Un @ MindSay

"The United Nations declared that 2008 is the International Year of the Potato."

Oh.

My.

God.

The article and the idea behind this whole thing is actually not bad, but man, is that an eye catcher or what? The guy who wrote this article should win some kind of journalist excellence award for catching the readers the quickest. Like you wouldn't click on a story entitled How to Celebrate the International Year of the Potato. Which, btw, can be found here.

And, of course, leave it to the good old UN, right?

It’s pretty obvious that I’m trying to catch up on the last few days.  I’ve avoided this article for some reason.  According to the Guardian’s ‘Comment is free’ site,

‘Ted Honderich is the Grote Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic, University College London…He is presently chairman of the Royal Institute of Philosophy.’ 

Like, wow!  So there must be something significant in there?

We cannot settle such fundamental questions of right and wrong as that of Palestine and so on by the common recourses to international law, UN resolutions, doctrines of human rights or our hierarchic democracy. Rather, for consistency and other reasons, we need a fundamental principle of right and wrong. This is the principle of humanity. It is, in short, that we must take actually rational steps, as distinct from political pretences and the like, to get and keep people out of bad lives, the latter being defined in terms of lacks and denials of the great human goods.

Now, I don’t know about these ‘fundamental questions of right and wrong’ he’s on about, but I’m with him as far as rejecting the ‘international law’ nonsense.  But I guess that’s where we part company.  Doubtless he is assuming some well known corpus of philosophical reasoning that I have no familiarity with, but then, he’s writing for a lay audience.  Frankly, in that or any other context, I’m surprised that a philosopher thinks he can get away with ‘consistency and other reasons’, especially without explaining what it is that consistency demands.  International law is certainly full of inconsistency.  But at least a codified system allows identification of the specific inconsistencies.  For the sake of consistency, however, he prefers a vaguely defined ‘principle of right and wrong’ otherwise known as ‘the principle of humanity’? 

So what is this principle?  To ‘take actually rational steps…to get and keep people out of bad lives’.  ‘Actually rational steps’ is a concept itself begging definition, although at least we know that they are ‘distinct from political pretences and the like’.  As for ‘bad lives’, they are ‘defined in terms of lacks and denials of the great human goods’.  I didn’t realize that philosophers were supposed to be able to get away with this kind of slovenliness.  To assert that red is defined in terms of the electromagnetic spectrum is not the same as to define red.  To assert that bad lives are ‘defined in terms of lacks and denials of the great human goods’ not only fails to define bad lives but also deploys other undefined concepts. 

The real question is where this gets us.  And the answer is not long in coming.

This morality of humanity includes certain propositions. It justifies Zionism, not vaguely understood but taken as the founding and maintaining of Israel in roughly its original 1948 borders.

The impression you start to get at this point is that when you start out from vague, undefined, assumed principles, it can lead just about anywhere.  And sure enough, the philosopher cuts right to the chase.  ‘Actual rational steps…to get people out of bad lives’ logically entails espousing a particular view of Zionism.  For Honderich, unlike the founders of Zionist thought and many other adherents and critics of Zionism, it means the colonial occupation of an ethno-religious sectarian state ‘roughly’ within its 1948 borders.  I suppose we can leave aside the little problem that those borders of 1948 were never actually defined – the Green and Blue lines, as I recollect were just provisional ceasefire lines.  Certainly Israel never accepted them as borders and still doesn’t.  More to the point, when he says ‘roughly’, it becomes clear that he doesn’t accept them either.  What counts as ‘rough’?  Is the Litani River, for example, ‘roughly the Blue Line’?  Is the Jordan River ‘roughly the Green Line’?  We’re not talking about long distances here.

