Objectivism and Reality

A Superflous Regurgitation of Probable Fact to Vulgar Capitalism

[38.] Say to those who disbelieve, if they desist, that which is past shall be forgiven to them; and if they return, then what happened to the ancients has already passed.

[61.] And if they incline to peace, then incline to it and trust in Allah; surely He is the Hearing, the Knowing.

[60.7] It may be that Allah will bring about friendship between you and those whom you hold to be your enemies among them; and Allah is Powerful; and Allah is Forgiving, Merciful. [109.6] You shall have your religion and I shall have my religion.

ISP has a pretty viable Objectivist contingent, so every now and then I recieve cordial invitations to their meetings and presetations, such as this: 

 > A speech by Dr. Yaron Brook
 >
 > President and executive director of The Ayn Rand Institute
 >
 > "In a Mideast dominated by Arab monarchies, theocracies and
 > dictatorships-Israel is a free country standing as the lone bastion of
 > Western civilization in that region. (...) Israel is our only true ally in
 > the Mideast, and supporting it is the only MORAL thing for the United States
 > to do."

Now one can readily look up what the president of the ARI is going to talk about by going to the ARI's website. So I head over and take some time to read the corresponding material, which is at www.aynrand.org/israel/.

Much talk about the MORAL thing to do. How odd?

By way of morality the Os state that self-interest is the highest virtue, as stems from the internally consistent and highly systemic philosophy of Objectivism - incorporating metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and politics [1]. From there it is clear that because Israel is our closest ideological counterpart[2] in the region we should support Israel with all our strength in it's present policies defending against Palestinian terror because in doing so we forward our own interests. According to the papers furbished by the Objectivists in question the US interests involved are freedom, democracy, self-determination, reason, etc etc. All highly vaunted, credible, admirable, need I say heroic, interests, as any rational being would concur.

Essentially the policies advocated argue that all Palestinians, as no means of distinguishing between those who would be terrorists and those who would not is offered, should continue to be boxed up into heavily guarded pens and blocked off from the outside world; preferably resettled to make more living-room for Israelis and free up paths for Israeli highways cutting across Palestinian areas, ad infinitum I suppose, at least until the Palestinian's somehow under said conditions become as freedom loving and as peaceful as their Israeli neighbors.

This isn't an uncommon arguement. Needless to say the inability to distinguish between terrorist, passive supporter of terrorism, and innocent is an ongoing problem on both sides of the conflict. There is no solution to this unless one happens to have psychic fore-knowledge, something our mutual dedication to rational inquiry would suggest as an infeasible alternative at present. With no such recourse at our disposal other means must be sought.

Before I continue I think the Objectivist authors do argue valid points: that the various radical factions of organized Palestinian leadership are destructive and should be dealt with destructively; that terrorism is evil and that those who engage it are barbarous, pathalogical agents against mankind who should be removed from society; that we should help defend Israel from attackers that would like to see it ultimately destroyed, as we should help defend, if possible, anyone from aggression; and that religious fanaticism cannot be reasoned with. On the last point it is essentially assumed, as they make no real case for it, that the majority of Muslims not in the West ascribe to or support religious fanaticism. They don't offer any actual evidence for it, nor examine the reasons for it being embraced at all, which I think demonstrates a tendency to frame debate around unexamined assertions. It's far easier, I suppose, to disregard attempts to understand the reasons for conflict as "multiculturalism".

The Myth, the Monolith, and the Muslim Mind

    When a whole society lionizes terrorists, accepts them as its leaders, and rallies to cries to "write in blood the map of the one homeland and one nation" and send "a million martyrs marching on Jerusalem" -- what right do they have to complain when their wish for blood and death is granted?

Establishing the degree to which Islamic radicalism has been embraced by Muslims is an important issue and deserves much more than a few cursory remarks, nevermind investigating the reasons for it being embraced at all. The concept put forth here is monolithic Islam, which is a sort of vast overgeneralization that blames terrorism entirely on the Islamic faith (and is generally accompanied by the belief that such terrorism is an illegitamate tactic only for non-state aggressors, precluding any possibility of such a thing as state-terrorism or at least the possibility that the states in question are involved in state-terrorism, legitamizing the crimes of states by defining them out of existence by virtue of the irrelevant fashion in the structure of the organization that carries them out. Such thinking is not unlike the arguments of terrorist organizations that their grievances legitimize their own crimes). The Objectivists are quite insistent that Israel is fighting a justified war of self defense, but the only justifications offered are that Palestinians are engaging in terrorism, and that the terrorism is popularly supported. This is all based purely on trivial moralisms, concepts such as legality and justice are explicitly avoided.

