As I mentioned in a comment to the last post, I will no longer be updating this blog.

While that is of course a tragedy to none, I was touched by those who commented, or e-mailed, asking me to continue. Alas, my schedule makes that infeasible; Sirocco has to call it quits.

Thanks to all who have dropped by! My e-mail address will still be working.

To go out in style — and as a hat tip to fellow Zapffe aficionado Mr. P (we few, we happy few, we band of brothers!) — I will sign off with two final translations of the great existential pessimist. The short pieces in question represent, respectively, the first and the last by the adult Peter Wessel Zapffe. As usual, the originals are better.

One night, man was seated upon the curved back of the earth, and there were stars on the vault and a stone below his bottom. Then he felt that he was there, and that it was him, and he was deeply puzzled, for he had not known before. And he spoke aloud and said: Lo, I am pushed from below and stars are above my head! Yet as he heard his own voice, he became anxious and began to shout more loudly: Lo, I am pushed! And it was as if he drew it from his angst.
     From this day hence he did not eat, and his brethren he knew not any longer. Whenever his angst appeared he would scream the same words, but each time in a new way, as if always seeking a better one. And at times, his eyes would shine as he screamed. Those who met him would sometimes pause to wonder at the strange sound of his voice.
     Then his heart burst, and people gathered to remember him. None had understood him, himself least of all, but all felt that his words were the highest wisdom.

Dear all of you who have come to say goodbye to the incarnation that was made available as an abode for my spiritual life. Say goodbye to the inscrutable synthesis that emerged in 1899 and kept together for 90 years, before it again disintegrated back into its inorganic elements.

Thank you for coming, all of you, and each specifically, each with his own perspective on this that has happened, in part foreseeably and in part as a fruit of pure happenstance. This, which we partly owe gratitude and must partly consider our perfidious foe – if we imagine a governing consciousness behind it all.
     And if we do not, then we have in part been lucky in the great lottery, and in part drawn blanks or actual harm. But it often feels as though some consciousness is waiting in ambush to strike us in our vulnerable moments. In any case, we come from nothing and go to nothing and that is nothing to worry about.
     Goodbye, everyone.

I’m a pompous theocratic fool

His eminence Grand Sheik Sayyed Tantawi of the al-Azhar in Cairo — the most respected religious authority in the Sunni Islamic world — won’t let go of the Muhammed caricatures. In an interview with Berlingske Tidende he now condemns their publication nearly a year ago as “one of the worst crimes ever,” and demands the following punishments:

* For the newspaper Jyllands-Posten: banning for several years.

* For its editor-in-chief: 1-3 years in prison.

* For its cultural editor, Flemming Rose: to be drawn as a pig.

No, I’m not making this up!

Memo to the Grand Sheik, his like-minded ulama, and their followers: the day you non-violently protest Israeli aggression with half the zeal which you have put into this farce, it will be possible to take you seriously again.

Peter Wessel Zapffe. Drawing: Finn Graff

So we are supposed to believe that President Alberich is reading Camus and has conversations on the origins of French existentialism. Yeah, fine, whatever. The more he and his ilk are abusing this precious planet, the more I am drawn to an existentialist who makes Camus appear sanguine.

There is only one such, and his name is Peter Wessel Zapffe. Here is my imperfect rendition of a 1967 radio interview with NRK, as transcribed in the book Essays and Epistles. Enjoy.

I remember once on the Arctic Ocean. The steward came up on deck, saying: “You should come down to the lounge, Zapffe. They are arguing vehemently there.” “What is it about?” “When I left, they had come around to man.”

Interviewer: And so, perhaps, have we?

The human being is not only the bearer of philosophy; it is also at center stage as its object. As far as we can tell, it is the only being that is both alive and able to regard its life ‘as from the outside’. It can also view itself as an observer of itself, and so on in absurdum, i.e. until reason folds.

The animal seems to be naturally at one with its existence. This naturalness is broken in the human being. It can experience itself as an foreign guest.

Interviewer: And which are the consequences of that?

The world around us, and man with his I-experience and life-situation, come across as the complete mystery. We know nothing about the origin and the so-called ‘deepest nature’ of the universe. First we must ‘know’ what it ‘is’ to know, i.e., obtain a pair of shoes so tight that we can only get them on after wearing them for a week or so.

Interviewer: We really know nothing, then?

Within the mystery, reason can find relations of greater or lesser constancy. It orients itself, seeking to determine its position. It discovers, for instance, that classes and individuals both have finite life spans; a beginning and an end. We ourselves live within a parenthesis of iron between birth and death.

A basic fabric in the texture are innumerable pathways of origination. Nearby matter is entrapped and turned into wefts. It discovers that it has become a dog, an eskimo, or Peder Jensen in Thorvald Meyer’s Street. These have not chosen their form. Yet there they are. And here we have, perhaps, a possible foundation for ethics.

Interviewer: And what kind of difference does such an origination make?

There has arisen a synthesis, a potential, a high pressure. This persists for a while; dissolves; dissipates; and returns to the elements. While they endure, individuals have their own interest status. There is something they want, and something they do not want. Their ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ meet their destinies. Fortunate conditions yield a fortunate fate; unfortunate conditions an unfortunate fate. To assist them they have their equipment, their abilities.

Interviewer: And what if we regard man as such a synthesis?

Then it is natural to consider the extent and peculiarity of its endowment, relative to outer and inner conditions.

The rest of the living world seems to be geared exclusively for the survival of the species. Individuals only matter insofar as they serve this end. A large percentage of humankind appears to be similarly geared, both individually and collectively.

This notwithstanding, man has a surplus with respect to biological necessities. With the exception of viruses, it has overcome all its enemies, and the remaining animals exist at the mercy of man. Yet it is not content with being the last species standing. It rages forth toward the depths of future and past, and toward the boundaries of space.

