Shit and Curses, and Other Updates on the Steven Salaita Affair (Updated)

Antisemitism can be explained by many things Corey (usually a combination of ignorance and social conditions) – but NOT excused! :)

The issue here strikes me as being less one of academic freedom than of collegiality. I happen to disagree with Salaita, but there’s nothing wrong with disagreeing with me. The issue is the tone and frequency of his tweets. I read the first few and thought “okay, we disagree and he’s a bit rude, but that’s life,” but they just keep going… and going… and going. He sounds like an obsessive crank who needs something to do with his time.

And I have to agree with Sasha (posts 1 and 2) that there’s a big difference between Glazer’s claim — that Israel’s actions explain anti-Semitism — and Salaita’s — that Israel’s actions justify it.

Finally: a good rule of thumb in life is that if you think a substantial fraction (perhaps even a majority) of all the people in your society are immoral or stupid because they disagree you with on something that is ultimately a value judgment rather than a matter of fact, the problem might be you, not your society. Many reasonable people think Israel just fought one of the cleanest wars in history, and that it was a war of necessity. They could be all secretly be bad people who like seeing children killed, or it could be that, when they examine the counterfactual, they see worse rights violations occurring. The fact that you don’t see that doesn’t make them stupid or immoral, but if you’re the sort of person who spends hours each day decrying them as such, I’d rather not work with you.

As an emeritus UIUC prof, I find this issue to be a no-brainer. Dunno shit about Salaita, but this is about as clear an academic freedom issue as we’re likely to see. Does anybody seriously think that if the Board pulls this off the rest of the faculty are safe? I remember when the U admin was very, very unhappy about our anti-SDI activity.
First they came for one type of loudmouth,…

Many reasonable people think Israel just fought one of the cleanest wars in history, and that it was a war of necessity.

So reasonable!
~

” a good rule of thumb in life is that if you think a substantial fraction (perhaps even a majority) of all the people in your society are immoral or stupid because they disagree you with on something that is ultimately a value judgment rather than a matter of fact”

Gee, JM, how good is your rule of thumb when almost every other society has different views than your society? Because that’s the case here – Americans as a rule simply do not realise how different the view they get on Middle East (and quite a few other) issues is from the rest of the world’s. And guess what – that is NOT because the rest of the world is anti-semitic, but because of US-specific political reasons.

Done and done.

And in the spirit of collegiality, f#ck those guys.

@Corey: collegiality goes beyond day-to-day in-person interactions. The administration has an interest in things like the university’s image in the popular press, the environment for students, the kind of faculty/grad students a department will be able to recruit, the focus of future research, etc. And if you make life more difficult for the administration, well… that’s not particularly collegial. That’s not to say you toeing the administration line is always the right thing to do, and that’s what academic freedom is for once you’ve actually been hired, but if I were an administrator and I’m reviewing this guy’s offer and suddenly he starts saying things that might make it harder to recruit (to make up an example) Jewish professors or grad students to other departments at UIUC because they only time they’ve heard of UIUC is when Saliata shoots his mouth off again (and again, and again) calling their cousin/sister/friend in Israel an accessory to murder (or whatever it is this time), that would be a legitimate consideration.

I’m reminded of the kerfuffle some months back when a colleague at another blog called for the NRA President’s “head on a stick” after the Newtown killings, plus maybe some cuss words. I don’t agree with that either, but the deaths of children sometimes makes people lose their shit, to echo Corey’s title.

You then get well-meaning people reminding us that we should all be civil and yes, we should all be civil, but JM’s pearl-clutching is in obvious bad faith.

Salaita’s outspokenness was well known, and as Corey says the collegiality criterion, to the extent that it’s valid at all, was a call for the voting faculty to make.

@Colin: Is “obvious bad faith” really the best you can do? Again, I specifically said that what distinguishes this from plain-vanilla “I saw something and got mad and posted something dumb” is the volume of material involved. I was pretty sympathetic when I read Corey’s original post on this and thought it sounded like a poor decision by the administration. But then I read his twitter, and changed my mind. Go check his twitter if you doubt the plausibility of this. The tweets for August 1st alone go on for several pages, and almost every one is about Gaza. Ditto for July 31st and 30th, and presumably more beyond that. That is not “outspokenness”; it’s obsession.

JM:

@LFC: there’s no such thing as “pro forma” in real life. If higher-ups get to have a say, you don’t resign the old job and sell the house until they’ve had their say. And if you do, you have no one to blame but yourself. The hiring process runs by higher-ups just for cases like this, where there is relevant information that for whatever reason has not been incorporated into the faculty’s decision-making.

I’m not employed by an academic institution, because none of the institutions to which I applied saw fit to offer me a job after I finished my degree. In light of that fact, I think I will let others somewhat more familiar with the way such institutions operate ‘from the inside’ answer your slightly condescending mini-lecture about how the “real world” works.

JM: Sorry, your exact phrase was “real life,” not the “real world.”

@Corey #22: Jeez. Again you’re intentionally misreading what I said. “Obsessive” can mean “hard-working” or it can mean “that crazy uncle who sends you birther conspiracy theory spam.” I clearly meant the latter, and I provided some evidence to back it up. Maybe there are lots of normal, friendly people spend all day for days on end angrily ranting on twitter about a faraway conflict, but in my experience that’s not the case.

“Maybe there are lots of normal, friendly people spend all day for days on end angrily ranting on twitter about a faraway conflict, but in my experience that’s not the case.”

Faraway conflict?? FARAWAY CONFLICT??

Salaita is Palestinian. Clearly you have no idea about the issues–e.g. how academic hiring happens. Are you just a troll?

@Corey:

I’ve found your commentary on this enlightening, and mean this question to be genuine — not trying to be amazing(ly obtuse). You draw the following distinction:
“The only legitimate moral appeal that collegiality has is the notion that you should be a good citizen of the department and the university. . . .But of course what collegiality is often a proxy for is precisely what you illegitimately claim here: namely, how much you are willing to make life easy for the administration and people in power.”

Is there room in your understanding of collegiality/citizenship for behavior that makes life easier (or less so) for administrators, thus freeing energy for the remainder of the faculty and staff? Take, for instance, someone who devoted all of his time to insulting or harassing (legally) town residents or state legislators, which then forced administrators to spend all their time placating same or developing strategies for circumventing their ire. Perhaps the university has to lump it. But I see a difference between that case, which to me really does touch on citizenship and the communal good in positive and negative externalities, and one in which the concern is just whether administrators are personally pleased or not.

@poco: And yet the various Israelis and Palestinians I know don’t seem to spend all day on twitter ranting about this.

@Corey: “deputy dean.” Lol. I’m pretty much the opposite of an administrator. I’m a lowly intern at a big software company who spends most of the day churning out code. I would imagine you have access to my email address so you can probably look me up on LinkedIn and verify that if you feel like it. (I’d appreciate you not revealing my identity, though.)
As to “normal, friendly people”: I do software, as I said. My definitions of “normal” and “friendly” are VERY loose. Keep the body odor to a minimum, don’t distract me when I’m focused, don’t pick fights with coworkers unless you have to, tabs are 4 spaces not 2, etc.

‘And yet the various Israelis and Palestinians “I know” don’t seem to spend all day on twitter ranting about this’.

Pay attention to the “I know.”

And here is the real problem–this statement combined with the requirement for “collegiality” is precisely the problem with diversity in academia. And when any attempt is made to diversify, as with the Salaita hire, there come the calls: “He is not one of us;” “None of the people I know behave in this way,” ad nauseam.

@poco: You could make the same argument about a lot of things. “No one I know pees in a cup at their desk instead of using the toilet, and when we try to diversify…”
Try actually naming a virtue of incessant twitter ranting that would make anyone want to diversify into the area of twitter ranters.

He does software. Why am I not surprised?

Good point: what would someone who spends all day working with complex but ultimately logical and well-defined systems know about academia?

JM @ 36

Thinking that I must be making my judgment on the basis of a (cheap) stereotype is where you go wrong, Going wrong in that way is in fact exactly the way you’ve gone wrong in all of your comments here so far.

You dismiss as irrelevant every experience which you aren’t familiar with, leading me to believe that your idea of relevance is administrative, i.e. task-based. You make assumptions about what other people should think based on ends which you’ve already defined, and you restrict your definition of those ends to those attainable by the means available to you, and ignore those means which might available to to others. You aren’t the slightest bit curious about the limits of your own reasoning.

These habits of mind are common in code monkeys, but are of limited use elsewhere, and almost everywhere else is elsewhere, including here — hence my lack of surprise.

