Bizonia Not Yet Ruled Out!

I think two-states is impossible. It's seeming like everyone in Israel agrees. Only Palestinians, and only Palestinians on the US payroll seem to doubt this. But why not begin preparing for the possibility that somehow or other this dream of two states will not happen?

Two states remains a perfectly viable solution of the Palestine Puzzle, as long as one understands "two states" in a hard-nosed and mushfree Wohlstetteter-Rabbîn-‘Inbar [*] kind of way:

[Prof. ‘Inbar] recalled that he had published a book about Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister who concluded the Oslo Agreement with Yasser Arafat’s PLO back in 1993, and said, “Even Rabin’s formula was always ‘land for security’… What Rabin wanted was a tyrant in power in Palestine. But he couldn’t get an effective one.”

Just so. BINGO! Give that gentleman a cigar, Mr. Bones!

Find and install an effective tyrant, and -- hey, presto! there you are. You can have your two states and you can even have one of them be prescriptively Zionistical and democratic (pretty much) simultaneously -- PROVIDED that the other one is a competent dictatorship that can endure.

Empathy fans may not much care for the proviso, but there is no need to agree with them if they cannot get past reciting "Tyranny cannot possibly be competent or endure" as a supposedly self-evident proposition. At the mantra-recitation level, "Sure it can, look at Mubárak!" is response enough. AE calls the Cairo régime "a dictatorship," which is clearly correct, and who can doubt that stamina has been exhibited by it? What a pity for certain interested parties that the good general should not be a native and local of Palestine! (Perhaps there is a cousin or nephew?)

It is plain from the account of the interview that Prof. ‘Inbar thinks that he and M. de Nétanyahou and le parti Lîkoud in general are sitting in the catbird seat at the moment. Not so clear is how he supposes that they will stay there for the next couple of centuries. Still, even an amateur can guess. The easiest and most eligible guess, based on the words here attributed to him, is that Prof. ‘Inbar supposes that sooner or later the strongman candidate that the late Gen. Rabbîn so regrettably failed to discover will turn up and be installed.

Something has to turn up, anyway, if that zillion-times reiterated dichotomy of "Either not a proper Jewish State® or not a proper democracy" is to be evaded. Messrs. les lîkoudiens show every sign of thinking that it can be evaded: could there be something that they know and we kibitzers have overlooked?

Happy days.

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[*] Is this the same way as that of our holy Homeland’s own Ambassador J. J. Kirkpatrick?

Not quite, because unless I misremember, the GOP neocomradess recommended her ‘authoritarians’ on a temporary basis. Of course as a diplomatic term of art in a suitable context, ‘temporary’ could mean, say, 417 years and eight months, but JJK does seem to have expected her clients, most Latin American, to succumb to liberalism and democracy reasonably quickly.

"Believing they could be led into democracy by example," say the wikipædiatricians , though without specifying any time frame.

(( In the hypothetical two-state Palestine, there would presumably be no pernicious ‘example’ anywhere in the vicinity near enough to become a seriously destabilizing -- that is to say, deauthoritarianizing or tyrannicidal -- factor. But God knows best. ))

O God! O Cæsarea!

Your HTML cannot be accepted: Must be at most 4,096 characters

O Mars! O Machpelah! What is seven hunded thirty-one (731) between e-friends? And why could they not post their e-property in advance?

Well, Mr. Bones, that Cæsarea won't have it does not mean that the Muses and thee must go without. This way I can stick in a couple of irrelevant goodies for print-challenged MacLuhanoids.

... the title of this op-ed, "Obama in Netanyahu’s Web" ... will necessarily enflame anti-Semitism on the web.

Well, of course no person of prudence dare dispute about such a claim until she gets well up to speed on GPCR peptide ligands. ("Who?")

Turning from future necessities to facts of observation immediately at hand, however, it looks as if the portion of the web immediately adjacent to the New York Times Company has minor inflammation problems already.

This keyboard was reading through the comments on Mr. Cohen’s op-ed in its accustomed way, top to bottom by "Reader Recommendations," and was surprised to find that this scribble, the first of a Hyperzionistical tenor to be encountered, came in no higher than twelfth. (As of 05/28/2009 12:41PM.)

