Rolling MENA 2014 (Middle East)

he went to school here in philly suburbs - attended the same high school at my mom (he was a few years ahead of her)

powerful speech so far I think (whether you agree with his points or not)

i like the point he just made, which is that /this deal/ or /war/ is a false dichotomy designed to make this particular deal seem inevitable

@MichaelCrowley
A "dark, Strangelovian" speech, says Christiane Amanpour

wow the iranian journalist didn't like it?

profiling the Fifth Estate, tsk tsk

...

false dichotomy says the guy who wants war

he said he doesn't want war and i believe that bibi is in general very conservative about such things - i don't think he wants a messy israeli-iran conflict

here's my realpolitik [tm] take on the Bibi speech:

I think Obama has two very bad habits that Bibi's speech may have had a somewhat ameliorative impact upon. One, he's terrible at negotiating deals (see: his entire administration's history with the Republican Party). He doesn't seem to understand leverage, and thinks that good faith efforts are more important than, eg, bargaining from a position of strength. He'll give away the henhouse if he thinks it'll get him a partner 'across the aisle.' Two, if he thinks he can push something through without a lot of attention, he feels no compulsion to be transparent. He's a very secretive dude with a very secretive administration, so putting some attention (even negative attention) on the negotiations might force him to come back w/ something better than he might've hoped to get away with.

i don't think he wants to convince the US to go to war against Iran. i think by, eg, hinting to the military option, he's trying to generate some leverage for the negotiations.

you don't think Bibi's domestic political concerns factor in at all?

Maybe I mean I believe he probably thought it would help his election chances but if anything I'd think the speech ultimately hurt him. But he's been outspoken about Iran for years now. When has the lack of an election ever stopped him from discussing Iranian nukes?

Also he didn't set the negotiating extension for so close to Israeli elections.

Does anyone believe that if the deadline for negotiations was March but the election was next year we wouldn't be hearing from Bibi?

I don't actually know how this is playing domestically for him, it's just that the timing being so close to the election makes me wonder. was an honest question

I heard he was trailing Herzog in the polls, so fingers crossed we get shot of the tubthumping blowhard... for a while anyway.

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2015/mar/04/netanyahu-speech-churchill-syndrome/

interrupted by nearly two dozen ovations

Laugh or cry, you decide.

one of the pro-speech saudi pieces: http://english.alarabiya.net/en/views/news/middle-east/2015/03/03/President-Obama-listen-to-Netanyahu-on-Iran.html

Barry Crimmins @crimmins
Netanyahu's next stop? Motivational speech @ Ferguson, Mo Police Dept.

so what are Bibi's re-election prospects? does Herzog and his center-left coalition even have a prayer?

Herzog and his party are reportedly close, but I keep seeing stories suggesting that Herzog's soft-spoken voice and his nickname (!) are hurting his support

http://jewishexponent.com/headlines/2015/03/isaac-herzog-hopes-soft-speech-can-carry-israel-s-election

Herzog is soft-spoken, focused on building consensus domestically and strengthening ties internationally. Netanyahu is vociferous, presenting himself as an uncompromising leader willing to stand up even to Israel’s closest allies.

“All parts of our society are simmering from within, are asking questions, are debating,” Herzog said on Sunday. “My role as a leader is to unite everyone, bring them together to a common denominator, give them a sense of purpose and hope.”

Herzog’s detractors — Netanyahu chief among them — say this tendency is a weakness. Netanyahu’s ads claim Herzog will “capitulate to terror” and question whether he’s fit to lead a country beset by threats. Herzog’s quiet demeanor may also be costing him with voters accustomed to an outspoken prime minister. Though his party has been running neck-and-neck with Netanyahu’s Likud atop the polls, a recent Times of Israel survey found that one-fifth of likely voters either had no opinion of Herzog or hadn’t even heard of him. Herzog’s nickname — the diminutive “Bougie” — doesn’t help.

