BBC has reported, the wildly popular hashtag #GazaUnderAttack, which has been used nearly 500,000 times over the past eight days to share shocking photographs of the impact of Israel’s assault on Gaza, is extremely unreliable. Some of the photos being tweeted (and then retweeted by thousands of other people) are actually from Gaza in 2009. Others show dead bodies from conflicts in Iraq and Syria. Yet all are posted with comments such as, “Look at Israel’s inhumanity.” It seems the aim here is not to get to the truth of what is happening in Gaza but simply to rage, to yell, to scream, to weep about what Israel is doing (or not doing, as the case may be), and the more publicly you weep, the better, for it allows people to see how sensitive you are to Israeli barbarism. It’s about unleashing some visceral emotion, which means such petty things as accuracy and facts count for little: the expression of the emotion is all that matters, and any old photo of a dead child from somewhere in the Middle East – Iraq, Syria, Lebanon – will suffice as a prop for one’s public emotionalism.

How has this happened? How has opposing Israeli militarism gone from being one facet of a broader anti-imperialist position, as it was in the 1980s, to being the main, and sometimes only, focus of those who claim to be anti-war? Why does being opposed to Israel so often and so casually tip over into expressions of disgust with the Israeli people and with the Jews more broadly? It’s because, today, rage with Israel is not actually a considered political position. It is not a thought-through take on a conflict zone in the Middle East and how that conflict zone might relate to realpolitik or global shifts in power. Rather, it has become an outlet for the expression of a general feeling of fury and exhaustion with everything - with Western society, modernity, nationalism, militarism, humanity. Israel has been turned into a conduit for the expression of Western self-loathing, Western colonial guilt, Western self-doubt. It has been elevated into the most explicit expression of what are now considered to be the outdated Western values of militaristic self-preservation and progressive nationhood, and it is railed against and beaten down for embodying those values. It is held responsible, not simply for repressing the Palestinian desire for statehood, but for continuing to pursue virtues that we sensible folk in the rest of the West have apparently outgrown and for consequently being the source of war and terrorism not only in the Middle East but pretty much everywhere. A poll of Europeans discovered that most now consider Israel to be the key source of global instability.

This is where we can see what the new anti-Zionism shares in common with the old anti-Semitism: both are about finding one thing in the world, whether it’s a wicked state or a warped people, against which the rest of us might rage and pin the blame for every political problem on Earth.

The Palestinian Blessing. By Bret Stephens.

The Palestinian Blessing. By Bret Stephens. Wall Street Journal, July 14, 2014.

Stephens:

Israel’s enemies deliver an unwitting favor. 


From time to time Israel and her supporters should give thanks for having as enemies the Palestinians and their supporters.

As of midday Monday, Hamas had fired more than 1,000 missiles at Israel, aimed more or less indiscriminately, without inflicting a single Israeli fatality. It isn’t every enemy whose ideological fanaticism, however great, is exceeded by its military and technological incompetence.

It’s true that much of the incoming fire has been shot down mid-flight by Israel’s Iron Dome, but Hamas must have seen that coming since the defense system was first deployed during the last round of fighting in 2012. It’s as if the French had concluded from the Battle of Agincourt that the English long bow wasn’t as effective as advertised and would surely fail against a more determined cavalry charge.

Alongside Hamas in Gaza there is the rump regime of Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank. Mr. Abbas is supposed to be a bystander in this conflict. But he made his sympathies known when, within a day or two of the fighting and with fewer than 50 Palestinian fatalities, he accused Israel of “genocide” and “war against the Palestinian people as a whole.”

“Shall we recall Auschwitz?” he added.

I sometimes wonder whether supporters of the Palestinian cause—at least those capable of intellectual, if not moral, embarrassment—cringe a little at the rhetorical flourish. Bashar Assad, in whose court Palestinian leaders bowed and scraped for a decade before the current uprising, used chemical weapons against the Palestinian refugee town of Yarmouk a year ago and then starved out the remaining residents. More than a quarter-million Palestinians living in Syria for decades have also been made refugees by Mr. Assad’s assaults.

Yet last month Mr. Abbas congratulated Mr. Assad on his re-election: “Your election to the presidency of the Syrian Arab Republic guarantees Syria’s unity and sovereignty,” the Palestinian president groveled, “and starts a countdown to the end of Syria’s crisis and its war against terrorism.”

This detail, reported by AFP, seems to have escaped mainstream attention, though it remains a useful reminder of just who—and what—Mr. Abbas is.

Similarly with pro-Palestinian demonstrators marching in the civilized nations. In Paris on Sunday, one such group of demonstrators tried to lay siege to a synagogue “with bats and chairs,” according to the Associated Press, trapping 150 Jewish congregants inside until police could rescue them. A day earlier, a firebomb was thrown at a synagogue in a Paris suburb. At yet another French protest there were calls for the “slaughter of the Jews.” In Seattle, a Voices for Palestine rally posted signs reading “Zionist Israel=Nazi Germany.” In Frankfurt, protesters held signs reading “You Jews are Beasts.” Police lent the protesters a loudspeaker, ostensibly to “de-escalate the situation,” according to the Jerusalem Post.

Maybe the Presbyterian Church, USA, which last month voted to divest from companies doing business with Israel, will issue a statement of concern. But don’t count on it.

All of which, as I say, is a blessing for Israel and her supporters.

