More Parries
December 2008
Stop Yesterday
Is the goal of Israel’s assault on Gaza to discourage Hamas from firing rockets, or is it to render Hamas incapable of firing rockets? These are two very different projects, yet we are hearing about both from the government, which worryingly suggests that the government isn’t quite sure.
Short-circuiting Place-based Longing
If there is one tangible benefit to having lived in a variety of places it’s that it furnishes evidence of the futility of longing to be elsewhere.
October 2008
Ebullience, Please
A President of the United States must be ebullient. At the presidential debates we should have seen McCain like we saw him at the Al Smith dinner.
September 2008
History Tonight, McCain vs. Obama
McCain pulled through but he’d better improve, better get relaxed. This was the big one, and Obama came off a 21st century Brat Packer.
Encounter at Wetherspoone’s
As if those glass double doors belong to a wild saloon wherein one must repulse brigands just for a peaceful drink.
August 2008
A Crawl Across Crawley, Part 1
Irit, the Jam and I walk from Brighton to Gatwick Airport.
July 2008
Suddenly Seymour
Time was, Seymour Hersh’s dispatches were a cause for minor celebration. They were full- and deep-throated journalistic tours de force, possible changers of paradigms. But his latest, “Preparing the Battlefield” on funding covert ops in Iran, leaves too many clues that reveal precisely where he’s coming from.
June 2008
Another End of Times
With the recent reported training exercises over Crete, perhaps Israel’s strike on the Iranian regime’s machinery of genocide has already begun.
Dead Till Eilenspiegel
Beyond steadfastness and vigor in prosecuting Islamofascism, John McCain seems an American president I’d love even more than the great liberator George W. Bush (most of you just left, I know) because he is more American on immigration than either his party or the other.
All So Simple
First, there is a general moode and desire to write.
March 2008
Why AAPL
Apple’s operating system will, I believe, become in time the dominant one, and with a current market share of only 6% or so, that’s a lot more computers to sell. And as the only operating system seller that also sells the computers it runs on, as well as owning the shops they’re sold from, Apple stands to become a colossus, even a frightening one.
Clash of the Midgets
My phone! One of the reasons I didn’t want an iPhone is that I’m invested in the T9 text entry method and like it. But while I do like the Nokia N95’s slider, it creates discomfort when entering text because all the weight in the phone is further up.
January 2008
Dangers of the Gaza-Egypt border breach
Hamas may try to use Egyptian territory to stage cross-border attacks on Israel, aiming to operate in parts of the Sinai as Hezballah does in southern Lebanon.
Glick Dismisses Gaza Border Breach
Caroline Glick, the strident Jerusalem Post columnist, seems to see the Gaza-Egypt border breach as yet another in a long line of Israeli strategic disasters by incompetent leaders. I’m not convinced however of her arguments, mainly because she doesn’t make any.
Israel’s Greatest Victory Since Osirak
The great tactician Ariel Sharon steamrolled through Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza and today we see another step in the unfolding of this masterplan to staunch the damage caused by the victory of the Six Day War in 1967.
I Do Like Mondays
First procedure: clean out the 2-cup mokka from the previous usage. The sink here is metal and I enjoy lightly bashing the coffee holder against it to knock the damp grains out then putting them in the rubbish before swilling out the remains under the tap. The sound is just the same as baristas make in cafes.
The Small Adventures - Part 2
There in the empty restaurant by the water at Dieppe I had toast with foie gras, a carafe of red wine, a huge plate of mussels and chips, and finally a creme brulee. Somehow, though I’ve eaten in restaurants hundreds of times, I felt grown up sitting there alone on my travels.
December 2007
The Small Adventures
Of course we were late for the train. We enquired frantically among the taxis for one who would accept the two dogs—mine and Davide’s—and take us to Termini Station so I could catch the 11pm train to Milan that would be one third of our journey to Britain.
Tony Blair and the Four-State Vision
Ariel Sharon’s disengagement policy reflected an understanding that ownership of the Palestinian issue is shared with Egypt and Jordan. Once Tony Blair acquires this view, he can help facilitate an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Spooked, They’ll Annoint Rudy
Because of the recent US National Intelligence Report, the electorate will turn to someone who demonstrates not only the ideological conviction required to continue to prosecute Islamism, but also the administrative savvy to reform entrenched bureacracies.
October 2007
A Restoration and Return
There she was, sitting outside the apartment block! How did she do it? Dogs must have some sort of navigational sense we don’t understand.
Curs to Fate
Yesterday I lost Jam in Villa Borghese, the central park here in Rome. She has not turned up since.
This Trip’s Last Day
I went to Astor Place Haircutters. I crossed Manhattan Bridge on foot. I walked west along Canal St, seeking a bamboo steamer.
I, Thou and Pastor Bob
At Rome I felt queasy that they would paint and revere scenes that occured in Israel, but here, looking at the Calvary Church campus, I felt that the religious energy is actually here, that we are far enough away from the places of the events themselves that they can finally become abstracted and spiritualized and kept relevant. An ocean and a small continent separate Fort Lauderdale from Afula.
September 2007
The Big and Easy
The moon is shining through these tropical September clouds, directly above a neighbor’s palm tree, and it’s completely full. An airplane is landing at a nearby airfield. I ramble, unable to reach what I mean, perhaps because what I mean is an almost meaningless jumble of contradictory thoughts that are less thoughts than incomplete attempts to label fleeting tumbling emotions.
