Year: 2013

The past week has seen multiple bombings in Syria, with more than 80 killed in a Tuesday attack on Aleppo University and more than 20 killed in suicide bombings in the Idlib Province on Wednesday. Scott Lucas highlights conflicting reports on the party responsible for the University attacks:

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has criticised US media for accusations blaming Tuesday’s blasts at Aleppo University on the Syrian regime: “Yesterday I saw a semi-neutral report on CNN that it was not ruled out that this terrorist act had been staged by the government forces themselves. I cannot imagine anything more blasphemous.” In a statement on Wednesday, the Russian Foreign Ministry blamed “terrorists” for the “merciless bloody provocation”, which was “the terrorists’ revenge for the significant losses sustained in their confrontation with government forces”.

In contrast, US State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland said, “The United States is appalled and saddened by the Syrian regime’s deadly attack yesterday on the University of Aleppo.”

James Miller reports on the work of the Local Coordination Committees, which provide daily updates on non-regime casualties:

The Local Coordination Committees (LCC) is an activist network operating both inside and outside of Syria. They claim to use stringent verification processes to ensure that a member of the LCC can vouch for any information posted either on their Facebook page or their website. The LCC also populates a database of those killed in the Syrian conflict, which can be seen at the website for the Center for Documentation of Violations in Syria. The LCC’s casualty figures are a mix of insurgents and civilians, and never include regime casualties. Syrian State Media has stopped reporting regime casualty figures.

The NYT captions the above video:

A description of the video posted on YouTube by ANA, which is run from Cairo by the British-Syrian activist Rami Jarrah, said that the video was filmed by an activist just after the university was hit by a missile fired from a Syrian Air Force MIG fighter jet, and captured the impact of a second airstrike.

“You know, at least I’m not lying saying “my girlfriend” anymore. And in all fairness, all my girlfriend jokes — for anybody who thinks, Oh, that’s sad, he had to make up whole stories — I didn’t make up whole stories; they were real stories, I just changed the gender. And by the way, if that doesn’t prove how much same-sex couples are the exact same as heterosexual couples, not once in my career did anyone ever hear a story I told and say, “Wait a second, that doesn’t sound like anything we … ” It’s all the same,” – comedian Todd Glass on coming out on Marc Maron’s podcast a year ago.

On the hundreds of interviews and radio call-ins I’ve done on marriage equality over the last two decades, one question was very common. It was: “I’m not anti-gay, I think. I just don’t understand homosexuality. I have no real way to understand how a guy is attracted to another guy. It makes no sense to me.” I loved getting this question because it helped get closer to the core of the issue. My response was simply: “Yes, you do understand homosexuality very well. Because you’re a heterosexual. It’s exactly the same – but with the gender switched. It’s the same bundle of love, pain, misunderstanding, passion, anger, communication, frustration, happiness, joy, respect, and sadness that all true romantic and conjugal heterosexual love entails.

Every straight person already knows everything important there is to know about a gay person’s needs and loves and lives. Just look in the mirror. We are humanbefore we are gay or straight. We are you.

(Hat tip: Jane Marie)

Alex Klein reports (link now fixed) on the latest chapter of the ever-darkening saga of Scientology – a real-estate scam labeled “Ideal Org” that sapped millions of dollars from members:

It’s no secret that Scientology is pay-to-play; the prices for its services and teachings, from books to audits to seminars, seem to know no ceiling. But this moneymaker is different: The building drives ask for straight-up cash donations of fixed amounts — many times larger than traditional Scientology buy-ins — and, according to former executives, go straight to the central church’s kitty.

When two friends began to question the shady “Ideal Org”:

[Tony] DePhillips complained to a staff member that the aggressive, post-purchase, empty-building fundraising “went against [founder L. Ron] Hubbard’s financial policy.” The staffer responded by suggesting he report himself to the church’s Ethics department, which would help him “get [his] shit together.” He ultimately resigned and was branded a “suppressive,” a church enemy with whom no Scientologist is allowed to communicate.

