Oliver Kamm

On the justification of barbarism

Read - if you can bear it - this:

At least 110 people have been killed in a massive car bomb south of Baghdad, local medical officials say. At least 130 others have been wounded in the blast in Hilla, 100km (60 miles) south of the capital. The car, reportedly driven by a suicide bomber, exploded near a queue of people applying for government jobs. Iraqi insurgents are waging a violent campaign against US-backed authorities, targeting anyone associated with the government.

And then read this from a well-known essay three years ago by the political philosopher Michael Walzer, whose writings on the ethics of war, terrorism and political violence I often cite and have learned much from:

There is no deeper impulse in left politics than this enlistment [with those suffering uder oppression]; solidarity with people in trouble seems to me the most profound commitment that leftists make. But this solidarity includes, or should include, a readiness to tell these people when we think they are acting wrongly, violating the values we share. Even the oppressed have obligations, and surely the first among these is not to murder innocent people, not to make terrorism their politics. Leftists who cannot insist upon this point, even to people poorer and weaker than they are, have abandoned both politics and morality for something else. They are radical only in their abjection. That was Sartre's radicalism, face-to-face with FLN terror, and it has been imitated by thousands since, excusing and apologizing for acts that any decent left would begin by condemning.

Walzer was making a call to first principles for a decent Left: the need to exercise moral discrimination among the acts committed by those one sympathised with, and to condemn the deliberate targeting of civilians. The extraordinary thing to reflect on, alongside the horror at so callous an act of mass murder as today's bombing, is how far the issue has moved on in political debate since Walzer wrote. There is a type of 'Left' in the advanced industrial democracies that explicitly endorses the use of terrorism by forces that are not oppressed at all but are doing the oppressing. The 'insurgents' - to use the BBC's inaptly romantic euphemism - are slaughtering people who seek no more than to build a civil society and a constitutional order in a country that has lately emerged from arbitrary despotism.

Those of us on the Left who point this out are accused ad nauseam of being turncoats and reactionaries in supporting the overthrow of theocratic and Baathist tyranny, and the promotion of global democracy. What we actually do is ally without sectarianism with those who serve such purposes. We have no cause to cede the title deeds of our deepest beliefs to those who are not entitled to them.

Paul Foot's posthumous work

I'm reading at the moment Paul Foot's The Vote: How it Was Won and How it was Undermined, which was published posthumously last week, and from which The Guardian has published two extracts. I'll write about the book in due course, as it demonstrates quite lucidly (if not always in the way Foot intends) the unbridgeable gulf between democratic and Leninist forms of left-wing politics. In the meantime I'm posting again a column I wrote last October for The Times on Foot's political output. It was given the title "A blind faith in absolutes that blurred vision of reality".

THIS WEEKEND, comrades of the late Paul Foot — including his uncle Michael Foot, Tony Benn and John Pilger — will gather at a rally to celebrate his life. Their message will be, as Mr Pilger wrote in The New Statesman: “Paul was the supreme journalist he was largely because of his socialism.”

Foot’s journalism and politics were linked — just not in the way Mr Pilger supposes. Obituarists who treated Foot’s Marxism as an idiosyncrasy were mistaken, but the error was generous. When campaigning against specific injustices (including numerous wrongful convictions) or corrupt businessmen, Foot was formidable; on other issues, his writings were enfeebled by dogmatism.

Tributes to Foot made little discrimination among those causes, and so praised his campaign to exonerate James Hanratty, executed for the A6 murder. But Hanratty was guilty: the science of DNA has resolved this once-intractable case. In 1999, Foot claimed in Private Eye that DNA evidence in the Hanratty case was unreliable because of possible contamination. Yet he later conceded in a BBC interview: “I’m a complete illiterate in relation to the science of DNA, physics and so on. I know nothing about it at all. My doubts stem solely from . . . a very, very clear belief that this man did not commit this murder, so if the science is saying he did commit the murder I say, well, that clashes with my belief that he didn’t commit the murder and there must be something wrong with the science.”

This is the credo of the biblical creationist confronted with geological evidence of the age of the Earth. Whatever it was initially, Foot’s campaign became an idée fixe, impervious to reason and indifferent to the sensibilities of Hanratty’s surviving victim.

Foot’s political writings displayed similar weaknesses. Against individual politicians, he deflated the overrated and harried the dishonest. He presciently observed in The Rise of Enoch Powell (1969) that, on immigration, Powell “had embarked on one of the most dangerous and opportunist escapades in the history of British politics”.

But on matters of state, Foot’s analyses rarely extended beyond caricature and his Marxism was strikingly uncritical. In Why You Should be a Socialist (1977) he declared: “Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, is usually painted as a tyrant. In fact he was the opposite.”

In The Case for Socialism (1990), this preposterous judgment became: “The thousands of intellectuals then and since who abused Lenin as a ‘tyrant’ and a ‘dictator’ cannot have read The State and Revolution, which again and again repeats that socialism and democracy are indivisible.”

This is like citing the 1936 Soviet constitution as proof of Stalin’s libertarianism. The State and Revolution depicts a democratic post-revolutionary order, all right, but that was not what Lenin created. It never could have been, because Lenin envisaged a social unity in which “all take part in the administration of the state”. He had no concept of opposition; when popular opposition did arise, he annihilated it.

