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Media on Edge
| Martin Barillas | August 19th 2017 |
Spero
Robin Simcox, a Thatcher Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, dismissed allegations in an appearance on Fox News that the terrorist attack in Spain was a work of a copycat emulation of the incident in Charlottesville VA that resulted in the death of a protester. On Thursday, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer appeared to draw parallels between the Charlottesville incident and the attacks in Spain. The latter caused the deaths of 14 innocents, and injured dozens more.
Speaking to show host Tucker Carlson Fox , Simcox said on Thursday: “I find that really hard to believe, really. Jihadists have been carrying out these kinds of attacks way before Charlottesville. This year alone you’ve seen a truck being used in Stockholm and London, and before that you’ve seen Nice and Berlin. So I don’t find that really credible.” Read more ..
Inside Film
| Charles Bernstein | August 17th 2017 |
Jewish Voice
 |
New York state has closed on a $7 million acquisition with the Greenpoint-based soundstage company Broadway Stages for a 69-acre former prison facility in Staten Island. The new facility is expected to draw in lots of television and movie productions that are looking to film authentic jail scenes.
Broadway Stages agreed to invest $20 million for maintenance work, renovations and the future construction of six soundstages in the old Arthur Kill Correctional Facility as part of the acquisition. The facility sits on the water’s edge in Staten Island’s neighborhood of Rossville.
The recent popularity of prison-themed shows, like Orange is the New Black, are increasing productions’ needs for jail locations, Broadway Stages president and CEO Gina Argento told Crain’s. She explained that her company can gain an edge over its city competitors by having a prison facility in its portfolio.
Argento said, "A lot of productions have had to go Upstate to film prison scenes. To have a prison in the city that has such a feeling of authenticity to it is going to be very attractive to a lot of productions that are otherwise based in the city."
According to Crain’s, “Broadway Stages won a state solicitation for buyers of the site over three years ago, but was delayed in part in closing on the deal by State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli. DiNapoli's office had directed scrutiny at Argento after her name arose in an investigation by federal and state prosecutors into Mayor Bill de Blasio's campaign fundraising. Read more ..
Inside Books
| Authors Guild Staff | August 11th 2017 |
contributed
We wrote in May that Amazon had begun allowing third-party booksellers to win featured status in a book’s “Buy Box.” That’s a problem because authors don’t earn royalties on sales of books by third-party retailers, whose source is often unclear. Since then, we’ve heard from a number of you about how the change affected you as authors and self-publishers, and we’ve spoken to Amazon about the new policy.
David Naggar, Amazon’s VP of Kindle Content, explained that only brand new books—not “like new”—are allowed to win the Buy Box. Vendors are required to describe their books as “new” only if they are in fact new books retailed directly from the publisher. Advanced review copies (“ARCs”) and remaindered copies should not be advertised as “new,” according to Amazon. Naggar explained that it’s unclear how third-party sellers would obtain copies that are not ARCs, remainders, or other second hand books. Those copies, he explained, should only win the Buy Box if the publisher has no copies available through Amazon to allow it to fill the order promptly. The problem lies in part with resellers who label their books as “new” when they are actually secondhand books that look new. Read more ..
Author Profile
| Rebecca Bynum | August 10th 2017 |
contributed
Alhough he served as a foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign in 2016, Dr. Walid Phares did not join the ranks of the administration in 2017. After election-day, as he returned to the private sector, he told diplomats and journalists, who continued to seek his assessments, that he “remains at the service of the President elect and later his administration, when needed.”
Dr. Phares is a veteran when it comes to advising presidential candidates and lawmakers. Back in 2011, he was appointed as a senior national security advisor to Republican candidate Mitt Romney, who asked Phares to review the Middle East related chapter of his own book No Apology: The Case for American Greatness (March 2010) and who later endorsed the Phares’ book which predicted the Arab Spring before it happened, titled The Coming Revolution, published in October 2010.
The Beirut-born scholar, who immigrated to the United States in 1990, has not only published several books and numerous articles, but has been prolific in national and international media interviews. The impact of his expertise, particularly on Jihadism, Islamism, Iran’s strategies, minorities’ issues and human rights in the Middle East, can clearly be found in number of congressional discourses, European Parliament policy conferences, the 2012 and 2016 presidential campaigns and the present administration.
Phares had briefed candidate Trump in the fall of 2015 but was not officially appointed until March 2016. Among the many talking points he advanced for the campaign on Fox News, French, British, Asian as well as Arab media was the call for an “Arab Alliance against Terror.” First published back in 2011 on al Arabiya, Phares’ concept of a NATO-like coalition was circulated in several arenas before advocated as a Trump foreign policy component in 2016. The idea, which Phares had discussed with a few Arab leaders early on, materialized when President Trump addressed fifty Arab and Muslim leaders in Riyadh earlier this year. Read more ..
Book Review
Mosaic
The battle for Deir Yassin was a milestone in the Israeli-Arab conflict, but exacting historical research reveals that no individuals were killed outside of battle, and that the myth was the result of a hasty Irgun propaganda effort. A review of a new book.
The battle which took place at Deir Yassin on April 9, 1948 should not have been different than any other battle in the War of Independence. For various reasons, the battle went haywire and dozens of Arab citizens were killed (the exact number is disputed), many women were shot, and much property was looted to aid Jews who were in dire straits due to the war.
The events of Deir Yassin became a key symbol in the consciousness of both Arabs and Jews. All those involved, past and present, didn’t hesitate to use demagoguery, half-truths, and unverified data to confirm their prejudices. The claims being made may have declarative value, but certainly no scholarly or factual value. Read more ..
Media on Edge
| Mike Tomko | August 6th 2017 |
BTH
“If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you do read the newspaper, you’re misinformed.” That quote is attributed to Mark Twain. It resonates today. A number of newspapers have attacked the parent company of this station. Here’s an example.
Politico first reported that President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner claimed the campaign “struck a deal” with Sinclair. That characterization was mindlessly echoed by countless outlets including The New York Times, Washington Post, The Hill, Salon, The Nation and others.
But what they didn’t report was that Sinclair made identical offers to both Trump and Hillary Clinton for campaign coverage. In fact, nearly 30 offers were made to the Clinton campaign. Shockingly, Politico refused an offer to see correspondence with the two campaigns. Refused to look at it. What’s that say about Politico’s agenda? Read more ..
Composer's Story
| CBS Interactive | August 4th 2017 |
from CBS and agencies
The first time most movie-goers heard the music of Hans Zimmer was in the 1988 movie "Rain Man." The composer went on to write the scores of more than 100 films. He has been nominated for 10 Academy Awards and won for "The Lion King."
Zimmer has also won four Grammys and two Golden Globe awards.
"Dunkirk" has been hailed as a visual masterpiece. But what you hear – the film's sweeping musical score – is the latest genius from the legendary composer, reports CBS News' Mark Strassmann.
"I wrote by going to the beach, picking up the sand, seeing the misery on that beach. You have to get a movie under your fingers. It's as simple as that," Zimmer said. To score "Dunkirk," the German-American Zimmer found inspiration in his own past. "I approached it at first, of course, as somebody who wouldn't be here if my parents had not escaped the Germans," Zimmer said. His Jewish mother escaped the Germans in 1939. Read more ..
Media on Edge
| Larry Goldbetter | July 15th 2017 |
Author's Guild
The National Writers Union/UAW Local 1981 (NWU) is preparing to go to court after the EBONY Media Organization (EMO) and its parent company, the Clear View Group (CVG) failed to meet a self-imposed deadline to compensate as many as 50 freelance writers who are owed as much as $200,000.
After mounting media attention due to the #EbonyOwes hashtag on Twitter, EBONY Media released a statement to NBC BLK on June 3 affirming their commitment to paying all of their freelance writers, in full, by the end of June.
“This is completely unacceptable,” NWU President Larry Goldbetter said about the missed deadline. “We took them at their word, in good faith, despite some freelancers going more than a year without payment. Now, we move on to the next step.”
The union represents 30 writers who are owed about $60,000. EBONY did issue checks to eleven writers for a total of $18,000. Only three of those were paid in full. He added, “Creatives don’t work for free and there are very real consequences when we don’t get paid. While EBONY Media executives from CVG were throwing lavish Super Bowl parties and Hollywood events, unpaid freelancers were struggling to pay the rent.” Read more ..
Trump vs the Media
Lifezette
CNN found itself ensnared in yet another ethical quagmire on Wednesday after a young reporter apparently tracked down the creator of a mock video tweeted by President Donald Trump and extracted an apology from him.
The Reddit user created the controversial animated GIF that showed Trump body-slamming a man at a World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) match. The man in the original video was Vince McMahon, the former president of WWE and a personal friend to Trump. In the mock video, the CNN logo was in place of McMahon’s head.
