Presbyterians Declare War on the Jews. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

Presbyterians Declare War on the Jews. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, February 11, 2014.

Presbyterian Church group: Zionism is the problem. By Lazar Berman. The Times of Israel, February 11, 2014.


Tobin:

In the last decade, several mainstream American Protestant denominations have flirted with resolutions endorsing boycotts of companies doing business with Israel. Most of these efforts have been defeated, albeit narrowly, by strenuous efforts by Jewish groups determined to preserve good interfaith relations as well as by Christians who wanted no part of a movement dedicated to waging economic war on a democratic state. In most cases, these battles have involved a small cadre of left-wing activists involved in church leadership groups that had little support among ministers, and even less among rank-and-file church members. Thus, even the Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA), a church that has a particularly virulent group of pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel activists working in positions of influence, failed to pass a divestment resolution in 2012. But despite that defeat, those anti-Israel elements have now regrouped and launched a new initiative that threatens to escalate the battle within the church and to undermine any remnant of good will that still exists between this Presbyterian group (the PCUSA is just one among a number of groups that call themselves Presbyterians) and American Jews.

 

As the Times of Israel reports, the Presbyterians’ Israel Palestinian Mission Network (IPMN) has issued a “study guide” about the Middle East conflict that will forever change the relationship between the church and the Jewish people. The 74-page illustrated booklet and companion DVD entitled Zionism Unsettled was published last month for use by the church’s 2.4 million members. Unlike other left-wing critiques of Israel, the Presbyterian pamphlet isn’t content to register disapproval of Israeli policies and West Bank settlements or to lament the plight of the Palestinians. The booklet is a full-blown attack against the very concept of Zionism and seeks to compare Zionism to the Christian anti-Semitism that led to the Holocaust and other historical atrocities. Its purpose is to brand Israel as an illegitimate entity and to treat its American Jewish supporters as having strayed from the values of their religion. Zionism Unsettled not only swallows the Palestinian narrative about Middle East history whole, it is nothing less than a declaration of war on Israel and American Jewry.

 

As a work of political science or history, Zionism Unsettled is unworthy of serious discussion. Its argument rests on the prejudiced assumption that the Jews are the one people on earth that are unworthy of self-determination or the same rights to a homeland as any other on the planet. It smears those who sought to create the Jewish homeland and whitewashes those who have waged war and engaged in terrorism to destroy it. Ignoring history and the reality of virulent anti-Jewish prejudice in the Arab and Muslim world, it claims Jewish life would thrive in the region if there were no Israel. If that absurd assertion were not enough to strip it of even a vestige of credibility, it goes so far as to claim that the tiny, intimidated remnant of Jewish life in an Iran ruled by a vicious anti-Semitic regime is a model of coexistence.

 

With regard to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, it sees only black and white. In Zionism Unsettled, the Jews have no right to Israel and no right to defend themselves. On the other hand, it rationalizes and even justifies violence against Israel.

 

But the argument goes further than anti-Zionism. The pamphlet actually criticizes the Catholic Church for its historic efforts at reconciliation with the Jewish people, saying the 1965 declaration Nostra Aetate that rejected the Deicide myth against the Jews “raises as many questions as it answers.”

 

Unlike past controversies in which Jewish groups sought to bridge the divide between the two communities, the distribution of a publication that is driven by sheer hatred and a determination to see Israel destroyed requires a more forthright response. The response to this screed should be unequivocal. Any Presbyterian Church USA that chooses to distribute it is not merely offending supporters of Israel. It is endorsing hate speech and seeking to spread a doctrine that seeks Israel’s destruction and views Jews who do not reject Zionism as guilty of complicity in the “crimes” of the Jewish state. With this publication, the PCUSA has crossed a line that divides people of good will from those who promote racism or anti-Semitism. The many decent members of congregations affiliated with the PCUSA can no longer stand by mutely while the good name of their church is sullied in this manner. They must either actively reject this ugly publication or forever be tainted by association with the vile hatred to which their leadership has committed them.


Berman:

“Zionism Unsettled” praises Jews who speak out against Zionism, and claims that a growing wave of Jewish criticism is underway: “Contemporary voices are breaking the taboos that have stigmatized and punished critical examination of Zionism and its consequences.”

 

To do so, the report argues, these brave Jews, including Peter Beinart, Ilan Pappe, and Philip Weiss, must withstand a concerted effort to silence them from the 51 member groups associated with the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, who are “committed to the suppression of any criticism of Israel in the mainstream American media, in American civil society, and even within their own organizations.”

 

“Zionism Unsettled” strives to paint Zionism as an ideology foisted initially upon an unsupportive Jewish public, and increasingly outside of the authentic Jewish mainstream today. Most Jews, it claims, reject Zionism with their feet, choosing to live outside of Israel. Were it not for Zionism, Jewish life would be thriving across the Middle East. One graphic presents Jewish life in Iran as “alive and well,” a model of ancient coexistence shattered by the intrusion of Zionism into the region.

 

It blames the expulsion of Jews from Arab lands as “blowback” from the “perceived injustice of the enforced partition of Palestine, the creation of a Jewish state, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1947-48, and the Sinai War of 1956.”

 

Zionism has done far worse to Palestinians, according to the study guide. It accuses Israel of intentionally depopulating Palestinian villages in 1948, a process that continues to this day. “Now, 65 years later, the Zionist quest for demographic control of the land in still underway – not only in the occupied territories, but within Israel itself. State planners pursue the goal of ensuring a ‘contiguous Jewish presence’ in every area within Israel.”

