We learned that when it comes to pre-emptively surrendering ancient liberties to the exponents of Sharia, Canadians have us Yanks dominated (we don't pre-emptively surrender our liberties to Muslim theocrats; we pre-emptively surrender our liberties because of Muslim theocrats). We learned that marginally-classier-than-Apollo Braun Jewish opponents of Barack Obama will stoop to anything, including doctoring his advisors' language, to insinuate that he is an antisemite. We learned that Leon Wieseltier's pre-eminent place in the public intellectual world is a symptom of profound cultural rot. And we learned that Obama is more in tune with Jewish culture than anybody who's gotten as close as he has to the presidency — and that doesn't necessarily augur well if he's elected.

In other words, it's been a blast writing for you, editing for you, and occasionally duking it out in comments threads. And now it's time for me to move on. I'm so tired of America, as Rufus Wainwright would say, and so I'm leaving — first to go to Israel, from which I'll come back, and then to move to England, where I'll be living for the foreseeable future. (More details here and in my revamped bio.) In the meantime, I'm going to do a month-or-two rotation blogging for The Art of the Possible, a brilliant entrepreneurial left-libertarian group blog I recommend all you hipsters check out soon, so that you can claim you were into it way before it sold out (when it was still cool). And also, there are a couple of projects that have been sitting on my back burner for too long, that I need either to finish or ditch before setting sail.

If there's one message I want to leave you with, it's that all opposition to Barack Obama is racist this small corner of the web is home to some of the most vibrant, fresh ideas going on anywhere (and some of the best original artwork!), so keep reading. And also, we really are enough of a shtetl that if you feel like dropping me a line, please do. That goes for everyone, including our own Castor-Pollux duo Naftali and Ismail, but not including the guy who keeps posting those several thousand word neo-Nazi tracts or that asshole "Kid Blast," who is anything but. You know where the messaging tab is (top right quadrant of the home page).

When Izzy left, she posted pictures of her cats. I have no pets; however, if I did, I would have a German shepherd dog named Ulli, pictured conceptually above. Adieu, adieu.

The post So Long, Jewcy appeared first on Jewcy.

Goldberg's check and mate many times over is a tranche of Ahmaghinejad quotes, from the notorious "wipe off the map" comment of October 2005, to a statement just this month, all of which are variously loathsome vamps on the old "Israel must cease to exist" standard. I've noted here at Jewcy before that Ahmaghinejad's "wipe off the map" remark of October 2005 is a mistranslation; my objections to repeating it are 1) it offends me as a student of Persian and 2) given the enormous supply of sickening comments from Ahmaghinejad re: Israel, of which Goldberg usefully provides a small but still representative sample, there isn't even a pragmatic rationale for persisting in mistranslating the remark. (We have an idea of what Ahmaghinejad says about Israel publicly; imagine what he says in private.) I'd hope Goldberg would credit the idea that, however merited objections to Walt and Mearsheimer are, fealty to the correct use and translation of Persian doesn't entail being an apologist for Ahmaghinejad.

The question, of course, is how best to interpret the comments. It's not a straightforward task, since Ahmaghinejad's speeches are littered with quotes from the Ayatollah Khomeini and from medieval Persian poets that involve idioms that don't correspond to anything in English, so figuring out what he meant involves either learning the language, or doing some careful inductive guesswork and hoping for the best.

Although I haven't been able to track down the originals of all the quotes Goldberg reproduces (there might be links on the Ahmadine-blog, in case somebody is willing to pore through the archives), I've looked at a few, and they have a number of recurrent features. Ahmaghinejad rarely if ever refers to Israel by name, but rather as ???? ???????? (rezhim-e eshghalgar), the 'occupying regime', of which the first word is an obvious western import that only has a narrow, technical meaning referring to a particular governmental apparatus (generally, as in English, in pejorative tones). By contrast, the Persian words for 'country' and 'nation' in a broader, non-technical sense are ???? (keshvar) and ??? (mellat), respectively. Moreover, the stem of the key verbs in Ahmaghinejad's proclamations of Israel's doom (at least, in the ones I've looked at) is always ??? (shodan) rather than ???? (kardan). This is a major, not a minor semantic difference: the latter is used in active and indicative constructions; the former is used in passive and subjunctive constructions. Which means that, on strict semantics, Ahmaghinejad has been expressing either a belief that Israel will cease to exist or a desire that it will (or both), rather than stating a policy objective.

