Technology, the economy and pool cleaning. By Chrystia Freeland. Reuters, February 21, 2013.
Book review: “The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change” by Al Gore. By Chrystia Freeland. Washington Post, February 22, 2013.
Freeland, Technology . . .:
One way
to divide people is into foxes and hedgehogs. Another is into those who think
this time is different and those who believe there is never anything new under
the sun.
The
latter split can be a matter of temperament, of politics or even of religion.
But today it is relevant for another, more urgent reason: It describes how
people think about the most critical economic problem in the industrialized
world today — the dearth of well- paying middle-class jobs.
The
this-time-is-different school attributes a lot of what is happening to the
technology revolution. That makes them an intellectually eclectic bunch. On one
hand, they include wide-eyed enthusiasts who believe in human progress and in
the transformational power of technology. But they also include grim
hand-wringers who fear the unprecedented changes may bring unprecedented woes.
That
combination of Pollyanna and Cassandra is perfectly embodied in the
multifaceted mind of Al Gore. Gore is a longtime fan of the geeks, and in his
post-political life he has very nearly become one of them, with his seat on the
Apple board and senior partnership with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a
leading venture capital firm in Silicon Valley.
It thus
comes as no surprise that in his new book, “The Future,” Gore foresees a world
of “hyper-change” in which the technology revolution is “carrying us with it at
a speed beyond our imagining toward ever newer technologically shaped realities
that often appear, in the words of Arthur C. Clarke, ‘indistinguishable from
magic.’”
But
Gore has also always been part Savonarola — remember the campaign of his
estranged wife, Tipper, against music with “profane language” — and his
conviction that this time is different has a sharp edge. In “The Future,” Gore
admits that the Luddites, who feared that the Industrial Revolution would
create structural unemployment, were wrong: “The new jobs that emerged in
factories not only outnumbered those lost on farms but produced higher incomes,
even as farms became far more productive and food prices sharply declined.”
Yet he
warns that there is no guarantee history will repeat itself. In particular,
Gore worries that thanks to the technology revolution, the traditional link
between rising productivity and a rising standard of living for the middle
class has been broken. He fears that severed link may be causing the economic
slowdown in the developed economies: A weakened middle class lacks the spending
power to drive growth.
One of
the smartest academics studying this phenomenon is Erik Brynjolfsson, a
management professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Brynjolfsson, who co-wrote the new book “Race Against the Machine,” also
believes the technology revolution is having a powerful and unprecedented
impact.
“Most
of the debate in Washington is really playing small ball and is missing the
tectonic changes in the way the economy works, which are driven by technology,”
he said recently. “This is the big story of our time, and it is going to
accelerate over the next 10 years.”
Like
Gore, Brynjolfsson thinks the canary in the coal mine is the decoupling of
gains in productivity and in wages. “Productivity since 2000 has grown faster
than in the ’70s, ’80s or ’90s,” he said. “But starting in the late 1990s,
we’ve had this decoupling of wages from productivity.”
Brynjolfsson
believes this break is a historic watershed. “There have been big economic
changes in the past, but productivity and jobs tracked each other pretty
closely,” he said. “It is only since 1997 that they decoupled. There is no
economic law that says they go together.”
That is
a change with tremendous social and political implications. As Brynjolfsson put
it: “A lot of economists felt that as long as productivity was growing, things
would take care of themselves. That’s no longer true.”
This is
indeed a watershed moment: Productivity and innovation, the focus of
policymakers and business leaders, no longer guarantee widely shared
prosperity. “Digital technologies are different in that they allow people with
skills to replicate their talents to serve billions,” Mr. Brynjolfsson said.
“There is really a drastic winner-take-all effect because every industry is
becoming like the software industry.”
Classical
economic theory isn’t entirely wrong. The danger isn’t — as it was easy to fear
during the depths of the financial crisis — structural unemployment. The
problem is what kind of jobs, at what kind of salaries, the shiny new
technologically powered economy of the future will generate.
Lawrence
H. Summers, the Harvard professor and former Treasury secretary, has a vivid
way of describing the dystopian possibility. “As economists like to explain,
the system will equilibrate at full employment,” Summers said in a public
interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last month. “But
maybe the way it will equilibrate at full employment is there’ll be specialists
at cleaning the shallow end and the deep end of rich people’s swimming pools.
And that’s a problematic way for society to function.”
This is
a personal problem — who wants to prepare their children for a life of deep-
and shallow-end cleaning? It is also a political one. As Brynjolfsson points
out, the technology revolution also has winners. The share they reap from the
increase in productivity is greater than ever, and they might quite like a
world of specialists in various depths of pool cleaning.
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Campaign Address on Progressive Government at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. By Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Campaign Address on Progressive Government at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, California, September 23,1932. By Franklin D. Roosevelt. The American Presidency Project. Also find it here and here.
FDR’s Commonwealth Club Address: Redefining Individualism, Adjudicating Greatness. By Davis W. Houck. Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Fall 2004.
Chrystia Freeland on FDR’s Commonwealth Club Address. Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else. New York: The Penguin Press, 2012, pp. 176-178.
Roosevelt:
So
began, in American political life, the new day, the day of the individual
against the system, the day in which individualism was made the great watchword
of American life. The happiest of economic conditions made that day long and
splendid. On the Western frontier, land was substantially free. No one, who did
not shirk the task of earning a living, was entirely without opportunity to do
so. Depressions could, and did, come and go; but they could not alter the
fundamental fact that most of the people lived partly by selling their labor
and partly by extracting their livelihood from the soil, so that starvation and
dislocation were practically impossible. At the very worst there was always the
possibility of climbing into a covered wagon and moving west where the untilled
prairies afforded a haven for men to whom the East did not provide a place. So
great were our natural resources that we could offer this relief not only to
our own people, but to the distressed of all the world; we could invite
immigration from Europe, and welcome it with open arms. Traditionally, when a
depression came a new section of land was opened in the west; and even our
temporary misfortune served our manifest destiny.
It was
in the middle of the nineteenth century that a new force was released and a new
dream created. The force was what is called the industrial revolution, the
advance of steam and machinery and the rise of the forerunners of the modern
industrial plant. The dream was the dream of an economic machine, able to raise
the standard of living for everyone; to bring luxury within the reach of the
humblest; to annihilate distance by steam power and later by electricity, and
to release everyone from the drudgery of the heaviest manual toil. It was to be
expected that this would necessarily affect Government. Heretofore, Government
had merely been called upon to produce conditions within which people could
live happily, labor peacefully, and rest secure. Now it was called upon to aid
in the consummation of this new dream. There was, however, a shadow over the
dream. To be made real, it required use of the talents of men of tremendous
will and tremendous ambition, since by no other force could the problems of
financing and engineering and new developments be brought to a consummation.
So
manifest were the advantages of the machine age, however, that the United
States fearlessly, cheerfully, and, I think, rightly, accepted the bitter with
the sweet. It was thought that no price was too high to pay for the advantages
which we could draw from a finished industrial system. This history of the last
half century is accordingly in large measure a history of a group of financial
Titans, whose methods were not scrutinized with too much care, and who were
honored in proportion as they produced the results, irrespective of the means they
used. The financiers who pushed the railroads to the Pacific were always
ruthless, often wasteful, and frequently corrupt; but they did build railroads,
and we have them today. It has been estimated that the American investor paid
for the American railway system more than three times over in the process; but
despite this fact the net advantage was to the United States. As long as we had
free land; as long as population was growing by leaps and bounds; as long as
our industrial plants were insufficient to supply our own needs, society chose
to give the ambitious man free play and unlimited reward provided only that he
produced the economic plant so much desired.
FDR’s Commonwealth Club Address: Redefining Individualism, Adjudicating Greatness. By Davis W. Houck. Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Fall 2004.
Obama’s Backers Seek Big Donors to Press Agenda. By Nicholas Confessore.
Obama’s Backers Seek Big Donors to Press Agenda. By Nicholas Confessore. New York Times, February 22, 2013.
Scientists Claim That 72 is the New 30.
Scientists Claim That 72 Is the New 30 . . . So, How Do We Pay for Increased Life Expectancy? Video. America Live with Megyn Kelly. Fox News, February 26, 2013. Also find it here.
72 is the new 30: Scientists claim healthcare and medicine extends keep us younger for longer. By Anna Hodgekiss and Martin Robinson. Daily Mail, February 26, 2013.
Human mortality improvement in evolutionary context. By Oskar Burger, Annette Baudisch, James W. Vaupel. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Early Edition, October 15, 2012. PDF.
