Entre Nous / Musings of a former Belgian

Odious debt and ditto NYT

There have been calls for applying the odious debts doctrine to Iraq's staggering foreign debt from the Saddamite era, thus wiping most of it off the books. Obviously, some creditors (table of debts by country here and here) who lent the money to the Saddamite regime are less than happy about this prospect. (Among the largest creditors you will find two permanent members of the Security Council.)

Hippercritical reports that the New York Times published an op-ed by one Mark Medish, arguing against such a debt amnesty. Hippercritical found this somewhat strange, as in another piece the same Medish passionately argued in favor of applying the odious debt doctrine to Russian debt from the Soviet days. Some legwork revealed... that M. Medish, Esq. is a partner in a law firm hired by several international corporate creditors. A fact that the NYT conveniently 'forgets' to mention. Could you picture the NYT printing an op-ed claiming secondhand smoke is not dangerous, without disclosing that its author is corporate counsel for a tobacco company?

Hate speech and law enforcement priorities

[sarcasm]
It is good to know that the French law enforcement system has its priorities set straight. (Background article in French.) [/sarcasm]

A French-Jewish computer programmer was apparently convicted to a four-month suspended sentence for "anti-Jewish racial hatred" for... running a website in which he lambasted public figures for their (real or alleged) anti-Israel sympathies, and identified some of them as Jewish by marking them with a Star of David logo. Some of those thus singled out reported getting hate mail.

As apparently the site called on people to show their disapproval "both verbally and physically" its contents could be interpreted as incitement to violence --- in and of itself a punishable offense in many countries (including Israel, by the way). But to claim this is "anti-Jewish racial hatred" is Turnspeak in the purest Orwellian sense of the word.

I now hope that the French courts will, with the same commendable zeal, go after every anti-Jewish and anti-Israel hate site run by Muslim extremsists and their red-green fellow travelers. Meanwhile, hell might freeze over.

And now for something completely different (?)

And now for something completely different. Via Instapundit, I hear that the master of "alternate history" SF, Harry Turtledove (a onetime UCLA historian, BTW) has a new novel out entitled In the presence of my enemies. This book depicts a "what if" scenario in which the US had staid of WW II and the Third Reich won it. Set about fifty years later, it focuses on the efforts of a handful of Jewish survivors who live a modern marrano (crypto-Jewish) existence, in perennial fear of being betrayed to the Gestapo.

The title is a reference to the line from Psalm 23: "Thou settest a table before me in the presence of my enemies". Actually, I always read that line more like: "And you bring good things upon us despite --- or perhaps because of --- our enemies looking on."

And speaking of good things, virtuoso prog-metalists Dream Theater have a new album coming up entitled "Train of Thought". The opening track, "As I am", is legally available for download as a low-bitrate MP3. The lyrics are ostensibly about sticking to one's guns musically and not giving in to trendiness or monday morning quarterbacks ("de beste stuurlui die altijd aan wal staan"). But it is very easy to read meaning somewhat closer to this weblog's subject into the lyrics. Judge for yourself:

Don't tell me how to win this fight
It isn't your life
It isn't your right to take the only thing that's mine
[You're p]roving all the time
It's over your head

[...]

I've been trying to justify you
In the end I will just defy you

To those who understand
I extend my hand
To the doubtful I demand
Take me as I am
Not under your command
I know where I stand
I won't change to fit your plan
Take me as I am

Belgian "journalism"

Maarten Schenk at Live from Brusselstells of an opinion[ated] writer (one Paul Geudens) at the Flemish daily Gazet van Antwerpen, who keeps blabbing on about Bush having prematurely "announced the end of the war". Schenk wrote a letter reminding him that Bush only announced "the end of major combat operations", as well as that US governmental sources immediately specifically stated that this was not a declaration that the war is over.

He had more luck than I usually have: the journalist wrote back, and in the process of trying to talk his way out of this revealed that he had relied on the title of a Dutch translation of a Reuters/AFP dispatch. Small matter that anyone who had access to cable TV or to the 'net could have heard or read the speech in the original. I can think of few better illustrations of the opinionated provincialism of the Belgian media. (The part that isn't outright anti-American/Islamorimmer agitprop, that is.)