Interviewer: But isn’t this just valuable?

Any realisation of active and receptive possibilities for living is experienced as valuable. Playing with the surplus can be harmless, but it can also collide with other vital interests. Think of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. We are becoming more numerous than the planet can sustain. As we divide into groups, the one may obliterate the other five or ten times over. This matter that everybody talks about today is just as much a chromosome bomb.

Within, too, the pressure of possibilitites and ends can overthrow the balance. We do have paleontological precursors: lobsters unable to raise their giant claws anymore, deer with antlers measuring more than three meters.

Interviewer: But scientists complain that our abilities do not suffice. Everywhere are problems we are unable to solve.

Indeed; we live upon a silk wrapper of safety. Yet the surplus resides in the fact that we see the problems. Around the bonfire of knowledge, we perceive the darkness. Otherwise, the sheep would despair of its ignorance.

Interviewer: Apart from the extent, you mentioned the peculiarity of our endowment?

Some animals have relatively constant reactions to impressions. Humans are more ‘un-fixed’; we are forced to make conscious choices. This can mean a greater pressure than our health endures. Dogs may become hysterical when their food becomes associated with pain.

Interviewer: But in general, surely, things do come out well?

Then one does not only take a ’general’ view, but also a selective one. Costs are left out. The promenade on Karl Johan Avenue is more presentable than all the hidden conditions that are rather not mentioned. Such isolation is but one of many means devised to neutralise the disastrous effects of the surplus and the lack of fixation.

Interviewer: But surely, not everything is mere doubt and uncertainty?

Beside the lack of fixation, there are also some fixations, partly in fortunate directions and partly not. The latter ones are especially relevant to our worldview and our view of life.

Interviewer: How so?

The unique quality within the biotic world that we demand morality of our surroundings, and an adequate meaning to it all, that is something we can hardly relinquish. And yet, what we call Nature displays neither morality nor meaning. So the question, What is the meaning of life? is less fertile than, Why do we ask for the meaning of life? Cats do not.

Interviewer: Shouldn’t we ask?

To be sure, we see the very criterion of humanity in this question. But anyone who is able to abstain from it, and e.g. breed children without hesitation, has at least a more comfortable spiritual economy. We can imagine an eskimo who suddenly arrives at a boarding house in Lier. He is perplexed and understands nothing. Where is the ice, he queries, and where are the seals? Yet noone can answer, and so he leaves again. Thus has man come into a world estranged from the soul. He asks for the meaning of Life, finds none, and leaves again. Only the moon stares after him in bewilderment.

Interviewer: You say that Nature has no morality. Yet at least it is brilliant in its adaptations?

If nature is seen as brilliant wherever it succeeds, then it is also idiotic wherever it fails. If not idiotic, then it is not brilliant. The Mystery does not call for awe. It just is what it is.

Interviewer: What do you really mean by saying that something ’is’?

Shall we say a conjunction of an X and a property? X derives from the Mystery, and the property, at least in part, from the observer.

Protagoras intuited this when he called man the measure of all things. Berkeley created the sentence ‘esse est percipi’ – to be is to be perceived by a consciousness. It can be read in many ways, including one that coincides with Kant’s doctrine of ‘Erscheinung’. Another interpretation appears to be confirmed by the biologist Jacob von Uexküll: The endowment of each individual helps determine its image of the surroundings. With humans, we must then consider more than just the senses.

Interviewer: Can you explain this further?

We have all learned that the so-called ’secondary qualities’, the colour red and so on, do not inhere in the ’thing itself’ but are formed by light waves plus the eye and the brain. Yet we can go further and regard even the model ‘wave’ as a human artifact, emerging from X as it meets our mental constitution. And similarly with all our dear and familiar, indispensable and obvious categories, such as time and space, distance, form, unity, beginning and end, ugly and beautiful, small and large, infinity, good and evil, Yes and No, to be or not to be. We take them with us when we leave.

Of the rest, one cannot even say ‘it is X’; one must say simply ‘X’.

Interviewer: Would you say, then, that the moon is not shining when nobody sees it?

If someone says that the moon is shining when nobody sees it, then he acts as a secret spectator. For we ourselves bring one half of the light.

Interviewer: Do you find this worldview satisfying?

If we need an adequate meaning to it all, that need goes unmet to be sure. A madam asked her husband: “What did the doctor say?” “He thought it was cancer.” “But surely, you cannot be satisfied with that.”

Interviewer: What, then, about all those who seek something perfect, something absolute?

Imagine a group of castaways afloat on assorted wreckage in mid-ocean. One seizes the floor, saying: “Our situation is untenable. What must we seek for? The only true, genuinely perfect system of rescue!” ”What is that like?” says another. ”You have to ask? It is something that picks us all up of the water, dries and warms us, treats us to the best of food and puts us into a wonderful bed. Will you not join us in seeking this means?” “I don’t think so.” ”What will you do then?” ”I am floating on an oar. Over there is another. I will try to reach it, to get an oar under each arm.” ”And such a goal satisfies you! You poor, undemanding soul!”

Interviewer: Can one do without the hope for a life after death?

When saying the hope, one presupposes a world or a form of life that is adapted to one’s own needs. Otherwise, one would ask: Can you do without the fear of a life after death? And that, I can. Olaf Bull could have written: “I think of days like this, when I shall not live. Buses will run into the ditch – without me.” Today is one of the days he had in mind. Terrible – or what?

Interviewer: So death becomes merely a question mark in the light of this?

Only the way of it, but that is not ‘mere’. The verdict is not published until the execution has begun. Personally I regard the year 2050 much as the year 1850, when I was nothing but northern wind and potato-land, and the lethal pathways swept past me far away. I did not worry about the war in 1864, nor will I be concerned by what awaits our descendants.

