Conrad Black2013-05-23T06:12:14-04:00Conrad Blackhttp://www.quebec.huffingtonpost.ca/author/index.php?author=conrad-blackCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Conrad BlackGood old fashioned elbow grease.Israel's Enemies Are Harming the Palestinians More Than Israeltag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.32814392013-05-15T17:27:58-04:002013-05-15T17:28:51-04:00Conrad Blackhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/conrad-black/
One of the factors well-known to anyone conversant in the least with Middle Eastern affairs, but rarely mentioned in our largely Jew-baiting mainstream Western media, is that the Palestinians are discriminated against in most Arab countries and are despised as a talented and avaricious minority, not unlike the Jews and the Christian Lebanese. As has been the case throughout the life of the State of Israel, the Arab powers use the presence of the Israelis as a pan-Arab provocation and outrage with which to distract the Arab masses from the corrupt and brutal despotisms most of the Arab populations have riveted on their backs. Israel perseveres and prospers and is steadily less vulnerable to its Arab neighbours, and the only inroads the Arab powers are making with their masquerade of concerned solidarity with the Palestinians is in the eyes of the gullible West. In these latest tragic displacements of the Palestinians, there has not been one motion for a United Nations airing of the issue from any of the Arab states who have been known to call for emergency debates on the flimsiest and most fictitious pretexts to pillory Israel for (usually, though not always) imagined abuses. Just as silent have been the civil and human rights organizations, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, and others. It is puzzling to try to imagine when the Western media will begin to recognize that they have been sold a false prospectus by the Arabs and have been as thoroughly distracted by what is, now that Israel is prepared to agree to a Palestinian state, as unfounded a distraction as that sold to the Arab masses about Israel, with no comparable excuse for their willful submission to this profound ignorance.
Also completely unpublicized is the building freeze imposed by the Netanyahu government on Jerusalem beyond the Green Line. In practice, this means that the Arabs are free to build but the Jews are not free to add one apartment. This is, of course, a complicated issue and these freezes are imposed from time to time and may be lifted quickly. Not too much should be read into it; but the point is that Prime Minister Netanyahu has been relentlessly taxed for inflexibility in the West while he has, in fact, incurred the wrath of his more conservative followers for his liberality and conciliatory attitude. As long as the Palestinian leadership is prepared to provide the cannon-fodder for this prolonged divertissement from the political and economic realities of the Arab and some other parts of the Muslim world, the Arab powers may be assumed to continue to promote conflict. The Arabs could have peace in 24 hours if they were prepared to accept the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state, albeit with borders to be determined. The restoration of an even-handed perspective in the West would play the last worthwhile card the Arabs have in their prolonged effort to reverse and defeat Israel. The overwhelming majority of people in the West are not anti-Semitic and the majority believe Israel has a right to exist, but a distressingly large number has been sold a bigoted and false misconception of the correlation of moral force in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Israel is not without fault, and the Palestinians deserve sympathy and support toward statehood, but they will be retarded and not helped by continuing Israelophobic misinformation on a scale that caused the otherwise inexplicable boycott of an annual Jerusalem conference by eminent scientist Stephen Hawking. Israel's enemies are doing more harm to the Palestinians than to Israel.
RELATED ON HUFFPOST:
Captions By The Associated Press ]]>It's Showtime in Syria -- Will Obama Finally Intervene?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.31945772013-05-01T17:29:55-04:002013-05-01T17:30:07-04:00Conrad Blackhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/conrad-black/used Sarin nerve gas on domestic enemies sharply raises the ante in the desperate death struggle of the Assad regime. It is taking on the character of the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939, which was kept going by foreign support for both sides, while the international community conducted a porous embargo, like that imposed by the European Community on the former Yugoslavia. (Once Serbia was armed to the teeth, the embargo was enforced, facilitating Serbian ethnic cleansing as they simply massacred their enemies until U.S. Republican Senate leader Robert Dole passed a "lift and strike" resolution that forced President Clinton's and Europe's hand.) The war on Serbia has gone on for an astonishingly long time. The general rules of thumb are that regimes that don't fire on their own citizens when real unrest starts are doomed, and those that do, and can get their orders carried out, can't use draftees to kill civilians in-country for very long before the armed and police forces suffer wholesale desertions. There has been lots of that in Syria, but the Alawi factional government has poured fire on the civil population for years and killed many thousands of them, and while it has suffered numerous defections there are no signs of its basic ethnic component crumbling altogether. Assad and his fellow Alawi are under no illusions that reprisals would be barbarous and profound if the Alawi lost, and the struggle seems to be becoming more desperate and unconditional as it wears on.
The United States and some other important countries have warned, in language reminiscent of the endless rather feeble warnings against Iran, that chemical weapons were a red line and crossing it would produce severe consequences. As with Iran and North Korea, the follow-through, including all Hillary Clinton's huffing and puffing about "crippling sanctions," has been so much hot air, although the sanctions and the cyber attacks have undoubtedly discommoded the regime in Iran. On this occasion with Syria, even the Russians, who have never really abandoned the Iranians in their right to develop and deploy Nuclear weapons, have rallied. But the question remains, and is posed ever more skeptically, of whether the international community will actually, finally, do anything. The North Korean case is easily distinguishable, as the antics of that country must in large measure be controllable, or at least subject to suffocation or deterrence by China. That country supplies almost all North Korea's strategic needs and it is hard to escape the suspicion that Beijing is manipulating its attack dog and using the loopy Pyongyang despotism of the Kim family, as it did from shortly after the Communist victory in the Chinese civil war, as a goad and flail to irritate, provoke, and generally knock off balance the Japanese and South Koreans, as well as the U.S. Russia has generally gone along with this throughout the history of this malignant tandem.
But worrisome though North Korea is, there is no doubt that completely irresponsible conduct would , as the South Koreans have clearly stated, bring massive reprisals, up to and including the "obliteration" of everyone in North Korea. It is hard to conceive of China and Japan together not having the ability to prevent a complete departure from sanity even by this most peculiar of all regimes in organized countries. The United States has armed South Korea and Japan with heavy defensive anti-missile capabilities and while there may be conventional tests of missile systems capable of delivering nuclear warheads, the local correlation of forces is such that the potential damage North Korea could do is limited to one offensive action that there would be a good chance of knocking out, with a certainty of a withering response.
Iran is of greater concern, as Iran is an ancient and substantial country with a distinct culture and not just a stub-end as North Korea is, an artificial government imposed on a reluctant though now thoroughly cowed and regimented people reflecting the demarcation of occupation zones between the U.S.S.R. and U.S. by junior American officers in 1945 (including future secretary of State Dean Rusk). Iran at least cloaks its ambitions in ancient Persian claims to regional hegemony and swaddles its aggression and belligerent posturing behind religious fervor. It is all made more sinister and violent by regular lapses into polemical aspirations to genocidal anti-Semitism. But Israel is a nuclear power and there can be little doubt that an Iranian attack on Israel would lead to the extreme devastation of that country by Israel, and after provocations that would probably achieve the unprecedented feat of rallying most Islamic and certainly most world opinion to support of the Jewish state. And Iran, despite rigged elections and outbursts of general disorder, is a functioning country governed, however erratically and corruptly, by a somewhat coherent regime.
Syria is now a failed state, where the Saudis on one side and the Iranians on the other, are funnelling in extensive quantities of weapons and munitions, as the Russians, Germans, and Italians did in Spain in that war just before World War II. There is now a serious possibility of nerve gas with full delivery capability being used and/or being transmitted to terrorist organizations which the Assad government has long supplied with conventional weapons. A government in its death-throes facing extermination by tribal and ethnic majorities in a country it has long governed with brutal heavy-handedness is much more likely to have recourse to extreme measures than the regime that seems able to rivet itself durably on the back of the unenthused Iranians, or the deranged North Korean puppet of Beijing. The fact that Assad used the Sarin against a small number of people may indicate panic by local officials, or more likely a considered policy of the gradual introduction of this new escalation.
That is why all eyes are again on Washington, which, under this administration wants nothing more than to pull back towards or within its own borders and put no more boots on barren political ground. It could assure an Assad defeat without committing ground forces and could presumably extract some comfort level from its protégés in the Syrian conflict that, whatever they did after seizing Damascus, chemical weapons would not be on the menu. Latest indications are that the Obama administration is finally seriously considering giving "lethal aid," real weapons, to the rebels, and the President is sending secretary of State John Kerry to Moscow to try to organize a common front with Putin. It is a complicated and dangerous impasse, but the greatest danger may now be in doing nothing. This American government has endlessly repeated that everything is on the table in every crisis area, but since very little has actually been done, there is grave question about its will to do anything. This is show-time; the world is watching and many habitual trouble-makers, including perhaps even the mischievous and treacherous gangster thugdom of Putin's Russia, are more amenable than they have been to support an effective intervention by the United States. If not now, when?
