Concerning the pomposity of calling yourself "doctor" and other such foolishness

Just a few months before I arrived at the University of British Columbia, Queen Elizabeth visited there and signed the guest book.  She was of course known as "Her Majesty" to one and all.  But what title did she use in the guest book ?  Perhaps "My Majesty," thus imitating the pomposity of certain "Doctors" of our day ?  No.  She signed the book simply "Elizabeth R."  True, the "R" alludes to her royal status, but, overall, I think that her signature can serve as a model of modesty for us all.

Elizabeth R. at UBC, 1959

Similarly, some ten years before this royal visit, I had occasion to write to Albert Einstein to comment on a political statement he had made.  A few days later I received a courteous reply that assured me that he and I agreed on the matter after all.  And he signed his note "A. Einstein."  He did not find it necessary to remind me of his doctorate, or of his Nobel prize.

Others are less modest.  A certain Freiherr zu Guttenberg, German defense minister until he was forced to resign in disgrace last year, felt constrained to call himself "Doctor" despite the fact that his dissertation turned out to be fraudulent.  And, similarly, there is the very sad case of Martin Luther King, Jr., who is still often referred to as "Dr. King," despite the fact that his dissertation, too, has been shown to be largely fraudulent.

Outright fraud aside, there is something unseemly in calling yourself "Doctor" in contexts that have nothing to do with the subject matter of your studies.

I have just written a longish piece that explores the folly of such pomposities.  You will find it here, on my website.

How smart is Noam Chomsky ? -- II

Chomsky says that Ron Paul is absolutely correct when he blames the US for 9/11.

How does Chomsky know this ? Because rich Muslims, when polled by the Wall Street Journal, have said so. For Noam Chomsky that is proof positive.

One problem remains:  Has Chomsky lost it altogether ?

And as I asked some time ago -- his claque of admirers notwithstanding -- just how smart, really, is Noam Chomsky ?






See also my earlier take on Chomsky's genius.



READ ALSO
Paul Bogdanor,  The Top 200 Chomsky Lies
 

Why There is No Peace Between Israel and the Arabs

Photo by Ahmed

As I write these lines, there are reports of peace talks in Amman between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, under the auspices of King Abdullah. Notwithstanding my very pessimistic view of such talks, which I will explain in this posting, I certainly hope that I will be proved wrong, that my pessimism is misplaced.  Time will tell.

As for now, I hold to a view that took firm form after the Palestinians' definitive rejection of the Camp David - Taba peace efforts of 2000 and 2001.  It then became obvious to me, as indeed it did to the Israeli public, that the Arab elites and the Arab "street" will not tolerate a Jewish state, no matter how small, anywhere in what the prevailing Arab view holds to be sacred Arab land, namely Israel.

In brief, I would accept what Professor Richard Landes has described as the Honor/Shame-Jihad paradigm:

The [Honor/Shame-Jihad paradigm] understands the Arab-Israeli conflict through the prism of honor-shame culture and Islamic jihad. These elements of Arab culture are the main factors that have made it impossible to reach a solution to the conflict. Arab leaders view any compromise with Israel as “losing face,” since such an agreement would mean recognizing as a “worthy foe” an inferior group that should be subject. Such a blow to Arab honor cannot be tolerated for cultural and political reasons: losing face means to feel utter humiliation, to lose public credibility, and to lose power. In search of lost honor, Arab (and Palestinian) elites, never particularly concerned with the welfare of their masses...

The Arabs' total rejection of any kind of Jewish presence in the Middle East is often hidden by a pervasive policy of forked tongue:  peaceful phrases in Western languages directed toward the West, violence of action and incitement to violence in Arabic-language pronouncements.

