Obama’s insistence on speaking to Israeli leaders about the ostensible diplomatic position of the US on settlements for a decade or more has been called “interfering with Israeli politics” by Americans and Israeli reactionaries, and it remains to be seen if it will have any serious backlash in Israel. (Obama is very popular there; Netanyahu less so.)

While to some extent this is because the American discourse on Israel is shaped pretty comprehensively by unswerving ideological and political fealty to Likud (with AIPAC routinely punishing American political actors for adopting positions or rhetoric similar to that of Kadima, Labor, or any other ideological grouping there), there is an ancillary influence that has recently become a critical part of Israeli politics: the new axis of debate.

Much of the debate between right and left in Israel has disintegrated in the wake of heavily US-backed integration of neoconservatism into the national politics. Instead, within Israel the debate is now between the political adherents to Israel as a nation and Israel as an ideology, and right now the latter have more money and control of the government. The latter tend strongly to be ignorant, well-off, ideologically inflexible, and foreign. The last of those seems to be the key: as long as you haven’t been raised from birth in Israel, it’s a lot easier to treat the hatred of the Arab world as either a grand, unending narrative or something arising ex nihilo. Anyone else would see the move from conflicts with states to conflicts with radicals – from surgical strikes to occupation and guerilla combat – and from bombings to rockets as indicative of some manner of change which can be somehow assuaged or at least contemplated.

It’s not for no reason that Avigdor Lieberman, the mover and shaker of the genocidal right, barely speaks Hebrew and makes an electoral strategy of courting Russophones and Americans – and that the overwhelming majority of active settlers are Americans or ideologues, and typically both. For them, and for their lunatic collaborators among the established Israeli population, the Israeli state exists to ensure that as long as you have a mother the Orthodox establishment feels is sufficiently Jewish and white, then you’re entitled to buy land in a subdevelopment and have a dozen children. Queers, secularists, and Arabs are enemies of the state whether or not they know it, and as such gay parades, cremation, and Arab Israeli presence in government and the Army are to be opposed no matter what. The Palestinians don’t exist, aren’t really Palestinian, and don’t belong there anyway, so one of the many things the state has to do to keep property values cheap is exterminate them like insects.

If you’ve noticed I haven’t discussed foreign policy here, it’s because it’s an ideological totem – something external to and not necessary for the fantasists’ creed. While their leaders are perfectly enthusiastic about the old Israeli reactionary project of nuclear blackmail, exaggeration of external threats, and utter disregard for foreign national sovereignty, those exist for the fantasists mainly as a way of adopting a persecution complex – something extremely important to Americans in particular, because the American Jewish experience’s primary activity is imagining your own destruction, an activity which produces a fairly dangerous mindset when combined with a lack of any actual danger to life or limb. (It would be ubiquitous, but Americans are only one of the several immigrant groups the ideologues aim for – and especially for those coming from the more dismal corners of the former Soviet Union, persecution isn’t some exotic thing to transform into ritual – it was big even in the Soviet days, and now it’s how right-wing politicians get elected.)

Israel plays a role in the ideologues’ grand fantasy that it not only should not but cannot in reality. It is a country of millions with citizens of every major creed, race, and walk of life, and the terra nullia created by the violent expulsion of the last rural Palestinians has more or less run out. The choice is between moving into the cities (which seems to  be deeply offensive to the Americans, for whom renting is a form of suicide) desert exurbs (which are an entirely different and less sexy kind of fantasy, banal and Southwestern) and territory whose occupation by Israel has made it a concrete force of evil in the eyes of hundreds of millions of people, which offers it no strategic and little economic value, which its citizens have no concievable claim to and which essentially makes foreign relations with Israel as difficult as with Taiwan. Realists of every political tendency have agreed almost unanimously that the settlements are destructive and need to end yesterday.

