Update: rubber bullets

Dear friends/well-wishers:

Given your wonderful messages of support, some posted here in the blogosphere, some sent privately, I thought I should provide a short update about Marianne, and take this opportunity to thank all of you for emotional support that we have sorely needed.

Please excuse this little side-excursion first, though. For some reason, I've been wrestling recently with the notion of how to shoot a person in the back of the head while he's choking me, but my imagination has so far failed me. Such a claim, though, seems to make perfect sense to the RCMP and to the Attorney-General of BC, and has an ignominious precedent in the shooting death of Michael "Wade" Lawson by Peel police officers in 1988. (In the latter case, the officers first testified that he had been trying to run them down in his car, and that they had fired in self-defence. But he too was shot in the back of the head.) What is needed, it seems, is either a contortionist with extensible rubber arms, or a flexible rubber gun that fires real bullets. I still haven't figured out how you get to dodge the bullet that takes out your assailant, but I'm working on it.

OK, enough current events, but this sort of wonderment does keep me sane about now (or insane, depending on your politics).

On the other hand, what has been striking my partner and myself recently is a series of rubber bullets, and the Sniper seems to have plenty of ammo left. You know the diagnosis, and a quick Google search will give you the prognosis too. We had begun to get over the shock, if that is possible, and were looking forward to a promising clinical trial. Today, however, we were given the word: she doesn't qualify. Something is wrong with her lungs, and the new drug can compromise even healthy lungs. So she starts a regime of gemcitabine tomorrow. She will be getting a celiac plexus block on Monday to deal with intractable pain that doesn't seem to respond well to narcotics; meanwhile, there are nausea and GI tract problems to overcome as well.

Folks, it isn't pretty, but I felt you should know the details, likely more than you probably wanted. I guess I want to tell it like it is, not how I'd like it to be. We still hope for a happy ending, which occurs in 10% of pancreatic cancer sufferers. But we're living one day at a time.

I will at some point have more to say about our much-maligned medicare system. It's a bum rap, people: take it from us. We've had top-quality care, no interminable waiting, prompt, efficient, sympathetic teams of people. It helps, of course, to live in a major urban centre, but still.

But back to our many well-wishers, from across the political spectrum. When I get back to regular blogging, if I ever do, how the heck am I going to be able to go after certain people (you know who you are) with the same gusto as before? Some of you have made this damned near impossible. I guess I should thank you for that as well. :)

Goodbye for a while

Dear friends and/or sparring partners,

I shall be taking my leave from the blogosphere for a period, and may return only sporadically for the foreseeable future. My dear partner Marianne has just been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, which is not one of the better ones to have. Every moment with her has become infinitely precious, while the world outside now seems both monstrous and trivial at once.

We are not believers, but any of you who are are welcome to offer up prayers if you wish--we'll take all the help we can get. I hope to return at some point, and will certainly report any positive developments.

Keep up the good fight. As some Republican once said, "I'll be back."

UPDATE: (August 17) I have been at bedside for many days now, sleeping alongside, but just stopped by the house for a few minutes, and have read all of your messages, from right across the political spectrum, the ProgBlog folks and Kate McMillan's article with comments, and Kathy Shaidle's post as well, and Eugene's.... I've been fairly composed until this moment, but your outpouring of support has been utterly moving. There is a level of humanity and empathy that transcends politics, and I appreciate this clear evidence of it so very much. I am back to the hospital and will convey your warmth and caring to Marianne.

Imperial Harper's air rage

Buried at the very end of a long Globe & Mail story about a mega-shuffle of deputy ministers in Ottawa by the Harper regime--apparently he's looking for a battalion of senior yes-persons--was this little anecdote, which speaks volumes about the character and personality of the man who stumbled into power earlier this year:

[O]n a recent trip, the Prime Minister was asked by a flight attendant to turn off his cellphone and BlackBerry. Mr. Harper declined. The pilot then made a request, saying it was for safety purposes. The PM relented. But, at the end of the journey, one of his staffers gave the pilot some news: His services would no longer be required on prime ministerial trips.

The man clearly believes himself to be above the law, and his personal wishes more important than the safety of airline passengers. His petty revenge upon a pilot who was simply performing his duties is symptomatic of an individual with disturbing personal issues.

It should be of serious concern to Canadians that incidents like this remain underreported, at least up to now. Harper is a person, after all, who might lead a majority government someday. More power is concentrated in the hands of a Canadian Prime Minister than in those of an American President. Do we really want a Maximum Leader with a persecution complex and delusions of grandeur? One hopes not: that style of governance has already been tried.

Hierarchy of hatreds: Gibson vs. Coulter

Let me first of all join the anvil chorus: Mel Gibson is an anti-Semitic moron with a drinking problem. No excuses, no equivocations: in vino veritas. You read it here, in Dawg's Blawg.

But you also read it in a Globe & Mail editorial, and in a lot of other places. Columnists have weighed in, and too many correspondents (now called "letter-writers") to reference. TV, radio and the blogosphere have fallen on the story like famished wolves. Indeed, at last count "Mel Gibson" resulted in 7,440 hits on Google News, and people aren't talking about The Road Warrior. Was his apology sincere, runs one current discussion, or is his soul so stained and stamped with the black dye of anti-Semitism that he is beyond redemption? A perhaps inevitable (but unfortunate) link is also made to the current Middle East crisis and the critics of Israel, sometimes in commentary that is unmistakeably anti-Semitic as well.

Let us leave this über-Catholic (shoot, I hate that prefix, but if you can't beat 'em, join 'em) in the quicksand--someone may or may not pull him to safety, and frankly I don't give a damn either way--and turn to someone else: the redoubtable Ann Coulter. On national US television every week, author of a number of best-selling tirades, a regular on the far-right speech circuit, the febrile Coulter is a woman who has made a career out of just about every form of racist bigotry except anti-Semitism. A selection of public quotes follows:

Press passes can't be that hard to come by if the White House allows that old Arab Helen Thomas* to sit within yards of the president.

The little Injun that could. [writing of Ward Churchill]

If you don't want to get shot by the police, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then don't point a toy gun at them. Or, as I believe our motto should be after 9/11: Jihad monkey talks tough; jihad monkey takes the consequences. Sorry, I realize that's offensive. How about "camel jockey"? What? Now what'd I say? Boy, you tent merchants sure are touchy. Grow up, would you? [The word used in her actual speech was not "jihad monkey" but "raghead."]

They could use flying carpets! [asked how Muslims would travel if they were banned from flying, a ban that Coulter supports.]

Thank God the white man did win or we would not have the sort of equality and freedom, or life, that we have now.

It’s extremely difficult to come in if you’re coming from a Western European country. However, if you are from a Third World country, ‘Welcome.’ If your genetic ancestors did not invent the wheel, ‘Oh, well, let them come in.’ But they’re the natural Democratic voters.

The Indians were savages…they were nomads, scalping people…We don’t eat people…we don’t engage in human sacrifice.