If you must have a nemesis, better it be a stupid one. If your adversary has an undeserved reputation for moderation and sincerity, better that he should give his own extremism and hypocrisy away. If you are going to be the object of mass protests and calumny, better to be hated by the worst than by the best. Israel’s enemies continuously indict themselves, whether or not the rest of the world has the wit to see it.

What if it were otherwise? It has always been something of a surprise to me that Israel’s enemies and critics have usually been too consumed by their own hatred to spot, or exploit, the Jewish state’s most obvious weakness. This is not the narrowness of its borders, or the fractiousness of its politics, or its vulnerability to atomic attack, or this or that ticking demographic bomb, whether of the Palestinian, Israeli-Arab or ultra-Orthodox variety.

The real weakness is a certain kind of vanity that confuses stainlessness with virtue, favors moral self-regard over normal self-interest, and believes in politics as an exercise not in power but in self-examination. People, and nations, with such attitudes cannot be beaten militarily. But they can easily—too easily—be shamed. Witness the outpouring of national self-reproach following this month’s murder of a Palestinian teenager by Jewish assailants. The killing was appalling, but it took Hamas’s missiles to prevent it from turning into an excruciating morality play.

It may someday be that Palestinians will wise up; that the next intifada, should it come, will be Gandhian in its methods and philosophy; that the next Palestinian leader will be in the mold of Vaclav Havel, not Fidel Castro. In the face of that kind of movement, Israeli resistance to a Palestinian state would crumble.

But that’s not the direction in which Palestine is going. Every Hamas missile and every barbaric protest is a reminder that the supreme purpose of Israel is to defend its people, not flatter them.

Islamist Jew-Haters and Their Leftist Enablers: “The Jews are Beasts.” By William A. Jacobson.

Islamist Jew-haters and their leftist enablers: “The Jews are Beasts.” By William A. Jacobson. Legal Insurrection, July 15, 2014.

Shocking anti-Semitic hatefest in downtown Seattle. By Michael Behar. The Mike Report, July 13, 2014. 

Anti-Semites Hold Hateful Demonstration in Seattle; Pro-Israel Rallies Disrupted in Los Angeles, Boston. The Algemeiner, July 14, 2014. 

A demonstration for Palestine in Seattle. Video. nader ali kaifa, July 12, 2014. YouTube. 




BDS and the Future of Israel-Palestine, 6/20/14 Seattle. Video. Todd Boyle, June 24, 2014. YouTube.

Rana Baker Justifies Palestinian Terrorism as Mere “Anti-Colonialist Counter-Discourse.” By the Elder of Ziyon.

Arab writer justifies Palestinian terrorism as mere “anti-colonialist counter-discourse.” Elder of Ziyon, July 14, 2014.

Rejecting victimhood: The case for Palestinian resistance. By Rana Baker. Open Democracy, July 14, 2014.

Finding my way to Palestine through narrative. By Rana Baker. The Electronic Intifada, August 15, 2013.

Supporting Terrorism and Bigotry at the Electronic Intifada: Anti-Israel Activists Thrilled by Abduction of Israeli Teens. By Petra Marquardt-Bigman. The Algemeiner, June 15, 2014. 


The Elder: 

Sometimes, pseudo-intellectual haters of Israel use their pretentiousness to justify the most heinous crimes. 

Introducing Rana Baker.

Baker writes regularly for Electronic Intifada, and she has also written for The Guardian. When the three Israeli teens were abducted, she gloated.

This article by Baker is in Open Democracy:

I wonder whether, when the settler-colonial army of Israel is pounding Gaza, Palestinians should grab guitars, pianos, and white ribbons, look up at their oppressors flying over their heads in apaches and F16s, and sing a lullaby of peace. Perhaps, then, we can impress Middle East “experts” and “non-violent resistance” – mind you, I am using the V word – butterflies. I wonder, moreover, what authority, defined by what experience, entitles these experts and butterflies to ask us, the Palestinians, to put down our arms. Nonsense.

. . . Resistance rockets fired from the Gaza Strip provide a necessary counter-discourse. The Israeli Jewish public must understand that there shall be no security so long as they do not turn their anger and frustration at their very supremacist privilege and ideological system which is embodied in the Israeli government, left-wing, centrist, or right-wing. No one is asking them to leave, but they must accept Palestinian resistance insofar as they accept the arrogance which characterises the Zionist ideology. The radical potential of Palestinian rockets, of sirens going off, lies in these rockets’ ability to disrupt a system of privilege which Israeli Jews enjoy at the expense of colonised and displaced Palestinians. Rockets, in other words, are a radical declaration of existence and unmediated expression of self-determination.

 . . . Israel was born in May 1948 after a mass wave of ethnic cleansing which led to the expulsion of more than half the native Palestinian population. This is the aggression to which every Palestinian rocket, demonstration, and burned tire, is a response. Until Palestine is liberated, and by Palestine I mean historical Palestine, Palestinian resistance cannot be expected to wane. To be clear, Palestinians fire rockets into what belongs to them in the first place.

There is a lot more nonsense in the article, but this is enough to demonstrate the lengths some people will go to in order to justify the rabid antisemitism that the Arab world has towards Jews – which is the real root cause of the conflict.

To perverts like Baker, terrorism is moral, and the only self-determination that means anything is that of a newly-minted people whose existence is impossible to find in any literature that is over a century old. Jews, of course, aren’t a people at all.

