In Good Taste

Apparently Kate McMillan of Brain Dead Animals made up a tasteful image of her motorcycle VIN written on her arm to simulate the tattoos that the SS put on Holocaust victims. Since I have a day job that does not revolve around the computer, it's sometimes difficult to pick up on these weird little blogosphere flare-ups. The takeaway from this little story is how much bullshit it is to hear some right-wing groups insist that conservatives are all the greatest friends of Jews/Israel. I suppose for some this coalition is sincere but overall I suspect that, like all ethnic politics, this sort of arrangement is a marriage of convenience.

Edit: To be fair, I should note that a wide cross-section of conservative bloggers have distanced themselves from Kate's idiotic stunt. But as JJ asks, what if Robert McClelland had done this?

Israel Gets a Free Ride

When it comes to the lives of Canadian soldiers, it appears that they are (rightly) worth a great deal when in Afghanistan, but not so much when they are in Lebanon and bothersome to the Israeli Defense Forces. The story that's come out the past couple of days seems to indicate that the UN observation post where Maj. Paeta Hess-von Kruedener was stationed was reporting Israeli war crimes. As for the investigation, Israel has refused to cooperate - despite Harper's assurances to the contrary.

Why is it that Israel can kill our troops with impunity? No one is called to account, no is made to testify. Harper has deliberately shifted our Middle East policy to be more explicitly pro-Israel, and what do we get for it? Nothing. No matter where one's sympathies lie in the Middle East, surely one should expect some kind of accountability for this kind of action.

Policy Change or Ministerial Cluelessness?

Maxime Bernier has now twice refused to answer a question about whether Canada opposes new settlement construction in East Jerusalem. The Canadian policy had been to oppose all new settlement construction, but now observers on all sides are wonder whether there's a new policy or if Bernier simply didn't know this file very well.

Insofar as there's one thing that seems to genuinely and legitimately piss off the Palestinians, it is surely ongoing construction of new settlements. Interestingly, the settlers are not well liked in certain segments of the Israeli population as well. Settlement construction seems like an attempt to gobble up as much of the West Bank as possible before any final settlement is reached. Bernier needs to clarify Canada's position on this matter.

Daniel Pipes Breeds Violence

Daniel Pipes is upset that people are giving money to the Palestinians. If there is one man who truly hates the Palestinians, it is surely Pipes. He attempts to show some kind of correlation between violence and funding, and yet what is his alternative? Turn Gaza into Mogadishu? Now Pipes does not conclude that funding causes violence:

"As Stotsky notes, 'These statistics do not mean that foreign aid causes violence; but they do raise questions about the effectiveness of using foreign donations to promote moderation and combat terrorism.'"

But if it doesn't cause violence, then why criticize it? Is Pipes upset that the Palestinians get any money under any circumstances? Does he think that the massive aid packages the US gives Israel every year could be topped up with this money? Pipes probably did not like how Jimmy Carter subtitled his book but the only long-term implications of Pipes' policy seem to look a great deal like apartheid. Yeah, I can't see cutting off people and starving them as a way to peace Mr. Pipes.

The Last Dash for a Legacy

Is this a trend? It feels a little like deja-vu to see Bush, in the last year or so of his presidency, groping for a deal between the Israelis and Palestinians. Bill Clinton tried to used the last year or so of his presidency to get a deal - and I suspect that Bush, like Clinton, will fail at this.

It's odd to look at these very different presidents attempting to achieve similar ends in the last months of their respective reigns. Clinton was never as unpopular as Bush is now - but he did seem to be aware that his legacy would be his impeachment. What he had accomplished in Kosovo or in Bosnia was probably not enough to cleanse the public memory of his various indiscretions. If Clinton were able to get the Israelis and the Palestinians to get some kind of deal on a "final status" for the occupied territories he could cast himself as a sort of flawed-hero statesman. Instead he was staring at legacy of being little more than a philanderer.

