It finally had to happen, after several abortive efforts. A high-level US-Israel diplomatic lovefest occurred at the White House between Pres. Obama and PM Netanyahu on Tuesday. As both governments had a strong vested interest in making the event successful, it was all smiles, firm handshakes and affirmations of undying friendship. The word of the day was “excellent,” a term repeated ad nauseum by both leaders. In order to ac-centuate the positive, so to speak, the public press event the two held emphasized all the matters on which the countries are in strong agreement: US support for Israel’s military qualitative edge over regional rivals and overall security commitment, new and significant sanctions against Iran, tacit US support for Israel’s nuclear program, and ever deepening defense and intelligence ties. So far, so good.

Beneath the shimmering veneer of warmth and bonhomie, however, still lurked the issues that have caused so much difficulty between the two countries in recent months, mainly having to do with the peace process. I got a great deal of attention from my comment on Russia Today TV on Tuesday when I called the settlement issue a “timebomb” lurking for both US-Israel relations and for diplomacy generally because of the expiration of the partial, temporary and one might even go so far as to say fraudulent, settlement moratorium. Neither leader directly mentioned the moratorium or the issue of settlements directly, but they were asked about the expiration date and while Pres. Obama was fairly vague, he made it quite clear that he expects the current levels of what he called “restraint” in building in the occupied territories to continue past September. In other words, since the moratorium is really such a fraud in its own way, he’s suggesting that it doesn’t matter how you package it, the United States just doesn’t want to hear about large-scale building projects, especially in Jerusalem, and above all in Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem.

We really do not know much about the substance of the private meeting or the extent to which it focused on these divisive issues as opposed to the feel-good rhetoric of the presser. But it seems difficult to imagine that Obama did not impress upon Netanyahu the importance United States places on restraining settlement activity. He needn’t have said so directly, but obviously since we’ve had three crises over settlement activity in Jerusalem since November, and no major change of policy from either country, another crisis could erupt at any moment to the detriment of both. There were clear hints during the public presentation of what Obama extracted from Netanyahu, including his praise of the state and institution building program, naming not only Pres. Abbas but Prime Minister Fayyad as well, and clearly stating the need for the zone of authority for the Palestinian security forces and other administrative control in the West Bank to spread. Both men, especially Netanyahu, repeatedly referred to practical confidence building measures to be put on the ground “within weeks,” which is very difficult to read outside of the context of Obama’s reference to the state and institution building program. In other words, it very much looks like Obama asked Netanyahu to cooperate with and facilitate state building in the West Bank, and that he seems to have agreed.

However, this brings us to the most obvious and noteworthy dissonance in the rhetoric of the two leaders who were doing their best to achieve resonance and harmony. President Obama confirmed, for the umpteenth time, that a peace agreement based on the creation of a Palestinian state is a vital American national interest. Prime Minister Netanyahu made no mention of the two state agreement, although he did talk in terms of peace. One might argue that since peace really can’t mean anything else to any rational person, he must’ve also been talking about a two state solution. One certainly hopes so. It is also noteworthy that Pres. Obama emphasized that following their conversation he was reassured that Prime Minister Netanyahu is genuinely serious about pursuing a negotiated peace agreement with the Palestinians. This could be read in two separate ways: either he was skeptical about Netanyahu’s intentions but has actually been reassured by whatever they discussed, or he is still skeptical about them but decided to make a point of the issue in order to lock Netanyahu into whatever assurances he had provided. Certainly, these are hardly the comments one would make with regard to someone whom one personally, and the world generally, regards as firmly and obviously committed to a negotiated peace agreement.

The clear difference in emphasis on this goal between the two leaders indicates a real gap in the extent to which each government believes this is possible or desirable. For the United States, this is not optional, and the foreign policy and military establishment believes that it is essential to ensuring the success of many other policy goals around the region including with regard to Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, among other challenges. Israeli society is, at best, badly divided on the subject. This, of course, is the Leviathan lurking beneath the babbling brook of goodwill at this week’s meeting.

Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren was recently in a flap over whether or not he had said there was a “tectonic rift” between the United States and Israel. I’m sure he didn’t say that, because obviously there is no rift, tectonic or otherwise. However, his clarification that what he had actually said was that there has been a “tectonic shift” at work makes perfect sense. Indeed it’s true, as I’ve argued many times in the past on the Ibishblog, that the context of the US-Israel relationship has changed, and a tectonic shift is a rather apt way of putting it. To recapitulate, in the past, US-Israeli relations have almost always been based primarily on the bilateral “special relationship” of American commitment to Israeli security, or even more problematically on US domestic politics and the wide coalition of forces that encourage maximal support for all Israeli policies. Because of the new understanding of Middle Eastern regional strategic dynamics inspired by the situations in Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, among others, Washington now sees the region as much more powerfully interconnected and interdependent, and Israel’s policies, like all other regional actors, are now also seen in these broader strategic terms. Therefore a third element has been added, one in which the United States views an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement and an end to the occupation as a vital strategic national security priority for this country. This is new, and it’s clear that Netanyahu and his colleagues, and Israeli society in general, are struggling to come to terms with this.

Obviously peace will require major American pressure on Israel, the Palestinians, the Arabs and others since left to their own devices, these parties are not capable of resolving their differences. And, because it is a vital American interest, it is a role and responsibility United States can neither avoid nor outsource. Therefore, many people who understand this were disappointed with the lovefest atmosphere of this week’s meeting and the relative lack of pressure that appears, at least in public, to be placed on Israel. I think this is a simplistic misreading of what is required diplomatically for the United States to move the ball forward. In my last blog posting, I explained how successful the recent Palestinian trip to Washington was, and how strong an understanding had been developed between Abbas and Obama on the most fundamental issues. That the United States is now on good terms and has some relative understandings with both the Palestinians and Israel at the same time cannot be a bad thing from the point of view of promoting peace and negotiations. A further public quarrel at this point probably wouldn’t have served any constructive purpose, and I think in general it’s fair to say that a scared and isolated Israel is less likely to be forthcoming than one which feels confident. Of course, there is always overconfidence and indeed arrogance, which we have seen plenty of in the past. However, I think the Obama administration has made its point on that issue quite clear during the Biden fiasco and, even worse, Netanyahu’s disastrous first visit to Washington earlier this year. It was time to kiss and make up, and that’s not a blow to prospects for peace.

What’s important is to keep the ball moving. Both men agreed that direct negotiations are important and may be imminent. The Palestinians clearly explained their requirements to Pres. Obama last month, and met with a positive American response. Therefore, one can only conclude that the administration has found a way, or believes it is about to find a way, of reconciling the Israeli and Palestinian understandings of what direct negotiations should constitute. But, as everyone knows, given the relative weaknesses of the governments involved and their great differences on final status issues, any major breakthrough in the coming months is unlikely, even though a return to formal and direct talks will be an achievement in itself. In the meanwhile, the real action is more likely to be on the ground in the West Bank centered around the state and institution building program. The fact that Pres. Obama specifically mentioned the need for it to move forward and operate in ever greater areas of the West Bank is highly significant, and so too, I hope, is Prime Minister Netanyahu’s pledge of “confidence building measures” to be in place “within weeks.”

This isn’t going to be easy, quick or painless. It’s going to require all parties to swallow large bags full of bitter pills. But the historic task facing the current leaderships of all the parties, and our generation in general, is to somehow find a way of making the two state solution work and thereby avoid the rise of a cataclysmic holy war. The Leviathan lurking underneath the ultimate failure to develop a two state peace agreement over the next 10 years or so is far more terrifying and more dangerous than the relatively puny leviathan-ete of ongoing US-Israeli disputes slithering beneath the surface of this week’s feel-good theatrics. It’s good for friends to be friends. It’s good for friends to be friends again. But the only point in being friends is to help each other to avoid calamities and disasters, and this can only be done by achieving a two state agreement.

This week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his entourage will be visiting Washington and meeting with Pres. Obama tomorrow, but it all comes very much in the context of last month’s highly successful trip by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and an entourage of PLO leaders, the centerpiece of which was a meeting on June 9 with Obama in the White House. The logic of the Abbas visit, which had originally been scheduled to follow one week after a similar meeting between Obama and Netanyahu, originally seemed lost due to Netanyahu’s cancelation of his meeting. He returned to Israel from Canada, rather than continuing on the United States, as scheduled, probably to avoid causing yet another embarrassment to Obama, given the Gaza flotilla attack. Theoretically, no one would have scheduled a meeting between Obama and Abbas before the aborted Netanyahu meeting, but neither party had any grounds or reasons to postpone it, so the Palestinians came as scheduled. As it turns out, the visit could hardly have been more successful under existing circumstances and proved to be an impressive surprise. More importantly, it has raised a significant set of challenges for the Israeli prime minister as he prepares for his delayed appearance.

The most important aspect of the Palestinian visit was the striking demonstration of Palestinian forthcomingness on peace, especially from Abbas personally. Crucially, when the PLO came under fairly heavy pressure from predictable quarters not to return to proximity talks after the flotilla attack, it firmly pointed out that while it condemned Israel’s actions, no purpose would be served by bowing out of the American-brokered talks. The two issues were separate and not connected, they pointed out, and could have added that refusing to continue with diplomacy on final status issues would actually reward rather than punish Israel and pointlessly damage the Palestinian national interest. The wisdom of this decision became clear during the visit, which would not even have taken place if Palestinians walked away from the talks or put them on hold.

What the Palestinians were able to do, for the first time in many years, arguably since the late 1990s, was position themselves as a real diplomatic and political partner in peace to the US administration, something the present Israeli government has most certainly failed to do. The Americans and Palestinians found themselves in broad agreement on the most pressing points. They agreed that a way has to be found to relive the suffering of the people of Gaza without strengthening Hamas and that breaking down the commonality of interests between Gazans and their rulers is crucial. On vexed question of negotiations, it was expected that the Palestinians were going to be harangued with a mantra of returning to direct talks as soon as possible and without conditions. The Palestinian position was unusually serviceable: they told the Americans that while they are all in favor of direct talks, the proximity talks should yield some progress of some kind first to demonstrate that there is, in fact, a point to negotiating with this Israeli government. The essential point they were making, and that was accepted by the administration, is that direct talks are desirable and important, but that more diplomatic and political groundwork is needed before they can successfully be launched. The Palestinian suggestion to the Americans is that they work out with Israel what, exactly, is going to be tackled in the early stages of direct talks, and that when the US is satisfied that the talks will have merit and substance and can explain how to the Palestinians, they will agree to resume direct negotiations. It has also helped that while the Israelis have been insisting that the proximity talks focus on procedural issues and water, Palestinians have been pushing the issues of borders and security, which is an agenda that is very compatible with the White House approach. In other words, the Palestinians came with a reasonable and constructive position and proved themselves serious, thoughtful and, from the administration’s point of view most importantly, helpful.

This helpfulness is rooted in the sense of a party that is willing to take risks and even political hits in a common agenda. During the fall, and again in the spring, when the Obama administration had two confrontations with Israel over settlements, the first the question of a freeze and the second about continued building in occupied East Jerusalem, the Palestinians largely failed to take advantage of the tensions by giving the impression that they were creating complications of their own. There was no sense in the administration as it was feuding with Netanyahu that on the Palestinian side was a team that would and could run with the ball if it were passed to them, rather than taking it and going home, or sitting on the ground and sulking. This impression is deadly for Palestinian diplomacy, and more than any other factor it limits the extent to which a White House is likely to pressure Israel within the constraints of the American political dynamic. If they have confidence in the Palestinian response, they are much more likely to do so, as Netanyahu discovered in the 1990s. If they do not, then the whole point of such pressure is greatly reduced and they are therefore much less likely to risk it. We are not quite at that stage yet, but last week’s visit was the biggest step in that direction in a long time.

The positive developments were not limited to dealings with the administration. Abbas had a long and unprecedented dinner with 30 key Jewish American leaders and took spontaneous, candid and blunt questions for about an hour and a half. Much of what he said surprised and impressed the audience, especially his forthright acknowledgment of the deep Jewish as well as Palestinian historical ties and attachment to the lands of Israel and Palestine. Abbas’ only public appearance at the Brookings Institute was another uncharacteristically successful exercise in public diplomacy for the Palestinian president. The president began with a boilerplate speech in Arabic that was brief enough not to bore the audience, but soon settled into a Q&A session with the audience moderated by Brookings VP Martin Indyk. Abbas spoke in imperfect but perfectly intelligible English, and was relaxed, avuncular and extremely effective. At the event I was sitting next to an extremely experienced former American diplomat and Middle East expert who commented that he had never seen him perform so well, and I certainly agreed. The general mood at the end of the event was, ?why doesn’t he do more of these things?? In other words, both in style and substance his message was not only receivable but pleasantly surprising and indeed encouraging to a Washington audience. Abbas’ outreach to Jewish Americans was so successful that it prompted the Washington Institute on Near East Policy to issue a compendium of statements he had made during the trip to emphasize the new message the Palestinians were sending, and the extent to which it was being well received not only by the US government but also by many in the pro-Israel community as well.

In subsequent Palestinian diplomacy, Abbas and others have been emphasizing the borders and security issues, and the need for the United States to secure some clarification on Israel’s position on these matters in order for the stage to be set for purposive direct negotiations. Abbas took things a stage further with an unprecedented direct outreach to the Israeli public through a number of reporters gathered to ask him questions in which he emphasized his commitment to reaching a peaceful, two-state solution. Even among Israelis it’s becoming clear that the Palestinians have a goal, a vision and a strategy, even if they may not have the power to unilaterally achieve it. The problem for Netanyahu and his cabinet colleagues is that it is extremely difficult if not impossible to define what exactly they want, what their vision of the future might be, and what is their strategy to achieve it. Netanyahu himself says he is in favor of a two state agreement, but with so many conditions and caveats as to make this essentially meaningless or at least extremely dubious. Defense Minister Barak is all for it, but even he is weak on details. Foreign Minister Lieberman has categorically stated his disinterest and lack of faith in the negotiating process, and recently publicized his own completely preposterous ?plan? that essentially centered around the removal of large Arab population groupings in Israel. Others in the inner cabinet have dismissed the possibility of a Palestinian state ever emerging. This calculated ambiguity from the Prime Minister and his Cabinet in general only opens the door to speculation that in fact the majority in the present Israeli government believes a negotiated agreement is neither possible nor desirable and simply does not wish to say so directly so as not to further alienate the international community and, above all, the United States which regards such an agreement as a national security priority. Therefore, one of the most potent elements of the new Palestinian outreach has been to place a major onus on the Israeli prime minister to demonstrate that he really isn’t fundamentally opposed to a viable, reasonable two-state agreement and that he’s willing to take meaningful steps in that direction.