Baker’s invocation of “historic Palestine,” whose borders were drawn by her hated colonial powers, proves as well as anything that she is not really interested in justice or self-determination – she’s interested in only the land that happens to be controlled by Jews. The complete silence of these supposed ideologues regarding any part of Transjordan is all the proof you need that their agenda isn't as pure as they pretend.

But this essay is more than just about Baker's hypocrisy.

Rana Baker is creating and pushing her own, new model of morality, where Palestinians - and only Palestinians – do not have to adhere to any laws, ethics or standards. 

Once you justify terror rockets in whatever bizarre and disgusting worldview you have, you justify everything. Arabs can rape Israeli Jewish women for the cause. Gazans can strap bombs to newborn babies and throw them over the fence. Hamas is allowed to place Arab women and children in mortal danger in the hope that Israel will be blamed. (Oh, right, they already do that.)

This is the perverted moral universe that Rana Baker is advocating.

Not surprisingly, it is the exact same moral universe that Hamas and Islamic Jihad operate in. Just they use the Koran to come up with their justification, and Baker uses a twisted concept of liberal values like “self-determination” and “anti-colonialism.” It doesn’t matter – because the justification isn’t important, only the results are. And both Baker and Hamas want a lot of dead Jews.

If Jews who believe that the land belongs to them would adopt Baker’s mindset, then flattening Gaza is not only allowed, but morally necessary. Israel’s morals interfere with Baker’s morals? Well, too bad, she made the rules. Now that anyone can do anything they want if they consider themselves oppressed, we can dispense with such irritating constructs as international law or the laws of armed conflict or The Golden Rule. Baker justifies living in a post-moral world.

Not that she would admit that. She believes that her cause is unique and only Palestinians can act in any manner they choose in order to take away Jewish human rights. She is advocating a form of Palestinian supremacy, where the rules that apply to the rest of the world do not apply to Palestinians, and anything goes.

If a Zionist Jew would write essays using the exact same language justifying terror against Palestinian Arab civilians as a necessary part of their right to self-determination, he or she would (rightly) be called racists, while Baker’s paean to the beauty of terrorism is considered merely “anti-colonialist.” You see, after decades of Palestinians believing that they do have a unique set of rules that apply only to them, many in the world actually start to believe it.

Isn’t that interesting?

Consistency in rhetoric isn’t important to Baker and her ilk, except for in a single, narrow dimension. The only moral or rhetorical consistency for people like Baker is that, to them, the existence of Jews maintaining anything other than their natural status of dhimmis is unnatural and must be fought, with whatever means is necessary: rockets, suicide bombs, nuclear weapons, or tendentious essays that give the Jew-haters a means to justify their sickening immorality. As one cheerleading commenter writes:

Rana, I wonder if you realise what brilliant piece you just penned down. As Arundhati Roy wrote “Gandhi get your gun” in Walking With The Comrades I say keep those rockets from Gaza coming and let the siren echo in every stolen corner, square, street, park and home.

Baker provides the veneer of intellectualism to justify terror for those who are still uncomfortable with the concept. The murderous rampages in Paris and Frankfurt are a natural result of the sickening supremacism of Rana Baker – because if proudly targeting civilians is a moral obligation, then so is attacking Jews wherever they might be.

What is scary is that so many so-called “progressives” would never think about calling Baker what she is: a disgusting cheerleader for murder.

(h/t Geuzen1)

UPDATE: I forgot that I fisked her before.

UPDATE 2: Best comment on the thread at Open Democracy from Podein: (h/t Alexi)

If rockets are the way Palestinians engage in discourse, then Apaches, gunships and assassinations are simply the way Israelis correct their grammar.

The One-State Solution Is Almost Here. By David P. Goldman.

Between the Settlers and the Unsettlers, the One-State Solution Is on Our Doorstep. By David P. Goldman. Tablet, July 14, 2014.

Netanyahu finally speaks his mind. By David Horovitz. The Times of Israel, July 13, 2014. 

Netanyahu: Gaza conflict proves Israel can’t relinquish control of West Bank. The Times of Israel, July 11, 2014.

Does Obama Want 20 More Gazas? By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, July 11, 2014.

Our EuroPresident. By Matthew Continetti.

Our EuroPresident. By Matthew Continetti. National Review Online, July 12, 2014.

Is Obama’s Foreign Policy Too European? By Clemens Wergin. New York Times, July 8, 2014.

Palestinian Delusions Fuel Conflict. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

Palestinian Delusions Fuel Conflict. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, July 13, 2014.

Tobin: 

As the current round of fighting between Hamas and Israel concludes its first week today, no resolution is in sight. Israel’s government has made it clear that its goal is nothing more than “sustainable quiet” from Gaza but Hamas sees no reason to stop since the suffering they have created on both sides of the border has worked to their advantage. The reason for this has nothing to do with military technology and everything to do with the peculiar culture of Palestinian politics.

To an objective observer this makes no sense. Hamas set events in motion last month when some of its operatives kidnapped and murdered three Israeli teenagers and then escalated the conflict by shooting several hundred rockets into the Jewish state from its Gaza stronghold. The result of these actions would all seem to undermine Hamas’s credibility vis-à-vis its Fatah rivals.

The rocket offensive has clearly failed on a military level. To shoot hundreds of rockets at cities for a week and to fail to score one hit or kill a single person—and killing civilians is exactly the goal of Hamas’s effort—can’t be represented as anything but a flop. At the same time, Hamas has not demonstrated any ability to deter or defend against Israeli precision attacks on Hamas targets.