Yet even the image of death depends on whoever has it. We cannot pronounce on aspects of existence without being seated in one of them ourselves.

And this is where the Mystery engulfs us.

More Zapffe here.

Is someone feeling stupid?

This is what Israel got out of depleting its last stocks of sympathy in the civilized world? Suckers.

Hell is going to host the Winter Olympics before Hizbollah surrenders its weapons. Anyone demanding otherwise will be told what King Leonidas of the Spartans told the Persians at Thermopylae: “Come and get them.”

And if any external force — be it the Lebanese “army,” a beefed-up UNIFIL operation, or any combination thereof — is suicidal enough to attempt this on Israel’s behalf in a hardcore Shia region which Israel has just turned to dust for the second time, then Hell is going to host it, too.

As is painfully obvious to anyone who hasn’t swapped his brain for a FOX News antenna, this war was absurd even on its own terms. It started out as a quest to reclaim two prisoners of war, but the chosen means (strategic bombing of Beirut and South Lebanon) led Hizbollah to deploy its strategic deterrent. Then, by mission creep, the Israeli objective morphed into the supposedly “existential” one of removing the said deterrent while it was already being put to use in response to the Israeli campaign! How can a mere threat be intolerable whereas its actual realization, to the tune of 3,790 missiles, is just the cost of doing business?

Moreover, if the threat truly was “existential” — i.e. both intended to and capable of annihilating Israel — then how come only 41 Israeli civilians have been killed? That’s annihilation in the slow lane for you.

Yet these are still significant losses. When it now turns out that they were the price for weakening Israel’s mid-term and long-term security, one must conclude that the Israelis have played themselves for fools.

I’m sure those two captured soldiers, wherever they are, concur.

For the Arab side to declare victory after clashing with Israel is merely what ritual demands. What is new is that the Arab side really did score a strategic and historic victory this time. Here is an analysis from Strategic Forecasting (subscription):

Sometimes a tactical draw is enough for a strategic win. The mystique of Israeli power has been dispelled, and Israel, hellbent on “restoring” its “deterrent,” has undermined it instead. Meanwhile it has sown enough hate to fuel Islamist radicalism for generations.

Of course, it hasn’t escaped the Arab masses that it was a paramilitary, subnational movement that stood up to the bully, while the perfumed operette dictators stood idly by, as they did during the invasion of Iraq. This too bodes ill for the traditional power elite on which Usrael relies.

Nasser was beloved (and to some extent, still is) just for trying to take on Israel, even though he failed. Nasrallah has tried and succeeded. As to those in Lebanon who still do not love Hizbollah, there is the Machiavellian maxim that being feared is more desirable than being loved. Warned the Lebanese pundit Michael Young in the NYT back on August 4:

Uh-oh.

As far as I can see, this has been a disaster for Usrael and for long-term Western interests in general. But I’m sure the luminous minds of Bush and Olmert have got it all figured out.

The calculation behind the wasting of Lebanon was akin to supposing that, upon 9/11, Americans would turn on the US Government and demand the disarming of the US military.

The first two of the poems below were contributed in comments by my friend and reader Gal. Wislawa Szymborska, with whom I was unfamiliar, won the Nobel Prize in Literature 1996. Naomi Shihab Nye is an American poet of Arab descent. Thanks again, Gal.

The third inclusion is the epigraph to an essay by my great compatriot Jens Bjørneboe, best known for his novel trilogy The History of Bestiality. This year is the 30-year anniversary of his untimely death by suicide.

The End and the Beginning

After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble
to the sides of the road,
so the corpse-laden wagons
can pass.

Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.

Someone must drag in a girder
to prop up a wall.
Someone must glaze a window,
rehang a door.

Photogenic it’s not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.

Again we’ll need bridges
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls how it was.
Someone listens
and nods with unsevered head.
Yet others milling about
already find it dull.

From behind the bush
sometimes someone still unearths
rust-eaten arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew
what was going on here
must give way to
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass which has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out,
blade of grass in his mouth,
gazing at the clouds.

Wislawa Szymborska
(translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak)

Blood

“A true Arab knows how to catch a fly in his hands,”
my father would say. And he’d prove it,
cupping the buzzer instantly
while the host with the swatter stared.

In the spring our palms peeled like snakes.
True Arabs believed watermelon could heal fifty ways.
I changed these to fit the occasion.

Years before, a girl knocked,
wanted to see the Arab.
I said we didn’t have one.
After that, my father told me who he was,
“Shihab”–”shooting star”–
a good name, borrowed from the sky.
Once I said, “When we die, we give it back?”
He said that’s what a true Arab would say.

Today the headlines clot in my blood.
A little Palestinian dangles a truck on the front page.
Homeless fig, this tragedy with a terrible root
is too big for us. What flag can we wave?
I wave the flag of stone and seed,
table mat stitched in blue.

I call my father, we talk around the news.
It is too much for him,
neither of his two languages can reach it.
I drive into the country to find sheep, cows,
to plead with the air:
Who calls anyone civilized?
Where can the crying heart graze?
What does a true Arab do now?

Naomi Shihab Nye

Epigraph to ‘We who loved America’ (1970)

What is the sense of complaining
in a time
when tragedies are only sold in cartloads?

Who asks
about the child’s doll in the grass
where this morning the parents were shot against a wall?

Who asks about details
of procedure
when the arrested are numbered in the millions?

Who asks for proof, or
whether the judges were qualified
when the condemned are executed and burned
whole nations at a time?

Who asks: right or left
when the question is:
do you stand among the murderers or the victims,
among the judges or the judged?

What is the meaning of justice
in days
when folk are simply waiting for the moment?

what does it signify that
surviving children too should have parents
in a time
when all revolves around landing
a Russian or an American idiot
on the moon?