The first eleven were all rooting for Team Cohen, some of them rather witlessly. The state of mind that finds it worthwhile to lift a finger to click approval of an analysis like "I agree with your editorial completely" -- item #3 by popularity, #7 by chronology, here reproduced in full -- eludes me. Enough to make you wonder about "Rochester Hills, Michigan" a little, that is!

Myself, I wonder more about Manhattan Island, New York.

After a certain amount of wondering, I have tentatively concluded that we have here no adequate evidence that the New York Times is not still the local Jewish fishwrap in those parts, only that the finger-click approval artists must be a different crowd almost entirely from hard-copy locals and natives [*].

UPDATE: as of 05/28/2009 02:47PM the NYTC management and staff announce "Comments are no longer being accepted." But an attempt to review the data points by "Editor's Selections" still yields "There are no comments in this view." Furthermore, when the race was called because of I-know-not-what, the "JG, Caesarea" effort, #5 chronologically, had risen to tenth place from twelfth.

Could the track management have been afraid the still pretty dark horse was going to sweep on to victory? It seems improbable.

Happy days.

(( Not to dodge the article’s substance altogether lest one look like a craven appeaser: is it really at all likely that Mr. Cohen was thinking of the electronic ‘web’ when he allegedly ventured into political entymology? Indeed, didn’t the arachnoid web come from some NYTC headline editor rather than from the author? Boo-boos of that type happen all the time nowadays. It must be really tough for the gentry to engage competent and reliable servants nowadays!

(( As an Eng. Dept. or Comp. Lit. conceit to toy with, ‘web’ is admirable and right up the present keyboard’s alley. Yet if I were to set up as toyer-with, Mr. Roger Cohen would get no more credit for my verbal plaything than he deserves -- none at all. ))


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[*] The NYTC flagship publication has recently started to divide like a peptide-crazed amœba

into a "Global Edition" and a "U. S. Edition." For a while it looked as if Mr. Cohen had been banished -- promoted? -- to the former exclusively. Neocomrade Herr Prof. Dr. M. Peretz of H*rv*rd even mistakenly inferred that he had got the boot altogether.

(( I’d supply the reference, except that the software over at The New Republican seems unable to find anything at all in the archives just now: "Thank you for coming to The New Republic! We are still trying to work out the kinks of our new website and ask for your patience while we move all of our content to the new location." Oh, well. ))

In fact, Mr. Roger is still around, and still around in the neighborhood as well as in the Gesamtganzweltall. The only distinction this keyboard can perceive is that he runs third in the Op-Ed Sweepstakes at the breakfast table of Joe Tweedledumbovitz and Archie Bunker, whereas Mynheer van Tweedledee and Mr. Tony Judt are implicitly solicited to read Roger Cohen first and foremost.

Whether or not that fine shade of difference means anything of any importance must await further research, but meanwhile it would be helpful to amateur social-scientisers like the present keyboard if the NYTC were to indicate which version of the corporate product each finger-clicker is clicking about. For all one knows with complete certainty, poor #7/#3 may be a resident of Beirut or the Bronx irrelevantly marooned in Rochester Hills MI when his one-hoss shay broke down.

"a fact of life because of, well, the Americans"

Has Señorito S. de Rosnér learned its political metaphysics lesson -- that 'linkage' is not to be reified -- or not?

About half and half, it look like: the pupil concedes that "It’s a fact of life because of, well, the Americans who believe in it."

Thus the substantive point is yielded. But consider the wistful tone of the concession: Oh, that our philosophy pupil lived on some other planet or in some other universe where facts and life are separated with greater ‘seemliness’! [1] [2] A Planet Beulah where facts are FACTS, goddammit!, and utterly cannot be "socially constructed" by low-life North American liberals and democrats and Democrats. Some blessèd Neualtland where non-linkage is an immutable fact as plain as potatoes and Original Sin [3] and not even in the lowest depths of tribal pond scum and ideological trailer trash can anybody so depraved as to attempt to perpetrate a linkage be discovered.

