Sunday, October 10, 2010

Limits of My Comprehension

Matthew Yglesias, in spite of his name, is a young Jewish liberal blogger. He's not as bad a Glenn Greenwald, and I don't know which of them is more popular. I don't read either of them regularly, but I go by from time to time, or I follow links when they say something particularly outlandish about Israel. The other things they write about don't much interest me.

Surprisingly, it turns out Yglesias has never been to Israel - until this week. Now he's here, studiously not seeing the 90-some percent of Israel that's not directly connected to the conflict with the Palestinians, but tweeting and blogging (a bit) about what he's seeing - so I'm a regular reader for the duration. It's odd how much he doesn't know, given the statements he occasionally makes. In one of his tweets today he told us that
As best I can tell, 99% of the clichés you've heard about Israel and Palestine are accurate.
and also
Hebron is the strangest thing I've ever seen
Personally, I have a sneaking suspicion he went to Hebron with Btselem or someone like them, so the chances he understood what they were showing him were, how to put it, slim.

In the meantime, however, he continues to blog about other subjects,and this afternoon he dabbled in an argument between two other bloggers (who seems to be professors) about the outcome of WWII. I've read Yglesias and the two others, and for the life of me I can't figure out what it is they're talking about. The discussion seems to be about how bad things were in post-1945 Europe, and how WWII couldn't plausibly have been said to have ended well until one had the perspective of, say, 1990:
There’s definitely a sense in which it all worked out for the best in the end, but the conclusion of the war in Europe was both very harsh on the Germans and also a spectacular failure in terms of cosmic justice. You can see this by contemplating the fact that a war France and Britain nominally launched for the sake of saving Czechoslovak and Polish independence concluded by sentencing Poland and Czechoslovakia and a great many other countries to decades of Soviet domination.
Soviet domination was a very bad thing, on balance. Still, compared to Nazi domination it was great. Not to mention millions of Eastern Europeans who were slated to die for being in the way of the Germans, and all the remaining Jews. I look at this exchange of opinions between these three fellows, rub my eyes, and ask if it's the same 20th century we're talking about.

Meanwhile, ideological enemies of mankind are still with us, though they use different terminology these days. Barry Rubin notices that the Muslim Brotherhood, an important movement, has essentially declared war on the West... and no-one is noticing. Of course, no-one would expect someone like Matthew Yglesias to make an issue of this sort of thing, but perhaps the New York Times? The Economist? Someone? Anyone?

Finally, since I'm listing odd things, Lizas Welt, an iconoclastic German blog, who follows Henryk Broder in telling the story of one Edith Lutz. Ms Lutz, it appears, has figured out that merely attacking Israel won't get her the media attention she wishes for, so she has decided to tell everyone she's Jewish. A Jew who says awful things about Israel: now that's just what the German media needs. The problem, in Liza's formulation, is that her conversion to Judaism seems to have been very private. So private that no-one in the Jewish community knows about it.

All of this is getting too complicated for poor old me. I guess I'm losing it.

17 comments:

Lee Ratner said...

Matthew Yglesias mainly focuses on economics, urban development, education, and social service issues plus immigration. On these issues he is pretty good if you agree with him, which I generally do. His foreign policy stuff, Israel or otherwise is not that informed even if you do agree with him.

Lee Ratner said...

On Edith Lutz, the critics of Israel whom I loathe the most are the "Jewish" ones, who don't participate in the Jewish community or partake in Jewish activities but proclaim themselves to be Jewish to make their criticism seem more potent. Edith Lutz is apparently trying to be worse, a goy pretending to be a Jew in order to give her criticism a force it wouldn't of had otherwise.

Anonymous said...

I've been following the case of Edith Lutz a bit and by now it is pretty clear that she converted by herself, felt it in her heart or in her bit toe or so (can't Muslims convert by saying something 3 times? maybe she got confused). She is not the only "as a Jew" we have but hopefully the only fake one. Though the claim that she studied Judaistik still stands and the most horrible tidbit I read, the nutter is apparently still allowed to teach children.

Here she is in her own words (Reuven is fake Professor Moskovitz) http://www.ipk-bonn.de/gesellschaft/news/2010100200.html

The IDF-Spokesperson had it right, when they said they hoped they could soon return to important stuff.

Silke

Anonymous said...

Goldberg comments on Yglesias also
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2010/10/unbelievably-israel-also-has-hummus/64296/

I've listened to him once in a talk with somebody when he was still at the Atlantic. I was underimpressed.

Silke

Joe in Australia said...

His name is Matthew, not Metthew. I read some of the comments on his posts, and I think his commentators probably deserve one another.

Anonymous said...

"very harsh on the Germans" ???

Idiot - in the first half of the 70s if you judged by the shine of skin and hair you could tell that the draftsmen from England had grone up with a lot less affluence than the German ones had.

Orwell's teacher: the most important thing in the world is FOOD and measured by that we had done better by miles than the Brits.

the first one doesn't talk about the country I lived in but later movies don't even get my 50s skirts right.

the second one has the news item about the reparations which I heard an explanation of on the radio which was so complicated that I can't repeat it. The short of it is that there were some still some bonds out there which had to be paid but there also was a long long interim. Really fascinating stuff the way the man explained it on the radio - now THAT would have made a blog post ;-)

I call these types Papperlapappers

Silke

Anonymous said...

