In the midst of A Matter of Opinion – Victor Navasky’s affable account of his professional life in journalism – The Nation‘s publisher tells a tale about a libel settlement that dishonors a smart set who have trashed efforts to mobilize resistance to the Muslim World’s Ku Klux Klan.
Navasky, though doesn’t seem to recognize he’s revealed the worst about some of his magazine’s “best friends.” His no regrets pose and narrow focus on process (legal and otherwise) make you wonder about his ethics. But this isn’t personal. The deals at the heart of A Matter of Opinion are everyone’s business. If you want to help stop the bleeding from the War on Terror you need to be on Navasky’s case.
His pre-legal war story begins back in 1993 when he agreed to publish an except from Kanan Makiya’s Cruelty and Silence. Makiya’s first book, Republic of Fear (1989), had called attention to the horrors of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime before the Gulf War (and before Iraq invaded Kuwait). Cruelty and Silence confronted the broad realities of tyranny in the Middle East and exposed the failure of Arab (and “pro-Arab”) intellectuals to condemn the slaughter of innocents.
The Nation excerpt placed Middle Eastern women inside “landscapes of cruelty of silence,” citing instances of state-sponsored rape and honor killings. Navasky doesn’t remark on the continuing relevance of Makiya’s perspective at a time when Janjaweed militias employ rape as a genocidal technique in Darfur and Shiite extremists execute prostitutes in Iraq, but he credits Makiya with “powerful reporting and analysis.”
Too powerful for at least one of Navasky’s Nation colleagues who alerted Edward Said – “the preeminent Palestinian intellectual in the West, The Nation’s opera critic and a friend of so many of my friends that I thought of him as a friend myself.” Said called Navaksy to urge him to kill the piece claiming Makiya was a “mischief-maker” who wrote “false (and libelous) things about Arab intellectuals, including not least Said himself.”
Navasky acknowledges it wasn’t “ideal” to have an (unnamed) Nation colleague collaborating with Said in an effort to suppress Makiya’s piece, but he’s too easy on these would-be cultural commissars. And his ease gets harder to take when he provides the back-story of his own relationship with “Edward.” (Navasky, by the way, is never on a first name basis with that mischief-maker “Makiya.”)
Back in 1981, Navasky had the sort of inspiration that justifies an editor’s existence. Aware that Israel was a relatively open society with an active Peace Now constituency, Navasky realized he should encourage Palestinians to explore Gandhian modes of non-violent resistance, “substituting civil disobedience for terrorism.” He also recognized (as a “New York Jew”) he couldn’t issue the necessary Call for non-violence: “It needed a Palestinian, someone with the stature, prestige, credentials and intellect of a Said.” So Navasky raised the subject with Said who was skeptical at first, asserting civil disobedience by Palestinians hadn’t been effective in the past. Navasky emphasized he wasn’t talking up any one tactic but calling for a non-violent Movement: “Edward liked the idea and we went our separate ways.”
A few weeks later, Navasky received an article on Israel/Palestine/America from Said that was “learned, nuanced, contextual, combative, and persuasive.” But: “The clarion call for civil disobedience, for passive resistance, for Gandhian nonviolence was nowhere to be found.” When Navasky “gently” asked why Said had put aside their original idea, he responded:
“Didn’t you read the piece?” he asked with genuine puzzlement. “It’s all there on page 8.”
Said had written a sentence that might be read (by those familiar with the rhetoric of Palestinian officials) to mean he was ready to accept the existence of the State of Israel. But the notion of a Palestinian protest movement dedicated to civil disobedience, in Navasky’s words, “got lost in the shuffle.” (Over the years, close readers got used to that Said – “the time for speaking clearly has come” – shuffle.) No-one could complain if Said had acknowledged that he wasn’t ready to issue a Call for non-violence. After all, that might have been a dangerous thing for a prominent Palestinian to do (as Navasky notes). But Said’s claim it was “all there on page 8” defines intellectual dishonesty.
Though not to Navasky who leaves it at: “So much for my brilliant idea.” And then rushes to his next brush with celeb-intellects – “Now, 12 years later Edward was calling about Makiya.” Maybe Navasky is in a rush to avoid judging the actions of his late Palestinian friend. But even if forbearance lies beneath the slick surface, his segues are bound to set off bullshit detectors.