 

Moreover, the book argues, Israel is entirely uninterested in peace, and does not negotiate in good faith. “It is hard to find any evidence,” the authors write, “that recent Israeli governments have any intention of negotiating a just peace with Palestinians.”

 

In “Zionism Unsettled,” Edward Said, Rashid Khalidi, and other anti-Zionist authors are treated as authoritative, with no critical examination of their positions. The chapter, “A Palestinian Muslim Experience with Zionism,” features several pages on Mustafa Abu Sway of Al-Quds University’s argument that while the Quran is inclusive and peaceful, Zionism is inherently racist.

 

The authors implicitly compare the Palestinian treatment at the hands of Israel to the Nazi treatment of Jews in World War II. After a paragraph on Abu Sway denouncing the Holocaust in speeches at Yad Vashem, “Zionism Unsettled” continues, “In like manner, the Nakba (catastrophe) that befell the Palestinian people in the late 1940s should never have taken place. The Palestinian story is one of suffering at the hands of the international community, which authorized the division of Palestine in 1947, and at the hands of the Zionists who planned, organized, and implemented systematic ethnic cleansing . . . They slaughtered untold numbers of Palestinian men, women, and children.”

 

The work could even be seen to justify some violence against Israel. “International law allows resistance to military occupation and dispossession,” reads one of the discussion questions. “What kinds of Palestinian resistance to Jewish expansionism and oppression do you feel are justified?”

 

In fact, apart from one brief timeline mention of a suicide bombing, Palestinian terrorism is absent from the book. The only group labelled ‘terrorist’ by the authors is a Jewish one, the Irgun.

 

“Zionism Unsettled” trips over itself at times. It criticizes Israel for ignoring UN resolutions it should accept as authoritative, then decries the UN for giving the Jews a “disproportionate share of territory” in the 1947 partition plan.
. . . .

Identifying with the “powerless” against the “chosen”

 

Why would an American church take such firm positions on a conflict half the world away, and why has it accepted the Palestinian narrative so completely?

 

In an email interview with The Times of Israel, Christian-Jewish relations scholar Murray Watson identified three reasons behind positions taken by mainline Protestant churches against Israel.

 

The first, he said, is “a deep rootedness in liberation theology, a stream of theological thinking and analysis that emerged from Latin America in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Central to liberation theology is the Biblical assertion that God seeks freedom and justice for all His people, and is actively on the side of the poor, the oppressed, the powerless and the marginalized — and, conversely, against those who oppress His people and deprive them of their legitimate rights.”

 

For many Western Christians, continued Murray, co-founder of the Centre for Jewish-Catholic-Muslim Learning at King’s University College at the University of Western Ontario, Palestinians are seen as the poor, the weak, the oppressed, while Israel is seen as the powerful, oppressive force. “Therefore, the Palestinian narrative deserves to be given a privileged place in theological analysis, since God is ‘on their side.’”

 

The second reason, said Watson, is that many Western Protestant churches either have Palestinian counterpart churches, or have a formal form of affiliation with Palestinian Christian churches. “Sometimes this results in a very uncritical acceptance of anything that any Palestinian Christian group proposes.”

 

The final reason lies in a Christian misinterpretation of the Jewish idea of “chosenness.”

 

“To a generation that has grown up with the idea of radical equality — that all people are fundamentally equal, and certainly equal in terms of God’s love and care, the idea that any particular group could claim to be ‘chosen’ in a way which makes them qualitatively different from others, strikes some Christians as arrogant, as if ‘chosenness’ was to be equated with ‘moral superiority,’” Watson explained. “I have said for a long time that this interpretation of chosenness is actually a Christian caricature, and doesn’t correspond to Jewish thinking or theology, which speaks of that ‘chosenness’ as something of a burden or a responsibility that is borne, often at great expense, for the sake of God’s love.

“The term ‘chosen people’ grates on the ears of some Christians, and so they react against it and, by reacting against it, feel the need to ‘put down’ Jews, whom they perceive to have used ‘chosenness’ to ‘lift themselves up’ above others.”

The Value of Putin. By Victor Davis Hanson.

The Value of Putin. By Victor Davis Hanson. National Review Online, February 11, 2014.

Hanson:

Vladimir Putin has the world’s attention this week. The circumstances will remind everyone that reset with Russia is dead. Its working hypothesis — that it was the George W. Bush administration, not the Putin regime, that had either inadvertently or provocatively offended the other’s sensibilities — was invented before the 2008 election on Obama’s partisan and political considerations, not empirical observation.

 

Under reset, the incoming Obama administration, more nuanced than the outgoing Bush administration and drawing on more enlightened thinking, would appeal to the better angels of Putin’s Russia. The more complex Obamaites would help enlighten the Putin autocracy to the fact that the U.S. and Russia had common interests in improving free trade. We really both wanted to calm world tensions while discouraging proliferation, combating terrorism, working with the United Nations, quelling international crises, and promoting human rights. Once Russians had been tutored about America’s good intentions, we could undo (“reset”) the damage done by the swaggering braggadocio of the interventionist prior administration. Misunderstanding and ill feelings, not ill intentions and malfeasance, were Russia’s sins.

