Iranian Deja Vu?

The L.A. Times ran an article yesterday about the recent capture of British troops in the Shatt-al-Arab titled, "Capture of British sailors is all too Familiar" that starts with the words: "A disconcerting sense of deja vu surrounds Iran's capture of 15 British sailors and marines on smuggling patrol Friday in the Persian Gulf." Of course, the only deja vu that the article relates has to do with the capture and detention of British soldiers in 2004. As the article goes on to explain:

Three years ago, eight British servicemen traveling in small boats up the Shatt al Arab waterway near the Iranian border with Iraq found themselves surrounded by members of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard, arrested and subjected to a three-day ordeal that included mock executions and a visit to what they thought would be their graves. After a few days, they were released.

Well, it's been three days and the 15 Brits are still in Iranian custody. If anything, it looks like the Iranians are not stepping back and the latest development involved the Iranian Foreign Minister Mottaki claiming their illegal entry into Iranian waters and the possibility of trying them for espionage in Iran. So far the British have not been granted access to their soldiers (as would be expected in the case of POWs) and it is not at all clear that they will be released anytime soon.

It will be interesting to see how Great Britain will deal with this crisis. So far, Prime Minister Blair has convened his COBRA team (an acronym for Cabinet Office Briefing Room A) and has told the Iranians that, "there is no doubt at all that these people were taken from a boat in Iraqi waters" and that he wants the Iranians to understand that the Iranian actions were, "unjustified and wrong".

There is plenty of deja vu in the recent events, but it has little to do with the capture of British soldiers three years ago. Three years ago, the Iranians were in a far weaker position strategically and were quite happy to assist the US and UK in making Iraq safe for Shias. Three years ago discussions on Iran's nuclear ambitions had started, but it was clear that after the fiasco of Iraqi WMDs everyone was going to play the Iranian round "by the book" - even if it means years of cat and mouse games and IAEA inspections. Three years ago Mohammed Khatami, the Iranian reformer was in power and now the hard-line Ahmadinejad is the President of Iran.

No, the deja vu stems not from 2003, but rather from last summer's kidnapping of Israeli soldiers on the Lebanese border by Hezbollah. Like last summer, this recent kidnapping came on the eve of a United Nations vote for sanctions on Iran with regard to their non-compliance to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (of which they are signatories). Of course in the case of Israel, Hezbollah also managed to kill a few soldiers while lobbing a few katyushas into Israel. In both cases, Hezbollah and Iran crossed internationally recognized lines and captured soldiers in uniform. At the time Israel was roundly accused of over-reacting and using disproportionate force. It will be interesting to see how the British and the international community decide to handle this crisis.

In any case, I have no doubt that this accounts for the recent Iranian histrionics surrounding President Ahmadinejad's visa to attend the UN sanctions vote in New York. By blaming the US for being slow in getting his visa processed he has an excellent excuse for not going abroad at a time when he needs to be in Tehran to manage this crisis and leverage these British pawns into tangible concessions for Iran. No doubt the Iranians are sending a message with regards to the recent disappearance of former Iranian Deputy Minister of Defense, Alireza Asgari in Ankara or the detention and arrest of five Iranian mission staffers in Erbil for allegedly aiding Iraqi insurgents.

The decision to target Britain and not the United States is also hardly arbitrary. At this point the Iranians are still trying to avoid a confrontation with the US while at the same time demonstrating their military capabilities. Because the British are militarily stretched to the limit, it means that they have few choices but diplomacy. Moreover, the Iranians have probably rightly interpreted the British as the weaker link in the trans-Atlantic alliance. It is no secret that the British people have no stomach for war and are already finding ways to blame all of this on Bush and the "American embrace". On the other hand, it will be interesting to see if, together with the kidnapping of BBC reported Alan Johnston in Gaza on March 12, will initiate a sea change in British public opinion regarding the Middle East.

Then again, who knows? Maybe "Bush's poodle" can bite!

"In Beeb we Trust"

The BBC is apparently so worried that a report on it's coverage of the Middle East conflict will be made public, that it has reportedly spent between ₤200,000 and ₤300,000 on legal fees to prevent it's release! The Balen Report, which was commissioned by the BBC in 2004 and written by a senior BBC editorial advisor (!) allegedly demonstrates that the BBC's coverage in recent years has been anti-Israeli.