Abstract:
Life expectancy is increasing in most countries and has exceeded 80 in several, as low-mortality nations continue to make progress in averting deaths. The health and economic implications of mortality reduction have been given substantial attention, but the observed malleability of human mortality has not been placed in a broad evolutionary context. We quantify the rate and amount of mortality reduction by comparing a variety of human populations to the evolved human mortality profile, here estimated as the average mortality pattern for ethnographically observed hunter-gatherers. We show that human mortality has decreased so substantially that the difference between hunter-gatherers and today’s lowest mortality populations is greater than the difference between hunter-gatherers and wild chimpanzees. The bulk of this mortality reduction has occurred since 1900 and has been experienced by only about 4 of the roughly 8,000 human generations that have ever lived. Moreover, mortality improvement in humans is on par with or greater than the reductions in mortality in other species achieved by laboratory selection experiments and endocrine pathway mutations. This observed plasticity in age-specific risk of death is at odds with conventional theories of aging.
72 is the new 30: Scientists claim healthcare and medicine extends keep us younger for longer. By Anna Hodgekiss and Martin Robinson. Daily Mail, February 26, 2013.
Human mortality improvement in evolutionary context. By Oskar Burger, Annette Baudisch, James W. Vaupel. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Early Edition, October 15, 2012. PDF.
Abstract:
Life expectancy is increasing in most countries and has exceeded 80 in several, as low-mortality nations continue to make progress in averting deaths. The health and economic implications of mortality reduction have been given substantial attention, but the observed malleability of human mortality has not been placed in a broad evolutionary context. We quantify the rate and amount of mortality reduction by comparing a variety of human populations to the evolved human mortality profile, here estimated as the average mortality pattern for ethnographically observed hunter-gatherers. We show that human mortality has decreased so substantially that the difference between hunter-gatherers and today’s lowest mortality populations is greater than the difference between hunter-gatherers and wild chimpanzees. The bulk of this mortality reduction has occurred since 1900 and has been experienced by only about 4 of the roughly 8,000 human generations that have ever lived. Moreover, mortality improvement in humans is on par with or greater than the reductions in mortality in other species achieved by laboratory selection experiments and endocrine pathway mutations. This observed plasticity in age-specific risk of death is at odds with conventional theories of aging.
The Egyptian Army is Making a Comeback. By Zvi Mazel.
The Egyptian army is making a comeback. By Zvi Mazel. Jerusalem Post, February 24, 2013.
More on Egypt and Morsi here.
Mazel:
Never has Egypt been so close to civil war and today it seems that only the army can prevent the worse from happening.
The Muslim Brothers and the opposition are both doing their utmost to bring the army to their side, with little success so far: Field Marshal Abd el-Fattah El-Sisi, the defense minister, never loses an opportunity to state that the army is taking no part in the political struggle and devotes its energy to protecting the country – while adding that it will not let it plunge into chaos. The opposition, in contrast, feels that only the army can bring back order – the way they want. During last Friday’s demonstrations people called on the army to “Get out of the barracks and make President Mohamed Morsi resign and call for new presidential elections.”
That state of affairs leaves the Brotherhood and Morsi with mixed feelings. In the course of the past few weeks they have became painfully aware of the fact that the army will not protect the regime should it lose its legitimacy and try to resort to force to stay in power. Last week the rumor that Morsi intended to fire the defense minister spread like wildfire, prompting an “unnamed military source” to warn that it would be “political suicide” for the president since the army – soldiers and officers alike – are angry with the regime. One of the president’s representatives hastened to placate army commanders and the army in turn distanced itself from the “unnamed source.”
Three days later Morsi declared that he had full confidence in the army and “the deepest appreciation” for the defense minister; the declaration was duly published in the media next to a photo of El- Sisi sitting opposite Morsi in the president’s office. The rumor may have been a trial balloon launched by the Brothers who wanted to gauge what kind of reaction could be expected to such a radical move. However the incident can also be seen as part of a wider series of clashes between the army and the Brotherhood.
Morsi first became aware of the problem last November during the violent demonstrations led by the opposition to protest the new Islamic constitution and the presidential declaration granting the president legislative power and full immunity for his decisions.
The army issued a call for dialogue between “both sides” while stressing “the legitimacy of the people.”
Suddenly the army was acting as an independent force distinct from the regime while asserting that legitimacy was vested in the people and not in the rulers, even though they had been democratically elected in free elections. There were some hasty – and secret – talks and the army shelved its call. However the Brothers will not forget that the army did not acknowledge the legitimacy of the elected president.
Especially since the Port Said riots last month between opposing demonstrators and security forces which leaving 60 dead, El-Sisi stated that the army was ready to intervene “to prevent the collapse of the country should no political solution be found.” Shortly afterward El-Sisi was quoted as allegedly having said that he would not let the Muslim Brotherhood take over the army.
There was an angry reaction from the Brotherhood and its Supreme Guide Mohammed Badie condemned “the widespread corruption of the army.” It was the turn of the army to protest and Badie apologized.
Maj.-Gen. Sedki Sobhi, commander in chief of the army, added fuel to the fire by saying that “the army does not intervene in politics but it will take to the streets if the people need it.” Deeds followed words.
When Morsi declared a state of emergency in the Suez canal zone following the Port Said clashes and imposed a curfew, the army refused to supervise it and Morsi had no choice but to cancel the state of emergency.
El-Sisi took Morsi by surprise and embarrassed him greatly by issuing on December 23, 2012 a ministerial decree turning the eastern border of Egypt with Israel and the Gaza Strip into a closed military zone five km. deep, Rafah city excluded.
Selling or renting land there was forbidden because it was a strategic area of military importance. The decree was issued days after the Egyptian government, in an attempt to promote better relations with Sinai Beduin and improve their lot, had informed them that they could sell or rent land in the peninsula.
El-Sisi had acted in order to tighten control over the border zone where the army is trying to prevent infiltration of jihadi operatives into Egypt from Gaza, and attacks on Israel from the Egyptian side while keeping a close watch on the contraband tunnels. However, he had apparently “forgotten” to consult with the president when he issued his decree – something well within his ministerial prerogatives.
The decree led to a renewed wave of anger from the Beduin who are threatening a civil disobedience campaign if it is not rescinded. The army has entered into negotiations with them with no result so far, and the situation remains volatile in the extreme.
Then it became known that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces has been meeting from time to time to discuss the situation in the country – without informing the president who is officially the head of the council. The meetings were described as “informal” which does not make them more palatable to Morsi.
Tensions between the army and the Brotherhood are a source of deep concern for the regime. Morsi had gotten rid of the former army commanders swiftly and unexpectedly a few weeks after his election, naming in their stead El-Sisi and Sobhi who were seen as devout Muslims; it was rumored that El-Sisi was a member of the Brotherhood.
However it soon transpired that though his wife wears the veil, El-Sisi is not a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. In fact, high-ranking elements in the Justice and Freedom Party tried to have him fired and the official party paper ignored him completely for weeks until Morsi himself explained to the Brotherhood that there was no use trying to reverse the situation.
However, Muslim Brothers are suddenly remembering that the army has always been against their movement – from Nasser to Mubarak – and that it was Islamic terrorists raised on their doctrine who assassinated Sadat.
There are widespread rumors to the effect that the Brotherhood is forming a clandestine militia while setting up listening posts to monitor the army, to be ready to confront the army should it become necessary.
And while the clash between the regime and the opposition shows no signs of abating, the president has called for parliamentary elections to be held over an unprecedented period of two months starting in late April.
Morsi will do all he can to achieve the complete takeover of the country before the new parliament can be convened in July. The opposition is up in arms threatening to boycott the elections if a new national unity government is not formed to ensure that they are free and fair, the large Coptic minority is outraged since polling will be held on their holy Easter week – and the country’s economy is still spiraling out of control.
What will the army do, if anything? On the one hand, the new constitution grants it powers beyond its wildest dreams. On the other hand, the army, for so long the symbol of Egypt’s greatness, cannot remain indifferent to the country’s slow degradation.
More on Egypt and Morsi here.
Mazel:
Never has Egypt been so close to civil war and today it seems that only the army can prevent the worse from happening.
The Muslim Brothers and the opposition are both doing their utmost to bring the army to their side, with little success so far: Field Marshal Abd el-Fattah El-Sisi, the defense minister, never loses an opportunity to state that the army is taking no part in the political struggle and devotes its energy to protecting the country – while adding that it will not let it plunge into chaos. The opposition, in contrast, feels that only the army can bring back order – the way they want. During last Friday’s demonstrations people called on the army to “Get out of the barracks and make President Mohamed Morsi resign and call for new presidential elections.”
That state of affairs leaves the Brotherhood and Morsi with mixed feelings. In the course of the past few weeks they have became painfully aware of the fact that the army will not protect the regime should it lose its legitimacy and try to resort to force to stay in power. Last week the rumor that Morsi intended to fire the defense minister spread like wildfire, prompting an “unnamed military source” to warn that it would be “political suicide” for the president since the army – soldiers and officers alike – are angry with the regime. One of the president’s representatives hastened to placate army commanders and the army in turn distanced itself from the “unnamed source.”