ALSO ON HUFFPOST ]]>Bringing Justice Back to the Land of the Freetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.31022402013-04-17T13:53:08-04:002013-04-17T17:10:01-04:00Conrad Blackhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/conrad-black/recent column expressing pleasure at the vindication of the Central Park Five. And it is a welcome event that such eminent film-producers as Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon have made a compelling documentary about the incident. On April 19, 1989, a 28-year-old white woman who worked for one of the major merchant banks in the financial district of New York. but lived in mid-town, went jogging just after sunset and was "wilded" -- in this case, attacked by a group of five young allegedly African-American individuals who raped her, beat her with lead or steel pipes, and gave her up for dead.
After a lengthy struggle with all the breakages and trauma of this terrible assault, she made a complete recovery and courageously wrote a book about her experience. She had to give very personal testimony about her sexual relations with her male companion at that time (though she was jogging alone), and was reviled as she came to be labeled by that upstanding man of God Al Sharpton and some of his followers as a "whore," as if jogging in one of the world's most famous public parks was a provocative enticement to rape and attempted murder.
It has since come to light that the five young men convicted were innocent -- that they were foxed by intensive interrogation into confessing to the crime, because their responses to interrogation were different in some respects from each other's, and the police convinced their families or them personally that they would be convicted and very severely sentenced if they did not plead guilty.
George Will quite rightly laments that better public defenders are not provided for relatively legally inexperienced people who do not have the means to arrange and pay (the normally rapaciously high legal bills of) serious defense counsel. Of course, none of this reduces in the least the gravity of the horrible crime the young woman suffered. She didn't prosecute the innocent defendants, the local prosecutors did, under heavy pressure to find and convict the authors of the heinous crime which was widely proclaimed at the time to be indicative of the general moral and social decay of New York.
The producers and George Will are absolutely correct that it was a terrible railroading of innocent people, and in Will's column they are poignantly quoted on the impact on their lives of having been wrongfully imprisoned. But there are a staggering 48 million Americans with some sort of criminal record, and at least 10 million of them were innocent and 20 million more grossly over-sentenced.
True and graphic and useful though this documentary is, all this somewhat misses the point. In the United States, prosecutors win 99.5 per cent of their cases, and of those, 97 per cent are without trials. As with the Central Park Five, police and prosecutors exploit the fact that they are almost certain to win, regardless of the facts, and in the American system, those who exercise their constitutional right to a day in court pay for it with four times as stiff a sentence when convicted.
In Great Britain, prosecutors win a little more than 50 per cent of their cases, and in Canada rather more than 60 per cent, and in both countries, sentences are on average, for most offenses, less than half what they are in the United States.
I'm afraid it will not do for George Will merely to express the hope for better public defenders. In fact they are often stooges of the prosecutors. They are paid for the number of people they claim to represent, not because of the quality of service they provide. They few no resources and their career interest is best served in not irritating the omnipotent prosecutors. They are only provided at all because the Clarence Gideon case caused the U.S. Supreme Court to declare that everyone was entitled to counsel in a criminal prosecution.
What has resulted is a pro forma regime of the rule of law. But in fact, many judges are ex-prosecutors, and hardly anyone really has a chance. It is a myth that the rich do much better than the people of modest means. The prosecutors claim their wealth is ill-gotten gains and freeze it, pending the criminal case, so they have trouble mounting a defense.
The convictions of centimillionaires Alfred Taubman and Martha Stewart were just as much a mockery as the lynching of the Central Park Five. The public defenders should be completely independent and properly funded and should be serious lawyers. There should not be any penalty for electing to try a case rather than plead it out. The infamous plea bargain, in which inculpatory perjury is routinely traded for immunity or a reduced sentence, should be banned and penalized by disbarment.
Evidentiary and procedural treatment should be equal for both sides, and the defense should speak last to the jury as it does in every civilized country in the world except the U.S. Media pre-trial lynchings by the likes of Nancy Grace should be banned and prosecuted, and jurors should be properly instructed and entitled to consult the transcript. The majority of judges should not be ex-prosecutors.
There should be a fast track for getting rid of catchment laws that are impossible to defend, the prosecutors should not be allowed to bring an excessive number of counts on the same facts, as is their practice, and where most counts are acquittals, all surviving counts should be retried. Prosecutors,while they have to be able to do their jobs, should not have an absolute immunity, as the Supreme Court gave them in the infamous Thompson case two years ago when it threw out a $14-million award to an appellant who served 14 years on death row while prosecutors willfully withheld exculpatory DNA evidence.
Nothing less than this will rescue the U.S. criminal justice system from the disgraceful stacked deck that now gives that country six to twelve times as many incarcerated people per capita as Australia, Canada, France, German, Japan, and the United Kingdom. This documentary and George Will's column are a welcome start, but that's all they are, in what will be an uphill struggle to turn the land of the free back into the society of laws James Madison and the other authors of the now inoperative Bill of Rights intended.
U.S. Supreme Court Justices ]]>Why Romney Lost and Jeb Bush Could Wintag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.30078602013-04-04T08:10:34-04:002013-04-04T08:05:40-04:00Conrad Blackhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/conrad-black/
President Obama, for obvious reasons, was pretty well assured of the African-American vote. Because the Republican nominee obligingly proposed a rather unaccommodating stance opposite the under-documented immigrants, he lost almost the entire Hispanic vote to the Democrats, apart from the hard core of anti-Castro militants in Florida, without attracting any appreciable number of people who were not going to vote Republican anyway. The inept and fearful Republican response to the regime's effort to exploit the gap between the official position on contraception of the Roman Catholic Church, and the position in practice of that Church, enabled the Democrats to reap a large harvest of support from independent voters among women and young people of both sexes who bought some of the official insinuation that Romney and his party were anti-woman, anti-contraception, and anti-abortion, and that the Republican Party was infested with bigots and fuddy-duddies.
Romney managed to flounder into this fiasco without mobilizing any appreciable number of Roman Catholic or other traditionalists who were not already committed to vote for him. This is in part the consequence of nominating a candidate who had faced in all four directions on most of the issues that were allowed to dominate the debate. He had nibbled all the way around the edges on abortion, health care, same-sex marriage, and other issues that should not be among the principal criteria for choosing a president, as well as taxes, and allowed Obama to get away with an appalling economic and foreign policy performance. The African-Americans, Hispanics (who comprise almost 40 per cent of the country's Roman Catholics), moderate feminists and their sympathizers, and gays must have accorded Mr. Obama a heavy majority, probably over 80 per cent, which, with the habitual Democratic majority among the general category of average Americans undistinguishable by sect, ethnicity, region, or lifestyle, reelected a regime that did not deserve to be returned. The Republicans kept the torso of middle and upper income America, but lost all their limbs.
Not all of this can be laid at the door of Mitt Romney. Each new candidate who entered the Republican race, no matter how improbable, surged to the top of the polls of a party that had serious reservations about its front-runner. Michelle Bachmann (completely unqualified), Rick Perry (who, "Oops," jogged with a hand-gun in his belt), Herman Cain (likeable but never elected, simplistic and a serial cad), Newt Gingrich (brilliant but, as Peggy Noonan wrote, "a human hand grenade who walks around with his hand on the pin, saying, 'Watch this!'"), Rick Santorum (thoughtful but very traditional and with too narrow an appeal for the majority), all shot upwards and burst and fell like fireworks on the Fourth of July when primary voters got a serious look at them.
The Republicans didn't really want to win, as was made clear by the fact that their strongest candidates didn't make the race. If the candidates who could win don't run, their party will lose. Mitch Daniels apparently couldn't persuade his family to agree to a run. Chris Christie did not answer the call even when it came from Nancy Reagan and Henry Kissinger. Jeb Bush would not hear of it, Marco Rubio felt he was too inexperienced, and Paul Ryan, who is young and from congressman to president is a long leap that only one president has made (James A. Garfield), at least made the race as vice president. Jeb Bush presumably felt that the country was not ready for another Bush, meaning that he, as the next Bush, would not make it so he shouldn't try. All of them may have had good excuses not to run, but they were the strongest candidates and as I said, when the strongest candidates won't run, the party loses. In the terrible year of 1968, with 550,000 draftees in Vietnam, 200 to 400 coming back in body bags every week in a war that had not been explained and was not apparently being won, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and riots, over race and war, all over the country all year; Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Robert Kennedy, Nelson Rockefeller, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan all, at one point, ran for president.
