At least Osama bin-Laden, despite being a psychotic mass murderer, knows who his friends are.

While the exact date of the taping cannot be determined by bin Laden's words, he suggests it was made in August by saying, "... just a few days ago, the Japanese observed the 62nd anniversary of the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by your nuclear weapons." The anniversary was on Aug. 6. He goes on to call Noam Chomsky "among one of the most capable of those from your own side," and mentions global warming and "the Kyoto accord."

One could call this humorous if it weren't so obviously true, in the sense that Chomsky is indeed one of those most capable of accomplishing binLaden's goals of driving the West to surrender and destruction. Of course, they are both psychopaths with a Sadean fetish for mass murder, tyranny and death. Great minds, such as they are, apparently think alike.

Someone in Europe appears to have finally understood the most pernicious aspect of 21st century antisemitism -- the congenital inability of most of its practitioners to understand the fact of their antisemitism.  From Haaretz:

Robin Shepherd is not the first person to try and define the world's oldest hatred, but he is perhaps one of the most unlikely. The senior research fellow at the Chatham House think tank in London has no significant connection to the Jewish people, and his visit to Israel last week was only his second. But he still believes his decision to spend a year researching the new European anti-Semitism is perfectly relevant for any serious observer of international affairs.

Shepherd is only beginning what he expects to be a year of research on the subject, probably culminating in a book, but he already has a number of basic insights. The first is a clear differentiation between the old and new European anti-Semites, or as he puts it, "subjective" and "objective" anti-Semitism.

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Regarding Leo Strauss, there is something particularly bizarre in the fact that the discussion always turns to politics. Not Politics in the Aristotelean sense, but everyday politics; the transient concerns and resentments of the current moment. Strauss, who thought in terms of the entirety of Western civilization, would likely have found this quite bizarre.

The truth beyond the debate over whether Strauss is the neo-con devil incarnate or simply misunderstood is that Strauss probably would not have cared one way or the other. His primary concern was, in fact, the role of the philosopher in society; both in historical and theoretical terms.

Strauss, like other Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany such as Hannah Arendt, struggled throughout his career with the question of what, exactly, had gone so horribly wrong in Germany and in the West as a whole. He was, in other words, trying to wrap his head around the fact of Auschwitz; and the sense that Auschwitz was not some horrifying aberration from the Western tradition but the fulfillment of something dark and terrible at the heart of that tradition.

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The New Republic has an interesting profile of an evangelical priest who converted to Orthodox Christianity because of his disatisfaction with the frivolousness of evangelical ritual.  I couldn't help but notice a certain synchronicity at work.

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Everytime you think that an American national holiday might have passed in peace, you find out that America's most famous faux-historian Howard Zinn showed up just in time to -- paraphrasing Hunter Thompson -- piss down everybody's throats.

On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed.

Is not nationalism -- that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder -- one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred?

Well, no. The great evil of the 20th century was atheistic totalitarian collectivism, of which Zinn has been a lifelong supporter. I believe the body count is now upwards of 100 million and likely to climb if the likes of Hugo Chavez get their way. The great evil of the 21st century, on the other hand, seems to be shaping up to be totalitarian theocratic collectivism.

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The Reform movement has once again made an attempt at the impossible: to find some way of normalizing homosexual relationships within the context of Judaism.

The Reform Movement recently published an expanded manual for the inclusion of homosexuals and transgender individuals, including list of three blessings to be said on the occasion of a sex change operation.

The 500-page Kulanu: A Program for Implementing Gay and Lesbian Inclusion contains among other things services for same-sex commitment and marriage ceremonies as well as advice for the inclusion of GBLT individuals in the community.

The original edition of Kulanu was published 10 years ago, and was considered at the time to be a modern and daring step for the movement, which had recognized homosexual individuals as legitimate and equal members of the community three decades prior.

I wont go into the problems surrounding such ideas as homosexuality being a defining factor of personal identity. I will only say that Foucault was self-evidently correct when he described it as a 19th century invention conducive to social control.

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Israel's most industrious theocrat, Moshe Feiglin, continues his quest for influence and power in the Likud Party and, according to Haaretz, he's succeeding.

Why not place a ballot box at Ben-Gurion Airport by the duty-free shops? Or by the entrance to a vacation club in Turkey? Not that it matters - Moshe Feiglin has already won.

There's no doubt that Bibi will retain the leadership of the party, but Feiglin and his followers would seem to be equally assured of getting what they want.