Three days later Morsi declared that he had full confidence in the army and “the deepest appreciation” for the defense minister; the declaration was duly published in the media next to a photo of El- Sisi sitting opposite Morsi in the president’s office. The rumor may have been a trial balloon launched by the Brothers who wanted to gauge what kind of reaction could be expected to such a radical move. However the incident can also be seen as part of a wider series of clashes between the army and the Brotherhood.
Morsi first became aware of the problem last November during the violent demonstrations led by the opposition to protest the new Islamic constitution and the presidential declaration granting the president legislative power and full immunity for his decisions.
The army issued a call for dialogue between “both sides” while stressing “the legitimacy of the people.”
Suddenly the army was acting as an independent force distinct from the regime while asserting that legitimacy was vested in the people and not in the rulers, even though they had been democratically elected in free elections. There were some hasty – and secret – talks and the army shelved its call. However the Brothers will not forget that the army did not acknowledge the legitimacy of the elected president.
Especially since the Port Said riots last month between opposing demonstrators and security forces which leaving 60 dead, El-Sisi stated that the army was ready to intervene “to prevent the collapse of the country should no political solution be found.” Shortly afterward El-Sisi was quoted as allegedly having said that he would not let the Muslim Brotherhood take over the army.
There was an angry reaction from the Brotherhood and its Supreme Guide Mohammed Badie condemned “the widespread corruption of the army.” It was the turn of the army to protest and Badie apologized.
Maj.-Gen. Sedki Sobhi, commander in chief of the army, added fuel to the fire by saying that “the army does not intervene in politics but it will take to the streets if the people need it.” Deeds followed words.
When Morsi declared a state of emergency in the Suez canal zone following the Port Said clashes and imposed a curfew, the army refused to supervise it and Morsi had no choice but to cancel the state of emergency.
El-Sisi took Morsi by surprise and embarrassed him greatly by issuing on December 23, 2012 a ministerial decree turning the eastern border of Egypt with Israel and the Gaza Strip into a closed military zone five km. deep, Rafah city excluded.
Selling or renting land there was forbidden because it was a strategic area of military importance. The decree was issued days after the Egyptian government, in an attempt to promote better relations with Sinai Beduin and improve their lot, had informed them that they could sell or rent land in the peninsula.
El-Sisi had acted in order to tighten control over the border zone where the army is trying to prevent infiltration of jihadi operatives into Egypt from Gaza, and attacks on Israel from the Egyptian side while keeping a close watch on the contraband tunnels. However, he had apparently “forgotten” to consult with the president when he issued his decree – something well within his ministerial prerogatives.
The decree led to a renewed wave of anger from the Beduin who are threatening a civil disobedience campaign if it is not rescinded. The army has entered into negotiations with them with no result so far, and the situation remains volatile in the extreme.
Then it became known that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces has been meeting from time to time to discuss the situation in the country – without informing the president who is officially the head of the council. The meetings were described as “informal” which does not make them more palatable to Morsi.
Tensions between the army and the Brotherhood are a source of deep concern for the regime. Morsi had gotten rid of the former army commanders swiftly and unexpectedly a few weeks after his election, naming in their stead El-Sisi and Sobhi who were seen as devout Muslims; it was rumored that El-Sisi was a member of the Brotherhood.
However it soon transpired that though his wife wears the veil, El-Sisi is not a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. In fact, high-ranking elements in the Justice and Freedom Party tried to have him fired and the official party paper ignored him completely for weeks until Morsi himself explained to the Brotherhood that there was no use trying to reverse the situation.
However, Muslim Brothers are suddenly remembering that the army has always been against their movement – from Nasser to Mubarak – and that it was Islamic terrorists raised on their doctrine who assassinated Sadat.
There are widespread rumors to the effect that the Brotherhood is forming a clandestine militia while setting up listening posts to monitor the army, to be ready to confront the army should it become necessary.
And while the clash between the regime and the opposition shows no signs of abating, the president has called for parliamentary elections to be held over an unprecedented period of two months starting in late April.
Morsi will do all he can to achieve the complete takeover of the country before the new parliament can be convened in July. The opposition is up in arms threatening to boycott the elections if a new national unity government is not formed to ensure that they are free and fair, the large Coptic minority is outraged since polling will be held on their holy Easter week – and the country’s economy is still spiraling out of control.
What will the army do, if anything? On the one hand, the new constitution grants it powers beyond its wildest dreams. On the other hand, the army, for so long the symbol of Egypt’s greatness, cannot remain indifferent to the country’s slow degradation.
Gun Control Advocates Need to Acknowledge Owners’ Rights. By Cathy Young.
Gun control advocates need to acknowledge owners’ rights. By Cathy Young. Newsday, February 25, 2013.
Young:
This week, more than two months after the deadly school shooting in Newtown, Conn., Congress is finally set to tackle gun-control legislation.
Many proposed measures, such as expanded background checks and stronger penalties for those who act as “fronts” to buy guns for criminals, make eminent sense. But two things need to be recognized: One, these measures probably won’t do much to reduce gun crime, or even mass shootings. And two, reasonable gun control can only succeed if its advocates show respect for law-abiding gun owners, their rights and their culture.
Last month, in the wake of the Newtown tragedy, novelist and literary critic Walter Kirn published a piece in The New Republic, the leading magazine of liberal opinion, titled “What Gun Owners Really Want.” Kirn disclosed that he grew up with guns and has owned them as an adult, at least once using a weapon to scare off a potential attacker and defend himself and his family. He also wrote about coming to support the need for more regulation, particularly for military-style firearms. His plea to readers was to stop demonizing responsible gun owners.
Yet the response on the magazine’s website was far from understanding. Some mocked gun owners as driven by “fear of death” at the hands of criminals or state tyranny – as if gun control advocacy did not rely on fear of death by firearms. Others questioned the truthfulness of Kirn’s personal narrative.
Around the same time, another piece in The New Republic admitted that most gun control legislation under consideration – including a renewed assault weapon ban – would barely make a dent in gun violence. But this, author Bill Scher wrote, was not important: While we don’t know yet what measures would work, we must affirm “the principle that it is our government’s responsibility to keep attacking the problem of death by firearms until we’re down to the low levels achieved by the rest of the developed world.”
Such rhetoric rightly alarms gun owners. The government, we’re told, can experiment indefinitely with restrictions in pursuit of what may be a utopian goal, considering that non-gun violence rates in the United States are also higher than in most developed countries, and that the correlation between gun possession and gun violence is by no means simple. (Switzerland and Norway have roughly half the gun ownership rate of the United States but about one-eighth the murder rate.)
Too many anti-gun liberals see the gun-owning culture as a baffling, repulsive, uniquely American barbarism. They are also inclined to treat gun owners as ignorant paranoid rednecks who don't know what's good for them – who think, for instance, that they need a handgun for protection but ignore the fact that it's far more likely to put them and their loved ones in danger of murder or suicide.
Of course, these comparisons leave out plenty of relevant facts: that most defensive uses of guns do not include actually shooting an attacker; that many gun murders between people who know each other involve criminals; or that the United States has fairly low suicide rates compared to many countries with strict gun regulations and few guns in civilian hands, such as Hungary or Japan.
When gun control advocates make it clear that they regard the ownership of guns – especially handguns – as stupid, unnecessary and dangerous, their assurances that they only want to promote reasonable regulations and have no wish to ban or confiscate guns ring hollow.
Any gun control debate must start with the acknowledgment that disarming America, even if it were desirable, is impossible, and that the concerns of gun owners must be taken into account. Then, perhaps, we can start moving forward.
Young:
This week, more than two months after the deadly school shooting in Newtown, Conn., Congress is finally set to tackle gun-control legislation.
Many proposed measures, such as expanded background checks and stronger penalties for those who act as “fronts” to buy guns for criminals, make eminent sense. But two things need to be recognized: One, these measures probably won’t do much to reduce gun crime, or even mass shootings. And two, reasonable gun control can only succeed if its advocates show respect for law-abiding gun owners, their rights and their culture.
Last month, in the wake of the Newtown tragedy, novelist and literary critic Walter Kirn published a piece in The New Republic, the leading magazine of liberal opinion, titled “What Gun Owners Really Want.” Kirn disclosed that he grew up with guns and has owned them as an adult, at least once using a weapon to scare off a potential attacker and defend himself and his family. He also wrote about coming to support the need for more regulation, particularly for military-style firearms. His plea to readers was to stop demonizing responsible gun owners.
Yet the response on the magazine’s website was far from understanding. Some mocked gun owners as driven by “fear of death” at the hands of criminals or state tyranny – as if gun control advocacy did not rely on fear of death by firearms. Others questioned the truthfulness of Kirn’s personal narrative.
Around the same time, another piece in The New Republic admitted that most gun control legislation under consideration – including a renewed assault weapon ban – would barely make a dent in gun violence. But this, author Bill Scher wrote, was not important: While we don’t know yet what measures would work, we must affirm “the principle that it is our government’s responsibility to keep attacking the problem of death by firearms until we’re down to the low levels achieved by the rest of the developed world.”