All this would seem to add up to a perfect formula for a quick cease-fire. The Israelis want to end the attacks from Gaza and its government has no appetite for a ground invasion. Hamas could just declare a victory of sorts and preserve what is left of their arsenal since replacing their stocks of Iranian rockets won’t be so easy this time due to the closure of the border with Egypt. But there appears to be no sign of the “sustainable quiet” Israel craves of even a temporary cease-fire. The reason for that is that Hamas believes it is winning.

How so? The answer comes from the people of Gaza. They have born the brunt of Israeli counterattacks while the leaders and fighters of Hamas and their weapons stockpile remains safe in shelters underneath the strip. But the sight of rockets being launched into Israel by the hundreds has bolstered the Islamist group’s political stock. They know that Hamas TV claims of Israeli casualties are lies. But nonetheless, the idea that Jews in Tel Aviv are being forced to take shelter even if the rockets never find their targets is a big boost to their morale.

Scratch beneath the surface and actually read or listen to the comments of Gazans and you see why Hamas’s popularity always goes up whenever there is fighting.

It’s not because the Israelis are being particularly awful to the Palestinians. People in Gaza know that Hamas is begging for Israeli retaliation and understand why the rockets are being launched from neighborhoods packed with civilians or in the vicinity of schools, mosques, and hospitals. They know that if instead of facing an opponent like the IDF that strives to minimize civilian casualties they were up against an adversary as ruthless as Hamas, the price they would pay for the attempt to terrorize the Israeli people would be far higher. After all, the Assad regime and its Islamist opponents have managed to slaughter more than 160,000 Syrians in the last three years and few in the West have even raised an eyebrow about that, let alone be motivated to action to stop that war.

The Palestinians have embraced the suffering that Hamas has brought upon them because they think being set up to be killed is their part in the war against the Jewish state. Read this quote from Al-Ahkbar:

Undefeated, the 43 year-old man told Al-Akhbar “this is the price that we have to pay; Haifa cannot be shelled and the Resistance men cannot sneak into Ashkelon to clash with the occupation soldiers if we do not present martyrs and casualties… all our wounds do not matter it if they can shorten the distance to Palestine.”

When Palestinians speak of Hamas actions they refer to it as “resistance against the occupation.” But by that they are not referring to any occupation of Gaza. Israel evacuated every single soldier, settlement, and civilian from Gaza in 2005. Nor are they talking about the West Bank. When they speak of “occupation” they are referring to pre-June 1967 Israel. They genuinely think of their war with Israel as an anti-colonial struggle in which the “colonists”—the Jews—will someday be forced to leave or die, as Hamas’s charter promises. Indeed, the conceit of that piece in Al-Akhbar is that even if bomb shelters were available to Palestinians (and as I wrote last night, they exist but they’re used for Hamas and their bombs, not civilians), they wouldn’t use them because they see their spilled blood as a contribution to the cause of reversing the verdict of 1948, i.e. the “Palestine” that the Gaza man is talking about.

The problem with attempts to understand this conflict is that all too much effort is spent on unraveling the minutiae of recent events and almost none is directed at trying to understand the motivations of Hamas and its supporters. If Palestinian statehood as part of a two-state solution were their goal, they could have realized it 15 years ago. Palestinian leaders, including the allegedly moderate Mahmoud Abbas, have rejected four such offers in that time. Instead, they have mindlessly preferred to refuse to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders are drawn and to insist on the so-called “right of return” for the descendants of the 1948 refugees (even though nearly as many Jews were expelled or fled their homes in the Arab and Muslim world after the same events) that is a prescription for the end of Israel.

Hamas makes no secret of its goal: the elimination of the Jewish state and the expulsion or murder of its people. Their rockets won’t get them closer to that objective. Nor will the spilled blood of Palestinians in Gaza. But it is the refusal of the Palestinian people to put aside the delusion that this is a desirable or achievable purpose that fuels Hamas’s popularity and perpetuates the conflict. Whether or not there is a cease-fire this week, it won’t really end until the Palestinians and their foreign supporters concede that history won’t be reversed and get on with the business of building their own lives in a world in which Israel’s existence is permanent.

British Guilt Over Jihadis Is for Dummies. By Janet Daley.

British guilt over jihadis is for dummies. By Janet Daley. The Telegraph, July 12, 2014.

Daley: 

In order to persuade young Muslims that their allegiance belongs here, this country will have to question its own casual self-loathing.

In the midst of the deeply unfunny news coverage of the two young British jihadi volunteers who were arrested on terror charges when they arrived back from Syria, there was one moment of comic absurdity. It seems that before setting off on their mission, Mohammed Ahmed and Yusuf Sarwar found it necessary to place orders with Amazon for those invaluable scholarly treatises, Islam for Dummies, The Koran for Dummies and Arabic for Dummies. Hilarity aside, there is something important to be noted here.

First, these 22-year-olds were obviously not the products of some extreme mosque which had drilled them in Islamist fundamentalism. In fact, they were so untutored in the religion to which they were nominally affiliated that they had to equip themselves with a crash course in its basic principles. Nor had they come from families which were inclined to endorse their terrorist fantasies. Indeed, their own parents were so horrified when they learned of the men’s activities that they turned them in to the police. So we need to ask, as a matter of urgency, where it came from, this bizarre determination to be inducted into a campaign of seditious murder that (we can assume from their decision to plead guilty to the terror charges) they fully intended to bring home with them. What causes young men to risk their own lives, and those of who knows how many others, for a cause about which they know so little that they have to mug it up before they catch the plane?