Alternatively, the señorito nuevo might conceivably settle for parity in linkage here on Terra, a correlation of farces such that the Tel Avîv régime pols have as much right and power to join together and put asunder as the pols of Rancho Crawford and Cook County. This, however, is only an off-the-cuff remark by the present keyboard that begins to look dubious only fifteen seconds after I have scribbled it down, for would not native and (non-Zionist) local pols be instantly wanting to play too if any such rules of the game were adopted? A world in which Islamic Resistance Movements and God Parties can link and dissever with impunity scarcely bears thinking about -- not even to mention the evil Qommies . . . .

On the practical rather than speculative level, though, I suspect the señorito and his ideobuddies will manage to cope. The long-term crisis management proposed by their M. de Ya‘alôn looks about as sure-fire and fool-proof as merely human contrivances can reasonably hope to be.

Its only obvious weakness is the fact that a dhimmí like the present keyboard has got wind of it at all. There is bound to be trouble with those linkage-crazed Obamacrat fiends if a policy of "maintain and strengthen (our) interests while managing the conflict, and working towards stabilization in the distant future" is frankly avowed. The fiends have a relatively short time horizon, not located much farther off than January 2017 at the utmost. Still, to let them know in May 2009 that one proposes to stall them for over seven years can scarcely fail to be counterproductive.

If the Hyperzionistical crew would stop printin’ their clever schemes in the newspapers and just DO them in stealth and silence, however, the prospects for success strike me as excellent. [3]

"Softly, softly, catchee monkey!"

If one takes the Ya‘alôn Plan™ as one’s overarchin’ strategy for Jewish Statism, then the metaphysics of ‘linkage’ will be seen in a quite different perspective than the present señorito’s. If a Ya‘alônite, one certainly does not want linkage and nonlinkage to be brute facts -- it would be absurd to want that. What one wants is for them to be talkin’ points. Furthermore, one ought to prep oneself to talk them either way. To talk them anywhich way that conduces to still more prevarication and delay. To run out the clock on Team Obama with linkage chatter, as it were.

A Señorito S. de Rosnér may well find all this philosophically disquietin’, insofar as it lies at the opposite pole from Rosnerian reification. ‘Linkage’ is to mean no more than Tel Avîv's commissar for foreign affairs chooses that it should mean, and there can be no guarantee that she will not change her mind what that meanin’ is between now and sundown on Thursday. "Everything solid melts into air," as Whazzizname used to say. [5] Though, as I began by noting, the neocomrade does admit that linkages and nonlinkages are not really quite as solid as platinum and potatoes, he is not happy about havin’ to make the admission, and therefore seems unlikely to take to ya‘alônicatin’ with blithe abandon.

I suppose the Hyperzionistical crowd in general will be divided in their feelin’s about linkage-as-prevarication versus linkage-as-fact. M. de Ya‘alôn himself speaks of "strategy," and at the strategic level his superiority over reifiers and wannabe reifiers is indisputable. At any rate, I cannot think of any plausible way of disputing it. Consider: if linkages and nonlinkages be socially constructed, if they are entities that can be invented rather than merely sit there and sog ‘objectively’ as they await discovery, the strategist has a powerful weapon at her disposal that would not be available on the alternative hypothesis.

This strikes me as so obvious a good thing that it overwhelms its own reverse, a negative flip side which does exist but amounts to no more than that what has been constructed by man can by man be dismantled. The nonlinkage between Occupied Palestine and neo-Muslim Iran that Neocomrade S. Rosner and many others desiderate cannot be relied upon as permanent. There may exist no particular reason the nonlinkage should melt into air this week or this month or this year, yet it is in principle a meltable-into-air sort of thing. (For us philosophical and critical Ya‘alônites, that is.)

Here in Greater Anglosaxonia, this peculiar class of evanescent entities may be slightly less alarming than it is to alien outsiders. We have been told, after all, that "Nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests." Specifically in the Heimatland Gottes, there is Washington's Farewell Address: "[N]othing is more essential, than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular Nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated ...."

Plainly M. le général de Ya‘alôn thinks so too, although, like Lord Palmerstone, he speaks of "interests" rather than of "feelings" -- language which perhaps makes Y. and P. (very) slightly more reificatory than General Washington was. [6] [7]

Happy days.