 

And what is the result of reset? It is open Russian promotion of the Syria/Hezbollah/Iran axis that was active in Iraq and is now more so in Syria. It is Russian obstruction at the U.N. of most American initiatives. It is another round of strangulation of the former Soviet republics. It is satisfaction that a frustrated United States has been reduced to appeasement instead of taking serious steps to thwart Iranian nuclearization, as Putin eggs Iran on. It is more pressure on Eastern Europeans to look to the East, not to the West. It is humiliation of the European Union over Ukraine. It is more internal oppression of a brutal sort. And it is a gratuitous delight in exposing the Obama administration as sanctimonious and weak, while the U.S. lectures Russia on human rights, as if its tepid moral remonstrations de facto translate into shamed abidance. In sum, what the Obama administration is for, Putin is mostly against.

 

All that said, there is a value for us in Putin. I don’t mean the strange Pat Buchanan–style admiration for Putin’s creepy reactionary social agenda and his tirades about Western social decadence. Rather, I refer to Putin’s confidence in his unabashedly thuggish means, the brutal fashion in which a modern state so unapologetically embraces the premodern mind to go after its critics, be they journalists or academics, or stifles free debate without worry over Western censure. Putin is a mirror showing more than just what we should not be.

 

We in the West get into fiery debates over civil union versus gay marriage as the appropriate legal means of recognizing homosexual unions, with all the accompanying charges of insensitivity — without much notice of how the vast majority of gays are treated elsewhere in the world. In contrast, Putin, mostly to global silence, does nothing as his thugs with impunity terrorize gay activists (who mostly demonstrate for basic freedom of speech, not marriage). Miley Cyrus insults our sensibilities and becomes fabulously rich; the Pussy Rioters go to jail.

 

We in California divert life-saving water to save a baitfish; Putin’s $50 billion Olympics may prove to be an ecological disaster. We worry about global warming; Putin takes a subtropical resort and with enough crooked cash and smoky carbon fuel fabricates sufficient unnatural snow for the Olympics — without calling up Al Gore to see how many Amazon trees he needs to buy to win a carbon-offset exemption. We worry about the victims of WMDs in Syria; Putin worries whether the mass murderer Assad has enough sarin gas to do what he thinks necessary to preserve power. Putin breaks missile agreements; we consult legal dictionaries to ascertain whether he has. We try to convince Putin that our anti-ballistic-missile plan for Eastern Europe is to protect only against Iran. He knows it is. He also knows that we worry whether he knows it is intended only for the Iranian threat. And so he says it isn’t. And, presto, it isn’t.

 

Americans often talk grandly in melodramatic fashion of “speaking truth to power” — mostly on silly issues about which liberals talk tough to moderates, usually in the faculty lounge or at a Senate hearing, often before sharing cocktails afterward. Putin speaks power to truth — an unpredictable, unapologetic brute force of nature.

 

Again, what is Putin? He is a constant reminder to the postmodern Western mind that the human condition has not yet evolved beyond the fist. He is a bumper-sticker example of Aristotle’s dictum that it is easy to be moral in your sleep, given that verbiage without power is hardly moral or difficult. He is also a reminder about what is important in the most elemental sense. As we debate former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg’s remonstrances on oversized Cokes or Michelle Obama’s advocacy of celery sticks, Putin has dogs shot down to spruce up the Olympic grounds. We calibrate to the point of paralysis just how large a carbon footprint the Keystone Pipeline may or may not have; Putin ignores the Arctic tundra to enrich kleptomaniac Russian oligarchs and prop up his dysfunctional state.

 

Bare-chested Putin gallops his horses, poses with his tigers, and shoots his guns — what Obama dismisses as “tough-guy schtick.” Perhaps. But Putin is almost saying, “You have ten times the wealth and military power that I have, but I can neutralize you by my demonic personality alone.” Barack Obama, in his increasingly metrosexual golf get-ups and his prissy poses on the nation’s tony golf courses, wants to stay cool while playing a leisure sport. It reminds us of Stafford Cripps being played by Stalin during World War II. “Make no mistake about it” and “Let me be perfectly clear” lose every time. Obama’s subordinates violate the law by going after the communications of a Fox reporter’s parents; Putin himself threatens to cut off the testicles of a rude journalist.

 

Putin is a reminder not just of our dark past, where raw force, not morality, adjudicated behavior, but, more worrisome, perhaps of a dark future as well, in which we in the West will continually overthink, hyperagonize, and nuance to death every idea, every issue, and every thought in terror that it might not be 100 percent fair, completely unbiased, absolutely justified. We will do anything to have the good life above all else; Putin prefers the bad life on his own terms.

 

Putin dares us to enforce an old treaty, to stop his clients using poison gas, or to prevent a lunatic regime from getting nukes. In our fearful hearts, we almost sense that Putin might like us better, or at least show a greater measure of respect, if we were to cut out the sermons and back up what we preach. Putin is the evil hired gun, Jack Wilson (“Prove it!”), in the movie Shane, whose only law is what he believes he can get away with. We are the Hamlet-like sodbusters who one day are ready to pack up and leave, the next terrified lest we really have to. We dream of having Shane stand up to the gunslinger Wilson, but then again, we suspect that so does the psychopathic Wilson himself.

 

True, Putin hated us for going into Iraq, but not just for going into Iraq. Rather, he despised us for not quickly dealing with the insurgency and then for pulling out abruptly once we did. He felt double-crossed about signing on to U.N. sanctions in Libya, not just because we lied about the nature of those resolutions and then exceeded them, but because we ended up being weak and leaving Libya a mess without order. His problem with us in Syria was not just that we issued a deadline, but that we could not even enforce it. For Putin, being weak is worse than being wrong. Putin’s problem with the Tsarnaev bombing was not that in furor we might send a Hellfire into his Caucasus, but that a Caucasian terrorist would make a mockery of our jurisprudence.