We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.

This wasn't one drunken incident on a highway. Coulter's been carrying on this way for years.But it seems that, far from being a social pariah (although, in fairness, there are a number of conservatives principled enough or at least strategic enough to distance themselves from her), she even merits the protection of the state when someone is unwise enough to heckle.

Coulter continues to be a kind of warped TV celebrity. Her inflammatory books are always on the best-seller lists. Maybe she'll make a movie someday. But there have been no calls for her head at the Globe & Mail for her vicious, perduring racism. Commentators haven't had to furrow their brows about the sincerity of her apologies, because there haven't been any. Avoiding the top rank of the hierarchy of hatreds, she escapes being brought to account.

What does it take, media peeps? Does she have to be DUI in California to get your attention? Or is anti-Semitism the only bigotry that counts?

________________
*Helen Thomas is a senior White House correspondent. Rather than dropping Coulter, her syndicator, uExpress, covered for her, by replacing "Arab" with "dyspeptic" in the print version of her comments.

Israel's "encirclement"

As Israel pounds away at Lebanon, coming ever-closer to Syria, it continues to claim that this is all an exercise of self-defence. A few days ago I quoted a conservative blogger at No Quarter, Larry C. Johnson, and his words remain timely:

Let's see if I have this right. The Arab "terrorists" attack military units, destroy at least one tank, and are therefore terrorists. Israel retaliates by launching aerial, naval, and artillery bombardments of civilian areas and they are engaging in self-defense. If we are unable to recognize the hypocrisy of this construct then we ourselves are so enveloped by propaganda and emotion that, like the Israelis, Hezbollah, and Hamas, we can't think rationally. We can only think in terms of tribalism and revenge.

There is an unpleasant echo in all this, from a different time and place. The claim of self-defence is, in fact, eerily familiar. Germany, too, once considered itself surrounded by enemies, giving rise to the doctrine of "encirclement." This was the rationale it put forward for starting both of the World Wars.

No two historical situations are congruent, and, furthermore, I am not making that tiresome and wrong equivalence between Nazi Germany and Israel claimed by some, an equivalence that obfuscates the geopolitical realities in a gust of inflammatory rhetoric. But I am prepared to make the case that self-defence is a weak argument in the current situation, just as it was largely self-serving propaganda in the case of Germany, under both the Kaiser and the Fuehrer. The notion of "encirclement," in fact, is a current commonplace, even if that isn't the term used today. Googling the phrase "sea of enemies" and "Israel" reveals its transformation into yet another Middle East meme.

There is something odd about "self-defence" being continually carried out on the territory of others. Israel presently controls two pieces of occupied Palestinian territory on its borders: Gaza, a huge prison currently under punitive lock-down, and the West Bank, colonized by settlers under the protection of the IDF. It is munching away on Lebanon (a nation it formerly occupied for nearly two decades, and whose Shabaa Farms region has been under Israeli occupation since 1981), devastating its infrastructure and causing incalculable environmental damage.

Israel has also arranged a permanent peace with two other border nations, Jordan and Egypt; and is not as yet engaged with the last border nation, Syria, whose Golan Heights region has essentially been annexed to Israel as well. Israel today is hardly a helpless country on the defensive, encircled by a "sea of enemies." Rather, it is a powerful nation, backed by the US, whose surrounding nations and territories are in various states of subjection or neutralization.

Writing of pre-WWI Germany, Allyson Booth, a professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy, notes: "While the Kaiser worried about 'encirclement,' his chief strategists organized the German army for a project of 'envelopment'." Ah. We have seen this movie before.

Qana: missing rocket alert

Where are the rocket launchers?

Liberal leadership candidate Michael Ignatieff, waking from a three-week doze, is "not losing sleep" about the massive civilian casualties in Qana. That's what happens, he said, when "you have rocket-launchers within 100 yards of a civilian population."

Ha'aretz, on the other hand, noted some revisionist history in the making a few days earlier:

As the Israel Air Force continues to investigate the air strike, questions have been raised over military accounts of the incident.

It now appears that the military had no information on rockets launched from the site of the building, or the presence of Hezbollah men at the time.

The Israel Defense Forces had said after the deadly air-strike that many rockets had been launched from Qana. However, it changed its version on Monday.

The site was included in an IAF plan to strike at several buildings in proximity to a previous launching site. Similar strikes were carried out in the past. However, there were no rocket launches from Qana on the day of the strike.

The rabid Right, meanwhile, began to fantasize conspiracies akin to those of the Twin Towers "inside job" theorists. It was staged. It never happened. Hezbollah did it. There was a gap between the time the bomb fell and the time the house collapsed! There's a clean pacifier on that dead child! Alas for the credibility of these foamy bloggers and print commentators alike, Israel has now admitted the obvious. In these situations, a judicious use of Occam's Razor is always best.

The "human shields" meme had been advanced yet again, of course, although this blanket knee-jerky claim, made every time a Lebanese civilian dies, is now in some dispute. In this case the building was bombed, we are told, because the IDF thought it was "a hiding place for terrorists." Qana and the area around it, the IDF claims, have been a staging-ground for 150 rocket attacks against Israel.

The usual suspects are still clinging to the "nearby rocket-launcher" theory, even as the IDF has evidently abandoned it. The problem is that evidence of Qana as launch-pad is a little thin on the ground. The IDF has devastated the area, but not a single rocket-launcher has come to light. Where are they? In Syria with Saddam's WMDs?

Certainly the smoking gun has yet to be found in or around Qana. Last word to one of the Qana survivors, Muhammad Mahmud Shalub:

"All four roads to Qana village had been cut by Israeli bombs," he said, which would have made it difficult, if not impossible, for Hezbollah to move rocket launchers into the village.

"If they [the IDF] really saw the rocket launcher, where did it go?" Mr Shalhub asked. "We showed Israel our dead. Why don't the Israelis show us the rocket launchers?"

The case for Israel

No, seriously. Readers of my blog will know that I have been harshly critical of Israel's continued war on Lebanon and Gaza, which amounts to a war on their respective populations. In this post I want to make the case, not of course for this internationally-condemned behaviour, but for the notion of Israel as a nation-state in a world of nation-states.

This may seem trivial to many. Of course Israel is a nation, they will respond. What does that have to do with anything? But on taking a closer look we can see rather plainly that this is not the way Israel is presented and re-presented in the media and in much public discourse. Instead, the polysemous signifier "Israel" conflates:

• The Jews. It is a formidable task to separate out these two identities, for a number of reasons that I have noted in a previous post. But it is essential, if we are to confine ourselves to geopolitics in our analysis of the Middle East, and not wander into essentialist metaphysics, that we attempt to do so. Israel is not “the Jews,” regardless of the natural affinity that many Jews may have for a self-defined Jewish state. Whatever its unique features, it needs to be seen through the same lens, and weighed by the same standards, as any other nation.
  
