THE SPINE JANUARY 19, 2011
-
Read Later
READ LATERAvailable only to subscribers. SUBSCRIBE TODAY
-
Listen
ARTICLE AUDIO
- Font Size
That is a simple fact, no matter what the apologists, paid and unpaid, say.
And what they are not immune from is murder activated by politically motivated killers. It almost doesn't matter who the victims are. It's the numbers that count, the bigger the better.
Yesterday, Stephen Lee Meyers reported in the New York Times that at least 49 hopefuls for the police academy were blown to smithereens in Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's home town. Meyers wrote that the ministry of the interior had announced that there had been 60 dead. The reporter's own number for the wounded and maimed was 116. An A.P. dispatch estimated that at least 150 were wounded. John Leland told today's Times readers that an ambulance packed with explosives blew up and "killed at least five and wounded 76." It's that afterthought about the wounded that also goes unreported after the initial reports that makes you ponder. How many of the injured had ultimately died from their wounds? But Iraq is now almost forgotten. The president has, more or less, declared "mission accomplished." Their dead don't concern us.
Although it is situated across the Mediterranean from Sardinia and between the humongous countries of Libya and Algeria near the western salient of Islam, Tunisia is now the center of the Arab world. Or at least at the center of Arab consciousness, if that is there is an Arab consciousness that sees clearly. How many people have been killed in the streets of Tunis alone will never be known, although some postmortem social science will make some crude estimates when the revolution will be all over.
But not so soon. In fact, the revolution may not be self-contained. With all the throat clearing of the professional reassurers notwithstanding, even the consummate prevaricator of Arab diplomacy, Amr Moussa, told an emergency meeting, at the luxurious Red Sea resort at Sharm El-Sheikh, of the Arab League (of which he's been head for decades) that "the Arab soul is broken by poverty, unemployment and general recession." The report of his remarks are in today's ArabNews.com. Moussa warned, "The Tunisian revolution is not far from us. The Arab citizen has entered an unprecedented state of anger and frustration."
So what was the new idea of the league's secretary-general? According to "the Middle East's leading English language newspaper," "he called for an Arab 'renaissance' to lift people from their frustration." Now, why didn't Saddam Hussein think of that?
Egypt's dottering president Hosni Mubarak, whose country is waiting for him to die and his son inevitably to take his place, stressed the importance of "economic cooperation," to which his country has literally nothing to contribute.
And the Saudi foreign minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal "urged all member countries to do more in strengthening joint Arab action in order to realize the hopes and aspirations of Arab citizens." Surely he did not mean citizens as we mean it in "citoyens." No, this is really crap. On behalf of his uncle King Abdullah, the "Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques" (one of them, the mosque in Mecca, now embellished by a neighboring architectural extravaganza including a vulgar replica of Big Ben), the prince "invited al Arab leaders to attend the next economic summit in Riyadh in January 2013. So maybe the Tunisian revolt will not spread.
The truth is that it certainly will not spread to Saudi Arabia. This prince is one of about a dozen grandsons, also princes, of King Ibn Saud who was born in 1876. This dynasty is still ruled by one of the founder's surviving sons. It's not about to pass out. (Forgive me: I can't quite figure out the status of Ibn Saud's inheritors. All I know is that women don't count. There's no Queen Elizabeth among them, and certainly no Queen Victoria who lived about as long as Ibn Saud.) But this is an exception to "no Arab society is immune." This one is immune.
Apparently, Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya is actually quaking from the bitter news from Tunisia. Madman that he is he attributed all of it to WikiLeaks. See Robert Mackey's blog post in the New York Times. Please pay attention to the crazed photograph accompanying the story. The dictator condemned the uprising and said also that it "pained" him.
In a dispatch from Amman, Jordan, the Jerusalem Post's correspondent Ruth Eglash reports that "anti-government protests gather steam" in the kingdom.
So Ray Hanania, an Arab-American Chicago radio talk show host, asks also in the Jerusalem Post, "What's the alternative?" And he answers: "The extremists are the only other option in several Arab countries and they offer an even more frightening future -devoid of any freedoms."
Daniel Pipes also takes up the question of "Tunisia's uncertain impact" in a challenging Jerusalem Post column. "If one exults in the power of the disenfranchised to overthrow their dull, cruel and greedy master, one also looks ahead with trepidation to the Islamist implications of this upheaval."
