Mick Hartley

This disastrous decision

This, from Anne Speckhard, strikes me as being one of the clearest expositions of the current Kurdish situation - with respect to Trump's betrayal, Erdogan's mendacious claims of clearing the area of terrorists, and of the differences between the various Kurdish factions. And not forgetting, of course, the huge debt we all owe to the Kurds for their battles against ISIS:

On October 9, with a “nod” from President Trump – given via Twitter – the Turkish military began an all-out aerial bombardment and invasion of Northeastern Syria, purportedly to clear the area to create a terrorist-free safety corridor and resettle over one million of the over four million Syrian refugees currently straining the Turkish system. This occurred despite the fact that the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) already were doing a good job of controlling the area and that there was no publicly available data that the SDF, despite being predominantly Kurdish-led and staffed, had allowed any PKK terrorist activity attacking Turkey to occur from inside their territory.

The PKK, whom the Turks continue to confuse with the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) and Women’s Protection Units (YPJ), have their headquarters in the Qandil mountains in Iraq, not Syria. The YPG and YPJ, who make up the major part of the SDF, are the Kurds who fought valiantly to defeat ISIS territorially and to save the Yazidis from being genocidally killed on Sinjar Mountain. After incorporating minorities into their ranks, the YPG transitioned into the SDF, which currently controls the northeast of Syria. While many Rojava officials leading inside the SDF sympathize with the larger Kurdish project and revere PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan for uniting the Kurds and for his visions of bottom-up governance, they state that they do not allow PKK to be active in their territory, and there is no clear evidence that they do.  [...]

Meanwhile, the Syrian Kurds who, since 2015, had U.S. military backing and air support to fight ISIS have been, and are currently, suffering from Turkey falsely labeling them as terrorists while they are in actuality the strongest and bravest force that fought and defeated the most heinous terrorist killers yet seen to date. In serving as U.S. “boots-on the-ground” to fight ISIS, the YPG and YPJ lost 12,000 fighters, saving us from losing many U.S. troops in the fight against ISIS. [...]

There is no need for this current Turkish military incursion. Turkey has not put forward any credible evidence that the PKK is mounting attacks into Turkey from Syria, where it is clear the PKK is a Turkish problem that they have themselves failed to adequately address. Turkish academics admit that the PKK routinely recruits in Turkey and we know that Turkey was engaged in negotiations with the PKK two years ago, which have now failed. These are totally domestic issues requiring resolution at home, not in Syria. If refugees are to be resettled that also needs to occur in a planful and nonviolent manner.

Our SDF allies are completely able to enforce the peace in their territory and have been doing so for a few years now. That we would acquiesce to Turkish demands and “fake news” accusing our best allies of being terrorists, without any evidence produced that the PKK is active in these zones, and allow this violence to occur harming our reputation and our allies is a shame to all of us. It costs us no American lives to offer airpower and protection to our Kurdish allies who fought valiantly to protect us all from ISIS.

While at some point the U.S. will have to back out of Syria, we are committed to Iraq for the longer term and our troop and air power are mainly situated there, decisions which are unlikely to change, so the costs are low at present to reverse this disastrous decision.

A very bad politics

A long piece in Fathom (originally in Dissent) from Michael Walzer, on Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism. Worth reading in full, but here's his conclusion:

Why not Zionism? Because the Jews aren’t a people; because they should be more cosmopolitan than anyone else; because the Zionist state has had some terrible governments; because no one should have a state (even if almost everyone does). Each of these claims can be made and reasons given, but the way they are made in the world today is bound to arouse suspicion. It is at least possible, and sometimes it seems likely, that the people making them also believe that Jews ran the slave trade, that the Zionist lobby controls U.S. foreign policy (as Representative Ilhan Omar has said), that Jews are disloyal to every country in which they live except Israel, and that Jewish bankers control the international financial system. There are too many men and women who believe these things — on the left as well as on the right. They are anti-Semites or fellow travelers of anti-Semites, and their anti-Zionism is probably tightly connected to their anti-Semitism (though there are now pro-Israel anti-Semites among, for example, American evangelicals and Eastern European right-wing nationalists).