How is bougie more of a liability than bibi

And what's with the weird nicknames?

Good questions. I have seen 3 stories mentioning that "Bougie" allegedly hurts him, but no real explanation or comparison.

I think Obama has two very bad habits that Bibi's speech may have had a somewhat ameliorative impact upon. One, he's terrible at negotiating deals (see: his entire administration's history with the Republican Party). He doesn't seem to understand leverage, and thinks that good faith efforts are more important than, eg, bargaining from a position of strength. He'll give away the henhouse if he thinks it'll get him a partner 'across the aisle.'

To call someone a poor negotiator you have to assume the good faith and honest intentions of the people on the other end. "His entire administration's history with the Republican Party" consists of listening to bat shit ideas from legislators who don't want to legislate and don't grant the legitimacy of his elections.

A big part of negotiations is recognizing the good or bad faith of the people you're negotiating with. You're not complementing him by suggesting he's a naif.

Like saying he's really good at negotiating w perfect actors is pretty meaningless

I suppose he could negotiate how to phase out Social Security, how many troops to commit to Syria, how to replace the ACA with a $1000 tax break, and resigning so that Mitt Romney can replace him.

Idk what you're trying to say. If your point is that the republicans were never interesting in compromise, that's what I'm saying is the problem. Despite that Obama often conceded his position as good faith signs to try to make bipartisan deals. The analogy to the ayatollahs should be obv

Aka I'm not as you appear to believe criticizing Obama for not compromising enough- I'm faulting him for too often compromising without getting anything real from his opponent

You go to the negotiating table with the batshit Republicans you have, not the good faith Republicans you wish you had.

-- Ronald Dumsfeld --

https://twitter.com/AsafRonel/status/574316970373308416

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/08/world/africa/boko-haram-is-said-to-pledge-allegiance-to-islamic-state.html

wow the iranian journalist didn't like it?

― Mordy, Tuesday, March 3, 2015 10:39 AM (4 days ago)

...

Wood: I’m pleased to see that it has baffled a lot of people. Much of the initial wave of reaction has come from people who desperately wanted it to say one thing or another, and who reacted by assuming that it fell into their predetermined classifications of pieces about politics, Islam, or terrorism. It is gratifying to write a story so resistant to classification that people have to pretend it says things it doesn’t just so that it fits in their mental categories.

Many enemies of Islam, and I consider you one of them even though I exempt you from this charge of misreading, have wanted to read the story as claiming that Islam is responsible for terror, or that ISIS is Islam. In fact it denies these claims explicitly and has a long section about literalist Muslim objections to ISIS. Many Muslims have, ironically, read the piece in exactly the same way, assuming it blames Islam for ISIS. That misreading, I think, is because it’s easier to argue against the anti-Islam point of view than to reckon with the possibility that Islam contains multitudes, like other religions, and that some of them are very, very nasty indeed, even though they share the same texts as the not-nasty ones. People are also frustrated by the fact that the piece discusses religion but has no time for talk of a “clash of civilizations,” and in fact argues that one of our main policy goals should be to avoid this. Finally, some readers are desperate to see my article as a portrayal of Muslims as savages, and cannot process that I am actually arguing something like the opposite, and specifically about ISIS. Its members aren’t brainless brutes who cannot think—that’s the Orientalist view, and ironically it’s the view that a lot of people who would call themselves anti-Orientalists take when reading the piece. ISIS members are often highly sophisticated people, just as capable of intelligent critical thought as anyone else. They are simply evil.

Then, finally, there’s the very interesting reaction of people who condemn the article for being “Islamophobic” in effect if not in intent, because people who hate Muslims will use it and ignore the parts about Muslims’ overwhelming rejection of ISIS. I’ll just say that Muslims, of all people, should be wary of assigning guilt to texts because of how they’re invoked by hate-filled people.

http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-true-believers

Harris: Do you have other ideas about why it’s so tempting for liberals to ignore the link between jihadism and religious belief?