In the meantime a few more protest suicides have taken place, an index--if an index of anything--of utter hopelessness.
In an immensely moving personal op-ed in the New York Times, the Tunisian novelist Kamel Riahi gives us something of a feel--how could it be more than something?--"a night in Tunisia." "Tear gas, bullets and death fly above us." Much of this piece focuses on Haroun, the 18 month-old son of Riahi and his wife. Keeping him out of peril and his insistence on playing and laughing. Still, with the clatter of death and devastation outside, Mrs. Riahi is driven to saying, "I don't want Haroun to live if we're dead." Mothers usually want their children to survive...to survive anything. Even in the Holocaust, as we know from many accounts. What the treachery of Arab leaders has done to their subjects is to deny them from imagining the joys in life.
24 comments
Tunisia is situated across the Mediterranean from Sicily, not Sardinia. Someone get Marty a globe.
- wildboy
January 20, 2011 at 10:50am
"Although it is situated across the Mediterranean from Sardinia and between the humongous countries of Libya and Algeria near the western salient of Islam, Tunisia is now the center of the Arab world." http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.sailingissues.com/yachting-guide/greece-maps/mediterranean-east-map.png&imgrefurl=http://www.sailingissues.com/yachting-guide/greece-maps/mediterranean-east-map.html&usg=__1DPbK0C41SFyBgSPNL9ENNYqSek=&h=544&w=795&sz=76&hl=en&start=21&sig2=HBlZSho5gVlu0bmWd_okxw&zoom=1&tbnid=96kOGJLxhijsaM:&tbnh=132&tbnw=193&ei=_1w4Tb7zCoO8lQernfzWBg&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dmap%2Bof%2Bmediterranean%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DX%26rls%3Dcom.microsoft:en-us:IE-SearchBox%26rlz%3D1I7SUNA_en%26biw%3D1575%26bih%3D644%26tbs%3Disch:10%2C331&um=1&itbs=1&iact=hc&vpx=1094&vpy=317&dur=296&hovh=186&hovw=271&tx=135&ty=109&oei=-1w4Tb_3FIaglAe7hanfBg&esq=2&page=2&ndsp=21&ved=1t:429,r:5,s:21&biw=1575&bih=644
- arnon
January 20, 2011 at 11:05am
Somebody get wildboy a map.
- arnon
January 20, 2011 at 11:06am
Wildboy does appear at a loss and grabbing at straws to mock Marty's knowledge. Why insist on Sicily rather than Sardinia?
- noga1
January 20, 2011 at 12:12pm
I stand corrected! Marty and Noga are ever wise and always right (at least in this instance). In case you're wondering, Tunisia is closer to Sicily then Sardinia (thanks to arnon's handy map), and I was thinking in terms of both history both modern (the invasion of Sicily in 1943 was launched from Tunisia, while Sardinia was not attacked by the Allies until 1944 -- from bases in Sicily) and ancient (Arabs from Tunisia conquered Sicily in the 8th century and from there spread to Sardinia and Southern Italy). Preferable sailing from Tunisia to Sicily instead of from Tunisia to Sardinia probably has something to do with prevailing wind currents in the Mediterranean. But I think I will stick to topics that I know already.
- wildboy
January 20, 2011 at 12:19pm
"And what they are not immune from is murder activated by politically motivated killers" And they are different from every other society on the planet... precisely how? Every society is subject to the horror of violence and murder, including the politically motivated kind. You might as well write a treatise on how interesting it is that "they"... those exasperating and ever strange people over there... use paper money, or are subject to the vagaries of weather.
- Tristan
January 20, 2011 at 1:45pm
Noga: This is from another thread but he must have heard you... "Fuad Ben Eliezer should join Kadima" Fuad Ben Eliezer should lose weight and start exercising. http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4016790,00.html
- rmakover@swbell.net-OLD
January 20, 2011 at 2:22pm
Hey, makover. Thanks for the link. This is good news indeed. " Let me have men about me that are fat; Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o' nights: Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look; He thinks too much: such men are dangerous."
- noga1
January 20, 2011 at 3:03pm
You forgot to mention the Phoenicians.
