Sam, meet Dora

Samuel Huntington, Mr. “Clash of Civilizations”, has his knickers in a twist once again. This time, it’s over the alleged “threat” that Hispanic immigrants pose to “America’s identity, value, and way of life.”
Writing the lead piece in the latest issue of Foreign Policy mag, Huntington twitters on about the fact that this wave of Hispanic immigration is unlike any other earlier waves of immigration in that it threatens to swamp the existing culture of the country. (H’mm, wonder if the native Americans feel this is so unprecedented?)
“The use of both languages [English and Spanish] could become acceptable in congressional hearings and debates and in the general conduct of government business,” he harrumphs.
He writes of the possible or probable transformation of the U.S. into a bilingual country that it, “would not only revolutionize the United States, but it would also have serious consequences for Hispanics, who will be in the United States but not of it.”
Whatever that means.
One of the few endearing things about this article is the great title that the FP team –led by Hispanic editor and publisher Moisés Naím–have put on it: “José, can you see?”
Anyway, let’s hope that Sam H either has a pre-school grandchild, or reads the Washington Post Style section as assiduously as I do. Because right there, in the lead article, is a great antidote to such fear-mongering. It’s a piece by Jennifer Frey about the enormous appeal to the pre-school and elementary-age crowd of a feisty young bilingual TV heroine called “Dora the Explorer”.
Well, I could fall for the name, for starters.
The piece is about the general Dora phenom, and it’s also about the palpable excitement at a live “Dora” show given in DC’s Warner Theater. (The “original”, Nickelodeon version of Dora is a cartoon character.) Here’s what Frey writes:

    It’s Wednesday night at the Warner Theatre, the clock hovering around the normal bedtime hour for this preschool-and-up set, and the kids are on their feet. Screaming. “Vamos a la casa! Vamos a la casa!” From the balcony, it looks like a commercial for cultural diversity — or perhaps just an ad for Benetton Kids — the crowd so multiethnic that it seems possible to map your way through the hemispheres, excited face by excited face…

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U.S. foreign policy: time for a clear alternative

Iraq, Haiti, Israel-Palestine, the world… Everywhere, the failure of the Bush team’s foreign-policy approach is quite evident.
Now, the Democratic Party has a candidate. But it is not enough for John Kerry simply to criticize Bush’s foreign-policy approach. Strikes me that to be fully persuasive Kerry also needs to get out there and promulgate a clear alternative to the Bushies’ approach.
For example:
Where the Bushies advocate untrammeled U.S. unilateralism, Kerry should advocate a thoughtful attempt not just to re-engage seriously with international institutions, but beyond that, a commitment to making those institutions inclusive and accountable to the peoples of the world– and to making them effective in resolving the problems of the world.
Where the Bushies advocate military solutions to almost every problem overseas–including those that evidently require a completely different set of tools– Kerry should advocate a robust commitment not just to pursuing non-military means to address the world’s problems, but also to building up the U.S.’s and the world’s “arsenal” of such non-military means.
A change in mindset like this would have many implications at the level of concrete policies. (We can discuss that more, later.) But what I am afraid of is that, instead of getting out there and proposing a bold and clear alternative to the Bushies’ approach, Kerry might end up just suggesting nips and tucks around the edges of the existing policies. That would, I feel, concede far too much validity to the arrogant, U.S.-uber-alles worldview that the Bushies seem to take as a given.
Yes, the U.S. is fine country, with many millions of fine people and some fine institutions and ideals. But no, imho, it is not the single pinnacle of human achievement at this point in human history. It has imperfections. On a number of important scores, other countries do a lot better. We can learn from them. We in the U.S. can gain a lot through being willing to engage in active and respectful cooperation with people from other countries, people from other cultures…

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Kerbala, Kazimiya, memories of Lebanon

