Posts by Oliver Kamm

A damaging document

Oliver Kamm — Sun, 12 May 2013 09:46:53 +0100

'All men," wrote Reinhold Niebuhr, the great Protestant ethicist, "are naturally inclined to obscure the
morally ambiguous element in their political cause by investing it with religious sanctity. This is why religion is more frequently a source of confusion than of light in the political realm."

Niebuhr was a steadfast friend of Israel. His warnings about the temptations of deploying religion in political argument are confirmed by a document arguing a very different position.

As revealed in the JC last week, the Church of Scotland is considering a report from its "church and society council" that challenges the Jewish national claim to the land of Israel. The Church stresses defensively that the paper (tellingly entitled The inheritance of Abraham? A report on the "promised land") has yet to be debated by its general assembly.

The damage has been done, however. This isn't a rogue opinion-piece: it exemplifies an approach that has become common in recent Christian thinking. Eschewing historical scholarship and running to just 10 pages, the report does little more than apply a radical patina to some highly traditional stereotypes. It obsequiously commends an American activist called Mark Braverman for being "adamant that Christians must not sacrifice the universalist, inclusive dimension of Christianity and revert to the particular exclusivism of the Jewish faith because we feel guilty about the Holocaust".

It's as if the 20th century never happened. As late as 1939, Jacques Maritain, the Thomist philosopher, could write a book entitled A Christian Looks at the Jewish Question that perplexedly treated the Jews as a historical aberration. In spite of a historic catastrophe in which the Jews' resilience was not some abstruse theological conundrum but a matter of bare survival amid barbarism, a major Protestant denomination is now reprising the dismal philosophy of counterposing Christian universalism to Jewish particularism.

The Church of Scotland's report is tendentious and inflammatory but it has recognisable ideological roots. While denouncing the biblical literalism that it claims underlies the cause of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, it derives from a reactionary and atavistic theology. According to the paper's authors, Zionism holds that "God promises the land to Abraham and his descendants". That's so crude a depiction of the Jewish national movement that it doesn't even reach the level of caricature. Many early Zionists were reacting against the notion that the Jews were a people engaged in prayer and scriptural study till the Messiah returned. One of the deepest fissures in modern Israeli society is between an ultra-religious minority and a far bigger constituency that supports pluralism.

As a commentator sympathetic to Israel, I pay precisely no attention to sacred texts. I'm swayed instead by Israel's status as a democracy in a region where that form of government is scarce, as a force for scientific inquiry and secularism, and as a polyglot and multi-ethnic society. Under armed siege since its birth, the Jewish state has perpetrated mistakes, injustices and crimes. These tarnish its history but do not invalidate its ethos, whose commitment to pluralism would be exemplified in a pacific two-state solution with a sovereign Palestine.

The Church of Scotland declares portentously that it "is called to speak out against injustice" yet is heedless of the implications. Niebuhr noted "a pitiless perfectionism" within liberal Protestantism that imagines there is a simple method of resolving conflict. In considering the tragic clash of national claims between Israelis and Palestinians, the churches should understand that peace will not be advanced by calumnious sanctimony.

Chomsky, sophistry champion

Oliver Kamm — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 19:00:00 +0000

Among Jewish contributors to modern intellectual life, few carry as much name-recognition as Noam Chomsky. Visiting London last week, he drew enthusiastic crowds to a lecture given in honour of Edward Said, the Palestinian literary critic, and an interview at the British Library with Jonathan Freedland, the Guardian columnist and my fellow JC contributor.

There is, though, a paradox about Chomsky’s reputation. He is a seminal figure in linguistics, celebrated for his insight that language is the realisation of an innate faculty. His fame lies less in this technical and specialised field, however, than in voluminous works denouncing Western foreign policy, which to Chomsky is guided by a “godfather principle, straight out of the mafia”. And while his political writings are revered by left-wing activists, they attract minimal attention among academics.

The scholarly indifference is apt. Chomsky’s political writings are a curiosity, not an intellectual revolution. Many of these books are merely collections of softball interviews with obsequious admirers. Those that purport to be original studies of Western society and diplomacy bear the paraphernalia of scholarship, being freighted with footnotes; yet I have experience where his sources weren’t quite as he depicted them and didn’t exactly say what he claimed.

In an exchange I had with Chomsky in Prospect magazine a few years ago, he claimed that I had misquoted a statement by him in an early work, American Power and the New Mandarins, that the US required “denazification”. In fact, I’d quoted him demonstrably accurately, and I’ve never worked out how he thought he would get away with a falsehood so easily refuted.

My scepticism about Chomsky’s work isn’t only that there are living Jewish thinkers (such as Michael Walzer, Avishai Margalit and Shlomo Avineri) of far greater significance in the study of political philosophy. It concerns his methods.

Even on controversies where Chomsky has been right (Vietnam in the 1960s, or Indonesia’s annexation of East Timor in the 1970s), these issues, in his writings, appear to be mainly ciphers for his principal concern: the wickedness of Western policy. Where the US and its allies respond to aggression, Chomsky still insists on that theme, which leads him into grave error. His writings about the Balkans reliably depict Slobodan Milosevic, the author of the genocidal wars in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s, as more sinned against (by Nato) than sinning. This is evidence of what can reasonably be termed Chomsky’s anti-Americanism: a reflexive hostility to the US, regardless of motive, act or evidence.

Notoriously, Chomsky came to the defence in the late 1970s of a Holocaust denier called Robert Faurisson. Chomsky was not defending the poisonous propaganda of this man, nor is he (in that irresponsible and illegitimate term popularised by Theodor Lessing) a “self-hating Jew”. Yet Chomsky’s defence of Faurisson was not the principled defence of free speech that Chomsky’s supporters claim (a myth credulously repeated last week by Aida Edemariam, a Guardian writer).

Chomsky will level hyperbolic abuse at his critics on the Left: Nick Cohen is a “maniac”; Christopher Hitchens expressed “racist contempt”; I am among “the more extreme apologists for Western crimes”. Yet in defending Faurisson (a Holocaust denier, recall; hence a real racist and apologist for state crimes), Chomsky termed him “a relatively apolitical sort of liberal”.

This is rare, dumbfounding sophistry. And that is the most benign description of Chomsky’s political oeuvre that I can come up with.

Civilisation beyond the Church

Oliver Kamm — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 16:00:28 +0000

It is particularly difficult for a Pope that comes from Germany to come here,” said Benedict XVI at Auschwitz in 2006. This was surely true.

But the Pope, who resigned this week, might have mentioned, too, the difficulties for the Roman Catholic Church in confronting its own historical contribution to the hatreds that fuelled the Holocaust.

Post-war German leaders acknowledged the horrors of the Nazi era. As Chancellor in 1970, Willy Brandt knelt in penitence before the memorial to the victims of the Warsaw Ghetto.

While there does remain historical debate about the role played by the Vatican and Pope Pius XII during the Holocaust years, there can be no doubt that the Church is historically implicated in the myths of antisemitism.

Pope Leo XII ordered in 1826 that Jews be confined to ghettos. Pope Pius IX infamously refused to return a Jewish boy to his parents after he had been abducted by papal police, for the boy had been secretly baptised a Catholic by a domestic servant.

Only in the post-war era has the Roman Catholic Church confronted squarely this legacy. The Second Vatican Council of 1962 to 1965, initiated by Pope John XXIII, renounced the notion of the Jews’ collective guilt for the crucifixion of Christ, and denounced antisemitic hatreds. To his credit, Benedict has shown himself as sensitive as his predecessor to developing relations with the Jews. He visited Israel and Yad Vashem in 2009.

Yet there is an inherent dilemma in Christian doctrine. If you regard Jesus as the Messiah, you necessarily stumble on the historical fact that the Jews rejected that claim. Jesus chose only Jews to be his disciples, one of whom is regarded by Catholics as the first Pope. The Church has rejected the antisemitic myth of deicide but, right up to the modern era, Catholic thinkers have still regarded the persistence of Jewry as, in some sense, a historical mistake (see, for example, Jacques Maritain’s 1939 book A Christian Looks at the Jewish Question).

