How Deep Is Obama's Concern?

As ChallahHuAkbar points out, (and I also did in April) President Barack Obama has a semantic problem thst devolves into an matter of moral inequivalency.  And even worse.

He is deeply concerned (and see there for the references) about Jewish residency across the Green Line.  And he is deeply concerned about the Syrian regime killing its own citizens.  Do both of those situations carry the equal moral weight?

Now, I discussed previously the issue of "illegitimate" of Obama, and I think this linguistic framing for the two concerns illustartes either a paucity of speech or a viewpoint which needs be corrected.

Murdering defenceless human beings does not equal Jews exercising their legal right to live in the Jewish national homeland.

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Lars Von Trier, Albert Speer, Aesthetism and Talent

In reconsidering my post on the stupid, provocative Nazi remarks of the Dannish director, Lars Von Trier, which were described as

his fascination with the Nazi aesthetic

(the question he responded to was:

asked by a journalist to comment on the film’s “Gothic aspect,” his “interest in the Nazi aesthetic” and on his German roots...)

And yes, he has had a painful personal biography:

He did not discover until he was 33 that his non-religious Jewish father was not his biological father, who was in fact an artistic German – a revelation he learnt from his mother on her death bed. In a 2005 interview with signandsight.com, he revealed that his mother slept with the man because her husband had such ordinary genes. “If I'd known that my mother had this plan, I would have become something else,” he said. “I would have shown her. The slut!”

and Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgard thinks there was an overreaction:

Everybody knows he is not a Nazi so what are they punishing him for? Lying, saying he was a Nazi? Joking? Or what is it? It's a storm in a tea cup.

And someone else thinks

 it was a lousy attempt at humour that he tried to wriggle out of inelegantly

who proceeds to 'explain':

Given that the Nazi comment was a clumsy way of alluding to Germanic ancestry, and the “Israel is a pain in the ass” remark is a ham-fisted attempt of signalling an objection (that many others share) to a country’s foreign policy, then the bone of contention is Von Trier saying that he could sympathise with Hitler a bit.  But why wouldn’t we want him to? If we can’t make sense out of atrocious situations such as World War II then we’re highly unlikely to learn anything from them. In that regard there’s few people in the modern age better placed to shine a light on the scum-ridden underbelly of such proceedings than film-makers, drawing our attention to truths that we ought to know, even when we don’t immediately realise it ourselves.

But, of course, his "Israel is a pain in the ass" would seem to indicate a less-than-artisitic character, whether his opinion is shared or not. 

His attempt to worm his way out was almost 'heroic':

"I lived most of my life as a Jew. I wore a skullcap when I had to and laid stones on tombstones in cemeteries. My mother wasn't Jewish, but my father, or the man I thought was my father, was. But then I found out that my father wasn't my father and my real father was German."  He added, "And instead of saying I was actually German at the news conference on Wednesday, in my characteristic haste and because I couldn't stand the man who turned out to be my biological father, despite my mother's telling me he was charming, I said with a kind of typical Danish humor that most people don't understand that I was a Nazi. But I'm not."

Von Trier continued, "It was a stupid joke. But that's the kind of humor I use when I talk to my friends, who know me and know I'm not a Nazi. I apologize profoundly for offending people. It was not my intention. I've also offended Germans, when instead of saying 'German' I used the word 'Nazi,' as though every German is a Nazi."

However, we need acknowledge that his fascination lies somewhere very non-artistic:

I found out that I was really a Nazi which also gave me some pleasure.

Pleasure?

Lars, there are some things even an artistic gentleman cannot be permitted to joke about (and his porn remark was simple vulgar).  And lets not forget, the moderator attempted to save him, to stop his verbal vomit and call on another questioner but Lars continued because he really is a pervert.  His politics are really more important than his art.  Instead of having his art express his ideas, his ideas fulfill themselves in his art.

