Month: March 2010

Wendy Kaminer, who supports marriage equality, chides the ACLU:

Not surprisingly, the right wing, anti-gay Alliance Defense Fund is perhaps the primary defender of First Amendment rights in cases involving the anti-gay speech and belief of conservative Christians.  ADF receives (and perhaps desires) little assistance from the ACLU, an increasingly unreliable defender of speech and belief that conflict with its gay rights agenda: while the ACLU aggressively defended the rights of students to wear t-shirts to school celebrating gay rights, for example, it stayed out of an important federal case, Harper v Poway, involving a Christian student punished for wearing an anti-gay t-shirt, even when the case reached the Supreme Court.  National and state spokespeople for the ACLU, once a staunch defender of freedom of conscience, have pointedly ignored an invitation to comment on Julea Ward's federal case, although they might simply have pointed out that liberty cannot be secured for some without securing it for all.

Title from Anthony Lewis' excellent biography of the first amendment. My own defense of this position here.

The newborn male Asian elephant, nicknamed ‘Mr Shuffles’ by staff, shelters under his mother ‘Porntip’ during his first public appearance at Taronga Zoo in Sydney on March 14, 2010. The baby elephant was believed to have died during labor but was born alive on March 10, amazing its keepers and defying expert opinion that such an outcome would take a miracle. By Torsten Blackwood/AFP/Getty Images.

Evan Feigenbaum has a theory:

Beijing rarely shares American threat assessments. And China’s leaders, even when they do sense a challenge to “stability,” are far more relaxed than are Americans about the scope and nature of those threats. This is certainly true of Pakistan, where Beijing trusts the military’s instincts and senses little threat to the Pakistani state. It’s true of Iran. And it’s true of North Korea, which few Chinese believe will collapse and where a managed transition toward Chinese-style reform is the medium-term outcome China seeks to achieve.

(Hat tip: Greg Scoblete)

Enduring America is tracking reports of aggression against Iran’s leading reformist party, the Islamic Iran Participation Front (aka Mosharekat, whose members include the recently released Tajzadeh):

Deputy Interior Ministry Solat Mortazavi told the Iranian Students News Agency that all activities of IIPF have been banned and its headquarters have been locked. Mortazavi implied that the ban was in place before the IIPF announcement that its congress had been called off because of pressure from security forces. … Speaking to BBC Persian, a leading member of the IIPF, Ali Shakouri, disputed the claim that the party was banned but confirmed that its headquarters are locked and inaccessible.

An EA correspondent puts the rumors in context:

This is potentially a very destabilising move that would be impossible without the direct consent of the Supreme Leader. Whether the judiciary confirms the Interior ministry announcement will be the next big development. If the head of the judiciary, Sadegh Larijani agrees with Mortazavi, Ahmadinejad’s political deputy, this would be a major setback for those hoping for a conservative alignment against the President.

From his recent post:

Andrew is free to publish malicious nonsense, such as the series of maps he published yesterday, maps which purport to show how Jews stole Palestinian land. Andrew does not tell us the source of these maps (in a magazine with standards, the source would be identified), but they were drawn to cast Jews in the most terrible light possible.

The map said nothing about "stealing land", the source was identified (as he has now conceded), and the notion that even if this were true, it would be tantamount to casting "Jews in the most terrible light possible" is certainly not what I intended and not what any fair reader would take away. As I've noted twice since publishing it, the map is certainly crude by conflating Ottoman and British public land with Palestinian land, and also misleading in conflating land owned with that politically controlled by Israelis or Palestinian Arabs, so I published a clearer one in response, and have provided more context today.

I aired the whole controversy in real time, which seems to me to argue against the notion that I'm "not particularly interested in hearing fact-based arguments that undermine whatever argument he happens to be making." I also aired a clarification to the new and better map here. I do this kind of blogging and clarification all the time – on every subject under the sun, with maximum accountability and reader reaction. I admit error promptly and I air dissents constantly. But I also stick to my arguments if they hold up over time.

Now this: my simple publication of a map was apparently

meant to deny Jewish claims to virtually any of the land of Israel.