Of these people who did not try in 2012, the chance will not come again for some. Mitch Daniels and Chris Christie are unlikely to repeat as possible front-runners. Christie's large and vocal persona is fine for New Jersey, but he is a deficit-cutter, a talent that is likely to continue to be useful, but he is also an ex-prosecutor, a very dubious occupation in a very corrupt state, and there is no sign that he knows much about federal issues or has much applied himself to some state issues such as health care and education. It isn't clear that Mitch Daniels, a diminutive man, wishes to remain in politics, rather than returning to a Republican cabinet, where he was under George W. Bush as a successful budget director. Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan will be available, but Ryan will still, likely, be a congressman, albeit a respected and influential one. Rubio is a possibility but he will have to be less slick and facile and more substantial -- still, this may well be feasible.
The likeliest at this point is Jeb Bush. The animosity to his brother will fade and the sense of tedium at another Bush will pass. And Jeb Bush has much more of what his father called "the vision thing" than the two presidents in his family already, and is much less malapropistic than they. In a recent address to the Conservative Political Action Conference, excerpted in The Wall Street Journal, Jeb Bush made the points a victorious leader of his party will have to make. He debunked the American declinists but decried profligate public spending and failing public education, and spoke from the experience of two terms as governor of the country's fifth state in population (Florida). Jeb Bush believes that the U.S. can resume its rise as a prosperous and civil nation if immigration is handled intelligently (his wife is Hispanic), and that it will be able to master the aging problem.
His program is to create a climate that admires success rather than reviling the proverbial one percent that are successful; an education system benchmarked to the best in the world and not just other failing domestic systems; a path to legitimacy for immigrants but one that does not leapfrog those who have followed the rules; and a re-emphasis of private sector solutions. He cautioned Republicans against alienating large groups of the population, both in principle, and on the mistaken tactical supposition that divisiveness brings in more votes than it alienates.
Jeb Bush sounds like a president, and if he didn't have some interest in the position, it is unlikely that he would take the trouble to sound like he does. The office is not, as far as can be discerned, seeking the man (or woman). But it does appear to be seeking someone who can do the job. The Obama interlude was an interruption after seven consecutive elections in which a Bush or Clinton or each, was nominated to national office. On April 24, the day before the opening of the George W. Bush presidential center at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton will debate. It should be the first of many, building to the 2016 election.
]]>Anti-Semites in the House (of Lords)tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.29104532013-03-20T12:24:55-04:002013-05-20T05:12:02-04:00Conrad Blackhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/conrad-black/born in Kashmir but raised in London and was a fishmonger before becoming a successful developer. He was also a Labour Party local official, town councillor, justice of the peace, and leader of a local Muslim community (which were almost all virtually Labour Party campaign organizations because of the perceived pro-Israeli stance of the Conservatives). He was rewarded for shepherding Muslim votes to Labour with nomination to Their Lordships' House at the age of 40.
Lord Ahmed's initial self-outing as an irrational Jew-baiter came with his book-launch party in 2005 for a notorious anti-Semite. This was followed in 2007 by his opposition to a knighthood for Salman Rushdie, whom Ahmed accused of having "blood on his hands." (Many will recall that Rushdie was the subject of a fatwa-death warrant-by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in 1989, over his book Satanic Verses. The fatwa has not been carried out, and the knighthood was accorded.)
In 2009, the Daily Mail's Melanie Phillips reported that Ahmed threatened to produce a mob of 10,000 demonstrators to prevent the screening in the House of Lords of a film critical of Islam by Geert Wilders. (Ahmed later denied making this threat, though he was vocal in his support of banning Wilders.) In the same year, Ahmed signed a public letter praising Turkish prime minister Erdogan for walking out in the middle of a debate with Israeli president Shimon Peres at the annual world's fair of talking shops, Davos; and he further raised eye-brows with wild and unfounded allegations that Israeli students in Britain were recruiting for the Israeli Defence Forces.
His provocations continued and escalated to his suspension from the Labour Party in 2012 because he was alleged to have placed a "bounty" of ten million pounds on Barack Obama and George W. Bush, whom he wished conveyed to the International Court of Justice in The Hague to answer charges of war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was later discovered that Ahmed was misquoted and had -- rather than placing a "bounty" on the two leaders -- actually pledged to raise and offer 10 million pounds to get Tony Blair and George W. Bush to the Hague on war crimes charges. Ahmed was also criticized for allegedly claiming publicly that India and Israel were jointly conspiring in the mass murder of innocent Muslims in Kashmir and Palestine. He was not just slagging off the Jews, but also Britain's considerable East Indian community.
Even more surprising was news last week of Ahmed's suspension by the Labour Party from its peers' caucus because he had allegedly declared in Urdu in a Pakistani television interview that his conviction in 2009 and prison sentence (of which he served only 16 days of a three-month sentence), for dangerous driving, was the result of a conspiracy of Jewish media owners to influence the courts against him because of his support for Palestinians in their dispute with Israel. He also allegedly aspersed the judge who sentenced him on the grounds that the judge was notoriously friendly with a Jewish friend of the then prime minister, (the much-wronged Tony Blair again). The incident in question occurred on Christmas Day, 2007, when Ahmed drove his luxury sedan at high speed into a legally parked car while he was texting messages, killing the passenger in the other vehicle, a young man who had recently emigrated to Britain from Slovakia. The fact that he pleaded guilty to the charge makes his subsequent complaint that he had been railroaded by a Jewish-influenced judge especially implausible.
Ahmed himself is not a figure of serious account and the House of Lords is generally adorned by eccentrics, though this sort of racist, and even genocidal, vitriol is tasteless, to say the least. There are others in both houses of the British Parliament who regularly repeat the malignant canard that there is any comparison to be made between the Nazi extermination campaign against Jews and others and Israel's conduct toward Arabs in Israel or contested areas occupied by or adjoining Israel. The most egregious case is the unspeakable George Galloway, a Saddam Hussein apologist, who refuses to speak to any citizen of Israel, and was expelled from the Labour Party but was able to achieve re-election in a heavily Muslim constituency. The point is not that these extremists exist and that anti-Semitism persists -- we shall always have them with us -- but that civilized political parties tolerate these people in the Mother of Parliaments which has probably done more than any other institution in the world to propagate and exemplify freedom.
Anti-Semites have a right to speak, certainly, but not to convey the impression that they are representative of a major democratic political party in one of the world's most distinguished countries. It is hard to imagine that George Galloway, who was not really more inflammatory than Lord Ahmed, would have been given the order of the boot from the Labour Party by Tony Blair if he had been a Muslim immigrant. The Ahmed case doesn't mainly illustrate the cancer of racism in its most widespread and hackneyed variety; it represents the extent to which Muslims are a voting bloc that is starting to shift the great political parties of the United Kingdom off their moorings. As ludicrous and even comical though the Ahmed saga is, it is no less disconcerting; Westminster has scarcely been so accommodating of the mortal enemies of Jewry since the unlamented days of Edward I (1272-1307), who expelled the Jews from England in 1290. They were not invited back until Oliver Cromwell did so in 1657, in the hope that their commercial aptitudes would help to reconstruct the country after the Civil War. No such degeneration is afoot, but Britain must reassert its respect for human rights and for the social underdog, as in olden times, and cease to placate these hate-mongers. Europe and the world are watching.]]>How Prison Shaped My View of Flanagan and Child Porntag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.28372912013-03-08T12:20:51-05:002013-05-08T05:12:01-04:00Conrad Blackhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/conrad-black/
I have met the University of Calgary academic twice, and find him to be a decent and civilized man. Last week, during Q & A at the University of Lethbridge, he spoke flippantly on a terribly serious subject, child pornography, and deeply offended legitimate sensibilities. It was a bad mistake and he has apologized for it.
In the circumstances, his apology should be accepted, and he should not have been dismissed by the CBC, the Globe and Mail or from any other affiliations. Sincere apologies for mistakes that are not illegalities or revelations of fundamental failings of character should not bring such heavy retribution as was inflicted on Tom Flanagan. This society's concern about pedophilia should not be taken to such extent that insensitive -- but not discreditably intended -- remarks become an instant race to stone verbal offenders to death before they can utter their abject recantations.
When I was in U.S. federal prisons, I met many men who had been severely sentenced for downloading child pornography. Most of what little violence there was in those low-security prisons was directed against these people, for no reason other than outrage at the nature of their alleged offenses. None of the people whom I met had actually molested or even approached a child; none had created child pornography, profited from it, or distributed it. I am well familiar with the practice of convicted people to whitewash their records, especially where they are at some physical danger, as those of us who were sent to prison could be if careless, unlucky, or stigmatized by the nature of the conviction. But in the case of those I refer to, I had all of their records checked (all criminal convictions in the United States are publicly accessible); and their offences were as I have described.