Men and women on the left need to be sharply critical, especially critical, of other leftists who hold these views. It is obviously easier to condemn right-wing anti-Semites and pretend that anti-Semitism doesn’t exist on the left. But it does; indeed, it has been a regular topic here in Dissent (see, among other pieces, George Lichtheim, ‘Socialism and the Jews,’ July-August 1968, and Mitchell Cohen, ‘Anti-Semitism and the Left that Doesn’t Learn,’ January 2008). It may well be true that right-wing anti-Semitism poses the greater danger to Jewish well-being, but the leftist version should not be underestimated.

Still, I am sure that a lot of anti-Zionists and many leftist anti-Zionists don’t believe any of the anti-Semitic fables. Maybe they are willfully ignorant about the Jewish people, maybe they are peculiarly focused on the Jewish state; maybe they just don’t like Jews (as George Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, said about Jeremy Corbyn). Maybe. But when it comes to leftist debates about Israel, Zionism is the issue, and it is Zionism that we should talk about. For all the reasons I’ve given, what’s wrong with anti-Zionism is anti-Zionism itself. Whether you are an anti-Semite, a philo-Semite, or Semiticly indifferent, this is a very bad politics.

Walzer's piece is part of a debate at Dissent. Reply from Joshua Leifer here, and Walzer's response here. 

His {Leifer's] piece reads to me like leftist boilerplate (I am sure that I’ve read similar sentences in half a dozen leftist magazines and websites, including the BDS website). It has this peculiar, but familiar, quality of treating Israel as the only agent in the Middle East. There are no surrounding countries whose politics might matter. The Palestinians are entirely passive, the victims of Israel’s evildoing.

Wichita lines

Marion Post Wolcott - October 1941. "Stockyards and flour mill. Wichita, Kansas."

[Photo: Shorpy/Marion Post Wolcott for the Farm Security Administration]

Misgendering

Yesterday was International Pronouns Day apparently, as Deputy Chief Constable Julie Cooke of Cheshire Police was keen to remind us:

“It is so important to understand the pronouns that somebody wishes to be used for them,” the uniformed DCC tells us in her video, filmed in front of a Cheshire Constabulary background – just in case we were in any doubt about whether this is an official police communication.

“Being misgendered can have a huge impact on somebody and their personal wellbeing. It also can be used as a form of abuse for them, and that just isn’t right,” DCC Cooke says.

Indeed it is not: personal abuse is unpleasant and unkind and decent people deplore it and avoid it. But is it a crime?  

Will the fact that a senior officer has used police resources to issue a public statement telling the public to respect the pronouns of others make some people wonder if the police now view “misgendering” as a criminal offence?  

Will this sort of thing have some effect on free speech?  

Should women who really, really don’t want to refer to male-born transwomen as “she” be put under pressure to say things they don’t believe?  

Should the feelings of transwomen in such cases automatically have priority over the feelings of women who feel uncomfortable using words they believe denote something fundamentally untrue?  

And is it really the business of the police to tell us how to speak to each other?

See Julie here on Twitter - with some amusing responses.

Galloway's hypocrisy

An amusing item from the latest Private Eye (Issue 1507):

George Galloways's latest carpetbagging wheeze is to challenge Labour deputy leader Tom Watson in West Bromwich East in the next election. Galloway, who will run as a pro-Brexit independent, is enjoying the widespread media criticism of Watson for fanning the flames of the baseless Westminster paedophile scandal. 

"Why isn't the Nonce Finder General Tom Watson in the dock?" was the headline of a Mail column by noted, er, left-wing icon Richard Littlejohn that Galloway tweeted last week - one of five anti-Watson stories he shared over two days. But what of Galloway's own role in amplifying the lies of Carl Beech? He used his shows on Tehran-owned Press TV and Kremlin-funded RT to promote Beech's false allegations, and so burnish the profile of the hacks at Exaro News.