Now, none of this suggests for a moment that the narrow semantic values of Ahmaghinejad's declarations of the impending destruction of the state of Israel completely exhaust the messages he was communicating (that's the first lesson of practical linguistics). And the upshot of the fact that Ahmaghinejad, strictly speaking, fastened his attacks on the Israeli "regime" rather than Israel or the Israelis, and that he never explicitly signed on to the project of bringing about the destruction of that "regime," isn't that Ahmaghinejad was really talking about flowers and candy and has gotten a rough break in the Western press. On the contrary, it simply goes to show that a politician is a politician no matter where he's from, and what distinguishes even deranged racist ignoramus politicians from deranged racist ignoramus non-politicians is that the former will speak calculatingly, as the politicians that they are. So even though Ahmaghinejad isn't literally pledging the Iranian state to a policy of genocide, he is personally endorsing an event — the destruction of the Israeli government — that would very likely entail the slaying of large numbers of Israelis.

Furthermore, Walt's term 'incitement' is (unintentionally) spot-on. When a leader "incites violence," he or she seldom does so by literally telling those under his or her influence to go out and kill, injure or maim anyone (we would call that "ordering attacks," not "incitement to violence"). Rather, incitement standardly consists in pushing just the right buttons to spur violence while maintaining a veneer of deniability. And that, plainly, is part of what Ahmaghinejad has been communicating, i.e.: "While I, the terribly important president of this holy state don't have the time or inclination to get my hands dirty, it sure is about time somebody did something to remove the regime occupying Qods from the pages of time and history."

There's just no other plausible way of interpreting the comments while being simultaneously faithful to both semantics and to the pragmatic implications that enable us as human beings, rather than artificial intelligence, to communicate with one another. Call me crazy, but I have a feeling that if, say, an Afrikaner politician mused about how black rule in South Africa is shortly coming to an end and pre-emptively endorsed a campaign of violence and intimidation against Africans without literally pledging to be a part of it, nobody would have a difficult time understanding what was up.

But the heinousness of Ahmaghinejad's incitements immediately raises the question of just what influence he has, and this is where I break with Goldberg. Permit me this Godwin's law violation, since I'm committing it only to strengthen the case I'm arguing against. Suppose that Hitler had had all the beliefs about Jews that he did in fact have, desired to exterminate the Jewish people, etc., but lived out his days as a penurious mediocre landscape painter in Munich never committing so grave a crime as jaywalking. His beliefs themselves wouldn't be any less vile under those circumstances, but in such a scenario, the fact that he held those beliefs just wouldn't be very important. Indeed, it's a matter of simple statistical probability that there have been untold numbers of people whose personal antisemitism and genocidal fantasies were more virulent than Hitler's on some sort of one-to-one comparison of beliefs, but we just don't and shouldn't care about such people. What made Hitler a menace was not only the evil of his ideology, which on its own couldn't do anything, but also his control of the most powerful war machine in world history up to that point.

That's why fretting over Ahmaghinejad's remarks about Israel is a waste of energy, even as it's good to stay alert to the casual antisemitism that excuses such remarks but would never countenance equivalent incitements against other groups . Maybe — maybe! — there are some irredentists in Gaza or the West Bank whose Shi'ism is strong enough to overcome the hatred of Persians they've been taught since childhood, who don't recognize what a laughingstock Ahmaghinejad is in Iran, and who take the clear message of his remarks to heart. But how many such people could there be, who will engage in terrorism against Israel because of Ahmaghinejad, but wouldn't have otherwise? I strongly doubt it would take very many hands to count them all.