Next, the church’s “counselors and security checkers” descended on [Bert] Schippers, insisting he agree, in writing, to never talk to his friend again. He demurred, tried to reason with the church. “Tony’s a good person,” he urged. That fell on deaf ears. He was later ushered out of the church and branded suppressive as well. His stepson and daughter, still in the church, no longer speak to him. “I moved up the ranks because I wanted the spiritual salvation,” says Schippers. “But I never got it. The spiritual salvation I was looking for turned into spiritual rape.”

(Photo: The Church of Scientology’s Flag Building, the centerpiece of a construction campaign for the church, is seen on May 22, 2008 in Clearwater, Florida. By Paul J. Richards / AFP-Getty Images)

It’s a disgrace. We have our differences. But on the vile attacks on him coming from Israel right now, and from the far left in the US, I just want to say I’m shoulder to shoulder with him.

Johnnie Freedland has a must-read. It’s a brilliant dissection of a complex situation, a drawing of distinctions that the American Jewish Establishment seems sadly incapable of. Money quote:

When European governments either abstained or voted for the Palestinian upgrade to semi-statehood at the U.N. in November, plenty in Israel and the U.S. saw that as yet another example of age-old European hostility to the Jews. But very few Jews here saw it the same way. We understood it for what it was, an attempt by governments avowedly sympathetic to Israel’s right to security to revive the two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Their calculation might have been wrong, but it was not anti-Semitic.

He also notes how some anti-Semitic moves are reported in the US, but their subsequent failures don’t get disseminated. And while European anti-Semitism is still a problem, it is often overwhelmed by Jewish success:

Take Britain. Jews here can feel unease at the tenor of the national conversation on Israel—a newspaper cartoon here, a politician’s turn of phrase there—but they also enjoy a Jewish life that is in many ways richer than ever before. Limmud, the annual festival of Jewish learning that has gone global, began here, while Jewish Book Week has become London’s biggest literary festival. The Booker Prize for 2011 was won by a novel about Jews, The Finkler Question, written by a man who has chronicled the British-Jewish sensibility better than anyone, Howard Jacobson. British TV currently airs not one but two highly rated sitcoms depicting Jewish family life. Meanwhile, if the current polls hold till 2015, Britain’s next prime minister is set to be the first Jewish leader of the Labour Party, Ed Miliband—who repeatedly stresses the pride he takes in his Jewish roots. Not bad for a Jewish community that, according to the latest census, numbers just over 260,000, less than 0.5 percent of the British population.

This Onion report is priceless (sorry for the ad beforehand):

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Some final reaction from readers on this week’s popular thread:

So you continue to assert and condemn Jodie Foster as having attacked other gay people. As I re-read her speech, her strawman was baiting the media, which would surely schedule a press conference, not other gays. Again, cite her language and show where she was attacking others, and say which others you mean. Repeating the assertion does not illuminate anything.

Here’s what I was referring to:

Now I’m told, apparently, that every celebrity is expected to honor the details of their private life with a press conference, a fragrance and a prime-time reality show.

This is both a straw man and a veiled swipe at those like Ellen Degeneres who showed real courage before Foster ever did and worked through the process and in turn made others’ lives freer and happier. I’m with Ellen’s courage, not Foster’s retroactive defensiveness. No one needs to know about the details of Foster’s private life, by the way, which she deserves to keep private. All anyone ever asked for was acknowledgment of the public fact of her being gay. And, as Mark Harris’s insightful EW story last year showed, the new wave is doing this simply, matter-of-factly and incidentally. No one wants a press conference or a fragrance or a reality show. And, by the way, on Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo, a redneck gay man, Uncle Poodle, is very effectively and elegantly integrated into the series and just revealed his HIV status. Now, that’s very 2013. Foster is still railing against 1989. How one reader translates her speech:

“Hi, thank you for this award and for acknowledging me for all the movies I’ve done, I’ve got a big announcement to make but I’m not really going to say it clearly, I’m just going to talk around it like Clarice Starling would do, and look, there’s my date Mel Gibson in the audience looking absolutely desperate and friendless and not weird at all, and I came out a million years ago, secretly, like a real hero, and don’t ask me what I came out of because that’s for me to know and you to only kind of know, and hey, get out of my business, entire world watching me on teevee now, this is private!”