On Press TV in 2014, he thundered: "You get to the stage where you're asking yourself if there was anybody in a position of power and influence in Britain in the 1960s and 70s who was not involved in the kind of sordid, evil, wicked things that these allegations point to - which go as far, incidentally, as an allegation that a member of parliament murdered a small boy, strangled him to death in some peculiar, bizarre, wicked sexual game." That nothing had been proven and no charges brought, he said, was the inevitable consequence of "the government's cover-up of these allegations".

A few months later, he welcomed Exaro's Mark Watts to his RT show, opining: "This is the biggest scandal in Britain for, well, since the war."

Even in February 2016 - by which time Operation Midland was collapsing under the weight of Beech's deceptions - Galloway was still attesting to his belief in the conspiracy. Interviewed by the New Internationalist, he mused: "There's absolutely no reason to imagine that it's still not happening. There has been a cover-up, that's obviously true."

Spreading the transgender wars

Mumsnet, as we all know, is "the UK's most popular site for parents". They say "parents" to be inclusive, but as the name suggests it's overwhelmingly for mums...for women. So it's hardly surprising that the fraught subject of transgenderism has come up. A trans activist however objected to any such discussion, and, in a by-now familiar move, claimed that the website was allowing "trans-hostile posts" and suggested that advertisers on the site, like Flora margarine, should cut their links if they didn't want to be seen as aiding and abetting transphobia.

Joanna Williams at Spiked:

One theme holding all the millions of Mumsnet posts together is the experience of being a woman – as a wife, mother, daughter, or all three. Unsurprisingly, what it means to be a woman is discussed most explicitly in relation to the transgender movement, and in particular the impact gender self-identification will have on women’s rights. Some contributors are concerned that the privacy and safety of women-only spaces, whether changing rooms, toilets, prisons or refuges, will be threatened if men can enter simply by declaring themselves to be women. Other Mumsnet posters have raised concerns about their own children being encouraged to question their gender identity at school.

Transgender activists hate that Mumsnet provides a forum for these concerns to be expressed out in the open, without either censorship or a clear editorial voice passing judgement on what is said. And rather than just not going on Mumsnet, or trying to challenge particular arguments made on there, Twitter warriors have instead petitioned companies to pull adverts from the site in order to rob it of revenue and ultimately have it shut down. This practice has been well-honed by the campaign group Stop Funding Hate, which ‘names and shames’ companies that advertise in the Daily Mail, the Sun or any other publication its members decide they don’t like.

Last week just one person, Helen Islan, tweeted, ‘I like Flora but there is no way I am going to buy it while it is partnering with Mumsnet which platforms nasty, trans-hostile posts on its website’. Another asked Upfield, the company that produces Flora, how its company values of being ‘intolerant of discrimination and harassment’ aligned with a promotion that marketed Flora as ‘Mumsnet rated’.

There’s a horrible, bullying narcissism in these activists’ insistence that, just because they don’t like what people are saying on Mumsnet, they will shut down the platform and stop the conversation entirely. Casually throwing around accusations of transphobia and bigotry is designed to intimidate companies into submission. Unfortunately, it works. Within less than two hours of Islan’s tweet, Upfield responded: ‘We’ve investigated. We are wholly committed to our values, which include treating everyone equally, so have made the decision to no longer work with Mumsnet. #DiversityMatters.’

Mumsnet are fighting back. From the Times (£):

Mothers are boycotting Flora after the margarine’s manufacturer stopped advertising on Mumsnet over complaints of transphobia on the site....

Dozens of mothers have boycotted Flora after the company decided to cut ties with Mumsnet. Deborah Barker wrote on Twitter: “I am wholly committed to free speech and mothers/women freedom to discuss issues which pertain to them and have decided to boycott @Flora. I was a pretty loyal customer with two teenage boys, but I cannot buy from companies that support the silencing of #women.”

