Back to Basics

Writing about Israel is a booming field. No news agency, be it ever so humble, can avoid embedding a few correspondents and a dog’s tail of stringers into Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, to sit in cafes clicking away on their laptops, meeting up with leftist NGO’s and the oppressed Muslim of the week.

At a time when international desks are being cut to the bone, this is the one bone that the newshounds won’t give up. Wars can be covered from thousands of miles away, genocide can go to the back page, but, when a rock flies in the West Bank, there had better be a correspondent with a fake continental accent and a khaki shirt to cover it.

Writing about Israel isn’t hard. Anyone who has consumed a steady diet of media over the years already knows all the bullet points. The trick is arranging them artistically, like so many wilted flowers, in the story of this week’s outrage.

Israel is hot, even in the winter, with the suggestion of violence brimming under the surface. It should be described as a “troubled land.” Throw in occasional ironic biblical references and end every article or broadcast by emphasizing that peace is still far away.

It has two types of people; the Israelis who live in posh houses stocked with all the latest appliances and the Arabs who live in crumbling shacks that are always in danger of being bulldozed. The Israelis are fanatical, the Arabs are passionate. The Israelis are hate-filled, while the Arabs are embittered. The Israelis have everything while the Arabs have nothing.

Avoid mentioning all the mansions that you pass on the way to interviewing some Palestinian Authority or Hamas bigwig. When visiting a terrorist prisoner in an Israeli jail, be sure to call him a militant, somewhere in the fifth paragraph, but do not mention the sheer amount of food in the prison, especially if he is on a hunger strike. If you happen to notice that the prisoners live better than most Israelis, that is something you will not refer to. Instead describe them as passionate and embittered. Never ask them how many children they killed or how much they make a month. Ask them what they think the prospects for peace are. Nod knowingly when they say that it’s up to Israel.

Weigh every story one way. Depersonalize Israelis, personalize Muslims. One is a statistic, the other a precious snowflake. A Muslim terrorist attack is always in retaliation for something, but an Israeli attack is rarely a retaliation for anything. When Israeli planes bomb a terrorist hideout, suggest that this latest action only feeds the “Cycle of Violence” and quote some official who urges Israel to return to peace negotiations– whether or not there actually are any negotiations to return to.

Center everything around peace negotiations. If Israel has any domestic politics that don’t involve checkpoints and air strikes, do your best to avoid learning about them. Frame all Israeli politics by asking whether a politician is finally willing to make the compromises that you think are necessary for peace. Always sigh regretfully and find them wanting. Assume that all Israelis think the same way. Every vote is a referendum on the peace process.

I have a novel idea. Let’s just let the Middle East stew in its own Islamic juices. Along with the Maghreb, the northern tier nations of Africa, down into Nigeria, wherever you find an Islamic regime, you find millions of very unhappy people.

I am not the only one who feels that way, a Monday, May 14 Rasmussen Reports poll found that 63% “believe there is a conflict in the world today between Western civilization and Islamic nations, but most also think the United States should leave the Islamic world alone.”

Will the Muslims ever practice tolerance or accept peace with the West or anywhere else for that matter? No, never. The Koran—which Obama always refer to as the “holy Koran”—is replete with directives to fight for “Allah’s cause” (Koran: 9.88), to “fight and kill the disbelievers wherever you find them” (Koran: 9:5) and twenty other calls to war and murder. There is a reason why their weapon of choice is a Muslim man or woman who is willing to kill themselves in order to kill you.

It is just my opinion, but I believe the present “war on global terrorism” will best be fought covertly with a well-funded, covert intelligence and a counter-terrorism program, not by a massed army followed by a decade of “nation building.”

In the recent past, people throughout the Middle East forced out Tunisia’s despot, killed Libya’s despot, removed Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak from office, and are fighting and dying to get rid of Syria’s despot, Bashar Assad. Both Yemen and Somalia are basket cases with tribal warfare the order of the day. Even the Iranians have demonstrated their unhappiness, taking away Amadinejad’s majority in their parliament. He recently abandoned his usual bellicose talk of wiping Israel off the map.

You cannot point to a single Islamic nation from Morocco to Bahrain that has not had demonstrations intended to pressure their monarchs into granting greater freedom and what we would call democratic reform. As long as Sharia law is in the mix, that’s not a likely outcome.