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Bill Kristol (anti-neocon psychopathic raving may begin now) has written an interesting article in Time in which he claims that a new "9/11 generation" is taking shape, particularly among the soldiers currently fighting in Iraq. He claims that this will have far reaching social and political consequences

What does this imply? That the soldiers who have done well in Iraq will be major figures in American life for the next couple of decades. These men and women are no less suited to national leadership than are entrepreneurs, lawyers or local community leaders. In fact, they've had to show more courage, they've had to operate in a more fluid and volatile environment--and they've risked their lives for their country. Just as John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush benefited from their experience as young officers in World War II--and from the high regard in which their experience was held--so the Iraq vets will have every chance to rise to the top of American public life.

More interesting is Kristol's assertion that the spirit of this new generation is active in both the civilian and military spheres.

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My friend Michael Totten, who is a much braver man than I, has been posting from the heart of the whirlwind that is Iraq today.  Its all a must read.  Go check it out.

The recent death of Michaelangelo Antonioni has occasioned a fascinating letter to Roger Ebert, alleging to reveal the fairly banal reason why Antonioni's sixties classic Blow-Up is so ambiguous and strange, which is to say, why it doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense. According to the letter's author:

My name is Ronan O'Casey, and I played Venessa Redgrave's gray-haired lover in the film. The screenplay, by Antonioni ("just call me Michelangelo"), Tonio Guerra, and Edward Bond, told the story of a planned murder. But the scenes depicting the planning of the murder and its aftermath -- scenes with Vanessa, Sarah Miles and Jeremy Glover, Vanessa's new young lover who plots with her to murder me -- were never shot because the film went seriously over budget.

Apparently, most of the film's acclaimed mystery was the result of an intervention by legendary Italian producer Carlo Ponti

The producer was Carlo Ponti, and he had been supervising another production which delayed his arrival in London. When he got there, he was furious. "Basta, Michelangelo, finito, we are done!" Shooting stopped and the crew went back to Italy. Antonioni took the bits and pieces of the film that had been shot and wove them together in a film since hailed for its "mystery" and "enigma." Of course it was mysterious; it was never finished!

While this certainly sounds in keeping with Ponti's reputation (he's satirized as the portly, vulgarian producer in Fellini's 8 1/2) one has to wonder how accurate this story is, mainly because Blow-Up was not an original screenplay but based on a short story every bit as ambiguous and strange as the film that resulted.

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An interesting commentary in todays Yediot by Roni Shaked claims that the Palestinians have begun referring to their current situation as the “waksa” (or “vaksa”, hard to tell in Hebrew transliteration) as opposed to the famous “nakba” and the slightly less celebrated “naksa”, which refers to their defeat in the Six Day War. Apparently, “waksa” is different from a “nakba” or “naksa” in that it is a self-inflicted catastrophe as opposed to one caused by outside enemies. The article goes on to note the widely known events which precipitated the “waksa”: the disastrous second intifada, the death of Arafat, the rise of Hamas and the ultimate division of Gaza and the West Bank into two separate territories governed by two separate ideologies, one nationalist the other Islamist.

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Moshe Feiglin, interviewed here at YNet, is a rightwing activist working hard to bring theocracy to Israel through his bid to take the leadership of the Likud Party. His Jewish Leadership movement has thus far failed to come even close to dislodging Benjamin Netanyahu (who is, after all, heir to one of the first families of Revisionism) but he represents a serious minority which deserves some listening to, if only because of the degree to which such fringe movements manage to underline certain discontents which are often very real. Most notably, Feiglin does sound a true note when he talks about the dangers of Netanyahu's economic policies:

I don’t want to talk about what [Netanyahu is] not, but about what I am. Enough looking at slogans on the side of buses. Netanyahu’s slogan is ‘Israel decides to succeed’. My slogan is ‘Because it has G-d’.

Bibi’s slogan is business, high-tech and such. I’m all for it, but my slogan comes from a very different direction. That says it all. Material success can be achieved anywhere in the world.

Feiglin claims that he wants to bring "spirit" back to Israeli governance. For him, this means religion. Nonetheless, he does have something of a point. Turning Israel into just another cog in the machine of global capitalism may help prosperity in the short term, but in the long term it is a serious threat to Zionism itself. For better or worse, Zionism is not a materialist ideology. No one ever made aliyah to get rich and, while Israel has its wealthy class, it has nothing like the plutocracy of the United States or Europe.

If the only arbiter of success is financial, there will be little reason to waste one's time on, say, the Hebrew language, a tongue which can hardly be of much use in a world whose language of global commerce is English. Like it or not, Zionism is about things which have little or no value in a world whose sole interest is production and consumption of goods. Indeed, it's somewhat surprising that the most ostensibly Zionist of Israel's mainstream politicians -- Netanyahu himself -- does not seem to understand the inherent contradiction between his nationalist ideals and his advocacy of Israel's total privatization.