Another mother wrote: “ It’s no great loss to Flora is it. Women are only responsible for the majority of the household budgeting/shopping etc. And there’s only a few million of us on here.”

Another front opens on the battlefield...

The Big Korean Match

North and South Korea are in the same group for the 2nd round of the Asian qualifier for the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar. On Tuesday they met in Pyongyang. A huge match for both countries, you'd think. Remember those cheering crowds when the South Koreans made it to the World Cup before. And here, against North Korea!

But they played out a miserable untelevised goalless draw in an empty stadium:

The rare match -- the first inter-Korean face-off on North Korean soil in almost three decades -- took place in an empty stadium, creating a bizarre experience for fans trying to follow it online.

Both South and North Korea now have two wins and a draw in their group, which also includes Lebanon, Sri Lanka and Turkmenistan. However, South Korea leads on goal difference, by 10 to 3.

In what turned out to be an anti-climax after much pre-game excitement, the match was held in bizarre circumstances, lacking a live broadcast, fans or media presence. The North did not allow the match to be broadcast, and denied entry to South Korean media. Those concerned, like officials from the Korea Football Association, media outlets and football fans, had to make do with brief updates on FIFA and the Asian Football Confederation's websites....

The South Korean players, who braced themselves to play before for a huge crowd of spectators cheering on the North Korean squad, were surprised to find the stands empty. "It was the opposite of how we pictured it, because North Korea told us a day before the match that some 40,000 people would come," a KFA official said.

Some China-based tour agencies specializing in trips to North Korea sold package tours to Pyongyang including admission tickets to the match, but they apparently canceled the tour programs.

So what happened? It could've been a source of considerable revenue for the cash-starved North Korean regime. But that's not how it works. The Daily NK spoke to "a source from Pyongyang":

Q: Did North Korea have any intention to broadcast the Tuesday match live? 

A: You can bet that North Korea never had any intention of broadcasting the soccer match between North and South Korea in the first place. The situation would be no different whatever large sum of money South Korean broadcasters might have been willing to pay for the broadcasting rights. The point is that North Korea does not want to be watched live by others around the globe. If relations between North and South Korea had improved to an exceptional degree, and the Supreme Leader (Kim Jong Un) magnanimously decided to allow broadcasts, it could’ve happened, especially because Kim would’ve been able to pocket the profits from the broadcasting fees. Even if the match had been broadcast in South Korea, however, North Korea would never have broadcast the match live on North Korean TV. 

The reason for this is that they know that the North Korean soccer team is weaker than South Korea’s team. If North Korea was to lose, the country’s leaders would be embarrassed. This is why a live broadcast would never have been allowed. If North Korea happened to win, then North Korean leaders would happily release a recording of the match. Ultimately, what they’re worried about is that something unexpected could happen and be broadcast to the globe. 

Q: Traditionally, matches officiated by FIFA are broadcast live. Doesn’t this behavior contradict North Korea’s aspirations and attempts to become a “normal” country?

A: It doesn’t occur to North Korean officials that the broadcasting of the soccer match impacts their claims to be a normal country. It is also difficult for North Koreans to complain about the lack of a live broadcast. A lot of North Koreans probably take it for granted that such games will never be broadcast live. Even the international community hasn’t really raised an issue about North Korea failing to permit a live broadcast of the match. What kind of North Korean sports official, then, would stick out his neck and propose that the match be broadcast live?...

Q: North Korea refused to let in South Korean press and broadcasters, and even South Korean cheerleaders. Why was this the case?

A: The most important reason is that North Korean officials worry about the enthusiastic cheering of the South Korean cheerleading team. Even if there are only a few of them, their heartfelt cheering would surely shock North Koreans. 

North Korean society would be all abuzz with talk about every little aspect of the South Korean cheerleading team, including, of course, their cheerleading accessories and outfits. Allowing in the South Korean cheerleading team would essentially be opening the door to an image of South Korea that North Korea has tried to keep out. 

