Friday, October 21, 2005

Delay Tactics

Toothy Tom DeLay's laywer, Dick DeGuerin, has made a motion for the judge in DeLay's case to recuse himself because the judge is a Democrat who gave to Moveon.org during the 2004 election. The argument, I guess, is that in a case arising from the 2004 election, a judge who gave to DeLay's political opponents cannot ensure a fair trial for Delay, a Republican. Delay apparently believes that he will get a fairer trial from a Republican judge, a notion which should be insulting to both Democratic and Republican judges. Apparently, DeGuerin thinks that insulting the bench is a good public tactic, or perhaps Delay will claim that the Judge was biased if he's convicted. It sure as heck isn't a great legal tactic.

Our system of justice treats defendant as innocent until proven guilty, as it should. The public, however, has no obligation to do so. They don't vote, and thus they can draw any inferences they want. That's why OJ's acquittal was something of a pyhrric victory and why Martha Stewart's conviction and jail term amounted to the equivalent of a temporary hiatus from running her empire.

Texans will see through this multiple ethics offender's charade of standing in front of the Texas Capitol building and claiming that he is beating prosecuted for beating the Democrats. Texans are (or should be) too smart for this nonsense. Indeed, Dick DeGuerin, who teachs Advanced Criminal Defense at the University of Texas Law School, seems too smart for it too, as this excerpt from a profile done on DeGuerin by MSNBC.com suggests:

"[DeGuerin] has taught at the University of Texas Law School for 12 years. This semester, he is teaching Advanced Criminal Defense, walking students through his cases and how he beat prosecutors.

"Third-year student Polo Gonzalez said DeGuerin told the class that lawyers should keep their clients quiet, so classmates were puzzled after DeLay’s indictment to hear the lawmaker defend himself on talk radio, television and in the newspapers.

"According to Gonzalez, when students asked DeGuerin about it, the lawyer responded: 'I don’t have control of Tom DeLay. He’s his own man.'"

Who will hopefully receive his very own conviction.

We Jews who look at DeLay as one the House's major Israel supporters should see through Toothy Tommy too, and we should drop him like a stone, because there are plenty of House members who manage to support Israel without burning bridges and disgracing themselves.

Opendemocracy on Democracy

Isabel Hilton and Anthony Barnett, two editors at the newsmagazine-like website Opendemocracy have published an article on Opendemocracy about the state of democracy and the role in fostering democracy Opendemocracy sees for itself.

Unfortunately, it reads very much like an endorsement of advocacy journalism as the way to go. I wrote a response which I published in Opendemocracy's forums after Opendemocracy chose other responses. Hilton and Barnett's article embodies the worst of what is often a very interesting website on world politics, globalization, and the internet: an article that mixes confuses the march of democracy with the left-wing politics of the website's editors. Thus, they hold, seemingly as an article of faith, that the anti-war protests against the Iraq War were great exercises in democracy.

Here is my response:
I have no doubt that OpenDemocracy fancies itself as a positive force for democratic change and evolution. The web offers the greatest chance for a truly open press, by which I mean an outlet for all possible views. Point, click, publish.

I offer a response to Hinton and Barnett on two grounds: First, particular political positions are not in and of themselves democratic, and second, that the concept of an independent media empowering the powerless is a concept that is based on a faulty premise and often results in the opposite of what is intended.

Democracy is first and foremost a system of government, and in all nation-state cases, a representative system of government. To the extent that it fosters values which permeate civil society, such as dialogue, openness for dissenting viewpoints, and so on, civil society might be termed democratic.

Unfortunately, what often happens is that the political partisans of civil society substitute ideas for institutions. The web, an institution, is a democratic place which offers a laissez-faire marketplace of ideas. But the ideas on my blog or someone else's are not themselves democracy.

Similarly, the idea that people may be allowed to march in the street for a cause is a democratic idea; in a democratic society, the marketplace of ideas should be open. But that does not make the anti-war movement in and of itself democratic, and it is out of place for Hinton and Barnett to argue that it is any less or more democratic than a protest in support of Iraqi freedom. Both are expressions of freedom in democratic society. Neither is intrinsically democratic. (As far as the promotion of democracy goes, one could argue, and argue easily, that the anti-war protests were fundamentally anti-democracy, because they opposed, and continue to oppose, the democracy in Iraq today.)

Neither are the positions taken by the mostly white anti-globalization movement, which often favors a brand of Eurocentric protectionism that will, if anything, hurt the developing world. The favoring of a policy of using international force in a legal and accountable framework, particularly when that framework is not the result of democratic processes and when such legality is highly politicized, is not a democratic position and does not in and of itself constitute the promotion of democracy.

Expressions of democratic freedom should not be conflated with democracy itself.

Hinton and Barnett loftily intone: "[W]ithin nations and globally, democracy calls for regular people having a say over how they are governed: which means empowering the powerless and checking the powerful. This is a great ambition. The calling of openDemocracy is to give it every support we can with our modest means – with truthful reporting, honest, lively argument and full use of the creativity of the web. For you can't have democracy without an independent media."

Democracy does call for people having a say; that is a truism. But it has nothing to do with empowering the powerless. There are no powerless people in a democracy, because the people have the vote. If the anti-war movement was supposed to check the powerful, it abjectly failed; Tony Blair is still the Prime Minister, George W. Bush is still the President of the United States. Majorities in both countries believe, in opposition to the anti-war movement, that pulling out of Iraq at this juncture would be a mistake and would ill-serve the nascent democracy that is the new Iraq.