BLOG CONTINUES AFTER SLIDESHOW
Having objected to the habit of over-reactive disassociation with anything or anyone to do with this kind of misconduct, I will not labour my own extreme distaste and concern for the subject. Lawyers, psychiatrists and qualified behaviourists whom I know and respect, have all told me that some examples of child pornography are so disgusting that even the most worldly and experienced professionals are profoundly shaken and repulsed by them.
I am sure that that is true. But inflicting heavy prison sentences on the sort of people I met in prison who were convicted of downloading this material in their homes -- who are no threat to anyone, but like watching this sort of thing, and don't pay for it or share it -- is wrong and part of the problem, not a step toward a solution.
Without exception, in all other aspects of their personalities that I encountered (and prisoners live at close quarters with each other), these were perfectly sociable men. They were often quite cultured; one was a chef, one a French teacher, one an art teacher. They were interesting conversationalists and their conduct as prisoners gave no hint of aggression or deviance.
I am afraid that this is a problem that surfaced in our Western societies relatively suddenly, having long been repressed, and has roused a level of hysteria that is understandable. And given the concern most of us rightly have for the welfare of children, this attitude is useful up to a point. But it is not an answer in itself, and it is not the sort of initial response conducive to finding the best possible way to address the problem.
Society does not need protection from the type of people I am writing about here. They are no more likely to inflict themselves on children or anyone else than the rest of us are. And sending them to prison for long periods where they are ostracized and largely forced to associate with each other, and where they are apt to be beaten up at any time as unlucky props in the sociopathic frustrations and belligerency of other prisoners, dressing up their aggressivity as righteousness on behalf of the defenseless, will make things worse. It is unjust to everyone.
From what I have seen of the response to the Flanagan affair, his critics have made practically no distinction between those who derive pleasure from looking at child pornography privately and passively, and those who sexually assault children. Yet few legal and moral distinctions are clearer and more honoured by time and practice than those between private contemplation of deranged or even psychotic activities, and the perpetration of them.
I was not present at Tom Flanagan's session with the First Nations people in which the child pornography matter was suddenly raised at the University of Lethbridge event last week. But I have not seen that his own account of the occasion (published in [the National Post] pages on Monday) has been contradicted by those who were there. And he seems certainly to have been on the better side of the question: He was just making that important distinction, albeit in negligently cavalier and provocative terms, as professors often do.
Then there is the civil rights aspect. It appears to be acceptable to society to have the police enter people's homes without notice and seize their computers and examine what they have been viewing and reading, and then to prosecute and imprison them for long periods in very hostile conditions, because of the nauseating and deranged nature of what they have been downloading for their own use -- even though their imprisonment could not fail to aggravate whatever drove them to such objectively disgusting susceptibilities in the first place.
I believe that this is not acceptable, in either civil rights or correctional terms. On balance, people should be able to read and view what they want in privacy, as long as they are not profiting from or distributing such intolerable material. I agree that this sort of predilection is so abominable that society is justified in having those addicted to it discreetly identified, subjected to special scrutiny, and compelled to report for treatment and counselling. But the people I met who were convicted on these charges were not hopeless cases of psychiatric wreckage; were, I repeat, no danger to anyone, and throwing them into prison and ostracizing them in society while they are beaten up at the pleasure of other prisoners often no less legally tainted than themselves, is not the response of a civilized society to a problem that requires a proper fusion of enforcement, compassion, and common sense.
It is particularly not an appropriate response given the unlimited availability of such material over the Internet, and the impossibility of prosecuting at the source. We are flogging the junkie, without recourse to the dealer, and then flogging insufficiently febrile commentators as well.
The scourge of child pornography is a terrible problem made more odious and unnerving by its revolting and perverted nature, and by the vulnerability of its victims. But the correct response is not to treat it like people in medieval times screaming "unclean" -- not only at those suspected of being lepers, but also, as in the Flanagan scenario, at those who even refer in an inappropriately relaxed way to non-contagious instances of leprosy. As a society, and for the sake of the victims especially, in reducing receptivity to child pornography and therefore the availability of it, we are going to have to do better than this.
]]>Richard Nixon Left America a Better Place Than He Found Ittag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.28211832013-03-07T08:21:10-05:002013-05-07T05:12:01-04:00Conrad Blackhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/conrad-black/birthday greetings of my friend Taki Theodoracopulos in The Spectator. Taki described him (Mr. Nixon's one hundredth birthday was on January 9) as the greatest president since Washington and Jefferson. He was not, in fact, as great a president as Lincoln or Franklin D. Roosevelt, or probably his fellow-Californian, Ronald Reagan. But he was surely a greater president that Jefferson, who sent Lewis and Clark west, picked up the Louisiana Purchase when Napoleon dropped it into his lap, and imposed suicidal trade restrictions on Britain over that country's outrages on the high seas, provocations Britain would not have dared commit had Jefferson not disbanded the army Washington and Adams maintained as a threat against Canada in the event of British high-handedness. Jefferson dismissed the takeover of Canada as "a mere matter of marching," but demobilized those who would make the march, and when his chosen successor, Madison, attempted the march, the British and Canadians gave him a well-deserved thrashing and burned down Washington (despite a distinguished American naval performance and Andrew Jackson's victory at New Orleans after the War of 1812 had actually ended).
Taki also takes liberties in claiming Nixon was the dominant political figure in America in the forties and fifties, and had the greatest landslide in history. Roosevelt and Eisenhower were the giants of those earlier decades and Roosevelt and Johnson, and by some measure Reagan, had slightly greater victories in 1936, 1964, and 1984. But Taki is absolutely right to contrast Hillary Clinton's clueless in Gaza approach to the Middle East to the genius of Nixon and Kissinger; and to make the point that Nixon was an advocate of civil rights in the fifties when the Kennedys and Lyndon Johnson still thought of African-Americans as railway porters and shoe-shine boys; and that Nixon never accepted a fee for a speech (nor did Truman, Eisenhower, or Johnson), while Clinton and Blair and the Bushes have enriched themselves in consideration of their former offices in, to say the least, unseemly ways. And he is right to quote Nick Carraway's last words to Jay Gatsby, that he was better than all those who had reviled him combined. These two salient facts, Nixon's merits as president and the worthless and self-serving hypocrisy of most of his adversaries, are creating an inexorably wider recognition of Nixon's historic standing.
All one need do is contemplate the condition of the United States when Nixon entered and departed the presidential office: In 1969 there were 550,000 draftees in Vietnam with no official clue of what they were doing there, and 200 to 400 returning each week to America in body bags. In 1966, when Lyndon Johnson had offered Ho Chi Minh the phased departure from South Vietnam of all foreign troops, all Ho needed to do was accept the offer, and return in overwhelming strength six months after the Americans had gone; he would not even do that because of his confidence that he could defeat the United States, with the encouragement of China and the U.S.S.R. Nixon withdrew entirely, obtained a peace agreement, and trained the South Vietnamese to the point that they won the ground war in 1972 without assistance, other than from the air, from the U.S. He preserved a non-communist government in Saigon and abolished the draft. Where in 1969 there were no relations with China or the major Arab powers, and no substantive discussions in progress with the USSR, Nixon opened relations with China, with immense positive consequences for that country and the world, started a peace process in the Middle East (that his recent successors have largely failed to continue), and signed with the Soviet Union the greatest arms control agreement in history. Nixon stopped the rioting, stopped inflation, the assassinations stopped, and he founded the Environmental Protection Agency. It is a record of achievement that puts him very close to the nation's greatest presidents. It easily bears comparison with Theodore Roosevelt's building of the Panama Canal, attack on J.P. Morgan's financial empire, and promotion of conservation, or with Harry Truman's Marshall Plan and NATO and defense of Korea, and surpasses the considerable presidential accomplishments of Jackson, Wilson, or Eisenhower.
And Nixon's critics appear ever more contemptible. The approved biography of Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee acknowledges that Bradlee did not believe what Woodward and Bernstein were reporting about Watergate (which did not prevent him from collecting his Pulitzer Prize for it), and Woodward has committed savage violence to his post-Watergate credibility, not least by publishing details of a conversation with former CIA director William Casey that a former CIA security officer insists was "fabricated," in which Casey conveniently confessed his guilt in the Iran-Contra affair. (Many others have also questioned whether the alleged conversation with Casey occurred as reported by Woodward, including Casey's widow.) The advisors Johnson inherited from Kennedy pushed him into Vietnam, and then ran out the back door into the tall grass and destroyed the leader they themselves had misled. Then they crucified Nixon for saving their war, and demanded, received, and for 40 years have basked in, the self-generated praise for destroying a distinguished president and snatching defeat from the mouth of victory in a war in which 57,000 Americans died. It is now clear that the counts of impeachment approved by the House Judiciary Committee in the frenzied summer of 1974 were false. While Nixon bungled the investigation and needlessly squandered his political capital, the only count with the remotest possibility of being accurate is that he approved advancing money to Howard Hunt to encourage altered testimony. And it would be very difficult to prove that in a fair trial in a serious court, or that such a process could then have been found. His accusers are liars, mountebanks, and bloodless assassins, and the country has paid a terrible price in the discrediting of government and the media, and, except for the Indian summer of Reagan, in mediocre or poor, and recently dysfunctional government ever since.
