The Obama administration deserves credit and praise for its determination to push forward with Middle East peace diplomacy. It is very reassuring that the administration has not regarded the frustrations and false starts of 2009 as evidence that nothing can be accomplished or that efforts are being wasted. It is vital that the United States continue to pursue progress towards peace on a variety of fronts, including at the diplomatic register. However, given the extremely difficult internal political circumstances in Israel and among the Palestinians, a healthy skepticism about what can be accomplished in the near term is warranted and serious consideration of innovations and parallel tracks is required.

For all of the considerable efforts and expenditure of political capital by Pres. Obama, Secretary of State Clinton, Special Envoy Mitchell, National Security Advisory Jones and the others, last year the administration was confronted by weakened leaders on all sides who lacked either the ability or the will, or both, to make dramatic moves towards a peace agreement. Prime Minister Netanyahu is clearly hamstrung by a crazy-quilt coalition that includes several parties and many individuals to his political right. He has coalition partners he relies upon that are overtly opposed to any realistic peace agreement. Moreover, his coalition is unsteady, and he does not even have the largest party in the Knesset. So there is no doubt that his ability to maneuver is limited.

However, there are also serious questions about his intentions. Historically, and maybe still in his heart of hearts, Netanyahu is of the party in Israel that does not believe an agreement is possible, or at the very least, that if it is possible, it will not end the conflict. There are at least two factors that may, however, have shifted his perspective in recent years.

First, many right-wing Israeli leaders have reluctantly come to recognize that peace based on two states is a strategic necessity for Israel. If Netanyahu has made this psychological and political breakthrough, he would be only the latest in a long line of individuals who have come to this conclusion privately, although the critical mass to push Israel into serious pursuit of such an agreement has yet to be developed. As it stands now, and as the vigorous debate in the Israeli press on the subject reflects, it’s really not possible to know what Netanyahu currently believes about whether or not a painful, difficult but workable peace agreement with the Palestinians is a strategic imperative for Israel. No one should dismiss the possibility that he does, but no one should be sanguine about it either. He has adopted a sphinx-like posture on the subject, preferring to remain an enigma to friends, rivals and opponents.

Second, this preference for ambiguity on the part of the Israeli Prime Minister is a reflection of his character as a pragmatic and indeed opportunistic politician who has shown many times in the past that he is willing to do whatever is necessary, within limits, to acquire and maintain power. It’s been pretty clear for quite some time that Netanyahu belongs to what we might call the “deal-making class” of political actors, and this is reflected in his ability to assemble a coalition partnership that makes absolutely no sense ideologically or programmatically, but makes perfect sense in terms of political power, beginning with his own. That his ideological fervor is tempered with a pragmatic sense of bowing to what is necessary was also demonstrated during his first tenure in office on several occasions. That Netanyahu is at heart a hawk, and expansionist and a greater-Israel ideologue is really not open to question. The question is, does he now or will he come to see that a reasonable, workable peace agreement with the Palestinians is essential to either his own interests or his country’s, or both? Such a conclusion is by no means difficult to imagine, even if it cuts against the grain of deeply-seated inclinations.

Netanyahu’s calculated ambiguity on his intentions regarding peace with the Palestinians is a reflection of both his own pragmatism and the political cost of having an unambiguous position either way. There would be a heavy political price to pay with his right wing coalition partners if he were to seriously and unambiguously embrace an agenda that pursued a workable peace agreement, since this would involve a willingness to compromise on shibboleths and cross the Israeli far-right’s red lines. On the other hand, it’s clear that the Obama administration has no patience for an Israeli position that unambiguously rejects the concept of a two-state peace agreement with the Palestinians, and Netanyahu’s highly attenuated and apparently reluctant acceptance of this principle a few months ago was plainly designed to appease the United States. So was the limited, temporary, partial and semi-fraudulent settlement freeze that is now ongoing, for what it’s worth. These measures go further than Netanyahu ever has in the past, or suggested he would, but they’re not obviously reflective of a government that has a real commitment to seriously pursuing a peace deal.

So in the case of Netanyahu, one can easily see the political limitations on his ability to pursue serious measures that advance peace, and one can easily argue and be forgiven for strongly suspecting that his fundamental attitudes have not, in fact, shifted. On the other hand, there are also firm grounds for suspecting that if he becomes convinced that pursuing peace is a political necessity, he would be willing to do so. It’s by no means inconceivable that in a different coalition, or with a different diplomatic or strategic environment in place, Netanyahu could, as many other right-wing Israeli politicians have in the past, surprise both friend and foe alike. But don’t hold your breath.

Regarding the intentions of the senior PLO and PA leaderships, there can be no serious doubt. They have based their entire political as well as diplomatic strategy on negotiations and peace, gambled everything on this hand and doubled down on it too. The status quo, although some on the Israeli right like to kid themselves about this, is not something the Palestinian leadership can live with for very long. The nationalist leadership is in a zero-sum competition for political authority in the Palestinian national movement with Islamists led by Hamas. These two factions agree on virtually nothing, including the national strategy for liberation and the future of Palestine, as well as the nature and character of Palestinian society. If the peace-oriented strategy of the PLO were to decisively fail over the coming decade or so, there is almost no question that the outcome would be the collapse, marginalization and possibly even disappearance of the PLO itself, or at least as we have known it, and its replacement by Hamas and/or other Islamists. Therefore, both in terms of their personal and ideological inclinations and because of their political interests and indeed survival, the commitment of the Palestinian leadership to a peace agreement can’t really be seriously doubted.

However, its political strength, authority and ability to take bold, decisive actions that show leadership and incur significant costs are all in question. The new PA security forces have done a lot to deliver security to the Palestinian public where they operate and to live up to Palestinian obligations under the roadmap, and progress has been made on numerous other issues in the West Bank. However, the leadership was obviously badly weakened over the past few years due to its irreconcilable differences and wide-ranging confrontation with Hamas, and the loss of power in Gaza.

2009 was a very complicated year for the PLO. For the first six months, the organization and especially Fatah party enjoyed a resurgence of credibility, popularity and authority based on guarded optimism springing from the Obama administration’s re-engagement with the peace process and push for a settlement freeze, and the extremely successful Fatah General Party Congress in Bethlehem. Unfortunately, the last six months of last year involved a series of severe blows to the PLO’s credibility and popularity and its internal political standing in Palestinian society. The Obama administration’s failure to achieve a full settlement freeze followed by its insistence of a Palestinian return to negotiations without a meaningful freeze resonated damagingly with deep-seated cynicism about the peace process, Israel’s intentions and the American role among Palestinians at the expense of the credibility of the PLO. The Goldstone report fiasco — which was partly a result of the unavoidable contradiction between the Palestinian leadership’s diplomatic imperatives on the one hand and domestic political necessities on the other, and partly due to their own prodigious mishandling of the affair — proved another extremely damaging blow. The last straw was probably Secretary Clinton’s poorly phrased and misunderstood comments that seemed to imply a certain degree of satisfaction in the administration with Israel’s gestures. Although this false impression was quickly corrected by many officials, including Secretary Clinton herself, the damage was done.

The point here is that the political weakness of the Palestinian leadership, although its intentions cannot seriously be questioned, has become extremely problematic. The current position is that the United States is trying to convince the Palestinians to return to final status negotiations, but at this point does not have a settlement freeze or workable terms of reference to offer them. The situation is so precarious that the Palestinian leadership obviously feels that it cannot simply return to negotiations under these conditions, but requires some additional measures, assurances or guarantees, along with clearly defined and appropriate terms of reference, not only for strategic and diplomatic reasons, but for domestic political reasons as well. Many ideas for how to square this circle are circulating in Washington, but it does not appear that in spite of last week’s Middle East visit by Jones and Mitchell’s visit that begins today the administration has made any firm decisions on how to proceed.

This caution is commendable. It is imperative that the administration remains actively engaged in the process at the very highest levels and spares no efforts to achieve progress. However, it is also essential that all parties avoid the potential disaster of getting into high-level, formal permanent status negotiations that result in some sort of spectacular, public failure or collapse. We have seen in the past what the results of such spectacular failures can be, especially when the Palestinian political scene is particularly volatile. Now is precisely such a time. My concern about the potential fallout from a spectacularly failed high-level negotiation is much greater now than it was before the fall, precisely because the Palestinian political scene has become very highly charged and very finely balanced. The diplomatic process must continue, and continue to accelerate, but the timing and conditions for formal, high-level permanent status talks need to be carefully determined in order to assure that not only is failure manageable and not catastrophic, but that failure is also unlikely.

There are a number of safety-nets that deserve and require sustained, serious attention. First of all, it is necessary to get the structure and terms of reference of the talks right. If serious permanent status issues such as Jerusalem are off the agenda or tabled for some indefinite period and future date, to take one of the broadest and crudest examples possible, the talks will be doomed to failure from the outset. Netanyahu is demanding negotiations without preconditions, which might be workable in terms of the settlement freeze issue, but is certainly not workable when it comes to terms of reference and permanent status issues. Those are not conditions, they are necessary mutual understandings about what is being talked about and to what end in order to avoid getting into another situation in which the two sides are talking past each other and trying to raise mutually exclusive issues or keep essential matters out of the discussion. In other words, the top-down world of diplomacy is right now operating in a political context of great delicacy, and care and caution needs to taken to avoid the pitfalls created by this highly charged atmosphere.

These grave difficulties confronting the diplomatic track at the moment necessitate serious attention, support and funding for the parallel bottom-up approach that concentrates on positive changes on the ground. The PA state and institution building program announced this summer is increasingly being recognized in Washington and by the administration as an essential component in the array of necessary measures required to produce a successful peace initiative. Recent remarks by Mitchell urging international donors to support the program indicate that it is starting to become an integral part of the administration’s agenda, and not a minute too soon. The program, which would unilaterally develop Palestinian administrative, infrastructural and economic institutions with an eye to independence in the near future, provides a parallel track that is entirely supportive of the diplomatic register, and provides an alternative source of momentum towards peace that is independent of a diplomatic process which can and is now being greatly complicated by political considerations. It is nonviolent, constructive, not inimical to any of Israel’s legitimate interests or concerns, and has been rhetorically supported by almost all international actors.

Now is the time for the United States and the rest of the international community to take advantage of this crucial component of Middle East peace-building. The state and institution building agenda has been almost universally praised, but has also been far too often ignored or treated casually, and has not enjoyed the attention or support it deserves from governments, multilateral institutions, corporations, NGOs or the media. While it is essential that the Obama administration continue to pursue the top-down diplomatic agenda with as much vigor, wisdom and caution possible, it is just as important for all actors to embrace and engage with the bottom-up state and institution building plan that will complement, reinforce and protect the diplomatic track, and lay the essential components on the ground for a Palestinian state, when it is established, to be successful.