Jens Bjørneboe
(translated from the Norwegian by Esther Greenleaf Mürer)

Finally, I highly recommend going to this indymedia site and listen to a reading of ‘From Beirut’ by Mahmoud Darwish, the most esteemed living Arab poet. The Palestinian Darwish wrote this poem during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

Darwish’s long, essayistic stream-of-consciousness poem ‘Memory for Forgetfulness’ (Dhakira lil-Nisyan) is available here. Published in August 1982, it is a remarkable work of art that affords a strong sense of déjà vu.

When I posted my unauthorized translation to English of Jostein Gaarder’s essay ‘God’s chosen people’, I had no idea of the amount of international attention it would attract. Had I known that it would be quoted in Haaretz and, in a crossposted incarnation at Booman Tribune, quoted and linked to by Time Magazine’s blog and linked to by Der Spiegel, I would certainly have spent more time on it, though it still strikes me as mostly accurate.

Yet my surprise at the brouhaha pales to insignificance compared to the author’s shock at the firestorm his piece set off, especially in Norway but also abroad. The debate has been raging for a week among intellectuals, writers, politicians, and thousands of Joes and Janes writing LTEs or duking it out online: Is the essay foul and dangerous anti-Semitism, or simply a brave calling out of a country in the process of committing moral suicide before our eyes?

Despite my intention not to post more on this subject, I guess I owe it to Jostein Gaarder to also translate his follow-up op-ed, wherein he answers his critics. As I thought, he does not advocate the abolition of Israel as such, but cautions that “Israel’s intransigent policies with respect to its neighbors may in the long term pose a threat to Israel itself.”

As before, the translation is unofficial and neither solicited nor reviewed by Jostein Gaarder.

I evidently have been misunderstood by many due to the literary technique I used when writing the op-ed about “God’s chosen people,” and I therefore find it necessary to return to the Aftenposten op-ed space with an attempt to clarify.

We need discussion

The genre proved demanding, and I regret if I have hurt anyone — though I intended and still intend to be harsh in my critique of the state of Israel. However, we need the discussion and exchange of views of public conversation. I mean by this fair discussions and exchanges of view — not inarticulate abuse.

The dream of dialogue

I give thanks for all rational criticism — and naturally, for all declarations of support. I also noticed a wise and sober commentary piece by the chair of The Mosaic Religious Community, Anne Sender. We have disagreed fervently in this matter, but I share with her the “dream of dialogue.”

In my Aftenposten op-ed on Saturday August 5 I wrote among other things: “We recognize and pay heed to Europe’s deep responsibility for the plight of the Jews, for the disgraceful harassment, the pogroms, and the Holocaust. It was historically and morally necessary for Jews to get their own home.” It is on this background and from this fundamental premise — to wit, the recognition of the state of Israel — that I sharply criticize the state of Israel’s policy of war.

What ‘recognize’ means

The op-ed begins with this rhetorical touch: “It is time to learn a new lesson: We do no longer recognize the state of Israel….” It has no doubt spawned much confusion that I have here deliberately played on several meanings of the word ‘recognize’. I refer at one point to the international legal recognition of a state, but I also use the word in the sense of being recognized for a practice, win recognition, enjoy recognition, etc. Or as in my op-ed: “We do not recognize the rhetoric of the state of Israel. We do not recognize the spiral of retribution of the blood vengeance… etc.” And towards the end: “We do not recognize the state of Israel. Not today, not as of this writing, not in the hour of grief and wrath.” (italics added) The op-ed was written on the same day that the pictures from Qana reached us.

1948 versus 1967

Regarding matters of international law, I specify, as I have also tried to emphasize in all interviews: “We recognize the state of Israel of 1948, but not the one of 1967. It is the state of Israel that fails to recognize, respect, or defer to the internationally lawful Israeli state of 1948.”

I thus do not dispute the state of Israel’s right to exist within the borders of 1948, but the border extension of 1967 by means of military force violates international law. In this I have both the UN and the majority of world opinion with me.

No god-given mandate

Many have expressed a view that I conflate religion and politics. I tried to do the exact opposite. When I have entitled the op-ed “God’s chosen people,” it is in order to emphasize that we must never accept that any party to a conflict can claim a god-given mandate.

Here it is primarily what we may call “Christian Zionist” notions I have had in mind, i.e. notions that God still has a plan for the Jews, and that what is going on in the Middle East today is an omen of the Acopalypse, the Second Coming, etc.

Back to Israel

One instance of what I warned against is the fresh statements from a representative of the Pentecostal movement’s work in Israel. He points out that the Second Coming and salvation for the believers are tied to Jews being able to return to Israel. By Israel he means “From the wilderness, and this Lebanon, even to the great river, the river Euphrates, all the land of the Hittites, and to the great sea toward the going down of the sun” (Joshua 1,4).

According to a recent edition of a newspaper he says: “How can we trust God if He does not fulfill these promises? This is of the essence for many Evangelical Christians, among them 70 million in the USA.” He continues: “Neither Judea nor Samaria have been part of the Arab realm. Why does one persist in using the concept ‘occupied land’?” Corresponding conceptions are also represented among Orthodox Jews, especially some settlers in the occupied areas.

Richer in humanism

I do not believe that Jewish thought and practice have been any less humanistic than what is found in Christian or Muslim history. Maybe quite the contrary; I think a comparative study might have to conclude that the culture and practices of Jews have by and large been richer in humanism and freer from religious fanaticism than what the Christian cultural area has to show for itself (with its crusades, conquistadors, inquisitions, persecutions of Jews, and the Holocaust, etc.).

