Madrid: Not a Real Football Team

Posted on July 25, 2005 by Tony

becks

It could be considered a little pathetic for ostensible superclub Real Madrid to be humiliated 3-0 by no-hopers Tokyo Verdy (losers even in the not exactly world-class Japanese league), but that would be missing the point. As Real coach Vanderlei Luxemburgo so helpfully explained after the match, “Real Madrid want to win things but we also have to think of business.”

Indeed, it’s hard to imagine that the erstwhile favorites of General Franco have been thinking of much else the past couple of years. The team is not picked by the coach, but by the chairman, who with an eye on the marketing concerns insists that none of his “galacticos” (superstar signings) can be dropped if they’re not delivering on the pitch — why do you think Ronaldo got fat? And anyone trying to fathom why on Earth they would spend so much money on David Beckham now has an answer. Beckham, of course, is a rather useful player on the right side of any midfield, a great crosser of the ball and a handy ability to score from free kicks. Useful, handy, committed. But not especially gifted, and not quite a world-class player in the tradition of other Real acquisitions such as Zidane, Figo, Ronaldo or Roberto Carlos. The special quality Real saw in Beckham, as many of us noted at the time, was his iconic status; his ability to sell replica shirts to Asian teenagers, to put it bluntly. (His first outing for Real was a promotional tour of China.) Acquiring Beckham was not about adding a dimension to Real’s game; it was about adding a dimension to its marketing strategy.

New evidence of the obvious comes in the form of what Real’s estimable chairman Florentino Perez recently described as the club’s “groundbreaking project”: Real, the Movie, recently previewed at Cannes.

The movie appears to make clear that Beckham’s role is not to ping over crosses for Ronaldo and Raul, but to grace the walls, in poster form, of starstruck Japanese teens. (In the movie, apparently, his fantasy role in one teenager’s life has her boyfriend threatening to break off their relationship. Well in, Becks!)

And I can’t hide my glee by the fact that a real football club, Barcelona FC, ensured that Real’s collection of aging “galacticos” (as they dub superstars like Beckham) once again finished the season empty-handed. Barcelona were inspired, of course, by the favela-fabulous bucktoothed Brazilian midfield wonder Ronaldinho. And the irony is that Real are widely reported to have passed up the opportunity to sign the player generally acknowledged right now as the best in the world because he was “too ugly” for their marketing purposes. Indeed, as Coach Luxemburgo put it, “Real Madrid want to win things but we also have to think of business.”

Posted in Glancing Headers | 11 Comments

Sharon’s Gaza Initiative

Posted on July 22, 2005 by Tony

gaza
Sharon’s planned “disengagement” from Gaza is not connected to any peace process, not even President Bush’s “roadmap” which Sharon has made clear may or may not eventually go into effect – but only after the Palestinian Authority dismantles the militias of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Fatah movement. In other words, not for the foreseeable future. But the plan is, nonetheless, part of a political offensive by Sharon to decisively reorder the battlefield of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which will likely have profound consequences for all parties to that conflict.

The plan, in short, involves withdrawing the 9,000 Israeli settlers from amid the 1 million Palestinians that live in the expanded refugee camp that is Gaza (for a vivid look at the distribution of land and population density, try this link to Google’s awesome satellite pic that you can actually manipulate), and also — supposedly, although this dimension will only be imlemented later (if at all) — from four isolated northern West Bank settlements. But its impact on the political map can’t be understood without understanding its intimate connection to the wall being built by Sharon to pen the Palestinians into a couple of West Bank enclaves, and cement Israel’s grip on its prime West Bank settlements and East Jerusalem. And Sharon has made abundantly clear to Washington that in exchange for quitting Gaza, he expected (and was given, albeit with the proviso that he eventually get Palestinian acquiescence) U.S. support for his intention to annex the West Bank land he most covets

The idea that the “disengagement” might restart some sort of peace process with the Palestinians has been touted mostly by U.S. and British politicians whose abilities to pursue their goals in the wider Middle East and wage an effective political campaign against al Qaeda are hobbled by the absence of progress on that front. It also has the backing of the Israeli opposition, which believes that while Sharon may have no intention of doing anything more than adjusting Israel’s tactical perimeter, by breaking the psychological taboo on uprooting settlements he may inadvertently set in motion a train of events beyond his control. (According to this logic, the pullout revives the peace process not if Sharon succeeds in what he’s trying to do, but only if he fails to maintain control over it – Israeli doves are not so naïve as to believe the rather brittle spin about Sharon being “a changed man.”)

And, of course, the Palestinian Authority are supporting it in the hope that if it proceeds smoothly, they can revive U.S. interest in pressing Sharon to resume the “final status” negotiations over a Palestinian state, including the fate of Jerusalem and the refugees, negotiations that began at Camp David in 2000. Needless to say, Sharon expects a very different outcome. He rejected the deal offered by Barak at Camp David far more vehemently than Arafat did, and has proved himself to be Oslo’s most effective critic. Oslo, to put it bluntly, is dead. That’s why Sharon felt at liberty to launch his disengagement plan — to keep it buried.

Bush, Blair, Mahmoud Abbas and Shimon Peres may like to think in terms of “after Gaza,” but for Sharon, there is no after Gaza. After Gaza, to use the Hebrew, “ze hu.” (That’s it.) Frankly, I’ll be surprise if he even gets as far as uprooting those four West Bank outposts.

It must be remembered that Sharon adopted the “disengagement” plan when Yasser Arafat was still in charge of the Palestinian Authority. It was conceived as a way of bypassing any international pressure to resume political negotiations with the Palestinians, redrawing the political map in ways calculated to neutralize U.S. pressure to continue any version of the Oslo process, and most importantly, to create a security, political and diplomatic environment favorable to reinforcing Israel’s long-term occupation of East Jerusalem and its most prized settlements in the West Bank.

Sharon described his plan as “a harsh blow to Palestinian dreams” and aspirations, rather than any movement towards fulfilling them. And his top political aide Dov Weisglass fleshed out the strategic rationale in an an interview with Haaretz, in which he explained that the “disengagement” was designed to “freeze,” rather than activate, the roadmap. The plan, said Weissglass, “supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.” By pulling out of Gaza and unilaterally redrawing the boundaries, Weisglass said, “you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem.” From the horse’s mouth.


On Sharon’s Wall:
Zeev Jabotinsky

Sharon has never advocated a two-state solution, at least in the way that anyone else understands the concept. He believes a political solution to end the conflict is simply not possible for the foreseeable future, and Israel instead must pursue the “Iron Wall” politics of Zeev (nee Vladimir) Jabotinsky, the moving spirit of the Betar movement of which the Likud Party forms part. (A portrait of Jabotinsky graces Sharon’s office in the way that an American president might display Washington or Lincoln, the the prime minister has come closer than any other Israeli leader to physically realizing Jabotinsky’s vision of an iron barrier that crushes Arab resistance and forces eventual acceptance of Israel.) To that end, he’s focused on achieving interim agreements based on his tactical reading of Israel’s best interests in changing circumstances. Anyone inclined to believe the “changed man” fantasy ought to re-read the interview he gave to Haaretz in April 2001, a month after taking office. (Republished here)

Don’t misread Sharon: He may be the political “father” of the settlement movement, but by adoption rather than by lineage. Although he long ago recognized the usefulness to his “iron wall” politics of the the bizarre Messianic fantasy that drives the religious-nationalist settlers, who insist that Jewish possession of the Biblical Land of Israel is a precondition for the Messiah’s arrival, Sharon has never had his political ideas dictated by religious absolutes. His own vision derives from the Betar movement’s idea of an expanded Israel rather than a misguided prophetic notion of “redeeming” the land to hasten the Messiah’s journey. He has stoked the settlers’ millenarian zeal over the years for political gain — for example, meeting settlers while then PM Bibi Netanyahu was at the Wye River talks in 1998 and urging them to “run, grab hills” — but at the end of the day, he’s a secular nationalist capable of compromise in order to cement his grip on the core prize. Of course, his “betrayal” in the eyes of the settlers may come back to haunt him, but if ceding Gaza is what it takes to cement Israel’s grip on the key West Bank territories seized in 1967, then it’s worth the price.