 

With such a coiled cobra it is always wiser to stay quiet and keep strong than to speak loudly while appearing weak. One does not lecture a Stalin but rather reminds him that you, unlike the pope, do have plenty of divisions.

 

You see, Putin is the dark side come alive without apology in a self-congratulatory age when he supposedly should not exist. That his economy is unsustainable, that his corruption ruined the promise of a new Russia, that his oppression is nihilistic, that we are mostly right, he usually wrong, bothers him not at all.

 

If Putin has any utility at all, it is the faint suggestion that even he would prefer — even believe that he himself might be better off — if we were more resolute. Putin is almost Milton’s Satan — as if, in his seductive evil, he yearns for clarity, perhaps even a smackdown, if not just for himself, for us as well. He is not the better man than Obama but, again like Milton’s Satan, the more interesting, if only because he reminds of us of our own limitations.

 

He ends up existing to warn us in the West of what we are not, and to demonstrate that in a strange sort of way our loud principles without toughness are not much better than his toughness without principles. In that regard, he gives us a valuable look into ourselves — we the hollow men, the stuffed men of dry voices and whispers.

 

After all, were not the Lotus-eaters nearly as dangerous as the Cyclopes, the nonviolent Eloi almost as pitiful as the savage Morlocks? And is not the triple-talking postmodern man often as empty as the premodern brute?

Sochi and Schadenfreude. By Andrew Cohen.

Sochi and Schadenfreude. By Andrew Cohen. Ottawa Citizen, February 10, 2014.

Russians Think We’re Engaging in Olympic Schadenfreude. They’re Right. By Julia Ioffe. NJBR, February 8, 2014. With related articles.


Cohen:

It is open season on Russia. Angered by its contempt for human rights, its rampant corruption, its intimidation of Ukraine and its president-for-life, the West piles on.

 

The context — or pretext — is the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi. There, a carping foreign media revel in unfinished hotels, inadequate venues, empty seats and suffocating security.

 

Julia Ioffe of The New Republic, a former Moscow correspondent who has written critically of the regime, has one word for the early reviews from Sochi: schadenfreude. The Western media delight in any misfortune that befalls Russia’s Olympics, hoping it all goes bad.

 

But if there is schadenfreude, it isn’t hard to see why. Our liberal sensibility is offended by a swaggering strongman who picks the wrong friends at home and abroad, jails his enemies and wants to rule forever.

 

We’re offended by an Olympics that displaces people and despoils the environment. We’re offended by spending some $50 billion on a show. And beyond the real estate play by the Black Sea, we have a catalogue of other grievances: Vladimir Putin’s support for Syria and Iran; his heavy-handedness toward Ukraine and his proposed economic union to rival Europe’s; his offering refuge to whistleblower Edward Snowden.

 

We are outraged by how Russia treats its gays and lesbians. At a time this issue is all but settled in Europe and North America, we consider Russia’s repressive law antediluvian.

 

And so we should recoil, for so many reasons. That’s why we talked of boycotting the Olympics. It was a natural if ineffective response to “do something” about something appalling.

 

The ethical problem for us is that, while we are quick to condemn the Russians, we accept no responsibility for the regime. We didn’t create Vladimir Putin, but he lays bare our own hypocrisy and amnesia.

 

When it comes to Russia, we forget that the West missed an opportunity to form a partnership with our old enemy after the end of the Cold War. For this failure, we blame the recalcitrant Russians.

 

To Stephen F. Cohen of New York University, one of the world’s leading Russian scholars, the Americans and their allies are at fault. He thinks that we have missed opportunities to engage the Russians in a way that would have eased their transition from communism and authoritarianism.

 

In the 1990s, Cohen says, Bill Clinton took an “aggressive triumphalist approach,” which imposed Western economic policies on Russia, moved NATO into Russia’s security zone and broke strategic arms promises.

 

After Sept. 11, 2001, for example, when Putin provided assistance against the Taliban in Afghanistan, the United States withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Cohen calls the treaty “the linchpin of (Russia’s) nuclear security.”

 

Did we think of the consequences when NATO (of which Canada is a charter member) decided to expand east and build missile defence installations near Russia’s borders? Did we think as we broadened our own sphere of political and military influence, that Russia, with its understandable insecurity, would want a zone of its own?

 

This doesn’t excuse Putin’s regime. But our indifference helped create a climate of anxiety among a proud people who had lost their empire, their stature and much of their dignity. We were insensitive to that.

 

In demonizing Russia, as we do so easily today, we forget the 20 million who died in the Second World War. We forget that it was the Russians who were killing Nazis (equipped with American arms) before we opened a second front in Europe in 1944. We forget the impact of their revolution, civil war, collectivization, purges and famines. Honestly, did anyone suffer more in the 20th century?

 

In rounding on Russia, what some call Russia-phobia, we scarcely acknowledge the country’s dazzling achievements in literature, music, art, architecture, science and space.

 

Like all Olympic hosts, the Russians celebrated themselves at the opening ceremonies, sumptuously if selectively. But if nothing else, we should be reminded that these are a great people.

 

At the same time, we might recall how relatively uncritically we marched to the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, where the assault on human rights goes far beyond gays and lesbians. Did anyone ask then what was done at Tiananmen or in Tibet? To a degree, yes, but the threat of official boycott was far stronger this time, and was fuelled largely by one issue, the mistreatment of gays and lesbians. Call this selective ethics.

 

Fifty years ago, at the height of the Cold War, John F. Kennedy asked Americans to rethink the Russians. He wasn’t embracing tyranny or exonerating communism. He was humanizing them.