In Ireland: Why Britain Must Get Out (1989), Foot maintained that severing the Union would cause Ulster Protestants to “demand — and create — a carnival of peace, prosperity and progress, North and South”. Unabashed in cliché and facile in argument, Foot was not long exercised by the prospect of civil war and bloody repartition.

Foot’s Guardian columns after 9/11 exhibited relentless casuistry. In October 2001, he asserted: “Appeasement of Israel has been the linchpin of US and British policy in the Middle East, and is obviously connected, at whatever distance, to the terrorist attacks on September 11.”

At whatever distance. I must remember that formulation the next time I’m challenged to demonstrate a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.

Of course there is some connection between Western policy on Israel and Islamist terrorism, for Israel is a Jewish state and al-Qaeda urges holy war on Jews. Yet for Foot the notion that jihadists pursue not remediable grievances but the destruction of Western civilisation was literally incomprehensible. With unintended irony he declared, after listing his own complaints about the international order: “That doesn’t excuse the fanatical and suicidal terrorism of September 11. But it helps to explain it.”

It helps in no respect whatever; Foot’s “explanation” for theocratic barbarism was a conceptual as well as moral evasion.

In March 2002, Foot wrote: “Anyone . . . who denies the right of violent resistance to the Palestinians is siding unequivocally with the oppressor against the oppressed.”

Those who consider Foot a stylish writer should reflect on that enervating euphemism. A just Israeli-Palestinian peace assuredly requires denying “the right of violent resistance” to the suicide bombers of buses and restaurants, and asserting the necessity of politics alone.

What caused the occlusion of Foot’s critical powers? A hint is provided in his panegyric Red Shelley (1980): “Our world, like (the poet Shelley’s) world, needs agitators. People’s aspirations need to be lifted and guided into action.”

An advocate of guidance by external agency would find something familiar in Shelley’s assertion that the poet “beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered”.

Perceiving how things ought to be is the reformer’s enduring concern. Discovering laws by which things ought to be ordered is a dangerous additional step. Paul Foot, hagiographer of Lenin, took it with zeal.

Chatham House again

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago the curious case of Rime Allaf, a Middle East specialist at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, with whom I had appeared on a CNN panel to give European reaction to President Bush’s State of the Union address. Mrs Allaf uses the Chatham House imprimatur to promote a personal web site that comprises in its entirety inflammatory op-ed columns, media citations, a web log and reader comments such as “It is horrible how the Jews have treated the Palestinian people.”

A correspondent has pointed out the additional quirk that, with the single exception of a book review in the RIIA’s regular monthly journal, the items cited on Mrs Allaf’s Chatham House page under the heading ‘Recent publications’ carry no reference to the place of publication. So far as I can ascertain, the place of publication is, in fact, Mrs Allaf’s personal web site. One of them is entitled 'America's fury over a potential French veto', February 2003. While it is a fairly standard op-ed condemning the Iraq war, it does include an arresting flourish:

Many may appreciate his eloquence and dashing looks, but it was Dominique de Villepin’s logic that provoked unprecedented and spontaneous applause in the Security Council on Feb. 14, star treatment that an American secretary of state could never hope for in the present state of affairs.

The current US Secretary of State of course made a well-received diplomatic tour of European capitals only this month. I am not aware that any European analyst of international affairs contributed a commentary during it along the lines of:

Condoleezza Rice isn’t just a pretty face, you know – she was formerly Provost of Stanford and has written a book on German unification!!!

But if any did, then I should have thought he is unlikely to be much longer in his post.

Mrs Allaf has been vocal in the last couple of weeks decrying the suggestion of Syrian complicity in the assassination of the former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Here she is in The Guardian on 15 February:

The Syrians could not possibly have wanted this. It would be a case of shooting yourself in the foot. It clearly is the pro- and anti-Syrian forces at play, but rationally and logically, whoever did this was trying to get the Syrians into more trouble.

Here she is In her web log making heavy insinuations for which she hasn’t the slightest evidence (emphasis added):

The Israeli media has been uncharacteristically quiet about Hariri’s assassination, and the developments in Lebanon in the past few days; has Israel been asked to lay low for the time being, while the US handles the problem? Or will it spring into action sooner or later? And does this mean Israel, or the US, commissioned Hariri’s assassination just to get Syria into even more trouble? Nobody knows. But these possibilities are just as plausible as others, and given the repercussions, they are certainly more plausible than that of a Syrian hand in the crime.

Here is the same thought transmuted into the language of crank conspiracy theorists inhabiting a political fringe so far distant you need a stepladder and field-glasses to locate it:

Harriri’s killing, like so many of those in Iraq, is the work of either the Israeli dark ops or American mercenaries who have been hired out to kill people who are progressive in the Arab and Muslim worlds…. The parallels are evident to experts, but these experts will not be allowed on American media. But, Professor [sic] Rime Allaf, of the Royal Institute [sic] in England is correct, this was the work of an intelligence agency—and we damn well know who the only two would be—because they are the only two to gain by this deed, Israel or America.

Whether an Associate Fellow of Chatham House ought, in that capacity, to be spending her time floating entirely speculative hypotheses founded on a priori assumptions about the malevolence of Israel and the US is, of course, a matter for Chatham House. But the fact of its happening is also, I think, a genuine matter of public interest.

