Kanellos the Greek protest dog

A dog that has been seen at nearly every demonstration in Athens over the last two years has turned up again during the recent protests against new austerity measures.

Full story: http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0508/riotdog-icon-greek-protest-movement/

Soul searching from Greek anarchists

The incident did not happen at night, at some sabotage action. It happened during the largest demonstration in contemporary greek history. And here is where a series of painful questions emerge: Overall, in a demonstration of 150-200,000, unprecedented in the last few years, is there really a need for some “upgraded” violence? When you see thousands shouting “burn, burn Parliament” and swear at the cops, does another burnt bank really have anything more to offer to the movement?

read full article

My pick for best movie of 2010 and I have not even seen it!

Is firebombing a bank an acceptable tactic?

Yesterday three workers in Athens died of smoke inhalation on the second floor of Marfin Bank. It had been firebombed during violent protests by anarchists who had hijacked a peaceful demonstration of workers just as had been the case a decade or so when the Black Bloc was in its heyday. An open letter by one of their co-workers has been circulating widely on the Internet. It blames the government rather than the anarchists for the tragedy and even points to a police conspiracy:

No member of security has any knowledge of first aid or fire extinguishing, even though they are every time practically charged with securing the building. The bank employees have to turn into firemen or security staff according to the appetite of Mr Vgenopoulos [owner of Marfin Bank].

The management of the bank strictly bared the employees from leaving today, even though they had persistently asked so themselves from very early this morning – while they also forced the employees to lock up the doors and repeatedly confirmed that the building remained locked up throughout the day, over the phone. They even blocked off their internet access so as to prevent the employees from communicating with the outside world.

While it is important first of all to recognize the high level of class consciousness that would allow such a worker to put the blame on the government, we still have not heard that much from the anarchists themselves. They are in something of a quandary it would appear. While they certainly would not want to be blamed for the death of innocent workers, they have trumpeted such tactics in the past. Infoshop, a key website for the anarchist movement, carried one of their proclamations:

We stand opposed to all authoritarian mechanisms and to all snitches that assist their task and we directly take the counter-offensive for now and forever. On the night of 25th of April in Thessaloníki we attacked with fire a news agency delivery truck of “Evropi (Europe)” company in the area of Evosmos and a branch of OTE (National Telecommunications Organization) in Stavroupoli. We continued the next night again with an arson attack on a Eurobank branch in Kalamaria.

While an arson attack on a bank at night might indicate Weatherman-type solicitude to avoid casualties, one must wonder how they could be sure that security guards and janitors were not inside the building. I suppose that they would be sorry for the collateral damage to someone slinging a mop, but perhaps the security guards would be regarded as a pig. This anarchist communiqué on the OccupiedLondon blog reveals their attitude toward such lowly bank employees, written as a justification for a bank robbery in 2006. The security guard apparently deserved to be shot because he was  “overzealous” and a “pig” in their eyes, who “thought he must run and stop the evil doers”. The fact that they could describe this as a “terror-crazed thriller of epic proportions” with zero hint of introspection illustrates how detached from reality these people are:

On January 16th 2006, a group of four people rob a branch of the National Bank, on Solonos St. in the center of Athens. A completely calm robbery, as all eye witnesses there that day confirm, was in the end turned into a record breaking, terror-crazed thriller of epic proportions, a breach in time that dramatically overturned the lives of tens of people, a critical point in the history of an entire political milieu. And that, thanks to the unique “heroics” of that bank’s security guard, who thought that he must run and stop the doers at all costs, because in his code of values the insured money of a bank is more important than anything. Even human life… or otherwise, as Einstein had said, two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the first.

The result of the overzealousness of that guard and a few other pigs who rushed to help in his “pious” cause was the midday transformation of Panepistimiou St. into a shooting range for cops on live targets, in contrast with those being pursued who didn’t use their weaponry… A nearly dead street vendor and a blood soaked, dying bank robber on the ground receiving kick after kick, close the curtains on act one.

Today the anarchists have released a statement about the death of the three bank workers that appears on OccupiedLondon. This dodgy phrase sticks out: “No anarchists would ever purposefully endanger other peoples’ lives.” So if a firebomb accidentally kills three workers, it’s okay? What a bunch of assholes.

Given such a stupid and adventurist orientation, we can certainly expect the cops to infiltrate the anarchist movement in order to propose ever more “bold” tactics that will result in the injuries or deaths of innocent bystanders. The bourgeoisie does not give a shit about such “collateral damage” as long as the provocation results in the further isolation of the ultralefts. An article in today’s NY Times illustrates the line of attack that will be mounted both in Greece and internationally:

The deaths shocked many in Greece, where demonstrations have been a way of life for decades and played a pivotal role in the overthrow of the military regime in 1974. In December 2008, thousands of rioters across Greece clashed with security forces for weeks over the fatal shooting by the police of a 15-year-old boy, without any further deaths.