BBC bosses have faced repeated claims that is coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict has been skewed by a pro-Palestinian bias.

The corporation famously came under fire after middle-east correspondent Barbara Plett revealed that she had cried at the death of Yasser Arafat in 2004.

If the BBC were not publicly funded and did not claim to be unbiased and independent, then it would not matter, but the fact remains that the BBC claims that it is impartial and therefore it's impact is greater than it would be otherwise. As the Beeb's own website states: "Trust is the foundation of the BBC: we are independent, impartial and honest".

While I find it interesting (and slightly Orwellian) that a news agency would value "trust" above "truth", this is consistent with Gramsci's brilliant analysis of how groups dominate in society without the need to resort to the threat of force. He called this "hegemony" and argued that it, "describes the process whereby ideas, structures, and actions come to be seen by the majority of people as wholly natural, preordained, and working for their own good, when in fact they are constructed and transmitted by powerful minority interests to protect the status quo that serves those interests." Basically, it "controls the way new ideas are rejected or become naturalized in a process that subtly alters notions of common sense in a given society." [My Italics]

A prerequisite for hegemony to have an impact on society is trust. Without trust, people reject what they are being told, seek other sources of information and threaten the status quo. While Gramsci's critique was directed against the Italian Fascists that had imprisoned him, he would have had a field day with the BBC, a "quasi-autonomous public corporation" owned by the British government, run by a board appointed by the Queen (on the advice of the government) and paid for by taxes (license fees) collected from the public.

To understand how hegemony works in practice, one need only compare the BBC to such documentary films as Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine or Fahrenheit 9/11. Most people are media savvy enough to realise that even though they are watching a documentary, it is being edited to present a particular viewpoint. This does not mean to suggest that Moore fabricated any of the footage in these films, rather that both the juxtaposition of images and what he chose NOT to present is as important as what he does present to the viewer. Most people realize this because they know they are watching a "movie" and not witnessing real life.

In the case of the BBC, people are much more likely to suspend their disbelief, because news footage is often so raw. If you add in the element of trust, then people begin to confuse what they are seeing on their TVs as "reality". If the only footage of Africa that people see is one of famine, poverty and war and the only Middle East coverage always centers on Israel and never about the serious social problems of the other states of the region, then it is not surprising if one's attitude towards Africa is one of pity and dismay while Israel is perceived as the biggest threat to peace in the world. That the media could have such a profound effect was succinctly explained by Marshall McLuhan as the phenomenon commonly known as "The medium is the message." As McLuhan pointed out, crime reporting does not necessarily change the amount of crime, but it does change our attitude toward crime and even contribute to a culture of fear (a point well made in Bowling for Columbine.)

I think that there is another reason why the BBC pundits chose "trust" over "truth". It reflects a post-modern sensibility that eschews "simplistic" notions such as "truth" for the supposed "nuance" of relativism. The problem with this is that it is really a disarming technique that causes the reader to "trust" the reportage. What this supposedly nuanced approach accomplished is the illusion of balance. After all, how can the BBC be accused of "taking sides" if it does not believe that there really are "sides"?

Interestingly, in all my years of writing complaints to the BBC about their skewed and partial coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict, I have only received one e-mail in response. When I complained that an IRA "militant" was termed a "terrorist" and a PLO "terrorist" a "militant", I was told that this was not accidental. In fact, I was informed that the official BBC policy was that only members of the IRA were considered terrorists while everyone else were "just" militants! While this exchange pre-dated September 11, it certainly does not appear that the events of that tragic day have changed much at the Beeb. It also shows that there are more sides to the BBC than appear at first glance.

Cultural Relativism and Liberal Universalism

Phyllis Chesler, an Emeritus Professor in Psychology and Women's Studies from City University New York has written a critical piece in the Times Online that questions the cherished Anthropological notions surrounding imperialism (e.g. "Dependency Theory" and Orientalism) as well as cultural and moral relativism. She writes this article from the personal experience of having lived in purdah during her marriage to an Afghan in the early 1960s. In the article she uses very un-PC words such as "barbarism", "evil" and "feudal" to make her point. For example:

Individual Afghans were enchantingly courteous — but the Afghanistan I knew was a bastion of illiteracy, poverty, treachery and preventable diseases. It was also a police state, a feudal monarchy and a theocracy, rank with fear and paranoia. Afghanistan had never been colonised. My relatives said: “Not even the British could occupy us.” Thus I was forced to conclude that Afghan barbarism was of their own making and could not be attributed to Western imperialism.