The new TSA security directive following the failed Christmas Day terrorist attack on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit raises the specter of ethnic and religious profiling in the most direct way since the 9/11 attacks. The first thing that needs to be acknowledged is that the primary blame for all kinds of negative fallout from terrorist attacks — whether they succeed in killing the innocent or, as in this case, are simply a halfwit setting fire to his own trousers — belongs squarely with the terrorists themselves and with their sympathizers. Other than the individuals directly affected by these attacks and their families, the maximum negative impact stemming from violent outrages by self-described “salafist-jihadist” groups like Al Qaeda, or solo actors imbued with their ideology like the Fort Hood murderer Maj. Hasan is borne by the Arab and Muslim American communities. Just as these dangerous extremists are the single greatest threat to Arab and other Muslim societies in Asia and Africa at the present moment, they and their supporters also pose the most serious dangers to Arab and Muslim Americans and their ability to thrive in the United States and other Western societies.

Ever since the 9/11 attacks, a veritable cottage industry of self-appointed “terrorism experts,” grandstanding members of Congress, right-wing ideologues, anti-Arab racists and Islamophobic bigots have been demanding that the government institute systematic discrimination against people of Arab ethnic origin or Muslim religious affiliation. The government’s response has been complex. With the exception of a couple of short-lived policies, broadbrush profiling that would affect US citizens has heretofore been rejected by the government as unworkable and ineffective. Indeed, it’s extremely revealing that there was probably more profiling going on at airports before the 9/11 attacks than afterwards, largely because the authorities suddenly had to take airport security much more seriously and therefore recognize that crude ethnic profiling is absolutely pointless.

However, the government did institute a large number of policies regarding immigration and immigration law enforcement that discriminate against, or rather between, non-US citizens on a whole range of subjects. Courts have historically held that immigration policy and law enforcement are essentially branches of foreign policy, subject to the discretionary authority of the executive. Citizens of different states may therefore be treated very differently simply on the basis of their nationality (it is unconscionable but not unconstitutional that historically and typically refugees from Cuba have been virtually guaranteed green cards and eventual citizenship while refugees from Haiti have frequently found themselves in mass detention centers). The post-9/11 restructuring of US immigration policy and law enforcement without question dragged the United States into levels of discrimination that had not been seen for many decades, however these policies were strictly limited to affecting foreign nationals and not US citizens.

The new security directive holds that any individual traveling from or through a list of 14 countries — Cuba, Iran, Sudan, Syria, Afghanistan, Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen — will be subjected to as yet not fully specified enhanced security scrutiny and measures. The first question worth asking is, does this mean a return to crude forms of profiling by the federal government? I think the answer is, not quite. But it’s certainly the most dramatic step in that direction in the past 10 years and therefore quite troubling. There is an argument, of course, that the new policies do in fact rise to the level of profiling: there is no question there will be disparate impact for people with origins in those societies, therefore the policy is plainly discriminatory. In addition, the list of countries is fairly homogenous: with the exception of Cuba, all of them are Muslim-majority states (or, in the cases of Nigeria and Lebanon, Muslim-plurality states). Therefore, it might be argued with some justification that this list of countries uses national origin as a proxy for religious affiliation.

On the other hand, it might be pointed out that the policy apparently does not distinguish between which kinds of travelers traveling from or through the countries in question will be subjected to the new measures. The disparate impact is unavoidable, but in theory the policy ought to apply to everyone traveling from or through these destinations, thereby mitigating the overt discrimination built into the policy. More tellingly, the policy does not apply to most Muslim-majority states, or most Arab states for that matter. Therefore, disparate impact and discrimination are not tied simply to ethnicity or religious affiliation, or to national origin or nationality as such, but to the act of traveling from or through certain states. This may be cold comfort regarding a policy that is plainly going to be discriminatory and involve disparate impact on specific groups (especially Arabs), but I don’t think this policy can be described accurately as involving profiling as such. It is definitely a major step in that direction, but it hasn’t arrived there quite yet.

The worst aspect of the new directive, of course, is that it will almost certainly be completely useless as a security and counterterrorism measure. It’s often an unrecognized reality among Arab and Muslim Americans that our communities have an almost incalculable stake in effective security and counterterrorism policies, since it is our communities that suffer most directly from the social and political consequences of the words and deeds of Muslim extremists. All such policies need to be examined carefully on a case-by-case basis in order to determine first of all if they will actually make anybody any safer, as well as whether they are consistent with American laws and core values. The new directive is almost certainly consistent with the law, and enjoys an uneasy relationship with core American values as it will have a discriminatory impact, but it crucially and definitively fails the test of effectiveness. It can’t possibly make us safer, and I think almost everyone who is serious about security and counterterrorism understands this.

As with so much of post-9/11 air travel security measures, the new policy seems designed to mollify the public and allow the government to claim that they are taking dramatic and effective action. There is no basis whatsoever for thinking that enhanced measures for anyone traveling from or through this, not exactly random but certainly somewhat arbitrary, list of countries is actually going to make anybody any safer or make it more difficult for terrorists to attempt to murder people on airplanes. True enough, the malevolent clown who set his pants on fire on Christmas Day began his journey in Lagos, but he was passing through Amsterdam. Like the 9/11 attacks themselves that were cooked up in Hamburg, a huge percentage of terrorism from Muslim extremists aimed at the United States seems to have its origins in Western Europe. But, of course, it wouldn’t make any more sense if Germany, Britain, Holland, Spain and so forth were added to the list either. It is extremely helpful that virtually all serious security and counterterrorism experts who have opined on the new policy have expressed a negative opinion, ranging from serious doubts about its efficacy to outright scorn at the foolishness and wastefulness of such a silly approach. Since the policy appears to have virtually no support from the experts and professionals, its long-term future is questionable. We’ve already seen a number of ill-conceived post-9/11 security measures shelved because they proved even more idiotic in practice than they looked on paper.

So there is no doubt that the TSA is instituting a policy that is both discriminatory and extremely silly, but I really don’t think it can honestly be described as fully-fledged profiling either. I understand the political motivation for labeling what is a foolish and in effect discriminatory policy as “profiling,” since this term is often used as a synonym for all kinds of forms of discrimination that are not, in fact, profiling as such. But I think it’s probably more useful to try to develop accurate, precise language to describe a troubling and wrongheaded new policy, and that an effective critique is better based on careful accuracy rather than emotional appeals. In fact, widespread, systematic profiling on the basis of Arab ethnicity or Muslim religious affiliation, including US citizens, is unlikely to emerge in the foreseeable future, first because it would be a huge waste of resources which all serious people would readily understand would be totally ineffective, and second because as a practical matter there is no method for distinguishing who is an Arab or, even more absurdly, who is a Muslim. Obviously it would be a tragicomedy of errors and absurdities if thousands of TSA and other security employees were to try to distinguish who is an Arab or Muslim based on appearance or name. Quite simply it can’t be done, even if there were an argument for doing it (which there isn’t).

The proponents of profiling don’t recognize this, of course. Many of them seem to live in an imaginary world where you can simply look at someone or read someone’s name and instantly and accurately distinguish who is an Arab and/or a Muslim. This is obviously a holdover from the historic cultural attitudes in the United States that were shaped by a society generally divided between black and white Americans with the false assumption that the distinctions were readily apparent on sight. There are also proponents of profiling who understand this problem but choose to ignore it because they realize that it makes their arguments completely untenable. But obviously the first question to be asked of anyone who proposes crude ethnic or religious profiling is, how will your average security agent accurately identify the targeted profile? As yet, I have not encountered a proponent of profiling who had a reasonable answer to this most obvious question, and the provisions of the new directive only emphasize these difficulties by creating a blanket category based on the objective and easily determinable fact that someone has traveled from or through a very specific set of countries.

Finally, for all those who worry about the adoption in the United States of systematic ethnic or religious profiling against Arabs and/or Muslims, there is therefore an obvious trigger for major concern that such a policy may actually be emerging. The day that policy advocates, security experts, counterterrorism professionals, members of Congress and so forth actually begin seriously discussing the need for new compulsory national identification cards or a national database that identifies people on the basis of their ethnicity and/or religious affiliation is the day that serious, systematic profiling becomes a real threat in the United States. Such a system of classification is the sine qua non for any really existing program of broad-based profiling, although implementing it would almost certainly be unconstitutional. But as long as people are talking in vague terms about ethnic or religious profiling without any system for identifying the targets of a profile, we are in the realm of grandstanding, balderdash and the imaginary. That the TSA’s new directive is discriminatory because it will have a disparate impact on numerous Arabs and Muslims who travel most frequently to the listed countries is unquestionable. That it will fail to enhance airline security is also unfortunately almost certain. But until we begin to move in the direction of the government systematically classifying people on the basis of ethnicity and/or religion, an actual system of profiling Arabs and Muslims in general will remain the fantasy of bigots and not the policy of the state.

Yesterday, Grand Ayatollah Hosein Ali Montazeri passed away at his home in the Iranian holy city of Qom, without question delivering another serious blow to hopes for internal reform to the Iranian political system. Montazeri leaves behind him a decidedly mixed legacy, and a very interesting set of questions about the immediate and long-term consequences of his absence from the Iranian political scene.

Montazeri was one of the most senior clerical figures in all of Shiite Islam, and also one of the original architects of the concept of villayat e-faqih (rule by jurisprudential scholars) most powerfully advanced by Ayatollah Khomeini. As such, he was a leading figure in the “Islamic revolution” that overthrew the shah in the late 1970s. Montazeri was one of the central figures behind the creation of the Revolutionary Guards organization that has now effectively taken over the Iranian government, and also the most enthusiastic of the senior “Islamic” revolutionaries in pushing for the exportation of the Iranian model and the establishment of sympathetic organizations among Arab Shiites such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and several of the Iraqi political parties that now dominate the government in Baghdad. His stature can be measured from the fact that he was at one point formally appointed to be Khomeini’s successor as supreme leader.

During the course of the 1980s, Montazeri became disillusioned with the path the “Islamic Republic” was taking earlier than most internal dissidents. Although he was in line to take over the leadership, he quarreled with Khomeini on several key points, including how aggressive Iran should be in trying to export its revolutionary ideals (Montazeri wanted to be more aggressive), the leaking of embarrassing information regarding the Iran-Contra scandal, and his increasing calls for the liberalization of the governing system. Montazeri, unlike Khomeini and certainly unlike Khamenei, apparently believed that the jurisprudential supreme guides should be more removed from power and act essentially in an advisory capacity rather than as direct rulers. It’s also clear that he was very uncomfortable with the mass executions of opposition members in the late 1980s. Beginning with his call in 1987 for the legalization of political parties, he increasingly became the most credible, and often lonely, voice for internal reform of the system. Following the election fraud and subsequent unrest this summer, most hopes for internal reform of the system centered around the idea that senior clerics led by Montazeri could make common cause with political reformers like Mousavi and Karroubi and create conditions for a nonviolent, peaceful “velvet revolution” in Iran.