Navasky recalls how he laid it on thick as he explained to Said why it would be “inappropriate for us to quash [Makiya’s piece] as a favor to a cherished friend of the magazine (which I told him I knew was not what he was asking for).” Though of course that was precisely what Said was asking for. Navasky assured Said The Nation excerpt from Cruelty and Silence wouldn’t focus on Arab intellectuals and warned that killing the piece would lead to a “minor” scandal that would “embarrass everyone involved”: “Edward took the point.”
Navasky’s remembrance of his own finesse is less than winning. Especially since he ends up conceding he asked Said to recommend reviewers for Cruelty and Silence though the man had announced his bias against Makiya’s work. Said proposed (among others) one of his very best friends, Eqbal Ahmad. Navasky’s narrative gets twisty (and windy) as he tells how Ahmad got the gig.
I would like to be able to confess that the fix was in. It wasn’t. Elsa Dixler, who very much has a mind of her own, invited Eqbal Ahmad to review Makiya’s book, not because his name was on the list I passed on to her (it was) …Eqbal, who was a friend of the magazine and of mine personally, was an anti-war visionary Pakistani radical…one of those rare scholar-activists who brought his own global vision and original perspective to any issue he tackled. I always learned something new from Eqbal’s writings. And when Elsa mentioned to me that Eqbal would be reviewing Makiya, I thought I could predict more or less what he would say.
Navasky’s puffery (“visionary…who brought his own global vision”) and compactions of self-contradiction (“It wasn’t”/ “it was” – “I always learned something new from Eqbal”/ “I could predict more or less what he would say”) belong to the discourse of modified, limited hang-out. And the contradictions keep coming. Navasky expected Ahmad would defend Said while allowing Makiya was right to argue Arab intellectuals (especially those in the West) ought to speak truth to power. Instead Navasky’s “visionary” turned in a “hatchet job.” Ahmad insisted Makiya’s case against State terror in the Middle East was worthless and “took a swipe” at The Nation for publishing an excerpt from a book that “treats documents carelessly.” Ahmad upped the ante by suggesting one of Makiya’s key sources was under investigation for embezzling billions of dollars.
But Ahmad mis-identified that individual who threatened to sue The Nation once the review was published. Navaksy was forced to publish a correction and settle the case before it went to court. While he was trying to beat this potential libel charge by offering evidence of The Nation’s “lack of malice,” Ahmad (“friend of the magazine”) proved to be full of himself:
[Eqbal] refused to believe there was more than one al-Sabah: “The man’s a liar,” he insisted. “It will make me very unhappy that I had any dealings with The Nation if you print a ‘correction’ of any sort.”…I explained that our libel insurance policy included a $50,000 deductible and the magazine couldn’t afford it. Eqbal offered to indemnify the magazine – anything in order not to allow this “liar” to win…
Over Eqbal’s vociferous objections, he argued it was Makiya’s responsibility to prove his friend wasn’t an embezzler [!], we published a correction.
Navasky elaborates on how The Nation came to make this correction (just as he goes on about how he handled Said’s censoriousness), but he misses the import of his own story. His account of his friends’ behavior bolsters Makiya’s critique of their circle of “pro-Arab,” “anti-imperialist” intellectuals – that “community of conscience and understanding” tenderly invoked by Said in his commentary on 9/11 (in The London Review of Books).
It’s instructive to compare Said’s response to 9/11 with Makiya’s. Said opened his LRB piece by noting the aftermath had been an “unpleasant time” for Muslim and Arab-Americans. After focusing on “the palpable air of hatred directed against the group as a whole,” he allowed “official bellicosity” against Arabs and Muslim had “slowly diminished” in America – “catastrophe and backlash” preceded “backtrack” in his interpretation. He concluded that “long-term hope” rested on dissenters’ capacity to spark a “decent reconsideration” that might lead eventually to “changed policies on Palestine, or a less crazy defence budget, or more enlightened environmental attitudes.”