Whereas the modern Catholic Church has shifted and Pope Benedict has undoubtedly played his part in this, it has never resolved this problem. It was evident even in Benedict’s visit to Auschwitz, where he gave thanks for the witness of Christian martyrs who opposed Nazism, but said little about the crimes against the Jews.

I recalled this history when reading the weekly column of Daniel Finkelstein, my close Times colleague and fellow-JC contributor. Reflecting on Benedict’s resignation, Finkelstein maintained that, contrary to the views of secularists, “the Church has been one of the great civilising institutions of mankind”.

This seems to me exactly wrong. The Church is, rather, a reflection of human frailties and has often compounded them through zeal. The great civilising influence in human history is the emergence of the Enlightenment, which among other things has, in Western democracies (including Israel), at last separated religious and civil authority. Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute on Religious Liberty, which enshrined the principle that there be no religious test for public office, is a defining advance for the freedom of religious minorities as well as the freedom of those who profess no religion.

There has never been, to my knowledge, a divine revelation of the merits of democracy and liberal political rights. These are values that human beings have alighted on for themselves. The thriving and flourishing of the Jews, and of all minorities, depends far more on defending them than on the personalities of religious leaders or the politics of interfaith dialogue.

From nonsense to indecency

Oliver Kamm — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 10:54:09 +0000

John Rentoul, the political commentator, and I have a friendly competition to find ever more outrageous examples of a genre of newspaper commentary that he calls "Questions to Which the Answer is No". This is a headline that floats a bogus and unsupported theory by posing it as a question. My favourite is a (genuine) Daily Mail headline asking: "Has Marilyn Monroe been reincarnated as a shop assistant called Chris?"

But our joke has fallen flat owing to an example that violates all bounds of decency. Amid the harrowing coverage of the murder of 26 children at Newtown, I found an article entitled: "Did Mossad death squads slaughter American children at Sandy Hook?"

The argument is monstrous, calumnious, demented bilge and comes from no reputable news outlet. It was published by Press TV, the English-language arm of Iranian state propaganda, and a website called Veterans Today. Despite its name, Veterans Today has nothing to do with the welfare of retired servicemen: it promotes conspiracy theories, including Holocaust denial.

The author is Jim Fetzer, a leading figure in the 9/11 Truth Movement, which maintains that the destruction of the Twin Towers in 2001 was perpetrated by the US Government. I cite Fetzer not for any merits of his argument (there is none) but because he illustrates a thesis I now regard as proved. Conspiracy theories are inherently, and not merely incidentally, a threat to the Jews.

Conspiracies do happen. Watergate, the Suez invasion and (in Israel) the Lavon affair show that even democratic governments have unavailingly resorted to them. But a conspiracy theory argues more than that truism. It explains history with reference to an overarching plot by powerful interests, and disposes of every piece of countervailing data by positing one more twist in the supposed conspiracy.

This is where the danger, and not only the intellectual disrepute, of conspiracy theories lies. If their exponents need to keep expanding the imagined conspiracy in order to explain inconvenient facts, they will sooner or later (and usually sooner) turn to a highly familiar staple of such notions. They will blame the Jews.

That depraved mode of reasoning characterises the 9/11 Truthers. Like all conspiracy theorists, they alight on small items of discrepant data that inevitably arise amid a complex set of events. They then draw the wholly unwarranted and implausible inference that the discrepancies point to an official conspiracy. That in turn prompts the question of the identity of the purported conspirators.

The baseless libel that the Jewish state shoots American schoolchildren belongs in a tradition that has done catastrophic harm. Norman Cohn, the historian, wrote a seminal work in 1967 on the Tsarist antisemitic fabrication The Protocols of the Elders of the Zion. He called it Warrant for Genocide, for it fuelled Nazi fantasies of global Jewish conspiracy.

It's obvious that a malevolent conspiracy theory such as Holocaust denial draws from the wellspring of antisemitism. It's not quite so obvious that ostensibly apolitical conspiracy theories do likewise. But they do.

Consider the proposition, dramatised in Roland Emmerich's film Anonymous, that the works of Shakespeare were in reality written by the Earl of Oxford. The originator of this hoary conspiracy theory of the 1920s decried democracy. Its most prominent recent advocate, Joseph Sobran, was a notorious antisemite who addressed a Holocaust denial conference in 2002.

In the fantastical world of the 9/11 conspiracy theorists, it is again the Jews who are behind momentous world events. It is nonsense, of course; but it is worse than that.

Oliver Kamm is a leader writer for The Times

Unlovable, but not self-hating

Oliver Kamm — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 10:53:10 +0000

Postwar America found not only prosperity but a new literary voice. Philip Roth, one of its principal exponents, has now laid down his pen. Having written 31 books, Roth has decided that he has said what he wants to say. He told the New York Times last week: "I sat around for a month or two trying to think of something else and I thought, 'Maybe it's over, maybe it's over'."

If it is indeed over, his is still a remarkable literary output. Roth is controversial. He has sometimes caused consternation, even outrage, among American Jews. He was an unlovable figure in a highly acrimonious divorce from Claire Bloom, a fine classical and film actress. But his work will last. With (especially) Saul Bellow and John Updike, Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal, he was part of a flowering of the American novel in the 1950s and 1960s, separating it from its European counterparts and the modernist tradition. And he is the only one of that circle now living.

Roth's most famous work is Portnoy's Complaint. It's about Jewish family life and sex. It is very funny. But there are quieter works and, in my judgment, more successful ones. His early collection of stories Goodbye, Columbus is an elegiac treatment of the loss of innocence. His 1979 novel, The Ghost Writer, prefigures both his vitriolic break with Bloom and his eventual retirement, in depicting the creative urge and its effect on human relationships. And American Pastoral (1997), which won a Pulitzer Prize, conveys as well as any modern novel "the frailty, the enfeeblement of supposedly robust things".

Yet, from the outset of his career, Roth has been assailed for supposedly unsympathetic portrayals of Jewry. His short story "Defender of the Faith" (included in Goodbye, Columbus) concerns a Jewish army recruit who uses his religious affiliation to secure privileges from his Jewish sergeant. According to Roth's own recollection, he was accused of being a "self-hating Jew" whose writings did "irreparable damage to the Jewish people".

Marie Syrkin, an author and teacher and a profound and important advocate of Zionism, was outraged at the lecherous protagonist of Portnoy's Complaint. She accused Roth of creating a character "straight out of the Goebbels-Streicher script" - apparently because Portnoy lusted after blondes.

It was an odd, even bizarre, attack. Roth is scabrous, not pernicious. Jewish "self-hatred" is a term that gained particular currency around the First World War, and wider circulation from the philosopher Theodor Lessing's 1933 book Der judische Selbsthass, but it is a label that I am wary about applying to anyone. Like the old antisemitic canard of Jewish "dual loyalties", it presumes that the secrets of the human heart are transparent.

In any event, Roth's characters are no more antisemitic than is Leo Rosten's great comic creation Hyman Kaplan, whose misadventures rely on his Yiddish literalism. Roth's works are a large slice of modern Jewish life.

They are also a link to the history of the diaspora. Roth's 2004 novel The Plot Against America is premised on a historical counterfactual: the election of aviator Charles Lindbergh as an isolationist American President in 1940. Christopher Hitchens, an acute critic of politics and literature, faulted Roth's attempt to "mesh the 'micro' - most usually the familiar world of Jewish angst in New Jersey - with the 'macro': the successive spasms of alarm and disorder that have punctuated modern American history".

But, for me, this is a great work of modern literature. It illustrates the terrible costs of insularity, from which the international order suffers still.

Hobsbawm’s blinkered vision

Oliver Kamm — Sun, 14 Oct 2012 11:39:32 +0100

The history of the past century is dominated by the clash between universalism and nationalism. Eric Hobsbawm, who died last week at the age of 95, wrote about it and lived it. He combined scholarly brilliance and monumental political error.

As a teenager in Berlin, Hobsbawm witnessed the collapse of the Weimar Republic. He studied at Cambridge in the 1930s and became one of the great historians of the modern era. Yet his understanding of the 20th century was bounded by an ideological choice he made as a young man. In 2002, he recalled in his memoirs, Interesting Times, that "in the crisis-saturated atmosphere of Berlin in 1931-33… political innocence was not an option". To the end of his life, Hobsbawm espoused the universalist ideals of Communism, which he contrasted with the particularist aims of Zionism. It's not necessary to await the verdict of history to recognise how terrible was that judgment.