Of course, Jabotinsky dealt with “Arabs” in the abstract; Sharon confronts the reality of a Palestinian national movement created to pursue historic redress for their displacement as a people to make way for the State of Israel. And so, the fulcrum of Sharon’s strategy, as brilliantly analyzed by Robert Malley and Hassan Agha in the NYRB last year shortly before Arafat’s death is to destroy Palestinian nationalism, and the very idea of a Palestinian national movement (the premise of Oslo, obviously, had been the recognition that peace could come only between Israel and the Palestinian national movement in the form of the PLO, which signed the Oslo treaty). When it comes to dealing with the Palestinians, in Sharon’s mind, the preferred politics is local. Cutting deals with local warlords, making interim arrangements, even negotiating more ambitious steps with Washington, but never, never being put in a position again, as at Camp David, where Israel was compelled to discuss issues such as Jerusalem and borders with the leadership of the Palestinian national movement.

That is the logic behind the Gaza pullout – to cede unimportant land and feint in the direction of accommodating demands for Palestinian statehood, while actually reinforcing Israel’s grip on its prized West Bank holdings – Sharon even got Bush to substantially alter U.S. public policy by signing a letter recognizing Israel’s claim to hold onto most of its West Bank settlements. And even as he proceeds with his pullout plans, Sharon is expanding West Bank settlements, tightening Israel’s exclusive grip on Jerusalem and promising West Bank settlers they will remain eternally part of Israel, connected territorially and that their settlements will be expanded. And this while Condi Rice is in town — the message is for her, as well.

The furor on the Israeli side over the pullout plan — signaling a rupture between the Messianic fantasy of the settlers and the realpolitik of secular nationalist statecraft — may trouble Sharon in the near term (and has raised fears for his life among his security staff). It potentially also signals the expansion of a deep ideological rift at the heart of Zionism, where the very nature and purpose of the Jewish State begins to irrevocably divide its citizens.

But the expected tumult of the coming weeks also works to Sharon’s advantage. The more sober heads in the Settler leadership are looking to make the Gaza withdrawal as traumatic as possible in order to make further retreats in the West Bank unthinkable, and in doing so they reinforce Sharon’s own inclination to do the same, by telling Washington that any further withdrawals are politically impossible — a position to which he may be able to rally considerable lobbying power in the U.S. if the Gaza action raises the specter of an Israel whose citizenry is fatally divided against itself.

And, of course, Sharon’s petty rivals such as the infinitely ambitious Netanyahu will use such discord as ammunition to pursue their own efforts to oust him.

On the Palestinian side, the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza may, ironically, precipitate the collapse of the Palestinian Authority — increasingly moribund since the death of the Oslo process that was its raison d’etre — and provoke a profound crisis in the Palestinian national movement.


Lame duck: Abbas the inheritor

The collapse of Oslo may have left the PA an increasingly redundant institution for pursuing Palestinian aspirations, being a “government” for a state that does not exist right now, nor will it in the near future. But Abbas is fortunate that keeping it going remains essential to U.S. goals — principally the need to be able to show progress on the Israeli-Palestinian front to an increasingly hostile Arab world. And Abbas and the survivors of the “Tunis” generation of exiles believes they can revive Oslo from the grave by delivering “calm,” ending the intifadah and folding Hamas into the Paletinian political mainstream by inducting its militants into the security forces and allowing it to contest democratic elections.

Although the “roadmap,” drawn up largely under Israeli influence, requires that Abbas dismantle the independent military capability of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Fatah faction, Abbas knows that can be achieved only by negotiation and consensus among those groups — plainly put, he’d lose a civil war if he chose to fight them.

Indeed, Abbas is essentially a lame duck — as Sharon is happy to point out, so as to avoid any expectation that he might be expected to engage in political negotiations with the man after quitting Gaza. Abbas won the election to replace Arafat only because Marwan Barghouti was persuaded to drop out – the most respected Palestinian polling organization found that the imprisoned Fatah militant leader would have beaten Abbas by about 4 percentage points if he’d stayed in. In other words, Abbas was allowed to assume the presidency at the pleasure of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, whose leaders had prevailed on Barghouti to withdraw.

Abbas has no independent political base, and his own strategy, again well documented by Malley and Agha, was to revive the diplomatic track that disappeared after the onset of the intifadah by delivering calm and an end to terror attacks from the Palestinian side. Well aware of the limitations of his power – it’s an open secret in the West Bank and Gaza that many of the rank and file soldiers and policemen of the security services are also the very same people who moonlight as combatants of the militia groups – Abbas has sought to build consensus with the militants for a cease-fire with Israel, on the basis that he would secure major prisoner releases, Israel would curb its attacks and elections would proceed. But Hamas, in particular, has its own counter agenda, needing to make the Israeli pullout take place under fire in order to be able to claim the credit for “driving” Israel out. And the long history of tit-for-tat bloodletting between Israel and Hamas meant that any cease-fire was going to be brittle — each side had plenty of “retaliation” arguments to offer for any new attack. Coupled with that, the prisoner releases were small and of limited symbolic value. And then, fearful of losing control (Hamas was expected to do well at Fatah’s expense, particularly in Gaza), Fatah persuaded Abbas to simply postpone the elections until the end of the year. One can only imagine the furor if Arafat had postponed democratic elections simply because his party might lose, but Washington was quite comfortable with Abbas doing just that.

And so, the infighting is intensifying. Mindful of Washington’s own interests, Condi Rice has pushed Sharon to coordinate the withdrawal with Abbas and make it look like a peace plan at work, but so far those efforts have been disastrous. Sharon has little interest in propping up Abbas, instead lecturing him on his obligations to attack Hamas and publicly expressing his doubts that Abbas will be any more useful as a Palestinian partner (and gendarme) than Arafat was. If the “disengagement” were part of a peace process, Sharon would be looking to build up Abbas; instead, the Israeli leader appears to content to let him flounder, knowing that if Abbas fails, he simply reasserts the notion — accepted by the Bush administration in the Arafat years — that “there is no partner” on the Palestinian side, and that Israel should therefore be under no obligation to negotiate.

Abbas now finds himself caught between Sharon and Hamas, both of whom have their own political reasons for escalating confrontation with the other (both, essentially, to look tough in the eys of their constituencies) and both may even share an interest in weakening Abbas — Sharon certainly doesn’t want any talk of political negotiations after Gaza, and Hamas wants a greater share of control over Gaza than Abbas is willing to concede. Ironically, Sharon and Hamas also share the belief that a peace settlement is not possible between Israel and the Palestinians for the foreseeable future, preferring to think in terms of interim arrangements.

So what’s going to happen? A period of chaos, more than likely. The settlers will clash with the Israeli police, and will also probably attack Palestinian civilians in the hope of provoking a response by Hamas and others, which will force the Israeli army to escalate its own actions in Gaza and, the settlers hope, scupper or delay the withdrawal. Even without the provocation of settler attacks, Hamas will continue firing mortars and rockets into the settlements in the hope of making themselves look like Hezbollah, credited throughout the Middle East as the only Arab army ever to have forced Israel to retreat. But Abbas can’t allow that because it makes nonsense of his efforts to sell Washington on a new negotiation process, so there’ll potentially be increasing confrontations between Hamas militants and PA security forces. Abbas is hoping that the withdrawal will deliver tangible gains that will translate into political support for his Fatah movement, but it’s just as likely, if not more so, that the events surrounding the pullout will actually strengthen support for Hamas by the time the elections are held in December or January.

More importantly, however, Sharon knows that the chaos that follows the pullout will create a new reality that will dominate the headlines and the discussions between the U.S. and Israel and the Palestinians — indeed, even among the Palestinians themselves. Haaretz columnist Daniel Levy calls this strategy “After Gaza, More Gaza,” with the idea of further pullouts or political negotiations once again deferred to another era. Problem for Abbas, of course, is that his position is only viable to the extent that he’s able to revive a political process towards a two state solution. Neither he, nor any other Palestinian leader, has much interest in simply administering Gaza and two Bantustan-like enclaves in the West Bank.