Trump tweeted the video on Sunday, and CNN reacted with outrage. CNN and other journalists claimed the tweet from Trump was not mockery but rather that Trump was encouraging violence against reporters. Read more ..
Media on Edge
BTH
“A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
That quote was attributed to Mark Twain. False stories spread faster than the truth.
On June 14th, the New York Times published an editorial with an outright falsehood that appears to defame Sarah Palin. The paper claimed Palin incited Jared Loughner. He was the man who shot U.S. Representative Gabby Giffords and 18 others, killing six back in 2011. Immediately afterwards, some liberals blamed Palin for instigating the shooting rampage. Palin was widely considered a potential opponent to Barack Obama the following year. This claim was quickly debunked. In fact, Loughner was a George Bush-hating liberal. This week, Palin sued the New York Times. Read more ..
The Edge of Music
| Martin Barillas | June 27th 2017 |
Spero
 |
Susan Boyle, whose rags to riches story has captivated music lovers ever since her Britain’s Got Talent debut, was attacked by a gang of as many as 15 teen assailants near her home in Scotland. Boyle has been regularly victimized by attacks. The latest episode has left her “cowering in fear,” according to a spokesman. The 56-year-old singer has Asperger syndrome and has been deliberately targeted by thugs near her home in Blackburn, West Lothian. She has been subjected to regular verbal abuse, while the group also throws stones at her car.
In one incident, the teens set a piece of paper alight and threw it at her when they spotted Boyle at a shopping mall, and called her an “ugly old bitch.” A witness told The Mirror that members of the gang threw stones, screamed and shouted abuse at the singer while she was riding on a bus.
Boyle has become a favorite in the United Kingdom and throughout the English-speaking world. According to the Sunday Mirror, most of the teens are boys. A spokesman for Boyle is seeking police protection for her. Read more ..
Media on Edge
Newsweek
CNN’s announcement of new publishing restrictions on articles about President Donald Trump and Russia, as reported by Buzzfeed, has delighted right-wing media.
Populist website Breitbart reported that the “very fake news scandal” was consuming the network, while Fox News host Sean Hannity taunted CNN's Jeff Zucker on Twitter.
CNN has long been accused of liberal bias by critics and has been one of the key focuses of President Donald Trump’s relentless rhetorical assaults against what he has branded the “fake news” media.
Trump aimed barbs at the network during his 2016 election campaign; White House press secretary Sean Spicer accused it of spreading unsubstantiated rumours in a bid to attract viewers. In his first press conference as president, Trump shouted down CNN’s Jim Acosta after denouncing the news network from the podium. Read more ..
Media on Edge
IPT
Last month's suicide bombing at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester wasn't the first time an Islamist terrorist targeted young people out for a night of fun. In 2001, a Hamas-affiliated terrorist blew himself up outside the Dolphinarium, a Tel Aviv nightclub, killing 21 Israelis, including 16 teenagers.
But news coverage of the two massacres was strikingly different, as the Manchester attack generated exponentially more attention. The New York Times, for example, offered a handful of small accounts about the Tel Aviv attack. But the Manchester bombing generated dozens of wire service and Times staff updates along with analysis stories and an editorial lamenting the horror of targeting children.
There are reasons why attacks in Europe are covered more exhaustively than those targeting Israelis. But as a result, Americans may not fully appreciate the depth of Palestinian violence because the near-daily examples of it are all but ignored. Read more ..
Film News
JV and agencies
Wonder Woman may be a hit at the box office, grossing $228 million worldwide in its first weekend, but the movie has hit the rocks in much of the Arab world because of its Israeli star, Gal Gadot.
After being banned in Lebanon, Wonder Woman is now facing bans in Tunisia, Jordan and Algeria.
The Hollywood media site Deadline.com reported Thursday that the movie’s scheduled release in Tunisia has been suspended because of Gadot’s defense of Israel’s 2014 incursion into Gaza.
Deadline said the secular Arab nationalist People’s Movement party petitioned the Tunisian culture ministry to ban the movie as part of an effort to isolate Israel. “We must continue the mobilization on this type of affair, as on everything related to normalization with the Zionist entity,” the People’s Movement said in a statement. Read more ..
Author Essay
| Newt Gingrich | June 14th 2017 |
contributed
The most startling revelation from fired FBI Director James Comey’s testimony this week was his barefaced admission that he intentionally leaked details of his private conversations with the President to the press in an effort to prompt the appointment a special counsel.
When asked Thursday by Senator Susan Collins of Maine whether he shared the memos he wrote about his conversations with President Trump with anyone outside the Department of Justice, Comey answered:
“I asked a friend of mine to share the content of the memo with a reporter – didn’t do it myself for a variety of reasons – but I asked him to, because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel.” Read more ..
Book Review
| Amram Sherby | May 21st 2017 |
Contributor
Genesis of the Palestinian Authority, by David Bedein. Edited by Bernhard Rosenberg. Behr Publishers, Edison, NJ. 2017
Over the past 30 years of covering the Israeli-PLO relations, David Bedein has witnessed many of its defining moments. He was present at the signing of the Oslo Accords, has met with the Fatah and Hamas leadership and has sent dispatched camera crews into key Palestinian Authority and UNRWA meetings and institutions.
While Bedein has consistently reported groundbreaking news, news agencies have often been n reluctant to publish his stories, most of which contradicted the “peace narrative” which was prevalent in the 90’s and early 2000’s.
Today, nearly 25 years after the signing of the Oslo accords, it is clear something went awry in the “peace agreement” aimed at ending the Israeli-Arab conflict. Read more ..
Amazon and the Book World
| Authors Guild | May 9th 2017 |
AG
The Authors Guild is deeply disturbed by Amazon’s new policy of allowing third-party book resellers to claim featured status in the “buy boxes” on Amazon. In a move that’s very likely to cut into publishing industry profits even more, Amazon will no longer automatically assign the main buy box for each hard copy, paper, audio and Kindle edition to the copies that Amazon distributes on behalf of the book’s publisher. Rather, a secret algorithm—which reportedly weighs factors such as price, availability, and delivery time, will now decide which seller (i.e., Amazon or a third party re-seller) gets the buy box. Amazon’s new policy states that “eligible sellers will be able to compete for the buy box for Books in new condition.” What this means is that second-hand book distributors—who often sell at extremely steep discounts—will be able to claim that premium real estate if they can beat out the publishers’ copies under the algorithm. Read more ..
Books on Edge
Author's Guild
A shocking proposal from the Internet Archive (IA) illustrates how deeply fragmented traditional alliances in the literary marketplace have become. IA has proudly announced that it’s a semifinalist for a $100 million grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which will allow IA to digitize over 4 million books. IA then plans to make a digital copy of every work available to any library in the country that owns a physical copy of that book. The idea is to create tens of millions of new ebooks, available for free to library users throughout America. It’s inevitable that most of the newly digitized books would still be within their copyright, since IA wants to concentrate on works published in the last century. Despite that, the IA does not plan to pay a penny to the authors or publishers of these books. Read more ..
Author Interview
CleanTechnica
 |
When I first met Paul Scott at the AltCar Expo in Santa Monica back in 2009, I automatically liked this friendly man on his electric Vectrix. Paul was frank, straightforward, and driven by a strong motivation to tell the world how to clean up its act with a smile. But make no mistake, this mild-mannered looking man is on a mission, and a dangerous one at that — to avoid a climate meltdown and terrorism. Paul Scott’s Radical book subtitle says it all: With Billions of Lives at Stake, What Would You Do?
When Paul first told me he was writing a dangerous book two years ago, I chuckled. What could be so dangerous writing a book about the environment? Surely, Paul isn’t one of those conspiracy theorists? But as he told me more about it, I knew the book would do more than raise a few eyebrows. The book is a chilling insight into what could easily happen if we continue on our merry way destroying our planet while mega-corporation pockets grow larger and larger. But who really is Paul Scott, anyway? Read more ..
Media on Edge
| Bassam Tawil | April 28th 2017 |
Gatestone
Seven Palestinian journalists are the latest victims of the Palestinian Authority's (PA) continued crackdown on the media.
The repressive measures are aimed at silencing critical voices among the journalists and deterring others from reporting stories that reflect negatively on the Palestinian leadership in particular and Palestinians in general.
In the view of President Mahmoud Abbas and his PA, Palestinian journalists exist to write stories slamming Israel or praising PA leaders. Media, for them, is defined as a mouthpiece for Abbas, the PA leadership and the Palestinian cause.
Any journalist who dares to think outside this checkpoint is subject to severe punishment. Under Abbas and the PA, there is no room for an independent media. The three major Palestinian newspapers -- Al-Quds, Al-Ayyam and Al-Hayat Al-Jadeeda -- are controlled, directly and indirectly, by the PA. Read more ..