He does software. Why am I not surprised?

Was Neal Stephenson (in Anathem) the first to make an explicit pun out of the Japanese Eta (burakumin) and the latter-day IT caste? Software users who, without any apparent trace of apology or self-deprecating irony, eat the beef and despise the butcher have always reminded me of Tokugawa Japan, so Stephenson’s “Ita” were already an idea in gestation, but somehow I never spotted the clever wordplay to bring it home.

there’s no such thing as “pro forma” in real life.

I’m just wondering if it’s the ‘pro forma’ part or the ‘real life’ bit you’re confused about. Having been in academia for a bit, I can promise you that there are lots of things that can be extremely well-described at ‘pro-forma’. They often involve boards, even!

The thing is, LFC’s obviously quite right here. Or else, it would make no fucking sense to have a planned starting date prior to the scheduled board approval. Though this kind of thing happens, and it tends to be described as ‘pro forma’, for reasons I’m sure you can understand.

[aeiou] @Donald: I’m curious if any other war that involved any urban warfare has been conducted in a cleaner fashion than this one?

Like watching a snake taunt a mouse, that.
–
Of course the use I’m making of “sociopath” is shtreet vocab, the clinical definitions are complex, scientific, they border on the arcane and are useful mostly in therapeutic and legal contexts, which hope though we might this is unlikely to become any time soon.
But for the record, these are handy hints:

…aggressive narcissism….indicative of personality traits, including, among others, (1) glibness and superficial charm
(2) grandiose sense of self-worth
(4) pathological lying
(5) conning/manipulative
(6) lack of remorse (
7) shallow affect
(8) callous lack of empathy and
(16) failure to accept responsibility for one’s own actions.

I use the word “sociopath” because I like it to use it, it’s got that judgmental tang to it. It’s like “paranoid” – clinically that means something far more complex than simply being irrationally afraid of non-existent threats. But that’s how they use it on the shtreet.
Who cares about terminology.

which, in the 300,000,000-strong US…
As if Jews don’t have the American public in virtual information lockdown. The disparity between the rest of the world’s opinions of the cunning inhumanity of Israel and American support for the carnage is because Americans do not know what’s happening. They do not know.
A factory farm of veal calves, pinned in immobility, helpless, and unable to do anything but eat what they’re fed.
Contempt. The contempt of the sadist for his victims.
Murderous wretches, proud of the blood they’re spilling, and in about an hour they’ll start spilling more.
A war. A fucking war.
An army of sadistic cowards killing an imprisoned impoverished population with nowhere to escape the heartless cruelty of prostheticized evil.
That’s war the way Jews fight war.
You craven asshole.
Craven lying sacks of shit.

I am not an academic but am related to a shitload thereof. So much for qualifications. The dog that did not bark, so far in this symposium, is the almost inevitable role of what academics Mearsheimer and Walt dubbed the Israel Lobby in the appointment revocation. Look no further for your “collegiality.”

JM,
” I’m curious if any other war that involved any urban warfare has been conducted in a cleaner fashion than this one?”

Someone was telling me of the engineering/technical feat of designing special vans that would be driven around so the war fighters would pick up poor victims and put them inside the van and gas them to death – this was more clean – but I do not think that is a virtue.

Oh, poop, lots of Jews do.

@Joeff: If you can’t find Jews critical of Israel, you’re not looking very hard. Heck, there’s a whole ultra-Orthodox sect that’s rabidly anti-Zionist, and they felt that way _before_ anyone said anything about war crimes.

Gas vans were not just hypotheticals or proposed – they were used. They were invented in Soviet Russia for purges and were used by Nazi’s in WW2 – Wikipedia says mostly to kill Jewish victims.
Less clean methods like firebombing are not virtuous either. And nor are nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, or robotic methods like drones or mechanical armor. War is a great evil vice whether it be clean or not.

Joeff, the point is, you must be living in a cave to say something like that.

Goodbye.

@ZM:
I’m not sure how Nazi gas vans are relevant. Killing Jews was never anything that could pass for a legitimate military objective, so while the result is certainly a sterile war in some sense — no mess — it is not at all clean in the sense I was using the word.

@ZM: Killing Hamas militants, of whom there are thought to be about 20,000, is a legitimate military objective, as is destroying their rockets. Both are located in urban areas. So, again, my question: what strategies for avoiding civilian deaths have been used or seriously proposed by other countries facing similar conditions? As I said, I don’t know the answer, but I’m curious to know what it is.

JM @ 46

Common because they’re essential to the task. The problem arises when you try to deploy them outside the scope of that task. It’s not written anywhere that coders more than members of any other intellectual sub-species have to be seduced by their own expertise in this way, but it’s a fact that many are.

As for JWB’s witticism about eating the beef while despising the butcher, I plead nolo contendere. There’s definitely room in my pantheon for heroically elegant logic, and for the coders who embed it in our modern prostheses physical as well as physical. It isn’t JM’s logic that I’m faulting here, but the premises it’s based on, and the hardly coincidental arrogance with which he neglects to mention those premises to himself or to any of the rest of us — as though they hardly matter at all.

PS to @JM 64: when the good folk of Kiryas Joel demonstrate against Israel’s high tech pogrom in Gaza, do drop a line.

JM,
Genuinely engaging in proper peace negotiations and reconciliation and agreeing on how to share agricultural land and water etc fairly with and share access to the sea etc with Palestinians since now they are all living in the land together is what is legitimate. The Israeli authorities are not doing this.

War just leads to more and more war. The only alternatives to continuous warfare or reconciliation would be to eliminate Palestinians all together, make Palestinians emigrate en masse like many Jewish people left Europe, or turn all Palestinians into hopeless and dehumanised people who can no longer go on:

‘This word ‘Muselmann’, I do not know why, was used by the old ones of the camp to describe the weak, the inept, those doomed to selection.’ (Primo Levi, The Drowned and The Saved).

” The United Nations — which had a lower death toll, 1,814 — said that at least 72 percent were civilians, while two Gaza-based groups put the percentage at 82 (Al Mezan Center for Human Rights) and 84 (the Palestinian Center for Human Rights). The conflict in the Gaza Strip has killed 392 children and injured 2,502, according to a U.N. official.
Israel has a very different assessment. The military says it took the lives of 900 “terrorists,” but it did not provide specifics beyond the 368 cases listed in 28 entries on its blog. Politicians have been saying that 47 percent of the dead were fighters”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/06/world/middleeast/civilian-or-not-new-fight-in-tallying-the-dead-from-the-gaza-conflict.html?_r=0

@William: I’m pretty new to software and actually got my degree in a field that’s in social science, so the coder’s “habits of mind” aren’t all that relevant anyway.

@Joeff #68: If you’re Jewish and you’re well aware that many Jews are vocally critical of Israel, you should also be aware that those who conflate Judaism with support for Netanyahu’s particular policies is out-and-out anti-Semitism.

@Joeff #71: The purpose of a pogrom is, per wikipedia, the “massacre or persecution of an ethnic or religious group.” Is there any actual evidence that either of these is the goal of Israel’s campaign? Presumably you’d need evidence that Israel is being substantially more brutal than is required for the campaign’s legitimate military objectives (Hamas militants, rockets and tunnels) and I’ve asked repeatedly on this thread if anyone knows of examples of legitimate military objectives being pursued under comparable circumstances with less loss of civilian life, and I’ve yet to receive a reply, although I’d be interested if anyone has one.

75/68: if someone claims to act on your behalf and you do nothing to disavow it, you should expect to end up with some shit on your shoes, so to speak.

75/71: persons are generally held to intend the reasonably foreseeable consequences of their actions, protestations of “benign” propose notwithstanding. Also, have you seen the pictures?

@ Corey 43:

Yes, exactly what I was saying.

From our comments policy:

“If your comments are blatantly racist, sexist or homophobic we will delete them and ban you from the site.”

Roy Belmont above has been disemvowelled for blatant anti-semitism. Roy, don’t come back.

[aeiou] Meanwhile, ISIS is raping and slaughtering thousands of children and women and committing no end of atrocities. You won’t hear a blip on that from the likes of Salaita or Robin (at most a casual one saying that of course it is wrong – before returning to their pathologic obsession with Jews). This shows all you need to know about these people and their opinions.

And commenters who angrily throw around accusations of anti-semitism where doing so isn’t warranted also risk being zapped, Mario.