Makiya called for a different sort of “reconsideration”:
As I wrote in Cruelty and Silence, citing the 1930s Iraqi alter ego of Tom Lehrer, Aziz Ali, Da’ illi beena, minna wa feena: “The disease that is in us, is from us and within us”… Muslims and Arabs have to be on the front lines of a new kind of war, one that is worth waging for their own salvation and in their own souls. And that, as good out-of-fashion Muslim scholars will tell you, is the true meaning of jihad, a meaning that has been hijacked by terrorists and suicide bombers and all those who applaud or find excuses for them. To exorcise what they have done in our name is the civilisational challenge of the twenty-first century for every Arab and Muslim in the world today.
Makiya backs up his talk. Based in Baghdad, he heads The Iraq Memory Foundation – the most comprehensive archive of Saddam’s crimes. Makiya’s Foundation is digitalizing its extensive records to enable Iraqi citizens to find out for themselves all the information available on those who were disappeared by the Baath Party between 1968-2003. Intent on reaching the next generation of Iraqis, Makiya wants to ensure the murderous history of Baathism becomes a central part of the curriculum in Iraq’s schools. His Foundation will help shape a new Iraqi sense of national identity:
Identity is Memory. And Memory is Identity. People whose identities are cobbled together from half-truths, or from distorted memories of who is to blame and who is blameless, are prone to commit new transgressions.
The Iraq Memory Foundation aims to teach each ethnic and confessional group in Iraq that Saddam’s regime committed crimes not just against their kind but against all Iraqis and against humanity. It seeks to sublate the psychology of the blood-feud; to model an alternative to the mentality of our terrorist enemies. As Emrys Peters, anthropologist of the Bedouin feud has written, the feud is eternal.[1] And the War on Terror will go on until the will-to-kill-and-be-killed is exorcized from within.
Makiya and the other Arab and Muslim humanists who have taken up his “civilizational challenge” ought to be embraced by anyone who longs for an end to the War on Terror. But the heart of A Matter of Opinion hints friends of The Nation are more likely to slander Makiya than support his radical history project. Navasky’s revelations are a symptom of a larger moral failure on the Left that Brit journalist Nick Cohen has nailed:
What we have witnessed is a sinister attempt by liberal opinion to deny legitimacy to the very liberals, feminists and socialists who have a right to expect support. The authentic Muslim has become the blood-crazed fanatic rather than the reformer. The authentic liberator has become the fascist rather than the democrat. This is a betrayal on an epic scale which casts doubt on whether it is possible now to have a decent left.
Cohen made his statement as he was explaining why he’s signed a petition against terrorism that began circulating on the Internet after the London bombings (http://www.unite-against-terror.com/). Other signers include Kanan Makiya and Omar (of the Iraq the Model website) – the Sunni Muslim who has been the strongest voice of Iraqi democrats in the blogosphere. No friends of The Nation have signed the petition yet. I don’t believe Edward Said or Eqbal Ahmad would if they were still here because the statement accompanying the petition explicitly rejects the notion that terrorist violence is a response by Muslims to injustices perpetrated upon them by the West. Perhaps Victor Navasky will take the lead here, picking up on the inspiration that moved him back in the day to imagine a humane future for Palestinians (and Israelis).
But I wouldn’t bet on that. Navasky seems stuck on the notion the Said/Ahmad/Makiya episode in A Matter of Opinion counts because The Nation had to pay somebody some money. When David Frum asked him about it on a CNN book-chat show, Navasky even denied it was an error to have Ahmad review Cruelty and Silence. Going back on his first interpretation, he insisted the only “mistake” was The Nation “ended up running through our libel insurance policy.”
Such bottom-lines probably help him connect with a certain class of people who are certainly a presence in A Matter of Opinion (which might be re-titled – Meetings with Remarkable Rich Men). They like Vic because he’s not a prick. But also because his lite-righteous tone and esteem for authority (“stature, prestige, credentials and intellect”) meld with their own way-of-dealing-in-the-world. A passage from a dreamy review of A Matter of Opinion (in The Common Reader) is on point here. The reviewer (another friend of Navasky) offers this story to explain why The Nation matters:
The Nation had sent two young journalists to South Africa to report on apartheid. I asked if I might bring someone from GM to meet them. The head of public relations at GM was John W. McNulty, former fundraiser for New York’s Lincoln Center project, speechwriter for Lyndon Johnson, and friend of Bill Moyers. McNulty, the executive vice president, the general counsel of the corporation, and I went to the offices of the Nation to listen to the young journalists. On the way back to midtown Manhattan, the general counsel said to McNulty, “Jack, we have to get out. You have to tell Roger [B. Smith].”[2] “Me?” said Jack. “You’re the general counsel, you should tell him.”
