The Meta (Perspective) on Mark (Steyn)

Iran, Islam, Neoconservatism, Political Philosophy

Mark Steyn’s essay, “Facing Down Iran: Our lives depend on it,” appears in the Spring-2006 issue of City Journal. The Journal is billed as “the nation’s premier urban-policy magazine… an idea factory” on policy questions.

Let me stipulate for the record that Steyn is an entertaining writer and fun to read. There is, moreover, a great deal that is valuable in this piece—and in his work, in general. However, I don’t think Steyn’s epistolary razzmatazz should be confused with in-depth analysis, or be passed as such in policy-oriented publications.

What do I mean in the context of his Iran run-down?

Just one example: Steyn is courting a confrontation of biblical proportions with Iran. But for me one of the profound questions is this: the West, including the U.S., consists of a bunch of deracinated nations, only relatively free, whose governments are engaged in indoctrinating their respective populations about the twin wonders of Islam and Muslim mass immigration. The Crusaders we are not.

On what philosophical basis, then, does Steyn wish to wage war on a belligerent Muslim country? What are we fighting for if we’ve surrendered already—we’ve welcomed their infiltration of our societies and institutions? (See my expose of this process in the winter issue of The New Individualist)

Surely the real war is at home? Surely the fight for self-determination—individual and national—must be waged against government and its sundering of our sovereignty, individual and national?

Apropos Mark (indirectly, that is), Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, a director of the International Foundation for Election Systems, recently wrote in Times Online: “Increasingly, bodies such as the AEI [American Enterprise Institute] are less keen on sponsoring thinking and research. They are giving desk space and star roles to a breed of fast-talking practitioners of the television soundbite.”

I think it’s fair to say this is a general trend.

The Israeli Elections & the Media Monopoly Exposed

Israel, Media

My guest this week on Barely a Blog is Daniel Doron. Daniel, the director of the premier Israeli free-market think tank, The Israel Center for Social & Economic Progress, is also a columnist for The Jerusalem Post, where this especially probative piece first appeared.–ILANA

The Media Monopoly—Again
By Daniel Doron

A few days prior to the elections, two top Israeli journalists—known for their rare combination of intelligence, courage and integrity—threw a veritable bomb-shell into the otherwise soporific electoral debate.

To preserve the large lead that Ariel Sharon gained for his newly formed Kadima, under the leadership of the less popular Ehud Olmert, party strategists decided to keep the election campaign on a low key. Though Israel faces some life and death choices that voters should understand and sort out, Kadima strategists refused to have Olmert debate his two chief rivals, Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu and Labor’s Amir Peretz. They also managed to have a very supportive media keep any serious issue out of the public’s eye.

This is why the extraordinary critical two articles, one by Ari Shavit, Ha’aretz senior columnist, and the other by Guy Rolnik, Ha’aretz and the Marker economic editor, people from the left, mind you, would have created a media fire storm in any normal country. Shavit and Rolnik asserted that Netanyahu, whom the media marked as enemy of the poor and a peon of the rich, was actually the man who saved the Israeli economy from collapse and protected the poor; that he was the one who broke the major power of the rich, the bank monopoly; and that conversely, Kadima and its leader, the darlings of the media, may actually endanger Israel’s security, and corrupt its democratic system and its economy.

In “The Country Is In Our Hands,” an imaginary secret memo submitted to the 18 families that control most assets in Israel by their chief strategists, Shavit wrote:

“It was impossible to buy Netanyahu… when he dared threaten the banks, we suddenly understood that the man is not ours… therefore we made a determined strategic decision: Bibi has outlived his usefulness, Bibi must go….”
“To face the danger (emanating from Netanyahu’s reforms)… we had to form a political body that will serve us (the oligarchy) faithfully, and we had to head it by one of our own…”
“E.O. is A1… his door is always open… there is not a deal that he won’t cut… we have gained access that is comparable only to what the rich have in Latin America…”
“The new ruling party will be a most useful instrument for gaining our objectives… it will enable us to have total control of the Israeli government, of the police, the state prosecutor’s office, the treasury (and the various regulatory bodies)… Our 20th century dysfunctional democracy will be replaced by a centralized oligarchy…”

Rolnik made equally dramatic charges. In his piece “Kadima (onwards)—For The Benefit Of Our Rich Friends,” he wrote:

“Netanyahu was made to look as the elite’s man…. Political, social, and economic commentators tell us that he made the rich richer and the poor poorer. Nice story, but little relation to reality… the rich hate Bibi, they are connected to Olmert and prefer even Peretz… (Netanyahu) was the worse Minister of Finance the rich families controlling the economy ever got.”
“Netanyahu totally backed the removal of the banks from their chief source of power—their control of financial markets…”
“(Netanyahu’s) cuts (in government handouts) have saved the economy from collapse, (they have generated the brisk growth) that makes it possible for all the politicians to make promises for more handouts…”
“We know Ehud Olmert… he can be relied upon, Nochi (Dankner) relies on him, Mossie (Wertheimer) relies on him, Eitan (Raff) relies on him, they (the oligarchs) all rely on him—he will not disappoint them…”

In addition, Shavit, a fervent supporter of total withdrawal from the disputed territories, also charged that Olmert’s promise to make unilateral withdrawals without securing international backing for the total demilitarization of these territories is so irresponsible and dangerous—because it will enable Hamas to establish on the doorstep of Israel a Jihadi regime supported by Iran and Syria—that he was unfit to be Prime Minister.