As for the significance of Ahmaghinejad's remarks for the Iranian government and Iranian society, it's basically non-existent. Despite the fact that his title is "President" — as I'll continue to point out again and again — Iranian state power is completely in the hands of the small circle of clerics around Ali Khamenei. Any power Ahmaghinejad exercises is at Khamenei & co.'s discretion, and can be rescinded on a whim. Indeed, as observers of the Iranian political scene well know, Khamenei's loathing of Ahmaghinejad is nearly as strong as that of educated Iranian society at large. Khamenei has barely tolerated Ahmaghinejad's presence in the government because he represented a significant, boorish segment of the Iranian "electorate" — a term I bracket with scare quotes both because the pool of Iranian voters is not representative of the country, and the elections in which they vote do not have any practical effect on the composition of the real leadership. And now that Ahmaghinejad's buffoonery has destroyed whatever popular support he enjoyed, Khamenei and the clerics were swift to exclude him from the government in every respect except nominally.

To be sure, many of the interests the regime in Tehran is working to advance conflict with American interests, and the regime's suppression of liberal freedoms and abuse of women and homosexuals is abhorrent. Nonetheless, Khamenei et al., who do hold power, have demonstrated again and again that they are practitioners of realpolitik, unlike Ahmaghinejad, who is an apocalyptic fanatic but fortunately doesn't hold power.

And in fact, the United States and Israel have some significant interests in common with Iran. (Those Zionists who long for the days of the Shah can fill in the details of why Iran is Israel's only natural ally in the middle East.) American and Israeli strategic interests and security are threatened by militarized Sunni extremists; and so are Iranian strategic interests and security. Some of the worst disasters in western and central Asia that could befall the United States and Israel are the takeover of Iraq by Wahhabist fanatics, the recapture of Afghanistan by the Taliban, the Talibanization of Pakistan, or any combination thereof; those would arguably be even greater disasters for Iran. And the Iranian regime wants to preserve its power, which in practice will mean delivering economic prosperity; likewise, the US wants Iran to scuttle its nuclear research and militarization, and holds important keys to helping Iran achieve prosperity. And just to conclude scratching the surface, the Iranian people themselves, whatever the positions of their government, are decidedly pro-Western and pro-American.

These features of Iran's polity and society and of the international relations picture by no means guarantee that diplomatic engagement with the Islamic Republic will be successful; but they do nonetheless come with some welcome sureties. As long as Iran is controlled by Ali Khamenei, the chances of a first strike on a nuclear power with massive deterrent capabilities (e.g. the US or Israel) are effectively null. Such a strike would be suicide, and the actual Iranian regime, as opposed to its court jester, is not suicidal. Moreover, the foundation already exists, and indeed has existed for decades, for engagement with Iran not merely at the highest strata of the government, but with the Iranian people themselves. Say what you will about Zbigniew Brzezinski — but don't dare say it about the recently departed, much beloved William Odom — they had exactly the right approach for dealing with Iran, and helpfully put Ahmaghinejad in his rightful, unserious place in the process.

As Brzezinski elaborated in a recent appearance on Morning Joe (sorry, no transcript available), applying the model of long-term cultural penetration through semi-official outreach like Radio Free Europe, encouragement of consumerism, exposure to the fruits of western liberties, etc., that was so successful in weakening the Iron Curtain, has even stronger prospects for success in Iran, where popular affinity for Western and indeed American values is pervasive. Iran certainly presents a major foreign policy challenge, and even if it poses no existential threats, its sponsorship of anti-Israeli terrorism is intolerable.

But stamping our feet won't do anything about that, and coming to a correct moral judgment about Iranian support for Hezbollah and Mahmoud Ahmaghinejad's eliminationist fantasies is not even the beginning, let alone the end, of policy to curb the Iranian threat. In particular, devoting vastly more attention than he deserves to an antisemitic circus act who can only be relevant to the future of US- and Israeli-Iranian relations if Americans and Israelis elect to make him relevant, threatens to obscure the full picture, in which engagement with Iran, in addition to being a challenge, is also an enormous opportunity.