The paradox of Hobsbawm is that his Marxism was not an idiosyncrasy. It saturated his understanding of history, and not always for the worse. It illuminated the themes of his outstanding work on 19th-century economic history. Hobsbawm's trilogy comprising The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital and The Age of Empire explores the ascendancy of bourgeois Europe from 1789 to 1914. But his treatment of 20th century history was far less incisive. In doctrinal disputes within the Communist movement, he took the side of Eurocommunism - a pragmatic accommodation with Western parliamentary democracy. Yet he was far from grasping the totalitarian character of Communist rule in Eastern Europe.

In his 1997 book, On History, Hobsbawm makes this judgment: "Fragile as the communist systems turned out to be, only a limited, even nominal, use of armed coercion was necessary to maintain them from 1957 until 1989." That is an extraordinary way to characterise a period that included the crushing of the Prague Spring by 6,300 Soviet tanks in 1968.

In his memoirs, Hobsbawm explains the roots of his Marxism and also his status as a "non-Jewish Jew" (the phrase was coined by Isaac Deutscher, the biographer of Trotsky, to denote someone of Jewish birth but no Jewish allegiance). He says: "I have no emotional attachment to the practices of an ancestral religion and even less to the small, militarist, culturally disappointing and politically aggressive nation-state which asks for my solidarity on racial grounds."

That slighting description of Israel coexisted with Hobsbawm's stubborn belief that the Soviet Union remained, for all its deformities, a workers' state. Yet Communism was not, as its defenders argued, an imperfect realisation of a humanitarian impulse, let alone a scientific route to emancipation. Oppression is integral to Communism because it aims at social unity. There is no place for political opposition in a state where the people's interests are one. That's why Communism has always and everywhere abolished liberal political rights.

The state of Israel has many flaws. It has perpetrated many injustices. But the Jewish national movement created and sustained a democracy through decades of siege. Modern, secular Zionism envisaged the need for a Jewish state and realised it in conditions of utter catastrophe for the Jewish people. In doing so, it confronted and disarmed its own extremists.

When eventually a Palestinian state coexists with a secure Israel, that too will testify to the ideals of pluralism and equity that characterised the vision of Theodor Herzl and other Zionist pioneers. In the clash of ideologies, Hobsbawm the great historian showed not just emotional distance but profound incomprehension.

Fine writer’s love of conspiracy

Oliver Kamm — Sun, 02 Sep 2012 10:29:15 +0100

"He is materialising my fear that he will do something to disgrace his oeuvre," Christopher Hitchens told me an in interview a few months before his death. The "he" was Gore Vidal, the author and essayist. They had once been allies. Vidal had only semi-jokingly nominated Hitchens as his successor in the world of letters. But, as he told me, Hitchens had become repelled by Vidal's 9/11 conspiracy theories and "his inability to stay off the Jewish question".

Vidal died last month, epitomising this enigma to the last. He was an outstanding writer with an essential role in the history of postwar literature in English. He was especially good at wryly revising historical reputations, as in his best novel, Julian. The protagonist is the Roman Emperor known to history as Julian the Apostate for his efforts to stem the spread of Christianity. In Vidal's account, the conflict is between free thought and the superstitions of the new faith.

In fictional depictions of the ancient world, Vidal enthralled. In scabrous commentary on modern manners and mores, he was brilliant. He ensured that dramatic treatment of love between men was not consigned to a ghetto of "gay writing" but became part of the mainstream of American cultural life. Few could equal him for the pithy, laconic one-liner. "Meretricious and a happy new year," he responded, unanswerably, to a hostile critic.

I was fortunate to hear Vidal speak once, at Oxford, where I was an undergraduate in the 1980s. He was eloquent and hilarious. Yet this erudite, cultured cosmopolitan was a relentless vehicle for crank conspiracy theories and nativist bigotry. He had a particular problem with Jews. The contrast between his personae was stark and the evidence is dispiritingly strong.

In a foreword to a tendentious polemic, Jewish History, Jewish Religion by Israel Shahak, in 1994, he claimed "the hasty invention of Israel has poisoned the political and intellectual life of the USA", and that "no other minority in American history has ever hijacked so much money from the American taxpayers in order to invest in a 'homeland'."

Vidal lacked any conception of the urgency of Israel's creation and the moral grounds for US support. If only he had left it there. He abjured even the pretence that he was talking of Zionism rather than Judaism, which he described as an "unusually ugly religion that caused a good deal of suffering not only in its original form but also through its later heresy, Christianity". He charged US Jewish critics with being "Israeli fifth columnists" and of holding dual loyalties.

Such grossness was replicated in Gore's demented theories of US complicity in 9/11. His partiality for conspiracy theories was long-standing. He believed that the Roosevelt administration had advance knowledge of Pearl Harbour. In a monstrous, 7,000-word tirade, he called for an investigation to discover whether the "Bush junta" had deliberately ignored warnings of the 9/11 attacks.

Aesthetic judgments on artists and novelists are independent of political criteria, and Vidal was a writer of the first rank. Yet obituarists were curiously reticent about the world-view that animated him. This was not, as both friends and opponents thought, ultra-liberalism. It was ultra-populism.

It derived from Vidal's old sympathies for the isolationist campaigns of Charles Lindbergh, whose opposition to US involvement in the Second World War mutated into antisemitism.

Populism is a position that permeates both wings of politics. Vidal, with his gift for rhetorical indiscretion, revealed its rankness and embraced it.

Islam must let bad ideas perish

Oliver Kamm — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 12:10:23 +0100

In his memoirs, published last year, Ken Livingstone referred to "several commentators and minor intellectuals" who, he said, had become obsessed with Islam. These included Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen, Martin Bright and me.

Cohen, at least, was unfazed by the accusation, but I was angered. I've written little about Islam. That output, moreover, is devoted to defending Muslims against campaigns such as the Swiss vote to ban the construction of minarets and rebutting claims that Europe faces a demographic threat from Muslim immigration and birth rates.

I recalled his insinuations last week when reading complaints by Mehdi Hasan, the political commentator. Writing in the Guardian, Hasan recounted the malicious online abuse he consistently receives. A wider problem is "relentlessly hostile coverage of Islam", for which he holds some in our profession culpable.

British commentators, Hasan says, can be divided into three groups: those who regularly condemn anti-Muslim bigotry (who include Jonathan Freedland, my fellow JC columnist); those who promote it with stereotypes; and the third and largest group, "those commentators who boast otherwise impeccable anti-racist credentials yet tend to be silent on the subject of Islamophobia".

I suspect, though don't know, that Hasan counts me in that third group. In any event, I count his typology no less tendentious, if a lot more thoughtful, than Livingstone's.

There is something disturbing in public discourse about Islam. A segment of opinion cannot distinguish between Muslims and the theocratic fanatics of al-Qaeda. It holds to a conspiracy theory that genuinely does recall the ancient prejudice, given modern garb in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, against the Jews. This is not only a problem but a pathology and an evil.

Note, however, where Hasan's argument then goes. It indicts anti-racist commentators who are insensitive to "Islamophobia". And here, while accepting that conspiracy theorists make little of such distinctions, I protest against treating belief and ethnicity as equivalent. Once you accept that elision, mayhem awaits.

A democracy will uphold freedom of conscience, belief, assembly and worship. Following Thomas Jefferson, it will eradicate religious discrimination in public office. But the defence of a system of religious belief and affiliation is not the same thing.

If you commit yourself to combating hostile portrayals of Islam, what principled reason would you have to oppose banning books and cartoons that deride people's deeply held beliefs? At best, you might treat free speech as a right to be balanced against other social goods, such as tolerance and social cohesion. And that's a lethal assumption. A free society depends on criticism, including derision and mockery, so that bad ideas rather than their adherents perish.

When I speak to Jewish audiences, I typically explain my support for Israel. As an atheist, I have no interest in the fortunes of Judaism; but I have a powerful interest in the flourishing of the Jews, for which a secure Israel in a two-state solution is essential. On similar grounds, I supported Western intervention to defend the Muslims of Bosnia and Kosovo from genocidal repression by Milosevic.