It is very likely that in their upcoming talks, Obama will be pressing Netanyahu on borders and security, terms of reference for direct negotiations which must be clarified for them to make any sense, and on the need to extend the partial, temporary settlement moratorium which is due to expire in the fall. In the last two months of 09 and the first few months of this year, until the flap over settlements in Jerusalem following the Biden visit to Israel, it was the Palestinians who were seen as the primary obstacle to diplomatic progress. Now the onus is most decidedly shifted to the Israelis, and Netanyahu had better not show up in Washington empty-handed, or with a message considered utterly inadequate by the administration, or he may find himself not only once again perceived as an obstacle, but with, most unusually, the Palestinians being perceived by the Americans as genuine and helpful political partners.

In other words, Netanyahu has some very difficult and important decisions to make in the run-up to this meeting, and the stakes are higher than anyone had anticipated. The partial American defense of Israel in the context of the Gaza flotilla attack certainly strengthens Obama’s hand with Netanyahu: it is impossible for the Israelis not to recognize that without American resistance to a broad-ranging international investigation into the bloody incident, Israel would’ve faced a virtually united international community insisting on a second Goldstone report, but with more teeth. Instead, Israel is conducting its own, thus far deeply flawed, investigations, but American pressure is allowing that to continue. Any sense that Israel is in a position to go it alone, snub the United States or act as if it were a superpower rather than the ally and client of a superpower has to have been most rudely disabused by this entire experience. Moreover, Netanyahu is not going to be able to triangulate between expectations from the White House based on American national security priorities on the one hand and the hard-line positions of most of his Cabinet colleagues on the other, as he rather skillfully did for a number of months. Those days are over. The bottom line is this: atypically adroit Palestinian diplomacy has placed Netanyahu in a position in which if he shows up at the White House tomorrow empty handed or without satisfactory answers to some of the blunt questions he is likely to receive, he may soon find himself reliving political experiences from the late 1990s (“Wye oh Wye, Delilah,” if you know what I mean) which he probably thought, and certainly hoped, could never recur.

In the first ever Ibishblog interview, I talk to Richard Byrne, author of the recently produced play Burn your Bookes about the 16th century alchemist Edward Kelly which was performed by the Taffety Punk Theater Company at the Capitol Hill Arts Workshop in Washington DC.

I: First of all, let me say congratulations on a really brilliant play, Burn your Bookes, and I want to just ask you the outset what exactly overall you were trying to communicate? Thematically, what’s the essence of your play, or does it defy a reduction like that?

B: It’s a play about knowing, and the costs of knowing to yourself and, more importantly, to others. Alchemy and the story of Edward Kelly was a good way to get into that topic because so many characters in it are obsessed with knowing and different kinds of knowing. We have John Dee, the great Renaissance polymath, who was one of Marlow’s models for Faustus, and very much so since Dee only began to engage in what he called ?angelic conversations? because he felt that he had exhausted human knowledge. And then you have Edward Kelly who, as we learn more about him…

I: Who could have been Jonson’s model for The Alchemist.

B: He was in some ways. In reputation, he was certainly the model. But Kelly clearly had some knowing and couldn’t properly capitalize on it.

I: The knowing you’re talking about here is proto-metallurgy?

B: Yes, and I think he was also very keen student of human nature.

I: Like any good grifter? A lot of what goes on in the play is other people being manipulated by Kelly: Dee, Dee’s wife, Kelly’s own wife, his stepdaughter and rival alchemists or other figures. Kelly is the central figure in your play because whatever he’s doing, it crucially involves manipulating other people.

B: Manipulating them to what end is really the question, and if you wanted to really reduce it, you’d say he was an entrepreneur. But his writings make it clear that he really did feel he was onto something real, that he had solved a lot of the riddles in the alchemical writings he had read and was attempting to communicate them somehow. That is where I think the theory that he was engaging in metallurgy under the cover of alchemy is convincing. It’s convincing because we know about what properties and duties he was given by the Emperor and nobles, many of which had to do with production in their mines.

I: He was sort of a minister of mining, 500 years ago version.

B: Yes, and almost every alchemist in that period who was a fake was eventually caught, and we know how and why they were busted. Kelly was never caught.

I: He died in debtors’ prison.

B: In those days you wouldn’t be just put in prison for being a fake alchemist, they did nasty stuff to some of the folks I read about.

I: Well, in the second act, which is I think in many ways the most perfect of the three and is brilliantly done, you’ve got Kelly having a conversation with two fellow alchemists, one, Muller, a self-avowed con man and fake, the other, Syrrus, a credulous and earnest fool. Kelly is kind of positioned triangularly between the two of them, as they are being hung up in cages literally to rot. That’s the kind of punishment you are talking about, I take it?

B: That was apparently a punishment that Rudolph meted out to some alchemists. The alchemists went on strike, and he made an example of them. I took his punishment for the striking alchemists and imposed them on the fakes, because execution wouldn’t have served my dramaturgical purposes.

I: To return to the first act for a second, Kelly is still the central figure but his principal target and victim isn’t his wife or Dee, it’s Dee’s wife. The intention of his manipulations is twofold: he wants to possess Dee’s wife, for whatever reason, and he’s also plotting to unseat and remove Dee and take his place in Bohemia. Your play does an interesting job of juxtaposing and pairing the kind of manipulation designed to betray his patron and virtually rape his wife with his actual proto-scientific stuff, so where does it fall in the realm of knowledge? There are at least two angles here: Kelly and Dee’s wife.

B: That’s a great question. The events concerning Act I are heavily documented, and I feel as a playwright the need to maintain a certain fidelity to the known facts. Kelly certainly adhered to the school of belief that predominated at that time, which held that to be a true alchemist, and if you wanted to bring forth fertility or health in other human beings, you have to be proven fertile yourself.

I: You had to have the power of essence.

B: So, much of Kelly’s desire to possess Dee’s wife is bound up with that.

I: He never had any children with his own wife?

B: These are the little cross currents of history. His actual wife, Joan Kelly, did have two children with her first husband, but the suggestion is that her second child was a difficult birth that left her subsequently barren and infertile. So Kelly was left, in my view, in a state of unknowing as to whether he was fertile or not. And when you read the angelic conversations and Dee’s private diaries much of the machinations of Kelly seem to be to prove himself fertile. He certainly didn’t want to kill Dee and marry his wife.

I: He was a scryer for Dee. Is there any reason to think that he was sincere, or was he simply manipulating him, or something in between?

B: There is a range of possibilities. The first possibility is that Edward Kelly could see angels in a glass.

I: Okay, let’s move right along from that one.

B: But there are a lot of people who believe that. Number two is that Kelly was somehow mentally ill and thought he saw things. When you read the angelic conversations he had you are struck by the amazing language and imagery, and it’s all coherent, not incoherent. So it tends to make me feel that it’s not really anything about mental illness. That leaves us with a third possibility, which was that Kelly knew exactly what he was doing and he was making up stuff as he was looking into the glass. And then there is a range within that, because he clearly wanted to stop. He didn’t want to be a scryer, because they’re often mentally ill but they had that weird quality of knowing. Nobody pays you to do that anymore. This was a big question for the actor playing Kelly. Daniel Flint was brilliant in the role. But my feeling is that even if Kelly was seeing what he wanted to see and was using those visions for his own purposes all along, over a five-six-year relationship, to live that kind of a lie in very close proximity with someone, who was one of the most brilliant people in the Renaissance, by the way, I would think that your version of what is reality starts to blur slightly. And ultimately I think that’s where I land. So I think he was very convinced of his own power to see or to create or to imaginatively inhabit this universe.

I: In a certain sense, if you do it for seven years to a very willing audience including yourself and all the other people around you, the difference between what you actually see and what you say you see ultimately would become almost meaningless.

B: Especially if you’re being rewarded for it. Let’s get back to Dee’s wife. During the production we had a lot of conversation about what was rape, what was consensual, not consensual, and what I was always trying to impress upon Marcus Kyd, the director, and the actors involved was that to my mind this is more sinister than a rape. This is two men, essentially, colluding to use one of their wives as a test tube.

I: Because Kelly wants to prove himself fertile in order to prove himself worthy as an alchemist, and Dee wants Kelly to impregnate his wife so that he can have a scryer on hand.

B: It becomes very much a transaction. I think some historical facts either speak to the abject helplessness of Jane Dee or to some sort of ambivalence because we don’t really know. The historical fact is that after this incident in 1588, Jane had this child and a few more children by Dee, so clearly the marriage didn’t end, and for the same reason that I was trying to signal to the audience that this is a very complicated situation and this isn’t a sort of ?no means no? modern sensibility of rape. There’s something very complicated going on here and in my view something very sinister.

I: You present it as quite evil and tragic, and almost devastating, it’s not overstated but it’s almost overwhelming.

B: This is the human cost of knowing. These are two men who are pursuing knowing to the destruction of a third-party.

I: What about her form of knowing? She doesn’t believe Kelly. So all of these people are running around pursuing knowledge, and everyone’s taken in to some extent, and the only one who isn’t taken in, in your play, is Dee’s wife, the ultimate victim.

B: That’s the essential tragedy of the first act. Knowing doesn’t save you.

I: Let’s talk about knowledge and the second act, because these sorts of imperfect versions of knowledge in the cages, the knowledge of how to con people but not well enough not to get caught, and knowledge of alchemy that is superficial enough to get you earnestly, credulously strung up in a cage. But then you’ve got Kelly, who is armed with a lamp and a staff as he is triangulated between the two, which give him the symbols of insight and action, so that is an encounter between three forms of knowing: two naïve kinds and one that avoids a certain kind of naïveté, or does it?

B: That’s the basic structure.

I: It has a wonderful geometry on stage.

B: When it was produced in the Prague Festival, the director had Kelly making a figure 8, an infinite loop, around each of the cages. In this production we were more interested in having Kelly interact with and take power over the other two. But there is also compensating knowledge in each. The con man knows enough to get away with it unless a certain kind of knowledge intervenes.

I: The knowledge of a better con man, Kelly, who exposed him.

B: And the fool who actually possesses the raw material, the tincture.

I: What is tincture?

B: There are two sorts of tincture. Alchemically, tincture is a combination of elements that are boiled in liquid. But by the late 16th century the definition of tincture had expanded. In earlier alchemical times, a red powder would never in and of itself have been tincture, which would have needed to have been reduced to some sort of an oil. In Kelly’s time, it could encompass almost anything that’s transformational, so the red tincture in this case is the powder that the earnest fool Syrrus has, and doesn’t know its power.

I: Did it have any power?

B: That’s an excellent question, at the essence of the whole Kelly/metallurgy theory, which was first proposed by Ivan Svitak, a Czech political philosopher who got caught up in the Prague Spring and ended up at UC Chico. He posited that what Kelly was actually doing was reprocessing waste from mines that hadn’t been thoroughly processed and was using mercury ? “red tincture” ? to do it. So in my universe the fool in the cage, Syrrus of Augsburg, is in possession of large quantities of mercury, which is very hard to come by, and he doesn’t know what to do with it, whereas in Kelly’s hands it could be used to make a lot of money.

I: Let’s talk about Syrrus’ form of knowing.

B: He knows just enough to get into real trouble. And the con man, Muller, knows enough to be a knight unless a superior knowledge intervenes. He’s learned a lot, but not quite enough.

I: Yes, because Kelly is responsible for both of their predicaments by exposing them. Before we leave the second act, I’d like you to talk about Kelly’s drunkenness. I’ve seen it four times, performed by the same actor, and each time it’s been played at a different level of drunkenness in that scene. He’s never sober, since it’s late night and he’s staggering home, and that’s built into the script. But I’ve seen it performed with him just tipsy enough to be obnoxious and also with him very drunk indeed.

B: That’s an acting choice. Daniel was never unfaithful to the logic of his own choice. His choice of degree of drunkenness was always calibrated to reach the end result I built into the second act which is that Kelly is empowered and knowledgeable. I think by the logic of the act, Kelly can’t be too drunk and my feeling is that Kelly comes there thinking, “by the end of the night I’m going to be in possession of a whole lot of tincture,” and I think that would lend him to a celebratory mood. And they’re both caged up and pose no threat to him. The question for an actor is, are you consistent with the inevitable draining away of inebriation to get to where you need to be at the end.

I: The third act is still about knowing. In this case Kelly appears only in flashbacks, only in the memory of his stepdaughter Westonia. And now we see Kelly in a new role, suddenly he is a doting stepfather, almost a model stepfather in a sense. Or is he?

B: I think it’s clear that Kelly sees a lot of his own intelligence in her, but the question is, is the kind of knowing he’s giving her not going to eventually make her very unsafe?

I: Because, again, it’s not enough. Like Muller and Syrrus she has some knowledge but not enough knowledge, and she has tincture.

B: Even with someone he clearly adores and clearly is mentoring at some level, he is still capable of manipulating them to his own ends, and in this case it’s hiding his tincture.

I: Would you we relate that to the title of your play, Burn your Bookes, which refers to a poem by Kelly which culminates with ?go burn your bookes, and come and learn of me,” suggesting that all existing knowledge other than what he possesses is useless and anyone who wants true knowledge must learn from him. He gives his stepdaughter knowledge, but not enough for agency. The agency she has is not a reflection of what Kelly has taught her, unless it’s a kind of linguistic facility. So, in a sense, it’s a very false promise.

B: It’s a very false promise for Muller as well. He is supposed to be learning from Kelly, but Kelly is only telling him just enough to get by. And you get that with Westonia, but you are dealing with a child or young teenager, so you really can’t explain that much detail to them.

I: He doesn’t tell her what they’re hiding is tincture, he just tells her it’s a powerful thing that isn’t for her and she must give it to some man.

B: And he doesn’t tell her even that until the very moment that he has to tell her so that the secret won’t get out. He tells her, but he doesn’t tell her. He gives her what we could consider a Renaissance version of a password to get into it. But I really did want to complicate that knowing for Westonia. What does she know, especially given that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, particularly so for her because it is a very physical danger that Kelly has put her in.

I: The danger comes from a spy who keeps breaking in and demanding tincture and information at knife point. Were there incidents like that in her life or is this a generalized metaphor for predators who wanted Kelly’s knowledge?

B: We don’t have a recorded moment of this kind of thing actually happening. But Act I was more difficult to write because there is such a mass of historical documentation, and with Act III, while there is much less of that, we are true to the general outline: she was a young woman trapped in Bohemia and writing poetry to the Emperor.

I: Are the poems you include genuine?

