Author Archive

Ship o’ Ghrouls

The Article: One of the better articles I’ve read in a while, Johann Hari describes taking the National Review Cruise in Titanic at the New Republic (and via Liberal Avenger).

The Text: I am standing waist-deep in the Pacific Ocean, indulging in the polite chit-chat beloved by vacationing Americans. A sweet elderly lady from Los Angeles is sitting on the rocks nearby, telling me dreamily about her son. “Is he your only child?” I ask. “Yes,” she answers. “Do you have a child back in England?” she asks me. No, I say. Her face darkens. “You’d better start,” she says. “The Muslims are breeding. Soon, they’ll have the whole of Europe.”

I am getting used to such moments, when holiday geniality bleeds into–well, I’m not sure exactly what. I am traveling on a bright-white cruise ship with two restaurants, five bars, and 500 readers of National Review. Here, the Iraq war has been “an amazing success.” Global warming is not happening. Europe is becoming a new Caliphate. And I have nowhere to run.

From time to time, National Review–the bible of American conservatism–organizes a cruise for its readers. Last November, I paid $1,200 to join them. The rules I imposed on myself were simple: If any of the conservative cruisers asked who I was, I answered honestly, telling them I was a journalist. But, mostly, I just tried to blend in–and find out what conservatives say when they think the rest of us aren’t listening.

I arrive at the dockside in San Diego on a Saturday afternoon and stare up at the Oosterdam, our home for the next seven days. We guests have been told to gather for a cocktail reception on a deck near the top of the ship. There are no big hugs or warm kisses at this gathering. This is a place of starchy introductions. Men approach one another with puffed-out chests and sturdy handshakes. Women are greeted with a single kiss on the cheek. Anything more, of course, would be French.

I adjust and stiffly greet the first man I see. He is a judge, he tells me, with the craggy self- important charm that slowly consumes any judge. He is from Canada, he declares (a little more apologetically), and is the founding president of “Canadians Against Suicide Bombing.” Would there be many members of “Canadians for Suicide Bombing?” I ask. Dismayed, he suggests that yes, yes there would.

A bell rings somewhere, and we are all beckoned to dinner. We have been assigned random seats, which will change each night. We will, the pub- licity pack promises, each dine with at least one National Review speaker during our trip.

To my left, I find a middle-aged Floridian with a neat beard. To my right are two elderly New Yorkers who look and sound like late-era Dorothy Parker, minus the alcohol poisoning. They live on Park Avenue, they explain in precise Northern tones. “You must live near the U.N. building,” the Floridian says to one of the ladies after the entrĂ©e is served. Yes, she responds, shaking her head wearily. “They should suicide-bomb that place,” he says. They all chuckle gently.

The conversation ebbs back to friendly chit-chat. So, you’re a European, one of the Park Avenue ladies says, before offering witty commentaries on the cities she’s visited. Her companion adds, “I went to Paris, and it was so lovely.” Her face darkens: “But then you think–it’s surrounded by Muslims.” The first lady nods: “They’re out there, and they’re coming.” Emboldened, the bearded Floridian wags a finger and says, “Down the line, we’re not going to bail out the French again.” He mimes picking up a phone and shouts into it, “I can’t hear you, Jacques! What’s that? The Muslims are doing what to you? I can’t hear you!”

Now that this barrier has been broken–everyone agrees the Muslims are devouring the French, and everyone agrees it’s funny–the usual suspects are quickly rounded up. Jimmy Carter is “almost a traitor.” John McCain is “crazy” because of “all that torture.” One of the Park Avenue ladies declares that she gets on her knees every day to “thank God for Fox News.” As the wine reaches the Floridian, he sits back and announces, “This cruise is the best money I ever spent.”

The next morning, I warily wander into the Vista Lounge–a Vegas-style showroom–for the first of the trip’s seminars: a discussion intended to exhume the conservative corpse and discover its cause of death on the black, black night of November 7, 2006.

There is something strange about this discussion, and it takes me a few moments to realize exactly what it is. All the tropes conservatives usually deny in public–that Iraq is another Vietnam, that Bush is fighting a class war on behalf of the rich–are embraced on this shining ship in the middle of the ocean. Yes, they concede, we are fighting another Vietnam; and this time we won’t let the weak-kneed liberals lose it. “It’s customary to say we lost the Vietnam war, but who’s ‘we’?” Dinesh D’Souza asks angrily. “The left won by demanding America’s humiliation.” On this ship, there are no Viet Cong, no three million dead. There is only liberal treachery. Yes, D’Souza says, in a swift shift to domestic politics, “of course” Republican politics is “about class. Republicans are the party of winners, Democrats are the party of losers.”

The panel nods, but it doesn’t want to stray from Iraq. Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan’s one-time nominee to the Supreme Court, mumbles from beneath low-hanging jowls: “The coverage of this war is unbelievable. Even Fox News is unbelievable. You’d think we’re the only ones dying. Enemy casualties aren’t covered. We’re doing an excellent job killing them.”

Then, with a judder, the panel runs momentarily aground. Rich Lowry, the preppy, handsome 38-year-old editor of National Review, announces, “The American public isn’t concluding we’re losing in Iraq for any irrational reason. They’re looking at the cold, hard facts.” The Vista Lounge is, as one, perplexed. Lowry continues, “I wish it was true that, because we’re a superpower, we can’t lose. But it’s not.”

No one argues with him. They just look away, in the same manner that people avoid glancing at a crazy person yelling at a bus stop. Then they return to hyperbole and accusations of treachery against people like their editor. The aging historian Bernard Lewis declares, “The election in the U.S. is being seen by [the bin Ladenists] as a victory on a par with the collapse of the Soviet Union. We should be prepared for whatever comes next.” This is why the guests paid up to $6,000. This is what they came for. They give him a wheezing, stooping ovation and break for coffee.

A fracture-line in the lumbering certainty of American conservatism is opening right before my eyes. Following the break, Norman Podhoretz and William Buckley–two of the grand old men of the Grand Old Party–begin to feud. Podhoretz will not stop speaking–”I have lots of ex-friends on the left; it looks like I’m going to have some ex-friends on the right, too,” he rants–and Buckley says to the chair, “Just take the mike, there’s no other way.” He says it with a smile, but with heavy eyes.