- arnon
January 20, 2011 at 5:50pm
Is Peretz waiting for a sign from the "custodian of the Two Holy Mosques" to mention Lebanon? I just read (former) PM Hariri's open letter to all Lebanon, and was very moved by his words until this part, clearly needed to out-Hezbollah Hezbollah?: http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=2&article_id=123964#axzz1BcyaB02c "...Dear brothers and sisters, we have not come all this way, offered all of these sacrifices, led the effort to rebuild the country and supported the foundations of socio-economic growth, as well as the steadfastness of Lebanon and its people in the face of the Israeli enemy, for us to give all of this away to discord. Our political system, based on the rotation of power and on coexistence, will not mean anything if we hand our children’s future over to further conflicts and wars. ..." BTW the Strait of Sicily (ninety miles wide) is important because all shipping between the Straits of Gibraltar and the eastern Mediterranean (Suez Canal plus Turkey/Black Sea/Bosphorus) has to go through the Strait of Sicily, not the Strait of Messina between NE Sicily and the toe of Italy. JE Dyer, retired US Naval Intelligence, had an interesting post on that at Contentions: "...Tunisia sits on a crucial geographic chokepoint — the Strait of Sicily — in the central Mediterranean Sea. The U.S. and Europe can get away with shrinking navies while the Mediterranean coast is held by well-disposed governments. But Tunisia is one of a handful of nations in the world that could single-handedly turn a maritime choke point into an oversize international security problem. A radicalized Tunisia would have even greater security implications than a radicalized Libya or Algeria; the geography of a strait is a stern taskmaster. ..." http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/j-e-dyer/386743#more-386743 Of course, Ms. Dyer, despite her usual rigorous attention to the facts, tends to be alarmist in what she highlights because of the pressures to continue to shrink the USN in the absence of any other western navy to help keep the sea lanes free for trade and from piracy. She wrote the above before today's announcement that all previously banned political parties are now able to participate in Tunisia's new public square. That includes Islamist political parties. Countdown to who invokes the rise of Carthage, Hannibal emerging from the ashes? :) That was in what is now Tunisia.
- K2K
January 20, 2011 at 8:42pm
noga: "Cry 'Havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war;"
- rmakover@swbell.net-OLD
January 21, 2011 at 12:32am
From Nick Cohen's pen: http://www.thejc.com/comment-and-debate/comment/44024/tunisia-and-our-black-and-white-mentality "Every morning I read The Times, the Guardian, the Telegraph, the Financial Times and the Independent. I stay with the Today programme until Radio 4 drives me away by insulting my intelligence with Thought for the Day and look at the Economist and the New York Times if I have a moment. But I knew nothing about Tunisia. No journalist thought it worthwhile to tell readers about the grotesque figure of Leila Trabelsi, an Imelda Marcos and Marie Antoinette rolled into one, who was looting a country millions of western tourists knew well. No one looked at how she hoarded gold on the one hand, while keeping her dirty old man of a husband sweet on the other. No one bothered to look at her equally ghastly and rapacious children, who, along with the wider clan, formed a Mafia state that forced businesses to pay off the ruling crime family. I would have liked have to read about the brutality of the secret police, as well, and to have had a little advance notice that the subject people was preparing to revolt. Leaving all political considerations aside, Tunisia was in journalistic terms a great story from the Middle East that virtually sat up and begged journalists to take notice, but because it did not involve Israel, foreign desks looked the other way. This newspaper normally looks at how the Jew-obsession of journalists and politicians topples over into antisemitism, and worries about the consequences for Israel and the diaspora. As the case of Tunisia shows, the consequences for Arabs, Berbers and Kurds are worth thinking about, too. Antisemitism is unique among religious hatreds. It is a racist conspiracy theory fashioned for the needs of messianic and brutal rulers, as dictators from the Tsars to the Islamists via the Nazis have shown. Many other alleged religious "hatreds" are not hatreds in the true sense. If I criticise Islamic, Orthodox Jewish or Catholic attitudes towards women, for instance, and I'm accused of being a bigot, I shrug and say it is not bigoted to oppose bigotry."
- noga1
January 21, 2011 at 3:06pm
Noga: It is very perceptive observation. Watch Melanie Phillips interviewed on Israeli Channel 1 television by Yaakov Ahimeir. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4dksiRW-Yg&feature=player_embedded
- rmakover@swbell.net-OLD
January 21, 2011 at 6:30pm
This is probably completely inappropriate here, but I couldn't see any other place for it. For all those who think the Left is the only place where antisemitism (or something close) comes from these days, here's an interesting take on Glen Beck's recent and ominous inventory of great enemies of America (and no, I didn't know that Ed Rendell is Jewish): http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/01/glenn-becks-jewish-problem/69682 I don't know if Goldberg is suggesting that there is a distinct constituency on the American populist Right for this kind of conspiratorial imagining, but I've always thought that loudmouthed "support" for Israel isn't the whole story.