  
• The Israeli people. As I have stated before, there is always a separation that needs to be made between a state and the subjects of that state. Criticizing George W. Bush is not—and should not be seen as—directed towards Americans in general; taking on Stephen Harper is to be distinguished from criticizing Canadians. But being critical of the Israeli state is too often taken as an attack on its people and, by further extension, upon Jews as a homogeneous group, whether they are Israeli citizens or not.
  
  
• The incarnation of a higher morality. Machiavelli teaches us that nation-states act in their own interests and strategize precisely along those lines. Morality is a false front that has its own propagandistic uses, but not the force that drives nations. This is not to say that moral arguments have no worth, or that morality is not an individual consideration: only that such discourses are not the dominant ones in the war-rooms. Israel, however, has not been seen in this way by many commentators, including Rex Murphy and other transmitters of the "Israel has the decency to be tormented by civilian deaths" meme. As is the case with every other country in the world, Israel as a state doesn't have feelings of any kind. That is not to say that individual Israelis do not suffer that torment (although the Lebanese, I suspect, suffer rather more), just that such anguish is not a consideration in strategic military planning and not generally a factor in how states behave.
  
  The human costs, for example, of the US intervention in Vietnam were catastrophic: two million dead, many cluster-bombed, flechette-gunned, burned alive with napalm and white phosphorus, or poisoned with Agent Orange, a defoliant that is still killing and maiming new generations. The transmission of the gruesome details of this war on civilians, for such it clearly was, helped eventually to put an end to the war. The Globe & Mail stated a few days ago that "Democratic countries like Israel accidentally kill civilians when they respond, and regret it profoundly," but Vietnam stands as a particularly stark and bloody counter-example. States kill: and they do it without compunction to achieve their aims.
  
  
• The implicit voice of the West. Israel is represented as an oasis of Western values planted in the heart of Otherness, our beachhead in the clash of civilizations. One cannot deny that in many respects Israel is a repository of the familiar. Lifting the veil on the West Bank, and Gaza and Lebanon has shown it in a somewhat different light, at least to some; but too many others remain in a state of denial. Israel is civilized, runs their mantra, Israel is moral, Israel must have reasons for doing the gut-wrenching things it does, Hezbollah is to blame, never stop cheering. The notion that those who actually do the killing of civilians might somehow be to blame for it never enters their minds.
  

The current state of denial reaches its absurd apotheosis in the current frenzied attempts by right-wing bloggers to excuse, justify and rationalize the massacre at Qana. We had no less than the Israeli Justice Minister announce that everyone in South Lebanon—everyone—is considered to be a Hezbollah terrorist. Qana followed shortly afterwards, this doctrine put into practice. An Israeli brigadier-general, in fact, repeated the formula in speaking of devastated Bint Jbeil. But such comments are ignored by the sleep-walkers as though they had never been uttered. Instead, conspiracy theorizing of the worse tinfoil-hat variety is making the rounds of the right side of the blogosphere. The massacre was likely staged, goes the claim—Hezbollah did it (who else?), for propaganda reasons. (No doubt they used shaped charges left over from the inside demolition job that brought down the Twin Towers. Kerosene and rabbit-wire experiments to follow?)

What we must realize is that Israel may speak to us in a reassuringly Western voice, but it is a Middle Eastern state that is not above using terror for its own ends, and human shields into the bargain. If we are to judge the actions of nation-states, whether morally, or geopolitically, or strategically, we need to use one weight and one measure. That many of us so signally fail to do so in the case of Israel is due in no small part to the fallacies and conflations noted above, the latter cheerfully exploited, of course, by those whose own considerations are in fact geopolitical and strategic.

It would clear the air to develop a discourse in which Israel as a state is confined to the same dimensions as those of other states. And hence the title of this article is not at all meant to be sarcastic. If we are to progress beyond the current falsification of the debate, punctuated as it is with periodic cries of "anti-Semitism" and "holding Israel to a higher standard" and "democratic states don't deliberately kill civilians" and "everything the IDF does is Hezbollah's fault" we need to talk differently. Unpacking the complex notion of "Israel" is an urgent task, and the sooner we begin, the better.

Lebanese civilians: quote of the day

"What we should do in southern Lebanon is employ huge firepower before a ground force goes in. Everyone in southern Lebanon is a terrorist and is connected to Hizbollah. Our great advantage vis-a-vis Hizbollah is our firepower, not in face-to-face combat."

--Israel Justice Minister Haim Ramon


h/t Mark Collins

London executioners back on the job

This past Monday was the first anniversary of the street execution of Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian electrician living in London, England, who was mistaken for a terrorist in a botched police operation. I blogged about this at the time. After de Menezes was killed by officers firing several shots at point-blank range, the police concocted a story that the man had been wearing a bulky jacket, had vaulted over a subway turnstile, and had ignored police who had identified themselves as such and had repeatedly ordered him to halt. This proved to be a tissue of lies.

About the same time as the de Menezes family was in London for a memorial service, the Independent Police Complaints Commission made its report to the Crown Prosecution Service. The CPS has now decided that no officer should be charged; those involved really did believe the man was a terrorist, claims a senior CPS official. Instead, Scotland Yard will be prosecuted under health and safety legislation, sections 3 and 33 of the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 to be precise. In a classic example of English understatement, the charge will be "failing to provide for the health, safety and welfare of de Menezes." Needless to say, this decision has attracted withering scorn in the British press, although this has all remained largely unreported in Canada.

On the political front, the aggrieved family has a few allies. Two London Assembly members, who also sit on the Metropolitan Police Authority, have been scathingly critical. One has called for a full public inquiry. Another, who is a Conservative as it happens, ripped into the evident closing of police ranks, calling it "repugnant and an affront to common decency" that no one was taking individual responsibility. Neither supports the current plans to prosecute, one calling it a waste of time and money. Meanwhile, Ken Livingston, Mayor of London and formerly known as "Red Ken," apparently neutered in his role by the London subway bombings, has given Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, a pass.

Sir Ian, obviously not a man who hesitates to press an advantage, is denouncing the decision to prosecute the police. And so is the Metropolitan Police Authority, although its reason is that this prosecution, denounced by one MPA member as a "cop-out," could prevent a full inquiry into the incident.

And the executioners themselves? Back on "full operational duty". But were they, too, part of a systemic failure? If so, where does the buck stop? If no one is to be held accountable, one Member of Parliament grimly suggests, we are likely to see more "accidents" of this kind.

In any case, we aren't likely to learn the location of the buck for quite a while. The IPCC will not release its report until the diversionary health and safety trial is over. Same time next year?


h/t Metcalph's Blog.

Civilians: deconstructing a meme

First, the meme itself, as relayed by a Globe and Mail editorial today:

Hezbollah and its like intentionally kill civilians and have no compunction about it. Democratic countries like Israel accidentally kill civilians when they respond, and regret it profoundly.

And in a blog combox:

Israel does not launch unprovoked attacks on civilians, Hizbollah does. Period!