Podhoretz and Buckley now inhabit opposite poles of post-September 11 American conservatism, and they stare at wholly different Iraqs. Podhoretz is the Brooklyn-born, street-fighting kid who traveled through a long phase of left- liberalism to a pugilistic belief in America’s power to redeem the world, one bomb at a time. Today, he is a bristling gray ball of aggression, here to declare that the Iraq war has been “an amazing success.” He waves his fist and declaims, “There were WMD, and they were shipped to Syria. 
 This picture of a country in total chaos with no security is false. It has been a triumph. It couldn’t have gone better.” He wants more wars, and fast. He is “certain” Bush will bomb Iran, and “thank God” for that.

Buckley is an urbane old reactionary, drunk on doubts. He founded National Review in 1955–when conservatism was viewed in polite society as a mental affliction–and he has always been skeptical of appeals to “the people,” preferring the eternal top-down certainties of Catholicism. He united with Podhoretz in mutual hatred of Godless Communism, but, slouching into his eighties, he possesses a worldview that is ill-suited for the fight to bring democracy to the Muslim world. He was a ghostly presence on the cruise at first, appearing only briefly to shake a few hands. But now he has emerged, and he is fighting.

“Aren’t you embarrassed by the absence of these weapons?” Buckley snaps at Podhoretz. He has just explained that he supported the war reluctantly, because Dick Cheney convinced him Saddam Hussein had WMD primed to be fired. “No,” Podhoretz replies. “As I say, they were shipped to Syria. During Gulf war one, the entire Iraqi air force was hidden in the deserts in Iran.” He says he is “heartbroken” by this “rise of defeatism on the right.” He adds, apropos of nothing, “There was nobody better than Don Rumsfeld. This defeatist talk only contributes to the impression we are losing, when I think we’re winning.”

The audience cheers Podhoretz. The nuanced doubts of Bill Buckley leave them confused. Doesn’t he sound like the liberal media? Later, over dinner, a tablemate from Denver calls Buckley “a coward.” His wife nods and says, “Buckley’s an old man,” tapping her head with her finger to suggest dementia.

I decide to track down Buckley and Podhoretz separately and ask them for interviews. Bill is sitting forlornly in his cabin, scribbling in a notebook. In 2005, at an event celebrating National Review’s fiftieth birthday, President Bush described today’s American conservatives as “Bill’s children.” I ask him if he feels like a parent whose kids grew up to be serial killers. He smiles slightly, and his blue eyes appear to twinkle. Then he sighs, “The answer is no. Because what animated the conservative core for forty years was the Soviet menace, plus the rise of dogmatic socialism. That’s pretty well gone.”

This does not feel like an optimistic defense of his brood, but it’s a theme he returns to repeatedly: The great battles of his life are already won. Still, he ruminates over what his old friend Ronald Reagan would have made of Iraq. “I think the prudent Reagan would have figured here, and the prudent Reagan would have shunned a commitment of the kind that we are now engaged in. 
 I think he would have attempted to find some sort of assurance that any exposure by the United States would be exposure to a challenge the dimensions of which we could predict.” Lest liberals be too eager to adopt the Gipper as one of their own, Buckley agrees approvingly that Reagan’s approach would have been to “find a local strongman” to rule Iraq.

A few floors away, Podhoretz tells me he is losing his voice, “which will make some people very happy.” Then he croaks out the standard-issue Wolfowitz line about how, after September 11, the United States had to introduce democracy to the Middle East in order to change the political culture that produced the mass murderers. For somebody who declares democracy to be his goal, he is remarkably blasĂ© about the fact that 80 percent of Iraqis want U.S. troops to leave their country, according to the latest polls. “I don’t much care,” he says, batting the question away. He goes on to insist that “nobody was tortured in Abu Ghraib or GuantĂĄnamo” and that Bush is “a hero.” He is, like most people on this cruise, certain the administration will attack Iran.

“I keep telling people we are in World War Four,” Podhoretz declares. He fumes at Buckley, George Will, and the other apostate conservatives who refuse to see sense. He again declares victory. And for a moment, here in the Mexican breeze, it is as though, thousands of miles away, Baghdad is not bleeding.

I encounter other ghosts of conservatism past wandering the ship as well. From the pool, I see John O’Sullivan, former adviser to Margaret Thatcher and former editor of National Review. And, one morning on the deck, I discover Kenneth Starr, looking like he has stepped out of a long-forgotten 1990s newsreel. His face is round and unlined, like that of an immense, contented baby. As I stare at it, all my repressed bewilderment rises, and I ask: Mr. Starr, do you feel ashamed that, while Osama bin Laden was plotting to murder nearly 3,000 American citizens, you brought the government to a standstill over a few consensual blow-jobs?

He smiles through his teeth and says, in his soft, somnambulant voice, “I am entirely at rest with the process. The House of Representatives worked its will, the Senate worked its will, the chief justice of the United States presided. The constitutional process worked admirably.” It’s an oddly meek defense, and, the more I challenge him, the more legalistic he becomes, each answer a variation on, “It wasn’t my fault.”

Several days later, the nautical counter-revolution has docked in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where passengers will clamber overboard into a nation they want to wall off behind a 1,000-mile fence. One expresses horror at my intention to find a local street kid to show me around, exclaiming, “Do you want to die?” D’Souza summarizes the prevailing sentiment by unveiling what he modestly calls “D’Souza’s law of immigration”: An immigrant’s quality is “proportional to the distance traveled to get to the United States.” In other words: Asians trump Latinos.

After wandering Puerto Vallarta without bodily harm, I return for dinner with my special National Review guest: Kate O’Beirne. She’s an impossibly tall blonde with the voice of a 1930s screwball star and the arguments of an 1890s Victorian patriarch. She inveighs against feminism and “women who make the world worse” in quick quips. She is sitting among adoring fans with her husband, Jim, who quickly announces that he is Donald Rumsfeld’s personnel director. “People keep asking what I’m doing here, with him being fired and all,” he says. “But the cruise has been arranged for a long time.”

