Category: Keepers

[Re-posted from last night.]

Below is a remarkable document. It's a memo circulated by Jan van Lohuizen, a highly respected Republican pollster, (he polled for George W. Bush in 2004), to various leading Republican operatives, candidates and insiders. It's on the fast-shifting poll data on marriage equality and gay rights in general, and how that should affect Republican policy and language. And the pollster's conclusion is clear: if the GOP keeps up its current rhetoric and positions on gays and lesbians, it is in danger of marginalizing itself to irrelevance or worse.

Read the bluntness of this. This is the GOP establishment talking to itself. And the Republican pollster who arguably knows more about the politics of the gay issue than anyone else (how else to explain the Ohio campaign of 2004?) is advising them in no uncertain terms that they need to evolve and fast, if they're not going to damage their brand for an entire generation:

Yep, it's a classic "talking points memo":

The last paragraph is, to my mind, the most remarkable. It's advising Republican candidates to emphasize the conservative nature of gay marriage, to say how it encourages personal responsibility, commitment, stability and family values. It uses Dick Cheney's formula (which was for a couple of years, the motto of this blog) that "freedom means freedom for everyone." And it uses David Cameron's argument that you can be for gay marriage because you are a conservative.

And the walls came tumbling down.

(More legible transcript of the memo below:)

In view of this week’s news on the same sex marriage issue, here is a summary of recent survey findings on same sex marriage:

1. Support for same sex marriage has been growing and in the last few years support has grown at an accelerated rate with no sign of slowing down. A review of public polling shows that up to 2009 support for gay marriage increased at a rate of 1% a year. Starting in 2010 the change in the level of support accelerated to 5% a year. The most recent public polling shows supporters of gay marriage outnumber opponents by a margin of roughly 10% (for instance: NBC / WSJ poll in February / March: support 49%, oppose 40%).

2. The increase in support is taking place among all partisan groups. While more Democrats support gay marriage than Republicans, support levels among Republicans are increasing over time. The same is true of age: younger people support same sex marriage more often than older people, but the trends show that all age groups are rethinking their position.

3. Polling conducted among Republicans show that majorities of Republicans and Republican leaning voters support extending basic legal protections to gays and lesbians. These include majority Republican support for:

a. Protecting gays and lesbians against being fired for reasons of sexual orientation
b. Protections against bullying and harassment
c. Repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.
d. Right to visit partners in hospitals
e. Protecting partners against loss of home in case of severe medical emergencies or death
f. Legal protection in some form for gay couples whether it be same sex marriage or domestic partnership (only 29% of Republicans oppose legal recognition in any form).

Recommendation: A statement reflecting recent developments on this issue along the following lines:

“People who believe in equality under the law as a fundamental principle, as I do, will agree that this principle extends to gay and lesbian couples; gay and lesbian couples should not face discrimination and their relationship should be protected under the law. People who disagree on the fundamental nature of marriage can agree, at the same time, that gays and lesbians should receive essential rights and protections such as hospital visitation, adoption rights, and health and death benefits."

Other thoughts / Q&A: Follow up to questions about affirmative action:

“This is not about giving anyone extra protections or privileges, this is about making sure that everyone – regardless of sexual orientation – is provided the same protections against discrimination that you and I enjoy.”

Why public attitudes might be changing:

“As more people have become aware of friends and family members who are gay, attitudes have begun to shift at an accelerated pace. This is not about a generational shift in attitudes, this is about people changing their thinking as they recognize their friends and family members who are gay or lesbian.”

Conservative fundamentals:

“As people who promote personal responsibility, family values, commitment and stability, and emphasize freedom and limited government we have to recognize that freedom means freedom for everyone. This includes the freedom to decide how you live and to enter into relationships of your choosing, the freedom to live without excessive interference of the regulatory force of government.

"It's a generational issue. If it passes, I think it will be repealed within 20 years," – North Carolina State House Speaker Thom Tillis, a Republican.

So there you have it. A key Republican leader concedes this amendment will one day be repealed and backed it anyway. The only word that comes to mind in the face of such cynicism is spite.

Absorbing the blow from last night is hard. If a victory for marriage equality happens, straight couples can go about their lives and nothing will change. If a defeat occurs, gay couples must live in fear of retaining joint custody of children, access to hospital rooms, health insurance, and on and on. Our families and friends, our children and nieces and nephews, come to realize that their family members are beneath civil equality – and that their inferiority is written into their very constitution. Listening to Maggie Gallagher this week, you may be struck by how she sees herself as the victim. Let me kindly suggest that that is not exactly an expression of human empathy. 