Such rhetoric rightly alarms gun owners. The government, we’re told, can experiment indefinitely with restrictions in pursuit of what may be a utopian goal, considering that non-gun violence rates in the United States are also higher than in most developed countries, and that the correlation between gun possession and gun violence is by no means simple. (Switzerland and Norway have roughly half the gun ownership rate of the United States but about one-eighth the murder rate.)
Too many anti-gun liberals see the gun-owning culture as a baffling, repulsive, uniquely American barbarism. They are also inclined to treat gun owners as ignorant paranoid rednecks who don't know what's good for them – who think, for instance, that they need a handgun for protection but ignore the fact that it's far more likely to put them and their loved ones in danger of murder or suicide.
Of course, these comparisons leave out plenty of relevant facts: that most defensive uses of guns do not include actually shooting an attacker; that many gun murders between people who know each other involve criminals; or that the United States has fairly low suicide rates compared to many countries with strict gun regulations and few guns in civilian hands, such as Hungary or Japan.
When gun control advocates make it clear that they regard the ownership of guns – especially handguns – as stupid, unnecessary and dangerous, their assurances that they only want to promote reasonable regulations and have no wish to ban or confiscate guns ring hollow.
Any gun control debate must start with the acknowledgment that disarming America, even if it were desirable, is impossible, and that the concerns of gun owners must be taken into account. Then, perhaps, we can start moving forward.
When Pharaohs Ruled Jerusalem. By Peter van der Veen.
When Pharaohs Ruled Jerusalem. By Peter van der Veen. Biblical Archaeology Review, Vol. 39, No. 2 (March/April 2013).
When Egyptian Pharaohs Ruled Bronze Age Jerusalem. By Noah Wiener. Bible History Daily, February 25, 2013.
What’s an Egyptian Temple Doing in Jerusalem? By Gabriel Barkay. Biblical Archaeology Review, Vol. 26, No. 3 (May/June 2000). Also find it here.
A Late Bronze Age Temple in Jerusalem? By Gabriel Barkay. Israel Exploration Journal, Vol. 46, No. 1/2 (1996).
Did Pharaoh Sheshonq Attack Jerusalem? By Yigal Levin. Biblical Archaeology Review, Vol. 38, No. 4 (July/August 2012).
van der Veen:
Perhaps our most exciting find was recovered in Germany. One day in 2006, I received a telephone call from my colleague Alexander Schick. The previous day he had seen something quite remarkable on a bookshelf in the office of a senior scholar from northern Germany (who prefers to remain anonymous), namely the upper body of a statue of an Egyptian queen made of coarsely grained red granite, some 14 inches high.
Our Second Adolescence. By David Brooks.
Our Second Adolescence. By David Brooks. New York Times, February 25, 2013.
The Forgotten Emancipationists. By Manisha Sinha.
The Forgotten Emancipationists. By Manisha Sinha. New York Times, February 24, 2013.
Monday, February 25, 2013
Barack Obama’s Cairo Speech, and His Israel Problem. By Marty Peretz.
Barack Obama’s Cairo Speech, and His Israel Problem. By Marty Peretz. The Daily Beast, February 25, 2013.
Peretz:
Last week President Obama announced he will finally visit Israel. But there’s no guarantee that it will be a pleasant trip. And it certainly will not be if he lectures the Israelis yet again about what they owe the Palestinians. After all, the Arabs of Palestine could have had, like the Jews, a state pursuant to the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan (which sanctioned for the Arabs a bigger state than the Jewish one that was offered) and then again after the 1967 Six-Day War. Instead the Arab League responded to Israeli peace overtures with the Khartoum declaration of the “three nos” of the Arab Solidarity Charter: “no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it.”
Comparisons will inevitably be drawn between Obama’s 2009 trip to Cairo and his impending one to Jerusalem. His fanciful Cairo speech—delivered with no evident recognition that each and every one of the Arab countries was at that moment on the precipice of chaos—was a shoddy and slippery job, historically so misleading on so many matters that one can hardly attribute it to innocent error. Granted, some of this had to do with the president’s own ignorant romanticization of Islam and the Arabs. Some of it was sheer invention, like his treatment of U.S. diplomacy during the late-18th- and early-19th-century Barbary Wars as a prelude to a long-term peace between Muslim principalities and America and his taking on for the American people sins against Muslims, like prohibiting the wearing of the hijab, which are actually not issues in the U.S. Largely, the speech could have been not an oration but an indictment of the United State before the International Court of Justice. Does the Internal Revenue Service really discriminate against Islamic charities, as he claimed?
It is not even four years since Obama’s counterhistoric discourse. But already two years back, with the beginning of the dreamily named Arab Spring, his version and vision of these societies had degraded into real human and social wreckage. Of course, the happy chimera still holds as a liberal canonical truth. Try raising the matter of Arab or Muslim essentialism at a Harvard Square dinner party.
But for all his romance with the Muslim world, the president has a tick about Israel. Why does he find Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, so much more congenial than Israel’s Bibi Netanyahu? Experts tell us that the American president is on the phone with the Erdogan more than with any other foreign leader. Why? After all, Erdogan is leading his country resolutely in a strident Islamic direction, he has picked endless and dogmatic fights with Israel, and his country has more journalists in prison than any other. Moreover, Erdogan has intensified the internal war against the Kurds and, after much ballyhoo, has done about zero for the rebel Syrians, with whom he pledged solidarity many months ago. He also is proposing constitutional changes to the Turkish judiciary. Under this plan, eight of 17 appointments to the constitutional tribunal would be designated by the president. One quarter of the new supreme court would also be appointed by him. And who is “him”? Oh, yes, Erdogan is running for president. Obama has had nothing to say about the demolition of Turkish secularism or about Erdogan’s authoritarian bent. Nor has he stood up for the cause of political freedom and pluralism now under attack in practically all—no, all—Middle Eastern lands other than Israel, where an increasingly moderate center is setting the parameters of its politics and society.
Yet, Obama somehow can't resist telling the Israelis how misguided they are in reading their own neighborhood. He makes no secret about this. Jerusalem, which the administration insists is not factually located in Israel, will now have to deal with Chuck Hagel, who is likely to be confirmed this week as secretary of Defense and who has rarely even disguised his antipathy to the Jewish state. With Hagel waiting to run the Pentagon, all our allies now have a heads-up on America's impending strategic withdrawal from their world. No one can honestly deny this, and almost no one tries.
After all, we already lag far behind socialist France in the protection of human life and dignity against militant Islam. This is quite an achievement. So Israel will no longer be dealing with a Defense secretary who has real-life commitments to it and to the free world, in general, but with one of those cool “realists”—actually more than a bit ruffled, as we saw at his confirmation hearings—who thinks that we have no determined enemies, only rational and flexible adversaries. We have yet to experience what John Kerry believes about this, although his optimism about peace between Israel and the Palestinians suggests that he may not have seen the handwriting on the wall. We are about to see what we shall see. Iran is a test of this argument. I believe the case is settled.
Yet it has been Syria, because of the loss of nearly 70,000 lives in the civil war, that has already shown the fatuousness of American policy over time. The president was apparently convinced that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad could be lured away from his inheritance as a tyrant’s son, from the corrupt interests and brutalizing habits of his tiny Shia sect and from the by now ingrained manner of a military, which like North Korea’s, brooks neither questioning nor dissent. We have been treated in these last weeks to panegyrics about Hillary Clinton’s performance as secretary of State. The apotheosis of anyone is almost always false, and the apotheosis of a pretentious pol is also wicked. The fact is that she has accomplished nothing except giving speeches and spreading preposterous illusions, like her belief that Assad had the makings of a reformer.
The administration had argued that arming the rebels would strengthen the rebel ultras. As it happens, not arming the rebels was what strengthened the extremists among them. And believe it or not, now that they are triumphant, the administration is contemplating arming them anyway. We are about to witness a witches’ Sabbath, which neither Obama nor Clinton did anything to impede—although both General Petraeus and Leon Panetta did, to no avail. The truth is now out. If you look back to the president’s Cairo speech, you will find that he hadn’t an inkling that the world of Araby was about to collapse in blood and fire—sacred blood and fire, some would say. Amid this pan-Arab bloodshed and aside from the intra-Muslim wars where not a day goes by without some mass killing of Shia or Sunnis, there is also the remorseless persecution of Christians, especially in Egypt. This grim reality was also something the president’s Cairo address overlooked, reflecting either ignorance or cynicism. I suspect the latter.
This is the world with which Israel is being asked to reconcile. For the present, it is the Palestinian Authority—itself splintered into factions rough and rougher—that would be the recipient of Jerusalem’s West Bank concessions. After all, it is Mahmoud Abbas who sits in Ramallah, relatively prosperous and also the capital of what there is of modern Palestine. But there is scant guarantee that its powers would not soon be in the hands of Hamas, a cohort of murderers more gruesome than the P.A. and which already reigns in Gaza.