The atmosphere of Jew-Hatred

"The Jews, sons of apes and pigs, destroy Al-Aqsa"

Source: Al-Aqsa TV (Hamas), Oct. 9, 2009

Friday prayer and sermon, unidentified Hamas speaker:      "Today we look at Al-Aqsa as it sighs beneath the yoke of the Jews, beneath the yoke of the sons of apes and pigs, brothers of apes and pigs. Destroy the Jews and their helpers."Click here to view

In the territory of the Palestinian Authority, streets and other public places are regularly named in honor of suicide-terrorists who have died, thus honoring the deeds of Jew-killing as much as the terrorists who gave their all to banish the Jews from the Middle East.  The Palestinian Media Watch (an absolutely indispensable resource) has documented this ongoing PA practice.  Israeli spokespeople have rightfully pointed out, repeatedly, that the PA here incites to murder,  that it thereby contradicts its own verbal professions of non-violence.

Holocaust-denial, currently the most practiced of the anti-Semitic propaganda tropes worldwide, is pervasive in the PA territory as it is in the media of the Arab world.  The PA President, Mahmoud Abbas, has a PhD in Holocaust-denial, awarded by a Soviet university:

The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism (Arabic: al-Wajh al-Akhar: al-'Alaqat as-Sirriya bayna an-Naziya wa's-Sihyuniya. Publisher: Dar Ibn Rushd, Amman, Jordan. 1984) is the title of a book by Mahmoud Abbas,[1] published in Arabic.[1] It is based on his CandSc thesis,[2] completed in 1982 at Patrice Lumumba University (now the Peoples' Friendship University of Russia) under the title The Connection between the Nazis and the Leaders of the Zionist Movement (Russian: Связи между сионизмом и нацизмом. 1933–1945), and defended at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. 

In the book, Abbas argues that the Nazi Holocaust had been exaggerated and that Zionists created "the myth" of six million murdered Jews, which he called a "fantastic lie".[3][4][5] He further claimed that those Jews which were killed by the Nazis were actually the victims of a Zionist-Nazi plot aimed to fuel vengeance against Jews and to expand their mass extermination.[6] (Wikipedia)

One of the most symbolic actions of the Arab elites is the annual observance of "Nakba Day" (Day of the Catastrophe) to mark the establishment of Israel in 1948.  Contrary to verbal declarations that PA demands could be satisfied by a return to 1967 borders, the staging of the annual Nakba event consitutes a rejection of Israel even if it were confined to its most limited borders, i.e. those of 1948.  These Nakba observances send a powerful message to the Arab "street":  the existence of Israel itself is a crime, no matter how small Israel might be;  and our cause today is what it was in 1948, when the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon invaded Israel, with material help from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Lybia.

 
The rejection of Israel by the Arab elites is so extreme that sometimes it appears comical.  One case in point is the ritualistic denial by Arab scholars, for propagandistic purposes, of any ancient Jewish connection to Jerusalem. In brief, according to these professors and, in the case of Jerusalem's Al-Quds University, of official University policy, there were no Jews in Jerusalem before modern times, there was no King David, there was no Jewish Temple.  I have documented these pseudo-scholarly distortions in a previous posting.

In the Muslim world, it appears that the word "normalization," when used in connection with Israel, is the equivalent of treason to the faith.  Despite the fact that both Jordan and Egypt, alone in the Arab world, have peace agreements with Israel, civic groups like unions and professional organizations in these countries routinely refuse any formal or informal relations with their Israeli counterparts.  Again, it is the PMW that has documented this phenomenon.

Violent Hatreds in the Muslim World

These Islamist manifestations of hatred against the Jews are very disturbing, but they must be seen against the larger, equally disturbing background of Islamist hatreds and violence that have nothing to do with Israel or the Jews, but which nevertheless have a bearing on the conflict between the Arabs and Israel.  The point here is that if the Arabs (and the Muslim world) behaves so violently in its internal conflicts, what hope is there for more pacific behavior when it comes to the Jews ?

First and most conspicuously, there is the conflict in Syria.  The Assads' regime, which from its very inception in 1970 declared itself as among the most implacable of foes of Israel, today kills thousands of its own people.  This development, unlike some of the others I am about to relate, has been well reported and needs no elaboration here.

