Today’s Notable & Quotable in the Wall Street Journal is by Brendan O’Neill, writing February 16 in the Australian on the striking absence of pro-Palestine placards among the protesters in Tahrir Square in Egypt – compared with the sea of placards reading “Free Palestine” and “End the Israeli occupation” in a pro-Egypt demonstration in London at the same time:

The speakers had trouble getting the audience excited about events in Egypt. … Yet every mention of the word Palestine induced a kind of Pavlovian excitability among the attendees. They cheered when the P-word was uttered, chanting: “Free, free Palestine!”

This reveals something important about the Palestine issue. … [It] has become less important for Arabs and of the utmost symbolic importance for Western radicals at exactly the same time.

The observation reminds me of the broader one liberal British journalist Nick Cohen made in What’s Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way, his look at the massive failure of the left to support freedom in Iraq and the wider Arab world and its blaming the resurgence of fascism and anti-Semitism in the Middle East on Israel:

[The liberal-left] had to pretend that from the 1790s until the 1940s, fascistic ideas were deranged conspiracy theories … [used] to justify tyranny, censorship, the suppression of the rights of women and genocide. As soon as the Second World War ended and the state of Israel was established, however, the madness vanished, and fascistic ideas became rational responses to a colonial venture by refugees from Europe.

As a result of this rationalization of the irrational, a dirty little war in a patch of land smaller than Wales acquired huge explanatory power. Palestine became the justification for everything that was going wrong in the Middle East. …

Cohen went a crucial step further, accusing the left of appeasing totalitarian governments it was unwilling to confront, pretending Israel was the worst abuser of human rights in the world. He argued that history would judge the left harshly: Read More

Iraqi Kurdistan was once a shining example of democracy’s potential in Iraq, but today it is freedom’s bleeding ulcer. While ordinary Iraqis have seen their freedoms increase since Saddam Hussein’s fall, the trajectory is the reverse in Iraqi Kurdistan, where the ruling families have grown more abusive with time.

Until last week, the Kurds could still claim to be the safest, most secure region. No longer: last Thursday, gunmen attached to regional president Masud Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) opened fire on demonstrators in Sulaimani celebrating the ouster of dictators in Egypt and Tunisia. Barzani’s reaction had precedent in Egypt: just as Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak burned down the headquarters of opposition leader Ayman Nour, so too did Barzani then proceed to seize and set fire to offices of the opposition Goran Party. And just as Egyptian security targeted the press, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani’s Brownshirts attacked an independent television station to prevent television coverage of the atrocities. It was a stupid strategy;  demonstrations continue, and with the deaths of protesters, have spread.

The senselessness Kurdish crackdown not only puts to rest the notion that Iraqi Kurdistan is a democracy but also should cause introspection about why so many Americans assume Barzani and Talabani are U.S. allies. Read More

The British writer Ian McEwan recently received the Jerusalem Prize from the State of Israel. He flew to Israel and chose to express his appreciation by using his one-day bully pulpit to condemn Israeli settlements and the Gaza blockade that attempts to keep Hamas barbarians from amassing sufficient arms to destroy Israel.

McEwan’s act of appalling bad manners was his no doubt self-congratulatory way of responding to demands from his progressive arty pals back in the UK, who’ve  adopted hostility to the Jewish state as their newest pet cause and urged him to boycott the ceremony. Israel, one presumes, is expected to feel grateful to Mr. McEwan for deigning to show up.

Europeans beset by growing Muslim populations intent upon substituting Sharia for extant democratic systems have responded by identifying with the aggressor and have developed an obsession with the so-called settler issue. In one notable instance, the musician Roger Waters, formerly of Pink Floyd, traveled to the West Bank and attempted to conflate that band’s dirge “The Wall” with antipathy toward Israel’s security barrier. Missing from Waters’s analysis was the fact that construction of that wall has altered the rate of Jewish deaths from suicide bombings from more than 1,000 a year to zero.

Like most neurotic obsessions, preoccupation with “settlers” would benefit from some stepping back and aiming for context. What we’re really talking about is the right of Jews to live wherever they please. The concept of Judenfrei — moving Jews out of specific areas of Europe — was a bulwark of Nazi policy that rapidly devolved to the even more viciously racist notion of Judenrein, cleansing Jews from all of Europe. We all know where that led. One would think that Europeans whose overall record of saving Jews in the Holocaust is, to be charitable, less than heroic would shudder at reintroducing such a repellent principle into contemporary political thought. One would be wrong. Six decades after the Holocaust, here we go again.

A so-called progressive individual, when asked if Jews have a right to live in London, Paris, or Madrid, would most likely answer, “Of course.”  (Even if in his so-called progressive but fundamentally anti-Semitic heart he wished those people would congregate in Brooklyn or simply disappear.) Ditto New York, Los Angeles, Chicago. Yeah, even Berkeley.