"Knitting as a positive social force"

Earlier this month I wrote a brief column about the Knit 2 Together exhibition that opens today at the Crafts Council Gallery. The curators kindly sent me an invitation to a private view of the exhibition last night, along with a note suggesting that I might like to attend as it had provided me with “my column inches” in the previous day’s newspaper (I assume this was a double-entendre alluding to the “knitted willy with realistic head and veins” that I referred to in the original article, but cannot be sure).

In the circumstances it would have been churlish to decline, especially as my scepticism about “the reclamation of knitting as a positive social force” appears not to be widely shared. (I was listening to the lunchtime news yesterday and looked up at the mention of this exhibition, to hear one of the curators explain that only “some buffoon called Oliver Kamm in The Times” had written a harsh word.)

Having seen it, I am none the wiser and got no drink. One of the constants is that the political sentiments the exhibits depict are striking only in their banality. An American knitter called Andy Diaz Hope has an exhibit called Everybody is Somebody’s Terrorist. It is:

… a topical expose of the fear propagated by the blanket label of terrorism – a term that may mean different things to different people.

It accomplishes this by means of “a series of hand-knitted balaclavas representing a variety of socioeconomic or political groups that someone might consider terrorist”. The series in fact comprises only two: one in the form of a monk's habit and cowl, and one depicting a pin-striped business suit and tie. The point, I guess – though it doesn’t take a great deal of guesswork to infer the artist’s train of thought – is that the oppressive forces of clericalism and big business are as - or possibly more - real a terrorist phenomenon than those conventionally understood to be terrorists.

What can you say, except that the crudeness of the reasoning is more than matched by the ineptitude of the artefact? It isn’t even a surprising thought, but a cliché from a collection that includes “institutional violence” and “root causes”. The pinstripes (I was the only person in the gallery wearing such a garb, so perhaps was over-sensitive) in particular will be familiar to readers of The New Statesman, whose editorial line after 9/11 concentrated on the culpability of … the bond traders murdered in the Twin Towers.

Kelly Jenkins (Knit Uncensored, 2003) is concerned with “the politics behind and the history of knitting”. So she says, anyway. I think she has her mind on other things:

My work transforms knitting from a domestic hobby into a naughty, but thrilling, erotic “must-have”.

A must-have you never knew you must have, in fact. The exhibition continues to 8 May, and if you’re in the area of the Crafts Council Gallery on Pentonville Road in Islington I recommend you hurry straight on past it.

Back to business

Apologies for the absence of posts over the past week. Work and the barest smattering of snow that invariably clogs up all routes into London have intervened, but I shall be back posting from tomorrow with the issues that really matter: Ken Livingstone, the Liberal Democrats, and a really good dose of Chomsky-bashing.

In the meantime, all my previous posts on the political writings of Noam Chomsky have been linked to on this page of a site set up by David Horowitz, of the US conservative FrontPage magazine. While I am a Europhile leftist, I am very happy to contribute material to this site – whose agitation for the international regime-change cause I am entirely in sympathy with - and will be cross-posting to its blog some shorter pieces that will appear here.

Chomsky, antisemitism and intellectual standards

A fortnight ago I discussed Noam Chomsky’s resort to antisemitic conspiracy theory when addressing the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign in December 2002.

Here, again, is the relevant passage (emphasis added):

By now Jews in the US are the most privileged and influential part of the population. You find occasional instances of anti-Semitism but they are marginal. There’s plenty of racism, but it’s directed against Blacks, Latinos, Arabs are targets of enormous racism, and those problems are real. Anti-Semitism is no longer a problem, fortunately. It’s raised, but it’s raised because privileged people want to make sure they have total control, not just 98% control. That’s why anti-Semitism is becoming an issue. Not because of the threat of anti-Semitism; they want to make sure there’s no critical look at the policies the US (and they themselves) support in the Middle East.

The plain interpretation of these sentiments is that the Jews dominate America and raise the non-issue of antisemitism in order to obscure their aim of total control. Even by the standards of those opposed to Israel’s very existence as a Jewish state, Chomsky’s argument is antisemitic. As Tony Judt (whose extremism on the Arab-Israeli conflict coexists with his having written two good books on French intellectuals and politics) wrote last December in The Nation:

To say that Israel and its lobbyists have an excessive and disastrous influence on the policies of the world's superpower is a statement of fact. But to say that "the Jews" control America for their own ends is to espouse anti-Semitism.

Judt’s first sentence is of course not a statement of fact at all, but an unsupported speculative hypothesis that, however fashionable, distorts the nature of US policymaking. (Adam Garfinkle, former editor of the foreign policy journal The National Interest, did a thorough debunking of the thesis a couple of years ago in Prospect - link requires subscription.) But his formulation does indicate the gulf separating Chomsky, now employing the language of crank conspiracy theorists, even from strident anti-Israel campaigners.

To repeat (because I get a lot of angrily careless correspondence on this subject): without further such evidence, I do not categorise Chomsky as an antisemite. I regard him as a cynic. He will tailor his message even to an audience – the Palestine Solidarity campaigns - that does not demur from raw anti-Jewish bigotry. His record on the subject of organised antisemitism – defending the political legitimacy (if not the factual accuracy) of the claims of the Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, even while being fully aware of the pro-Nazi character of Faurisson’s opinions – is despicable.