The Iraq-Iran war of 1980 to 1988 was among the most savage in history.   Here is part of Wikipedia's description:

The war came at a great cost in lives and economic damage—half a million Iraqi and Iranian soldiers as well as civilians are believed to have died in the war with many more injured—but it brought neither reparations nor change in borders. The conflict is often compared to World War I,[17] in that the tactics used closely mirrored those of that conflict, including large scale trench warfare, manned machine-gun posts, bayonet charges, use of barbed wire across trenches, human wave attacks across no-man's land, and extensive use of chemical weapons such as mustard gas by the Iraqi government against Iranian troops and civilians as well as Iraqi Kurds. At the time, the UN Security Council issued statements that "chemical weapons had been used in the war." However, in these UN statements it was never made clear that it was only Iraq that was using chemical weapons, so it has been said that "the international community remained silent as Iraq used weapons of mass destruction against Iranian as well as Iraqi Kurds" and it is believed[18][19][20] that the "United States prevented the UN from condemning Iraq".[18]

The bloody warfare by the Arabs of the Sudan against its fellow religionists in Darfur (as well as against the Black population of the South) is still ongoing.  It has received some Western attention, but the fact that most of the aggression emanates from Arab sources is not often mentioned. (There are now some new reports of warfare within the South, involving the Nuer and their neighbors, none of which are Muslim.)

And then there is the bloody repression of the people of Iran by its own government.

The violence in Somalia -- perhaps the most unfortunate country in the world -- seems mostly initiated by the Islamist Al-Shabaab, although it would take a specialist to sort out the various actors in that continuing disaster.

Of very great relevance here is the bloody story of intra-Palestinian violence.  Here is an account from Wikipedia:

Intra-Palestinian violence was a prominent feature of the Intifada, with widespread executions of alleged Israeli collaborators. While Israeli forces killed an estimated 1,100 Palestinians and Palestinians killed 164 Israelis, Palestinians killed an estimated 1,000 other Palestinians as alleged collaborators, although fewer than half had any proven contact with the Israeli authorities.[4][5]And then there are the very frequent mutual killings by Fatah and Hamas.  

In short, over and above its violent Jew-hatred, the Muslim world harbors a virulent culture of internal violence.  One would think that this topic should be of interest to would-be peacemakers like Peace Now and JStreet, but -- guess what -- these and allied groups are generally mum on the subject.

Which brings us to


The Evolution of bien-pensant thinking on Israel


The  intransigence of the Arab elites would matter less if it were not for the support it receives, at least implicitly, from an apparently growing anti-Israel current in the liberal/left circles of the West.

Today we are used to seeing more than a few committed enemies of Israel in academia and in the high-brow punditry, whom Schleiermacher might have called the cultured despisers of Israel and Jews.  That was not always the case.  For the first twenty years or so of its existence Israel generally enjoyed, if not approbation, at least a modicum of good will among such classes.

A detailed, probing history of the evolution of such bien-pensant views remains to be written (are you listening, Mr. or Ms. Recent Graduate ?).  Suffice it to say, while objectivity (at least) could be counted on in the past, this is no longer the case.  Of course it is easy to exaggerate the importance of figures like Tony Judt, Mearsheimer, Walt, etc.:  when I attend AIPAC conferences, I find the most liberal members of Congress come out very strongly for Israel, no less so than the conservatives.  Nevertheless, it would seem that strongly hostile views and strongly hostile action are fairly common in liberal-left circles, especially so in the more activist groups like Occupy Wall Street (on this, see my piece here) and the politicized Lesbian groups.