I heard nothing more for about a month. Had they dared to carry a message from two kids at the Nation to Roger Smith? And then one evening, after dinner in New York, standing on the corner of 57th Street and Sixth Avenue, McNulty said to me, “Roger’s going to announce that we’re getting out of South Africa. He’s made an agreement with his pal at IBM. They’ll announce their withdrawal two days later. Can you have a memo on my desk with your ideas about how we should withdraw?”
“Jack, it’s the end of apartheid.” I said.
He could, on occasion, be the tallest leprechaun. With a tight-lipped smile, he said, “Yeah.”
I doubt Navasky shares his fan’s fantasy that apartheid ended of an evening “after dinner in New York.” (As Charlayne Hunter-Gault once murmured to herself after a 90’s screening of a Hollywood flic starring daring white men in struggle against apartheid – “God save us from white liberals.”) But Navasky presides comfortably over a magazine that advertises its own elitism – “THAT’S WHY SO MANY SOMEBODIES READ THE NATION.”
Which might be old news but The Nation’s in-crowd mentality is more problematic now than ever before. E.M. Forster famously claimed he’d betray his country before he’d betray a friend. And many of The Nation’s writers and readers shared his values back when the magazine was solidarizing with Communist Party people or Viet Nam era draft resisters. There’s always reasons to resist the patriot game. But in our post-9/11 era, the old antimonies are almost out of time. It’s no longer about choosing between the State and your buddies. The choice now is between humanism and barbarism, between feeling and the jihadis’ stone-cold absence of emotion – “I don’t feel your pain” said the faith-based murderer in the Dutch courtroom to Theo Van Gogh’s mother.[3]
Old New Leftists find it hard to get their minds around the new facts of feeling. One Ivy League revolutionist/cartoonist recently insisted in an email that soldiers in Iraq share the attitude of Viet Nam era draftees – “The more fraggings the better, from my standpoint. As in Vietnam: a reasonable alternative to going out and murdering the civilian population.” Ask this tenured member of the “community of conscience and understanding” which side in Iraq is defined by its commitment to murdering civilians and he slips the question – “It ain’t THEM. They don’t have to be admirable. It’s US.” But jihadis in Baghdad (or Amsterdam or London or Cairo or Bali or Madrid or Nairobi or New York) aren’t simply – or even chiefly – anti-U.S., they’re at war with this worldly world.
A Nation contributor predicts First of the Month writers will soon be claiming the war in Iraq failed because “valiant Americans were betrayed by the Left” as hawks used to argue after Viet Nam. But it’s our critic who (implicitly) amplifies the farcical notion that Iraq’s right-wing Sunni death squads are morally equivalent to the North Vietnamese Army. And he’s the one locked on class-bound oppositions between Left and Right that cover up a shared insensibility. The Ivy Leaguer who can’t wait for the fragging to begin or the fantast on 57th street who imagines Roger and he ended apartheid are brothers under the skin of Bush Adminisration officials who ended the State of Iraq without preparing Americans for what might happen on the day after. Clarity about the mindless Left’s THEM vs. U.S. bias doesn’t mean you excuse the Administration’s multiple failures of imagination and candor. Dick Cheney’s recent happy talk (on Larry King Live) forecasting the “last throes” of the insurgency is more likely to kill the American people’s will to struggle in Iraq than doom-mongering on the Left. Dick and Co. and friends of Vic all live the surreal life.