I've written this before, but I am grateful to Taki for a timely reminder to observe the centenary of a great American with some recollections that bear repetition. While I am at it (defending presidents of whom I have written thick biographies), I would like to debunk the theory that has arisen again that Franklin D. Roosevelt was derelict in assisting the Jews in the thirties and in the war. Roosevelt intensely disapproved of anti-Semitism, and required that the anti-Semitic laws of French North Africa be repealed after the American occupation of Algeria and Morocco in 1942. He admitted about 100,000 Jews, more than 15 per cent of the 1933 Jewish population of Germany, to the U.S., including 15,000 Germans and Austrians in 1938 after the Anschluss, when the Reich government invalidated Austrian passports. Among those who benefited were Albert Einstein, Walter Gropius, Leon Feuchtwanger, Berthold Brecht, Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weil, George Grosz, Thomas Mann, Herman Hesse, and Franz Werfel. He pulled the U.S. ambassador from Berlin after Kristallnacht and famously denounced racial and religious prejudice when the French and British and Canadian leaders were ignoring the issue. Even the horrible St. Louis (the liner packed with refugees) episode would have been much different if the Joint Distribution Committee in New York, which supervised the relocation of Jews, had not refused to pay the normal bribe to the government of Cuba for accepting 930 fleeing Jews. Roosevelt has largely seen off the unfounded accusations that he gave Eastern Europe to Stalin, and is rising above the canard that he failed to address the Depression, and he will prevail against the claim of insufficient concern about the pogroms of the Third Reich. In none of these areas was his record perfect, but as with Nixon, when the country's and the world's condition are examined before and after his presidency, the comparison is as between night and day.
]]>Want Peace in the Middle East? Stop Piling Blood Libels on Israeltag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.27258662013-02-21T08:29:07-05:002013-04-23T05:12:01-04:00Conrad Blackhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/conrad-black/
If they were not such whitewashes, they would be reminiscent of the 1960s "self-criticism" sessions on American campuses, when the professorial sympathizers with the unruly students who shut down and even burned down campuses, submitted and admitted their failings, like the victims of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in their dunce-caps. Syria, and similar lawless states, made no confession and was congratulated for going through this unspeakable charade, whose chief function is the harassment and defamation of countries that do pay attention to human rights, Israel in particular. Beseeched by the United States to undergo this burlesque, Israel was scheduled to appear on January 29 of this year. Israel commendably declined to appear and dignify this outrage. Forty per cent of all United Nations resolutions are condemnations of Israel. There is a standard pro forma resolution demanding the "return" to the "Zionist entity" (created by the United Nations itself -- not just recognized by it -- as a Jewish state in 1948), of five million alleged displaced Palestinians. The number is unverifiable, and once in hand it would undoubtedly swell to seven or ten million, whatever was necessary to assure the expulsion or subjugation of the Jews in what the United Nations, with the unanimous concurrence of the permanent Security Council members created as a homeland of the Jews, just three years after the liberation of the death camps in which half the world's Jewish population, six million souls (and an equal number of non-Jews) had been liquidated.
The human rights activities of the United Nations are designed and intended to support and uphold the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, largely written by Eleanor Roosevelt, in which activity, as the (Australian) session chairman said at the time, she achieved the remarkable feat of "adding lustre to the great name that is hers by right of birth and of marriage." (She was Theodore Roosevelt's niece and god-daughter as well as Franklin D. Roosevelt's wife.) The Universal Declaration, inter alia, requires equal respect for all nations, great and small. There will be no peace in the Middle East until the region accepts the fact of the founding of Israel as a Jewish state, as the United Nations explicitly created it. And there will be no movement from the game of piling blood libels on Israel and the Jews by the majority of the world's failed countries until the world's successful countries cease to be pawns in this shameful and hypocritical ostracization, and they end the effort, begun by the British in the Balfour Declaration in 1917, of selling the same real estate to two different parties. There was never any solution except to divide the twice-promised territory in two. The Great Powers, through the United Nations, created the Jewish State; Israel has been the success story of the region. For the United Nations and its leading members to have any moral credibility, this contemptible farce must end; Israel must be affirmed, and the Palestinians must have a viable state of their own and the right to return to it. The West must learn from the Canadians and the Czechs and retrieve its courage. And the Iranians, North Koreans, Zimbabwe, and other outlaw states must be denied their over-used ability to distract the world with this red herring of racist malice.
]]>Why Argentina Is Accusing the U.S. of "Legal Colonialism"tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.25336192013-01-23T12:19:03-05:002013-04-20T22:46:33-04:00Conrad Blackhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/conrad-black/
In this case, Argentina has been pursued through the commercial courts in New York for over a decade by the vulture funds which bought its effectively defaulted debt and rejected what they considered insufficient offers of replacement bonds, better secured but at discounted face values, in 2005 and 2010. The Argentinian approach to the country's financial embarrassment was the traditional one, but the vulture funds, being, as their generic name and vocation imply, tough and uncharitable bargainers, didn't entirely buy into the arrangement. About 90 per cent of them accepted the hair-shirted Argentinian offer -- 33 cents on the dollar, but the remaining ten per cent litigated for the full face value of the bonds with accrued interest. It was a bold, not to say greedy, step, and the ensuing ten years of litigation has incurred the usual demonstration of the demiurgic talent of the American legal profession at running up legal invoices into man-made mountains.
The ringleader of the rebel funds was Elliott Management, which had already successfully pursued the governments of Peru and Congo-Brazzaville down the same route. In 2005, to strengthen the hand of its treasury, the Argentinian Congress passed what became known as the Lock Law, which closed the bond exchange and statutorily prohibited the government of Argentina from making any follow-up offer or accommodation to non-accepting bond-holders after the offer at 33 per cent had expired. This was a vintage, take-it-or-leave-it ultimatum: the official offer was the last and only train leaving the station. The train left and the litigation began, albeit in a foreign jurisdiction, whose authority Argentina disputed, but where it contested the case anyway.
Since 2005, Argentina has faithfully met the terms of the replacement bonds issued to the 90 per cent of holders that accepted its offer, but has refused to pay one centavo to the refractory litigants, even though the bond exchange was reopened briefly and the Lock Law lifted slightly in 2010 to restructure more of the defaulted debt in a similar manner. Where the plot has become complicated is that the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York has recently upheld a federal district court ruling barring Argentina from giving priority to bondholders who participated in the 2005 and 2010 debt exchanges.
This was an unforeseen development and cannot be ignored with the usual (rather refreshing) official Argentinian contempt for U.S. courts, as it lands on American recipients. The judgment is based on the standard pari passu clause in such arrangements, which are often asserted in bond issues at the insistence of buying groups, to ensure that the issuer does not favor some bondholders over others in capricious preferments. It has not been applied in this way before in the United States, and many financial commentators have actually agreed with Argentina that the general imposition of such a finding could make the field of discounted sovereign debt exchanges and redemptions even more chaotic than it already is and cannot fail to be, by its nature.
The judicial findings effectively required that the rejectionist holders of the defaulted bonds receive the same treatment as those who accepted the Argentinian treasury's offer, even though they had rejected the offer. This would not, in itself, inconvenience Argentina, as it was hoping for complete acceptance of its offer and only resorted to the draconian Lock Law to try to bludgeon resisters into line. But it would not end the claims of the resisters, who, if they succeeded, and if Argentina agreed to honor such a U.S. court finding, would then find themselves facing a massive claim from the cooperating bondholders demanding, under the same pari passu rule, a full payout on a huge quantity of debt Argentina thought it had successfully discounted by 67 per cent eight years ago.
Any such turn of events would induce holders never to settle for any significant discount, and in many cases to reopen the immense quantum of discounted bonds now being regularly amortized at agreed discounts. Under the New York court rulings, Argentina will be declared by the American judicial system to be in default again if it does not pay the dissentient ten per cent as it is paying the 90 per cent that accepted the discount offer in 2005. If this ruling is upheld by a further hearing next month, Argentina will have either to comply and lift the Lock Law to pay all the holders equally even though those additional holders it will be paying have not accepted the proposal, or be declared generally in default for American judicial purposes.