B: They are by her, and I translated them into rhymed couplets. She wrote in Latin, in traditional Latin blank verse. I wanted to do two things: I wanted to heighten the poetic language, because the play is already full of a lot of wordplay, so I wanted to make sure that the poetry was obviously such and that’s why used rhymed couplets. But it was easier to write Act III because while I had the general outline I was able to bring in a lot of other characters. I didn’t feel quite as hemmed in by the actual history, which there is a need to respect. For instance, Amadeus is a great play, but it’s totally unfair to the character of Salieri. This was basically a character assassination, and I didn’t want to do anything like that.

I: I’m glad to say I think that almost everyone knows that Amadeus is completely fictional, but maybe there may be some who don’t.

B: I think there are a lot of people who don’t.

I: Unfortunately, I guess you’re right. You know Shaffer didn’t come up with that on his own. It was a play by Pushkin originally, that got turned into something much better by him.

B: I’m not familiar that.

I: I mean it’s not entirely his fault. He took the conceit and turned it into something better, but it’s totally unfair. What about Westonia’s two suitors? You’ve got George of Silesia and Leo the lawyer, who she ended up marrying. The way you present them they seemed to me a couple of idiots.

B: I don’t think that they’re idiots. I think George is an aesthete, he’s fallen in love with her poetry, and hence with her. This is one of the great things about that doing a play with a company like Taffety Punk, which has a frame of reference that is very modern. A lot of them having been in punk rock bands, they all thought he was like the classic A&R guy from a record company. He’s very much a talent scout, but he’s very much in love with her. He sees himself very much mirrored in her. So I don’t think he’s an idiot, I think he’s young man who is infatuated and in a way that young men are when your sexual passion and your aesthetic passions are so intertwined as to be indistinguishable. And Leo I think very much views her as a singular personality and something attractive that he wants. He feels the path he’s chosen as a lawyer is somewhat more boring than his actual aspirations and by marrying someone who is on a more interesting path he is somehow filling a void. It’s more like an enzyme fitting operation. They are definitely young men who aren’t operating on the level of Kelly or Westonia.

I: She’s miles ahead of both of them, which is I guess what I meant. None of them seem to me to have anything you could call systems of knowing, or if they do it seems rudimentary. In the end of the play, alchemy dies, in a couple of ways. First, because she doesn’t know what to do with a tincture and doesn’t know how to interpret Kelly’s poems, and her new husband either isn’t interested or up to the task.

B: He doesn’t know.

I: So in that sense, the legacy dies. It ultimately proves to be infertile, it cannot pass it to the next generation. It is a barren legacy. The second way in which it dies is that she declares at the very end that they are forbidden by law to ever speak of alchemy, because the authorities have felt that it’s a criminal racket. So that means also that it’s dead not just within the milieu of Kelly’s family, but it’s dead socially because authorities have banned it. And thirdly, we are moving out of one system of knowledge, out of the medieval and Renaissance system of knowledge and structure of viewing the world as a collection of symbols that have to be interpreted mystically and metaphysically, into a world of testable reality, that is measurable and verifiable rather than interpreted. So all the background of the alchemical symbols on your set were rendered moot and meaningless, and the idea of interpreting these monads of the world becomes ridiculous as alchemy gives way to chemistry and metallurgy, and metaphysics to science.

B: I think you’ve hit all the major points about the end of the play. There are two other things though. To your second point about alchemy becoming socially unacceptable, I’d like to fast forward on that a little bit. Alchemy doesn’t really die out until the end of the 17th, early 18th century. Let’s think about the battering rams that discredit it. First of all, Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist as a satire, and just the overall sense that none of this stuff works.

I: But it’s not alchemy that gets overthrown, it’s the entire metaphysical worldview that gets overthrown by the scientific revolution in the 17th century.

B: And Kelly is one of the last of them. In the play he’s sort of moving away from it as well. Those are the books that you’re burning.

I: And what he’s offering his proto-metallurgy.

B: Exactly. I want to push that home a little more. If you think about the monad, that’s the journey of the play. The journey you’ve just talked about from a world where alchemy is considered something that makes perfect sense to one in which it is thrown out altogether. Remember we end with a candle being blown out.

I: And in your play the lighting of a candle is always the sign of a metaphysical process at work.

B: But the play begins with Dee describing to Dyer his hieroglyphic monad. What’s at the center of that? The earth, with the sun revolving around it. It’s a Ptolemaic model, not a Copernican model. So these are not dueling arcs, they are parallel arcs.

I: This is probably a question for the director, but I’m going to ask you anyway. The characters’ faces are painted with symbols and a lot of the people I went with were puzzled by this. Of course that added a punk feel to it and everything, but the sense I could make of it is the way it doubles back on what we’ve been talking about. Because you have the characters represented by these images painted on their faces, they are therefore in a sense readable in symbolic ways. At the end of the play when we’re no longer permitted to speak about alchemy, Westonia is wiping the painted symbols off of her face because we are no longer in a reality which is about symbolic interpretation, but are now in a reality that is measurable, testable and verifiable because we are in the middle of the scientific revolution.

B: Yes, and I was very much in favor of the face-painting. But it was also supposed to represent some of the interiority of some of the characters. I think we wanted to give audience more signposts. Especially Act I is a very dense piece that is asking a lot of the audience to follow. With Act I, everything has to go right to make it work. I think if you’re reading it, Act I is easy to make out. The question is, is everything working as well as it can on stage. I was amazed at how well it did end up working. But the writer here is taking some responsibility for clarity, and it’s something you learn as a playwright. Act I was by far the bit that took the most drafts, and in contrast Act II and Act III were a doddle to write. This is something you learn as a playwright to solve conceptually. The triptych element asks the audience to process a lot: three different views of Edward Kelly that inform against each other at some level. That’s not the easiest thing in the world.

I: I think people responded very well and you could have had at least another two weeks out of that run.

B: As a playwright I want to set the bar high for myself and for the audience.

I: Let’s talk a little bit about language. You play a lot of interesting games with the language in the play and some of it is quite subtle.

B: What I was aiming for was an active language that was going to evoke that period without replicating it, and certain characters like John Dee need to be a lot more in that realm. There are moments when I knew the audience wasn’t going to take in everything he was saying, but it was more important how he was saying it.

I: What’s next?

B: I had read Tacitus’ Annals but I had never read his Histories and last summer when I did, I got to this point very early when he mentions the fake Nero who showed up very shortly after Nero’s suicide, who looked like Nero, played the lyre, and raised an army of rabble, criminals and slaves. They caught up with him on an island and cut his head off and sent it on a tour of the empire, on which everyone said, “oh wow, he does look a lot like Nero.”

I: So the message was both this is what happens you if you do this and, by the way, doesn’t it really look like him so it’s not that surprising some of us were fooled?

B: Yes. So I’ve written a play about that called Nero Pseudo.

I: Not Pseudo Nero?

B: Pseudo Nero is the correct term, but I’m inverting it for reasons that will become apparent. And I’m starting to research and write a play about the original Luddites. It’s a lot of fun.

I: Very topical. We’ll be waiting with bated breath to see it. Thank you very much for joining me on the first Ibishblog interview.

It can’t, and it shouldn’t be, all Gaza flotilla all the time, and forcing a change of subject momentarily, an Ibishblog reader, somewhat out of the blue, poses the following question: "Muslims swear allegiance to the Koran and I read in one chapter about 13 statements instructing followers to kill, silence or destroy people who did not agree with Muslim teachings. Do you really think these people are peace loving and tolerant of others? Have you read the Koran?"

Obviously, this should be answered, since it’s representative of an entire and rather dangerous school of thought in our country today. First of all, whatever this individual thinks they know, it has led them deeply astray. Muslims do not swear allegiance to the Quran, whatever that might mean. In Islamic theology, the Quran is many things, most importantly, by supposedly being God’s literal words, it is above all the sole trace of the divine essence in the profane realm of creation (to be best compared in this sense to the role of the divine person of Jesus in Christianity, and not therefore to the Bible). One may swear allegiance, in a sense, to God, and really that is the essence of Islam (literally "submission," to the will of God) but not to the Quran which is not itself God, or an actor of any kind. The reader claims that because he read in the Quran some violent, intolerant passages that Muslims (or should I say, excuse me, “these people”) can therefore never be peace loving and tolerant of others. If that’s true, all the world’s religions are in deep trouble, and none of their followers could be assumed to be anything other than dangerous, because virtually all of the holy books I have ever glanced through have plenty of violence and intolerance in them.

Let me turn it around and ask the reader: have you read the Bible? Personally, and as an agnostic with no particular dog in this fight, I find the Quran to contain a great many passages with which I am uncomfortable for many different reasons, including some which are disturbingly violent, but I have to say it really can’t compete in this regard with the Bible. Prof. Philip Jenkins’ upcoming book, "Dark Passages," based on his 2004 Sunday Boston Globe article of the same name, I think will make this case most powerfully. This doesn’t mean that Christianity and Christians are more violent than Islam and Muslims, but it means that this whole discourse about religion and violence is not only based on logical fallacies, it’s based on false assumptions. I don’t know if people in the Christian West simply fail to carefully read their Bibles, or are in some cases incapable of reading them in the same way they read the Quran, as an outsider skeptically looking at each passage line by line, and outside of the context of the mainstream religious traditions through which they are interpreted. People in Christian societies understand that the extraordinarily violent, intolerant and draconian passages in the Bible, which are much more elaborate, baroque, far-reaching and lengthy than anything similar to be found in the Quran, don’t represent what Christians think of the world because they understand the traditions through which these passages are interpreted (If anybody wants to challenge me and force me to get into where you can find all of that juicy stuff in the Bible, go right ahead, but you’re wasting your time, since if you just pick it up and start reading from beginning you’ll get to it pretty darn quickly). Yet there seems to be an assumption that the Quran can, by contrast, simply be picked up and read like the New York Times, and that from its passages randomly strewn about here and there, the mindset of over 1 billion people and huge chunks of humanity across enormous sweeps of space and time can be deduced.

If the past 1500 years of world history is anything to judge by, neither Christian nor Muslim societies are in any position to take a superior attitude about being “peace loving” or “tolerant of other people.” Obviously you can find plenty of examples in societies, informed by both faiths, of people generally behaving well, and plenty of them generally behaving badly. An argument about which has generally behaved worse is absolutely pointless because so many people and peoples throughout human history, informed by any number of legitimating doctrines and religions, have taken it upon themselves to bully, abuse and slaughter others. There are no clean hands, and adopting an attitude of unjustifiable superiority in this regard, or, worse, giving into a chauvinistic and paranoid worldview (as many Islamists and western ultra right-wingers do), is intellectually and morally unjustifiable and politically dangerous. I think it’s very clear that religion has been a major, if not the major, source of violence throughout human history, but also a major source of tolerance and reconciliation, and that all religions have shown themselves capable of inspiring and legitimating both.

As I’ve argued many times in the past, people are people, and while cultures differ, the tendency towards violence, bigotry and oppression is universal. One can find more or less of it in any given society at any given time, but the general tendency is always there. The essential virtues and flaws of humanity are remarkably consistent across space and time, and in freer or more oppressive societies. Obviously if we apply this to governments, it’s much easier and more reasonable to make distinctions, but the reader has asked me about “these people,” based on the presumed religious beliefs of 1.25 billion human beings all over the world. So obviously, we’re not talking about governments, or even cultures. When talking about an identity category as large and diverse as that of “Muslim,” which in its broadest sense applies to about one fifth of humanity, it becomes very difficult to distinguish between the category Muslim and the category human. I mean that every element of human experience can be identified in some part or other of the Muslim experience. We are, after all, talking about people, and this is such a gigantic and heterogeneous group that, taken on its own, the category “Muslim” tells us virtually nothing more than the category “human.” So, do I really think that “these people are peace loving and tolerant of others?” Some of them are and some of them aren’t. And, the fact that they happen to be somewhere in the general category of “Muslims” doesn’t tell me anything at all that can help me guess whether they’re more or less likely to be peace loving and tolerant of others.

There is, of course, a cottage industry of bigots and holy warriors in the United States agitating furiously against Islam in an effort to denigrate, exclude and marginalize the Muslim Americans and make sure that they are subjected to the maximal possible discomfort and that their ability to establish a thriving, vibrant community in our country and other Western societies is thwarted. There are several reasons that motivate this desire to promote bigotry, including religious or cultural chauvinism; a sense of religious competition between Christianity and Islam; a genuinely phobic, hysterical pathology of raw, irrational fear; and a desire by certain right-wing supporters of Israel to prevent the empowerment of a community that could, over time, begin to shift the discourse on Middle East policy in the United States. I’m sure there are more, but these are some obvious motivations that are readily identifiable in the attitudes of some of the more famous Islamophobes (if anybody wants a more detailed breakdown of this, you’ll have to ask). The reader’s question strongly suggests that he is familiar with some of this discourse.

In the past, I’ve argued strongly that the best way to understand the structure, strategies and mechanisms of Islamophobia is to study the essential elements of anti-Semitic rhetoric, because the parallels between the two are uncanny and exact and because Americans are familiar with the ugliness and unfairness of anti-Semitism. Since it can easily be shown that Islamophobia is without doubt in most instances a virtually exact replication of anti-Semitism, this ought to prove a decisive platform for exposing and counteracting its pernicious effects. As it happens, last week, completely coincidentally, I was reading with amazement anti-Semitic tracts that attempted to demonstrate all kinds of evils about Judaism and the Jews based on tendentious and malicious quotation and interpretation from Jewish holy books. I refuse to link to any of them, because they are poisonous, but anyone who seeks them out online should unfortunately have no difficulty finding them. In fact, the Quran, the Bible, and certainly also the Talmud, contain passages that, if read literally, out of context and especially outside of the mainstream of both traditional and contemporary interpretation, could be seen as quite alarming. Indeed, in all three cases, especially in the past, their effects upon the "righteous true believers" have been alarming, and in some cases, at the moment especially among Muslim extremists, they continue to be. However, what these anti-Semitic polemical tracts attempt to do is to suggest that contemporary and mainstream Jews around the world have a mentality and mindset defined by the literal or maliciously interpreted meanings of these passages, mainstream Jewish understandings of them notwithstanding. This is precisely what many of the worst of the Islamophobes do to the Muslims.

A 2003 report from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), The Talmud in Anti-Semitic Polemics, explains how this process of selectively quoting from and misrepresenting Jewish scripture is being used by anti-Jewish bigots in their campaigns of defamation in exactly the same way in which Islamophobes use the Quran and Hadith to slander and systematically misrepresent Islam and Muslims. The report opens with this telling passage: Recently there has been a renewal of attacks on Judaism and Jews through recycling of old accusations and distortions about the Talmud. Anti-Talmud tracts were originally developed in the Middle Ages as Christian polemics against Judaism, but today they emanate from a variety of Christian, Moslem and secular sources. Sometimes such "studies" have blatantly anti-Semitic tones; sometimes they are more subtle. Yet all of them remain as false and pernicious today as they did in the Middle Ages.