This is all quite convenient if you want to avoid discussing grievances against Israel, but it renders any objective discussion impossible, and rejects the possibility of compromise or dispute settlement on account of the belief that the adversary is incapable of holding such concepts in his head. When these concepts shape one's world view what will be demanded is total, unnegotiated surrender (as negotiations as such are thought an impossibility), and if they're stuck to fanatically what becomes assured is annihilation. When one party is in fact capable of annhilating the other in such a circumstance these demands essentially become calls for mass murder and genocide. The big question is whether or not the Palestinians are really doing this out of purely ideological, fanatic religious grounds that cannot be reasoned with or whether it stems from other causes. If the Palestinians widely percieve terrorism as legitimate there may be a reason for it outside of irrational fanaticism.

If one looks at the profiles of suicide bombers. the monolithic view of a people incapable of reason is the first thing that falls apart. Suicide bombers are often college educated, many have been Christian or secularists, they come from divergent backgrounds, generally well educated, well off in their societies, and almost always perfectly, intolerably sane.

There has been at least one Israeli citizen to commit this horrendous act: Muhammed Shaker Habashi killed himself and three others near a train station in Nahariya in early September 2001, suggesting that the problem will not be easily resolved just by establishing further control over the occupied territories. Suicide bombing itself is a recent development, the first was carried out in 1985 by a young Christian woman, Loula Abboud, in Southern Lebanon who attacked an IDF patrol in southern Lebanon. As an attack on a military target this individual event is hard to describe as 'terrorism', suicide bombing in the region has roots in asymetrical warfare. Terrorism - in terms defined as any gratuitous attack on civilian populations - in this conflict is by no means souly limited to followers of the Prophet, nor limited to Palestinians in the territories. The causes for this behavior must be more complex than just religious fantacism, or for that matter poverty, poor education, martyr stipends, military and economic oppression, or any of the other attenuated, logical narratives that we attempt to construct in our understanding of Palestinian terrorism, and unless we incorporate all those relationships into our profile of Palestinian culture the understanding of the roots of the terror will be misplaced and our policies will be ineffectual in countering it, short of genocide at least.

That this poses a daunting challenge shouldn't come as a surprise being as the act itself is so blatantly irrational as to defy explanation. What is understood is that those who organize the bombings are by and large highly politicized Islamic radicals, but they have little or no difficulty in finding recruits from diverse backgrounds, more than willing for their own reasons to give their lives to what they identify as the Palestinian cause. Obviously there is more to the terrorism than just Islam. Presuming our noble purposes, our intention, in turn, is presumably to seek opportunities to resolve the conflict with minimum human toll. I'm of course assuming Objectivists hold human costs in some relevant regard, I have yet to see any actual evidence for this, however [3].

If one looks at Palestinian demographics (albiet this survey is from 1993, more recent data is presumably available) one is quickly disabused of the notion that every Palestinian is an Islamofacist thug, as secular, non-practicing Muslims outnumber political Muslims two to one, and the family and people remain their top priority, over Islam. Polls only give us a shallow picture, but they are, generally speaking, all we have to work with in considering demographic positions. Individual accounts can enrich the picture with useful details, but given the widespread differences of individual views, rationalizations, and experience among any population they have to be treated in total, and not as representative. Short of widespread religious fanaticism these results, at least, suggest that there is some possibility for religious enlightenment.

The Objectivists spend little time considering any of this or what it might mean. The judgement passed onto the Palestinians is obtusely negative, and the cornerstone of the argument is the preponderance of authoritarian rule over most of the world's Muslim population. This, we are to believe, is proof enough that the Muslim mind cannot bear the responsibility of self-determination. Making such a case is laughably ignorant of history. It ignores not only the history of Islam, which clearly and directly contradicts the religious totalitarian and militant dictatorships of modern mid-eastern governments, but it also ignores the consistent Western support and creation of the same authoritarian regimes the Objectivists point to for their evidence. Western civillization has been involved in just this fashion in the Arab arena for centuries, and the US has been involved since it inherited the legacy of Western colonialism and transformed the old system into one of proxy imperialism and economic neo-oligarchic institutions. Perhaps I am getting ahead of myself, many readers will probably find that assertion questionable, and by all means they should question it. I have, however, taken the time to lay the argument out on the table.

