We Celebrate, And Seperate Our Milkplates From Our Meat»

Outstanding reflections on Israel’s 60th birthday from Daniel Levy:

To try to understand that co-existence of modern, cosmopolitan Israel with the Israel of permanent violent occupation, it’s worth going back to that rather silly 1991 solidarity visit and those scud misiles. Ah, of course, Israel is under permanent threat from an relentless foe, or set of foes, unswervingly committed to its destruction, to a second Holocaust — or so the thinking goes — so the occupation has to be like that. The conversation normally ends there. If it continues, it’s about why embattled Israel deserves empathy, maybe a prayer, along with the unconditional support of the United States, and why it should certainly avoid making risky territorial concessions.

Thankfully, though, the conversation doesn’t end there. Israel does have enemies, bitter, even implacable ones. But Israel also has the most powerful military in the region and it’s most sophisticated military-industrial complex and R+D capacity. It is one of the world’s largest arms exporters and has an economy that is the envy of its neighbors.

The disconnect, I would argue, is that Israel has locked itself into a box of fear that is not only substantially self-generated and all-embracing, but has also become a danger in itself, preventing Israel from taking urgently needed steps. Explaining that fear is easy — remember the Holocaust, look at how Israel is targeted. But it does not alter the fact that it has become utterly unhealthy and paralyzing, and ironically a reason to actually be concerned.

Apathy by American Jewry toward Israel’s internal political psychosis — or, worse, apologies for it — is, effectively, an anti-Israel sentiment we need to confront. Happy birthday big homie.

Two Sides Coming, Two Sides Coming So Quick»

Behold Leon Wieseltier at his best and his worst, all at the same time, as he reviews Martin Amis’ reflections on Islamist terrorism. The best:

Amis enjoys the moral element in contempt, and he is splendidly unperturbed by the prospect of giving offense. But he appears to believe that an insult is an analysis. He wants us to remember, about the Islamists in Britain, “their six-liter plastic tubs of hairdressing bleach and nail-polish remover, their crystalline triacetone triperoxide and chapatti flour.” He knows for a fact that Islamists “habitually” jump red lights, so as “to show contempt for the law of the land (and contempt for reason).” Iranians, he teaches, are “mystical, volatile and masochistic.” Amis seems to regard his little curses as almost military contributions to the struggle. He has a hot, heroic view of himself.

Yes, yes, perfect. Neither Amis nor Leon nor myself nor anyone else in the writerly trade is going to march into the Northwest Frontier Province with a butchers’ knife in our teeth and slit bin Laden’s throat. So let’s all calm down. (My guess is that Leon’s real target here is his longtime enemy and Amis’ best friend Christopher Hitchens, who also writes as if he believes he’s a combatant in the war on terror.) Bravo Leon.

But then… then there’s the inability to conceive of strategy. Leon is a huge fan of “seriousness,” but he’s never been a fan of explaining what propositions his “seriousness” actually boil down to containing.

In “The Second Plane,” his collection of noisy, knowing writings about theocracy and terror, Martin Amis goes out on a limb. He denounces both. Really, he does. He hates Islamism and he hates Islamist murder. And so he should: if certain forms of evil are not hated, then they have not been fully understood.

This doesn’t get you much when you cash it out. Hatred is not understanding. Hatred is not a strategy. One of Leon’s blind spots, when it comes to jihadism, has always been to confuse a necessary condition for strategy with sufficient conditions for it. Sure, I hate Usama bin Laden. Now what? Do we invade Iraq or don’t we? Close Guantanamo Bay or double it? It’s so much easier to hector other writers for an alleged lack of “seriousness,” but Leon shouldn’t want to take the easy way out, and it’s just disappointing to see him do so, again and again and again. Read the rest of this entry »

Victims Of A Bomb Raid»

Gabriel Schoenfeld — last seen standing up for freedom by whining that The New York Times ought to be prosecuted for revealing the warrantless surveillance program — implies in Commentary that Joe Cirincione is an antisemite. He never actually comes at and says it — that would require two things that most men have but he lacks — because then he’d have to defend such a toxic and disgusting smear, and he can’t. At issue, allegedly, is a post that Cirincione wrote last September expressing skepticism that North Korea helped Syria build a nuclear reactor. Now that the administration is making that case publicly, Schoenfeld calls Cirincione a fool — and worse.

