Yes, we know – witness the commentary on Ahmedinejad for the last four years, in which a lot of Americans professed to believe that he was the Big Boss of Iran, rather than, basically, the Prime Minister (domestic affairs).

The South African president is a chief of state as well as a head of government, but is chosen by parliament. Mind you, indubitably a democracy, so I’ll count them. That’s 3, I don’t consider Russia a democracy, and I’m going to give Ukraine and Lebanon each half a point – Ukraine because the presidency is being dismantled, Lebanon because the national convention isn’t quite democracy.

Mind you, Latin America has some fairly significant presidencies; wikiing, Brazil and Argentina both have an executive president. So less rare than I thought, but still hardly obvious.

Also, she was a Senator before being President, and Irish Senators are almost as powerless as Irish Presidents, and have much less symbolic influence. She was a high-profile lawyer, though. The closest analogue might be Cherie Blair, if Cherie Blair’s husband had been a cartoonist.

How terrible to have been disoriented so often and for so long ! (USSR 1922, Eire 1937, India 1947, FR Germany 1949, Austria 1955, etc).

the position of President under the Irish constitution was specifically designed to have less political power in Ireland than QEII has in Britain…her role is [almost] entirely ceremonial and symbolic

Yes. I might have saved trouble if I’d clicked the link Henry provided earlier, instead of trying to figure out what is the EU Presidency and work backwards from there. It is a little disorienting to an American to read about a Presidency which isn’t a supreme executive power, and in this case we have two (three, if you count the new office being contemplated for Tony Blair).

The network is far more powerful than we imagined!

As President, Robinson met my uncle a number of times. Does that get you there?

BTW Links @41 were broken – nothing earth-shattering anyway; originally assembled in response to the Highly Circumscribed Dershowitz Challenge ($15,000 to anyone who can find ‘a statement by a prominent Jewish leader [?] equating criticism of Israel with Anti-semitism’ – but I can’t afford the time, expense and potential costs award of a transatlantic lawsuit, even as litigant in person – though it would be fun): not be in entirely good faith

Lastly, it’s just astonishing that the discussion here is being conducted by people who apparently have never even heard of Mary Robinson… Have some respect, will you, for a person who is better than you are.

I’ll give you this: such criticisms of Robinson as I can find online do rest on facts that are somewhat overstressed.

Also, I believe those documents allegedly obtained during the operation “Defensive Shield” are still commonly referred to as “alleged proof”.

On the subject of wit, there’s a bit of a giveaway that the Commentary piece is an instant-opinion cribsheet in the clumsily ironic, resentful ‘Well, isn’t that just dandy’ at the start. The reader snarls agreement – yeah, isn’t it just. Typical of, er something or other. So who is Mary Robinson?

But if we’re going to bother criticising, better avoid focussing on one distortion while others slip by unchallenged.

documents seized during the recent Israeli incursion into the West Bank revealed that the Palestinian Authority spent approximately $9 million of European Union aid money each month on the salaries of those organizing terror attacks against civilians. While European officials like Robinson looked the other way, the Palestinian Authority regularly converted millions of dollars of aid money into shekels at rates about 20 percent below normal, allowing the Palestinian chairman to divert millions of dollars worth of aid into his personal slush fund.

are these claims being accepted except insofar as they relate to Robinson?

The whole thing sounds like the usual combination of exaggeration, distortion and fabrication, all stretched to the limit (well maybe not fabrication), and all in one direction.

The documents (Do they exist? Are they genuine? Do they contain what they are said to contain? Do the concusions drawn follow from what is said to be in the documents?); the numbers (are they based on what was in the documents? How were they derived? Was there any doubt and if so, er, who got the benefit? What is this business about exchange rate differences?); the matter of ‘those organizing terror attacks against civilians’ (Does this in fact mean militias? Are these ‘terror attacks’ a main part of their activities? What is being counted as ‘terrorist attacks on civilians’? The IDF seem routinely to describe military operations against themselves as ‘terror’ attacks, btw).

Is there any evidence that anyone was ‘looking the other way’ – which implies (though can’t of course be pinned down to asserting) they deliberate ignored obvious facts? Is the entirety of this ‘personal slush fund’ assumed to have been paid to ‘terrorists’? Etc.

No doubt each issue (taken in isolation) can in the usual way be claimed to be minor or irrelevant but if so, why is it in there? A further problem – you can hardly even raise one issue without presuming that the context is basically accurate. I dont know the answers to the specific questions above, but it has the appearance of a standard exercise in wholesale mudslinging (and if metanoia works well enough within the space of a sentence, it works even better when the retraction – or a refutation – is piecemeal, much later, and can be portrayed – if acknowledged at all – rather mundane and ‘nitpicky’ – or as ‘a point, but only a bit of one’.)

Last time I checked, the onus of proof fell on those making claims, so if I’m being asked to take on faith a story that can be traced back only to some polemical hack, or perhaps one step further back an unsubstantiated IDF report (‘the documents described here say…’), then I think I’ll give it a miss.

William Sjostrom @36: …trying to put together a group of people because of their bigotry toward Israel rather than their scholarship, and that is particularly egregious in a school with a large Jewish student population careful, or people might start thinking the line about not confating anti-Israel (or rather anti-Crazed Rightwing Israeli Hawks) opinion with anti-semitic racism might not be
in
entirely good faith. (Not that I accept the misdescription of what was actually happening at Columbia…)

Accidental or incidental contact with reality is harmless as long as no one notices.

http://www.atlanticblog.com/archives/002875.html

“Thuggish”, “gross bigotry toward Israel”, “anti-Semitic”. Now, there’s the Bill Sjostrom we all know.