There is a sharp disagreement over whether Montazeri’s death constitutes a significant blow to the opposition in Iran or not. On the other hand, there is almost universal agreement that the Khamenei-Amhadinejad clique will be utterly delighted to be rid of this turbulent priest. It was not just his reformist tendencies and liberal views that were a thorn in their side, but his scholarly eminence stood in marked contrast to Khamenei’s own dearth of academic credentials. His mere presence on the scene was an embarrassment, simply in terms of a contrast of academic CVs, to the current supreme leader. This alone suggests, but does not necessarily mean, that his death is by definition a blow to the Iranian opposition, whether reformist or more ambitious in its intentions.

Some argue that Montazeri’s death is not a blow to an opposition movement because it is largely spontaneous, barely organized, nascent, fledgling and essentially without coherent political leadership. Others say that Montazeri was an important source of inspiration and religious legitimation for the opposition, just as he was a powerful source of delegitimation for the regime. It strikes me that there is no way in which his death is not a blow to reformists, by which I mean specifically those who wish to transform the nature and behavior of the regime from within, without a total overhaul of the system and doing away with the whole bizarre concept of villayat e-faqih. Such forces would necessarily require not only religious legitimation and the validation of one of the foremost leaders of the “Islamic revolution,” but also someone who is ready, willing and able to say that the present system is not that intended by the originators of the villayat e-faqih system including not only himself, but also Ayatollah Khomeini.

This point, that Montazeri stressed time and again, that Khomeini himself would disapprove of the extreme illiberalism and repressive nature of the present regime is exceptionally dubious but also exceptionally powerful as a means of rhetorically undermining the current leadership. And, if Montazeri says so, few would be in a position to credibly disagree without invoking the idea that Khomeini too approved of repression and illiberal policies. Given their own belief systems and political rhetoric, this constitutes a trap from which the ruling elite had no easy way out other than ignoring it or arresting anyone who repeated these claims too loudly or vociferously. So the fact is that the Iranian reformist movement as such has lost its most authoritative and credible champion, and probably the only figure in its circles who was, essentially, untouchable (insofar as one can be effectively immune to the power of the state in a country like Iran).

On the other hand, as I have been stressing for many months now, I do not think there is any reason to believe that the movement for internal reform and civil rights in Iran has any serious hope of succeeding in the foreseeable future. Therefore, the centrality of people who essentially believe in but want to change the system, as Montazeri almost certainly did, it seems to me is becoming increasingly diminished as time goes on. I have written many times that I think the Iranian ruling elite has given the public a simple choice: stick with us on our terms or enter into a dangerous revolutionary spiral which will have unpredictable consequences and involve terrible risks and enormous pain. It seems clear that the reform movement, including Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, has found no effective answer to this. The regime is beyond scolding and shaming, and has answered calls for reform with brute force. Mousavi, Karroubi and Montazeri, it seems to me, although they serve as powerful voices of delegitimation of the regime from a position that is essentially within the system, have been rendered increasingly irrelevant by the tactics of the government. I suspect that the reformist movement has found itself in a lose-lose situation: if the government prevails, they remain marginal and things don’t change; but if change is actually to come, it will require much more far-reaching measures than they have been willing to countenance or would probably be enthusiastic about, again leaving them marginal.

Reformists including Montazeri have staked out an honorable middle ground that is sensible, reasonable and constructive. Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s any space in which it can operate effectively in the current Iranian scene, which the government has decided to force into a rather stark binary of acceptance of the present situation versus revolutionary change. Therefore, while Montazeri’s death is certainly a blow to the reformist movement, I doubt it’s a major blow to the prospects for significant change in Iran because I think these are only really possible, under the present circumstances, through much more far-reaching restructuring than reform proposes. Insofar as there are nascent revolutionary movements developing to correspond to the government-created revolutionary situation in Iran, the passing away of Grand Ayatollah Montazeri probably won’t be much of a blow to them, and could even serve as an inspiration and source of religious legitimation for measures, agendas and organizations that he might have recoiled from if he were still alive.

After my recent posting about anti-Semitism in the Merchant of Venice and the Jew of Malta, I received a very kind invitation from Seth Duerr founder and director of the York Shakespeare Company which, I was surprised to learn, was staging rotating productions of the two plays at the Jewish Community Center of Manhattan. I couldn’t resist. Last weekend I went to New York, saw both productions and had an extremely enjoyable and interesting dinner with Mr. Duerr. He strikes me as a most remarkable young man, and one of those rare individuals whose capacity seems to match their ambition; it’s much more typical to meet those with capacity but limited ambition, or those with huge ambitions but limited capacity. Mr. Duerr directed but, due to complicated New York City union regulations, was unable to perform in these plays.

I’m used to discussing Shakespeare and other Renaissance literature with academics rather than performers and directors, and I have to say I found Mr. Duerr’s command of and insights into the Shakespeare canon to be impressive and interestingly different from the understandings achieved by those who tend to mainly read the texts on paper or electronically. One of the more interesting things he told me is that he doesn’t derive any pleasure from reading Shakespeare, which I find remarkable, but needs to locate these texts in terms of a staged performance in order to engage with them properly. One of the reasons, I think, that I found his approach to the works unusual is that he is looking at them not as a reader/critic, or even so much as an actor, but rather as a director, concentrating on staging and theatrical storytelling that can communicate meanings from a stage to seats in the stalls. This is, of course, a restoration of the closest proximity to the conditions of the original production and initial reception and use of the texts themselves, since they were written by a manager/director of a theater, and were initially read by those involved in theatrical productions as scripts for performances rather than poems on paper. Engaging with Shakespeare as a director, or even an actor, places one in the oldest and most unbroken chain of conversation with the works themselves, far older and in many ways richer than anything academic and literary criticism can offer. And it necessitates knowing the plays literally inside out.

Regarding the productions of the Merchant of Venice and the Jew of Malta at the Manhattan JCC, the most straightforward evaluation would be to say that driving from Washington to New York early in the morning, watching one play, having dinner, watching the second play, and then driving back to Washington arriving in the middle of the night was well worth the trip. Rightly or wrongly, I’m not a fan of New York City and it takes a great deal to get me up there, and even more to make me consider that the visit was worthwhile. In this case, there’s no question. Allowing for the fact that the productions enjoyed virtually no budget and because of the aforesaid regulations could only be cast with nonunion performers, they were remarkably engaging, entertaining and stimulating.

The obvious argument at the heart of staging both plays in a rotating fashion at the JCC of Manhattan is that neither play is meaningfully, or simply and simplistically, anti-Semitic. The Jew of Malta, which has, as I explained the other day, an overwhelming and, I think, undeserved reputation as viciously anti-Semitic, especially in contrast to the Merchant of Venice, was staged in a very straightforward manner. There was no effort to recuperate the character of Barabas, because, as I wrote, a sympathetic portrayal of this character is quite impossible. However, the key is getting the audience to go past the dreadful and apparently anti-Semitic character of Barabas with which they are assaulted from the outset to patiently see how the equal or worse villainy of all the other characters (except, perhaps, his daughter) changes the context and therefore the meaning of what would otherwise be simply a racist caricature against Jews.

The Jew of Malta is something like a two part sentence in which Marlowe’s first clause says, “isn’t it amazing how horribly bad the Jews are,” only to be followed after the comma with a second clause saying, “except, of course, that everyone else is worse.” The second part of the sentence, or in this case what unfolds in the action of the play about the other characters, completely changes the context and the meaning of what is initially apparent. My imaginary analogy sentence functions a little bit like the famous dictum quoted by Winston Churchill about democracy being the worst possible system of government, except for all the others. What begins as an apparent denunciation in its full context proves to be something of a recuperation (not to suggest that Marlowe was trying to praise Jews as Churchill was trying to praise democracy, but rather that Marlowe effectively kills the notion that his stereotypically “bad” Jew is any worse — or better — than the Christians or Muslims surrounding him). On this basis I argued that the Jew of Malta should not be seen as an anti-Semitic text, and Duerr?s straightforward and uncut production — though it unfortunately albeit understandably skips the famous Machiavel prologue — bears out this case quite clearly.

The parallel production of the Merchant of Venice is also uncut, and it’s clear which play Duerr engages with more thoroughly. Duerr and I don’t agree, I think, ultimately about the question of whether or not the Merchant of Venice can be legitimately seen as containing genuinely anti-Semitic elements or not. My argument, as I explained last week, is based on the broader cultural context of the time, in which I think the Merchant, especially the trial scene, constituted a theatrical staging of an assertion of superiority of what are supposedly Christian ethics and culture versus what are allegedly Jewish ones. I think Duerr and many others take issue with this by seeing Shylock more in the context of the drama of the play itself, as a wronged man belonging to a wronged people who came by his vengeful rage honestly, so to speak, and as a survivor who is always prepared to move on to the next bitter phase of a bitter life. His staging and direction certainly reflects this reading powerfully, but I don’t think it does anything to compel me to reevaluate my own historicized assessment.

As with Barabas, Duerr presents Shylock straight, so to speak, directly as suggested by the full, uncut text of the Merchant. He doesn’t try to reframe or reconstruct the Merchant in order to attenuate Shylock’s rage, or in any other way exculpate him more than is already present in Shakespeare’s script. He also emphasizes the ?outsider? status of the Jews and others in both of his productions. In both plays most of the Jews have extravagant Yiddish accents (except for Barabas and his daughter Abigail) and the men wear skullcaps but, unlike the Christians, not ties. As for the other others, so to speak, like the Turkish slave Ithamore or the Prince of Aragon, Duerr ?others? them to the hilt with the most extravagant accents and preposterous costumes. His production ultimately, I think, supports both of our readings of the Merchant, since both are eminently justifiable from the unvarnished text.

What is more interesting and significant about this production of the Merchant is that Duerr bucks the prevailing trend of seeing the fifth act of the play as a disappointing and unworthy dénouement to the climactic and shattering trial scene, and therefore cutting it up and largely out. It has long been argued that the fifth act is an artless tack-on to an otherwise brilliant and breakthrough achievement by Shakespeare, clumsily resolving the outstanding issues and achieving an unsatisfactory set of couplings; that he was bound by the conventions of comedy to provide a ?happy ending? to what is, at its core, the Tragedy of Shylock. It has also long been generally agreed that the two stories in the Merchant — the tale of the bond and the tale of the three casks — are not equally important to either the narrative framework or the dramatic and emotional economy of the play. What Duerr understands is that, as so often happens, conventional wisdom has it backwards: the story of Shylock and the pound of flesh is ultimately of secondary importance in the overall schema of the Merchant when compared with the story of Portia?s marriage. By presenting the Merchant uncut and staging the fifth act in a manner that clearly demonstrates the unresolved tension between males and females in all three of the major couplings and the ongoing presence of Antonio as a destabilizing factor between Portia and Bassanio, he effectively demonstrates that the much-maligned “clumsy” happy ending is in fact deliberately structured to undermine itself, and promise as much unhappiness as happiness, as much faithlessness as faithfulness.