Obviously, all it takes is a simple transposition of nouns to find in this a precise and exact description of the way in which Islamophobes like Robert Spencer, Andrew Bostom and the like go about casting Islam and Muslims in the worst possible light. As the ADL’s report points out, In distorting the normative meanings of rabbinic texts, anti-Talmud writers frequently remove passages from their textual and historical contexts. Even when they present their citations accurately, they judge the passages based on contemporary moral standards, ignoring the fact that the majority of these passages were composed close to two thousand years ago by people living in cultures radically different from our own. They are thus able to ignore Judaism’s long history of social progress and paint it instead as a primitive and parochial religion. Those who attack the Talmud frequently cite ancient rabbinic sources without noting subsequent developments in Jewish thought, and without making a good-faith effort to consult with contemporary Jewish authorities who can explain the role of these sources in normative Jewish thought and practice.

I don’t think there can be a better description of the methods used by contemporary American Islamophobes to defame Muslims, as exemplified in the dispute I had with Robert Spencer about whether or not the Quran calls Christians and Jews apes and swine, and whether or not therefore Muslims view their fellow monotheists in this light. The passage in the Quran in question does not contain the words Christians or Jews, and while both Islamophobes and Muslim extremists have interpreted it in this intolerant, mean-spirited manner it plainly requires an interpretive leap since it simply does not literally say anything of the kind. Moreover, it’s certainly and obviously not the case by any means that mainstream Islam or anything but a tiny fraction of Muslims in our era and historically have viewed Christians and Jews as apes and swine. The total disregard for both mainstream and traditional interpretations of Islamic doctrine by most Muslim scholars and commentators is the hallmark of the work of Spencer and his ilk, who present passages of scripture ripped from their context and traditional meaning as proof of Islam being violent, intolerant and bent on world domination. This is why, of course, their work garners absolutely no respect whatsoever from the qualified and trained academic and intellectual communities that actually study Islam, and can only appeal to the ignorant or the enraged. Unfortunately, that’s a significant constituency.

“Are the polemicists anti-Semites?” the ADL report asks, and answers, quite rightly, “by and large, yes” (they are clearly leaving themselves some wiggle room on the issue of Israel Shahak, who is cited in the report but is almost certainly not vulnerable to such an accusation). It cites as tell-tale signs of bigotry and malevolence, their systematic distortions of the ancient texts, always in the direction of portraying Judaism negatively, their lack of interest in good-faith efforts to understand contemporary Judaism from contemporary Jews, and their dismissal of any voices opposing their own, [which] suggests that their goal in reading ancient rabbinic literature is to produce the Frankenstein version of Judaism that they invariably claim to have uncovered.

In just this manner, Islamophobes dismiss what contemporary and mainstream Muslims say their faith means to them and systematically misrepresent the common understanding of complex ancient texts written in both a language and a style very foreign to the present-day American manner of expression. They too dismiss any voices other than their own, such as renowned academic experts on Islam, even non-Muslims scholars and experts, and denounce them as “apologists” and supporters of extremism. In these cases too, it is clear to any impartial observer that the goal is in no way a good-faith effort to examine honestly what Muslims believe but rather to create “the Frankenstein version of Islam.”

It will, of course, be objected that some extremist Muslims, such as Osama Bin Laden or many others of this radical ilk, do in fact preach an extreme version of Islam that in some cases does mirror the claims of Islamophobes like Spencer and others. This is not disputed. The question is not what fringe elements believe but what is mainstream. Similarly, there are in fact some Jewish extremists who do hold to readings of Jewish scripture and tradition that are similar to the claims made by anti-Semites to defame Judaism and Jews in general. Some extremists in the Israeli settler movement certainly qualify, such as Rabbi Yaacov Perrin who proclaimed that, "One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail" in his eulogy of the Jewish settler Baruch Goldstein, who conducted a massacre at the Ibrahimi Mosque (within the Cave of the Patriarchs) in Hebron killing 29 worshipers and wounding another 150 in 1994. Goldstein’s tombstone, at his shrine-like grave in the Israeli settlement of Kiryat Arba in Hebron, reads: “Here lies the saint, Dr. Baruch Kappel Goldstein, blessed be the memory of the righteous and holy man, may the Lord avenge his blood, who devoted his soul to the Jews, Jewish religion and Jewish land. His hands are innocent and his heart is pure. He was killed as a martyr of God on the 14th of Adar, Purim, in the year 5754 (1994).” Goldstein is buried at the "Meir Kahane Memorial Park," named in honor of the extremist Rabbi who advocated the ethnic cleansing of all non-Jews from historical Palestine and who was the leader of at least two organizations formally designated by the United States government as terrorist organizations. Goldstein, it should be noted, was one of his followers.

It is necessary and important to recognize that such political extremists exist among Jews and Muslims – and Christians, Hindus and others for that matter – who are happy to justify and rationalize their radical acts and opinions by performing eccentric, heterodox or anachronistic and atavistic readings of holy texts and traditions. The ADL report acknowledges that, “Judaism has had its share of bigots, racists and xenophobes, some of whom expressed their prejudices in religious terms.” Obviously no serious commentator can fail to recognize the undeniable phenomenon of extremist rhetoric and action among fanatical minorities of Muslims, not only historically, but certainly also in the present day. It is a critical problem that is currently confronting both Muslim and non-Muslim societies, and should not be trivialized or dismissed. The ugly side of holy books is almost always there and can be used by both external bashers and internal fanatics. But these radical ideas must be recognized as extreme views, which they almost always are, and not falsely posed as mainstream discourse or, worse still, characteristic of the attitudes of whole identity communities.

The parallels between the calumnies the ADL cites against Jews in anti-Semitic literature and those currently being promoting in contemporary American Islamophobia are striking indeed (all of the following in bold are direct quotes from the ADL report):

• “Jews are intent on subjugating non-Jews around the world and even on committing genocide against them” – this finds obvious and clear parallels in the constant refrain that Islam is bent on world conquest and the subjugation of all non-Muslims as “dhimmis” or worse, and in the frequent allegation that Islam has a genocidal attitude towards non-Muslims.

• “Jewish law enjoins or permits Jews to murder non-Jews whenever feasible” – one of the most familiar charges against Islam and Muslims is that “infidels” may or must be killed.

• “Jews are permitted to lie without moral or religious compunction” – Islamophobes frequently claim that Islam authorizes, permits or even encourages Muslims to deceive non-Muslims, as in the calumnies about taqiyyah I have written about in previous Ibishblog postings.

• “Judaism condones the sexual molestation of young girls” – obviously the charge of pedophilia against the Prophet Muhammad is closely echoed here, as are a whole slew of charges that Islam permits, mandates or does not forbid a wide range of sexual perversions and abuses. More on this from the Ibishblog will be forthcoming.

• “Judaism is ‘more of a crime syndicate than a religion.’" – in Islamophobic discourse, it is frequently alleged that Islam is “more of an extremist political movement” (recall statements to this effect by Ayaan Hirsi Ali cited In a recent Ibishblog post, for example) or some such bizarre formulation, than a religion.

I think I’ve made my point very clearly. Islamophobia is a barely warmed over, 20 seconds in the microwave, version of traditional anti-Semitism, and I’m sorry that the reader has fallen for it. If we were transported to the 1920s and 30s, I’m sure he’d be demanding to know if anyone really thought “those people” (the Jews) were really reasonable and decent given what they supposedly believe and what is supposedly in their holy books, etc. Can’t we ever learn our lesson?

To most of the world, this is a very simple story: elite Israeli counterterrorism commandos stormed an unarmed, civilian ship carrying aid supplies in international waters, in order to enforce a morally indefensible and politically counterproductive blockade, and as a consequence 10 civilians were killed and many others injured. The entire Israeli effort since these realities became known has been to try to complicate the picture and shift the responsibility for the bloodshed away from the military commandos who stormed the ship, or their commanders, and onto the passengers themselves. The effort is failing miserably, in many ways backfiring on itself. It’s worth looking at how and why this is all happening.

The first and most important element of its campaign has been Israel’s effort to create a media blackout. The first move against the ship was to try to shut down all communications and links to the outside world. Reports suggest that commandos prioritized dispossessing and even disabling journalists and photographers on board, reportedly tazering an Australian photographer, Kate Geraghty. Most of the detained activists have been held incommunicado, including many journalists who have not been allowed any contact with their home offices or publications. The names of the dead and any details about their injuries have been thus far suppressed. In short, Israel’s behavior looks exactly like what one would expect a guilty party to do if it felt it had not just something, but plenty, to hide.

Of course, Israel has been releasing information, but in a very fragmented and piecemeal manner, all of which has been designed to bolster its argument that its counterterrorism commandos were trying to storm the ship in a ?peaceful? manner and were savagely, brutally, viciously (all words dominating Israeli official discourse at the moment) set upon by a rioting mob of terrorists. In one of its more ham-handed gestures, Israel has displayed to the world’s press a photo op of a pile of random ship objects in a completely unconvincing effort to demonstrate how heavily armed and dangerous these passenger-activist-terrorists really were. To be sure, some of the video fragments released by Israel demonstrate there was a melee on board, and there is no doubt that Israeli soldiers have been injured, but they don’t demonstrate anything at all to establish a clear narrative. Because of the media blackout, the Israeli narrative is the only one we have, and it’s almost coherent except that nothing in it really explains how and when the melee with the unruly activists really began and how all of the carnage ensued. At the very least, there is a huge missing piece, and probably many missing pieces, to the picture, even if many, if not most, elements of the Israeli narrative are accurate. It doesn’t even begin to explain how a large, well armed and very powerful navy was unable to seize control of an unarmed civilian ship without killing and injuring so many people.

And then there are the contradictions. I had an hour-long debate with the Israeli consul general in Los Angeles, Jacob Dayan, yesterday and I was struck by the numerous logical contradictions in the narrative he was presenting. I almost felt sorry for him. On the one hand he was maintaining that the reason the situation got out of control was that the Israelis expected this to be a simple, peaceful operation (which is why, I guess, they sent in their elite counterterrorism forces), and were shocked by and unprepared for the alleged unprovoked eruption of violence by the activists. On the other hand, he insisted that Israel had no choice but to intercept the ship and do so in international waters long before it approached the Gaza port because the Turkish NGO involved is a group of well-known extremists and terrorists with strong links to Hamas and Islamic Jihad, if not Al Qaeda itself, and that they were well known to be extremely dangerous. Well, which is it? In defending one part of the narrative, Israeli officials are insisting they were taken completely by surprise and expected everything to be peaceful. In defending another part of the narrative, they insist they were well aware that the Turkish group was dangerous ?terrorists,? possibly smuggling weapons and who knows what, and that this was therefore obviously an act of war and aggression by the forces of Islamic jihadism. It’s pathetic.

In another miserable contradiction, echoing his boss Foreign Minister Lieberman, Jacob (who I actually like and respect, but who I think was in a completely impossible position) maintained that it was the clear and stated intention of the organizers to provoke a violent confrontation. I certainly agree, as I wrote in my last Ibishblog posting, that the flotilla was a provocation, but it was a political provocation, not a military provocation. Obviously a political provocation is to be dealt with politically, and not through a military action that results in 10 dead civilians and scores wounded. But more importantly, if as Lieberman said, it was obvious from the beginning that this group was “hoping for bloodshed,? why then did Israel decide the best thing would be to oblige them and go ahead and spill large quantities of blood? In other words, this allegation not only doesn’t help to explain Israel’s actions, it makes them much more puzzling. And, if this were the case, why weren’t these ?terrorists? armed with more than random items to be found on many a ship? If they came for a violent confrontation with Israeli military forces, they certainly came ill-prepared and the outcome strongly reflects that. The whole thing doesn’t add up, and that’s a charitable assessment.

So, even in the context of a media blackout in which Israel controls the overwhelming majority of hard evidence about what happened that is available to the public, its attempts to create a coherent and convincing narrative that explains what happened or starts to shift responsibility away from its decision to storm the ship is a complete failure. It’s likely to become an even greater failure as survivors begin to be released and make public statements and, especially, when the journalists that are being held are able to tell their stories. Those who have been released are strongly contradicting the Israeli version, and that’s likely to continue and intensify, especially since it’s clear that the Israeli narrative is at best tendentious and incomplete.

The coming days will also reveal a crucial, definitive reality: Israel has seized possession of almost all of the documentary evidence about the attack, especially the numerous media and recording devices in the possession of the activists. The few who have been set free have been released with their clothes and passports only. Obviously, there is a huge mountain of documentary evidence, especially from the activist side, that would clearly help to establish the facts. Israel has a few simple options: it can give people their property back so that the activists themselves can make use of their own documentary record, but obviously this is extremely unlikely; it can destroy the evidence, or selectively destroy it; it can suppress it and make limited and propagandistic use of it in a whitewashing and non-credible internal military/government investigation; or, finally, it can retain the evidence and provide it in good faith to either an international investigation or to a credible and independent Israeli investigation headed by respected jurists with subpoena powers and the ability to create consequences. Given the present attitude of the current Israeli government and what is suggested by its extremely suspicious behavior up to this point, I’m afraid I wouldn’t be surprised if it either destroyed or suppressed some, if not most, of this evidence. If it does so, it will be ensuring that the world’s worst suspicions will be considered confirmed forever by many, if not most, observers.

There is only one way out of all of this for the Israelis: a credible, serious independent investigation that has genuine integrity and lets the chips fall where they may. In the case of many countries, one would have reason to doubt their capacity to do such a thing. However, Israel has successfully done this in the past, most particularly the Kahane Commission Report into the massacres at Sabra and Shatila in 1982. The report was not perfect, but it was serious and credible and it had consequences. If the Israelis initiate a similar process regarding the flotilla attack, it could avoid much of the worst consequences that are likely to attach to this ghastly blunder over the long run. The question is, is Israel in 2010 capable of the same introspection it was in 1982? I don’t know the answer to that, but I am sure that if Israel does not launch such an investigation and tries to fob the world off with some kind of internal whitewash like the military’s own investigation of the Gaza war, for example, an international investigation similar to but in many ways exceeding and more significant than the Goldstone Report is inevitable. And then, the extremely negative consequences for Israel and for many other actors in the region will be virtually unavoidable.

