K Marx The Spot

Boston Globe Death Watch

This is what a supposedly liberal paper looks like. Jeff Jacoby is the house conservative for the Boston Globe's op-ed page, and when it comes to most things, there is only one way to think, the facts be damned.

I suppose that I should be glad that the house conservative thinks that a two-state solution to the problem of Israel and Palestine is good, at least in theory. But I despair that he nonetheless shows that you don't need to be factual when you're a columnist.

Who favors a two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict?

President Obama does, of course, as he made clear in welcoming Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House on Monday. So does former president George W. Bush, who began advocating Palestinian statehood in 2002 and continued until his final days in office. The Democratic Party's national platform endorses a two-state solution; the Republican platform does, too. The UN Security Council unanimously reaffirmed its support a few days ago, and the European Union is strongly in favor as well....

International consensus or no, the two-state solution is a chimera. Peace will not be achieved by granting sovereignty to the Palestinians, because Palestinian sovereignty has never been the Arabs' goal. Time and time again, a two-state solution has been proposed. Time and time again, the Arabs have turned it down....

Over and over, the pattern has been repeated. Following its stunning victory in the 1967 Six Day War, Israel offered to exchange the land it had won for permanent peace with its neighbors. From their summit in Khartoum came the Arabs' notorious response: "No peace with Israel, no negotiations with Israel, no recognition of Israel."

The problem is that it isn't 1967 anymore. In 1978, Egypt and Israel signed the Camp David Accords. Egypt sought peace with Israel, negotiated with Israel, and even recognized Israel. In 1994, Jordan signed the Washington Declaration. By doing so, that Arab country demonstrated that it was good to seek peace with Israel, negotiate with Israel, and recognize Israel.

It is unfortunate that more Arab countries have not been able to emulate Egypt and Jordan. (One should point out that the previous inhabitant of the White House was not exactly bending over backwards to get either a comprehensive peace accord signed or a more specific one with, say, Syria.)

Writing, in essence, that the Arab countries are immutably opposed to peace is ignoring the glaring fact that Israel is at peace with two of its three immediate neighbors. Alas, doing so would be an opportunity for nuanced thinking about Israel and Palestine, and in the United States, even so-called liberal newspapers would rather have arrant nonsense than nuance.

Labels: Boston Globe, Egypt, Israel, Jeff Jacoby, Jordan, Stupid reporting tricks

Boston Globe Cost-Cutting

Apparently, the Boston Globe, under orders from World Headquarters in New York City, has made some cuts to save money.

One of them is to replace the conservative op-eds normally served there with a op-ed-writing computer program. Here is what the program, Jeff Jacoby 2.0, produced two days ago.

"When you stand for your liberty," Bush told the world's prisoners of conscience in 2005, "we will stand with you." Yet while the brave democrat Ayman Nour rots in an Egyptian jail, Washington continues to send $1.8 billion in aid each year to the brutal regime of Hosni Mubarak.

That $1.8 billion per year satisfies the United States's obligations under the Camp David accords, which mandated contributions to both Israel and Egpyt.

That $1.8 billion payment is the main reason why Israel and Egypt, which fought a war in 1967 and another in 1973, have not fought a war since then.

Why Jacoby would prefer a world in which Israel and Egypt were at best threatening each other with war and were probably fighting one now and again, over a world in which the two countries have stepped well back from a permanent-war posture is a very good question. Why the Globe continues to insult its readers that historic events like the Camp David accords simply do not matter is another good question.

Labels: Boston Globe, Camp David accords, Jeff Jacoby, stupid pundit tricks

Clockwork

How do you know when your local newspaper columnist is a third-rate hack? One way to tell is how quickly the right-wing memes of the moment make it into print. Case in point, Jeff Jacoby of the nominally liberal Boston Globe, with this gem from today. Last week, Bush tried to argue that the Democrats were appeasers, and like clockwork, the little bird emerges from the hole in the clock.

Speaking in Jerusalem on Thursday, President Bush criticized the appeasement-flavored mindset of those who imagine that the world's worst tyrants can be placated with face-to-face chats. "Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals," said Bush, "as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along."

Though Bush didn't mention anyone by name, Democrats decided that his target was Barack Obama. The Obama campaign blasted the president for launching an "unprecedented political attack on foreign soil"—and insisted that if Obama is elected, "we're not going to sit down and engage Iran, unless or until they give up their nuclear weapons program."

Really? Obama's own website describes him as "the only major candidate who supports tough, direct presidential diplomacy with Iran without preconditions." When Obama was asked during a televised debate last year whether he would agree "to meet separately, without precondition . . . with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea," he promptly answered: "I would."

If Obama has had a change of heart, he should say so. Complaining of an "unprecedented political attack" when he hasn't even been named, let alone misrepresented, is peevish and pathetic, not presidential.

The idea that negotiations, even with people we really do not like, are somehow some sort of appeasement is both stupid and dishonest. When Neville Chamberlain agreed in September 1938 to allow Germany to annex part of Czechoslovakia, critics decried the appeasement of German imperial ambitions. And there was much to worry about: Germany was an industrial and military superpower, run by men with ambitions to run the world. And there was no reason to think that Germany was going to start abiding by international niceties.