In any case, Arab politics is bloody and raw, and no agreement with or among its parties has ever held for long. The territory in dispute is grand in the imaginings of history and infinitesimal in geography. This is a volatile mix, and with the Arab penchant for glory, no contention can be discussed truthfully.
That mix is a standing temptation for mischief and atrocity. Or the invention of atrocity, as in the Palestinian tale of a massacre in Jenin more than a decade ago and many times since elsewhere from Dan to Beersheba. No one can be trusted to patrol any agreement honestly as, for instance, the United Nations Interim Forces in Lebanon, in existence since 1978, proves. What about the United States guaranteeing a peace agreement? Being obsessed with Palestine, Obama might just agree. But Americans, both idealists and realists, should not permit our armed men and women into such perils. Now there is the other Obama habit: pour our troops in, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, and pull them out when they are being shot at in intolerable numbers. There is still John Kerry’s immortal question asked of a Congressional committee oh, so long ago, and actually apt for our imperiled men and women in Afghanistan now: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”
The irony of Obama’s confidence in his mission of peace for the Jews and the Palestinian Arabs is that he has been proven demonstrably ignorant of the region. The irony of his hauteur toward Netanyahu is that it is applicable to the Israeli center, as well, and even to parts of the left, which also is not eager to open the country to new rounds of terror. The mass of Israelis do not want to govern Arab life. They do not want to run Palestinian foreign policy, if the other Arabs will allow such to be. But neither are they ready to admit unto Zion untold numbers of “refugees” into the fourth generation, and they won’t. Nor can they pretend that Arab insistence on a return to the armistice lines of 65 years ago is realistic or just. The march of time now runs faster than ever before. The “Arab state” envisioned along side the Jewish state by the General Assembly in 1947 is no more.
Barack Obama will be welcomed in Israel, for the pro-American sentiments run deep in that country. But if he comes to Israel to save it from itself or to browbeat its governing coalition, he is sure to return empty handed. Israelis know their neighborhood, and they can see laid before them the erosion of American power and authority in a region they understand much better than foreign visitors in a hurry.
Peretz:
Last week President Obama announced he will finally visit Israel. But there’s no guarantee that it will be a pleasant trip. And it certainly will not be if he lectures the Israelis yet again about what they owe the Palestinians. After all, the Arabs of Palestine could have had, like the Jews, a state pursuant to the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan (which sanctioned for the Arabs a bigger state than the Jewish one that was offered) and then again after the 1967 Six-Day War. Instead the Arab League responded to Israeli peace overtures with the Khartoum declaration of the “three nos” of the Arab Solidarity Charter: “no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it.”
Comparisons will inevitably be drawn between Obama’s 2009 trip to Cairo and his impending one to Jerusalem. His fanciful Cairo speech—delivered with no evident recognition that each and every one of the Arab countries was at that moment on the precipice of chaos—was a shoddy and slippery job, historically so misleading on so many matters that one can hardly attribute it to innocent error. Granted, some of this had to do with the president’s own ignorant romanticization of Islam and the Arabs. Some of it was sheer invention, like his treatment of U.S. diplomacy during the late-18th- and early-19th-century Barbary Wars as a prelude to a long-term peace between Muslim principalities and America and his taking on for the American people sins against Muslims, like prohibiting the wearing of the hijab, which are actually not issues in the U.S. Largely, the speech could have been not an oration but an indictment of the United State before the International Court of Justice. Does the Internal Revenue Service really discriminate against Islamic charities, as he claimed?
It is not even four years since Obama’s counterhistoric discourse. But already two years back, with the beginning of the dreamily named Arab Spring, his version and vision of these societies had degraded into real human and social wreckage. Of course, the happy chimera still holds as a liberal canonical truth. Try raising the matter of Arab or Muslim essentialism at a Harvard Square dinner party.
But for all his romance with the Muslim world, the president has a tick about Israel. Why does he find Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, so much more congenial than Israel’s Bibi Netanyahu? Experts tell us that the American president is on the phone with the Erdogan more than with any other foreign leader. Why? After all, Erdogan is leading his country resolutely in a strident Islamic direction, he has picked endless and dogmatic fights with Israel, and his country has more journalists in prison than any other. Moreover, Erdogan has intensified the internal war against the Kurds and, after much ballyhoo, has done about zero for the rebel Syrians, with whom he pledged solidarity many months ago. He also is proposing constitutional changes to the Turkish judiciary. Under this plan, eight of 17 appointments to the constitutional tribunal would be designated by the president. One quarter of the new supreme court would also be appointed by him. And who is “him”? Oh, yes, Erdogan is running for president. Obama has had nothing to say about the demolition of Turkish secularism or about Erdogan’s authoritarian bent. Nor has he stood up for the cause of political freedom and pluralism now under attack in practically all—no, all—Middle Eastern lands other than Israel, where an increasingly moderate center is setting the parameters of its politics and society.
Yet, Obama somehow can't resist telling the Israelis how misguided they are in reading their own neighborhood. He makes no secret about this. Jerusalem, which the administration insists is not factually located in Israel, will now have to deal with Chuck Hagel, who is likely to be confirmed this week as secretary of Defense and who has rarely even disguised his antipathy to the Jewish state. With Hagel waiting to run the Pentagon, all our allies now have a heads-up on America's impending strategic withdrawal from their world. No one can honestly deny this, and almost no one tries.
After all, we already lag far behind socialist France in the protection of human life and dignity against militant Islam. This is quite an achievement. So Israel will no longer be dealing with a Defense secretary who has real-life commitments to it and to the free world, in general, but with one of those cool “realists”—actually more than a bit ruffled, as we saw at his confirmation hearings—who thinks that we have no determined enemies, only rational and flexible adversaries. We have yet to experience what John Kerry believes about this, although his optimism about peace between Israel and the Palestinians suggests that he may not have seen the handwriting on the wall. We are about to see what we shall see. Iran is a test of this argument. I believe the case is settled.
Yet it has been Syria, because of the loss of nearly 70,000 lives in the civil war, that has already shown the fatuousness of American policy over time. The president was apparently convinced that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad could be lured away from his inheritance as a tyrant’s son, from the corrupt interests and brutalizing habits of his tiny Shia sect and from the by now ingrained manner of a military, which like North Korea’s, brooks neither questioning nor dissent. We have been treated in these last weeks to panegyrics about Hillary Clinton’s performance as secretary of State. The apotheosis of anyone is almost always false, and the apotheosis of a pretentious pol is also wicked. The fact is that she has accomplished nothing except giving speeches and spreading preposterous illusions, like her belief that Assad had the makings of a reformer.
The administration had argued that arming the rebels would strengthen the rebel ultras. As it happens, not arming the rebels was what strengthened the extremists among them. And believe it or not, now that they are triumphant, the administration is contemplating arming them anyway. We are about to witness a witches’ Sabbath, which neither Obama nor Clinton did anything to impede—although both General Petraeus and Leon Panetta did, to no avail. The truth is now out. If you look back to the president’s Cairo speech, you will find that he hadn’t an inkling that the world of Araby was about to collapse in blood and fire—sacred blood and fire, some would say. Amid this pan-Arab bloodshed and aside from the intra-Muslim wars where not a day goes by without some mass killing of Shia or Sunnis, there is also the remorseless persecution of Christians, especially in Egypt. This grim reality was also something the president’s Cairo address overlooked, reflecting either ignorance or cynicism. I suspect the latter.
This is the world with which Israel is being asked to reconcile. For the present, it is the Palestinian Authority—itself splintered into factions rough and rougher—that would be the recipient of Jerusalem’s West Bank concessions. After all, it is Mahmoud Abbas who sits in Ramallah, relatively prosperous and also the capital of what there is of modern Palestine. But there is scant guarantee that its powers would not soon be in the hands of Hamas, a cohort of murderers more gruesome than the P.A. and which already reigns in Gaza.
In any case, Arab politics is bloody and raw, and no agreement with or among its parties has ever held for long. The territory in dispute is grand in the imaginings of history and infinitesimal in geography. This is a volatile mix, and with the Arab penchant for glory, no contention can be discussed truthfully.