To Cirincione, writing on the blog of Foreign Policy Magazine, the stories surrounding surrounding the Israeli strike, namely that North Korea was building a Yongbyong-type plutonium reactor not far from the Euphrates River, was nothing more than a lie. It was a reprise, wrote Cirincione, of the way in which administration officials “misled the press” in the run-up to the second Gulf war.

Who was behind this nefarious manipulation? It seems, wrote Circincione, “to be the work of a small group of officials leaking cherry-picked, unvetted ‘intelligence’ to key reporters in order to promote a preexisting political agenda.” What exactly was that political agenda? “[I]t appears aimed at derailing the U.S.-North Korean agreement that administration hardliners think is appeasement.” There was also a dose of Zionist mischief thrown in: “Some Israelis want to thwart any dialogue between the U.S. and Syria.”

No reasonable Zionist observer would read Cirincione’s “Some Israelis” remark in context and come away with it believing that Cirincione was stirring up “Zionist mischief.” To treat Schoenfeld like a good-faith interlocutor is to commit a category error. Because here’s what the smear is really about: Schoenfeld identifies Cirincione as “Barack Obama’s top expert on matters nuclear.” And then he writes:

why are so many of Obama’s advisors so prone to blame, in whole or in part, the machinations of Israel for the problems of the world? See here and here and here.

Ah, this smear again. Maybe I should write in response: Why are so many Commentary writers reacting with such vitriol to the prospect of the first African-American president? (See how this works?) Read the rest of this entry »

Psycho Meshuggenahs»

I hosted my first seder at the Flophouse yesterday. Surprisingly few things went wrong in Punk Rock Kitchen, which Flophouse trivia mavens know is highly unusual. The menu:

a. Ginger-dill matzah ball soup. I’ve never made matzah balls before, so I looked up a recipe — it’s really simple — and the rest I did freestyle.
b. Lamb with a pomegranate-molasses reduction.
c. Parsnip puree. I make a mashed potato dish with coconut milk and wasabi that I did this time with parsnips in the interest of trying to avoid your typically oppressively heavy Pesach meal. Becks observed that parsnips are the new potatoes.
d. Steamed garlic string beans.
e. Sauteed collard greens. You know, traditional shtetl food.
f. Becks made a fantastic chocolate-ganache cake. I think it was even parve.
g. Ezra made two different kinds of charosets. One traditional. One Yemenite. Both delicious.

A fun time was had by all. Not to take anything away from the value of a family seder, but it’s nice to have one with friends. Photos — courtesy of Flophouse Vice President Sam Boyd — after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

Two-Fisted Tales»

Seder is in a few minutes. Everything’s prepared. Time management! Motivation provided by Metallica’s “Creeping Death” (best Passover song ever) and Rancid’s entire catalogue.

So we’re going to celebrate a proud tradition. While we do, check out this io9 post about Iron Man vs. the Hulk.

The Sacred And The Profane — Both Lay Within Your Domain»

Posting is going to be a little bit light today, as I’m hosting a seder this afternoon. In the meantime, check out and discuss the New York Times’ big story about Maj. Gen. Jack “Sock” Puppet (USA/USAF, ret.). I’ll have more on this post-seder, but check out Rick Perlstein, Dave Dilegge, Marcy Wheeler, Abu Muqawama, Matt Yglesias, and I’m sure lots of other people in your RSS.

Slim Switched Sides On Me»

My friend Jacob Heilbrunn has a provocative piece in the new World Affairs about the intellectual vanity involved in breaking ranks — that is, selling out your old ideological comrades. (If neoconservatism is, as Jacob observes in his excellent book They Knew They Were Right, a Jewish phenomenon, then this would be a true shonda ver de goyem, which translates to “disgracing the Jews in front of the gentiles.”) His thesis:

While the stakes are arguably as high today as they were in the 1930s, our current crop of public intellectuals has resurrected some of the acrimony of those heady times, but little of the substance. What in an earlier era were battles grounded in strenuous intellectual engagement today often amount to little more than highbrow food fights and, in some cases, nifty career moves. The life of significant contention that the critic Lionel Trilling once lauded as the intellectual’s calling has been overtaken by a life of competing for significant attention. Compared to their predecessors, who staked everything on disputes over fascism, Stalinism, and imperialism, today’s rank-breakers are mere epigones.