At this point, the crisis in the Palestinian national movement becomes acute, and the likelihood is that leadership passes to a new generation (even if via the interim stewardship of the exiled Fatah rejectionist Farouk Khadoumi), with Hamas joining Fatah in a new PLO federation. But attainment of their national goals will once again be deferred by years, or even decades. Israel will have left behind a chaotic Gaza, but frozen the current lines of occupation in the West Bank. The basic motive forces of the conflict will not be altered by the Gaza “disengagement, but the prospects for resolving it on the basis of a separate, sovereign Palestinian state are beginning to look increasingly remote.

Posted in Featured Analysis, Situation Report | 8 Comments

Free Mandela (From the Prison of Fantasy)!

Posted on July 20, 2005 by Tony

Monday was Nelson Mandela’s 87th birthday, and on these shores, I sometimes feel he’s in need of rescuing, trapped in some pretty bizarre narratives that have nothing to do with his own story or politics. Full disclosure: I freely admit that Nelson Mandela is the only politician for whom I’ve ever voted; that I celebrate him as a moral giant of our age, and that I proclaimed him my leader (usually at the top of my tuneless voice, in badly sung Xhosa songs) during my decade in the liberation movement in South Africa. That maybe why the “Mandela” I’ve encountered in so much American mythology is so unrecognizable. Herewith, the three most egregious versions:

Mythical Mandela #1: “Like Gandhi, Martlin Luther King and Nelson Mandela…”

How many times haven’t you heard that phrase to describe some politician, somewhere, opting for pacificism in the face of a nasty regime. Don’t take it from me, try a google search on that exact phrase.

I understand the compulson to link figures of great moral authority, but this is a little misleading. Nelson Mandela was never a pacifist. When the Ghandi route of non-violent civil disobedience brought only violence from the state, Mandela declared “The time comes in the life of any nation when there remain only two choices – submit or fight.That time has now come to South Africa. We shall not submit and we have no choice but to hit back by all means in our power in defence of our people, our future, and our freedom”


He played a leading role in setting up the ANC’s guerrilla wing, and traveled abroad to gather support, even undergoing guerrilla training himself in Algeria, from the commanders of the FLN who had recently ejected the French colonials.

Mandela was no terrorist, however: Under his leadership, the movement’s armed wing targeted symbols and structures of minority rule, and combatants of its security forces; never white civilians or any other non-combatants. And most importantly, he saw it as always, immediately and ultimately, subordinated to the political leadership.

In these beliefs he remained consistent and proud. Even as the mass non-violent opposition reasserted itself, under ANC guidance, in the 1980s, he reiterated its connection with the armed wing, writing in a smuggled message from prison that “between the hammer of armed struggle and the anvil of united mass action, the enemy will be crushed.” (Of course it didn’t ever work that way– the armed struggle was never particularly effective, and mass action combined with international sanctions did more to topple the regime.) And he, like the rest of the movement’s leadership, never hesitated to take the opportunity to find a political solution for the greatest benefit of all South Africans — but that was the same spirit with which he’d embarked on his armed struggle, telling the court, “During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

Mandela and his organization suspended the armed struggle only once the apartheid regime conceded to democracy. He was no pacifist; on the contrary, he never hesitated to pick up arms when he perceived his people were confronted with the choice between submission to tyranny and armed resistance. But nor was he a militarist: He never hesitated to take the political path when that presented itself. And in that example, he has much to teach the world.

Myth #2: The “Mandela Miracle”

Google Mandela and Miracle together, and there are at least 86,000 citations. This idea has entered American shorthand as follows: South Africa would have exploded in a racial war, and white people would have been driven into the sea, had it not been for the “miraculous” generosity of spirit of Nelson Mandela, who supposedly restrained the vengeful hordes.

Oy, where to begin?

The assumption that black people would seek violent revenge for the violence they had suffered at the hands of white people is pretty racist. (Remember Gandhi’s arch put-down when asked by a journalist what he thought of Western civilization: “That would be a fine idea,” or words to that effect.)

But let’s not even go there. This myth ignores the political culture of the ANC, of which Mandela helped form, and which also formed him, and was never dependent on his own, or any other individual’s strength of character. The basic political architecture of the process of reconciliation always inscribed the internal politics of the ANC which was always a non-racial movement that had substantial white membership, and whose policies distinguished between white minority rule and white people. It would be remiss of any historian to understate the role of the South African Communist Party in nurturing this culture. I’ve written some pretty nasty things about the SACP in the past, but nobody can deny that not only were they the first, and for a long time the only organization in South Africa advocating black majority rule; inside the ANC they played the leading role in shaping the analysis and strategy based on non-racialism and drawing whites into the struggle against colonial-style minority rule. When some angry youths who had left to join the guerrilla forces wanted to respond to the regime’s rampant bloodletting in the townships in the 1980s by targeting white civilians with terror strikes, it was the communists — led by Chris Hani, the commander of the ANC’s military wing and later leader of the SACP, who walked the ANC back from the brink.

And, paradoxical as it may sound, it was the Leninist realpolitik of the ANC’s communist intellectuals that led the movement to embrace the path of a negotiated, compromise solution with negligible “rejectionist” backlash.

Of course communist discourse had a downside: I remember cringing when freed Robben Island prisoners would tell me things like “In Moscow, comrade, when you come out of the subway, there’s just piles of fruit there, really good fruit, and it’s just there for anyone to take, free, for everyone…” And I nearly fell off my chair when reading a statement Mandela released to the media in Cape Town from prison late in 1989 proclaiming German reunification such a spectacularly bad idea that if released from prison, he would personally fly to Germany to try and stop it. Uh, let’s just say he was a product of a different age, shall we?

But the broader point here is that it was not some epiphany on the part of Nelson Mandela that led South Africa to its inspiring outcome. There were no angry hordes baying for revenge. Everyone understood what freedom meant, and it had nothing to do with revenge. To imagine otherwise is to insult the millions of ordinary South Africans who struggled and sacrificed to free Mandela, and bring him to power.

Myth #3 Marcus, Malcolm, Mandela and Me — It’s a Black Thing, You Wouldn’t Understand


Action Man

When I first saw that on a T-shirt being sold in Chinatown in 1991, I laughed out loud. (And actually, when watching Spike Lee’s Malcolm X movie at ANC fundraising premiere in Cape Town, I’ll never forget how the audience of Mandela loyalists erupted in raucous laughter when their good-natured leader appeared in the final “Spartacus” scene, intoning “I am Malcolm X.” The implication that their leader was inspired by a figure entirely unknown in South African liberation movement discourse was pretty funny.)

Louis Farrakhan was probably a little surprised when he visited South Africa in 1995, and received a verbal dressing down from Mandela over his separatist politics.

My own favorite encounter with the Marcus-Malcolm-Mandela myth came one night in 1997, at a media party where I was chatting with a well known hip-hop scribe and his girlfriend, who ended up giving me a ride home in their rented limo. I should have known trouble was coming when girlfriend said to me “So, what was it like coming to America and meeting FREE black people?” I told her that I had worked in the struggle, and although the black people I met there were viciously oppressed by a colonial regime, their minds were always free.

But the scribe and his girlfriend simply could not accept that I, a white boy — a Jew, to boot — had been in the ANC. “Mandela didn’t work with white people,” he insisted. Uh, actually, of the eight men on trial with Mandela in 1964, three were white (all of them Jewish, actually). By the time the regime fell, there were thousands of whites in the broad liberation movement led by the ANC. A minority of the white community, to be sure, but a consistent presence in the ANC. Neil Aggett was killed in security police detention, just like Steve Biko. David Webster was murdered by a police assassin, just like Matthew Goniwe. Of course the vast majority of the people waging the struggle and bearing its sacrifices were black. But there were always a handful of whites alongside them. And so I went on, but none of this was making any impression.