Flightblogging
With the squeaks from the front and the clatter from the bulkheads and the smell from the toilet, there’s a reason to prefer Gatwick and the train over Heathrow and the bus. It’s very misty but we’re here. Korean Air Cargo. A parking lot.
August 2007
A Drop in Time
To have a camera back again a personal epoch later feels like a time machine squared. Your chronicling device—itself a time machine of sorts—is suddenly back to what it was years ago, before much was changed, which in itself somewhat returns you to those times.
Sauna Losing Heat
Rather than reaching the heights, to exciting thoughts and feelings, I tend increasingly in the sauna to just sit and think about the work I’ve just done and the work I’m about to do after. Something’s missing.
A Ride to Gatwick Airport
Gatwick is my airport now, largely unchanged since 1986, so it now looks tawdry. Airports. They’re so charged, so symbolic, and so empty once you’re at one; I dream of them often.
July 2007
Busy, Busy City
There’s a bridge in London’s St. James’s park where you can see Buckingham Palace at one end of the pond and Whitehall at the other, with the London Eye behind. Whitehall looked less a thumping fast haven for bureaucrats than a fairytale town, with the improbable slowly-moving Eye completing the fantasy.
First Time in this House All Day
One reaction (in The Times) to Islamist terrorist doctors: “Nowhere can inequality be so devastatingly stark as in a well-resourced British hospital.” So now we know: it’s understandable that after removing an annoying woman’s varicose veins, why, one sets a car alight and drives it into an airport departure hall.
The Soft Ache of Cold Hotels
The back yard is now set up and quite effortlessly picturesque, with its greenage and raw brick walls. Until we start trying to grow wee vegetables nothing else need be done except the daily maintenance of clearing the butts from the ashtray and the leaves from the ground.
June 2007
Only the Rustle in the Trees
We all, like twinkles on a sunny day’s waves, shine briefly. That I do know to be true. Other perspectives are futile. Grief, loss—these are the great teachers surely. Understand that what one has will pass.
A Rash Appointment
I have a rash on my face these days, reaching from my forehead down the sides of my nose and to my mouth. It went away while I was in America but now back in Britain it’s returned. How can that be?
A Cabaret Old Chum
It’s a last bastion of civility, Brian mused ruefully (with that inability of his to be really rued), as we had a beer walking through Penn Station to his train. I realized that I don’t know people like him anymore: libertarian Democrats.
Fatahland and Hamastan
Wherein I obsess about developments in Gaza rather than recording the sights and sounds of New York City in the springtime.
Squelching in a Bath of Me
I rode the Metro subway for the first time—didn’t even known Los Angeles has one. It’s cheap and clean, but the problem is there just aren’t that many trains, as if the city sabotages its own public transport system and wants you to have a car.
Stars, Stripes and Superlatives
Here in Los Angeles I am bombarded with superlatives. Daniel’s record collection. The Bikram Yoga College of India world headquarters. Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm. Cutting-edge web applications by people down from the Bay Area. All mixed in with the most ravaging mediocrity.
Pursuit of Hashemesh
Welcome to three weeks in America. Top story in USA Today: Tiger Woods is going to design a golf course.
May 2007
Bikram’s Yoga, Meet David Allen’s GTD
Both systems are comprehensive in their respective realms and, controversially, ground-up rather than top-down.
Notes and Chords on the Levant Right Now
Palestinian Arabs, quasi-sovereign for the first time, are descending into civil war in Gaza. Lebanon, acting militarily for the first time, is going after al-Qaeda cells within its Palestinian camps. And Israel is undergoing political convulsions, hammering out a new political system it seems. And all these developments among the neighbors are in play each with the other.
My City to Your City
A bunch of loud white kids came running down from the promenade shouting vilely to each other. I was reminded of El Topo (we saw it yesterday at the fabulous Duke of York cinema) and I was reminded of the scene when the three bandits gradually build up their cackling harassment of the man in black as he rides into their valley.
Shite on Brighton
“Like many provincial towns,” the Private Eye reviewer stabs, “Brighton, as depicted in this hacked-together tribute, defines itself more by what it isn’t than by what it is. It’s not London, for one thing.”
From DisneyWorld to Watford
I needed my wallet more than the gypsies did.
Back in Black
Please pardon the unannounced, unplanned and unbecoming two weeks off. Following are some memorable moments from them in the order they popped into mind.
Daily Yin
For my first test of the day as day, I open the back door and step outside to the little patio to see the sky and feel the air. I realize not everybody does this, so if people tell me I’m a miserable bastard then perhaps this little habit will correct their impression.
April 2007
Wetherspoones and Raisins
No that’s not right, said I, sipping strong tea just brewed. Klement wanted me to read over an email he wrote. “Thank you for taking your time to interview me,” it began. My Dad also called to tell me of his new socks.
Mind the Dream
Dreaming about our passed companions as if they are alive requires tricks to the dreaming mind to overcome what it believes and knows to be true.
The Meaning Addiction
I’m reading Shardik by Richard Adams, famous for Watership Down. I chose it because it’s about religion, and Adams demonstrated such insight there with the rabbits’ religion—“Oh Frith on the hill, he made it all for us!”—that he’s clearly a contributor to our understanding of ourselves and our meaning addiction.
Short Stuff
Persian civilization typefaces, Palestinian innovation, Flood worries, that’s life with websites, Brighton is slow, and bad Jajah.
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.
∞
Previous
Our Vagaboncy Neighborhood
Next
A Passage to Sauna