Israel’s narrative of the flotilla attack is failing completely because it doesn’t make any sense, it doesn’t explain what happened, and it’s all taking place in the context of an information blackout. It couldn’t be less convincing. It’s adding insult to injury. It’s backfiring, big-time.

The whole point of the “Gaza flotilla” was to get a reaction out of Israel and call international attention to the problem of the blockade of Gaza. Israeli officials described it as “a provocation” and I’m not sure that was entirely incorrect: like all other acts of civil disobedience it was designed to provoke a response. I’m shocked but not surprised that the Israeli military, which was determined to prevent those ships from reaching the Gaza port, managed to mishandle the situation so badly that, as present report stand, at least 10 flotilla participants were killed and 60 injured. The Israelis claim that the ships had weapons on board and that their commandos were attacked with sticks and knives and had to defend themselves. I don’t think anyone in the world with the least degree of critical rationality is going to take this explanation at face value. It’s been rendered even more fatuous by the extraordinary hyperbole coming out of Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, who claimed that flotilla members were connected not only to Hamas, but to Al Qaeda! Next they will be telling us these were members of the Nazi party. It won’t wash.

Flotilla organizers are no doubt shocked, horrified and appalled by the way this has turned out. But if they were engaged in classic civil disobedience, their action has actually produced some version of the intended result. If the point is to provoke a reaction, and indeed an overreaction, to make a point, they have succeeded beyond their wildest imagination. This bloodbath is likely to create sustained international attention to the way Israel has treated the Gaza Strip in a way that nothing else has since the Gaza war and possibly since the beginning of the blockade. Compare it to the “Mississippi Freedom Summer” in which young white Americans from around the country went to the bastion of Jim Crow in order to organize local African-Americans, register them to vote, educate them and confront segregation. They knew it was a dangerous situation, and they were shocked but not surprised when James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman were abducted and killed by the KKK as the project just got going. There were many other acts of quasi-official violence meted out to the volunteers, and while the organizers obviously would have preferred to have avoided all of that, they expected it and it was part of their strategy. The largely but not entirely unstated reasoning was that the country would continue to ignore massive violence directed towards the African-American community in Mississippi, but could and would not remain oblivious to similar violence directed towards young, white, middle-class college students from New York City and other metropolitan centers. This, indeed, proved the case. The violence directed at the Mississippi Freedom Summer shocked the conscience of the country and was among the numerous decisive moments in the civil rights movement that ultimately succeeded in dismantling the apparatus of formalized racism in the United States.

I don’t think the analogy is terribly strained, though obviously it’s merely about strategy and not a political or moral comparison. The flotilla activists knew they were sailing towards a confrontation with the Israeli military. They also knew how the Israeli military deals with anyone, including civilians, who challenge its arrangements in Gaza. Let me venture that the idea was that if anything dreadful should happen to the activists on the ships, it would focus attention and international coverage and concern on the violence that underlies the Gaza blockade in a way that could not be generated by Israel’s violence towards the local population in Gaza. I think that’s clearly going to prove the case. Tohar HaNeshek, the “purity of arms” that the Israeli military boasts of, has many times over proven itself to be a hollow, meaningless doctrine, and today it is in greater disrepute than ever.

I doubt the incredible, historic, blunder of the way in which the Israeli military has mishandled the Gaza flotilla will end the siege or fundamentally change the realities regarding the Gaza Strip. However, I do think it will have a lasting impact on Israel’s international reputation. Israelis are concerned about “delegitimization,” and so they should be. Their own army just made the biggest contribution to the process of delegitimization we’ve seen in a very long time. Even if they are able to produce plausible evidence that some of the flotilla passengers were holding sticks, or even knives, where they were being boarded, it’s not going to convince anyone that so many people had to be killed and injured to seize a few ships. Somali piracy has usually even avoided this kind of death toll. I’m not sure how Israel is going to be able to live this down. It will have significant and serious long-term implications, and if the organizers of the flotilla were hoping to engineer a major public relations event, they certainly got their way.

While we are on the subject of anniversaries, it occurs to me that 2010 marks 30 years since the release of Talking Heads’ fourth studio album, the seminal Remain in Light. At the very end of the 70s and the beginning of the 80s, there was a burst of interest in polyrhythms, African and other international musical styles, sampling, looping and other techniques that suddenly breathed new life into what had been a completely moribund field in what can best be described as post-prog-rock that had been devastated by its own ludicrous excesses, the punk counterattack and, of course, disco. Rhythmic complexity suddenly presented itself as the new path to sophistication in rock music, as was illustrated by albums such as Peter Gabriel III, King Crimson’s gamelan-influenced Discipline and, above all, Remain in Light. The trend culminated with Gabriel’s 1982 release of the groundbreaking Music and Rhythm double LP, designed to raise money for the first Womad Festival, which alternated between contemporary Western rock music tracks and both traditional and pop music from the Third World. Music and Rhythm was, for example, the first time many of us heard the voice of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. With Music and Rhythm, the die was cast and a number of rapid developments, especially Gabriel’s establishing of the Real World label for releasing album after album of international music for the Western market, in effect produced a new genre, or at least a new record store section, “world music.”

It’s not that rock musicians hadn’t flirted with non-Western musical forms or instruments before 1980, for instance the Beatles’ infatuation with Indian music or least instruments, or the Rolling Stones’ encounter with the Jajouka musicians of Morocco. But the focus on complex polyrhythms inspired by African music and Indonesian percussion required and invited an intensity of engagement that was genuinely new. Remain in Light was particularly influenced by the work of Fela Anikulapo Kuti, the Nigerian superstar whose music still represents the apotheosis of African pop or, as he plausibly called it, African classical music. His influence is everywhere on Remain in Light, and it’s only been confirmed by the inclusion in the 2006 re-release CD of four outtake tracks, the best of them called simply “Fela’s Riff” (and what a riff it is). The Fela-inspired polyrhythms and complex layering of rhythmic patterns combined with producer Brian Eno’s sampling and looping experiments to produce an entirely original and still awe-inspiring soundscape. The LP has held up exceptionally well over the past 30 years and still sounds in many ways original and certainly unique.

It opens inauspiciously with its least impressive track, although its weaknesses have become much more evident over time than they were when it’s sheer originality was more striking, and even shocking. Born under Punches ultimately doesn’t hang that well together as a song and, alone on the album, sounds somewhat forced. However, by the second track, Crosseyed and Painless, it becomes immediately obvious that we’re in the terrain of greatness. David Byrne had spent his career up to that point largely concentrating on extremely paranoid songs expressing serious fear about small furry animals, the government and even the air. The attempt to marry rhythmic frenzy with the barely contained hysteria of Byrne’s paranoid voice isn’t, as I say, entirely successful in Born under Punches. But in Crosseyed and Painless, a powerful and insistent rhythm drives forward as he starts reporting with deep alarm that he has “lost my shape” and is generally undergoing some kind of profound physical calamity. The perfection of the pairing is immediately obvious. The third track on side A of the LP, The Great Curve, I think ranks at the very highest order of rock music. The barely controlled frenzy of its rhythmic introduction, the suggestion of Fela-like horn-ish sounds, and vocals that weave in and out of triple and quadruple layering are a remarkable achievement. And, unlike Byrne’s usually paranoid lyrics, The Great Curve is an unexpectedly buoyant affirmation of some goddess, women generally, or perhaps the sheer power of sexuality. The whole track feels like an excess of abundance, a celebration, an exuberant shout, not from the heart, but from the pelvis.

Side B of the LP begins in a slightly different vein, with the legendary Once in a Lifetime, an irresistible blend of shimmering, base-heavy funk with Byrne declaiming from some imaginary pulpit about the kind of dissociative state of lost personal narrative in which individuals may suddenly realize they have no idea how, precisely, they came to be in the situations they have crafted for themselves. The fifth track is another of the LP’s greatest achievements, the hypnotic, shuffling Houses in Motion that features an extraordinary and very early performance from the Canadian electro-trumpet player Jon Hassell, justly celebrated for his collaborations with Brian Eno. As with so much else that was recorded between 1980-82, this was the first taste of something that would become very familiar shortly but which was, at the time, absolutely flabbergasting. The next track, Seen and Not Seen, seems almost like an addendum to Once in a Lifetime, with a similar shimmering, base-heavy funk track providing the background for Byrne’s ruminations on identity crisis, though spoken softly this time rather than declaimed. More than any other track, Seen and Not Seen set the stage for the equally groundbreaking 1981 Byrne-Eno collaboration LP My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which had an almost incalculable influence on the music scene, setting the stage for so much found-sound, sampling, and East-West funky fusion, and its traces can still be seen in numerous styles including the popular “Buddha Bar” CDs.

Special attention is warranted for the seventh track on the LP, The Listening Wind, which qualified at the time and even more now as one of the edgiest rock songs ever written in terms of subject matter. It tells the story of a young terrorist called Mojique who is involved in bombing attacks on American targets. Where, precisely, this is supposed to be set is unclear, but the song has a distinctly Middle Eastern feel and some Arabic instruments are plainly being deployed. The lyrics play on the themes of wind and dust as the inspirations and allies of Mojique, which is also certainly evocative of Middle Eastern landscapes. This was a dangerous subject matter at the time, and post-9/11, obviously, it can acquire a whole new significance. If Talking Heads ever performed it live, or otherwise tried to promote it other than including and leaving it on Remain in Light, I’m not aware of it. But, leave it to Peter Gabriel to have resurrected the song on his recently released CD, entirely of covers of other bands’ material, called Scratch My Back. His performance of The Listening Wind is soft, sensitive and heartfelt, as is the entire CD. There isn’t much in common between the two existing versions (excluding Phish’s forgettable re-recording of the entirety of Remain in Light), except an unexpected tenderness towards Mojique and his emotions that doesn’t necessarily convey any approval of his conduct but rather a willingness to refuse to dismiss his motives or his sentiments. The LP is wound down with the final track, The Overload, a ponderous, again bass-heavy dirge that almost might serve as a requiem for Mojique and/or his victims. Yet this track retains an incongruous, almost buoyant, and indeed almost euphoric quality that makes a careful engagement with Remain in Light an experience that is for want of a better word… trippy. It has a positively intoxicating quality from beginning to end.

Remain in Light is also noteworthy for having set the stage for what I think was undoubtedly one of the greatest live tours in rock history, the 1980-81 concerts performed around the world by Talking Heads as a 10-member expanded band, including a second, one might say lead, base by Busta “Cherry” Jones, percussion from the outstanding Steve Scales, additional keyboards by Funkadelic’s Bernie Worrell, backing vocals by Dolette McDonald and Nona Hendrix (of all people), and absolutely superb lead guitar from Adrian Belew who was about to join the reborn King Crimson. In other words, even more than on Remain in Light, for the tour Talking Heads called on an astonishing array of talent to perform the intense, complex polyrhythms from the album and compatible earlier songs. The results, most extensively released on the live LP The Name of This Band is Talking Heads, are simply astonishing. If I ever had to be pressed on my favorite live album of all, this would have to be it. If anything, the live performances take the achievements in the studio and double down on them, increasing the complexity, the wildness, and the exuberance. To a very large extent, the tour was so artistically successful because it spun wildly out of the control of Talking Heads in general and even its canny leader David Byrne because the amount of talent on that stage was simply uncontainable.

For example, Houses in Motion, while it loses the subtlety of Jon Hassell’s delicate electronic trumpet, comes to life with an almost terrifying intensity. It never ceases to astonish. The Great Curve and Crosseyed and Painless similarly erupt with energy, as if the studio productions had been oddly contained. It’s like a jailbreak. A number of earlier songs from LPs antecedent to Remain in Light are similarly given extraordinary treatment including revelatory versions of Animals, I Zimbra, Drugs, and Life during Wartime.

A few weeks after acquiring the newly released live LP in the late spring of 1982, I returned to Beirut for a visit, with my prize in hand. It became the soundtrack of my life, especially songs like I Zimbra, Drugs, and Life during Wartime. In the manner of any good 19-year-old, I took them to be describing almost everything I’d ever experienced. At one point during the Israeli siege I was given five minutes to collect a small plastic grocery bag of belongings to take with me as I fled the country. I included a couple of changes of socks and underwear, large quantities of illicit and extremely Lebanese material, and one cassette, one side of which was exactly this. Even under those circumstances, I couldn’t leave home without it. The original LP was no doubt swept away with the rest of the rubble of the Jurdak Building. My experience of looking at the rest of the war from Nicosia didn’t lessen the intensity of the effect the songs on that cassette had on me. One day, I’m sure, I’ll write more about that in another context.

When I first moved to DC to work for ADC at the end of 1998, I packed light and brought no music with me at all. I distinctly remember lots of stuff turning around in my head, but what forced its way to the forefront of my consciousness walking back and forth to work day after day were these live performances, mainly the songs from Remain in Light, but also some of the others. The extremely complex, dense rhythmic patterns have stuck in a way very little else has, and have aged better than most. Remain in Light has to be seen as the single most important achievement for Talking Heads, but the live album ultimately is more memorable and more satisfying in my view.

It’s instructive to compare The Name of This Band is Talking Heads with the brilliant Jonathan Demme film and the CD of Talking Heads’ subsequent 1983 tour, Stop Making Sense. Many of the songs are the same, but the sound is radically different. The glorious mess of 1980-1981 was contained in 1983, and the original band members reasserted their control. The elements that had most strongly overshadowed the original members — Busta Jones’ lead base, Adrian Belew’s lead guitar and the soaring vocals of McDonald and Hendrix — were all gone, and the entire sound streamlined in good 80s style rather than wild and uncontrolled as it had been two years earlier. These concerts, which I saw several times in person, were much more visual affairs, and we know this because, along with the 1984 Demme film, there are at least two high quality videos extant of the 1980-81 tour, one from Germany and one from Italy. Do yourself a favor and watch some of this. It’s all on YouTube, as are many clips from Stop Making Sense. The contrast is extremely instructive. The Stop Making Sense tour was extremely impressive, and it was extremely theatrical, in a clever way, but also in a way that was antithetical to the original ethos of Talking Heads who wanted to present themselves as a band made up of totally ordinary people dressed in a totally ordinary way doing things to which the audience would say, “I can do that.” No one can possibly look at Stop Making Sense and have that reaction. But it lacks the shear, awesome power of the out-of-control 1980-81 performances, and deliberately so.