Finally, the limo driver turned around, exasperated. He was Palestinian, he informed us. From Ramallah, where he’d been active in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a leftist faction of the PLO. “And we always had Israeli Jews in our organization,” he said. “Not many, but always a few. Because we were against Zionism, not against Jews.”

And so it went on. The South African Jew and the Palestinian leftist trying, in vain, to explain Mandela’s basic non-racialism to the hip-hop philosopher who preferred the Mandela of his own fantasies. Only in New York.

Posted in The Whole World's Africa | 158 Comments

London and After: What al-Qaeda Fears

Posted on July 14, 2005 by Tony

Five Thoughts on the London bombing

1.
God, I love the Brits!


Prescient? ‘My Son the Fanatic’

Their collective response to the London bombings is infinitely courageous, infinitely dignified, unflappable, sober, inherently collective, and educated and worldly in their assessment of the event, its meaning and the necessary response. Listening to the BBC all day that day, the word I heard most often from officials and commoners was “sensible.” Britain needed a sensible response. Of course it does, and the implications of that word being so heavily in play were pretty obvious. The broader circumstances against which the London attacks occurred remind us that what we’ve seen since 9/11 has, in fact, has been anything but sensible.

Questions about whether the effect on Blair will be similar to the effect of Madrid on Aznar are facile: It didn’t take a bombing wave to convince the Brits that Blair’s support for the Iraq war has been a disaster, and they punished him for it at the polls a few months back. (If he’d been a Tory, he’d be gone.)

The British public is plainly far too sensible to let the bombing change its view on Blair in either direction.

Meanwhile, if all those young second generation Pakistani immigrants from Yorkshire commenting on the fact that four of their peers became suicide terrorists, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d seen this all before. You might well have, in the dark comedy My Son the Fanatic, based on a story by Hanif Kureishi, about an immigrant father whose second-generation son turns Taliban on him. (And to understand all those Pakistani-British kids in Yorkshire with the Geoff Boycott accents who can’t understand why anyone from their neighborhood would want to blow up the London tube, you could also rent East is East.

2.
Homegrown Jihad: A Tactical Miscalculation?
British Intelligence believes there are as many as 15,000 Qaeda supporters in Britain. Interesting thing is that while they’ve been busily recruiting for Iraq and other foreign projects, they haven’t until now launched attacks in Britain itself despite calls by Bin Laden and others to “punish” Britain for its role Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s not hard to imagine why: Presumably they’ve seen more benefit in channeling the energies of British jihadis outside of Britain, than drawing the wrath not only of the authorities, but also presumably of much of the British Muslim community by striking on home turf. It’s not hard to imagine that many in that community would be sufficiently angered by what Bush and Blair have done in Iraq to sanction recruitment and fundraising for jihadist activities in Iraq and elsewhere abroad, but when those elements start blowing up subway trains in London, the equation may change even for many British Muslims who see the “jihad” option as legitimate in Iraq or Afghanistan. I’d hazard a guess that the four men who blew away so many innocents in London are going to get a lot less support and respect in their own communities than if they’d been killed fighting in Iraq. Terrorism is the use of spectacular violence in pursuit of political ends, and the analysis of its impact must proceed, first and foremost, from the question of how it transformed the political landscape. While “punishing” Britain may be an emotionally satisfying action for Qaeda supporters around the globe, in Britain itself — which appears to have been a major recruiting ground — it could actually prove to be a self-inflicted setback. Indeed, some British Muslim groups that might share al Qaeda’s dim view of U.S. and British actions throughout the Middle East have nonetheless unequivocally condemned the London bombings, as have Hamas, Hizbollah and scores of likeminded Muslim groups.

3.
Chronicle of a tragedy foretold
Britons know exactly why the bombing occurred — they’ve literally been expecting it — and aren’t likely to get mired in hours of discussion on “why they hate us.” They know full well that there’s plenty that could have been done in the wake of 9/11 to transform the political climate in the Arab and Muslim world in ways that would isolate the Qaeda types and dim their appeal. Instead, the exact opposite has been done, and the U.S. has behaved in ways that have actually burnished al Qaeda’s appeal. And the Brits new full well that there would be a price to pay. They tried from the outset to impress on Bush the sheer folly of trying to fight al-Qaeda and its influence while leaving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict festering. Instead, Bush (to the alarm of the Brits) backed Sharon to the hilt and gave him the green light to bypass any peace process, instead pursuing his own unilateral tactical adjustments such as the current Gaza plan. Like it or not, the Israeli-Palestinian issue remains the single most important prism through which the Muslim world reads U.S. bona fides. The Bush administration’s failure to march Sharon along the road to a solution based on the 1967 borders almost precluded success on the political front in the “war on terror.” And on top of that came the Iraq invasion, which Britain’s foremost security experts believe has been the single greatest boon to al Qaeda, with additional booster shots in the form of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and similar scandals. Leaving Iraq won’t disarm or demobilize al Qaeda. But that doesn’t detract from the fact that going in in the first place has done Bin Laden’s movement more good than harm. Perhaps Britain’s suffering will give London more weight in the transatlantic discussion. But don’t hold your breath.

4.
What al Qaeda Wants
The “Al Qaeda” idea is not simply a nihilistic negation of Western ideas and modernity. It presents itself to its followers as the organizing principle of a broad insurgency designed to drive Western influence out of Arab and Muslim lands. That influence and presence is blamed not only for the continued humiliation of the Palestinians and more recent offences such as the occupation of Iraq, but very importantly it is seen as the reason local Islamist groups are unable to topple the authoritarian “apostate” regimes in places like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. Bin Laden and Zawahiri sought to transform the local battles waged by Islamist warriors in these places into a global jihad targeting the U.S. by arguing, and demonstrating, that it was possible to strike at the “far enemy” as they called it, and in driving him out of the region the “near enemy” (the “apostate” regimes) would collapse. That was the strategic logic of 9/11 and the attacks that preceded it. They were intended to rally local Islamists to the global cause, and leadership of OBL/Zawahiri. And the combination of the response by the U.S., as well as the intensification of the Palestinian intifada, actually reinforced the traction and appeal of the Qaeda world view among its intended audience. Iraq was particularly disastrous in this respect, confirming the validity of bin Laden’s portrayal of the U.S. in the minds of many Muslims – probably the majority – even if they would never support terrorism against civilians. Thus, for example, even those Iraqi Sunnis who are cooperating in the new U.S.-authored political process in Iraq nonetheless continually restate their belief that while attacks on civilians are impermissible, they believe attacks on U.S. forces there are “legitimate resistance.”

Al Qaeda’s original leadership may be dispersed and it can no longer operate from a single geographic base as it did under the Taliban, but Iraq has ensured the movement’s survival – indeed, British security officials now believe that Iraq will serve the new generation of Qaeda types in the way that Afghanistan did their forebears, creating a hand-on training environment whose results will be spread far and wide.

Bush likes to argue that by fighting the jihadis in Baghdad he won’t have to fight them in New York. That’s ridiculous, of course, because they have no plans to invade New York, and Iraq does nothing to stop them planning new long-distance operations in the future. But bin Laden may well be arguing the inverse: Fighting the U.S. in Iraq is far more effective than mounting long-distance terror operations against mounting security odds. (9/11, after all, took the U.S. by surprise.) Attacks on New York are hardly likely to force the U.S. to withdraw from the Middle East. But the Qaeda types may well believe that by forcing a humiliating retreat by the superpower in Iraq, they can turn the tide elsewhere in the region, too. In other words, the Qaeda types may well actually prefer to face the U.S. on home ground rather than try to export their jihad over long distances.