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[1] Could the philosophy pupil be an M.I.T. chauvinist or victim of so-called "physics envy"? A neo-Cartesian, in the sense that animals would be much more satisfactory to Neocomrade S. Rosner if they really were made of clockwork instead of meat?


[2] As ever, ‘seemly’ and its verbal cousins are used with the gracious nonpermission of Her Imperial Highness, Jennifer Princess Neoterica of Outer Pajamastán.


[3] "The ancient masters of religion ... began with the fact of sin--a fact as practical as potatoes. Whether or no man could be washed in miraculous waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing. But certain religious leaders in London, not mere materialists, have begun in our day not to deny the highly disputable water, but to deny the indisputable dirt."

Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 1909, second paragraph of Chapter Two. (P. 24 of the Googleswipe.)

[4] Mais que sçay-je?


[5] Alle festen eingerosteten Verhältnisse mit ihrem Gefolge von altehrwürdigen Vorstellungen und Anschauungen werden aufgelöst, alle neugebildeten veralten, ehe sie verknöchern können. Alles Ständische und Stehende verdampft, alles Heilige wird entweiht, und die Menschen sind endlich gezwungen, ihre Lebensstellung, ihre gegenseitigen Beziehungen mit nüchternen Augen anzusehen. [ p. 465 ]


[6] Considering its date, that Presidential reference to the cultivation of feelings is quite remarkable--almost as improbable as an Encomium to Empathy from the same source would be.

Yet I dare say there is no sound reason to suppose His Excellency had fallen for Jean-Jacques all across the board. Perhaps in Century XVIII feelings were considered somewhat less perishable than they are in 2009? (This is the sort of puzzle that one dearly wishes historians of thought treated better than they seem able to do.)


[7] An objector may object that a ‘linkage’ of issues is not the same thing as an alliance of States. Very true, but I take it that what applies to the latter applies to the former as well a fortiori. An ‘alliance’ or ‘attachment’ looks and sounds much more solidly thinglike than a mere ‘linkage’, does it not? And yet Washington and Palmerstone could contemplated the melting away of alliances and attachments into air with equanimity!

Miller's Tail

Now here -- down to, but not including the neocomrade’s bottom line -- is a cool, clear steel-claptrap mind at work, Mr. Bones!

Here you will find no sentimental folderol leadin’ to wishful thinkin’ that maybe Uncle Sam (and idiot nephew Barák Husáyn) will suddenly reconsider and start singing "Bomb, bomb, bomb / Bomb, bomb Iran!" along with J. Sidney McCain so that the Tel Avîv statelet need not aggr preëmptively retaliate in isolation.

Better still, and better than their M. de Nétanyahou [1] has been able to manage, is the absence of what we may call the Higher Sentimentalism. Neocomrade A. H. Miller does not waste the time of us insignificant dhimmís with crude mob-appeal stuff like "Western civilization will have failed if Iran is allowed to develop nuclear weapons."

You can’t imagine how much it pleases me, Mr. Bones, to find a Hyperzionist who can actually attempt to make his faction’s case without draggin’ in poor old

Western Sieve! I seem to be a tad immoderate on that particular point, sir: why should I become angry at passionate appeals to what I consider a mere figment of self-servicing agitprop in the first place? The intellectual history of Greater Europe exists and is worthy of study: "Western Civilisation" as it emanates from the mouth of hormone-urged Hyperzionisers, "Western Civilisation" as the name of a cause that anybody sane could ever seriously expected to fight or die for, or even merely to drop a few bombs for occasionally -- well, what could be rubbishier rubbish than that, sir? I guess the reason I get worked up about it is not an impartial distaste for rubbish as such, but rather fear that such stuff might actually appeal to the mob. Oh, well!

In any case, it is a pleasure to have no occasion for annoyance on this score with Neocomrade A. H. Miller, at least.

The severe Millerite steelclaptrapness of mind does falter a little at the end, though. It would have been better to omit "Perhaps President Obama too will one day see the benefits of Israel eliminating the Iranian nuclear threat" and the paragraph that leads up to it.