But I’m just having a go.  Really, I know just what he means, although I can’t see any reason to let a prominent philosopher get away with ‘You know what I mean, dude’.  What he means is that he wants Israel to withdraw to the Green Line, except for a few adjustments to take into consideration ‘facts on the ground’, like the huge settlements Israel has been establishing precisely and quite explicitly to create ‘facts on the ground’ that philosophers will later have to take into consideration when determining what is just and fair and ‘actually rational’.  And like the famous Geneva initiative, the Palestinians will be compensated for the territory lost to the facts on the ground with ‘roughly’ equivalent areas within ‘Israel proper’.  Sometimes this exchanged territory is supposed to be a bit of desert adjacent to Gaza.  Sometimes areas with high concentrations of ‘Israeli Arabs’.  Just to be fair, you understand.  Never something actually useful, like sovereignty over a secure corridor between the West Bank and Gaza.  That would undermine Israel’s territorial integrity!  Absolutely out of the question!

But at a more fundamental level, what he’s really saying here is that colonizing 78% of Mandatory Palestine, notwithstanding irrelevancies like the UN partition plan of 1947, with all the ethnic cleansing, massacres, and terrorism that went along with that, satisfies the philosophical requirements of justice, fairness, ‘the morality of humanity’, but

The morality of humanity also condemns neo-Zionism, understood as the taking from the Palestinians at least their freedom in the last fifth of their homeland.

Insofar as this gibberish is intelligible at all, I think what he’s getting at is that he believes there is a separate ideology, distinct from what he has defined Zionism as, which covets the remaining 22% of Mandatory Palestine.  In reality, of course, conventional Zionism has always had this property, but the point is not really to quibble over how Honderich defines terms.  The point is to discern the philosophical principle that can make this distinction between colonizing and ethnically cleansing a particular tract of land, but not too particular, just roughly particular, remember, and colonizing and ethnically cleansing another, adjacent bit of land.

There are in fact arguments that make this distinction.  The whole ‘two state solution’ school of thought depends on making it.  But they always couch it in quite specific terms.  UN General Assembly Resolution 273 effectively accepted Israel’s existence within the ‘1948 borders’, although it also called on Israel to implement certain obligations, such as compliance with Resolution 194 on the refugees’ right of return, which Israel agreed to at the time, but never actually implemented.  That is the basis for believing that Israel within the 1948 ‘borders’ has a ‘right to exist’.  UN Security Council Resolution 242, demanding that Israel withdraw from the territory acquired by conquest in the 1967 war provides the basis for excluding those territories from Israel.  Professor Honderich is quite right, in my humble estimation, to reject making this distinction on so arbitrary a basis.  After all, why should territory acquired by force in 1948 be sacrosanct, but not territory acquired by force in 1967?  The conclusion I draw is that there is no distinction – it was never legitimate to turf the Palestinians out in the first place and no amount of UN resolutions is going to change that.  But obviously I lack the subtlety of a distinguished philosophy professor who discerns that there is indeed a distinction which derives transparently from ‘the morality of humanity’. 

In what looks suspiciously like a non sequitur, Professor Honderich proceeds to assert that

It [the morality of humanity] gives to them a moral right to their liberation-terrorism against neo-Zionism in historic Palestine, including Israel.

And yet

The morality of humanity judges 9/11 to have been monstrously wrong, an irrational means to ends that included resistance to neo-Zionism.

If I am following the argument correctly, the morality of humanity, which he has adopted in the interests of consistency, among other things, permits acts that he is willing to characterize as terrorism on those who are directly or indirectly responsible for the depredations of ‘neo-Zionism’.  This morality also sanctions attacks on those, like small children, who are perceived to benefit from those depredations, or who may grow up to perpetrate them.  It is ok to commit terrorist acts against these people if they happen to be located somewhere in historic Palestine.  But if anyone commits such acts against similar targets in New York, the same moral principle condemns their acts as monstrously wrong and irrational.  I suppose this geographical principle of morality is in some bizarre way consistent with the geographical or chronological distinction between the moral justification of the occupation of ‘roughly’ 1948 Israel and the moral condemnation of the occupation of the territory occupied in 1967. 