Joeff @74,

Australia has quite a lot of diasporic (?) communities as well, Jewish (112,000 ), Irish (2 million ), Palestinian (9000 ) amongst many others. I was talking to three girls in the city the other day and they were praying for the safety of their family in Gaza.

I was just reading this article about the Jewish community in Carlton.

“THE earliest memories are incongruous . . . the ABC News at seven o’clock and the face of King George VI. What have they to do with my Jewish boyhood? Listening to the
news was as much a ritual as the lighting of the candles on the Sabbath Eve. For the news told us how the war was going.
…
In much the same way as the war had determined much of the talk about and around the Jews of my early boyhood, the emergence of Israel affected much of my later childhood, I joined Habonim, the first of the Zionist youth movements to be established in Australia.
It was an exciting time to join such a movement. At every meeting there was passionate talk about the events in Palestine, about the coming of independence and about the
realisation of historic dreams. It was quite overwhelming for a boy of nine
and I took it all terribly seriously, as did my friends. Saturday afternoon when we would meet in a crumbling old factory turned into clubrooms at the top of Drummond Street, became the focal point of the week. The blue uniform with its dark blue scarf was
the one item of clothing I cared for through the week and the songs of the
Zionist pioneers crowded out all others.
…
Nevertheless [my father] was a strong supporter of the “terrorist” liberation movement because, as he said, “God needs sleep sometimes”. The word “terrorist” angered him and
he dismissed the ideas of “self-restraint” I brought home from my youth movement which was ideologically aligned with Ben Gurion’s political party in Israel — the Mapai, ‘opponents of the “terrorists”. In later years I was to join a Zionist youth movement which was fundamentally religious: Habonim was irreligious (rather than anti-religious
although its leadership then included some outspoken Marxists). But in my boyhood Habonim was my first love.” (Sam Lipski, Memories of a Jewish Boyhood)

I think the author of the reminiscences is a leading Zionist in Australia – but he seems also to be involved (via his work as CEO of the Pratt Foundation and its link with the Royal Children’s Hospital) in this healthcare endeavour created after the mother of a young Palestinian girl (Rozana) who fell and was injured insisted she be treated at Hadassah hospital which is the best for children’s care in the area :

“Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank have access to improved healthcare thanks to a unique multi-faith partnership created in Australia that has won the endorsement of the Palestinian Authority. Project Rozana brings together the Hadassah Australia Foundation; Anglican Overseas Aid, an overseas relief and development agency of the Anglican Church of Australia; and the world-renowned Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem”

“I think Israelis have lost what we can call a “humanitarian sensibility,” the capacity to identify with the suffering of a distant other.” (Eva Illouz Professor of sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.)

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/interview-with-sociologist-eva-illouz-about-gaza-and-israeli-society-a-984536.html

The same is undoubtedly true of many Palestinians: but, surprise surprise, brutality brutalises. What should be clear to the world now is that the “two-state” solution will never work. Indeed, Likud’s policy of settlements was partly designed to undermine any such possibility. Hamas’ militancy paid off in one sense: since 2005 there have been no more Israeli settlements – or perhaps it would be more honest to call them exclaves – in Gaza. The more moderate leadership in the West Bank has no hope of achieving this: their land, water etc are all targets for slow assimilation: West Bank Palestinians are second class citizens in a territory they nominally control – just as was the case in the former South African “homelands”.

Military victories are not making Israel more secure. Gaza reduced to rubble is simply arming the future for more atrocity. A “two-state” solution could only ever work on the basis of equal rights for all residents, and Israel was never going to allow that. But equal rights for all residents and power sharing is the only way the peoples of these lands will ever be able to live in peace. Unrealistically idealistic? Perhaps, but nothing else has worked, or has the prospect of working.

Ahem – a lot of this seems rather off-topic. Even if Salaita’s tweets were anti-Semitic, he was offered the position with a written letter affirming the AAUP policy. AAUP policy would not allow him to be fired if he tweeted that he was Hitler’s biggest fan.

Israel’s conduct during Operation Protective Fucking Edge is entirely irrelevant.

@Kevin: Operation Motorman took one day, occurred only in some neighborhoods, and the IRA basically gave up without a fight. If Israel could mount a one-day, successful ground invasion of Gaza with zero casualties, I’m sure they would. And for the analogy to hold, they’d have to be in control of most of urban Gaza already and retake only a few areas.

@Niall: Isn’t the university’s claim that this was a withdrawal of an offer rather than a firing?

@JM: Yes, that is their claim. So I’m this black lesbian, and I get a written offer from the University along with a statement that they operate a strict policy of no discrimination against minorities. I say cool, quit my job, rent my home and prepare to settle in. Then the Chancellor gets a letter from Rednecks of America telling her I’m black and gay and unsuitable, so she withdraws the offer.

And the strict no-discrimination policy doesn’t apply until after she approves my hire?

I don’t think so. I think Salaita’s lawyers will be sending a firmly worded letter.

I predict the Chancellor climbs down after the lawyer’s letters start, and privately says “Sorry guys, my hands are tied” to the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

@J Thomas:
Hamas is a military organization whose actions and words show a dedication to one goal and one goal only: hurting Israel, regardless of the cost to anyone else. People who join that group know full well what it is and what it stands for, and they are all legitimate military targets for Israel. As it happens, Israel doesn’t want to topple Hamas because it prefers the devil it knows, but if it wanted to it would be well within its rights to kill all 20,000 members of Hamas in the absence of a viable but less bloody strategy.

As to the Gaza-as-a-sovereign question: if Gaza were a sovereign state, the first government-sanctioned (i.e. Hamas-sanctioned) tunnel into Israeli territory to attack and kill Israeli civilians would have represented an act of war, and led to exactly the result we’ve seen these past 3 weeks. And that, as it happens, is why no two-state solution can include Hamas. The moment they have their sovereign territory they’ll use it to launch more attacks on Israel, and a few days later we’re back to the occupation.

“‘Actually they’re not your prisoners,’ says Elisha. ‘And, look, they’ve been marching for hours, they need food and drink.’ At a stroke Elisha turns the enemies into guests. The king sees this, and switches at once to a different social code, the obligations of hospitality. He knows as much about generosity in hospitality as he does of ruthlessness in war. Honoured guests deserve a banquet, and this is what they get. Richly satisfied, the soldiers are sent home. The text leaves us to imagine what they reported to their king. But the long-running state of war comes to an end. You don’t attack those who treat you as honoured guests.”
http://richardbauckham.co.uk/uploads/Sermons/Elisha.pdf

#99 JM

Hamas is a military organization whose actions and words show a dedication to one goal and one goal only: hurting Israel, regardless of the cost to anyone else.

OK! Now I understand your position. If this was true, it would make sense for Israel to kill them all, regardless of the effect on innocent neutrals. Just like the USA wants to kill every AQ member regardless of innocent muslim casualties in any muslim nation around the world. Obviously if their only intention is to hurt us, we must kill them regardless of collateral damage.

But what I have read about Hamas says you are not right. They have a very active program to help Palestinians. That’s why they have so much support. When they got started, they did more to help Palestinians than the PLO did with a much larger budget, because they were not as corrupt.

Lots of observers claim that they have a “military wing” which tries to organize defenses against Israel, and a “political wing” which tries to help Palestinians. But Israelis claim there is no distinction and does its best to kill both.

It makes some sense for Israel to take this position, because they believe all Palestinians hate them and want nothing more than to hurt Israel, so anybody who feeds Palestinians is harming Israel. If you allow Palestinians food they will find a way to turn it into explosives. Better not to let them have food.

I’m kind of surprised that you would believe the Israeli propaganda about Hamas, but now I see why you take the stand you do.

As to the Gaza-as-a-sovereign question: if Gaza were a sovereign state, the first government-sanctioned (i.e. Hamas-sanctioned) tunnel into Israeli territory to attack and kill Israeli civilians would have represented an act of war, and led to exactly the result we’ve seen these past 3 weeks.

How many Israeli civilians have Gazans killed by going through the tunnels?

Did you know that there are tunnels under the US border with Mexico? But they haven’t particularly been used to kill US citizens. When the USA found the first one, should we have bombed Mexico?

Let’s be very clear about something. If the hiring and firing of professors is based on what opinions they hold extraneous to their scholarly duties, then the wholesale firing of CP professors and their fellow travelers in the 1950s was justified. They supported a government that was having people executed or thrown in prison simply for advocating democracy. They also believed that the USA should follow that path. How could a university employ such people since their views were bound to come across as uncollegial to their colleagues? This is about as simple a case of academic freedom as you are going to run into. If the U. of Illinois is successful in its McCarthyite type behavior, the American academy is going to end up more like those totalitarian societies the CP professors supposedly advocated.