Actually, this kind of thing is not unprecedented: romantic death cults involving nihilistic violence and garbled philosophy have a well-established attraction for the young. (Even suicide is a form of power, to choose your own death being the ultimate expression of omnipotence.) What is peculiarly dangerous about this version is that it has a global power base. This is not a handful of neo-Nazi fantasists plotting in a suburban garage, or a clique of misfit teenagers arming themselves for a school shooting spree. There are international, well-funded movements churning out professional recruitment videos designed specifically to invade the daydreams of the credulous Ahmeds and Sarwars of Britain and lure them into annihilation.

There has come to be something of a consensus that this is a problem that only the moderate Muslim community can deal with through its own moral authority. But parents as courageous and civically responsible as these two would-be jihadis had are not going to be ten-a-penny. And it is unfair for the society at large to wash its hands and leave it all to the families and the neighbours, most of whom are as new to all this as we are. If too many young Britons are drawn to a hateful, barely understood dogma because it seems to bring some magical sense of belonging, then something is clearly wrong with their lives in this country. There is apparently nothing on offer here that can compete with the promise of exaltation that is available for the price of a plane ticket.

Contrary to all the educational shibboleths of our time, young men are motivated by aggression and power: their dreams are of glorious triumph over rivals. If they are denied these things – even in the ritualised forms that used to be provided by an education system that understood how dangerous male adolescence was – then they will seek them wherever they can be found. Gang violence, with its criminal initiation rites, or Muslim fanaticism can fill a void, offering not just a licence for brutality but for banding together into hostile tribes. There was a time – before characteristically male behaviour was devalued in favour of the female virtues of empathy and conciliation – when these proclivities were dealt with quite effectively by combative team sports and military cadet corps. Institutionalised aggression was supervised by adult authority until the young men grew up and became responsible for their own impulses.

But now that the Western powers are clearly withdrawing from the global policing business, what point could there be in the quasi-military training which provided such a useful outlet for youthful male energy? As the great Atlantic nations recede into domesticity and quieter recreations, what are young men likely to do with their ungovernable instincts? Look abroad, presumably – to somewhere with which they can feel some plausible identification, even if that relationship does require a bit of homework. And that path is made particularly compelling by the self-flagellating guilt with which Britain (and much of the West) regards its own history. Most of what is taught in school about the British past is designed to induce remorse – over colonialism, imperial exploitation and vainglorious nationalism. It is not utterly beyond the bounds of reason to conclude from this, if you are searching for a cause, that you are morally justified in avenging the historic wrongs that were inflicted on your race.

There has been – until very recently – a carefully considered educational policy of encouraging pride in minority ethnic identity. The assumption was that pressuring pupils to be wholeheartedly British would be not just “racist” (because it implied that British was better) but disorienting to the child who needed to identify with “his own community”. So here we are – with a generation of British-born young people eager to identify with a community that it isn’t really “theirs” at all, and which they know so little about that they need to study the crib notes in order to fit into it.

All of this coincides rather too neatly with the decline of the West as a global force. That retreat from power has an impact on this phenomenon on more than one level. It downgrades our effectiveness in dealing with the foreign forces who are seducing these recruits. Our wilful helplessness in the tumultuous throes of Middle East power play, and apparent indifference to the suffering being inflicted in Syria by the Assad regime, must make it so much easier to see our side as defunct and defeated. We must seem to be conniving at our own humiliation – almost to be suggesting that we are the losing side now and that we deserve everything that militant Islam can dish out.

If we expect law-abiding, loyal Muslims to handle this problem, we are going to have to give them a lot more help. The parents and the mosques and the communities can condemn as much as they like – and to their credit they have done a great deal of that over recent months. But these are displaced people themselves who need support in order to understand the values of British culture. In order to persuade their sons (and some of their daughters too) that their allegiance belongs to this country, Britain will have to question its own casual self-loathing. And the West will need to consider the larger consequences of its cynical isolationism.

John Kerry’s War. By Evelyn Gordon.

John Kerry’s War. By Evelyn Gordon. Commentary, July 9, 2014.

Kerry’s Mideast “Failure” Was a Success. By Shmuel Rosner. New York Times, May 9, 2014. Also here.

Syria: Losing the Lonely War. By Lauren Wolfe.

Losing the Lonely War. By Lauren Wolfe. Foreign Policy, July 8, 2014. Also here.

“Take your portion”: A victim speaks out about rape in Syria. By Lauren Wolfe. Women Under Siege, June 18, 2013. Also at The Atlantic.


Wolfe (Lonely War): 

Suicide is becoming a crisis among people affected by Syria’s protracted civil war – and no one is talking about it.

Her hands showed every tendon, and her arms were like matchsticks. With a grayish tint to her face, Alma Abdulrahman, 27, spoke from a hospital bed in Amman, Jordan, one year ago about the torture and rape she’d endured at what she said were the hands of the Syrian government. Paralyzed from her diaphragm down, she spoke in an exhausted voice over Skype to me in New York last June.

She described being stuffed into a tire and beaten, being drugged and sexually assaulted twice a day while passing in and out of consciousness, and being whipped with a wire during two separate detention periods that lasted each about a month. As she did, Abdulrahman wavered between anger, despair, and a resolve to speak: “You know, these are things no one talks about but I’m going to share them with you because I want the whole world to listen and see.”