The most interesting prospect opened up by this controversy is the possibility that Argentina, as is the practice of its current president, tells the Americans to stuff their rulings and attempts to engage financial markets in Europe and the Far East. The Argentinian position is not particularly unreasonable in this case and vulture funds are not the most natural beneficiaries of judicial compassion. The notorious and tenebrous complexities of the American legal system could here contribute another blow to the status of the U.S. financial markets, adding to the tactical and ethical debacle of 2008 and the fiscal incontinence of the country. The Argentine economy minister has accused the Americans of "legal colonialism," and, for once, that thoroughly disreputable government has a point, and this is far from the only offense the masters of the American economy have committed.
Thanks to Kurt Rive of Byron Capital in Toronto for his research on Argentinian debt.
]]>Why Language Laws Don't Worktag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.24394862013-01-09T12:02:21-05:002013-03-11T05:12:01-04:00Conrad Blackhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/conrad-black/
German is the primary language of more Europeans than any other tongue, over 90 million, against nearly 70 million for English and French. But English is the second language spoken fluently of a much greater number of Europeans than any other language. The British agreed to certain modifications of official spelling, to make it easier for Europeans, to be phased in over five years. The result will be known as Euro-English, and the United Kingdom is not bound to alter the instruction of English in U.K. schools to conform to it.
The results promise to be interesting. In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c," which will not only make the sivil servants happy, but will surely be taken up with selerity by many when the new plan commenses. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of "k," which will klear up konfusion, as the letter "c" kan then be skrapped kompletely. The public will become more akkustomed to these korrections, which will be a sinch to introduse by the sekond year, when "ph" will be replased with "f." This will kut words like fotograf by 20 per sent. By the third year, Publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expected to sede easily to more komplikated and exsitingly kreative changes. Europeans will be enkouraged to sease to use double letters, which have always ben a deterent to akurasy. Most wil aksept that the silent "e" is a teribl mes, a disgraseful oddity that should be skraped.
It is anticipated that by the fourth year, the profetic reform wil be sufisiently advanced to apeas the Germans by replasing "th" with "z": and "w" with "v." Akordingly, in ze fifz year, ze unesesary "o" kan be kut from vords containing "ou" and at ze end of zis fifz year, ve wil hav a sensibl vriten styl. Zere vil be no trobl viz ze ofisial Uro-speak for zos zat speak the languags of Servantes, Kamus and Rasine, Goz and Hin, (zey ver Goethe and Heine), and Makhiaveli, ets. Ze dream of a kultur of Urop vil kum tru; after ze fifz year, ze Uropeans vil al be speaking German as zat grat ras vanted.
Not to be outdone by this surging linguistic progress in Europe, Quebec, ever at the cutting edge of cultural matters, can provide an authoritative table of translation between English, French, and Quebecois. Thus "Check that" ("Regardé " in French), is "Garsa." "What's new " ("Quoi de neuf?"), is "Pis?" "Look at her and Look at him" ("Regardé -la y" and "Regardé -le") are "Gar la y don" and "Gar le don." "I don't believe it" ("Je ne le crois pas") is "Ben voyon." "What?" ("Quoi?), is "Quessey?" "With that" ("Avec ca"), is "Aik sa." "I'm going to beat you up" ("Je vais me battre"), is "Ma te crises un vole X." "You're kidding me" ("Tu badines") is "Vatendon." "It stinks" ("Ca pue"), is "Sassen charogne." "I was scared" ("J'ai en peur"), is "Gey eu la chienne." "Right here" ("Ici meme"), is "Drette la Y." "Move your ass" ("Tasse-toi"), is "Anweille." "I'm so confused" (Je suis confus"), is "Ch'toute fourre X.") "I'm so tired" ("Je suis si epuisé X"), is "J'cogne de clous." "Get lost" ("Disparais.") is "Decrisse." "Because" ("Parce que"), is ""Stacose." "Anyway" ("En tout cas"), is "Anteka." "See you later" ("A plus tard"), is "Mat woere talleur." "Relax" ("Détends-toi"), is "Camme toe X." "Damn" ("Damne X"), is "Viarge." "She's crying" ("Elle pleure"), is "A braille." And "I'm in trouble" ("Je suis dans le pétrin"), is "Chu dan marde."
To be altogether serious, the Euro-initiative to modernize English has not reached such absurd lengths, and an ever larger number of Quebecois is making the effort to speak a French that is acoustically and grammatically closer to the middle version of the phrases above. Most of the leaders in Quebec society, including many of those best known to English-speaking Canadians, such as Pierre Trudeau, Robert Bourassa, and Jeanne Sauvé, spoke with great elegance and precision. But the point of these endless discussions of language is not that they can be made more like other languages and homogenized, or that other languages can be restrained by legislation.
In free societies, people must be free to speak any language they wish and to put out commercial signs in any language they wish. The most eloquent of all Quebecois of my acquaintance was Paul-Émile Cardinal Léger, who in accepting an honorary degree from the University of Montreal in 1974, at the height of the controversy over the restrictive Bill 22, which envisioned language tests for pre-schoolers to see if they should be streamed into French or English schools regardless of the wishes of their parents, made this point.
"I remember walking through the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris in 1928, as a young priest and hearing the chatter of the children, as clear as the chirping of the birds and the splashing of the water in the fountains. It will not be by laws, regulations, fines, and harassments, that a language is promoted. It is by speaking your language in a way that to hear it, others will wish to speak it also."
That is what he did.
Europe will not succeed by homogenizing its nationalities, but by making a virtue of diversity. Quebec will not make French stronger by trying to weaken English. All people should be proud of their language and speak it well and all people should recognize that it is an advantage and an enviable condition to speak more than one language. Americans should not be concerned about the advances of Spanish in the U.S., as long as all public schooling has English as the language of instruction and all school attendees learn English. Beyond that, any additional language facility expands the cultural resources of the country and should be encouraged.
]]>Poverty and the Presidency: Uruguay's Jose Mujicatag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.23680232012-12-27T03:10:00-05:002013-02-25T05:12:01-05:00Conrad Blackhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/conrad-black/
President Mujica donates about 90 percent of his official salary to assist the poor, which brings him down to the average Uruguayan per capita income of about $10,000 a year. Even including half the value of his wife's farm, he still has only about a third of the declared wealth of his predecessor and two thirds the declared personal net worth of his vice president. This means that two consecutive presidents of Uruguay and the incumbent vice president combined have a net worth of barely over $1 million, pretty thin gruel for Latin American officialdom, even allowing that Uruguay is a small country wedged between Argentina and Brazil.
President Mujica was a guerrilla in the 1960s and 1970s and for his reformist efforts was shot six times and imprisoned under rather severe conditions for 14 years. He seems to be one of that rare breed of sincere anti-materialists, who thinks that the pursuit of wealth beyond a minimum is sociopathic and the root of most evil in the world. He is not exactly a Marxist, as Marx and his ostensible Communist followers, even the likes of Stalin and Mao Zedong, were fierce materialists who just wished to distribute the wealth evenly, although, of course, they excepted themselves and their senior collaborators from too literal an enactment of that ideal.
Mujica regards his comparative poverty as freedom, and emphasizes that it is a free choice, and speaks nothing but the truth when he says that "I may appear to be an eccentric old man." He lectured the Rio+20 summit that it was a chimera to speak of liberating the masses from poverty.
"What are we thinking? Do we want the model of development and consumption of the rich countries? I ask you now what would happen to this planet if Indians would have the same proportion of cars per household as Germans. How much oxygen would we have left? Does this planet have enough resources so seven or eight billion can have the same level of consumption and waste that today is seen in rich societies? It is this level of hyper-consumption that is harming our planet."
He was unswayed by responses that yes, the world could sustain such economic growth and one where India had the same standard of living as Germany would be one where the people of Uruguay itself would be much happier, and much more content with their national leadership.
Though he is admired for his sincerity and his picturesque championship of a bucolic idyll to which not one percent of his countrymen would subscribe, the public is grumpy that he has not translated the rising prosperity of the country into improved social services and education. Much of Uruguay remains very conservative (which is why the Tupemaros could not win their long insurrection and could only achieve power by awaiting the return of democracy and winning popularity contests that do not imply a radical socialization of government). This is why he is not clearly carrying the country on his proposed legalization of abortion and marijuana. He lives only about 30 miles from Punta del Este, the Palm Beach of the southern hemisphere and playpen of much of South America's very rich.
President Mujica leaves the fiscal direction of his country to the finance minister he retained from his more capitalistic predecessor. In some respects, he is more like the mascot than the president of the country, and his example is not entirely replicable in the Ruritanian, pretended grandiosity of contemporary government leaders, especially in Latin America where chiefs of state normally disport themselves with great panache, even leftists like Fidel Castro. But it is still a stirring example of down-to-earth government, and puts a determinedly human and amiable face on the Latin American far left that is generally better characterized by machine gun-happy violence addicts like Che Guevara and blood-stained terrorists who are ostentatiously indifferent to the human tragedy they wreak.