#106 There is an obvious Godwin in all of this.

Wow – two disenvowelings in one strand, you don’t see that everyday (fortunately).

Curiously the more ardently some defend Salaita’s dismissal, the more I agree it was wrong.

Even if I were to agree with the word & tone police or think academic freedom has more shades of gray than some might allow – the matter is clearly not so cut and dried that it deserves a vigorous and ardent defense. Giving the Chancellor all of the possible benefits of the doubt, the best I can come up with is that it was a close call to defend the University reputation as a supporter of religious diversity at a not inconsequential reduction to its reputation as place of academic freedom.

If their goal was to simply tone down the rhetoric, there should have been other levers to pull. If their goal was to supress the rhetoric – they’ve done the opposite and are now associated with it regardless.

Busby link

Oh, I see the IRA example was already being thrashed out –should have read the rest of the thread.

Corey Robin @ 115

The difficulty in making the distinction, necessary not only to describe accurately the historical shifts in the meaning of Jewishness, but also to deprive the mass slaughter of Palestinians of each new justification as it arises, is that there never seems to be a shortage of people who hate Jews on general principle, without any necessary reference to the actions of the State of Israel.

The growing threats to the Jewish communities of Europe are both deplorable, and a warning. Saying, well, they deserve it, after all as some in the anti-Israel left seem tempted to do, even knowing what they know about the history of the last 80 years or so, is all the evidence we should need that the distinction is not only worth preserving, but actively defending as well, no matter how many Jewish Community Centers in the U.S. still display little Israeli flags in their anterooms.

The medium’s strengths and constraints play an outsize role in all this. Cary Nelson and others argue that by virtue of the overlap with Salaita’s academic interests, they are extramural but part of his public profile or something or other. Some but not all of the tweets become more palatable if they are explained and contextualized, but it is very hard to accomplish that on Twitter, let alone while remaining consistent with the reason for tweeting — getting others to pay attention to you and giving tantalizing or even incendiary glimpses of what you might say in another medium.

Do we accept character limits and tonal norms as a side constraint under which academics have to persevere, such that they may be cited as extenuating circumstances, or do we say proceed entirely at your own risk? All this tempts me to the latter, at least as a prudential matter. So long as universities refrain from promoting the success of their faculty on social media.

Whew.

Saying that Jews deserve antisemitism because of Israel.
And saying that Gazans deserve to be bombed because they haven’t killed off Hamas themselves.

It’s the same logic mistake really. Just with fewer bombs.

I emailed about Salaita the first hours, for whatever good it does.

At this point anything they do makes University of Illinois look bad. But if they come out against academic freedom, it’s going to be another big controversy the next time somebody pressures them to fire somebody for inadequate “collegiality”. It will go straight to the Chancellor who will have a reputation for bending to such things, and they’ll get irate people on both sides arguing back and forth, and it will make the University look bad all over again.

LFC–I used to know that, about the connection between the Malayan campaign and the strategic hamlets, but had forgotten the details.

It’s my opinion that the reason that it is hard to find examples of humane urban warfare is that there’s almost never a good reason for it in the first place. WWII, maybe, where if the enemy holes up in a city you go in, and the only justification there is that the other side is worse and maybe you have no choice but to go in and root out the enemy. But Gaza is not WWII–Hamas wasn’t running death camps. Israel provoked the war in both the short term sense (arresting Hamas members in the WB) and in the long term sense (the occupation and blockade). And the IDF has accurate weaponry and didn’t need to blow up homes with children in them or bomb hospitals even if they thought Hamas had a bunker inside, nor did they need to use 155 mm howitzers. It’s sort of ridiculous one even needs to argue this.

Brett Bellmore @ 100

Essentially, Hamas and Israel are in a state of war.

How convenient! Israel is at war with the occupants of the vast ghetto it has created in Gaza. And the Palestinians there do not even have an army, let alone one of the more powerful ones on the planet.

What is the standard for the “most moral army in the world? Seems to be a rather low bar.
~

Brett Bellmore @ 100

“Essentially, Hamas and Israel are in a state of war.”

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n15/mouin-rabbani/israel-mows-the-lawn

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n16/nathan-thrall/hamass-chances

Israel sought this war; Hamas submitted, and Israel backstabbed them and continued the war.

J Thomas #121 — I agree 100%. University of Illinois is making a huge mistake.

on tit for tat, there already is a ‘tit for tat’ war, ie Israel often makes incursions into (the outskirts? of) Gaza. This hasnt ‘worked'(and neither has the siege in general)
Why you would replace this with a policy of ‘a missile for a missile’ is beyond me. Perhaps the mood in Israel is slowly changing from their current course to something *actually* sustainable. We should hope so. But this ‘hit the desert and we’ll hit a school’ schtik is bizzare(and not an example of ‘unemotional logical thinking’)

people used to contrast how the Americans and French fought the communists in Vietnam compared to, I think, how the British handled communists in what is now Malaysia

Let me put it this way. When there are two sides that are ready to fight, and neither of them is weak enough to lose easily, then they have a hard fight ahead of them.

When one side is ready to call in foreign troops — which will require payments of various sorts — they are usually the weaker side. Likely they are so weak they will lose when the foreign troops go home, or before.

Malaya involved a fight against Chinese communists. The Chinese communists didn’t have much of a chance, they didn’t have enthusiastic support even from the chinese ethnic group much less any of the others. The Malayans had british help because they hadn’t left the British commonwealth yet. The opposition consisted of maybe 50,000 Chinese communists supporting maybe 8,000 troops who got some sympathy from something like 500,000 people who lived in the jungle. The Chinese communists didn’t do very well at getting additional support, and 350,000 troops (including 40,000 from outside Malaya) were enough to mop them up. It helped that the British could relocate and subsidize a lot of the poor edge-of-jungle farmers that the chinese troops depended on for food and information.

The british announced that the emergency itself was the main thing keeping them there, and after they left the anti-colonial revolt was over. They could probably have ended it a couple of years earlier with a general amnesty and such, but the British wanted an unconditional surrender.

The opposition had no chance to win, but they got a lot of attention for awhile by looking dangerous. If the national government had been in place sooner, it probably could have handled the problem without british troops.

When a foreign government comes in to help the weaker side, usually the foreigners do whatever they can think of until eventually they lose and go home. One possible exception was Greece after WWII. During the war, parallel communist and anti-communist resistance movements got practice at guerrilla war. After the war, the US and British occupation troops supported a new greek government that would shut out the communists entirely. When the communists tried nonviolent protest they were massacred. The communists were probably the weaker side all along, but the government got military aid and troops from Britain and the USA, and also Marshall Plan economic support that would be gone if the communists won. The foreign troops helped slaughter a whole lot of communists who attempted conventional warfare, and when the Russians and the Yugoslavs disagreed about whether to continue supporting the war and then neither did, the Greek communists lost decisively and many more died. Communism has not been a serious threat in Greece since then. Probably the anti-communists would have won without the foreign troops but they would likely have taken more casualties.

In democracies, usually resistance movements can be destroyed by giving them political representation. But when they are communists or palestinians this is not practical.

please make sure to email the chancellor, Phyllis Wise

I was lazy about this the other day but today it’s done.

Ronan(rf) #130-132 — The only thing you wrote that makes sense is that funds cannot be routed through Hamas. So, an international force is required.

For the rest of it? Oddly scattershot: All sides are already committing war crimes; support for Hamas is increasing now; immediately hitting the guys who fire the missiles would prevent them from ever firing another thus reducing escalation; the system would be technological and have to be tested; no policy is set in stone and the tactics can be changed; etc. etc.

I wasn’t emotional, either when I predicted that Iraq must break up (and when you said it wouldn’t, or that it wouldn’t be an issue) or now that it is happening.

I think the humanitarian airdrop to the Yezidis is a good idea, and the US should use airstrikes on IS who come after them or the Kurds. I just don’t want US soldiers dragged back onto the ground. I know a few who were there the first time.

As for how it is possible to hand a paper outline of a resolution to the combatants and then walk away? I have no idea why that process isn’t obvious to you. Why don’t you ask the last US ambassador to Israel, who proposed doing just that?

LFC – do you know, how would a UN mission work in such a context ? Would they be involved not only for security but economic and political development ? And would they work through existing political organisations (such as Hamas and Fatah) ? Do you know the kind of ‘success’ rates there have been on those kinds of missions (rather than just peacekeeping, ie how long til an area becomes reincorporated into an existing state or sovereignty transferred ?)