Remember how meretricious this assault on gay couples was. They are already banned by state law from marrying. Now their own state constitution bans them from any civil rights as couples whatsoever: no domestic partnerships, no civil unions, nothing.

It's an act of pure punishment of citizens who are gay, a deliberate psychological blow to their self-esteem, their sense of citizenship, their core equality as human beings. A 60 percent majority decided that 2 percent of their fellow citizens are and must remain inferior in law. When gay rights advocates seek recourse in the courts, is it so surprising?

All I can say to my fellow gays and lesbians in the great state of North Carolina is: do not allow these people to get into your heads; do not begin to doubt your worth as equal citizens, equal spouses and an equal parents. What we're seeing is the strategy clearly laid out by the National Organization for Marriage: divide blacks from whites, create confusing amendments that do not just ban marriage for gay couples, but any recognition or rights at all, and use the churches as your main organizing tool. This had, for me, an added wound: seeing some African-Americans celebrate marginalizing another minority in the South is heart-breaking.

(Photo: Seth Keel, center, is consolded by his boyfriend Ian Chambers, left, and his mother Jill Hinton, during a concession speech during an Amendment One opposition party on Tuesday, May 8, 2012, at The Stockroom in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina. By Travis Long/Raleigh News & Observer/MCT via Getty Images.)

What remains of the Breitbart emporium is releasing snippets from Jonah Goldberg's new book. One of the recent ones takes aim at yours truly:

It’s all very well and good to decry certainty and extol em­piricism, but it’s quite another to live by such values. The reality is that Sullivan is using the Trojan Horse of conservative empiricism to deliver an army of theoretical, theological, and ideological certainties fighting under the banner of humility and doubt. Boiled down, Sullivan’s crusade amounts to the exact same shtick I’ve been describing: Defend your own "way of looking at the world"—i.e., your Weltanschauung—as coolly prag­matic and empirical while describing your opponents’ as blindly and dan­gerously ideological. Those who disagree with the excitable Sullivan are immediately cast as ideologues, "Christianists," fundamentalists, bigots, and fools.

Sigh. I haven't read the book so cannot know what Goldberg means by my "theoretical, theological, and ideological certainties." I wish he'd name one. Just one. It would turn an insult into an argument. Maybe he can answer it on the Corner and help me out. Or would that mean a link to the Dish – not often allowed in that ideological fortress called NRO?

A response to the broad dismissal nonetheless. I wrote my dissertation on the primacy of practical wisdom in human conduct – in contradistinction to ideology. My stand on marriage equality has been elucidated by clear, reasoned argument (it was reviewed in Goldberg's own National Review by the political philosopher Kenneth Minogue thus: "Sullivan has done for homosexuality what John Stuart Mill did for liberty"), has long supported a federalist, gradualist approach to the subject, and compiled an anthology that included many articles against it.

Yes, my view that torture is illegal is simply a fact, as it is also a fact that the techniques used by Cheney and Bush were and are torture as defined under a plain reading of domestic and international law. I'm in favor of a small solvent government, as a general principle, one that runs routine surpluses in good times and helps mitigate recessions by short term stimulus – again pragmatic support for limited government.

I'm prepared to back Democrats and Republicans in a prudential conservative belief that a successful polity needs two healthy parties and that collectivism and individualism are both integral parts of the Western tradition which is stronger for both of them. But my heart remains with individualism, if possible, depending on the circumstances (war and depressions would be exceptions).

Dish readers can judge for themselves whether this blog is about imposing "theoretical, theological, and ideological certainties" or whether it is about taking positions but always subjecting them to scrutiny, re-evaluation, re-thinking. As I have always understood conservatism, this is its essence.

And the fact remains that Goldberg's GOP – no tax increases can ever be contemplated; the Iraq War remains a success; torture isn't torture; religious doctrine dictates social policy; tax cuts always lead to growth; an abortion regime in place for decades should be ended overnight; all gay relationships should be barred from any legal protections in the federal constitution; there can be no accommodation with illegal immigrants who have lived here for decades or with their US-born children – is as rigid an ideology as one can imagine. It has become, in fact, a theology that remains eternally true regardless of circumstance or context or moment.

In the aftermath of the clearest yet revelation of Obama's exquisite non-position on marriage equality, the RNC is claiming that Romney's position on marriage is the same as Obama's. Weigel counters:

Romney's committed to a federal marriage amendment. Has Obama ever spoken about such an amendment? Yes. He was against it.