Book Review
| Dan Lazare | April 15th 2017 |
HNN
 |
When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, experts agreed that the world would soon be a more peaceful and democratic place. But with war raging across the Middle East and showdowns looming from Eastern Europe to Asia, Richard Haass’s A World in Disarray is a primer on how they went wrong. Haass is president of the Council on Foreign Relations, the country’s premier foreign-policy think tank, so he’s in a position to know. But his book is vague, meandering, and about as penetrating as a strand of overcooked spaghetti. The only insight it offers is into how alarmingly shallow the US foreign-policy establishment has become.
Haass served as special assistant to President George H.W. Bush during the 1991 Gulf War and then as the State Department’s director of policy planning during the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Unfortunately, the only effect has been to lock in a world view that is self-serving and contradictory. He writes that post-invasion Iraq “proved far less ripe for democratic change than had been anticipated by the war’s proponents,” as if people like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld had any interest in democratizing Iraq in the first place. (They didn't.) He writes that the Iraqi collapse led to the rise of “subnational identities tied to set, tribe, and ethnicity” and that “Sunni anger and humiliation stoked recruiting for both al-Qaeda and subsequently ISIS.” But he doesn’t mention the role of close US allies such as Saudi Arabia in building such forces up. (By 2009, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was warning that “donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.”)
He criticizes the Obama administration for abandoning Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak during the Arab Spring because it would be “taken as a sign in Riyadh and elsewhere that the United States could not be expected to back its friends of long standing.” But he doesn’t explain why the US should be friends with such a nightmarish dictatorship. He notes that in order “not to alienate the Saudis,” the US held its tongue when the kingdom sent troops to crush pro-democracy demonstrations in neighboring Bahrain. But he avoids saying whether this was a good policy or not.
A World in Disarrayalso criticizes America and its allies for failing to put Libya back on its feet after toppling Muammar Gadhafi but doesn’t mention the role of Qatar, which joined the anti-Gadhafi campaign at Clinton’s behest and then distributed some $400 million in military aid to Salafist rebels so that they could spread havoc from one end of the country to the other. It accuses Barack Obama of “an act … of omission” for failing to fund anti-Baathist rebels in Syria, when in fact CIA was spending close to a billion dollars per year. Haass assails the White House for not responding more forcefully when Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was accused of using poison gas in August 2013, but neglects to mention that Obama only pulled back when Director of National Intelligence James Clapper informed him that the case against Assad was less than a “slam dunk.” He says that the US should have proceeded regardless with a concerted assault on “important military and political targets over several days involving both aircraft and cruise missiles.” But then he cautions a few pages later that “the rapid collapse of the Assad regime [in 2015] without careful preparation for what would take its place would likely have paved the way for ISIS to establish a caliphate in Damascus, something to be resisted at all costs.” So why would a massive missile barrage not have produced the same disastrous result two years earlier? A World in Disarray doesn’t explain.
Finally, Haass is less than forthcoming about his own role in the great Middle East debacle. He says of the run-up to the invasion of Iraq: “The road to a transformed Middle East, it was widely believed, ran through Baghdad. I did not share this view, but I had little opportunity to challenge those who did, given the structure of decision making in the George W. Bush administration.” In fact, he had ample opportunity when the New Yorker’s Nicholas Lemann called him for an interview just as the war was getting underway. Instead of letting loose with his misgivings, though, he mounted a vigorous defense, accusing the French of “being disingenuous” in objecting to the invasion and declaring that Bush was right to proceed without UN approval.
“This is a way, I believe, quite honestly, of preserving the UN’s potential viability in the future,” he said. “We’ve not destroyed it. We’ve just admitted, though, that it can’t do everything, when the great powers of the day disagree.”
These are the weasel words of someone who had just gotten the nod to become head of the Council on Foreign Relations – which Lemann correctly describes as “one of the foreign-policy world’s plummiest jobs” – and didn’t want to say anything to queer the deal. Estimates of Iraqi war deaths from March 2003 to June 2006 run as high as 600,000, all because the Bush administration thought it had a unilateral right to disregard both the UN and world opinion in general. Judging from A World in Disarray, Haass still hasn’t faced up to the enormity of his mistake. - See more at: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/165504#sthash.YDg3Ug9L.dpuf
When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, experts agreed that the world would soon be a more peaceful and democratic place. But with war raging across the Middle East and showdowns looming from Eastern Europe to Asia, Richard Haass’s A World in Disarray is a primer on how they went wrong. Haass is president of the Council on Foreign Relations, the country’s premier foreign-policy think tank, so he’s in a position to know. But his book is vague, meandering, and about as penetrating as a strand of overcooked spaghetti. The only insight it offers is into how alarmingly shallow the US foreign-policy establishment has become.
Haass served as special assistant to President George H.W. Bush during the 1991 Gulf War and then as the State Department’s director of policy planning during the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Unfortunately, the only effect has been to lock in a world view that is self-serving and contradictory. He writes that post-invasion Iraq “proved far less ripe for democratic change than had been anticipated by the war’s proponents,” as if people like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld had any interest in democratizing Iraq in the first place. (They didn't.) He writes that the Iraqi collapse led to the rise of “subnational identities tied to set, tribe, and ethnicity” and that “Sunni anger and humiliation stoked recruiting for both al-Qaeda and subsequently ISIS.” But he doesn’t mention the role of close US allies such as Saudi Arabia in building such forces up. (By 2009, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was warning that “donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.”)
He criticizes the Obama administration for abandoning Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak during the Arab Spring because it would be “taken as a sign in Riyadh and elsewhere that the United States could not be expected to back its friends of long standing.” But he doesn’t explain why the US should be friends with such a nightmarish dictatorship. He notes that in order “not to alienate the Saudis,” the US held its tongue when the kingdom sent troops to crush pro-democracy demonstrations in neighboring Bahrain. But he avoids saying whether this was a good policy or not.
A World in Disarrayalso criticizes America and its allies for failing to put Libya back on its feet after toppling Muammar Gadhafi but doesn’t mention the role of Qatar, which joined the anti-Gadhafi campaign at Clinton’s behest and then distributed some $400 million in military aid to Salafist rebels so that they could spread havoc from one end of the country to the other. It accuses Barack Obama of “an act … of omission” for failing to fund anti-Baathist rebels in Syria, when in fact CIA was spending close to a billion dollars per year. Haass assails the White House for not responding more forcefully when Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was accused of using poison gas in August 2013, but neglects to mention that Obama only pulled back when Director of National Intelligence James Clapper informed him that the case against Assad was less than a “slam dunk.” He says that the US should have proceeded regardless with a concerted assault on “important military and political targets over several days involving both aircraft and cruise missiles.” But then he cautions a few pages later that “the rapid collapse of the Assad regime [in 2015] without careful preparation for what would take its place would likely have paved the way for ISIS to establish a caliphate in Damascus, something to be resisted at all costs.” So why would a massive missile barrage not have produced the same disastrous result two years earlier? A World in Disarray doesn’t explain.
Finally, Haass is less than forthcoming about his own role in the great Middle East debacle. He says of the run-up to the invasion of Iraq: “The road to a transformed Middle East, it was widely believed, ran through Baghdad. I did not share this view, but I had little opportunity to challenge those who did, given the structure of decision making in the George W. Bush administration.” In fact, he had ample opportunity when the New Yorker’s Nicholas Lemann called him for an interview just as the war was getting underway. Instead of letting loose with his misgivings, though, he mounted a vigorous defense, accusing the French of “being disingenuous” in objecting to the invasion and declaring that Bush was right to proceed without UN approval.
“This is a way, I believe, quite honestly, of preserving the UN’s potential viability in the future,” he said. “We’ve not destroyed it. We’ve just admitted, though, that it can’t do everything, when the great powers of the day disagree.”
These are the weasel words of someone who had just gotten the nod to become head of the Council on Foreign Relations – which Lemann correctly describes as “one of the foreign-policy world’s plummiest jobs” – and didn’t want to say anything to queer the deal. Estimates of Iraqi war deaths from March 2003 to June 2006 run as high as 600,000, all because the Bush administration thought it had a unilateral right to disregard both the UN and world opinion in general. Judging from A World in Disarray, Haass still hasn’t faced up to the enormity of his mistake. - See more at: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/165504#sthash.YDg3Ug9L.dpuf
When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, experts agreed that the world would soon be a more peaceful and democratic place. But with war raging across the Middle East and showdowns looming from Eastern Europe to Asia, Richard Haass’s A World in Disarray is a primer on how they went wrong. Haass is president of the Council on Foreign Relations, the country’s premier foreign-policy think tank, so he’s in a position to know. But his book is vague, meandering, and about as penetrating as a strand of overcooked spaghetti. The only insight it offers is into how alarmingly shallow the US foreign-policy establishment has become.