It took just over seventy years from 1917 to 1991 to bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union, but Islam’s grip on the Middle East goes back to the seventh century. The region is not going to change any time soon and those in power, like Assad, are going to be ruthless in their means to retain it.

The only reason that Saddam Hussein is not in control of Iraq is because the United States and its allies invaded in 2003 and brought his brutal regime to an end. Thank you, George W. Bush, but we should have left right after accomplishing that. Americans are tired of lengthy, inconclusive wars. We have been understandably unhappy with all the conflicts since Vietnam.

Afghanistan has been invaded many times since the days of Alexander the Great and the results have always been a disaster for those who did. Next door is Pakistan which like so many nations in the Middle East has never done anything but take our military and economic aid, and betray us at every opportunity. Egypt’s new leaders are getting ready to throw us overboard.

Obama promised so much for improving our international relations. “Obama advocates forging a dialogue with foreign publics to create a joint narrative about a shared future. . . .  Obama has suggested by example that cross-cultural knowledge can be used to understand and address societies where extremism has taken hold.“  200,000 people flocked to Obama’s 2008 speech in Berlin.   The AP reports that a lot of people around the world don’t believe that Obama has delivered on his promises:

In Europe, where more than 200,000 people thronged a Berlin rally in 2008 to hear Barack Obama speak, there’s disappointment that he hasn’t kept his promise to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, and perceptions that he’s shunting blame for the financial crisis across the Atlantic.
In Mogadishu, a former teacher wishes he had sent more economic assistance and fewer armed drones to fix Somalia’s problems. And many in the Middle East wonder what became of Obama’s vow, in a landmark 2009 speech at the University of Cairo, to forge a closer relationship with the Muslim world.
In a world weary of war and economic crises, and concerned about global climate change, the consensus is that Obama has not lived up to the lofty expectations that surrounded his 2008 election and Nobel Peace Prize a year later. Many in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America were also taken aback by his support for gay marriage, a taboo subject among religious conservatives.
But the Democrat still enjoys broad international support. In large part, it’s because of unfavorable memories of his Republican predecessor, George W. Bush, and many people would still prefer Obama over his presumptive Republican challenger Mitt Romney. . . .

With Krugman and other Democrats claiming that austerity policies have been the problem in Europe, we will soon have a big test.  Just like Germany’s and Poland’s policies have been a big test that restraining government spending has worked well and Greece, Spain, and Portugal have provided excellent tests for the opposite, France will now provide another test.  Does raising government spending, increasing deficits, taxing the wealthy sound familiar?

Here are some articles on topics that we will hear more about:

From the Financial Times:

. . . . François Hollande, the Socialist candidate who leads the presidential race after the first round of voting last week, wants to impose a tax rate of 75 per cent on income above €1m and at the launch of his bid in January said: “My true adversary in this battle has no name, no face, no party … It is the world of finance.” Inquiries from French clients had risen by roughly 40 per cent since the speech, says David Blanc, a partner at Vestra Wealth, a London-based wealth manager.
“I have definitely seen strong interest in what could be done to protect assets both for people resident in France but also for French nationals who are UK resident,” said Mr Blanc, a former UBS executive.
The prospect of a Gallic diaspora of high earners was backed up by Knight Frank, the property agent, which said numbers of French web users searching online for its prime London properties online in the past three months had risen 19 per cent compared with the same period last year. The equivalent figure for Europe as a whole fell 9 per cent.
“The election seems to have pushed a growing number of wealthy French to consider their options for where they are likely to base themselves in the future,” says Liam Bailey, head of research at Knight Frank. . . .

France will be waking up today to its first Socialist President for 17 years – and bracing for radical change. There are all kinds of reasons why one might fear a François Hollande presidency, especially if you are a prosperous French person. The 57-year-old Socialist has openly admitted that he “does not like the rich” and declared that “my real enemy is the world of finance”. This means taxing the wealthy by up to 75 per cent, curtailing the activities of Paris as a centre for financial dealing, and ploughing millions into creating more civil service jobs. Add an explicit threat to renegotiate the euro pact to replace austerity with “growth-creating” spending, and you have one of the most vehemently left-wing programmes in recent history. German Chancellor Angela Merkel – the woman at the centre of the Franco-German economic powerhouse which has dominated Europe – was at one stage even threatening to campaign for her conservative ally, Nicolas Sarkozy, against Mr Hollande.Caution is justified, though one thing Mr Hollande will not repeat is the disastrous tax-and-spend policies introduced by France’s last Socialist President, François Mitterrand, in 1981. He was soon forced into a humiliating U-turn, and into sharing power with the right as the Communists quit his cabinet in protest. . . .

