Shifting the brackets

Our hazy theme today is how rhetoric and threat language are used to shift around the perceived morality of Acting Against The Evil Ones.

Sometimes we should reflect on how the government views internal enemies. The inclusion or exclusion of various groups from heightened law enforcement scrutiny tells us a lot about how that government perceives its own identity.

So I have some stuff about Natan Sharansky, whose supposed ideology about the spread of freedom has totally infatuated Bush, but is itself the slanted product of a hardcore Likud supporter, shifting the definition of Arabs to suit his own purposes, influencing both Israeli and American government identities.

First thing is a report of a leaked memo from the Department of Homeland Security which indicates DHS will institutionally become more fixated on left-wing groups, those Real Dangerous Earth Liberation Front types, apparently placing less emphasis on right-wing militia and white supremacist groups. Great:

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does not list right-wing domestic terrorists and terrorist groups on a document that appears to be an internal list of threats to the nation’s security.

According to the list — part of a draft planning document obtained by CQ Homeland Security — between now and 2011 DHS expects to contend primarily with adversaries such as al Qaeda and other foreign entities affiliated with the Islamic Jihad movement, as well as domestic radical Islamist groups.

It also lists left-wing domestic groups, such as the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), as terrorist threats, but it does not mention anti-government groups, white supremacists and other radical right-wing movements, which have staged numerous terrorist attacks that have killed scores of Americans. Recent attacks on cars, businesses and property in Virginia, Oregon and California have been attributed to ELF.

On the flip side is Bush's Democratic Revolution Loverboy, Israeli Minister of Jerusalem Affairs/Olde Time Soviet Dissident Natan Sharansky. Sharansky wrote some book about the global democracy movement, but this all seems to be slick packaging within which lies a typical Likud hawk. Perhaps I'm not being fair; he did truly spend the better part of a decade in the Soviet gulag. However, as a piece in the American Conservative, a paleo-con periodical put it...

The one-time Soviet prisoner, now an Israeli cabinet minister, became the personal embodiment of the link that neoconservative intellectuals had long asserted in print between the Cold War and “World War IV”—a long twilight struggle against totalitarianism morphing seamlessly into the War on Terror. Sharansky could claim authoritatively that the battles against Soviet despotism and Islamic terrorists were essentially part of the same fight, the free against the unfree. As a result of his personal struggle, Sharansky embodied, to use a favorite catchword of the administration’s ideologists, “moral clarity.”

But in real political life, moral clarity between liberty and despotism is not so easy to come by—and perhaps nowhere is that clearer than in Sharansky’s own path since he entered Israeli politics. For there his career has been marked not by moral clarity but rather by moral ambiguity and inconsistency in his advocacy of democracy and human rights, particularly in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. [....]Over the course of Sharansky’s political career, he has steadily morphed from avatar of universal human rights into a pillar of Israel’s nationalist camp.

Soon after Sharansky’s arrival on Israel’s political scene, international human rights advocates and members of the Israeli peace movement began to suspect that he adopted a double standard in dealing with the Palestinians. After a long and exasperating exchange with Sharansky in 1997, an Arab reporter for Al-Sharq al-Awsat threw up his hands and exclaimed, “What you are in effect saying is that everything that the Israeli Government does today is right, that the whole world is wrong to criticize Israel, and that there is no possibility of making any changes in Israel’s policies?” Sharansky blithely responded, “I would not put it quite so strongly.”
[....]
In a particularly cynical move, Sharansky and Sharon’s other opponents sought to twist Israel’s democratic process to hobble even this very tentative step toward peace [the Gaza withdrawal]. As a recent Ha’aretz editorial characterizes this ploy: “The referendum campaign being waged by Sharon’s ministers, his buddies in the Likud, the settlers and fanatics of every stripe, is a threat to the democratic-parliamentary structure of the state, no matter how you look at it.” In a recent cabinet vote on Sharon’s Gaza withdrawal plan, Sharansky cast one of five nays.
[...]
....the nature of Sharansky’s political constituency in Israel drove him to the nationalist extreme. His original party started out narrowly focused on advancing the ethnic interests of Russian Jews and was fairly moderate on most other issues. But Avigdor Lieberman, another Russian Jew, saw the potential for a political party based on the growing Russian Jewish community and better understood that this community was very hawkish, particularly on the issues of Islam (which for Russians was clearly identified with the Chechen War) and the Arabs. Subsequently, Sharansky and Lieberman formed the National Unity Block, which came to represent the most nationalistic edge of the Israeli political spectrum. Like their former countrymen back in the old motherland, Russian Jews in Israel are, in the words of Eduard Kuznetsov, editor of the Israeli Russian-language paper Vesti, “the descendants of an imperial attitude. Land is sacred. And though only 1 percent of them live in the occupied territories, they have an instinctive hatred of Arabs and see no reason to make any concessions.”