The post Jeffrey Goldberg On Ahmadinejad On Wiping Out Israel appeared first on Jewcy.

If the presence of swastikas were not enough, Barcelona also has the dubious honor of being home to Europe's most infamous neo-Nazi bookstore, brazenly titled "Europa Bookstore: Persecuted Books – The Truth Will Set You Free."…

The books in the store were a literary mix covering revisionism, fascism, Israel-bashing, Hitler-praising, anti-immigration and homophobia. To this was added DVDs and CDs of Hitler's "greatest hits."

In my best Spanglish, I told a young woman who asked if I needed help that I would like to take some pictures and talk to her. She hesitated and then declined, but told me that I could "come back tomorrow and speak to the leader."…

[A]s I walked around I had a "for the six million!" moment. One of those moments that lead Jews to do something about injustice. So I took out my camera and started taking pictures…

"Give me your camera," she had raised her voice. "I want to see the pictures. I want to eliminate the pictures!"

"Leader"; "eliminate." The great thing about European fascists and racists is that they traditionally haven't put up much of a pretense of not being fascists and racists. Sadly, though, the new crop of the European far-right seems to be taking trans-Atlantic PR cues. Even the most deranged neo-Nazis on these shores feel compelled to wrap their hatred up in some public interest cause — like saving the wombs of white women from the Pornocaust. So it's comforting, in its way, to learn that there's a little corner of Catalonia where the good stuff, the real unadulterated neo-Nazism is served straight up, no chaser.

The post Homage To (Neo-Nazi Bookstores In) Catalonia appeared first on Jewcy.

The take-home question: Will "it's not you, it's gay marriage" become the 21st century's "it's not you, it's me"?

(h/t: John Aravosis)

The post Viral Video Of The Week: Gay Marriage Ruins Marriage appeared first on Jewcy.

The Fine-Tuning Argument goes something like this: The laws of nature are specified not only in terms of variables like force, mass, charge, spin, color, flavor, etc., but also in terms of fundamental constants, real number values that are (at least presently) irreducible from physics. These constants are measured to an extraordinary degree of precision: the fine structure constant is 7.297352570(5) x 10^-3; Planck's constant is 6.62606893(33) x 10^-34 J?s; and so on (the numbers in parentheses are uncertainties of the last digits). Suppose each constant is set or tuned by some vast cosmic dial. If any dial were turned just a little bit — and "a little bit" here means by magnitudes far smaller than anything human beings can consciously comprehend — the formation of the universe would have been radically different from what it turned out to be, and in particular, there would have been no life in the universe.

Here's where the proponent of fine-tuning comes in. (The term itself, obviously, suggests an anthropomorphism.) Only a tiny range of values for the fundamental physical constants, a range smaller than any human imagination can conceive, permits the existence of life in the universe. Yet there is life in the universe — look around. With that background established, the proponent of fine-tuning can now deliver her decisive blow: "Sure, maybe the fundamental constants just randomly all happened to settle on values conducive to life rather than the vastly larger range of values that would not have supported life. But isn't it infinitely more probable, given the apparent fine-tuning of the universe and the vanishingly small probability of the universe randomly fine-tuning itself, that some intelligence deliberately fine-tuned the physical constants so that they would support life? From a purely rational perspective, therefore, doesn't the fine-tuning of the universe warrant belief in a Fine-Tuner?"

At the extremes of the debate, this argument doesn't tend to move many people. Theists are already in the position the fine-tuning argument wants to take them to. Atheists, on the other hand, are far more likely to think there's something fishy about the argument than to be persuaded, but are seldom in a position to say just what's wrong with it. However, in the broad ecumenical center where those who "just know there's something out there" reside, an argument like fine-tuning that doesn't explicitly contradict evolutionary theory (indeed, it's a means by which religious believers can be Darwinists) and instead maintains the trappings of scientifically-informed discourse has great potential to shore up people's faith. It also — and this is not the intent of all its proponents — shores up the reasoning that supports Intelligent Design theory. It's a truly ingenious little argument.