I don’t think it’s unfair at all to say that the changes were an effort by the original band members to regain control over their own show and their own sound. All four expressed extreme preference for Stop Making Sense over the 1980-81 tour and The Name of This Band. I can certainly see why. If one wanted to maintain the extraordinary feel and tone of the 1980-81 sound and yet cull the herd, the first to go would be two if not three of the actual Talking Heads, Byrne excluded, but even his role was being often overshadowed, particularly by Belew’s pyrotechnics. Don’t get me wrong — there is much to be said for Stop Making Sense, and certain songs from the older era really benefit from the streamlined arrangements and contained performances. Once in a Lifetime is a real highlight from 1983 and didn’t really work at all during the 1980-81 tour, because it requires a more disciplined sound to convey its scolding, pressure-cooker effects.

Found a Job from Stop Making Sense, even though it was recorded in late 1983 and released in 1984, is probably the apotheosis of the angular, rhythmic, slightly hysterical pop of the late 1970s of which Talking Heads were the most important practitioners. The performance of the song in the film is flawless and its conclusion never ceases to move. It’s significant that the high point of the film,which begins with Byrne alone and adds to the band bit by bit, is this moment when all four of the original Talking Heads are on stage together for the first time, and right before the addition of any newer, and indeed blacker, band members. That would never have happened in 1980 when Talking Heads were at the forefront of experiments that soon resulted in the new genre of “world music.”

Once again I have grouped a series of questions into an extended post I’m calling an Ibishblog readers’ interview. So far, no one’s objected to this structure, and while it makes for longer reading, I still think the questions, although completely independently submitted, sometimes work very well together to move from A to B. By all means, please keep the questions and comments coming.

Q: It seems to me that Mr. [Paul] Berman [author of The Flight of the Intellectuals] as well as the vast majority of our intelligentsia should have abandoned any pretense of possessing any integrity regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by, for over sixty-three years, ignoring Israel’s state sponsored terrorism against the Palestinians. What’s your opinion in that regard?

A: I can’t comment about “the vast majority of our intelligentsia,” but I would say that Paul Berman does in fact strike me overall as being a fair-minded, serious intellectual. My differences with him are differences of opinion, not conclusions about his integrity. Berman is essentially a literary critic, which is probably the best single starting point for the kind of work he does, which is largely rooted in textual analysis. I think where he falls short at times, in my reading of his last book for example, is that on occasion he has less of a grasp of the subject (the evolution of 20th century Islamist political theory, for example) than he thinks he does. His focus on Amin al-Husseini, however, was not arbitrary in any sense. He couldn’t get to Buruma and Garton Ash without going through Ramadan and a critique of Ramadan requires a critique of Hassan al-Banna, which itself does not require but certainly invites a critique of Amin al-Husseini. His choice in this regard was entirely defensible and legitimate. And, he wasn’t unfair to al-Husseini, either. The only, albeit rather serious, problem was his according al-Husseini far more important a role in both the Palestinian national movement and in the Sunni Islamist movement in the Arab world than he reasonably warrants. As I wrote, he would have been better off acknowledging the much more significant influence of Rashid Rida, whose role he gets wrong. But this is not a matter of integrity, it’s a matter of opinion, and I think Berman has plenty of both. Having said that, I do think the overwhelming majority of people in the West, intellectuals and otherwise, would benefit greatly from more knowledge and sensitivity regarding Israel’s history of brutality towards the Palestinian people.

Q: Since you too seem bothered on the matter of pedigree, I would ask you, since Ramadan is to be made accountable for al Banna and the Grand Mufti, may we
hold Norman Schwarzkopf accountable for his father, who assisted in the coup in Iran in 1952? Should we demand that Norman issue a denunciation of that action? Are repudiations and denunciations the requirement here, using the Ramadan standard? And should we force Tzipi Livni to repudiate her father, for killing innocent Palestinians when he was a fighter for the Israelis? I could go on. Are only Muslims to be held to this standard?

A: I’m sorry, but I think you have misunderstood my arguments entirely. Neither Berman nor I are particularly bothered about pedigree. It doesn’t matter who Ramadan’s grandfather or father are, particularly, if his arguments don’t highlight and foreground the question. In fact, Ramadan spends a great deal of his writing embracing, tweaking, massaging and variously dealing with the legacies of his famous forebears. If he has seriously criticized any major position of either of them, I’m not aware of it. Berman is unfortunately right that Ramadan has seen as one of his major roles the custodian and promoter, and I’m afraid hence distorter, of his grandfather’s legacy. Under such circumstances, the substance of his grandfather’s opinions and agenda are relevant. It’s not a matter of DNA, it’s a matter of ideology and agenda. Obviously, Ramadan’s agenda is not the same as Hassan al-Banna’s, but in so far as it’s influenced by, and sees itself as an extension of, it that’s very relevant.

It would be extremely stupid for any of us to ignore Ramadan’s heritage when he makes such a big deal out of it. If he were, for example, a Trotskyite, converted Catholic, or radical Libertarian, implicitly or explicitly rejecting or at least moving past his grandfather’s legacy, his heritage wouldn’t matter at all, and any effort to bring it up would be superfluous and unworthy. But, in fact he has foregrounded the issue at all stages of his career and has built much of it on his position as a kind of Muslim Brotherhood prince. This is not to say that he hews to all of his father’s and grandfather’s positions. Obviously he does not. But also obviously his relationship to them is complex and exceptionally important, and to ask either Berman or me, or anybody else for that matter, to ignore this question when Ramadan himself goes on about it at extreme length is unfair. Finally, it’s preposterous to suggest that I would hold people of Muslim background to any kind of double standard when that would also apply to me. In other words, don’t be silly.

Q: A recent article in the New York Review of Books and supposedly Ha’aretz have both reported that the so-called “freeze” is being systematically violated by Israeli settlers. Is this true and why doesn’t anyone address the terrible impediments, particularly the permit system, which prevents Palestinians from building on their own land?

A: Definitive information about this is hard to come by but all the evidence suggests that several things are going on. First, the moratorium doesn’t apply to certain kinds of building, or many important areas, especially municipal Jerusalem as Israel has defined it. So in that sense, there’s been settlement activity going on all the time. That said, as the confrontation over settlements in Jerusalem between US and Israel demonstrates, the political cost for Israel building in Jerusalem, especially in the Arab neighborhoods, has gone up considerably. Nobody really knows the substance of the US-Israel understanding that resolved the confrontation, but it seems to me that at a minimum the “don’t ask, don’t tell” arrangement means that in effect Israel will not be building in the coming months in Arab neighborhoods in occupied East Jerusalem and will be building lightly, if at all, in Jewish neighborhoods and try to keep that quiet. For now, in effect, I think it amounts to the implementation of the “Clinton parameters” in occupied East Jerusalem, although how long it will last is very much open to doubt. The complication in all of this is that Israeli politicians love to boast about settlement activity. There’s hardly a settlement that hasn’t been announced time and again, with great fanfare at every stage of the planning and construction process. This is in spite of the fact that so much of it has gone on in violation of Israel’s own regulations or permit system. So it’s not easy to keep track of things, and one has to rely on the various Israeli human rights organizations that keep close tabs on the subject in order to make sense of it.

Second, there is the question of the unauthorized (in Israeli parlance, “illegal,” although, of course, from a perspective of international legality, all settlements are illegal) outposts. Not only have they continued to crop up around the occupied West Bank, the Israeli government is retroactively recognizing them and ignoring court orders to dismantle them. One of the most cynical arguments we’ve seen deployed during the temporary, partial moratorium is the notion that, and Israeli officials really have made this case both publicly and in court, enforcing the settlement moratorium is so time-consuming and onerous that the Israeli government simply can’t find the time or resources to go ahead with court-ordered or otherwise mandatory dismantling of “illegal” outposts. Probably there isn’t any single greater question mark over the whole moratorium business than the issue of outposts. I think it demonstrates how insincere the entire, I think by now we can say with confidence fraudulent, gesture really has been. In the end, I’m sure that in a two-year period beginning with the first day of the settlement “freeze” there will have been as much settlement activity with as there would have been without it, if not more.

Third, as a matter of fact one has to acknowledge that in some parts of the occupied West Bank, settlement activity genuinely has been constrained by the order. As I say, I’m pretty sure that in the long run as much settlement activity as anyone seriously would, as a practical matter, have anticipated is actually going to take place during a 18-24 month period starting with the settlement “moratorium,” but it’s also true that some building has been prevented in certain areas and even dismantled, or at least scheduled to be dismantled. As with so much that goes on in the occupied Palestinian territories, it’s very hard to distinguish between Israeli announcements and the reality on the ground, both negative and positive. Really, we have to rely on Israeli and Palestinian organizations that actually monitor the situation to come up with accounts that are based on reality rather than on pronouncements. This cuts in both directions. There are plenty of instances in which the Israeli government claims not to be doing things that it is actually doing, but also plenty of times in which they claim to be doing things that, as a matter of fact, are either not going to be done or will be done sometime in the distant future, or which are intended to be done but in the end cannot be done because of American or other pressure. One of the things one learns in following the occupation is not to base one’s opinion on Israeli official statements of any kind. The Foundation for Middle East Peace, B’tselem, Ir Amim, Americans for Peace Now and many others are much better guides to what is happening or not happening than the newspapers are.

Finally, I think a lot of people make quite a big deal over the fact that Palestinians can’t get proper planning permission for building, especially in occupied East Jerusalem. The groups cited above all do, as does the American Task Force on Palestine, and many others. There has also been considerable coverage of this in the media, at least internationally. As long as there is occupation, this is going to continue to be a major problem. The solution to this, as with most other dire circumstances afflicting the Palestinian people, is an end to the occupation. Israeli rule in the occupied territories is almost certainly not going to allow Palestinian society the space it requires. That, after all, is the whole point of the occupation.

Q: When can we expect you to call for Lebanon to grant citizenship to Palestinians and to take down those refugee camps they’ve been cramming 300,000 Palestinians into, denying them healthcare and employment? Or, are you not interested in the plight of “those” Palestinians because Israel is not involved?

A: Right now, and for the umpteenth time. I’ve called for that many times, although the subject hasn’t come up in the 12 months of the Ibishblog. I think Palestinians in Lebanon should immediately be granted the option of citizenship and, whether or not they take citizenship, full and equal rights within Lebanon. The same applies to Syria, although the situation of the Palestinians in Syria is much less dire than that of the Palestinians in Lebanon. I’d go so far as to compare the situation of the Palestinians in Lebanon to apartheid, and describe it as one of the world’s more shameful cases of callous abuses of civil rights. As a Lebanese citizen, I’m extremely embarrassed by this, and I have been ever since I was a politically conscious human being. It’s an outrage! I’ve said all of this many, many times in the past, in many public forums in the United States, Lebanon and elsewhere in the Arab world. I’d merely point to my very widely viewed appearance on the Doha Debates, in which I excoriated Lebanon’s treatment (and that of the whole Arab world, for that matter) of the Palestinian refugees and contrasted it negatively with the treatment of Palestinians in the United States. You can easily find that on the web and view it, if you’re really interested in my opinion rather than just trying to find some random stick to charge at me with. In other words, try this line on the next guy. It doesn’t work with me.

Having said all of that, the sad and miserable fact is that the only thing that all of the Lebanese factions can agree on is not granting citizenship or equal rights to the Palestinians in Lebanon. Syria, Jordan and other Arab states can and should accommodate the Palestinian residents as equal citizens if they wish to be, but as a practical political matter, there is almost no chance of this in the Lebanese context. This is, unfortunately, a reality. I don’t think there’s any constituent group in either the March 8 or March 14 groupings (not that they really exist since the aftermath of the last election) that sincerely would support the granting of citizenship or genuinely equal rights to the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. This unites virtually all the Lebanese from the far left to the ultra-right, and from Maronite chauvinists to Shiite Khomeinists. So in truth, there is almost no chance that this will, as a reality, take place. I think the situation of the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon is an important secondary argument for the creation of a Palestinian state and a major example of the benefits to refugees, short of the universal application of the right of return, from the creation of a Palestinian state. A Palestinian state would serve as a representative of the Palestinians, including refugees, on the international stage, and a haven for those refugees who cannot safely and reasonably continue under their present circumstances. The Palestinian refugees in Lebanon are exhibit A in that regard and need to be, literally, rescued. Their precarious situation has been in the past, and may well again become, a matter of life and death.

The reality is they are surrounded by Lebanese sectarian forces none of which have anything but a generalized ill will towards them, and it’s possible that whenever civil conflict erupts in that country they will be drawn into it in a very dangerous way. Among other things, the long-standing understanding that the Lebanese army and authorities will not enter Palestinian refugee camps makes them almost irresistible targets of anyone who wants to operate outside of the, already limited, remit of the Beirut government. I think the sad fate of the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in northern Lebanon, which was hijacked by Salafist-Jihadist gangsters on a crime spree and slowly reduced to rubble by the Lebanese army that was confronting them was an excellent case in point of such dangers. Those who blamed the Lebanese army were wrong — they had no choice but to respond vigorously to the criminals. But in reality the refugees in the camp were blameless victims of the entire set to, and it was a tragedy of significant dimensions. So, obviously the best thing for the 200,000 or so Palestinian refugees in Lebanon is to be relocated to a Palestinian state in which they will not be regarded as an unassimilable alien presence.

Q: I’d like to ask you, in light of the apparently meaningless “reconciliation talks,” if, when and how do you see a change in leadership in the Gaza strip? How far do you think the so-called “proximity talks” (if they even start moving) can go without such a change?

A: This is, of course, the question I always get first in my public lectures: what about Hamas? First, I completely agree with you that Palestinian national reunification negotiations are, at this stage, unfortunately pointless. There is a zero sum contest for power between the PLO and Hamas for national leadership of the Palestinian movement and the two parties cannot cohabitate as equals, as demonstrated in 2006-2007, because they disagree about everything. They have incompatible visions on all national questions, the future of Palestine and the nature of Palestinian society. The reality is one position is going to win and the other is going to lose. Obviously neither Islamists nor secularists will vanish and disappear from Palestinian society. However, I have no doubt that over the next 10-15 years a consensus will be established in one direction or the other among a decisive majority of Palestinians and one vision — either that of a negotiated peace agreement with Israel leading to the establishment of an essentially secular state or that of armed struggle leading to the rule of political Islam in whatever territory it can establish itself — will define the lone effective and consequential part of the Palestinian national movement. In my view, it is absolutely essential that a secular nationalist vision prevails and I don’t think the Palestinian cause, as such, can survive its transformation into an Islamist cause. The struggle against Israel would go on, but it would increasingly be about religious ideas like holy places and the will of God and not about Palestinian national rights or aspirations.