The play ends with a distinctly unconvincing and sexually charged promise on behalf of the males in the three couples to, ?fear no other thing, So sore as keeping safe [their wife?s] ring.? However, as this production clearly asks, to what extent can we credit the notion that the men have learned their lesson and will now suddenly keep true to promises in spite of the fact that the play is a litany of broken vows and commitments, and that, in spite of its profoundly homoerotic atmosphere, they will now focus their emotional as well as sexual affections on their wives and not their friends?

I don’t think anyone can seriously question the homoerotic text and subtext in the Merchant, but it certainly can be staged in a manner that foregrounds, contains or ignores this factor. Duerr, I think rightly, confronts the character of Antonio’s love straightforwardly — his affections for Bassanio go far beyond the idealized version of Renaissance male friendship they are usually understood to represent, but his overblown sense of and attachment to received versions of ethics, honor and especially religious devotion bar him from either acting on or probably even fully recognizing their nature. In Duerr?s spare production, Antonio’s crucifixes grow ever larger, culminating in a giant, ostentatious silver necklace worn at the end of the trial scene, a kind of religious erection. Both poles of this impossible binary combine to inform Antonio’s vicious, and seen in this context hysterical, anti-Semitic abuse of Shylock (which, when confronted with, he promises to repeat indefinitely): his defensive religious sentiments give him a ready-made target for his unmanageable frustrations. The link throughout the play between sexual frustration and racism, also clearly expressed in Portia?s court in early scenes, comes through masterfully in this production.

A word or two about Duerr?s semi-professional cast are warranted. Though there are plainly moments that fall short, and the entire cast of the Merchant seemed to let the dialogue get away from them a little bit after the intermission, overall the performances are impressively engaging and very sound. Paul Rubin provides an entertaining, comic Barabas who revels in his own malfeasance and rages against everyone else’s. Stephen Olender as Launcelot Gobbo and Graciany Miranda as the Prince of Aragon (in a shirt that might have been donated by an aging Carmen Miranda impersonator) ham it up marvelously, although Jed Charles? Prince of Morocco seems more Caribbean than North, or even sub-Saharan, African in a somewhat jarring way. But for me, the standout was Luis de Amechazurra, who was an extremely convincing, effective and consistent Shylock. He was also directly involved in two moments that demonstrate his own, and Duerr?s, sensitive interaction with the details of the texts.

Amechazurra has the small role of 1st Jew in Marlowe’s play, and when, as Barabas is a raging against the injustices that have befallen him, he asks him to consider the plight of Job, he is greeted by a long and perfectly hilarious silence and stare from Rubin. On a more serious note, Amechazurra?s Shylock, raging against his daughter’s theft and betrayal exclaims, ?The curse never fell upon our nation till now,? and then suddenly halts in midsentence and stutteringly backtracks, “I? I never felt it till now.? The artfulness here is that Shylock realizes in midsentence but he is about to commit an atrocious blasphemy, catches himself in the act, and corrects it in a manner that is religiously defensible. It’s more typical to see the passage “The curse never fell upon our nation till now; I never felt it till now,” as a complete thought consistent in itself, the second point following logically upon and illustrating the first. The way Duerr has directed and Amechazurra performs the passage is sensitive to a much richer interpretation in which the second passage following the semi-colon is a quick and decisive correction to the rash and dangerous first passage. It suggests that Shylock is not only religiously sensitive to his faith (though it doesn’t make him fanatical), but also reinforces his sensitivity to precision in language (which could be overtly staged as part of the Christian condemnation of Jewish “literalism” and “dogmatism,” but in this case is not) and his status as a careful survivor surrounded by dangers of all kinds from which he has no choice but to protect himself. This small, easily overlooked, moment for me summed up what Duerr was, I think, trying to communicate about Shylock and anti-Semitism in the Merchant.

UPDATE:
Seth Duerr writes the following to clarify his views on anti-Semitism in the Merchant of Venice:

“I would say that it could be legitimately seen as containing genuinely anti-Semitic elements. I believe it contains a pile of them. However, I feel that they are lines that come out of the Christian mouths. I’m not so convinced about the actions (pound of flesh, etc.) or the assertion of superiority of Christian ethics and culture. Quite frankly, I that were so,
you’d side with Antonio, Gratiano, Bassanio, Portia, etc. in the trial, and while saving Antonio’s life is necessary, that is all that need occur. The degradation they continue to impose upon Shylock is sickening and I don’t believe we’re meant to side with it or to find Christian ethics/culture as superior. They do, but we need not. Shakespeare leaves this option possible (mistakenly equating Antonio with Christ, etc.) for those who cannot be convinced of the hypocrisy of the Christians in the court and want to see themselves as holy, merciful, et al. but of course leaves the loophole of sympathizing with Shylock. If anyone feels the slightest sympathy for Shylock after the Christians have asserted their ‘superiority,’ then that moral high-ground can’t mean much. After all, Christ supposedly laid down his life for our sins, Antonio lays down his life to impress a spendthrift boy to whom he is powerfully attracted.”

I don’t disagree with any of that.

Iranian internal politics appear to have arrived at a crucial turning point that has been inevitable since the election fraud and protests this summer. At the time, I wrote that the regime had given the population a straightforward choice: accept our repression or enter into a revolutionary movement with uncertain consequences. It’s a high-stakes gamble, but thus far it seems to have worked. The problem, as I wrote at the time, is that the regime forced a revolutionary situation in what was otherwise essentially a rights movement (it’s likely that most of the protesters were outraged not so much at the system in theory but at the fact that the system was duplicitous: they were supposed to have the right to choose between approved candidates but in reality did not; they were supposed to have the right to freely assemble and speak but in reality did not; etc.). What the regime did was to double down on its authority and refuse any compromise with the protesters and both the internal and external opposition, ruling out a recount or a new election or any reasonable means of addressing the fraud or recognizing the fairly limited rights Iranians are supposed to enjoy under the odd vilayat e-faqih system that supposedly blends theocracy with constitutional republicanism. The "Islamic" part of the "Islamic Republic" is intact through ongoing clerical rule, but the republican, and implicitly constitutionalist, part is in absolute tatters.

It’s been pretty clear for some time that the Iranian government is not capable of reforming itself internally and that the reform movement must either fail or turn into a revolutionary movement seeking regime change. It’s very natural that Iranians do not relish such a choice. It’s unlikely that there much of an inclination to go through another tumultuous revolt a few decades after the seismic events of the "Islamic revolution." And, after all, that’s how they got into this situation in the first place. Were serious, far-reaching reform possible, I’m sure most Iranians would prefer to take that route. But it’s not. Since that became clear very early on after the election, the question has therefore been when would new centers of political gravity outside of the "official," semi-approved opposition led by people within or associated with the system begin to form themselves and articulate an agenda that looks past reform to a more radical solution that can really change things.

It would appear that this, one hesitates to say finally because these things were always going to take a good deal of time and probably still will, is beginning to happen. Iranians seeking to restore or reclaim their rights, whether they view the government as betraying its principles or living up to them all too well, will simply have to look beyond the likes of Moussavi, Karroubi and Rafsanjani if their movement is going to get anywhere. There is no indication that any of these men are interested in a revolution or revolt against the system as such, but that is what will be required. Their campaign of internal reform, met with complete rejection and brute force by the Khamenei-Ahmadinejad clique, was never going to succeed, and there is no reason to think that it could in the future either. The government itself chose, deliberately and strategically, to create a revolutionary situation where there were no revolutionaries to act upon it. The question has been if and when revolutionary groups with any significant following and momentum would begin to form themselves and press the issue in a very different way and with very different goals than the official opposition has thus far been willing to.

It would appear this is happening, and it was almost bound to. Some groups were going to decide that they were not going to take this lying down, or be satisfied with a reformist agenda that is and almost certainly will be going nowhere fast. Apparently, this sentiment, and the split between internal opposition and those openly opposed to the system as such, is beginning to develop. The question now, therefore, is whether or not these groups will build a coherent political agenda capable of eventually challenging the power of the regime. It’s still totally unclear whether Iranians are ready for another uprising, but the government has given them a stark choice: it’s us, or the abyss.

Khamenei, Ahmadinejad and their allies in the Revolutionary Guards, are obviously counting on fear of the unknown, their own authority and the fact that they have genuine constituencies, and brute force, to dissuade the public from choosing confrontation over submission. Thus far, unfortunately their strategy has worked quite well. There is no way of knowing whether or not in the foreseeable future the Iranian opposition will form revolutionary groups and agendas that can take advantage of what is inherently a revolutionary situation and begin to build a mass constituency for regime change from within Iranian society. But if it’s ever going to happen, the decisive split that appears to be developing between the internal, reformist opposition to the regime and the external, revolutionary opposition will be one of the crucial turning points. This seems to be happening now.

Elizabethan England produced two great plays involving Jewish protagonists, and for most of the past hundred years or so it has been generally believed that one of these plays is essentially defensible although highly problematic while the other is simply and crudely anti-Semitic. The Merchant of Venice remains controversial, and with good reason, but it is generally defended and is and can be performed in the English-speaking world without much protest. The Jew of Malta, Marlowe’s earlier masterpiece, on the other hand is, in fact, not controversial: it is generally regarded as crudely anti-Semitic and therefore almost unperformable. There are occasional public readings of the play, and there have been one or two productions in London and New York, but its reputation as an anti-Semitic rant has rendered it pretty well outside the scope of general theatrical performance and even undergraduate university courses.

I think the general opinion has it precisely backwards: the Merchant of Venice is, in fact, an anti-Semitic text, albeit attenuated in many important ways and indeed defensible, whereas the Jew of Malta is, I think, not an anti-Semitic text at all. This is going to require some explaining, but it’s an important point especially to someone like me who spends a good deal of time thinking about the problems of defamation such as Islamophobia and anti-Semitism.

To begin with the Merchant of Venice, for most of the history of the reception of the play, Shylock has been seen as fundamentally an unsympathetic character if not a villain. He is also often seen as a caricature of a grasping, vicious and resentful Jew. The debate is not about whether or not Shylock is bad, but really is about whether Shylock is bad because he is a bad Jew or bad because he is simply a Jew. The play establishes quite clearly that he and his community are badly treated in Venice and subject to vicious discrimination, so it could be argued that he came by his rage honestly. It is also argued that at least two other Jewish characters in the play, Tubal and Shylock’s own daughter Jessica, are not cast in a bad light, suggesting that Shylock’s malice is personal and particular rather than communal or sectarian. However, Tubal’s role is exceedingly small and Jessica converts to Christianity and renounces Judaism while stealing Shylock’s money, so this case is rather weak.

A stronger argument lies in Shylock’s famous defenses of his positions. One of Shakespeare’s greatest qualities is that all his characters have their turn to speak and almost everyone explains themselves (except, of course, Iago, who offers multiple unconvincing explanations and ultimately becomes an impossible cipher — more on this in the near future). Shylock therefore has every opportunity to express his undoubtedly well-founded grievances, give his famous speech about the equal humanity of Jews with Christians, and justify his quest for vengeance on the grounds that Christian revenge is typical and that therefore Jewish revenge cannot be faulted.