In this post, however, I wish to examine the immediately succeeding passage in Chomsky’s remarks. It is important, because it illustrates a central characteristic of his writing. Chomsky states (emphasis added):

With regard to anti-Semitism, the distinguished Israeli statesman Abba Eban pointed out the main task of Israeli propaganda (they would call it exclamation [sic – this is obviously a transcription error for ‘explanation’], what’s called ‘propaganda’ when others do it) is to make it clear to the world there’s no difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. By anti-Zionism he meant criticisms of the current policies of the State of Israel. So there’s no difference between criticism of policies of the State of Israel and anti-Semitism, because if he can establish ‘that’ then he can undercut all criticism by invoking the Nazis and that will silence people. We should bear it in mind when there’s talk in the US about anti-Semitism.

Now, it is characteristic for Chomsky to select as his principal ideological targets statesmen, writers and academics of liberal or moderate left-wing views. His method is to depict those figures as, under their ostensibly progressive veneer, apologists for and accessories in the exercise of power. His writings on the Vietnam War vehemently attack the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jnr. In his principal book on the Middle East, Fateful Triangle , 1983, Chomsky reserves particular scorn for the philosopher Michael Walzer and the literary critic Irving Howe, both editors of the democratic socialist magazine Dissent, and Martin Peretz, editor-in-chief of The New Republic. In his book on the Cold War, Deterring Democracy, 1991, Chomsky makes a graceless, puerile and impertinent attack on Vaclav Havel (you can read it here) – unlike Chomsky, Havel is a real dissident against arbitrary power, who knows what it is to live under totalitarianism.

So it is unsurprising that, looking at Israeli politics, Chomsky should attack Abba Eban. A brilliant and cultured man, Eban served as Ambassador to the US and the UN in the 1950s, and Foreign Minister during the Six-Day War. He was one of the great figures of Labour Zionism and, till his death two years ago, a powerful advocate of the cause of peace.

But this particular claim about Eban – supporting Chomsky’s assertion that the issue of antisemitism is a ruse manufactured by those self-interested “privileged people” - is, on the face of it, extraordinary. I have spoken at length with senior figures in Israel’s diplomatic service, and have never encountered the view that “there’s no difference between criticism of policies of the State of Israel and antisemitism”. Yet if we are to believe Chomsky, just such a view was held by the most high-profile diplomat and foreign spokesman Israel has ever had. Is Chomsky speaking the truth?

Because Chomsky – whose admirers often labour under the misapprehension that he is scrupulous in citing sources – gives no reference to Eban's alleged remarks and no quotation, it is impossible to prove that Eban never said anything like this. But it is highly likely that Chomsky is referring to two genuine and well-known quotations by Eban. The first is:

There is no difference whatever between anti-Semitism and the denial of Israel's statehood. Classical anti-Semitism denies the equal right of Jews as citizens within society. Anti-Zionism denies the equal rights of the Jewish people its lawful sovereignty within the community of nations. The common principle in the two cases is discrimination. (New York Times, November 3, 1975).

The second is:

One of the chief tasks of any dialogue with the Gentile world is to prove that the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is not a distinction at all.

In fact. Chomsky does quote the second of these accurately in his book Necessary Illusions, 1989:

There have long been efforts to identify anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in an effort to exploit anti-racist sentiment for political ends; "one of the chief tasks of any dialogue with the Gentile world is to prove that the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is not a distinction at all," Israeli diplomat Abba Eban argued, in a typical expression of this intellectually and morally disreputable position (Eban, Congress Bi-Weekly, March 30, 1973). But that no longer suffices. It is now necessary to identify criticism of Israeli policies as anti-Semitism -- or in the case of Jews, as "self-hatred," so that all possible cases are covered.

Now, notice that in Necessary Illusions in 1989 Chomsky makes a more restricted criticism of Eban than he does in his comments to the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign in 2002. In the book he criticises Eban’s identification of anti-Zionism with antisemitism, claiming that it exploits anti-racist sentiments. Typically, Chomsky hurls abuse that he makes no attempt to substantiate (“intellectually and morally disreputable”), but at least his account of Eban’s views is accurate.

(I should add, however, that while Chomsky accurately quotes Eban here, he does it without context. In his comments on anti-Zionism as the equivalent of antisemitism, Eban was referring to the political anti-Zionism of the sort he encountered at the UN and that is a staple of far-Left groups who employ it as a euphemism for their deep-rooted antisemitism. He was not referring to the sort of theological anti-Zionism that used to be quite common, but is now largely a historical curiosity, on the respective fringes of Orthodox and Progressive Judaism. Indeed in An Autobiography, 1978 (p. 42) Eban writes movingly of a relative, Annie Landau, who "was rigorously orthodox and had no patience with Zionism…. She lived to a great age, and I was sadly present at her deathbed. Her ‘anti-Zionism’ was more a figure of speech than reality, for she was passionately attached to every part of the Palestinian landscape and to all the treasure of the Jewish legacy.")

But note that by 2002, in his remarks to the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Chomsky is giving a flatly different account of Eban’s argument. What Eban is saying in the genuine quotation is that the denial of Israel’s statehood is equivalent to antisemitism. This is not at all the same thing as claiming that criticism of Israeli policies is equivalent to antisemitism. Chomsky’s interpolation – “By anti-Zionism he meant criticisms of the current policies of the State of Israel” – is not remotely supportable from the quotation. Chomsky has doctored his source in order to set up a straw man.

