Apropos Of Nothing

I’m trying to give the NY Times the benefit of the doubt here.

I know it’s important to put a bright shiny face on incipient Palestinian statehood (although the absence of any coverage whatsoever abroad regarding most of the internal Palestinian chaos currently prevailing [c.f. deadly clan battles over turf, trigger-happy Fatah security guys wasting civilian protesters, attempted lynchings of academics and terrorizing of journalists, kids and old people being blown away in the crossfire/explosions/etc.] rather begs the question why such news is so rarely considered fit to print). Yes, all the parties need to see and believe that progress is being made, that Israeli disengagement wasn’t a bad idea.

But there’s pointing out the positives and there’s bending the truth.

Today’s NY Times has a piece on the imminent Gaza harvest, a historic event that most assuredly warrants coverage and admiration. The way the information in the piece is written and organized, the implication is made that the stumbling blocks on the road toward Palestinian agricultural economic sustainability lie more with Israeli intransigence at checkpoints than with Palestinian acts of stubborn self-defeatism (like reducing functioning greenhouses to rubble). Still, we must be fair: the author does mention in graf 8 that the Israeli greenhouses were subjected to Palestinian looting after the departure of the settlers.

But farther down the article, there’s a bit of language that is so patently attempting to massage the reader’s perceptions toward a falsehood that I’m surprised it was allowed to stand:

James D. Wolfensohn, the envoy for countries involved in Middle East peacemaking, cobbled together a group of wealthy Jewish Americans who pledged $14 million in compensation for the Israeli farmers provided that they left the greenhouses intact. The deal was reached just days before the settlers were evacuated, and it is not clear that it prevented much additional damage to the greenhouses.

There’s something gloriously Humphrey Applebyesque about the locution “it is not clear that it prevented”. Let’s blow away a little of the agent-less obfuscation, shall we? Philanthropists (through the efforts of the tireless and admirable Wolfensohn) came up with a large chunk of money to ensure the Palestinians a livelihood, and they (no, not all of them by any means, but enough) threw the gesture in the donors’ faces. The satisfaction of taking a sledgehammer to an Israeli greenhouse outweighed both the desire to respond in a civilized manner to an unsolicited act of great generosity and the desire to sustain a viable source of Palestinian income.

All right, you say; but after that initial hiccup they did get on the ball. We should be accentuating the positive at this delicate time, no? Acknowledging their successes? Encouraging them further?

Couldn’t agree more. But the trouble with taking the agency out of the “damage to the greenhouses” in the sentence as it was contextualized in the surrounding paragraph is that the reader is subtly encouraged to believe it was the Israeli settlers who trashed the greenhouses themselves. Look at the order of the information given: donors pledge money to settlers provided they leave greenhouses intact; deal is accepted; greenhouses are damaged anyway. To whom is the reader logically intended to assign responsibility? The only actors in the paragraph are donors and settlers.

Picky? Perhaps. But image is everything, isn’t it? That’s where we started, after all: with the premise that the image of a successful, sustainable Palestinian Gaza is important enough to elide the details of the bullet casings flying through the air, university doors being shuttered, free newspapers being forcibly closed down, and so on. But you know what? We have an image too. And as one who believed that disengagement from Gaza was indeed a good idea, and who expects the parties on all sides to pull up their socks, behave like mensches, and make it a success, I particularly resent sly, dishonest attempts to make the Israelis who were compelled by the rest of us to leave their homes look bad. We have no right to cast any false aspersions. And neither does the NY Times.

Well, these guys certainly did some snazzy accessorizing when voting in the Fatah primaries in Jenin.

The conversations at home before the vote must have been fun. “Honey? You think the shoulder-mounted missile launcher is too much? Yeah, you’re right. The M16 has got a lot more class. Especially with that hot scope. Gotta have the scope! Wait, where’s my clip?”

(The fellow casting the extremely well-defended ballot is Palestinian militant leader Zakareia Zubaidi. Photo courtesy of today’s Haaretz.)

The American Interfaith Institute, an “organization with a long history of working to remove bigotry and hatred from the religions of Abraham”, has a very worthy and necessary project called Faiths for Fairness that is designed to combat biased, ill-informed decision-making about this region by religious bodies. The Institute’s members were inspired to create the project by the July 2004 decision by the Presbyterian Church USA to divest its portfolio of companies that do business with Israel. Faith for Fairness views this decision as a “one-sided indictment against Israel” and takes particular issue with the “lack of fair and balanced reporting when the case for divestment was presented”.

God bless them.

(Via Solomonia.)

The Palestinians have apparently asked Israeli intelligence to help them locate the zillions of dollars Yasser Arafat stole from the Palestinian people over the course of his rule.

(Via Ocean Guy.)

A 25-year-old woman writer in Afghanistan, Nadia Anjuman — the mother of a six-month-old baby — was beaten to death last week, apparently by her husband. Her crime? She had published a volume of poetry, Gule Dudi (Dark Flower), and thus brought shame upon the family.