5.
What al Qaeda fears


Qaeda’s Zawahiri:
Fear of politics

President Bush likes to remind us that the extremists fear democracy, and he’s not wrong — although he’s only right to the extent that he means a genuine democracy that gives the Islamists a political option, and it’s far from clear that the U.S. is pushing for genuinely free elections in places like Egypt that would very likely put the Muslim Brotherhood in power. Still, I was struck last month by the vehemence with which Ayman Zawahiri warned Islamist groups in the Arab world to shun democratic politics. “Continue with jihad, do not give up your arms and do not be drawn into the electoral process,” Zawahiri said claiming that the agenda of Israel and the U.S. could not be defeated “solely through demonstrations and speaking out in streets.”

Terrorism and conspiracy thrive in climates where their agendas cannot be pursued in open, electoral or mass politics. Pretty much all of the localized insurgencies that together were melded into al Qaeda shared the common experience of being born in situations like Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Algeria and Saudi Arabia, where police states violently thwarted the Islamists. And, of course, the Qaeda argument has been that the only way those local insurgencies can prevail is by joining the global jihad against the “far enemy.” Which also puts Zawahiri and OBL in charge. But what if the political order in the Arab world was reversed, in a way that allowed the Islamists to pursue their agenda and contend for power through democratic means?

Plainly, that’s a scenario Zawahiri fears, not least because it would make him and OBL somewhat irrelevant in those countries where their fellow travelers opted for that path. Nor is that a farfetched scenario: Drawing violent Islamist groups into the mainstream political process is precisely the strategy being pursued by the current Palestinian leadership under Mahmoud Abbas, who is trying to fold Hamas into the democratic process, even though it could eclipse him there.

Hizbollah has not put down its arms, but it has for years been the largest single party in the Lebanese parliament. Plainly, there are many Islamists who are just as interested in democracy in the Middle East as the U.S. professes to be. That was certainly the conclusion of a group of senior former U.S. and British intelligence professionals who recently conferred in a series of exploratory talks held this past April in Beirut with various Islamist groups considered beyond the pale for formal talks by their governments

Plainly, al Qaeda potentially has something of a problem in its efforts to advocate violent jihad as the sole valid approach for likeminded groups all over the Muslim world. That may be what prompted Zawahiri’s outburst. But thus far, there are few signs that Zawahiri has much to worry about, for the simple reason that the U.S. has yet to demonstrate that it’s serious about Arab democracy.

Posted in Situation Report | 4 Comments

Don’t Say I Didn’t Warn You!

Posted on July 14, 2005 by Tony

Digging through my archives of “Tony Karon Weblog” emailings, I came across this gem sent out on December 14, 2002. Re-reading it reminds me of how clear it was, even then, that the Weapons of Mass Destruction case for invading Iraq was bogus, and that the “liberal hawk” case for supporting the invasion as an exercise in exporting democracy was equally mired in delusional fantasy.

The Evidence Gap

As things stand, the Bush administration is looking increasingly unlikely to get UN authorization to go to war with Iraq for the simple reason that Baghdad is complying with the new inspection regime, putting the onus on the U.S. and Britain to come up with evidence of prohibited weapons activity that can be verified by the inspectors. And the U.S. has made clear that it doesn’t have such specific nuggets of evidence, and that its case is based on circumstantial evidence derived from putting together tips from defectors with satellite imagery, procurement records etc. That’s why, for now, they’re focusing on the fact that Iraq has again failed to account for Gulf War mustard gas shells etc. that had been left unaccounted for after the last UN mission. Still, a skeptical Security Council is unlikely to be convinced in the absence of forensic evidence, and London and Washington are already preparing the public for the possibility that none may be revealed.

Saddam is well aware of this, of course, basing his strategy on maximizing divisions among his enemies and isolating Washington from potential allies. (Bush operates from the principle, echoing Stalin during his 1928-33 “left turn,” that “Those who are not with us are against us.” Saddam and bin Laden, separately of course, are basing their own strategies on the principle that “Those who are not against us are with us,” i.e. doing everything they can to neutralize potential opponents and keep them out of the American camp. And frankly, the Bush administration is playing into his hands with the way it’s approaching this thing.)

The al-Qaeda Chestnut

Both sides, though, seem to accept that a war is inevitable. And if the inspections won’t create a pretext, other means will be found. Enter the Washington Post, this week (12/11/02), with a lede that might have been culled from a Saturday Night Live skit:

“The Bush administration has received a credible report that Islamic extremists affiliated with al Qaeda took possession of a chemical weapon in Iraq last month or late in October, according to two officials with firsthand knowledge of the report and its source. If the report proves true, the transaction marks two significant milestones. It would be the first known acquisition of a nonconventional weapon other than cyanide by al Qaeda or a member of its network. It also would be the most concrete evidence to support the charge, aired for months by President Bush and his advisers, that al Qaeda terrorists receive material assistance in Iraq. If advanced publicly by the White House, the report could be used to rebut Iraq’s assertion in a 12,000-page declaration Saturday that it had destroyed its entire stock of chemical weapons.”

“If,” indeed. The report is more than a little bizarro, claiming that the group responsible is a tiny al-Qaeda linked (who isn’t, these days, in the world of militant Islam?) group based in a single Palestinian refugee camp Lebanon, Asbat al-Ansar, who had supposedly established themselves in an enclave in Iraqi Kurdistan. Journalists covering Iraqi Kurdistan say this is simply rubbish. The group in Kurdistan is Ansar al-Islam, an Islamist Iraqi Kurdish faction with some links to al Qaeda and unclear relations with Iraq and Iran.

Even if you read to the bottom of the Post story you’ll see that U.S. defense and intelligence officials pooh-pooh the claims, some speculating that the W Post’s source got the wrong end of the stick after reading a hypothetical scenario described in an internal Pentagon communication. “Knowledgeable officials, speaking without White House permission, said information about the transfer came from a sensitive and credible source whom they declined to discuss.” Now that’s a scoop.

Massaging the Media

Reading this stuff reminds me of recent remarks by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld regarding the Office of Strategic Influence. Remember, that was the Pentagon program designed to secretly intervene in the media to influence public opinion in support of whatever the Pentagon was up to at the time – and the idea was dropped after a firestorm of criticism in February. Except, as Rusmfeld said two weeks ago, they’ve dropped the title but have continued the program: “And then there was the Office of Strategic Influence. You may recall that,” he told reporters at a Pentagon briefing. “And ‘oh my goodness gracious isn’t that terrible, Henny Penny the sky is going to fall.’ I went down that next day and said fine, if you want to savage this thing fine I’ll give you the corpse. There’s the name. You can have the name, but I’m gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done and I have.”

Not that the media needs much massaging. They’re ready to run just about anything that maintains the momentum of their “Countdown Iraq” type threads. Because hey, that’s what gets people tuning in.

A Feith-Based Initiative

The Bush administration’s “evidence gap” on Iraqi WMD and the efforts to revive the Iraq-al Qaeda link despite that notion being pooh-poohed by the CIA after extensive investigation, is a reminder of the new intelligence order the Likudniks have built in the Pentagon. Disturbed that the CIA was failing to harmonize with the hawks’ war cries, Wolfowitz’s deputy, Douglas Feith (who, like Richard Perle, also served as a political adviser to Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996) set up a parallel intelligence structure in the Pentagon, which quizzed their pals in the Iraqi exile community and combined their tips with raw data gleaned from other U.S. intel sources, reporting straight to the President. But these are the people, remember, who after 9/11 immediately put out the word to their operatives (as reported by CBS) to link it all to Iraq, whether or not there was any evidence of any real connections.

Al Qaeda’s Take

The al-Qaeda game plan, of course, is not a short term one or simply tactical (in the sense of doing as much physical damage as possible). As Paul Rogers notes in a perceptive piece (with some great insights on question of its relations with the Palestinians and with Iraq), “al Qaeda is specifically interested in inciting greater U.S. and western military action anywhere in the Islamic world. It is not expecting to defeat the United States in the short term. Quite the contrary–it positively seeks an increased confrontation as a means of greatly increasing support for both its medium- and longer-term aims.” Right now the U.S. strategy is based almost exclusively on pursuing al-Qaeda’s organizational structures and picking off its operatives. But it’s doing very little to address the political climate in its theaters of operation, which has become even friendlier to Al Qaeda in the year since 9/11 because of the way U.S. actions are perceived.