As I have noted in earlier posts, Chomsky’s characteristic polemical technique is sophistry. When caught out in misrepresentation he wriggles. I have little doubt that if taxed on this one, he would come up with an imaginative justification of why Eban’s words ought to be interpreted in the way that he, Chomsky, chooses, despite the fact that they manifestly don’t mean what he claims they mean. But it so happens that in this case Chomsky’s characteristic technique is not available to him. Chomsky doesn’t only interpret Eban in a tendentious way: he attributes to Eban an explicit statement to that effect. In Chronicles of Dissent, 1992, p. 38, Chomsky states:

These tactics [i.e. crying ‘antisemitism’ or ‘self-hating Jew’] run across the board, so it’s not just right-wing extremist Israeli circles, or supporters of Israel here [in the US] that adopt that position, but also people like Abba Eban, a Labor dove, who have explicitly stated that the task of Israeli agitprop is to make it clear that any criticism of Israel is either anti-Semitism or the position of self-hating Jews.

My correspondent who drew Chomsky’s comments to the Scottish campaigners to my attention, writes pertinently:

Now, I am no way familiar with all of Abba Eban’s writings, so I can’t say with absolute certainty that he did not write or say what Chomsky says he “pointed out.” But given Chomsky’s history, it appears that Chomsky’s pervasive animus is directed at the two actual and well-known quotes from Abba Eban [which I have quoted above – OK].

It is indeed impossible to prove the negative, but I am familiar with Eban’s writings and am prepared on that basis to make a judgement on Chomsky’s veracity. An incomplete list of Eban’s books is set out here, on the site of the Knesset, the Israeli legislature. (The list does not include Personal Witness: Israel Through my Eyes, 1993, and Diplomacy for the Next Century, 1998. I am assuming that the book listed on the Knesset site as Chapters of My Life, 1978, is the Hebrew edition of An Autobiography, published in English a year earlier, but I am not able to read Hebrew and cannot verify this. I should be very grateful if any Israeli reader could advise me on this point.)

The statement Chomsky attributes to Eban is found nowhere in these books. Eban writes nothing – literally nothing – that is even remotely comparable to the assertion that criticism of Israeli policies is tantamount to antisemitism. Nothing he says can be legitimately - or even tenuously - interpreted this way. It is of course logically possible that an obscure article somewhere, written by Eban at some time in one of the ten languages in which he was fluent, includes that statement - but if Chomsky is not prepared to cite a source, then a logical possibility is all that it remains.

The reason I am, however, for all practical purposes certain that Eban said no such thing, ever, is that it was alien to everything he wrote and stood for. To put at its simplest, Eban as an advocate of peace negotiations and territorial compromise was perfectly prepared to criticise Israeli policies that he judged ran counter to those aims. Throughout his writings there is a keen though civilised willingness to argue against Israeli politicians and governments whose policies he disagreed with. The embrace of criticism is a consistent theme, as is its extension to his compatriots.

In his address to the General Assembly of the United Nations on 1 November 1950 (included in Voice of Israel, 1958, p.219), Eban states:

We are not satisfied with a justification of our actions in terms of national expediency. There is perhaps no member of this Organisation more senisitive to all the currents of international thought, more vulnerable to the disfavour and the dissent of friendly world opinion, broader in the scope and extent of its universal associations, less able to maintain its life on any principle of self-sufficiency or autarchy.

In My People, The Story of the Jews, 1969, p. 521, Eban sets out his plans for peace, and notes:

This median position, safeguarding Israel’s internal status, her Jewish identity, and her prospect of an ultimate regional harmony, was brought under fierce attack by a vocal minority which advocated a permanent regime of force, accepted cyclical wars as Israel’s national fate, and professed to believe that a state could endure with nearly half of its citizens opposed to its aims, alienated from its culture, and supported in their dissidence by tens of millions in neighbouring lands.

In An Autobiography, 1978, p. 560, recording the Geneva Conference of 1974, Eban writes of Likud demonstrators:

However strongly we rejected what they were saying, their presence reminded us that we would have to fight hard for a domestic consensus in favour of compromise.

In The New Diplomacy, 1983, p. 231, Eban does precisely what Chomsky quotes him as claiming is equivalent to antisemitism. He criticises Israeli policies:

The new government established by Menachem Begin in 1977 turned its back on this doctrine [of keeping the West Bank and Gaza juridically separate from Israel and treating them as negotiable in a peace settlement]…. Not a single country in the world community, including those most in favour of Israel, was prepared to support the idea that Israel’s security required the imposition of permanent Israeli jurisdiction over a foreign nation.

In Personal Witness: Israel Through My Eyes, 1993, pp. 646-7, Eban records his strong belief in US intervention to penalise the policies of the Israeli government:

There was a brief moment in which I feared that the Bush-Baker team would indulge [Yitzhak] Shamir’s appetite for unearned benefits, in order to keep him within the peace process and to avoid an inconvenient clash with a Jewish electorate that then seemed to admire hawkish shrieks rather that [sic] dovish melodies.

On the same page, Eban praises the first President Bush for tying loan guarantees to changes in Israeli policy:

He resolutely held the line in demanding a sharp diminution of settlements activity as a natural environment for granting the loans. He understood that Shamir was like a man who negotiated the sale of an automobile while unobtrusively removing the tires and steering wheel from the scope of the transaction.

In Diplomacy of the Next Century , 1998, pp. 165-6, Eban writes:

The idea that only Israel has moved while the Arab world has stood still does not deserve to be taken seriously anywhere in the world. It resembles an alibi for diplomatic rigidity more than a lucid commentary on events and movements.