The familiar routine of the dinners–getting-to-know-you chit-chat, followed by raging right-wing echo chamber–is accelerating. Tonight, there is explicit praise for a fascist dictator before the entrĂ©e has arrived. I drop the news that there are moves in Germany to have Rumsfeld extradited to face war crimes charges. A red-faced man who looks like an egg with a moustache glued on grumbles, “If the Germans think they can take responsibility for the world, I don’t care about German courts. Bomb them.” I begin to cite the Pinochet precedent, and O’Beirne snaps, “Treating Don Rumsfeld like Pinochet is disgusting.” Egg Man pounds his fist on the table: “Treating Pinochet like that is disgusting. Pinochet is a hero. He saved Chile.” “Exactly,” adds O’Beirne’s husband. “And he privatized Social Security.”

The table nods solemnly before marching onward to Topic A: the billion-strong swarm of Muslims who are poised to take over the world. The idea that Europe is being “taken over” is the unifying theme of this cruise. Some people go on singles’ cruises, some on ballroom-dancing cruises. This is the Muslims Are Coming cruise. Everyone thinks it. Everyone knows it. And the man most responsible for this insight is sitting only a few tables down: Mark Steyn. He is wearing sunglasses on top of his head and a bright shirt. Steyn’s thesis in his new book, America Alone, is simple: The “European races”–i.e., white people–”are too self-absorbed to breed,” but the Muslims are multiplying quickly. The inevitable result will be “large-scale evacuation operations circa 2015? as Europe is ceded to Al Qaeda and “Greater France remorselessly evolve[s] into Greater Bosnia.” He offers a light smearing of dubious demographic figures–he needs to turn 20 million European Muslims into more than 150 million in nine years, which is a lot of humping–to “prove” his case.

But facts, figures, and doubt are not on the itinerary of this cruise. With one or two exceptions, the passengers discuss “the Muslims” as a homogenous, sharia-seeking block–already with near-total control of Europe. Over the week, I am asked nine times–I counted–when I am fleeing Europe’s encroaching Muslim population for the safety of the United States.

At one of the seminars, a panelist says anti-Americanism comes from both directions in a grasping pincer movement–”The Muslims condemn us for being decadent; the Europeans condemn us for not being decadent enough.” Midge Decter, Norman Podhoretz’s wife, yells, “The Muslims are right, the Europeans are wrong!” And, instantly, Jay Nordlinger, National Review’s managing editor and the panel’s chair, says, “I’m afraid a lot of the Europeans are Muslim, Midge.” The audience cheers. Somebody shouts, “You tell ‘em, Jay!”

He tells ‘em. Decter tells ‘em. Steyn tells ‘em. On this cruise, everyone tells ‘em–and, thanks to my European passport, tells me. It is, unsurprisingly, the last thing I hear at the end of the voyage. I’m back on the docks of San Diego, watching the tireless champions of the overdog filter past and say their formal goodbyes. As I turn my back on the ship for the last time, I feel the judge I met the first day place his arm affectionately on my shoulder. “We have written off Britain to the Muslims,” he says. “Come to America.”

Analysis: Sound the alarm, brown people are coming. Wait — Arabs or Mexicans? Or both?

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Crazy Bloodsucker Doctrine

The Article: The Cheney Doctrine by Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post.

The Text: Let’s admit it: We in the media haven’t had this much fun with Vice President Cheney since he shot a man in the face and neglected, for a while, to tell the boss. And let’s admit: Like that episode, this one doesn’t matter much on its own.

So the vice president’s office wouldn’t report how many documents it had classified, and it wouldn’t let an obscure division of the National Archives look at its security procedures. In bureaucratese, OVP blocked ISOO from conducting an on-site review under Section 5.2 (b)(4) of Executive Order 12958, as amended.

Of all the vice president’s excesses, this one barely registers on the Cheney Scale. Its seismic impact, rather, stems from the combination of so many Cheneyesque attributes: mania for secrecy, resistance to oversight, willingness to twist the law and assertion of unreviewable power.

This is Cheney’s version of the $400 haircut/I voted for the $87 billion before I voted against it/I invented the Internet — a moment whose importance is magnified because it fits with jigsaw precision into an existing template. In this case, as the Post series on Cheney has shown, those preconceptions are justified.

As maddening as the vice president’s above-the-law attitude is the way he and his staff respond when challenged: first, the silent treatment, then the legal bait and switch. When the Information Security Oversight Office asked Cheney’s chief of staff, David S. Addington, why the office had blocked its inspection, Addington didn’t deign to reply — twice. Neither did Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, to whom ISOO wrote in January for guidance.

Cheney’s initial explanation for his refusal to file ISOO reports — and this is where the fun we’ve been having with this story comes in — rested on his unique status as both vice president and president of the Senate.

“This has been thoroughly reviewed, and it’s been determined that the reporting requirement does not apply to [the office of the vice president], which has both legislative and executive functions,” a Cheney spokeswoman told the Chicago Tribune in May last year.

This makes no sense — as the White House’s subsequent abandonment (mostly) of this argument suggests. No doubt, the vice president wears two hats. But it’s hard to credit the argument that he is not as a result, “within the executive branch,” and therefore covered by the executive order.

Indeed, when President Bush rewrote the order in 2003, he granted the vice president explicit authority “in the performance of executive duties” to classify and declassify information. So under Cheney’s interpretation he simultaneously gets new executive classification powers but isn’t part of the executive in having to report his handling of classified material.

Moreover, when the executive order wanted to exempt the vice president’s office from one provision, it did so clearly. The amended order explicitly relieves the vice president’s staff from having to comply with a rule letting outsiders seek declassification.

Now, the argument has shifted from that shaky ground to other, equally shaky ones.

First, that the office of the vice president isn’t an agency covered by the regulation. “Supreme Court precedent shows that the vice president and the president are not seen as an agency when it comes to executive orders,” the battered briefer, Dana Perino, dutifully recited Monday.

She was referring to a 1992 census case, Franklin v. Massachusetts, in which the Supreme Court said that the president was not considered an “agency” for purposes of the Administrative Procedure Act. That might be vaguely relevant if the executive order didn’t contain its own, far broader definition of agency (“any other entity within the executive branch that comes into the possession of classified information”).

Second, Perino now argues, the president never intended for his office or the vice president’s to be covered by the reporting and inspection rules.