This may not be the place for an exhaustive discussion of the rationality of terrorism.  But I believe you can make a case that the attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001 succeeded in drawing the US into military adventures which have weakened it.  We have no way of knowing what the actual objectives of the perpetrators were, but it is certainly possible that they worked out the probable outcomes.  I would characterize that as rational.  Palestinian terrorism against Israeli targets of any kind may or may not be morally justified within Honderich’s or someone else’s framework.  But there is little doubt that it is thoroughly irrational.  Decades of experience have shown that it has never succeeded in driving the military occupation to retreat, or even in displacing settlers in significant numbers. What it has done is to provide the Israeli state with a pretext to exacerbate the oppression of ordinary Palestinians in ways that are amply documented everywhere daily.  There are other factors involved, like residual Holocaust guilt and the diplomatic protection afforded by the US with its UN Security Council veto, but acts of individual terrorism are widely perceived as a valid excuse for Israel’s routine violations of such niceties as the laws of war and occupation.  Like any small scale retail terrorism, by substituting the acts of courageous or foolhardy martyrs for the mass activity that can really bring changes about, all of these acts are ultimately counterproductive, and therefore irrational.

The balance of the article is no clearer than the first three paragraphs that I have been discussing.  They appear to comprise an attempt to defend himself against accusations of anti-Semitism.  After a couple of readings, it is not at all obvious that he succeeds in this endeavour.  He does seem to make the point that Jews have a special responsibility to act against ‘neo-Zionism’, whatever you make of that, because, he alleges, ‘They can have a little more effect on it than others’.  He also specifically recommends his colleague Professor Michael Neumann’s The case against Israel.  I have been intending for some time to write a critique of Neumann, but will have to reread it first, a task so repugnant that I will probably defer it forever.

When I heard Milton Friedman had died, I rejoiced.  And then I read that he was 94 and died in the bosom of his loving family.  Surely he, if anyone, deserved an earlier and more uncomfortable death?  The father of the Chicago Boys and godfather of Pinochet? 

And now Robert Altman is dead, at 81.  Why couldn’t he have lived to 94?  Then maybe we could have been spared 13 years of Friedman, quite apart from the obvious benefits of Altman sticking around until 2019?

I’m a big fan of Altman’s, although I confess I’ve never seen some of his films, like McCabe and Mrs Miller, and barely remember others, like Popeye and Gosford Park.  When I use the term Altmanesque, it means more than one thing.  There are the big movies with lots of characters and interlocking plots, if they’re plots, like MASH, Nashville, Short Cuts, Kansas City, Cookie’s fortune, and my personal favourites, which got pretty short shrift in the NYT obit, A wedding and Pret a porter.  But then there are those amazing films with five characters and one set – Streamers and Come back to the five and dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean.  Of course the dude also made what I think of as conventional films like The player. 

This morning I found this appeal from American Friends of Magen David Edom (Red Star of David – the Israeli Red Cross) in my intray:

“In light of the increasing missile attacks on Sderot, we call for immediate support from MDA and its supporters to help us build out emergency facilities.  We need help more than ever.”

Eli Moyal, Mayor, Sderot, Israel

MDA paramedics race t the scene to care for the wounded every time a rocket strikes.

American Friends of Magen David Adom is building a new, reinforced, state-of-the-art MDA station in Sderot.

In any case, where do they get off with this amazing level of cynicism?  One or two precious Israelis injured a year and pull out all the stops, state of the art facilities, paramedics rush to the scene.  But a few hundred metres away, dozens are slaughtered weekly and the most they can hope for is that the beneficent occupiers’ 155mm shells miss the ambulance and the paramedics who rush to their aid.  Maybe they will even condescend to open the border crossing to allow some medical supplies in for a few hours.

There used to be an old saying.  They taught it to us in school.  ‘An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.’  Nowadays, you might prefer to say, ‘28.35g of prevention is worth 435g of cure’, or perhaps more euphoniously, ‘a gram of prevention is worth a kilo of cure.’ 