There you have it, lucidly put in both cases. Good vs. Evil. Black vs. White. Them vs. Us. The screen of history is pulled back once again to reveal the binary dynamo of the universe.

But I'd like to return to history, and to the phenomenal world. The current carnage in the Middle East is not taking place in a metaphysical realm. Civilians are being killed, and the uncomfortable fact, less and less easily explained away, is that Israeli forces are doing most of the killing. The current respective death counts stand at 433 dead Lebanese civilians, 17 Israeli civilians, and in temporarily forgotten little Gaza, about 70 Palestinian civilians, including 31 children.

Of course civilians are killed in war. But let us return to the meme. Hezbollah, we are told, intentionally kills civilians. After all, they did fire rockets into Haifa loaded with ball-bearings. But Israel, meantime, uses anti-personnel artillery cluster munitions and white phosphorus with impunity, although both are of dubious legality. The attacks that precipitated Israel's war on two fronts were both on strictly military targets, despite an odd revisionist chronology that has appeared here and there, claiming that Hezbollah showered Israel with rockets as a precursor.* But most of the dead in Lebanon and Gaza are civilians.

Hezbollah is blamed for using civilians as cover, trading on the good graces of Israel by using human shields. But that alleged tactic is evidently not working. So an alternative theory has now emerged: Hezbollah is deliberately setting up Lebanese civilians to be killed to win a propaganda war in the West. Alan Dershowitz argues both, apparently keeping a straight face while doing so.

One imagines a Hezbollah militant, drawing his support from sympathetic sectors of the civilian population: "Let's see. We'll set up a base over here, among our village friends, because the IDF won't bomb us. Oh, gosh, they are bombing us. Well, then, let's make sure they kill as many of our friends as possible, and hope that there's a photographer around."

Meanwhile, there are disturbing reports of civilian convoys of villagers ordered by the IDF to evacuate, even Red Cross vehicles, coming under Israeli fire. These are a little harder to rationalize, but that hasn't stopped people from trying. And then we have the dead UN observers, and armies of spin-doctors working overtime to blame that one on Hezbollah too.

So it's never the people who are actually doing the killing who are to blame--it's always somebody else's fault. The Right despises mushy leftists who talk about root causes and social problems. People are responsible for their own actions, they thunder. But when it comes to Israel, the Right wins the mushy contest by far, and personal responsibility goes out the window. It's Hezbollah and Hamas to blame, it's always Hezbollah and Hamas, as though those two groups erupted out of the ground one day, ferocious and menacing and ready to do battle.

If one is going to do root causes, one should try to trace those roots a little deeper. The capture kidnapping of Gilad Shalit, which supposedly started the present conflagration, was preceded by an IDF kidnapping capture of two Palestinians in Gaza. But we must return yet again to the meme. Israel is on the side of the angels. You have to go over to the dark side to get information like that. And here's a little more: thousands of Palestinians have been "disappeared" in the past forty years.

Northern Israel is now evacuating, at least temporarily. Their citizens are moving deeper into Israel. They are not coming under fire on the roads as they try to leave, and they have homes to return to. The same cannot be said of Lebanon. Here are the words of one commentator who is generally sympathetic to Israel:

"We don't want to do any damage to the Lebanese infrastructure and clearly, we don't want to kill any civilian life in Lebanon," Shimon Peres told Wolf Blitzer on CNN yesterday.

What planet does he live on?

Israel might have conducted two weeks of precision air attacks against "legitimate" military targets, but to argue -- and not see -- that in this boilerplate targeting approach, it is civilian infrastructure, and by extension, the people of Lebanon, who are the targets, is either dishonest or blind.

Dishonest, blind--or trapped by a meme from which there is, for far too many people, no escape.

_______________
*See, for example, "Hamas [sic] is reaping the whirlwind" by George Jonas in the Ottawa Citizen on July 22, not available on-line.

Your Wednesday smile

Damian Penny, seconding US blogger Andrew Sullivan, complains of left-wing bloggers' "stunning silence on the Israel-Hezbollah war."

Uh, Progressive Bloggers? Could you jack it up just a notch?

Hey, that means you too, Robert! I CAN'T HEAR YOU!

Standards

This article is prompted by two isolated sets of events, which may, in some not-too-subtle way, be connected. The first is a purulent outbreak of hatred over at the Western Standard, the gist of which can be found over at Cerberus' place. This pathetic loathe-fest is brought to you courtesy of Ezra Levant, the owner of the Standard, a person whose evidently visceral dislike of Muslims has already landed him in some minor trouble with the Alberta Human Rights Commission. A month or so before that, he attempted a hatchet-job on Liberal candidate Omar Alghabra, which I dealt with here. His place makes a comfortable home for those who feel the same way about things.

Leave no Muslim unstoned seems to be the credo over at WS. The present imbroglio was caused, in part, by a common-or-garden attack on Muslims by one of the Usual Suspects. A long series of hysterical, foamy, racist, hate-soaked words proceeded to slither into the combox, prompting a spirited post by Chris Selley, who didn't mince his own words. (What on earth is the humane and urbane commentator of Tart Cider doing posting over at the Standard anyway? But I digress.) This only led to a fresh spate of venomous comments.

Right-wing bloggers are quick to pounce on any comment from the Left that they feel crosses the line of decency. You can hear the contrived huffing and puffing clear across cyberspace. But the reaction to the poison being vomited forth at the Standard, as noted at the Cerberus site, has been...silence.

Meanwhile, back on the topic of the Middle East, differing standards are also an issue. It is a common complaint in some quarters that "Israel is held to a higher standard" than other nations, particularly Middle Eastern ones. Indeed, unquestioning supporters of Israel insist that the country not only has those higher standards, but lives by them. All civilian deaths in Lebanon and Gaza are accidental, for example, despite reports like this. Israel is a Western-style democracy in a sea of Islamofascism, fighting for its very survival against...well, Others.

Could there be a possible kernel of truth in the charge, nevertheless? I for one have certainly reflected on the possibility that some of us may be holding Israel to higher standards than its neighbours. Perhaps, in a naive fashion, some of us expected better of Israel, at least those in the crowd who imagine that suffering enobles people. (It doesn't. It hardens them, if anything.) Maybe we do have higher expectations of a country that actually endorses those standards itself. Possibly we are indulging in the "racism of low expectations" by being less surprised by, and therefore less noisy about, the violent intolerance of theocratic regimes like Iran.

Or is a manipulative media to blame? Mark Collins over at Daimnation asks rhetorically: "Why are a few hundred dead Lebanese a crisis? And not millions of black Africans? My answers: television news; racism on the part of all non-blacks; and political agendas completely remote from any concern with real human beings, their lives, and their deaths."