Thirteen years after he was sent packing by Bill Clinton’s political consultants and a phony third party, Bibi Netanyahu has become a political survivor. The awkward politician constantly under siege by the media and at the mercy of domestic political squabbling, has become a veteran of Israel’s turbulent politics.

Netanyahu owes most of his success to a dysfunctional political climate. in which there is no one left to replace him. The old generation of leaders is gone and even a notoriously fickle Israeli electorate would not trust most of his rivals to make them dinner, let alone run a country. Displaced by Sharon, he learned the game of coalitions from him and has ably exploited the rivalries and petty careerism of the Knesset lineup to stay in office. With Barak by his side and Peres shaking hands with foreign dignitaries, the transformation is almost complete.

Netanyahu’s electability allows him to exploit the less electable, flipping through ministers and coalition partners like a game of cards. A deeply divided and thoroughly corrupt Knesset has no shortage of partners willing to dance with him for a ministry and the perks of power. With no one positioned to take down Netanyahu, his is the only game in town and everyone knows it.

Before Sharon, two conservative Israeli Prime Ministers were forced out by American pressure over the peace process. One of those men was Netanyahu. Since Begin met Carter, there has never been a relationship as bad as the one between Netanyahu and Obama. If Clinton wanted Netanyahu gone, Obama wants him gone on a rail. And that makes Netanyahu’s position dangerously precarious because in any election or coalition deal, Washington D.C. is the shadow player.

But Livni’s appeals to Obama suggesting that she would make all the deals that Netanyahu would not, did not help. Instead she was shouldered aside by Shaul Mofaz who has brought Kadima, with its sizable Knesset presence, into the coalition with Netanyahu. There is little doubt that Mofaz, like anyone who jumped ship for the trumped up Kadima Party, would sell out the country and his own mother at a signal from Obama.

This brand of insanity makes Israeli politics a high-wire act where there is no stability and no future, and Bibi has learned to walk the tightrope. Whether he has learned to enjoy it is another story.

Outsiders may imagine that Israeli politics involves long discussions about terrorism, and depending on their political views, extended sessions on how to make Palestinian Arab children cry or how to win a stunning victory over terror. Neither is really true. Like most countries, Israeli politics are domestic. They involve things that hardly anyone on the outside cares about, even when poison pen correspondents like Karl Vick and Jodi Rudoren try to explain to Time Magazine and New York Times readers how this development once again reaffirms Israel’s status as the liberal devil.

Israeli politics, like everyone’s politics, is mainly about dividing the government pie among all the interest groups who want a piece; it is about politicians advocating programs that won’t pass in order to score points with a constituency; and it is about interest groups denouncing each other for taking too much of the pie and using it the wrong way.

For the last twenty years Israel has been swept into an obsession with few parallels except to the Dutch Tulip economy. Except instead of tulips, its commodity of choice is an even more insubstantial thing, the faint promise of peace.

Peace fever is the disease consuming Israel as surely as the Black Death took Europe. If the Dutch traded fortunes for flowers, the Israelis have traded away most of their territory for worthless pieces of paper that last about as long as tulips do. Mostly, like Madoff’s investments, after they wither and die it turns out that they were never worth anything to begin with.

Take the Camp David Accords, greeted with insane romantic fervor in Jerusalem and European capitals, but resented and despised by Egyptians because they were a reminder of how their army had failed to destroy Israel. It was a worthless accord that gave Egypt a vast amount of territory in exchange for maintaining a status quo that it had no choice but to maintain after losing multiple wars. With the fall of Mubarak, it was revealed that the Accords were never more than moonbeams and fairy dust. A puff of Arab Spring and they are gone.

Camp David was an illusion, but the Oslo Accords are a delusion. A tulip economy where Israel doles out fortunes in money, land and power in exchange for the promise of peace and an end to the violence… tomorrow, always tomorrow. The most devastating impact of the delusion isn’t on the cemeteries where children lie side by side with soldiers, on the broken homes and synagogues of Gaza, or on the tightening circle of terror around Jerusalem. As with all delusions, its most devastating impact is on the mind.