Shaking Off Colonial Rule

    The Palestinians are not seeking to gain their freedoms - they are unequivocal enemies of freedom. They, along with the rest of the Arab world, reject the whole concept of rights. Every Arab country is a monarchy, theocracy or some kind of dictatorship. Freedom of speech, property rights, free elections, and the separation of church and state are almost nonexistent. Speaking out against the rulers or against the Muslim religion leads to imprisonment or death. All attempts to start competing political parties are ruthlessly crushed.

Such purified ignorance is astounding. Egypt, just as one example, has an "emergency" brand of dictatorship that is actually involved in the repression of Muslim political parties, it has a constitutional ban on such religious organizations, which rather contradicts Locke's assertion. What's really overlooked here though is that the US is propping up this dictatorship. That the monarchies were created by the British on their partial exit from the region, and that the few theocracies there are were the targets of US approved dictatorships for years, if not just the targets of US aggression in general, and have since recieved their own US and Western support (e.g. Iran-Contra, or US support for the Islamist regime in the Sudan through most of the 80s).

US behavior in supporting the dictatorship in Egypt is repeated elsewhere in a wide pattern around the Muslim world, over and over again supporting violent factions, terrorists, or authoritarian, abusive governments: in Turkey, in Saudi Arabi, in Pakistan, in Chad, in Afghanistan, in Indonesia, in Kuwait, in Syria, in Iraq, in Jordan, and others. This pattern of behavior is now spreading into Central Asia, where brutal regimes left over from the Breschnev era are being supported by Washington. It's simply absurd to blame all the shortcomings in liberty among these countries on peoples and their religion who are daily abused for resisting US supported governments.

Nowhere have they been allowed to follow an independent course without massive interference from abroad. Foreign support for dictatorial governments sever ties to the population that government might otherwise have, allowing it to react to any opposition with simple brutality rather than accomadation. This marginalizes the population politically and, because no other form of resistance is likely to be either allowed or successful, radical underground organization becomes the only source of opposition. When the regime finally does fall it will easily fall into the hands of whatever organized opposition still exists - and then the pattern repeats itself.

US policy as such has matched well all the madness encompassed in the violent strains of radical Islam that it incubated, in fact created as a political force, in Afghanistan. That international politics is a complex and difficult matter is no secret, but the Os tend to obscure the fact with their good vs. evil moralizing. To imagine that US policy is guided by the shining light of peace and democracy is little more than cruel joke. It's quite laudible, considering, for these Objectivists to lay at the feet of the Muslim world the blame for their ongoing oppression. The Muslim world has serious internal problems, but it's hard to see where we've acted as the example rather than the provocateur.

Fingering the Radicals

And what of Western and Zionist fanaticism? No point regarding it is raised, as if it simply doesn't exist, though its existence is perhaps as important as its Islamic counterpart, particularly with regard to the settlements, as the fanatics are apparently guiding settlement policy. Does it exist? Do I go to the bar on Tuesdays? Of course, but when do the "think" tanks speak out against either? Just because one sounds vaguely like some sophisticated, well-armed snobbery and the other looks suspiciously like a mini-fridge in my living room does not excuse them.

This is the Objective idea of nuance. The description rather reminds me of a certain group of Irish Catholics and their many sympathizers in Boston - never so bloody and vampiric a people ever walked the earth, I suppose. It amounts to little more than an extended slander on Islam and the Palestinian people, as though none of them are able to comprehend so much as the barest simplicities of liberty or peaceful co-existence. It might occur to the independent and objective observer that perhaps self-determination is exactly what the Palestinians - much like any oppressed people - seek, and that given either the state of apartheid or occupation they live under that many have resorted to violent and coercive means of resistance just as the British and then the Israelis resorted to violent and coercive means of oppression and expulsion for some 80 years.