But in addition to being ingenious, it's a bad argument. There are at least three fatal objections to it, which recur in one way or another in debates over Intelligent Design — hence understanding them is a key to understanding how ID proponents mislead their audiences. The first objection undermines Fine-Tuning on its own premises, so I'll dwell on it a little more than the others (bear with me). In order:

The post Does Fine-Tuning Prove God Exists? appeared first on Jewcy.

TOM CLANCY

Strengths: Gets all the conservatives and Jack Ryan fans running back into our arms. Wrote the book, several times, on how to fight terrorists.

Weaknesses: According to Time, prefers keeping his "virtue intact" to working toward a political career. More importantly, can he love another president as much as he loved Reagan? Dedicated books to him and said, "Ronald Reagan will always be 'my' president. He was instrumental in making me a bestseller." What quid pro quo would he expect from us? Also, Bill Maher created a McCain/Clancy image confusion problem when he said, "Some people look at McCain and see a tough guy who's going to protect us from the Islamofascists. I look at him and see a walking Tom Clancy action figure who's going to get us all killed." Sell it as a good cop/bad cop negotiating strength? Maybe better in poet laureate role?

Level of interest: He called our office first. Said he had a video game that could help us.

ERICA JONG

Strengths: Carrying substantial anger against Obama. Recently wrote this witchy threat: "Okay sweetie, we'll step aside. Watch your own cauldron bubble. You're in a heap of trouble—and you don't even know it." Women wouldn't fear flying our way! Ditto HRC supporters. Ditto perhaps the Clintons themselves. Big help in New York. Perfect debate matchup with Roth. Isadora Wing could take down Nathan Zuckerman anytime. And Roth has never been mentioned in a Bob Dylan song (see: "Highlands").

Weaknesses: What would Cindy say? And press might have field day with political commentary like this: "We need beavers and we need stallions. Beavers get the work done. Stallions inspire us." She also claims that the "job of the writer is to seduce… demons." Appeasement?

Level of interest: Waiting to see if HRC runs as an independent.

TONI MORRISON

Strengths: Unlike Roth, has actually won a Nobel Prize. Friend of Oprah. A maverick woman for a maverick man: "I don't subscribe to patriarchy, and I don't think it should be substituted with matriarchy. I think it's a question of equitable access." Brings gender and racial balance to the ticket, but also a published expert on Whiteness (see: Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination). Her belief that Bill Clinton was the first black president helps us. Beloved in Ohio!

Weaknesses: Even older than we are. Also has endorsed Obama early and often. Called him "the man for this time." But that was back in January.

Level of interest: Zero, but never surrender.

LYNNE CHENEY

Strengths: Brings at least as many conservatives as Clancy, and strong female support. Background as Mormon, Presbyterian and Methodist. Already answered the Red Phone at 3 a.m. on several occasions.

Weaknesses: Not yet well-known as a writer of literary fiction, despite her novels Executive Privilege and Sisters. But signs of change there. Elaine Showalter, Avalon Foundation professor emerita at Princeton, calls Cheney's novels "skillful and fascinating." Admittedly, some trouble lurks in lines like this, from Sisters: "The women who embraced in the wagon were Adam and Eve crossing a dark cathedral stage—no, Eve and Eve, loving one another as they would not be able to once they ate of the fruit and knew themselves as they truly were." Problematic, but if we put it out there ourselves, might make our GOP tent look warmer and bigger.

Level of interest: Was on the shortlist in 2000 and very unhappy about not being chosen. Could with good reason believe it's her turn this time. I think she remains interested. Just to be sure, I'll ask her tonight during our ride over to the in-laws for dinner.

On a serious note, Jim Webb, who really is a celebrated novelist, is the favorite to be Obama's running mate according to the punters at Intrade (the second favorite is Hillary Clinton, who won't be the nominee).

How could Team McCain counter that? David Frum argues for Rudy Giuliani, which would set up, for the first time in American history, a contest between a ticket composed entirely of compelling memoirists and a ticket composed entirely of people who had (rather forgettable) memoirs ghostwritten for them. That's just bad politics. I suggest McCain draft Tom Wolfe, who poses the triple threat to the Dems of being a more prominent writer than either of them, makes McCain look younger, and can make inroads among the latte-sippers to offset the God and guns voters Webb can tip back over to his side.

