Dusted with grated stupid

Why on earth would you think that, after all these years? One of the more interesting recent discoveries in cognitive neuroscience is that we are measurably influenced by information, even if we know it is false. So HITLER! HITLER! HITLER! is a valid HITLER! HITLER! HITLER! communications HITLER! HITLER! HITLER! strategy HITLER! HITLER! HITLER! – availability heuristic, see?

I mean, if you want to argue facts, there’s the point that the presidency of the European Union doesn’t actually control individual aid disbursements, that the only content in the whole smear is an appeal to uncited, unquoted sekrit documents seized from a certain German Prince’s cabinet noir, that the EU is somehow responsible for the internal accountancy of the PA…but that’s not the point.

This sort of thing – guilt by association, big lie, links ‘n’ ties, accusations of treason – is just what the Rubins do. Because – HITLER! HITLER! HITLER! – availability entrepreneurship works as a propaganda strategy.

By the way, a big hand for Jenny “Whose Kid Are You?” Rubin. WKAY is a fun game with the media for all the family…

Jennifer Rubin…Michael Rubin….”accountability”….bwaaahaahahaaaa!

Based on your argument, it seems doubtful indeed that Robinson funneled money to the PLO in her capacity as the President of Ireland, whatever her discretionary powers were. But it’s reasonably plain (not quite plain, just reasonably so) that Rubin is talking about what Robinson did by way of the EU, when Robinson was President of Ireland and Ireland was President of the EU (whatever that means). So that’s the question this post ought to address; the powers of the President of Ireland, as such, don’t get to the point.

Note that Robinson went on to be UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, for which the job description would be something like “funnel money to the PLO”. I’d guess the UN would want someone with experience.

Until the Lisbon treaty goes into force, the powers of the EU presidency accrue to a national government, not an individual. The Taisoeach is the head of the Irish government, not the President.

That was quick!

However, as above, the whole point is to throw the most obscenely libellous smears at political opponents as frequently as possible with the greatest possible amount of publicity. I note that this is a form of politics amenable to mass production, which may explain its success.

Alex, not to mention the crucial question mark in his title.

To be fair, various Resident Scholars, Research Fellows and raving nutcases were equally outraged by some of the other medal recipients.

Let it also be noted for the record that Mary Robinson has had her own entry from the beginning on Discover the Network.

I can’t seem to get Horowitz’ website to tell me just how Robinson is related to Bérubé, though; can someone help a fellow blogger out?

And considering that among the early recipients of the award under George W. Bush were George Tenet and L. Paul Bremer, it is hard to see how one could complain about any future recipients, even if they were devotees of the PLO.

Well, the President of Ireland has the power to resign rather than be complicit, and, for that matter the moral obligation to do so as well, but that’s both fairly weak sauce ans well as being more or less equally condemning for each and every head of state or government in Europe (not to mention the various legislators and tax collectors.)

All in all, it’s a bizarre charge to make. After her record at Durban I, the case against her is airtight, and even if one feels the need to gild the lily the record at the High Comissioner post does that more than qdequately.

“the European Union donated large sums of money to the Palestinian Authority.”

As did the United States of America, which was the second largest contributor of funds to the PA – $778 million for the period 1994-2005. The UK made contributions independent of the the EU for the same period of $248 million. So maybe we can refer Clinton, Bush and Blair to the ICT too.

Oh, and Musical Mtneer? The UN Commission for Human Rights has nothing to do with funding Palestinians. That’s done by UNRWA, the UN Relief and Works Agency. But hey, why let facts get in the way of a disgusting smear?

Lastly, it’s just astonishing that the discussion here is being conducted by people who apparently have never even heard of Mary Robinson, who does more to alleviate suffering and empower the oppressed and improve the human condition each day than all of us collectively will do in our entire lives. Have some respect, will you, for a person who is better than you are.

people who apparently have never even heard of Mary Robinson, who does more to alleviate suffering and empower the oppressed and improve the human condition each day than all of us collectively will do in our entire lives.

Now, hold your horses there – I’ll defend her from insane charges by nutters, but that doesn’t mean that I’ll swallow that guff either.

Just what (outside of the liberal cocktail circuit and the media cameras and the NGO industry) has our Blessed Lady of the Irish Times done to “improve the human condition”? I’ll make it easy; just one, good concrete example will do.