On Sunday night, Jodie Foster just came out as weird.

Another:

My favorite part is how right before she goes off on privacy, she mentions how her publicist will probably be mad at her. I love it when a person with a publicist bemoans a lack of privacy.

Another:

You’re thinking too hard about Foster. She’s a narcissistic movie star. I didn’t realize how repulsively full of herself she was until she gave that speech.

No modesty about receiving it at relatively young age. (Only three previous recipients have been under the age of 50.) No comment about being one of the few women to receive it. (Only 14 women have received it in the 60+ years the award has been given and the last one was thirteen years ago.) No account of what she’s learned from certain roles or other actors and directors or what a privilege her job is. No reflections on the craft and work of acting and directing.

Ms. Foster just rambled on about how hard it has been to deal with movie stardom, how long she’s done it, and how she had to overcome it and what it’s done to her privacy. From the narcissistic cocoon from which she seemed to be speaking, I don’t think she has overcome it. Stardom made her famous, powerful and a ton of money but it seems to have warped her perspective and humanity.

She’s not homophobic; she just doesn’t care. She doesn’t care about the gay community, other women, or what anyone thinks of her calling on Mel Gibson to be her date. Frankly, I’ve been shocked that anyone in the press lauded her speech. It was like Anna Nicole Smith without the drugs.

Another:

Perhaps, just perhaps, her friendship with Gibson exists in spite of his vile acts and the beliefs he has espoused.  Perhaps, just perhaps, she sees that within this deeply troubled man there remains a spark of decency and she refuses to give up on it. Perhaps, just perhaps, like an alcoholic’s sponsor, she is one of the few people that can call him on his shit and guide him out of the darkness.

I was struck, during her speech, by the images of Gibson, who looked sad and small and grateful – grateful that one person had not given up on him, had not written him off.  Perhaps, when she referred to him as having “saved her” she meant that by making the effort to stand by him, to do her best to right his ship, she had found in herself a deep well of compassion for even the lowest man.  As a Christian that concept can’t be foreign to you.

Of course it isn’t. But it is the reverse of what Foster actually said. And another:

How would Foster being out of the closet have helped prevent gay men from dying of AIDS? Would they have reconsidered the risks associated with unprotected sex because Foster’s orientation was weighing on their minds or something? Would AIDS researchers have been extra-motivated in their work, knowing that America’s sweetheart, Ms. Foster, just might be the next to fall ill?

This is extremely silly, collectivist, identity politics. Jodie Foster is an autonomous individual with her own ambitions, her own thoughts, and her own desires, as we all are. Just because she happens to share your and your friends’ sexual orientation does not make her part of your “community” in any meaningful way, and it certainly does not make her obligated to take up the cause of this community’s self-inflicted health problems.

Go see “How To Survive A Plague” and witness the incredible support so many lesbians and straight women gave to their gay brothers and friends in an existential crisis. I’m the opposite of an identity politics maven. But when you are in the middle of a plague, community matters. Another:

In your latest about Jodie Foster’s emotional and clumsy speech on Sunday, you threw a piece of insult about silence equaling death in the general direction of someone who is undeserving of it. Throw it directly Reagan’s way; I do. But Ms Foster is not responsible for the death of people who had AIDS due to her silence about her sexual life. She never once denied being a lesbian or pretended otherwise. Sorry but that was a bold choice 30 years ago or 20 years ago or even five years ago. Jodie Foster came out in front of a global audience of tens of millions on Sunday in her own, sometimes opaque way. But. She. Did. It. Can’t we honor all steps forward even when they stumble?