The obvious way of resolving this impasse would, of course, be new national elections that would resolve the conundrum created by the split decisions in the 2005 presidential election won by Fatah and the 2006 parliamentary elections won by Hamas. At present, Hamas is completely opposed to any elections, having rejected the PA’s efforts to hold elections in January according to Palestinian law and the Egyptian national reconciliation agreement, signed by Fatah, which would have permitted elections this July. I think the PA is right not to try to hold national elections in the West Bank only, as this would reify and consolidate the political division between the West Bank and Gaza that is absolutely antithetical to the Palestinian national interest. However, they were also right in scheduling municipal elections, that do not have national implications, for the West Bank at least, this July. Hamas is so opposed to elections of any kind at this stage because of their profound current unpopularity and likely trouncing in any election that they have not only opposed the municipal elections, they have ordered everyone not to participate. So, Palestinians will not have national reconciliation through an agreement and will also not have their present political division resolved, as it should be, at the ballot box either. Pres. Abbas recently compared Palestinian society in this regard to an airplane that has been hijacked by Iran, and honestly I don’t think that was a ridiculous comment. One can’t discount the role of regional actors in the Palestinian national division, and while much has been made of the American role supporting the PLO and the PA, there’s no doubt that the Iranian and Syrian roles in supporting Hamas are even more decisive, especially when it comes to blocking national reunification through the Egyptian agreement or through elections, both of which Hamas has rejected.

I think the outcome of all of this will be decided in the West Bank, and not in Gaza. It seems to me that everything depends on the fortunes of the PLO’s national strategy of diplomacy rather than armed struggle and the PA’s state and institution building program. If those are, over the next decade or so, largely seen as successful and moving in the right direction I don’t think preventing Hamas rule in Gaza or anywhere else will prove sustainable even though it is presently enforced at gunpoint. If, over a sustained period of time, it becomes widely perceived to be unsuccessful, I don’t think there’s anything preventing the gradual, or possibly even sudden, takeover of Hamas in the West Bank as well as Gaza and the transformation of the Palestinian movement into an Islamist one. Obviously, this will be a lot more difficult as long as the Arab regimes remained opposed to Muslim Brotherhood power, but it could happen anyway. If the Arab world started to fall to the Brotherhood, Palestine would certainly follow, and it’s possible this could operate the other way around, with Palestine being the bellwether for many other Arab societies to go Islamist. The whole thing is a nightmare of pretty colossal proportions either way, and against the interests of all rational or constructive actors. Therefore, it is essential for all parties to make sure that the PA’s domestic and PLO’s international policies succeed. And, I would add, this means that Israel and the United States will play a crucial role in determining precisely which Palestinians they will be dealing with over the long run.

As for negotiations with Israel, they can proceed very far without the involvement of Hamas. There is no question that legally and politically the PLO is the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, and every Palestinian, Arab and international document affirms this. So do the Letters of Mutual Recognition that are the basis of all Palestinian-Israeli negotiations. Even Hamas recognizes this, although they call for the PLO to be restructured, by which they mean they should take it over. What this means, of course, is that talks not only can proceed far, they can be concluded without Hamas participation. Of course, for negotiations to be successful it would be preferable, and possibly even necessary, for outreach to the constituency Hamas represents, the Palestinian religious right, as well as outreach to the Israeli religious right and the settlers, among others. But the framework and substance of a negotiated agreement can be concluded without any direct Hamas input, and in fact the process of arriving at such an agreement will almost certainly relegate Hamas to its rightful position as the main representative of that 15-25% minority of Palestinians who have always been inclined towards religious politics. That constituency needs a voice, and Hamas is going to be that for the foreseeable future, but given that it is naturally and historically a relatively small minority, it certainly shouldn’t have a decisive national role. The same, of course, applies to the Israeli religious right as well.

The implementation of an agreement is another matter. It’s readily imaginable that this might have to start with the West Bank and extend itself by one means or another to Gaza. But my view is that if the train of a negotiated agreement that will end the occupation is leaving the station, Hamas will have to decide whether to get on board or stay behind, and I can’t imagine the people of Gaza tolerating a situation in which the rest of the Palestinians are moving rapidly towards independence and they continue to languish in a giant, rubble-strewn prison because of the irrational, or at least indefensible, policies of their rulers. In other words, I don’t see a change of leadership in Gaza as essential for progress in talks, I see progress in talks is essential for a change in leadership in Gaza.

Q: With $12trillion in petro dollars in US banks, which economists put it around 7-8% of US GDP- how can we Arab Americans take advantage of this Arab power and use it to compete with the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee?

A: Ah, the age-old question. I think the proven answer is, we can’t. The Arab states have demonstrated conclusively over the past 30 years and more than they’re not in the least bit interested in influencing domestic public opinion in the United States or intervening in American politics with the very limited exceptions of securing their aid packages or weapons deals and defense arrangements. I no longer subscribe to the view that they don’t know how to engage the American political system. I am absolutely certain that they simply have no interest in doing so except on very limited, parochial matters of concern. So there’s no chance of doing that.

Moreover, the Arab-Americans are a disproportionately successful, educated, prosperous community with plenty of money of its own. We don’t need petrodollars. But, the Arab-Americans to have also proven disinterested in affecting American politics. We complain, shout and scream, and play the victim well enough, but very few of us actually do anything to make the least bit of difference. In fact, I see the cynicism about Arab-American organizations and politics that prevails in the Arab-American community as essentially a smokescreen for not being involved and, especially, for not contributing financially to collective causes. I think people are always looking for excuses to withhold their time, and especially, money, and I think Arab-Americans are among the greatest masters of this art in the history of humanity. At an ADC convention several years ago, the great historian Walid Khalidi asked a simple question: why do the pro-Israel organizations have so much more influence than the pro-Palestinian ones? He went right down the line. Do they really have so much more money, numbers, education, etc.? The answer obviously in all cases is, no. It might be observed that they’ve had much more time to adjust to the American political system, but that hardly explains the extraordinary disparity. Instead, Khalidi offered the simple, obvious and unavoidable conclusion: they simply care more than we do. They, by and large, contribute their time and money to their cause, and we, by and large, do not. I think this is simply a fact. It doesn’t help that we have professional cynics, naysayers and choric, communal idiots so prominent in our discourse, falsely telling people there is either no need or no point in engaging in the American political system. But the only reason, in the end, there is a market for such grotesque nonsense is that people want an excuse for withholding their time and their money from anything constructive and instead nurturing their supposed victimhood like a hot house orchid and enjoying their symptoms.

One more point: I think that given all the circumstances it is a more rational approach to seek to build bridges, rather than compete, with mainstream Jewish American organizations. They and we, and our friends in Palestine and their friends and Israel, need the same thing: a negotiated two state agreement that ends the conflict. No doubt we’ve had a very long history of rivalry, opposition and unpleasantness between the communities, including JDL terrorism aimed at ADC that took the life of Alex Odeh, among other violent incidents. But it would be irrational not to recognize that when two parties need the same outcome, they should be willing to forge an alliance to achieve it. Of course, our ability to do this, or anything else politically, would be greatly enhanced by a transformation in the community’s willingness to support its organizations (I hold out very little hope for Arab governments getting involved in a serious way, unless people come to them waving the banner of Islam, of course). But I think the reality is that the best of our organizations are either small and starved or forced to seek financing that compromises their independence. The worst are fronts and shills for bad actors in the Middle East. There is only one solution: the community needs to wake up, immediately, and start supporting and funding the small group of genuinely independent, serious organizations that understand American politics and want to engage as sincere, patriotic American citizens with an Arab-American agenda. Frankly, I’m not holding my breath.

On May 28, 2009, one year ago today, I launched the Ibishblog. Like any good one-year-old, the Ibishblog is starting to find its own voice and even walks around the net a little bit, somewhat unsteadily, although it mostly still crawls. A year ago I promised my main subjects would be ?political extremism of the left and the right, bigotry including both Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, opposition to peace in the Middle East, and religious fanaticism of all stripes.? I think I’ve stuck to that agenda pretty solidly, and attempted to tack always to a centrist position that tries to avoid clichés and judges everything, in so far as possible, not ideologically but fairly and on its own merits. A recent example of that was my take on Paul Berman’s new book, largely agreeing with him on Tariq Ramadan, Hassan al-Banna, Amin al-Husseini, and, to some extent, Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash, and disagreeing with him on the history of 20th century Islamist political thought and, of course, on Ayaan Hirsi Ali (whose new book, sadly, proves my point all too powerfully). So, something for everyone to hate!

I’m very grateful for all the questions and feedback, including a lot of helpful and constructive criticism, from my various readers. I’d like to invite anybody out there with any suggestions, comments or questions to feel free to engage me. Tell me what I’m doing wrong, and I will carefully consider it. Obviously I already know that the Ibishblog breaks all the rules of the blogosphere, and that’s likely to only get increasingly worse over time, unless I’m restrained by well-meaning readers. Also please tell me what’s missing, what you’d like more of and, of course, what you could do without (but if you hate Shakespeare, don’t even bother trying).

It’s my view that, in general, postings on the Ibishblog have gradually become more sophisticated over the past 12 months, and, unfortunately, somewhat longer as well. It’s my intention not to take the length much further than it has gotten at this stage, but I think the quality of the analysis can continue to develop almost without limit, depending on the amount of work I’m willing to put into it. I’d like to do more to bring in art and culture, that was slow to be included on the Ibishblog but I think has added an interesting dimension to the site. It can’t, or at least it shouldn’t, be all Palestine, Islamophobia, anti-Arab racism, anti-Semitism and so forth all the time. There are some very well-known monomaniacs among the Arab American commentators (you know, the kind of people who looked at a mountain of dead Haitians and immediately thought about the evils of the Israeli settlements), and they show exactly how mentally and emotionally unhealthy it is to fixate on one issue to the exclusion of everything else. I’d also like to start to introduce occasional interviews with people I find extremely interesting, especially those that usually don’t get a public hearing, and I’m pretty sure I know who the first victim is likely to be. Look forward to that shortly.

My main aims for the coming year are to do whatever it takes to increase the distinctiveness of what is already, I am sure, an unusual if not a unique voice on the Internet and to be more responsive to what my readership is interested in and responds to. I know some of my postings are demanding in terms of subject matter, style and, to be sure, length. But surely the Arab-Americans, and those interested in their issues, deserved something better than what has been traditionally on offer. I strongly believed when launching the Ibishblog that there was an audience for a more serious, sober and substantive conversation than one dominated by idiots who have become even more angry and more idiotic, extremists even more extreme, and overgrown delinquents even more juvenile than they were at the time. At bottom, one year ago it was my hope that I’d be able to provide something that was not only better, but infinitely better. On that score, although admittedly it’s an extremely low bar, I feel the Ibishblog has already succeeded. With your help, in the next 12 months we can take the Ibishblog to the next level. I look forward to hearing from you all.

In my recent Ibishblog posting on Paul Berman’s new book “The Flight of the Intellectuals” (Melville House, 2010), there was one crucial topic I deliberately did not directly address and that is important enough to warrant an altogether separate commentary: the vexed question of the relationship between Amin al-Husseini and the Nazis, and more generally and by extension, the Arabs and the Holocaust. On this subject Berman’s book benefits greatly by being read alongside another important recently released volume, Gilbert Achcar’s “The Arabs and the Holocaust” (Henry Holt, 2009). Berman’s case against Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash is almost entirely based on the case against Tariq Ramadan, which is largely based on the case against Hassan al-Banna, which is partly based on the case against Amin al-Husseini. This isn’t a critique so much as it is a rough sketch of the architecture of Berman’s somewhat complicated argument. And, because of this, a book that purports to be about Western liberal intellectuals, but perforce has in practice to be even more about Tariq Ramadan, actually ends up spending so much of its time on Amin al-Husseini, the Nazis and the Holocaust.

Berman struggles a bit with this subject because I think his grasp of the trajectory of 20th century Arab political thought is somewhat skewed. He accords al-Husseini far more significance in Arab political thinking than I think can be justified, and presents al-Husseini’s enthusiastic collaboration with the Nazis after he fled from the British authorities in Palestine as a cause and crucial starting point for what he describes as a “Nazified Islam.” Berman doesn’t exaggerate al-Husseini’s outrageous conduct during World War II, or the foulness and character of his rhetoric, because it’s very difficult to exaggerate them (although some have, by making him a key figure in the Holocaust when he was, at most, a marginal player). There is no doubt that having fled Palestine, he didn’t take up an alliance with the Nazis merely out of necessity as some other anticolonial figures from the British Empire did, but rather showed a level of enthusiasm for Nazi anti-Semitism that is not only appalling but probably crossed the line into outright criminality. And I would certainly agree that the broadcasts that he engaged in for Germany directed towards the Arab world did indeed preach a version of fundamentalist Islam infused with a Nazi version of anti-Semitism.

But these broadcasts hardly introduced such ideas into the Islamist discourse. Had he paid attention to Achcar, Berman wouldn’t have gotten so badly wrong the central role of Rashid Rida, one of the key founders of the Salafist revival movement and publisher of the hugely influential journal al-Manar, who Burman cites as “express[ing ] sympathy for the Zionist settlers” in the 1920s. This is correct, but it misses, rather badly, Rida’s subsequent introduction of the very Nazi-like anti-Semitic ideas that Berman associates most strongly with al-Husseini, and probably in a much more lasting and influential manner. And, Rida was not the only such influential voice. Indeed, Achcar provides a far better, more sophisticated, and much better informed, roadmap to the development of Nazi-like anti-Semitism among Islamists and sympathy among them for the Nazism generally, than Berman’s somewhat ham-handed attempt at this.

Berman lavishes a great deal of attention in the service of his case against Ramadan on al-Husseini’s ghastly broadcasts for the Nazis, but admits “the broadcasts reached a relatively small audience in the Arab world.” Indeed, there is really no reason to think that they had any significant audience or lasting impact at all, although Berman tries, quite unconvincingly, to maintain they did. His weakest argument, repeated more than once, is in trying to link a typically appalling recent statement by Yusuf Qaradawi describing Hitler as, essentially, a scourge of the Jews sent by God (a statement similar in tone to comments about 9/11 and natural disasters frequently made by our own American televangelists) with implicit claims in some of al-Husseini’s broadcasts that Hitler had some sort of divine mission. Apart from the deep anti-Semitism and Islamist context of the two comments, which are separated by over 50 years, the idea that the only way to get to the latter was to either have overheard as a youth, or at least be indirectly influenced by the ideas expressed in, the former is pretty indefensible. The sad fact is that people like Qaradawi have imbibed enough Western-style anti-Semitism, combined with some anti-Jewish Islamic traditions, to come, in our own day and age, to that kind of callous and immoral remark, and no doubt would have even if al-Husseini had never been born.

