Apparently, "jailed" is another word that means something different from what I thought it meant:
Arafat Orders Militants Jailed, but They Balk: The Palestinian leader, Yasir Arafat, acted overnight to put some 20 militants under detention at his battered West Bank compound, as part of a potential deal with Israel. But the detainees, though loyal to Mr. Arafat, refused today to be sent to jail, creating a standoff, Palestinians said...
The spookiest thing is that the New York Times reporter--Greg Myre--gives no hint of surprise at the idea that being sent to and kept in jail is a voluntary process...
Posted by DeLong at August 2, 2003 06:45 PM | TrackBack
"Spooky," perhaps, but utterly unsurprising, very much to the contrary. The Orwellian cast to these types of pronouncements and news items is so ubiquitous that it's become trite to even note that it is in fact an Orwellian and Alice-in-Wonderland world we're dealing with. On second thought, this type of thing is SO unsurprising and commonplace, why think of this as "spooky" at all?
Posted by: M Bond on August 2, 2003 09:34 PM>"...On second thought, this type of thing is SO unsurprising and commonplace, why think of this as "spooky" at all?"
>M Bond on August 2, 2003 09:34 PM
"Fence" is another "spooky" word like that. Sometimes it all reminds me of those famous shadows on the wall of Plato's Cave....
Here's a recent snapshot of the 'fence' as William Safire 'sees':
July 31, 2003
Do Fence Me In
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
WASHINGTON—At first, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was wary about his political opposition's idea of a security fence separating Israelis from Palestinian suicide bombers. "Not a magical solution," he told me when doves pushed a plan to create a border along the indefensible 1967 borders, freezing out all Israeli villages in the West Bank, including Jerusalem suburbs.
Since then, the idea of a wire fence with sensors and video cameras, making it possible to control entry into Israel, has been refined to encompass most of the close-in Israeli settlements. Now the fence, one-fourth completed, provides what Sharon sees as not only more security for all Israelis but also as an incentive to Palestinians to make peace...."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/31/opinion/31SAFI.html
An honest to God Israeli "dove", on the other hand, described THE VERY SAME THING the other day this way:
July 23, 2003
Caesar's Favor
By URI AVNERY
George Caesar, the Imperator of the new Rome, likes Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen). He has invited him to the White House and showers him with compliments.
As in ancient Rome, the likes and dislikes of the Emperor shape the policy of the Empire. All the ministers, eunuchs, officials, proconsuls and local rulers act accordingly, while mouthing words of flattery and praising the wisdom of Caesar, irrespective of whether he is really wise, like Julius Caesar, stupid like Tiberius or downright mad, like Caligula. Caesar is Caesar.
George Bush is a simple man. His mental world, like a Western, contains Good Guys and Bad Guys. His impressions are personal and come "from the gut". They have nothing to do with logic or political analysis. Arafat made Bush angry, he is a Bad Guy. Abu Mazen is a Good Guy, mainly because he is not Arafat.
Like King Herod, who lived in Jerusalem but whose ears picked up the slightest murmur in Rome, Ariel Sharon listens to every whisper in Washington. In order to influence Bush, he always has to know exactly which way the wind is blowing. If Bush likes Abu Mazen, so Sharon, too, likes Abu Mazen.
More than that, he lays out a blue-and-white carpet for him to walk on. He invites him to his Jerusalem office, exchanges smiles and handshakes over the emblem of the State of Israel, publicly orders his people to strengthen Abu Mazen in every possible way, watching over him like a good father over a promising son.
But with friends like this, one has no need of enemies. I would advise Abu Mazen not to turn his back when Sharon is around. Definitely not.
Because Sharon's hidden agenda is far removed from his public one. As we have said many times before: don't listen to what Sharon says but pay attention to what he does.
From the day Abu Mazen was appointed Palestinian Prime Minister, Sharon's sole aim has been to topple him from his rickety chair as quickly and as forcefully as possible.
It started with statements from Sharon and his henchmen that made Abu Mazen look like an Israeli stooge, a sub-contractor for Israeli security. It is continuing by denying him any political achievement at all, making him look like a "featherless chicken", as Sharon has called him.
Sharon's many statements about releasing prisoners as a gesture of generosity have been loaded with so many "no"s as to become meaningless. No prisoners with "blood on their hands". No Hamas and Jihad members. No, no, no, until only 300 remained, including common criminals and prisoners about to be released anyhow.