The president and vice president, for purposes of this order, she says, are one and the same — an argument that doesn’t quite square with Perino’s point, at the same briefing, that “the vice president’s paycheck comes from the Senate.” And, Perino says, neither is covered by the relevant part of the executive order.

That would be a fine argument, and certainly within the president’s power, except that’s not what the order says. It’s not the way previous administrations have interpreted it — or how this one did for the first two years, when Cheney’s office filed reports about its classification procedures. If the president meant to change that practice when he rewrote the executive order in 2003, he didn’t mention it.

In the end, Cheney vs. ISOO is just another example of the Cheney doctrine at work: Never willingly provide information, however innocuous. Never do in public what you can accomplish by stealth. And never make a reasonable argument when an outlandish one is at hand.

The Analysis: Dick Cheney is a crazy mother fucker.

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America, Fuck Yah!!

The Article: Number of Americans who believe Saddam-9/11 tie rises to 41 percent by Josh Catone in Raw Story.

The Text: A new Newsweek poll out this weekend exposed “gaps” in America’s knowledge of history and current events.

Perhaps most alarmingly, 41% of Americans answered ‘Yes’ to the question “Do you think Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq was directly involved in planning, financing, or carrying out the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001?”

That total is actually up 5 points since September 2004.

Further, a majority of people couldn’t identify Saudia Arabia as the country of origin of most of the 9/11 hijackers, even given the question in multiple choice format. 20% answered Iraq, while 14% believed the hijackers came from Iran.

A majority (52%) believe the US is losing the war against al Qaeda, however Newsweek disagrees. In the magazine’s reporting of the poll, they made judgment that the US is in fact not “losing the fight against al-Qaeda or radical Islamic terrorism.”

Closer to home, 89% of Americans are unable to name the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (John Roberts), though a majority of those polled were able to name Nancy Pelosi as the current Speaker of the House.

A large majority of people said they didn’t know or didn’t care who the winner of this year’s American Idol competition was (or at least weren’t willing to admit it).

The full results of the Newsweek poll are available here.

The Analysis: Oh America, you’re so wonderful.

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Martyrs or Traitors

The Article: Martyrs or Traitors in this weeks Economist.

The Text: Arab world has long been criss-crossed by feuds and rivalries. But if there is one point on which Arabs have agreed for more than half a century it is the justice of the Palestinian cause. Much as they may have loathed him in private, all Arab leaders had to show public respect for Yasser Arafat, the emblematic freedom fighter (and terrorist) who as leader of the Fatah movement personified the Palestinian struggle from the 1960s until his death three years ago.

That is why the scenes from Gaza have shocked Arabs far beyond Palestine. Arafat’s portrait was torn off office walls and smashed under the boots of the Islamist fighters of Hamas. The Palestinian flag was hauled down and
the green banner of Islam hoisted in its place. In one brutal week Hamas’s swift destruction of Arafat’s Fatah movement in Gaza summed up a change that is spreading across a broad swathe of the Middle East. Secular nationalism of the sort Fatah stood for is coming to look like the weak force and radical Islam like the strong force. This poses a huge danger to a region already beset by violent conflicts. What is worse, Western policy is in danger of strengthening the wrong side by making the Islamists look like martyrs and the secularists like traitors.

In Washington this week George Bush met Ehud Olmert, Israel’s prime minister, to work out what to do after Hamas’s seizure of power (see article). Their plan, which may be co-ordinated by Tony Blair when he steps down as Britain’s prime minister, is to keep Hamas penned up in its Gaza enclave and to shower love, money and weapons on Palestine’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, whose Fatah-dominated security forces are still more or less in control of the larger and more populous West Bank. The hope is that if Gaza fails under Hamas while the West Bank prospers under Fatah, Palestinian opinion will eventually swing back behind the moderates.

Can such a plan possibly work? There are reasons specific to Palestine that suggest it will not. But the first point to note is general. Any Arab leader who wins the label “moderate” and is showered as a result of this with American love and money is in danger of being called a traitor.

The most dangerous love

Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat, was called a traitor for making his courageous peace with Israel in 1979 (and assassinated by jihadists two years later). Arafat was called a traitor after shaking hands with an Israeli prime minister on the White House lawn. In Lebanon right now the Hizbullah movement calls the beleaguered government of Fouad Siniora traitorous because it is propped up by France and America. Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, needs to keep his distance from America to fend off accusations that he is a puppet of the occupation. And, of course, the assumption of many Muslims that a pro-American leader must in some way be a traitor to the cause extends beyond the Arab world: in Pakistan and Afghanistan Presidents Musharraf and Karzai have constantly to face down the cry that by allying with the superpower they have sold out their countries—or, worse, their religion.

America’s allies cannot stop the martyrs from calling them traitors. America has made itself deeply unpopular in the Islamic world by invading Iraq and standing by Israel. This is bound to taint any Muslim leader who looks as if he owes his position to American military or economic power. But guilt by association is only one half of the reason for the growing popularity of the martyrs and the spreading idea that America’s allies must be traitors. The other half is that, by comparison with the traitors, the martyrs look clean.

When Arafat returned to Palestine from exile his honeymoon was brief. The returning hero created a regime of a kind all too familiar in the Arab world. It was riddled by corruption and ruled over by a sinister mukhabarat—the secret-police network that spies on and bullies the citizenry in most Arab states. By contrast, Hamas in Palestine, Hizbullah in Lebanon and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jordan have earned a reputation for both honesty and efficiency. They often provide the poor with the health and social services that the state fails to deliver. When Hamas blew up Fatah’s security headquarters last week, many Arabs silently cheered. All the more pity that Mr Bush has lately dropped his efforts to push Arab allies towards greater accountability and human rights.

The banker in the suit

The martyrs have another selling point. They are still “resisting”. During the Lebanon war last summer Hizbullah won millions of admirers for breaking the spell of Israeli invincibility. Hamas claimed credit for forcing Israel to evacuate its settlers and soldiers from the Gaza Strip two years ago. Salam Fayyad, the new Palestinian prime minister installed by Mr Abbas, is a decent man. But he is a former World Bank employee in a suit. The Hamas fighter with a bandanna and machinegun makes much better box office.