Long before the rise of the Taleban, I learnt not to romanticise Third World countries or to confuse their hideous tyrants with liberators. I also learnt that sexual and religious apartheid in Muslim countries is indigenous and not the result of Western crimes — and that such “colourful tribal customs” are absolutely, not relatively, evil.

Although Anthropology emerged as an Imperial endeavor - as an attempt by the conquering powers to better understand and rule their new subjects - the field has long ago turned its back on Empire and any ideological encumbrances it may have once had in this regard. If anything, the Anthropology of the post-WWII era has been the font of some of the most scathing critiques of the colonial imperative and a champion of national rights for those who were once colonized. Based on anti-essentialist notions that undermined the worldview of those who believed in the "White Man's Burden", anthropology (as a field) was supportive of and deeply invested in the liberation movements of the 1950s and 60s.

Unfortunately, as self-rule spread from country to country throughout the developing world, these new states miserably failed at bettering the lives of their citizens and often descended into civil war and anarchy. To account for this unanticipated turn of events, anthropologists and other social scientists put forward explanations such as "Dependency Theory" and Orientalism. The former blamed the recently departed colonizers for economic and political emasculation of these societies and the latter argued that this behavior stemmed from, "old-fashioned and prejudiced outsider interpretations of Eastern cultures and peoples."1

According to Dependency Theory, the colonizers may have left, but what they left behind were nation-states that were either not viable states (because their borders did not take into account underlying ethnic rivalries) or so economically dependent on the departing imperial power that independence was effectively a ruse designed to benefit only a tiny comprador group serving external interests. This viewpoint, which stemmed primarily from communist and structuralist analyses became the accepted wisdom in the the 1970s, especially among liberals and academics. That these ideas are still quite potent is clearly exemplified by the anti-globalization movement, the modern-day inheritor of the anti-neocolonialist mantle.

That most of these colonies were pre-modern societies that suffered from long-standing social and economic issues prior to the advent of the first European is apparently irrelevant and does not fit the model of a "lost Eden". At the same time, it is apparently irrelevant that some of these former colonies have now been independent states for longer than they were subjugated to foreign rule. Even in places like India, where Empire stretched to almost 400 years, the fact that well over one billion people have been born since British Raj is discounted as irrelevant. As Chesler rightly points out, these theories do not account for failed states such as Afghanistan which were never colonized, yet have been unable to provide their citizens with basic necessities or a modicum of human rights. However, the notion that there may be something indigenous to these cultures that is disadvantageous or detrimental to development has been repeatedly rejected as racist.

I suspect that this actually stems from the wide-ranging philosophical impact of Anthropology's most cherished notion, "cultural relativism". This posits that the differences between people are just a question of custom à la "You say to-may-toe and I say toe-mah-toe." No doubt Franz Boas, who spent his life combating essentialist notions of race and hierarchical notions of superiority would be both pleased and chagrined at his legacy. The smug certainty of Western civilization or White superiority has been vanquished, yet Boas - who was well-known for his scientific temperament and an unwavering moral compass - would undoubtedly balk at the populist interpretation that everything is relative.

Boas clearly recognized the existence of evil and regularly spoke out against both racism and Nazism. Indeed, "When the Nazi Party in Germany denounced "Jewish science" (which included not only Boasian Anthropology but Freudian psychoanalysis and Einsteinian physics), Boas responded with a public statement signed by over 8,000 other scientists, declaring that there is only one science, to which race and religion are irrelevant."2 Scientists are supposed to base their conclusions on facts and not on ideology. Unfortunately , what started as a healthy corrective against prejudice and racism has morphed into an ideological albatross that effectively blinds us to the essentializing of our adversaries.

Unfortunately, many anthropologists confuse their role as ethnographers and become anthro-apologists. While it is certainly the role of an anthropologist to understand and explain other cultures, it has become the custom among anthropologists to explain away the excesses of all cultures but their own. Rare is the anthropologist who can explain without condoning. While anthropology emerged as the science which embraced the "exotic" and rightly called into question the civilized nature of the industrial or "developed" world, it has too often taken sides while suffering from a bad case of the Stockholm syndrome.

