Latest Parries
April 2012
From Nokia N95 to iPhone 4S
Annoyances and upsets with the iPhone 4S have been more than offset by its screen, the silkiness of its surfaces, the camera, and the third-party market for both software and hardware.
February 2012
2001: A Space Odyssey: Dry, Juicy, Linear, Luminous
After they finished watching the Bond movies, I figured the next series John Gruber and Dan Benjamin would discuss on The Talk Show would be Stanley Kubrick’s oeuvre. But Gruber refused — too personal for podcasting, he said. Disappointed, I rewatched 2001.
January 2012
A Scheme of a Number of Friends
Instead of acknowledging the wisdom of leading from behind, the Right jumped on the Obama administration’s handling of Libya as yet another example of at best incompetence. They lost me there.
October 2011
The Mouse and the Cantilever
Steve Jobs we lost at the age of 56; when Frank Lloyd Wright reached that age it was still only 1923, the time of merely his second comeback with Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel.
March 2010
Friendship is for Weenies
It’s amazing, given the adulation he enjoyed elsewhere, that the Israeli public knew from the start not to trust this US President.
Before the Setup
Nobody from usesthis.com has asked me what my setup us, nor is likely to anytime soon. So I’m just going to mouth off here about it. But first, some background.
February 2010
Walter Russell Mead steps gingerly into the Wieseltier/Sullivan imbroglio
On the Leon Wieseltier/Andrew Sullivan spat, Walter Russell Mead seems to want to have his strudel and eat it too.
October 2009
My Hope: Obama’s Change
Defeat in the Olympics bid may focus the mind in the Oval Office where it should be: Afghanistan.
July 2009
At Modi’in Mall
There’s nothing else around here except empty desolate pretty hills. The Israel Trail passes by a bit to the west. It’s a hot July Wednesday morning. Things are reasonably busy. The shops are mostly franchises, almost all homegrown — Super-Pharm, Aroma, Tzomet Sfarim, Cup O’ Joe’s, LaMetayel, Mega, Fox, Castro, H&O.
Israel, the Bad So Far
I’m surprised at the general appearance of Tel Aviv folks. Yes, it’s hot, but people appear dressed as if they’re in, I don’t know, Be’er Sheva. And the people in Be’er Sheva, last time I was there, looked to me like they’re dressed for Gaza.
R ight now, the top story on Israel’s Debka news site is that the group of virulent Palestinian scumbags who kidnapped veteran BBC journalist Alan Johnston are Al Qaida. Here in the UK meanwhile, the BBC’s own homepage leads with the well nigh non-story that renewing the Trident programme, Britain’s submarine nuclear doomsday device, has been approved. Non-story because there was no question that it would be approved. The second story is that Gitmo detainee Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has reportedly admitted to being behind 9/11 and planned attacks in the UK. The third story is the BBC’s apology for faking the results of a competition on venerable children’s programme Blue Peter. The other stop stories are as follows:
- Cadbury plans to split business
- Vicar stabbed to death at church
- Call for extra Zimbabwe sanctions
- Riot at asylum centre ‘contained’
- Shares volatile in world markets
- Kidnappers treated Britons ‘well’
- France to launch superfast trains
The kidnapped Britons story is not about Johnston but kidnappings in Ethipia. Switching to the world news, the Sheikh Mohammed confession is the top story. Ah, here it is, the second item on the Middle East page’s other top stories list: ‘Hunt continues for Gaza reporter’. Am I being overly paranoid? I know the BBC site keeps its headlines short, but this one mentions neither “BBC” nor “kidnapped”. Rather than blasting this story about their own reporter from the rooftops, it looks like they’re trying to keep it quiet.
The story concludes: “There has been a series of abductions of Westerners in the increasingly lawless Gaza Strip. All were eventually released unharmed. The motives for the abductions were mainly local: unpaid salaries, demands for jobs or the release of jailed family members.” I wonder: will the BBC pay a ransom? Will it then report that it paid that ransom?
Another thing that infuriates me, partially due to its relentless predicatability: For most of my life people only used the term “Palestine” in an historic sense, referring to the land between Syria and Egypt. As the Palestinian Arabs gained a place in global consciousness and became known as Palestinians, responsible people were careful to refer to the conflict as that between Israel and the Palestinians, mindful of the fact that there is as yet no Palestine, that is, no Palestinian state. Within the past five years however the term Palestine has come increasingly into currency, used even by ardent Israeli supporters such as Charles Krauthammer and Hillel Halkin — the latter an Israeli himself.