The post The Campaign’s Secret Weapon: Writers For VP appeared first on Jewcy.

Senator Clinton has really grown on us over here in Crystal City over the past few months. She ran an impressive campaign, and proved herself to be an impressive candidate and as John McCain has said, inspired a generation of women…[I]t's clear that John McCain and Hillary Clinton respect each other — and there is a genuine affection for her here at McCain HQ.

Moving, no? Of course, for most of the period in which Senator Clinton is alleged to have grown on McCain staffers, Michael Goldfarb was a safe distance from Crystal City writing, of Samantha Power calling Hillary Clinton a monster, "tell us something that we don't know." Still, he at least has been consistent in preferring Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama:

I'm surprised that anyone can be surprised by the Clinton's [sic] lies anymore. Frankly, I find them rather comforting in comparison to Obama's new kind of politics, which best I can tell seems to be the same old politics in a new self-righteous package. All politicians lie, and the Clintons more than most.

All together now: That's not change we can believe in!

(h/t: Frank Rich)

The post The Michael Goldfarb Variations appeared first on Jewcy.

Across the road from Berlin’s monument to Jewish Holocaust victims, the new shrine features a pavilion-sized concrete slab with a window through which visitors view a video of two men kissing. This commemoration follows a longstanding, misleading attempt to depict homosexuals as prime targets of Hitler. In fact, even historical material released with the memorial noted only "an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 gay men deported to concentration camps"–and by no means all of them were killed. While homosexuals surely outnumbered the less-than-one-percent of the German population that was Jewish, Jewish victims of Nazi death camps outnumbered estimated gay victims by more than 500 to 1. Persecution of any group deserves condemnation and remembrance, but it's wrong to exaggerate the extent of victimization for politically correct P.R. purposes.

More succinctly: fags have cooties. In addition to its loathsome downplaying of the scale and nature
of Nazi war crimes against the gay populations of Germany and its captive nations, in addition to its perhaps even more loathsome attempt to lay proprietary claim to the Holocaust, this passage is grossly misleading about the monument. The memorial for Jewish victims of the Holocaust (see aerial view above) takes up a large city block in Berlin and is composed of 2711 "stelae." The memorial for gay victims of the Holocaust (see right) is one single slab four meters high. By Medved's grim, cynical arithmetic, the twin Berlin monuments overstate the relative toll of the Holocaust on Jews by a ratio of more than 5 to 1. Medved cannot possibly sincerely believe this memorial "exaggerates" the extent of the victimization of gay people during the Holocaust — not if he knows what "to exaggerate" means. Notwithstanding his empty lip service to the notion that "persecution of any group deserves condemnation and remembrance," Medved's problem is with any recognition of Nazi atrocities inflicted on gay people as a part of the Holocaust. In other words, he's a sad old bigot for whom the Holocaust isn't a crime but a trophy to be fought over.

The post Michael Medved Owns The Holocaust appeared first on Jewcy.

By mounting a coup against a government to which he no longer has any legitimate claim, Mugabe has done the world the clarifying favor of removing any objections to an intervention in Zimbabwe on grounds of national sovereignty: Whatever constraints one thinks sovereignty does or does not impose on foreign powers' actions in a state, Zimbabwe's sovereign authority resides with Morgan Tsvangirai and the Movement for Democratic Change. Since Mugabe has usurped that authority, there is no conflict with national sovereignty, or any other provisions of international law, to prohibit an external intervention to enforce the results of the election.

In practice, of course, an external intervention means a (mostly) American deployment. Without American support, as Shmuel Rosner and Adam LeBor have been discussing, the international community is helpless to do anything about humanitarian crises. Which is why nothing will be done. The case for an international mandate to arrest Mugabe and restore democracy in Zimbabwe is so straightforward that it might still be possible, despite the damage the Bush administration has done the the US's bargaining power, to assemble broad international support for such an operation. But what army would we do it with? And how would we begin to pay for it?