So when Hasan challenges pundits whether we are with him in standing against "the Islamophobes", I say this. I defend free speech and deprecate the abuse he suffers. I condemn populist campaigns depicting Muslims as a homogeneous, threatening force. I support religious liberty, pluralism, and the rights of persecuted peoples. But adopting the neologism of "Islamophobia", analogous to xenophobia, is another and extraneous matter. I'm not buying it.

Don’t let the Philistines succeed

Oliver Kamm — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 14:13:28 +0100

"It's fundamentally ignorant to censor and suppress art," James Shapiro, the Shakespeare scholar, told me, referring to the campaign to ban Habima from the Globe. Habima performed last week; the actors withstood disruptions and heckling. It recalled the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra's Proms concert, when protesters purporting to defend Palestinian rights interrupted the performance.

There is a serious danger of under-reacting to this. Because the protesters did not succeed in preventing the Israelis from finishing their performances, and publicity for their demonstrations is what they sought, it is tempting to overlook what they were trying to do. But Shapiro is right. Disrupting drama and concerts is aggressive cultural vandalism of a historically stubborn type.

It takes organised form in the campaign for cultural boycotts and is an assault on a free society. Once you assume that it is legitimate to stop actors from declaiming words, or musicians from performing, you can as easily suppress authors by burning their books.

My interview with Shapiro took place in April. Almost as an afterthought, I mentioned the protest by various notable figures, among them Mark Rylance and Caryl Churchill, who maintained that Habima had "a shameful record of involvement with illegal Israeli settlements". Shapiro has taught in Israel, and is familiar with Habima's ability to expose what he terms the "fault-lines in Israeli society". He was incredulous that people who work in British theatre should have sought to silence this.

Free speech is tested by its hardest cases. I criticised Labour for blocking the entry of Geert Wilders, the Dutch anti-Muslim demagogue. I've condemned the imprisonment of David Irving and defended Nick Griffin's civil liberties. These are the worst of people, whose freedom of expression should nonetheless be vigorously defended. The consummate irony of the campaign for a cultural boycott of Israel is that its targets are among the very best of people: cultured, learned, liberal intellectuals who exemplify the principle that art transcends nationality and politics. Their sole "offence" is to be Israeli Jews.

The ignorance of the boycott campaign was anticipated a decade ago. Mona Baker, a professor at Manchester, sacked two academics from roles on journals she published. It had nothing to do with professional competence. She explained: "I do not wish to continue an official association with any Israeli under the present circumstances."

Both academics stood on the left of Israeli politics. One, Miriam Shlesinger, had chaired Amnesty International in Israel and been active in an organisation that during the first intifada circumvented Israeli army blockades to deliver supplies to Palestinians. But, to Baker, ethnicity was all. Stephen Greenblatt, another leading Shakespearean scholar, condemned Baker's boycott as "violat[ing] the essential spirit of scholarly freedom and the pursuit of truth".

Ten years on, Israeli cultural figures are being shouted down. And there is a subsidiary irony to the Habima boycott campaign. Rylance is a vocal exponent of the proposition that Shakespeare was not the true author of the works that bear his name. No documentary evidence supports this view. It is a conspiracy theory that violates critical inquiry and bears as much relation to literary scholarship as Holocaust denial does to modern history. Instead of studying the works of Shakespeare, it ransacks them for supposed autobiographical clues.

This is the face of philistinism. In bringing to the Globe their performance, Habima testified to something nobler. Their defence matters for more than Jews alone.

Oliver Kamm is a leader writer for 'The Times'

Dangerous lies that spread from Auschwitz to Srebrenica

Oliver Kamm — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 15:36:47 +0100

The words "I was wrong" rarely appear under journalists' bylines. But in the Observer this week, John Simpson, the veteran BBC correspondent, acknowledged that he had been mistaken about a libel trial arising from the Bosnian war.

The 20th anniversary of the most destructive conflict in postwar Europe fell this month. In a country the size of Scotland, almost 100,000 Bosnians were killed and two million were displaced. Because all sides suffered, observers argued that culpability was shared and that its cause was a resurgence of ancient ethnic hatreds among Serbs, Croats and Muslims. That was a fateful misreading. The war was a preventable humanitarian catastrophe that was compounded by the stance of Western governments.

Responsibility lay overwhelmingly with the Bosnian Serbs. Their leaders, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, sought to carve out an ethnically pure territory in a deranged, racist scheme for a "Greater Serbia". Their target was the legitimate government of a multi-ethnic state. Their Svengali was a thuggish bureaucrat and ballot-rigger, Slobodan Milosevic.

The crimes of which Karadzic and Mladic now stand accused at The Hague are a catalogue of barbarism: mass murder, ethnic expulsion and rape. These include the siege of Sarajevo, which killed more than 10,000, and the genocide of 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica.

None of this ought to have surprised Western policymakers, who maintained an arms embargo that froze in place the military superiority of Serb forces. Some brave journalists had uncovered appalling depredations early in the conflict. The Guardian's Ed Vulliamy and ITN 's Penny Marshall and Ian Williams exposed inhuman conditions at the Serb-run concentration camp at Trnopolje in northern Bosnia. For their pains, they were accused of fabricating their evidence.

Hence the libel trial, at the High Court in 2000. ITN successfully sued LM, a small magazine. A roster of media figures came to LM's aid, claiming a threat to free speech. Simpson was one. But in a review this week of Vulliamy's fine new book, The War is Dead: Long Live the War, he wrote: "Vulliamy's account of what happened in the camp is completely unanswerable."

You can say that again. Yet while LM went out of business under the costs of its calumnious lies, several of its staff have since attained media prominence. Mick Hume, its editor, was for some years a Times columnist.

During the war, prominent Jews did their best to urge a change in Western policy. In a speech at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, Elie Wiesel turned to President Clinton and implored him to protect Bosnian civilians. After the revelation of the Serb camps, three American Jewish groups lobbied for "every necessary step, including the use of force" to stop the atrocities. It was not their fault that their words went unheeded.

Jews have a particular interest in helping to ensure that the human costs of what followed are accurately recounted. The facts of the genocidal assault on Bosnia's Muslims are so horrific that a cottage industry of denial has since grown up. You will find websites claiming that the number of victims of the Srebrenica massacre has been exaggerated, and that those who died were killed in combat. This material is not just the equivalent of Holocaust denial, but the same fraudulent argument. It should be recognised and named for what it is: genocide denial

Vulliamy cites two far-left polemicists; Edward Herman and David Peterson. Their contemptible volume, The Politics of Genocide, claims that Western media swallow a propaganda line about Srebrenica and Rwanda. It has a foreword by Noam Chomsky and an endorsement by John Pilger.

Such arguments have an echo on the nativist Right, including some who insinuate themselves as friends of Israel. The Jerusalem Post published a piece in February by one Srdja Trifkovic claiming that US recognition of Kosovo was an advance for jihadism. It did not mention that Trifkovic has described Srebrenica as "a myth based on a lie", the number of whose victims "remain[s] unknown and misrepresented".

To paraphrase the late Christopher Hitchens: it's impossible to eat enough in order to vomit enough on reading such material. The Muslim populations of Bosnia and Kosovo bear as much relation to al-Qaeda as the Archbishop of Canterbury does to the snake-handling sects of Appalachia. Milosevic's victims should be remembered. The truth about their fate should be defended.

Oliver Kamm is a leader writer for The Times

Pantomime cases against Israelis make a mockery of international justice

Oliver Kamm — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 11:59:37 +0000

There is a concerted effort by Israel's adversaries to try to delegitimise it by using the rhetoric rather than the substance of international law. It is tempting to ignore such an obviously tendentious and malevolent campaign. But there is a good argument instead for Israel's friends to counter it, by counterposing to it the justification for international tribunals to try suspects for genuine war crimes.

International war crimes tribunals are an important humanitarian advance that have unfortunately become a destructively politicised notion. Anti-Israel campaigners bear much of the responsibility. Israeli politicians are used to frivolous invective but they have also had to contend with the threat of legal harassment and even arrest if they venture to Europe.