The Liberal Hawk Fallacy

Never mind the presence or absence of weapons of mass destruction, say the self-styled “liberal hawks” – the best reason for invading Saddam Hussein is that he’s a horrible dictator who tortures and butchers his own people. The arguments in this respect are summed up in last Sunday’s Times (12/08/04) magazine by George Packer

He interviews various (current and former) liberals and lefties who’re now backing the war. Most laughable, predictably, is Christopher Hitchens with his Patton swagger and his plans for a Valentine’s Day tipple with Iraqi “comrades” in Baghdad: “So you want to be a martyr? I’m here to help…” Orwell morphs into Flashman and puts to flight the Mohammedan legions…

Packer attributes this swing in the liberal mood to Bosnia, and the idea of military intervention in pursuit of good. Frankly, I think the traumatic impact of 9/11 may have more to do with it, bringing to the surface the inner-Rumsfeld of a lot of (mostly male) liberals – Alan Dershowitz suggesting U.S. judges being empowered to order the fingernails of suspects to be pulled out, that sort of thing…

The idea that the best reason for going to war in Iraq is to overthrow the noxious Saddam and replace him with a democracy is simply wishful thinking. Democracy has never been the organizing principle of U.S. foreign policy, and to imagine the Bush administration as a kind of Lincoln Brigade of selfless internationalists going out to fight the good fight is simply delusional. These are the same people who helped empower Saddam Hussein in the 80s – Rumsfeld was Reagan’s point man in cutting deals with him.

Washington is suddenly demanding democracy throughout the Arab world and lambasting its own client regimes for their failures on this account. Everything they say about democracy and human rights in Saudi Arabia, Egypt etc. is true. What they’re not saying, of course, is why they have done everything necessary to keep such regimes in place for decades, and when one fell (in Iran) under the weight of its own corruption and violent authoritarianism, the Bush types regard their failure to quickly restore the despotic Shah as one of Jimmy Carter’s greatest crimes. Democracy in the Arab world is a very good idea, but is the U.S. prepared to tolerate democracy when they don’t like the choices made by electorates? Are they prepared to accept the Muslim Brotherhood as the government of Egypt or Jordan? Are they prepared to accept Saudi Arabia’s oil reserves being in the hands of a government hostile to U.S. interests? Obviously not. And that’s the reason democracy has never been a priority in Washington’s dealings with the Arab world. (No matter how democratic they are at home, empires very rarely reproduce that democracy in their satellites abroad, for obvious reasons.)

Jonathan Raban, in the Guardian, offers a perceptive [we might now add “prescient” — ed.] piece on the history of Western nation-building in Arab lands, and warns that the same mistakes are about to be repeated.

But in the scenario outlined by Packer, the argument is sealed by the introduction of a certain Kanan Makiya, self-styled philosopher king of the Iraqi opposition who berates liberal skeptics that they have a moral obligation to support a war because most Iraqis want it and it’s their only chance of ousting Saddam. But who is this Kanan Makiya and does he speak for ordinary Iraqis? Edward Said paints him as a cynical opportunist with no standing in Iraq or anywhere else in the Arab world, and skewers his basic arguments for war: [Link no longer available — ed.]

And Sinaan Antoon, an Iraqi doctoral candidate in Arab literature at Harvard, points out that Makiya has become the favorite “native critic” of Washington hawks, making it all the more important that Iraqis hold him accountable for things he says in their name. [ibid.]

Republic of Fear

All of this, of course, may soon become moot. The forces will be in place in February to mount an invasion, and if Karl Rove approves, the UN may be simply discarded. A tough call for Rove, since polls are still finding some 55 percent of Americans preferring UN authorization – then again, a few Qaeda-Iraq link stories could swing that. Indeed, I think the reason we’re even contemplating this scenario right now is to be found in the central thesis of Michael Moore’s new film “Bowling for Columbine” – that fear is the primary organizing principle of contemporary American political culture. The 10 o’clock news is all about things that could kill you – microbes living in sponges, lysteria in your ground beef, out-of-control young black men or terrorists spreading smallpox… This is not just an episode, but a consistent thread that I’ve noticed throughout the decade that I’ve been here. Domestically its all moral panic; internationally it’s the Threat of the Month Club. It’s lampooned in Saturday Night Live and South Park (check out their Christmas episode which has the kids joining Christ and Santa in a Special Forces raid to bring Christmas cheer to Baghdad), but I think it’s deeply rooted. And it allows the likes of Bush not only to scare Americans into wars, but also to distract them from the more immediate and politically-challenging fears induced by the recession.

Posted in From Tony's Archive | 5 Comments

Where do France’s Jews Belong?

Posted on July 1, 2005 by Tony

A version of this story appeared on TIME.com published 7.21.2004

Ariel Sharon’s belief that the Jews of France belong in Israel and ought to get there as soon as possible lest they fall victim to anti-Semitism gone wild has opened a major diplomatic row between France and Israel. But it’s also a signal of deeper tensions on the question whether it is the “manifest destiny” of almost two thirds of the world’s Jewish population, who live outside of Israel, to emigrate to Israel and help maintain a Jewish majority there.


French Anti-Semitism:
Is Israel the answer?

The furor began when, in a speech to U.S. Jewish leaders, Sharon said that while he wanted all the world’s Jews to move to Israel, in the case of France where they face “the wildest anti-Semitism” such a move was essential and a matter of urgency. France is home to Western Europe’s largest Jewish community, numbering some 600,000. The condemnation of Sharon was swift and shrill, not only from the French government, but also from leaders of France’s Jewish community who accused Sharon of pouring gasoline on the fire.

Curiously enough, despite Sharon’s claim that “wild” anti-Semitism leaves French Jews no option but to flee to Israel, the Anti-Defamation League’s own study of European anti-Semitism released in April suggests that there has actually been a 10 percent decline in anti-Semitic attitudes in France over the past two years. (Sharon himself commended the French government for taking steps to fight it.) To be sure, anti-Semitic attacks have become a worrying reality for many Jews in France, and a tiny, but growing minority have taken Sharon’s advice. Still, the reason French Jewish leaders have been particularly dismayed by Sharon’s comments is not hard to see: One of the questions asked in the ADL survey as a measure of anti-Semitic attitudes was whether the survey’s respondents agreed with the statement “Jews are more loyal to Israel than their own country.” Sharon left no doubt about his belief that they ought to be.

Seeking to explain Sharon’s remarks, Israel’s eloquent New York consul Alon Pinkas offered the following on CNN: “Israeli prime ministers, by definition, by their mission statement, and if you will, to borrow a term from your political culture, by their manifest destiny, are expected and required to ask Jews to come and live in Israel. Mr. Sharon has asked American Jews to come and live in Israel. In fact several months ago said he hopes that within a few years, a million American Jews will come to live in Israel. I didn’t hear George W. Bush saying that he’s upset about it.”

The “manifest destiny” theme was reiterated by a number of current and former Israeli officials. Former Interior Minister Avraham Poraz, for example: “As you know Israel is a Zionist state. We always advocate that all Jews should return to Israel. This is not a new opinion.”

Indeed. And nor is the idea of tension between the Zionist leadership and Diaspora Jewish communities over how to respond to anti-Semitism. Some 110 years ago, the founder of the modern Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl, went to Paris as a journalist to cover the notorious trial of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army falsely accused of spying for Germany whose indictment touched off a wave of anti-Semitism in France. The case may have prompted an outraged Emile Zola to pen his famous J’Accuse indictment of French anti-Semitism, which he denounced as a betrayal of France’s own values – but Herzl reached a different conclusion. The founder of the modern Zionist movement wrote in his diary that “In Paris, then, I gained a freer attitude toward antisemitism which I now began to understand historically and make allowances for. Above all, I recognized the emptiness and futility of efforts to ‘combat antisemitsm.’ ” Today, Sharon appears to echo Herzl’s notion of the futility of trying to combat anti-Semitism in France. Despite acknowledging the efforts of the French government to do so, he maintains that immigration is the only solution.