Moreover, an unforeseen outcome of these critiques and "deconstruction" is that they have intellectually undermined the foundational notions of Western civilization. Frankly, if this were aimed against other cultures it would be considered "politically incorrect" and run the risk of being seen as bordering ethnocide. This begs the question of why the same person who will travel half way around the world to experience a "colorful tribal custom" has only scorn for the long-standing traditions of their own culture? Why is it that the same person will eloquently defend the "right" of cannibalism, wearing of the burqa or female genital mutilation but bristle at Western hegemony when equality, human rights and democracy are suggested? This is because cultural relativism is often confused with moral relativism. If every culture is "adaptive" in its own way, then who are we to judge which one is better?

Chesler rejects this view and instead proposes:

Now is the time for Western intellectuals who claim to be antiracists and committed to human rights to stand with these dissidents. To do so requires that we adopt a universal standard of human rights and abandon our loyalty to multicultural relativism, which justifies, even romanticises, indigenous Islamist barbarism, totalitarian terrorism and the persecution of women, religious minorities, homosexuals and intellectuals. Our abject refusal to judge between civilisation and barbarism, and between enlightened rationalism and theocratic fundamentalism, endangers and condemns the victims of Islamic tyranny.

I share Chesler's wish that those Western intellectuals who support tyrants and murderers would no longer be so blinded by ideology that they embrace anyone professing anti-Western or anti-capitalists rhetoric as a "progressive". I am old enough to remember that at one time Pol Pot was the cause célèbre of the Left and I will not be terribly surprised in the future if people start disappearing and concentration camps are uncovered in Chavez's Venezuela. No doubt, twenty years from now legions of university professors will make their careers arguing that the Bush administration really should have invaded Venezuela instead of searching for WMDs in Iraq. Somehow the fact that the same people would be the most vocal opponents of any such action today does not seem to be a contradiction. After all, if all truth is relative, then one can certainly advocate one thing today and something else tomorrow.

The problem with Chesler's neat "solution" of a "universal standard of human rights" stems from the same totalizing place that it opposes. Chesler is basically proposing a liberal universalism that is the opposite pole of ethnocentrism and xenophobia. In my opinion, it is a morbid fear of liberal universalism, more than the existence of American bases in Saudi Arabia, that causes Bin Laden to wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night. As globalization continues to extend it's inexorable grip on the planet, more and more cultures and customs will bump up against each other with all the potential for conflict that this entails. It is precisely for this reason that "minimum" if not "universal" standards of human rights should be adopted.

The Basis for Hope

In his most recent dispatch, "A Country Called Hope", Daniel Gordis reflects on Last Summer's war with Hizballah, the sense in Israel that the country is rudderless at present while another war is brewing for the not too distant future. Gordis correctly recognizes the malaise as greater than a simple reaction to Israel's poor performance in the war or the loss of faith in the country's leaders and public institutions. I think he is correct in saying that the root of this unease stems from a loss of faith in Zionism - the country's stated raison d'etre. As he notes:

I was speaking with an Israeli Army general the other day and our conversation turned to the recent government scandals.

“How do you explain this country?” the general asked me. “In any normal country, people would be in the streets, burning tires, protesting by the thousands. But here, nothing happens. People are going on as if there’s nothing to get worked up about.”

Maybe, I said, but I look at it differently. Burning tires would suggest that a change in the government would be enough. But that would be delusional. The reason Israelis aren’t protesting, I think, is that they understand this problem is much deeper than the government or the corruption. It’s Zionism. No one frames it that way, but that’s the real issue. One hundred and ten years after the First Zionist Congress, people are beginning to wonder if Zionism hasn’t begun to fail.

As he rightly points out, this is not meant to imply that Israel as a State has been a failure. If anything, the State has prospered and has proven itself viable in more ways than one. To take only the Israeli economy as an example, Israel's GDP is greater than that of it's neighbors combined and the standard of living that it's citizens enjoy is unmatched by its neighbors. In fact, the economic opportunities are such that over 100,000 Palestinians have made their way into Israel since 1994 either through marriage or illegal immigration (If you don't believe me, check it out). Rather:

But Israel is not doing for the Jews what the original Zionists had hoped for. And that’s what accounts for the national funk.