President Mujica will be 79 when his term ends in 2014, and is unlikely to seek reelection. Here, at last, long after the collapse of international Communism, may be Communism's human face, an amiable, unthreatening old flower farmer, tossing off aphorisms to passersby from the rocking chair on his wife's farmhouse veranda. It probably would not satisfy Lenin or Trotsky, but the Uruguayans rather like it.]]>Can Obama Improve America's Reputation? (Debate)tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.22769752012-12-11T09:36:16-05:002012-12-11T09:38:34-05:00Conrad Blackhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/conrad-black/"One of the Dumbest, Most Futile Elections in History"tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.20861002012-11-07T01:39:41-05:002013-01-06T05:12:01-05:00Conrad Blackhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/conrad-black/
He is the only president to be reelected to a second term with fewer electoral votes than in his first election. It was the most expensive, and one of the most uninformative and unintelligent campaigns ever. The incumbent could not stand on his record, and the best candidates of the party out of office did not stand.
The president ran a personal attack on his opponent and conjured a series of fantastic threats to titillate the paranoia of the witless left: the war on women by the Republicans, the campaign for the salvation of the 97 per cent from the oppressions of the "billionaires and millionaires." It is only the second time in American history that there have been three consecutive two-term presidents, and the last time, they were the principal authors of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Monroe Doctrine.
Any substantial president would have mopped the floor with Romney, and any serious challenger would have evicted the incumbent like a derelict squatter. The Obama administration has increased the national debt it inherited after 232 years of American government debt issuances by 60 per cent in less than four years. No country in history has been as broke as the U.S. now is, and the administration's only answer was to blame it on George W. Bush (who was an unsuccessful president and has a lot to answer for, but not the failings of his successor).
The administration added $17,000 of new debt for every man, woman and child in the country in less than four years, and most of it isn't really debt, it's just an inflationary money supply increase, fake notes issued by the Treasury's subsidiary, the Federal Reserve, to the Treasury in exchange for the Treasury's bonds to pay the hemorrhaging deficit, $188 million per hour.
There are five million fewer people working than four years ago, and there is no economic recovery. Inflation is only apparently moderate because the housing industry is bombed out, most other industries are very soft, and interest rates are negligible in an unsuccessful effort to revive economic activity, and this disguises 25 per cent annual gasoline price increases, and double digit annual increases in the price of most of the essential food and milk shopping basket, (and food stamp users have almost doubled to about 47 million, almost as many people as have criminal records thanks to the country's fascistic justice system).
President Obama has no mandate at all; he may not have as many votes as Governor Romney, did not achieve the endorsement by the voters of any particular program, and the country perpetuated gridlock in government, with the most unimpressive congressional leadership the country has had in over a century. Speaker John Boehner is a nervous, lachrymose bumbler, where some great legislators have sat, (though he is not as utterly hopeless in policy terms as Nancy Pelosi), and Harry Reid is an affront to the memory of previous Senate majority leaders such as Joe Robinson, Alben Barkley, Robert Taft, Lyndon Johnson, Howard Baker and Robert Dole.
The president will probably force through some tax increases, because the Republicans, stupid though they are, can't just be the party of no for another four years. Instead of taxes on discretionary sales and transactions to reduce the deficit and reductions in personal and corporate income taxes to spur the economy, some fiscal blunderbuss will be confected that will make a snail's progress on the deficit and strangle the pitiful squeak of economic recovery that this regime has generated with pelagic blood-lettings of debt.
Historians will want to know how the United States conquered the world and then laid itself low; replaced the generally strong leadership it had (except for Jimmy Carter), from the first inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt to the early Clinton years, with 20 years of grinding mediocrity and bad public policy. My concern is not partisan or ideological. The Republicans were only marginally preferable to the regime because Paul Ryan is a star and Mitt Romney, the conviction-free zone that consultants usually are, would at least have come up with less antiquarian socialistic nostrums than the incumbent and has the temperament to get on with the other side, as he did in Massachusetts. He also might have prevented Iran from becoming a nuclear military power. Now, we may be fairly confident that Iran will achieve that status, requiring Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia to do the same, unless Israel can deal with it itself, as the world, once again united in cowardice, leaves it to the Jews to do its dirty work.
The Republicans, especially reaching back to the blunders of the second Bush administration, are almost as much a part of the problem as the Democrats. And ideologically, while Obama is an enemy of capitalism, which is the only economic system that works because it is the only one that is aligned with the universal human desire for more, the Democrats are the only party that has any interest in human rights or helping the disadvantaged. What the country needs is a blend of economic conservatism, regulatory libertarianism, liberal human rights and leftist but innovative welfare policy, but not just the extravagant acquisition of the votes of the destitute and the defenseless by bigger government in the name of "spreading wealth around."
Of all the world's major nations, only France presents a comparably pathetic spectacle of failure at self-government, just 20 years after the United States enjoyed the greatest and most bloodless strategic victory in the history of the world with the satisfactory end of the Cold War. The United States has had the swiftest rise and fastest decline of any major nation. Mitt Romney was never going to be a candidate for Mount Rushmore, but barely 40 years after he warned of it, America has become, in Richard Nixon's eerie phrase, "a pitiful, helpless, giant." It is almost irrelevant to the world, except as an engine of fiscal incontinence.
American exceptionalism is dead, except in matters of scale. As Mr. Churchill said to the French in 1940: "Sleep well until the dawn, for the dawn will come." So it will, but these will be very bad years.
]]>Israel's Task: Win the Waiting Gametag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.19709442012-10-16T17:57:31-04:002012-12-16T05:12:02-05:00Conrad Blackhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/conrad-black/
But it only encourages Israel's enemies to press harder, as it is taken as evidence that anti-Israeli militancy is a force for attrition wearing down Israel's power to resist the daunting demographic numbers in its region and the endless anti-Israeli propaganda generated by the Arab league and its Third World and Communist parrots.
It is the conundrum of all peoples and movements which enjoy success or are trying to protect an acquired position, in the teeth of the hostility of a larger antagonist. They always want to end play where they are and render the status quo more durable, and the larger antagonist always has other ideas. For the emissary of good will, it is always difficult to square the desire to draw a line under the current correlation of forces with a confident attitude that his side possesses the ability to conserve that status quo whatever the antics of the larger opponent.
And as people generally believe what they want to believe, the larger antagonist will always see time as on his side, along with demography and, doubtless, the rights and wrongs as well, and he will see peace-making efforts by the advantaged underdog as a confession of weakness, justifying devious behaviour to seem to accept an olive branch while in fact assimilating its concessions and inflicting disappointment on and wearing down the nerves and morale of the rival.
That is effectively what has been the lot of the Jews, in Israel and out, for a very long time. Oversimplifying grossly, but, I believe, accurately, about 80 per cent of Jews became Christians in the first few centuries of the Christian Era, and those that did not, suffered many centuries of intermittent persecution of varying stages of barbarity. Their refusal to join the Christian wave, their alleged status as Christ-killers, and their comparative success, especially in financial matters and sophisticated professional occupations, the consequence of their persecution and resultingly heightened determination to persevere, increased the abrasions with the majorities in the host European and Middle Eastern societies where they were scattered.
Sufficient numbers of them successfully decamped to the United States (and Canada and Australia and up to a point, South America), new and relatively optimistic countries pledged to the avoidance of Europe and the Middle East's ancient hatreds, that they flourished and became somewhat influential in those countries. And the United States, and, proportionately, Canada and Australia, grew to such geopolitical importance that they became important, and finally indispensable, to resolving the European balance of power in the 20th century in favour of the democracies led by Britain and France.
This led the British government, through its foreign minister, Arthur Balfour, in the desperate struggle of the First World War, to make a pitch for American support with a gesture to the Jews, now stirring with the idea of the creation of a Jewish homeland where they would be self-governing and not persecuted any more. To this end, the Balfour Declaration of 1917 promised a "Jewish Homeland" in Palestine, (the ancient Roman colonial name, not a local one), around Jerusalem, which they were seizing from the Turks, who had occupied and governed it for many centuries.
Unfortunately, Balfour, in deference to the large Arab majority, which had its own expectations of how the area would be occupied in a post-Turkish time, in the following sentence, promised not to disturb the legitimate interests of the Palestinian Arabs. This was a flim-flam job that has haunted the world ever since: a classic case of selling the same real estate to two different and hostile parties at the same time. In the end, there would be no alternative than to divide it between the two parties, half a loaf for each and full satisfaction for neither.
The horrible atrocities committed against the Jews in Europe in the '30s and up to the end of the Second World War, causing the death, in the most horrible circumstances, of half the world's Jewish population, six million souls, so shocked the Western world that even Stalin's Russia agreed to the founding of Israel. The Arab position was that terrible things had indeed been done to the Jews, but in Europe and not by Arabs (though all indications are that they were in entire sympathy with the Nazis on this point and emulated them where they could). So if territory needed to be found for Jews, the Europeans should provide it.