Yes, we can. Which is why I also said I was “thrilled” by her coming out. Another sees the stage differently:

Among all the reactions to Jody Foster’s speech at the Golden Globes, I haven’t seen anyone suggest that the venue was ill chosen. Certainly the award was in recognition of a lifetime’s work, but that made it someone even more inappropriate. At least I found it self indulgent. Here is a yearly event that is known for imbibing of alcohol and general frivolity, which doesn’t seem quite the place for an extended “I Did It My Way.” Even though there is certainly talk of who wore what, Ben Afflecks’s win, or Jennifer Lawrence’s Meryl Streep comment, most of the attention has been grabbed by the WTF ramblings of Foster.

I hear that Oprah is looking for people who want to get things off their chest.

Serwer looks on as Republicans “vigorously oppose imaginary Obama gun proposals”:

Republicans were primed to expect a gun grab. Prominent conservatives like Matt Drudge have made historically obtuse warnings that Obama, like Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, is bent on disarming the population (presumably prior to building a gulag and engaging in genocide). But rather than of banning guns by fiat, the White House’s list of executive actions consists mostly of practical or symbolic measures, containing lots of phrases like “release a letter,” “start a national dialogue” and “provide incentives.” It’s not exactly the stuff dictatorships are made of, but Obama’s imaginary executive actions on guns are certainly more exciting than the ones he actually proposed.

Massie’s view:

The measures Obama has announced are chiefly of symbolic value. That’s important, not least because it would have been impossible, in the aftermath of this kind of horror, for the President to do nothing at all. But there is a limit to what symbolic measures can realistically be expected to achieve. All this is, of course, pretty depressing. But unless the culture changes we should not expect there to be any great decrease in American gun violence.

Douthat wrestles with the president’s proposals:

[T]he best idea in the president’s proposals is probably his call to beef up the existing background check requirement so that it covers private sales as well as licensed dealers — a proposal that some of the smartest conservative writers on guns have cautiously endorsed as well. Again, given the experience of the Brady Law, the impediments to enforcement, and the relative ease of black market buying in a country with 300 million guns, I am extremely doubtful that background checks would have much impact on crime. But the modest delays (perhaps too modest, in an age of instant checks!) and inconveniences they introduce might well make a difference to someone in a downward spiral, giving them a chance to seek help, think again, or reconsider gun ownership entirely.

Wilkinson doubts Congress will pass new gun regulations:

Even with the small shift in public opinion following the Newtown tragedy, it remains unlikely that Mr Obama’s legislative proposals to ban large clips, to ban guns with certain cosmetic features, or to end the gun-show exception to mandatory background checks, will make it through Congress. Even if they do, mass shootings are going to continue to be a horrifying fact of American life. As Lexington wrote on the day of the tragedy, “I am not sure that tinkering with gun control will stop horrible massacres like today’s. And I am pretty sure that the sort of gun control that would work—banning all guns—is not going to happen.” Indeed,according to Gallup, American opposition to an outright ban on handguns is at a “record high”

Ezra sees one way new gun laws could become law:

The assault weapons ban could suck up all the attention only to die toward the end of the process, when Republicans and centrist Democrats kill the proposal in order to remain in the NRA’s good graces. That will infuriate supporters of gun control, but it could help the laundry list of proposals behind the assault weapons ban to slip through as a compromise package. The result won’t necessarily feel like a victory to supporters of gun control, but it might be one, and it wouldn’t be possible if the assault weapons ban wasn’t available to be thrown overboard.

Here’s the NewsHour interview link. The relevant section starts around the 8:20 mark. He’s against it. But he isn’t asked about his own complicity with it, as credibly alleged here. My previous takes here and here. McChrystal was never asked about his alleged complicity in some of the most barbaric torture methods in Iraq by the Senate. To the best of my recollection, no reporter or interviewer on his book tour has even brought it up so far. That’s the American way, isn’t it? Those who reveal (false) details of torture are prosecuted; those who authorized and oversaw the brutal torture are rewarded with promotions and book tours in which the subject isn’t broached.