 

“We all breathe the same air,” he said on June 11, 1963. “We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”

 

We don’t have to like Putin and his regime. But had we been less sanctimonious and more perceptive, we might be seeing a different Russia behind those Olympic Rings today.

Burke and Paine, a Rivalry That Still Reverberates. By Michael Gerson.

Burke and Paine, a Rivalry That Still Reveraberates. By Michael Gerson. Real Clear Politics, February 11, 2014. Also at the Washington Post.

Gerson:

One of the most vivid, outspoken conservatives of our time has the drawback of being a fictional character in a British costume drama, “Downton Abbey.” Here is Lady Violet, dowager countess, sparring with her relentlessly progressive in-law, Isobel Crawley:

 

Lady Violet: “You are quite wonderful, the way you see room for improvement wherever you look. I never knew such reforming zeal.”

 

Isobel: “I take that as a compliment.”

 

Lady Violet: “I must have said it wrong.”

 

One of America’s leading young interpreters of British conservatism, Yuval Levin, has written a book detailing a more consequential historical version of the contest between preservation and radical reform. In “The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left,” Levin tells the story of an unfriendly rivalry between the progenitors of modern conservatism and modern liberalism. In the time Burke and Paine shared — the late 18th century — philosophical arguments could ignite revolutions, and pamphlets could be as important as battles. Both Burke and Paine were masters of political rhetoric at a time when political rhetoric really mattered, and their rivalry still reverberates.

 

Levin praises Paine for his ability “to bring even modestly educated readers into contact with profound philosophical questions.”

 

It happens to be Levin’s talent as a writer as well. Paine emerges as a restless, homeless agitator for liberty, convinced that governments should be torn down and rebuilt according to rational enlightenment principles. “Government by precedent,” argued Paine, is “one of the vilest systems that can be set up.” Burke, in contrast, proposed to “make the most of the existing materials of his country.” Demonstrating Burke’s own gift for epigram, Levin observes, “The best kind of political change, in Burke’s view, builds on what is best about the given world to improve what is worst about it.”

 

Levin gives both great thinkers their due. But this cannot conceal the fact that Paine’s greatest political hope proved to be a horror, and Burke’s greatest fear turned out to be a prophecy. Burke argued that the triumph of Paine’s enlightenment ideology in the French Revolution would unmoor men and women from tradition, habit and moral restraint. A revolt in the name of liberty alone quickly turned against liberty itself, producing both the Terror and Bonaparte.

 

Burke’s prediction was swiftly and completely vindicated.

 

But the complex story Levin tells offers plenty of correctives for conservatives as well — including on the nature of conservatism itself. Burke would not have been comfortable among the Lady Violets of his day — the Tory conservatives of crown and altar. Instead, Burke was a Whig and a reformer who criticized the British war against America, pushed for Catholic rights, opposed the exercise of unjust colonial power in India and was an early critic of slavery. He was also a social outsider, set off by his red hair, his Irish accent and his Catholic mother, sister and wife.

 

Modern politics emerged as an argument between two sorts of Whigs, meaning two sorts of liberals — what Levin terms “progressive liberalism” and “conservative liberalism.” Both were distinctly modern movements. Both accepted liberalism’s commitments to liberty and reform. But they differed dramatically on how reform should be achieved. One was the party of radical liberation through revolution, which supported the French Revolution even after its violence emerged.

 

The other was the party of gradual progress.

 

In a typical illuminating flash of insight, Levin compares these divisions of ideology to branches of science. Paine’s approach is more similar to Newtonian physics — the application of rational, abstract laws and scientific methods to remake society. The past, in this view, is a dead hand. The individual must be liberated from superstitions and unchosen obligations. Burke’s politics are more like evolutionary theory — moving by gradual mutations and reflecting the inherited wisdom of the species. Human beings, in this view, live in a complex web of social relationships that preexist us and outlast us.

 

And government should protect and strengthen these structures rather than rip them up according to abstract theories of liberty.

 

Levin finds these conflicting visions — between politics as physics and politics as evolution — reflected in modern arguments between left and right. And the author, though a fair-minded historian, is not neutral in the great debate. He seeks the reconstitution of a communitarian conservatism that takes the need for reform seriously rather than offering pure opposition. That is a Burkean task — in which Levin is increasingly playing a Burkean role.

Distorting Russia. By Stephen F. Cohen.

Distorting Russia. By Stephen F. Cohen. The Nation, February 11, 2014. From the March 3, 2014 issue.

Kerry’s Israel Boycott Talk Will Backfire. By Jeffrey Goldberg.

Kerry’s Israel Boycott Talk Will Backfire. By Jeffrey Goldberg. Bloomberg, February 6, 2014.

The Palestine Prize. By Eytan Sosnovich.

The Palestine Prize. By Eytan Sosnovich. The Commentator, February 9, 2014.

Comedian Evan Sayet on Liberals and the Media.

Comedian Evan Sayet: Liberals Think “It’s an Act of Bigotry to Be an Objective Reporter.” By Tim Graham. NewsBusters, February 5, 2014.

Evan Sayet on How Liberals Think. By Rush Limbaugh. RushLimbaugh.com, February 6, 2014.

Evan Sayet: Liberals and the Media. Speech to The Conservative Forum of Silicon Valley. Video. C-Span, January 7, 2014. Alternate filming, video at YouTube.

Sayet:

The modern liberal, there’s something about his ideology that leads him to invariably and inevitably side with evil over good, wrong over right, the lesser over the better, the ugly over the beautiful, the profane over the profound, and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success.”