There’s a lot to that. But there’s something else at work, too, that Jacob doesn’t quite get into. He writes, “the movement from right to left would never achieve quite the status of a syndrome because conservatism, unlike its opposite, was not a secular religion that punished doubt by excommunication.”

No doubt that’s partially true, as leftism and liberalism are acutely prone to sectarianism. (Remind me to tell you the story of Leon Wieseltier and Paul Berman thinking up a hit piece on Christopher Hitchens exactly at the moment they all agreed on Iraq, and for the same reasons.) But the mainstream media just fears full-throated liberalism more than it does full-throated conservatism. That’s due to a degree of self-hatred and a respectable but misguided concept of journalistic integrity: most national reporters are liberal, and isn’t it just the responsible thing to do to overcorrect for your own biases by giving the other side a bit of an advantage? And wouldn’t it be intellectually dishonest to do otherwise? Here you go, Mr. Kristol, right this way to the Green Room. Still or fizzy water? Sorry, Mr. Krugman, but we’ll call you some other time. Loved that Hillary column, though!

Among intellectual journalists, particularly on the ostensible left, the problem is a bit different. Liberalism encourages doubt and conservatism relies upon certainty. For the restless liberal surrounded by her confreres, agreement is unnerving. She wakes up in the middle of the night fearful that she’s abandoning the virtue of rigor for the comfort of certainty. And maybe for a while she reexamines her foundational principles and reconsiders a few things. But then she overcorrects and merely recycles the right’s arguments. There’s no dialectic, merely opposite-pole pinballing. But that’s not how it looks to our valiant intellectual journalist! I swear: people who walk the hallways of TNR truly believe that by sneering at Juan Cole or Eric Alterman a jerk they’re doing something brave. They’re not like those symps, those dupes, those conformists, those, those, those liberals!

We Can’t Lose A Fight, ‘Cause We Are The Chosen Ones»

You may have already read Matt and Ezra discuss the brand-new J Street Project, a liberal alternative to what’s come to be known as the Israel Lobby. But if it’s long-form J Street-based reporting you want, I’ve got precisely that, fresh out from the Washington Independent kitchen:

Two young, leading liberal Jews — the former Clinton administration domestic policy adviser Jeremy Ben-Ami and the former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy — plan to unveil the first-ever political action committee dedicated to promoting political candidates in the United States who support a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Known as the J Street Project, the effort intends to raise millions of dollars even at this late date in the 2008 election cycle.

It has an even grander ambition: to reframe the terms of the debate over what it means for America to support Israel, and recast them in a progressive direction. Currently, support for Israel is often seen as backing Israeli militarism against its Arab adversaries; liberal Jews believe that the only lasting security for an Israeli democracy is through a negotiated peace. But “our side gets cowed into silence,” said Ben-Ami, a former policy director for Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign. “They’re afraid to say, ‘No, we are more pro-Israel than you, our path is better.”

And check out this quote from Levy:

Levy, though a long-time peace negotiator, is eager to debate what it means to be pro-Israel, and draws a comparison between AIPAC and the hard-liners who ended up compromising the Jewish future millennia ago. “We’ll say, ‘Zealots like you led to the destruction of previous Jewish commonwealths,’” Levy said. “We’re not going to be intimidated.”

Ohhhhhh snap!

I’m The Realest To Run It, I Just Happen To Rap»

Say the brucha for the radio! In the course of reporting a story about a new Jewish lobby (it’s not what it looks like!) for the Windy, I learned something explosive. Did you know that Peter Rosenberg from Hot 97 is the son of M.J. Rosenberg from the Israel Policy Forum? So that’s why he’s hot.

If you haven’t seen Peter’s take on Rich Boy, stop working right this instant (arguably NSFW):