This means, of course, that the play can be performed in a way that emphasizes Shylock’s humanity, justified grievances and the rationale for his behavior. And, nowadays, it is almost always performed that way. However, I think there are some fundamental qualities to the play that make it inescapably anti-Semitic as a text, which is not to say it shouldn’t be performed, read or enjoyed, but that we should not deify Shakespeare to the point that we fail to see the incorporation of genuine negative stereotypes and religious, ethnic and cultural bigotry in one of his most famous plays.

First of all, the underlying logic of the play, and especially the question of the bond and the pound of flesh, appears to be rooted in the contrast between what are supposedly rigid, inflexible, dogmatic and draconian Jewish ethics versus Christian mercy and forgiveness. The citizenry of Venice and its political leadership all repeatedly implore Shylock to show forgiveness and be merciful, implicitly as a Christian would, even though the law would appear to allow him to extract a bloody and fatal repayment of his loan. Shylock’s insistence on the letter of the law, on inflexible and legalistic justice, and on violent revenge as a form of justice are rooted in medieval and Renaissance Christian concepts of Judaism as a legalistic religion that emphasizes unjust forms of “justice” according to an outmoded and indefensible Talmudic law in contrast to the supposed Christian emphasis on mercy and forgiveness. For the Jew in the Merchant of Venice to be depicted as unmerciful, inflexible and literalistic in his legalism is, in fact, deeply rooted in Christian religious polemics against Jewish beliefs and practices. It is the old, flawed covenant that Christ repealed continuing to unjustifiably insist on its continued relevance even though it has been superseded by a superior religious and moral sensibility that supposedly replaces an emphasis on justice with an emphasis on mercy.

Of course, the Christians of Venice are so superior to Shylock that in the end his effort to exploit legal literalism is his comeuppance since his bond called for a pound of flesh but not a drop of blood. In other words, when their efforts to appeal to Christian mercy fall on deaf Jewish ears, their own legal literalism and dexterity can outmatch the Jewish one. The horrifying ritual humiliation of Shylock in the trial scene is not simply the debasement of a bad individual, it is a theatrical performance of Christian religious antagonism against not only Jews but Judaism as it was stereotypically perceived during most of the past millennium. The message is: the Jews, who wrongly seek to live by the letter of the old law ignoring the new covenant of mercy instituted by Christ, will have their comeuppance through the very letter of the law; that even their own most cherished values will undo them in the face of Christian virtue and determination.

Of course, many performances have demonstrated that it is possible to downplay this aspect of the Merchant to the point that many people fail to see it or that it is not reflected in a given production. Indeed, Shylock has been sympathetically performed since Edmund Kean’s legendary performance in the early 19th century. However, in the text as it exists I fear it is unmistakable. Shakespeare accords Shylock his full humanity and makes his personal distaste for racism quite apparent. But, he also participates enthusiastically in the assertion and representation of the superiority of Christian values and culture over Jewish ones, and I think it is impossible to fail to recognize this clearly in the Merchant. Therefore, while it is certainly a great work of art and an important humanist document that includes a great deal of antiracist sentiment, it seems impossible to me not to conclude that the Merchant of Venice does in fact also reflect anti-Semitism based on religious bigotry.

The Jew of Malta has acquired a perfectly dreadful reputation for anti-Semitism during the same period of time in which enormous efforts have been expended to recuperate the Merchant of Venice from the same charge. But I think the general opinion has it exactly backwards: Marlowe’s play is fundamentally not anti-Semitic, whereas Shakespeare’s unfortunately is. The Jew of Malta is generally seen as anti-Semitic because even more than Shylock, Barabas is a stereotype of the wealthy, grasping, unscrupulous, avaricious Jew. He also despises Christians and is introduced as a follower of Machiavelli, the synonym of amoral ruthlessness in Elizabethan England. He is also responsible for and enthusiastic about numerous murders, especially when committed against Christians. It has been argued that the abuses by various authorities against Barabas turn him into the anti-Semitic stereotype as the play unfolds, but I find this unconvincing. From the outset, Barabas is a thoroughly villainous character with no redeeming features at all. Because of this, he is often contrasted with Shylock who has many redeeming features and whose rage is much more carefully explored with typical Shakespearean subtlety and depth.

I think the reputation of the Jew of Malta as an anti-Semitic play rests on the absolutely immoral and stereotypically evil character of Barabas and the contrast with the Merchant of Venice and its more nuanced portrayal of Shylock who can be and now usually is portrayed sympathetically. No such sympathetic performance of Barabas is conceivable. However, the key to the Jew of Malta is that none of the other characters are any better — indeed, all of them prove at least as bad if not worse than Barabas himself. Ithamore, a Turkish Muslim slave purchased by Barabas, proves more vicious, murderous and immoral than his master, although also much less intelligent. The continuously invading Turks have a master plan to turn the entire Maltese population into galley slaves. As for the Christians in the play, I would argue that at every stage they outdo both the Jews and the Muslims in avarice, hypocrisy, violence and sheer unmitigated badness. Monks and nuns are depicted as engaging in unrelenting orgies of sexual depravity. Two friars behave in the most outrageous manner in order to try to entice Barabas into joining their orders, thereby gaining his wealth. The behavior of Malta’s Christian governor is certainly the most unprincipled of any of the characters, sparing no opportunity for the exercise of theft, murder and self-aggrandizement, especially at the expense of the Jews and Turks. When Barabas requires Christian mercy, though he has been continuously upbraided throughout the play for not showing any himself, he receives none, from either the Christians or the Turks.

In truth, none of the ethnic and religious groups depicted in Marlowe’s play behave any better than the others. All profess superior moral and religious values yet all display the same debased hypocrisy, violence, rage and greed. Marlowe appears at first to be launching into a familiar and despicable anti-Semitic screed, but by the end of the poem there is no doubt that what he is expressing is not so much anti-Semitism as cynicism and indeed misanthropy. Shakespeare’s play amounts to a defense of Christian values and culture against Jewish ones and, as I’ve argued, in fact has a distinctly anti-Semitic element although it is also a humanist and antiracist text. Marlowe’s play is simply cynical, misanthropic and deeply antireligious. He holds all cultures, civilizations and religious traditions in equal contempt and in that sense, I think it is perfectly impossible to describe the Jew of Malta as anti-Semitic. It’s anti-everything.

As I have been arguing with regard to Islamophobia, a generalized attack on religions and cultures — if not even on humanity itself — whether in the form of an analysis or a satire in my view should not be regarded as an instance of bigotry. Shakespeare’s play does, in fact, contain an assertion of Christian superiority at least in terms of ethics and values over those of the Jews. The best argument that can be made on behalf of Shylock is that he is a bad Jew rather than that he is bad because he is Jewish. But I think ultimately this case fails because the indictment of Shylock is such a perfect replication of the traditional Christian indictment of Judaism. Interestingly, the religion now indicted most frequently in the Christian world for excessive legalism, literalism, dogmatism, intolerance, lack of mercy and forgiveness, and irrational inflexibility is not Judaism but Islam. The most common Christian complaint about both Judaism and Islam is that they are religions of law that emphasize justice whereas Christianity is supposedly a religion of higher moral ethics that emphasizes mercy and forgiveness. It would be an understatement to say that history does not bear out any such claim as a practical consequence of these theological distinctions as Marlowe appears to have understood all too well.

One final observation on the contrapuntal reading of the two plays is that it absolutely crushes any notion that Marlowe actually wrote Shakespeare’s plays. This ridiculous idea, which actually has some currency (as does the equally ludicrous candidacy of the Earl of Oxford), amazingly enough has some supporters, and not all of them are fringe idiots. However, it strikes me as perfectly impossible that the person who wrote the Merchant is the same individual capable of writing the Jew. No question styles change over time, and early Shakespeare bears scant resemblance to mid and later Shakespeare in some ways, but personalities don’t change. Fundamental worldviews don’t change. The author of the Merchant, and all of Shakespeare’s plays, is plainly an idealist. He was an early humanist, a man in love with love, taken to task by those who thought only God should be truly loved in the medieval fashion. There is almost no aspect of human baseness, corruption and foulness that is not reflected in Shakespeare’s characters, so he’s no Pollyanna, but he is still an idealist at heart, and I don’t think this fails to come through in any of his plays, including the Merchant. This author loves humanity, for all its myriad faults, like his greatest tragic hero Othello, “not wisely but too well.”

Marlowe, on the other hand, is an arch-cynic, one of the great cynics of all time. He doesn’t seem to have believed in much of anything except the value of art, his own extraordinary talents (had Shakespeare died on the same day Marlowe did we would remember Marlowe as far greater an artist), having a good time, and the fundamental corruption of human existence. This sensibility — that everyone is worse than the next person — defines entirely the ethos and dramatic economy of the Jew of Malta. In the Merchant, at least some of Shakespeare’s characters are trying to be good, and the contrast I outlined above between his vision of superior Christian ethics versus supposedly inflexible and draconian Jewish ethics again points to some hope in virtue and “the quality of mercy.” In Marlowe’s play, the concept of mercy, the concept of human goodness, is a joke. Bottom line: these are two completely different authors with completely different sensibilities, completely different worldviews and completely different personalities. If it isn’t obvious from all the more direct and clear-cut facts that Shakespeare wrote his own plays, at least a comparison between these two masterpieces demonstrates there is no possibility they were penned by the same hand.

UPDATE:
Shortly after this posting went live, I was contacted by Seth Duerr who informs me that he is currently directing rotating repertory performances of both of these plays at the JCC of Manhattan, a perfect location. For more information see:

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This is a brilliant idea, and I shall be bitterly disappointed if I’m not able to make it before these performances close.

Pres. Obama probably had no choice at this stage of his presidency and under the present circumstances but to accede to the demands of his military commanders and commit tens of thousands of additional American troops to the Afghan war. It took him months longer to make the decision than it probably should have, and that’s because I think it is both strategically and politically almost impossible to decide what the wisest course of action would be. In the end, therefore, he decided to both maintain the logic of his presidential campaign in which he distinguished between stupid, unnecessary wars (Iraq) and unavoidable, essential wars (Afghanistan), and to avoid a public fight with the military. Moreover, the decision not to increase troop levels would have amounted to a decision to begin to withdraw from the country under the present circumstances, which, with a resurgent Taliban not only threatening Kabul but also rising in Pakistan as well, would have been strategically difficult to justify. But by putting an 18 month limit on the surge and implicitly promising to begin a generalized withdrawal in approximately 2 years, he has also tried to reassure those who feel the war is pointless, lost or fundamentally unwinnable.

As with the healthcare debate, neither the left nor the right could be satisfied by anything that is politically plausible, so Obama has again decided to split both sides against the middle. In the immediate term, it probably avoids the most significant political damage he would have suffered in yet another brutal battle with an increasingly incensed Republican minority and significant and powerful segments of his own cabinet and some leading Democrats. Whether it proves politically or strategically wise in the long run, seems almost impossible to accurately predict at this stage.