Haass served as special assistant to President George H.W. Bush during the 1991 Gulf War and then as the State Department’s director of policy planning during the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Unfortunately, the only effect has been to lock in a world view that is self-serving and contradictory. He writes that post-invasion Iraq “proved far less ripe for democratic change than had been anticipated by the war’s proponents,” as if people like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld had any interest in democratizing Iraq in the first place. (They didn't.) He writes that the Iraqi collapse led to the rise of “subnational identities tied to set, tribe, and ethnicity” and that “Sunni anger and humiliation stoked recruiting for both al-Qaeda and subsequently ISIS.” But he doesn’t mention the role of close US allies such as Saudi Arabia in building such forces up. (By 2009, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was warning that “donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.”)
He criticizes the Obama administration for abandoning Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak during the Arab Spring because it would be “taken as a sign in Riyadh and elsewhere that the United States could not be expected to back its friends of long standing.” But he doesn’t explain why the US should be friends with such a nightmarish dictatorship. He notes that in order “not to alienate the Saudis,” the US held its tongue when the kingdom sent troops to crush pro-democracy demonstrations in neighboring Bahrain. But he avoids saying whether this was a good policy or not.
A World in Disarrayalso criticizes America and its allies for failing to put Libya back on its feet after toppling Muammar Gadhafi but doesn’t mention the role of Qatar, which joined the anti-Gadhafi campaign at Clinton’s behest and then distributed some $400 million in military aid to Salafist rebels so that they could spread havoc from one end of the country to the other. It accuses Barack Obama of “an act … of omission” for failing to fund anti-Baathist rebels in Syria, when in fact CIA was spending close to a billion dollars per year. Haass assails the White House for not responding more forcefully when Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was accused of using poison gas in August 2013, but neglects to mention that Obama only pulled back when Director of National Intelligence James Clapper informed him that the case against Assad was less than a “slam dunk.” He says that the US should have proceeded regardless with a concerted assault on “important military and political targets over several days involving both aircraft and cruise missiles.” But then he cautions a few pages later that “the rapid collapse of the Assad regime [in 2015] without careful preparation for what would take its place would likely have paved the way for ISIS to establish a caliphate in Damascus, something to be resisted at all costs.” So why would a massive missile barrage not have produced the same disastrous result two years earlier? A World in Disarray doesn’t explain.
Finally, Haass is less than forthcoming about his own role in the great Middle East debacle. He says of the run-up to the invasion of Iraq: “The road to a transformed Middle East, it was widely believed, ran through Baghdad. I did not share this view, but I had little opportunity to challenge those who did, given the structure of decision making in the George W. Bush administration.” In fact, he had ample opportunity when the New Yorker’s Nicholas Lemann called him for an interview just as the war was getting underway. Instead of letting loose with his misgivings, though, he mounted a vigorous defense, accusing the French of “being disingenuous” in objecting to the invasion and declaring that Bush was right to proceed without UN approval.
“This is a way, I believe, quite honestly, of preserving the UN’s potential viability in the future,” he said. “We’ve not destroyed it. We’ve just admitted, though, that it can’t do everything, when the great powers of the day disagree.”
These are the weasel words of someone who had just gotten the nod to become head of the Council on Foreign Relations – which Lemann correctly describes as “one of the foreign-policy world’s plummiest jobs” – and didn’t want to say anything to queer the deal. Estimates of Iraqi war deaths from March 2003 to June 2006 run as high as 600,000, all because the Bush administration thought it had a unilateral right to disregard both the UN and world opinion in general. Judging from A World in Disarray, Haass still hasn’t faced up to the enormity of his mistake. - See more at: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/165504#sthash.YDg3Ug9L.dpuf
When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, experts agreed that the world would soon be a more peaceful and democratic place. But with war raging across the Middle East and showdowns looming from Eastern Europe to Asia, Richard Haass’s A World in Disarray is a primer on how they went wrong. Haass is president of the Council on Foreign Relations, the country’s premier foreign-policy think tank, so he’s in a position to know. But his book is vague, meandering, and about as penetrating as a strand of overcooked spaghetti. The only insight it offers is into how alarmingly shallow the US foreign-policy establishment has become.
Haass served as special assistant to President George H.W. Bush during the 1991 Gulf War and then as the State Department’s director of policy planning during the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Unfortunately, the only effect has been to lock in a world view that is self-serving and contradictory. He writes that post-invasion Iraq “proved far less ripe for democratic change than had been anticipated by the war’s proponents,” as if people like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld had any interest in democratizing Iraq in the first place. (They didn't.) He writes that the Iraqi collapse led to the rise of “subnational identities tied to set, tribe, and ethnicity” and that “Sunni anger and humiliation stoked recruiting for both al-Qaeda and subsequently ISIS.” Read more ..
Block Review
| Stephanie Block | April 10th 2017 |
Cutting Edge News Contributor
Get the Book
Shaken Earth. Amazon Kindle
History, in its purest form, is a collection of facts about past events. As a discipline, however, historians impose an interpretation onto selected facts in order to tell a story about the past, from a given perspective.
See the Interview
Historical novels, if they’re well-written, carry the process a step further – that historical perspective is fleshed out, given blood and sinews and filled with the breath of human drama. Martin Barillas’ novel about 1930s Guatemala, with one foot in a rapidly modernizing world and the other in a romantic past of Spanish high culture and indigenous mystery, conveys familiarity. It is a place where Barillas spent much of his youth, visiting his father’s family, drinking in their stories, and walking their roads. The era about which he writes was still within their living memory and the result is a highly compelling tale that evokes the flavor of a specific time and place – one that intersects with American history, as well.
The heroine is Soledad, a fiery Latina who, in the course of Shaken Earth, is courted, marries, betrays her husband Mariano and, in the end, is (perhaps) reconciled with him. Against that framework, we are introduced to Central America’s dizzying development, glorious promise, revolutionary madness, and (possible) settlement into modernity. Read more ..
Media on Edge
| Mark Hemingway | April 6th 2017 |
Daily Standard
Bloomberg's Eli Lake dropped a bombshell on Monday: Obama National Security Adviser Susan Rice was responsible for "unmasking" the identities of Trump officials in intelligence intercepts, and spreading this information around the government.
Now House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes has emphasized that the fact identities were unmasked does not validate President Trump's claim Obama surveilled him and his campaign. Further, there is no evidence that Rice did anything illegal and, given the ongoing Trump-Russia investigation, reasons may yet emerge to justify the unmasking. Read more ..
Authors on Tour
staff
On Monday, March 27th, Louis D. Brandeis Center President, Kenneth L. Marcus will give a talk on his book The Definition of Anti-Semitism for the Northern Virginia Jewish Community Center. The talk will feature a discussion with Marcus of the matter in which anti-Semitism has evolved from the ancient world to the present day, from religious anti-Judaism to secular anti-Semitism.
Kenneth L. Marcus The talk is part of the j.talks series, an ongoing series of conversations with authors and artists. The talk, as described by the j.talks website, will involve:
"Founder and president of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law Kenneth Marcus offers an indispensable book about the manner in which anti-Semitism has evolved from the ancient world to the present, from religious anti-Judaism to secular anti-Semitism. The book describes many instances of anti-Semitism that have occurred in recent years and examines why they constitute anti-Jewish hatred as the meaning of the term has evolved with the times." Read more ..
Media on Edge
| Ivan Oransky | March 23rd 2017 |
STAT
Spring break season is here, and, like a lot of beachgoers, science too is suffering some stings — albeit not of the jellyfish kind.
In the latest ploy, reported Wednesday, a group of researchers at the University of Wroclaw, in Poland, tried to seat a fictional scholar onto the editorial boards of 360 academic publications.
The goal: to test whether, with just a CV — full of fake scientific degrees — and a profile on Academia.edu as well as a fake university, some would accept a scholar named “Anna O. Szust” (which translates to “Anna, a Fraud” in English) as a member of their editorial boards.
And many did. The sting, reported in Nature, netted 48 journals — nearly all of which were so-called “predatory” journals. Such journals accept manuscripts without reviewing them, print them without editing them, and otherwise make a mockery of the scientific literature by pumping out low-quality work. Read more ..
Film Review
| Laura Cotta Ramosino | March 21st 2017 |
Mercator
Alone in Berlin. Directed by Vincent Perez. Screenplay by Vincent Perez, Achim von Borries, Bettine von Borries. Starring Emma Thompson, Brendan Gleeson, Daniel Brühl, Mikael Persbrandt. 97 minutes.
Berlin, 1940. Anna and Otto Quangel receive the news of their soldier son’s death in France. Up to then, they had tried to survive life under the Nazis by minding their own business and not meddling in politics but their loss stirs them to a quiet rebellion.
Based on a 1947 novel by Hans Fallada, Every Man Dies Alone, and inspired by a true story, this film draws its strength from the performances of Emma Thompson and Brendan Gleeson, who portray the two protagonists of an instinctive and silent resistance, apparently useless and on the losing side, but in the end incredibly significant, against the Nazi regime.