Seriously, this is absurd. It was clearly designed to show how far we've come since the original partition the Palestinians foolishly rejected, and how dangerous it would be for the US, the region and Israel to continue even more aggressively on this path. My commitment to a secure Israel is as strong as Joe Biden's (before he too got a taste of the current government). Only a week ago, I wrote in my "Much Delayed Response to Goldblog":

I regard the establishment of the Jewish state as one of the West's

high-points in the 20th Century.

Like America's founding, it was not immaculate, and its survival has been a brutal struggle in which Israel has not been as innocent as some want to believe, but whose enemies' anti-Semitism and hatred is tangible and omnipresent and despicable … Israel, for its part, remains, in its own proper borders, a model state for that part of the world; its openness and democracy vastly exceed any neighboring regime's; it has made more of a tiny strip of land than most of its neighbors have of their vastly greater territory and resources put together. If I were Jewish, I'd be proud. But I'm not, and I can still admire a great deal.

My decision after the Gaza horror to challenge and debate some of the ideas I once held with respect to Israel in a post-9/11, post-Cold War world does not mean I wish Israel ill. It means I think Israel has not acted as a real and constructive ally this past year, and is increasingly at odds with US interests in the Middle East and in the world in general, and is committing assisted suicide if it does not get out of the West Bank sooner rather than later.

In the last week, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Tzivi Lipni, and David Petraeus have all made essentially the same point. And if Jeffrey believes that my blogging has "caused real damage to real people", then I can only say that words and arguments hurt no one.

Bombs and missiles do.

Friedersdorf is unimpressed by the latest Lady Gaga video:

Music videos are a visual medium, and Lady Gaga is most interesting as a visual spectacle, but what finally strikes me about this new effort is the gulf between its extreme ambition in the visual realm and the utter indifference to its “written content” (for lack of a better term). Why didn’t Gaga get a better song? Surely there are decent lyricists who work for a quarter of what they pay creative directors. And why is the situation so seldom reversed? Whether we’re talking about network television or Avatar or Hollywood movies, the visual and technical aspects are so frequently superior to the actual content, whereas it is hard to think of a high budget project where the writing is exceptional but the production values are as sub-par as writing we often see.

Alex Blaze on the lesbianism in the video:

From a sexuality standpoint, I give it a “meh” as well, since the lesbianism is obviously just there to make straight boys drool and it’s given a complete “Well they’re in prison” (a straight male fantasy if ever there was one) excuse so that Beyonce can still be read as straight.

Alyssa Rosenberg also has harsh words:

Now, this may be a little literal of me, but to start out with, women’s prison isn’t cute, and it’s not a device to be cheerfully re-appropriated. I’d be willing to listen to an argument that it’s a clever riff on lesbian exploitation movies from the ’70s or something. But for someone who’s spent a long time and a lot of energy cultivating a gay fan base, it seems a little odd to use stereotypically butch female prison guards and situational lesbianism as a framing device.

Julian Sanchez coins a term:

We have what appear to be an array of monitoring mechanisms in place to check intelligence surveillance, but the watchdogs will in practice often lack a full picture of what they’re supposed to be overseeing. During the Bush administration, a handful of legislators were briefed on the National Security’s Agency’s program of warrantless wiretapping, but one of those few, Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), has since asserted that she didn’t understand the program was being conducted beyond the limits of FISA, because she was forbidden from consulting attorneys with expertise in that obscure and complex statute.

Laura Friedman argues against sanctions for Iran:

South Africa is the one case where sanctions were about supporting the self-identified interests of a large portion of that country's population.  In every other case, sanctions have been about promoting US interests, not the interests of the people bearing their brunt.  We sanctioned the Castro regime because we refused to tolerate Communism so close to home.  We sanctioned Gaza because we rejected any dealings with Hamas.  We sanctioned Iraq because we decided that Saddam Hussein had become an irredeemable enemy of the US.  We started sanctioning Iran because we decided that the Iranian regime was beyond the pale.  And – no surprise – in every case except South Africa, the populations that were expected to rise up and act as tools of US foreign policy obstinately refused to cooperate.