At the same time, Sharon has fulfilled almost none of his obligations under the Road Map. The removal of some 60 settlers' "outposts" has become a joke. Only one single inhabited outpost was removed in a dramatic struggle before the cameras, and two new ones were put up in its place. The freezing of all the settlements has been "forgotten".
The building of the "separation wall", whose main aim is the drawing of a new border deep in Palestinian territory and grabbing as much land as possible, is going rapidly ahead, contrary to Sharon's obligation not to do anything that may change the situation on the ground. He is about to spend almost two billion (billion, not million) dollars on this monstrous enterprise, while the education and health systems in Israel are collapsing for lack of funds and single mothers are sitting in protest tents next to his office.
The withdrawal from the Palestinian territories is a sham. The Israeli army has left some areas in the Gaza Strip which it wanted to leave anyway. The central road has indeed been opened, but not completely, and it can be shut down again at a moment's notice. The army has also left parts of Bethlehem, but continues to build walls in other parts of the town. Withdrawals from all the other Palestinian towns "are not under consideration for the time being".
All over the West Bank, the checkpoints continue to make the lives of the population hell. Every night more people are arrested.
The Chief-of-Staff boasts that the hudna (cease-fire) constitutes an Israeli victory...
http://www.counterpunch.org/avnery07232003.html
Here's what they're REALLY talking about:
1 August 2003
Is it a Fence? Is it a Wall? No, it's a Separation Barrier
Nigel Parry,
The Electronic Intifada,
Israel's Separation Barrier, dubbed the "Apartheid Wall" or "Berlin Wall" by Palestinians, has increasingly attracted international media attention, largely due to the hard-to-ignore scale of the project.
The most obvious historical parallel to the barrier is the Berlin Wall, which was 96 miles long (155 kilometers). Israel's barrier, still under construction, is expected to reach at least 403 miles in length (650 kilometers). The average height of the Berlin Wall was 11.8 feet (3.6 metres), compared with the maximum* current height of Israel's Wall -- 25 feet (8 metres)...
WIRE SERVICE IMAGES OF THE SEPARATION BARRIER
Wire service images are important at they represent part of the education of foreign and photo editors sitting in newsrooms around the world who have not actually seen the barrier with their own eyes. With caption descriptions of the barrier ranging from "concrete wall" to the wonderfully inventive "concrete fence" of AFP's Yoav Lemmer, a large number of images from the wire services make it absolutely clear that the barrier is not merely or entirely a "fence"...
SEMANTIC PROBLEMS RELATING TO THE STRUCTURE OF THE BARRIER
Typically, Israeli terminology is favored in US reportage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In Hebrew, the word for fence is gader. Consequently, the preferred Israeli terminology for the barrier is gader hafradeh ("separation fence").
The Hebrew words for wall are qir and chomah. The former is mostly used for structures and buildings; the latter for protective fortifications -- the formulation chosen by Israeli activist organisation Gush Shalom. Either of them would be more appropriate for this particular structure.
The semantic problems posed by the use of the word "fence", in either language, are enormous...
The route of the wall
Similarly, looking at the route of Israel's Wall, it is clear that the wall does not run along the Green Line that separates Israel proper from the West Bank but rather runs through the West Bank, on Palestinian land...
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article1775.shtml
Posted by: Mike on August 3, 2003 05:35 AMWow, if one does not go to jail when ordered it invalidates the usage of the word jail?
Posted by: bryan on August 3, 2003 07:37 AMMike,
For one, Uri Avnery is a thoroughgoing leftist ideologue, hence his pious simplisticus and boorish caricaturizations and self-assurances. He's yet one more amongst the not so varied dumb and dumber ideological religionists of the left; conveniently myopic and obdurately so.
So you're noting we can view the fence in different lights, from different perspectives? Or is Uri Avnery's perspective the "correct" perspective? Are there no security concerns that Sharon and Israel are attempting to address? Are the suicide bombers mere shadows and illusions in a cave?
And still again you entirely evaded the specific issue alluded to, failing to jail someone simply because they decided they did not wish to be jailed. Even Plato's cave is an earnest attempt to explain, not to be evasive and dissimulate.
The fence is certainly a debateable issue, but how does it relate to jailing someone? Is this simply another massive equivocation that essentially says, "well you can debate one thing and you can debate other things, therefore all things are equally things that can be endlessly debated"? Again, that ploy at the very best is evasive and dismissive only.