Iran, on the other hand, is a superpower in no sense of the word. Its military capabilities are severely limited—it is no threat to any of its immediate neighbors. The idea that Iran is going to try to annex any territory, let alone claim it needs lebensraum is absurd—it is Israel that has, bizarrely, decided that German claims on the Sudetenland and some sort of model for statecraft.

And Iran's nuclear weapons program is years behind those of countries that the United States has managed to abide. Why Iran's nascent program is somehow anathema while Israel's is not is a worthy queation. Why Iran's program makes it a potential enemy while Pakistan's program does not keep it from being an ally of the United States makes the United States look like global schmucks. (The fact that Pakistan's nuclear designers were running a global nuclear technology swap meet makes the worry about Iran even more ludicrous.)

Hacks like Jacoby would have us believe that any negotiations with countries like Iran makes us appeasers. History has shown that countries with many reasons to distrist one another have had ample reason to negotiate about those reasons. The SALT talks between the United States and Soviet Union were important steps in limiting how hot the Cold War got. The Camp David accords in 1978 came about because Israel and Egypt—longstanding enemies which had fought two wars in the past dozen years—knew that negotiating was neither appeasement nor suicide. And I will bet that even Jeff Jacoby took some flak from his friends when he negotiated his contract with the supposedly liberal Globe.

Labels: appeasement, Iran, Jeff Jacoby, stupid pundit tricks

Don't Hold Your Breath

Jeff Jacoby has managed to spin out four skeptical articles about global warming in the last year, including a recent one in which he crows about how warm December 2007 was.

Now comes news about January 2008 in Australia.

Australia experienced its hottest January on record this year, with the dry continent heating up as part of the global warming process, the bureau of meteorology said Friday.

Temperatures rose by between 1.0 and 2.0 degrees [Celsius] in most parts of the country, with the national average hitting 29.2 degrees Celsius (84 Fahrenheit) for the summer month, said the bureau's head of climate analysis, David Jones.

"It's a remarkable number certainly. Averaging, as we did across the whole country 1.3 degrees [Celsius] above average is the highest temperature we've seen in our history of records for Australia in January," he told AFP.

Please don't wait for Jacoby to update any of these columns. Merely waiting for Jacoby to write about global warming without cherry-picking evidence, labeling oddball climatologists as mainstream experts, or ignoring the interplay of greenhouse gases and global temperatures, will require possibly infinite patience.

Yes, Jeff Jacoby is a perfect example of why editorial pages need much better opinion writers. One would think that newspapers would want well-thought, reasoned opinions in order to attract thoughtful, reasonable readers. But perhaps slapdash and lazy is still good enough nowadays.

Labels: Boston Globe, Jeff Jacoby, stupid pundit tricks

Clueless Near Gaza

What a sinecure it must be to be a conservative columnist at a so-called liberal newspaper. If you write the most ludicrous things, it is so very difficult to get fired, for the bosses as so afraid of being red-baited, even today.

So it must be in Boston, where the Globe keeps printing the nuanced and illuminating prose of Jeff Jacoby. One of his latest columns laments that the Bush administration is giving up the hard line on the Palestinian Authority that has worked so well for the past seven years.

the president who once insisted that a "Palestinian state will never be created by terror" now insists that a Palestinian state be created regardless of terror. Once the Bush administration championed a "road map" whose first and foremost requirement was that the Palestinians "declare an unequivocal end to violence and terrorism" and shut down "all official . . . incitement against Israel." Now the administration says that Palestinian terrorism and incitement are nothing "to get hung up on."

Whatever happened to the moral clarity that informed the president's worldview in the wake of 9/11? Whatever happened to the conviction that was at the core of the Bush Doctrine: that terrorists must be anathematized and defeated, and the fever-swamps that breed them drained and detoxified?

Bush's support for the creation of a Palestinian state was always misguided—rarely has a society shown itself less suited for sovereigntyRbut at least he made it clear that American support came at a stiff price.

Let us leave aside the notion that somehow Palestine has anything that amounts to a civil society given the astoundingly fragmented territory that the Palestinian authority controls in the West Bank; given the chronic use by Israeli governments of settlements in both Gaza and the West Bank; and given the chokeholds that Israel places on the economies of those states. And let us leave aside the fact that no other country dares place a "security fence" along its border in such a way that it cuts off large chunks of its neighbors' territory.

Jacoby is clearly upset that the Palstinian government is linked to the clear use of terrorism against the current Israeli state. Three words come to mind: King David Hotel. Perhaps Jacoby's editors are daft enough to know that the current state of Israel was founded by men and women who were clearly linked to terrorism against the British. But not everyone is so completely stupid.

Labels: Israel, Jeff Jacoby, Palestine, stupid pundit tricks

(Cold) Snap!

Poor Jeff Jacoby. Even Mother Nature is tired of his wingnut hackery. On Sunday, his column blustered about how cold it was this winter. Interspersed among quotes from the usual contrarian climatologist was this nugget: "Closer to home, 44.5 inches of snow fell in New Hampshire last month, breaking the previous record of 43 inches, set in 1876. And the Canadian government is forecasting the coldest winter in 15 years."

On Tuesday, Boston had a record high temperature of 67 degrees, three degrees higher than the previous mark.

Should we wait for a retraction?

Labels: Jeff Jacoby, stupid pundit tricks