At the very least one would expect some argument offered with whatever damned statistics are at hand to validate the claim that the Palestinians generally demand that Israel be pushed into the sea or otherwise wiped off the face of the planet, or whether they would predominately prefer some more moderate solution in return for an end to the bloodshed. No statistics, not even those skin-deep presentations of the polls (which in general, if looked at objectively, tend to reveal how utterly confused most people are) that might support the O's case are offered. All we get are damned lies. Taking quotes from the most radical elements of the population as representative is misleading, I don't think anyone would claim that the Kach movement represents the sentiments of most Israelis. Quoting Hamas or Hizballah doesn't prove the Objectivist Axiom of Palestinian Monstrosity, particularly as Hizballah is a foreign group. It wouldn't, had they bothered to look, have been difficult to offer up evidence of militant support for the dissolution of Israel, just look at some polls. At the same time one needn't look very far for evidence that the Israeli population shares similar sentiments, supporting non-voluntary "transfer" (as many as 44%), meaning the forceful expulsion of Arabs from Israel and the occupied territories. So there's non-trivial support for ethnic cleansing on both sides, which, either way, isn't a positive sign. It isn't a positive sign that transfer has already begun, for that matter. What's disturbing is that Israel actually has the capacity for such violence. With or without US support Israel is in no position to be dissolved at present, and won't be anytime in the near future. Assuming you justify Israel's existence the problem is not supporting Israel, but supporting it unconditionally.

It might also occur to the objective observer that there is little meaningful difference, morally speaking and with regards to the virtue of self-interest or much of anything else, between the killing of innocents by the Israeli army due to gross negligence and the killing of innocents by Palestinian militants by purpose (nevermind continued harassment and violence against UN staff and continued violence against the press). Certainly in terms of legality there is no difference and both classify as acts of first degree homicide. Palestinian terrorists are organized criminal syndicates, they're not a nation that has chosen to go to war. And the practical affect is the same for both, both obviously to reach political ends - terror for the bystanders and suffering for the victims. Arguments to the effect that such an analysis bespeaks of "moral equivelancy" are blindly irrational: acts of murder are morally unique, and in these instances the Israeli government is on moral low-ground by virtue of their occupation, expulsion, and unequal and oppressive treatment of a people; the Palestinian terror organizations are on moral low-ground by virtue of their intent to willfully slaughter innocents for some imagined political gain. Who, in this frightening scenario, is "more evil"?

Little Hitlers

    Consider that when the Jews came to Palestine, it was a desert. People were living in the same primitive manner as they had been since the time of Moses. The Jews brought Western knowledge and Western values to the Middle East. They turned an almost barren land into a modern, industrial civilization. They raised cities where there had been only dirt; they developed irrigated farms where there had been only dry sand; they built cars and trucks and planes where there had been mainly pack animals. They produced wealth where there had been only poverty. They brought freedom and individual rights to a land where these ideas were unknown.

    And many of the Arabs hated Israel for doing so, because it was an achievement they could not, and did not want to, equal. That is why they have always wanted to destroy Israel. That is why the Palestinians continue today in that quest.

So maybe I'm just quibbling over details, but I would think a bunch of war-mongering flame-baiting quasi-moronic pinheads like what I've just spent two hours reading who were really espousing a philosophy based on principles of objective realism and reason would be interested in more than just making a few vast overgeneralizations of a situtation and then running with the ball. Rather I would think a group making an objective and reasoned inquiry into the US position on Israel would, in fact, be prone to spending some time investigating what facts can actually be ascertained from observers' reports from the region, all of which are consistently twisted around for political ends by any given party, and furthermore spending time making a reasoned argument based on what facts end up on the table, nevermind treating the disembodied peoples of nations - Israelis and Palestinians both - as not some sort of systematic counterpart to what passes as their leadership, but complex societies made up of complex individuals and complex social, economic, and political forces. This would presumably require a good deal of effort by the participants and such an effort should result in a body of work of scholarly or investigative merit. Instead the Os espouse their political means first and apparently only support their ends with whatever agreeable reports are at hand, with little inquiry exposited whatsoever into the validity or value of the claims made, and present an argument made almost entirely on analogical grounds. There is no citation, supporting research, and their 'facts' are presented without documentation. In most cases their poor record of evidence hardly matters as what they offer provides little more than a cursory glance into a complex and volatile circumstance.