While the overall picture of  changes in the bien-pensants'  viewpoint remains to be examined, the position of  one part of this public -- that of the Communists, their followers, and their lineal descendants -- is clear.  The Soviet Union broke diplomatic relations with Israel after the 1967 War,  on June 10, 1967,  and, for geo-political reasons, aligned itself with the Arab enemies of Israel, especially with Syria.  I happened to have been in Paris at the time, and I well remember the shock of French Jewish protesters at a demonstration against the sudden change of the line of the French Communist Party (PCF).  "We will not forget this," I remember one speaker declaiming, addressing the Party hacks.  Annie Kriegel has provided us with the text of a surprisingly anti-Semitic speech delivered by Benoît Franchon, Secretary of the Communist-controlled CGT union, one of the top PCF leaders,  at the Thirty Seventh National Congress of the CGT, held in Nanterre from June 12 to 16 of 1967:

They [war correspondents] have shown us -- replete with the details that go with a great demonstration of faith -- a ceremony at the Wailing Wall.... The presence of certain high financiers conferred upon it a significance that had nothing to do with the religious fervor which the true believers who participated thought to find in it.  The spectacle makes us think that, as in Faust, it was Satan who led the dance.  Nor was the golden calf missing;  there it was, just as in the Gounod opera, standing up contemplating its feet, amid the blood and the filth, the results of these diabolical machinations.  And indeed, we are told the two representatives of a cosmopolitan tribe of bankers attended this saturnalia, people well known throughout the world:  Alain and Edmond de Rothschild.  At their feet lay the dead, still bleeding.  Among them were Jewish workers, who died for them;  Jordanian workers and peasant, who also died for them.  (from l'Humanité, June 17, 1967;  reproduced in Kriegel, The French Communists, p. 163-4).

I believe that, with all the marginalized anti-Semitism that could be found in the Stalinist movement for years before, the decisive turning point came at this point, in 1967.  The upshot of course is well known:   how the "German Democratic Republic" became a bastion of "anti-Zionism;" how the Lumumba University in Moscow turned out doctors of Holocaust-denial (see the case of Abbas, above), etc. etc.

The Soviets' 1967 line, to which they held to the end of their existence in 1989, had a tremendous effect on the broad spectrum of liberal/left opinion.  The Soviets' fiercest opponents on the Left, the Trotskyists, followed their Stalinist enemy/friends in the decisive turn against Israel after the '67 War.   The Trotskyists  saw themselves in competition with the Communists for the pool of left-leaning "militants." As a result of the Soviet position, it became more and more required for the "revolutionary socialists" and the "anti-imperialists" to include a fierce opposition to "Zionism" in their propaganda. The Trotskyists could not afford to be outbid in the left-wing marketplace. (Of course there were earlier reasons, primarily the inherent Marxist anti-Semitism, that made them vulnerable for this shift.  I have discussed these matters here.)

As for the descendants of the old Stalinist movement, most strikingly The Nation magazine of the United States, it is the Soviets' turn against Israel in 1967 that still seems to weigh heavily in its hysterical campaign against Israel. (See my blog on this here). Obviously there are other reasons as well for the liberal/left "anti-Zionism" of our day.  Just what these are awaits the careful study of a historian yet to appear.

Conclusion

There is little hope for peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors in the foreseeable future.  The reasons for this pessimism lie mainly in the Muslim culture of hate and violence.  The "anti-Zionism" of parts of liberal/left opinion in the West  -- giving support to the Islamist anti-Israel project --  contributes to the difficulty of finding a solution.

How clean are the countries that do not recognize Israel ?

There is a fairly reliable index of corruption in the various countries of the world, the Corruption Perception Index, according to which the "cleanest country" (New Zealand) is rated 9.5, and the lowest (Somalia) is rated 1.0.  The average country receives a score of 5 or 6.

Now, of the 192 members of the UN, Israel has diplomatic relations with 156.  The remaining 36 governments refuse to have such relations with Israel, some more vociferously than others.  Quite a few go so far as to deny that Israel exists at all.  The full story is told here.