Q: On the other hand, the North Korean cheerleading team has attended matches hosted in South Korea multiple times. It is quite a contrast. 

A: When our cheerleading team visits the South, it is presented as a “war for communism on enemy territory.” Only members of the elite who have undergone an intense process of indoctrination are nominated to go. 

What is frustrating is that when our cheerleading team goes to the South, the South Korean authorities do not place any conditions on them and provide every convenience free of charge.

Shouldn't FIFA make live broadcasting a requirement of participation in the World Cup? Why not?

At least, with the state of North Korea's finances, it's unlikely that FIFA have been influenced here by large amounts of cash finding their way into the bank accounts of high-ranking officials. Which makes a change.

Power which is totally unlimited by any laws

Gary Saul Morson, in an essay in New Criterion, analyses the extraordinary, chilling brutality of Vladimir Lenin:

Lenin did more than anyone else to shape the last hundred years. He invented a form of government we have come to call totalitarian, which rejected in principle the idea of any private sphere outside of state control. To establish this power, he invented the one-party state, a term that would previously have seemed self-contradictory since a party was, by definition, a part. An admirer of the French Jacobins, Lenin believed that state power had to be based on sheer terror, and so he also created the terrorist state....

Numbers do not tell the whole story. Under the Third Reich, an ethnic German loyal to the regime did not have to fear arrest, but Lenin pioneered and Stalin greatly expanded a policy in which arrests were entirely arbitrary: that is true terror. By the time of the Great Terror of 1936–38, millions of entirely innocent people were arrested, often by quota. Literally no one was safe. The Party itself was an especially dangerous place to be, and the nkvd was constantly arresting its own members—a practice that was also true of its predecessor, the Cheka, which Lenin founded almost immediately after the Bolshevik coup.

NKVD interrogators who suspected they were to be arrested often committed suicide since they had no illusions about what arrest entailed. They had practiced exquisite forms of torture and humiliation on prisoners—and on prisoners’ colleagues, friends, and families. “Member of a family of a traitor to the fatherland” was itself a criminal category, and whole camps were set up for wives of “enemies of the people.” Never before had such practices defined a state.

For good reason, many have traced these practices to Lenin’s doctrines. In his view, Marx’s greatest contribution was not the idea of the class struggle but “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” and as far back as 1906 Lenin had defined dictatorship as “nothing other than power which is totally unlimited by any laws, totally unrestrained by absolutely any rules, and based directly on force.” He argued that a revolutionary Party must be composed entirely of professional revolutionaries, drawn mainly from the intelligentsia and subject to absolute discipline, with a readiness to do literally anything the leadership demanded.

A salutary read for those who might still harbour some vague nostalgia for those heady Bolshevik days.

Lenin regarded all interactions as zero-sum. To use the phrase he made famous, the fundamental question is always “Who Whom?”—who dominates whom, who does what to whom, ultimately who annihilates whom. To the extent that we gain, you lose. Contrast this view with the one taught in basic microeconomics: whenever there is a non-forced transaction, both sides benefit, or they would not make the exchange. For the seller, the money is worth more than the goods he sells, and for the buyer the goods are worth more than the money. Lenin’s hatred of the market, and his attempts to abolish it entirely during War Communism, derived from the opposite idea, that all buying and selling is necessarily exploitative. When Lenin speaks of “profiteering” or “speculation” (capital crimes), he is referring to every transaction, however small. Peasant “bagmen” selling produce were shot.

Though he doesn't mention it, the thinking here was surely a significant influence on Michel Foucault, perhaps the most famous of the French postmodern philosophers of the 20th century, and one still quoted, studied, and admired in the right "progressive" intellectual circles. With his belief that human relationships are, underneath it all, struggles for power and mastery, and that truth itself is merely a coefficient of coercion, Foucault was surely just following in Lenin's footsteps.