“I wasn’t emotional, either when I predicted that Iraq must break up (and when you said it wouldn’t, or that it wouldn’t be an issue) or now that it is happening. ”

No I didnt. I said Sunni areas might get greater autonomy and the Kurds might become fully independent, but we couldnt really predict with the certainty you were; and you wouldnt even deal with the geopolitical realities involved, ie the difficulties in getting countries to officially recognise a divided Iraq, or explain how the security issue becomes resolved with three militarised, sectarian states.
The rest of your comment is pretty non responsive.

donald johnson at 123:

It’s my opinion that the reason that it is hard to find examples of humane urban warfare is that there’s almost never a good reason for it in the first place.

Thank you. That was my point way back at 48. I typed it and went to bed assuming that JM wouldn’t be so obtuse as to not get it. Wrong. Intra-thread nostalgia…

Well, first you’d prob have to get UNRWA, which has some role and jurisdiction now, out of there.

The UNSC could put them in charge of sequestering the weapons.

Afaict, from military analysts (!!!!), the Peshmerga are more than likely concentrated on protecting Kurdish territory, so were not willing to commit to protecting areas outside of ‘Kurdistan.’

that’s in relation to Sinjar(which I think? is outside of Kurdish autonomy?) Dont know whats happened today re Erbril.

actually, sorry Lee. Im going to stop being snarky/oppositional at this stage.

J Thomas #150 — It’s also possible the security establishment understands the psychological implications, since that is the impression I got from reading Diskin’s statements. So they haven’t been able to sell it to the civilian leadership, or else Netanyahu hasn’t been able to sell it to his rightwing. The suggestion that Kerry and Netanyahu pretty much see eye-to-eye on a two-state solution, but that Netanyahu is hamstrung by the right, is given in this long-form article on the negotiations:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118751/how-israel-palestine-peace-deal-died

The UNSC could put them in charge of sequestering the weapons.

I get it, Joshua. Just for the record. Wdn’t want your attempts at levity to go totally unappreciated (just mostly unappreciated).

J Thomas: “In democracies, usually resistance movements can be destroyed by giving them political representation. But when they are communists or palestinians this is not practical.”

What a crock.

As a non-American I’m somewhat amused by the amount of ink spilled on Palestine-Israel. Less amused about the amount of blood. But that being said I am fascinated by 160,000 Syrians killed in a brutal and inhumane civil war that receives not 1/10th the discussion of a Palestine-Israel conflict that has killed 8,000 Palestinians and 1,200 Israelis in the past FIFTEEN years. I cannot understand why this issue is not of equal or greater importance on American campuses EXCEPT the soft racism of expectations of Syrians/Arabs/Muslims OR the hard racism of expectations on Israelis/Jews/American “allies”

Andrew F – “I seem to recall” is a nice phrase, a link would be more convincing though ?

” I seem to recall articles reporting that parents who did so received gunfire, not cooperation, in response”

Actually, I dont really doubt it tbh.

Corey @115
“Zionists: transforming ‘anti-Semitism’ from something horrible into something honorable since 1948″.

The clearest and least tortured interpretation of this statement is that the reasons for anti-Semitism before 1948 were wrong/horrible but that after 1948 they are correct/honorable. At a minimum, he is saying that anti-Semitism is understandable since 1948 because of Zionism.

Well Corey, there are a lot a people that thought anti-Semitism was honorable before 1948 for different reasons than Steven or those Steven is trying to understand. There is always a reason for anti-Semitism or a reason for the good scholar to “understand” why others, not them of course, would be anti-Semitic.

You also have to admire Steven’s take that anti-Semitism became honorable just 3 years after the Holocaust. The man doesn’t pull punches. Clear as a bell.

You can try to parse his statement as much as you want but none of it is good.

Ze Kraggash
It’s all designed by professionals a-la George Kennan, who devise optimal plans with various scenarios. Keyboard strategists like ourselves have no idea of their equations, their risks, their objectives, their intrigue.

I think you might have been reaching for the name of a U.S. nuclear strategist of the Cold War era, e.g. Bernard Brodie, Thomas Schelling, Albert Wohlstetter, Herman Kahn, just to name a few of the well-known names — they were all quite different (present tense is appropriate in Schelling’s case, since he’s still alive), but all probably appear in a book like Kaplan’s The Wizards of Armageddon. Kennan does not really fit in this list; that kind of thing was not for the most part what he did (though he no doubt followed the debates).

#165 T

You also have to admire Steven’s take that anti-Semitism became honorable just 3 years after the Holocaust. The man doesn’t pull punches. Clear as a bell.

When you don’t give him the slightest benefit of the doubt, others may treat you similiarly.

For example, you are responding like a zionist. Zionists say it’s OK to kill Palestinian babies provide you are also trying to kill Palestinian adults who support Hamas. If you are a Zionist you are a bad person.

I wouldn’t really say that. But more and more, it looks like antisemites are bad goys and Zionists are bad Jews. And there is more similarity between them than I like.

#166 Joshua Burton

Automated counterbattery fire in an urban setting is immoral, mediapathic and pointless, but the reasoning against it doesn’t even have to get that far, because it’s expensive and the countermeasure that defeats it is very cheap.

In case it wasn’t plain to everybody, your idea was that even if you destroy missile sites immediately, you don’t kill the people who fired the missile because they can arrange to not be nearby when the missile launches.

But Lee Arnold’s idea wasn’t that you kill the people who fire the missile. It was that you kill everybody who lives nearby, and immediately — before they have time to run away unless they knew about it hours ahead of time.

That way you turn people against anybody who wants to fire missiles against Israel. If they fire a missile and don’t tell people ahead of time, people die. Anybody who sees them set up will try to stop them, knowing that they and their families will die otherwise, killed by Hamas.

And if they do tell people ahead of time, with time to escape, people will still want to stop them to keep their personal homes from being destroyed. Also if there are any spies for Israel there, the spies can report it and maybe Israel can attack the site before the missile launches.

As it is, when Israel just blows people up at random, Gazans get mad at Israel and cheer on people who try to hit back. But if they knew that Israel would kill them in a few minutes after a rocket launch, they would be all NIMBY and would blame Hamas for the people Israel killed.

His intention is not particularly to reduce the number or the percentage of innocent civilians killed. It is to make their deaths more *effective* at hurting Hamas and helping Israel. To get Gazans to blame the deaths of innocent people at Israeli hands on Hamas and not on Israel.

BTW, the idea behind the term ‘making antisemitism honorable’ is rather clear:
Zionists equate opposition to the government of Israel with antisemitism. Since opposition to the government of Israel is frequently honorable, the conclusion follows from simple logic.

Lee, I seem to remember that you felt deterministic about the situation in Iraq; what makes you think that you can affect this situation? Is it that in Iraq you see the situation shaped by blind forces of nature, and here you think you recognize intelligent actors on one side of the border? That’s your mistake. ‘Cause there’s bugger all down here on Earth.

T: “That’s an incredibly tortured reading of Saliaia. ”

To be honest, I wasn’t working off of that; I was working off of the statement itself, and decades of seeing the assertion ‘anti-(government of) Israel=antisemite’.

Once that’s been done for decades, ‘antisemite’ loses its sting.

Corey turned himself into knots to try to make a defense and now your adding on things Salaita didn’t say to try and make sense of the original tweet. It doesn’t work.

There’s an old DC saying that goes “Where you stand depends on where you sit.”

If you’re Jewish and sensitive to antisemitism, then of course that’s what will seem important to you. Anti-semites will naturally latch onto criticism of Israel to try to make Jews look bad.

But if you aren’t Jewish and you start noticing really bad news out of Israel, but if you talk about it people say you are an anti-semite because otherwise you would not ever say anything bad about Israel, after awhile it looks like you don’t actually have to do anything bad to get called anti-semitic.

Here’s how that started for me. I read about the Liberty incident, and I got a copy of the unclassified US Navy report on it. The Israelis attacked a US ship and gave a curt apology saying they mistook it for an Egyptian ship that looked nothing like it. They said they did not see the US flag on the ship, when their initial airstrike included a precision strike on the radio antennas, much much thinner than the flag. They destroyed those antennae, and the Liberty would have had no communication except that the crew improvised a radio by using the ship’s hull as an antenna. The Israeli torpedo boats that came later blasted a great big hole in the ship at fairly close range. The Liberty put out life-rafts on the assumption the Liberty would sink, and the Israeli ships machine-gunned the life-rafts and took them away from the Liberty. That would be a war-crime if they did it to an Egyptian ship, right? The Israeli government said the warriors involved would get reprimands but instead they got medals.