Though I do not suppose the neocomrade himself pins any wishful thoughts on that passage, yet some of his weaker siblin’s might. That is to say, they may unreflectively turn "Someday Sam will perhaps admit that we were right to retaliate preëmptively" into "Eventually Sam must see that we were right, which means that it will all be OK with the Yanks in the long run, which means why not we go ahead this afternoon?" What began as a mere contingency of future fact for Neocomrade A. H. Miller himself would thus become a positive recommendation for the siblin’s -- and also become a wishful thought that they might conceivably not get their wish about.

Perfect Kirkegaardian purity of heart and steelclaptrapness of mind would therefore proclaim altogether unmistakably that "Israel eliminating the Iranian nuclear threat" is a good thing and will be a good thing forever, no matter who does or does not perceive the goodness of it before, during, or after the perpetration. [2]

But God knows best.

Happy days.


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[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200903u/netanyahu


[2] Is the neocomrade obliged to consider now what position the Tel Avîv pols would find themselves if they go ahead and bomb Natanz &c. this afternoon but subsequently find that Sam never does come to agree that they made the right choice?

This is a rather tricky question, it seems to me, and one that calls for protracted cogitation.

Off-hand my inclination is to say it depends on exactly what sort of goodness A. H. Miller attributes to his pet project -- is it an instrinsic goodness or only a goodness of collateral consequences?

Also it depends on how strictly or loosely he deploys the English verb "to eliminate" in formulatin’ it. If one single preëmptive retaliation ensures that there can never be another nuke-you-larry threat to Jewish Statism again, then obviously Sam and Sam’s Barák can be ignored with impunity. But is that scenario likely to be the real-world case? Myself, I kinda don’t think. Mais que sçay-je?

Finally, one must bear in mind that Sam’s reaction after the perpetration would not be an entirely independent variable. Doubtless the unmentionable W*lt and M**rsh**m*r have spoken of this aspect of such affairs in terms that are far too strong, but surely there would at least a small margin of adjustability, so to call it, after the fact. Within limits that we need not specify precisely at the moment, reaction at Washington would be an object of manipulation for Tel Avîv pols and weekly standardisers and common terrorisers et hoc genus omne.

Attaining unto 100% steelclaptrapness of mind and zero percent of sentimentality and wishful thinkimg becomes a very stiff challenge at this point, Mr. Bones. There are simply no adequate precedents to go by. The Osirak preëmptive retaliation is no doubt pertinent to some extent, but the difference in scale probably makes that extent tiny.

Kirkegaardian perfection would be possible, I think tentatively, only if one could predict the worst possible outcome with a reasonable degree of reliability and then decide that the A. H. Miller caper would be worthwhile even at that price. Unfortunately, such a calculation cannot be made. Or more exactly, I have not the faintest clue how to make it, despite reading hundreds of articles for and against Iran-bombin’. It looks as if nobody knows for sure.

Form trumps matter, the Master has taught us, Mr. Bones, and formally speaking, the upshot seems to be that steelclaptrapness of mind is stymied when it faces a sufficiently high level of uncertainty. But God knows best.

"re-evaluate their culture of hate"

Does not that nifty Hyperzionistical "culture of hate" remind thee of Neocomrade H. L. Carr,

Mr. Bones, "Emperor of the Empire of Hate"?

Ammá ba‘da, "but seriously,"

A call from Obama for Muslims to re-evaluate their culture of hate against Jews, Israel and America would not be welcomed by its listeners. However it would be not only an act of intellectual honesty but a step toward the honest dialogue that is desperately needed.

I suppose that is the flip side of the recordin’ made by some GOP genius of the 1950's who thought the Palestine Puzzle™ would go away if only natives and Zionists would "just agree to live together like good Christians."

That will have been cornfed Ohio and Iowa Christians, naturally; nothing to do with exotic Maronites or Greek schismatics or Monophysites who unintelligibly demand to be relabeled ‘miaphysites’.

The philosopher will seize this opportunity to think of Professor Kant of Koenigsberg. She will guess, as I conjecture, that Kant would regard perpetual re-evaluation of one's own culture as the sort of thing that is, or ought to be, categorically imperative. Possibly the very sort of thing that separates ‘us’ from Primitive Endarkenment. And from all the neo-endarkeners.