Instead of anything remotely identifiable as "objectivity" I find a seemingly valid value system being run into the ground by ideological zealots who can't see any solution to a conflict besides the obliteration of one side or the other. Apparently the Objectivists have replaced self-interest with a militant lack of creativity as their highest moral standard, as their "solution" amounts to little more than blanketing support for the past 50 odd years of official US policy. Sharon's party is sadly in agreement with the Objectivist stance, on the other hand, having voted against the future establishment of a Palestinian state [2], pushing the historical absence of any wilingness to recognize the Palestinian right to self-determination a step further towards the vacuum.

One should appreciate that objectivity in the gushing slander against Islam and the string of seperate quotes that 'prove' the Palestinians are a race of bloodthirsty fanatics. I'm sure after an Israeli bulldozer ran through my home [*] that I would respond with rapture that the Israelis were dealing with the terrorist threat and acknowledge their ultimate providence. It's amazing how the writer in question can put the problem right under his own nose and manage somehow not to notice it. It honestly boggled my mind, reading it.

A fundamental error comes from the American love for anology - the Objectivists insist on comparing the present conflict with WWII and other international conflicts between nation-states. It shouldn't have to be said that anyone making comparisons to Hitler or Nazis has already reduced their argument to meaningless babble. The idea that the Palestinians are in some way comparable to an imperial power such as Germany or Japan is ludicrous, particularly given that the Palestinians have been under colonial rule or expulsion for centuries: by the Ottomans, then by the British, by extraneous others simultaneously for brief periods, and now by the Israelis. The Palestinians are not occupying foreign territories and subjecting another people to their rule. They're not making bombing sorties or supporting a proxy army in Israel. They're not invading other countries. They're not even managing their own country, let alone their own empire. How then do they in any way compare to the Japanese or the Germans?

Their Freakin Livers

    There has been a lot of talk about the "legitimate aspirations" of the Palestinian people for an independent state. But people who embrace suicide bombings and choose career killers as their leaders, as the Palestinians have done, have no legitimate political aspirations. They will be "ready for democracy" only when they stop worshipping murderers.

International resolutions, agreed to by the Palestinian leadership and the surrounding Arab countries nevermind the rest of the international community, for a peaceful solution to this conflict have been on the record since 1976 [*] to "guarantee...the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of all states in the area". Such a resolution has been proposed multiple times and have been unaminously supported by the Arab states and the PLO, but have been vetoed by the US and voted against by Israel at every juncture. In 1988 Arafat, the PLO, and the Palestinian National Council formally recognized Israel's existence inside its pre-1967 borders, or 78% of Historic Palestine [*] [*]. Even the UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 declaring that "Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination" has been revoked, were it considered a barrier in some way to peace - given the General Assembly is nothing more than an advising committee with no actual authority it couldn't be taken as anything worse than an insult for Zionists to get a hitch in their panties about. Furthermore, considering the past recognitions of Israel's right to exist (in a broad sense: no nation-state has an actual "right to exist") it implies a different understanding of "Zionism", as it is hardly an monolithic concept: the kooky messianic Zionist movement is supremecist and after 1967 became increasingly noticable, as in they were elected into office in the form of the Likud party. Given that Zionism's most powerful adherents repeatedly deny the right to a Palestinian state while insisting on the right to a Jewish one it is not difficult to see where one could get the idea that mainstream Zionism had become a racist ideology, rather than one merely advocating a Jewish state. Amidst all this the Israeli government's long denial and lies about Palestinian expulsion (which has since been evidenced by declassified documents) and various Palestinian organizations' refusals to acknowledge the right of the state of Israel to continue existing (which has largely reversed) only served to inflate hatreds. Honesty, as they say, is the best policy, and generalizations rarely serve good purpose where the gross individual sentiment, often self-contradictory, is what matters when looking for productive solutions (and on this note critics of Israeli policy shouldn't support the work of anti-Jewish conspiracists and other anti-semites who make up a fraction of the authoritarian ideologues on both left and right).