I would quarrel with his answers on several counts, but it would be less than honest not to admit some difficulty in dismissing them out of hand. Blaming the media is a little problematic, I think: what processes, after all, determine what is deemed important by the media? But racism is undoubtedly part of it. Stephen Lewis has been trying to awake the conscience of the world to the pandemic AIDS crisis in Africa, with indifferent success. It is hard to imagine the same inattention were this happening in Europe or the United States. For whatever reason, in any event, the media chooses some spots and not others in which to plant its tripods.

In the case of the Middle East, though, the media might have made the only available choice. All of us are affected immediately in some way. At the level of the trivial, gas prices have risen once again. Organizations on both sides of the divide have given the war considerable profile; and significant numbers of Canadians, as we have recently learned, actually live in that part of the world. When the lens is brought to bear, however, no matter what the reason, we can see the deaths and injuries, and feel them. There is nothing inconsistent in that reaction; we know, for example, that the grief of a single family closer to home can result in a massive outpouring of emotion. We don't react to death based on numbers: that's not how empathy works.

We invoke our common standards when we see what we can't accept or rationalize. We are now looking, every day, at the on-the-ground results of conflict in the Middle East. I think that there is merit--and I don't know whether we should be criticized for this or not--in the suggestion that our expectations of Israel might be higher than those we hold of an irregular non-state armed force calling itself the Army of God. Although the latter isn't doing much of the killing at present.

In any case, when we see the pictures and hear the reports, it is Lebanese civilians whom we encounter, in extremis. And our aroused feelings demand that we lay blame. But many are not predisposed to see Muslims/Arabs in a sympathetic light; crude propagandists like Ezra Levant bear their share of responsibility for constructing that threatening, cartoonish Other, although more mainstream commentators, journalists and editors do their bit as well. Israel gets a far better press in these parts, and Muslims do not fare as well as Jews in this venue. Imagine substituting the words "Jew" and "Jewish" for the Islamic references in the Western Standard commentaries and the point becomes obvious. The human suffering brought to you by satellite TV, therefore, will be blamed on the guys with the black hats, not the white ones. And that's human, isn't it?

Our personal sense of the Middle East conflict arises immediately from empathy. We experience that most essential of emotions in a multitude of ways, and our rational frameworks are then forced into play. We reach radically different conclusions because those frameworks are socially constructed, and part of that construction is the too often unreflected-upon, mediated image of the Other.

Perhaps we can at least agree, though, that comparing tragedies around the world makes little sense. Our response, as the tsunami relief effort indicated, depends very much on where the camera is pointed. A few hundred dead Lebanese civilians do not mean any less because genocide is being practised in Darfur, largely out of our sight and without much media attention. We need to question more closely why we are allowed to see some things and not others; how it is decided what the media will mediate, and how--because we are affected by what we see, and the media are our eyes. But in the final analysis, in or out of sight, numbers don't matter. Last word to Kenneth Patchen:

The Fox

Because the snow is deep
Without spot that white falling through white air

Because she limps a little - bleeds
Where they shot her

Because hunters have guns
And dogs have hangman's legs

Because I'd like to take her in my arms
And tend her wound

Because she can't afford to die
Killing the young in her belly

I don't know what to say of a soldier's dying
Because there are no proportions in death.

On anti-Semitism (2)

The Middle East is where short tempers were born. One runs a risk in even attempting to discuss the notion of anti-Semitism in that flammable context. It is important to step lightly and heavily at the same time. Almost inevitably one is suspected of the sin for trying to make the necessary fine and not-so-fine distinctions. The gleeful decoder/propagandists will tell you what “critical of Israel” must mean; nothing less than full support is without its hazards.

This is not of course to say that there are no genuine anti-Semites in the mix. Obviously there are, and by that I mean that they are obvious—they stand out. The President of Iran comes immediately to mind, with his bone-headed introduction of Holocaust-denial into the current debates, and he’s not alone in that part of the world. Closer to home we have Hal Turner and David Duke. Anti-Semites can’t be expected to approve of any Jewish project whatsoever, and you’ll find, therefore, no friends of Israel in that quarter. But they are no friends of progressives, either, and we are no friends of theirs.

I hasten to qualify the second-last statement. Israel, to be sure, can fairly be characterized as a “Jewish project.” History tells us so, from the Balfour Declaration onwards, and that’s only recent history. But there are non-Zionist and indeed anti-Zionist Jews, and, perhaps more germane to this discussion, there are fervent supporters of Israel who happen to be non-Jewish and non-Israeli. It is that latter group that needs a closer look. Before doing so, however, we need to try to disentangle, at least for the purposes of argument, that which cannot be readily disentangled, if at all—“Israel” and “the Jewish people."

I will admit that this is a daunting task. In France, there are “the French.” In Israel, on the other hand, we find adherents of a form, or more properly several forms, of Israeli nationalism, under the umbrella term of Zionism, and at the same time a second identity: Jewishness. Jews, with their multiplicity of cultures, languages, traditions and histories, may have in some way formed a "community," but if community it was, it lacked a nationalism until the development of Zionism.

Israel has filled that void, and it is for this reason close to the hearts of those in the Jewish Diaspora, even, it must be admitted, of those Jews who are hostile to its aims and policies. Israel is not just a territory and not just a state comme les autres. The majority of its inhabitants are at once Jews and Israelis. There is a double identity here, far more profound than that of the so-called “hyphenated Canadian."

In this sense Israel is genuinely like no other country in the world. It is home and refuge not only to its own citizens, but, by law, to the citizens of many other countries. Forged out of the Holocaust, which claimed six million Jewish victims among the twelve million who perished in it, Israel is a conjuncture of state, land, history, myth, nationalist ideology, a multitude of peoples, a state of mind.

I do not here want to revert to the competing claims on the land. Suffice it to say that it was never terra nullius. For the purposes of this article, I want simply to underline the obvious: one cannot speak of Israel and ignore the Jews. The underlying reality, the unique double nature of the country, is laid bare when one appears too antagonistic to that state’s aims and policies. We are not accused of simply being anti-Israeli, which would be bad enough—opposition to state policy should not be taken as opposition to the subjects of the state. We are accused, rather, of anti-Semitism—of the so-called “new anti-Semitism” about which a substantial literature has already accumulated.

This phenomenon, taken so readily for granted by so many, is actually the subject of contentious debate among Jews and non-Jews alike. It's a bit of a grab-bag, in fact; the first books on the subject appeared in the early 1970s and were concerned with a resurgence of the old anti-Semitism emanating from the usual suspects on the Right. Only a few years later, the concept was linked to the Left, which had by that time taken up the Palestinian cause in earnest, while the Right had embraced Israel for a number of reasons ranging from the religious to the strategic.

This is not to say that the entire debate comes down to a kind of verbal proxy war between progressives and conservatives, but it must be said that Israel is obviously a site of ideological struggle. The distinctions that some commentators labour to make between, for example, anti-Semitism and "Israelphobia," between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" criticism of Israel, are too often completely erased in that wider conflict.