Fortunately that legal loophole has been closed in the UK, but the experience has tarnished the cause of universal jurisdiction applied to war crimes. That is a shame, for international justice is an essential tool in combating terrible crimes. Jews in particular have strong historic reason to welcome it and to support its most recent achievement, the creation of the International Criminal Court at The Hague.

Tzipi Livni, the leader of Israel's Kadima opposition party, is a prime example of the undoubted problem. She experienced what can only be described as an abuse of legal process when she prepared to visit the UK in 2009. She had accepted an invitation to speak at an event in London. It emerged in the meantime that British magistrates had issued a warrant for her arrest in connection with Israel's military campaign in Gaza the previous winter, when Livni had been Foreign Minister. The warrant had been sought by a pressure group. It was rescinded only when the court learnt that she had cancelled her trip.

It was not clear whether Livni's decision against travelling to the UK was due to these legal manoeuvres, but the Israeli foreign ministry was understandably incensed. Campaigners had attempted similar harassment against Ehud Barak, Israel's defence minister, on an earlier visit to the UK. It turned out that, as a serving minister, Barak enjoyed immunity from prosecution. But as my own newspaper, The Times, commented after these techniques were attempted against Livni, it was preposterous that so serious an issue should have been reduced to a legal technicality.

After this fiasco, the new British government moved mercifully swiftly (as its Labour predecessor was also committed to do) to ensure that the Director of Public Prosecutions had the power of veto over arrest warrants. Livni has since visited the UK and met William Hague.

This is, of course, as it should be. Though no longer in office, Livni is an important political figure in a vital ally of this country. It is legitimate for allies to criticise each other. The Times is a proud friend of Israel's, and insists on the Jewish state's right of self-defence, but had reservations about the tactics of the Israeli Defence Forces in the Gaza incursion. (The newspaper exposed the use of white phosphorus, against official denials). Reasoned criticisms are entirely different from the abuse of the important principle of applying the rule of law to the conduct of warfare. And here a distinction needs to be drawn.

The legal basis for the arrest warrants issued by an English court against Israeli politicians was the principle of universal jurisdiction. This allows courts to indict and try suspects for crimes against humanity regardless of where the offences were committed or the nationality of the accused. There is good reason for upholding that principle in the affairs of states, because not all states have robust enough a legal system to apprehend suspects. Some states, such as the Baathist regime in Syria now slaughtering demonstrators in order to retain power, are indeed so far outside the norms of international conduct that they are themselves an affront to the notion of justice.

Israel is nothing like such a state. The independence of its judiciary is demonstrable and highly prized. Yet Israel is assailed by essentially political campaigns through domestic courts and at international forums. The Goldstone Report into Operation Cast Lead issued under UN auspices was plainly biased and its central contention has been retracted by its chairman. None of this is disputable by a disinterested observer. But there are reasons, even so, for concluding that Israel should take its case to those forums and support the principle of universal jurisdiction.

Shlomo Avineri, the Israeli scholar and diplomat, argued powerfully last year that Israel had made a strategic error when it decided not to appear before the International Court of Justice in The Hague regarding the security barrier. The UN and other international forums are essentially political rather than legal bodies and Israel cannot give up on politics.

Avineri is right in his reading and recommendation. International law is an important construct, but it lacks a supranational body capable of exercising sovereignty to implement it. A transparent attempt to present partial political campaigns as some scrupulous quasi-judicial process is bound to bring it into disrepute. The disrepute does indeed follow, but it needs to be combated rather than allowed to go by default.

The ICJ judgement on Israel's security barrier is no model whatever for conflict resolution, let alone a conflict as intractable as the one between Israel and the Palestinians. Peace between the contending parties, when it comes, will take the form of a negotiated territorial compromise in which a secure Israel will coexist with a sovereign Palestinian state, in something approximating the pre-1967 armistice lines. But it would be politically more effective not to ignore this arena but to drive a wedge between properly constituted judicial bodies and ad hoc institutions of civil society.

The model for politicised, pseudo-legal meddling is a purported tribunal set up by Bertrand Russell, the philosopher and peace activist, during the Vietnam war. Sidney Hook, the philosopher and fierce opponent of totalitarianism, wrote illuminatingly of the Russell tribunal when it was established, in 1966. Hook had nothing against the principle of a tribunal, but cautioned that "whoever conducts such an investigation must not be a party to the conflict or violently prejudiced against either side. He must not be so committed to an antecedent conclusion that he weighs the evidence unfairly. He must not have previously condemned the 'crimes' to be investigated."

There is, to this day, a "Russell tribunal" on Palestine. Its deliberations are worthless, for exactly the reasons Hook anticipated. Similar charades take place periodically under the auspices of Blair-hating campaigns. A purported international tribunal (with absolutely no powers of arrest) took place recently in Kuala Lumpur at the instigation of the antisemitic former prime minister of Malaysia Mahathir Mohamad.

Its prosecuting counsel, Francis Boyle, is a notorious 9/11 conspiracy theorist. The judges included another American lawyer, Alfred Lambremont Webre, who goes one better by maintaining that there is a conspiracy of extraterrestrial reptilians.

Such pantomimes do great damage to the participants, but more seriously they bring the concept of judicial deliberation into disrepute. It is not hard to spot the difference, and Jews and other friends of Israel have particular cause for stressing it. The worst acts of the modern age were committed by Nazi Germany when that crime did not even have a name. The very term "genocide" is a neologism invented by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish lawyer and émigré, after the Second World War to try to capture the distinctive barbarism of what had just happened. A student of philology, Lemkin wanted a term that would describe a crime referring not merely to violence against civilians and aggression but to the attempted destruction of a people in whole or in part.

Horrifyingly, the crime of genocide, given official definition in the UN Genocide Convention of 1948, is very much a part of more recent history. Lemkin insisted that genocide referred not only to the attempted annihilation of every last member of a national or other grouping. It was the obliteration of a group as such, whether or not some of its members survived. Saddam Hussein's campaign against the Kurds clearly fell into this category of unique crime. So did the slaughter of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims by Serb forces at Srebrenica in 1995. Most chilling of all postwar atrocities was the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Astonishingly, Hutus slaughtered some 800,000 out of a population of 930,000 Tutsis in just three months.

In the 1990s, the UN set up temporary tribunals to try those suspected of war crimes and genocide in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. These institutions continue to do important work. Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb leaders, are currently being tried at The Hague. But these are costly and slow-moving institutions. Because they are explicitly temporary, they do not serve as a credible deterrent to those in other conflicts who might be tempted to use extreme violence against civilians and national groupings.

There is now, however, a permanent, treaty-based court that can try war crimes cases where a domestic legal system is inadequate. It is the ICC, established under the Rome treaty of 1998. The United States, which supported the ad hoc tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, has not signed up to the ICC, partly out of fear that its military personnel might one day be the target of frivolous prosecution.

That apprehension is not groundless. Israeli statesmen can testify that international jurisprudence is periodically misused as a political tool by campaigners and states who do not have the interests of Western democracies at heart. But as a practical matter, the ICC has demonstrably not behaved in such a way. It has, on the contrary, acted speedily against genuine threats to legal standards. It issued an arrest warrant in June against Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the late dictator's son, for the murder and persecution of civilians. (In a neat historical twist, the younger Gaddafi's doctoral thesis at the London School of Economics praised the establishment of the ICC. Satisfyingly, Gaddafi now has an involuntary chance to engage in direct research of its procedures.)

The postwar history of Western foreign policy has been marked by what can perhaps most diplomatically be termed pragmatic insouciance in the face of great crimes. As the catastrophe of the Balkan wars of the 1990s showed, such a stance is morally culpable and not even in the narrow strategic interests of democratic nations. International war crimes tribunals, dispensing disinterested justice, are a message to potential aggressors that they will be found and put on trial. Just as important, they signal to threatened peoples that they are not on their own - not this time; and, let us profoundly hope, never again.

Man who put tragedy into words

Oliver Kamm — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 11:46:06 +0000

WG "Max" Sebald, the novelist, was killed in a car crash near his home in Norfolk ten years ago this week. He was 57 and at the peak of his creative powers. He was posthumously awarded the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize for his novel Austerlitz, of which a tenth anniversary edition has just been published. Admirers of Sebald, including AS Byatt and the tenor Ian Bostridge (singing from Schubert's Winterreise), will gather at Wilton's Music Hall in east London on Wednesday to celebrate a notable life and a body of work that stands among the most remarkable artistic achievements of modern times.