After Fatah’s debacle in Gaza, Mr Bush and Mr Olmert see an opportunity to prove via a Hamas-free government in the West Bank that moderation pays. But it is not enough for Israel and America to release the economic help they withheld from the Palestinians when Hamas was still formally in charge. For the Palestinians’ principal grievance is not economic. What they chiefly want is an end to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank as well as Gaza so that they can enjoy an independent national existence in both places. And in this respect the West Bank is a tougher problem than Gaza, because it remains speckled by Israeli settlements and throttled by checkpoints.

What America must now prove is that its moderate Arab allies, far from being traitors, can actually deliver desirable results. In the case of Palestine, Mr Abbas and his new prime minister have to show not only that they can govern cleanly but also that they can get Israel to start dismantling outposts and leaving the West Bank. This, as it happens, is not something martyrs can do: Hamas’s rockets just make the Israelis less willing to take risks. But to offer the moderates money and no visible progress towards statehood is to treat them with contempt—and to invite Arabs everywhere to do the same.

The Analysis: You don’t need mine; read Daniel Levy’s.

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Rich, Black, and Don’t Give a Fuck

The Artlcle: Rich, Black, and Flunking by Susan Goldsmith in the East Bay Express.

The Text: The black parents wanted an explanation. Doctors, lawyers, judges, and insurance brokers, many had come to the upscale Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights specifically because of its stellar school district. They expected their children to succeed academically, but most were performing poorly. African-American students were lagging far behind their white classmates in every measure of academic success: grade-point average, standardized test scores, and enrollment in advanced-placement courses. On average, black students earned a 1.9 GPA while their white counterparts held down an average of 3.45. Other indicators were equally dismal. It made no sense.

When these depressing statistics were published in a high school newspaper in mid-1997, black parents were troubled by the news and upset that the newspaper had exposed the problem in such a public way. Seeking guidance, one parent called a prominent authority on minority academic achievement.

UC Berkeley Anthropology Professor John Ogbu had spent decades studying how the members of different ethnic groups perform academically. He’d studied student coping strategies at inner-city schools in Washington, DC. He’d looked at African Americans and Latinos in Oakland and Stockton and examined how they compare to racial and ethnic minorities in India, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, and Britain. His research often focused on why some groups are more successful than others.

But Ogbu couldn’t help his caller. He explained that he was a researcher — not an educator — and that he had no ideas about how to increase the academic performance of students in a district he hadn’t yet studied. A few weeks later, he got his chance. A group of parents hungry for solutions convinced the school district to join with them and formally invite the black anthropologist to visit Shaker Heights. Their discussions prompted Ogbu to propose a research project to figure out just what was happening. The district agreed to finance the study, and parents offered him unlimited access to their children and their homes.

The professor and his research assistant moved to Shaker Heights for nine months in mid-1997. They reviewed data and test scores. The team observed 110 different classes, from kindergarten all the way through high school. They conducted exhaustive interviews with school personnel, black parents, and students. Their project yielded an unexpected conclusion: It wasn’t socioeconomics, school funding, or racism, that accounted for the students’ poor academic performance; it was their own attitudes, and those of their parents.

Ogbu concluded that the average black student in Shaker Heights put little effort into schoolwork and was part of a peer culture that looked down on academic success as “acting white.” Although he noted that other factors also play a role, and doesn’t deny that there may be antiblack sentiment in the district, he concluded that discrimination alone could not explain the gap.

“The black parents feel it is their role to move to Shaker Heights, pay the higher taxes so their kids could graduate from Shaker, and that’s where their role stops,” Ogbu says during an interview at his home in the Oakland hills. “They believe the school system should take care of the rest. They didn’t supervise their children that much. They didn’t make sure their children did their homework. That’s not how other ethnic groups think.”

It took the soft-spoken 63-year-old Nigerian immigrant several years to complete his book, Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb: A Study of Academic Disengagement, which he wrote with assistance from his research aide Astrid Davis. Before publication, he gave parents and school officials one year to respond to his research, but no parents ever did. Then Ogbu met with district officials and parents to discuss the book, which was finally published in January.

The gatherings were cordial, but it was clear that his conclusions made some people quite uncomfortable. African-American parents worried that Ogbu’s work would further reinforce the stereotype that blacks are intellectually inadequate and lazy. School district officials, meanwhile, were concerned that it would look as if they were blaming black parents and students for their own academic failures.

But in the weeks following the meetings, it became apparent that the person with the greatest cause for worry may have been Ogbu himself. Soon after he left Ohio and returned to California, a black parent from Shaker Heights went on TV and called him an “academic Clarence Thomas.” The National Urban League condemned him and his work in a press release that scoffed, “The League holds that it is useless to waste time and energy with those who blame the victims of racism.” The criticism eventually made it all the way to The New York Times, where an article published prior to the publication of Ogbu’s book quoted or referred to four separate academics who quarreled with his premise. It quoted a Shaker Heights school official who took issue with the professor’s conclusions, and cited work by the Minority Student Achievement Network that suggested black students care as much about school as white and Asian students. In fact, the reporter failed to locate a single person in Shaker Heights or anywhere else with anything good to say about the book.

Other scholars have since come forward to take a few more swipes at the professor’s premise. “Ogbu is just flat-out wrong about the attitudes about learning by African Americans,” explains Asa Hilliard, an education professor at Georgia State University and one of the authors of Young, Gifted, and Black: Promoting High Achievement Among African-American Students. “Education is a very high value in the African-American community and in the African community. The fundamental problem is Dr. Ogbu is unfamiliar with the fact that there are thousands of African-American students who succeed. It doesn’t matter whether the students are in Shaker Heights or an inner city. The achievement depends on what expectations the teacher has of the students.” Hilliard, who is black, believes Shaker Heights teachers must not expect enough from their black students.

To racial theorist Shelby Steele, the response to Ogbu’s work was sad but predictable. Steele, a black research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and the author of The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America, has weathered similar criticism for his own provocative theories about the gap between blacks and whites. He believes continued societal deference to the victims of racial discrimination has permitted blacks “the license not to meet the same standards that others must meet,” which has been detrimental to every aspect of African-American life. “To talk about black responsibility is “racist’ and “blaming the victim,'” he says. “They just keep refusing to acknowledge the elephant in the living room — black responsibility. When anybody in this culture today talks about black responsibility for their problems, they are condemned and ignored.”