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As with all things pop cultural in Israel, the Sopranos has recently come to an end slightly later than it did in America. Israel seems to work on a permanent two or three month delay (sometimes more) than the rest of the TV watching world, and there are no exceptions even for pop cultural phenomena as intense as David Chase’s mafia black comedy/social satire. In the interests of full disclosure, I must confess that I have not seen the controversial final episode of the Sopranos. In fact, I haven’t watched it for over three years or more. I must also, and with greater trepidation, confess the reason why: I don’t like it.

As perhaps the only person in the known universe who doesn’t like the Sopranos, I feel an obligation to explain myself before being stoned to death by a mob of outraged New Jerseyites hell-bent on revenge. The reason I don’t like the Sopranos is not because of the excessive violence, sex or foul language, it is not because of the show’s interminable self-consciousness and orgiastic love of self-reference, and it isn’t because the show is unnecessarily convoluted and obscure. The reason I don’t like the Sopranos is that the Sopranos is and was bad.

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Israel's Channel 8, which regularly foists documentaries and educational programs of varying quality upon us, has unfortunately chosen to inflict Israel's most asinine expatriate on the Hebrew speaking world. The irritator in question is Canadian-Israeli television producer Simcha Jacobovici and his show The Naked Archeologist.

For the uninitiated, the show involves little more than Jacobovici running around Israel making an ass out of himself and spinning ridiculous theories about various Biblical and Bible-related events in the most pompous manner possible. What makes the show so galling is not so much Jacobovici's spurious claims, which are fairly obviously ludicrous, such as when he tells us in one episode that the Biblical fragments found in the Dead Sea Scrolls are identical to the Masoretic text (they aren't) or his assertion that the Israeli Antiquities Authority may have declared the James ossuary a fake in order to spuriously prosecute a prominent private collector (if this sounds like something pretty close to slander, its because it is) but rather his pestilent on-screen persona.

Constantly preening for the camera, Jacobovici keeps up a relentlessly self-aggrandizing and thoroughly obnoxious monologue throughout the show, commenting on nearly everything he trains his camera on, which is mostly himself. In between insulting credentialed archaeologists for not agreeing with his theories, perhaps the most famous of which is the "Jesus family tomb", Jacobovici clowns for his viewers in a manner which his credentialed (and therefore inherently untrustworthy) opponents would likely describe, with understatement, as unprofessional in the extreme. Perhaps the most idiotic of his lens-hogging stunts is breaking into a closed archaeological site possibly connected to John the Baptist all the while proclaiming "why would they hide this from people?"

This P.T. Barnum-style theatricality leaves the viewer with little more than the inevitable conclusion that the site is likely closed in order to protect it from idiots like Simcha. Other sites have undertaken extensive criticisms of Jacobovici's various theories regarding Biblical history, such as his claim that refugees from the Exodus somehow got to Mycenae and carved a visual history of the Exodus on to a tomb (the evil credential-holding archaeologists think the carving represents a chariot race) so I will not belabor the passing reader with the details. I will merely note that the egregious con-job now being foisted on the Israeli public by Jacobovici and his collaborators (filmmaker James Cameron apparently among them) is perhaps best illustrated by the show's title itself, which implies, of course, that its host is the (thankfully not actually naked) archaeologist in question.

Jacobovici, needless to say, has degrees in philosophy, political science and international relations, but no credentials in the field of archeology whatsoever. Such scurrilous dishonesty may lead the viewer to conclude that the show is as trustworthy as its title. We can only hope.

The New York Times Magazine’s recent profile of Tzipi Livni is too lengthy to be dealt with in a single post, but a few issues spring immediately to attention. For one, the Times is once again (forgive the egregious pun) decidedly behind the times. With his successful survival of the Lebanon war report, appointment of Ehud Barak and installment of Shimon Peres in the presidency, Olmert seems to have outmaneuvered his opposition despite his low poll numbers. Tzipi’s half-rebellion non-rebellion hasn’t endeared her much to Israeli voters and, in country at least, the hype seems to be off. The profile doesn’t do a bad job of profiling Tzipi’s slightly bizarre charm (she somehow makes her total lack of charisma come off as charisma, don’t ask me how) but then meanders off into a general assessment of the conflict and Israel’s current historical-strategic position which, to me at least, appears to exist wholly in the mind of the reporter in question.

Israelis these days fret about how they are seen. They like to convey the spirit of the underdog — that of Israel’s heroic beginnings — as if discomfited by the adornments of an increasingly moneyed, Americanized and postheroic society. More powerful than ever, Israelis are also more anxious than ever, a paradox with U.S. parallels that they find maddening. Israel’s strength and wealth grow, but the country’s long-term security does not grow with them. The shekel rises; so does the billowing smoke just over the border in Gaza. Two Israeli withdrawals, from Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005, have ended up bolstering two groups that the West and Israel brand as terrorists — Hezbollah and Hamas. Some Israelis, watching the black-masked militia of Hamas take over Gaza, have taken to calling the benighted sliver of territory “Hamastan.”