Posted by: M Bond on August 3, 2003 09:03 AMMike
Thanks for the propaganda show. Not...!
Will simply skip all such rubbish from here.
Mike's article referred to:
"the hudna (cease-fire)"
The much more precise meaning of "hudna":
"Hudna has a distinct meaning to Islamic fundamentalists, well-versed in their history: The prophet Mohammad struck a legendary, ten-year hudna with the Quraysh tribe that controlled Mecca in the seventh century. Over the following two years, Mohammad rearmed and took advantage of a minor Quraysh infraction to break the hudna and launch the full conquest of Mecca, the holiest city in Islam.
When Yassir Arafat infamously invoked Mohammad's hudna in 1994 to describe his own Oslo commitments "on the road to Jerusalem," the implication was clear. As Mideast expert Daniel Pipes explained, Arafat was asserting to his Islamic brethren that he will, "when his circumstances change for the better, take advantage of some technicality to tear up existing accords and launch a military assault on Israel." Indeed, this is precisely what occurred in Sept. 2000 when Arafat & Co. launched a terror assault upon Israeli citizens.
As for Hamas, they have proven time and again their commitment to a tactical hudna — replenishing their strength during the quiet periods, then returning with increased deadliness. As recently documented by The Washington Institute, Hamas agreed to no less than ten ceasefires in the past ten years, and after every single one returned freshly armed for terror. Hundreds of Israeli citizens have paid for these hudnas with their lives."
http://www.honestreporting.com/articles/critiques/Hudna_With_Hamas.asp
"Wow, if one does not go to jail when ordered it invalidates the usage of the word jail?"
One might ask whether jail for such people serves any purpose at all.
And no doubt there are many in the West who think the "refrigerator bomber" described below is one hell of a guy.
Released bomber says peace and freedom the goal
Date: June 5 2003
Riding on the shoulders of chanting supporters, Ahmad Jubarah, a Palestinian released by Israel after he had served 28 years for a deadly 1975 bombing in Jerusalem, proclaimed himself a man of peace.
"We are not murderers," said Mr Jubarah, 68, who had been the longest-serving Palestinian prisoner."We are not criminals. We are people who seek peace and freedom." He was freed on Tuesday as part of an Israeli goodwill gesture on the eve of yesterday's summit in Jordan.
Mr Jubarah's release by Israel's hawkish Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, is part of a broader effort to revive a peace process that collapsed more than two years ago. Israel on Tuesday freed nearly 100 prisoners, and slightly eased some of the punitive measures that have been imposed on the Palestinians during the fighting.
The detainees had been arrested since the conflict began in September 2000, and most had been held without charges, Israeli officials say.
Palestinians described the Israeli moves as cosmetic. Israel has arrested more than 5000 Palestinians who are suspected, or have been convicted, of involvement in the violence.
Israelis, in turn, expressed mixed feelings about the release of a man who killed 13 people in a notorious attack known as the "refrigerator bombing".
On July 4, 1975, the bombers took an old refrigerator out of their car and placed it on Zion Square, in the centre of Jerusalem. A timing device set off hidden explosives a few minutes later, wounding more than 60 people in addition to those killed. Mr Jubarah was convicted of planning and carrying out the attack.
"This is a man who has expressed no regrets, no remorse," said David Bedein, 53, who was within 30 metres of the blast, but was not wounded.
"A Palestinian hero should be someone who teaches peace to his people, not someone who murdered people," said Mr Bedein, head of the Israel Resource News Agency, a pro-Israeli group that produces research on the Middle East conflict.
But Hanan Avital, 49, who was badly injured in the attack, said he was not opposed to Mr Jubarah's release.
"After 28 years I don't have feelings of revenge," Mr Avital told The Jerusalem Post. "If this will turn out good for Israel, with the bringing of peace, then it's a good thing."
The New York Times
http://www.smh.com.au/text/articles/2003/06/04/1054700278900.htm
Posted by: Pooh on August 3, 2003 10:32 AMbryan,
Stephen Pollard recommended the following post by Norman Geras which deals with human rights and the left's response to terror.
It truly is, as suggested by Mr. Pollard, superb:
The War in Iraq
[This is an amended and slightly enlarged version of part of a talk given to the Workers' Liberty summer school in London on 21 June under the title 'After the Holocaust: Mutual Indifference and Moral Solidarity'. To be fair to those who invited me, I should point out that, although the views I expressed in this part of the talk met with a perfectly civil reception, they plainly weren't shared by most of the audience.]