But when it comes to Jerusalem, a city that only the Jews have regarded as a capital and whose sacred Jewish sites Jordanian occupiers turned into a monumental latrine before their liberation in 1967, the rules somehow change. If self-determination is the alleged motive for all those voices raised shrilly, where are the demands that Jews be allowed to own property and reside in Kuwait, Dubai, Amman, and Damascus?

Ian McEwan makes his living telling stories. The story he chose to narrate in Jerusalem was ill-conceived, shallow, and predictably facile. Bit of a potboiler, that.

Yesterday, John Steele Gordon noted that the protests in the Middle East and in Madison all carry great significance, but beyond that there are few similarities between them.

But that hasn’t stopped activists and a very sympathetic media from trying to make cloddish comparisons between the Wisconsin rallies and the Egyptian uprising. From the beginning of the demonstrations, union supporters have labeled Gov. Scott Walker a “mini-Mubarak” and carried signs with Walker’s image next to a photo of the ousted Egyptian dictator. A Washington Post column even described him as “Wisconsin’s pharaoh.”

These analogies have increased over the past few days after one particularly enterprising pizza restaurant in Madison began accepting donations from out-of-state individuals who want to send pizza pies to the protesters. According to the restaurant, donations have come from all over the world, including Egypt. And that piece of information was all the media needed to hear in order to start crowing about the “solidarity” between the Egyptians and the union activists in Wisconsin.

“In an act of intercontinental solidarity, an Egyptian has ordered a pizza for Wisconsin protesters,” reported Slate.

“How do you go about showing your solidarity with protesters on the other side of the world?” asked Time magazine. “Making sure they are well fueled, of course.

According to Politico, a local pizza joint, Ian’s on State Street, has been inundated with phone calls from all over the country and around the world — including one caller from been-there, done-that Cairo — who are concerned with getting food to the union supporters who have gathered at the Capitol. “Someone in Egypt has been paying attention to what’s happening in Madison and wanted to send a message of solidarity from across the globe — so they ordered a pizza.”

Of course, it’s entirely ridiculous to compare the protesters in Cairo — many of whom put their physical safety by attending the demonstrations – with the disgruntled Wisconsin union workers taking the day off from cushy government jobs to carry signs around the state capitol. These people don’t even have to worry about losing their jobs for attending the protest, let along their lives. Not to mention that they’re getting free pizza out of the deal.

What we’re seeing on display in Madison, Wisconsin, is a powerful faction (public-sector unions) unhappy with the chief executive of the state (Scott Walker), who was elected by a comfortable margin only three months ago. Walker was elected in large part on his promise to tame the power of unions. In acting on his commitments, we’re seeing massive protests. One might think such a thing unwise, but it’s not unexpected.

What is unusual is that 14 Democratic state senators have fled Wisconsin in order to prevent Governor Walker’s policy from being voted into law — and they are the ones now taking aim at Walker for acting in a way that is contrary to American political principles.

Mark Miller, one of Democrats who fled the state, said, “The problem is, is that the governor has to agree, and the governor has not done anything except insist that it has to be his way — all or nothing.” Miller went on to say: “He should have negotiated with the workers and he refused to do that. He tried to impose his will. And he unilaterally is stripping away workers’ rights. The governor needs to recognize that this is a democracy, and in a democracy you negotiate.”

In response, Ed Morrissey makes this Madisonian point: “If Wisconsin was a democracy, then every issue would be settled by a state-wide vote, and the legislature wouldn’t exist at all. Voters elect representatives to form a legislature to debate and then decide these issues, usually based on the professed agendas of the candidates in the campaign season.”

Beyond that, though, you have legislators who are themselves throwing sand in the gears of the machinery of government. And what an innovative way they have settled on. Having lost an election, having lost the governorship, and having lost control of the state Senate, Democratic legislators are literally fleeing Wisconsin in order to avoid a vote they know they cannot win. They are thwarting the public will in a way that is making the citizens of Wisconsin enraged and that is turning their state party into a laughingstock. This strategy seems to be spreading to other states, which is an amazingly self-destructive political strategy.

Governor Walker seems serene through what James Madison called “spectacles of turbulence and contention.” Walker should be. After all, he is showing himself to be a “proper guardian of the public weal.”

The Washington Post’s Anne Applebaum has a wonderfully insightful op-ed in today’s paper in which she rightly points out that the proper analogy to the series of revolts breaking out across the Arab world is in the events of 1848, not 1989. The fall of the Berlin Wall was a historic moment in which tyrannies fell, but today’s events have much more of the feel of the great revolts that ended Europe’s age of reaction 163 years ago. Moreover, as Applebaum notes, the outcome of the 1989 demonstrations that led to the collapse of the Soviet Empire was very different from the probable outcomes of the various struggles in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, and Libya, with perhaps other countries to follow.