Lost also in the fog of these wars is the reason for the intensity of the original debate: the fate of European Jews at the hands of the Nazis and their allies, and the much longer history of persecution that, as Jean-Paul Sartre for one has has argued, may be the defining fact of Jewish identity (although, like so many of his summings-up, this seems unsatisfactorily narrow).

In any case, if Israel is not a nation like the others, anti-Semitism is not a prejudice like the others. There is a hierarchy of hatreds in our society, and Jew-hatred is at the very top. What influence can be mustered will be mustered by any people with such a history. Further influence will be exercised by those who have their own ideological reasons for doing so. But the result has been that one community is relatively privileged in comparison to other communities, which in fact suffer a kind of erasure. When neo-Nazis attack a Tamil or a Roma, spokepeople from those communities are not even consulted by the media. Instead, Bernie Farber of the Canadian Jewish Congress can be counted upon for a comment. And when it comes to Israel, the same voice is raised.

I am not here insisting that it not be: that would simply be foolish. The voice will be heard, for perfectly plausible reasons. But other voices need to be heard as well; those of other dispossessed or persecuted peoples and groups, and those of individuals who attempt, although the discursive space is lacking, to critique Israel as though it were simply another nation-state. Instead, such critiques are regularly undermined by, on the one hand, Jewish spokespersons who are so fiercely protective of Israel that they will readily silence or discredit critics with a temptingly handy label; and, on the other, conservatives who brandish that self-same label for their own political purposes. There is little genuine debate that can take place in such a climate.

And of course one of the unfortunate consequences of this is the hollowing out of the very notion of anti-Semitism, something that must give true anti-Semites considerable aid and comfort. I will conclude this post, therefore, by giving the last measured word on the subject to Brian Klug, writing in The Nation:

In his contribution to A New Antisemitism?, historian Peter Pulzer, faulting the way "the liberal press" sometimes reports the activities of the Israel Defense Forces in the occupied territories, makes a telling point about the misuse of words. He says: "When every civilian death is a war crime, that concept loses its significance. When every expulsion from a village is genocide, we no longer know how to recognize genocide. When Auschwitz is everywhere, it is nowhere." Point taken. But equally, when anti-Semitism is everywhere, it is nowhere. And when every anti-Zionist is an anti-Semite, we no longer know how to recognize the real thing--the concept of anti-Semitism loses its significance.

On anti-Semitism (1)

The Israeli state's on-going attack on Lebanon has resulted to date in hundreds of dead civilians and hundreds of thousands of ordinary Lebanese displaced from their homes. An entire nation continues to be terrorized by Ehud Olmert’s “No one is exempt” policy. At this point, in fact, Lebanon has indeed been set back twenty years, if not more, fulfilling in its smashed infrastructure and traumatized population the obscene boast of Israeli officials.

Were we talking about any other nation than Israel, we could simply have the debate. Not all would agree with my characterization of the conflict, above. Some might call it incomplete, badly phrased, antagonistic, over-simplified. That's fair enough: I can defend my position, and the discussion, in any case, is not likely to end anytime soon.

Were the country in question France, or New Zealand, though, one could make such comments without being labelled "anti-French" or "anti-Kiwi." The obvious difference between government policy and the people make such notions absurd to the feel. Even at the height of Stalin's atrocities, for example, I can find no references to his critics being called "anti-Georgian."

But Israel is different. Phil McNeely, the Ottawa-area MPP who dared to utter criticisms of that country's current adventures in the Middle East, has learned this to his cost. Rather than engage him in debate, the Canadian Jewish Congress immediately demanded that he "retract" his statements. The Ontario Premier expressed "serious dismay and disappointment." The Ottawa Citizen is full of angry letters today, accusing McNeely of everything from anti-Semitism to mental illness. Against McNeely's statement that it is dangerous for critics of the Israeli state to speak out, one writer argued that this very claim indicated "an insidious old-fashioned anti-Semitism." Ironically, the correspondent nicely made McNeely's point for him.

For commenting perhaps too bluntly about the human cost of Israel's two-front adventure, I myself have been accused of anti-Semitism. This is the vile comment in full:

Welcome to the "reality-based" world of the Left. A reality where the only Jew is the Eternal Jew.

To his considerable credit, Mark Collins, the writer of the piece where this comment later appeared, has asked the author to apologize. But I won’t hold my breath. Welcome, everyone, not to the "new anti-Semitism," but to the new McCarthyism. Look around. It’s everywhere.

Over at Small Dead Animals, none other than the Spanish Prime Minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, stands accused. "Scratch a socialist," Kate McMillan states, such insouciant slander being the current stock-in-trade of much of the Right, "and underneath you’ll find an anti-Semite." Somehow, in the pretzel logic that passes for thought in some quarters, the al-Qaeda bombing of Spanish trains, causing terrible loss of life, led straight to anti-Semitism.

Zapatero, according to a scurrilous article in Ynet News, is guilty on two counts, or maybe three. Our suspicions are aroused by the fact that the charges made in this badly-translated and often incoherent rant appear nowhere else, other than in screechy right-wing blogs whose commentary inevitably leads back to this one source. Here, in any case, is the bill of account:

First, Zapatero had the effrontery to put a "Palestinian kaffiyah" around his neck when the object in question was handed to him by a student—putting me in mind of the old joke, here paraphrased: "My mother made me a Palestinian." "If I give her the yarn, will she make me one too?" Through sympathy, at least, many "Palestinians" are indeed being made these days. But takes more than a scarf to make an anti-Semite.

Secondly, it took too long, says the writer, to shut down a Hizbollah television channel, Al Manar, that was broadcasting in Spanish to Latin America by satellite. (More on that here.)

Finally, the biggie: Mr. Zapatero and his wife were having dinner with the distinguished Jewish Bennaroch family, and proceeded to abuse their hospitality by

claiming what Vidal Quadras, member of the European Parliament, described on the radio as "a tirade of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. By the moment the Benarroch couple had left the table to express their regrets, Zapatero was explaining his lack of surprise about the Holocaust: according to the people present, Zapatero claimed to understand the Nazis.”

Now we know this precisely how? This incident, which allegedly occurred last December 5, is not recorded anywhere else but in that illiterate Ynet article. Such a thing, of course, would have been front-page news had it really happened. Instead it comes to us third-hand, courtesy of one Vidal Quadras. Who is this Quadras, anyway?

As it happens, it's not that difficult to track him down. He's a conservative opponent of Mr. Zapatero, and he writes a blog with entries like this one, soberly entitled "The lunatic Spain of Zapatero." Kate McMillan ought to link to him. Even with his evident pith and vinegar, though, and his undoubted connections, the best Quadras could muster in the way of planting this juicy piece of gossip was one squib in Ynet News, which then, as noted, oozed through the usual pipelines into the blogosphere.