The call to empower those that have little power is a lofty aim, but it does not congeal with truthful reporting. Neither does self-congratulatory terms like "independent media", which appears, like calls to empower the powerless, to be little more than a left-wing catchphrase. On the contrary, most of the time it leads to deeply biased political analyses which are short on the truth and long on demonization of whatever the en vogue target is. That's not to say that OpenDemocracy fails at telling the truth most of the time, but it has had its share of pieces which have nothing to do with truth and everything to do with partisan politics, suggesting that OpenDemocracy's "independence" bears a startling resemblence to political viewpoints of its editors. There is the token dissenting viewpoint from time to time, of course, but any good "corporate" media newspaper has that.

True independence involves the transcending of the personal political viewpoints of the editors. The independent media movement would do themselves a great service if they merely committed to doing the job of representing all relevant viewpoints better than their corporate counterparts instead of constantly proclaiming their independence. Perhaps it is time these forces sit down and ask themselves what they are independent from. If it is rancorous partisanship, they have failed. If it is a narrowness, they have failed. If it is "mendacity" (a major charge for anyone to level), they have not fared better than their corporate counterparts, and in their political zeal, may well be worse than they are.

The web offers that great opportunity for important voices with little power to get through. Opendemocracy's job is not necessarily to help them or promote them. It is to keep them to a high standard of truthfulness, accuracy, and relevancy, the values of any good publication.

Thursday, October 20, 2005

Man with Shit-faced Grin

Tom Delay, right-wing nut job, has turned himself in. Only nut jobs smile for mugshots. That and people who know no shame.

Sunday, October 16, 2005

A War Against the War against Prejudice

"The War Against Prejudice" is the title of a new radio documentary that played on BBC4 last week. It examines the Community Security Trust (CST), a British-Jewish defense organization which documents incidences of antisemitism and, through its volunteer services, provides security for Jewish events.

The premise of the program - and it clearly has an agenda - is that the CST is a controversial organization that is hyping the antisemitism problem in Britain. It's a typically annoying project - the documentarian's main sources for criticizing the CST are two Jews, one of whom has long been a critic of the Jewish establishment, another an orthodox rabbi who has a history of downplaying conflicts between Muslims and Jews because of his position as the head of a large interfaith group. The documentarian's investigative work is apparently limited to outing the vandalizing of a synagogue as possibly the work of hoodlums rather than an overt act of antisemitism. He sounds like a idiot bringing this example to the CST and trying to use it to prove a systematic attempt by the CST to inflate the statistics.

There's nothing wrong with opposing views, of course, but do they really establish the CST as a controversial organization, or do they establish that the documentarian has created a controversy where none existed before, and hyped that controversy into a radio documentary? The Observer certainly doesn't think so, and referred to the CST's compilation of antisemitic attacks as "one of the most exhaustive analyses of abuse of Jewish people."

There is one chilling moment during an interview of Melanie Phillips, a columnist for the Daily Mail and the Jewish Chronicle, where Phillips, a demonstrated proponent of Jewish-Muslim interfaith relations, complains of being at a dinner and hearing a fellow diner say "I simply hate the Jews." To which Melanie replied, "What do mean you hate the Jews?" To which her fellow diner replied, "because of what they're doing to the Palestinians."

As Melanie told this to the interviewer, he says, "But she meant the Sharon government."

Did she? Is that for the interviewer to assume? And does this mean that we're simply supposed to let baldly antisemitic statements pass in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and assume they're aimed at the Sharon government. Melanie Phillips has written about the BBC documentary here.

Just imagine the equivalent scenarios:

"I hate the Christians."

"Why?"

"Because of what they're doing to the Iraqis."

"Because of what they're doing to the Kosovar Albanians."

"I hate the Muslims."

"Why?"

"Because of what they're doing to the Jews."

"Because of what they're doing to the Americans."

Would you consider these anti-Christian and anti-Muslim sentiments? I would. It's pretty certain that if someone expresses their hatred of Israel's government by saying they hate the Jews, there's something else there besides hatred of Israel's government, just as I'd say that anyone who presents their hate for the 9/11 terrorists as hate for Muslims should give others pause.

Remember when I wrote a few months ago that repeating the mantra that being anti-Israel was not antisemitic was fast becoming an excuse for people to utter antisemitic statements? I think it was when the Guardian published a letter by a prominent adherent of the theory that the Israelis were behind 9/11, claiming anti-imperialism and anti-racism as a defense that I realized the bounds of manipulating language were nearly limitless. And the other warning was when the anti-Israel-is-not-antisemitic mantra became the answer to a question no one was really asking. In situations where no one had made the claim that anti-Israel equalled antisemitic, someone would invariably invoke the mantra anyway.

Is it possible that the CST hypes the antisemitism problem slightly? Well, yeah. They fight antisemitism, and they fight a media and collection of prominent people who are underplaying the problem. Any defense organization worth its salt needs to remind people that a problem exists, and as any good lawyer knows, eyewitness accounts are not always going to be perfect. What is the CST supposed to do, underplay the problem and reassure people that nothing whatsoever is amiss? The Anti-Defamation League suffers from the same "problem". Does the ADL produce reports where the statistical methods are open to criticism? Sure. So does the RAND corporation. But no one calls them controversial.