“A demonstration is one thing and murder is quite another,” Mr. Papandreou told Parliament in an emotional session on the proposed cuts that was suddenly overshadowed.

I first got a sense of the problems of the Greek ultraleft in a talk given by Stathis Gourgouris at the 2009 Left Forum. He was part of a panel discussing the youth revolt that took place before the wheels came off the Greek economy. I wrote:

Stathis Gourgouris introduced a cautionary note, drawing attention to the fact that for the rioters rage played more of a role than politics. Sparked by the cop murder of a high school student in a “bohemian” neighborhood sounding like Athens’s East Village, they moved against the 3 C’s: corruption, cops and commodification.

Gourgouris warned that there was a nihilist streak in the uprising that could not be ignored. It was fueled by a sense that all politics was rotten, including that of the left. He said that it was possible that under certain conditions the movement could shift to the right. But for the time being, it was shaped by three equally important factors: nihilism, spontaneism, and anarchism. During the discussion period, I commented that it sounded like the Argentine piqueteros who also had a fetish against politics. Considering the fact that Greece has powerful anarchist traditions, this outcome might be expected to some extent.

I confess to being something of a hard-liner when it comes to Black Bloc adventurism. At the age of 65, I saw firsthand the bitter fruits of ultraleftism in the 1960s and 70s. While there was not much of an anarchist movement back then, I saw the consequences of “off the pig” rhetoric and “exemplary” actions. American workers who had begun to develop the first signs of class consciousness would not identify with a left that seemed to have walked out of a Godard movie. I also saw how the cops infiltrated ultraleft groups with the same intention as they have today in Greece, namely to encourage tactics that will only backfire and isolate the left as a whole.

I thought I had seen the end of such stupidity as the 80s trod its weary way into the 90s. But as the “oughts” began, you saw a new spasm of anarchism. In 1999, the black bloc showed up at Seattle and set a precedent for “anti-globalization” protests that would be repeated over and over. During a massive peaceful demonstration, the black bloc and its friends would stage an assault on some stupid fence or building in order to demonstrate how rrrrevolutionary they really were. If the cops used this action as a pretext to tear gas or beat the other demonstrators, that was no big deal to them. Hearkening back to Bakunin, they believe that the bold action of a dedicated minority could bring communism or who knows what. I know that sounds stupid but that’s what they believed. Essentially that is what we are dealing with in Greece but on a much larger scale.

Apparently I am not the only person concerned about these developments. This morning I learned from a comrade on the Marxism mailing list that other voices are being heard:

Regardless of who is responsible for the fire in the bank, there’s discussion on what one contributor calls the Greek anarchist scene’s “macho-militarism” on Libcom.org:

The comment by JH on macho militarism hits exactly to the point. The truth is that, even if the left wing press like Eleftherotypia are right in pointing out that the tragedy might have been a result of parastate or fascist groups that were seen to have penetrated the mass rally, the possibility of it happening today or tomorrow as a result of the rising militarism and nihilism of anarchists in greece has always been very high.

I do not want to exploit my position as a contributor to articles here, but the situation is very serious and no one can keep silent any longer: since December the anarchist scene has been characterised by a mass quantitative increase and a critical qualitative leveling. As a result it is verging on the dangerous limits of what one could call “an unprincipled struggle” where violence has acquired an almost totemic dimension. That is not to say that there are no groups which have engaged critically with the issue of violence in the last year or so, but these efforts have been brushed aside as either too academic or too pacifist or whatever, and marginalised.

The only thing that can save the anarchist scene in the eyes of the much wider social and labour movement in greece is at last some trace of self-criticism. Anarchists should develop a sense of public responsibility and realise the consequences of “playing war” on the backs of others. If the anarchist believe they are the vanguard of society that need give word to no one because they embody some historical necessity, they are no better than the Stalinists in the KKE.

I want to conclude by stating what I think a truly “exemplary” action would be. In 2003 a coup was organized against Hugo Chavez of the same kind that had occurred so many times in Latin America. This time, however, the working people and those on the margins of the capitalist economy rose up en masse and confronted the coup organizers with their bodies and their hearts. Their force was irresistible even though they were unarmed. This is the kind of mass action that the left should be emulating, not the temper tantrums of the infantile left. Fortunately we can see what took place in Venezuela now that “The Revolution will not be Televised” is online. This is must viewing for anybody seeking to understand how revolutions take place.

A Righteous Jew

NY Times May 4, 2010

Rabbi Moshe Hirsch, Israel Opponent, Dies at 86

By DENNIS HEVESI

Rabbi Moshe Hirsch, a leader of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish sect that opposes the existence of the Israeli state and a longtime adviser to the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat, died Sunday at his home in Jersusalem. He was 86.