This has been a long post. I’m afraid that refutations of Chomsky necessarily are long, because he habitually distorts and fabricates source material, and it requires a close examination of that material to understand how Chomsky works. In this case, where Chomsky makes an extreme assertion without troubling to give a source at all, it requires examining a large amount of material to come to a conclusion. I have genuinely and in good faith endeavoured to verify Chomsky’s claims about Abba Eban, anti-Zionism and antisemitism. The ineluctable conclusion is that those claims are without foundation and utterly distort the views of one of the leading statesmen of the post-war world.

Noam Chomsky is a liar, and his handling of source material is an intellectual scandal.

Arthur Miller

As a playwright Arthur Miller, who died yesterday, has always been something of a blind spot for me. His most celebrated works are recognisably in the tradition of the socialist realism favoured by radical Jewish writers of the 1920s, who in turn found their own inspiration in the diffuse romanticism of Walt Whitman. A playwright does not necessarily speak through his characters, but the 'attention, attention must be paid' oration in Death of a Salesman is nonetheless a didactic device - attacking American consumerism - that grates. The Crucible is a one-idea political allegory - likening the anti-Communist investigations of the late 1940s and early 1950s to the Salem witch trials - that is hobbled by political earnestness. Allegory can work as a literary form, but it needs to illuminate an idea in an original and surprising way (as Orwell's Animal Farm imaginatively depicts the Bolshevik coup d'etat). The Crucible is a laboured and one-dimensional treatment of a far more subtle political reality. McCarthyism's essence was gross and irresponsible exaggeration of a claim that we now know - from the VENONA decrypts of Soviet cables, among other sources - was true. Soviet infiltration at senior levels of US government, media and civil society really did take place; Alger Hiss was a spy; Julius Rosenberg ran an atomic-espionage ring.

But as a novelist, Miller was deft and subtle. There is a beautiful novella, written late in his life, called Plain Girl (1995), which covers his political themes succinctly and without overkill. It depicts in retrospective the long quest for personal fulfilment of a New York Jewess, Janice Sessions, who eventually finds happiness for 14 years with a good and wise man, Charles, who is blind. Charles - who clearly is the authorial voice in this case - says, as Janice reflects on the character of political radicals:

People have to believe in goodness.... And memories of one's naivety are always painful. But so what? Would you rather have had no beliefs at all?

This is well put. What Miller in his political criticism never quite understood was that, against secular or theocratic totalitarianism, some of us believe in Enlightenment values so strongly that we subsume every other political question to defending the societies that, however imperfectly, embody them.

The Chatham House Version revisited

Last April the Times columnist Michael Gove wrote trenchantly about Chatham House, the informal name for the Royal Institute of International Affairs:

ON EASTER Monday the Today programme broadcast a debate on Iraq, reviewing coalition progress one year after that country’s liberation. The three protagonists were Dr Rosemary Hollis, head of the Middle East Programme at Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs; Dr Toby Dodge, an academic at Warwick University who has been an Associate Fellow at Chatham House; and the historian Andrew Roberts. The discussion was quite blatantly one-sided. Only Roberts backed the Iraq war and essayed anything other than a bleak view of the future. Both Dodge and Hollis were sceptical of the worth of intervention and dismissive towards the coalition.

Why did the BBC think two against one was a fair discussion? Was it because Today’s producers believed that the Chatham House Version, as offered by both Dodge and Hollis, was somehow closer to the objective truth than the partial and biased view of Roberts? The BBC’s general modus operandi would seem to suggest just that. Both Hollis and Dodge, along with others who share their broad, left-of- centre, Americo-sceptic approach are regularly deployed as “detached” experts who can provide “independent” analysis. But they are nothing of the kind — experts they may be — but they are also partial observers with very particular prejudices.

Thirty-four years ago the distinguished historian of the Middle East, Elie Kedourie, published an essay entitled 'The Chatham House Version'. He pointed out that the conventional, consensual wisdom of the British foreign policy establishment embodied by Chatham House, which claimed to be the product of objective observation of the world, was in fact the product of a string of questionable assumptions, intellectual biases and personal prejudices.

I don’t agree with this in every detail. In particular, it needs to be noted that Kedourie (a Jew whose family was exiled from Baghdad after WWII) founded much of his criticism on a particular malign influence at Chatham House, the historian Arnold Toynbee, whose arguments did cross the line into antisemitism.

But Gove’s central point came back to me last week when, also as a Times columnist, I took part in a panel discussion on CNN. The subject was European reaction to President Bush’s State of the Union address. The other participants were Colleen Graffy, an Anglo-American academic and former Chairman of Republicans Abroad (who was impressive); an Anglo-French television journalist with the BBC’s French service, Benedicte Paviot; the London correspondent of Der Spiegel, Matthias Matussek; and Rime Allaf, an Associate Fellow of Chatham House’s Middle East programme.

There are of course numerous fair criticisms of the administration’s execution of foreign policy. Needless transatlantic friction has been generated by maladroit diplomacy (which I believe is now being rectified); international economic diplomacy has been all but ignored in favour of bilateral trade agreements; plainly the problems of post-war reconstruction of Iraq were grossly underestimated. But the grand strategy that the President expounded last week – the promotion of global democracy as a means of preserving Western security, as well as being the right thing in itself - seems to me unimpeachable, and I support it.