I want to say something about support for democratic values and basic human rights. We on the left just have it in our bloodstream, do we not?, that we are committed to democratic values. And while, for reasons I can't go into here, there are some on the left a bit more reserved about using the language of basic human rights, nonetheless for many of us it was this moral reality, and more especially its negation, that played a part in drawing us in: to protest and work against a world in which people could just be used for the purposes of others, be exploited and super-exploited, worked maybe to an early death, in any case across a life of hardship; or be brutalized for organizing to fight to change their situation, be 'disappeared', or tortured, or massacred, by regimes upholding an order of inequality - sometimes desperate inequality - and privilege. In our bloodstream.
However, there is also a certain historical past of the left referred to loosely under the name 'Stalinism', and which forms a massive blot on this commitment and these values, on the great tradition we belong to. I am of the generation - roughly 1960s-vintage, post-Stalinist left - educated in the Trotskyist critique of that whole experience, and in the new expansion and flourishing of an open, multi-faceted and pluralist Marxism; educated in the movement against the war in Vietnam, the protests against Pinochet's murderous coup in Chile and against the role of the US in both episodes and in more of the same kind. Of a generation that believed that, even though the Western left still bore some signs of continuity with the Stalinist past, this was a dying, an increasingly marginal strand, and that we had put its errors largely behind us. But I fear now it is not so. The same kinds of error - excuses and evasions and out-and-out apologia for political structures, practices or movements no socialist should have a word to say for - are still with us. They afflict many even without any trace of a Stalinist past or a Stalinist political formation.
I obviously don't have the time or space here to rehearse all of the relevant arguments. I will confine myself to sketching some important features of the broad picture as I see it.
For remainder of post please follow link:
http://www.normangeras.blogspot.com/2003_07_27_normangeras_archive.html#105948316257163866
Posted by: Pooh on August 3, 2003 10:44 AMPooh
Whatever could Norman Stephen Stephen Norman mean. Frankly, I don't give a damn. This labelling of left this left that is of no account at least in America.
There were all sorts of reasons to support or decry the war in Iraq. If the reasons had been honestly presented, we could have debated them properly.
Posted by: bill on August 3, 2003 11:11 AM"Whatever could Norman Stephen Stephen Norman mean. Frankly, I don't give a damn. This labelling of left this left that is of no account at least in America."
I have absolutely no idea what you are on about. Perhaps you might arrange a translation and post the same? However, you may or may not be interested to learn that Norman Geras is Professor (note: not "a" professor but "the" professor) in the Department of Government at the University of Manchester and is a Marxist.
I suggest that you read the entire article a lot more closely.
Posted by: Pooh on August 3, 2003 11:39 AM"Whatever could Norman Stephen Stephen Norman mean. Frankly, I don't give a damn. This labelling of left this left that is of no account at least in America."
I have absolutely no idea what you are on about. Perhaps you might arrange a translation and post the same? However, you may or may not be interested to learn that Norman Geras is Professor (note: not "a" professor but "the" professor) in the Department of Government at the University of Manchester and is a Marxist.
I suggest that you read the entire article a lot more closely.
Posted by: Pooh on August 3, 2003 11:41 AMDo not care a fig for Norman Geras or Stephen Pollard. Let me know the next time Tony Blair tells the truth about cheering America to war to protect us all against Iraq WMDs. "The professor" may make sense to Europeans but not to Americans. Marxism can rest in peace.
Posted by: bill on August 3, 2003 01:34 PMPooh
Though I agree with the "strongest" defense of Israel, I know there must be formation of a peaceful democratic Palestinian state for there to be peace. Also, there must be true recognition of Israel by the other mideast states. That ultimately means considerable compromise; compromise through strength for Israel but compromise.
Posted by: bill on August 3, 2003 02:22 PM>M Bond on August 2, 2003 09:34 PM
BRAD started this with a comment on how words (and their operators ;-) tend get twisted beyond recognition (depending upon how far the thing(s) to which they are purportedly being applied happen(s) to be from Jerusalem):
HE said:
>"Apparently, 'jailed' is another word that means something different from what I thought it meant..."
YOU then chimed in with...