The problem is Lieberman and what he represents – not just a radical ideology whose core involves the flat denial of basic, observable reality, but massive foreign support for that ideology based on a common developed or affected ignorance. There will always be Americans coming to Israel and acting as if the place exists to give them a half acre in a stupidly-named suburb; as of right now, it is the policy of both the Americans in charge of dealing with Israel and what is or at least was the major Israeli political party of the realist right to treat that ridiculous fantasy as the national purpose. This, not Israel and more than just Likud, is what AIPAC stands for: Give me Kosher Pines or give the entire country death!

1. I’m really hoping to see some Republican flack characterize her as an illegal (besides reliable fascist G. Gordon Liddy) in the next couple of months, because
(a) it’s the single dog-whistle they seem to get the most mileage out of; and
(b) it’s legitimately and infuriatingly easy to get Latinos to accept tirades about filthy illegals at face value instead of recognizing the entire genre as one blatant ethnic slur after another.

2. Obama’s choice to go through the nomination process in the traditional timeframe is a good one, especially in light of the serious cross-purposes the Republican Party and its constituents are working at in re. despicable wop-a-doos. While it might be somewhat challenging for a White House which has yet to fully acclimatize to the relatively glacial pace of news and opinion outside of the Internet to spend seventy whole goddamn days on this one issue, that cuts both ways – there’s a long, long time for the miasma of The Base to seep out, and two months is a long time for the Republicans – whose strategy so far has been one of constant escalation, stoking an entitlement to fascist outrage as politics – to keep shit under wraps.

3. In light of the recent tragic murder of one of the country’s three late-term abortion providers by a survivalist lunatic, I have to wonder if as moderate a justice as Sotomayor seems bound to be on abortion is wholly appropriate, even in light of the benefits that exist in her presence. I like to think that sharing the court with misogynist jackasses like Scalia & Son will radicalize her a little, but I’m not holding my breath.

4. It’s a pity that with God as his witness Jeffrey Rosen will never blog again. Now who is going to get paid by a liberal institution to imagine that sensible centrist Obama will finally have his Sister Souljah moment rebuking this terrible identity politician and her extreme brownness?

5. If the phrase “we owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Obama for helping us out the extremist bigots who helped shatter our solid national majority and lose us elections from Alaska to Virginia” or some variant of it fails to come up among Republican political veterans or commentators during or after this fracas, the Republican Party is a walking corpse.

Enraged Citizens Stage ‘Tea Party’ Protest Over Tax Increases For The People Who Take Four Fifths Of Their Money Plus Interest

America’s Heroic Businesses Help Millions ‘Go Galt’ In Spite Of Government Interference, Temporary Stipends

“Expert” Testimony From “FBI” On “Torture” Refuted By Special Episode Of 24

Cheney Acknowledges Grievous Error In Denouncing Robert Downey Junior Before Finishing ‘Tropic Thunder’

I’ve got a bigger post on green culture on the way, but in the meanwhile (and because I’ve lost his name before) I’d like to direct your attention to Wang Chong, an obscure Taoist who – in addition to having a name which we must find hilarious – was not only one of the few Chinese philosophers to come from humble origins but also profoundly skeptical, coming to incorrect conclusions frequently but tearing the superstitions of his time a new asshole. From Wikipedia:

People say that spirits are the souls of dead men. That being the case, spirits should always appear naked, for surely it is not contended that clothes have souls as well as men.

I’m Glenn Beck / and I’m here to say
The IRA are smuggling drugs in my mouth / On Kolob I will be Jesus’s favorite wife
Bamboo, Obama, connect the dots people / Oh God the Arabs are watching again

So I’m hearing where the Republicans have, in the face of economic depression, offered a budget which includes a five-year spending freeze. That rustling sound you hear is the gathering ectoplasmic storm, in which the shades of Keynes and Friedman will rise from the earth, put aside their differences, and go to town on John Boehner — one ghosty wang in each ear.

(P.S. sorry for the silence recently; work has been hell. Have a post nearly ready to go.)

An unnerving number of North America’s political cartoonists are bizarrely obsessed with President Obama’s lips.

On alicublog, which remains one of my favorite blogs, Roy Edroso addressed the potential hate speech prosecution of Dutch kulturkampfer Geert Wilders in the same way he did the earlier legal complaint against Mark Steyn:

Hear, hear. Wilders is a wretched bigot, but here in the states we let them rave.