That mix is a standing temptation for mischief and atrocity. Or the invention of atrocity, as in the Palestinian tale of a massacre in Jenin more than a decade ago and many times since elsewhere from Dan to Beersheba. No one can be trusted to patrol any agreement honestly as, for instance, the United Nations Interim Forces in Lebanon, in existence since 1978, proves. What about the United States guaranteeing a peace agreement? Being obsessed with Palestine, Obama might just agree. But Americans, both idealists and realists, should not permit our armed men and women into such perils. Now there is the other Obama habit: pour our troops in, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, and pull them out when they are being shot at in intolerable numbers. There is still John Kerry’s immortal question asked of a Congressional committee oh, so long ago, and actually apt for our imperiled men and women in Afghanistan now: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”
The irony of Obama’s confidence in his mission of peace for the Jews and the Palestinian Arabs is that he has been proven demonstrably ignorant of the region. The irony of his hauteur toward Netanyahu is that it is applicable to the Israeli center, as well, and even to parts of the left, which also is not eager to open the country to new rounds of terror. The mass of Israelis do not want to govern Arab life. They do not want to run Palestinian foreign policy, if the other Arabs will allow such to be. But neither are they ready to admit unto Zion untold numbers of “refugees” into the fourth generation, and they won’t. Nor can they pretend that Arab insistence on a return to the armistice lines of 65 years ago is realistic or just. The march of time now runs faster than ever before. The “Arab state” envisioned along side the Jewish state by the General Assembly in 1947 is no more.
Barack Obama will be welcomed in Israel, for the pro-American sentiments run deep in that country. But if he comes to Israel to save it from itself or to browbeat its governing coalition, he is sure to return empty handed. Israelis know their neighborhood, and they can see laid before them the erosion of American power and authority in a region they understand much better than foreign visitors in a hurry.
Is John Kerry the Second Coming of Warren Christopher? By Adam Garfinkle.
The Second Coming of Warren Christopher? By Adam Garfinkle. The American Interest, February 24, 2013.
Has Liberalism Won in America? By Bill O’Reilly.
Talking Points Memo: Has Liberalism Won in America? Bill O’Reilly. Video. Fox News Insider, February 25, 2013. Also find it here. Transcript.
Arab Filmmakers to Celebrate Genocide. By Jonathan S. Tobin.
Arab Filmmakers to Celebrate Genocide. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, February 24, 2013.
Tobin:
While Jews around the world commemorate the inability of an ancient villain to make good on his threat to wipe out the Jews of Persia with the holiday of Purim, some in the Arab world are preparing to celebrate one such effort that did not fail. In the seventh century, the large Jewish community in the Arabian Peninsula fell victim to the influence of the newborn Muslim movement. The result was that after a futile effort to defend themselves, the three Jewish tribes of the region–the Banu Nadir, the Banu Qainuqa and the Banu Qurayza–were all forced into exile after the battle of Khaiber. The Prophet Mohammed’s followers mercilessly slaughtered the bulk of the latter tribe. This sad chapter of history is little known in the West even among Jews but it is familiar to Muslims who, even today, use the phrase “Khaiber” as a battle cry to rally opposition to Israel and as an indication of their desired fate for the Jews who live in the Middle East today.
But as the Anti-Defamation League’s blog reports, a Qatar-based production company is slated to start filming next month of a multi-millionaire dollar television series focused on the events of Khaiber. The author of the script is Yusri Al-Jindy, whose work has previously depicted Jews and Israelis as bloodthirsty villains.
But the “Khaiber” film is especially significant because it blends ancient hatreds with contemporary hopes for a similar destruction of the Jews. The goal of such a film is to dehumanize the Jewish people and to delegitimize their rights, especially to self-defense.
The genocide of the Jews of Arabia is a historical fact that speaks to the intolerance of early Islam that need not inform contemporary relations between Jews and Muslims. But the glorification of the slaughter of Arabian Jews more than 1,300 years ago is a not-so-subtle signal that justifies the efforts of those who intend a similar fate for the 6 million Jews of Israel. The embrace of these ideas by a popular Muslim audience is an ominous sign that the sea change in Arab culture that will be required to create a genuine peace in the Middle East is nowhere in sight.
Tobin:
While Jews around the world commemorate the inability of an ancient villain to make good on his threat to wipe out the Jews of Persia with the holiday of Purim, some in the Arab world are preparing to celebrate one such effort that did not fail. In the seventh century, the large Jewish community in the Arabian Peninsula fell victim to the influence of the newborn Muslim movement. The result was that after a futile effort to defend themselves, the three Jewish tribes of the region–the Banu Nadir, the Banu Qainuqa and the Banu Qurayza–were all forced into exile after the battle of Khaiber. The Prophet Mohammed’s followers mercilessly slaughtered the bulk of the latter tribe. This sad chapter of history is little known in the West even among Jews but it is familiar to Muslims who, even today, use the phrase “Khaiber” as a battle cry to rally opposition to Israel and as an indication of their desired fate for the Jews who live in the Middle East today.
But as the Anti-Defamation League’s blog reports, a Qatar-based production company is slated to start filming next month of a multi-millionaire dollar television series focused on the events of Khaiber. The author of the script is Yusri Al-Jindy, whose work has previously depicted Jews and Israelis as bloodthirsty villains.
Arab countries, including Morocco, Egypt and Jordan, and will apparently feature several well-known Arab actors. Echo Media Qatar has reportedly started building sets with structures similar to the ones inhabited by Jews 1,400 years ago.
A report on Al Jazeera in Arabic yesterday described “Khaiber” as “the most important feature of the Islamic-Jewish fight. Muslims always raise its name in their rallies against Israel because it constitutes a memory of a harsh defeat for the Jews who lived in the Arabian Peninsula during the time of prophet.”
The story of “Khaiber,” according to most Islamic sources, ends with the execution of thousands of Jews, including women and children. Protesters at anti-Israel rallies around the world, including the U.S., often evoke this battle in their chants to galvanize supporters.
The filming of “Khaiber” is just the latest instance of major TV productions in the Arab world (which are often broadcast in prime time during Ramadan) being used to promote anti-Semitic themes. Egyptian TV’s “Knight Without a Horse” blockbuster centered on the forged “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” canard. Echo Media Qatar has previously produced a film blaming the Jews for the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.According to Al Jazeera, Al-Jindy said he wrote the script because “the Zionist movement is currently passing through a turning point as a result of the changes in the Arab world.”
But the “Khaiber” film is especially significant because it blends ancient hatreds with contemporary hopes for a similar destruction of the Jews. The goal of such a film is to dehumanize the Jewish people and to delegitimize their rights, especially to self-defense.
The genocide of the Jews of Arabia is a historical fact that speaks to the intolerance of early Islam that need not inform contemporary relations between Jews and Muslims. But the glorification of the slaughter of Arabian Jews more than 1,300 years ago is a not-so-subtle signal that justifies the efforts of those who intend a similar fate for the 6 million Jews of Israel. The embrace of these ideas by a popular Muslim audience is an ominous sign that the sea change in Arab culture that will be required to create a genuine peace in the Middle East is nowhere in sight.
Mediterranean Diet Fights Heart Disease, NEJM Study Finds.
Primary Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease with a Mediterranean Diet. By Ramón Estruch et al. The New England Journal of Medicine, February 25, 2013. PDF.
Mediterranean Diet Fights Heart Disease, Study Finds. By Michael Smith. ABC News, February 25, 2013.
Mediterranean Diet Can Cut Heart Disease, Study Finds. By Gina Kolata. New York Times, February 25, 2013.
Mediterranean Diet Fights Heart Disease, Study Finds. By Michael Smith. ABC News, February 25, 2013.
Mediterranean Diet Can Cut Heart Disease, Study Finds. By Gina Kolata. New York Times, February 25, 2013.
A World Without Work. By Ross Douthat.
A World Without Work. By Ross Douthat. New York Times, February 23, 2013.
The Affluent Economy: Our Misleading Obsession with Growth Rates. By Scott Winship. The Breakthrough, Winter 2013.
Liberalism and the New Inequality. By Dalton Conley. The Breakthrough, Summer 2011.
Does the Middle Class Really Have It So Bad? By Andrew Sullivan. The Dish, February 21, 2013.
Less Innovation, More Inequality. By Edmund S. Phelps. New York Times, February 24, 2013.
The Affluent Economy: Our Misleading Obsession with Growth Rates. By Scott Winship. The Breakthrough, Winter 2013.
Liberalism and the New Inequality. By Dalton Conley. The Breakthrough, Summer 2011.
Does the Middle Class Really Have It So Bad? By Andrew Sullivan. The Dish, February 21, 2013.
Less Innovation, More Inequality. By Edmund S. Phelps. New York Times, February 24, 2013.
The Cyrus Cylinder and the Jews. By Jonathan S. Tobin.
The Cyrus Cylinder in the British Museum. Wikipedia.
The Cylinder and the Jews. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, February 22, 2013.
Find the Missing Word. By Roger Cohen. New York Times, February 21, 2013.
Cyrus, Ahmadinejad, and the Politics of Purim. By Alex Joffe. Jewish Ideas Daily, February 1, 2011.
Cyrus Cylinder. The British Museum. Translation.
Cyrus Cylinder. Wikipedia.
Cyrus Cylinder. NIAS.
The Cyrus Cylinder and Achaemenid Imperial Policy. By Amélie Kuhrt. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, February 1983.
Cyrus the Messiah? The Historical Background to Isaiah 45:1. By Lisbeth S. Fried. The Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 95, No. 2 (October 2002).