"Geudenske: baino 't zelfde es nie hielemoal 't zelfde." (Antwerp dialect for "Geudens boy, 'almost the same' isn't)

Bush Democrats

Georgia Senator Zell Miller (Democrats) says he will sooner change his name than his party affiliation. Mystery novelist and screenwriter Roger L. Simon is a leftist liberal of the old school who basically disagrees with Bush on every single domestic issue. Yet both (Miller and Simon have announced to the world that they will vote Bush in 2004. Go read both articles to find out why. (As one of the commenters pithily put it: "We can argue about whether the top tax rate should be 35 or 40 percent, whether [homosexuals] should marry or not marry, but [at this juncture] this is like arguing about interior decoration and kitchen privileges while the barbarians are outside trying to burn down the house.")

In this context, Best of the Web points out that

If the election were held today, the latest Washington Post polls asks, would you vote for Bush or "the Democratic nominee for president"? Bush edges out the anonymous nominee, 48% to 47%--a statistical tie.

But the poll also pits Bush against all the actual Democrats who are seeking the nomination, and he has a wide lead over all of them. Among registered voters, Bush leads Wesley Clark 52% to 40%, Joe Lieberman 56% to 38%, John Kerry 54% to 43%, Dick Gephardt 51% to 42%, and Howard Dean 53% to 39%.

Law of unintended consequences

Oliver Kamm is on another roll: check out various posts around this one, which is about the "swan song flight" of the Concorde. He noted that "looney leftist" Tony Benn made the Concorde his pet project while Minister of Transportation. True to the Law of Unintended Consequences, he thus ended up playing "reverse Robin Hood" ("steal" from the poor and give to the rich), as even at the enormous ticket prices the Concorde charged it could only be kept in the air through massive state subsidies.

Bastille Day II?

Sylvain Galineau writes about the intellectual monoculture in France, the "witch hunts" against those dare step out of line, and the first signs (such as this) of what he considers an inevitable backlash against the "enarchie".

VDH on fashionable antisemitism

Victor Davis Hanson's verbal scalpel lays bare the latest metastases of the world's oldest intellectual cancer:

What links all these people — a Muslim head of state, a rude crowd in Michigan, an experienced magazine contributor, and a European public intellectual — besides their having articulated a spreading anger against the "Jews"? Perhaps a growing unease with hard questions that won't go away and thus beg for easy, cheap answers.

A Malaysian official and his apologists must realize that gender apartheid, statism, tribalism, and the anti-democratic tendencies of the Middle East cause its poverty and frustration despite a plethora of natural resources (far more impressive assets than the non-petroleum-bearing rocks beneath parched Israel). But why call for introspection when the one-syllable slur "Jews" suffices instead?

And why would an Arab-American audience — itself composed of many who fled the tyranny and economic stagnation of Arab societies for the freedom and opportunity of a liberal United States — wish to hear a reasoned explanation of the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian war when it was so much easier to hiss and moan, especially when mainstream observers would ignore their anti-Semitism and be impressed instead with the cadre of candidates who flock to Michigan?

How do you explain to an audience that Quentin Tarantino appeals both to teens and to empty-headed critics precisely because something is terribly amiss in America, when affluent and leisured suburbanites are drawn to scenes of raw killing as long as it is dressed up with "art" and "meaning"?

How could a Tony Judt write a reasoned and balanced account of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict when to do so would either alienate or bore the literati? [...] And what is the value of the only democratic government in a sea of autocracy if its existence butts up against notions of third-world victimhood and causes so much difficulty for the Western intelligentsia? [...] Judt [...] confirmed what most of us knew for years — namely, that there is an entrenched and ever-bolder school of European thought that favors the de facto elimination of what is now a democratic Jewish state.

So they all, whether by design or laxity, take the easier way out — especially when slurring "Israel" or "the Jews" involves none of the risks of incurring progressive odium that similarly clumsy attacks against blacks, women, Palestinians, or homosexuals might draw, requires no real thinking, and seems to find an increasingly receptive audience.