Having joined the Free Syrian Army early in the revolution, Abdulrahman said she rose to the rank of battalion commander, becoming the rare woman on the front lines, overseeing about 15 men. Paralysis came after her second detention, when a soldier struck her in the neck with a rifle at a regime checkpoint. She told me she'd killed at least nine men.

“If I weren’t so strong, I would have died a long time ago,” she said, claiming to be “working” from the hospital by facilitating a way for her fellow revolutionaries to receive medications from physicians in Daraa, in southern Syria. “If I was able to sit up – I swear by God – if I could just sit up, I would return to help the cause. I would assist the injured, in the very least.”

Her resolve, however, was plainly wavering.

“I am only a spirit and a voice now,” she said.

“I am practically dead.”

“I am only a soul.”

Abdulrahman endured torture and rape, separation from her children, paralysis, and loneliness. She lasted longer than many would in her position. But on June 14, 2014, everything ended: Abdulrahman died, bereft and alone, in a Jordanian hospital.

“Hopeless,” a psychiatrist who treated her early on and followed her health told me. “She was hopeless.”

Psychiatrist Yassar Kanawati, who oversees a psychosocial team in Amman for the Syrian American Medical Society, described how Abdulrahman was “refusing to eat, refusing to take medicine. They put a gastric tube [but] she would wake up and take it out.” The hospital had recently informed Abdulrahman that they had no more money for her care; her family and friends had abandoned her, according to Kanawati. “Nobody came,” she said. Kanawati speculated that her friends had either moved on in the tides of refugees or died.

“She said, ‘What kind of life is this?’” Kanawati told me. “It wasn’t much.”

Abdulrahman ultimately died of dehydration.

***

Abdulrahman had endured torture that would seem unimaginable except for the fact that it is happening so frequently. In April, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said torture was routinely being used in government detention facilities and “almost certainly” in “a systematic or widespread manner.” Mental health support, as I recently wrote, is nearly nonexistent, both for Syrians who’ve suffered torture and for those who have not, both inside their country and in nearby states holding burgeoning numbers of refugees. And now suicide, according to doctors and social workers I spoke with, is rapidly becoming a very real fallout of this war – one that is so taboo, it is rarely spoken of within families, let alone publicly.

“Suicide is strictly forbidden in Islam,” said Haid N. Haid, a Beirut-based Syrian sociologist and Middle East program manager at the Heinrich Boll Foundation. Scholars often forbid the recitation of a funerary prayer for people who’ve committed suicide, as a way to punish the families of the dead and to deter others from taking their own lives. The cause of death is usually obscured – it is called an “accident” or “natural.” Suicide, Haid emphasized, is always “a big scandal that people will talk about for a long time.”

Despite the taboo, doctors I spoke with said they are seeing more and more cases of people with suicidal impulses – a trend confirmed by the number of reported instances in which, because of a feeling of being unable to provide for one’s family as a refugee, or because of the shame of rape, pregnancy through rape, or sexual humiliation, it has been carried out. Hard data are difficult to come by. But while I was unable to find formal statistics on suicide in the Syrian war, the picture painted by doctors working in and near the country is decidedly bleak – and given how precious few mental health services are available to Syrians affected by the war, it is probably just the tip of the iceberg.

“About 70 percent of all our clients have thoughts about dying, but for many they say their religion keeps them from doing harm to themselves,” said Adrienne Carter, a psychotherapist who works in Jordan at the Center for Victims of Torture, a nonprofit that offers mental health care and rehabilitation to survivors. Carter said that she believes her Syrian clients have a higher rate of suicide than people she works with from other Muslim nations. She estimates that 3 to 4 percent of her clients walk in “highly suicidal.” Right now, the center has 693 people waiting for its services.

For some, suicide is “the last escape from a world of misery,” said Salah Ahmad, a psychotherapist and the director general of the Jiyan Foundation for Human Rights (formerly the Kirkuk Center for Torture Victims). “Most of my patients who wanted to kill themselves perceived themselves as ‘worthless,’ either because they had psychological or social problems before their flight, or because they lost everything and did not see any future perspectives for themselves or their families.”

For women, Ahmad said, “the situation is especially hard because they have no one to support them,” with their husbands and male relatives either killed or detained.

On Tuesday, the UNHCR released a report that estimates that 145,000 Syrian women are now heading up one in four refugee households throughout the Middle East. Their circumstances are made worse by being unable to pay rent, feed their children, or buy basic goods. Extremely poor and suddenly the main breadwinners of their houses, they are all struggling with the trauma of losing their loved ones on top of everything else. Only one-fifth of these women have work, according to the report. One in three say they are too scared to even leave their houses.

In the absence of firm suicide statistics, a handful of news reports have described horrific death scenes, especially for women. They have reportedly thrown themselves off rooftops and set themselves on fire.

One case that particularly stands out to Yassar Kanawati is that of a woman who is the sole survivor of a bombing of a school in Aleppo that was preparing an exhibition of art made by children about the war. The woman was their art teacher and the exhibition’s organizer. At least 20 people, including two teachers and 17 children, aged eight to 12, had been killed. Now living in southern Turkey with shrapnel in her back, she is refusing treatment, Kanawati said, because she suffers severe depression and survivor’s guilt. “I see them all in my dream every night,” the teacher told Kanawati. “I feel responsible and guilty for their death. I wake up wishing I died with them.”