His death was confirmed by Eida Haredit, an organization for ultra-Orthodox Jewish groups.

Rabbi Hirsch was the son-in-law of Rabbi Aharon Katzenelbogen, founder of the anti-Zionist sect Neturei Karta. Created in 1938 in what was then Palestine, Neturei Karta (“guardians of the city” in ancient Aramaic) has several thousand members in Israel, the United States and Canada. They believe that according to the Torah, Jews were exiled from Israel because they sinned and that God has forbidden the formation of a Jewish state until the Messiah arrives.

Even ultra-Orthodox Jews who share its theological views have distanced themselves from Neturei Karta because of its actions. In 2006, Neturei Karta leaders traveled to Tehran (it could not be determined whether Rabbi Hirsch was among them), where they posed for pictures with the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, at a conference where the Holocaust was denied.

Rabbi Hirsch became a confidant of Arafat in the 1980s, while Arafat, the Palestine Liberation Organization chairman, was in exile in Tunis. When Arafat returned to Jericho in 1994, Rabbi Hirsch greeted him and soon after was chosen as his adviser on Jewish affairs. While Arafat lay in a coma for 13 days at a French hospital in 2004, Rabbi Hirsch led a delegation from Neturei Karta that prayed for him there. Arafat died on Nov. 11 that year.

“Neturei Karta opposes the so-called ‘State of Israel’ not because it operates secularly, but because the entire concept of a sovereign Jewish state is contrary to Jewish Law,” the organization’s Web site says.

“The true Jews are against dispossessing the Arabs of their land and homes,” it added. “According to the Torah, the land should be returned to them.”

Jonathan D. Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis, said that what made Rabbi Hirsch so controversial “was not just that he believed — as did some other rabbis of his day — that Jews should await the Messiah before establishing a Jewish state, but that he befriended someone like Arafat.”

Neturei Karta, he said, “represented a small fringe, but were very good at gaining publicity.”

Moshe Hirsch was born in Brooklyn in 1923. He received his rabbinical training at a yeshiva in Lakewood, N.J. He emigrated to Israel, but never became an Israeli citizen. He is survived by three children and a brother.

Hatem Abdel Qader, an adviser on Jerusalem affairs to the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, was quoted by The Associated Press as saying on Sunday: “We consider Rabbi Hirsch a part of the Palestinian people. He is one of the Palestinian Jews whom we give all respect, and this is to confirm that our problem is not with the Jews as a religion, it’s with Zionism.”

Turkish food, Arizona nativism

Just out of curiosity, I went into a grocery store called “Straight from the Market” on First Avenue and Ninety-First Street a week or so ago and was delighted to discover that it was a specialty store owned by Turks and featured goods like simit, a kind of Turkish bagel that is sold on the streets of Istanbul.

Meanwhile, the other night me and the wife went to Marmara, a new restaurant across the street that featured Turkish cuisine. It used to be called Benelli’s, an Italian joint, even though the owners were Turkish and the same people now running Marmara. They figured out that the market for Italian food was saturated. My wife, who is Turkish, generally has little use for Turkish restaurants in New York but was pleased with this one, especially the zucchini pancake called mucver (pronounced mujver) that was on the meze, or appetizer, section of the menu.

Now I don’t give a good god-damn if the people working in the grocery store or the restaurant were “legal” or not. They are not stealing jobs from anybody but helping to keep the cultural diversity of New York intact. For as long as I have lived in New York, this is one of the things that appeals to me most.

I love the fact that I can walk ten blocks north on 3^rd Avenue and enter Spanish Harlem with its rich variety of bodegas, Mexican tortilla stands and botanicas. Who in their right mind would want to pressure such people to speak English and open up McDonald’s?

In some ways New York strikes me as a modern-day version of the multi-ethnic cosmopolitan centers of the Ottoman Empire. Istanbul ruled over a vast empire but left people to their own devices as long as they provided tribute to the precapitalist ruling families. Columbia University’s Mark Mazower wrote a book in 2004 titled Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430-1950 that chronicled the lifestyle of an earlier version of New York. A review that appeared in the October 22, 2004 Independent noted:

Chronicled by Mazower with great erudition and impeccable research, it turns into a mental and moral feast. Salonica’s dramatic life grips us inexorably. We rub shoulders with a host of her peoples – Turks, Greeks, Jews, Macedonians, Slavs, Bulgars, Vlachs, Gypsies and Albanians – and learn about their religions, arts and cultures. We empathise with the terror unleashed by brigands, invaders and plagues. We feel the religious fervour of Greek martyrs, Sufi sheikhs, and the crypto-Jews, the followers of Sabbatai Zevi, “the false Messiah” who converted to Islam…Above all, as Mazower intends, by absorbing the “experiences of Christians, Jews and Muslims within the terms of a single encompassing historical narrative”, we snatch the much-needed hope that cultural and religious co-existence is possible.