Resources are scarce—that's the foundational premise of economic theory. Every single day in Iraq costs $720 million dollars + approximately 16 man-hours of labor x 150,000 men (and some women); there's a lot you can do with that much capital. You can give it all back to taxpayers. You can invest it in domestic projects. You can use it to pay down the national debt. You can use it to fund and staff a massive global anti-poverty campaign, or anti-hunger campaign, or anti-disease campaign. And you can use it to intervene to save democracy in places like Zimbabwe or shut down killing fields in places like Darfur. Humanitarian crises happen frequently. And as long as the armed forces of the United States remain over-deployed, the prospects of any humanitarian crisis being resolved in any non-disastrous way are minimal.

Never mind the sunk cost fallacies that keep propagandism for the Iraq war going; to argue credibly and honestly for the continuation of the war, one has to be willing to argue not just that it's a worthwhile cause, but that it is a uniquely important cause that justifies losing the opportunity to attend to any of the world's problems which our commitment to Iraq prevents us from doing. How sad that it should fall to monsters like Mugabe and the Janjaweed of Sudan to expose the essential fraudulence of our foreign policy debates.

The post How We Could Save Zimbabwe appeared first on Jewcy.

The thing is, Mandela has denounced Mugabe. He has described Mugabe as a paradigm example of African "'tyrants' who cling to power…'who have made enormous wealth, leaders who once commanded liberation armies.' They had come to 'despise the very people who put them in power' and 'think it is their privilege to be there for eternity.'" For good measure, Mandela added that "'we have to be ruthless in denouncing such leaders.'"

That denunciation of Mugabe came a year into Mandela's retirement from politics, when he was already eighty-two years old, at the height of a political, agricultural, and financial crisis in Zimbabwe. It made no difference in Zimbabwe whatsoever. So Hitchens' notion that "the smallest word" from Mandela would make a "huge difference" is patent nonsense. His complaint amounts to accusing Mandela of being culpable for "the pillage and murder of an entire nation" because he hasn't denounced Mugabe frequently or recently enough to satisfy Christopher Hitchens, regardless of the negligible practical effect of such a denunciation. Which is a distinctly less compelling indictment.

Incidentally, Hitchens' failure to give an answer to his own question isn't for lack of having received one. George Bizos told Hitchens that Mandela is "a very old man" whose "doctors have advised him to avoid anything stressful." Well, that just won't do it for Hitchens, who insinuates that Bizos—the heroic human rights activist and counselor to the defendants in the Rivonia trial as well as (more recently) to Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai—is prevaricating to cover up for Mandela's "squalid compromise."

It can't be that Bizos is stating the simple truth that Mandela is a frail ninety-year-old man whose body has been wrecked by decades of abuse and malnutrition and who lives in constant pain. It can't be that finally after all these years, his mind is beginning to show signs of what happens to a human mind after enduring for so long: Just before the Rugby World Cup final between South Africa and England last year, Mandela mistakenly called his beloved Springboks 'the All Blacks,' the nickname of their arch-nemesis New Zealand. That's not a minor lapse. It would be like a passionate fan of the Red Sox inexplicably calling them 'the Yankees,' at least if his support of the Red Sox were a profound symbol of his nation's post-apartheid reconciliation with which everyone from his country is intimately familiar.

South African blogger Michael Trapido puts things more politely than I can: "Madiba, of all people, has merited his greatness and earned his rest. While we would all love to see him as much as we can, exerting pressure will only shorten his time with us and be of benefit to nobody." Less politely, Hitchens believes Mandela owes it to Hitchens to give himself a coronary episode. Otherwise he's a squalid moral compromiser with Zimbabwean blood on his hands.

Next week in Slate: Christopher Hitchens explains that Martin Luther King's silence on genocide in Darfur proves that the once great man has descended into the squalor of moral relativism.

The post How Not To Criticize Nelson Mandela (Or Anyone At All) appeared first on Jewcy.