A century ago, the early Zionist ideologues promised that if a Jewish state were created, there would finally be one place on earth where Jews would be safe. It might not be big, it might not be beautiful, but it would be safe. In Israel, it was said, Jews would be able to defend themselves. In Israel, it was said, they would be spared the capriciousness of the world.

While I do not disagree with Gordis that this was the goal of early Zionists and of Herzl in particular, I think it is long past due for Israelis and Jews to question the assumptions under which these hopes were formulated. Zionism developed as a political philosophy in Europe during the rise of the European nation states and is a product of that historical cauldron. The majority of Europe's Jews were living in close proximity with neighbors who strived for their own imagined states. In Europe of the 1880s there was no Poland or Hungary, no Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania nor Serbia, Slovakia or many other of the nations we presently take for granted.

To be fair, the modern world has not been terribly kind to tribal peoples - whether Gypsies in Europe or Native Americans in the New World. The Jewish people have long seen themselves as a "Tribe" and combined with a sense of chosenness, there is perhaps nothing that has infuriated our detractors more than this fact. The creation of a modern nation-state, was supposed to resolve this "problem" by leading the Jews into modernity and acceptance. Once the Jews had their own country, the Jews living in the diaspora would finally have a country of their own that would be responsible for them. Zionist Jews believed that if they could get the world community to agree to let the Jews have a state of their own, the Jews could finally be masters of their own fate and become "normal" in the eyes of their neighbors. As Herzl stated, "The resolution of the Jewish difficulty is the recognition of Jews as a people and the finding by them of a legally recognized home to which Jews in those parts of the world in which they are oppressed would naturally migrate". Zionism was conceived as the antidote to European Anti-Semitism.

With the birth of the State of Israel, Jews did finally have a say in the making of laws and governance that affected them and others. Yet the notion that this would spare the Jews from, "the capriciousness of the world" was unrealistic and I suspect that stems from a millenial mindset that confused the beginning with the end. I am not suggesting, as some have, that Zionism was a messianic movement - rather that the founding of the State of Israel following the horrors of the Holocaust, Israel's unexpected military victory in the '48 War after 2000 years of exile and oppresion seemed so unexpected and unreal - that the Jewish people can be excused for confusing this with the "birth pangs" of the Messianic age.

Actually, I think that the early Zionists knew that to truly be a master of your own destiny, you had to be able to grapple with capriciousness. Unfortunately, they failed to pass this knowledge onto their children. Instead they sold them false hopes of an imagined time when there would be no more need to struggle and suffer or of a time in the future when the Jewish "problem" would be resolved. It is hardly a wonder that so many Israelis have sought out normalcy elsewhere - moving to the United States, Australia and Europe when the capriciousness proved to be too much for them.

Unfortunately, the "capriciousness of the world" does not spare anyone and normalcy has always been an ephemera. The root of the problem actually lies in an approach that treats the Jewish people as a "problem" that needs to be resolved. The founding of the State of Israel should not be in order to solve some "problem", but rather because of Jewish self-determination and a historic right to a homeland - to their own homeland. If you make the raison d'etre of the Jewish state contingent on the resolution of a problem, then you get what we have today - either despair that the problem has not been "solved" or emigration to countries where Anti-Semitism is not tolerated and Jewish safety is no longer seen as a problem.

At a time when the State of Israel has been singled out among the nations and publicly villified to the point that the right of the State to exist is constantly being called into question, it is time that we reject the Zionist approach that seeks to solve the "Jewish Question". We should stop worrying about what our patrons might think and we should definitely not expect guarantees, approval or legitimacy from the international community. As long as we think of this as a "problem", we delude ourselves into thinking that if only we did this differently or conceded that point we would finally have the "solution". Let us publicly reject an approach that makes Jews a problem that needs to be "solved" and instead demand what are our natural rights as human beings.

To insist on Jewish rights implies that we are clear-headed and have the knowledge and conviction to demand sovereignty in our historic homeland with neither guilt nor hand-wringing. This is precisely what most of the world's nation states have done and no one questions their right to exist. Our enemies do not doubt that they have rights and are willing to unapologetically fight for these rights. It is time we abandoned the naive dreams of a bygone era, truly accept that we also have inherent rights while demonstrating our willingness to vigorously claim those rights. Frankly, this is the only basis for hope.