 

If no religion, no culture, no person, if no behavior, if no form of governance – if nothing is better than anything else, then success is unjust. Why should a person, a nation, a government, religion succeed, if it’s not better than any other? So that liberalism says “everything is equally good, man, coexist – doesn’t make everything meet in the middle. It makes the better, bad.

 

Failure as proved by nothing other than the fact that it has failed is proof positive that some injustice has taken place. Why should a person, a country, a  nation, a business – why should it fail, if it’s not worse than anything else? And by the same logic, just by extension, if success and failure are proof of injustice, then great success and great failure is proof of great injustice, and at a certain point, great and sustained success and failure – 6,000 years of Jewish survival, thriving when it’s not oppressed; America, the longest surviving and most successful democracy – you wonder why they hate America and Israel most?. . . Great and sustained success and failure is proof positive not just of great and sustained injustice, but that this injustice is intentional, and part of an evil conspiracy.

Peace or the West Bank? By Marc Goldberg.

Peace or the West Bank? By Marc Goldberg. Jerusalem Online, February 9, 2014.

Goldberg:

Unlike previous announcements of settlement building, the latest announcement of 558 new settlement homes will be met with silence. The Americans have learned, it will take more than that to derail a peace process.

 

While these stuttering talks continue, the Palestinians have come out with compromise measure after compromise measure. They have been met by a deeply uncomfortable Israeli leadership. As the talks that were once widely ridiculed bring Israeli security needs and a Palestinian state closer the coalition government becomes weaker.

 

The divisions that were ignored when it was thought that these talks would fade away have become more pronounced now there is a chance for success. The Prime Minister once said:

 

“If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more ‎violence. If the Jews put ‎down their weapons ‎today, there would be no ‎more Israel‎.”

 

When he made that statement few doubted him, but what about now? What about now that Abbas has realised that Palestinian strength lies in not in terror but in testing our claims to want peace more than anything else?

 

The Israeli public went with Barack when he pushed for peace, they went with Sharon when he pushed for peace and with Olmert when he pushed for peace. When the Palestinians pushed these opportunities away the Israeli public went to the Likud. A party whose founder would be turning in his grave if he thought that the current premier was even negotiating over the land promised to the Jews by God. The Likud is a party that was created with the intention of settling that land and making it Jewish, permanently.

 

This must weigh on Bibi while he sits in negotiations. Now is the critical moment when he is forced to confront a changing strategic reality. One that has rendered a great deal of the security argument vis a vis the Palestinians moot.

 

The head of the Palestinian Authority is consenting to an “indefinite presence” of a US led, NATO force on its own territory and for IDF forces to conduct a phased withdrawal over a 3 year period. We in Israel are now confronted with the dilemma of having to admit that the reason Israel is so hell bent on hanging on to the West Bank isn’t merely security.

 

This is the land God promised to our people, the land our forefathers lived in and are buried in, the land Jewish Kings and warriors fought over and shed blood conquering, defending, losing and ultimately conquering once more. This is the land that causes us to question our very essence as a people, as a nation.

 

If it’s possible to liberate dust, rocks and graves then the IDF did precisely that in 1967. But no more. The people born and raised among the dust and rocks have their own way of seeing things. They have a right to. They had no right to rise up and murder us. The horror they inflicted upon was indiscriminate slaughter, waves of terror that served only to strengthen our resolve. From bus bombings to airplane hijackings. We beat that terror, we won the wars and the battles . . . and yet the Palestinians remain.

 

But what do we do now? What do we do now that our enemy is prepared to both abandon terror and to pursue sovereignty just as doggedly as we did some 6 decades ago?

 

They are certainly campaigning diplomatically for us to be forced out of the West Bank and they are meeting with success in every theater.

 

Ironically this is what we have been screaming for them to do for decades, now that they are doing it the Israeli government looks like a deer stuck in the headlights.

 

The choice by Abbas to put down the gun but to raise the megaphone has our politicians running for cover when they should be jumping for joy. The terse statement by Defense Minister Moshe “Boogie” Ya’alon that Israel “will manage without a peace deal” lay the Likud bare. Looking to a past with longing, a promise made by God who has yet to fulfill that promise. They should be looking forward to a future where we achieve things our forefathers never could have dreamed of. That future is waiting for us.

 

I say that the truth is we can’t have it all. We took the land but we weren’t fated to make it ours. We have enough, give the Palestinians theirs, let the Americans patrol it and look to the future of Israel rather than the past.

Bastille: Pompeii.

Bastille: Pompeii. Video. BastilleVEVO, January 20, 2013. YouTube.

Russians Think We’re Engaging in Olympic Schadenfreude. They’re Right. By Julia Ioffe.

Russians Think We’re Engaging in Olympic Schadenfreude. They’re Right. By Julia Ioffe. The New Republic, February 6, 2014.

Ioffe:

As Western journalists have flooded into Sochi for the 2014 Winter Olympics, they have taken to Twitter to howl about the state of disarray in their hotel rooms. The curtains are broken, the elevators are breaking, the pillows are deficit goods, the water is yellow and cold, and it’s all an unmitigated clusterfuck.