Back from the frontlines in Afghanistan and Iraq, Austin Bay reported (in The Weekly Standard) U.S. soldiers in the field wonder at the vice president’s beamishness (just as they’re mystified by Nation-style negativism). “What in the hell is going on back there?” asked a Navy officer. Bay rightly criticizes the Administration for refusing to confront Americans with the case for a long hard slog, pointing out Bush “failed to tap the great reservoir of political willingness 9/11 generated…Administration officials did preach a bit, but the sermon was too cheery.” Bay followed up his Standard piece at his blog by printing a Marine’s comment on the inadequacies of the Bush Administration’s political arguments for the war in Iraq: “[We’re] watching the most important symphonic performance of human history without a conductor and no program.”
The absence of a “conductor” is daunting. And not just for navy officers or Marines or The Nation‘s wannabe “thought-leaders.” But radical democrats who want to see history made from below or on the margins must respond to this challenge. If Bush’s “you’re either with us or against us” line left you cool, try this,
Which Side Are You On?
Notes
1 Thanks to The Belmont Club/Tech Central Station for the steer to Peters’ work.
2 The Roger in Roger and Me.
3 Austin Bay called attention to this ad-lib.
CRUELTY AND IRONY
By Victor Navasky
Victor Navasky responds to “With Friends Like These” in the following letter to the editors of First of the Month.
I write to thank my friend Benj DeMott not only for calling my book, A Matter of Opinion, an “affable account” and me personally “not a prick” (memo to Tina, my book publicist: Do we have a blurb here?); but more significantly, for his instruction in the higher media ethics. However, although I have read his good piece (“With Friends Like These” July, 2005) three times I am so morally obtuse that I still can’t quite figure out exactly what my sins are.
Okay, I’ve now read it a fourth time and even though I still have trouble understanding the basis of Benj’s various indictments, I know they must be important. Why else would he write early on “If you want to help stop the bleeding from the war on terror you need to be on Navasky’s case”? Not only that but further on, much further on, Benj reminds the reader that “Navasky’s revelations are a symptom of a larger moral failure of the left.”
I want to help stop the bleeding from the war on terror. Who wouldn’t? And although from where I sit it’s hard to see The Left as a single, united entity, if “it” has a moral failure, large or small, I want to know about it. Needless to say I’m humbled to think that getting “on Navasky’s case” can help bring an end to the death and destruction.
Here I apologize to the reader for perhaps telling you more than you want to know about pp. 321-328 of A Matter of Opinion (which are the only pages Benj has singled out for his exegesis) but it’s the only way I can think to explain my culpability so that I may begin to make my amends.
The background: In his essay, Benj focuses on the 7 page section of my book where I reflect on the fact that “whereas I thought I had left the law for journalism, as The Nation became enmeshed in covering the increasingly acrimonious extra-national political and cultural conflicts of the late 1980s and 1990s, at times it felt like I had never left the law at all.” As a case in point I tell the story of how The Nation got sued after publishing an excerpt from the Iraqi dissident Kenan Makiya’s new book Cruelty and Silence, which documented the failure of the Arab intelligentsia to condemn Saddam Hussein’s brutal massacres and human rights abuses of Arabs and Kurds. In my account I relate that we published the piece despite a request that we not do so from Edward Said, The Nation’s long-time contributor and friend. After the excerpt appeared, I continue, our literary editor subsequently recruited Ahmad Eqbal, the Pakistani radical, to review Makiya’s book. Eqbal (who revealed in his review that he was a friend of Said) ended up (a) attacking Makiya and his book (b) attacking The Nation for excerpting it and (c) attacking Makiya’s key (pseudonymous) source in the book. Unfortunately for The Nation, Eqbal mis-identified the source he attacked, confusing him with another person with the same name and profession and living in the same place, London. Makiya’s source ended up suing The Nation; and we chose to print a correction and an apology and to settle a lawsuit that our attorney, Floyd Abrams, assured us we would probably win, but which could have cost us $50,000 out of pocket.
Space precludes me from doing adequate justice to each and every one of Benj’s ethical injunctions, but the gist seems to be that I (or The Nation or the left in general) am/is/are morally lacking for having Eqbal review the book in the first place, but more importantly for our failure to support Makiya, a strong opponent of Hussein and a strong supporter of the Iraq war.