Different interpretations

But that was not the point. Only in regard to the very notion of “the Kingdom of God” do I believe that Jesu’ preaching and what I take to be Christianity have had a more humanistic interpretation than the late-Jewish, and now Christian Zionist, notion of a political restoration of the Kingdom of David as a “Kingdom of God” for the people of Israel. I am here referring to different interpretations of the religious message — be they Christian or Jewish — and to the problems we all encounter when extreme interpretations are put into life.

A symbol of intransigence

“May spirit and word sweep away the apartheid walls of Israel,” I write. Thus I hope that diplomacy and intellectual force will suffice to convince Israel that the illegal wall on occupied land must be torn down, not least because it will otherwise remain as a monumental symbol of intransigence. The wall does not only cause daily irritation and harm to the Palestinian people, but may in a somewhat longer term be a greater danger to Israel than the country will appreciate.

In other words, I fear Israel’s intransigent policies with respect to its neighbors may in the long term pose a threat to Israel itself.

Violence against civilan population

I naturally do not advocate that any citizens of Israel should ever have to leave their country. I do not even consider it a possibility. When I evoke an image of Israeli civilians fleeing the ‘occupied areas’ (such as Jerusalem and the West Bank), I realize that this may elicit strong emotions.

Yet the message is crystal clear: Whatever the background and context — whatever religious or eschatological conceptions we might have — we never can tolerate violence against a civilian population.

Triggering anti-Semitism

And finally: It can be outright irresponsible to prematurely accuse a debater of anti-Semitism — simply because it may serve to legitimize and trigger anti-Semitism. (If he or she is an anti-Semite, hey, maybe it ain’t so bad….) When one of the provincial councils in Norway decided to boycott Israeli goods, this was in certain Jewish circles said to be “in the spirit of the Nazis,” and they concluded that “this is unquestionably an expression of anti-Semitism.”

Well, such characterizations are in my view not only highly irrational. In the long term they can prove fatal. For how are we then going to describe Nazism and anti-Semitism?

Missiles and bombs

I hope I have cleared up some misunderstandings with this entry. Meanwhile the missiles and bombs are raining; civilians are dying; roads, water supply, and healthcare are being set back decades. We all owe the victims of war a cry of distress.

Let us now concentrate on the matter of substance.

While Israel, a rogue state, is reducing its northern neighbor to a failed state, Sudan already is both. The escalating disaster in the west of that giant country, larger than Western Europe, is being totally eclipsed by the Lebanon war:

It is not inconceivable that denizens of Darfur are less understanding.

Village torched by Janjaweed milita, Darfur.

Writes leading Darfur specialist, Eric Reeves:

The stumbling block is oil-thirsty China, whose intransigence on behalf of its rogue client state equals that of the US on Israel’s behalf. Yet there is an asymmetry: Whereas China threatens to veto any Chapter 7 resolution authorizing an international peacekeeping force in defiance of Khartoum, the US threatens to veto any resolution that does not authorize such a force in defiance of Beirut. In other words, China wields its veto power to buttress legal state sovereignty; the US wields its ditto in contradiction thereof. About the humanitarian dimension, neither really gives a damn.

The result may very well be that an international peacekeeping force with a robust mandate is sent to occupy south Lebanon on behalf of Israel as a reward for the latter’s willful and catastrophic escalation of a low-intensity border conflict, while millions of Darfurians continue to be starved, gang raped, shot, or hacked to death by genocidal Janjaweed, abetted by the bombs of the Sudanese Air Force.

Thus the rogue regimes of Khartoum and Tel Aviv will be equally pleased.

It’s a sobering prospect for anyone clinging to the hope that in A.D. 2006, power and basic decency can mix.

For some background on the Darfur disaster, see my post from earlier this year: They sing when they rape.

So British police has foiled a major international terrorist plot.

Said plot aimed to blow up as much as ten commercial airliners en route from the UK to the US. Most of the around 21 suspects are British born Muslims. Not Saudi born. British born.

Does this ring a bell? The Iraq War and other misadventures of the War on Terror ™ are not merely irrelevant to the objective of quelling the international jihadi Salafist movement: they positively boost the latter. In particular they give rise to terrorism against the countries leading this perceived “War on the Ummah,” the terrorists frequently being alienated Muslim citizens of same.

For a while now, we have been reassured that al-Qaeda is finished off as a command-and-control structure, persisting solely on a “franchise” basis. The fresh mega-operation is the latest sign that the reality may be more complex. Last month I quoted one Bruce Hoffman at the Rand Corporation (not a hotbed of leftist pacifism) to the effect that a reassessment may be in order. Let’s have a fuller excerpt of that WaPo article:

Predictably, Bush called the plot a “stark reminder that this nation [the USA] is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom.” But pace Chimpoleon, when such ploys are actually foiled in time, it’s due to police work, not preventive war.

In the aforementioned post from July I also quoted a certain Osama bin Laden’s own account of the formative experiences leading him to find his vocation. This, too, is worth a rerun:

I ask again: how many jihadi mass murderers will go into business after the unholy trinity of Bush, Blair, and Olmert are done grinding Lebanon back to dust? Could something possibly be learned from history over and above the hackneyed mantra of “Münich 1938″?

Shimon Samuels, Director for International Relations at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Paris division, goes into a frenzy over the essay by Jostein Gaarder:

Shimon Samuels and his “center” — in fact a huge international lobby group — are a disgrace. In the name of millions of murdered Jews they shy no means, short of violence, to bully, intimidate and vilify anyone who points out the dark underbelly of Israel, or what I have called the Spartan side of Israeli society.

One example out of many is how they have led a campaign to have the UN recognize any objection to Zionism (the nationalist ideology underpinning Israel as a specifically Jewish nation-state) as racism worthy of censure and censorship:

In other words, far from being in a position to criticize Gaarder’s highly problematic conflation of Judaism with the state of Israel, Samuels has lobbied for having the UN recognize that very same conflation. The only difference is that Samuels extols the package solution and condemns anyone who doesn’t as evil or deranged.