She also said, “I need to be with them.”

***

Guilt and depression are two symptoms I left in the background when I first told Abdulrahman’s story last year for the Atlantic. I was told by doctors and social workers that she was a “broken” woman. She was requesting medicine to sleep, refusing food, and hurting from injuries old and new: both burns from her torture and bedsores wept from her body. She was having suicidal thoughts.

I chose not to include this information because of Islam’s taboo around taking one’s own life, as well as the fact that her internal mental state felt private – I didn’t want to compromise her publicly and have that overshadow her story, which illustrated the severity of sexualized violence and torture in Syria. I’m sharing it now because Abdulrahman’s death, and the way it came about, is also emblematic of what many thousands of Syrians are enduring: a lack of health care, isolation, poverty, terror. The mental pain is so intense that, for many, dying is preferable to continuing to live as the war gets worse and worse.

A year ago, I wrote that the horrors Abdulrahman described “have positioned her to become the face of powerful women survivors in Syria.” I still believe that to be true. Only now, perhaps, her decision to end her time in that hospital bed can be seen as a call to the world to pay attention to the suffering that is so immense that even the most powerful can no longer survive.

There Is No Moral Equivalent to the Murder of Three Israeli Teenagers. By Thane Rosenbaum.

There Is No Moral Equivalent to the Murder of Three Israeli Teenagers. By Thane Rosenbaum. The Daily Beast, July 1, 2014.

Where Are the Palestinian Mothers? By Bret Stephens.

Where are the Palestinian Mothers? By Bret Stephens. Wall Street Journal, July 1, 2014.

Stephens: 

A culture that celebrates kidnapping is not fit for statehood. 


In March 2004 a Palestinian teenager named Hussam Abdo was spotted by Israeli soldiers behaving suspiciously as he approached the Hawara checkpoint in the West Bank. Ordered at gunpoint to raise his sweater, the startled boy exposed a suicide vest loaded with nearly 20 pounds of explosives and metal scraps, constructed to maximize carnage. A video taken by a journalist at the checkpoint captured the scene as Abdo was given scissors to cut himself free of the vest, which had been strapped tight to his body in the expectation that it wouldn’t have to come off. He’s been in an Israeli prison ever since.

Abdo provided a portrait of a suicide bomber as a young man. He had an intellectual disability. He was bullied by classmates who called him “the ugly dwarf.” He came from a comparatively well-off family. He had been lured into the bombing only the night before, with the promise of sex in the afterlife. His family was outraged that he had been recruited for martyrdom.

“I blame those who gave him the explosive belt,” his mother, Tamam, told the Jerusalem Post, of which I was then the editor. “He’s a small child who can’t even look after himself.”

Yet asked how she would have felt if her son had been a bit older, she added this: “If he was over 18, that would have been possible, and I might have even encouraged him to do it.” In the West, most mothers would be relieved if their children merely refrained from getting a bad tattoo before turning 18.

***

I’ve often thought about Mrs. Abdo, and I’m thinking about her today on the news that the bodies of three Jewish teenagers, kidnapped on June 12, have been found near the city of Hebron “under a pile of rocks in an open field,” as an Israeli military spokesman put it. Eyal Yifrach, 19, Gilad Shaar, 16, and Naftali Fraenkel, 16, had their whole lives ahead of them. The lives of their families will forever be wounded, or crippled, by heartbreak.

What about their killers? The Israeli government has identified two prime suspects, Amer Abu Aysha, 33, and Marwan Qawasmeh, 29, both of them Hamas activists. They are entitled to a presumption of innocence. Less innocent was the view offered by Mr. Abu Aysha’s mother.

“They’re throwing the guilt on him by accusing him of kidnapping,” she told Israel’s Channel 10 news. “If he did the kidnapping, I'll be proud of him.”

It’s the same sentiment I heard expressed in 2005 in the Jabalya refugee camp near Gaza City by a woman named Umm Iyad. A week earlier, her son, Fadi Abu Qamar, had been killed in an attack on the Erez border crossing to Israel. She was dressed in mourning but her mood was joyful as she celebrated her son’s “martyrdom operation.” He was just 21.

Here’s my question: What kind of society produces such mothers? Whence the women who cheer on their boys to blow themselves up or murder the children of their neighbors?

Well-intentioned Western liberals may prefer not to ask, because at least some of the conceivable answers may upset the comforting cliché that all human beings can relate on some level, whatever the cultural differences. Or they may accuse me of picking a few stray anecdotes and treating them as dispositive, as if I’m the only Western journalist to encounter the unsettling reality of a society sunk into a culture of hate. Or they can claim that I am ignoring the suffering of Palestinian women whose innocent children have died at Israeli hands.

But I’m not ignoring that suffering. To kill innocent people deliberately is odious, to kill them accidentally or “collaterally” is, at a minimum, tragic. I just have yet to meet the Israeli mother who wants to raise her boys to become kidnappers and murderers—and who isn’t afraid of saying as much to visiting journalists.

***

Because everything that happens in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is bound to be the subject of political speculation and news analysis, it’s easy to lose sight of the raw human dimension. So it is with the murder of the boys: How far will Israel go in its retaliation? What does it mean for the future of the Fatah-Hamas coalition? What about the peace process, such as it is?