That co-existence was generated by Ottoman rule. Today, when much of the Western world yields to Islamophobia, it is imperative to understand, as Mazower brings to light, that true Islam has been a model of tolerance, particularly towards other religions and their worshippers. That Turks, Greeks, Jews and many other Balkan peoples lived in peaceful co-existence for centuries was not an accident, but entirely the result of the tolerance prescribed in the Ottoman Empire’s persuasion of Islam – the Hanafi school of Sunni law.

Ironically, when Turkey became a modern state based on a nationalist ideology, all that was lost. It became illegal to speak Kurdish and the Armenians were annihilated.

At the risk of sounding like Woody Allen in “Annie Hall”, I take a very dim view of Arizona and most of the Southwest. As someone who lived in Houston for three years and witnessed the nativism there, I am not surprised that Texas is considering enacting copy-cat legislation that would turn Mexicans into unpersons.

One would think from the chatter emanating from the punditry that the state was forced to adopt such stringent legislation because of a crime wave that matched Medellin in the 1980s. The facts do not support such hysteria.

In 2008, Phoenix had a population of 1,585,838 and the total number of violent crimes was 659. Meanwhile Indianapolis had a population of 808,329 and reported 1204 violent crimes. So the issue does not seem to be crime per se but the perception that brown-skinned peoples are some kind of foreign body that has to be expelled, just like Jews in Germany in the 1930s.

In some ways, Phoenix is an apt symbol of American capitalism in decline. With its punctured real estate bubble and nostalgia for a white bread America that never really existed, it is the perfect spawning ground for ultraright movements. It is also a place whose long-term environmental sustainability is in doubt.

Arizona’s cities rely on water provided by the Colorado River that was dammed up in the 1930s as part of FDR’s shortsighted project to turn the Southwest into a commercial and industrial powerhouse. Back in 1986, environmentalist Mark Reisner wrote Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water that was turned into a documentary that can now be viewed on Youtube:

The Paul Berman-Ian Buruma feud

Paul Berman

Ian Buruma

Today’s NY Times has a review of The Flight of the Intellectuals, Paul Berman’s latest Islamophobic tirade:

Paul Berman’s new book, “The Flight of the Intellectuals,” plural, might as easily have been titled “The Flight of the Intellectual,” singular. It is essentially a booklong polemic against one magazine article: a profile of the Islamic philosopher Tariq Ramadan, written by Ian Buruma, the Dutch academic and journalist, and published in The New York Times Magazine in 2007.

While I doubt any of my readers would waste $26 dollars on Paul Berman’s trash, you can read the short version of the book, an article titled Who’s Afraid of Tariq Ramadan? that appeared in the June 4, 2007 The New Republic (TNR).  For those who are unfamiliar with the TNR, this is a magazine whose editor Martin Peretz defended the war in Iraq this way recently:

There were moments–long moments–during the Iraq war when I had my doubts. Even deep doubts. Frankly, I couldn’t quite imagine any venture like this in the Arab world turning out especially well. This is, you will say, my prejudice. But some prejudices are built on real facts, and history generally proves me right. Go ahead, prove me wrong.

The review of Berman’s book was quite sympathetic and situated it in the kind of debates that used to take place on the Old Left:

Mr. Berman’s book has already made some noise. Writing in Slate, Ron Rosenbaum compared its stinging ambience, nostalgic to some, to one of “those old Partisan Review smackdowns,” in which Dwight Macdonald or Mary McCarthy cracked some unsuspecting frenemy over the head with a bookcase and a tinkling highball glass. And for sure, everything about “The Flight of the Intellectuals” feels old school, from Mr. Berman’s tone (controlled, almost tantric, high dudgeon) to the spectacle of one respected man of the left pummeling another while the blood flows freely, and no one calls the police.

Of course, the idea that Berman or Buruma have anything to do with “the left” is nonsense. As should be obvious, Berman is a neoconservative like Christopher Hitchens who invokes “liberalism” in his Islamophobic rants. Their main goal—obvious to anybody operating outside of the rather narrow political framework of the NYT—is to attack the left.

But what about Buruma? From the violence of Berman’s attack, you’d think that he was another George Galloway and a prime candidate for MRZine. But nothing can be further from the truth. Ian Buruma, a Bard College professor, only appears soft on political Islam from the perspective of a full-bore racist like Berman.