Does Romney support North Carolina's amendment, stripping gay couples of all rights, even in second-class domestic parnerships? Yep. David Link focuses on the candidates' actions:

Jim Burroway aptly notes that whatever rhetorical symmetries Obama and Romney may share on same-sex marriage, it’s clear that the President won’t pander to the lingering brackishness of prejudice, while Romney not only will, he will do so with vigor.

That's too weak in my view. Romney has also donated to groups that advocate "psychological cures" of gay people, and his church is arguably the most effective and well-financed religious organization dedicated to keeping gay citizens out of civil marriage, with an eliminationist organization called Evergreen which tries to cure you. That's way worse than even the Catholic hierarchy. According to this survivor of the therapy, a third of the enrollees commit suicide:

This is not a fringe issue for the LDS. Here's a leading LDS Bishop speaking to the "reparative therapy" group. Ezra Klein may well sigh:

Obama’s real pitch to the gay community: He’s not Mitt Romney.

But, given how little power the president has on marriage, that's enough for me. Romney is virulently anti-gay, and could not stand up to even the most rancid of homophobes in Bryan Fischer. His church, moreover, is brutal in its hostility. I have some personal experience of this. I dated an ex-Mormon several years ago. He went to BYU and as he ventured out to gay bars, the university sent out spies to track his movements. They intimidated and bullied him. When he tested positive for HIV, they disowned him. I went to his funeral. Even his family wouldn't show up. There are many Mormons fighting this, and I've been honored to speak with and to them over the years. But they are fighting against an institution which enshrines eternal male-female marriage in ways other faiths don't.

I'm disappointed in Obama, but his leading from behind is not exactly a surprise at this point. And after the end of DADT and withdrawing from a legal defense of DOMA, he's done a huge amount. But the idea that there is some kind of equivalence between his cynical waffling and Romney's rank hostility to gay people's equality is preposterous.

His official reason for a clear obstruction of justice is the following in his Sixty Minutes interview:

Rodriguez: To protect the people who worked for me and who were at those black sites and whose faces were shown on the tape.

Stahl: Protect them from what?

Rodriguez: Protect them from Al Qaeda ever getting their hands on these tapes and using them to go after them and their families.

But it is routine for such tapes, as with photos, to be ruthlessly redacted and the faces of servicemembers or CIA agents blurred or blotted out before they even get near public view. So this is obviously untrue. The reason he destroyed them – even though they could have resolved permanently the specific elements of the torture authorized by Bush and Cheney – was, it seems to me, precisely because they would have shocked the world and shocked America.

When apologists for war crimes, like Mark Thiessen or Mike Mukasey, insist that American waterboarding was not like Khmer Rouge waterboarding, or that US stress positions were different than Chinese Communist stress positions, or that US use of hypothermia as a torture weapon was different than the Gestapo's, they can do so without any threat of being proven visually wrong. And visuals matter, as we found out at Abu Ghraib. But there we only saw still photos of prisoners being tortured along the precise lines laid out by Cheney; watching live-action tapes of waterboarding would have brought the reality of torture – and the rank incompetence and brutality of the torturers – into stark relief. It would have destroyed any remnants of Bush's and Cheney's reputation and America's moral standing in the world.

It would have forced the American people to realize that their leaders really were and are war criminals. And that would have serious legal implications for the lot of them. Scott Horton notes how Rodriguez, whose career was predominantly on the "dark side" in Latin America, must have been aware of how, over time, war criminals who left office with tight legal immunity ended up swamped by the physical and visual evidence of their crimes and the public turned on them:

Jose Rodriguez watched all of this happen. He would certainly appreciate the power of these historical precedents and the likelihood that the ninety-two tapes, if released, would come back to haunt him, and quite possibly send him to jail. That, I believe, is why he destroyed them.

Me too. But it is vital – vital – that we remember the many who resisted the torture program, from the FBI and the military to the CIA and the State Department. Few were as brave as Ali Soufan, a professional interrogator of terrorists who was shoved aside for the Cheney thugs to do their evil work – and then destroy the evidence of something they claim to be proud of. He just got the Ridenhour Prize. Here is a must-see extract from his speech in receiving it:

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The war criminals are on notice. We won't forget. And we will bring you to justice one day – as history already has.