Being of that view, I am probably not representative of European opinion. But then Matthias Matussek – a vitriolic anti-American of a scatological turn of phrase who shouted at Professor Graffy a lot – is certainly not representative of German opinion. (Matussek is best-known in Germany for a series of articles he wrote for Der Spiegel in 1997-98 that attacked what he called Die vaterlose Gesellschaft, the fatherless society. Ostensibly an argument about bias against men in German social policy, his writings are crude, boorish and prejudiced.)

What was more interesting was the role of Mrs Allaf, who is listed on the Chatham House web site as having the Arab-Israeli conflict as one of her specialist areas of knowledge, and who points readers to her personal web site for further information.

I don’t doubt that Rime Allaf has extensive knowledge of the Arab world, but that is not the same thing as knowledge of the Arab-Israeli conflict. You can read Mrs Allaf’s site at length – and could have listened to her on CNN last week – and get no sense of Israel’s arguments or of the conflict’s competing national claims, both of which must be accommodated in any lasting settlement. She doesn’t even give a reliable account of US policy. You will not find, for example, reference to the fact that President Bush, so far from ignoring UN Security Council Resolution 242, interprets it no differently from any previous US administration in not requiring unconditional and unilateral Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 armistice line (and of course he has set as an explicit goal of policy the creation of a Palestinian state).

Mrs Allaf is energetic, however, in conveying that she has no sympathy for:

... the extremely belligerent and irresponsible statements Bush made about Syria and Iran, practically calling on their people to rise against their government, and promising threateningly (and without much proof) to “confront the regimes that continue to harbor terrorists and pursue weapons of mass murder.”

She takes her stand instead with those who assault Israel, literally as well as metaphorically, as she made clear in an ‘open letter’ to President Clinton five years ago:

We are determined to keep a united front. Remember, we the people have not yet begun to fight. But fight we will, literally and symbolically. Those who can’t throw rocks in frustration will at the very least throw words in determination. I hope you and your ally are ready.

I found Bush’s declaration of solidarity (which is what it was) with those suffering under totalitarianism inspiring and a prerequisite of a decent politics. I find Mrs Allaf’s solidarity with political violence despicable. But then I’m a biased blogger and columnist.

But then again, Rime Allaf’s web site comprises nothing but op-ed columns, media citations, a web log, and reader testimonials of the type, “It is horrible how the Jews have treated the Palestinian people.” I should be glad to know the reasoning behind Chatham House's citing, in the name of relevant expertise, a personal web site that evidences no greater scholarly standing than, say, an archive of the Times columns of Michael Gove, without an ounce of their humanity, breadth of knowledge or literary skill.

UPDATE: Here is a report in Scotland on Sunday from last September, on the Iraqi elections:

Rime Allaf, a Middle-East analyst at Chatham House, said yesterday: "For months I have been saying that I do not believe there is going to be an election in January. The parties wanted an election last October but the US said the country was not ready. The situation now is 100 times worse...."

Put a sock in it, Katie

This comment appears in The Times today.

AN EXHIBITION called Knit 2 Together opens this month at the Crafts Council Gallery. It comprises the work of “15 international artists who are pushing perceived boundaries within knitting”, and its curator, Katie Bevan, makes expansive claims for its timeliness: “There’s a sort of Zeitgeist. . . Everyone just wants to go home and knit socks.”

I know that Ms Bevan’s assertion is not literally true, but I can still admire the enthusiastic promotion even of a decorative art in which I am uninterested. Things become more contentious when artists venture judgments beyond the aesthetic. Ominously, The Guardian notes that the artists in Knit 2 Together — whose exhibits include representations of prostitutes’ calling cards and a text by the literary semiologist Roland Barthes — seek “ the reclamation of knitting as a positive social force”. For them, knitting is a statement of resistance to capitalism and war.

“It’s about making objects, but it is also about sharing stories, an oral tradition,” says one knitter. “If more people knitted, the world would be a more peaceful place.”

It is easy to parody these sentiments, but the notion of a pre- or non-capitalist tradition of simplicity, harmony and collective wisdom is an enduring theme of Western thought, through Rousseau and Herder. The only problems with the notion are that it is historically bogus and politically pernicious.

The history of knitting in the British Isles, especially after the mechanisation of the garment industry ensured that only coarser work was available to its craftsmen, is one of necessity and bare subsistence, not Arcadian creativity. Excepting a longstanding trade in the Shetlands and a few other remote areas, periodic revivals — as in Donegal in 1887 — have been largely an expedient for the relief of desperate poverty.

There is, in fact, a genuine radical political tradition in needlework, exemplified by William Morris and his early association with the Royal School of Needlework, founded in 1872. But Morris celebrated art, not folk wisdom. His protest against industrialism was that it foreclosed the cultivation of beauty, which he looked forward to becoming “a necessary part of the labour of every man who produces”. Today’s radical knitting, by contrast, extends to patterns for “a knitted willy with realistic head and veins”. Clearly, we have the philistines always with us, after all.

"Amorality and error"

I am late in expressing my admiration at the bravery of Iraqis in voting in spite of the threat of Jihadist violence. It is, of course, a story about Iraq and Iraqis, but it prompts important questions about Western policymaking too. David Aaronovitch commented effectively in The Guardian yesterday:

A unilateral decision about troop withdrawal would be a fit continuation of the west's record of amorality and error in Iraq. But, after Sunday, we have no more excuses. The elections, so vilified in some quarters, were a revelation. Those anti-war people who could escape their [rhetorical] hooks saw millions of ordinary people delighting in the process of voting, and many thousands risking everything (where we would risk nothing) to cast their ballot.