William Sjostrom: Mary Robinson may have visited the Pope in unconventional dress and expressed opinions without getting government clearance, but she certainly didn’t redirect funds to the PLO. Henry is right. Charging the Irish government with this is unhinged enough–that they are being levelled at Robinson? Completely absurd.

it seems improbably that she stayed away from foreign policy issues.

What’s constitutionally impossible is that she arranged for the PLO to receive any money.

MM’s notions are quite amusing, it must be said. Robinson was President of Europe. Ireland held the Presidency of the EU. By transitivity therefore Robinson was President of Europe. Watertight reasoning there.

Alex, I have just one disagreement with your original claim. We did not need to wait for recent cognitive neuroscience to learn that we are measurably effected attitudes. Social psychologists were studying this and related phenomena well before fMRI was even invented. It’s probably not even true that neuroscience has added to our knowledge of the phenomena.

EWI, saying “name one thing” was a mistake, but that Bloix passage you’ve now quoted twice is ludicrous. And more than a little cultish.
The attractiveness of Mary Robinson was that she represented a move away from cultishness towards modernity. Instead of plodding along in the old ruts, playing out the cards dealt in de Valera’s agricultural catholic backwater, she was all about engaging with and participating in the shared European mainstream. She took stands, and they tended to be good ones. As Henry pointed out, she had a largely ceremonial role, and her politics was mainly carried out at the level of symbolism. But this allowed her to build up a mass appeal, and added to her effectiveness at that level.
The Clinton campaign last year made fools of themselves when they tried to inflate Hillary’s role as First Lady into that of a top-tier international player. It would be a mistake to attempt something similar with Mary Robinson. Far better to say that she represents much of what’s admirable about contemporary Ireland, and leave it at that.

As for the Rubin nonsense, let’s hope that J Street bears fruit. Effectively marginalising people who reach for this kind of repertoire seems a better approach than endlessly wasting one’s breath in argument.

My guess is that he erred by relying on the High Commission’s website, which gave Robinson credit for her trips to Africa during her presidency.

my guess is he made it up because he’s a hack.

Did he really say “International Criminal Tribunal”? Ain’t no such animal, but I assume he meant the International Criminal Court. And which doesn’t investigate random individuals, but “situations” (and then of course individuals involved in that situation) based on a list of referral conditions (or at the behest of the Prosecutor him/herself, which hasn’t happened so far). Oh, and Israel hasn’t ratified the ICC Statute, and Palestine isn’t a member of the UN, so it would take a Security Council referral to have the situation investigated, and guess who has a veto over that!

So the ignoramus who wrote about this is, well, as ignoramus about the name, purpose and procedures of the ICC. What a surprise!

So, not only are Irish expatriates running the bureaucracy of the European Commission out of all proportion to their numbers (as we learnt the other day), but now the country is also single-handedly setting the EU’s foreign policy and spending Europe’s hard-earned taxes on foreign terrorists, despite the opposition of all the other member-states. Next thing that little pipsqueak of a country will be deciding by itself whether the entire European Union should adopt a new constitution or not!

Obama, the thuggish Chicago machine politician, is disgracing the Presidential Medal of Freedom by giving it Mary Robinson. Her history of gross bigotry and dishonesty toward Israel, from Durban to Jenin, has been gone over repeatedly, in the context of this sham award by the American Thinker and Jennifer Rubin, and in the past by Jacob Gershman, Michael Rubin, and Tom Lantos. It should come as no surprise that she should get an award from a bigot who happily spent two decades with a raving anti-Semitic minister. Two peas in a bigot’s pod. A pox on the pair of them.

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

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

Two peas in a bigot’s pod See what he did there? Me neither.

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…)

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.

I can’t seem to get Horowitz’ website to tell me just how Robinson is related to Bérubé, though; can someone help a fellow blogger out?

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

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

The network is far more powerful than we imagined!

“It is a little disorienting to an American to read about a Presidency which isn’t a supreme executive power,”

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

France up to 1958; come to think of it, I reckon an actual majority of democracies have a nonexecutive presidency (or a constitutional monarchy, which is much the same thing but with ponies). The only notable executive presidencies I can think of are the US, France since 1958, Russia, if you accept it as a democracy, Ukraine before the office was recently cut down to size and if you accept it as a democracy, and Lebanon, if you accept that it is a democracy.

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.

“It is a little disorienting to an American to read about a Presidency which isn’t a supreme executive power,”

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).