I take it that the fact that ‘we’ do not much enjoy doing self-re-examinations is a plus inside the system. If the Kantian enjoyed self-re-examination, her motives would probably be impure eo ipso. At any rate, it would be difficult for self-re-examination to pin down what its own motives actually are. When it is quite clear that self-re-examiners did go not into that line of business to make bucks or to have fun or to rule the world, it follows (doesn't it?) that they must be doing it only because they think it the right thing to do.

Inside what remains of Western Sieve, that sort of old-fashioned Prod gush is still not uncommon, though no doubt there exist post-whateverists eager to show that poor Professor Kant had a mind full of invincible ignorances and self-servicing provincial druthers. Those of us who cherish the traditional gush would, of course, respond that at least our hero got as far as disapproving of whims and ignorances and parochialism and selfocentric advantage-grabbin' even if never managed to detoxify himself completely. Diagnosis is not the same thing as cure, but nevertheless there is something to be said (is there not?) for having an inaccurate acount of the disease rather than an inaccurate one, or no account at all?

From this seemingly obsolescent standpoint, the trouble with the above quotation is pretty much that identified by the amateur narrow-bore philosopher of Century XVIII who noted that "Most quarrels about religion are as if two gentlemen were to fight a duel over a lady whom neither of them care for." (I quote from memory.)

Like the natives and Zionists of the 1950's, the current crop either never evolved as far as Kantianism or have evolved past it so far that it is now around the bend behind them. Either way, it is out of sight. With the above quotee, it is not altogether out of mind, though: he still expects to score some agitprop points for his team by recommending the self-re-examination product strictly for export. [1] (On those terms, however, perhaps it is not the exact same product?)

The performance puts me in mind of the cigarette manufacturers making up in sales to lesser breeds without what they have lost at home thanks to Surgeons General of the Evil Fedguv. But that analogy will not ultimately answer, because it is not (as I estimate) the case that Kantianism was ever as widely accepted in these parts as recreational nicotine. But God knows best.

Happy days.


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[1] Discussion of Islám and neo-Islám by the likes of me certainly deserves relegation to a footnote. Que sçay-je de celà? Still, one must do what one can . . . .

With natives, as opposed to Hyperzionists, there were never any very plausible empirical grounds to accuse them of Kantianism. Naturally the Philosopher is free to take the line that Muslims and neo-Muslims, like everybody else, ought to be guilty, that failure to Kantianise is impairs the intellectual honour of the human race. And so on, and so forth! it would be a pleasure to let that tap run until the tub of rhetoric overflows, yet no amount of elegant Prod gush is likely to make any impression on weekly standardisers and common terrorisers who find the above quotation edifyin’. It is mere waste of breath to try to persuade grown-ups that they may not be very good at telling right from wrong. (And I am not so sure about children either.)

Certainly it is a waste of breath with Muslim and neo-Muslim grown-ups. It is not perfectly accurate to distinguish them from Hyperzionists as having never been through the Western Sieve at all, instead of havin’ been winnowed out by it. At a very high educational (and socio-economic) level, the natives of the neo-Levant have heard of Kantianism. They never, so far as I know, rejected it in some great opus refutatorium such as might have been aimed at the Prussian professor himself, but reject it they did. The late M. Hourani wrote a work called Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798-1939; his title dates the rejection plausibly, even though practical ‘liberalism’ incorporates a good deal more than theoretical Kantianism.

When it comes to the reasons for the rejection, I assume they will have been chiefly historical rather than philosophical. Muslims have always had to live with ‘us’ darkening their door at least remotely, and after 1789 often with ‘us’ right on the front porch armed to the teeth and, for the moment, inexpugnable. They never much liked ‘us’ to begin with, so the chances that they would accept a New Liberal West™ that had definitively broken with crusading and Endarkenment were never high. ‘We’ still looked very same old same-old to them, and anybody with even the slightest residual sniffles of Koenigsberg flu should be able to see why they might think so -- as well as why they were in substantial part mistaken so to think.