...

Whatever the underlying causes of this form of jihadism, at the end of the day we have pure, fanatical, implacable evil vs. basic human sanity.

Worthless.

Its members aren’t brainless brutes who cannot think—that’s the Orientalist view, and ironically it’s the view that a lot of people who would call themselves anti-Orientalists take when reading the piece.

Agree with this. What's interesting is that in discussing ISIS, there's an element of Orientalist thinking among a number of "enemies of Islam" as well as among a number of "enemies of enemies of Islam" (even if the latter have good intentions).

lots of good stuff in there imo.

Wood: Well, the question of whether he thinks I should be put to death turns out to be a little bit more complicated. He certainly thinks that Americans are fair game, given that America is attacking the Islamic State. That said, he can imagine places for non-Muslims in the Islamic State. One place is slavery. Another place is dhimmitude, a condition of acknowledged subjugation for Jews and Christians, whereby they pay a tax and get the protection of the caliphate. These are the conditions that he could imagine for me.

But we had a cordial conversation, and he even bought me cookies and sweets. I pointed out to him, “Look, the Islamic State, which you seem to be entirely in favor of, counsels its adherents to poison infidels, and now you’re giving me food. Is this something I should be worried about?” And his answer, of course, was entirely prudential. He said, “Is Islam going to be better off if Anjem Choudary goes to prison for the rest of his life because he poisoned some journalist who just wanted to talk to him about the faith?” This was roughly how Cerantonio responded as well, and neither of them was rude to me, let alone violent.

also the entire question of whether we can/should exploit the belief in Dabiq

Unfortunately, there are so many myopic partisan lenses through which we (in the West in general) view ISIS, it's very hard to get an undistorted clear view. Whatever the shortcomings of Wood's article, I think one of its strengths was to shake up and break out of some of those partisan blinders (worn by all parties).

xp

A willingness to behead or burn other human beings, solely on the basis that your victims have thoughts which displease God, may be distressingly common in human history, but it is a dysfunctional feature of the human brain we'd all be better off without. Calling it evil or insane may be imprecise terminology, but it isn't so wholly incorrect to be worthless. The difficulty is that it borrows its terms from a framework that is too strongly associated with the same kind of dysfunctional thinking.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/03/opinion/the-education-of-jihadi-john.html

Author of that nyt opinion article is the co-author Sam Harris refers to ("I’ve just written a short book with the Muslim reformer Maajid Nawaz, Islam and the Future of Tolerance (Harvard University Press, June 2015)").

Rather a weak article, given that his direct experience of higher education referenced was twenty years ago and the government and universities have put a huge effort into tracking and combating campus extremism since - including MI5 and police infiltration. The idea that Islamists have been allowed to work ' unfettered' is curious, as is the lack of suggestions over what these fetters should look like. There are more interesting investigations on Westminster and its ongoing issues with campus extremists out there.

It's worth noting that Nawaz and his colleague Ed Hussein have been increasingly courting US funding, including from some pretty dodgy groups on the right, and attempted a weird partnership with British neo-nazi Tommy Robinson when the government cut their funding off in 2012.

I'm assuming because no-one in the UK is interested in this clown Anjem Choudary anymore that he (or his agent or whatever) is touting for business in the US.

I suppose a guy's got to make living.

Yep, his reinvention as a Fox talking head / expert on radical Islam / subject of serious intellectual analysis is bizarre. If ever a man was destined to spend the rest of his career handing out leaflets with his three followers outside Tottenham Hale tube station, I thought it would be him.

I suppose Fox is the lair of the idiot troll so where better, cf. Daniel Hannan.

wow the iranian journalist didn't like it?

― Mordy, Tuesday, March 3, 2015 10:39 AM (4 days ago)

...

― the late great, Sunday, March 8, 2015 7:20 AM (Yesterday)

late great otm