Finally.....a glimmer of sanity coming out of Israel

Ex-Security Chief in Israel Questions Current Leadership

By JODI RUDOREN
Published: April 28, 2012
New York Times

JERUSALEM — The recently retired chief of Israel’s internal security agency said on Friday night that he had “no faith” in the ability of the current leadership to handle the Iranian nuclear threat, ratcheting up the criticism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak from the defense and intelligence communities.

"I don’t believe in a leadership that makes decisions based on messianic feelings,” said Yuval Diskin, who stepped down last May after six years running the Shin Bet, Israel’s version of the F.B.I. “I have observed them from up close,” Mr. Diskin said. “I fear very much that these are not the people I’d want at the wheel.”

Echoing Meir Dagan, the former head of the Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, Mr. Diskin also said that the government was “misleading the public” about the likely effectiveness of an aerial strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

“A lot of experts have long been saying that one of the results of an Israeli attack on Iran could be a dramatic acceleration of the Iranian nuclear program,” Mr. Diskin said at a community forum in Kfar Saba, a central Israeli city. “What the Iranians prefer to do today slowly and quietly, they would have the legitimacy to do quickly and in a much shorter time.”

The comments followed interviews published last week in which the current chief of the Israeli Defense Force, Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz, appeared to be taking a more moderate approach on Iran than Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Barak, although aides to all three men later insisted that they were on the same page.

Mr. Diskin has been widely thought to share the views of Mr. Dagan — who has been harshly attacking the government’s approach in speeches and interviews for nearly a year — but this is the first time he has spoken about it publicly. Shin Bet does not deal with foreign affairs, and Mr. Diskin was careful to say that he was not saying that attacking Iran “is not a legitimate decision,” but was instead questioning the leaders’ abilities and their motives for their hawkish policies. Still, his biting statements, coming so soon after Mr. Gantz’s remarks, suggest that Mr. Netanyahu might be facing more of a challenge of his policy on Iran than before.

Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Barak have made clear for months that they believe urgent action is needed to stop Iran from building a bomb, and that they consider themselves the main decision makers on whether to stage a pre-emptive strike on Iran.

Ronen Bergman, an Israeli analyst and author of the 2008 book “The Secret War With Iran,” said in an interview that Mr. Diskin’s comments were significant because he left the government in good standing with Mr. Netanyahu — unlike Mr. Dagan, who was forced out — and because he was widely respected “for being professional and honest and completely disconnected from politics.”

Still, Mr. Bergman noted the growing chorus of criticisms: “They have an impact, but I wouldn’t say that this is a crucial factor in the decision-making process. The opinion of the current chief of Shin Bet and the chief of Mossad and the current chief of the military are much more critical when it comes to whether to strike Iran or not.”

Meir Javedanfar, an Iranian-Israeli who runs the blog Middle East Analyst, said Mr. Diskin, in his comments, offered an insider’s view of the motivations and decision-making processes of the nation’s leadership. “Israel’s citizens would be forgiven for thinking that when it comes to addressing the Iranian nuclear threat, Netanyahu and Barak rely more on their own self-created image as the messiahs,” Mr. Javedanfar wrote in an e-mail, “than mounting evidence and warnings that such an attack could be counterproductive.”

“The public nature of such warnings by former intelligence officials puts pressure on Netanyahu and Barak,” he added, “because if they attack Iran and it backfires, such warnings could be used against both of them in postwar commissions.”

The prime minister’s office was expected to respond to the comments on Saturday night. A vice prime minister, Silvan Shalom, hinted in an interview with Israel Radio that Mr. Diskin might have political motives, and promised that any decision on attacking Iran would not be made by Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Barak alone, but in a wider forum.

Indeed, Mr. Diskin did not limit his critique to the policy on Iran. He said Israel had in recent years become “more and more racist,” and, invoking the 1995 assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, said there were many extremist Jews today who “would be willing to take up arms against their Jewish brothers.”



Isabel Kershner contributed reporting.

Sho Nuf'! Sho Nuf'!

Good Food for your thoughts~

N Y Times Book Review:

Race, the Remix ‘The Grey Album,’

 by Kevin Young

By DAVID SHIELDS

Published: April 20, 2012

From the first slave ship arriving in harbor, America stole and judged blacks. Black life that didn’t fit into white logic was commercially exploited or lynched. Slave bodies lied to their masters. Denied dancing and musical instruments, slaves expressed a hidden tradition of musicality and poetics by tongue and signal. The trickster was born. In his new work of literary and cultural criticism, “The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness,” the accomplished poet Kevin Young unearths, orchestrates, improvises and imagines lies and more lies — in short, American history.

Kevin Young

THE GREY ALBUM

On the Blackness of Blackness

By Kevin Young

483 pp. Graywolf Press. Paper, $25.

Young places the trickster near the axis of black American culture. “A tradition of counterfeit and fiction, of storying,” he writes, “has just as much place in African-­American letters as our rituals of church or prayer or music.” Separated from their families, blacks created a communal story from fragments. Condescended to, suppressed, effaced, ripped off and covered, black artists have resorted throughout American history to subversive styles of artistic expression largely revolving around the “trickster” as mask and music. How much of Young the Author is in the trickster tradition? He’s escaping even as he’s explaining. “The desire to escape America is as American as you can get,” a friend warns him.