On February 25, 2006 Buruma wrote a piece in the Guardian raising the question Can sexual inadequacy or deprivation turn angry young men into killers? It attempted, believe it or not, to explain Muslim violence in terms of not getting laid:

Sexual deprivation may be a factor in the current wave of suicidal violence, unleashed by the Palestinian cause as well as revolutionary Islamism. The tantalising prospect of having one’s pick of the loveliest virgins in paradise is deliberately dangled in front of young men trained for violent death.

I personally think it has more to do with IDF brutality and the theft of Palestinian land but what do I know. I’m no Bard College professor.

Only two years earlier, Buruma had teamed up with Princeton professor Avishai Margalit (I dealt with his argument that Stalin was much worse than Hitler here) to produce Occidentalism: A Short History of Anti-Westernism, a book that consciously seeks to undermine the arguments made by Edward Said in Orientalism. (I wrote a letter to Buruma about this analysis.) They see the Arab and Muslim world as seething with the kind of irrational attitudes that lead to jihadi violence. There’s little here, it would seem, to distinguish Buruma from Berman, whose Terror and Liberalism covers the same territory.

Indeed, writing about Berman’s book in the May 2003 New York Review, Buruma was generally positive:

There is, however, much to admire in Berman’s book too. As a general analysis of the various enemies of liberalism, and what ties them together, it is superb. All—Nazis, Islamists, Bolsheviks, Fascists, and so on—are linked by Berman to the “ur-myth” of the fall of Babylon. The decadent city-dwellers of Babylon, corrupted by luxury and poisoned by greed, infect the people of God with their wicked ways, even as the forces of Satan threaten the good people from afar. The people of God will only be freed from these abominations after a massive war of Armageddon, in which the city slickers and Satanic forces will be exterminated. A pure new world will rise from the burning ruins and “the people of God will live in purity, submissive to God.”

It would seem that this is just another case of cruise missile leftists having some kind of turf battle. George Packer, another cheerleader for Bush’s wars, wrote a nasty attack on Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War, a book written by Mark Danner, another Bard College professor noted for his gung-ho support for bombing the Serbs to oblivion. I discussed their feud here. All of these characters—Danner, Berman, Buruma, Hitchens, Packer—share a belief that the U.S. has the right to police the world and would regard anti-imperialism as an evil to be avoided at all costs.

Berman’s TNR article is filled with outrageous Islamophobic observations such as the following:

The Muslim emigration has turned out to be one of history’s largest events, and in scattered regions across the whole of Western Europe, old-stock populations nowadays wake up to discover that people from the Muslim world have suddenly come to dominate this or that neighborhood or town, and Arabic or Turkish has begun to outpace some of the smaller European languages, and here and there Islamist groups are demanding censorship of one thing or another, or are demanding gender-segregated beaches, or the curricular demise of Voltaire or Darwin, or an end to history instruction on the crimes of Nazism. And there are always sermons by one or another exotically costumed Islamic scholar fantasizing about a Muslim conquest of Europe and the world, which therefore can be cited as evidence of a giant conspiracy.

I should state to begin with that Berman does not document the charge about demanding an end to history instruction on the crimes of Nazism. The article is filled with such inflammatory and unsubstantiated allegations. With respect to exotically costumed Islamic scholars fantasizing about a Muslim conquest of Europe, you’d have to search far and wide for more offensive and racist prose.

The article also singles out “Trotskyists”, including the British SWP and the French LCR, for marching in antiwar demonstrations with Islamic radicals. Considering his support for a war that has cost the lives of nearly 2.5 percent of the Iraqi population according to Lancet (equivalent to 7.5 million American deaths), it is shocking to see him passing judgments on those who agreed mostly on the need for peace rather than how to interpret the Quran.

A January 2004 symposium in Slate Magazine invited Thomas Friedman, Christopher Hitchens, Fred Kaplan, George Packer, Kenneth Pollack, Jacob Weisberg, and Fareed Zakaria to revisit their support for the war in Iraq. Berman was as fanatical as he was at the outset, stating:

Sept. 11 did not come from a single Bad Guy—it was a product of the larger totalitarian wave, and the only proper response was to comprehend the size and depth of that larger wave, and find ways to begin rolling it back, militarily and otherwise—mostly otherwise. To roll it back for our own sake, and everyone else’s sake, Muslims’ especially. Iraq, with its somewhat antique variation of the Muslim totalitarian idea, was merely a place to begin, after Afghanistan, with its more modern variation.

Somewhere along the line, liberals began to step back from this kind of blood-curdling militarism. Packer and Friedman, for example, did a feeble mea culpa. Understanding that his credibility as a liberal pundit was at stake, Buruma began to retreat from the arguments made in Occidentalism. While not explicitly confessing that they were garbage, he began to distinguish himself from the kind of mouth-breathing racism that people like Hitchens and Berman typify.