The Quangels choose an odd form of protest: they write postcards criticising the regime and the war and they leave them, risking their lives, in public places in the hope that someone will find them, read them, and begin to think.
This resistance does not involve weapons or secret organizations, or even foresight (Otto starts on its own and Anna follows him later). But, perhaps without even knowing it, it resembles the gesture of the sower from the parable, casting his "revolutionary” seed on many different patches of soil, leaving its fate to providence and individual freedom. Read more ..
Book Review
| Daniel Pipes | March 14th 2017 |
ME Forum
 |
When Michael Doran of the Hudson Institute told me he's writing a book on President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Middle East policy, I nodded politely, wondering why someone engaged in current policy issues would devote himself to a topic of mainly antiquarian interest. Well, having now read Ike's Gamble, I know the answer: his topic is both fascinating in itself and has continuing relevance for U.S. foreign policy.
Gamal Abdel Nasser came to power about the same time in Egypt as Eisenhower and, as the leader of pan-Arab nationalism, dominated the Middle East during the president's entire eight-years in office. In light of their intense competition with the Soviet Union, American leaders had a choice of two basic approaches to Nasser: build him up to win him over or treat him as an opponent to reduce his influence.
Focused primarily on finding allies against Moscow, Eisenhower and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, decided to woo Nasser; that's the gamble of the title. Doran follows this implausible effort in painful but nearly novelistic detail, revealing the full extent of its faulty premises, tactical blunders, and strategic errors. In brief, American support turned Nasser into the dictator of Egypt, wildly popular pan-Arab nationalist hero, invaluable Soviet ally, and global anti-American chieftain. Finally, in 1958, after the particularly bruising Suez War experience, the realist core in Eisenhower and Dulles wised up. Read more ..
Media on Edge
IPT
Hamas operatives burst into the Associated Press (AP) Gaza bureau during the 2014 war with Israel, angered by a picture shot by an AP photographer. Gunmen threatened the AP staff, which never reported the incident.
The incident shows that Hamas can control what journalists report, and what they don't, former AP Middle East reporter Matti Friedman says in a new documentary, "Eyeless in Gaza."
Producer Robert Magid's 50-minute film, which is screening via pay-per-view online, examines the flaws and challenges in reporting on the 50-day war.
Magid said he wanted to "set the record straight and provide context," after being appalled at news coverage that ignored Hamas' practice of launching rockets from civilian areas. That omission allowed the media to push a false narrative that "Israel was callous in their bombing." Read more ..
The Edge of Film
| Penelope Poulou | February 10th 2017 |
VOA
 | | Meryl Streep |
The 89th Academy Awards are upon us, and critics and Hollywood insiders are placing bets on which nominees will go home with the coveted statuette. The idea of the Academy is to judge films on their artistic merit, but as always, political considerations and even current events can have an impact on who wins an Oscar.
Damien Chazelle’s nostalgic musical La La Land may be the big winner this year. The film offers a tribute to Hollywood musicals, has great cinematography, good music and a tear-jerking story; but, some critics question if the film really deserves all of its 14 nominations. That number has been equaled by only two other movies throughout Hollywood history: the 1950s drama All About Eve starring Bette Davis, and James Cameron’s 1997 Titanic.
Ads, money influence Oscars
Giovanna Chesler, director of the Film and Video Studies program at George Mason University in Virginia, says that as in any other campaign, robust advertising and a large amount of money can have as much influence as artistic merit in securing a film’s road to the Oscars.
She says that in some categories, such as the Documentary category, filmmakers have to submit a $50,000 fee just to be considered for a nomination. She says such fees guarantee screenings of the prospective nominees’ films in core markets during the Oscar season.
A filmmaker herself, Chesler says she has renewed faith in the Oscars because, as she puts it, “in this year’s nominees you see more talent reflected, not just the marketing ability of the industry.”
Oscars less white
There are more nominations for minority films and actors. She points to art films like Moonlight, a coming-of-age drama about an African-American boy growing up in a drug-infested community, and Denzel Washington’s movie adaptation of the play Fences, about a struggling husband and father who, despite his personal flaws, is working hard to make his mark in the world. Read more ..
The Book World
| Clinton Gillespie | December 31st 2016 |
Spero
After coming under fire for agreeing to publish a book by political columnist Milo Yiannopoulos, the publisher released a public statement to defend their right to release books without fear of censorship.
In an email sent Friday evening, Simon & Schuster responded to progressive critics: "we do not and never have condoned discrimination or hate speech in any form. At Simon & Schuster, we have always published books by a wide range of authors with greatly varying, and frequently controversial opinions, and appealing to many different audiences of readers."
Yiannopoulous is a columnist for Breitbart who was an early and outspoken supporter of Donald Trump. His popular tweets about Trump, the media, and progressive critics were shared by Trump supporters and critics alike. At the height of his popularity early this summer, Twitter banned Yiannopoulos's account after he criticized actress Leslie Jones' performance in this year's Ghostbusters movie. Twitter claimed Yiannopoulos incited hatred and prejudice against Jones, who is black.
After The Hollywood Reporter claimed this week that Simon & Schuster paid $250,000 in advance to Yiannopoulos for the book, progressive activists took their anger to social media and on the publisher. Read more ..
Book Review
| Daniel Pipes | December 11th 2016 |
Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World, by Norman A. Stillman (executive editor) Leiden: Brill, 2010. 5 vols. Vol. 1, A-C: 698 pp.; Vol. 2, D-I: 655 pp.; Vol. 3, J-O: 637 pp.; Vol. 4, P-Z: 695 pp.; Vol. 5, Index and Resources: 499 pp. $1,099. If Jews in Muslim-majority countries have shrunk to a miniscule 50,000 souls, nearly all of them in Morocco, Turkey, and Iran, things were once different.
Indeed, until the seventeenth century Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews outnumbered the Jews of Europe. More than that, as Stillman writes in his introduction, it was in the medieval Muslim world that "many aspects of Judaism as a religious civilization were formulated, codified, and disseminated, and this includes the domains of liturgy, law, and theology." Read more ..
Film Review
| Lori Lowenthal Marcus | November 29th 2016 |
Jewish Press Online
Hate Spaces: The Politics of Intolerance on Campus, 110 minutes. APT. There is a brand-new documentary that focuses on the relationship between American universities and their Jewish students, particularly those who support Israel. The movie is called “Hate Spaces” and that gives you an idea of how those Jewish students are treated.
Of course the name is a play on the current ridiculous yet widespread notion that American college students need “safe spaces” – sometimes equipped with crayons or puppies or soft pillows – from any ideas that might make them even a teensy bit uncomfortable.
This film is a must-see. “Hate Spaces” is so chock-full of important facts, details and examples that it could easily provide the basis for a full semester course, yet it has been masterfully edited down to a mere 110 minutes long.
Another reason why this film is so useful is that it interweaves current examples and interviews with a historic progression of the problem on American campuses. Read more ..
Book News
| The Authors Guild | October 25th 2016 |
 |
Maria Pallante, the Register of Copyrights and Director of the United States Copyright Office, submitted her resignation today, after being abruptly removed and transferred from office last Friday by Dr. Carla Hayden, the new Librarian of Congress, who was sworn in just weeks ago. According to a statement issued by the Library of Congress, Hayden transferred Pallante to a newly created non-managerial position within the Library, Senior Advisor for Digital Strategy. Karyn Temple Claggett, an Associate Register, was appointed Acting Register of Copyrights, effective immediately.
We are disappointed to see Pallante go. She was a devoted leader of the Copyright Office, launching several major initiatives—including a full review of the Copyright Act to bring it into the 21st Century, and the modernization of the Copyright Office to better serve the evolving needs of digital-era Copyright Office constituents—initiatives that took great vision and courage. She also oversaw a full review of and set of recommendations for bringing the Office’s technology into the 21st Century; she shored up copyright registration practices and created a comprehensive online guide to registration and recordation—the 2014 Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices, Third Edition—which was the first wholesale revision of the Compendium in 30 years.
In another major initiative (which the Authors Guild has adopted as part of our 2016 Legislative Priorities), Pallante led the Office in a comprehensive study and then a recommendation to create a small claims tribunal, which would allow authors and other creators to bring small infringement claims inexpensively, without having to hire a lawyer. Read more ..
Book Excerpt
| Patrick Phillips | October 12th 2016 |
HNN
 |
For hundreds of African Americans in Forsyth County, Georgia, the worst kind of trouble broke out in the Fall of 1912. Though it would take weeks before reports reached Atlanta, in the days after an 18 year-old young girl named Mae Crow was found beaten and bloody in the woods along the Chattahoochee River, a nighttime ritual began to unfold, as each evening at dusk groups of white men gathered at the crossroads of the county. They came with satchels of brass bullets, shotgun shells, and stoppered glass bottles of kerosene, and sticks of “Red Cross” dynamite poked out through the tops of their saddlebags. When darkness fell, the night riders set out with one goal: to stoke the terror created by the recent lynching of a man named Rob Edwards and use it to drive black people out of Forsyth County for good.