Looking back

A taste of Martin Parr's new photobook Early Works:

Elland, West Yorkshire, England, 1978 © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos

Mayor of Todmorden’s inaugural banquet, Todmorden, West Yorkshire, England, 1977 by Martin Parr / Magnum Photos

Yates’s Wine Lodge, Great Charlotte Street, Liverpool, England, 1983 © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos

Brimham Rocks, North Yorkshire, England, 1974 © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos

Butlins Filey, North Yorkshire, England, 1972 © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos

Manorhamilton Sheep Fair, County Leitrim, Ireland, 1981 © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos

Moss Side, Manchester, England, 1972 © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos

St Ives, Cornwall, England, 1975 © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos

Wheldrake, North Yorkshire, England, 1980 © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos

"Transphobic" stickers

Oh dear. James Kirkup reveals the appalling news in the Spectator. A ‘transphobic’ crime wave has hit Oxford:

Oxford is suffering a crime wave. Police are investigating numerous serious offences over more than six months. Thames Valley Police has issued this sweeping statement about unacceptable acts in the city:

“Thames Valley Police is appealing for witnesses following a number of public offences in Oxford.

Officers are investigating a large number of offensive stickers that have been placed across Oxford city centre containing transphobic comments. It is believed they started appearing in March 2019 within the High Street, Catte Street and Parks Road area.

Investigating officer PC Rebecca Nightingale based at St Aldates police station said: “Behaviour like this is not acceptable and we take incidents of this nature very seriously....

Sounds serious, eh? Makes you wonder what sort of hateful, poisonous messages were on those stickers. It must be something pretty horrible, to prompt a police force to make an appeal like this, right? Maybe those stickers were inciting violence? Or perhaps they were encouraging people to otherwise break the law? 

Oddly, Thames Valley Police didn’t explain in that dramatic statement exactly what sort of vile and hateful messages are on those “offensive” stickers. Even more oddly, when I asked the force what those stickers say, a press officer told me “the content and appearance of the stickers is not suitable for sharing.” 

Fortunately, the Oxford Mail did a bit of reporting and appear to have established the horrifying truth.

The “offensive” and “transphobic” messages on those stickers, those terrible, hateful stickers now under active police investigation apparently include these:

“Woman: noun. Adult human female”

And:

“Women don’t have penises”

Look at that Thames Valley statement again. It states clearly that “public offences” have been committed because the words on the stickers are “offensive”.

Let us celebrate the fact that a police force is devoting resources to tracking down the awful people who have apparently broken the law by stating that “woman” means “adult human female” and that “women don’t have penises”.

It's true that, from the original Oxford Mail piece, one of the stickers does state "Transwomen are men. And most have a penis". Which, whether you agree with it or not, could reasonably be taken to be transphobic. But still...hate crime? Police involvement?? Astonishing.

Update: interesting on Twitter. 

Peerlessly great men

Exciting news. Well, it made the news in North Korea's official Rodong Sinmun anyway:

A delegation of the British Group for the Study of the Juche Idea led by Chairman Dermot Hudson toured the Monument to Party Founding.

Being briefed on the exploits of the peerlessly great men who victoriously led the Workers' Party of Korea, they looked round the tower, cylindrical structure and round pedestal.

The delegation also toured Mangyongdae, the birthplace of President Kim Il Sung, the Tower of the Juche Idea, the Party Founding Museum, the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum, etc.

Dermot Hudson is something of a peerlessly great man himself. As proof, here he is surrounded by his many supporters and admirers, demonstrating against the "fascist puppet regime" of South Korea a while back:

Post Office Drugs

More Marion Post Wolcott up north - this time in Montana and North Dakota, 1941:

September 1941. "Buildings on main street of ghost town. Judith Basin County, Montana."