Samuels’ previous communiques on matters Norwegian are marked by the same sense of unhinged dishonesty. In a recent open letter to the Prime Minister he claims that Norway has donated $100 million to Hamas since January 2006, whereas the actual amount is $0 (all support being channeled to President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, whose office even the US doesn’t mind funding). He also conveniently ignores the reason why one government party is proposing to slash tax deductibility for donations to certain Zionist institutions: these are financing settlement expansion on the occupied West Bank, a war crime under the Fourth Geneva Convention and under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which Israel refuses to ratify on these very grounds.

Last year, in another open letter to PM Jens Stoltenberg, he held the national government responsible for a provincial council’s boycott of Israeli products, which he called a return to Quisling. I don’t know, Mr. Samuels. The motivation for the provincial council’s decision is the similarities between Israeli occupational practices and the apartheid regime of South Africa, which that council was the first in Norway to boycott. The similarities are confirmed by people like Ronnie Kasrils, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and Nelson Mandela; are they Nazis too?

Perhaps in your mind, Israelis and they alone are a priori immune from such comparisons, judging by your misplaced complaint to Norway’s ambassador in Washington about a newspaper caricature of Ehud Olmert?

This is how the Israel lobby operates.

Anyone who sincerely wants to restore Israel’s standing in the eyes of the world are better advised to engage in honest dialogue with those of us who find pictures such as this more obscene than any cartoon or essay:

Manal Husseini, killed in Israel’s war of choice. R.I.P.

P.S. The English version of Gaarder’s piece accompanying Samuels’ letter is largely based on my translation. It is instructive to note, however, that Samuels & co have tried to get a better fit with traditional anti-Semitic myths. For instance, my accurate translation of the term ‘barnemordere‘, ‘child murderers’, has been altered to the incorrect ‘baby killers’. Nice job.

Andrew “Flytrap” Sullivan slams Jostein Gaarder as an anti-Semite calling for the “obliteration” of Israel and for Jews to “surrender.”

These are certainly misinterpretations of the furious, fire-and-brimstone essay I translated. The prophetic voice, speaking in the first person plural, explicitly recognizes the “internationally lawful” Israel of 1948.

True, the voice is at points unclear in separating policy recommendations from the expected bad consequences of ignoring same. In my reading, however, the message is that the Israeli state we know today is no longer sustainable, having forfeited its legitimacy in the eyes of the world:

This is an uplifting prospect, the prophetic voice suggests, for it signals the abolition of apartheid-like injustice:

Let us briefly pause for a historical sidebar:

The ensuing liberation struggle was predominantly non-violent yet eventually succeeded in ending oppression, with equal rights for all featherless bipeds entrenched in a new constitution. By no means did it involve the physical “obliteration” of South Africa. This is therefore an optimistic forecast, though as Robert Sharp and many others (including Norwegian debaters) rightly complain, it is not made explicit.

Later on, the prophet cautions that the demise of Israel in its current form could also come about in a darker way:

Thus, if Israel elects to continue its self-destructive policies of occupation and aggression, then the international community is not obliged to prop it up when the tables ultimately turn. This does not, however, amount to “calling for the obliteration of Israel.”

Furthermore, it is unclear to what ‘occupied areas’ refers. If this is simply the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Sheeba Farms, the Golan Heights, and so forth, then the statement is relatively unproblematic.

Otherwise, however — and arguably, in any case — the prophet should not limit himself to petition the victors to give the Jewish refugees free passage (plus “milk and honey”). He should councel letting them stay as citizens of a new and better state, be it called Israel, Palestine, or whatever. Possibly the author has here been tempted to echo his literary model:

Be that as it may, this is a serious flaw in Gaarder’s cri du coeur. And it is not the only one. Many critics, including yours truly, have noted how it lumps together a questionable construal of Judaic religion with the state of Israel. It is fair to say that Gaarder has hardly gone out of its way to avoid misunderstanding of his real intent.

Then again, as the Jewish Norwegian journalist Mona Levin — the essay’s fiercest detractor — agrees, that intent is not anti-Semitic.

One last point. Part of my own motivation for translating this piece was to show the extent to which Israel’s international image, outside of the American bubble, is in tatters. Before the ongoing demolition of Lebanon over two abducted soldiers and the engineered humanitarian crisis in Gaza, I doubt that it would have seen print in a major newspaper.

Accordingly, if one insists that it does reflect genuine anti-Semitism, then it also illustrates how Israel’s behavior qua self-declared “Jewish State” unfortunately makes fertile ground for such. As I put it in a previous post:

But that is of course a fact which Flytrap Sullivan and his ilk would never dream of acknowledging.

Update: Gaarder reflects on his essay in an interview with Aftenposten.

This isn’t funny anymore. Actually, it ceased to be so quite a while ago.

After some 3,149 Iraqis were killed in June alone and 20,000 citizens of Baghdad — mostly the last tattered remains of the middle class — were driven out by militias during the last ten days of July, Chimpoleon takes stock of the situation:

Incredible. By standard scholarly definitions, there has been civil war in Iraq since 2004. And if democracy was “born quickly,” it was either stillborn or strangled in the cradle.

A few days ago, this entity that passes for a US President diagnosed the dramatic conditions a bit farther west:

I cannot improve on Matt Yglesias’ comment:

Obviously that assumes he was aware of it in the first place. Another possibility is that his lips just mindlessly mouthed some staff-prepared script. If that sounds far-fetched, consider this:

Sorry, I don’t know how to properly comment on that. I just don’t.