But a belief in “manifest destiny” even over the preferences of Jews who choose to live elsewhere is driven today not so much by pure ideology, but by the demographic concerns of the Israeli leadership. Anyone following political discussion in Israel will notice how prominently demographic trends feature in political discourse. Ariel Sharon promotes his Gaza pullout plan to his own party which has traditionally opposed a Palestinian state anywhere west of the Jordan river via the demographic route: Based on the territory currently under its control, Arabs will eclipse Jews as the demographic majority inside Israel in the next ten to twenty years. This, too, is the argument of the left for handing back the West Bank, also. And these demographic concerns have prompted Ariel Sharon, since he first took office, to repeatedly stress his desire to bring 1 million Jews to Israel in the next ten years. But these days, of course, they’re proving difficult to find.

According to Israeli figures, some 46 percent of the world’s Jewish population live in North America, compared with 37 percent in Israel and 12 percent in Europe. Given the fact that North American Jews are, in the main, unlikely to emigrate any time soon, that leaves Sharon to seek his new immigrants mostly in Europe, the former Soviet territories and among the 350,000 Jews of Latin America and the 80,000 in South Africa.

Traditionally, from Herzl onward, the basic argument – as I learned it in the Zionist youth movement in South Africa – has been that Jewish life in the Diaspora is inherently unsafe, unfulfilling, and transient. Sooner or later, all Jews will realize that their destiny lies in Israel. But the demographic trends are showing the opposite: A majority of Jews when given the choice, have chosen to remain in the Diaspora. Not only that; a growing number of Israeli Jews appear to be choosing to join them. Late last year, the Israeli government revealed that some 760,000 Israeli Jews are currently living abroad, a number that has increased by 40 percent since the onset of the current Palestinian uprising in 2000. And last year’s total Jewish immigration into Israel, numbering some 23,000, was a 15-year low. And even as Sharon insists that the safety of French Jews depends on immigrating to Israel forthwith, Israelis are flocking to European embassies to apply for EU passports. Indeed, concern for their personal security may actually be prompting more Jews to actually leave Israel than to settle there.

Germany, rather than Israel, is the preferred destination of Jews leaving the former Soviet territories today – a fact that has Zionist officials so steamed that they’re calling on the Israeli government to pressure Germany to stop “enticing” Jews to settle there. The very fact that Jews leaving the former Soviet territories are being given a choice to go anywhere other than Israel appears to be unacceptable, since in the words of Jewish Agency chairman Sallai Merridor “this drastically effects immigration to Israel.” Merridor appears oblivious to the irony in attacking Germany for making it easier for Jews to live there.

As a Jew who actually likes living in the Diaspora and sees no reason for immigrating to Israel, comments such as Merridor’s – and Sharon’s – make me uncomfortable. My Uncle Adam and his family live in Paris, and have no desire or intention to leave. My cousin Cathy and her children live in Israel, and they, too, have no intention of leaving. I have family in South Africa, the U.S., Canada, Australia, Mexico, Poland and Scotland, all of whom have declined the option of living in Israel. In my book, anyone who tells Cathy she doesn’t belong in Israel because she’s a Jew, is an anti-Semite. But I apply the same label to anyone who tells Uncle Adam that as a Jew he doesn’t belong in France, or says the same thing to any of my relatives elsewhere in the Diaspora. “Go back to Israel” was a message I heard occasionally growing up, both from Zionist emissaries promoting immigration and from rightwing anti-Semites hostile to my anti-apartheid views, which they somehow mistook to be uniquely Jewish. Unlike Herzl and, by extension, Sharon, I can’t accept that fighting anti-Semitism in France is futile, because I believe that a Jew’s place is anywhere he or she chooses to live.

Posted in A Wondering Jew | 3 Comments

McDonald’s Simply Wants to Blend in

Posted on July 1, 2005 by Tony

This story was first published on TIME.com in January, 2002

Extract:

Like the Romans before it, the empire of the Golden Arches has finally succumbed to the indomitable spirit of Asterix the Gaul. As of Wednesday, Ronald McDonald has been retired as the icon of McDonald’s France, replaced by the Gallic nationalist comic-book hero. Ironies abound, of course, since Asterix had been something of an anti-Mcdonald’s icon, appropriated by anti-globalization protestors such as Mac-basher Jose Bove to symbolize French resistance to foreign encroachment. Resentment of the perceived “McDonaldization” of their culture runs high in France — the influential daily Le Monde, for example, warns that Mcdonald’s “commercial hegemony threatens agriculture and (its) cultural hegemony insidiously ruins alimentary behavior — sacred reflections of French identity.”

That may sound a little hysterical to the rest of the Mcworld, but spare a thought for those who actually have to market Big Macs to a population primed to view them as alien invaders out to ruin their sacred “alimentary behavior.” Co-opting Asterix may simply have been a case of the judo of globalization — use your enemy’s momentum against him.

This is hardly the first time McDonald’s France has aligned itself with symbols alien to, and even at odds with America’s own. In 1998, for example, the company ran a print ad campaign featuring overweight cowboys complaining about the fact that McDonald’s France refuses to buy American beef but uses only French, to “guarantee maximum hygienic conditions” — an unsubtle effort to identify the Global Arches with European efforts to block the import of hormone-laced American beef.

Americans may find it strange to see their “official sandwich” touted by a bellicose cartoon warrior with pigtails and a big moustache, but such adjustments are part and parcel of marketing across cultures. Indeed, if an Indian Mac tastes a little different, that’s because it’s a “lamb-burger” — eating beef offends Hindu tradition. Forget about ordering a cheeseburger at a kosher outlet in Israel (mixing milk and meat is a no-no), but you could always console yourself in Cairo with a “McFalafel,” or in Bangkok with a “Samurai Pork Burger.” Big Macs are hard to find on the menus of the 80 Mcdonald’s outlets in Beijing, which include spicy chicken wings and red bean pie — the Big Mac is there, of course, it’s just sporting a more grandiose moniker: “Lu Wu Ba” (“huge incomparable warlord”).

Not only do local McDonald’s marketers have to adapt the chain’s offerings to the local palate, they are also often careful to align their product with local heroes and concerns. Sometimes that’s a hedge against the Golden Arches becoming the first stop, as it invariably is, for any anti-American mob assembled to protest some aspect of U.S. foreign policy. It’s fine for the Golden Arches to be identified with all things American in markets where all things American are celebrated. Elsewhere, however, different tactics may be required.

Click here to read the full article

Posted in Annals of Globalization | 4 Comments

Of Fries and Getting Fried: The Allure of Death Row Menus

Posted on July 1, 2005 by Tony

This article appeared on TIME.com in August of 2000. Note, the Texas Death Row Final Meal request page has since been taken down by the State’s Department of Correctional Services
Extract:
Just two weeks, ago, for example, murderer Juan Soria wanted “chicken, three pieces of fish, burgers, pizza, fruit (grapes, plums, peaches, apples, tangerines), doughnuts, walnuts, chocolate candy bar, plain potato chips, picante sauce, hot sauce, salad with ranch dressing, Coke and Sprite” before going to meet his maker. A month earlier, Jessy San Miguel, who had killed four people execution-style while robbing a Taco Bell, had asked for “Pizza (beef, bacon bits, and multiple types of cheese), 10 quesadillas (5 mozzarella cheese, 5 cheddar cheese), 5 strips of open-flame grilled beef, 5 strips of stir-fried beef, chocolate peanut butter ice cream, sweet tea, double fudge chocolate cake, broccoli and grapes” before he lay down for the last time on that Huntsville gurney.