The whole thing did not make sense. It really looked like the Israelis wanted the Liberty to sink without a trace and with no survivors, and they gave up on that after they found out that the mayday message had been sent. Why would they do that? I don’t know. But that torpedo happened to take out the arab-language communications experts the ship was there to support, who also translated hebrew messages being US Jewish communications experts. If they learned something that Israel did not want the USA to know, maybe it’s still classified or maybe they did not get the message off before they died.

It was a puzzle. The US media almost completely ignored it. There were a few very brief mentions like the one that got me to look it up. Eventually there was one report in I think Hustler magazine, an entirely private publication that did not care about looking respectable. People called the Liberty crew anti-semites because they talked about what happened to them.

Later more info got out because of the internet. Whenever I joined an online discussion about it, I got called an anti-semite because I was ready to consider the possibility that Israel did something bad.

In general anybody who was open-minded about Israeli hasbara could expect to get called an anti-semite. After a couple of years of that I stopped taking it at all seriously. It was just something Zionists said.

@179

This is not hard. Antisemitism is hatred for Jews because they are Jews. You don’t need an Israel and you don’t need Zionism for antisemitism. It has existed for centuries. Just like racism.

Salaita comes along and says hatred is Jews was horrible before Israel but honorable after Israel. He’s conflating his hatred of Zionism with a hatred of Jews. There is almost no other way of reading that. And, as we know, it’s another in the long list of reasons anti-Semites use to hate Jews. Just one he’s comfortable with. Corey, the anti-Zionist Jew, got thrown under the bus by the tweet.

Salaita is an English professor. Makes a living using words. Gotta admit that the tweet is snappy. He thought about it. He owns it.

The plural of goy is goyim. I see why you’re using that word. Trying to get a rise out of people. Tee hee.

The antisemitism charge gets abused, as I’m sure everyone here is aware. But yes it is a real thing. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/08/nyregion/swastikas-slurs-and-torment-in-towns-schools.html?pagewanted=all

sorry, scratch “don’t”

among other slopinesses

That was a typo, right, and not racist.

J Thomas @179: I read about the Liberty incident

Short version: The photo on the cover was taken from Kursa flight leader’s gun camera on the second strafing pass. The smoke from USS Liberty is going straight up, because she was running at five knots patrol headway in a flat calm. The flag on the main halyard was therefore hanging straight down.

Long version: read the whole book, preferably the expanded edition including the missing radio transcripts that Judge Cristol succeeded after seven years in FOI’ing out of the NSA. Much of the crew will, understandably, go to their graves telling it differently, but this was a fog-of-war tragedy, as every one of the ten or eleven investigations since June 1967 has correctly concluded.

Really long version: I’ve known Judge Cristol for forty years; he was my grandmother’s attorney, he taught me to sail, and his son was best man at my wedding. He and Captain Ernest Castle (the 1967 US naval attaché in Israel) met me for dinner in Tel Aviv on 7 June 1992, the night before they flew themselves, two of the Israeli pilots, and some of the Liberty survivors out to drop 34 pink carnations at the exact site and say kaddish. He’s the real thing, and — well, read the book before you even get this far; the author is his own character reference, beyond my poor ability to add or detract.

Pleeeze come back J Thomas. I will go away and not say mean things to you.

#189 Josh Burton

“J Thomas @179: I read about the Liberty incident”

Crystol

Excellent hasbara. He makes it kind of plausible. He is of course an utterly biased source, and his results could not have come out otherwise.

My own best guess is that after Israel told the US Navy to stay out of the eastern mediterranean because it belonged to them now, that the US Navy sent a ship in to prove that the Israelis would not dare to sink it. And the Israelis did dare. But other interpretations are possible.

One of the biggest things I got out of the US Navy report was that after the Israeli ultimatum (they sent messages saying they “could not guarantee the safety of” the Liberty) there were reportedly eight different orders sent to bring the Liberty out of harm’s way, and all of them failed to get through. One was accidentally given low priority and higher-priority traffic delayed it. Another was accidentally sent by way of the Philippines. I find this utterly implausible. At least six of those messages were constructed after the event, by people who wanted to play CYA, to make it look like they did the right thing after they found out that they did not do the right thing.

Partly in response to this incident, the US military got a new multi-billion-dollar communications system that was computerized in a way that was supposed to prevent officers from tampering with the records of previous messages. It was supposed to prevent them from going back and changing the old records to make themselves look better.

Of course I knew that admirals etc would do what they could to make themselves look better, but it was seldom so obvious. I guess I was kind of naive in those days, and that made a big difference to me, bigger than anything about Israel. As a side issue, it showed me that almost any evidence quoted by the report could have been doctored to make somebody look better, and the report itself could have been was doctored to make somebody look better.

My original point here though, was that for years afterward the US media printed nothing at all about the incident except abbreviated bits of hasbara, and anybody who tried to talk about it got called antisemitic. And one result of that was that I did not take accusations of antisemitism nearly as seriously as I had before.

#183 godoggo

The plural of goy is goyim.

There’s a reasonable case that in English the plural can be goys.

Similarly, in english we can say meshuganas and not necessarily meshugoyim.

“Long version: read the whole book, preferably the expanded edition including the missing radio transcripts that Judge Cristol succeeded after seven years in FOI’ing out of the NSA. ”

I don’t think Cristol ever succeeded in getting the NSA transcripts of the actual attack, did he? His FOI request produced transcripts of communications in the immediate aftermath. NSA said it had none from during the attack, though numerous witnesses, including those who made the recordings, disagree with that claim. Cristol’s book hardly settles the matter. And, when you say ‘the author is his own character witness’, you’re not kidding, since your link goes to his own account of his character!

There never were NSA transcripts of the actual attack — as you say, numerous witnesses disagree, but the FOI releases provide substantiating contemporary negative evidence. The FOI’d cover memo, dated 22 June 1967, from NSA to the White House, says: “This activity deals solely with the aftermath of the attack of Israeli jet aircraft and torpedo boats on the USS Liberty (GTR 5). There are no COMINT reflections of the actual attack itself.” The transmissions from the Kirya to the Mirages were UHF line-of-sight, and the American EC-121 apparently didn’t get anything until 1430, about 32 minutes after the attack started. The FOI’d transcripts from that point match the Israeli transcripts released in 1987.

By “his own character reference,” I meant that Cristol’s integrity, patriotism, diligence, training, intelligence and temperament show clearly through in his writing taken as a whole. My own personal character reference on his behalf is as strong as I can make it; there is literally no one on earth whom I know as well and admire so much. But as a bitstream I don’t flatter myself as carrying my own passport to credibility (as he does), so it doesn’t add much that I say so.

The general observation that “eyewitnesses suck” is perhaps even more important than the one that “eyewitnesses lie.” I have a relative who will go to his grave believing that TWA flight 800 was shot down, on the sheer number of civilians who saw lights in the sky and think they know what happened. Sometimes, as with the fabricated Jenin massacre of 2002, there is malice in the air, but more often, as with the Liberty survivor conspiracy theories, it’s just fog. (Notice, however, how J Thomas’s artful juxtaposition of “machine-gunned the life-rafts” with “war-crime” supports the libel, widely repeated but not found in evidence or testimony, that US sailors in the water, not discarded rafts from the firefighting effort, were shot at. While that could just barely have been innocently crafted on Thomas’s part, I would need some convincing to believe it.) The timely moral to take away, if any, is that caution is always needed.

Whatever ship they thought they were attacking, destroying and removing the liferafts does tend to confirm that they intended there would be no survivors.

Because ordinarily when you strafe a ship at 600 knots, you carefully avoid the rafts?

Testimony of Lt. (jg) Lloyd Painter at U.S. Navy Court of Inquiry: “We then filed out to our life rafts which were no longer with us because they had been strafed and most of them were burned, so we knocked most of them over the side. All during this time in Repair Three, my men were fighting fires and knocking burning life rafts, etc.”

The rafts were damaged from the air, in the initial attack; there is no contemporary testimony that they were ever targeted by the torpedo boats returning .50 fire. MTB 203 picked up one of the discarded rafts at 1503, and, discovering the “US Navy” stencil on it, immediately flashed an offer of assistance. (At 1451, they had read the stern lettering and misidentified the ship as Soviet according to radio intercepts. Fog of war.)