[Re-posted from earlier today]

Some actual reporting from yours truly. It seems clear from sources close to Grenell and reporters on the foreign policy beat that his turning point came last week. He’d been part of organizing a conference call to respond to Vice President Biden’s Romney’s national security spokesman, was not introduced by name as part of the Romney team at the beginning of the call, and his voice completely absent from the conversation. Some even called and questioned him afterwards as to why he was absent. He wasn’t absent. He was simply muzzled. For a job where you are supposed to maintain good relations with reporters, being silenced on a key conference call on your area of expertise is pretty damaging. Especially when you helped set it up. Sources close to Grenell say that he was specifically told by those high up in the Romney campaign to stay silent on the call, even while he was on it. And this was not the only time he had been instructed to shut up. Their response to the far right fooferaw was simply to go silent, to keep Grenell off-stage and mute, and to wait till the storm passed. But the storm was not likely to pass if no one in the Romney camp was prepared to back Grenell up. Hence his dilemma. The obvious solution was simply to get Grenell out there doling out the neocon red meat – which would have immediately changed the subject and helped dispel base skepticism. Instead the terrified Romneyites shut him up without any actual plan for when he might subsequently be able to do his job. To my mind, it’s a mark of his integrity that he decided to quit rather than be put in this absurd situation. And it’s a mark of Romney’s fundamental weakness within his own party that he could not back his spokesman against the Bryan Fischers and Matthew Francks. I’m with GOProud’s Jimmy LaSalvia on this. A couple other thoughts. How many gay conservatives oppose marriage equality – now, apparently, a litmus test (though it wasn’t for Cheney)? I cannot think of any. Why? Because marriage equality started out as a conservative revolt within the gay community. Gay conservatives and Republicans helped pioneer gay marriage as an issue – to some serious pushback from the gay left at the start. So if all gay Republicans who support marriage equality are banned even from speaking on other topics entirely (like Iran or Afghanistan, where Grenell is a fire-breather), who’s left? The answer, I’m afraid, is no one. Grenell was prepared to stay silent on gay issues entirely and do his job. But that wasn’t enough. Romney’s anti-gay agenda is therefore deeper and more extreme than Bush’s.

I might add that the private conversation among many Republicans in this town is that this was unjust and unfair. The Romneyites are correct when they say they tried to talk him out of it. But they kept and keep their views quiet. The gay-inclusive elements in the elites simply do not have the balls to tackle the religious right. And this is particularly true of Romney, as this case now proves. The Christianists gave Bush a pass on social issues because of his born-again Christianity. They trust Mormon Romney not an inch. And this week demonstrates without any doubt that Romney will therefore not be able to deviate from their wishes an iota. He has no room to maneuver. The notion that he could be a moderate on social issues in office is, alas, a pipe dream.

Remember: Grenell was told to be silent solely because he was gay. He was accused in National Review of being a potential fifth columnist for Barack Obama, simply because of his support for marriage equality, which he was never going to speak in public on anyway. His job was to speak on national security, a job for which he was very well prepared and very, very neoconservative.

But the bigots won.

The Dish's full coverage of the Grenell controversy here, here, here, here, here, here and here. It's almost poignant to read Dan Blatt's response to the Christianists' successful scalping of an openly gay GOP spokesman:

Grenell’s sexual orientation is irrelevant to his ability to serve as Romney’s foreign policy spokesman. Heck, he’s worked in a similar capacity for other prominent–and respected–conservatives for years. And he didn’t leave his party even as gay groups demonized Republicans. And even when a Republican president came out in support of an amendment which would enshrine the traditional defining of marriage in the federal constitution.

Yes, Grenell was prepared to work for an administration opposed to marriage equality even when he supported it passionately (like, ahem, Dick Cheney). He was prepared to be ostracized by many in his own community for being a Republican, taking brickbats from the gay liberal establishment, and throwing many punches back. His neoconservatism is, so far as I can tell, completely sincere, and he has a huge amount of experience as a spokesman.

It's sometimes hard to explain to outsiders what level of principle is required to withstand the personal cost of being an out gay Republican. I've only ever been a gay conservative (never a Republican), and back in the 1990s, it was brutal living in the gay world and challenging liberal assumptions. I cannot imagine the social isolation of Grenell in Los Angeles today, doing what he did.

And his reward for such loyalty, sincerity and pugnacity? Vilification.

I mean: what do Republicans call a gay man with neoconservative passion, a committed relationship and personal courage?

A faggot.