Neil MacGregor: 2600 years of history in one object. TED, July 2011. At YouTube.
Sunday, February 24, 2013
Time to Get Tough with Egypt and Morsi. By Robert Kagan and Michele Dunne.
U.S. needs to show Egypt some tough love. By Robert Kagan and Michele Dunne. Washington Post, February 20, 2013.
More on Egypt and Morsi here.
Kagan and Dunne:
President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry need to pay attention to Egypt — now. The most populous Arab country, poster child of the Arab Spring, faces a looming economic crisis and a widespread breakdown in law and order, including increasingly prevalent crime and rape. Either will cripple Egypt’s faltering effort to become a stable democracy.
The Obama administration has treated Egypt primarily as an economic problem and has urged Cairo to move quickly to satisfy International Monetary Fund (IMF) demands to qualify for financing. But there is no separating Egypt’s economic crisis from its political crisis — or from the failures of its current government. Egypt’s economy is struggling and disorder is rampant primarily because the country’s leaders the past two years — first the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, now President Mohamed Morsi — have failed to build an inclusive political process. Until they do, no amount of IMF funding will make a difference.
Although Morsi won a narrow victory last summer, he has yet to learn what it means to lead in a democratic society. His Muslim Brotherhood is Egypt’s strongest political force, but it does not command a majority of public support. It cannot simply force its will on the nation, especially one still aroused by the spirit of revolution. Morsi can hardly take on urgent tasks, such as the cutting of wasteful fuel subsidies and the reformation of a corrupt interior ministry and police force, when much of the country is against him and ready to take to the streets at the least provocation.
Under Morsi’s rule, Egyptian society has become polarized between Islamists and non-Islamists. Enraging the political opposition late last year, he railroaded through a new constitution that contains inadequate protections for the rights of women and non-Muslims and leaves open the possibility of Islamic clerical oversight of legislation. Ignoring protests about the flawed process by which the constitution was drafted and passed, Morsi is moving ahead to legislative elections based on an electoral law to which the opposition objects. Meanwhile, his government has cracked down on journalists, brought spurious charges against opposition leaders and limited the right to public protests. It is considering legislation that would constrain the activities of non-governmental organizations even more than Hosni Mubarak did.
The increasingly desperate secular opposition parties have formed a “National Salvation Front,” but under the surface they are divided between those who want to force Morsi to compromise and those who want to force him from power. Even though most favor the economic reforms necessary to get an IMF loan, many feel they must mobilize street protests against any Morsi action.
The result is that, with Egypt at the edge of bankruptcy — it has enough reserves to pay for only three more months of food and fuel imports — the government and the opposition are locked in a game of chicken. The economy is sinking, political conflict is rising and the security situation is deteriorating.
Washington’s response to this crisis has largely been business as usual. Just as the United States once clung to Mubarak, the Obama administration has hewed closely to Morsi, offering a visit to Washington and continuing to deliver the annual $1.3 billion in military assistance — including a recent shipment of F-16 aircraft. The administration’s response to Morsi’s majoritarian bullying has been muted. Egypt’s opposition and nonpartisan human rights groups believe, understandably, that Washington has resumed ignoring undemocratic practices so long as the Egyptian government protects U.S. strategic interests. Outside of opening new contacts with the ruling Muslim Brotherhood, there has been no fundamental reassessment of U.S. policy toward Egypt since Mubarak’s removal in 2011. Our military and economic aid packages remain the same — except that nearly all democracy and civil-society assistance has been cut off.
It’s time for a new approach. Both the administration and Congress need to fully review military and economic assistance to Egypt. What does the Egyptian army need to bring security to the Sinai? Probably not F-16s. What conditions should Congress place on aid? Previous packages have appropriately been conditioned on progress toward democracy, but the administration has insisted on a national security waiver and has exercised it to provide the aid regardless of Egypt’s behavior. Perhaps Congress should not permit such a waiver in the next aid bill.
As for Morsi’s planned trip to Washington, it would be better to hold that invitation until he demonstrates a sincere commitment to working with all of Egyptian society and allowing genuine freedom to all citizens. That means supporting a law that meets international standards on regulating civil society, allowing watchdog organizations to operate freely and finally resolving the controversial status of foreign and foreign-funded NGOs. It means ending the persecution of journalists and opposition figures, committing to reform the police and hold them accountable, and building a consensus on such critical matters as the constitution and electoral law.
The United States made a strategic error for years by coddling Mubarak, and his refusal to carry out reforms produced the revolution of Tahrir Square. We repeat the error by coddling Morsi at this critical moment. The United States needs to use all its options — military aid, economic aid and U.S. influence with the IMF and other international lenders — to persuade Morsi to compromise with secular politicians and civil-society leaders on political and human rights issues to rebuild security and get the economy on track.
More on Egypt and Morsi here.
Kagan and Dunne:
President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry need to pay attention to Egypt — now. The most populous Arab country, poster child of the Arab Spring, faces a looming economic crisis and a widespread breakdown in law and order, including increasingly prevalent crime and rape. Either will cripple Egypt’s faltering effort to become a stable democracy.
The Obama administration has treated Egypt primarily as an economic problem and has urged Cairo to move quickly to satisfy International Monetary Fund (IMF) demands to qualify for financing. But there is no separating Egypt’s economic crisis from its political crisis — or from the failures of its current government. Egypt’s economy is struggling and disorder is rampant primarily because the country’s leaders the past two years — first the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, now President Mohamed Morsi — have failed to build an inclusive political process. Until they do, no amount of IMF funding will make a difference.
Although Morsi won a narrow victory last summer, he has yet to learn what it means to lead in a democratic society. His Muslim Brotherhood is Egypt’s strongest political force, but it does not command a majority of public support. It cannot simply force its will on the nation, especially one still aroused by the spirit of revolution. Morsi can hardly take on urgent tasks, such as the cutting of wasteful fuel subsidies and the reformation of a corrupt interior ministry and police force, when much of the country is against him and ready to take to the streets at the least provocation.
Under Morsi’s rule, Egyptian society has become polarized between Islamists and non-Islamists. Enraging the political opposition late last year, he railroaded through a new constitution that contains inadequate protections for the rights of women and non-Muslims and leaves open the possibility of Islamic clerical oversight of legislation. Ignoring protests about the flawed process by which the constitution was drafted and passed, Morsi is moving ahead to legislative elections based on an electoral law to which the opposition objects. Meanwhile, his government has cracked down on journalists, brought spurious charges against opposition leaders and limited the right to public protests. It is considering legislation that would constrain the activities of non-governmental organizations even more than Hosni Mubarak did.
The increasingly desperate secular opposition parties have formed a “National Salvation Front,” but under the surface they are divided between those who want to force Morsi to compromise and those who want to force him from power. Even though most favor the economic reforms necessary to get an IMF loan, many feel they must mobilize street protests against any Morsi action.
The result is that, with Egypt at the edge of bankruptcy — it has enough reserves to pay for only three more months of food and fuel imports — the government and the opposition are locked in a game of chicken. The economy is sinking, political conflict is rising and the security situation is deteriorating.
Washington’s response to this crisis has largely been business as usual. Just as the United States once clung to Mubarak, the Obama administration has hewed closely to Morsi, offering a visit to Washington and continuing to deliver the annual $1.3 billion in military assistance — including a recent shipment of F-16 aircraft. The administration’s response to Morsi’s majoritarian bullying has been muted. Egypt’s opposition and nonpartisan human rights groups believe, understandably, that Washington has resumed ignoring undemocratic practices so long as the Egyptian government protects U.S. strategic interests. Outside of opening new contacts with the ruling Muslim Brotherhood, there has been no fundamental reassessment of U.S. policy toward Egypt since Mubarak’s removal in 2011. Our military and economic aid packages remain the same — except that nearly all democracy and civil-society assistance has been cut off.
It’s time for a new approach. Both the administration and Congress need to fully review military and economic assistance to Egypt. What does the Egyptian army need to bring security to the Sinai? Probably not F-16s. What conditions should Congress place on aid? Previous packages have appropriately been conditioned on progress toward democracy, but the administration has insisted on a national security waiver and has exercised it to provide the aid regardless of Egypt’s behavior. Perhaps Congress should not permit such a waiver in the next aid bill.
As for Morsi’s planned trip to Washington, it would be better to hold that invitation until he demonstrates a sincere commitment to working with all of Egyptian society and allowing genuine freedom to all citizens. That means supporting a law that meets international standards on regulating civil society, allowing watchdog organizations to operate freely and finally resolving the controversial status of foreign and foreign-funded NGOs. It means ending the persecution of journalists and opposition figures, committing to reform the police and hold them accountable, and building a consensus on such critical matters as the constitution and electoral law.
