I am scaling back my ambitions for this site. I think that other people have stepped in and done a better job. You can get good coverage by going to some site on our links page, particularly
Little Green Footballs
Joe Katzman
The crisis for Jews is serious. There is a bloc of people that would kill all of the Jews in the Middle East (and perhaps elsewhere). I term these enemies exterminationists.
The fight against exterminationism is partly a war of ideas. The crucial fronts are international bodies, the news media, and college campuses.
We should define our foes narrowly, to include only those who embrace exterminationism. Everyone else is a potential ally.
We should seek measurable results. Every action that we take should be designed to achieve a meaningful objective. The crisis will have abated when we see quantitative indicators that the Arab press publishes fewer exterminationist editorials, international bodies give Israel the same legitimacy and benefit of the doubt as other states, the major news media report clearly and factually on the Middle East, and college students show an ability to sort out facts from rhetoric.
In short, America and the West have potential partners in these countries who are eager for us to help move the struggle to where it belongs: to a war within Islam over its spiritual message and identity, not a war with Islam.And that war within Islam is not really a religious war. It is a war between the future and the past, between development and underdevelopment, between authors of crazy conspiracy theories versus those espousing rationality, between advocates of suicide bombing and those who know you can't build a society out of gravestones.
--Thomas Friedman, The War of Ideas, 2002-06-02
I offer this site as a clearing house for these efforts. This page will consist of a web log (on the left). Web logs typically are updated at least once a day, but for the first week or two updates will be less frequent. Other sections of the site are listed in the menu near the top of the page.
I encourage feedback and suggestions. Write to:
arnoldsk@us.net
please put "ideas rain" in the subject line
With the latest attacks in Israel, I have become pessimistic. I cannot picture peaceful coexistence between the Palestinians and Jews. My prediction is that one side will expel the other within the next 5-10 years.
I thought that the U.S. response to the killing of Americans at Hebrew University was pathetically weak. By not retaliating in any way, we gave the green light to more terrorism.
Here is an opinion piece on the problem of Muslim immigrants not assimilating in Europe. It says, for example,
Finally, these immigrants must be thought of–and must be encouraged to think of themselves–as full and equal members of the societies in which they live. European natives must appreciate what an accomplishment it is for people to become functioning members of societies radically different from the ones in which they were born. Those who do make the adjustment successfully deserve the utmost respect. To persist in calling them immigrants after they have been living and working in a country for years (and, even more outrageously, to use the same word to describe their European-born children and grandchildren) is not only offensive and insulting but staggeringly counterproductive.As for those who, after a period in the West, make it obvious that they are unwilling or unable to adapt, they must be sent home and replaced by deserving individuals who can adapt. This may appear extreme, but there is no reasonable alternative.
Some interesting links this week include a a group opposed to the anti-Israel academic boycott, an encouraging report on American radio broadcasts in Arabic, a sobering report on Saudi funding of radical religious schools, and a survey of the popularity of Mein Kampf in the Arab world. Also of interest may be this long article on the Anglosphere/a>.
Finally, this terse, apt quote from InstaPundit.
The solution to the terrorism issue is to cut off the snake's head -- which I think is in Saudi Arabia, not America. Everything else is just windowdressing and bureaucratic empire-building.
I feel that George Bush's speech on the Middle East really helped to change the atmosphere. It was very close to what the Shadow State Department would have wanted. Here is a similar opinion, from David Warren.
Top stories this week included N.Z. Bear's articulation that we are engaged in a war of memes, more reports of Arab introspection--this one from Saudi Arabia, and students protesting the firing of Israeli professors by an English bigot.
Another development was a weblog community open letter to the people of Iran, which was picked up by our Shadow State Department.
There were a number of stories this week about critical self-reexamination among Palestinians and Arabs in general. For example, here and here and here.
Still, there remains the basic rejection of the right Israel to exist, as exemplified by the maps of Palestine. And European anti-semitism continues, as indicated by the firing of academics for being Israeli.
On Monday, President Bush gave The Speech. I thought that it represented a dramatic and positive break with the past. The conventional wisdom has always been that peace will result from the right package of mutual concessions. President Bush said that democracy and human rights under the Palestinian authority are a pre-requisite for peace.
The Oslo accords can be seen as an attempt to relieve Israel of the burden of policing the West Bank and Gaza by turning the job over to an authoritarian Arab regime. President Bush, not sharing the "soft bigotry of low expectations" for the Palestinians, now says that they deserve and are capable of better self-government.