The rafts were damaged from the air, in the initial attack; there is no contemporary testimony that they were ever targeted by the torpedo boats returning .50 fire.

Yes, some liferafts were damaged earlier. There is no Israeli testimony that they targeted liferafts, but American sailors reported that after they were ordered to abandon ship the Israelis did target the remaining liferafts they tried to launch, and the sailors trying to launch them, and also collected the floating liferafts that the sailors would have tried to reach in the water.

It’s only natural that the Israelis would deny this, since it makes them look very very bad.

It may be a coincidence that Israeli efforts to identify the ship as American and stop firing came after they found that the Liberty had actually gotten an distress call out giving information about the attack. There is no proof that without the message from the Liberty the Israelis would have sunk the ship with no survivors.

But anyway this is all water over the bridge. It happened more than 40 years ago and it hasn’t happened again. The USA is Israel’s best and only ally regardless of the incident. My point is that the US media barely reported it, and reported only the barest hasbara about it, for a long time afterward. In those days the US media was totally biased in favor of Israel.

Joshua Burton @ 198

Eyewitnesses do suck, though this case is not a question of describing or recognizing a face. Some people who ought to know claim there were comm intercepts during the attack, and that there were transcripts of those intercepts; while NSA says there were never any such transcripts. Cristol believed the NSA, but I don’t know why. With this kind of discrepancy, either several witnesses are lying, or the NSA is. I don’t particularly trust denials from NSA, for obvious reasons.

I also understand some witnesses report that Johnson, his immediate team, and senior naval officers all believed at the time that the Israelis were deliberately targeting a ship they knew was American, and chose to cover it up in order to protect Israel’s reputation; and those witnesses were similarly in a position to know. It’s possible Johnson, etc, were simply wrong at the time, but if they did decide to cover up their suspicion, that lends credence to the witnesses who claim there is information the NSA hasn’t divulged.

I don’t know what to believe myself. Would Israel target an American spy ship if they thought they had to for some reason vital to their national interest? I’d have to say ‘yes’. Was this in fact the case? It looks that way to me, but I can’t be sure.

“The NSA cover-note denial purports to be from June 1967, and if genuine but false turns a passive falsehood into an active one with no obvious contemporary motive, incompetently carried out such that the transcripts were seen long after their existence was denied. If forged (that is, non-contemporaneous), it is pretty short-sighted, since it will be verifiable against the received White House copy in the next few years as the Johnson papers age out.”

I don’t find this impressive. First of all, the NSA withheld 14 pages of the transcripts they did provide, on the grounds of legitimate national security interest. Second, anything they say they told the White House in June 1967 can be ‘discovered’ to have been wrong and corrected now, with appropriate apology, if and when the need arises. This is true even if they actually made a denial to the White House at the time. Third, it seems to be the case that our intelligence services routinely lie directly about matters of fact, for the purposes of concealing their current or prior bad acts.

The portion of the transcripts actually released does imply some uncertainty about the identity and nationality of the ship. It’s not clear how the missing 14 pages would strengthen or weaken the case.

“Also, this commits the NSA and the Kirya to a very slow and intimate two-step, where Fort Meade commits to paper (but does not release) the partial transcripts in 1967, then Tel Aviv, without seeing those, releases falsified full transcripts in 1987 that leave untampered the parts that Cristol will get out of the NSA in 2005. Oh, and there are still NSA and USN bodies awaiting burial while this transatlantic lie is being concocted.”

Not if the transcripts released in 2005 are within their bounds true, but very incomplete. Tel Aviv releases parts of the truth – those parts they find helpful – in 1987, along with lots if other stuff, and the NSA in turn releases partial transcripts in 2005 which don’t contradict Tel Aviv. Neither release requires premeditation in 1967; just a willingness to deceive now.

I don’t really know. I’d like some reasonable explanation as to why people in the know say there were intercepts from during the attacks; and say it was common knowledge at the highest levels that the attack was deliberate; and say the personally witnesses direction to cover it up.

“Seriously, once we’ve reached the point where erecting an NSA lie is more complicated than N cases of faulty memory and mutually reinforcing fabrication in the service of shared understandable rage and paranoia, the charge of black conspiracy in high places comes cheaper than free with the package.”

Nonsense. There simply has to have been a determination from the beginning not to reveal information demonstrating the Israelis knew the identity of the ship; which was, after all, spying on Israel. Considering the times – the Gulf of Tonkin deception comes to mind – it’s not hard to believe.

As for John McCain, I wouldn’t ask him for the time. He’d certainly get it wrong, and then he’d argue we should invade Switzerland for foisting bad watches on an unsuspecting democratic and peace-loving world. He’s a cretin masquerading as a serious person.

Nonsense. There simply has to have been a determination from the beginning not to reveal information demonstrating the Israelis knew the identity of the ship; which was, after all, spying on Israel.

Not to reveal it to whom, Clark Clifford?

The smoke from USS Liberty is going straight up, because she was running at five knots patrol headway in a flat calm. The flag on the main halyard was therefore hanging straight down.

http://www.tallshipwindy.com/extras/flag_wind_speed.aspx
http://www.tallshipwindy.com/extras/beaufort_wind_scale.aspx

They claim a 5×7 flag is easily seen at 1 Bft or 2 Bft. 2 Bft is 4-6 knots. They give moving pictures.

I think it’s possible that whoever told you the flag would be hanging straight down was not lying but only misinformed. Somehow all the misinformation seems to head in the hasbara direction, though.

Five knots, btw, is nine km/hr: if you were moving at that speed I think you’d call it “running”.

It’s a side-issue. Time spent dismantling bullshit hasbara claims about israeli actions — and “in a five-knot breeze flags hang vertically” is plainly and patently bullshit — is time not spent doing useful stuff: the whole point is to make dealing with israel issues to tooth-pullingly horrible and tedious as to make people not want to engage in criticism of israel.

With just a sprinkling of character assassination, care of people like you and me.

Anyway, I’m incredibly petty, rarely have anything substantive to say, and I know it, so I shouldn’t get involved.

But insufferably arrogant and quarrelsome creeps are another thing that CT is all about.

Not to get too technical, but the pointy end in front is called the bow; the relative wind across the deck (which, from the smoke, appears to be Bft 0, suggesting a slight tailwind) will be the vector sum of the true wind and the ship’s way, so flags usually stream sternward.

Right. You said, 5 knots in flat calm, which gives a vector sum of 5 knots.

You point at a picture in red which you say you can use to tell the windspeed from the angle of the smoke you say you can see, when the picture is taken almost lined up with the ship’s keel.

You are blowing smoke.

I want to give you the benefit of the doubt, but this time I cannot. I can’t explain this by incompetence on your part. You are a baldfaced liar. It is time for you to retire this name and come back with the next name on your list.

Finding 2, front page; also, message, 1.C from Adm. McCain to SecNav Nitze. Good people to explain the Beaufort scale to, with mighty Google in your corner.

Hey, but thanks for all the fish.

The real problem, I think, is that the palestinian claims are too modest. Been the same for years: sovereignty, settlements gone or under the palestinian state, ’67 borders and token right of return is [rather less than] what Israel’s obliged to deliver anyway, that or one-state-solution, so any negotiation will end with israel giving the palestinians everything they asked for.

Which israel can’t do, no matter what “everything they asked for” is.

“if he had been obsessively insisting on Twitter the women who wear provocative clothing are responsible for rape, should we have overlooked that too?”

Whoa. Good question.

“Joshua W. burton:

At this point, in this particular thread, it has become irrelevant who knows more or who knows less about the Liberty incident.

What has become clear is that you are increasingly behaving like an insufferably arrogant and quarrelsome creep.”

Really? I think he is demonstrating that he actually knows something about the topic in question….

…and that the message you cite was sent by Liberty only after she was boarded by the Navy board of inquiry…

I think he is demonstrating that he actually knows something about the topic in question….

He has demonstrated that he knows a lot about the hasbara about the topic.

He has claimed personal knowledge that strongly appears to be flat-out wrong, that he claims proves a point.

His intention is to raise a reasonable doubt that perhaps the Israelis did not know they were attacking a US spy ship.

On the one hand, there was a superbly well-executed attack. In the very first move they destroyed all of the Liberty’s communications, destroying radio towers (and also the flag). Of course they were ready to take out an egyptian supply ship’s advanced communication system, that’s just standard procedure. Then the napalm etc to keep the Liberty crew busy, and the torpedo hit would have sunk the ship except for a lucky accident. They destroyed the liferafts. Whoever they were aiming at, they intended no communications and no survivors. Perhaps by coincidence, they started to worry about going through with it after they found out that the Liberty had gotten a message out and was in continuing communication with the fleet.