If you haven't read Sebald, you may wonder what remains to be said about the crimes of Nazism, let alone by fiction writers rather than victims or historians. You would be surprised. In Austerlitz, Sebald writes of his protagonist's speaking "at length about the marks of pain which, as he said he well knew, trace countless fine lines through history". It turns out that the character (Jacques Austerlitz) has been borne along one of those historical tributaries, having arrived in Britain in 1939 on the Kindertransport. Sebald's description of the piecemeal recovery of tragic memories speaks to the Jewish experience powerfully, harrowingly and- extraordinarily enough - freshly.

The late Susan Sontag said of Sebald that he "demonstrates that literature can be, literally, indispensable". AN Wilson wrote of Austerlitz that very few novels had ever moved him so much; he had finished reading it with tears streaming down his face.

Yet his output was spare. His other main fictional works comprise Vertigo, The Rings of Saturn, a Suffolk travelogue, After Nature, a long poem on the despoliation of the natural world, and The Emigrants, a novel of four linked narratives of exile. There is also On the Natural History of Destruction, a set of lectures that reflect on the Allied firebombing of German cities during the war. A selection of poems has just been published. These works, appearing in the space of a few years, exercise a hold on readers that can properly be described as devotion. Sebald's reputation has burgeoned still more since his untimely death.

So who was Sebald? He was born in Bavaria towards the end of the Second World War but spent most of his adult life as an academic in Britain. His father was a soldier and his family, rooted in rural Catholicism, was typical of the traditionalist German heartland that proved susceptible to Hitler's malign message. Germans of Sebald's generation expressed widespread revulsion at their parents' acquiescence to Nazism, but did so in varying ways. Some perversely sympathised with the murderous cause of the terrorist left in the 1970s. Sebald was different; his protest at his nation's reluctance to come to terms with its barbarous past was through the written word and the work of the imagination.

Sebald taught for four years at Manchester University before being appointed to a lectureship in German at the University of East Anglia in 1970. There he remained for the rest of his life. He wrote in German, while collaborating closely with his English translators, first Michael Hulse and then Anthea Bell (who, I should disclose, is my mother).

Sebald's fiction, especially through the character of Austerlitz, expresses a consciousness of "how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life". Being too young to have personal recollection of the Holocaust, Sebald wrote not of its horrors direct but of the void its perpetrators created. That sense of oblivion and menace is implicit but always present. Wittgenstein wrote starkly that "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent". But in incomparable, masterly works, Sebald found a way of depicting the unspeakable.

Review: The Philanthropy of George Soros

Oliver Kamm — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 10:52:43 +0100

Perseus, £20

George Soros's public activities are a conundrum. While containing much interesting detail, this unsatisfying book fails to resolve it. Soros has devoted huge sums to the cause of establishing institutions to protect human rights and advance the disinterested application of justice. Yet he conspicuously fails to exemplify the qualities he espouses. This is not merely an idiosyncrasy: Soros's approach tarnishes his message.

The book is in three parts: an extended essay by Soros on the thinking behind his philanthropy; a longer, sycophantic but illuminating account of that work by Chuck Sudetic, a former journalist; and a brief afterword by Aryeh Neier, an impressive figure who served as chief executive of Helsinki Watch, the European arm of what became Human Rights Watch.

With the wealth generated by his investment activities, Soros has over 30 years created a network of foundations to advance the notion of the open society. The sums he has committed to these activities are immense: some $8 billion to date. At its best, the work of Soros's foundations has undemonstratively but tenaciously asserted the rights of the excluded and disadvantaged. It is difficult to think of anyone who has taken a more intense interest than Soros in, for example, the rights of Roma people in the transition from Communism in Eastern Europe.

Sudetic provides the political context to the issue, in which the eastward expansion of the EU provides a framework of protections, and describes the work of the Open Society Foundations in helping to establish Roma organisations that will promote civil liberties.

It is a task that organisations of civil society rather than governments are best at promoting. Soros is a difficult man to warm to yet there is something inspiring in the vision behind interventions at this level. The same is true of work that Sudetic describes in tackling the spread of curable disease in parts of the world whose inhabitants cannot afford effective treatment. Likewise the work of the Open Society Mental Health Initiative in helping people with mental disabilities in isolated institutions in Central and Eastern Europe.

There is a place, too, for lobbying by philanthropic and humanitarian organisations. Neier was at the centre of this controversy in the early 1990s, when Slobodan Milosevic's genocidal campaign of aggression in the Balkans met a feeble diplomatic response by Western governments. Sudetic comments on the outstanding work of the Open Society Foundations in helping to strengthen the institutions of international jurisprudence, to pursue the guilty and deter future aggressors.

All this is important. Yet Soros seems hazy on the distinction between disinterested justice and partisan politics.

There is no reference in the book to the vexed issue of the Israel-Palestine conflict, where strengthening institutions of governance is a prerequisite of a just settlement. Yet this is one field where Soros prefers grand declaratory gestures to practical peacemaking. And his interventions in the politics of the United States could scarcely be cruder or shriller. In his essay for this book, he likens the claims of the Bush Administration to Nazi propaganda techniques.

There lies the problem: the extent of Soros's philanthropy is inversely related to the amount of intelligence invested in his political ideas.

Bigotry and xenophobia well to fore

Oliver Kamm — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 12:19:07 +0100

Anti-Israel campaigners have every right to assemble, demonstrate, picket and argue. But preventing speech that they disapprove of is no legitimate part of a democratic society. Shouting down a musical performance is the same type of outrage, but a degree worse. It is not mere boorishness but militant philistinism. Its near equivalent is book-burning.

The 30 or so demonstrators who purported to be advocating Palestinian national rights (a principle of justice accepted by successive Israeli governments and widely shared among Israeli voters) damaged their own cause and doubtless magnified the deserved ovation within the Albert Hall for the IPO.

But ineffectuality does not mitigate intolerance. Often, as with the small groups of revolutionary leftists of the 1970s, the sense of being part of an elect only intensifies assaults on liberty. A responsibility in these circumstances lies with government, law enforcers, pundits and the public. It is our first duty to defend the right to self-expression. To do that requires us to be intolerant of the intolerant.

The familiar street protests are about what Israel represents: Jewish nationhood and constitutional democracy. Boycotts of Israeli academics and cultural organisations - none of whom controls Israeli government policies, which they may disagree with - are an assured way of coarsening British public life and inflaming political debate. But the attack on the IPO is beyond this. It reflected a prior determination that an Israeli orchestra, purely because of its members' nationality, would not be heard.

In short, the protest exemplified bigotry and xenophobia. In withstanding it, the IPO defended more than Israel's reputation alone.

Oliver Kamm is a leader writer for The Times.

Interivew: Peter Beinart

Oliver Kamm — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 11:07:23 +0000

Peter Beinart is an articulate and important liberal voice on American foreign policy. Now a professor of journalism at the City University of New York, he became editor of The New Republic in 1999, at the age of 28, and held the post for seven years. A few months ago he published in the New York Review of Books an essay arguing that Israel needs to be saved from itself and from the American Jewish establishment, whom he charged with promoting "an uncritical brand of Zionism".

That essay caused ructions. Commentary magazine complained that Beinart had "joined a legion of others in the burgeoning profession of being an Israel scold". James Kirchick of The New Republic accused him of "a grievous misunderstanding of why the Arab-Israeli conflict persists to this day: Arab intransigence".

Beinart travelled to the UK last week to argue that Jewish leaders and the community should re-evaluate their relationship with Israel. I met him to talk about liberalism, the West and Israel.

I have a particular interest in Beinart's approach to foreign policy, as a few years ago we were independently arguing an uncannily similar case. In his book, The Good Fight (2006), Beinart advocated the pro-defence traditions of the American Left. He identified in the Truman Administration a fighting liberalism that modern Democrats needed to recall. Liberals would not win the support of voters unless they are trusted with national security and he urged Democrats to commit themselves fully to the war on Islamist terrorism rather than retreat from the world.