What I do know, and what in fact any fool with a newspaper must know, is that the New Middle East ™ and adjacent areas are turning out less than stellar under the guiding hand of this monstrous man-child. Here’s Daniel Levy summing it up in Haaretz:

Oh, and Lebanon — that tiny place with the adorable “Cedar Revolution” which until a month ago was a showcase for the “domino theory of democracy” — has been reduced to a smoking crater whose hitherto pro-American PM now talks like a Hezbollah spokesman without a beard.

Bush and his regime are a cosmic joke. Yet it’s been a long time since laughter was even possible.

Update: God help us. See Fred Kaplan on the Killer Chimp’s most recent press conference. To make this individual POTUS was an insult to the entire human race.

Nearly three out of four Americans think Iraqis are better off now than before the invasion, a survey shows.

Iraqi blogger Riverbend might beg to differ. She describes how Baghdad’s middle class is being expelled by Mahdist goons:

This takes the surprise out of the fact that, in a survey carried out this April by the International Republican Institute, only 1% of Iraqis said they trusted American and coalition forces for their personal protection (and that poll was taken before a certain ‘incident’ was known).

Mahdist militiamen in Baghdad

Nor is it rocket science to see why, as even the Wall Street Journal admits, “the middle class — upon whom so much depends — is fleeing Iraq in numbers.” A point worth noting for the 55 percent of Americans who, according the the aforementioned poll, think “history will give the U.S. credit for bringing freedom and democracy” to Iraq. For without an urban, educated middle class, Iraqi freedom and democracy remain a chimera.

It’s the last remains of this middle class that are going now. Here’s a BBC report from 2002:

Riverbend continues:

As documented in this HRW background paper, Iraq ranked among the most progressive Arab societies with respect to women’s rights from the 1968 Baathist coup until the Gulf War. Gender equality was enshrined in the constitution; there were compulsory schooling and free higher education for both genders; and the law ensured equal employment opportunities in the public sector. However, the tide turned after 1991, as a weakened dictator traded off his modernizing vision for religious support, especially among reactionary Shias. Additionally, UN sanctions hit women disproportionately, just as they decimated the middle class.

After the second US-led war on Iraq, the wheel has now turned full cycle.

Not depressing enough, you say? Try this fresh report in the Observer:

What’s not to like? Reading on:

I think this goes to show that three out of four Americans can be wrong.

However much Israel’s war of choice is sold to its Jewish majority as a war of necessity, this doesn’t work with Arabs. Least of all with Israel’s own 1.3 million Arab citizens, many of whom are also victims of the increasingly savage missile attacks, and nearly all of whom watch Arabic TV stations.

These Israeli Arabs, or Palestinians, were disenchanted with the “Jewish state” of Israel at the outset. This is due not only to solidarity with their kin in the occupied areas. Nor is it only due to the apartheid-like law reserving 94 percent of land for Jewish purchase only; nor to the one excluding Muslims from serving in the military (thus limiting their eligibility for social benefits) as well as in the police, the security services, and the prisons (though not as inmates); nor to a host of discriminatory statutes ranging from a 2003 “emergency regulation” restricting the right of Arabs to naturalize their families, to lower children’s allowances for non-Jews. It is due to the sum of all these, and more generally, to systematically occupying the lowest rung of the socioeconomic ladder:

These data are from 2000, but things are hardly better now. For further reading, see this book entitled The Other Side of Israel, written by an Israeli Jew who, as it happens, grew up in apartheid South Africa.

On top of this one now has the simmering resentment over the brutal, meaningless destruction of Lebanon, with its consequent missile rain over Arab and Jew alike.

It’s common in Israel to talk about an ‘Arab population bomb’; indeed, several of the aforementioned discriminatory practices are justified in terms of such. But unless a constructive ‘Operation Change of Direction’ be launched, and soon, some Arab Israelis may well find themselves at their wit’s end. That could involve far uglier bombs than childbirth.

Olmert applies avant garde logic to the Kosovo conflict in order to defend his pointless atrocities:

Never mind that Israel’s onslaught on Lebanon wasn’t prompted by rocket attacks either. What stands out is that Serbia’s brutal counter-insurgency cum ethnic cleansing and the NATO effort to put an end to this — about which much can be said, but to which Olmert himself does not object — are both filed under “European attacks on Kosovo”! Fantastic!

Jostein Gaarder, the author of the global literary phenomenon Sophie’s World (printed in 26m copies in 53 languages), launches a scorching attack on Israel in Aftenposten, Norway’s paper of record. Gaarder, a historian of ideas, describes himself as a friend of the Jewish people but doubts whether Israel truly is the same. Suffice it to say that this will not appear in the New York Times anytime soon.

The form of Gaarder’s condemnation is inspired by Amos, the first Judaic prophet whose message is preserved in scroll (ca. 750 B.C.). Quoting Wikipedia: “The central idea of the book of Amos according to most scholars is that Yahweh puts his people on the same level as the nations that surround it — Yahweh expects the same morality of them all.”

Please note: the below is an unofficial translation with no connection to Jostein Gaarder. Any errors are mine alone. On the other hand, I do not endorse all the views expressed: see my postscript.

There is no turning back. It is time to learn a new lesson: We do no longer recognize the state of Israel. We could not recognize the South African apartheid regime, nor did we recognize the Afghan Taliban regime. Then there were many who did not recognize Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or the Serbs’ ethnic cleansing. We must now get used to the idea: The state of Israel in its current form is history.

We do not believe in the notion of God’s chosen people. We laugh at this people’s fancies and weep over its misdeeds. To act as God’s chosen people is not only stupid and arrogant, but a crime against humanity. We call it racism.

Limits to tolerance

There are limits to our patience, and there are limits to our tolerance. We do not believe in divine promises as justification for occupation and apartheid. We have left the Middle Ages behind. We laugh uneasily at those who still believe that the God of flora, fauna, and galaxies has selected one people in particular as his favorite and given it funny stone tablets, burning bushes, and a license to kill.