The segment he had on with Jessica Chastain last night – a simply extraordinary actress, by the way – shook me up. I may be wrong, but I got the very strong impression that after seeing the movie, he had moved toward supporting torture. Since the movie didn’t do that for me, but was seen that way by many I deeply respect, Stewart’s impression – indeed his entire attitude to the subject – made me wonder if indeed my naivete or attempt to see the movie as an artistic whole was misplaced. Here’s the interview, so let me know whether you think I’m off-base:

One small but important thing. Chastain insisted that Boal and Bigelow decided to have no cooperation with the government. Maybe she got some things muddled up but one of the things no one doubts – because it was first questioned and then proven by the right’s Judicial Watch FOIA and then by the anti-torture coalition – is that there was close cooperation with the Pentagon, the CIA and even the White House. There is now a Senate investigation into whether the CIA figures with knowledge of the torture program overstepped the line in cooperating with ZD30. And yet the Daily Show’s site still has this sentence describing the segment:

Jessica Chastain explains why Kathryn Bigelow and the creators of Zero Dark Thirty decided not to work hand-in-hand with the US government.

Just. Not. True. Here’s a good summary of Boal and Bigelow’s close cooperation with the government in getting details right. Here are the documents and emailsproving it beyond any doubt. Chastain must surely walk back or clarify what she means by that. This movie was made hand in glove with the very war criminals who knew the full details. That’s not necessarily a bad thing: getting the layout of OBL’s compound exactly right is what a good movie should do. But that in turn also reveals a key difficulty with the movie: how can you say it’s just a drama “based” on real events when parts of it are meticulously rooted in government sources down to the ceiling heights in OBL’s bedroom? And how can you possibly get objective information about the use of torture from those who did it? Of course they are going to spin it to defend themselves. How many torture victims did Bigelow and Boal get access to? That’s the more salient question – and the other side of the story. Any movie-maker trying to get to the truth would also interview the tortured. Did they?

Then Stewart said he remained queasy about knowing about the existence of the CIA’s “black sites” where prisoners were routinely tortured using Gestapo methods – some actually to death, some completely innocent. “Shouldn’t we be watching this thirty years from now?” he asked, as my jaw dropped. What other crimes done by the government does Stewart think it’s best we don’t know about? Then we got to the nub of the matter, and what I think is a virtue of the movie. It sure did show that what was done by Americans was torture. If you’d had a figure in a World War II movie in Nazi uniform doing the same things CIA operatives are shown doing, you wouldn’t hesitate to call it such. The first torture scene is basically a crucifixion. And you would reflexively flinch and see the abuse as the despicable antithesis of everything we stand for in Western civilization.

So here’s how Stewart began to articulate his response:

Stewart: “This was a time when our government did some truly difficult -”

Chastain (interrupting): “Not great things.”

Difficult? Using overwhelming force to beat suspects to a pulp, drown them to near death scores of times, cram them into boxes, hang them from stess positions used by the Communist Chinese, freeze them to near-death: these things are not difficult. Real interrogation and investigative work is difficult – and it’s what caught and killed bin Laden (which the movie also shows, thank God). Not resorting to torture as a first option after an act of unimaginable terror is difficult. The word the Stewart I thought I knew (and admire) was looking for was surely “evil” or “barbaric”. But they didn’t come to his mind. No: this was a card-carrying liberal seemingly persuaded by the movie that torture was more acceptable than he had previously believed. Maybe I’m wrong. But this subject is too important for equivocation or the “I’m just a comedian” cop-out.

By the way, this movie is now in wide release, and many of you will have seen it by now. My lungs are getting better now so I’m going to see it again soon. But I trust your judgment as much as anyone’s. What did you glean from ZD30? Did it make you more or less persuaded that torture is defensible? Was my partial defense of it justified? Or dangerously naive?