Bush is in worse shape. His legacy is one of squandering global sympathy after 9/11 for the pursuit of an invasion that was ill-considered at best and criminal at worst. Clinton was respected in many places outside of the US where it was not apparent why the public should become embroiled in a scandal over sexual favours. Bush is widely disliked though - some of his cabinet minister may very well one day be in the position that Henry Kissinger is in today where they cannot travel safely for fear of war crimes indictments in old Europe. What Bush is hoping for I suspect is a deal. This way he can attempt to cast his other Middle Eastern mis-adventures in the light of an honest (if horrendously executed) concern for democracy.

What might be nice is if presidents did not wait till they were in search of a legacy to do something about the festering problem of Israel and the Palestinians.

What are we doing at the UN anyway?

Apparently Canada sponsored a resolution condemning human rights violations in Iran - and it passed. While this seems sensible in that most observers would tell you that, yes, there are rights violations in Iran, what is mind boggling though is how you set this in the context of how the Conservatives have treated other UN resolutions or other expressions of concern for human rights.

Canada would not place a simple phone call to support a death penalty resolution recently. This could not be done because our people at the UN were busy on other, unspecified, resolutions. Last year, Canada could not even get behind a resolution to investigate Israel's use of collective punishment in the Gaza Strip.

In the meantime, if you raise questions about Canada's own actions in Afghanistan, it's because you hate our troops. We are no better at home than we are abroad.

When Canada took a stand on an issue at the UN, there used to be some moral weight behind it - or at least the sense that we were an independent-minded agent. Now we appear to be useful idiots for the US and Israel. At home, when there were serious problems with our mistreatment of Somali prisoners we went to the trouble of a public inquiry. Now the government accuses critics of lacking patriotism.

What this does is drain all the credibility out of our efforts at the UN. When we now condemn Iran's government it appears to be less an exercise in legitimately criticizing the immoral actions of its government and more an effort to establish our bona fides with the US and Israel.

This ain't a scene...

...it IS an arms race. No, really. The US is going to give a ton of military goodies to the gulf states, Israel, and Egypt.

There are several things here that strike me as glaringly wrong. First of all, this does smell like so much corporate welfare for the arms industry. The last I checked the Israelis still had about the most advanced military in the region, I'm not sure what else they need. I mean they even have nukes... oops, am I not supposed to say that? Let's stop pussyfooting around, the Israelis have nukes, it's the worst kept secret in the world.

As for selling arms to the Egyptians and the gulf states, in the case of Egypt I always wonder how far the Islamic Brotherhood is from being able to run the rather dictatorial Mubarak regime out of town. Remember how the Shah got F-14s, fat lot of good that got him when the public became fed up with him. In the case of the gulf states you have the same risk of coup d'etat, and it's not like any of these countries are hard up for cash.

Furthermore, after doling out all these weapons, what is Iran going to think? Forget about whether Ahmadinejad is nuts or not because he doesn't control the military. What would any leader in Iran think? What would any hypothetical leader slightly more militaristic than Gandhi think? I suspect the answer would be something about it being time to buy more weapons. It's the only rational response.

And so it goes...

With Friends Like These...

One of the more curious trends of the past couple decades is the increasingly uncritical support that more and more evangelical Christians are prepared to give to the most militaristic, pro-settler strains of Israeli society. Why. For a great deal of them this is all about hoping for the pre-millenialist rapture and holy war that wipes out most of the Jews (all but 144 000 according to some of these groups I think).

In other words, some (but not all) of these groups are aligning with the most right-wing, hawkish elements of Israeli society because they apparently want world history to culminate in the wiping out of most of the Jews during a war that wrecks their homeland. Question: is it possible for support of Israel to actually be anti-Semitic?

Edit: Here's the Max Blumenthal video on Christians United for Israel.

Oh the Irony!

Tony Blair is being put in charge of the one file at which he failed abysmally as Prime Minister. At least that's how I look at his new job being the Middle East peace envoy.

I remember after 9/11 that it was popular to speak of the "death of irony" and all that. Irony isn't dead, it's become darker and more monstrous. I started writing out examples, but really, I'm tired and they are obvious.

Blame the Soviets?!