We call child murderers ‘child murderers’ and will never accept that such have a divine or historic mandate excusing their outrages. We say but this: Shame on all apartheid, shame on ethnic cleansing, shame on every terrorist strike against civilians, be it carried out by Hamas, Hizballah, or the state of Israel!

Unscrupulous art of war

We acknowledge and pay heed to Europe’s deep responsibility for the plight of the Jews, for the disgraceful harassment, the pogroms, and the Holocaust. It was historically and morally necessary for Jews to get their own home. However, the state of Israel, with its unscrupulous art of war and its disgusting weapons, has massacred its own legitimacy. It has systematically flouted International Law, international conventions, and countless UN resolutions, and it can no longer expect protection from same. It has carpet bombed the recognition of the world. But fear not! The time of trouble shall soon be over. The state of Israel has seen its Soweto.

We are now at the watershed. There is no turning back. The state of Israel has raped the recognition of the world and shall have no peace until it lays down its arms.

Without defense, without skin

May spirit and word sweep away the apartheid walls of Israel. The state of Israel does not exist. It is now without defense, without skin. May the world therefore have mercy on the civilian population. For it is not civilian individuals at whom our doomsaying is directed.

We wish the people of Israel well, nothing but well, but we reserve the right not to eat Jaffa oranges as long as they taste foul and are poisonous. It was endurable to live some years without the blue grapes of apartheid.

They celebrate their triumphs

We do not believe that Israel mourns forty killed Lebanese children more than it for over three thousand years has lamented forty years in the desert. We note that many Israelis celebrate such triumphs like they once cheered the scourges of the Lord as “fitting punishment” for the people of Egypt. (In that tale, the Lord, God of Israel, appears as an insatiable sadist.) We query whether most Israelis think that one Israeli life is worth more than forty Palestinian or Lebanese lives.

For we have seen pictures of little Israeli girls writing hateful greetings on the bombs to be dropped on the civilian population of Lebanon and Palestine. Little Israeli girls are not cute when they strut with glee at death and torment across the fronts.

The retribution of blood vengeance

We do not recognize the rhetoric of the state of Israel. We do not recognize the spiral of retribution of the blood vengeance with “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” We do not recognize the principle of one or a thousand Arab eyes for one Israeli eye. We do not recognize collective punishment or population-wide diets as political weapons. Two thousand years have passed since a Jewish rabbi criticized the ancient doctrine of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”

He said: “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” We do not recognize a state founded on antihumanistic principles and on the ruins of an archaic national and war religion. Or as Albert Schweitzer expressed it: “Humanitarianism consists in never sacrificing a human being to a purpose.”

Compassion and forgiveness

We do not recognize the old Kingdom of David as a model for the 21st century map of the Middle East. The Jewish rabbi claimed two thousand years ago that the Kingdom of God is not a martial restoration of the Kingdom of David, but that the Kingdom of God is within us and among us. The Kingdom of God is compassion and forgiveness.

Two thousand years have passed since the Jewish rabbi disarmed and humanized the old rhetoric of war. Even in his time, the first Zionist terrorists were operating.

Israel does not listen

For two thousand years, we have rehearsed the syllabus of humanism, but Israel does not listen. It was not the Pharisee that helped the man who lay by the wayside, having fallen prey to robbers. It was a Samaritan; today we would say, a Palestinian. For we are human first of all — then Christian, Muslim, or Jewish. Or as the Jewish rabbi said: “And if you greet your brethren only, what do you do more than others?” We do not accept the abduction of soldiers. But nor do we accept the deportation of whole populations or the abduction of legally elected parliamentarians and government ministers.

We recognize the state of Israel of 1948, but not the one of 1967. It is the state of Israel that fails to recognize, respect, or defer to the internationally lawful Israeli state of 1948. Israel wants more; more water and more villages. To obtain this, there are those who want, with God’s assistance, a final solution to the Palestinian problem. The Palestinians have so many other countries, certain Israeli politicians have argued; we have only one.

The USA or the world?

Or as the highest protector of the state of Israel puts it: “May God continue to bless America.” A little child took note of that. She turned to her mother, saying: “Why does the President always end his speeches with ‘God bless America’? Why not, ‘God bless the world’?”

Then there was a Norwegian poet who let out this childlike sigh of the heart: “Why doth Humanity so slowly progress?” It was he that wrote so beautifully of the Jew and the Jewess. But he rejected the notion of God’s chosen people. He personally liked to call himself a Muhammedan.

Calm and mercy

We do not recognize the state of Israel. Not today, not as of this writing, not in the hour of grief and wrath. If the entire Israeli nation should fall to its own devices and parts of the population have to flee the occupied areas into another diaspora, then we say: May the surroundings stay calm and show them mercy. It is forever a crime without mitigation to lay hand on refugees and stateless people.

Peace and free passage for the evacuating civilian population no longer protected by a state. Fire not at the fugitives! Take not aim at them! They are vulnerable now like snails without shells, vulnerable like slow caravans of Palestinian and Lebanese refugees, defenseless like women and children and the old in Qana, Gaza, Sabra, and Chatilla. Give the Israeli refugees shelter, give them milk and honey!

Let not one Israeli child be deprived of life. Far too many children and civilians have already been murdered.

Postscript by Sirocco: I am quite ambivalent about this piece because of how it seems to lay the crimes of Israel at the feet of Judaism, implying that the Jewish religion has failed to absorb the humanism and universalism of Christianity. I think a more apt perspective is the following.

Yet its blind patronage may not last forever. And without it, Israel will reap the whirlwind.

Update: Here is my translation of Gaarder’s follow-up article, wherein he clarifies his stance.

Besides Digby, my favorite American blogger these days is Billmon. As am I, he is giving up on the spineless lickspittles known as the Democrats.