All this is eerily similar to the hatchet-job that was attempted this past January on Hugo Chavéz, the popular president of Venezuela. The charge of anti-Semitism this time was sparked by a Christmas Eve speech given by the president. Here's the original, followed by the translation:

El mundo tiene para todos, pues, pero resulta que unas minorías, los descendientes de los mismos que crucificaron a Cristo, los descendientes de los mismos que echaron a Bolívar de aquí y también lo crucificaron a su manera en Santa Marta, allá en Colombia. Una minoría se adueñó de las riquezas del mundo, una minoría se adueñó del oro del planeta, de la plata, de los minerales, de las aguas, de las tierras buenas, del petróleo, de las riquezas,pues, y han concentrado las riquezas en pocas manos: menos del diez por ciento de la población del mundo es dueña de más de la mitad de la riqueza de todo el mundo y a la...más de la mitad de los pobladores del planeta son pobres y cada día hay más pobres en el mundo entero.

The world is for all of us, then, but it so happens that a minority, the descendants of the same ones that crucified Christ, the descendants of the same ones that kicked Bolivar out of here and also crucified him in their own way over there in Santa Marta, in Colombia -- a minority has taken possession of all the wealth of the world, a minority has taken ownership of all of the gold of the planet, of the silver, of the minerals, the waters, the good lands, oil, of the wealth, and have concentrated the wealth in a few hands: Less than 10 percent of the population of the world owns more than half of the wealth of the world and … more than [half] the population of the planet is poor, and each day there are more poor people in the whole world.

Certain right-wing commentators seized upon the reference to the crucifixion of Christ. It was a classic "gotcha" moment, accompanied by incomplete references to Chavéz' association with a wonky old crank named Norberto Ceresole, who, as it happens, was the genuine article--a real anti-Semite. (In fact, Chavéz gave the old fool the boot right out of Venezuela in 1999, for, among other things, precisely that.)

Now, in context, it is rather obvious that the Venezuelan populist was referring to rich elites in general. No Jews, so far as I am aware, had a hand in mistreating Bolivar. 10% of the world's population is not Jewish. What is far more interesting, however, is the anti-Semitic assumptions underlying the very accusations of anti-Semitism levelled against Chavéz. To read anti-Semitism into his Christian-socialist utterance, we would have to have already in our minds an image of Jews collectively responsible for the death of Christ, rather than a rich elite in complicity with the Roman occupation. You won't find any of that in his words, but you'll find it in the mouths of his accusers.

More recently, Chavéz has come under fire again, this time--no surprise here--for being critical of Israel's current actions in the Middle East. He makes a crucial distinction, however, that all of us would be wise to make ourselves:

The flame of war is once again ignited over there in the Middle East, and whose fault is it? We cannot say it is the people of Israel, we cannot say that is the people of Palestine, no. It is the North American empire’s fundamental fault, it is the empire that has armed and supported the abuses of the Israeli elites, which invade, abuse, challenge the United Nations since a long time ago.

The "Israeli people," versus the "Israeli elites." When one writes about Israel, to what is one referring? The people, the state, the territory? It is not always clear, and when one tries to be clear, once again one runs the risk of being called--well, anti-Semitic.

But, of course, there is more to all this than unclarity in the use of terms like "Israel" and "Israeli." The elephant in the room, which I shall address directly in my next post, is Jewish.

(To be continued)

The civilian question

Over at another site I was asked point-blank whether I believed that Israeli forces "intentionally" target civilians during the current Mid-East crisis. Such a question deserves a straight answer, even if it is really two questions rolled into one.

If by "intentionally" one means that Israel's objective is simply to kill civilians, then the answer is no, generally speaking. Many times more casualties than those reported would obviously have been inflicted otherwise. (That does not mean, however, that some evidently intentional killing is not going on: see below.) But if by "intentionally" one means that Israel knows that civilians will be killed in large numbers by its actions, and ploughs ahead anyway, then the answer is just as plainly Yes.

The oft-repeated assertion is that Hisbollah deliberately hides among civilians, thus making civilian deaths inevitable. This is a staple, in fact, of pro-Israeli arguments that seek to rationalize those deaths. Allegedly, rockets are placed within civilian populations in the south, and arms have been stored in Beirut suburbs, for example. But this strongly-made claim has been equally strongly contested.

In Beirut, there has been talk of Israeli use of banned anti-civilian weapons, although this has not been confirmed by anything like an impartial source. Banned or not, though, Israeli weapons have so far killed more than 300 Lebanese, mostly civilians. Israeli civilian deaths currently number fifteen.

More troubling, perhaps, is what has been happening in Southern Lebanon. Villages continue to be demolished, with terrible loss of civilian life. Worse--far worse--are reports like this one:

Israeli air strikes and a naval bombardment on the Christian town of Srifa near Tyre overnight killed more than 30 people.

With many of the dead believed to be civilians, those still in the south are being presented with a dangerous choice.

Israel's army has ordered residents of dozens of villages near the border to leave their homes. But the United Nations peacekeeping force in South Lebanon says virtually every civilian or humanitarian convoy that's chanced the roads has come under Israeli fire.

Marwaheen, it seems, was not an isolated occurrence. Civilians are being ordered by the IDF to leave their villages and then fired upon. Lots of "intention" there, I'm afraid.

Hisbollah, for its part, has recently been firing anti-personnel rockets into northern Israel, something that Human Rights Watch has correctly called "serious violations of international humanitarian law and probable war crimes." Clearly this is something for which they should be brought to account. Now, if only our hopelessly biased media commentators would apply the same standards to Israel's current conduct.

Middle East: gags and apologies in Ontario

Whenever I find myself wondering why I spend valuable time in the blogosphere, a news story appears that reminds me, once again, why this form of information and opinion-sharing needs to be nurtured and treasured.

An Ontario MPP, Phil McNeely, has discovered what happens in Canada these days when one has the temerity--or foolhardiness-- to criticize Israel's current adventures in Lebanon.

Mr. McNeely stands accused of stating the obvious in "an email obtained by the (Ottawa) Citizen":

1) Israel is engaging in collective punishment of the people of Lebanon.

2) After decades of war and devastation, Lebanon has been set back years by Israel's destruction of its infrastructure.

3) Israel's detention of a number of democratically-elected members of the Palestinian government is the act of a rogue state.

4) The federal government should apologize to Canadians for supporting this behaviour.

He had a few choice words to say about the war in Iraq as well, and concluded: "Arabs and particularly Muslims do not count as people for some governments."

In a subsequent interview with the Citizen yesterday, he enlarged a little on his views:

"I feel very strongly that the U.S. is going in the wrong direction and we have Harper, who is leading Bush instead of following Bush, who is a puppet of Bush and I felt as a Canadian, Ontarian that I have to speak out," he said.

He went on: "You know, the death of Arabs doesn't matter, they are expendable and I just feel very badly the way the world is going. I don't think it is the way to build relationship [sic], I think we should be reaching out to the Arabs and Muslims. We are not."

He said Arabs and Muslims in the community are continually barraged as terrorists, but "people like ourselves feel very strongly, but you know, it's very dangerous speaking freely in this country."