- ironyroad
January 21, 2011 at 6:36pm
I'm fully aware of the perversions of support for Israel from the Right, ironyroad. I have a visitor to my blog who keeps me up to date on the latest inventions from that corner. The danger to Israel, however, comes from the Left antisemitism. When you go on safari, they tell you that a visible lion, is a safe lion. You ought to be wary of what crouches in the tall grass. Beck's kind of antisemitism is a visible lion. The Left's kind of antisemitism is dangerous because it lurks behinds such grass as human rights language, post colonialist academic fashions, all territory where Jews have been most comfortable and contributed most. Today Jews who support Israel are regarded, in these circles, as traitors to the cause, undesired outsiders. It was very amusing to see how Palin's use of the term "blood libel" suddenly became an antisemitic slur for those Leftists who are most active in the delegitimization of Israel. I couldn't believe the hypocrisy.
- noga1
January 21, 2011 at 7:15pm
I wasn't quite thinking of the danger to Israel, although I don't deny the reality of that, but rather of the way in which Beck's strange diatribe draws on a weirder vein of old conspiratorial fantasies. To put it another way, I wouldn't see it as having to do with Israel in the first instance, but rather with an eerie hostility to modernity and the idea of Jewish intellectual effort as subversive per se.
- ironyroad
January 21, 2011 at 8:36pm
Funny. Just came across this story, very a-propo: http://contested-terrain.net/blockade-of-claude-lanzmanns-film-why-israel/ "A group of left anti-Semites on Sunday has violently prevented the showing of a film about Israel. During the blockade of the cinema insults such as “Jewish swine” were to be heard. A Hamburg association of the Left Party published a justification of the action, saying a “Zionist propaganda film” was prevented from being shown. The film to be shown was the 1972 movie “Why Israel,” by the French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, who is best known for his nine-hour documentary “Shoah.” According to the cinema in the district of St. Pauli, and the organizer of the planned demonstration which had about 15 people from an anti-imperialist group, the Center internationalist B5, access to the cinema was blocked and the incoming visitors were filmed and photographed."
- noga1
January 21, 2011 at 9:13pm
must be driving the palestinian-obsessed Left crazy with all the news about Tunisia, UN rapes in Congo, anti-government demonstrations in Albania (three people died), no government in (fill in the blank), squeezing Israel mostly off even the bottom news banners. I particularly enjoyed the BBC tonight - a crocodile in a Ukrainian zoo who ate a cellphone followed the mini-story about the attack on a French diplomat in her car in Gaza for suggesting Hamas committed a war crime, re: Gilad Shalit whose photo is missing tonight from this post.. I do NOT enjoy all the terrible news - but I do enjoy when the BBC actually covers important news that do not include Israel and the palestinians. noga: I read somewhere that Tunisia's Leila Trabelsi had used the story in public announcements that times were tough because Tunisia had to support the palestinians, and now everyone knows that was a lie to cover her corruption. One of my favorite quotes, this week, from Contentions on BDS: "...Last year, Grammy winner Carlos Santana, the alternative band the Pixies, and British singer Elvis Costello pulled the plug on their Israel concerts, a sign of mass artistic cowardice. In sharp contrast, Paul McCartney, Elton John, Leonard Cohen, and Johnny Rotten of the now-defunct punk band the Sex Pistols all performed last year in Israel. Rotten, who now goes by his birth name, John Lydon, summed up, in a flash of neoconservative punkism, the misguided Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction (BDS) campaign against the region’s only real democracy: “I really resent the presumption that I’m going there to play to right-wing Nazi jews [sic]. If Elvis-f-ing-Costello wants to pull out of a gig in Israel because he’s suddenly got this compassion for Palestinians, then good on him. But I have absolutely one rule, right? Until I see an Arab country, a Muslim country, with a democracy, I won’t understand how anyone can have a problem with how they’re treated. ” ..." http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/benjamin-weinthal/387218 well, back to not looking forward to what happens to a foot+ of snow covered by two inches of ice, with six inches of new snow on top, when the temperatures drop way below zero for three days and nights, followed by new snow. Must find Russian sable hat...