As evidence of my bias I am accused of calling Said by his first name, i.e., “Edward” whereas “Navasky…is never on a first name basis with that mischief-maker ‘Makiya.’” Benj is right I am, indeed, guilty of calling Edward Said, whom I had known for 20 years, by his first name and Kenan Makiya, whom I have yet to meet, by his last. I guess friendship got in the way of my ethical antennae here. I won’t let it happen again.
Second, Although Benj notes that the excerpt The Nation published from Makiya’s book, Cruelty and Silence, focused on Arab cruelty towards Arab women, including state-sponsored rape, he adds “Navasky doesn’t remark on the continuing relevance of this perspective.” I plead guilty not only of failing to mention the continuing relevance Makiya’s piece but also the continuing relevance of most of the other Nation pieces I referenced in the book. I am grateful to Benj for his suggestion, since a less generous reviewer might point out the book is long enough as it is.
Third, Benj writes that his “bullshit detector” was triggered because after I report Said’s request that we not run Makiya’s piece I move too quickly to my explanation of why we turned down Edward’s [there I go again!] request. Here I am baffled as to what is bothering Benj. It’s clearly not the ethics of a magazine running a review which attacks the magazine for having excerpted the book, since he doesn’t mention that. Surely he is not suggesting that we should have killed the Makiya piece? Enlightenment please.
Fourth, Benj reports that when I explain how Eqbal Ahmad came to review Makiya’s book my narrative is “twisty and windy.” Here I am pleased to concede guilt, especially to such an expert on twisted windy-ness.
Finally, Benj instructs us that our dilemma in the age of terrorism comes down to an update of E.M. Forster’s famous hope that given the choice between betraying a friend or betraying a country he would betray his country. Rather “in the post 9/11 era” Benj helpfully explains, “The choice now is between humanism and barbarism…”
Hey, like Benj, I’m for humanism and against barbarism. Maybe I’m not such a moral reprobate after all. But I still don’t understand why Benj, who is anything but an old-fashioned Red-baiter, feels it necessary to make his point by comparing the new choice to the bad old days “when the magazine was solidarizing with Communist Party people or Viet Nam era draft resisters…” Is he accusing the magazine of once again “solidarizing” with an evil crowd, in this case, terrorists? Explanation por favor.
Happily, Benj hasn’t given up on me. There is, if I read him right, ethical hope for me yet if I will “take the lead here” by signing a petition which he says is making its way on the Internet and which he assures us that neither Edward Said nor Ahmad Eqbal were they alive, would sign. This he tells us is because the petition “explicitly rejects the notion that terrorist violence is a response by Muslims to injustice perpetrated upon them by the west.” All terrorists? Some terrorists? Are the injustices said to be the sole cause or one among many? Is the response alleged to be justified or unjustified? What does this have to do with a section of the book whose main subject is how lawsuits have, alas, intruded on the editorial process? He doesn’t tell us or rather me. So I remain grateful, affable, not a prick but perplexed.
HE AIN’T HEAVY, HE’S MY BROTHER
By Benj DeMott
Victor Navasky’s new streamlined cover version of the Makiya/Said/Ahmad story is blander – and less revealing – than the original narrative in A Matter of Opinion. (Trust the tale not the teller.) But I’m happy to have his forthright acknowledgement that Kanan Makiya’s Cruelty and Silence documented “the failure of the Arab intelligentsia to condemn Saddam Hussein’s brutal massacres and human rights abuses of Arabs and Kurds.” That exact assessment is credited to Christopher Hitchens in A Matter of Opinion. Given that Hitchens no longer writes for The Nation because he believes the magazine is soft on Islamo-fascism, it’s odd to find his words coming out of Navasky’s mouth now. But – what the hey – in this case that’s progress.
