Saturday Snips

By John Ballard

Another Saturday, another assignment. No time to blog long reflections, but here is this morning's surfing collection...

While the US was preoccupied with snow and other distractions, Tunisia was experiencing a revolution. Literally, not figuratively. To use the metaphor of a baby's birth, the water has broken and labor has begun. The newborn is still in the birth canal and we still don't know what it will look like. Or if it will live.
But those not paying attention are missing out on something important.

?Blake Hounshell: For Tunisia, many questions linger...

Events are still moving quickly in Tunisia, where word has just come out that 87-year-old Fouad Mebaza, the speaker of the lower house of parliament, is now the new interim president after someone (we don't know who) determined that yesterday's takeover by the prime minister wasn't strictly legal. Also today, Saudi Arabia announced that it had welcomed Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the ousted president, and his family.

Under Article 57 of the Tunisian Constitution -- invoked today by the Constitutional Council because Ben Ali has fled the country and is therefore incapable of performing his duties -- Mebaza can only be in charge for a maximum of 60 days, after which he must hold a new presidential election (in which he is not allowed to run). Whoever wins may at that point dissolve the parliament and hold new legislative elections.

?By the time you read this USA Today report it will no longer be "breaking news."  But it could be part of the background needed to understand what comes next.

?Those in control in both Jordan and Egypt are looking at events in Tunisia with well-deserved nervousness and apprehansion.
Or as our VP might say, This is a big fucking deal.

?Despite what many would like to believe, this is not a Twitter or Social Media Revolution.
Iran, maybe. Even Thailand or Myanmar. But not this one. This one has been incubating since long before the Internet.This short essay by Luke Allnutt should be read in full. His personal experiences as a tourist give his comments more credibility than most I have found.

In our search for a single cause, we're much more likely to settle on an "new technology" explanation rather than something as dull as a great many of the participants were unemployed or wearing socks. Not only do "Twitter revolution" explanations mean more page views, but they fulfill some deterministic urge within us -- the dual promises of technology and modernity. There was as much breathless enthusiasm about the power of the telegraph to do good as there is the Internet. In Tom Standage�s wonderful book on the growth of the telegraph he says these reactions are amplified by what he terms "chronocentricity," "the egotism that ones own generation is poised on the very cusp of history."

More than that, Twitter revolution narratives are popular because rather than being about Tunisia, they are often really about ourselves. When we glorify the role of social media we are partly glorifying ourselves. Some of us are not only praising the tools we know and love and use every day, but also the tools we build and have stakes in. To proclaim a Twitter revolution is almost a form of intellectual colonialism, stealthy and mildly delusional: We project our world, our values, and concerns onto theirs and we shouldn�t. We use Twitter and so must they. In our rush to christen the uprising, did we think to ask Tunisians what they wanted to call their revolution?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~���~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Two additional items caught my attention, both tangent to the Israel/Palestine conflict.

?Among the rash of complaints from various Jewish groups to Mrs. Palin's ignorant use of the term blood libel, the response of ADL's Abe Foxman was more tame than most. This rebuke by David Kaufman drives home a few points that deserve repetition.

Foxman�s reluctance to demand Palin�s contrition not only libels the very American Jewish community he�s charged with protecting, but painfully echoes the exact words of Beck himself. Baseless and beyond the pale, Beck suggests Soros betrayed his own family to curry Nazi favor. Two months later, the question must now be asked: Just who is Foxman trying to appease by sucking up to Sarah Palin?

The answer is as unfortunate as it is obvious � the Palin-led Republican base and their Israeli counterparts over in Jerusalem. Indeed, while the conservative-Christian Palin and Holocaust-survivor Foxman may appear to have little in common, their unholy alliance confirms that old Arab maxim �the enemy of my enemy is my friend.�

In this case, it�s a friendship rooted in unwavering support of Israel�s hard-line government, Jerusalem�s pro-Settlement policies and a vested interest in a weakened and isolated Barack Obama. Well aware of Palin�s approval � and the White House�s disavowal � of the settlement enterprise, the ADL has aligned itself with an ascendant Republican party and its most telegenic pop-star.

In doing so, Foxman has made a Faustian bargain in which Israeli Jewry may now trump American Jewry as the main focus of ADL sentiments. How else to explain defending a politician like Palin � who�s regressive, anti-intellectual, faith-based rhetoric stands in stark contrast with the core values of American Jewry. In fact, even Palin�s Settlement support is out of sync with the majority of American Jews � and Jewish intellectuals � who mostly support President Obama and his settlement freeze demands.

[...]  Palin, however, has invented an entirely new narrative � one that must be stamped out in its infancy: The Pro-Zionist anti-Semite. Like many of her fundamentalist cohorts, Palin hypes the Jewish nation while dissing Jewish people, Jewish culture and Jewish history. Already, Palin has resorted to unbridled racism to promote her ambitious agenda. That she�s added antisemitism to her retinue was only a matter of time.

As its own mission statement makes clear, the ADL was founded to �stop the defamation of the Jewish people�. Yet this mission � at least for Abe Foxman � apparently does not extend to Sarah Palin. Nonetheless, in conjuring up the �blood libel� myth, Palin has categorically defamed the Jewish people � at least this Jewish person � and must be held accountable.

Jews � like Gays and African-Americans � are often accused of inflating the levels of bigotry against them. But no inflation is needed here � only vocal and immediate outcry from the voice that matters most: The ADL.

?Finally, I am posting this video simply because it needs to be seen by as many people as possible.