These questions are a distraction from what ought to be the main point. Three boys went missing one night, and now we know they are gone. If nothing else, their families will have a sense of finality and a place to mourn. And Israelis will know they are a nation that leaves no stone unturned to find its missing children.

As for the Palestinians and their inveterate sympathizers in the West, perhaps they should note that a culture that too often openly celebrates martyrdom and murder is not fit for statehood, and that making excuses for that culture only makes it more unfit. Postwar Germany put itself through a process of moral rehabilitation that began with a recognition of what it had done. Palestinians who want a state should do the same, starting with the mothers.

The Trouble Isn’t Liberals. It’s Progressives. By Charles Murray.

The Trouble Isn’t Liberals. It’s Progressives. By Charles Murray. Wall Street Journal, June 30, 2014.

Murray:

Not everyone on the left wants to quash dissent or indulge President Obama’s abuses of executive power.

Social conservatives. Libertarians. Country-club conservatives. Tea party conservatives. Everybody in politics knows that those sets of people who usually vote Republican cannot be arrayed in a continuum from moderately conservative to extremely conservative. They are on different political planes. They usually have just enough in common to vote for the same candidate.

Why then do we still talk about the left in terms of a continuum from moderately liberal to extremely liberal? Divisions have been occurring on the left that mirror the divisions on the right. Different segments of the left are now on different planes.

A few weeks ago, I was thrown into a situation where I shared drinks and dinner with two men who have held high positions in Democratic administrations. Both men are lifelong liberals. There’s nothing “moderate” about their liberalism. But as the pleasant evening wore on (we knew that there was no point in trying to change anyone’s opinion on anything), I was struck by how little their politics have to do with other elements of the left.

Their liberalism has nothing in common with the political mind-set that wants right-of-center speakers kept off college campuses, rationalizes the forced resignation of a CEO who opposes gay marriage, or thinks George F. Will should be fired for writing a column disagreeable to that mind-set. It has nothing to do with executive orders unilaterally disregarding large chunks of legislation signed into law or with using the IRS as a political weapon. My companions are on a different political plane from those on the left with that outlook—the progressive mind-set.

Wait, doesn’t “progressive” today reflect the spirit of the Progressive Era a century ago, when the country benefited from the righteous efforts of muckrakers and others who fought big-city political bosses, attacked business monopolies and promoted Good Government?

The era was partly about that. But philosophically, the progressive movement at the turn of the 20th century had roots in German philosophy (Hegel and Nietzsche were big favorites) and German public administration (Woodrow Wilson’s open reverence for Bismarck was typical among progressives). To simplify, progressive intellectuals were passionate advocates of rule by disinterested experts led by a strong unifying leader. They were in favor of using the state to mold social institutions in the interests of the collective. They thought that individualism and the Constitution were both outmoded.

That’s not a description that Woodrow Wilson or the other leading progressive intellectuals would have argued with. They openly said it themselves.

It is that core philosophy extolling the urge to mold society that still animates progressives today—a mind-set that produces the shutdown of debate and growing intolerance that we are witnessing in today’s America. Such thinking on the left also is behind the rationales for indulging President Obama in his anti-Constitutional use of executive power. If you want substantiation for what I’m saying, read Jonah Goldberg’s 2008 book Liberal Fascism, an erudite and closely argued exposition of American progressivism and its subsequent effects on liberalism. The title is all too accurate.

Here, I want to make a simple point about millions of people—like my liberal-minded dinner companions—who regularly vote Democratic and who are caught between a rock and a hard place.

Along with its intellectual legacy, the Progressive Era had a political legacy that corresponds to the liberalism of these millions of Democrats. They think that an activist federal government is a force for good, approve of the growing welfare state and hate the idea of publicly agreeing with a Republican about anything. But they also don’t like the idea of shouting down anyone who disagrees with them.

They gave money to the ACLU in 1978 when the organization’s absolutism on free speech led it to defend the right of neo-Nazis to march in Skokie, Ill. They still believe that the individual should not be sacrificed to the collective and that people who achieve honest success should be celebrated for what they have built. I’m not happy that they like the idea of a “living Constitution”—one that can be subjected to interpretations according to changing times—but they still believe in the separation of powers, checks and balances, and the president’s duty to execute the laws faithfully.

These Democrats should get exclusive possession of the word “liberal.”

As a libertarian, I am reluctant to give up the word “liberal.” It used to refer to laissez-faire economics and limited government. But since libertarians aren’t ever going to be able to retrieve its original meaning, we should start using “liberal” to designate the good guys on the left, reserving “progressive” for those who are enthusiastic about an unrestrained regulatory state, who think it’s just fine to subordinate the interests of individuals to large social projects, who cheer the president’s abuse of executive power and who have no problem rationalizing the stifling of dissent.

Making a clear distinction between liberals and progressives will help break down a Manichaean view of politics that afflicts the nation. Too many of us see those on the other side as not just misguided but evil. The solution is not a generalized “Can’t we all just get along” non-judgmentalism. Some political differences are too great for that.

But liberalism as I want to use the term encompasses a set of views that can be held by people who care as much about America’s exceptional heritage as I do. Conservatives’ philosophical separation from that kind of liberalism is not much wider than the philosophical separation among the various elements of the right. If people from different political planes on the right can talk to each other, as they do all the time, so should they be able to talk to people on the liberal left, if we start making a distinction between liberalism and progressivism. To make that distinction is not semantic, but a way of realistically segmenting the alterations to the political landscape that the past half-century has brought us.