When the problems of obvious falsehoods and denials were mixed with anti-semitic propaganda (ie. racist lies about semitic peoples) its obvious how that PR can come to be believed, as Israel's own propaganda continually contradicts the reality of the Palestinian situtation. Such is bound to leave much of the populace in a state of confusion and more liable to accept conspiracy theories and racial hatreds as factual and justified, and accept the leadership of people who make empty but appealing promises. Widespread racism against Jews among Arab nations exists to a significant degree, but as the Israelis have their own state that is well defended and has a sizable nuclear deterence, that racism is irrelevant in considering the situation except in its capacity to help fuel non-deterable terrorism, nor is it difficult to ascribe the label 'racist' to Israeli foreign policy. Determination of the extent and breadth of racism on either side serves only one purpose: determining whether or not there is a viable non-racist population. It's a matter of course that if any peaceful settlement of the conflict is possible it depends on those who are capable of moderation to take control of the situation. If everybody is filled with irreversible racist hatred then we might as well save some time and let them slaughter eachother - without our assistance.

Arafat is a terrorist, Sharon is a terrorist, blah dee blah. There are too many fallacies that continue to go unquestioned, there's no objectivity, and if US leadership is going to have a hand in settling the dispute it needs to wake the hell up from these dillusions of Israeli grandeur and singular victimization. Take for instance the idea that the Camp David II accords were generous when they were far from it. That has to be recognized before anybody can make claims about Palestinian insensibility during the Olso process. The 'fact' of Arafat's involvement in recent terrorism alleged by the ARI also remains questionable; according to the NYT (5/6/02) the documents released by Israel accusing Arafat of terror "do not appear to show definitively that the Palestinian leader ordered terror attacks" [*] [*]. This probably just provides more evidence that Arafat isn't actually leading much of anybody.

Furthermore, Israel has never, not once, recognized the Palestinian right to a state or their rights to fully participate in the political process of the nation which essentially rules over them. Nor did Israel, counter to what the Objetivists say, "pull out" of occupied territories during the late 90s. Between 1994 and 1999 the number of Israeli settlers on the Golan increased by 18%, and the population of Israeli Settlers in the West Bank almost doubled to 200,000 [*], as well as constructing new settlements such as the Har Homa settlement on Jabal Abu Ghneim. The rate of settlement has only increased since Sharon became head of state, as have construction of the bypass highways that cut through the occupied territories connecting vast, dispersed Israeli settlements. It would be worthwhile to question what legitamate purpose such settlements could possibly serve.

The idea that Israel can expect to have security while at the same time continuing to bulldoze Palestinian homes and build new settlements inside the occupied territories can only be the result of irrational thinking, not logic. You can't easily take territory and ensure security at the same time, unless you intend to wipe out opposing "forces" completely with insurmountable force - certainly within the realm of the possible for Israel. Apparently that's what the Objectivists are advising. Tracinski says at the end of 'War for Peace' that "more military action will be needed after the terrorists regroup". How does this bring about peace then? Historically asymetric warfare ends when both parties fatigue themselves of the struggle and settle upon compromises that were obvious from the start, there's no reason to repeat that, and unless the goal is completely cynical and bent on more or less utter destruction then this doesn't work.

The conviction the Objectivists hold that those seeking a resolution to the conflict without a bloodbath are little more than terrorists themselves is just as irrational - charging 'peaceniks' with aiding crimes against humanity is little more than mindless, irrelevant libel. For the Os anyone calling for peaceful resolution has committed some kind of a thought crime, a line of thinking worthy of the authoritarian dictators they rightly despise.

Seven-Horned Hippos Batman

So, some nutballs tossing bombs at babies want to plunge Israel into the sea, and some fanatics want to expand the settlements and ethnically cleanse the area of the Palestinian Problem so that Christ will come flying down from Heaven on a seven-horned hippo. There are statements to these effects that cannot be ignored, both of which advocate the wholesale slaughter of a people. Someone explain to me why we insist on listening only to the craziest motherfuckers we can find?