As it happens, the countries that refuse to have diplomatic relations with Israel are, by and large, among the most corrupt in the world, some having a cleanliness score of no more than 1 or 1.5 out of ten. The average rating for these refusal countries is 3.16.  (The US has a score of 7.1, Israel 5.8).  Below are the scores of all the 36 governments that refuse to deal with Israel:

Afghanistan	1.50
Algeria	2.90
Bahrain	5.10
Bangladesh	2.70
Bhutan	5.70
Bolivia	2.80
Brunei	5.20
Chad	2.00
Comoros	2.40
Cuba	4.20
Djibouti	3.00
Guinea	2.20
Indonesia	3.00
Iran	2.70
Iraq	1.80
Kuwait	4.60
Lebanon	2.50
Libya	2.00
Malaysia	4.30
Mali	2.80
Mauritania	2.40
Morocco	3.40
Nicaragua	2.50
Niger	2.50
North Korea	1.00
Oman	4.80
Pakistan	2.50
Qatar	7.20
Saudi Arabia	4.40
Somalia;	1.00
Sudan	1.60
Syria	2.60
Tunisia	3.80
United Arab Emirates	6.80
Venezuela	1.90
Yemen	2.10
average	3.16

"Guilt by Association"

I. F. Stone (Isidore Feinstein), 1907-1989

very progressive journalist, and pioneering user of 

the trope "guilt by association"

All my adult life as a newspaperman I have been fighting, in defense of the Left and of a sane politics, against conspiracy theories of history, character assassination, guilt by association and demonology.  I.F.Stone

A "new McCarthyism" is seen in the manner in which guilt by association has been pursued by the likes of Glenn Beck and "mainstream" GOP leadership (if there is such a thing).  Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation

In the United States of America, we don’t practice guilt by association. And let’s remember that just as violence and extremism are not unique to any one faith, the responsibility to oppose ignorance and violence rests with us all.  Jeremy Ben Ami, President, JStreet

 The tenuous "evidence"—later discredited—that landed Arar in a rat-infested cell was guilt by association. And if that could happen to Arar, a successful software engineer and family man, who is safe?  Naomi Klein

This is the story of a late-twentieth century invention, namely the ostensible moral and intellectual sin of accusations of "guilt by association."

This trope, "guilt by association," or GbA,  has a curious history and a curious present.  It has the following characteristics:

1) The trope user is almost invariably a self-described person of the "Left," or, in somewhat more modern usage, a "progressive."  The target is someone perceived as, or at least designated as someone opposed to the Left, a "right-winger."

2) The trope has a surface resemblance to accusations of established errors of reasoning -- fallacies -- but in fact it is the user of the trope who is illogical and irrational.

3)  The accusation underlying the usage of the trope is as much moral as intellectual;  the trope user combines a disdain for the ethics and morality of the target (the ostensible bad faith of so-called right-wing McCarthites, for example) with an accusation of intellectual incompetence (failure to understand elementary logic).

4)  The trope enables its users, who are often devoted supporters of totalitarian and other hateful movements, to pose as moral and intellectual superiors.

Morris Raphael Cohen (1880-1947)

Except when an author is involved in left-wing political polemics himself ( e.g. Fearnside and Holther in "Fallacy," 1959),  books on formal logic do not discuss this trope;  despite the claims by its proponents, it is not one of the recognized "fallacies."  But there is, or can be, some kernel of truth in the otherwise mindless GbA trope, namely that generalizations can be inappropriate.  Here is what that eminent American logician and long-term CCNY professor Morris Raphael Cohen (with Ernest Nagel) had to say in their Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method (1934):

We have so far discussed the relation between premises and conclusion in case of rigorous proof.  But complete or conclusive evidence is not always available, and we generally have to rely on partial or incomplete evidence.  Suppose the issue is whether a certain individual, Baron X, was a militarist, and the fact that most aristocrats have been militarists is offered as evidence.  As a rigorous proof this is obviously inadequate.  It is clearly possible for the proposition Baron X was a militarist to be false even though the proposition offered as evidence is true.  But it would also be absurd to assert that the fact that most aristocrats are militarists is altogether irrelevant as evidence for Baron X having been one.  Obviously one who continues to make inferences of this type (Most Xs are Y's, Z is an X, therefore Z is a Y) will in the long run be more often right than wrong.  An inference of this type, which from true premises gives us conclusions which are true in most cases, is call probable. 