One thing is certain: “nation-building” and attempting to rule in Afghanistan is a fool’s errand. It is one of the greatest clichés involving international relations that Afghanistan is virtually ungovernable from within (this actually is probably not true, and there is quite a bit of historical precedent against such an assertion) and completely ungovernable from without (this, on the other hand, would certainly seem to be the case). At the very least, it can be said that Afghans have a habit of making it prohibitively costly for any outside power that tries to impose its direct rule on the country in general, and even local authorities seen as exerting too much heavy-handed control over regions that are disparate and fiercely independent. Therefore, insofar as Obama’s vision of the Afghan war involves nation-building on a grand scale, or long-term direct or proxy American rule of Afghanistan, it’s almost certainly bound to fail, and probably at considerable financial, human and strategic cost.

However, although his critics would accuse him of envisaging precisely such a scenario, the president has in fact left open the possibility of a very different path that is not inconsistent with this troop surge and the conditions he laid down in his speech last night. The president and his supporters can credibly argue that it is simply too dangerous for the United States under the present circumstances to leave the Afghan (or rather as it has become the Afghan/Pakistan) theater completely and that therefore a new level of intensification of efforts involving not only troops but additional efforts is required. He placed the emphasis on training the Afghan military, but there are very real questions as to the extent that a military based out of Kabul could rule all of that country directly and effectively after what it has gone through over the past three decades, especially if ethnic tensions persist. A great deal of what the President said probably can be dismissed as window dressing (complaints about corruption, etc.) on what is to all appearances a very dismal Afghan government. But his warnings about the dangers of the resurgence of Al Qaeda linked to the Taliban are extremely well-founded, and on that basis alone trying to do more in Afghanistan before leaving probably makes sense as opposed to simply drawing down and walking away (as we did twice in the recent past, both times to disastrous consequences).

Immediately after 9/11 most Americans agreed on the necessity of removing the Taliban government from power in Afghanistan and doing everything possible to make sure that Al Qaeda would no longer find safe haven there. To say that the mission has been bungled would be an understatement I think. The most dramatic miscalculation, obviously (and it was obvious at the time as well) was turning attention away from Afghanistan and, inexplicably, towards Iraq, which not only allowed the situation in Afghanistan (and ultimately Pakistan) to deteriorate disastrously, but also breathed new life into what was a moribund Al Qaeda movement. The fact that the Iraqis themselves in the end decided collectively and virtually unanimously that Al Qaeda had to go was more a product of the extremists’ own lunacy and barbarity than any strategic success on the American part (of course, paying the former insurgents of the so-called “awakening” certainly helped accomplish this goal, although it also helps set the stage for a much more dramatic potential Iraqi civil war in the future – but that is another matter.)

The Afghan war has also been bungled not only by relative neglect, and the embracing of an incredibly corrupt and incompetent Kabul government, but also a failure to appreciate both what is possible and impossible in that country. The fact that the conflict is driven at least as much by ethnic tensions and parochial political interests than it is by ideology seems to have escaped American planning until now. The same problem applies in Pakistan. What you’re looking at is the convergence of ethnic civil conflict and tensions and parochial power interests with ideological fanaticism and transnational terrorism. It’s a combustible mix, and I can understand why Obama wouldn’t want to leave things the way they unacceptably are.

The problem is, historical experience and practical logic suggest that there is only one effective solution to this combustible mixture, and it’s not the creation of a well functioning, harmonious, integrated and reliably pro-western Afghan state. Even if such a goal were achievable by outsiders under the present circumstances, which I highly doubt, it would almost certainly not be worth the cost, and the American public would undoubtedly decline to pay it in blood and treasure. Even more limited long-term counterinsurgency is incredibly costly, bloody and time-consuming, and I doubt the American public has the will or the wallet to countenance the decades of counterinsurgency designed to suppress the Taliban.

What could possibly work, however, is to decouple the two sides of this equation that make it intolerable to the outside world. In other words, accept that the ethnic divisions and even conflicts in Afghanistan (and possibly even northern Pakistan) are simply not a vital strategic interest to the United States, and that local parochial and regional proxy interests are best left to their own devices as long as they genuinely remain local and not the tools of those wishing to overthrow national governments or engage in transnational terrorism.

The traditional arrangement by both central governments and colonial powers in places like southern Afghanistan and northwest Pakistan has been simple: you over there, doing what you want, us over here with you leaving us alone. This kind of understanding is, conceivably, recuperable in both of those places in the foreseeable future. For the moment, the problem is that there are too many ideological fanatics interwoven into the various movements, especially both the Afghan and Pakistan versions of the Taliban, who are unwilling to accept the idea that they may do as they wish in their own areas as long as they do not try to destabilize the central governments, expand the territory under their control in an unreasonable manner, or, most importantly, collude with transnational terrorist groups like Al Qaeda. If there is to be a “success” for the United States in Afghanistan and for Islamabad in its northern provinces, it’s going to have to be based on distinguishing between those willing to accept the old arrangement of radical autonomy in their own areas, possibly enhanced with financial incentives and other goodies, versus those whose designs extend towards the Afghan and Pakistani states generally and worse towards the broader world.

This decoupling, difficult though it might be, is not impossible by any means in my view and is going to have to be at the heart of American, Afghan government and Pakistani strategies in the next couple of years if they are to have any hope of success. The worst case scenario has been playing itself out in recent years: ideological fanaticism of an unacceptable variety, that can and must be contained if not obliterated, has managed to fuse itself with ethnic and parochial grievances that can be neither contained nor obliterated but which traditionally have been and can again be accommodated. Whatever Obama was telling the American public last night, whatever his generals are telling him, and whatever Richard Holbrook is telling everybody who will listen to him, in the back of their minds they had better understand this is the only realistic way forward.

I believe it is entirely possible to read this strategy into Obama’s speech last night, which emphasized denying Al Qaeda safe haven and thwarting Taliban ability to overthrow the Afghan and Pakistani governments. But I would hasten to add this can only be achieved by the decoupling I described, as the ethnic, local and parochial elements defining the Afghan civil war (and the incipient civil war in Pakistan as well) are not, in fact, going to go away. Neither will the persistent efforts of all regional powers to use proxies to project their own interests into Afghanistan (it is this imperative that prompted Pakistan to counterintuitively continue to support the Taliban in Afghanistan as its proxy there, while feeling deeply threatened by any Taliban activity inside Pakistan itself, ending up producing a nascent civil conflict threatening Islamabad).

All of this ethnic, parochial, local and regional infighting in Afghanistan is going to go forward, no matter what, and trying to stop it is pointless. But it could go forward without the extreme ideology and transnational terrorism that are the source of genuine, serious international concern. Any efforts at troop surge, counterinsurgency, nation-building, winning hearts and minds or whatever else you want to call it that are not ultimately aimed at affecting this decoupling and making a deal with those who are willing to accept the old formula of you over there and us over here, against those who are not willing to accept this arrangement, will be worse than a waste of time.

I believe there is a potential for a measure of what one might call “success,” as I have defined it, if everybody is clear about what is necessary and achievable, as opposed to what is unnecessary, unachievable, prohibitively costly, counterproductive and possibly even disastrous. The elements of it were reflected in the President’s speech last night, but so were many other less worthy ideas that I can only hope are window dressing for a sober, limited and focused campaign to restore the old arrangement of you over there and us over here. That, and only that, could actually work.

Hussein Agha and Robert Malley have produced another in a long series of articles for the New York Review of Books on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and this one is essentially a follow-up to a very controversial New York Times op-ed they published this summer which many people took to be an endorsement of a one-state agenda. Malley in particular spent a great deal of effort trying to clarify that this was not, in fact, what they were saying at all, and that they continue to believe, along with almost all other serious observers, that the only possible peaceful arrangement would be a two-state negotiated agreement. In the New York Review of Books, they are careful to point out that a one-state agenda is "politically fanciful," since "it fails the elemental test of any proposed solution, which is to fulfill both sides’ basic needs." They also dismiss the notion that the status quo is tenable and manageable, although it is the kind of one-state arrangement, but they agree that it cannot possibly be maintained in any kind of sustainable manner.

In the New York Times, they were arguing that the essential problem with the negotiating process as it has existed until now has been that it dealt with 1967 issues — borders, Jerusalem and ending the occupation — to the exclusion of the core issues of the problem, which they link to the war in 1948. In their new article, according to Agha and Malley, the central questions defining the conflict and precluding a resolution of it are the Israeli refusal to deal with the dispossession and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in 1948 and the Palestinian refusal to accept the legitimacy of a Jewish right to national statehood in Palestine:
It promises to close a conflict that began in 1948, perhaps earlier, yet virtually everything it worries about sprang from the 1967 war. Ending Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories is essential and the conflict will persist until this is addressed. But its roots are far deeper: for Israelis, Palestinian denial of the Jewish state’s legitimacy; for Palestinians, Israel’s responsibility for their large-scale dispossession and dispersal that came with the state’s birth.

Like the other great critic of all existing ideas, Aaron David Miller, whose critiques are, if anything, even more biting and incisive, Agha and Malley are quite brilliant in anatomizing the malignancies that have rendered the "peace process" moribund and incapable of producing a solution. However, like Miller (and, I would add, almost everybody else), Agha and Malley fail to propose any serious alternative. To me this means that while their criticisms are interesting and occasionally brilliant, they’re also of no value at least in terms of policy. They don’t suggest any practical means for overcoming the problems they’ve identified. And, they don’t really propose any alternative method for correcting what is supposedly lacking. What are we to do with this, one asks. Answer came there none.

As they did in the New York Times, they now repeat the allegation that the peace process as it has been structured since Madrid has tried to deal with 1967 issues while avoiding the 1948 issues that actually define the conflict. I’m not sure this is entirely correct. True enough, the land for peace formula built into Security Council Resolution 242 which has defined every aspect of the peace process as it has developed over the past 20 years deals directly with 1967, framing the problem essentially as one of foreign military occupation, Arab hostility to and rejection of Israel, and the lack of statehood for Palestinians who live under Israeli rule without many basic human and no national rights. But I don’t think that that means that this process evades or elides issues springing from 1948 at all.

It’s true enough that Israel is not going to accept the mass return of millions of Palestinian refugees, and serious Palestinian negotiators have understood this from the beginning of the process. But I think it’s also true that no Palestinians are going to sign an agreement that allows Israel to avoid any sense of responsibility for the dispossession of the refugees. Every serious proposal I have heard linked to the peace process has involved some acknowledgment of Israeli responsibility, compensation for refugees, resettlement in Palestine or even in small numbers in Israel itself, and the creation of a state that can serve as a refuge, haven, advocate and representative of the refugees. Obviously, a two-state agreement is not resolve all the problems of the refugees, but it is also not going to ignore the refugees or fail to provide them with major benefits that they currently do not enjoy. I simply do not agree that the question of the refugees is somehow missing from the structure of negotiations built around 242. The various Oslo agreements, the Roadmap of the Quartet, and the terms of reference outlined by Pres. Barack Obama at his recent speech before the UN General Assembly all include the refugees as a core permanent status issue. To me it seems hard to imagine a mechanism for bringing the issue forward in a more proactive way, unless one is suggesting that Palestinians insist on the full implementation of the right of return as a fundamental condition for any agreement. Under such circumstances, we would never have an agreement and the occupation and the conflict would continue indefinitely.