He had the temerity to describe Tariq Ramadan in the following terms in the New York Times Magazine on February 4, 2007:

Ramadan’s favorite Muslim philosophers are the late-19th-century reformists Muhammad Abduh and Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, who tried to revive Islam under Western colonial rule by rational interpretation of the holy texts. They were skeptical of religious tradition, accumulated over time, and looked for core principles in the Koran that spoke to reason. For them there was no contradiction between scientific reasoning and their Muslim faith. And female emancipation or democratic government could be reconciled with the original principles of Islam. Both had lived in Europe. Both were harsh critics of colonialism and Western materialism. In Ramadan’s words, “They saw the need to resist the West, through Islam, while taking what was useful from it.”

Berman’s answer to this is to connect Ramadan to al-Qaeda through a kind of “six degrees of separation” logic:

Here, on page 26, is Hassan al-Banna; and Abul Ala Mawdudi from the South Asian subcontinent, whose activities Tariq’s father, Said Ramadan, coordinated with the Muslim Brotherhood; and Ali Shariati, Ayatollah Khomeini’s fellow thinker in Iran. And here is Sayyid Qutb, one more influential reformist among the others, listed without comment—even if Qutb’s legacy, in one of its offshoots, did lead to Al Qaeda.

I myself have little patience for this kind of amalgam-building, having seen the low-rent version from Michael Pugliese when he was on Marxmail briefly a decade ago.

But the proximate cause of Berman’s new book was Buruma’s treatment of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somalian émigré now ensconced at the American Enterprise Institute. In a review of Norman Podhoretz’s World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism that appeared in the September 27, 2007 New York Review, Buruma knocked Ali off her pedestal, although rather daintily:

Since she renounced her Muslim beliefs to become an atheist and a defender of “Enlightenment values” against Islam, she has been taken up by neocons and neoleftists as an iconic figure, described in The New Republic Online as “the most courageous and remarkable woman of our time.”

She is indeed a courageous and remarkable woman, whose skillfully ghostwritten memoir, Infidel, has attracted a great deal of attention. Her views on the oppression of women in the name of Islam are admirable, and I share her conviction that liberal democracy should be defended against violent intimidation. But atheists, especially after conversion from religious orthodoxy, tend to retain some of their old zeal. This rather limits Hirsi Ali’s influence over Muslims who are trying to find a place for their faith in a modern democracy. Dogmatism also leads to errors of judgment, for example when she recommends backing the Turkish military against the democratically elected Turkish government, just because it is led by an Islamic party. To point this out is not the same as placing her on the same moral or political level as the violent zealots she opposes. And it should not be a reason to denounce the critic as an implacable foe not only of Hirsi Ali herself, but of free speech, democracy, the Enlightenment, and so forth. Like Podhoretz’s description of the US press as pro-Islamic, such a conclusion can only be drawn by fanatics.

Buruma also took a swipe at Berman and his creepy co-thinkers:

Such tub-thumpers for Bush’s war as Christopher Hitchens, the Parisian writer Pascal Bruckner, and the American journalist Paul Berman would not describe themselves as neocons. On the contrary, in their view, they are just where the true left should be, the neoleft as it were. The revolution has moved on. In the words of Hitchens: “The United States has placed itself on the right side of history.” Or, as Dick Cheney once said about Bush to a neocon friend of mine: “Yup, he’s a revolutionary president.”

This prompted a letter to the NYR from Berman that included the following:

He mentions in his review Christopher Hitchens and Pascal Bruckner, and he links their names to mine, as if in further expression of his all-purpose loathing for Bush. Yet he might have shed a clarifying light on his own article by acknowledging that, among the many writers in the United States and especially in Europe who have uttered a few indignant words in Hirsi Ali’s defense, Hitchens and Bruckner have made themselves especially prominent. Pascal Bruckner’s name appears in The New York Review for one reason only, which is to punish him for having become the single most scathing and influential of Buruma’s European detractors.

Allow me to add that, regardless of his journalism, which I have not been reluctant to criticize, I continue to admire the book that Buruma wrote with Avishai Margalit, Occidentalism, the first sketch of which appeared in The New York Review [“Seeds of Revolution,” March 11, 2004]. Buruma and Margalit’s Occidentalism is a classic of the antitotalitarian left—an outstanding study of totalitarian and fascist ideas of the past and their enduring influence today.

Buruma answered Berman thusly:

What I wrote was not that Berman likes or admires George W. Bush. My point was that on the question whether it was right to go to war in Iraq to fight “Islamofacism,” in the name of Abraham Lincoln, I see no difference between the neocons and the neo-left. Indeed, Berman appears to agree with this, at least partly. He said in an on-line interview in March 2003:

I admire the neocons in one regard: their political ideas are very ambitious. I think the neocons are correct in supposing that something fundamental has gone wrong in the political culture of the Middle East, and that radical measures are required to set the wrong aright.