Monday’s NY Times is scandalised over the new UN Human Rights Council.  This is the result of the touted UN ‘reform’ that was supposed to fix the discredited Human Rights Commission.  Now, all of a sudden, it’s ‘a weak-kneed compromise from which the United States stood honorably apart’.  Among its crimes,

The council is new, but its deliberations have already fallen into a shameful pattern. When it comes to the world’s worst and most consistent human rights violators, like China, Iran, North Korea, Myanmar and Sudan, there has been a tendency to muffle words and conclusions and shift the focus from individual and political rights to broader economic and social questions.

So, notwithstanding the expressed opinion of all those ‘members of the international community’ who have ratified the basic human rights Covenants and pay lip service to the Universal Declaration, the Times’s editorialists, in their wisdom, have decided that the UN body purported charged with enforcing those instruments has been remiss in focusing on ‘economic and social questions’, as if these were not at least as important in international human rights ‘law’, and indeed, in reality, as ‘individual and political rights’. 

I squandered a significant portion of my life writing letters to governments pointing out where their actions departed from their commitments under these treaties they had signed.  So I am not about to repeat the litany of individual and political rights denied the long suffering people of the US.  I will, however, note in passing that when it comes to the rights that are universally regarded as most fundamental, even, presumably by the Times, the right ‘to life, liberty and security of person [that is, not to be wounded]’ (UDHR Article 3), the US is far and away the preeminent violator.  We now know that just in the last three years, the US has, on demonstrably and demonstratedly false pretexts, slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, perhaps as many as a million, who would otherwise be alive and kicking today.  They have displaced hundreds of thousands more and nobody has even tried to estimate the number wounded, maimed, crippled, blinded, etc.  The numbers imprisoned and tortured are probably well known to their captors, but they’re not saying.  It makes Darfur and Western Congo look like child’s play, which of course those tragedies are not. 

But when it comes to criticizing Israel for violations committed in a wartime context that includes armed attacks against its citizens and soldiers, the council seems to change personality, turning harshly critical and uninterested in broader contexts.

And, now, in case you hadn’t noticed, it turns out that Israel is at war!  And here’s me thinking Israel had occupied territory by force, in clear and undeniable violation of ‘international law’, and were holding the population in siegelike conditions, also in violation of international law, while their captives lash out as best they can in a vain attempt to end the occupation, as they are entitled to under international law.  Or at least that’s how I read the preamble of the UDHR, ‘…it is essential, if man [sic] is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law’. 

‘Armed attacks against its citizens and soldiers’ [my emphasis]!  If Israel is indeed at war, as the Times avers, then since when is an attack on a military target grounds for retaliation and collective punishment?  There’s really only one explanation that will account for the Times’s, and MDA’s, concern about Israeli civilians and soldiers to the exclusion of Palestinian children, and that is racism.

To add insult to injury, quite literally, it turns out that the humanitarians who run the Zionist state are not just racist against the Palestinian Arabs whose land they covet.  In the 1950s, they believed that the inferior Arab Jews who were ‘making aliyah’ in large numbers at the time were carrying parasites, specifically, the Microsporum canis and Tricophyton verrucosum fungi that cause scalp tinea.  Clearly these Untermenschen made exemplary experimental subjects and were ‘treated’ not with topical fungicides, but radiation.  Under the 1994 Tinea capitis law, the victims are entitled to compensation.  But when they undergo questioning to determine whether they are eligible, if they should fail to remember the experience they had at the age of three or four fifty years ago accurately in every detail, they are denied compensation.  In fact, even if they misinterpret their correctly remembered experience by, for example, reporting that the radiation was painful, when in reality what hurt them was having their hair torn out by the roots, that is sufficient to disqualify a claim.  A safe haven indeed.

"...a new report from the U.N. drives home the effects of 2.6 billion people around the world lacking access to a decent bathroom. More than two million children die each year of illnesses caused by contaminated water.

The problem, according to the author of the report, is that bureaucrats and politicians often don't want to talk about toilets. Such topics are often just taboo. He told the NYT that "issues dealing with human excrement tend not to figure prominently...[on] the agendas of governments." So, despite U.N. estimates that it would cost $10 billion a year (think about that in terms of most countries' military expenditures) to cut in half the percentage of people needing clean water and a latrine, little at the government level is ever accomplished."