Both Shavit and Rolnik are politically close to Kadima’s policy of total withdrawal from the disputed territories. However, unlike most of the media their integrity prevented them from joining the virulently anti-Netahyahu campaign which the pro unconditional withdrawal media exploited to advance its agenda; it has also prevented them from participating in the systematic cover up of Kadima’s and Labor’s shortcomings.

But it did not matter, because they were a drop in a sea of media manipulations and distortions.
The media did not even report or comment on their unusual criticism so most people were not aware of its existence.

Israel has three major TV channels, several radio stations, plus a number of very competitive newspapers. Yet the very liberal (in its own eyes) Israeli media has a united political voice and a single agenda, the promotion of a Palestinian state no matter how jingoistic, oppressive or dictatorial it is. It makes sure that no other voice is heard, and if heard, that it is discredited.

People in the media are entitled, of course, to their opinions. But it is questionable whether Israeli democracy can thrive when the media manages “to inject itself as an actor in this campaign in a manner unprecedented in Israeli electoral history” (as Yaron Dekel, senior commentator of Israel’s “public” TV channel 1, put it) and does it not only by manipulating the news but by outright lies and fabrications. In fact, it is quite likely that the media’s success in squelching a vigorous public debate on the urgent issues facing Israel is the reason for the worrisome and extremely low voter participation.

Immigration Rallies: Hobbesian Democracy in Action

America, IMMIGRATION

The nationwide illegal-alien rallies have been touted by the contemptible Ted Kennedy as the victory of democracy. “The country has spoken, and today the Senate listened,” Kennedy grandiosely crowed (emphasis added).
What makes the apparently no-longer-soused Senator assert that the in-your-face anti-American specter sweeping the nation—if anything more French than American—represents the majority?
What we are seeing unfold are special-interest politics, likened by Loren E. Lomasky to “Hobbes’s war of all against all, albeit by democratic means.”
The winner in an election is certainly not the fictitious entity referred to as “The People,” but rather the representatives of the majority. Do these elected representatives at least carry out the will of the majority? Hell no! The majority has little say in the business of governance; they’ve merely elected politicians who’ve been awarded carte blanche to do as they please.
The tyranny exercised by well-entrenched minorities over unorganized majorities,” in Lomasky’s words, now that’s the democratic reality Kennedy is exulting.

A Saddamless Iraq — A Free Iraq

Bush, Democracy, Iraq, Islam, Neoconservatism, War

Genghis (Bush) and his gang have recently told Iraqis to get with the program: form a government, or else. There is something really screwy about this administration’s admonitions to Iraqis for not getting it together. As though Iraq ever had it together; Saddam’s reign was one of the more peaceful periods in the history of this fractious people, which did not, I might add, ask to be invaded—and “improved.”

Under our ministrations, Iraq has gone from a secular to a religious country; from rogue to failed state. Put yourself in the worn-out shoes of this sad, pathetic people. Would you rather live under Saddam—who was a brutal dictator, but did provide Iraq with one of the foundations of civilization: order or under a force made up of ideological terrorists and an “Ali Baba” element, all running rampant because they can, and where not even mosques provide a safe haven from these brutes and their bombs?

I know what my answer would be. But then I’ve actually had some experience—nothing compared to the experience of the Iraqis, but certainly something compared to the inexperience of the types (Hannity, O’Reilly et al.) who talk up this war.

I lived under a dictatorship in apartheid South-Africa. So did millions of Africans. Crime was never an issue then. Africans suffered indignities, but not much violence. Unless one made a point of clashing with the authorities, one’s life was secure. Now that “freedom” has come to South Africa, lawlessness is such that the “democratic” government has implemented “an official blackout” on national crime statistics. The place is one of the most violent spots on earth, after Iraq, Haiti, and some other African countries.

A few weeks back I got the news that my youngest brother and his family (wife and new baby) were attacked in their suburban fortress at 2:00am by a gang of Africans. The alarm was bypassed. Luckily they escaped with their lives.

In my father’s upmarket neighborhood, another dad was shot point-blank in front of his little girls, as he exited his car to open the garage gates. The loot? A cell phone and some cash. He begged the savages to take his car and all his possessions and spare his life. Two of my husband’s colleagues are dead; one shot in broad daylight as he left his girlfriend’s apartment.

South-Africa is heaven on earth compared to Iraq. So don’t speak to me about “liberation.” The removal of Saddam is not to be equated with liberty in Iraq; a Saddamless Iraq is not necessarily a free Iraq.

Let us stipulate for the record that Saddam Hussein was a killer, a wicked man indeed. Yet even the invasion’s most avid supporters cannot but agree that Iraq was not a lawless society prior to our merciful faith-based intervention.

In addition to their society’s cultural limitations vis-a -vis the attainment of democracy, if Iraqis appear ungrateful or disoriented it is because they are busy… busy dying at rates much much higher than those claimed by the Saddam = Hitler crowd. In the final days of Saddam’s reign of terror, i.e., in the 15 months preceding the invasion, the primary causes of death in Iraq were natural: “heart attack, stroke and chronic illness,” according to a Lancet report. Since Iraq became another neocon object lesson, the primary cause of death has been violence.

As I once wrote, people “whose lungs are airless, whose hearts are not beating, and whose eyes and limbs are missing are not free and will never be free.” And people who risk such a fate daily are not free in any meaningful way.