Yglesias was somewhat interesting before he was paid to blog. Now he is just a copy of every other left leaning blogger on the internet with very little original thought.

His posts from Israel are rather unsurprising considering he has never had a good word to say about Israel or a bad one to say about the Palestinians. Just copy everything that Juan close writes and add "and I am a Jew from New York" to the end and you have his views on the conflict.

Anonymous said...

Sorry accidentilly typed Juan "close" instead of Juan "Cole".

Barry Meislin said...

Should be, "Juan not even close".....

Barry Meislin said...

As for Yglesias, he one very confused dude.

"...a sense that in which it all worked out for the best in the end"?

What a tremendous relief for all of us, no doubt, to finally discover---and have it confirmed by Mr. "Cosmic Justice" himself.

No, things ain't perfect. Irony exists. Grim irony, in fact. Murderous irony. Gosh... (We should never have left the Garden; oh, that's right, we were thrown out....)

Though, in his defense (perhaps), he's probably steeped in Antony Beevor's (quite magnificent) "Fall of Berlin: 1945"---or whatever they decided to call it.

And while I would prefer not to get into the (grim?) irony of Berliners by and large being anti-Fuhrer, if you want to feel truly sorry for Germans, read Beevor. (But caveat emptor: you may, if you take yourself too seriously, end up writing drivel like M.Y.)

Anonymous said...

Why does anyone want to convert at all?

Either you are religious, or you aren't. I'm a bit suspicious of people zapping through religions like the tv programme.

Some blokes like Pierre Vogel, ex-boxer, now islamist preacher of hate, give me the creeps. Or those western converts to islam, that are fighting against ISAF. Sick.

Regards, André

Empress Trudy said...

First off, and I can't stress this enough, Greenwald by his admission is no liberal. He's a darling of the liberals because of his psychotic antisemitic ravings. But he's also opposed to Obama. In fact he's a former colleague of Pat Buchanan and Lyndon Larouche. He's a rabid libertarian on gay rights but having cut his legal teeth on defending neonazis, white supremacists and the like, he's as right wing as they come. He also defended, in his blog, the rights of corporations and foreign governments to funnel limitless amounts of cash to American elections.

Secondly, and as a result of 'liberals' like Greenwald, you're starting to see the beginnings of a new revisionist movement. It started with the usual conspiracy theories about FDR and how he apparently knew about Pearl Harbor, and it proceeds along the lines of what historians recognize as the Paul-Fauristes of pre war Socialist France and how the "real danger" was not the Nazis but the French (Jewish) warmongers who of course wanted war to line their own pockets. etc etc. And this line of reasoning ends with claims that the wrong side won WW2 the world would have been better off with a defeated US, a strong and seemingly contained Germany. This plays straight to the Alperovitz-Chomsky fools who never saw a cannibal dictator they didn't like.

Just you see - the far left in the US will soon join hands with the far right and start advocating for a Vichy relationship with their Sharia overlords.

Bryan said...

André,

Not everyone thinks that religiosity and spirituality are things that one feels by oneself. Moreover, not all religions are the same. So, if you feel that being in a group will help your spirituality, and that the group you were raised in is uncomfortable, then you find a different group, and you convert.

It's really not complicated.

Empress Trudy said...

Barry it should be John not "Juan". He gave himself that vaguely Spanish name as an affectation. I guess it sounds more romantically revolutionary, and "Che" was already taken. But the oddest thing about Dr. Cole is not his name, it's his craven love of Islam even though as a Bahai convert he is viewed as a heretic and an apostate of sorts, from Islam, worthy of death according to all the major voices in militant Sunnia and Shiia with which he loudly champions. It really is a textbook Stockholm Syndrome.

Anonymous said...

Bryan,

thanks, but I'm still puzzled. In regard to interfaith couples, I perfectly understand the wish to convert.

I'm a very non-religous person. Maybe that explains my lack of understanding these "simple" things.

Still I'm convinced that religiosity, morality and spirituality has to start with the single human being and not with others, not with religious "Rules of Engagement" of which various religions are so proud of.

What's the point of praying 5 times a day, or doing all the stuff your religious "Rules of Engagement" tell you, if you still do not believe in what you're doing? If you're heart and soul aren't into it?

Regards, André

Bryan said...

André,

"Still I'm convinced that religiosity, morality and spirituality has to start with the single human being and not with others..."

And that's where other people simply disagree. Your opinion is not a proven truth about which religious people are simply in denial. It's a philosophical question, one that doesn't have a correct answer, and many, many people disagree with you. Your view is perfectly valid (and is a tenet of, for example, Protestant Christianity), but the other side is equally so.

Even if your heart and soul aren't into praying at this exact second or all the time, many people still find it comforting and strengthening to have a tradition and a routine that doesn't change no matter how chaotic life becomes. For example, keeping kosher. A lot of people (and a great many Jews) don't understand why people who keep kosher do so, since it doesn't seem to directly connect with God in the same way that prayer does. But aside from people who keep kosher simply because that's what Jews do (in the same way that even Italians make pasta because it's "Italian food"), there are plenty of people who keep kosher because it makes the most mundane of human acts into a holy one that reminds oneself of God.

Just because you personally don't find following the "rules of engagement" fulfilling doesn't mean others don't.

Anonymous said...

Bryan,

good point, thanks for your answer!

Regards, André