You see, in our mixed-up world those Jewish are not a "people of color." And if there really is such a mythical monolithic entity in America as the "Jews," they (much like the Cubans) are not easily stereotyped as impoverished victims needing largesse or condescension, and much less are they eligible under any of the current myriad of rubrics that count for public support. Israel is a successful Western state, not a failed third-world despotism. Against terrible oppression and overt anti-Semitism, the Jewish community here and abroad found success — proof that hard work, character, education, and personal discipline can trump both natural and human adversity. In short, the story of American Jewry and Israel resonates not at all with the heartstrings of a modern therapeutic society, which is quick to show envy for the successful and cheap concern for the struggling.

This fashionable anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism — especially among purported intellectuals of the Left — reveals a deep-seated, scary pathology that is growing geometrically both in and outside the West. For a Europe that is disarmed, plagued by a demographic nightmare of negative population growth and unsustainable entitlements, filled with unassimilated immigrants, and deeply angry about the power and presence of the United States, the Jews and their Israel provide momentary relief on the cheap. So expect that more crazy thoughts of Israel's destruction dressed up as peace plans will be as common as gravestone and synagogue smashing.

Read the whole thing, then file under "Cluebats".

Umwertung aller Werte/Re-valuation of all values

Nietzsche talked a lot about his seeking a "re-valuation of all values" (Umwertung aller Werte). I had another "Nietzsche moment" as I saw the following two items on LGF:

(a) an opinion poll commissioned by the European Politburo European Commission lists Israel and the US as "the greatest threats to world peace", ahead of North Korea, Iran,...
Considering the steady diet of anti-American, anti-Israeli, and Arab-appeasement propaganda the average European gets force-fed by their state-controlled media (it's hard for me to dignify the Belgian TV news with the term "journalism") I am not surprised one bit. The difference between an "unsophisticated" and a "sophisticated" Belgian is between one who believes everything they tell him on VRT (Belgian state TV) and one who actually checks it against the Biased Bullsh*t Corporation. Many in the latter category I talked to thought CNN has a pro-Republican bias (!!). Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Planet EUranus.

(b)The Jesuit magazine Civilta Cattolica, of all places, published an incredibly sharp (if equally accurate) attack on the oppression of non-Muslims in the world of Islam. A summary in English ((original in Italian) is available on a Catholic website: go read the whole thing. This could have been written by Daniel Pipes or Bat Ye'or. Or by a more scholarly version of Charles Johnson (himself an ex-Catholic). The significant point: everything that gets published in Civilta Cattolica had been reviewed and approved by the Vatican Secretary of State --- therefore the article can be assumed to reflect the views of the Holy See and may actually be a harbinger of a papal Encyclical on the subject.

As I see it, the Vatican's Arabophile policy of the past was not just a product of Catholic antisemitsm of pre-Vatican II vintage, but also of a desire to protect the (at any rate precarious) status of its flock in Islamic countries (which includes not just Roman Catholics but a gaggle of Catholic churches that historically followed non-Latin rites, such as the Maronites in Lebanon and the Chaldean Catholics in Iraq).
On the first issue, John XXIII started a process of reconciliation that was taken to its logical conclusion by John-Paul II. But much more importantly from the Vatican's point of view, on the second issue it is clearly getting totally fed up with the degradation, humiliation, and persecution of its flock by Islamist governments (particularly in places like Sudan). And it has come to the conclusion that this is not merely an bug but a feature of Islamism ;-)

We sure are living in interesting times...

UPDATE: a new weblog, Dhimmi watch, is dedicated to the status of non-Muslim tolerated half- and quarter-citizens (a.k.a. dhimmi in Arabic) in Islamic countries. See also the companion weblog Jihad Watch.

UPDATE 2: Frontpage Magazine has an online symposium on Islamic antisemitism (a special case of the phenomenon) featuring Kenneth Timmerman, Bat Ye'or, Prof. Walid Phares, and Robert Spencer. Edifying reading, especially for those unfamiliar with Islamic sources on the subject. Here is an earlier one on Islamic persecution of Christians.