The question is what radical measures he had in mind. Here, too, there is no mystery. Arguing in Dissent magazine with an imaginary leftist opponent of the Iraq war, he wrote: “If only people like you would wake up, you would see that war against the radical Islamist and Baathist movements, in Afghanistan exactly as in Iraq, is war against fascism.”

There was, of course, in the case of Iraq, the matter of international law, something liberals, unlike neocons, have always taken seriously. But Berman wrote in the same article:

We have had to choose between supporting the war, or opposing it—supporting the war in the name of antifascism, or opposing it in the name of some kind of concept of international law. Antifascism without international law; or international law without antifascism. A miserable choice—but one does have to choose, unfortunately.

Yes, one does, unfortunately. And Berman’s choice was precisely the choice of President Bush and his neocon supporters. “On principle” it is easy to agree with Berman. The overthrow of Saddam Hussein is a fine thing. But how responsible is it to promote a war that is waged by a president who is as hopeless as Berman says he is? Berman proudly relates that he resisted telling the world “I told you so.” Told us what exactly? That this reckless war should never have been attempted?

Between Buruma and Berman, I’d have to give critical support to the former since he certainly qualifies as a “lesser evil”. Our business, of course, as leftists is to stick to our anti-imperialist principles and leave such feuding to the Upper West Side of Manhattan salons where it belongs.

May Day in Istanbul

Obama’s Katrina?

Barack Obama statement on April 2, 2010:

I don’t agree with the notion that we shouldn’t do anything. It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills. They are technologically very advanced. Even during Katrina, the spills didn’t come from the oil rigs, they came from the refineries onshore.

John McCain statement on June 17 2008:

As for offshore drilling, it’s safe enough these days that not even Hurricanes Katrina and Rita could cause significant spillage from the battered rigs off the coasts of New Orleans and Houston.

But according to the official report prepared for the US Government by a Norwegian firm:

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita Caused 124 Offshore Spills For A Total Of 743,700 Gallons. 554,400 gallons were crude oil and condensate from platforms, rigs and pipelines, and 189,000 gallons were refined products from platforms and rigs. [MMS, 1/22/07]

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita Caused Six Offshore Spills Of 42,000 Gallons Or Greater. The largest of these was 152,250 gallons, well over the 100,000 gallon threshhold considered a “major spill.” [MMS, 5/1/06]

If 100,000 gallons is considered a “major spill”, what are we to make of the discovery that the BP platform has been dumping 210,000 gallons per day since April 20? Furthermore, unlike the Exxon-Valdez this spill is impossible to quantify since the oil is coming from the ocean bottom rather than the innards of a ship.

Even at this late date, Obama has not backed off from the idea of offshore drilling as the McClatchy news service reported yesterday:

President Barack Obama on Friday appeared unwilling to scrap plans to expand oil and gas exploration, but promised that the administration will carefully study what mistakes led to the explosion of an oil drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico.

As is the case with just about every other Obama policy, his commitment to offshore drilling is portrayed as transcending traditional divides:

Ultimately, we need to move beyond the tired debates of the left and the right, between business leaders and environmentalists, between those who would claim drilling is a cure all and those who would claim it has no place. Because this issue is just too important to allow our progress to languish while we fight the same old battles over and over again.l

Not surprisingly, this very same speech proposed a renewed commitment to nuclear power. Despite his insistence on avoiding “tired debates”, Obama manages to repeat the same talking points as John McCain about Hurricane Katrina and oil spills. Looking back at the 2008 election, frightened liberals urged a vote for Obama since a McCain victory would amount to a 3^rd Bush term. If they had the capability to think honestly, they’d have to admit that this is what we got anyhow.

Like the slasher villain who refuses to die in a Halloween or Friday the Thirteenth movie, Halliburton turns up in this oil spill catastrophe. Not content to have ruined Iraq, this energy tools and technology company that Dick Cheney ran from 1995 to 2000 now appears ready to commit homicide on the U.S. itself as yesterday’s Wall Street Journal reports (the news section of the paper has not been completely tainted by Rupert Murdoch, the new owner, at least not yet.)

An oil-drilling procedure called cementing is coming under scrutiny as a possible cause of the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico that has led to one of the biggest oil spills in U.S. history, drilling experts said Thursday.

The process is supposed to prevent oil and natural gas from escaping by filling gaps between the outside of the well pipe and the inside of the hole bored into the ocean floor. Cement, pumped down the well from the drilling rig, is also used to plug wells after they have been abandoned or when drilling has finished but production hasn’t begun.