- K2K
January 22, 2011 at 12:53am
Ah yes, the Sex Pistols: God save the Qeeeeeen! / And her fascist regiiiiiiime! Bought that single in a record store on Harrow Road in West London in October 1977. Noga, that was an interesting link, especially the "anti-German" reference. I remember that in the early '90s there was a small (fairly intellectual/journalistic) grouping that identified itself as "antideutsch" and set out deliberately to provoke the radical "autonomen" milieu with a consistent and (to them) infuriating argument that so-called anti-imperialist left theory was in fact deeply implicated in a kind of "German moralism" that was nationalist and anti-semitic despite its pretence of progressive internationalism. That grouping is, ironically enough, identified with the magazine Konkret, that RAF founder Ulrike Meinhof had worked for in the 1960s.
- ironyroad
January 22, 2011 at 1:25am
Ah yes, the Sex Pistols: The very best Punk Rock group ever. But never the same without Sid Vicious.
- rmakover@swbell.net-OLD
January 22, 2011 at 8:22am
Maybe not relevant to this post but precious anyway: "PA President Mahmoud Abbas revealed that he had reached an understanding with former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that Jerusalem would not be divided, Israel Radio reported on Saturday." I guess PLOroid and Miss Molly will have to call Abbas and rebuke him. http://www.jpost.com/MiddleEast/Article.aspx?id=204731
- rmakover@swbell.net-OLD
January 22, 2011 at 8:28am
makover, the best part of that January 22, 2011 jpost report http://www.jpost.com/MiddleEast/Article.aspx?id=204731 is: "...Abbas called on Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to agree to his predecessor's understanding, which he emphasized could be the basis for renewing negotiations, the report stated. However, Abbas warned that a continued collapse of the peace process could lead to dangerous consequences for Israel, which could lead to a popular uprising rather than a military confrontation. The PA president asserted that he would continue his efforts to seek Palestinian statehood, but ruled out a unilateral declaration. ..." I can not read between the lines to discern whether Abbas is responding to Tunisia or Lebanon, although I would think the PA/Fatah knows that if Hezbollah does officially become the ruling party in Lebanon, any fantasies of waiting for Tzipi Livni to be Israel's PM disappear. 'Hamas to the west - Hezbollah to the north' means more construction work on Israel's network of underground bunkers without a villa for Abbas :) I guess Abbas also agrees with "... the Los Angeles Times regarding the Palestinian “prime minister,” the reporter noted that Salam Fayyad’s political fortunes “face a major test this summer, when his state-readiness campaign is slated to be completed by Aug. 26.” Fayyad insisted that the work can be completed on time and said he has “no Plan B.” On the other hand: He acknowledged that there is major unfinished business, including weak courts, a nonfunctioning parliament and the absence of elections because of the split between Fatah and Hamas, the militant group that controls the Gaza Strip. All of that, including the reunification of Fatah and Hamas, needs to be completed before Palestinians will be ready for statehood, he said. ..." quoted from this commentary, which includes the direct link to the LA Times article: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/richman/387474 pesky details of being a nation-state...
- K2K
January 22, 2011 at 11:25am
"If one exults in the power of the disenfranchised to overthrow their dull, cruel and greedy master, one also looks ahead with trepidation to the Islamist implications of this upheaval." (Daniel Pipes) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JU5MLBFNEM
- noga1
January 22, 2011 at 1:58pm
More about the antisemitism of human rights poseurs: http://www.israelwhat.com/2011/01/22/judenhass-in-trondheim/ "Furthermore: The cafe in Trondheim which attempts to be a meeting-place for students, artists and intellectuals at times houses guests who are permitted to loudly voice their contempt of Jews, significantly enough. The university milieus in this city have in part developed into a political spawning site where intellectual integrity and humanist principles have become tools of political and social power, reminiscent of the one-tracked AKP-dominance of AKP at Blinderen (University of Oslo) during the end of the 1960s. Woe upon he whom in this environment stands up against the dominant locomotive of meaning; by such an act one is redefined as a human being and am no longer considered to be entitled to hold an opinion. And one thereby looses any claim to respect. I and my family were forced to move from Trondheim. There are now several others who plan to move from the city. It is sad that this is going on without any action from the democratic Norway."
- noga1
January 22, 2011 at 7:11pm