One rides Young’s groove from slavery to hip-hop, a line that looks like this: the slave poet Phillis Wheatley, whose authorship had to be proved by white “experts” before her book could be published; another slave poet, George ­Moses Horton, who sold his poetry in thwarted attempts to buy his own freedom; the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, in whom Young sees “modernism’s not-so-modest beginnings”; Zora Neale Hurston, who “collected ‘lies’ as a folklorist but lied just to get by”; Robert Johnson, evoked via W. E. B. Du Bois’s description of “two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder”; Louis Armstrong (“entertainer is no less a mask than cool is for those who came later”); bebop, which Young sees as the early flowering of a “postmodern black aesthetic”; the obscured Beat poet Bob Kaufman (“anonymity is not indeterminacy, but rather, namelessness as a state of grace, an acceptance of being part of the unnameable universe”); Otis Redding, who reverse-engineered the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction,” laying bare its black influences; Jimi Hendrix, who commandeered the national anthem, turning it into a “benediction”; Afrika Bambaataa, sampler of Kraftwerk, who “renamed himself in order to craft something interplanetary, his earlier identity erased so effectively few if any know it”; Lauryn Hill, whose “Mis­education” album represents “the possibilities of a post-soul aesthetic”; Jay-Z (“the maker as mogul, translating the street game to the corporate one — and making this somehow the stuff of realness”); N.W.A., following in the Jamaican and African-American tradition of “bragging and hyperbole as a form of critique”; Danger Mouse, the D.J. who merged the vocals from Jay-Z’s “Black Album” with the unlicensed beats from the Beatles’ “White Album” to create his own illicit “Grey Album,” which gives Young’s book its name.

What does the trickster-curator want? For one thing, to overthrow the literary executor of black writing. To Young, white critics who read slave narratives “simply in terms of authenticity do two quite damaging things: first, they read (white) skepticism back into the slave’s writing and thus limit the ‘freedom’ of black authorship; second, they ignore or downplay the African-American trickster tradition, itself related to black rhetorical strategies like lying.” It is not just creation per se but specifically creation of the counterfeit that “provides a means of black acquisition of authority (even as so-called authenticity is called into question).”

The figure in the carpet is “the notion of lying — the artful dodge, faking it till you make it — the forging of black lives and selves in all their forms.” This lying can manifest in the “storying” of Hurston, “the ‘lies’ black folks tell to amuse themselves and to explain their origins,” or in “counterfeiting,” a term Young uses to “discuss ways in which black writers create their own authority in order to craft their own, alternative system of literary currency and value, so to speak, functioning both within and without the dominant, supposed gold-standard system of American culture. . . . For the black author, and even the ex-slave narrator, creativity has often lain with the lie — forging an identity, ‘making’ one, but ‘lying’ about one too.” Young is “interested in the ways in which black folks use fiction in its various forms to free themselves from the bounds of fact.”

The problem is, one reads the scholarship and misses the party. A potentially incendiary throw-down gets lost in a redundancy of too-long, too-close readings. Black life has taught America how revolutionary pleasure is against the capitalism of the Pilgrim, the plantation and plagiarism. “Pleasure is a revolutionary act in the face of pain,” Young argues. “Hip-hop at its zenith insists on thinking and dancing simultaneously. In fact, it sees them as synonymous.” The historical remix is in session. Do you hear the thrumming bass line?

A core conviction of the book is “the centrality of black people to the American experience, to the dream of America.” Young understands that language is a weapon and that black self-defense necessitates a radical reimagining of the English language. “We are, after all, not immigrants but imports to this experiment America, lending not just everyday artifice to our experience in English but true violence” — dismembering and reassembling the master narrative.

To complete the remix, Young needs to remake modernism and postmodernism. He nominates the blues as a fount of modernist artistic impulses, and he promotes James Weldon Johnson’s “Book of American Negro Poetry” as a gathering that “should be thought of as one of the heights of modernism.” Young wonders if the “it” in Ezra Pound’s dictum “Make it new” might refer not to “tradition but the Negro.” “White folks projected back onto blacks the kind of pastiche or ‘blank copy’ that Fredric Jameson saw as one of the fundamental qualities of postmodernism — a full century before the idea took hold. In this, those of us in the postmodern era may glimpse a fascinating, racialized aspect of the postmodern — its possible black origins.” Young wants what everybody else wants. He wants the zeitgeist (the stealth-made man’s moment is now). He wants it all.

The party is on, but it’s deadly serious. The curatorial trickster claims American language as black music. “At our peril we ignore the fact that black vernacular, like the blues, both has a form and performs. . . . For just as there would be no American music without black folks, there would be very little of our American language.” The mask drops; Young exercises power. “It is black culture that is the dominant culture. English broken here.” This Young is a musician with muscle.

The story could be called “How Blacks Invented America.” In the end, the trickster’s desire isn’t to replace white America (which, after all, the trickster’s black America helped construct), but instead to remix the destroyed dream of integration as panacea and say, as Dr. King said, “I must confess that I am not afraid of the word ‘tension.’ ” Did I dream this book or did it just kill me and the dream? America is built on the tension between black and white. “The Grey Album” is angular scholarship for whites, a storying songbook for blacks. Who is the liar, who the thief, who is telling whose history, and who is keeping score? Young forces us to contemplate who controls the music.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Photo: By Todd Martens


lovu,
Kentke
 
 
 

Nature at It's Best

Need a lift for your Heart?

Hit the link, start the video and feel good about being a human being.

lovu,

Kentke

This happened on a beach in Brazil~

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