I also think Agha and Malley are wrong in their assessment that the extant peace process doesn’t involve Palestinian recognition of Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish state. Obviously, Netanyahu’s latest bugaboo about Palestinians recognizing Israel’s Jewish character is a complete red herring. Israel, like all states, will and does define itself, and while most Jewish Israelis agree that Israel is a "Jewish state," there is very little consensus about what that means. Some people see it in religious terms, others as an ethnocracy involving the rule of a Jewish demographic majority, some see it in macro historical terms as the resurrection of some kind of ancient Hebraic kingdom, others as a "normal" ethno-national state along European lines, some as simply a state embodying their view of "Jewish values," and there are even those ultra-Orthodox who reject the entire project as a sin against the will of God pending the arrival of the Messiah. All of this is of direct concern only to the Palestinian minority in Israel which has every right to participate in helping to shape the definition of their own country.

As for the Palestinians generally in the occupied territories and living in exile as refugees or expatriates, this issue of the "Jewish character" of Israel is almost entirely beside the point. A two-state agreement means Palestinian recognition of Israel with the implicit understanding that Israel will define itself, just as Palestine will, and that both parties recognition of each other is not dependent on any agreement about the nature of each other’s states. A two-state agreement means precisely that in practice: Palestinian recognition of the reality, and hence the de facto legitimacy, of a Jewish Israeli state, however that is defined by its government and citizenry. As with the issue of the refugees, I don’t know of any way to bring this issue forward more decisively in the negotiating process without creating a situation in which the difficult negotiations are rendered utterly impossible. Palestinians are not going to become Zionists, any more than the Israelis are going to allow a mass return of millions of refugees to reverse the consequence of the 1948 war which was the establishment of a state with a substantial Jewish majority in a large part of Palestine.

Saying that these core issues need to be addressed fails to recognize first that they are being addressed through the process that exists (when it works, that is), or it least the process as it is structured to work, and second that any mechanism for re-emphasizing these essentially emotional issues at the expense of practical concerns such as the borders of a Palestinian state, the future of Jerusalem, the status of refugees, and both sides’ security requirements is likely to make a negotiated agreement less rather than more likely. Agha and Malley say that the process as it has been structured so far comes close to constituting something like a confidence trick, precisely because it supposedly avoids the core historical issues as they describe them.

They do not accept that a two state agreement would entail Palestinian recognition of a legitimate state of Israel that is free to define itself as "Jewish" whatever its citizenry believes that means. They do not acknowledge any of the obvious benefits short of the implementation of the right of return that such an agreement would, in fact, provide for the Palestinian refugees, most drastically the potential rescue (and I use that word advisedly) of the refugees in Lebanon who live under unconscionable conditions that have in the past and could once again degenerate into a matter of life and death. I simply think it’s false that 60 years of struggle on the part of the refugees would be, as they claim, "in vain" in the event of a two-state agreement, even though it’s almost certainly true that the ethnic cleansing in 1948 cannot as a practical matter be reversed.

Agha and Malley are, however, probably right when they describe the current negotiating structure and positions as a straitjacket in which both sides are locked into irreconcilable positions. From this they conclude:
As currently defined and negotiated, a conflict-ending settlement is practically unachievable; even if signed it will not be implemented and even if implemented it will not be sustained. Against this background, the idea of a long-term interim arrangement acquires some logic.

The problem is that any such arrangement will in fact constitute a continuation of the occupation. Israelis might be willing to go along with such an approach, but for Palestinians it would undoubtedly suggest an interim that would almost certainly turn into a permanent situation in which their human and national rights would remain unrealized for the foreseeable future, as the authors themselves acknowledge. It seems extremely difficult to imagine a long-term interim arrangement not creating the backdrop for another explosion of violence in the foreseeable future

They also consider the "Jordanian" option, but they do not, I feel, fully appreciate the absolutism with which the Jordanian government would, under almost any imaginable circumstances, oppose any formal ties to the West Bank as a matter of almost existential national security. Any form of this idea fails their absolutely correct dictum laid down at the outset of their article that "the elemental test of any proposed solution… is to fulfill both sides’ basic needs." Bringing Jordan into the picture in this manner would most certainly fail to meet its basic needs, whatever attraction it may have for Israel and possibly even the Palestinians

What Agha and Malley are really arguing for is some method of bringing the core grievances — Palestinian refusal to accept the legitimacy of a Jewish Israeli state and Israel’s refusal to acknowledge and take responsibility for the dispossession of the Palestinian refugees — to the forefront of negotiations. They don’t actually describe how this would be done or what it would precisely accomplish, but they do suggest that establishing Palestinian formal acceptance of a Jewish Israeli state (which I would argue has already been accomplished in 1988 politically if not emotionally) and Israeli formal acceptance of the tragedy that befell the Palestinians in 1948 would then set the basis for a return to the negotiations as they are now about security, borders, refugees and Jerusalem. I fail to see the potential benefits from such an approach. Not only would it bring to the forefront the most difficult emotional issues, these rhetorical gestures are unlikely to accomplish anything.

Palestinian acceptance of Israel, formally through the PLO, has been on the table for 20 years. It doesn’t seem to have changed anything in the Israeli psyche. Similarly, I very much doubt that an Israeli acknowledgment of at least partial responsibility for the tragedy of the refugees would really be an equation changing development either. The occupation would still be in place, refugees would not be returning, nothing practical would change, and I find it very questionable that some kind of transformative emotional catharsis would be the result. They argue that such an approach would be "fresh," and that’s certainly true, but that’s not much of an argument in its favor. Both of these issues are, in fact, already on the table. Rearranging things to bring them to the fore and to bank on securing reciprocal rhetorical gestures acknowledging each other’s pain and fears would be not only very difficult to achieve if everything else is still in place unchanged, there isn’t any reason really to suspect that it would then allow all these other issues to be more easily resolved. And, they do not consider the consequences of the potential and possibly bitter failure of a round of negotiations focusing on these two emotional, rhetorical issues and what that would mean for any prospect of securing an agreement on substantive matters.

Agha and Malley reasonably complain that the Obama administration is following the same path previous administrations have in pursuit of an agreement. There has certainly been a new level of energy and commitment, but it’s also true that no fresh ideas are on the table. And I don’t think they’ve really provided any either. But there is one new approach recently developed that is genuinely fresh, and potentially very effective in changing the equation and the strategic conditions between Israel and the Palestinians.

Agha and Malley are, I think, wrong in seeing the PA government state-building plan as an example of a long-term interim arrangement, lumping it in with a number of implausible ideas that are supposed to be a substitute for diplomacy designed to produce a permanent status agreement. In fact, the PA State building plan is not an interim arrangement at all but a unilateral, proactive agenda for developing the administrative, bureaucratic, institutional and economic framework for an independent Palestinian state in preparation for independence. This is a completely different approach than anything the Palestinians tried in the past, and although left to its own devices Israel would undoubtedly block any such moves, this interference can be greatly attenuated by Western and especially American political protection as well as technical and financial aid to the project.

It is essentially calling everyone’s bluff: you say you want a Palestinian state, negotiations are stalemated, therefore we will begin peacefully, constructively building the institutions of our future state in spite of the occupation. This is consistent with Palestinian, Arab, American, international and even Israeli stated policies about what the Palestinians should be doing. But they cannot accomplish this on their own, both because they need aid and technical assistance and because they need political protection from Israeli interference. All Americans interested in real, potentially transformative progress should be sparing no effort in rhetorically, politically and practically assiting it. It’s the only game-changer in sight and it’s extremely serious.

But it strikes me that anyone looking for a fresh approach and a new option for salvaging the moribund peace process, saving the prospect of a two state agreement, creating improvements on the ground that encourage hope rather than despair, and ultimately transforming the strategic context in which Israel and the Palestinians negotiate should take this state-building agenda very seriously. It is complementary and parallel to diplomacy and negotiations and provides an alternative path for forward progress and positive change in the face of diplomatic gridlock. The one or two lines that Agha and Malley devote to the plan and their erroneous identification of it as part of a group of interim arrangements I think shows a considerable lack of imagination on the part of two extremely intelligent people who are trying to think imaginatively about how to find a way forward in a seemingly foreclosed space. Agha and Malley seem to have concluded that practical measures are less important than emotional breakthroughs. Personally, I can’t see the justification for this approach.

I find the relative indifference of so many of the most intelligent American commentators on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to the PA government state building plan puzzling and slightly disturbing. If it’s true, as almost every sensible commentator seems to agree, that ultimately a Palestinian state is a sine qua non for Middle East peace, for goodness sake let us begin to create it in spite of the occupation and whether the Israelis like it or not.

The Egyptian state-run newspaper Al-Ahram, particularly its English-language weekly edition, seems to be on a determined campaign to corner the market on the most arrant nonsense printed in English in the Middle East. Most of its worst rubbish, significantly, is written by Westerners rather than Arabs or Muslims, and I have complained before that apparently in the minds of its editors this somehow makes these outrageous, pernicious articles more defensible and less objectionable. It does not. There is something very strange going on with that newspaper, as anyone who reads it on a regular basis will have readily recognized, and it’s extremely dangerous and disturbing.

The latest offering comes from someone called Stephen Lendman, whoever that is, who somehow convinced himself that it would be useful to claim that:

Post 9/11, America has declared war on Islam with the FBI in the lead at home. It notoriously targets the vulnerable, entraps them with paid informants, inflates bogus charges, spreads them maliciously through the media, then intimidates juries to convict and sentence innocent men and some women to long prison terms. Justice is nearly always denied. At times wilful killings are committed.

To bolster this preposterous allegation, Lendman cites the cases of Luqman Ameen Abdullah (aka Christopher Thomas) and Jamil Al-Amin (aka H. Rap Brown), both members of the so-called "Ummah," which the government describes as, "a group of mostly African-American converts to Islam, which seeks to establish a separate Sharia-law-governed state within the United States." This may or may not be an entirely accurate characterization of the rather strange religious sub-community in question, but it certainly indicates that we are not dealing here with anything remotely connected to the mainstream American Muslim community.

Abdullah was killed in a shootout with FBI agents on October 28, 2009 under circumstances that certainly need further investigation and clarification. Al-Amin was convicted of murdering a police officer, although he has many supporters who protest his innocence. There is no need whatsoever to go into the details of these cases or the merits of the claims on either side. The point is that these rather strident, alienated converts to Islam are anything but typical of the mainstream American Muslim community, and their relationship with the police does not in any way reflect the generalized attitude of the government or the FBI towards Muslim Americans. The article even approvingly quotes one of their supporters as stating, " The FBI is not only tricky and devious…. they are extremely dangerous thugs and murderers."