It does not help that to this day ‘westoxification’ is a very upper-class disease amongst the natives. The way the assassins of the late General as-Sadát reviled him would be a good place to start looking into that side of il gran rifuto. To what extent religionism sensu stricto comes into it is not immediately obvious. My own guess is that, in the absence of theoretical Kantianism and practical ‘liberalism’, neo-Levantine natives lack any vocabulary with which to discuss justice and injustice that is not faith-tainted. *Grossly* faith-tainted, that is, not slightly tinged with Islám or neo-Islám as Kantianism remains coloured by specifically Christian Christojudæanity of the brand that has called itself ‘reformed’ or evangelisch.

Quâ Kantian, I see that this position is likely to annoy a great many interested parties: (1) The militant extremist neocomrades with their jihád careerists prefer to take the natives’ religionizing seriously ("Seventy-two virgins apiece forever! Yippeee!") and dismiss what I take to be a message about justice than about the quality of anybody’s Islám. Or anybody's shirk and kufr either

But (2) the message-senders are required by their medium of expression to get angry too, for what is to be said of this wretched dhimmí who wants to demote Islám (than which there is no whicher!) to the status of a side issue and even has the gall to coin a vicious slur like "neo-Muslim" on the model of "neoconservative"?

I may (or may not) be on roughly the same wavelength with the President of the United States, for what that is worth. Unfortunately at the critical and philosophical level Mr. Obama's sort of credentials are not worth much. Not worth anything at all, really.

Oh, well.

"Obama’s New Linkage"

Obama’s New Linkage Noah Pollak - 05.18.2009 - 9:20 PM The good news from the Obama-Netanyahu press conference today is that the president indicated his engagement with Iran would not be endless, which is nice to hear — but the sense of relief that this has caused indicates a bar that couldn’t be set lower for Obama if it was held off the floor by a couple of Legos. The bad news is that Obama reiterated his endorsement of “linkage,” or as it’s known around here, the myth of linkage. He said: If there is a linkage between Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, I personally believe it actually runs the other way. To the extent that we can make peace with the Palestinians — between the Palestinians and the Israelis, then I actually think it strengthens our hand in the international community in dealing with the potential Iranian threat. This of course gives rise to a predictable set of questions, such as: what if Israeli-Palestinian peace will take many years to accomplish, but the Iranian nuclear bomb will only take a year or two to accomplish? Obama essentially proposes that America will race the Iranians — our peace process versus their nuclear program. Does anyone wonder who will win? There are lots more problems with all of this, many of which are discussed with great clarity in the myth of linkage link above. But I’d be surprised if Obama himself believes that the kind of cosmetic progress that might be accomplished in the peace process over the next year will actually create leverage on Iran. Rather, I suspect that his invocation of linkage serves a different purpose: to incorporate the peace process into the U.S.’s dealings with Iran, enabling Obama to extract the maximum possible concessions from Israel in the course of his fruitless attempt to talk the Iranians out of nuclear weapons. It won’t work, but it is shrewd. And it is linkage, albeit of a new kind.

"... 'linkage', or as it’s known around here, the myth of linkage. "

That is clearly not the strongest rhetorical ploy ever invented: the señorito's shudder-quoted ‘linkage’ and its mythical-like-unicorns linkage are but one and the same toxic substance, after all.

However the high-and-dry neocomradely crowd do happen to be talkin’ sense for once, be their language skills what they may. "Every tub on its own bottom," and let's not fash ourselves that the Palestine Puzzle™ is the axis of Weltgeschichte, please. Pretty well every ‘us’ in sight ought to drive by that simple rule of the road, and also some ‘us’es that are not immediately visible. Plus, preëminently, the US of poor old Uncle Sam Hyperpower.

Not disagreeing much with the neocomradesses and neocomrades about putting linkage down a peg or six, I have leisure to hyperventilate about their distinctly proäctive notion of "around here." One had thought Zip Code 96127 for weekly standardisers, or possibly some address in London or Kangarústán where the proprietor hangs out.

With common terrorisers it is not so easy to get a snail-mail address, but presumably Area Code 212 must still be the savin’ remnant of what it once was. Beltway City and Manhattan Island, in short.

Imagine one’s surprise to find that "around here" refers to that glorified imitation mobile home [1] over at 1737 Cambridge Street in 02138 / 617, just down the pike from the present keyboard! Golly!! [2]

But seriously, Demosthenes Jr. here has a tin ear as well as pebbles in its mouth, as may be seen by substition of a less emotive noun substantive than ‘linkage’. Who would acclaim Comrade POTUS as a firm supporter of the unicorn community on the basis of a remark beginning "If there are unicorns . . . ."?