The truth about 1848 is that Europe’s year of revolution ended unhappily for the advocates of democracy. Hapsburg Austria and Tsarist Russia joined forces to brutally crush Hungary’s independence movement. Revolutions against monarchies around the Continent met with defeat everywhere. Another royal dictator, by the name of Napoleon III, soon replaced even France’s Second Republic.

But, as Applebaum correctly asserts, the defeats of 1848 were not permanent. The ferment that characterized the year of revolt would eventually bear fruit in a Europe that would ultimately reject the status quo of authoritarian monarchism. It is in this sense that we can hope that the current wave of revolution in the Middle East will be a good thing in the long run. As Applebaum writes:

It is equally true that by 2012, some or even all of these revolutions might be seen to have failed. Dictatorships might be reimposed, democracy won’t work, ethnic conflict will turn into ethnic violence. As in 1848, a change of political system might take a very long time, and it might not come about through popular revolution at all. Negotiation, as I wrote a few weeks ago, is generally a better and safer way to hand over power. Some of the region’s dictators might eventually figure that out. Read More

For those who take it as their mission to expose every foolish thing said on Glenn Beck’s radio or TV program, the talk show host is a gift that keeps on giving. Today’s bon mot from the famous talker is one in which he takes a shot at the 400 rabbis who signed an ad organized by the Jewish Funds for Justice group denouncing him and FOX News’s Roger Ailes. We have previously written about the hypocrisy of this ad, which rightly chided Beck for his inappropriate language about the Holocaust but failed to mention the many examples of leftist hate speech that used the same wrongful analogies. But, of course, Beck couldn’t leave it at that.

So today, while discussing the ad’s signers, he went on to tell his listeners that rabbis from the Reform movement of Judaism are “generally political in nature. It’s almost like Islam, radicalized Islam in a way, to where it is just — radicalized Islam is less about religion than it is about politics. When you look at the Reform Judaism, it is more about politics.”

Beck then goes on to note that this analogy is not about “terror,” but a rule of thumb about analogies is that if you have to issue a disclaimer in the same breath, it’s probably not a smart analogy to start with. Read More

As the dreadful human toll mounts in Libya, geopolitical context is beginning to obtrude on the Arab world’s revolt. The suggestions for military measures against the Qaddafi regime started yesterday with a member of Libya’s own UN mission recommending a no-fly zone. This first serious suggestion for a military response to the Arab unrest serves to highlight the fact that there are already some military responses being mounted. Nothing being done today will save imperiled Libyans: Qaddafi is slaughtering them right now, and only immediate intervention with summary force would have a hope of protecting them. But the nations of the region are recognizing military necessity (and, in one case, military opportunity) in the domestic instability of the Arab states.

The EU on Sunday inaugurated a new border-security operation, “Hermes 2011,” to deal with the influx of refugees from Tunisia into Italy’s southern islands. The Italians are coordinating the operation, to which other nations — France, Spain, the Netherlands — will contribute patrol aircraft and ships. Fearing new eruptions from Libya, Italy has put its air force on alert and moved helicopters to its southern airfields. Turkey has dispatched a naval transport ship and two commercial ferries to Libya, along with a warship escort, to retrieve Turkish nationals.

Meanwhile, the Suez Canal authorities finally affirmed on Tuesday that Iran’s warships have finished their canal transit, which raises the curtain on Act Two of this sometimes farcical but nevertheless significant drama. Iran’s tactical use of the warships will depend very much on circumstance; I don’t expect the more dire predictions about them to pan out. One small frigate is overmatched by virtually any navy in the Mediterranean. Certainly the Iranians would lose their warship if they provoked a shooting match with Israel. Read More

Very confusing numbers about what’s going on in Wisconsin. Rasmussen Reports says 48 percent of likely voters nationwide are siding with Gov. Scott Walker, while 38 percent are supporting the unions. Two other polls didn’t try to screen for voters at all, and have very different results. According to We Ask America, an automated polling outfit, 2,400 Wisconsin residents disapprove of Walker’s actions by a margin of 52-43 (though they disapproved of legislators’ fleeing the state 57-39). And today Gallup reports that in a poll of 1,000 adults, 61 percent said they would oppose “a law in your state taking away some collective bargaining rights of most public unions, including the state teachers union.”

This is fascinating, though not for the reasons you might think upon first glance. At this moment, 11.9 percent of the workforce in the United States is unionized. In the private sector, the number is even more startling: 6.9 percent. Indeed, the percentage of Americans who have ever been in a union has declined so precipitously in the past 30 years that it probably numbers no more than 20 percent overall. Which raises the question: How many people whom Gallup polled actually know what is meant, in public-policy terms, by the words “collective bargaining rights”?