In a slighter and less influential volume, I made the same argument about the interventionist policies of Tony Blair and historical debates on the British Left. The difference between us was that Beinart had recanted his earlier support for the Iraq War, whereas I remained (and still am) a supporter of the forcible overthrow of Saddam
Hussein.

"American foreign policy has intellectual cycles," he says. "The Bush Administration drew on the idealistic, Wilsonian tradition of liberal-democratic internationalism, but overlooked its limitations."

By limitations, Beinart means the impulse of humanity to sin. The theological phrase in no accident, given his intellectual inspiration. He cites with particular respect Reinhold Niebuhr, the great Protestant social thinker, who turned from an early pacifism to a theologically-grounded defence of the US role in the struggle against Nazism.

"The liberalism of the 1940s stressed reason and law," says Beinart. It is that element that he believes is lost in recent US foreign policy. "Niebuhr warned against the hubris that arises from success. He knew that idealism could be infected by self-interest."

It is this sense of the moral ambiguities of foreign policy that has shifted Beinart's views since publishing his appeal to a renewed liberal anti-totalitarianism. He now distinguishes more sharply within that tradition.

"I'm more sympathetic to the liberalism of the Truman Administration before 1950 than after it," he tells me. "The earlier Truman set out the need for reconstruction in Europe. After 1950 the US got embroiled in the Korean War and NSC-68." (He is referring to the expansive commitments, in the national security document of that name, to countering communism.)

When the Cold War ended, the temptation was there to conclude that liberalism had triumphed amid the end of history. "It was like investors who believe they've cracked the code to the stock market just by being lucky," says Beinart. And triumph caused misplaced triumphalism, with the Bush Administration's impeachably inadequate efforts to plan for Iraq's
reconstruction.

In his writings on Israel, Beinart is concerned about another kind of triumphalism. "There is a dichotomy in Israel," he says. "There is a shift in Israeli society away from the communal solidarity of the 1960s to an emerging distrust of authority."

This is exemplified, in Beinart's view, in the writings of the New Historians, who have detailed the original sin of the nascent Jewish State in the supplanting of the Palestinians, and in the stand taken by Israel's judiciary against abuses of power by officialdom. "These are stands that need to be made," Beinart argues, "because the dominant culture in Israeli society has little connection with the Enlightenment elements of Zionism."

Beinart is especially concerned with the theocratic elements in Israeli society and with the worldview brought with Israelis of recent Russian origin, who see a model in co-existence in Russia's dealings with Chechnya rather than a pacific two-state compromise.

"The founders of Israel believed that the ultra-Orthodox sects, which were themselves suspicious of the notion of a Jewish State, were a relic of history that would die out as Jews lived free of persecution," he says. The problem for modern Israel is that this stubbornly religious element has not only survived but thrived - and, says Beinart "has not made peace with Israel's democratic character. Israel cannot retain that Enlightenment spirit while providing subsidies to religious millenarians to move to West Bank settlements."

This is a trend, Beinart maintains, that needs to be confronted by Israel's friends. I put it to him that there is, in fact, no shortage of Jewish and pro-Zionist criticism of Israel. But Beinart insists that liberal Zionists need "to draw some line under what we stand for". He is incredulous at the idea that Jews are threatened by trends in Western societies. "Every post-war US President till, and including, Richard Nixon was antisemitic," he says. No such politician could be elected now. Philosemitism is widespread in American politics.

As a sometime ideological fellow traveller of Beinart's, I find his warnings cogent. They should be heeded. Beinart has nothing in common with the crude conspiracy theories of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer - co-authors of the 2007 book, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy - who purport to expose the power of the pro-Israel lobby in Western foreign policy. He believes that "darker forces may emerge in Israeli society", especially if a third intifada breaks out, unless the friends of the Jewish State make plain that there are compromises they will not make.

But perhaps we interpret liberal traditions differently. Niebuhr believed it was a dangerous temptation to distinguish between the children of light and the children of darkness. There is a morally ambiguous element in every political cause, including Western foreign policy and Israeli national security. Yet politically modest ambitions are not necessarily the right response. There are few global problems that would not be eased by more rather than less American intervention. This was true of the resurgence in the 1990s of the aggressive and xenophobic nationalism represented by Slobodan Milosevic. It is true now of the axis of Islamist terrorism that encompasses Iran and its proxies Hamas and Hezbollah. Israel has many flaws and illiberal tendencies, but at root it represents the advance of democratic and secular ideals in a region that is short of them. That is the reason that Israel remains an essential liberal cause.

Pevsner: The early life, Germany and Art

Oliver Kamm — Thu, 27 May 2010 15:00:33 +0100

By Stephen Games
Continuum, £20

Nikolaus Pevsner was the most celebrated architectural historian of his generation. Born in Leipzig in 1902, he settled in Britain at the age of 31. He became the pre-eminent cataloguer and critic of England's architectural heritage. As Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge from 1949 to 1955, and in his teaching at Birkbeck College, he embodied a concern for Englishness.

Pevsner's 46-volume work, The Buildings of England, has been much revised but never surpassed. No mere chronicler of the past, Pevsner was a theorist for the times. He looked forward to the possibilities of post-war reconstruction drawing on the English tradition of the picturesque.

An advocate of what came to be called Modernism, he perceived its roots (not altogether convincingly, but far from destructively) in William Morris. Modern architecture has notoriously become associated in the public mind with ugly concrete bunkers. Pevsner stressed instead that urban planning needed to be sensitive to its purpose.

Stephen Games's biography places Pevsner in a tradition of notable Germans, such as Holbein and Handel, who made England their home and shaped the nation's cultural life. Games was contracted to write a biography when Pevsner, diminished by Alzheimer's, was incapable of being interviewed (he died in 1983). It has been an exhaustive task. This volume deals only with Pevsner's early life, in Germany.

Games handles his subject with skill and a deep knowledge of architectural thinking. He writes illuminatingly of, among much else, Pevsner's elucidation of the artistic importance of Leipzig's Baroque buildings.

But the most potent issue of the book is a darker facet of Pevsner's life. In the last months before his long exile, Pevsner wrote respectfully and even sympathetically of the artistic notions of Goebbels. Games writes that Pevsner "gave no sign of wanting to reject anything about the new politics, only of wanting to remove the obstacles to his becoming more involved with it".

Pevsner, having Jewish parents, was unable to continue his vocation in Germany. His dismissal and move to what appeared to be the "academic wasteland" of England conclude this part of the story. But in an appendix Games recounts a media furore of a few years ago when the Evening Standard - running an extract from a volume of Pevsner's radio talks that Games had edited - provided the headline: A Nazi in England. It was an unsubtle interpretation, which provoked numerous commentators to defend Pevsner and accuse Games of making scurrilous claims.

Games feels aggrieved by his treatment, and here defends himself capably. It is not Games's claim that Pevsner was a Nazi; but the notion that Pevsner was merely naïve will not do either.

Pevsner was a great figure of English culture, but it was a tradition that he imbibed as well as interpreted. The German nationalist and authoritarian presuppositions that Nazism fed on and appropriated were widespread. They were decisively banished from German public life with the post-war founding of a great democracy on the ruins of barbarism. Until then, they formed a historical undercurrent that even victims of it such as Pevsner did not fully escape.

Utopia or Auschwitz? Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust

Oliver Kamm — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 11:28:59 +0000

By Hans Kundnani
Hurst, £45 (pb: £16.99)

Among the greatest achievements of Western diplomacy since 1945 is the creation of a democratic Germany from the ruins of barbarism. But, for Germany's immediate postwar generation, the sins of their parents and grandparents dominated their political thinking. The knowledge of such crimes gave urgency to the participation of the German baby-boomers in the radical protests of the 1960s.

The revolutionaries advocated not only social change and the abolition of militarism: they sought a purgative transformation of Germany. The choices they imagined were those of the title of Hans Kundnani's excellent work of recent political history: Utopia or Auschwitz.

There were two great ironies in this political movement, however. Kundnani traces them with astuteness and with mastery of his source material. First, the 1968 generation saw terrible historical resonance in war, and also urged the memory of Auschwitz. Yet, in their political maturity, some Germans came to see that renouncing military force in all circumstances might merely encourage the worst of rulers.