Yet, for him to say

I just want to say, about the art, I’m very much for Speer. Speer I liked, Albert Speer I liked. He wasn’t also maybe one of God’s best children, but he had some talent that it was possible for him to us

That he could promote an idea that Albert Speer was one of God's best children for his talent is what is really perverts.  For him to enable his mind to accept one 'good' value that negates an 'evil' value is what is wrong becuase there is no relatavism.  For sure no moral relativism and that is the curse of post-modernism which influences the hatred not only of Jews but Zionism as well.

Just like he can think Israel is a pain in the ass, so he is for me.

Richard Brody alternatively slams and praises while actually pinpointing a major problem:

Clearly, von Trier was actually trying to say something substantial and very personal...[his frivolity] should not be troubling to anyone that he claims to understand Hitler; it’s the job of artists to attempt to understand and enter into imaginative sympathy even with monsters...as for his taste for Speer, well, there are serious people who consider Leni Riefenstahl a major artist, too.

and finally gets to the issue:

What is offensive about von Trier’s remarks is his setting of Jews and Nazis in a binary opposition, as if they were two sides to an argument...and about disliking Jews for disliking Israel (I suppose he meant that he dislikes the policies of Israel). He approaches such traditional anti-Semitic tropes as if they were utterly normal, familiar, and funny, and he does so in a way that would be more or less unthinkable regarding other ethnic groups.

When von Trier says he’s “not Mel Gibson,” I suppose he means that he’s not in any way anti-Semitic, and there’s no reason to disbelieve him. The problem is that he treated anti-Semitism, the anti-Semitism of others, lightly. He spoke with grotesque insensitivity; he acted like a jerk.

Not a jerk but as someone who has osmossed what has become, in elitist cricles, normative subliminated anti-semitism. That's the danger.

Danger?

Worse. The empathy he provides as an entertainment icon who espouses an artistic approach to life, his joking was unforgivable.

The clip is here.

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Guess Who?

...naval forces fired missiles into southern ________ on Monday, aiming at what the _______________ called terrorist targets.

Residents reached by telephone said that three civilians were wounded, and that the only other casualties were three dead cows, one dead donkey and a partly destroyed house.

Okay, who did the firing at who?

Israel? at Gaza?

Naw.

Read again:-

American naval forces fired missiles into southern Somalia on Monday, aiming at what the Defense Department called terrorist targets.

Residents reached by telephone said that three civilians were wounded, and that the only other casualties were three dead cows, one dead donkey and a partly destroyed house.

Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman in Washington, said the target was a “known Al Qaeda terrorist.”

The missile strike was aimed at Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, a Kenyan born in 1979 who is wanted by the F.B.I. for questioning in the nearly simultaneous attacks in 2002 on a hotel in Mombasa, Kenya, and on an Israeli airliner taking off from there, said three American officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the strike.

An American military official said the naval attack on Monday was carried out with at least two Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from a submarine. The official said the missiles were believed to have hit their targets. Witnesses on the ground, though, described the attack differently.

“I did not know from where they were launched, but what I know is that they hit a house in this town,” said Muhammad Amin Abdullahi Osman, of Dhobley, a small town in southern Somalia near the Kenyan border.

A Rose By Any Other Name Might Smell Differently

Since the suicide bombing phenonemom has begun, yet again, I think we should review again selections from this apologia for it by Jacqueline Rose who teaches at Queen Mary, University of London. Her books include On Not Being Able to Sleep: Psychoanalysis and the Modern World and, most recently, The Question of Zion. This is from a few years back:-

All suicides kill other people. However isolated the moment, suicide is also always an act of cruelty. Anyone left behind after someone close to them commits, or even attempts, suicide is likely to spend much of the rest of their life wondering whether they themselves have, or should have, survived. Suicide is rarely the singular, definitive act it appears to be. The ego, Freud tells us, turns onto itself the hatred it feels towards the object. But the object is never spared. No one commits suicide, the psychoanalyst Karl Menninger wrote in 1933, unless they experience at once ‘the wish to die, the wish to kill, the wish to be killed’. You can die, but you can’t commit suicide, on your own.