 

And the Russians have had enough. Noting that the lead-up to the Olympics was full of negative cover stories on Russia—like the Economist’s and, well, ours—Vladimir Yakunin, the head of the Russian rail monopoly, slammed Western journalists for “feeding hysteria about Russia.” And he’s not just bothered by the images of Putin on the covers that upset him, or the stories of mind-boggling corruption, or the warnings of “black widows” and “creating fears that the Games in Sochi will not have adequate security.” It’s the vocal, ungrateful complaining about Sochi’s readiness, “which takes the form of mockery worthy of tabloids and not serious journalists.”  “They are sending their readers signals that are far from sportsmanlike, and the tone they take with the country hosting the Olympics is far from friendly,” Yakunin writes. “Really, this has nothing to do with freedom of speech. Rather, it is a desire to befoul everything about the massive effort to prepare for the Winter Games, and to create a negative atmosphere for the athletes and Olympic guests.”

 

Now, Yakunin is a massively corrupt official whose company oversaw a massively corrupt Olympic railway project, and I’d never thought I’d say this, but I agree with him.

 

On one hand, yes, things are objectively dysfunctional and not ready despite the fantastic sums spent, and there is objective photographic evidence of this. On the other, as I prepare for my Moscow-Sochi flight tomorrow, a lot of this complaining does smack of some pretty fantastic schadenfreude. From where I sit—and, granted, I have yet to get to Sochi and encounter the shock of cold water in the shower, and, granted, I’m a fine practicioner of mocking Russian ridiculousness—it does seem like the Western press is on the hunt for evidence of how inept and hilarious the Russians are. There does seem to be something mean-spirited in all of this, as if the Western press came hoping to encounter pillow shortages and rusty water.

                                                                      

Again, the evidence of failure is incontrovertible and embarrassing, but it is also, in the scheme of things, minor. So far, nothing major has happened. Ski jumps have yet to collapse, trains have yet to derail, there’s just some cold water and an upside down toilet lid. It’s inconvenient and, yes, it’s funny, but here’s where I agree with Yakunin: it’s the tone. There’s a fine line between fair criticism and schadenfreude, and the Western press has been largely well on the side of the latter. I’d also argue that there's something chauvinistic, even Russophobic in it. The Europeans may not be ready for their Olympics, but, okay, we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and hope for the best. The Chinese prepare for theirs ruthlessly, but we don’t understand them so whatever. We railed on Romney for daring to criticize the preparedness of our British friends, and we wrote in muted tones about Athens not being ready in time for their Olympics, but with the Russians, we gloat: Look at these stupid savages, they can’t do anything right.

 

Within hours of arriving in Moscow yesterday, Russian friends, even the Westernized ones, those who are openly, viciously critical of the Kremlin, have expressed their hurt at the Western blooper coverage of Sochi. A whole lot of their tax money has been spent on something they may not have wanted and in ways they find criminally wasteful, and, yes, their government has not done much to endear itself to the West of late, but they’re puzzled by why the Americans and the British are so very happy that the details are a little screwy, the way they generally are in Russia.

 

The word they use is zloradstvo, literally: evil-reveling.


I Want the Olympics to Succeed. On TV, the Opening Ceremony Did. By T.A. Frank. The New Republic, February 8, 2014.

In Praise of Sochi Schadenfreude. Here’s why we should celebrate Russia's failure. By David Harsanyi. The Federalist, February 7, 2014.

Harsanyi:

A few months prior to the 2008 Summer Olympics games in Beijing, there was an Olympic torch running ceremony in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa. There, the nation’s Communist Party leader, Zhang Qingli, declared that “China’s red flag with five stars will forever flutter high above this land” before dropping a bit Jesse Myerson-ish rhetoric on folks, explaining that China would “totally smash the splittist schemes of the Dalai Lama clique.”

 

Qingli saw the Olympics as optimal moment to launch into some political haranguing, because the Olympics is a political event. Always has been. And sporadically, regimes in various stages of authoritarianism, say the Nazis or the Chinese Communists or the Russian Putinists, use this overhyped and overrated sporting exhibition to try and convince others of the superiority of their regimes. This is why the Germans made a spectacle in 1936, why the Soviets spent decades trying to create Ivan Dragos — and also why, the 1980 United States ice hockey victory over Soviet Union team was, for many of us, the greatest sports moment of all time.

 

Here’s how Charles Lane put it in a superb column detailing the uselessness of the event:

Whatever might be said for that idea in theory, it hasn’t panned out in practice. The ostensibly apolitical Games have been marred by several boycotts — of Montreal in 1976 (by African nations protesting apartheid), of Moscow in 1980 (by the United States and other Western countries protesting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan) and of Los Angeles in 1984 (by communist countries retaliating for 1980).

 

The Games also have created a target for extremists, from the Palestinian terrorists who killed 11 Israeli athletes at Munich in 1972 to ultra-rightist Eric Rudolph, who placed a deadly bomb at the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta. Consequently, these celebrations of international conviviality proceed under heavy military guard.

On the bright side, Sochi has been utter embarrassment for Vladimir Putin – or, in other words, though it’s hardly started, it’s been the rare entertaining Olympic experience. (update: Yes, this includes opening ceremonies, with its Cirque du Soleil celebration of 20th-century tyranny.)

 

We’ve seen an avalanche of tweets from Western journalists about the crude amenities in Sochi, the architectural challenges, the unfinished hotel rooms, the stray dogs, the yellow drinking water, the garbage, not to mention the embargo of imperialist Greek yogurt to American athletes.

 

Vladimir Yakunin, a Russian plutocrat who, unlike some less vigilant magnates, knows where his black bread is buttered, groused about Western journalists who were “feeding hysteria about Russia.” Some people wondered if it was fair? Here’s Julia Ioffe at the New Republic:

There’s a fine line between fair criticism and schadenfreude, and the Western press has been largely well on the side of the latter. I’d also argue that there’s something chauvinistic, even Russophobic in it.