Al-Husseini’s main role in Germany was to whip up Arab support for the Germans and the Italians, especially in the form of recruits. As Achcar notes, “the meager results say a great deal about both the Arab’s support for Nazism and the mufti’s influence. In May 1942, when a German victory still seemed very possible, the Wehrmacht’s Arab unit counted a mere 130 men.” Achcar says that in total during the war “6,300 soldiers from Arab countries served in various German military organizations.” Contrast this to the many hundreds of thousands of Arabs and Muslims who served on the Allied side during the same war, not to mention the Arab concentration camp victims and others (I’ll return to this theme at the end of this post). As Achcar points out, al-Husseini’s “appeals to the Arabs of the Middle East or North Africa produced no tangible effects” during the war itself. At the same time, Achcar has no difficulty identifying al-Husseini as an enthusiastic supporter of Nazism and, in his letter addressed to the Nazi-dominated Hungarian government in 1943 suggesting that Jews be sent to Poland instead of Palestine, as probably criminally complicit in the Holocaust. Achcar notes that while al-Husseini may or may not have known at the time about the systematic genocide against the Jews, he certainly knew about the concentration camps in Poland, and “it is probable that he would have made the same request even if he had known that the Nazis were carrying out their Final Solution.” So, Achcar’s book can hardly be seen as any kind of whitewash of the “Mufti,” and he has already been criticized by some Arab ultra-leftists known for their sympathy with Islamist movements as having “really overstated his case” against al-Husseini. Needless to say, he hasn’t.

The bottom line is that, in my view, Berman is misreading the influence that al-Husseini had on the Arab politics of his day, and, above all, on Arab politics subsequent to 1948, and therefore misreading his role in promoting anti-Semitism among Islamists. Al-Husseini was certainly the most prominent Palestinian leader of his generation, largely because, for complex reasons, he was promoted far beyond his qualifications or abilities by the British, who saw him as a useful ally until the Palestinian uprising in 1936. But he was hardly unchallenged, and throughout the 1930s significant rival factions vied with him and his allies for power and influence. And, it’s significant to note that until he fled the prospect of British arrest in 1937, al-Husseini and the mandatory authorities relied on each other more than they clashed. During the Second World War he remained a popular figure among some Palestinians, in spite of the fact that his flight was also regarded by many as an act of cowardice. But it’s clearly an exaggeration to say, as Berman does, that he returned to the region after the war “in glory.” Received with a combination of respect and skepticism would probably be a more accurate way of putting it. Tellingly, when it came time to make decisions, he was unceremoniously shoved aside by the Arab League in all the diplomacy on the question of partition and in the build up to the 1948 war, and his various demands repeatedly rejected. In a last-minute maneuver led by Egypt, the Arab League tried to restore his authority in order to offset the influence of Jordan, but the entire project failed completely. And there is no question that following the defeat in 1948 and the Palestinian Nakba, al-Husseini was an utterly discredited figure with not only virtually no political influence remaining but also generally bearing a large part of the blame for the catastrophe.

Achcar quotes one of al-Husseini’s biographers, the former Israeli military governor of the occupied territories, Zvi Elpeleg, as pointing out “the memory of Haj Amin disappeared from the Palestinian public consciousness almost without a trace. [Upon his death] No days of mourning were set aside in his memory. His name was not commemorated in the refugee camps, and no streets were named after him. No memorials were built in his memory, and no books written solely his deeds…” Achcar points out that even Hamas maintains an “embarrassed silence” about Amin al-Husseini, while glorifying Abdul Qadir al-Husseini and Izzedin Al-Qassam. He also notes that “at a time of writing, there is only one article about Amin al-Husseini on the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s website — a short biography,” and that “he does not feature any more prominently in the publications of the Palestinian Hamas.” Even more interestingly, Achcar says that “a Google search conducted in October 2008 turned up 10 times more results for ‘Amin al-Husseini’ on English sites than on Arabic pages.” Personally, I never even heard of this man until I permanently relocated to the United States at age 17, in spite of being raised in Beirut in the 1960s and 70s in an atmosphere saturated with the Palestinian national narrative.

Berman describes the initial Arab reaction to the Holocaust as “the belief that, whatever may have happened in Europe, the Arab world had no reason to give the matter any thought.” And, he says, “It was not so much a question of Holocaust denial, nor of Holocaust justification, nor of Holocaust belittlement, but Holocaust avoidance.” These passages suggest a serious lack of understanding on Berman’s part about the way cultures function. The Holocaust, for all its horror, was an entirely Western phenomenon, and, in effect, the byproduct of a massive internecine Western civil conflict that spilled over into, and drew in, parts of the colonized world. The phenomenon Berman is describing is not only not unique to the Arab world, it is, frankly, the virtually universal nonwestern reaction to the Holocaust. The same could be said of India, China, Indochina, or much of Africa for that matter, all societies in which there wasn’t and continues not to be any great amount of thought given to the matter. And, given the experiences of much of the colonial world at the hands of the European empires, which on multiple occasions involved the infliction of genocide and mass killings to be counted in the hundreds of thousands at least, there is an additional reason for the lack of great interest in the Holocaust. Right or wrong, from a colonial perspective German behavior didn’t necessarily look all that different from what Europeans had generally been perceived as doing, except that it was being done in Europe and to other Europeans. It might be argued that the Arab world was different, because of the conflict with Israel, and in fact interest in the Holocaust has grown in the Arab world in both healthy and, unfortunately more commonly, unhealthy ways, much more than it has in other postcolonial societies. The power of the Holocaust to shock, uniquely, in the West, derives greatly from the fact that it was so thoroughly Western in all its aspects, including its victims, and so modern, including its reliance on an industrial machinery and hyper-bureaucratized administration of death, not to mention the cultural and scientific sophistication of the society which produced it.

But, given Achcar’s book, and many others, it’s clear that Arabs have not always simply avoided, or merely denied, the Holocaust, but have had a very complex relationship to it as a narrative and is a historical fact. I don’t usually indulge in personal reminiscences on the Ibishblog, but I think it’s worth noting that when I was growing up in Beirut I heard the Holocaust deployed politically in three ways in order to bolster Palestinian and pro-Palestinian arguments. First, of course, was that whatever the Jews had suffered in Europe, it was not the fault of the Arabs and the Palestinians and that they therefore should not have to pay the price for the sins of others. The second argument, a corollary to the first, was that the Palestinians were the final victims of Hitler, since, so the argument went, if not for the Holocaust, the creation of Israel and the Nakba would not have taken place. Finally, and this was less common but nonetheless to be encountered on a regular basis, that “the Jews were doing to us what the Nazis had done to them,” or something to communicate the idea that Nazi-style cruelty, which had been inflicted on Jews, was now being inflicted by Jews. None of these are edifying or historically accurate claims, but neither are they anything remotely resembling Holocaust denial or reflective of traditional or modern European anti-Semitic paranoia. I did hear about the so called “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” I think first when I was 11 or 12, but only as a fatuous and ugly forgery, not as anything to be taken seriously except as an example of Europeans behaving badly. Suffice it to say that the Islamist and Nazi-influenced rhetoric Berman is describing was alien to anything I heard in Beirut in the 60s and 70s. If it was out there with any degree of cultural force, I was sheltered from it, and that’s a minor miracle because of the amount of political discourse I was subjected to on an hourly basis given the environment in both my city and my home.

As I noted in my earlier commentary on his book, Berman writes as if the Palestinian national movement, and sometimes even Arab political culture generally, were and have been historically entirely defined by Islamism: “al-Banna’s alliance with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem played a major role in the rise of Islamist movement in Egypt and other places, including Palestine, and the ideas al-Banna shared with the Mufti played an even larger role in condemning the Islamist movement to its endless and hugely self-destructive war against the Jewish state — the war that has brought so much devastation upon, most of all, the Palestinian Arabs.” The only part of this sentence that could possibly be defended comes before the first comma, since it’s clear that al-Banna did use Amin al-Husseini and the Palestinian cause to gin up popular support for his movement in Egypt during the 30s and 40s. It probably wasn’t decisive, but I’m sure it wasn’t irrelevant either, to the fortunes of the Muslim Brotherhood at the time. However, attributing the rise of the Islamist movement generally to anything seriously connected to this alliance seems completely ahistorical and totally wrong to me. To take one of the two examples Berman cites directly, the Islamist movement in Palestine was very marginal and not explicitly political until the founding of Hamas in 1987, and this was a direct outgrowth of the first intifada and, let us not forget, the enthusiasm of the Israelis for encouraging the development of an Islamist rival to the secular nationalist PLO. This early Israeli enthusiasm for Hamas was prompted, of course, by the fact that the “endless and hugely self-destructive war against the Jewish state” historically was not waged by “the Islamist movement” at all, but by Arab states, none of which were Islamist in any sense whatsoever, and by the PLO and the mainstream Palestinian national movement which also has not been an Islamist one.

Berman asks, “Will someone argue that in my presentation of these developments in the Middle East, I am making too much of the Nazi contribution?” Yes, indeed I will, and I think the passage cited above is a good example of that. There is no doubt whatsoever that much of the present Islamist movement is infected with a very virulent form of anti-Semitic paranoia, largely imported from the West and that was promoted by many forces, including the Nazis, but which has a complex and overdetermined political and cultural history. It is at very best a reductive caricature to imagine that at the center of this wretched turn of events were laughable and totally ineffective Nazi propaganda efforts, particularly radio broadcasts that very few people listened to and no one appears to have heeded, and that certainly produced none of their intended effects, made by a man who was partly discredited at the time and completely discredited within three years after the end of the war, and has been almost entirely forgotten by Arab political culture except as an embarrassment and the author of a gigantic defeat. There have been plenty of other very significant, and indeed much more powerful, sources of these terrible ideas, not least of them anti-Semitic Western Christian missionaries in late 19th and early 20th centuries. One might observe, very plausibly, that it really doesn’t matter what the trajectory of the growth of the Islamist movement and the development of its anti-Semitic strain that combines certain Muslim traditions and anti-Israel fanaticism with modern European anti-Semitic political paranoia might be, but the fact remains that it exists and it is a huge problem. But I do think it’s important to understand what phenomena really combined produced this effect and not to get sucked into false leads and incorrect analyses that will only complicate the process of developing the necessary correctives. History matters.

I think Berman basically falls into the trap described by Achcar as “a historical grand narrative that lead straight from the mufti to Osama bin Laden” (or at least to Qaradawi and, by extension, to Ramadan), a grand narrative that in the past “came to a halt with Arafat as in a 1993 book by Benjamin Netanyahu.” Berman cites and sometimes quotes approvingly from a number of books that reflect some version or other of this narrative, mostly German, that Achcar savages as insufficiently informed, “fantasy-based narratives pasted together out of secondary sources” reflecting “flagrantly anti-Arab prejudice.” In some cases this is hyperbole, in others not.

That said, Achcar’s book also suffers from some extremely significant flaws, and his own dubious grand narratives. While he is appropriately tough on the Islamist movement, he soft-pedals the angry anti-Semitic views of some Arab nationalists. Achcar’s most significant intervention in contemporary politics is his book’s uncompromising anti-Zionism. The whole point of his book is to draw a connection between them, but I don’t think the two themes — a serious and largely fair-minded historical account of Arab reactions to the Holocaust on the one hand and a fairly strong political polemic against Zionism on the other hand — sit very well together. It raises suspicions that the first is deployed in order to strengthen the hand of the second, and that this may have been the main point all along. Or perhaps the second is being deployed to defend the credibility, at least for Arab audiences, of the first. Either way, the main point of the book about the complex history of the cultural and political reception of the Holocaust in the Arab world is undermined by the anti-Zionist polemic. I don’t think either Berman or Achcar set out to write anti-Palestinian or anti-Israeli books intentionally, and if read with sensitivity both books are capable of avoiding giving that impression. However, both of them also contain enough material for a biased reader to get very much of the wrong impression.

One final point: the ongoing and endless debate about Amin al-Husseini and the Holocaust, as well as some widespread and crude propaganda, has given many people in the West the impression that during the Second World War, the Arabs and the Muslims in general sided with the Nazis and that this was based largely on anti-Semitism. Berman says as much: “Everyone understood during the war that, if a good many Arabs and Muslims condemned the Axis and even fought on the side of the Allies, an even larger number, in some regions an overwhelming number, cheered the Axis on, actively or passively.” Personally, I’ve never seen a shred of evidence that can be mobilized to seriously suggest that during the war the larger number of Arabs or Muslims cheered the Axis on, and the main evidence, the number of Arabs and Muslims that fought in the war, and on which side, militates most powerfully against such a claim (as does much of the public discourse in the Arab press at the time, in spite of British and French colonialism in the region). Berman acknowledges the reality, although it doesn’t seem to have really sunk into his analysis, that “vastly more Arab soldiers fought on the Allied side, in the British and Free French armies.” And, he notes, “some forty thousand African and North African soldiers in the Free French armed forces are said to have died in the liberation of Europe in 1944 and ’45 alone — a huge statistic if you give it any thought.”

I noted above that the best estimate I’ve seen holds about 6,000 Arabs to have been involved in the German war effort during the entire conflict. Achcar points out that 9,000 Palestinians alone enlisted in the British army during the war, which already dwarfs the first figure. At least half a million Indian Muslims enlisted in the British military during the conflict. The majority of the French army in North Africa in 1939 and ’40 were Arabs. In the French defeat of June 1940 approximately 5,400 Arab soldiers were killed fighting on the Allied side, and an estimated 90,000 Muslims, 60,000 Algerians, 18,000 Moroccans and 12,000 Tunisians were captured by the Germans. It has been estimated that 233,000 North African Muslims were serving in the Free French Army in 1944. It has also been estimated that something like 52% of all soldiers of the Free French Army killed during the last year of the war were Muslims, mostly from North Africa. So, as a matter of fact, the Arabs and the Muslims were heavily involved in the Second World War, but on the Allied and not on the Nazi side. Someone desperately needs to do a thorough but accessible book on this totally unappreciated fact aimed at Western societies that are being systematically given the opposite impression. There is one further noteworthy fact: in all the territories of the “Third Reich,” it was in Albania alone, which just so happens to have been the only Muslim-majority country in Europe to come under direct German occupation, that not one Jew was handed over (the same, it must be said, doesn’t apply to Muslim-majority enclaves in parts of Yugoslavia such as Bosnia or Kosovo, sadly, not to mention Catholic Croatia). As a consequence, Albania was the only country in continental Europe to emerge from the war with a larger Jewish population than it had had at its start. This, at least, has been documented in the excellent book “Besa: Muslims Who Saved Jews in World War II” by Norman H. Gershman (Syracuse University Press, 2008).