It was not surprising to see the speech draw criticism from the left, including the left in Israel, which still believes in the peace-through-concessions chimera. It was more surprising to see this attack by Daniel Pipes, who seems to me to have missed the point of The Speech. Steven den Beste offers an analysis that comes closer to the way that I see The Speech.
I even find myself hopeful that The Speech will help to turn the tide on anti-semitism, by de-romanticizing Palestinian militants and making it clear that they are the enemies of a free and democratic Palestinian state. Meanwhile, these poll results show a disturbingly high degree of anti-semitism in Europe.
This week, we have interesting updates in all of our main sections. In addition, I want to mention a couple of things here.
While French diplomats spar with editorial columnists over whether there is anti-semitism in France, here is a report from the ground.
Michael Oren's Six Days of War is proving popular. What struck me was how confident the Arabs were in 1967 that losing militarily would mean winning diplomatically, and how fearful Israel was that winning militarily would mean losing diplomatically. As long as those circumstances prevail--as appears to be the case today--the incentive is for the Arabs to provoke violence.
This week, David Tell of The Weekly Standard drew attention to Muslim hate indoctrination, including an example of a television interview with a 3-year-old toddler taught to call Jews apes and pigs, because it says this "in the Koran."
The German paper Die Zeit exposed the diversion of European aid to the Palestinian Authority to fund terrorism.
A column by Louis Rene Beres offers a reminder that Palestinian terrorism is unusually barbaric and uniquely exterminationist.
A columnist wrote a racist attack on Condoleezza Rice in an Egyptian newspaper.
More updates can be found in our journalism awards and Shadow State Department sections.
I have written a Strategic Survey of the war against terrorism, from the U.S. perspective. I conclude that we remain hampered by complacency and a desire to avoid confrontations.
Even using the term "war on terrorism" can be an attempt to avoid confronting specific enemies. This point was made eloquently by Lou Dobbs, who said,
But terror is not the enemy. It is what the enemy wants to achieve. So on this broadcast, we are making a change... in the interests of clarity and honesty. The enemies in this war are radical Islamists
Dobbs may merit a journalism award.
(Technical problems prevented me from updating this site until today. I wrote an essay on the problem with "balanced" journalism, called The Mirror Image Libel, right before the server hosting problems took down the site.)
The Boston region of the Anti-Defamation League has launched a Break the Wave of Hate campaign, which strikes me as exactly on target. This should be a worldwide campaign.
Senator John Kerry signed onto the Break the Wave of Hate petition. MOreover, as this story indicates, Senator Kerry is positioning himself as being more confrontational than President Bush with respect to the hate rhetoric emanating from Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
The whole history of the peace process can be reduced to one simple point: If the Palestinians persuade the Israeli center that they are ready to live side by side in peace, they will get a state; if they don't, they won't. Everything else is just commentary.
From The Forward, a column that expresses a view that is along the lines of what motivated this site.
I could cite a dozen other instances where, in the last few weeks, someone in a city like New York or Washington, London or Paris, has argued or chanted in favor of mass murder — someone who has never done such a thing in the past, in settings that have never heard such arguments before, or at least not in many years.
I updated the campus education page to include Joe Katzman's "blogburst" about the San Francisco State incident.
Michael Barone makes a strong case against Saudi Arabia.
Brendan O'Neill makes an interesting argument that it is the fecklessness of our leadership that is responsible for the media's inability to provide clear reporting on the Middle East. Although I do not fully share this view, it is worth considering. O'Neill's case is strengthened by the fact that our State Department went out of its way to overlook Palestinian terrorism in its latest survey.
Finally, I am trying to come up with a better way to articulate what bothers me about the lenses through which the press views Israel and the Palestinians. I have a draft of an essay that I call The Mirror Image Libel. In it, I argue against those who try to say that Jews and Palestinians are the mirror image of one another. Comments encouraged.
One reason that American conservatives are appealing to me these days is that they see through the Mirror Image Libel. For example, there is this background paper from Empower America.
Among the stories that the press seems to find difficult to grasp is evidence obtained in operation Defensive Shield that implicates high-level Palestinian Authority figures as well as Saudi Arabia in providing support for terrorism.
In the San Diego Union-Tribune, Professor Samy Swayd writes
True peace and a lasting solution must be planted in the hearts and minds of all Palestinians (and Arabs and Muslims) and all Israelis (and Jews). It must not be one negotiated only between elite members of government. Only comprehensive re-education of both societies could guarantee a brighter and more dignified future for both Israelis and Palestinians.All Palestinians and Israelis first must seek to remove offensive and derogatory statements about the other from their school textbooks. In the same manner, both must raise their children with a sense of respect and honor for the other.