According to Eric Margolis the Soviets deliberately caused a panic in Cairo and Damascus with doctored intelligence and that led to the military build-up that caused Israel to... Well, you know the rest of the story.

Margolis posits a couple reasons why the Soviets might have done this:

• They actually believed that Egypt and Syria could win this type of conflict,
  
• They were setting up the Arabs for failure to drive them further into Moscow's arms,
• Pro-Israeli KGB agents were acting on their own.

Any other ideas? I really recommend the whole article. It also touches on the curious saga of the USS Liberty.

Supporting an illegitimate ruler

Isn't that what the West is doing by suddenly rushing to support Mahmoud Abbas' all-new government in the West Bank? I mean, I'm sure that the Palestinians need whatever help they can get but surely this contradicts the whole Iraq project. Remember all that neocon idealism about democracy in the Middle East and no more support for strongmen just because they might be expedient?

Bullshit.

Abbas is seen as marginally easier to deal with than Hamas, so he gets propped up with a government that the Palestinians never voted into office. Like I said before, if it puts bread on the table in Ramallah and elsewhere I'm sure that not too many in the West Bank are complaining, but make no mistake, the West has always, always preferred strongmen to democracy as an expedient for governing the parts of the developing world where it has strategic interests.

"Me, I'm with God and a bag of flour."

So says a man known only as "Yousef" in Gaza today (he was afraid to give his full name). The same man comments about Hamas' Gaza victory by saying,

"Today, everybody is with Hamas because Hamas won the battle. If Fatah had won
the battle, they'd be with Fatah. We are a hungry people; we are with
whoever gives us a bag of flour and a food coupon,"

This is important to keep in mind when the inevitable images of Gaza draped in Hamas-green get spewed out on the news networks. Hamas sustains its popularity by being more adept at social services than Fatah ever was. Now long-term Hamas may not be the wisest choice for the Palestinians (they are something of an international pariah), however hungry people do not have the luxury of long-term thinking.

The US must attack Iran to save Israel's tourism sector!

That is the assertion from Noah Pollack. Or at least that's what it seems to be if you endeavour to unpack his lengthy post on what to do about Iran. Here's the money quote:

"A nuclear Iran allied with Hezbollah to the north and Hamas and Islamic Jihad to the Southwest and East would dramatically embolden Israel's enemies, suppress foreign investment and tourism in Israel, and over time would cause the economic and psychological attrition of the Jewish state -- with no bombing runs over Tel Aviv necessary."

Well, I suppose if you work in the Israeli tourism industry, this is a concern. It is probably not the sort of problem that requires an airstrike. As for Israel's economy, my impression was that it was generally focused on arms production, so, um, wouldn't this help that sector?

Moreover, having a nuclear backer in the form of the Soviet Union really didn't help Israel's enemies in the 1960s or 1970s, did it? Pollack concedes there will be no "bombing run" over Tel Aviv, yet thinks potential damage to Israel's economy or tourism should warrant a mass assault to attempt to cripple Iran's nuclear program.

Pollack goes on about the delicate balance that the US has constructed in the region. It is of course the atomic equivalent of two fat kids sitting on one end of the teeter-totter. Oops, well, I mean one has a paper bag on his head since Israel doesn't "officially" have nukes.

I am not a fan of more states going nuclear but I do not think it any more possible to stop Iran than it was to stop Pakistan and India. The attempt to stop Iran though would unleash hell in one way or another. In Iran you have an extremely ideological regime that is not terribly well supported by the public (though many would be reflexively patriotic in the face of a serious international threat) and an economic policy that is not working out terribly well.

Is it not time to think in terms of a stern, credible but ultimately peaceful engagement in the mold of engaging the Warsaw Pact nations in the 1980s instead of the psychotic, demand-an-immediate-showdown mode of the Iraq debacle?

On Israel, The Palestinians, and The Media

Jason Cherniak has written a post about his dissatisfaction on how The Toronto Star portrays the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I was going to just leave a brief comment, but I ended up writing the jeremiad that you see below:

On the specific matter that Cherniak claims was under-reported: I was aware of the Fatah-Hamas conflict, no I don't recall if I read it in the Star, but I was aware. I'm sure that the National Post reported this affair in a far more Israel-sympathetic way so it balances out.