The allusion is to a call made at the weekend for the government to set a date for a unilateral withdrawal of British troops from Iraq. I wrote a column a few months ago attacking a comparable proposal when it was put to the Labour Party conference, on these grounds:

The notion that matters would improve by announcing a date for withdrawing troops is absurd. The jihadists will not wind down their campaign of bombings and beheadings; they will intensify it. The consequences for Iraq of a depletion of coalition forces scarcely bear thinking about. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s barbarism is directed not only at Westerners but also at Iraqi Muslims. He maintains that Shias are “ the most evil of mankind”, hence the campaign to assassinate religious leaders.

Aaronovitch is absolutely right in identifying this proposal as an expression of realpolitik considerations for the UK rather than a strategy for supporting Iraq. Its authors are the former Foreign Secretaries Robin Cook and Douglas Hurd, and the current Liberal Democrat Foreign Affairs spokesman, Menzies Campbell. All of them are guilty of amorality and error – and isolationism – but one of them has a particularly notable record in these respects.

The Conservative Government of John Major presided over the greatest moral failure in British foreign policy since the war. A conservative pessimism concerning the ability to exercise power for humanitarian purposes in the international order produced a feckless and callous acquiescence in Serb aggression and the dismemberment of Bosnia. In his memoir of the Balkans conflicts, the then BBC correspondent Martin Bell described Hurd’s first visit to Sarajevo, in July 1992 (In Harm’s Way, 1995, pp. 40-42):

The war and ethnic cleansing were at their worst. Mr Hurd held the presidency of the Council of Ministers, and the Bosnian government was looking for tangible evidence that Europe understood the suffering of its people and was finally willing to help. Also, and by chance, Mr Hurd came to Sarajevo on the day chosen by a local cellist, Vedran Smiljovic, who had once played the concert halls of Europe, to enlist the world’s musicians in its defence. His plan was that on the stroke of midday musicians everywhere should stop what they were doing, get out their instruments and play Albinoni’s Adagio, whose haunting notes, as Vedran played them, were the very anthem of the city’s suffering….

It was twelve o’clock exactly, and Mr Hurd came out of the Presidency as if on cue. There was a violinist on one street corner, a trumpeter on another, and Vedran with his cello and in his full concert hall finery of faded white tie and tails at the scene of the bread queue massacre of May 1992 – at that time still the city’s worst – all playing the Adagio. Mr Hurd, accompanied by the Bosnian president, was making a mandatory diplomatic pilgrimage to the shrine of the massacre site….

It was as if he saw and heard nothing, and was deaf to more than the Adagio. He strode silently to his motorcade. From there President Izetbegovic had planned a visit to the hospital, for which he believed he had the foreign secretary’s consent, so that Mr Hurd might see for himself some of the human costs of the war. The president led the way and turned right towards the hospital. Mr Hurd sped straight on to UN headqurters at the PTT building, and from there to the airport and home.

His staff at the time explained that there had been a misunderstanding. To the Bosnian government it was no misunderstanding, but another case of a politician who couldn’t get out fast enough. Vice-president Ejup Ganic put it bitterly: “They come and they go,” he said, “and they know nothing.”

It is appropriate that the since-ennobled Lord Hurd of Westwell, and the then Defence Secretary Malcolm Rifkind, the principal architects of the betrayal of the multi-ethnic Bosnian democracy, should more recently have worked so hard to prevent regime-change in Baghdad. It is dispiriting but unsurprising, and indeed perfectly consistent, that that revolutionary cause has been diluted to the point of being spurned by an opportunistic and reactionary Conservative Party. But the cause of regime-change isn’t merely a liberal cause in contradiction to a strained conservative pessimism: it’s a prudent reading of the threats western societies face when those bellicose elements are caucuses rather than states.

There are huge and horrifying failings in the execution of the administration’s security strategy (that absence of post-war planning for Iraq; those prisons where torture debased the cause of freedom); there are also triumphs (the overthrow of mediaeval barbarism in Afghanistan and its replacement by an emerging democracy). However Iraq turns out after these elections and in the longer term, the grand strategy itself remains the only practical and enduring course for preventing terrorist attack. It identifies the genuine root cause of political violence – autocracies that foment or tolerate, through their own internal weakness, ideological fanaticism – and seeks to excise it through the promotion of global democracy. It needs to be advanced and articulated with much better diplomacy than the Bush administration has so far deployed, and I hope that State of the Union Address this evening will augur that improvement. As the historian John Lewis Gaddis observes, in a fascinating and balanced analysis, in the current edition of Foreign Affairs, of the administration's prospects, successes and failures:

The second Bush administration will now have the opportunity to reinforce the movement--the shift in the status quo--that the first Bush administration started in the Middle East. A Kerry administration would probably have done the same. What September 11 showed was that the United States can no longer insulate itself from what happens in that part of the world: to do so would be to ignore clear and present danger. A conservative Republican administration responded by embracing a liberal Democratic ideal--making the world safe for democracy--as a national security imperative. If that does not provide the basis for a renewed grand strategic bipartisanship, similar to the one that followed Pearl Harbor so long ago, then one has to wonder what ever would.

The point could be extended. The political opposition in Great Britain and in the United States has not played its part effectively in renewing that strategic bipartisanship. It's time it did.