In 1907, W. E. B. Du Bois had put into words what every “colored” person in Georgia knew from experience, which was that “the police system of the South was primarily designed to control slaves. . . . And tacitly assumed that every white man was ipso facto a member of that police.” In the first decade of the twentieth century, the days when all white men had been legally empowered to pursue and arrest fugitive slaves was only fifty years in the past, and the fathers and grandfathers of many locals would have been part of such posses in the days of slavery.
So it must have seemed natural to many whites when, each night around sundown, a knock came at the door and the adult men of the family were summoned to join a group heading out toward the clusters of black cabins scattered around Forsyth—along the Chattahoochee out in Oscarville, in the shadow of Sawnee Mountain north of Cumming, and south, toward Shakerag and Big Creek. It would take months—and, in a handful of cases, years—before the in-town blacks of Cumming were finally forced out, since many lived under the protection of rich white men, in whose kitchens and dining rooms they served. Instead, it was to the homes of cotton pickers, sharecroppers, and small landowners that the night riders went first, and it was these most vulnerable families who fled in the first waves of the exodus. Read more ..
Book News
| Martin Barillas | October 12th 2016 |
Spero
France’s President Francois Hollande admitted today that Islam is the problem facing the country and warned that the current trend would lead to having a woman in a burka as the national symbol of the French Republic. Undaunted by criticism, he also expressed doubts about the patriotism of French footballers of Middle Eastern ancestry.
The revelations are found in a new book entitled “A President Should Not Say That…”. The book records more than 60 private conversations between Hollande and Le Monde newspaper journalists Gerard Davet and Fabrice Lhomme. The conversations began in 2012, shortly after Hollande’s election, and continue until recently. Read more ..
Author Interview
| Martin Barillas | September 27th 2016 |
Spero
Eduardo Szklarz is a journalist based in Buenos Aires who covers political and economic news. In his new book, which is available currently in his native Portuguese only, he shows his prowess in explaining to Latin American writers that there remains fertile ground in the world where crazed national socialism of the sort that gripped Germany and much of Europe during the second two quarters of the 20th century.
Szklarz does a yeoman's service and brings his scholarship to bear by referring to multiple sources in multiple languages to show how a civilized nation -- Germany -- sank into barbarism and then savagery but always with terrible purposefulness and efficiency. He cites the work of Edwin Black, the author of "IBM and the Holocaust" and "War against the Weak", as a warning against those who all too easily fall into the trap of seeking to create a heaven on earth but ultimately create a hell like Auschwitz and Dachau. It was American social reforme Read more ..
Book Review
| Rachel Cooke | September 26th 2016 |
The Guardian
Blizted by Norman Ohler. Allen Lane Publishers. 2016. 16 BP. 368 pages.
The German writer Norman Ohler lives on the top floor of a 19th-century apartment building on the south bank of the river Spree in Kreuzberg, Berlin. Visiting him there is a vertiginous experience. For one thing, he works – and likes to entertain visitors – in what he calls his “writing tower”, a flimsy-seeming, glass-walled turret perched right on the very edge of the roof. (Look down, if you dare, and you will see his little boat moored far below.) For another, there is the fact that from this vantage point it is possible to discern two Berlins, one thrusting and breezy, the other spectral and grey. To our left, busy with traffic, is the Oberbaum Bridge, where there was once a cold war checkpoint, and beyond it the longest remaining section of the Berlin Wall, its doleful length rudely interrupted by the block of luxury flats that went up in 2013. As for the large building immediately opposite, these days it’s the home of Universal Music. Not so very long ago, however, it was the GDR’s egg storage facility. Read more ..
Book Review
| Murray Polner | September 10th 2016 |
HNN
 |
John Le Carré's forceful and absorbing book The Pigeon Tunnel is a quasi-memoir and predecessor to a possible future and fuller version. In a series of recollections he says virtually nothing about his two wives and four sons while leaving his last chapter, the longest in the book, to the people who have colored his life, his conman, thief and twice-convicted father Ronnie, and Olive, his mother, who fled her abusive husband, and abandoned five year old David (Le Carré's real name is David Cornwell), leaving reviewers and critics to analyze forever the psychological price of parental desertion and absence of love.
Devotees of his unique genre of novels, as I am, admire Le Carré for his exemplary spy stories that evoke the lies and myths of our ambiguous, confrontational and bewildering times. Here he writes about men and women, ordinary and Very Important, like Yasser Arafat, Andrei Sakharov and Elena Bonner, Rupert Murdoch, Josef Brodsky, Nicholas Elliott, Le Carré's fellow spy and double agent Kim Philby's best friend, a Major Kauffmann, the woman warden of an Israeli supermax prison for convicted Palestinians and their allies, Alec Guinness, his brilliant if diffident and reticent George Smiley in Tinker, Tailor Soldier Spy who detests "flattery and mistrusts its praise," and Hollywood's Richard Burton, Martin Ritt, Sydney Pollack and Fritz Lang.
"Men and women of power drew me because they were here, and because I wanted to know what had made then tick.... Only afterwards, back in my hotel bedroom, did I fish out my mangled notepad and attempt to make sense of what I had heard or seen."
Murat Kurnaz a Turkish-German raised in Germany was no one special and quite powerless except he was a classic victim of the disastrous American invasion of Iraq. Accused without trial or evidence of being a terrorist, he was shipped to Guantanamo, held for five years, and Le Carré writes,"electrocuted, beaten senseless, waterboarded and hung from a hook" by low-level American thugs acting on orders from American thugs in high places. With German help Kurnaz was eventually proven innocent. Le Carré spent time in Bremen with Kurnaz and describes how he was finally freed with only a pair of jeans, underwear and a T-shirt, guarded on the flight home by ten US soldiers who then offered handcuffs to the Germans who met their plane, "to which," comments Le Carre, with obvious pleasure, "the German officer, to his eternal glory, replied: 'He has committed no crime. Here in Germany he is a free man.'"
For three years Le Carré served in Britain's spy service during the Cold War, mainly in Austria and Germany. "Having made a negligible contribution" he resigned to write full-time after the extraordinary success of his third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Looking back, now well in his eighties, he offers his personal "Rule One of the Cold War," just as true in today's emerging New Cold War: "Nothing, absolutely nothing, is what it it seems. Everyone has a second motive, if not a third."
Spies, he tells us, "spy because they can," whether Putin's Russia or Obama's US, and their spy agencies love seeing themselves mythologized, which is something Le Carré avoids. Neither the British nor the Americans predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall or the collapse of the USSR. But he reserves a special dig at his own country, "But the Brits are a class apart. Forget our dismal showing in the Cold War when the KGB out-witted and out-penetrated us at every turn."
Having served in Bonn and Hamburg, he wrote A Small Town in Germany which criticized the British Embassy and the Bonn interim government, but he admits to having mistakenly predicted the emergence of a far-right post-Nazi Germany. Still, he captures the post-WW II Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union when the US welcomed Nazi war criminals. Hitler's former military intelligence Chief General Reinhard Gehlen was embraced by the CIA, "the pampered favorite of his new best friends, the victorious Americans." And more. "Old comrades from Nazi days form the core of his staff. Controlled [American] amnesia relegates the cost to history." The US housed Gehlen in Martin Bormann's mansion and "gave him his rations, and clean bedding, and his Nazi-era files and card indices, and his old Nazi-era staff, while uncoordinated teams of Nazi hunters chased around after Martin Bormann, and the world tried to absorb the indescribable horrors of Belsen, Dachau, Buchenwald, Auschwitz, and the rest."
He turns his attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which resulted in a cinematic mishmash of The Little Drummer Girl, and where the film's Diane Keaton's character was inspired by his radical younger half-sister Charlotte Cornwell. He interviews some regional specialists and then Yasser Arafat invites him to visit at a meeting where he is scheduled to speak but never does and he never gets to interview him. It's 1982, Israel has invaded Lebanon, Arafat and the PLO have been expelled from Lebanon, and their next refuge is Tunisia where Le Carré chases after him for that interview but never gets to talk with the hard-to-pin down Palestinian.
Still looking for background material for The Little Drummer Girl, he returns to Israel. Because of his acquaintance with a high-ranking general he is allowed to visit a top secret prison in the Negev desert to interview Brigitte, a radical young German woman, who with a group of Palestinians tried and failed to shoot down an El Al plane as it neared Nairobi's Kenyatta airport. Possibly taken with her, he describes her as a "tall, beautiful woman in prison tunics ... her long blonde hair combed freely down her back. Even her prison tunic becomes her." He says he wanted to talk about her motives, none of which she cared to share with him save to denounce Germany, some of her family and the US, while mentioning the influence of Jurgen Habermas , Herbert Marcuse and Frantz Fanon.
