The conservative intellectual Peter Wehner has an Op-Ed in Thursday’s New York Times called “Why I Will Never Vote for Trump.” Though Wehner’s thesis is in many ways a belaboring of the obvious, it’s worth reading, as much for its condensed summary of the obvious as for the obvious things it manages to omit. The omissions offer an interesting glimpse into the thought processes of the most morally decent thinkers on the political right. What the glimpse reveals, I think, is that even the most morally decent thinkers on the political right are too clueless and bereft of original ideas to cure what’s wrong with it.
Author Archives: Irfan Khawaja
A Teenager Shall Lead Them
I’ve written before about the resort to force and intimidation in discussions of Palestinian-Israeli issues, but here’s an outrageous case– and one that hits close to home. From The New York Times, “Tweets About Israel Land New Jersey Student in Principal’s Office“:
A New Jersey high school student found herself in a social media storm on Wednesday after she live-tweeted and apparently secretly recorded a trip to her principal’s office.
She said administrators warned her that her comments about Israel and a fellow student on Twitter might have violated a state law against bullying.
The student, Bethany Koval, a 16-year-old Israeli Jew, said she had been reprimanded by administrators at Fair Lawn High School in Bergen County for a tweet that contained a string of expletives directed at Israel and expressed happiness that a pro-Israel classmate had unfollowed her Twitter account.
New Jersey has some of the toughest anti-bullying laws in the nation. After the suicide of a Rutgers University freshman, Tyler Clementi, in 2010, it passed the Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights, a far-reaching law with stiff penalties for educators who do not sufficiently respond to complaints of harassment or intimidation.
Read the whole thing for a fuller account of the story. Here’s a January 7 story from the Bergen Record, and here’s a January 8 story from the same place. Muftah reproduces some of the tweets involved. (Unfortunately, Koval’s Twitter feed is no longer operating in the public domain.) Fair Lawn, by the way, is just a few towns west of Lodi, where I teach.
Setting aside whatever narrowly legalistic insanities may reside within the various “anti-bullying” statutes, this is not a morally complex matter. A high school student tweets her political views about Israel. Some of what she says contains profanity. Some is sympathetic to, or appeasing of, Hamas. Some of her peers don’t like what she says. She gets some verbal flak from some of them. One “unfollows” her Twitter account. She doesn’t reveal the “unfollower’s” name in public, but reveals it to someone privately.
American (and Muslim) Complicity in Saudi Theocracy
Here’s the best short commentary I’ve recently seen on our complicity in Saudi tyranny, from the letters section of today’s New York Times:
To the Editor:
What are American “interests” in this region, who determined them, and why have they not been shared with the American people?
We get energy from the Saudis and also used to buy significant amounts of oil from Iran. But we diversified our oil purchasing after the 1973 Arab-Israeli War and cut off all Iranian shipments after the Iranian Revolution in 1979. With the current glut of oil on the market, we have never been in a stronger position to press the Saudis for democratic reform. But we don’t.
The only plausible answer is that they continue to buy enormous quantities of American weapons and get support from that lobby. They also continue to invest tens of billions of their petrodollars in Western banks. So despite all our talk about human rights and democracy, it appears that our “interests” are being dictated by the arms industry and Wall Street, both of which have a lock on the White House and Congress.
We the people, who do have an interest in human rights, are left to write letters to the editor and hope that our so-called representatives will hear our voices above the money machine in Washington. Something is very, very wrong with this picture.
VICTOR GOODE
Long Island City, Queens
The writer is a professor at the CUNY School of Law.
Every element of that is right, but there’s one thing he doesn’t mention: no boycott of or blacklist against the Saudi regime can work unless Muslims, especially Sunni Muslims, decide to join in and boycott the hajj and umra pilgrimages to Mecca (and Medina).
Update: Wedding of Hate Video
I’ve updated the post on the Israeli “wedding of hate” video to include updates from the Israeli press.
Update: “The No Boots on the Ground Fraud”
An odd, unexpected update to my recent post on Obama’s deploying Special Forces in Syria. It’s a feel-good, pro-American postscript to my unabashedly anti-American rant, so savor it: we don’t get many of those here.
Update: Communication Breakdowns
I’ve updated an October 2015 post on the problem for free speech posed by hecklers and the like. Scroll to the bottom for it.
Happy 2016
So 2015 is basically over. I probably couldn’t summarize the year better than Roger Cohen does in this column for The New York Times–it’s got Palestinians, it’s got Jews, it’s got Native Americans, it’s got Syrian refugees, it’s got flyover country, it’s got anti-Trump derision, and it’s ultimately about a tired old guy lumbering around America, ranting lugubriously about why so much of the world has come to suck so bad. (Sound familiar? )
This was PoT’s first full year in operation; the blog started as a solo act mid-year in 2014. This year, we managed to land 37,000 unique visitors, and took on five new bloggers–Matt Faherty, Michael Young, Hendrik Van den Berg, David Potts, and Stephen Boydstun. Most of our visitors came, unsurprisingly, from the U.S., followed in turn by the U.K., and the Palestinian Territories.
Update: Enjoy the Silence
I’ve meekly updated the “Enjoy the Silence” post from a few days ago.
Update: The Criminalization of Curiosity
I’ve updated the post on “The Criminalization of Curiosity” to add a short discussion of the views of Cass Sunstein and Jeremy Waldron. Scroll to the bottom.
The “No Boots on the Ground” Fraud
I spent a fair bit of time during the fall of 2014 boring the readers of this blog with my insistence that despite Obama’s “promise(s)” not to put “boots on the ground” in Syria, he would eventually find some disingenuous, incremental way of putting them there. Since “boots on the ground” doesn’t really mean anything, military speaking, the phrase is practically designed to guarantee plausible deniability: you can promise not to put “boots on the ground,” then send military personnel to the relevant place, and then deny that that’s what you meant by “boots on the ground.” No, no: “boots on the ground” referred, all along, to those military personnel that we haven’t (yet) sent, not the boot-wearing ones that now happen to be there.
I may be a newly-minted Democrat, but I’m not dumb, amnesiac, or loyal enough to our President to forget that this is just a tired variant on the semantic game that the Bush II Administration played with the phrase “weapons of mass destruction.” As we all by now know (or ought to know), very strictly speaking, weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq as a result of the 2003 invasion; it’s just that the WMD we found found bore no relation to the WMD that furnished the rationale for the invasion. So if the invasion of Iraq was predicated on “finding weapons of mass destruction,” very narrowly conceived, well, it was a great success: weapons were found. But this is just a pathetic way of saving a pathetic thesis. The war was predicated on finding usable stockpiles of WMD, and precisely none of those were found.