Well, "instinctive hatred" is more of a blanket term than I really like, but then again this is a Russian newspaper editor talking. The following interview in Mother Jones illustrates the Likud-nationalist ideology behind the flowery democracy talk:

MJ: Another criticism of you is that as Housing Minister in Ariel Sharon's first government, you participated in the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. And many people say: "Well, how can one promote a democratic Palestinian state while at the same time supporting settlements which Palestinians see as an impediment to that state?"

NS: Well, look, Palestinians see the strengthening of Jewish settlements as an impediment, and some Israelis see the strengthening of the Palestinian Authority as an impediment. But the truth is that if you really want to live in peace, with two democratic societies—Palestinian and Israeli—these must be societies where people can live without fear. And here's something that's strange. The whole world expects that Arabs should be able to live peacefully in Israeli territory—and as you know 17 percent of Israeli citizens are Arabs. At the same time, the world also expects that Jews should leave the territories controlled by the Palestinian Authority, because those Jews will be killed there. That, from the beginning, shows that the world expects very different things from these two types of societies.

I never saw the legitimate strengthening of the Jewish community in the territories under discussion as an obstacle to peace. Israel has showed many times that, as soon as there is any hope for peace, we will make all sorts of concessions. The last example of this was Ehud Barak. But if we're making these concessions, I want to make sure that we have a reliable partner first, a partner who is also ready to take those concessions, for the sake of peace.

MJ: Israel has peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, which have held, even though neither state is a democracy, why wouldn't the same be true for an undemocratic Palestinian state?

NS: First of all, we want to have peace with everybody, whether they are a democracy or not. But the difference is that with democracy you can have peace that you can rely on. For leaders of democratic states, war is always the last option, but when you have peace with a non-democracy, you have to rely on the strength of your military to enforce it. So we have peace with Egypt backed by a treaty, but also peace with Syria without a treaty. In both cases, it's because we can rely on the strength of our army. Peace with the Palestinians, however, will not come with their state safely behind the Sinai. The new state will be in the suburbs of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. In this case, it's much more difficult for Israel to rely on the strength of its army to enforce peace, so we need a partner we can trust and rely on, a democratic partner.

One more word about Egypt. What's interesting about our agreement with Egypt is that Egypt got a lot out of it: the territories, financial support, weapons from Americans, and so on. But it lost something very important to the government: It lost Israel as enemy. And for a dictatorial regime, an outside enemy is something that helps the regime survive. So they lost us as a political enemy, but then in the last twenty years they emerged as the new anti-Semitic center in the world. The country prints more anti-Semitic literature, like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, than any other Arab country, and that's a direct result of the fact that Egypt is not a democracy. When they lost us as a political enemy, they still needed us as a national enemy, so now they're becoming the center of anti-Semitism.

A whole array here of Likud bits. The "rely on the strength of your military to enforce [peace]" option == Revisionist Zionism's Iron Wall philosophy. The "I never saw the legitimate strengthening of the Jewish community in the territories under discussion as an obstacle to peace" bit was pure Land Grabbery and Hegemonic Discourse, and lazy hegemonifying at that. Of course it's legitimate, that's why it wasn't an obstacle to peace! Now that is a tautology worth putting clusters of zealots on the West Bank for. And we can see the ideological continuity with the Clean Break neocon folks as well.

On the other hand, he is right that the outside enemy helps the regime survive. USSR and the Capitalist Cigar smokers, Nazi Germany and International Jewry, the New Pentagon and Shibboleth O Evil Zarqawi, these are handy things. War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning. To hate at least rhetorically delays the pressures of reform, but doubly so in a democracy where vast sections of the population have been brainwashed.

To make the American people intolerant of imaginary WMDs held by an inflated enemy image, that was the genius of Wolfowitz, and his Cold War predecessors like Wohlstetter. To run intelligence puffing-up using totally fake Empirical Evidence, like the old Team B venture, was recognized as the best political strategy to making doves look foolhardy. in those days, it was the nukes, whereas nowadays it was the Curveball-based intel, Yellowcake Uranium and Aluminum Tubes.

I have to go to bed now. More later. Augh, I always say that.