Suicide bombing is most often considered a peculiarly monstrous, indeed inhuman aberration that cannot – or must not – be understood. When the Lib Dem MP Jenny Tonge observed, ‘If I had to live in that situation – and I say that advisedly – I might just consider becoming one myself,’ the Israeli Embassy responded with this statement: ‘We would not expect any human being – and surely not a British MP – to express an understanding of such atrocities.’

Tonge was sacked from her party’s front bench. We can be fairly sure that had she expressed similar understanding of the policy of targeted assassination, or extra-judicial killing, in response to suicide bombings, she would not today be out of a job. The wording she used – ‘If I had to’ – is crucial. She was not sympathising: she was trying to imagine what it was like to be a Palestinian in the Occupied Territories. (She condemned the bombings.)...But perhaps there is a logic here. If the case for war is weak – or non-existent – then the ugliness and guilt of war rise perilously close to the surface of the public mind: war, in Levin’s words, as murder and revenge. In which case, it helps to be able to point to something far worse, preferably from another culture or world, with which no reasonable human being could possibly identify...

Suicide bombing kills far fewer people than conventional warfare; the reactions it provokes must, therefore, reside somewhere other than in the number of the dead. It is, of course, feared as a weapon against which there appears to be no protection, and to which there is no viable response: targeted assassinations simply provoke further retaliation (and Israel’s security wall is already proving incapable of deterring attacks). The horror it inspires cannot, however, be explained in terms of the deliberate targeting of civilians: according to McNamara, 100,000 people were burnt to death at the end of the war in the Allied attack on Tokyo, and in On the Natural History of Destruction, W.G. Sebald describes the ten thousand tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs dropped on the densely populated residential areas of Hamburg in the summer of 1943.

The horror would appear to be associated with the fact that the attacker also dies. Dropping cluster bombs from the air is not only less repugnant: it is somehow deemed, by Western leaders at least, to be morally superior. Why dying with your victim should be seen as a greater sin than saving yourself is unclear. Perhaps, then, the revulsion stems partly from the unbearable intimacy shared in their final moments by the suicide bomber and her or his victims. Suicide bombing is an act of passionate identification – you take the enemy with you in a deadly embrace. As Israel becomes a fortress state and the Palestinians are shut into their enclaves, and there is less and less possibility of contact between the two sides, suicide bombing might be the closest they can get...

...There is one thing that nobody will disagree with: the story of suicide bombing is a story of people driven to extremes. ‘Children who have seen so much inhumanity,’ El-Sarraj states, ‘inevitably come out with inhuman responses.’ We need to find a language that will allow us to recognise why, in a world of inequality and injustice, people are driven to do things that we hate. Without claiming to know too much. Without condescension.

Another Precedent

A formal decree published in Tunisia’s official register indicated that Suha Arafat, the widow of the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat, had lost her citizenship. No explanation was provided. Mrs. Arafat, 44, who was born in Jerusalem, became a naturalized Tunisian last year. News reports suggested she had moved on to Malta. She had lived in Tunisia since Mr. Arafat’s death in 2004.

Now, if Arabs can shell refugee camps and now do this, why can't Israel...oh, right, Israel can't do things like that because..., er, well, umm, yes, we're Jewish and we're not allowed to act like other people.

Health Disaster

Haaretz reports:

21:13 Oxfam Int`l Director: Closure of Gaza crossing could cause health disaster (Reuters)

Here's the quotation from Reuters:-

Oxfam International Director Jeremy Hobbs said Karni's closure could cause a health disaster by preventing companies from bringing in water treatment equipment and chemicals.

Funny, and here I thought that Qassam rockets were a health disaster but was their a similar outcry from the world's charities and human rights groups?