After Brigitte is returned to her cell, Major Kauffmann, perhaps, he suggests, an assumed name, asks him, "Did you get what you came for," and then adds, "I only speak English with her. German, never. Not one word. When she speaks German, I cannot trust myself. You see, I was in Dachau."
Invited to speak at Moscow State University, the questions from students are about spying, the Cold War, ratting on one's colleagues.(Le Carré mentions early on that when he was with M-I5 they had him spy on left wing Oxford students.) A final question comes from a woman student. "Please, Mr. Le Carré, What do you think of Marx and Lenin, please? Greeted with laughter, he comes back, 'I love them both.' " "It doesn't strike me as my best line, but the audience treats it with prolonged applause and howls of merriment." Later, students ask about the once-banned Spy Who Came in from the Cold, which many tell him they had read. But, he asks, weren't they scared reading forbidden books, and again howls of laughter. (When I visited my WWII surviving family in Russia in the sixties, my two uncles, former Red Army conscripts, stood on their barely standing balcony and loudly cursed Lenin and Stalin's memory. "Are you scared," I asked. My surviving family members just laughed.)
Back in London, he lunches with the exiled Soviet poet Joseph Brodsky, thought of by admirers as "the very soul of Russia." Brodsky, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, once wrote an appreciative essay about Anna Akhmatova, the great Russian poet who Andre Zhdanov, the Leningrad Party boss, once called "a cross between a nun and a whore" but who has left nothing of note for future Russians to remember him by except repression and cruelty.
Obsessed with spies and spying he spends time with Nicholas Elliott, Kim Philby's best friend. Elliott had worked for the British spy service until 1969. About Philby, Le Carré writes: "The scale of Philby's betrayal is barely imaginable to anyone who has not been in the business. In Eastern Europe alone, dozens and perhaps hundreds of British agents were imprisoned, tortured and shot." (There were other British double agents he omits, especially George Blake.) While Le Carré recommends Ben Mcintyre's first-rate account of Philby in A Spy Among Friends, he reminds readers of another famous spy, James Jesse Angleton, the "delusional alcoholic head of the CIA's counter-intelligence arm, who convinced himself that the red web of the KGB had spread itself into every corner of the Western world. While stationed in Washington, Philby had counseled him, over liquid games of chess, introducing him to the art of running double agents."
He travels to Dublin where Spy is being filmed. Hollywood director Martin Ritt, once blacklisted by American Torquemadas in Washington and Hollywood, preferred hiring former blacklisted actors Sam Wanamaker and Claire Bloom. Mention anyone's name from that mad and ugly era and Ritt instantly responds, "Where was he when we needed him?" About Richard Burton, the film's star, Le Carré is generous, portraying him as "a literate, serious artist, a self--educated polymath with appetites and flaws that in one way or another we all share."
But for me the most meaningful part of The Pigeon Tunnel occurred after he joined a group celebrating François Bizot, "the only Westerner to have been taken prisoner by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge and survive" and whose memoir, The Gate, Le Carré drew on in part for The Secret Pilgrim. It was there he met Jean-Paul Kauffmann, a French journalist, who had written The Dark Room at Longwood about Napoleon's years in exile.
Kauffmann had been grabbed in Beirut by Hezbollah gunmen he described as "conceited fools, brutal cynics who used religion and the credulity of young militants to satisfy their appetite for power." In three years of captivity Kauffman had been tortured, feared for his life, felt deserted by all. He wrote Le Carré that he had found a tattered paperback copy of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold in one of his secret prisons. In that book Kauffmann said he "found reasons to hope. The most important is a voice, a presence. Yours. The jubilation of a writer who describes a cruel and colorless world and delights in rendering it so grey and hopeless. You feel it almost physically. Someone is talking to you, you are no longer alone. In my jail, I was no longer abandoned. A man came into my cell with his words and his vision of the world. Someone shared their power with me. I would make it through...."
No more powerful and praiseworthy words about a writer and his book were ever written. - See more at: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/163810#sthash.1xy4WqV1.dpuf
John Le Carré's forceful and absorbing book The Pigeon Tunnel is a quasi-memoir and predecessor to a possible future and fuller version. In a series of recollections he says virtually nothing about his two wives and four sons while leaving his last chapter, the longest in the book, to the people who have colored his life, his conman, thief and twice-convicted father Ronnie, and Olive, his mother, who fled her abusive husband, and abandoned five year old David (Le Carré's real name is David Cornwell), leaving reviewers and critics to analyze forever the psychological price of parental desertion and absence of love.
Devotees of his unique genre of novels, as I am, admire Le Carré for his exemplary spy stories that evoke the lies and myths of our ambiguous, confrontational and bewildering times. Here he writes about men and women, ordinary and Very Important, like Yasser Arafat, Andrei Sakharov and Elena Bonner, Rupert Murdoch, Josef Brodsky, Nicholas Elliott, Le Carré's fellow spy and double agent Kim Philby's best friend, a Major Kauffmann, the woman warden of an Israeli supermax prison for convicted Palestinians and their allies, Alec Guinness, his brilliant if diffident and reticent George Smiley in Tinker, Tailor Soldier Spy who detests "flattery and mistrusts its praise," and Hollywood's Richard Burton, Martin Ritt, Sydney Pollack and Fritz Lang.
"Men and women of power drew me because they were here, and because I wanted to know what had made then tick.... Only afterwards, back in my hotel bedroom, did I fish out my mangled notepad and attempt to make sense of what I had heard or seen."
Murat Kurnaz a Turkish-German raised in Germany was no one special and quite powerless except he was a classic victim of the disastrous American invasion of Iraq. Accused without trial or evidence of being a terrorist, he was shipped to Guantanamo, held for five years, and Le Carré writes,"electrocuted, beaten senseless, waterboarded and hung from a hook" by low-level American thugs acting on orders from American thugs in high places. With German help Kurnaz was eventually proven innocent. Le Carré spent time in Bremen with Kurnaz and describes how he was finally freed with only a pair of jeans, underwear and a T-shirt, guarded on the flight home by ten US soldiers who then offered handcuffs to the Germans who met their plane, "to which," comments Le Carre, with obvious pleasure, "the German officer, to his eternal glory, replied: 'He has committed no crime. Here in Germany he is a free man.'"
For three years Le Carré served in Britain's spy service during the Cold War, mainly in Austria and Germany. "Having made a negligible contribution" he resigned to write full-time after the extraordinary success of his third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Looking back, now well in his eighties, he offers his personal "Rule One of the Cold War," just as true in today's emerging New Cold War: "Nothing, absolutely nothing, is what it it seems. Everyone has a second motive, if not a third."
Spies, he tells us, "spy because they can," whether Putin's Russia or Obama's US, and their spy agencies love seeing themselves mythologized, which is something Le Carré avoids. Neither the British nor the Americans predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall or the collapse of the USSR. But he reserves a special dig at his own country, "But the Brits are a class apart. Forget our dismal showing in the Cold War when the KGB out-witted and out-penetrated us at every turn."
Having served in Bonn and Hamburg, he wrote A Small Town in Germany which criticized the British Embassy and the Bonn interim government, but he admits to having mistakenly predicted the emergence of a far-right post-Nazi Germany. Still, he captures the post-WW II Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union when the US welcomed Nazi war criminals. Hitler's former military intelligence Chief General Reinhard Gehlen was embraced by the CIA, "the pampered favorite of his new best friends, the victorious Americans." And more. "Old comrades from Nazi days form the core of his staff. Controlled [American] amnesia relegates the cost to history." The US housed Gehlen in Martin Bormann's mansion and "gave him his rations, and clean bedding, and his Nazi-era files and card indices, and his old Nazi-era staff, while uncoordinated teams of Nazi hunters chased around after Martin Bormann, and the world tried to absorb the indescribable horrors of Belsen, Dachau, Buchenwald, Auschwitz, and the rest."
He turns his attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which resulted in a cinematic mishmash of The Little Drummer Girl, and where the film's Diane Keaton's character was inspired by his radical younger half-sister Charlotte Cornwell. He interviews some regional specialists and then Yasser Arafat invites him to visit at a meeting where he is scheduled to speak but never does and he never gets to interview him. It's 1982, Israel has invaded Lebanon, Arafat and the PLO have been expelled from Lebanon, and their next refuge is Tunisia where Le Carré chases after him for that interview but never gets to talk with the hard-to-pin down Palestinian.