Here's a statement from Romney's foreign policy spokesman, Ric Grenell, who has been prevented from, er, being a spokesman these past two weeks because of a Christianist campaign:

I have decided to resign from the Romney campaign as the Foreign Policy and National Security Spokesman. While I welcomed the challenge to confront President Obama’s foreign policy failures and weak leadership on the world stage, my ability to speak clearly and forcefully on the issues has been greatly diminished by the hyper-partisan discussion of personal issues that sometimes comes from a presidential campaign. I want to thank Governor Romney for his belief in me and my abilities and his clear message to me that being openly gay was a non-issue for him and his team.

But it decidedly was not a non-issue for the base:

The ongoing pressure from social conservatives over his appointment and the reluctance of the Romney campaign to send Grenell out as a spokesman while controversy swirled left Grenell essentially with no job.

Why? Grenell – like almost every homosexual in America – favors equal marriage rights for gays. He has indeed blasted Obama for his reticence on this question. He is also quite clearly a movement neo-conservative on a whole variety of issues, especially the area he was selected to be a spokesman for: national security. He was John Bolton's spokesman for Pete's sake. If a Boltonite cannot be allowed to speak about foreign policy because he is gay, is there any place for any gays in the GOP? National Review's Matthew Franck pounced last week:

When the Obama State Department is already moving to elevate the gay-rights agenda to a higher plane than religious freedom in the foreign policy of the United States, it is reasonable to wonder whether Grenell, after taking such a prominent place in the Romney campaign’s foreign-policy shop, would be in line for an influential State posting where he could pursue his passion for that same agenda.

In a subsequent post, Franck went further and abandoned any pretense:

Williamson is quite sure that it is harmless to hire an ardent advocate of same-sex marriage for a prominent place in a campaign pledged to defeat same-sex marriage, because the hireling’s brief runs to matters not directly related to the issue. If he thinks that the gay-rights agenda doesn’t have any bearing on American foreign policy, he’s not paying attention. If he thinks that influence doesn’t run up as well as it does down in the hierarchy of a campaign, that voters are not inclined, with some justice, to regard hiring decisions such as this as an indication of the seriousness of the candidate about such a subject, and that it doesn’t matter whether the campaign is seen to be unequivocal on an issue that moves many millions of voters, then he is not the keen observer of politics I took him for.

(To be fair to NRO, Kevin Williamson was a voice for toleration.)

If opposition to marriage equality is a litmus test for gay inclusion in the Romney campaign and administration, then there will be scarcely a single openly gay person willing to sign up to play any part in it. It has come to this. The GOP will have no gays within it unless they are prepared openly to oppose their own core rights and dignity. Romney has gone from promising to be more pro-gay in the Senate than Ted Kennedy than hanging a lone gay spokesman out to dry and pledging to write into the very constitution that gays are second class citizens.

If you're gay, or your friend, son, daughter, brother, sister, aunt or uncle is gay, you just learned something about what the GOP now is. Do not forget it.

I can see no problem with the ad run by Obama on his extraordinarily ballsy decision to choose the riskiest path to get bin Laden and all the intelligence his compound contained. It is the kind of ad that would be a no-brainer for any Republican president, seeking re-election. If Bush had done it, he would have jumped out of a helicopter in a jump-suit with fireworks. And it is simply true that both George W. Bush and Mitt Romney downplayed the importance of finding and bringing Osama bin Laden to justice. Here is the last president, after his bungling of the battle at Tora Bora, in March 2002:

I don't know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority… I am truly not that concerned about him.

And here is Mitt Romney who still seems to believe that the "Soviets" are our number one geopolitical foe:

It's not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person.

And this was a key issue in the 2008 election. You may remember the debate in which Obama pledged that he would launch a unilateral attack within Pakistan if necessary to get the mass murdering religious fanatic. McCain cited this as evidence of Obama's insufficient experience in foreign policy and general jejuneness. So this was a hugely successful policy opposed by McCain, opposed by Bush and opposed by Romney. No wonder they're so upset at reality. It's the same reaction they have when it becomes clear that Osama bin Laden was captured and killed by a president smart enough not to deploy torture, years after a bunch of thugs took over US intelligence on the orders of the panicked incompetent, Dick Cheney.

And one thing about John McCain. He actually said: "And, you know the thing about heroes, they don't brag.” For his entire political career, McCain has done nothing but brag about his own military service, milking every last, disgusting drop for his own interests, making it the center-piece of his campaign. And he didn't kill anyone – just crashed his plane, was tortured, and cracked under tortured interrogation. He has spent decades making this a reason for him to be elected to various offices, from the very first first=person account in US News, which launched his political career. Heroes don't brag, Senator? How else would you describe your entire career?