Nevertheless, linkage is a bad thing and BHO is a bad thing, so how shall the two not travel together? [3] Si erit malum in civitate quod Dominus non fecit?

The student of neocomradology will notice that the rest of the Presidential assertion is not expressly contradicted. That is to say, N. Pollak does not venture to claim that a solution of the Palestine Puzzle™ would somehow make the evil Qommies *more* formidable than they are at present.

Bein’ a real smart cookie, St. Martin the Less perhaps could pull that neosophistry off successfully, though he does no such thing in the scribble referred to. [4]

Happy days.

___
[1] The charms of the ædifice are such that it is no surprise the pet google could not find a proper snapshot with { Harvard | 1737 | Weatherhead } . There is, however, a not bad icon of St. Martin the Less that comes in thirty-ninth. Not to mention the heraldic device of ¡¡¡MESH!!! itself in position nine.

’Tis not, perhaps, the happiest acronym a pack of linkage-bashers could pick to christen themselves with! And a close examination of the heraldry suggests a somewhat constipated conception of the geographical neo-Levant. But never mind: H*rv*rd remains a private- or secret-sector institution, not a public utility, so these matters are no business of thine or mine. And anyway, God knows best.


[2] I beg your pardon, O pet google! There was this



in eleventh position. Though very overlookable as regards the core monstrosity, this picture does show off that glass pyramid thingee that everybody architectural at Paris must be dying from envy of.


[3] The Pollakian Ploy is what the Comp. Lit. folks used to call "self-referential" -- the señorito practices linkage of its own in the very article of talkin’ ’bout other folks’ ditto.

(Comp. Lit. seems to be relocated to between Lamont and the Faculty Club .)


[4] I hope Ms. Student will not be offended if I point out that the Kramerian neo-ingenuities are eleven months old and were not ‘crafted’ to exploit exactly the present correlation of farces. ¡¡¡MESH!!! seems to have affected the little laddie’s mind for the worse in at least two respects:

(1) It is absurd to make Hyperzionism out the ninth (9th!) most important cause of divisions in the neo-Levant. If Kramer Minor had been content to rank it third or fourth, he might have taken some people in. Similarly if he had stopped countin’ on his fingers and only said vaguely that the whole region might well be a mess even if the Tel Avîv statelet did not exist. (The latter seems to be the line adopted by Neocomrade Prof. Dr. B. Lewis of Princeton, and works much better for the neocomradely cause, me judice.)

(2) Boo-boo (1) is only a special case of a more general brain disease: Kramerides began as an area student, but, havin’ fallen into the ¡¡¡MESH!!!, he has taken to thinkin’ in PowerPoint® like the rest of them rather than in any natural language. Hence a social-scientistic nonsense like "I have called linkage a myth, both in past and present. It is a myth because the Middle East is not a single region."

To reason anti-empirically and _de haut en bas_ on the basis of some stipulative definition of the word ‘region’ may not be completely incapable of ever adding value -- who are we lay sheep to pronounce on so high a question of methodology? Yet we may fairly baaaaaah that Neocomrade Dr. M. H. Kramerovitch in particular comes up with nothin’ worth mentionin’.

Neocomrade N. Pollak does not, as I conjecture, give a hoot about the actual quality of the Kramerite product. The señorito is pretty clearly operatin’ on the " ‘Shut up!,’ she explained " paradigm. The customer is to take one look at that dread H*rv*rd augustness and then just take N. Pollak’s word for it that M. Kramer has refuted ‘linkage’ definitively and forever.

Well, it's a cute whore move, Mr. Bones, but naturally it has no chance of workin’ on thee and me, who notoriously cannot be told much.

Coleological Cross Reference

Here is the very first time, Mr. Bones, that the neobozos have come up with somethin’ that asks to be filed under both Cole Patrol and Rio Limbaugh. And naturally I run into all sorts of strangenesses on the part of Google!

Still, I suppose thee and the Muses will be able to make out what I decided not to trouble to send off to the common terrorisers.

Happy days.