When Navasky speaks in his own voice it’s all about tone – the high empty sound of his irony. While Navasky sees himself pissing from a great height on penny-ante pieties, his facetious shtick brings home his own lack of moral clarity: “Is he accusing the magazine of once again ‘solidarizing’ with an evil crowd?” If Navasky has to ask, he hasn’t been reading his own journal. When the murderous misogynist Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi army battled the American military (and terrorized civilians) before and after the handover of sovereignty in Iraq last year, Nation columnist Naomi Klein repeatedly made the case for Sadr. One Klein piece, headlined “Bring Najaf to New York,” urged the American left to take their cues from Sadr’s militia. Thanks to the independent journalist Stephen Vincent, we can find out what that new model army has done for us lately:
Outraged at the sight of [700 young students in Basra] picnicking, listening to music and freely intermingling–worse, many women were not wearing hejab–between 20-40 of Sadr’s blackshirts attacked the fete with guns, sticks and heavy electrical cables, injuring and robbing several, hauling at least 10 away in pick-up trucks. The assault triggered several days of protests by students and their families, who demanded an apology and the disbanding of the school’s morality police. Surprised at the public outcry, Sadr’s office issued an apology–of sorts. “There was a mistake in our execution, but we had the right to intervene,” said Mr. Jabari.
Vincent’s parsing of these events beats the hell out of The Nation’s “nuanced” approach to evil in Iraq:
Oppression thrives in secret; exposure to the light of public scrutiny reveals the true face of illegitimate power and constellates perhaps the most potent and revolutionary reaction to its brutality–revulsion. No doubt many Basrans and Iraqis view Sadr’s actions as necessary, if not admirable. But most, I’ll wager, interpret the sight of masked armed men publicly beating helpless students–helpless female students–as despicable, contemptible, pathetic. The noble and strong do not act this way; the craven and cowardly do. Cravenness, cowardice–these are taboo, psychic stains to be avoided. Despite being armed with guns, truncheons and public sentiment that was hostile to civil rights, the reactionaries lost on the day that Bull Connor unleashed his dogs on peaceful marchers of Birmingham. Moqtada al-Sadr has taken another step into the barren wastes of Connor Country. It will take time, but he, like the Alabama sheriff and his ilk, will shrivel and die as well.
Navasky has not been responsive to efforts to apply lessons of the American Civil Rights Movement to situations in Iraq. (Viet Nam, of course, is the preferred template at The Nation.) But Stephen Vincent is beyond anyone’s ironic dismissal now. He was murdered last month on the streets of Basra after writing an op-ed piece in the New York Times exposing assassinations committed by Sadr-ites and other Shiite extremists who have infiltrated that city’s Police Department. Vincent wrote for a number of American publications including The Christian Science Monitor, The National Review, The Wall Street Journal. He never published in The Nation. His heroic reporting (like Kanan Makiya’s journalism) wouldn’t have fit. He was outside The Nation’s (the enemy is U.S.) consensus.
Navasky is an inside guy but when he tried to encourage Palestinians to explore Gandhian modes of nonviolent resistance, he was 20 years ahead of First of the Month’s outsiders. (See our attempt to catch up at https://www.firstofthemonth.org/archives/2002/06/a_palestinian_g.html) I hope he finds his way to the margins again but I doubt he’ll get Out because he takes it so light. Consider his response when he recalls in A Matter of Opinion how Said stiffed him after promising to make the case for civil disobedience to Palestinians: “So much for my big idea.” It’s just something to laugh off. But (pace Brecht) “he who’s laughing hasn’t yet heard the bad news.”
The need to cultivate non-violent political action in Palestine and Iraq and throughout the Middle East is no joke (especially in a post-9/11 context). But a good tease can push the program. There’s an effective one in the film Divine Intervention (2004) – an absurdist comedy about everyday life in Nazareth and Jerusalem. High-flying female Palestinian ninjas face off against the Israel Defense Forces in a scene that implies revenge fantasies come with occupied territories. But director Elia Suleiman, a Palestinian who describes himself as an “absolute pacifist,” isn’t going for catharsis when his levitating women start catching bullets in their teeth and the IDF goes up in smoke. His bloodless fantasia mocks blood-lust. Though that was lost on one angry white man in an aisle seat at the screening I attended. He solemnly clapped for the ninjas – signifying his support for the glorious armed struggle of the Palestinian people (and wishing a few more of them into their graves). Victor Navasky edited a satirical magazine in his youth and I’m sure he’d get Suleiman’s hard goof. But that fool at the movie was carrying a copy of The Nation when he left the theater. And with friends like him…
From July, 2005