Outside of their present control over the situation what do they matter? Israel isn't in threat of being pushed into the sea. Israel is expanding its borders, not being pushed back. You already have on record from the Palestinian leadership that they recognize Israel's right to exist. You already have on record from those in the settlements that they will move. Meanwhile Sharon's party is voting against there ever being a Palestinian state. It should be obvious enough that all the people want on either side of the conflict is peace and security, and their leaders and/or unelected radical organizations offer them peace and then carry on with the violence. Can we gauge the extent of these mindsets in the population under present circumstances? That would be impossible while the occupation and invasion of Palestinian territories and the terrorism of both parties continues to take the life of innocents. The same occupation that is a significant cause of the predominant sense of injustice that results in support for the present violence. I don't find it difficult seeing who it is that really has the power to hold up negotiations. After all the recent violence what we're left with as one of the few likely replacements for the PLO, partly as a result of past [* *, these reports tend to get sucked down the corporate memory hole] and in some ways continuing Israeli support, is Hamas:

For a time, the IDF made no move to curb Hamas. Indeed, it seemed actually to encourage its activities. The reason for this was that--even in the early days of the intifadah--Hamas fought the PLO and the "leftists"; it spent as much time fighting them as it did the occupation authorities. At a point, however, Hamas changed, and this compelled the IDF to move against it.

Some option. There are better alternatives, and they would be more feasible if the US were to lend credibility to them without acting at the same time like a rampaging imperialist and loudly demanding the immediate replacement of Arafat. Obviously the Palestinians would have a stronger hand at the bargaining table if they had a leadership that could control the radical fringe, and certainly they would be better off with one that gave two shits about their well being: if the Palestinians had at any point been given any reason to trust the US maybe they'd be more prone to listen to its demands that they oust Arafat. The blanket, uncritical US support for Israeli leadership and its militant policies as proposed by the Objectivists is a pretty piss poor option unless you want to continue the atrocities unabaited.

The one shared goal among the radicals on either side of the conflict is to prevent a secular Palestinian state existing alongside Israel, and these parties incite and continuing the violence. They're the ones in control, and so long as that remains the case a peaceful alternative to mutual annhhilation doesn't appear likely. What should the US do? Should it be supporting a party that has refused to even consider Palestinian statehood? Should it unconditionally support a leadership that has done nothing to compromise and everything to exacerbate the violence in the region? Should it continue blacking out the PLO and strengthening Hamas as a result? Should Israel go unadmonished for its abuses or begin, finally, to respect the Palestinian right to self-determination? Whatever desire exists for the erradication of Israel can be dealt with when it actually poses a threat - something that, given the strength of US support and the Israeli military, shouldn't even be on the negotiating table for being a stark impossibility. If an agressive war was initiated by one of Israel's neighbors than by all means the US, as well as the international community, should be there to defend it. The same goes for such an aggressive war initiated by Israel, the UN charter is a perfectly good outline for what the MORAL thing to do is in such instances. Most of the settlements no longer serve a defensive purpose. Israel could secure its borders far more efficiently if it stopped expanding them.

There is plenty of support amongst the population for this, from Ben-Eliezer, the Council for Peace and Security and other Israeli moderates and peaceniks. The settlers themselves support the idea. The Objectivists attack the idea when phrased as "land for peace", and all they suggest as an alternative is for further escalation of military attack. They're right enough when they argue that retraction of the settlements might appear as "giving in" to terrorist demands, though it's hard to see how stopping the expansion of the settlements might be construed that way. This is in every way like the debate during Vietnam about "returning with honor": how can we lose in Vietnam but make it look like we won? What it really meant then, as it means now, is that more bodies pile up while some politicians try to save face. Call the policy "aggressive pre-emption" or "land for war", make a big show about how aggressively just you are by leaving. You put up a new Israeli politician who demands justice for both parties, who retracts the settlers that will leave, give them a heavy military guard on the way out, lock down borders to the territories during the process, maybe even offer the abandoned development on the settlements as reparations to the kin of unjustly killed or bulldozed Palestinian civillians, continues aggressively policing against known terrorist organizations without blowing many more innocents up, demanding a like turn from Palestinian authorities, and then when the place erupts in a massive wave of suicide and slaughter you can tell me how wrong I was, because I don't think it would happen. Not that Hamas and Hizbalah wouldn't try, but most of their violence occurs in the settlements in the first place. They'd have a far harder time finding civillians to kill if they weren't living next door to them.

