http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/a-truly-conspiratorial-mind-1.348503
Haaretz March 11, 2011 A truly conspiratorial mind Even if Assange had not compared Guantanamo to Auschwitz, his latent paranoia would have materialized. By James Kirchick That WikiLeaks impresario Julian Assange would feature as the latest contributor to the recent spate of anti-Semitic celebrity outbursts is hardly a bombshell. Last week, Ian Hislop, editor of London's satirical Private Eye, revealed details of an angry phone call he received from Assange after he published a story about WikiLeaks' collaboration with a notorious Holocaust denier (more on that in a moment ). By daring to criticize WikiLeaks, Assange claimed, Private Eye was "part of a conspiracy led by the Guardian, which included journalist David Leigh, editor Alan Rusbridger and John Kampfner from Index on Censorship [an organization promoting press freedom] - all of whom 'are Jewish.'" (That Assange would accuse the Guardian of leading a Jewish conspiracy shows how little he knows about the British media.) When Hislop pointed out that Rusbridger is not Jewish, Assange "insisted that he was 'sort of Jewish'" by virtue of his being married to a Jewish woman. After Hislop questioned whether Assange's intimations of a Jewish cabal out to destroy him would bear scrutiny, Assange declared, "Forget the Jewish thing." Why quit while you're ahead? To his legions of adoring followers, who see him as something of a saint, Assange's anti-Semitic tirade must have come as a shock. But to anyone following his career with a critical eye - never mind those possessing the most rudimentary understanding of the conspiratorial mind-set to which Assange adheres - this harangue was inevitable. It certainly didn't surprise those of us who heard Assange opine last April at the Oslo Freedom Forum, an annual gathering of human rights activists in the Norwegian capital. There, he claimed that WikiLeaks had been "censored in all the rogues' gallery states, China, Iran and Israel," before making an explicit comparison between Guantanamo Bay and Auschwitz. Citing the moniker which hangs over the entrance of the American detention facility, "Honor Bound to Defend Freedom," Assange waxed incredulously, "The defense of freedom as a value is on the front of Guantanamo Bay! And I say that, as a perversion of the truth, that that slogan is worse than 'work brings freedom.'" This sort of hyperbole is all too common on the anti-war left, but suffice it to say that a man who minimizes the Holocaust by likening a death camp where over a million people were gassed to a military prison which holds some 600 terrorist detainees is not the sort of person who should be offering lectures on the depredations of the American imperium. Assange again revealed his true stripes when he made common cause with the Russian-born, Swedish-based Holocaust denier known by the alias "Israel Shamir." (Forgoing the mealy-mouthed equivocations of many deniers, who deny that they deny the Shoah, Shamir has forthrightly proclaimed that "it's every Muslim and Christian's duty to deny the Holocaust." ) Assange deputized Shamir to handle diplomatic cables concerning Russia and the post-Soviet states, and, according to the new book "WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's Secret War on Secrecy," allowed him to satiate his appetite for documents concerning "the Jews." Last December, in the midst of a violent crackdown on pro-democracy activists in Belarus following a stolen presidential election (which I happened to witness ), Shamir met with regime officials. It was no coincidence when, two days later, dictator Alexander Lukashenko bragged to the international media that he was in possession of classified documents portraying his opposition as Western stooges. Shamir has been nothing if not useful to Assange. When the latter was accused of sexually assaulting two Swedish women, Shamir wrote an article for an obscure, left-wing American website claiming that his associate had been the victim of "castrating feminists and secret services." Assange has attempted to downplay his association with Shamir, claiming that he only had a "brief interaction" with him. But former Assange second-in-command Daniel Domscheit-Berg recently told The Weekly Standard that the WikiLeaks head "sought out" Shamir, describing his work as "compelling." Even if Assange had not compared Guantanamo to Auschwitz, or collaborated with a Holocaust denier, or alleged that a Jewish conspiracy was out to destroy him, chances are that his latent paranoia about Jewish power would have materialized in some other way. And that's because anti-Semitism is the by-product of a conspiratorial mind. It is the only type of bigotry that can be found around the world, even in places with few or no Jews. It has existed for millennia and will never go away because it serves a basic human need: to explain the world, albeit in a way that is both ignorant and often deadly in its consequences. Very rarely does one come across a person who believes the sorts of things that Assange does - that, for instance, a small, shadowy group of power brokers wage war on the third world for profit - who does not also subscribe to the conviction that a cabal of Jews manipulates the global media and financial markets for nefarious ends. Not all conspiracy theorists are anti-Semites. But all anti-Semites are conspiracy theorists. Assange has refuted Hislop's claims, so the least that can be said in his favor is that he feels sufficiently embarrassed by the imputation of anti-Semitism to deny the ugly words which have been attributed to him. It would indeed be easier to "forget the Jewish thing," however, if people like Julian Assange weren't so obsessed with continually stuffing it in our