August 1941. "Rail yard and grain elevators. Minot, North Dakota".
[Photos: Shorpy/Marion Post Wolcott for the Farm Security Administration]

Commending a display of racism against Jews

The common complaint by left anti-Zionists - that their anti-Zionism is maliciously characterised by their opponents as antisemitism - gets blown apart here by the experience of Batya Ungar-Sargon, Opinion Editor at The Forward, at Bard College:

When the conference began Thursday morning, I was warned that protesters from the Bard chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine planned to interrupt my panel with Wisse and Mor. I was surprised they were not targeting the one on Zionism, but the one on anti-Semitism, the only panel of about 20 over the course of the two-day program where three Jews would be discussing the topic.

“But we’re not even talking about Israel,” I said to the conference organizers. “How does that make sense?”

My concern was met with an aggrieved explanation of the College’s policy towards protesters. The center’s leadership, and the two Bard College deans attending the conference, seemed to have no particular plan to handle what was fixing to become an ugly disruption of Jews trying to discuss anti-Semitism. Berkowitz told us that there would be added security, but the security officers were not allowed to remove the students.

As the protesters started to gather in the lobby, I approached them. I told them that I respected their passion and commitment to what they thought was right, but asked why they had picked this panel.

“Come to my panel tomorrow,” I said. “Come protest my comments on Zionism. I’ll be talking about the occupation. Bring your signs.”...

“Don’t you see that?” I asked. Didn’t they see that protesting Jews over Israel when they are not even talking about Israel is racist? Didn’t they understand that saying we were responsible for the behavior of the Israeli Jews just because we shared their ethnicity was racist? That making every conversation with Jews about Israel is racist?”

“The conversation about anti-Semitism is already inherently about Israel,” one of the students archly explained, repeating a deeply anti-Semitic trope that has been voiced across the spectrum from David Duke to Louis Farrakhan to Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters. Right-wing anti-Semites see any accusation of anti-Semitism as a Jewish conspiracy to take away the rights of whites, while left-wing anti-Semites sees the same accusation as an attempt to silence Palestinians.

Apparently, so do some Bard students.

I started to respond, but was beat to it by member of my panel on Zionism and racism, Shahanna McKinney-Baldon, who was, astoundingly, encouraging them.

“I disagree with what she is saying,” she told them. “I support what you’re doing. I think you should protest.”

I was shocked that someone the Hannah Arendt Center had invited to discuss racism and anti-Semitism was actually egging on what was a blatantly anti-Semitic protest. But she would not be the only one.

When the protesters proceeded to interrupt Wisse, they were applauded by several of our fellow conference speakers in the audience. These vaunted intellectuals, flown in from across the country to discuss racism, were commending a display of racism against Jews.  [...]

So when I was introduced the next morning, I pulled out a new set of remarks. I directly addressed these academics and writers and intellectuals who were brought to Bard to speak about how to fight racism and anti-Semitism. I told them I was appalled that not one of them had called out this blatantly racist act, the way they surely would have if it had been three Muslims on the dais, or three black speakers — or at least, the way I would have in that scenario.

“I’m horrified by your cowardice. By your self-justifications,” I read from the new set of remarks I had written the night before. “You, who I called luminaries! Whose books I’ve read! There’s nothing more I want to say to you or hear from you.

“The next time someone says, ‘What have you done to help Jews as anti-Semitism has spiked across the nation, as Jews have been murdered at their place of worship and Orthodox Jews get beaten to a pulp day after day in Brooklyn,’ you can say, ‘I sat idly by as Jews were protested for trying to talk about anti-Semitism. I allowed a Jewish woman to be held accountable — because of her ethnicity — for the actions of a country halfway around the world where she can’t even vote. I egged the protest on, in fact. And then I went to a party.’”

There is no debate possible when people think that your very humanity is up for debate, something my fellow conference goers no doubt accept as obviously true when it comes to anti-Black racism or anti-Muslim racism. And yet somehow, when it comes to anti-Jewish racism — holding one Jew accountable for the actions of another simply because they are Jewish — no one bats an eye.