Ogbu knows that better than anybody. In the months since publication of his book, he’s been called a sellout with no heart for his own people, and dismissed entirely by critics who say his theory is so outrageous it isn’t even worth debating. It is not surprising that Ogbu himself is now a bit uncomfortable discussing his own conclusions, although he has not backed down at all. After all, many scholars are eager to blame everything but black culture for the scholastic woes of African Americans. “I look below the surface,” he says, in response to his many critics. “They don’t like it.”

Parents in Shaker Heights began trying to explain the disquieting gap months before Ogbu arrived. A small group of black and white parents gathered in the mid-1990s to study the issue months before the student newspaper at Shaker Heights High School published its article. Their preliminary explanations were divided into four broad categories: the school system, the community, black parents, and black students. The group concluded that the academic gap was an “unusually complex subject, involving the internal and external synergistic dynamics not only of the school system, but also of the parents and of students, collectively and individually, as well as our community as a whole.”

It was a diplomatic way of saying there was much blame to go around, some of it attributable to black parents or students. Although many black parents would later react negatively to Ogbu’s work, this biracial group had in fact beaten him to some of his conclusions. “Ogbu didn’t find anything new,” recalls Reuben Harris, an African-American parent who served on the subcommittee. “It’s just a community where you wouldn’t think this kind of gap would occur.”

Ogbu agreed. And because he had spent much of his prior career looking at inner-city schools, he was particularly intrigued by the idea of studying a relatively affluent minority group in an academically successful suburban district. This was an opportunity to do a new kind of research. Why were there such stark differences when the socioeconomic playing field was comparably level? How could you explain the achievement discrepancies when they couldn’t be dismissed with the traditional explanations of inadequate teachers or disparities in school funding?

Shaker Heights is an upper-middle-class city whose roughly 28,000 residents live on lovely tree-lined streets that run through neighborhoods of stately homes and manicured lawns. Years ago, both blacks and Jews were prohibited from living in the community by restrictive real-estate covenants, but the civil rights era brought a new attitude to the Cleveland suburb, which voluntarily integrated and actively discouraged white flight. Today, blacks make up about one third of the community, and many of them are academics, professionals, and corporate executives.

Ogbu worked from the 1990 census data, which showed that 32.6 percent of the black households and 58 percent of the white households in Shaker had incomes of $50,000 a year or more — a considerable sum in northeast Ohio. It also was a highly educated community, where 61 percent of the residents graduated from college, about four times the national average. The school district was a model of success, too: Considered one of the best in the nation, it sent 85 percent of its students to college. Today, the district has approximately 5,000 students, of whom 52 percent are African American.

These were the kids of primarily well-educated middle- to upper-class parents, and yet they were not performing on a par with their white classmates in everything from grade-point average to college attendance. Although they did outperform other black students from across Ohio and around the country, neither school officials nor parents were celebrating.

Ogbu’s approach was to use ethnographic methods to study the problems in Shaker Heights. In ethnography, the point is to try and “get inside the heads of the natives,” he says. “You try to see the world as they see, and be with them — as one of my colleagues puts it — in all sorts of moods.” An ethnographer lives in the community, talks to his subjects extensively, observes the environment, reviews data, but then derives his own conclusions about the situation.

Many of Ogbu’s academic critics take issue with his methods, which they say are way too subjective. Most of them are sociologists, who rely on their subjects’ own sense of the situation when studying something. It is the view of those being studied and not the view of the researcher that counts most. “They do surveys,” Ogbu says. “They ask questions. I live in the community and socialize. My research is not confined to schools. I tell you what I observe.”

Ogbu addresses this point in the introduction to his book: “The natives’ own account of their social reality is also a social construction rather than a reality that is out there.” He uses the example of racial attitudes in Shaker Heights to show why he believes this approach fails. Ask people there about race relations in the community and you will get wildly divergent opinions, depending on whom you ask. Whites, he found, say it is a racially harmonious and tolerant place. African Americans, meanwhile, describe the community as racially troubled and filled with tension between blacks and whites.

There are other differences between Ogbu’s approach and that of most other academics who study minorities and education. They focus their scrutiny on the academic system or society at large, pointing to factors such as socioeconomics, inadequate urban schools, or the legacy of racism in the United States. Such theorists often cite the 1994 publication of The Bell Curve, which argued that blacks are intellectually inferior to whites, as evidence that negative stereotyping of African Americans still exists.

Ogbu, however, trains his eye elsewhere. “I am interested in what kids bring from home to school,” he says. “And it seems to me there are different categories of students and they bring different things. I want to know what are those things.”

The question of what students in Shaker Heights brought to school from their homes turned out to be profound. Black homes and the black community both nurtured failure, he concluded.

When Ogbu asked black students what it took to do well in the Shaker district, they had the right answers. They knew what to say about how to achieve academic success, but that knowledge wasn’t enough. “In spite of the fact that the students knew and asserted that one had to work hard to succeed in Shaker schools, black students did not generally work hard,” he wrote. “In fact, most appeared to be characterized by low-effort syndrome. The amount of time and effort they invested in academic pursuit was neither adequate nor impressive.”

Ogbu found a near-consensus among black students of every grade level that they and their peers did not work hard in school. The effort these students put into their schoolwork also decreased markedly from elementary school to high school. Students gave many reasons for their disinterest. Some said they simply didn’t want to do the work; others told Ogbu “it was not cool to be successful.” Some kids blamed school for their failures and said teachers did not motivate them, while others said they wanted to do well but didn’t know how to study. Some students evidently had internalized the belief that blacks are not as intelligent as whites, which gave rise to self-doubt and resignation. But almost of the students admitted that they simply failed to put academic achievement before other pursuits such as TV, work, playing sports, or talking on the phone.

The anthropologist also looked at peer pressure among black students to determine just what effect that had on school performance. He concluded that there was a culture among black students to reject behaviors perceived to be “white,” which included making good grades, speaking Standard English, being overly involved in class, and enrolling in honors or advanced-placement courses. The students told Ogbu that engaging in these behaviors suggested one was renouncing his or her black identity. Ogbu concluded that the African-American peer culture, by and large, put pressure on students not to do well in school, as if it were an affront to blackness.