This is a fairly typical American liberal conception of Israel: namely, that Israel is somehow an historical failure if it is not accepted by its enemies. One could easily argue that Israel’s consistently growing economic strength is essential to its long term security and that a rising shekel is, in some ways, as important to the survival of the Jewish state as a peace treaty, perhaps more so. Countries go through revolutions, peace treaties fail, situations destabilize, but economic growth and development are what solidifies and ensures a country’s future. That billowing smoke and that benighted territory over the border are just that: over the border. Not us and not our responsibility. They are now an external danger, and having the military, economic and political strength to deal with external dangers is not particularly discomfiting, as far as I can tell, to me or most other Israelis.

The reporter seems firmly ensconced in the Oslo mythology of peace as messianic savior. The fact that Israel grows stronger while peace grows more elusive is counter-intuitive to such thinking and nearly impossible to understand. Thus we find Hamas and Hezbollah’s rise to power ascribed to Israel’s withdrawals rather than to internal factors or general Western fecklessness. The first was Hamas’ key to power and the second Hezbollah’s. This isn’t particularly surprising, since first hand experience has taught me the sad state of foreign journalism over here, with lazy and ideologically fettered reporters incapable of speaking Hebrew or Arabic biding their time in the Jerusalem bubble and soaking up the English-language gossip without a clue as to what the rest of the country (i.e. all of us) are thinking. I have a vivid memory of being at a media conference where Steven Erlanger, the Times’ Jerusalem journeyman, remarked that the government wanted to cover up the lack of sufficient water in the field during the Lebanon war. The fact that Israel’s reservists were probably cell-phoning their families en masse to report such things didn’t seem to enter his mind. You can’t keep such things secret for long with a citizen army. This kind of basic ignorance of Israeli society and how it works is, unfortunately, fairly universal amongst the journalistic glitterati who pontificate on Israel and its neuroses while shunning all contact with the country to which they are dispensing their apparently indispensable advice.

Today’s Yediot Acharanot contains a lengthy article (thus far unposted and untranslated on the web) on a recent meeting between Minister of Strategic Affairs Avigdor Liberman and NATO commanders in which he was reportedly told that, due to American and European forces being bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq, Israel will have to act alone against Iran’s nuclear program. One of the more interesting aspects of the article was not the fact that Israel will have to go it alone (again) but rather than there now appears to be a total consensus among the military powers that be that Iran’s nuclear program is military in nature and has to be dealt with by force. Liberman was also apparently told that a unilateral Israeli strike against Iran will meet with support and approval from NATO and its constituent nations, which, if true, would represent something of a watershed in Israel’s international relations, considering the outpouring of condemnation (now conveniently forgotten) against Israel’s bombing of the Osirak reactor some two decades ago.

In some ways, of course, it’s to both Israel and NATO’s advantage that Israel act without active collaborators. It keeps NATO forces from having to get involved in another Middle East conflict which could conceivably spiral out of control and insulates the nations involved from the political wrath of the Muslim world and possible use of the oil weapon. Whether a unilateral Israeli strike is militarily feasible remains a debated issue, but the recent appointment of Ehud Barak to the Defense Ministry does suggest that certain political considerations are being set aside in anticipation of a major crisis. On the other hand, Yediot reported yesterday that reserve units are being stretched to the limit and the Chief of Staff is complaining about budget cutbacks. As per usual, chaos rules in the interim.

[Note: Benjamin is the Shvitz's new Israeli-based correspondent. He'll be blogging here on a regular basis about politics and culture in the Middle East. --MW] 

Living in Beersheva has its advantages and its disadvantages. Usually the latter loom larger than the former, the heat, the sandstorms, the relative distance from the all-important mercaz, the neighbors who slaughter their own Passover dinner...but I digress. One of the good things, in fact the best thing, at least from the point of view of a recent arrival (five years and counting) is the lack of a bubble mentality.

Unlike the Anglo bubble in Jerusalem, which sometimes seems obsessed with reconstructing Brooklyn in the middle of the Old City, or the Tel Aviv bubble, with its relentless cosmopolitanism and hipper-than-thou obsessions with sex, fashion and designer drugs, living in Beersheva forces you, for better or for worse, to confront the real Israel, such as it is. Which is to say, a rather dusty community of underpaid, overworked, family oriented, Hebrew (or sometimes Russian) speaking folks who find it utterly incomprehensible that you don't take sugar in your coffee. Beersheva sometimes feels like a microcosm of the under Israel, the Israel left behind by tourists, reporters and Biblical fetishists alike. This does not, however, imply that places like this are disconnected from the rest of the country.

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