Tulips Bouquet

From Photos of the Week at the Atlantic:

A creation titled "Tulips Bouquet" by the U.S. artist Jeff Koons is displayed next to the Petit Palais on October 4, 2019, in Paris. "Bouquet of Tulips" is a monumental work in bronze, stainless steel, and aluminum polychrome, 10 meters high and eight meters wide, weighing 27 tons, offered to France by Koons to pay respect to the victims of the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris.

[Photo: Stephane Cardinale / Corbis / Getty]

France gives America the Statue of Liberty, and America gives France....this?? And yes, there are echoes, in that hand stretching up, holding a torch - or a bunch of silly plastic tulips.

There must be a few in the crowd there thinking..."hmm...not quite sure...".

By Koons' standards this is restrained. Tasteful, even. I like it as a fun piece of Pop Art. But as a memorial to the victims of a terrorist attack? Well...I dunno.

"Offered to France" - so a gift, presumably. Can't argue with that. Which is maybe how the Parisian authorities felt. Can't argue with a free gift from one of the world's leading artists. If they'd run a competition for a memorial, and had to pay, I doubt this would have been the final choice. The winner would have been some worthy but dull piece which would have sat forlorn and increasingly forgotten as the years went by. A tasteful block of black stone, say. So, clever old Jeff. At least this won't be forgotten so easily.

The thing about Koons is, he does what a lot of artists nowadays claim to do but don't - that is, he challenges your idea of taste. Of art, even. And certainly, here, of memorial art. Does he do it with his tongue in his cheek and an eye on his bank balance? Very possibly. He's enormously wealthy. And this gift to Paris won't harm his image. But with Koons you can never quite tell. I'm not sure even he knows.

Predictably, the work has indeed aroused controversy - Jeff Koons' Paris Bataclan sculpture mocked as 'pornographic'. 

Yep. Can't argue with annoying all those crusty old French art snobs. Tellingly, the one parent of a victim of the Bataclan attack quoted said it was "a very strong testament" to France's relationship with the US, adding "for me it represents the colours of life". So there you go. Clever old Jeff.

The North's crystal meth problem heads South

Reports of widespread use of crystal meth in North Korea are nothing new - here, here, and here, for instance. The problem has now reached the South, as the drug is smuggled in from the North by defectors and others:

Police have arrested 19 people on charges of selling and using crystal methamphetamine smuggled in from North Korea.

A police spokesman on Monday said, "We arrested 19 people including North Korean defectors on charges of taking and distributing what we suspect is North Korean-made crystal meth, and handed 18 over to prosecutors while four of them are put in remand prison."

"Most of those arrested are either defectors and foreigners," the spokesman added. "We have expanded our investigation due to suspicions that individual [South Korean] citizens or organized group are involved."

All admitted that the crystal meth came from North Korea.

The resulting police investigations confirm that it is indeed a major problem in the North:

Police investigations here of organized crystal meth smuggling from North Korea have revealed some startling information about widespread abuse of the drug in the North.

Many North Koreans apparently regard the highly addictive drug as a healthful picker-upper that is effective in preventing cardiovascular diseases such as stroke and cerebral hemorrhages, when in fact the opposite is true.

Many North Korean households apparently have stashes of crystal meth, which is touted as a panacea in some regions. There are statistics supporting such accounts. The Database Center for North Korean Human Rights interviewed 1,383 defectors from the North recently and found that just 4.7 percent had either taken narcotics or witnessed another person abusing drugs there in the 1990s, but that rose sharply to 36.7 percent by 2015.

Some 33 percent of North Korean defectors who serve time in South Korean prisons are drug offenders. According to defectors, the most widely distributed drug in North Korea is crystal meth. A gram of the narcotic costs just US$15.

The drugs, which are manufactured for export, have been siphoned off for local distribution since the late 1990s, when there was a massive famine, because they work among other things as an appetite suppressant. Methamphetamine was a widely popular slimming drug in the West in the middle of the last century.