To make it be an accident requires a long series of coincidental blunders. They knew the Liberty was there, but they forgot. They got a report about an egyptian ship in the area that turned out to be entirely a mistake. They scanned the Liberty and wrongly measured its speed as way faster than it could actually travel. Etc. A long series of incompetent blunders leading to the superbly-done attack.

Joshua is arguing a subtle point about one of the later minor blunders. They were supposed to check and make sure it was an Egyptian ship. But clearly they didn’t check, they just attacked. It doesn’t really matter whether the flag was drooping or not, because they came at an angle where they wouldn’t see it regardless. Did they not look because they knew who they were attacking or was it that it was just another blunder, a minor one? Who can tell? Someday we might be able to look at their radio communications, but if they said over the radio that they knew what they were doing that would be a *giant* blunder! So that doesn’t tell us anything useful about that question.

So, like typical hasbara, he wants to argue whether the flag was visible in the wind even though that makes no difference. He argues from one blurry picture taken at the wrong angle that he can tell the windspeed, and that the flag was hanging straight down. He argues by authority from a zionist source, and by incorrect reasoning. I don’t believe he would do the reasoning this wrong by accident.

Bad reasoning annoys me, and there’s a lot of it published about the Liberty nowadays. For example, there’s the argument that the Israelis could not have worried about the US spy ship near their operations, because the Liberty’s NSA people were all experts in arabic and none of them knew hebrew. So they had no reason to attack the Liberty. This is like chalk-screeching-on-blackboard for me.

The fundamental conclusion is right anyway. We do not have enough evidence to know whether Israel made that attack deliberately or not, and we probably will not ever get the evidence one way or the other. Unless Israel stops existing while Israeli veterans who were involved are still alive, and they then choose to tell what they experienced.

“Bad reasoning annoys me”

hahahahahaah!

Well I am a Canadian so what the hell do I know about this issue, however I tend to distrust conspiracy theorists and he doesn’t sound crazy to me as an uniformed outsider.

That’s the point of hasbara, to give the impression that their position could be reasonable.

Are you military or police? Somehow from your tone etc I didn’t expect you to be either one.

Sorry that was immature. My apologies.

No problem. We all like to have fun, and you are by no means the only one here who laughs at logic. ;-)

I think ‘uniformed’ was a typo for ‘uninformed’

Yes, so do I. I *like* good typos.

It’ snot that I’m immature or anything.

I actually nearly always read ‘uniformed’ as ‘uninformed’ with the effect of rendering many news reports more accurate.

Lee A. Arnold, 202: “…the biggest foreign policy mistake in US history”

Again, as I’m analyzing your thinking, it appears fitting Edward Said’s observations: only the West has agency, the East has none. The US and Israel make foreign policy calculations and miscalculations, while Palestinians and Iraqi tribes do the things that they do, motivated by simple emotions of fear, rage, hatred or whatever (though usually it’s just hatred).

I’m sure from where they sit our actions look just as simple and obvious: always grabbing, blindly and ruthlessly, land, resources, power; more and more, as much as we can swallow. Like a python.

“In the three-thousand-year-plus history of counterinsurgency, the argument “gosh, if we just make the civilians suffer enough in retaliation for the behavior of insurgents in their midst, then they will have an incentive to cooperate with our side” has been employed many, many times—often without success.”

Indeed, this appears to be Israel’s strategy, both in Gaza and in the West Bank.

In the three-thousand-year-plus history of counterinsurgency, the argument “gosh, if we just make the civilians suffer enough in retaliation for the behavior of insurgents in their midst, then they will have an incentive to cooperate with our side” has been employed many, many times—often without success.

It mostly worked for the Germans in occupied France. The french resistance killed german soldiers and also german civilians who participated in the occupation, and the german army threatened to kill innocent french civilians at a ratio of ten to one or a hundred to one, and carried out the threats. The resistance immediately switched to property damage and sabotage. And of course they killed french collaborators, that the germans didn’t bother to retaliate for.

Starting around D-Day they damaged or destroyed many railroad locomotives, bridges, track, etc in France, at a far greater rate than normal, which hindered the german defense. And when it looked like the germans could no longer carry out reprisals they killed a number of germans too.

I think this sort of thing works much better when it is explicit.

Like, for Israel to do it well they should announce that an Israeli soldier has been killed in Gaza so they will do a reprisal. Then they send in helicopters with solders who secure some random area in Gaza and capture say 105 Palestinians and shoot them one by one, for the TV cameras, counting. Then leave the pile of bodies behind with the five random living witnesses.

When they repeated and publicly claim that they are not doing reprisals against civilians at all, then it doesn’t work nearly as well. It makes sense that Gazans ought to make the connection themselves, but when it is publicly denied they are likely to think of it as random destruction.

Ze Kraggash #247: “Again, as I’m analyzing your thinking, it appears fitting Edward Said’s observations: only the West has agency, the East has none.”

I think you should analyze YOUR thinking. This appears to be an illusion inside your head. I just finished writing that ISIS has “agency”.

I think this is a false dichotomy.

When you’re thinking about what to do about somebody, then you need to predict what they will do both before and after your own actions. (Unless you intend them to be dead, and then you don’t have to think about what they will do afterward assuming you succeed.) While you are predicting what they do you will tend to figure they do not have free will but respond to stimuli.

When you are negotiating with somebody, then you need to think of him as an agent with free will who makes choices, and pay attention to what he appears to want. If you assume you know what he really wants so you can ignore what he does, the negotiation will probably not go well.

People who think they know what strategy will work on “the arabs” etc, do not grant them agency. If they did, they would not think they knew what strategy would work against them.

But the same people will switch things around when it comes to making agreements. They tend not to be stuck in one mindset unless they are stuck always planning strategies, or always negotiating.

Incidentally… is it a war crime to target your own soldiers once captured? It’s hard to frame a prisoner-of-war as a combatant.

I would like to clarify my previous statement. There were previously precisely 2 people here whom I viewed with profound distaste. One is gone and one is J Thomas. The reason for my profound distasted is because they are antisemitic as hell.

Re Slater’s response to Walzer, linked by Ronan @254, that I looked through some of: I’m still inclined, despite the disagreement on this pt expressed by certain commenters upthread, to think the strongest, easiest-to-demonstrate criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza is along violation-of-proportionality lines. To show a violation of proportionality one has to show what it was “reasonable” for the attacker to anticipate in terms of civilian casualties vs. mil. value of the target, but I don’t think under that analysis it will be difficult to show proportionality violations (to the satisfaction of a majority of observers). Showing proportionality violations will prob. be easier than showing *deliberate* targeting of noncombatants. (I’m thinking in terms of what has to be demonstrated, as opposed to simply asserted.) That’s not to say one couldn’t show deliberate targeting of noncombatants (eg in cases of shelling of a school w nonprecise artillery), just that in many cases it would perhaps prove difficult. The ’06 Lebanon war and maybe some other previous ‘operations’ do seem to have featured deliberate violations of noncombatant immunity, but I can see why Walzer wanted to emphasize the proportionality/exposure-of-own-soldiers-to-risk point in that piece. I think most people (and I include myself) read W’s piece as critical of the IDF (regardless of the somewhat circumspect tone).

Btw, minor errors: in the second graph of Slater’s post he refers to the “Institute for Advanced Studies” — the correct name is Institute for Advanced Study; Slater says Walzer was “a fellow” there — actually, Walzer’s title was professor (now emeritus).

J Thomas #253: “I think this is a false dichotomy… People who think they know what strategy will work on “the arabs” etc, do not grant them agency. If they did, they would not think they knew what strategy would work against them.”

This is asinine. You can game strategy all the time, believing that others have agency. Stop blathering.

J Thomas #@62: “you are assuming you can control him”

No you are not. This is thoughtless nonsense to defend previous thoughtless nonsense.

There is nothing grumpy about it. I am not interested in meandering, train-of-thought speculations and redefinitions. Anybody can write stuff like that.

Collin, agreed. Lee Arnold had already shown he had no interest whatsoever in toleration. I wanted to respond but did not want to respond in kind. I was feeling tolerant myself.

I didn’t mean to upset. Personally, I don’t believe any of these massive categories (US, Israel, Arabs, ISIS) have agency. It’s like this:
http://boboleechronicles.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/2008-11-16.gif?w=655

And I’m not buying the idea that “antisemite” is the new “kike.”