Still looking for background material for The Little Drummer Girl, he returns to Israel. Because of his acquaintance with a high-ranking general he is allowed to visit a top secret prison in the Negev desert to interview Brigitte, a radical young German woman, who with a group of Palestinians tried and failed to shoot down an El Al plane as it neared Nairobi's Kenyatta airport. Possibly taken with her, he describes her as a "tall, beautiful woman in prison tunics ... her long blonde hair combed freely down her back. Even her prison tunic becomes her." He says he wanted to talk about her motives, none of which she cared to share with him save to denounce Germany, some of her family and the US, while mentioning the influence of Jurgen Habermas , Herbert Marcuse and Frantz Fanon.
After Brigitte is returned to her cell, Major Kauffmann, perhaps, he suggests, an assumed name, asks him, "Did you get what you came for," and then adds, "I only speak English with her. German, never. Not one word. When she speaks German, I cannot trust myself. You see, I was in Dachau."
Invited to speak at Moscow State University, the questions from students are about spying, the Cold War, ratting on one's colleagues.(Le Carré mentions early on that when he was with M-I5 they had him spy on left wing Oxford students.) A final question comes from a woman student. "Please, Mr. Le Carré, What do you think of Marx and Lenin, please? Greeted with laughter, he comes back, 'I love them both.' " "It doesn't strike me as my best line, but the audience treats it with prolonged applause and howls of merriment." Later, students ask about the once-banned Spy Who Came in from the Cold, which many tell him they had read. But, he asks, weren't they scared reading forbidden books, and again howls of laughter. (When I visited my WWII surviving family in Russia in the sixties, my two uncles, former Red Army conscripts, stood on their barely standing balcony and loudly cursed Lenin and Stalin's memory. "Are you scared," I asked. My surviving family members just laughed.)
Back in London, he lunches with the exiled Soviet poet Joseph Brodsky, thought of by admirers as "the very soul of Russia." Brodsky, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, once wrote an appreciative essay about Anna Akhmatova, the great Russian poet who Andre Zhdanov, the Leningrad Party boss, once called "a cross between a nun and a whore" but who has left nothing of note for future Russians to remember him by except repression and cruelty.
Obsessed with spies and spying he spends time with Nicholas Elliott, Kim Philby's best friend. Elliott had worked for the British spy service until 1969. About Philby, Le Carré writes: "The scale of Philby's betrayal is barely imaginable to anyone who has not been in the business. In Eastern Europe alone, dozens and perhaps hundreds of British agents were imprisoned, tortured and shot." (There were other British double agents he omits, especially George Blake.) While Le Carré recommends Ben Mcintyre's first-rate account of Philby in A Spy Among Friends, he reminds readers of another famous spy, James Jesse Angleton, the "delusional alcoholic head of the CIA's counter-intelligence arm, who convinced himself that the red web of the KGB had spread itself into every corner of the Western world. While stationed in Washington, Philby had counseled him, over liquid games of chess, introducing him to the art of running double agents."
He travels to Dublin where Spy is being filmed. Hollywood director Martin Ritt, once blacklisted by American Torquemadas in Washington and Hollywood, preferred hiring former blacklisted actors Sam Wanamaker and Claire Bloom. Mention anyone's name from that mad and ugly era and Ritt instantly responds, "Where was he when we needed him?" About Richard Burton, the film's star, Le Carré is generous, portraying him as "a literate, serious artist, a self--educated polymath with appetites and flaws that in one way or another we all share."
But for me the most meaningful part of The Pigeon Tunnel occurred after he joined a group celebrating François Bizot, "the only Westerner to have been taken prisoner by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge and survive" and whose memoir, The Gate, Le Carré drew on in part for The Secret Pilgrim. It was there he met Jean-Paul Kauffmann, a French journalist, who had written The Dark Room at Longwood about Napoleon's years in exile.
Kauffmann had been grabbed in Beirut by Hezbollah gunmen he described as "conceited fools, brutal cynics who used religion and the credulity of young militants to satisfy their appetite for power." In three years of captivity Kauffman had been tortured, feared for his life, felt deserted by all. He wrote Le Carré that he had found a tattered paperback copy of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold in one of his secret prisons. In that book Kauffmann said he "found reasons to hope. The most important is a voice, a presence. Yours. The jubilation of a writer who describes a cruel and colorless world and delights in rendering it so grey and hopeless. You feel it almost physically. Someone is talking to you, you are no longer alone. In my jail, I was no longer abandoned. A man came into my cell with his words and his vision of the world. Someone shared their power with me. I would make it through...."
No more powerful and praiseworthy words about a writer and his book were ever written. - See more at: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/163810#sthash.1xy4WqV1.dpuf
John Le Carré's forceful and absorbing book The Pigeon Tunnel is a quasi-memoir and predecessor to a possible future and fuller version. In a series of recollections he says virtually nothing about his two wives and four sons while leaving his last chapter, the longest in the book, to the people who have colored his life, his conman, thief and twice-convicted father Ronnie, and Olive, his mother, who fled her abusive husband, and abandoned five year old David (Le Carré's real name is David Cornwell), leaving reviewers and critics to analyze forever the psychological price of parental desertion and absence of love.
Devotees of his unique genre of novels, as I am, admire Le Carré for his exemplary spy stories that evoke the lies and myths of our ambiguous, confrontational and bewildering times. Here he writes about men and women, ordinary and Very Important, like Yasser Arafat, Andrei Sakharov and Elena Bonner, Rupert Murdoch, Josef Brodsky, Nicholas Elliott, Le Carré's fellow spy and double agent Kim Philby's best friend, a Major Kauffmann, the woman warden of an Israeli supermax prison for convicted Palestinians and their allies, Alec Guinness, his brilliant if diffident and reticent George Smiley in Tinker, Tailor Soldier Spy who detests "flattery and mistrusts its praise," and Hollywood's Richard Burton, Martin Ritt, Sydney Pollack and Fritz Lang.
"Men and women of power drew me because they were here, and because I wanted to know what had made then tick.... Only afterwards, back in my hotel bedroom, did I fish out my mangled notepad and attempt to make sense of what I had heard or seen."
Murat Kurnaz a Turkish-German raised in Germany was no one special and quite powerless except he was a classic victim of the disastrous American invasion of Iraq. Accused without trial or evidence of being a terrorist, he was shipped to Guantanamo, held for five years, and Le Carré writes,"electrocuted, beaten senseless, waterboarded and hung from a hook" by low-level American thugs acting on orders from American thugs in high places. Read more ..
The Ivory Tower
| Martin Barillas | August 8th 2016 |
History Network News
On July 20 at 4:15 PM ET, New York Times bestselling historian Edwin Black conducted a global Q-A conference call for readers of his syndicated investigation Nazi Policy and Black Victims—Before, During, and After the Holocaust— from Africa to Berlin to North Carolina. The 10,000-word opus ran in various highly-condensed lengths in about 30 publications, but was published in full by just a handful of long-form platforms such as History Network News, The Times of Israel, and Spero News. The teleconference may be the first time a historian has organized a global conference call to respond to reader questions on a published essay and comments. This reporter and Spero News monitored that session.
By way of background, Black is the author of numerous award-winning books such as IBM and the Holocaust, War Against the Weak, and The Farhud. Earlier this year he began researching in depth the impact of Nazi policy on Black victims before, during and after the Holocaust, spanning a century of genocidal and discriminatory episodes from the 1904-1908 Herero massacres of Southwest Africa to the post-WWI and post-WWII eugenic sterilization and persecution campaigns in the United States. In February 2016 Black delivered globally broadcast lectures on the topic at Michigan State University and University of Michigan, earning a Plaque of Tribute from the Michigan State legislature.
Black then expanded his research to create his syndicated 10,000-word essay. Many editors routinely inserted their own headlines, Black states. The HNN version prompted Iowa State University professor Jeremy Best, who specializes in the history of nineteenth-century German missionaries, to write a lengthy critique asserting Black intended to draw a direct line of causation between the genocide in Southwest Africa and the Holocaust. Black rejected this interpretation and offered to answer any questions from readers in the global conference call held July 20. Read more ..
Inside Books
| The Authors Guild | July 26th 2016 |
Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), a member of the House Judiciary Committee, introduced a bill, entitled the Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement (CASE) Act of 2016, H.R. 5757, that would establish an accessible and efficient forum to resolve “small” copyright claims. The legislation, co-sponsored by Rep. Tom Marino (R-PA), would allow individual authors to protect their intellectual property rights without having to file expensive and complicated federal lawsuits.
The Authors Guild has been actively advocating for a small copyright claims court since 2006, when we testified before the House Judiciary Committee about the need for such a venue, citing an Authors Guild survey that revealed most authors do not have effective access to the courts for many of their copyright infringement claims. As the threats to authors’ copyright incentives have increased since that time—due to the growth of digital book piracy and courts’ reluctance to enforce digital rights—so have our efforts to establish a small claims court. Read more ..
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