That dilemma is exemplified in the political career of Joschka Fischer, a revolutionary who became Foreign Minister in the Red-Green coalition that took office in 1998. To the fury of his radical allies, Fischer accurately gauged the character of the regime of Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia. As Kundnani quotes him, Fischer learnt not only "Never again war" but also "Never again Auschwitz" - and in the campaign of xenophobic violence against Albanian Kosovars, Fischer saw an augury of National Socialism.

Fischer represented the gaining of political wisdom of the postwar generation. As Foreign Minister, he was an intellectually honest seeker for a just Israeli-Palestinian settlement and a determined opponent of Milosevic's depredations. His political turn came with the Entebbe hijacking in 1976. Kundnani gives a powerful vignette in which Fischer defends the Israeli action to his comrades and insists that the German terrorists who took part in it deserved to die.

Fischer was, in that respect, different from those afflicted by the second irony of the Germany's radicals. In ostentatiously rejecting their parents' political quiescence, some parts of the German radical Left crossed over to unabashed antisemitism under the thin veneer of anti-imperialism. The Baader-Meinhof terrorist gang came easily to that perverted ideology. Ulrike Meinhof defended the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics as "anti-imperialist, anti-fascist and internationalist".

The collective insanity of a movement that ostensibly wished revenge on Nazism yet ended up embracing it is a salutary and bloody tale. Kundnani's is a model account of this Frankenstein's monster and a fascinating intellectual history. Yet he stops short of the greatest irony of the radical generation. The government in which Fischer served was an indifferent one because Chancellor Gerhard Schröder was an unprincipled, mediocre figure, who lacked the idealism of the pioneers of the Federal Republic: Konrad Adenauer, who allied German conservatism with the liberal west rather than authoritarian nationalism, and the Social Democratic Kurt Schumacher, who resolutely opposed Communism.

Liberal democracy, rather than its revolutionary alternative, marked the true break in Germany's political history.

Analysis: We are bolstering the delusions of terrorists

Oliver Kamm — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 11:27:21 +0100

Terrorist groups sometimes abandon violence and sublimate their aims in constitutional politics. The old Official IRA renounced the armed struggle and transformed itself into the small, left-wing Workers’ Party.

Similarly, the meeting between Britain’s ambassador to Lebanon and a Hizbollah MP will have been intended by the Foreign Office to strengthen the political process.

The British government hopes that Hizbollah will be incorporated in its entirety in Lebanon’s politics and no longer practise terrorism. It is not an absurd idea: if diplomatic meetings save lives then they are worth a try. But the meeting is wrong in principle, and a serious misreading of Hizbollah’s aims.

The problem for democratic government in judging whether to talk to terrorists is that it is never clear in advance which groups can be reasoned with and which cannot.

Talking to groups that are interested not in remedying specific complaints but only in exposing the supposed weakness of democratic governments is likely to be counterproductive.

There is a particular danger in encouraging Hizbollah to imagine that its terrorist campaigns are gaining political traction. The organisation defines itself in Lebanese politics by its supposed heroic resistance to Israel.

Elevating Hizbollah to the status of a direct interlocutor with a Western government will merely reinforce that self-image.

In reality, Hizbollah must come to terms with the non-Islamist Shia forces and the non-Shia Muslims in Lebanon who have no wish to live under a state run on the principles of Iran’s regime.

The most prudent as well as principled course for Britain is to insist that Hizbollah make its accommodation with Lebanese politics and pluralism. Only then would there be even a pragmatic case for treating Hizbollah as a party to direct talks.

Analysis: Press TV peddles pernicious tosh

Oliver Kamm — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 12:41:25 +0000

Press TV is the English-language arm of Iranian state broadcasting. I am regularly invited to appear on the station’s discussion programmes and have sometimes accepted. I have seen no evidence of any censorship of my contributions to those programmes, but I do not regard Press TV as reputable.

The station’s presenters include Yvonne Ridley, a Muslim convert and activist in the Respect party of George Galloway MP, but also established journalists such as Andrew Gilligan of the Evening Standard. Gilligan is chairman of a round-table programme of guests who take questions from an invited audience.

I have appeared twice on it — the second time purely because Tony Benn was one of the other guests, and I consider he has an easy ride in the media. I have no criticisms of Gilligan as an impartial moderator.

But I recall him being surprised when, in a discussion of Iran’s nuclear diplomacy, he read out some chilling antisemitic remarks of President Ahmadinejad — and found that they elicited vigorous applause from the invited audience.

In other programmes, the choice of guests extends to the bizarrely insignificant. One recent commentator was a pro-Milosevic blogger known for faking laudatory comments about himself under female pseudonyms on third-party websites.

But the corrosive aspect of this station is not so much the idiosyncrasies of its production as the seriousness with which it advances the most disreputable of fringe causes.

On its website, Press TV carries a preposterous article by astronomer Nicholas Kollerstrom, who was exposed last year as a Holocaust denier. Kollerstrom purports to demonstrate that “the alleged massacre of Jewish people by gassing during World War II was scientifically impossible”.

And it is clear where the station stands. “The West punishes people for their scientific research on Holocaust,” runs the introduction to his piece. “But the same Western countries allow insults to prophets and religious beliefs.”

Press TV has excelled itself by running a story that no reputable news outlet had reported: a supposed CIA study predicting the collapse of Israel within 20 years. The only authority cited for this study was “international lawyer Franklin Lamb”. Lamb is a political activist described by Hizbollah’s TV station in Lebanon as “persistent in his support for the just cause of the Lebanese people’s resistance”.

Press TV has, rightly and importantly, the liberty to broadcast in the UK. It hardly needs stating that British journalists do not enjoy comparable liberty when reporting from Tehran. But the most significant aspect of Press TV’s role is its ability to insinuate into public debate the worst and most pernicious ideas around. It will continue without any further appearances from me.

Analysis: Listen to him, but remember that he is a liar

Oliver Kamm — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 14:11:15 +0000

V Since his crushing libel defeat in 2000 against Professor Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books, who had identified him as a Holocaust-denier, David Irving has pursued an itinerant lifestyle, selling his self-published works and evangelising for his cause. He has also suffered, disgracefully, a period of incarceration in Austria. But his ill-treatment and pathos should not obscure his character and methods. He is no historian. He is forever a discredited figure owing to his falsifications and bigotry.

Irving came to prominence in the 1970s with the publication of Hitler’s War. This massive work purported to demonstrate that the Nazis’ attempt to annihilate European Jewry was far from being a systematic plan on Hitler’s part. Rather, it was “partly of an ad hoc nature...and partly a cynical extrapolation by the central SS authorities of Hitler’s antisemitic decrees”. Irving’s extraordinary proposition was that Hitler was a leader acting under constraints, whose antisemitism was opportunistic more than ideological, and who was largely ignorant of the Holocaust.

Historians who ought to have known better treated this thesis as heterodox but well-researched. Irving is a man of intelligence, linguistic accomplishment and diligence in scouring archival material. What he does with that material, however, is something else again. Irving’s libel defeat undermined his entire body of work by exposing his methods.

His very first book, written in 1963 when he was 25, affected to demonstrate that the Allies’ bombing of Dresden constituted “the biggest single massacre in European history”. Irving arrived at this conclusion by the simple expedient of arbitrarily inflating the numbers of victims five-fold. As Professor Richard Evans, expert witness for the defence in Irving’s libel suit, later put it, his work consisted in “consistent and deliberate falsification of the historical evidence” to serve the end of “achiev[ing] implicit and in the end explicit comparability with the mass murders carried out by the Nazis at Auschwitz and elsewhere”.

Irving’s aim is to rehabilitate Hitler’s reputation as a wartime leader and to consign the Allies’ wartime tactics to the annals of infamy. This case can be advanced consistently only by denying the central fact of the Nazis’ campaign of destruction: the Holocaust. And that can be advanced consistently only by employing fraud and evincing racism. Irving’s career is testament to both of those qualities.

In the 1980s, he established formal connections with the principal voice of Holocaust denial, the Institute for Historical Review — a pseudo-scholarly body based in California. Irving addressed the IHR’s 1983 Congress, and the experience apparently set him on course for ever more hardline propositions.