The professor says he discovered this sentiment even in middle- and upper-class homes where the parents were college-educated. “Black parents mistrusted the school system as a white institution,” he wrote. They did not supervise their children’s homework, didn’t show up at school events, and failed to motivate their children to engage in their work. This too was a cultural norm, Ogbu concluded. “They thought or believed, that it was the responsibility of teachers and the schools to make their children learn and perform successfully; that is, they held the teachers, rather than themselves, accountable for their children’s academic success or failure,” he wrote.

Why black parents who mistrusted the school district as a white institution would leave it up to that same system to educate their children confounded Ogbu. “I’m still trying to understand it,” he conceded. “It’s a system you don’t trust, and yet you don’t take the education of your own kids into your hands.”

Ogbu’s critics find much to argue with in his Shaker Heights work. They believe his methods were shoddy, his research incomplete, and his assumptions about Shaker Heights outdated or wrong. They say the black community is far less affluent than Ogbu portrayed it and add that many of the black parents are first-generation college graduates with fewer family resources than their white counterparts. By and large, they blame the district and outside forces such as discrimination, stereotyping, and poor job opportunities as the cause of its academic problems. Talk to these critics and you also get a sense that they see Ogbu as a bit heartless.

“I find it useless to argue with people like Ogbu,” says Urban League educational fellow Ronald Ross, himself a former school superintendent. “We know what the major problems in this school system are: racism, lack of funding, and unqualified teachers.” Although Shaker Heights is in fact an integrated, well-funded, and well-staffed school district, Ross is nonetheless convinced that it suffers from other problems that contribute to the achievement disparities between the races.

Ronald Ferguson, a senior research associate at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government who also is studying Shaker Heights, believes the denial of equal educational and socioeconomic opportunities is at the root of the gap. He argues that Ogbu didn’t pay enough attention to these essential differences, which he blames for the achievement disparities. The key to those differences is the amount of preparation students receive for academic challenges. “The differences in homework completion are not necessarily signs of lower-level academic disengagement,” Ferguson says. “Instead, they’re signs of skill differences, and in family-background supports.”

Ferguson notes that even in affluent Shaker Heights, the rates of parental education are lower among African Americans than whites, and half the black students report living with one or no parent. “Ogbu writes as though the differences in family background are not very great, but in fact, they’re substantial,” he says.

Ogbu rejects this criticism in a way that suggests he’s sick of hearing it.

“Nonsense,” he says, dismissively. “What about other groups that come from one-parent families, like refugees, and they do better than the blacks? In Shaker Heights, 58 percent of the whites in 1990 made $50,000 to $100,000. Thirty-two percent of the black families made the same amount. The people who invited me are lawyers, real-estate agents; one was elected judge just last year. Over 65 percent of that community had at least four years college education. It’s not a poor community.”

Ogbu points out that another recent study of fourteen affluent communities around the United States found that the achievement gap between well-heeled whites and blacks is widespread, and not confined to Shaker Heights. “This is not unique,” he says.

Although it’s perhaps not surprising that Ogbu’s theory would be criticized by a competing researcher with his own explanation for what’s happening in Shaker Heights, even colleagues who have worked with Ogbu in the past are eager to put some distance between themselves and the anthropologist’s latest work. Signithia Fordham is a professor of anthropology at the University of Rochester in New York who did research with Ogbu in the 1980s. It was that research that popularized the concept of “acting white,” the notion that black students avoid certain behaviors like doing well in school, or speaking Standard English, because it is considered “white.” The two researchers were criticized harshly over that research, which has been attacked in at least ten doctoral dissertations. Ogbu is now writing a book about that work.

Although Fordham did not want to comment on Ogbu’s latest work, it is clear that her beliefs are almost exactly opposite from those of her former colleague. She believes school pressure to speak Standard English and “act white” is the very thing that makes black students fail. “What I found, the requirements in school compelled them to act in ways as if they weren’t living in black bodies but who were essentially white or mainstream Americans,” she says. “Kids found it difficult to deal with that and they found strategies to deal with it. They had to speak a certain variety of English in order to be successful. They had to buy into the ideas that dominate mainstream America. … Black kids couldn’t just be who they were.”

In Ogbu’s work with other American minority groups, the anthropologist has identified a core distinction that he believes is central to academic success or failure. It is the idea of voluntary, versus involuntary, minorities. People who voluntarily immigrate to the United States always do better than the involuntary immigrants, he believes. “I call Chicanos and Native Americans and blacks ‘involuntary minorities,'” he says. “They joined American society against their will. They were enslaved or conquered.” Ogbu sees this distinction as critical for long-term success in and out of school.

“Blacks say Standard English is being imposed on them,” he says. “That’s not what the Chinese say, or the Ibo from Nigeria. You come from the outside and you know you have to learn Standard English, or you won’t do well in school. And you don’t say whites are imposing on you. The Indians and blacks say, ‘Whites took away our language and forced us to learn their language. They caused the problem.'”

Georgia State University’s Hilliard brushes all this attitude stuff aside. He is convinced that the way teachers approach students of different races is key to understanding academic disparities. “It doesn’t matter whether the students are in Shaker Heights or an inner city,” he says. “The achievement depends on what expectations the teacher has of the student. There are savage inequalities in the quality of instruction offered to children. … Based on other things we do know, many teachers face students who are poor or wealthy and, because of their own background, make an assumption certain students can’t make it. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that would be the case in Shaker Heights.”

Ogbu did, in fact, note that teachers treated black and white students differently in the 110 classes he observed. However, he doesn’t believe it was racism that accounted for the differences. “Yes, there was a problem of low teacher expectations of black students,” he explains. “But you have to ask why. Week after week the kids don’t turn in their homework. What do you expect teachers to do?”

Vincent Roscigno is not convinced by Ogbu’s Shaker Heights theory. A sociology professor at Ohio State University who studies race and class disadvantages in achievement, he says Ogbu’s latest premise descends from a long line of blame-the-victim research. “A problem in racial research historically has been to vilify the culture of the subordinate group,” Roscigno says. “In the 1960s, a popular explanation for poverty was a culture-of-poverty thesis. That thesis argued the problems of urban poor people had to do with their culture and they were being guided the wrong way by their culture. … At the turn of the century, the culture of white immigrants was blamed for their poverty and all the social conditions they faced.”