The conflict has formed into two camps. The Muslims are pro-Palestine. The Jews are pro-Peace, which means they are both pro-Palestine and pro-Israel. They are for Israel and for the terrorists trying to destroy Israel. What does being pro-Peace actually mean? It means believing above all else that peace is possible and that it will come riding in on a white donkey in our time, if we just want it badly enough.

The last twenty years have been hard on the illusion of peace. As the violence goes on year after year, it has become necessary to assign blame somewhere. There are the Dershowitzes who say that Israel wants peace; but that it lacks an amenable peace partner. There are the Friedmans who say that both sides lack leaders who want peace. Then there are the Beinarts who blame Israel for not seizing the opportunity to make peace.

Only one of those positions is logically supportable within the context of the peace delusion. If Israel lacks a peace partner, then why not abandon the whole peace process, reclaim the territory, expel the terrorists and restore order? If both Israel and the Palestinian Authority are hopeless, then what is there to negotiate when neither party wants peace? Blaming Israel is the only internally consistent position for a peace advocate because it avoids coming to grips with the futility of negotiating with terrorists.

The only way to sustain the peace delusion is by blaming Israel. And that very act concedes the hopelessness of the Palestinian Authority and the farce of negotiating with it.

We’ve been a little preoccupied talking about the upcoming face-off in the U.S., but there are other elections going on around the world. One of them is in France, where Nicolas Sarkozy has been voted out of office in favor of a Socialist Party candidate:

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has conceded defeat in France’s presidential elections, saying he called challenger Francois Hollande to wish him “good luck” as the country’s new leader.

Sarkozy thanked his supporters Sunday and said he did his best to win a second term, despite widespread anger at his handling of the economy.

He said “I take responsibility … for the defeat.”

Sarkozy faced voters’ anger over austerity Sunday in a presidential run-off expected to replace him with Socialist rival Francois Hollande, with far-reaching consequences for efforts to fight Europe’s debt crisis.

Hollande will be the first Socialist Party president of France since Francois Mitterrand was elected in 1981, and Sarkozy is France’s first one-term president since Valery Giscard d’Estaing was voted out, losing to Mitterrand.

Part of Hollande’s platform includes initiatives that sound like they were scripted as porn for die-hard Keynesians, including what sounds like a Buffett Rule on steroids:

Hollande has promised more government spending and higher taxes — including a 75-percent income tax on the rich — and wants to re-negotiate a European treaty on trimming budgets to avoid more debt crises of the kind facing Greece. That would complicate relations with Germany’s Angela Merkel, who championed the treaty alongside Sarkozy.

Hollande also pledged to lower the retirement age from 62 to 60 (which Sarkozy had raised from 60 to 62) and to add 60,000 employees to France’s public education system. And yet the budget, according to another of Hollande’s campaign promises, will be balanced by 2017.

What’s French for “good luck with that”?

Update: Ben Brogan at the UK Telegraph: French Socialists’ joy of election victory will be shortlived

Update II: By way of Twitchy, for some reason, this sounds very familiar:

Update III: “The Dictator” congratulates Francois “Hollandaise” on his victory.

Update IV: Rocketman pointed this out in the comments: Are France’s wealthy packing up their Château Lafite Rothschild for a move across the Channel? It would only make sense.

Update Cinq (let’s start doing the numbers in French now, what the heck): Not surprisingly, a friendly working relationship may already be developing:

It’s hard running an Obama-style campaign when you’re a bland former civil servant whose only real achievement is putting in enough hours in the French Socialist Party to get the top spot on the ticket, after the likely candidate was accused of rape after a tryst with a maid in a New York hotel leading the Party to turn to another man with a foreign last name to lead its charge against Sarkozy for the Presidency of France.

It was easier to dress up Ségolène Royal in 2007 as a revolutionary candidate, than it is to pass off François Hollande, who always looks like a tired bank teller on his last hour at work, as anything of the kind. If Hollande does become President of France, it will be as a party man who was in the right time and place to step in after flashier men like Sarkozy and Dominique Strauss-Kahn imploded.