The United States made a strategic error for years by coddling Mubarak, and his refusal to carry out reforms produced the revolution of Tahrir Square. We repeat the error by coddling Morsi at this critical moment. The United States needs to use all its options — military aid, economic aid and U.S. influence with the IMF and other international lenders — to persuade Morsi to compromise with secular politicians and civil-society leaders on political and human rights issues to rebuild security and get the economy on track.
The Walmart Test: Payroll Taxes and the Social Contract. By George Packer.
The Walmart Test: Payroll Taxes and the Social Contract. By George Packer. The New Yorker, February 20, 2013.
Packer:
If you were to write a social history of America through the story of business, what would be the most significant companies in the years since the Second World War? I’d divide the period into two: from 1945 to the mid-seventies, I might name General Motors and Woolworth’s. They set the standard for corporate success and behavior during a period that could be called the Roosevelt Republic, when a social contract underwrote American life. It included an expanding middle class, a strong safety net, high marginal tax rates, a white male establishment that grudgingly made way for other groups, a bipartisan approach to legislation in Washington, and a business culture that was cautious, loyal, hierarchical, and unimaginative.
In the decades since the mid-seventies—you could call it the Reagan Republic, but I prefer the “Unwinding”—the social contract has frayed to the point of disintegration. The middle class has shrunk; tax rates (especially on upper brackets) have plunged; inequality has exploded; the safety net (especially for the poor) has weakened; the old power structure has given way to a more diverse and broad-based upper class based on education; bipartisanship—well, you know; and business culture has become entrepreneurial, fast, risk-taking, and harsh. The trade-off: more freedom, less security.
The Broken Contract: Inequality and American Decline. By George Packer. Foreign Affairs, November/December 2011.
Packer:
If you were to write a social history of America through the story of business, what would be the most significant companies in the years since the Second World War? I’d divide the period into two: from 1945 to the mid-seventies, I might name General Motors and Woolworth’s. They set the standard for corporate success and behavior during a period that could be called the Roosevelt Republic, when a social contract underwrote American life. It included an expanding middle class, a strong safety net, high marginal tax rates, a white male establishment that grudgingly made way for other groups, a bipartisan approach to legislation in Washington, and a business culture that was cautious, loyal, hierarchical, and unimaginative.
In the decades since the mid-seventies—you could call it the Reagan Republic, but I prefer the “Unwinding”—the social contract has frayed to the point of disintegration. The middle class has shrunk; tax rates (especially on upper brackets) have plunged; inequality has exploded; the safety net (especially for the poor) has weakened; the old power structure has given way to a more diverse and broad-based upper class based on education; bipartisanship—well, you know; and business culture has become entrepreneurial, fast, risk-taking, and harsh. The trade-off: more freedom, less security.
The Broken Contract: Inequality and American Decline. By George Packer. Foreign Affairs, November/December 2011.
Gilded Class Warriors. By Victor Davis Hanson.
Gilded Class Warriors. By Victor Davis Hanson. National Review Online, February 21, 2013.
Brave New World. By Victor Davis Hanson. Works and Days. PJ Media, February 19, 2013.
Hanson, Brave New World:
Them and Us
I think it was around 2009 when an entire new vocabulary entered the American popular lexicon. Where did the 1% versus the 99% come from? From where did the new financial Mason-Dixon line arise — good below $250,000 in annual family income, very bad above it? When did the 47% — or is it the 50%? — pay no federal income taxes?
At some magical point, the rich became not the successful, the skilled, the well-inherited, the lucky, or the hardworking, but “them”: the suspect, the damned even, even as the lifestyles of the rich and famous became ever more sought after.
There are not just the rich and poor any more, but now the “good rich” (e.g., athletes, rappers, Hollywood stars, Silicon Valley grandees, Democratic senators, liberal philanthropists, etc.) and the “bad rich” (e.g., oil companies, CEOs, doctors, the Koch brothers, etc.). The correct-thinking nomenklatura and the dutiful apparat versus the kulaks and enemies of the people.
The president in his State of the Union damns the “billionaires with high-powered accountants,” as a friendly Facebook pays no state or federal taxes, as a George Soros walks away with $1.2 billion in speculation profits (in three months, no less!) by betting against the Japanese yen, and as a Jesse Jackson, Jr. gets caught stealing from a campaign fund to buy a $43,000 Rolex (was not a $1,000 one enough?). I thought Soros at his age knew when he had made enough money?
We shrug at all this. A president who thunders to the nation that we must be on guard against the “well-off and well-connected” heads south to Palm Beach to meet his $1,000-an-hour golf pro, while Michelle and the family go west to hit the slopes at “downright mean” Aspen, where no one accepts that they’ve reached a point where they’ve made enough money, or that there was any time when it was not good to profit.
Something strange has insidiously happened to the old notion of hypocrisy. Does it even exist any longer?
Or do we shrug and just accept it as rebranded medieval penance? Obama gets to golf with zillionaires because in soaring cadences he attacks them — and all for us?
Jack Lew takes his $1 million bonus from a federally bailed-out Citigroup and invests his stash in his offshore tax haven in the Caymans because he will be a progressive, raise-your-taxes secretary of Treasury — and because Barack Obama has castigated those who took bonuses from a federally bailed-out money-losing company and derided offshore tax havens in the Caymans?
Chris Hughes is a cutting-edge, gay progressive who buys the New Republic because his Facebook portfolio does pretty well without owing taxes? Is that how it works now?
Have we come to the point where we expect John Kerry’s populist rhetoric to explain why he can feel no pain over dodging taxes on his yacht or marrying into the big money that he used to warn against? John Edwards can lounge around in his ugly mansion precisely because of his “two Americas” choruses?
When did we expect the elite to enjoy their wealth and to rail against its acquisition, to lumber around on four legs in the barn with the animals and strut on two in the kitchen with the overseers? Do Levis and t-shirts mean it’s okay for Google to offshore its profits? Does “Earth in the Balance” mean you can walk away as a guilt-free liberal with $100 million in petro-profits from a sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic sheikdom?
Brave New World. By Victor Davis Hanson. Works and Days. PJ Media, February 19, 2013.
Hanson, Brave New World:
Them and Us
I think it was around 2009 when an entire new vocabulary entered the American popular lexicon. Where did the 1% versus the 99% come from? From where did the new financial Mason-Dixon line arise — good below $250,000 in annual family income, very bad above it? When did the 47% — or is it the 50%? — pay no federal income taxes?
At some magical point, the rich became not the successful, the skilled, the well-inherited, the lucky, or the hardworking, but “them”: the suspect, the damned even, even as the lifestyles of the rich and famous became ever more sought after.
There are not just the rich and poor any more, but now the “good rich” (e.g., athletes, rappers, Hollywood stars, Silicon Valley grandees, Democratic senators, liberal philanthropists, etc.) and the “bad rich” (e.g., oil companies, CEOs, doctors, the Koch brothers, etc.). The correct-thinking nomenklatura and the dutiful apparat versus the kulaks and enemies of the people.
The president in his State of the Union damns the “billionaires with high-powered accountants,” as a friendly Facebook pays no state or federal taxes, as a George Soros walks away with $1.2 billion in speculation profits (in three months, no less!) by betting against the Japanese yen, and as a Jesse Jackson, Jr. gets caught stealing from a campaign fund to buy a $43,000 Rolex (was not a $1,000 one enough?). I thought Soros at his age knew when he had made enough money?
We shrug at all this. A president who thunders to the nation that we must be on guard against the “well-off and well-connected” heads south to Palm Beach to meet his $1,000-an-hour golf pro, while Michelle and the family go west to hit the slopes at “downright mean” Aspen, where no one accepts that they’ve reached a point where they’ve made enough money, or that there was any time when it was not good to profit.
Something strange has insidiously happened to the old notion of hypocrisy. Does it even exist any longer?
Or do we shrug and just accept it as rebranded medieval penance? Obama gets to golf with zillionaires because in soaring cadences he attacks them — and all for us?
Jack Lew takes his $1 million bonus from a federally bailed-out Citigroup and invests his stash in his offshore tax haven in the Caymans because he will be a progressive, raise-your-taxes secretary of Treasury — and because Barack Obama has castigated those who took bonuses from a federally bailed-out money-losing company and derided offshore tax havens in the Caymans?
Chris Hughes is a cutting-edge, gay progressive who buys the New Republic because his Facebook portfolio does pretty well without owing taxes? Is that how it works now?
Have we come to the point where we expect John Kerry’s populist rhetoric to explain why he can feel no pain over dodging taxes on his yacht or marrying into the big money that he used to warn against? John Edwards can lounge around in his ugly mansion precisely because of his “two Americas” choruses?
When did we expect the elite to enjoy their wealth and to rail against its acquisition, to lumber around on four legs in the barn with the animals and strut on two in the kitchen with the overseers? Do Levis and t-shirts mean it’s okay for Google to offshore its profits? Does “Earth in the Balance” mean you can walk away as a guilt-free liberal with $100 million in petro-profits from a sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic sheikdom?
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