Roscigno also believes Ogbu’s research methods are flawed because he failed to do any comparative research on white families in Shaker Heights, substantially weakening his premise. “He’s drawing very big conclusions about black students and black families in a case where he doesn’t do much comparison,” Roscigno says. “We don’t know if white students would say anything different.”

Ogbu barks a bit defensively in response: “I was invited by black parents. If I had more money and more time, I could study everybody.”

John McWhorter, the author of Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America, says Ogbu’s book roiled the waters of academia, which he believes is too invested in blaming whites for the problems plaguing black America. “There’s a shibboleth in the academic world and that is that the only culture that has any negative traits is the white, middle-class West,” says McWhorter, a UC Berkeley professor of linguistics who is currently serving as a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a New York think tank.

McWhorter’s own book, based largely on the author’s experiences as a black man and professor, blames a mentality of victimhood as the primary reason for most of the problems in black communities — including educational underachievement. “There’s an idea in black culture that says Plato and hypotenuses are for other people,” he says. “There is an element of black identity today that sees doing well in school as being outside of the core of black identity. It’s a tacit sentiment, but powerful. As a result of that, some of what we see in the reluctance of many parents, administrators, and black academics to quite confront the ‘acting white’ syndrome is that deep down many of them harbor a feeling that it would be unhealthy for black kids to embrace school culture too wholeheartedly.”

Nor is Steele, who’s also been dismissed as a sellout in his day, surprised by the way the scholarly world has reacted to Ogbu’s latest work. “Academics are a sad case,” Steele says. “They support the politics of white responsibility for black problems. If they were to do research that found blacks responsible they’d be ‘Uncle Toms,’ and that’s how they’ve treated Ogbu.”

Ogbu seems a bit bothered by the avalanche of criticism that’s come his way. He treads carefully when he talks about his work and reiterates repeatedly in his writing and in person that he is not excusing the system. First of all, he concedes there are historic socioeconomic explanations to account for some black academic disengagement. Historically, there has been a weak link between academic success and upward mobility for African Americans. Blacks traditionally saw big leaps in social mobility only during times of national crisis such as war — or during shortages of immigrant labor. “If those are the points where they move, it’s not a kind of experience that allows a group to plan their educational future,” Ogbu says.

In his book, he writes that the school district in Shaker Heights could do more to involve black parents and work at building more trust. He believes school officials should expand their existing Minority Achievement Committee, adopt more cooperative approaches to learning, and educate teachers about how their expectations can affect student performance. “I don’t think it’s one thing,” he says cautiously. “There are a whole lot of things involved. My advice is we should look at each very carefully.”

But Ogbu is adamant in his belief that racism alone does not account for the distressing differences. “Discrimination is not enough to explain the gap,” he says. “There are studies showing that black African immigrants and Caribbean immigrants do better than black Americans even though some of them come with language barriers. It’s just not race.”

Ogbu believes he knows this firsthand. The son of parents who couldn’t read, he grew up in a remote Nigerian village with no roads. His father had three wives and seventeen children with those women. Ogbu has a difficult time explaining his own academic success, which has earned him numerous accolades throughout his career. He did both undergraduate and graduate work at Berkeley and has never left. When pressed, he says he believes his own success primarily stems from being a voluntary immigrant who knew that no matter how many hurdles he had to overcome in the United States, his new life was an improvement over a hut in Nigeria with no running water. Involuntary immigrants don’t think that way, he says. They have no separate homeland to compare things to, yet see the academic demands made of them as robbing them of their culture. Ogbu would like to see involuntary immigrants, such as the black families in Shaker Heights, think more like voluntary immigrants. In doing that, he says, they’d understand that meeting academic challenges does not “displace your identity.”

The parents who invited Ogbu to Shaker Heights are uncertain about what to do with his theory. They know he is one of the preeminent scholars in his field, and yet his premise makes many of them uncomfortable and angry. They insist that they care deeply about education, which many say is the reason they moved to Shaker Heights. They feel betrayed by the very person they turned to for help.

Khalid Samad, the parent who compared Ogbu to Clarence Thomas, believes the professor fails to understand the black experience in America and how that creates problems for African-American students. “The system has de-educated and miseducated African Americans,” he says. “Africans came here having some knowledge of who they were and their history and they had a self-acceptance. For several generations there has been a systematic robbing African Americans of their sociocultural identity and their personal identity. The depth of that kind of experience has created the kinds of problems we’re still grappling with today.”

Meanwhile, Howard Hall, a black Shaker Heights parent who is a child psychologist and professor at Case Western University, believes Ogbu had his mind made up before he even started his research. “It’s scandalous to blame the kids for this,” he says. “It’s a good school system, but there are weaknesses in addressing the racial disparity and it’s not the parents’ fault. Effective schools set up an environment where most kids reach their potential.”

Obgu’s theory did find some support among black parents. Although they are in the minority, these parents believe he’s pointed out a painful but powerful truth, and are happy to see it aired. “I already held his position before he did his research,” says Nancy Jones, who has one child in the district and two who have graduated. “You can’t get African-American parents to get involved and stay involved.”

Jones says she is sick of the finger-pointing and blaming in her community, and was thrilled to see Ogbu highlight why this is detrimental. “We come from this point of view of slavery and victimhood and every problem is due to racist white people,” she says. “That victim mentality is perpetrated by parents and they’re doing their kids a disservice. … My primary objective is not to hold someone accountable but to close the achievement gap.”

Other parents also agree with Ogbu, Jones says, and will admit it privately, but publicly, it’s too politically charged. “When you’re in a public setting people are less apt to speak their mind if they think it’s politically incorrect.”

Sadly, Jones says, harsh criticism of Ogbu’s Shaker Heights work has made any positive change nearly impossible. “Experts are telling the parents, ‘The research wasn’t good,’ and, ‘Disregard him,'” she says. “Besides, the parents’ gut instinct tells them the district is at fault. When you have that many academics trashing him, it’s easy to write off his conclusions. I’m having my doubts his work is going to motivate African-American parents and kids.”

The Analysis: The stats don’t lie.

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