faces. http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/new/blogs/kirchick/Libya_and_the_Lessons_of_86 World Affairs Journal March 10, 2011 Libya and the Lessons of ’86 Three weeks into Libya’s civil war, debate is raging over what, if any, military action the United States should take to help end the 42-year reign of Muammar el-Qaddafi. Much of the opposition to American intervention is based on tactical concerns. Echoing the dissuasive congressional testimony of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who outlined the costs of enforcing a no-fly zone over the country, Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal that intervention “would be a potentially costly distraction for the U.S. military.” In the halls of power, however, the crux of resistance appears to be based on doubts over the very legitimacy of American interference. In a piece that relied heavily on sources around President Obama, the New York Times reported that, “of most concern” to the president “is the perception that the United States would once again be meddling in the Middle East, where it has overturned many a leader, including Saddam Hussein.” There are certainly valid reasons to oppose more robust action against Qaddafi, and any use of arms against his regime should be seriously debated. Yet it’s important to remember that, were the US to engage in a military action against his regime it would not be for the first time. As skeptics question the legitimacy of using force against the Qaddafi regime, it is instructive to recall the history of America’s military encounters with the tyrant of Tripoli. At 1:40 a.m. on April 5, 1986, a bomb went off at La Belle nightclub in West Berlin, a hangout popular with American servicemen. Two US soldiers died in the attack, and 229 people were injured, including 79 Americans. Several hours later, the National Security Agency obtained and translated cables sent from the Libyan Embassy in East Berlin to Tripoli, indicating Libyan responsibility for the attack. With this and other intelligence in hand, President Ronald Reagan decided to bomb Libya. On April 14, 66 American fighter jets struck military and government targets in Tripoli, including one of Qaddafi’s personal residences, in which his adopted baby daughter was killed. Qaddafi, however, managed to escape. “Today, we have done what we had to do,” Reagan said in a nationally-televised public address. “If necessary, we shall do it again.” The La Belle bombing was not an isolated incident. For more than a decade prior to that attack, Qaddafi had been an enthusiastic sponsor of long-since forgotten terrorist organizations, including Italy’s Red Brigades, the German Red Army Faction, the Japanese Red Army, Black September, and the Filipino Moro Islamic Liberation Front. In 1981, American F-14 Tomcats shot down two Libyan fighter jets in the wake of a long-running maritime dispute whereby Qaddafi had claimed the international waters off the Libyan coast to be his own (another aerial dogfight occurred in March 1986, just a month before the West Berlin bombing). In 1984, Libyan agents, using their government’s embassy in London as a hideout, shot and killed British policewoman Yvonne Fletcher. Despite this string of outrages, opposition to the American assault was swift and nearly uniform across the world. The next day, the UN General Assembly overwhelmingly voted to condemn the assault, proclaiming that it “constitutes a violation of the Charter of the United Nations and of international law.” In hindsight, however, it’s clear deny that the fault with the 1986 attack was that it didn’t go far enough: Qaddafi continued supporting terrorism, most significantly the 1988 Lockerbie bombing that killed 270 people. Today, many of the countries that denounced the United States are clamoring for international action to stop Qaddafi’s continuing slaughter of his own people. Indeed, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, hardly a body known for its humanitarian sympathies, has backed calls for the enforcement of a no-fly zone. The UK and France, perhaps shamed by their military and financial dealings with the regimes in Libya and Tunisia, respectively, have taken the lead in drafting a no-fly zone resolution at the United Nations. Senator John Kerry has suggested “cratering” Libyan airfields so as to prevent jet fighters from being able to take off. What is being asked of the United States today — the multilateral enforcement of a no-fly zone, which, according to James Thomas and Zachary Cooper of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, would not require deploying a single allied plane over Libyan airspace — is less taxing than what it undertook in 1986, i.e., the unilateral bombing of military barracks and Qaddafi’s house. Then, the United States took more drastic action against Qaddafi over a significantly lesser crime, and with much less international support, than what it is being called to do now. Not to minimize the death of two American servicemen, but can anyone seriously argue that what moved President Reagan to bomb Tripoli in 1986 — a move he undertook with widespread domestic support — was more significant than the crimes Qaddafi is committing today? “We Americans are slow to anger,” Reagan said in his April 14, 1986 address to the nation. “We always seek peaceful avenues before resorting to the use of force, and we did. We tried quiet diplomacy, public condemnation, economic sanctions, and demonstrations of military force, and none succeeded.” Twenty-five years later, as diplomacy, public condemnation, sanctions, and threats of military force once again fail to persuade Qaddafi to lay down his arms, President Obama could do worse than heed the actions of his predecessor. -- Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups. 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