To me, this issue of "bottom-up" peace seems crucial. Unfortunately, the media focus overwhelmingly on "top-down" issues, such as Sharon's policies or "reform" of Arafat's government.
In my view, the need for popular preparation for peace must also include other Arab countries. As long as anti-semitic propaganda is routinely presented to Arabs in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere, it is difficult to imagine the Palestinians shedding their radical extremism.Part of the "bottom-up" peace process would be the simple act on the part of the Palestinians of drawing a map that includes the state of Israel, as the Boston Globe's Jeff Jacoby points out.
Visit www.fateh.net, the Web site of Al-Fatah, Arafat's faction of the PLO, and the first image you see is the Fatah emblem: a map of ''Palestine'' behind crossed guns. But the country depicted is Israel, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
The major news media hang on every word of diplomats involved in the "peace process." Meanwhile, as this recent ADL report indicates, the largely state-run Arab media are moving in the opposite direction.
The biggest mistake that Israel made in the wake of Oslo was to overlook the drumbeat of incitement that the Palestianian authority kept up. The west is making a similar mistake in ignoring the arsenal of hatred that the Arab world is assembling.
Check out a new memo from the Shadow State Department and some new material in our campus education section, including some links to pro-Palestinian web sites.
Here is a Wall Street Journal column about a Palestinian moderate.
There's a lot of soul-searching, a lot of people asking what has he done," says a Palestinian named Omar Karsou...."Once the Israelis see some serious, peaceful leadership on the Palestinian side, they'll be willing to go out of their way to accommodate it," he says, citing a recent poll showing 57% of Israelis support the Saudi plan. "The way to end the Palestinian issue is by having a Palestinian Mandela. That's what we urgently need."
I am skeptical that Karsou personally has a viable political base. But his emergence is one of several signs that Operation Defensive Shield has led to some rethinking in the Arab world. While Operation Defensive Shield was being conducted, the conventional wisdom in the media was that it would fail, causing more resentment and fail to stop suicide bombings. However, this defeatist journalism has not been borne out by subsequent facts.
...a recent event at San Francisco State University — and the way the university responds to it — may be pivotal in determining whether it will remain possible to take the academic claim to foster a diversity of ideas seriously any more.
He is talking about an anti-semitic riot (see Intimidation at San Francisco State University) and some encouraging signs that universities and police may be starting to shake off the mental cobwebs that have kept them from dealing with anti-Jewish militants.
An Israeli acquaintance who was a left-leaning dove the last I knew just emailed us saying that we should support House Majority Leader Richard Armey, who said,
I am content to have Israel occupy that land that it now occupies and to have those people who have been aggressors against Israel retired to some other arena, and I would be happy to have them make a home. I would be happy to have all of these Arab nations that have been so hell bent to drive Israel out of the Middle East to get together, find some land and make a home for the Palestinians. I think it can be done.
These remarks, made during Chris Mathews' "Hardball" program, were interpreted by Arabs as a call for "ethnic cleansing" on the West Bank. Instead, what I believe it we are seeing is a reaction to the betrayal represented by the post-Camp David intifada. When "land-for-peace" has been perverted into haven-for-militants, Israel and its supporters are ready to put other options on the table.
I believe that Israeli support for Palestinian self-government can be rebuilt. However, the Arab world must change its vision for Palestine to one of a peaceful neighbor. Right now, the Arabs treat Palestine as a front line for confrontation.
We keep adding new material to the site. For example, the Shadow State Department has written another memo.
The San Francisco State University incident has broken into the mainstream media. The San Francisco Chronicle discusses it in a rather tepid editorial. For more information, see Meryl Yourish's blog, which has offered the best web site coverage of the affair.
Several updates, including a small initial population of the links page, more on the San Francisco State anti-Jewish riot, and another memo from the Shadow State Department.
Here is a link to Binyamin Netanyahu's speech arguing against a Palestinian State. Whether or not one agrees with it, it is best to read it first hand in order to understand the context.
Reporters covering Operation Defensive Shield clearly had an agenda. They wanted to show that Israel massacred civilians and that the operation was a failure. For example, the tone of this piece in the New York Times Magazine is overwhelmingly defeatist. However, the reported could not fail to capture the discipline of the Israeli troops in trying to prevent civilian casualites.
The coverage of Jenin was particularly disgraceful in Britain. Several major papers described a massacre that never took place. They have failed to issue apologies or corrections, although one would hope that their readers would interpret the lack of new stories as a sign that the original stories were fabrications.