No kidding. The Canadian Jewish Congress was quick off the mark, demanding that McNeely "reconsider and retract" his statements. And then Dalton McGuinty got into the act, expressing "serious dismay and disappointment," distancing his government from McNeely's views, and phoning the Canadian Jewish Congress personally to assure them that everything was under control. Shortly afterwards, McNeely issued an abject apology that sounded as if it had been extracted under torture:

Recently I have made comments with respect to the current situation in the Middle East, which were inappropriate. I apologize for the language of my comments and sincerely regret the hurt they have caused. I recognize that the challenges faced in the Middle East are complex and longstanding. During this time of tension, it is even more important for everyone to remain respectful of each other, which I failed to do.

Meanwhile, the killing on both fronts continues. Lebanon "has been torn to shreds," her desperate Prime Minister cries out. But woe betide any public figure in Canada who dares cry out as well.

War on Lebanese civilians continues

Canada has asked Lebanon and Israel to guarantee that they won't attack ships full of Canadian evacuees heading for Cyprus.

Do the Lebanese armed forces have the time, inclination and materiel at the moment to bomb a flotilla of Lebanese-Canadian evacuees fleeing the country? Not all that likely: no harm in asking, though. But Israel? Whoa, hold on a minute...I thought that Israel never intentionally targets civilians. But now they have to be formally asked not to?

Back in the real world, civilians are continuing to die in large numbers--in fact, all but a handful of the Lebanese dead so far are civilians. And hundreds of thousands more have been driven from their homes, as Ehud Olmert continues his relentless "no exemptions" policy.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak is a little iffy on the subject of safe passage, as it happens. This interview, in fact, is well worth reading in full, and will be of special interest to those captivated by the surrealism that has descended upon that part of the planet. Here, for example, is Barak's stance on the role of the Lebanese government:

TONY JONES: But even the United States appears to acknowledge the Lebanese military and the Lebanese Government are too weak on their own to take on the hard core Hezbollah militia in the south. Do you really believe that Lebanon and Lebanon's army could have disarmed Hezbollah?

EHUD BARAK: Yeah. Until two years ago, the Government was a puppet government of the Syrians and they did not want to do that. But now there is a weak government, but a democratic one, that wants to see the Hezbollah dismantled and it's up to the world to back them in a convincing way and tell them, "We are behind you. Don't be frightened. We will come to your help if necessary to help you exercise your sovereignty over the whole sovereignty of Lebanon." I believe that if they will feel the support of the world leadership in their backs, they are capable of doing it. They are clearly willing to do it.

TONY JONES: But, Ehud Barak, how could they do that when Israel has effectively declared war on them, has bombed its civilian infrastructure, its international airport in Beirut has been bombed, sea ports, bridges, communication infrastructure, electrical plants, houses, vehicles on the roads, have been bombed by the Israelis. It's hard to see that the Lebanese Government would be able to do anything at all at the present moment. You've declared war on them.

EHUD BARAK: We did not - I repeat - we did not declare war on the Lebanese Government. We declared war on Hezbollah. I believe that no government on earth would accept the situation that someone tries to - Hezbollah tries to dictate to us, as well as the Hamas from the other side of the Gaza Strip. Namely, the first attribute of any legitimate sovereign is the monopoly on the use of weapons. No one would accept or enable where a political party, which has its Members in the Parliament, even the Government, has its own militia with weapons and they shoot rockets at will of the militia, not of the Government, into a neighbouring sovereign. That's no way to accept it. The primal contract of our Government with our nation, as well as your Government with your public, is to protect them. If this would have happened in Sydney or Melbourne, I have no doubt what Prime Minister Howard or his predecessors would have done. I'm talking from experience. I know him very well.

Barak is simply evading, and not very skilfully, I might add, the central question: How is the Lebanese government supposed to proceed?

At some points, the interview is almost Monty Pythonesque:

EHUD BARAK: If the Lebanese Government will order its armed forces to move to the south, backed by the international will, I think that it will dramatically reduce the level of violence and probably stop it.

TONY JONES: But only overnight 12 Lebanese soldiers were killed by an Israel air strike. I mean, I would imagine they would be afraid to send armed troops to the south for fear that they too would be caught up in the fighting.

EHUD BARAK: Oh, no. No reason for them to avoid it. We will not hit them.

On the seven Canadians killed, note the off-the-shelf apology (a version of which has been delivered to Stephen Harper by Ehud Olmert):

But, basically, only areas that are held by Hezbollah are attacked and normally you may say if what you have described just happened, of course, we regret it and I'm sorry for it.

Enough. I think the last word, under the present circumstances, should go to the beleaguered Lebanese Prime Minister, Fuad Saniora:

"Is the value of human life in Lebanon less than that of the citizens of other countries?" Saniora asked.

He also slammed nations that have said Israel is only acting in self-defence -- a thinly veiled swipe at the United States.

"Is this what the international community calls self defense? Is this the price we pay for aspiring to build our democratic institutions?

"Can the international community stand by while such callous retribution by the State of Israel is inflicted on us?" he added.

Unfortunately, all of Saniora's rhetorical questions have only one answer at present: Yes.

Israel's crocodile tears

Israel has formally expressed "deep sorrow" over the killing of seven Canadian citizens, including four children. Sorry? I'll just bet they are. An ally as staunch as Prime Minister Stephen Harper, first in line to cut off aid to the newly-elected Palestinian government, a man whose notion of a "measured response" I have already covered, is not one to trifle with. His "ethnic" flank is now badly exposed. So it's time to bring out the tears and handkerchiefs, but not for the Lebanese kids killed by an Israeli rocket attack on an open road after obeying Israeli orders to evacuate their village. And not likely for the Canadians either.

Meanwhile, is Harper becoming more, well, measured?

Israel must show restraint as part of the solution

What, "show restraint?" Is he having a lucid moment?

but it is essential that the attacks against Israel would stop and it is essential that Israeli soldiers be returned to Israel.

Ah. Too good to be true. All that's needed to secure peace is a one-sided truce and a one-sided prisoner release. Why hasn't the UN Secretary-General's mission to the region thought of that?

I have a confession to make: I find myself increasingly unable to navigate the surreal sea of geopolitics in which our Leader is presently dog-paddling. Not because I am unable to follow Realpolitik: I'm a student of Machiavelli and I know how the game is played. But when I look at those photos of dead children on a country road, I find myself blaming--why, the people who did it.

People have tried to talk me out of this moralizing nonsense. One commenter told me to "grow up." Didn't I know that this was simply "prepping the battlefield?" And now Israel is expressing "deep sorrow," and I still don't get it.

I'm sorry to be a slow learner. The only thing that cheers me up--a little--is that there's a whole lot of people in my class just like me, asking dumb questions about "disproportionate responses" and stuff. And the classroom appears to be more crowded by the day. I'm not lonely or anything. But I just can't stomach the lessons.