In the case of the Deepwater Horizon, workers had finished pumping cement to fill the space between the pipe and the sides of the hole and had begun temporarily plugging the well with cement; it isn’t known whether they had completed the plugging process before the blast.

Regulators have previously identified problems in the cementing process as a leading cause of well blowouts, in which oil and natural gas surge out of a well with explosive force. When cement develops cracks or doesn’t set properly, oil and gas can escape, ultimately flowing out of control. The gas is highly combustible and prone to ignite, as it appears to have done aboard the Deepwater Horizon, which was leased by BP PLC, the British oil giant.

Concerns about the cementing process—and about whether rigs have enough safeguards to prevent blowouts—raise questions about whether the industry can safely drill in deep water and whether regulators are up to the task of monitoring them.

The scrutiny on cementing will focus attention on Halliburton Co., the oilfield-services firm that was handling the cementing process on the rig, which burned and sank last week. The disaster, which killed 11, has left a gusher of oil streaming into the Gulf from a mile under the surface.

Federal officials declined to comment on their investigation, and Halliburton didn’t respond to questions from The Wall Street Journal.

British Petroleum, a European conglomerate that took advantage of American deregulation, owned the oilrig. They wanted to make bigger profits at the public’s expense just like that other scumbag corporation Goldman Sachs. In one case, you get a ruined environment and in the other ruined homeowners all for the sake of the almighty dollar.

Last night Mike Papantonio was a guest on the Ed Schultz show on MSNBC. He is an environmental attorney, lawyer whose firm has filed a class-action lawsuit in three states on behalf of the shrimpers, fisheries, oystermen and business owners. Here’s the exchange between host and guest that demonstrates the clash between social needs and private property:

SCHULTZ: Where`s the liability? Where`s the culpability here? What`s the call for the lawsuit?

PAPANTONIO: You nailed the story perfectly at the beginning of this program. Deepwater Horizon had two trip devices to use in blowout catastrophes. Both of them failed because of either human error or defect.

Now, here`s what people don`t know. BP didn`t want to spend the money for a system. It`s a fail-safe system, absolutely fail-safe. It`s a device system that`s used all over the world except in the United States, because we give them a free pass in the United States.

SCHULTZ: What system is that, Mike?

PAPANTONIO: The system`s called the acoustic switch system. It`s a relay system that blows out the bottom of the catastrophe. In other words, it stops the oil where it — exactly from the source.

Now, here`s what`s interesting. If BP has to do business in Norway, they have to use the switch. When they do it in the U.S., they don`t have to use it.

It happened because of this — during the Bush deregulation years, you had the Minerals Management Service that told companies like BP that, gee whiz, we have a new policy. It`s the closed-door Dick Cheney policy.

That Dick Cheney program allowed the industry to bypass safe systems like the acoustics switch, and there was no need to spend $500,000 with a company that was making $40 billion. It was a complete bypass of safety.

So is this Obama’s Katrina? Apparently the liberal apologists for this 3^rd Bush term president reject this notion, especially since the chief outlet for such a charge is Fox News, WABC talk radio, Matt Drudge and all the other rightwing shitheads who care little for the environment or the New Orleans poor.

Media Matters, a Democratic Party website funded by George Soros, takes pain to distinguish Obama from Bush by citing the federal response the day after the oilrig explosion:

April 21: Deputy Secretary of Interior, Coast Guard dispatched to region. An April 22 White House statement noted that following a briefing with President Obama, Department of Homeland Secretary Janet Napolitano, Admiral Thad Allen, United States Coast Guard Commandant, Department of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, EPA Deputy Administrator Bob Perciasepe, and FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate, “Deputy Secretary of the Interior David Hayes was dispatched to the region yesterday to assist with coordination and response.” The Coast Guard announced that four units were responding to the fire, with addition units en route.

While all this might be true, the real similarity between Katrina and the current disaster is that the two-party system—not individual presidents—bears the brunt of responsibility. In Katrina, you had faulty levees brought on by government neglect. With priorities set on destruction in Iraq, the government allowed levees, roads and bridges to become risks to humanity. It was understood by both parties that the fight to control oil in the Middle East meant much more to the future of capitalism than flooded homes in an African-American neighborhood.

That devotion to the needs of oil companies continues unabated. President Obama, just like the president who preceded him, sees the world in the same way as the men who run Exxon, BP, Chevron and all the rest. For most of the 20^th century and continuing into the 21^st century, wars between nations have often involved power grabs over oil resources. Some scholars explain the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as a response to an embargo on oil by the U.S.

Meanwhile confrontations with Iran threaten once more to let loose the dogs of war at the very same time that oil itself makes war on nature. Either the human race gets rid of capitalism, including its wasteful and destructive dependence on greenhouse emission fossil fuels, or the system will get rid of us.