A woman in a group to which Anjuman belonged prior to the fall of the Taliban, a circle of women who gathered in secret (and at the risk of being hanged) to discuss literature, described life under the Taliban as “no more than being cows in sheds”. She used to do calculus problems in the small hours of the night because she “so feared her brain would atrophy”.

Rest in peace, Nadia Anjuman. I hope for the child’s sake your baby is a boy.

(Via To the Point.)

Have a look at Adloyada‘s post on the recent anti-terrorism demonstration in Amman. The banners (most of them, anyway) and the passion of the Jordanian blogger with whom she corresponded are heartening.

When Israel pulled out of Gaza, the expectation among pessimists was that Hamas would swoop in and openly challenge the authority of Abbas’s administration. It took, oh, about a minute and ten seconds for that prediction to be made manifest. Under the pessimists’ radar, however, was the additional threat of violent clan warfare over the evacuated land.

Two days ago we saw our first fatality in that increasingly ugly war: a 17-year-old Palestinian lay dead and several others wounded as clans battled the Palestinian police over land claims. Two clans, Astal and Farra, had sent members to stake out territory near the evacuated settlement of Neve Dekalim (territory that has been designated as public by Abbas and that is intended to be part of a new university campus). The Khan Yunis police, in an attempt to assert the administration’s authority over the land, arrested two members of each clan. The clans responded by sending “armed tribal members to sack the police station and free the prisoners”. Several police officers were wounded in the ensuing shootout, the station was damaged and police cars were set ablaze.

In what has become a sadly empty mantra, the Palestinian Authority announced its determination to crack down on the mayhem. The underequipped police are sitting ducks, meanwhile, and law-abiding local Palestinian citizens remain entirely at the mercy of their hair-trigger neighbors.

Yesterday, eight masked men waving Kalashnikovs and hand grenades stormed the Palestinian Authority’s Central Elections Committee in Rafah and demanded the cancellation of the parliamentary vote scheduled for January. They identified themselves in a flier as members of a previously unknown group called the “Islamic Army” (there seem to be quite a few freelancers operating these days) who believe the democratic elections are a ploy of “collaborators” to spark a Palestinian civil war. Naturally, the flier went on to threaten dark reprisals against anyone who dares assist the Israelis in dividing the Palestinians, which is presumably defined as “helping to mount the election”.

Take a look a bit further down the article: several paragraphs in, there’s a mention of the occupation yesterday of the PA local offices in Khan Yunis by “at least 70″ Fatah gunmen who are irked at the administration’s failure to incorporate them into the security forces. This large-scale, gun-wielding occupation does not warrant its own article because it’s the fifth time it’s happened in the past few months. Meanwhile, the residents of Nablus and Tulkarem have complained to the authorities that they are being subjected to a “reign of terror” by roving gangs. The PA claims it will launch “major security operations” today to clamp down on the chaos.

I’ve been blighted by maddening computer problems over the past couple of weeks and have been almost entirely without Internet access (meaning no email, no news [I don't watch television], and no blogging). The problems seem to be solved, so there shouldn’t be any more radio silence. (She says naively.)

To get back into the swing of things, I’d like to refer you to an interesting post over at Daniel in Brookline‘s that addresses the curious cognitive dissonance of right-on American homosexuals who reflexively support Palestine, where open homosexuality is an invitation to discrimination, abuse, violence and possibly death, against Israel, which has a thriving gay scene in which both Jewish and Arab homosexuals are free to be what they are and express themselves honestly without fear of state-sanctioned reprisal. Aside from anything else, it’s the sheer dopey predictability of such a mindless political position — a position that’s utterly divorced from the reality on the ground — that makes me throw up my hands in exasperation.

Rather than work myself into a state explaining the inanity of such a position, I’ll leave it to Paul Varnell at the Independent Gay Forum (cited by Daniel), who makes the point clearly and well. I’ll just add the postscript that this business falls in with my oft-repeated observation that chunks of the far left appear curiously without imagination. I’d hazard a guess that these demonstrators, for example, have never seriously imagined a world other than their own, in which political opinions no matter how indefensible can be expressed with blithe abandon and same-sex sexual preference can be displayed without fear. I doubt the placard-waving woman in the “Dykes From Hell” T-shirt has spent much time contemplating what would happen to her if she woke up one day as a Muslim woman in Ramallah.

One might suppose that any reasonably thoughtful person would be capable of imagining the reality of being snatched from your home, humiliated, physically and psychologically tortured, and forced into exile on pain of death, with the full approval of the state and no defense or help from any quarter. One might further suppose that people who would themselves be subjected to this treatment because of, say, their eye color, or their mother’s religion, or their height, or their sexual preference would be unlikely to blanketly defend the offending regime. One would be wrong.