... back to the original theme of this thread , today's Ha'aretz had interesting reporting on the Bush vs. Risen/NYT legal fight -- over who leaked the details of the Mossad/CIA plot to frame [?] Iran.... Oh the ironies....

Even "ironies" would be better than yet another all-out food fight about 1948 And All That.

Unfortunately my irony detector seems to be on the fritz again. Journalists stick the pretentious label on pretty well any human event with some slight element of conflict or incongruence in it anywhere, which means that no human event is safe from the accusation -- "Ironically, J. Sidney McCain lost the same Party's nomination in 2000!" I noticed the moral equivalent of that one a month or six weeks ago. Admittedly there is still room for improvement: "Two plus two equals four; ironically, two plus three does not" has not been spotted yet, although it may well be out there.

Meanwhile, back at HaAretz, the first time through that article I forgot I was supposed to be on a snark hunt and was mostly struck by the mad Crawfordites’ Rube Goldberg scheme for copin’ with the evil Qommies and their nukes, namely

to build electromagnetic devices, smuggling them inside Iran to sabotage electricity lines leading to the country's central nuclear sites. According to the plan, the operation was supposed to cause a series of chain reactions which would damage extremely powerful short circuits in the electrical supply that would have led to failures of the super computers of Iran's nuclear sites.

That's a large barrel of fun, no doubt about it, and if it had actually happened, it would have shown up the late Jimmy Crater's performance at Desert One, 25 April 1980. However the genre of these two specimens is Farce, not Irony.

Rereading with both I-words in mind, the other one being "Israeli," and recurring ever to the original theme of this thread, Israel's restrictions on reporters , I wound up once again wondering what on Gore's green earth the journalistic mentality accounts "ironic" nowadays. At a guess -- and a guess is all it is -- I decided some folks might think it a bit uppity for HaAretz to go on about the mote in George XLIII's eye while all the time "The IDF Censor will not authorize reports of rocket hits at IDF bases and/or strategic installations."

The HaAretzians are an interesting phenomenon, a plausible topic for discussion. One ought, though, to get straight at the outset that they are not a public utility, only a private-sector gabfest. The New York Times inspires that mistake in its uncouth despisers, and the mistake then leads, as I conjecture, to ‘irony’ abuse. When it is once grasped that neither crew of kumo no ue no tsuki , "[gentlemen like] the moon above the clouds," is responsible for the debts of their local politicians, nor the thug pols responsible for what toney journalism scribbles, the path to understanding is opened before us. (I've already revealed that I find the HaAretzians a tad spoofworthy, but spoof has nothing essential to do with Dame Irony.)

Mooning it above the clouds, discussing all the world as if one's brain still lived in some Habsburg Vienna coffeehouse, can seem laughable, even contemptible, when viewed from Planet Murdoch, but it used to be traditional here in Western Civistan. Lip service is occasionally paid to it still, which implies that the notion of it has not yet perished. Something closely connected to it gets slathered with Cloudcuckooland praise every Commencement Day, for HaAretzianity is closely connected with the former Liberal Education. In Cloudcuckooland and Old Vienna (and Academe?), everybody can talk about anything she likes as if she herself were the pluperfect rootless cosmopolitan, affiliated to nobody and nothing that is permitted to impact on how she talks. Cloudcuckoolanders and HaAretzians would find nothing strange in denouncing other folks' aggressions from the Berlin of 1940: it may be a fact that "they" are guilty of much worse themselves, but (1) that sort of "they" and "we" is excluded a priori, and (2) more importantly, the superlawful aggression of Columbia against Ecuador may be a mild case comparatively, but aggression remains a bad thing absolutely, does it not? And if that is so, why not say so out loud? Q.E.D.

Mooning it above the clouds is thus "liberal" in a sense that drives radical illiberals up the wall:

The most conspicuous of these is Gabriel Schoenfeld, a senior editor at Commentary, who believes that liberal newspapers like the New York Times are not sufficiently patriotic. In his articles and in testimony before a Senate committee that discussed the issue, Schoenfeld claimed that "The New York Times reporters had revealed confidential material that weakened America's struggle against Al-Qaida. He calls for relinquishing the soft approach which he says the administration has taken against journalists in whose publications, in his opinion, America's security is harmed.