Russophobic? As in harboring negative prejudices, dislikes and fears about Russia and Russians? The place that gave us Dostoyevsky, Stravinsky, Solzhenitsyn and so on and on and on . . . ? Hardly. Is it Russophobic to have a good laugh at the expense of a crooked government that squanders an estimated $50 billion on a publicity party when its per capita income is less than that of Equatorial Guinea or Gabon? A country that is 140th in on the economic freedom index, according to Heritage Foundation, slotted between Tajikistan and Burundi.

 

These Olympics might even end up doing the Russians a favor by bringing attention to their plight. Maybe Sochi will be seen as an event emblematic of the deeper problems in the country, As Garry Kasparov puts it:

Do not mistake the epic graft in Sochi as unusual or incidental. Corruption is the overriding principle of Putin’s 14 years in power and looting the Russian treasury and the Russian people is itself the goal. For all the foolish attempts to interpret Putin’s geopolitical strategy and personal ideology, the common denominator is always whether or not an action helps him maintain the cash flow that in turn enables him and his clique to stay in power.

We don’t even have to bring up the fact that Putin has consistently undermined American interests, abetting brutal dictatorships in Syria and North Korea – not to mention, shielding Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Surrounded by an army of 40,000 soldiers and police in a “ring of steel,” Bob Costas can whitewash his host’s misdeeds, but Russia’s government is not only corrupt, and not only is it intolerant of gays, but according to Amnesty International, human rights violations by the government include killings, enforced disappearances and torture, and they are “frequent.” According  to Freedom of Information index by Reporters Without Borders, Putin belongs on a list with Chinese President Xi Jinping, North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Italian Mafia and Chechnya’s Ramzan Kadyrov.

 

That’s not to say that Russians, with or without Putin, don’t have a long way to go. It’s not to say that the Russian people don’t have their quirks. But if Sochi is, as Putin claims, a vision a “new Russia,” lots of people around the world will see that the new Russia is extraordinarily similar to the old Russia.

 

This is his Olympics. We should all get in a good laugh at his misfortune.

 

Sochi 2014 opening ceremony: Ernst delivers disco-led paean to the past. By Owen Gibson. The Guardian, February 7, 2014.

Gibson:

But after all the talk of oppressive security, the disgrace of recently introduced anti-gay laws, Russia’s human rights record and Putin’s macho shows of strength, it was somehow refreshing that Konstantin Ernst chose to at least try to highlight another side of the country’s character.

 

“I wanted to present the history of Russia as seen though the eyes of a little girl, who represents the feminine side of Russia,” he said. “The real Russians, untainted by decades of propaganda and the cold war.” Malfunctioning snowflakes aside, he largely succeeded.


Sochi’s Opening Ceremony Forgot to Mention a Few Things About Russian History. By Julia Ioffe. The New Republic, February 8, 2014.

Irina Rodnina, the Woman Lighting the Sochi Olympic Flame, Tweeted a Racist, Doctored Picture of President Obama. By Julia Ioffe. The New Republic, February 7, 2014.

Irina Rodnina, Former Russian Skater Who Lit Olympic Flame, Tweeted Racist Obama Photo. By Andrew Hart. The Huffington Post, February 7, 2014.

Russian MP Irina Rodnina’s Obama with banana picture sparks racism debate. By Shaun Walker. The Guardian, September 16, 2013.

Welcome to Sochi: Beware the Water. By Stacy St. Clair. NJBR, February 5, 2014.

My So-Called Revolution. By Julia Ioffe.

Maria Baronova

My So-Called Revolution: The Loneliness of Vladimir Putin. By Julia Ioffe. The New Republic, February 2, 2014. From the February 17, 2014 issue. Also here.

He crushed his opposition and has nothing to show for it but a country that’s falling apart.


Why Did Someone Put a Giant Wooden Cock on a Kremlin Critic Katya Romanovskaya’s Car? Buy Julia Ioffe. The New Republic, February 3, 2014.

Maria Baronova: Lady Dada. By Julia Ioffe. The New Republic, August 2, 2012. From the August 23, 2012 issue. Also here.

Maria Baronova: A Face of the Russian Protest Movement. New York Times, June 25, 2012.

Maria Baronova talks with soldiers guarding the Kremlin (in Russian). Video, Vodkerr, May 6, 2012. YouTube.

The Geopolitics of Sochi. By Michael A. Reynolds.

The Geopolitics of Sochi. By Michael A. Reynolds. Real Clear World, February 5, 2014. Also at Foreign Policy Research Institute.

Sarah Brightman: Stranger in Paradise. Alexander Borodin: Polovtsian Dances.

Sarah Brightman: Stranger in Paradise. Live from Las Vegas 2004. Video. Angelheart1959, January 8, 2014. YouTube. Also here. From the DVD Harem: Live from Las Vegas.




Sarah Brightman: Stranger in Paradise. Studio version from Harem. Video. lovechangeall, June 15, 2010.




Sarah Brightman: Stranger in Paradise. Studio version from Harem. Audio. Abrakt, November 1, 2013. YouTube.




Alexander Borodin: Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor. Bolshoi Theatre. Video. Dragoslav S, June 16, 2013. YouTube.




Borodin: Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor. Kirov Opera Company. Video. John J, March 5, 2012. YouTube.




Alexander Borodin: Prince Igor. Complete. Video. Pavel Karmanov, June 19, 2013. YouTube.