For not entirely comprehensible reasons, the Arabs saw the founding of Israel in their midst as the crowning and intolerable humiliation after more than a millennium of Arab retreat, at the hands of Europeans, Turks, and Persians, and Israel was the last straw. The Israelis, after the massacre of half of Jewry by the Nazis, (and Germany had been one of the most philo-Semitic of societies outside the New World), were horrified and traumatized not only by the Holocaust, but by the fact that most of their co-religionists had gone quietly to their deaths, apart from the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto. For the first 30 years or so of Israel's history, the Arabs regarded the existence of Israel as intolerable, and many Israelis regarded, reflexively, any concessions as a first step back to the camps of the Third Reich. It was an unpromising ambiance for negotiation.
Since Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat recognized Israel as a Jewish state and exchanged embassies with it, (in exchange for restoration of the Sinai and the Suez Canal), there has been considerable progress toward the two-state solution. But with Sadat's expulsion of his Soviet advisors, and Israel's eviction of Jordan from the West Bank in the 1967 War launched by the Arabs, negotiations are now with the local factions rather than between Great Powers, or even Israel and the Arab Powers. The Palestinian factions, Fatah, Hamas, and Hezbollah in Lebanon, are splintered, desperate, and fanatical, and they influence the Arab masses among the major Arab nationalities, and now non-Arab Muslims, especially the theocratically governed Iranians, and recently even the Turks have been whipping up Arab sentiments against Israel as part of a power play within the Muslim world, as Turkey has been effectively rejected by Europe.
The Israelis would have accepted the 1967 borders prior to being attacked by and defeating the Arabs in the war of that year. The Arabs have become deft at promising land for peace, which in practice has meant permanent return of land to them for temporary cease-fires, which some Arab factions do not recognize in any case. Israel and overseas Jews keep hoping that peace will attract Israel's neighbours, most of whom think of peace as bait to get more concessions from Israel without really making peace. They cling to their idea that six million or more supposedly displaced Palestinians can return to Israel and demographically swamp the Jewish state, and have gulled much of the world with their agitation about Jewish settlements. The Israelis demonstrated in Sinai and Gaza that they would uproot settlers in a real peace agreement, but rightly decline to do so for another Arab bait and switch operation.
Trying to put Israel's best foot forward, the Canadian Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, the principal agency for promotion of Israel's interests in Canada, has adopted what it calls its Ten Commandments, which include: "Do not directly attack or assign blame to the Palestinians or their leadership; Do not ask Canadians to pick a side in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; Do not ask the government of Canada to appear -- or be -- more favorable to Israel; and Do not attack the media for being biased against Israel." Here, in a word, is the problem. So hobbled, Israel would be better off without any advocates for it in Canada.
It is slightly reminiscent of the group of leading American Jews, including the late publisher of the New York Times, Arthur Sulzberger, that called upon President Roosevelt at the end of 1938, and asked him not to name a second Jew to the Supreme Court, succeeding Benjamin Cardozo (and joining Louis Brandeis), because it would incite anti-Semitism. Roosevelt pointed out that he had just pulled his ambassador from Berlin after the infamous Kristallnacht attacks on German Jews, and given a world broadcast condemning religious and racial persecution. He sent the nomination of Felix Frankfurter to succeed Cardozo almost immediately after this visit and he was confirmed without opposition.
The temptation is often strong to appease; it must always be resisted. The temptation to preemptive tangible gestures for durable improvement in relations is also strong but is not the same thing. That was done by Ehud Barack in 2000 at the second Camp David Conference and led to the Second Intifada. The Arabs could have peace tomorrow if they were prepared to accept the right to exist of Israel as Jewish state. Israel and its espousers must stay the course and wait for it. It will come; slowly, but it will come.]]>Did You Hear the One About the Impotent German and His Neighbour?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.18978372012-09-19T15:00:03-04:002012-11-19T05:12:02-05:00Conrad Blackhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/conrad-black/
This was a law that had already been struck down by the high court once before, but resuscitated by then Senator Joe Biden a few weeks later, when he tacked it onto a budget bill just before the Congress rose for
the Christmas recess. The bill was designed to deal with public officials who took bribes from individuals to whom the officials directed government business, to deal with corrupt behaviour even though it didn't evidently cost the taxpayers anything.
The citizens had the right to honest services. In the usual manner of American prosecutors, who have warped a long series of statutes, including the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), and the legislation governing obstruction of justice, Honest Services was redesigned, with the complicity of the courts in many jurisdictions, to apply to any alleged lapse of complete propriety, very thinly and variously defined, regardless of whether the accused was a public official or not.
Various judicial circuits had different criteria for falling afoul of the statute, as they did for RICO and obstruction. Perhaps the most egregious example of this that was well-publicized was the prosecution of Roger Cardinal Mahoney of Los Angeles under RICO for the allegedly insufficiently vigorous suppression of child abuse by several priests in his archdiocese.
If His Eminence was guilty of anything, it was not being influenced by racketeering, but the whole ethos of American prosecutors is to empower themselves with as many catchments as possible for assuring the conviction of their targets no matter how capriciously the targets are selected and no matter how far-fetched the charges.
My pride in having struck down this terribly abused statute and reopening the cases of hundreds of fellow-victims is made more piquant by the unfolding drama on the same general issue in Germany in the last
few weeks. In Stuttgart, Demetrius Soulopolos, unable to impregnate his former beauty queen wife, an utterly delicious woman from her photographs, despite what we are assured were very energetic and frequently repeated efforts, engaged their neighbour, Frank Maus, who had two children and resembled Demetrius, to do the trick for 2,500 Euros. Demetrius was tested impotent, and manfully handed over to his friend and neighbour, to the audible reservations of the wives of both men. (Women are so much better at evaluating these things.)
Despite the misgivings of his wife, Maus (meaning mouse in German), mounted the beautiful Traute, the name in which Frau Soulopolos rejoices (but it doesn't mean the same as it sounds in English, the German translation is "beloved"), 72 times in six months, but the desired result did not occur. Demetrius became disillusioned and required Frank to undergo a potency and virility test, which he flunked, as Demetrius had. He too didn't have the reproductive goods.
Poor Traute had been brokered into coupling with another non-starter. But as Frank had two children with his comely wife, the pressure on the relationship between the couples became intense, and there were naturally questions of Frau Maus (literally, Mrs. Mouse, a misnomer in this case from the sound of things), and she revealed that in the higher interests of the continuation of the Maus family, without destabilizing the ego of her herr, she had had their children through the intervention of another man.
Herr and Frau Maus came into heavy matrimonial weather, as Demetrius sued Frank for violation of the German Honest Services statute. Frank defended himself vigorously, giving new meaning to the role of the righteous cuckolder, and said that he had not promised success; only his best effort, and that he had done that, as Traute acknowledged, (no doubt with a wistful sigh). Frank claimed to have had no idea that he was impotent, and to have believed that his children had been sired by him. He had given it his best shot, and was disappointed to learn that he was destined not to deliver. All Germany is awaiting the court's decision.
Of course, this is far removed from the crisis I had, and is a welcome, light-hearted German farce, salacious, adult Hansel and Gretel stuff, without the Teutonic forest murmurs. Only return of the 2,500 Euros was sought, and for such a footling sock of phennigs, all four members of the Demetrius/Traute, Frank/Frau Maus quartet were embarrassed before the media of all Germany.
Germany's honest services statute is being light-heartedly tested without hundreds of anxious interested parties waiting in their prisons as I did, to see if the Supremes would brush back the prosecutocracy. They did in my case, and required a bribe for the Honest Services statute to apply, which no one alleged against me.
In Germany, prosecutions are only taken after an impartial commission determines that there is sufficient evidence to justify it, not the contemptible rubber stamp of a U.S. grand jury, represented in the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution as an assurance against unfounded prosecution. Germany is again proving itself a liberal state. It is simultaneously facing a peculiar test of whether religious circumcisions are acceptable, or are acts of cruelty. As this is chiefly a Jewish rite, and other circumcisions are normally performed by doctors, it has become tangled in the notorious history of German-Jewish relations. The federal chancellor, Angela Merkel, has opposed Rhineland and Bavarian court findings against the practice, but there are aspects to the public controversy that are questionably motivated.
Withal, it is refreshing to see that the Western World's second greatest power can work out these matters, humorous in some respects but affecting in others, in a civilized and judicious way. In Germany there is in no need comparable to that of the United States to have some interloper like me throw a wrench in the insidious works of that most contemptible and least magnificent of the world's jungle beasts, the American prosecutor.]]>