The cosmopolitanism here is perhaps not perfectly rootless, in that G. Schoenfeld and his organ are not outstandingly conspicuous to Gentiles uninterested in Levantine affairs. I'd probably have mentioned Prof. John Yoo and the late General Alberto Gonzales first as enemies of soft approaches, or Dr. Limbaugh and Miss Coulter if sheer volume be preferred over persuasiveness. Yet G. Schoenfeld is mentioned only by way of example and though he is only a name to me, evidently he exemplifies militant illiberalism well enough to be getting on with. One could scarcely prove from that one fairly recondite detail that HaAretz is published in neo-Israel rather than at Old Vienna or on Mars.

Notice, by the way, that the HaAretzians are doing their obsolete stuff on purpose :

The Haaretz computerized site ("the site") makes it possible to access news, articles and reports that have been published in Haaretz newspaper WITH A BROADLY LIBERAL OUTLOOK both on domestic issues and on international affairs ("the service").

The snark of journalistic ‘irony’ could, I suppose, be hiding not in the affiliations of these airy moonbats who pretend to be unaffiliated but in the fact that their avowedly liberal stuff has become obsolete or obsolescent at New Zion. But what development could be less incongruous or surprising, now that even persons who remember their parents' stories about the cafés of Mitteleuropa are becoming rare?

It is harmless to reflect what Herr Herzl (obit A. D. 1904) would make of the really existing Jewish Statism of 1429/2008/5768. Lots of incongruities and dissonances would turn up, no doubt, but would any of them qualify as properly speaking ironical?

In any case, the HaAretzians stand out as being pretty much what Theodor Herzl would have understood and approved of instantly, do they not? Ah, the unironies! [1]

But God knows best. Happy days.


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[1] It might be convenient to actually have some such term to describe things that we are surprised not to be more surprised about. "Change and Decay in all around I see" moralises well enough in its way, but it may have a tendency to direct attention away from particular details that have not decayed yet.

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On the Herzl front, it occurred to me that I didn't clearly recall the cliffnotes for Altneuland, whereupon my pet google retrieved the following :

Herzl did not foresee any conflict between Jews and Arabs. The one Arab character in Altneuland, Reshid Bey, who is one of the leaders of the "New Society", is very grateful to his Jewish neighbors for improving the economic condition of Palestine and sees no cause for conflict. All non-Jews have equal rights, and an attempt by a fanatical rabbi to disenfranchise the non-Jewish citizens of their rights fails in the election which is the center of the main political plot of the novel.

Sufficient grounds do appear to exist for the imputation of Journalism College ‘irony’ even if we are still a long way from the Oedipus Tyrannis. Observe, however, that the learned wikipaediatrician contradicts herself, for "a fanatical rabbi [out] to disenfranchise the non-Jewish citizens" surely involves at least a smidgen of "conflict between Jews and Arabs." (Or was it Maori and Estonians who were making trouble in Rabbi Ben Trovato's eyes?)

Ah, here is a fuller account:

References to Arabs

In Herzl's vision, the creation of the Third Temple in Jerusalem on the Temple Mount had been accomplished without opposition from either local Arabs or the wider Muslim World, since they accept that it will usher in a period of redemption and peace for all mankind, since the legitimate heirs, the Jewish People, will direct their national and personal influence from there. The sole Arab character in the book, Reshid Bey, tells the protagonists that the Jews had in no way harmed him, but on the contrary, increased the value of his property. Based on an assumption of no Arab hostility to the Zionist project, the "Jewish Society" in the book (Herzl does not call it explicitly a "state", apparently in order to avoid antagonising the Ottoman authorities) is depicted as having no armed forces at all.

No sign of "the main political plot," however.

At last Friedrich put a question, and every man answered it after his fashion. "We see a new and happy form of human society here," he said. "What created it?"

"Necessity!" said Littwak the elder.

"The reunited people!" said Steineck the architect.

"The new means of transportation!" said Kingscourt.

"Knowledge!" said Dr. Marcus.

"Will Power!" said Joe Levy.

"The Forces of Nature!" said Professor Steineck.

"Mutual Toleration!" said the Reverend Mr. Hopkins.

"Self-Confidence!" said Reschid Bey.

"Love and Pain!" said David Littwak.

But the venerable Rabbi Samuel arose and proclaimed: "God!"