I'm with Jon Meacham, who plays a tiny violin for the upset Republicans:

Republicans are — forgive the cliché — shocked, shocked to discover that a presidential contender is "politicizing" an important national event. In this sense, "politicizing" might be best translated as "beating us up and we don’t have anything much to say to stop it." The ad itself raises intriguing, substantive, legitimate questions — and the ferocious, sputtering Republican reaction is proof positive that they know it, or at least suspect it.

Tomasky echoes:

It couldn’t be more hilarious, watching these Republicans rend their garments over the Obama administration’s bin Laden video. Imaging the paroxysms we’d have been forced to endure if George W. Bush had iced the dreaded one is all we need to do to understand how hypocritical it all is. But what obviously gets under Republicans’ skin is not the fact of this video’s existence, but the fact that Barack Obama got him and they didn’t, which destroys their assumption of the past decade that they are "the 9/11 party." And more than that—and this is the real story here—it’s the fact that the Democrats don’t appear to be afraid of the Republicans anymore. That, to Republicans, is what’s truly unacceptable.

I think the Obamaites need to be more aggressive in foreign policy arguments. Obama ended one war in Iraq, dispatched Osama bin Laden and Muammar Qaddafi without a single US casualty, re-set relations with Russia, brought unprecedentedly united international pressure against Iran's nuclear bomb potential, wiped out much of al Qaeda's mid-level leadership in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and presided over democratic revolutions in Iran, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Bahrain. He restored this country's moral credibility after the dark period of Nazi-style interrogation under Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld.

The historian and father of the current Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, died today. Jeffrey Goldberg eulogizes him:

He was the hardest of the hard — a man for whom compromise was anathema — but he was all too often tragically correct about the nature of what he called "Jew hatred".

Neo-fascist Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman goes further:

“Anyone who ever spoke with him could not help but be impressed by his precise ideological stances.”

One of the best aspects of Peter Beinart's must-read new book is his exploration of the thought of this man, Ben-Zion. He never conceded any partition of land in Palestine with the Palestinians. As early as 1944, his Zionews argued that "the partition of the land was an utter impossibility." He was so far right even Menachem Begin called him a rightwing extremist – when Netanyahu opposed the land-for-peace deal with Egypt. Netanyahu also called the Oslo Accords "the beginning of the end of the Jewish state." As recently as 2009, he wanted a reinvasion of Gaza:

"We should conquer any disputed territory in the land of Israel. Conquer and hold it, even if it brings us years of war … You don't return land."

Ben Zion's newspaper in the 1940s editorially backed the physical transfer of resistant Arabs out of Israel "to one of the rich and underpopulated Arab territories in the Middle East, preferably to Iraq". As recently as 2009, he uttered the following words:

"The Jews and the Arabs are like two goats facing each other on a narrow bridge. One must jump into the river … [The Arabs] won't be able to face the war with us, which will include withhholding food from Arab cities, preventing education, terminating electrical power and more. They won't be able to exist and they will run away from here."

Another beaut:

"The tendency toward conflict is the essence of the Arab. He is an enemy by essence. His personality won't allow him any compromise or agreement. It doesn't matter what kind of resistance he will meet. His existence is one of perpetual war."

His work on the racial aspects of the Inquisition was, by all accounts, a real act of scholarship. And his insistence on the ubiquitous and eternal toxin of anti-Semitism is necessary – even vital, as it resurges today. He also lost a son in the heroic raid on Entebbe airport, to free a hundred hostages. He had reason to be bitter, vigilant and angry.

But he also appears as someone who tragically could not forget – let alone forgive – and who became a Zionist in the least liberal sense: prepared to crush or forcibly transfer or starve populations of a rival people because of their racial and cultural "essence" – and fully comfortable with the idea of collective punishment of Arab women and children as a tool in the for-ever war aganst the enemy.

You can call this, as Jeffrey does, "the hardest of the hard". And Israel exists in a very hard environment, and the anti-Semitism that consumed Netanyahu also burned millions in ovens at the heart of "civilized Europe" and is still real and violent in the Middle East. You can see in Ben Zion the pain and tragedy and evil in all of this – and try to forgive. Or you can simply sigh with Auden in his observation of what

“I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.”

(Photo: In this handout photo, Benjamin Netanyahu (R), head of the right-wing Likud party, confers with his father Ben Zion Netanyahu in his father's house February 8, 2009 in Jerusalem. By Michal Fattal/Likud via Getty Images.)