Ad-Hominem and Shalom

How Os can claim to be rational without so much as examining Palestinian grievances is bizzare. If they were to actually examine the conflict on objective terms their strong convictions about property rights would immediately call into question Israeli settlement policy, which in many instances amounts to little more than theft and the destruction of Palestinian property. It's amazing how they can blanket such monstrous criticism on the Palestinians without once mentioning any of the numerous details that lay fault upon Israeli policy. They fail completely to account for the slightest complexity in the human spirit and are apparently convinced that you can blow up social relationships. So many facts are left out of their reckoning that to refer to them as anything remotely describable as 'objective' would be a joke in exceedingly poor humor. I guess the other applicable names for their philosophy were either already taken or too abhorrently accurate to qualify.

The only literature I've seen as reprehensible in any comparable fashion to what has been released by the ARI on this matter is the material released by radical Islamic organizations that call for a sick perversion of 'jihad' [4] against Western Civillization and all other percieved enemies of Islam. In the same fashion that the ARI uses such material to justify their diatribes against peace the Islamic radicals use material like the ARI's to justify theirs. It's terrific when war nuts can work together so seamlessly. It's almost like they were family.

I would have thought that when Rand rejected skepticism on rational grounds that it would have amounted to more than just a rationalization for accepting dogmatism in its stead.

It always struck me as odd that a perfectly capable author, one I have personally enjoyed, should have her name associated with such dreadfully dull people. While I'm hardly one to refrain from name calling, it is only in a viable state of unhappiness that I do so now. There is a name for unthinking, intolerant, close-minded supporters of bigotted, hateful policies. There is a name for people, otherwise potentially rational, loving persons, who accept nothing by reactionary snobbery and would have the world crumble below them so they might fiddle on top of the ashes of humanity. There is a name for people so indoctrinated with the just superiority of their own beliefs that any conflict must result in the annihilation of themselves or the other, lest they appear weak even for the briefest moment. There is a name for people who can waltz headlong into ancient conflicts and proceed to mouth off like vested authorities without any demonstration of investment, either in time or consideration, of the subject at hand, revealing them to be in all matters of practical policy demagogic meatheads. There is a name for people who preach reason, objectivity, self-interest, free-markets and at the same time demand on the grounds of their own moral absurdity that most irrational of all human endeavors - war. Remarkably there is a name for a person encompassing all of these conditions simultaneously: randroid.

"The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."

--josh buermann © 2002

    1. I won't bother going into their failure to distinguish between self-interest and greed, as pertains to the Objective rejection of altruism, or their utter disregard of established constraints on knowledge with respect to technicalities like the uncertainty principle, Godel's theorems, non-locality, relativity, information theory, etc. - nevermind the mild observation that human systems are far more complex than are any models of those systems, which would be more relevant to their political positions - on the grounds that the developments of 20th century sciences were part of a gigantic post-modernist conspiracy. Internal consistency is easy when you reject contradictory external examples.

    2. The most unassuming of assumptions by the Objectivists, in their determination that Israel is the closest ideological counterpart in the region to their own philisophical beliefs, is the fact that Israel is, by all accounts, rather deep on the socialist end of the pool of liberal democracy, and not by any stretch of the imagination anything like a capitalist minarchy - which numerous Arab dictatorships resemble far more closely - that which any self-respecting O would acknowledge as his or her wet-dream. This is left unexamined, though it is quite likely that - outside of the absurd sophistry of a bunch of minarchist, individualist capitalists defending a massive socialist state on moral grounds - their assessment is essentially correct. The death of the kibbutz would establish this dictum further.

    3. Os subscribe to an exceedingly odd brand of political realism that, rather than accepting as most realists do that some negative consequences arise from the amoral nature of nation states, that the amoral nature of nation states is in fact moral. This all fits into their conception of morality, anyway, and they have as valid a system of rationalization for this as anybody else, assuming their assumptions. My point is to note their unique position in arguing political realism with a pacifist's plea for an ideologically pure morality, untainted by any such pragmatism. It's a true service to the evils of the world to argue that such evils are in fact good.

    4. It's worth repeating that "Western civillization", in so far as it's represented by the US/UK intelligence establishment, made a concious choice to incubate that very same vision in it's own 'jihad' against Communism, with everything from providing material aid to Islamist terrorist organizations (aka "freedom fighters") to spreading specifically violent jihadist educational materials as part of "humanitarian aid" sent to Muslim countries. This Islamofacist enemy is Dr. Western Civilstein's monster, and while I share the desire to see it wiped from the face of the planet I'm not so ready to foist all responsibility onto the numerous adherrents of Islam.