In the wake of this change, within the past couple of years the term “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” has been telegraphed increasingly into “Israel/Palestine”. And in the past year or so, this new term has been lumped together with other conflicts that are merely single place names, eg, Iraq, so that the list can be read both as a list of conflicts and as a list of places. The result: now you can increasingly see Israel in print as Israel/Palestine. A few years ago I remember Tony Blair would to be careful to say “Israel and the Palestinians” when referring to the conflict or “Israel and the Palestinian Territories” when referring to the place. Now he just says “Israel/Palestine”. And see the young award-winning journalist Johann Hari’s homepage biography — “He has reported from the United States, the Congo, Iraq, Israel/Palestine, Venezuela, Rwanda, Syria and Peru.” This fellow works for The Independent, pretty lefty but still considered mainstream. How many more years, or even months, will it take until the first mainstream outlet casually takes it a step further and flips the term to “Palestine/Israel”? And how long after that until it appears as “Palestine (Israel)”? And then just “Palestine”?
And to what end? What is this will to Israel’s disappearance that Europe’s chattering classes have? Sometimes I feel I’m close to understanding it. Let me join the bandwagon for a moment and say for a moment that just like everything else in the world, maybe this is Israel’s fault. Israel is always demanding in public that it wants the Arabs to acknowledge its right to exist. So it is Israel that has helped transmit this issue to the world. I don’t think it would be so easy to question this right if it was never presented as a right; nobody questions the right of any other nationstate in the world to exist, even if they are involved in conflicts far more heinous than Israel’s, and even if they too are relatively recent colonial creations, such as Pakistan. And certainly not one that has won its independence in a series of historic defensive wars. Sure, Israel has a special set of circumstances, but so does every other country. I can only see it as playground mentality: Israel is a strong but nerdy boy, always eager to join in games, but constantly harassed by a group of ne’er do wells, and after a while everyone says Why don’t you just do everyone a favour and disappear. A Jonah tale — ironically a Hebrew story.
Israel does not need the Arab nations to bestow it with a right to exist; what difference does it make anyway if they think we do or don’t, let alone if they merely say it. All we need from them is diplomatic relations and a status of non-hostility. We don’t need their blessing, nor it seemly to ask for it. If Israel stops talking about its right to exist, perhaps others will stop framing things that way too. It’s wrong to expect others to be holier than the Rabbi.
Update: The BBC has added another story, ‘Hunt continues for Gaza reporter’, and it’s their #5 story, which seems reasonable. A couple of weird things in it though. First, prime minister (of what? is there a state or isn’t there?) Ismail Haniya says kidnappings are unacceptable and “harm the civilised face of our people.” Civilized face? Is he saying merely that kidnapping is wrong for PR reasons? Is he saying that Palestinians should in fact not currently be civilized due to fealty to Jihad? Second, BBC Middle East bureau chief Simon Wilson is quoted as saying that Johnston had dedicated the last three years to living and working with the people of Gaza, that it was now becoming clear how much his efforts were appreciated, and that “we would therefore urge everyone with influence here to continue their efforts.” He is saying that Gazans should be working towards Johnston’s release because the reporter has made efforts to live and work with them. I can read this two ways. My healthy reading is that the people liked him and he was their guest so their representatives should try to help him regain his liberty. My paranoid reading is that the BBC is telling Gazans they should be grateful for Johnston’s presence, because he propagandizes for them, and so out self-interest they should help him get back to work.
Mon 19 Mar 2007 Update: In ‘Father’s appeal for BBC reporter’, the BBC’s latest story on the kidnapping, this is what the father says: “it is no way to treat a friend of the Palestinian people, and all I can say to the men who are holding Alan is: please let my son go, now, today.” It’s terrible to criticize the fellow while he’s undergoing such an ordeal, but I can’t help but note the patronizing way of putting it, suggesting that it would be more understandable to kidnap the fellow if he were not a friend of the Palestinian people, merely an objective observer, say. Or just a visitor.
People such as this clearly left-of-center Scottish family refuse to grasp that Johnston has not been kidnapped because he is an enemy but because he is a foreigner.
Shouldn’t Tony Blair be getting involved in this, or even the Queen, using their bully pulpits? Gordon Brown addressed the nonsense over Shilpa on Big Brother whilst visiting in India. This is a bit more serious.
Previously
Our Vagaboncy Neighborhood
Nextly
A Passage to Sauna
Thank you for administration advantageous articles….
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