I can’t deny my own voyeuristic fascination as I scroll down through the choices of men being offered one final moment of the “freedom” to be a consumer. Their choices, as diverse, poignant and sometimes just plain wacky as they are, offer clues to their identities and character… But even more fascinating than the contents of the site, perhaps, is the decision by the folks down at Huntsville to post this information on the Web.
Click here to read the full story

Posted in Cuisine | 3 Comments

Colonel Sanders Keeps His Head

Posted on June 27, 2005 by Tony

Published in the sadly departed Japanese food culture magazine Eat in May 2001


This time around, the Colonel kept his head. Local police in China’s Hunan province had been braced for the worst during the Hainan spy-plane standoff earlier this year, remembering how angry crowds vandalized two Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets after the 1999 U.S. bombing of China’s Belgrade embassy. One group of rioters had even beheaded a statue of the chicken chain’s affable icon, having mistaken Colonel Sanders for a representation of Uncle Sam.

The reason the Colonel kept his head this time was not because the Chinese were any less angry with the U.S. than in 1999. But even the staunchly nationalist residents of Beijing and other cities have begun to make KFC and McDonalds their own. Throughout the Hainan crisis, Western reporters in China found those restaurants filled with consumers happily munching on Big Macs or fried chicken even as they excoriated the United States.

“McDonald’s means America, but it also means China, too,” engineer Wang Zishen told a Washington Post reporter while buying his son a burger in Beijing. “Of course, we are angry at the United States, but that doesn’t stop my boy from liking McDonald’s.”

The distinction made by Wang, of course, is the Holy Grail of those responsible for marketing McDonalds to a diverse, yet divided world – a task which requires patience, determination and some skillful political and cultural gymnastics. Because the Golden Arches have become a kind of universal lightning rod for anti-U.S. rage. McDonalds has been the target of protests, sometimes violent, in more than 50 different countries over the past six years – invariably over issues that have nothing whatsoever to do with the fast-food chain.

French farmer-activist Jose Bove, protesting U.S. trade sanctions against his foie gras, famously trashed a small-town McDonalds three years ago. Serbs protesting NATO’s bombing of Belgrade did the same a year later (while their supporters in Rome actually bombed three of that city’s outlets). For Mexico City residents denouncing U.S. immigration policy in 1994, Danish anarchists who’d simply had enough of capitalism in 1996 – whatever the issue, McDonalds was the target.

Thus the wages of globalization: Ronald McDonald and Colonel Sanders takes a bullet for Uncle Sam. Partly, they’re victims of their own success – U.S. fast-food outlets are such a tempting target precisely because there are so many of them. Most of McDonalds revenues today come from outside the U.S. A new outlet opens somewhere in the world every 17 minutes — during the Hainan standoff, there were reportedly 87 McDonalds restaurants operating in Beijing, alone.


Belgrade McDonald’s

And where globalization’s cheerleaders once thought that spread might ease global tensions — “No two countries that have McDonalds have ever fought a war” was a U.S. media mantra until 1999, when the Kosovo conflict saw U.S. planes bombing Belgrade, a city with seven McDondalds outlets – instead McDonalds, KFC and other chains find themselves feeding an ever-divided world. And for the most part, they’re welcomed, even in climes quite hostile to their homeland. Ronald McDonald and the Colonel do occasionally take lumps, of course, but only when they’re taken to symbolize American power.

And so, the challenge of marketing Ronald or the Colonel abroad is to make sure they’re not mistaken for Uncle Sam. The basis of McDonalds’ advertising all over the world is to associate their brand with the heroes, causes and experiences treasured by their target markets. Link your logo with the consumer’s own values, preferences and tastes, and the market is yours for the taking.

That explains why the Big Mac is touted as the “Official Sandwich” of the Olympic Games. Or why the company makes promotion deals with Disney kiddie movies, or uses the hottest new baseball or basketball star in its commercials. It may also explain why the Saudi Arabian license-holders for McDonalds came up with a unique promotion during Ramadan – giving 25c (American) out of every sandwich sold to that country’s ‘Al Quds Intifada Fund,’ which supported Palestinian children’s hospitals swamped with casualties of the uprising that began last October.

It may not have been a promotional initiative likely to picked up by the parent company back home in an overwhelmingly pro-Israel culture, but it made business sense in a Saudi market where anger at the plight of the Palestinians was directed as much at the United States as at Israel – and threatened to spawn a boycott of all products associated with America. Thus the concern of Mohammed Emam, marketing coordinator of McDonalds, Jeddah, who told a Saudi newspaper, “We want to prove to people that even though McDonalds is an American franchise, it cares about the plight of the Palestinians.”

James Cantalupo, currently President of McDonalds, had said in 1991 that the company’s strategy in each of its global operations was to become “as much part of the local culture as possible.” And in Saudi Arabia, that meant being seen to do your bit for the Palestinians. Such sensitivities, of course, can be double-edged for the parent company, as Burger King found out two years ago. Under threat of a pan-Islamic boycott after an outlet was opened at an Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank, the company withdrew its franchise from the food court in question, only to be threatened with a counter-boycott in the U.S. by angry pro-Israel elements.

Sometimes, a brand even has to bite the hand that reared it. McDonalds in France, two years ago, ran a series of ads designed to identify the Global Arches with Europe’s efforts to block the import of hormone-laced American beef. “What I don’ t like about McDonalds France,” says an overweight U.S. cowboy in one, “is that it doesn’t buy American beef.” The ad specifies that French McDonalds only uses French beef, to “guarantee maximum hygienic conditions.”


McThai menu adaptations

But even beyond such overtly political sensitivities, building a brand across borders can be a major cultural challenge. And the fast-food chains may have learned from the original globalizing corporation, the Catholic Church. As it ventured out into new worlds, the Church adapted to indigenous tradition and belief all over the world and often found itself inexorably reshaped by its host cultures. Likewise, McDonalds: If your Mac tastes a little different in India, that’s because it’s a “lamburger” – eating beef offends Hindu tradition. In Thailand, besides the standard lineup of burgers, you can order a “Samurai Pork Burger,” in the Philippines you can add a “MacSpaghetti” to your tray. In Beijing the menu includes spicy chicken wings and red bean pie, while the Big Mac is known by the altogether more grandiose title of “Lu Wu Ba” (“huge incomparable warlord”).

But the key to “indigenizing” McDonalds, KFC and other American fast food chains around the world is generational. If you grew up eating McDonalds in Tokyo or Manila, chances are you don’t even think of it as foreign – it’s always been part of your experience. Hence the familiar tale of Japanese kids visiting the U.S. and marveling that America, too, has the Golden Arches. Older Muscovites may have queued for hours in 1991 to taste the forbidden fruit when the Golden Arches first marched into post-Soviet Russia, but the next generation will know it simply as a local burger joint in which the staff smile more often than is the norm in Russia.

The generation of young Chinese who grow up eating at “Mai Dang Lao” are unlikely to even be aware that their “huge incomparable warlord” has a double life. And if they find occasion to mount anti-American demonstrations outside the U.S. embassy, they’ll think nothing of stopping at the Golden Arches for a red bean pie on their way home.

Posted in Annals of Globalization, Cuisine | 12 Comments

Lipstick Jihad!

Posted on June 27, 2005 by Tony

lipstick

Five reasons why you should buy my friend Azadeh’s book

1) Because she’s supersmart, writes with delightful wit and levity, and has an acute eye for the telling detail and irony that best convey a broad observation – her recent Time piece Fast Times in Tehran will give you a taste;

2) Because, in the finest “Rootless Cosmopolitan” tradition, she’s entirely suspended between two worlds, as her subtitle suggests — and that gives her the unique insights of the outsider in both;

3) Because Iran is very important right now, and it is far, far more complex than even the best Western reporting can convey. You need a guide;

4) Because she does the Proust thing of allowing the delicious recipes of her childhood serve as her link to her Persian roots, and those lavish descriptions of pilafs and lamb stews will have you running to the fine food store for saffron and pomegranates; and

5) Because she’s a fresh voice who makes nonsense of tired “clash of cultures” cliches.

And, of course, because she’s a long-time subscriber to the Tony Karon email blog that preceded this site!

Buy the book at Amazon.com

Posted in Shameless Cronyism | 8 Comments