That hasn’t stopped the press from gushing over Hollande anyway as if there were anything to gush about, or prevented the release of “48 H AVEC FH,” a viral campaign video that tries to marry Hollande’s sheepish campaign route with rap bravado. Set to “Niggas in Paris” a rap song by Kanye West, French voters are treated to quick cuts of mainly African and Muslim voters showing their enthusiasm for Hollande while Jay Z and Kanye West make the usual boasts and threats transplanted to Paris that, in their own way, are every bit as tired and empty as Hollande.

Hollande hardly appears in “48 H AVEC FH” which is a smart decision. It’s easier to sell him as a revolutionary candidate if you don’t have to look at him or listen to him. It makes it easy to forget that, in this race, Marine Le Pen was the revolutionary candidate. Hollande isn’t revolutionary, he’s as much a figure of the reactionary left as Bo Xilai, the corrupt Chinese Communist leader and former Red Guard who tried to revive the Cultural Revolution with his Red Culture Movement. A clueless apparatchik of an old regime promising the old socialist virtues that no one can afford anymore.

“Niggas in Paris”, a song inspired by Kanye West’s trip to Paris, where he hung out with the fashion elite, is a perfect soundtrack for a fake revolution. West, the middle-class son of a Black Panther and a professor of English, is about as revolutionary as Hollande, part of a generation of rappers who make the usual ghetto boasts, but who are as suburban as neatly mowed lawns. The bravado of “Niggas in Paris” isn’t that of a kid from the hood making it bigger than life, it’s an obnoxious American brat visiting Paris. It’s as revolutionary as Hollande or Obama, whose girlfriend related that “He felt like an imposter because he was so white. There was hardly a black bone in his body.”

Hollande’s banlieue tour in “48 H AVEC FH” tries to borrow the bravado of the rap star party circuit, and that seems about right when he’s promoting economic policies that stopped being socially relevant around the time that rap stopped being socially relevant. Hollande, like West, doesn’t have anything to say. He’s just around, capitalizing on cultural malaise and bad decisions.

VICTORIES AND DEFEATS

The whole “Gutsy Call” narrative depends on the calculus of risk. In going after Bin Laden, the SEALs were risking their lives, but what was Obama risking?

An ordinary leader would at least be expected to suffer political fallout from a failure. But does anyone really believe that a media which failed to hold Obama accountable for his defeats in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Islamic disaster in Egypt and Libya, not to mention an economic crater, would have held him accountable if the operation had failed?

Even in the worst case scenario, had the SEALs been captured and paraded on Pakistani television, the blame for the operation would have gone to some military figures, while Obama would have given another speech, conducted more backdoor appeasement and would have been praised for his leadership in a difficult time.

This operation, like everything Obama has done, was strictly no risk. There are no “Gutsy Calls” when you never take responsibility for anything. When the buck never stops with you. To be “gutsy” you have to be playing without a net. And the media is Obama’s net.

Had the operation gone wrong, we would never have seen that situation room photo. Obama would have pretended to have had little knowledge of the operation until it was too late to prevent it from going forward. The whole thing might have even been blamed on some eager beavers who went rogue in their eagerness to get Bin Laden. In time, the story might have unraveled, and there would have been tips and conspiracy theories, but you would likely never have have heard about it from the media.

The media bubble creates Obama’s reality. The same operation under Bush would have been tagged with names like “unilateral” and “dangerously irresponsible” with a strong suggestion that the president had taken us to the brink of nuclear war because of his bloodlust and to improve his political standing. Under Obama, it’s proof that he’s a superhuman strongman who singlehandedly took down Bin Laden, doing what no one else would have done in his place.

It’s easy enough to compare the narratives. Remember how much media furor there was about a proposed invasion of Iraq? How much skepticism, criticism and sheer coverage the whole thing got? Now compare that to our proposed invasion of Syria. Oh right, we’re on track for that, but don’t expect the media to tell you about it, or to challenge the “Friends of Syria” name for the coalition, far more risible than “Coalition of the Willing”, which despite its ridicule and awkwardness was at least true. (For bonus points imagine, if Bush had dubbed it “Friends of Iraq”)

That blast in Kabul was not the first or the last. We’re losing the war. We’re trying to cut a deal with anyone in the Taliban willing to deal with us. And most of them aren’t. But you wouldn’t know all that from the splashy media coverage of the “Mission Accomplished” tour.

Targeting individual terrorist leaders is the only thing that this administration has successfully done. But as victories go, it’s akin to assassinating Hitler and Rommel while losing Africa and Europe.