Those who employ the GbA trope misconstrue statements of probability to make them appear to be statements of certainty.  For example, the Wikipedia article on GbA employs a Euler diagram to argue the obvious:  if some B is part of C, it does not follow that all of B is C.  But in the political discussions to which the GbA users address themselves, the arguments by the GbA targets are not arguments of certainty.   It is not (typically) claimed that all members of a Communist front organization were dedicated Stalinists.  Insofar as such arguments were at all serious, they were arguments of probability, not certainty.

The "guilt" in the GbA trope is also telling.  "Guilt" is a term most frequently used in the criminal law, where the standard of proof is much higher  -- "beyond a reasonable doubt" --  than in the everyday world of political discussion.  The judgements we make in ordinary scholarship and in ordinary life  rely on what seems more probable, not on what seems probably beyond a reasonable doubt.   During the lifetime of the late Paul Robeson, for instance, both he and the Communist Party always insisted that he was not a Communist at all, just a very progressive person.  (After he died, the CP revealed that he had been a secret Communist all along).  But in his lifetime, given all the various associations of Robeson, it was reasonable to hold, by a balance of probabilities, that Robeson was a Communist, even absent proof beyond reasonable doubt.

Moreover, the trope "guilt by association" is ambiguous in its very nature.  It is regularly applied to the following types of statement, among others:

1)  A was once seen in a certain bar in which the notorious gangster B was also seen.  Therefore A is a gangster.

2) A is a member of five groups that were dominated by the Communist Party.  Therefore there is a certain probability -- whether high or low needs to be established by all the other circumstances -- that A is also a Communist.

It is the gravamen of GbA proponents that the truth-value of propositions 1) and 2) is exactly the same, namely nil.  That is of course preposterous on its face.  Pace these progressive writers and activists, associations among men are varied.  Sometimes negative inferences can be drawn from them to a greater or lesser degree of probability.  In some instances, as for example in those designated by the law of conspiracy, association may indeed give rise to valid findings of criminality.  In other cases association may be totally harmless.  Most generally, human associations are relevant without being conclusive in a great many of the judgements that we are called upon to make.    The proponents of the GbA trope must know this as well as we all do;  in the course of their daily lives they must know, just as the rest of us do, how to chose their spouses, their friends, their business associates,  their merchants, all on the basis of some sort of "guilt by association" judgements.  But when it comes to politics, these progressive GbA proponents declare that all evidence of human association is ultra vires, inadmissible for discussion in the market place of political ideas.

The origins of the GbA are not altogether clear.  The usage seems to have arisen in the post-WWII era, most specifically in the nineteen fifties.  The country was faced, on the one hand, with a Stalinist conspiracy, both through an elaborate network of Communist front organizations and Soviet espionage.  On the other hand, there were demagogic politicians, notably Senator Joseph McCarthy, who sought to use the Soviet conspiracy for his own purposes by making exaggerated claims of Communist penetration of the US government.  But there were indeed many Communists in places of influence, for example in the trade unions, who by and large attempted to rid themselves of Communist domination.  The trope "guilt by association" seems to have arisen in this atmosphere as a defense mechanism by Communists and their fellow travelers.  I. F. Stone, quoted above, was one of the most prominent users of the trope.  The logic was always this:  true, some members of the front organizations are Communists, some may even be Communist spies.  But this has no relevance, no relevance whatever, to the nature of the "progressive" (read front-organization) movement.  Not a few of these progressives had been students at CCNY during the tenure of Morris Raphael Cohen;  their ears had obviously been deaf to his teaching.

Today, the trope seems to be used in two specific efforts by the progressives.  The first is to criticize (and to misconstrue) the public's concern over Islamist terrorism.  This concern is termed "Islamophobia," a fairly new addition to the progressive polemical armamentarium.  The GbA argument runs as follows:  a) it is true that some Muslims are terrorists;  b) not all Muslims are terrorists; therefore, c), it is unjust, it is "guilt by association,"  to be more concerned over activities of American Muslims than over those of American Christians and Jews.  The fallacy of the trope, of course, is to construe the heightened concern by the public as holding that "all Muslims are terrorists."  This latter proposition is not advanced by anyone in public life who is at all serious.  Were it to be encountered, it would of course be both false and malicious.