To take these two highly unusual and related cases and extrapolate from them that, as the Al-Ahram sub-headline emphasizes, "Post 9/11, America has declared war on Islam, as a disturbing recent case in Michigan shows," can only be described as an outrageous lie. The United States has NOT declared war on Islam post-9/11, least of all here at home in the United States. Of course there are significant challenges facing the American Muslim community, and I’ve written about them extensively in numerous reports, essays, speeches and book chapters. I doubt there’s any significant aspect of the problems facing the Arab and Muslim American communities of which I am not aware, which I have not commented on, and on which I have been inactive.

There are serious civil rights issues, however the government, particularly the civil rights division of the Justice Department and the FBI, have been quite conscientious about prosecuting hate crimes and discrimination against Muslim Americans by private parties. The deeper concern, of course, is questions of civil liberties. As I’ve written many times post-9/11 discrimination in immigration and immigration law enforcement has been a serious problem that we need to address. And, of course, Islamophobia in our popular culture and political discourse is a grievous ongoing challenge and I take a back seat to nobody in confronting it with as much energy as I can muster. However to establish and agree that there are very significant problems and challenges, as well as opportunities, facing Muslim Americans does not change the undeniable fact that the United States remains an excellent country for Muslims to live in. The problems are serious, but manageable and correctable. The opportunities, on the other hand, are unparalleled, and the privileges in many ways unmatched.

It is a common exaggeration — to which I always object — to describe the Arab and Muslim Americans as being "under siege." I have a good sense of what it would feel like to live in a community that is genuinely under siege, and if that ever happens, we’re all going to know it without a prompter. Hyperbole gets us nowhere and only makes the problem worse by confusing the issues, creating ill-advised tactics and ineffective strategies. But if it is an unhelpful exaggeration to describe Muslim Americans as being "under siege," saying that the United States has "declared war on Islam" can only be described as a damned, odious lie. Whatever the merits of the two cases in question, there is simply no argument to be made that the United States has "declared war on Islam" in any sense whatsoever.

I know nothing and care less about Mr. Lendman, but there is a real question to be asked about what the editors at Egypt’s state-run newspaper are hoping to achieve by printing this kind of outrageous rubbish. The two cases could easily have been critiqued without leaping to this sort of grand indictment of the United States as a country that is completely unjustified and utterly false. They must know that the only effect of this kind of rhetoric is to inflame readers in Egypt, the Arab world and internationally and to stoke the smoldering coals of alienation, anger and indeed hatred. What, after all, is the difference between citing incidents like this and claiming "America has declared war on Islam" versus citing violent incidents such as 9/11 or the Fort Hood tragedy and claiming, as so many hate-filled bigots do, "Islam has declared war on America?"

Obviously people who say things like "Islam has declared war in America" are malevolent deceivers attempting to spread fear and hatred and play on chauvinism and paranoia in order to promote conflict and exacerbate tensions. These are the believers in a "clash of civilizations," those who think they are either is or should be a generalized conflict between the Muslims of the world and the West led by the United States. But is it in any way possible to argue that Al-Ahram is not doing precisely the same thing in reverse by printing this kind of hate-speech against an entire country? What do they imagine the effect on their readers will be? And how could they possibly accept the notion that two incidents spread out over quite a long period of time involving a very small group of fringe and alienated converts somehow demonstrates that "America has declared war on Islam?"

This is shameful, and it’s also a pattern. It’s a pattern here in the United States in the right wing media (and sometimes on the left too), and all of us, myself included complain about it all the time, and we are right to do so. But it’s a pattern that’s growing in the Arab media as well, and as I said before the English language Arabic papers are hiding behind authors with Western names in order to try to get away with it. The editors of Al-Ahram must be asked: how dare you? How dare you print such nonsense? How dare you deliberately try to inflame fear, hatred and alienation? How dare you be so irresponsible?

And there is a further question for whoever it is in the Egyptian government who oversees the activities of this newspaper: what on earth do you think you’re trying to do? This systematic undermining of your own government policies through your own newspaper — and not only in this instance vis-à-vis relations with the United States, but with reportage from Palestine and Lebanon by "journalists" whose thinly-veiled perspectives not only contradict but condemn your own policies, and regular commentaries from former politicians and others who similarly and passionately make the case against everything you have decided is in your strategic interest — how can you possibly explain it?

Perhaps the thinking is that publishing a newspaper that stridently and often angrily contradicts your entire foreign policy on a regular basis can help offset any calls for a genuinely free press. If so, this is a poisonous policy. Perhaps the thinking is that it is useful to keep people riled up and angry, so that you can appear to be nobly and courageously persisting with your foreign and security policies in spite of the fact that they are unpopular (in large part because your own media in effect denounces them, and you never even try to explain them honestly to your public) and thereby get more credit with the international community, the West and the other Arab states. Perhaps the left hand simply doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, although I find that hard to believe even in the case of an Arab bureaucracy. Whatever the explanation, there is madness going on at Al-Ahram in almost every issue. Pure, unadulterated madness.

I recently complained rather bitterly, and with plenty of justification, about the Shakespeare Theater Company’s embarrassing, terrible performance of Ben Jonson’s classic The Alchemist. This negative evaluation was only intensified by the contrasting modernized performance of Much Ado About Nothing approaching the end of its run at the Folger Elizabethan theater (without question the most charming stage in our nation’s capital). While the Shakespeare Theater Company got just about everything wrong in its modernization of The Alchemist — effectively ruining Jonson’s masterpiece for cheap laughs and extravagant, irrational and often inexplicable costumes — the production at the Folger is a textbook example of how to get it right in modernizing and adapting the context in which Elizabethan theater can be effectively revivified with a contemporary feel without damaging in any way the integrity of the original and, indeed not only adding but recovering lost meanings to the play.

Timothy Douglas’ inspired decision to reset the action of the play from Messina to an unspecified Caribbean milieu quite literally puts the Carnival in the carnivalesque of one of Shakespeare’s most freewheeling, giddy comedies. The main atmosphere of the setting is Afro-Caribbean, but the multiracial cast calls to mind more the cosmopolitan immigrant neighborhoods of large US cities then the West Indies themselves (though they, too, are multi-racial societies of course). Not only does the Carnival atmosphere work perfectly with the script, the reggae and hip-hop influenced soundtrack is also surprisingly effective and the recasting of the singer Balthasar as a DJ is positively inspired. It may have been a fairly simple exercise, but it was a pretty brilliant gesture to perform his famous song from Act II, Scene III as a reggae/hip-hop rap:

Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,
Men were deceivers ever,
One foot in sea and one on shore,
To one thing constant never:
Then sigh not so, but let them go,
And be you blithe and bonny,
Converting all your sounds of woe
Into Hey nonny, nonny.

[You’ll simply have to imagine the backing chorus of three ladies chanting, "Hey nonny, nonny, Hey nonny, nonny, Haaayeeeeeeeee" in the contemporary hip-hop/soul manner, but trust me, it completed the effect hilariously and doing nothing less than justice to the original.]

The cast deserves enormous praise, particularly Doug Brown’s impeccable, dignified Leonato, Rachel Leslie’s delightful and deliciously feisty Red Stripe-swilling Beatrice, and Roxi Victorian’s well-calibrated vulnerability as Hero. But the show-stealer clearly is Alex Perez as Constable Dogberry, one of the more challenging of Shakespeare’s clowns to perform effectively. Dogberry is a standard Shakespeare character, a low-born, officious and exceptionally foolish officer given to a stream of non sequiturs and malapropisms (think Elbow in Measure For Measure, and his immortal denunciation of "a notorious benefactor.") But Dogberry’s lines in and of themselves cannot carry the day as with some similar characters in some other Shakespeare plays. This character requires a performance of comic panache, and sufficient bravado and physical absurdism to fill out the relative weakness of some of his dialogue. When performed well, Dogberry is an immensely memorable character, but is otherwise forgettable at best. Perez, strutting, dancing around, gesticulating wildly and continuously resorting to his expandable metal pointer as an impotent symbol of empty authority, carries it off beautifully.

I began by referring to the recovery of meaning, and one of the most important aspects of recasting Much Ado in a Caribbean setting with many of the characters employing West Indian accents (to a greater or lesser degree), and even introducing some elements of demotic West Indian English (referring to "she" when standard forms of English would employ the word "her," for example) recaptures a crucial pun central to the title and the fundamental conceit of the play itself. The "nothing" in Much Ado has multiple meanings, some of which are obvious, but others less so.

It most obviously refers to the fact that Hero’s alleged infidelity is untrue, and that therefore the narrowly averted tragedy was based, literally, on nothing. Second, it refers to the comedy’s own triviality, an announcement at the start that what we are going to enjoy is a light soufflé of enjoyment rather than anything heavy and ponderous. Third, and this is perhaps less obvious now than it was during the Renaissance, nothing in this instance is also plainly a reference to "no thing," which is in both Elizabethan and Freudian terms, a reference to the vagina as signified by absence (the whole play, of course, is about romance and coupling).

A fourth, and largely lost — but in this production I think marvelously recovered — meaning, of the "nothing" in the title comes from the homonym that existed in many parts of England during Shakespeare’s time between the words "nothing" and "noting." In a sense, the play is much ado about noting, since it is a comedy of misrecognition, misapprehension and false impressions. The Caribbean setting and the West Indian accents restore this homonym: i.e., in much West Indian English, "there’s nothing going on over there," would be phonetically indistinguishable from "there is noting going on over there." The new setting therefore restores a sense that what we are watching is much ado about noting, a comedy about the interplay between recognition and misrecognition, apprehension and misapprehension.

Finally, this recovery of the original homonym adds a fifth dimension to the play on words built into the title of Much Ado, that noting also refers to music and musical notes, which play such a strong role in the play (especially in this production). When Don Pedro, tried of wooing Hero on Claudio’s behalf demands a song as a form of relief, Balthasar at first demures:

Don Pedro: Now, pray thee, come;
Or, if thou wilt hold longer argument,
Do it in notes.

Balthasar: Note this before my notes;
There’s not a note of mine that’s worth the noting.

Don Pedro: Why, these are very crotchets that he speaks;
Note, notes, forsooth, and nothing

It is at this point that Balthasar launches into his legendary, "Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more" performance ["Hey nonny, nonny, Hey nonny, nonny, Haaayeeeeeeeee"].

Don Pedro has it: "Note, notes, forsooth, and nothing," are the puns at the heart of the conceit in Much Ado and already announced in its title: perception, misapprehension, music, sexuality, and the lightness of a carnivalesque in place of an incipient tragedy. Everyone involved in the Shakespeare Theater Company’s lamentable massacre of The Alchemist should get their sorry behinds over to the Folger before the final performance of Much Ado this Sunday and learn how it’s done.