I have to say that there are vicious war criminals on both sides of this conflict. Any honest inquiry will lead you to that conclusion. I am sick though, so sick and tired of reading one-sided, myopic commentary from either party. I'm sick of the ex-pat peanut gallery on both sides engaging all manner of rhetoric and conspiracy talk to suggest that they are the forces of shining truth and it's only those idiots in the media that ruin a glorious narrative.

Why do I say "war criminals?" Well, neither side in this conflict has the faintest idea what a proportionate response is, one side shells and bombs randomly, the other claims a "targetted" response that often involves bombing the hell out of an entire building, neighbourhood, city or UN Peacekeeping post.

On that note I see the slogan on pro-Israel fundraising signs that reads "We don't leave our sons behind." Sure, fine, but you'll bomb the fuck out of Canada's sons too. I don't care that Israel apologized or that Harper eagerly accepted, if one of the premises of Israel going to war was to contrast some kind of IDF "leave no man behind" ethos with suicide bombers, I really think that killing the soldiers of other countries to make that point sort of undermines it.

I don't know if I've made a coherent case here, about anything, but I'm so sick of this. I want to believe that ordinary Israelis and Palestinians are too. What fuels this conflict in part has to be the aforementioned overseas cheering sections. Everyone from US evangelicals to Saudi financiers has taken an interest in this conflict. It reminds me of Bono talking about Irish Americans who hadn't gone back to Ireland talking about the glory of the "revolution":

Gaza's "Riverbend"

Dennis Perrin stumbled on the blog of a Palestinian single-mother trying to raise her son in Gaza. I haven't really even had a chance to read it, but I'm interested already. If there's one benefit we can derive from blogs on a global scale, surely its that we can look beyond the talking points of Israeli settlers or Hamas or whoever the media goes to for a sound-bite.

Neocons Alone

Juan Cole has a most excellent piece today on how Nancy Pelosi's visit with Bashar al-Asad represents not only Democratic Party attempts to revive a full spectrum of foreign policy tools (not just bombing and invasions) but also mainstream opinion in Israel. Why? Well, as Cole writes,

"So since the Neocons' Iraq War has turned into a catastrophe that poses an asymmetrical security threat to Israel, since the Lebanon war they so strongly backed turned into a fiasco, and since their plans for overthrowing Bashar are likely to even further endanger Israel, then the Israeli political and military elite must be fuming and seeking a way to outmaneuver the Bushies and their wild man Neocon allies."

Arguably the most aggressive attempt at building a new conservative coalition since Nixon's "Southern strategy" has been centered on convincing Jews in North America that neoconservative foreign policy is best for Israel. It is apparent now that the strategy is not really working. Of course such a position was formulated in part because on the surface it fused well with Evangelical premillenialist beliefs about a Jewish state being necessary for Armageddon. If you read most premillenialists, you'll see that the Jews end up mostly getting wiped out in this scenario.

All the stuff is now getting thrown out (I hope) for a more sensible foreign policy. You know, one that doesn't see hard power as the only power.

3 = 1 or Peter Kent's Middle East Non-Solution

Jason Cherniak has been talking about how Peter Kent, a likely Tory star candidate in the next election apparently endorsed a three-state solution to the whole Israel-Palestinian kerfluffle. Jason unpacks the utter lack of appeal that this would have here.

I want to go one step further, a three state solution would be a de facto continuation of a single state with some territories under occupation. What could keep two sovereign states from uniting? Even if they did not formally unite into one Palestinian state, then for all intents and purposes they could act as one. What would Kent block? Could the two states have free trade? A customs union? What about a common currency?

Moreover, who would enforce such things? I don't see the UN doing it. I don't see NATO doing it. Really, only Israel could stand in the way of a united Gaza and West Bank. In effect then, neither of Kent's two ministates would have independence of any real sort.
Picture: Peter Kent once thought he was Howard Beale