The second GbA effort concerns the overlap of self-described "leftists" and "progressives" on the one hand with the organized anti-Israel movement on the other. As I have shown in a previous posting, the progressive group JStreet contains a sizable number of aggressive opponents of Israel.  Those of us who point to this association are regularly accused of using "guilt by association."  The logic, or rather the illogic of this accusation takes the same form as that of the other GbA accusations that we have seen.

I recently reported my finding that six of the nine identified top leaders of the Occupy Wall Street movement were also active in the anti-Israel movement.  One reader, an ordained rabbi no less, wrote to complain that I was engaging in a "guilt-by-association" argument.  I wrote back, explaining, among other things, that I made no accusation of "guilt" but I also insisted that surely, to a thinking man, there would be something of interest in this finding.  "Nothing of interest at all," replied the rabbi,   "what you say is a red herring."  Red herring ?  Here is another left-wing trope from the fifties. My curiosity was aroused.  "Rabbi," I wrote back, "indulge  my curiosity:  do you personally support the boycott movement against Israel ? "  "I will not answer this question;  it has no relevance to our discussion,"  replied the good rabbi.  Well there you have it:  an I. F. Stone of our time, bearer, unlike his predecessor, of the nice Jewish name of his birth.

Above all, the Arabs don't want the Jews to have a state....

Finally, a leading Israeli politician tells it as it is.

The Arab street, and elites,  may or may not wish the Palestinians to have a state.  But their main preoccupation, now as much as at any time, is to get rid of Israel.  This, more or less, is the gist of a remarkable interview with left-of-center Knesset member Einat Wilf, published in the Jewish Week of September 16. To read the whole interview, click here.

And here is an excerpt:

... the last decade, with the failure of Camp David, the intifada, the disengagement, the repeated failures of the Palestinian leadership to take advantage of opportunities to have a state has made me very skeptical. I began to question whether the Palestinians want a state more than they want the Jews not to have a state. They may want a state, but it’s second or third priority after making sure the Jews don’t have their state … I’ve become increasingly convinced that the conflict is not about simple territorial claims that can be resolved by finding where exactly the border should go. At the core, the entire Palestinian identity is wrapped in the battle against Zionism. It emerged as a separate identity only through this battle, and for them justice was always more important than statehood. … Given the opportunity to have a state but not perfect justice they’ve always tried to pursue their version of justice and given up on having a state…

 Einat Wilf

I felt the self-flagellation that has become a mark of the left — we don’t have peace because Israel didn’t do enough, in Camp David Barak should have been nicer to Arafat, should have let him go first through the door — it was getting to the point of just being ridiculous...
I’m still in the left in the sense that if by some miracle tomorrow there were an agreement with the Palestinians and it came to a vote in Knesset and we had to get out of the West Bank, I’d vote for it. I don’t have an emotional problem or attachment or messianic views that would make that difficult for me … But I’ve become skeptical that this is what the conflict is about and that it is possible to reach an agreement …

RIP: Eugene Nida, 1914-2011

He was not literally my teacher.  I never met him, and I certainly never sat in a class that he taught.  But I have learned from colleagues who had learned from him.  Two of his great books are on my shelf and I still refer to them from time to time:  God's Word in Man's Language (1952), and Bible Translating (1961).  Despite the fact that I have never had a direct interest in Bible translating, these books had a lot to teach me and indeed all social scientists.  Nida, together with a few others, was a giant in the social science of linguistics.  (Those were the days when linguistics was still a social science and not the speculative game it became later). Now he died, aged 96.

Here is a rare video of Nida as an old man, still teaching:



and here, a bit of comic relief, is an attack on Nida's scholarly approach to translation by a fundamentalist who thinks that the Bible needs to be translated one word at a time:



Of course the Chomskyans, who do not believe that language should be studied empirically any more than this misguided religious fundamentalist, could no doubt make an equally ludicrous anti-Nida video.  Maybe they already have.

Not to be missed:  the fine obit in the NYT by Margalit Fox.