I didn’t respond before, bu it’s this kind of thing that pisses me off. In the US, we let them rave because we have a legal tradition protecting speech and a broad right to freedom of speech and press encoded in the Constitution. The Netherlands is not the United States. Neither is Canada, for that matter. Different nations have the right to their own legal traditions. If you want to argue that the specific American concept of freedom of speech is an inalienable right, do that; just be honest about what you’re doing.

I live in Oregon. We have an even stronger constitutional protection of free speech than the US Constitution. It’s so broadly interpreted that it’s been repeatedly applied by the state supreme court to regulations banning all-nude stripping. Other states may put their exotic dancers under the unfair yoke of “pasties” or “g-strings,” but in God’s own country, that 18-year-old has a right, enshrined in 150 years of glorious tradition, to display her unobscured genitals to drunk guys for money for as long as she damn well pleases. Other states don’t have that protection, and that’s why there’s so many strip clubs on the Oregon-Idaho border. Is Oregon right, and Idaho wrong? Is the federal interpretation of free speech right, and the Oregonian interpretation wrong?

Israel banned Meir Kahane’s Kach party and prevented him for standing for office for basically the same thing — openly campaigning for the persecution and exclusion of a large minority of his country’s citizens. I can’t remember the last time I heard a free-speechy liberal mourning Kahane’s persecution, and for good reason. The United States is large, and its race-warriors have generally either been marginal or in control of the reins of state. Hate speech has never been as dangerous here.

Have you seen Fitna? In the context of Wilders’ political stances and demands, and the current climate in the Netherlands, it can only be seen as incitatory — an attempt to depict Islam as incompatible with Western laws and ideals, and Muslims as ineligible for protection under those laws and ideals. Ultimately, whether Wilders has broken Dutch law is up to the Dutch people. Hate speech laws would be unconstitutional in the United States, and I oppose them completely. But while freedom of speech is an inalienable right, whether hate speech is as well is another question.

Oh, and Roy? Must you, must you quote someone who uses the word “dhimmitude” unironically?

Hello there, *campers*. I’m Thuryl, II*D*’s Australian correspondent, here to bring you news from the other side of the world (or, if you are on this side of the world, this side of the world).

Before that little election or whatever it was that you Americans held a few months ago, some of you contacted me about the possibility of moving over here in the event that McCain won. To you, dear friends, I say: you’re ignorant fuckwits who know nothing about Australia. At the best of times, we manage to be slightly less horrible than you. My purpose here will mostly be to show you just how bad we are.

The media over here are already getting tired of reporting on Obama’s inauguration and looking for news further afield. Today, they’ve managed to latch onto a misogynistic lecture by Abu Hamza, an “Islamic cleric” who runs a small Muslim social club about 10 minutes’ drive away from my home. (Wonderful term, that, isn’t it? Don’t bother researching whether he’s widely respected or has any kind of recognition outside his own congregation; just call him a “cleric” and be done with it. Do people go around referring to street preachers as “Christian clerics”?)

Now, this lecture was delivered back in 2003, and Abu Hamza hasn’t done anything much in the public eye since then, so the only purpose anyone could have for digging it up and kicking up a fuss about it today is race-baiting. It’s not as if it’s even a slow news day, for heaven’s sake. Yes, the lecture is pretty repulsive: among other things, it argues that a married woman has no right to refuse her husband’s sexual advances. On the other hand, this is still the Catholic Church’s official position on marriage. The Vatican is a damn sight more influential than Abu Hamza, and yet somehow people find it easier to believe that a Catholic can disagree with the Vatican than that a Muslim can disagree with whichever “cleric” has been trotted out and demonised this week. Or, if you happen to be a Protestant, look at, say, your own Phyllis Schlafly. Civil authorities don’t do much better than religious ones on the issue, either: spousal rape was completely legal in Australia until 1985, and many police still don’t take it seriously.

I seem to recall something in a book I read once about removing the log from your own eye before pointing out the speck in your neighbour’s.