>"The Orwellian cast to these types of pronouncements and news items is so ubiquitous that it's become trite to even note that it is in fact an Orwellian and Alice-in-Wonderland world we're dealing with. On second thought, this type of thing is SO unsurprising and commonplace, why think of this as "spooky" at all?
I merely noted:
>"Fence" is another "spooky" word like that. Sometimes it all reminds me of those famous shadows on the wall of Plato's Cave....
(And I then went on to demonstrate what I meant by that remark.)
Then YOU...
>M Bond on August 3, 2003 09:03 AM
...(after a bunch of preliminary polemics) said:
>"...And still again you entirely evaded the specific issue alluded to...
NO. I didn't.
>...Is this simply another massive equivocation..."
NO. It wasn't.
Was THAT succinct, unequivocal, clear, 'on message' and directly 'to the point' enough for you, M Bond?
----------------------------
>arthur on August 3, 2003 10:07 AM
You're welcome.
----------------------------
> Pooh on August 3, 2003 10:26 AM
I'm left with the impression Pooh, that you believe Yassar Arafat is a rather inflexible, intransigent, manipulative, duplicitous, devious, boorish, blood-thirsty kind of guy.
DO tell us, pooh:
How would YOU 'sum up' Ariel Sharon's character and/or 'career'?
>M Bond on August 2, 2003 09:34 PM
BRAD started this with a comment on how words (and their operators ;-) tend get twisted beyond recognition (depending upon how far the thing(s) to which they are purportedly being applied happen(s) to be from Jerusalem):
HE said:
>"Apparently, 'jailed' is another word that means something different from what I thought it meant..."
YOU then chimed in with...
>"The Orwellian cast to these types of pronouncements and news items is so ubiquitous that it's become trite to even note that it is in fact an Orwellian and Alice-in-Wonderland world we're dealing with. On second thought, this type of thing is SO unsurprising and commonplace, why think of this as "spooky" at all?
I merely noted:
>"Fence" is another "spooky" word like that. Sometimes it all reminds me of those famous shadows on the wall of Plato's Cave....
(And I then went on to demonstrate what I meant by that remark.)
Then YOU...
>M Bond on August 3, 2003 09:03 AM
...(after a bunch of preliminary polemics) said:
>"...And still again you entirely evaded the specific issue alluded to...
NO. I didn't.
>...Is this simply another massive equivocation..."
NO. It wasn't.
Was THAT succinct, unequivocal, clear, 'on message' and directly 'to the point' enough for you, M Bond?
----------------------------
>arthur on August 3, 2003 10:07 AM
You're welcome.
----------------------------
> Pooh on August 3, 2003 10:26 AM
I'm left with the impression Pooh, that you believe Yassar Arafat is a rather inflexible, intransigent, manipulative, duplicitous, devious, boorish, blood-thirsty kind of guy.
DO tell us, pooh:
How would YOU 'sum up' Ariel Sharon's character and/or 'career'?
Given that the Palestinians don't have a state, why should it be surprising that jail doesn't mean what it usually means?
In traditional liberal theory, the State has a monopoly on violence. But that presupposes a State.
M Bond wrote, "For one, Uri Avnery is a thoroughgoing leftist ideologue, hence his pious simplisticus and boorish caricaturizations and self-assurances. He's yet one more amongst the not so varied dumb and dumber ideological religionists of the left; conveniently myopic and obdurately so." A clear cut case of ad hominem argumentation; can't you do better than that?
The situation here would be much clearer if the reporter had been more precise. Apparently it is not that Mr Arafat chooses to respect their wishes, it is that he cannot forcibly arrest them without a firefight in his compound which he may not win.
Like so much in Israel/Palestine, it would be hilarious if it wasn't so heartbreaking.
Posted by: derrida derider on August 4, 2003 06:46 AMDiscussing the Israeli - Palestinian conflict and ideas on resolution with passion but not with anger is astonishingly difficult.
Posted by: avi on August 4, 2003 09:51 AMGoing back briefly to the original story, which part of "under detention" is so hard to understand? It happens all the time in civilized countries that people locked up in one place refuse (by various means) to go and be locked up in some other place. Often courts of competent jurisdiction agree with them.
In this case you can see a bunch of reasons, including self-preservation and a desire to protect Mr. Arafat, why detainees locked up in his compound might want to resist being transferred elsewhere. Disagreeable, but seems pretty far from orwellian.
Posted by: paul on August 5, 2003 10:47 AM