I am just saddened beyond words by today’s bombings in Kerbala and Kazimiya (Baghdad).
There is something particularly sickening about people launching such horrific attacks at times of particular religious/community significance. I recall the recent dual attacks against the Iraqi Kurdish leaders during their celebration of Nowruz– and also, a couple of years ago, in Israel, the suicide bombing against the families celebrating Pesach in the Park Hotel in Netanya.
Enough! Enough!
Regarding the Nowruz bombings and the latest attacks, one can only up to this point speculate whether the same person/organization is beyond both sets of incidents, and if so who that might be. I seem to recall the Kurds had found a suspect?
This is all so eerily reminiscent for me of the early days of the Lebanese civil war in April, May, and June of 1975, which I lived through from day to day. None of us knew what was coming next.
In those days, the “tinder” for conflagration was everywhere present in terms of old resentments, etc, etc. Plus there was no effective state apparatus that could guarantee public security. (Many Lebanese people have always had a strong anti-government cast to their thinking, and the state there had been kept weak and impotent by design.) But there were definitely foreign hands stirring things up, as well. Certainly the Israelis were active, building up their ties with some of the Maronite extremists who wanted to eradicate the Palestinians’ political/military presence in Lebanon. But the Palestinians themselves, the Syrians, Iraqis, Saudis, and all other regional and world powers were also all eager to pursue their own ends inside Lebanon at that time….
That’s what happens when you don’t have a functioning state: everyone else from the neighborhood and from far beyond piles in and treats the country and its existing divisions like a football field on which they can kick around their own private grudges over the corpses of the country’s people.
So I weep for the Shi-ites, I weep for the Kurds, I weep for all Iraqis. My special hope/prayer for them all is that they can find some way, with or without the help of outside parties, to (re-)build a decent and working national compact among themselves that will provide a strong foundation for the working Iraqi state which is the only institution that, at the end of the day, can provide the continuing atmosphere of public security that all of the world’s peoples need.

Talking with an Islamist

Here’s a little fragment from my recent trip to Israel/Palestine that I wanted to share.
I was sitting with a colleague at Bir Zeit University who’d been telling me about the Islamic List having recently swept to (yet another) victory in the Student Council elections. I enquired if I could have a quick talk with one of these student leaders; and soon thereafter a very interesting young man came by.
In the course of the conversation, he expressed support for the continuation of the “martyrdom operations” (amaliyat istishhadiya), also known in the west as suicide bombings, that Hamas and Islamic Jihad resumed after the failure of last summer’s hudna (truce).
I put to him something an Israeli friend told me once, namely that when there are bombing attacks against Israeli soldiers, the general effect is to turn the Israeli public against the policies of their government, “since soldiers are seen as carrying out the policies of the government; but they are also our own sons”; whereas when there are bombing attacks against Israeli civilians, the general effect is to cause Israeli society to rally more strongly around the policies of the government…

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Bremer’s constitutional follies

The 24-member group of (mostly) blunderers who were appointed by the occupying forces to be the “Iraqi Governing Council” have been engaging in just-about-impossible contortions and ructions in their attempt to pull together an Interim Basic Law–that is, a sort of transitional constitution for their country–before the end-of-Feb deadline announced by Ayatollah Paul Bremer in November.
This effort has three major problems:

    1. It’s illegal.
    2. It’s quite pointless and diversionary.
    3. It’s unnecessarily divisive in a country that, God knows, has enough other internal divisions to deal with, too.

Need me to run thru the arguments quickly here?
Illegal? This is under the Hague and Geneva Conventions, which are quite clear on the fact that an occupying power cannot change the basic structure of governance in the territories it occupies. The IGC holds its “mandate” (such as it is) only from the occupying power. Certainly not from the people of Iraq. From that point of view, you could view it as exercising the same kind of mandate as, say, the Judenraat Councils appointed by the Nazis to run the Jewish ghettoes…

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Gender and whistleblowing: Karen K

Marine’s Girl was eager to remind us that, regarding women and whistleblowing, Karen Kwiatkowski’s name definitely needs to be near the head of the list.
I agree!
Here is a good archive of KK’s recent writings. If you haven’t read anything by or about Karen, this is a good place to start. This is a great interview with her, too.
Karen was a USAF liutenant-colonel, working on intel analysis for the Middle East in what she now calls “the five-sided asylum” before sheer disgust at the way her civilian bosses were wilfully perverting the craft of intel analysis that she quit.
So yes, she definitely belongs in JWN’s emerging “Female Whistleblower Hall of Fame.”
Any other nominations?