We have our first material for the campus education section of the site. Sad to report, it describes an ominous demonstration at San Francisco State University.
the 50 students who remained praying in a minyan for the traditional afternoon prayers, or chatting, or cleaning up after the rally, talking -- were surrounded by a large, angry crowd of Palestinians and their supporters. But they were not calling for peace. They screamed at us to "go back to Russia" and they screamed that they would kill us all, and other terrible things. They surrounded the praying students, and the elderly women who are our elder college participants, who survived the Shoah...As the counter demonstrators poured into the plaza, screaming at the Jews to "Get out or we will kill you" and "Hitler did not finish the job," I turned to the police and to every administrator I could find and asked them to remove the counter demonstrators from the Plaza, to maintain the separation of 100 feet that we had been promised... But the police could do nothing more than surround the Jewish students and community members who were now trapped in a corner of the plaza...
Not one administrator came to stand with us. I knew that if a crowd of Palestinian or Black student had been there, surrounded by a crowd of white racists screaming racist threats, shielded by police, the faculty and staff would have no trouble deciding which side to stand on.
The full story is in our campus education section.
An initial version of the Shadow State Department page is up. Initial versions of the Campus Education and Links pages should follow within a few days.
I put up initial versions of the journalism awards page and the indicators of progress page.
The proposal for a one-week protest against the Washington Post was criticized in the latest Washington Jewish Week.
But, when it comes to a boycott, consider this: Do you really want to use the mechanism that anti-Israel activists have so long used and are trying to revitalize in their efforts to hurt the Jewish state?
This criticism is too mild. I strongly condemn this proposed boycott, as well as other mindless boycotts, such as the proposal to boycott French products or to boycott certain brands of gasoline. I want to use this web site to promote rational, effective actions instead of these nihilistic boycotts.
A boycott of the Post is an inarticulate protest that can only produce a defensive reaction. The public relations consequences are bound to be adverse, setting back our cause.
I absolutely share the frustration with The Washington Post and other major news media. But what is it that we want the Post to do? We have an obligation to present the Post with a complete, careful, well-articulated proposal for how to improve its coverage.
I believe that the problem with the major news media is that reporters and editors fail to re-examine long-held assumptions in light of facts. As a result, they distort stories in order to fit assumptions, which is frustrating to those of us who have come to doubt those assumptions. Here are some examples of assumptions that need to be re-examined:
Negotiations are a sign of progress toward peace.
The major news media equate progress toward peace with negotiations. However, since Oslo, there has been a disconnect between negotiations and peace. Apart from external diplomatic efforts, governments also must prepare their own people for peace. Only when the Arab governments articulate to their people the promises and responsibilities for peace will peace be possible. But the press does not report on the state of internal preparation.
The media's focus on diplomatic activity creates a false impression of the prospects for peace. They over-estimate progress whenever the diplomacy is active even though the internal preparation for peace may be nonexistent. The media treats any breakdown in negotiations as a "setback" even when it should be clear that negotiations are phony or irrelevant.
Violence is symmetric.
The media insist on covering violence as a symmetric process. Israel's actions are described as "retaliation," suggesting that Israel responds to suicide bombings with its own wanton attacks on civilians. The situation in Europe is describe as "Jewish-Muslim conflict," as if Jews were throwing fire-bombs at mosques.
The media cover violence as if either side would slaughter the other if one side unilaterally renounced violence. But only the Israelis would be slaughtered of if they were to unilaterally lay down their arms. The fact is that if the Palestinians renounced violence (as they agreed to do at Oslo), they would not be attacked by the Israelis.
The symmetric treatment of violence in the media creates a perverse incentive. By attacking Jews, Muslims can actually gain support for their cause! Any attempt at self-defense on the part of Jews is criticized for encouraging the "cycle of violence."
Members of "victim" classes cannot be expected to live up to our values.
Once the media assign someone to a "victim" class, the standards for behavior drop. Africans and Arabs are not expected to respect human rights, treat women with dignity, or adopt democratic principles.
The impact of the "victim" classification in the Middle East is that it tilts the balance in favor of violence on the part of the Palestinians. Because they are held to lower moral standards, acts of violence receive relatively light condemnation.
The point of the foregoing is that the form that bias takes in the media is subtle and difficult to articulate. It consists of a set of unexamined assumptions that serve to shape the story. We need to spell out why these assumptions are harmful and encourage reporters and editors to re-think their assumptions, to explore more sources of information, and to follow stories where the facts lead them.