Palestinian refugee issues

This is so embarrassing. I was going through my June 2003 posts to pick some ‘Golden Oldies’ and I found this one, which I hadn’t ever hit ‘Publish’ for…. So it’s just been sitting there in Draft form in my JWN files…. Might as well publish it now, eh? Far as I can figure the situation’s about as described there….
I’ve been thinking a lot about the Palestinian refugee issue these past few days, in connection with a big writing project I’m working on. It’s hard issue to discuss much, publicly, here in the US, where much of the hardest of hard-line Israeli rhetoric about the refugees has just been accepted at face value.
That is, such mendacious old canards as (1) the refugees all left their homes in 1948 because the Arab leaders told them to. (Therefore they don’t have any “right” to return to their homes… ) Or (2) that the refugee camps are all run as training camps for the Palestinian militant groups and should be disbanded immediately. Or (3) that the Palestinians should all just resettle in the countries where they now are. (What’s all this about a “right” of return, anyway?). Or (4), that Arafat only raised the issue of the refugees in late 2000, suddenly and “capriciously”, with the sole aim of torpedoing the negotiations. Or (5), that anyway, before the Jews started going to Israel in the 20th century there weren’t even many Arabs there at all; the ones who were there just before 1948 were nearly all recent migrants who’d been attracted only by the Jewish wealth being poured into the country to “make it bloom”…
Are those the main ones? Any more?
I’ve been trying to figure out just why it is that the Palestinian refugee issue pushes such ultra-sensitive buttons for so many Israelis and so many of their supporters worldwide. What’s the big deal? Why is it that these ultra-Zionists feel they have to be so combative (defensive) about the refugee question that oftentimes they just refuse to discuss or even examine the claims of the refugees at all?
I think there are probably two reasons:

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Memories of the truce that failed

I’ve just about finished (let’s hope!) reviewing the final edit of the long piece I’ve written for Boston Review since I got back from Israel/Palestine. It should be in the upcoming issue.

Anyway, here’s one little bit of data I pulled together for the piece, that I’ve been pondering on quite a lot since. This does not attempt to be a complete description and analysis of Palestinian-initiated hudna (truce) of last year. It just presents some of the basic casualty figure for that period. You’ll have to read the BR piece to find the longer version (and a lot more, too.)

When Mahmoud Abbas became Palestinian Prime Minister in May 2003, one of
his first priorities was to persuade Hamas and Islamic Jihad to agree to
the broad Palestinian hudna vis-a-vis Israel that was required
from the Palestinians under the terms of the Road Map. By late June, he and his
main negotiator on this front, Ziad Abu Amr, had won the support of all the
Palestinian factions for a three-month truce. The truce went almost immediately into effect.

Here are the casualty figures for that period:

    Number of Israelis killed by Palestinians in Israel or the occupied territories:

    May 2003–13
    June–28
    July–2

Ariel Sharon’s government in Israel never felt itself bound any commitment
to any kind of reciprocal ceasefire. Nevertheless, many Israelis were
extremely eager to see an easing of the tensions, particularly with the annual
tourist season about to peak. So, though Sharon reserved the right to carry
on with actions like the extrajudicial killings he ordered against suspected
Palestinian militants and the use of excessively lethal fire against demonstrators,
still, the Palestinians’ announcement and indeed enactment of the truce in
late June 2003 evidently had an effect on Israel’s behavior, too:

Continue reading “Memories of the truce that failed”