ShrinkWrapped

On Demographic Decline

[Welcome Instapundit readers and thanks for the link.]

Yesterday Glenn Reynolds noted a Sunday New York Times magazine article examining the demographic decline in Europe.  He took the key meme from the article and summarized it as follows:

Flexibility is the key to success. But read the whole thing.

Having read the whole thing, I must say that Glenn Reynolds is correct that that is the major take-away from the article, but I also have to point out that the article was somewhat disingenuous in its most glaring omissions.  In the Times article, the writer explains that adequate birth rates in Northern Europe and the United States are achieved in different ways, leading to the conclusion that flexibility is the key:

No Babies?

(pp. 4) This is a crucial difference between the north — including France and the United Kingdom and the Scandinavian countries — and the south. The Scandinavian countries have both the most vigorous social-welfare systems in Europe and — at 1.8 — among the highest fertility rates.

...

(pp. 5) If this reading of southern European countries is correct — that their superficial commitment to modernity, to a 21st-century lifestyle, is fatally at odds with a view of the family structure that is rooted in the 19th century — it should apply in other parts of the world, should it not? Apparently it does. This spring, the Japanese government released figures showing that the country’s under-14 population was the lowest since 1908. The head of Thailand’s department of health announced in May that his country’s birthrate now stands at 1.5, far below the replacement level. “The world record for lowest-low fertility right now is South Korea, at 1.1,” Francesco Billari told me. “Japan is just about as low. What we are seeing in Asia is a phenomenon of the 2000s, rather than the 1990s. And it seems the reasons are the same as for southern Europe. All of these are societies still rooted in the tradition where the husband earned all the money. Things have changed, not only in Italy and Spain but also in Japan and Korea, but those societies have not yet adjusted. The relationships within households have not adjusted yet.” Western Europe, then, is not the isolated case that some make it out to be. It is simply the first region of the world to record extremely low birthrates.

...

(pp. 6) So there would seem to be two models for achieving higher fertility: the neosocialist Scandinavian system and the laissez-faire American one. Aassve put it to me this way: “You might say that in order to promote fertility, your society needs to be generous or flexible. The U.S. isn’t very generous, but it is flexible. Italy is not generous in terms of social services and it’s not flexible. There is also a social stigma in countries like Italy, where it is seen as less socially accepted for women with children to work. In the U.S., that is very accepted.”

The disingenuousness comes from omitting the not so small point that much of America's demographic success comes from immigrants who become Americans while much of Northern Europe's demographic success comes from immigrants who remain unassimilated.  This may yet change but until the prevailing multi-cultural mindset changes, all Northern Europe is doing is exchanging Scandinavians for pre-modern anti-Westerners.

Glee Reynolds also linked to his article from two years in which he dealt with deeper and more important reasons for the demographic collapse of Europe:

Reverberations of Al-Dura

On Wednesday, Richard Landes translated an article by Ben-Dror Yemini discussing the recent  developments in the Al-Dura affair. 

Just Don’t Touch their Symbol: Ben-Dror Yemini tackles the al Durah affair in the pages of Maariv

Everyone remembers the death of Muhammad Al-Dura. France 2 accused the IDF; the Israeli media went along. One Frenchman dared to doubt and began a kulturkampf; the Israeli media was silent. It has now become clear that he was right. Israel is still silent.

The Muhammad Al-Dura affair refuses to die. In Israel, it is mainly the first part that is recognized. In France, in recent weeks, there are those who are already calling it a new Dreyfus Affair.

The AL-Dura affair is a blood libel, accusing the Israelis of purposely targeting a young boy; it triggered the second intifada and has been used to delegitimize the state of Israel, excuse Palestinian terror in response to their suffering, and facilitate attacks on Jews and Israel in academic and media forums around the world.  When Phillipe Karsenty, Richard Landes, and others fought back, and a French court ultimately found that France 2 and Charles Enderlin were guilty of at best, gross journalistic negligence, the left reacted with an attack, via petition, on the messengers.  Ben-Dror focused on the attack:

The petition took flight. In the last two weeks, it has become the focus of conflict between opposing camps in France. The defensive text of the signatories, against journalists in service of the truth, recalls the text of the anti-Dreyfusards, against officers working in the service of the state. One must not criticize them. The truth is theirs. Harming them is harming the holiest of holies. Then they were anti-Semites. Today they are anti-Israelis.

Ben-Dror Yemini concluded with some questions about the Israeli response, or lack thereof, to the entire affair:

The Legacy of Heorot

The Legacy of Heorot was written over 20 years ago.  It is a straight forward science fiction/horror novel based on the Beowulf legend, with relatively uncomplicated characters and a plot driven by a terrifying monster.  Amazon reviewer Sesho outlined the plot:

The first wave of 200 settlers have established an outpost called Avalon on Tau Ceti Four on an island called Camelot. The atmosphere and gravity is pretty much the same as Earth. Vegetables, plants, and animals from Earth are being introduced to the alien environment with mixed results. One thing all of the settlers agree on is that one day the entire planet will be covered with humanity, since there isn't any indigenous intelligent life. Or is there?

The planet appears to offer no indigenous threats to the settlers and, as a result, security is not considered a particularly important consideration.  Development of the colony proceeds well.

Colonel Cadmann Weylan the military representative and war veteran believes they are going too well, that the colony's security and vigilance is becoming soft. The perimeter of the site is left in disrepair and if he didn't fix it himself, they would be defenceless. He can't quite put his finger on his worry. It becomes apparent when a amphibian alien, similar to Earth's komodo dragons, dubbed a Grendel, finds a taste for terran lifeforms which could lead to the destruction of Avalon. The alien has intelligence and is superfast and a killing machine.

The colony is also suffering from internal dissension. Weylan is treated as a goofball because of his constant vigilance. Plus he is in love with Sylvia Faulkland, who just happens to be married to another man, and also pregant with that man's baby. The problem is that the husband knows. Zack Moscowitz, the leader of the colony feels threatened by Weyland's failure to go along with the status quo.

I have not read the book in 20 years but if memory serves me, Colonel Weylan was not only considered a "goofball" but was thought of as overtly paranoid ("crazy") by the colonists.  The current analogy to the popular image of Dick Cheney comes to mind.  In point of fact, Weylan agrees that he is somewhat paranoid; there is no obvious threat but it is his job to be paranoid. He must prepare for any and all threats, conceivable (known knowns and unknown knowns) and inconceivable (unknown unknowns.)

It is the nature of most of us, whose jobs do not require us to be paranoid, to discount threats that do not impose themselves upon us.  In democracies, when threats are not noticed or are minimized, preparations to deal with eventualities are neglected.  Galrahn notices this tendency in a venue few of us are thinking about:

Anti-Semitism and Anti-Americanism: Part II

Yesterday I discussed A. B. Yehoshua's thesis, set out in An Attempt to Identify the Root Cause of Antisemitism, delineating the psychological underpinnings of anti-Semitism as related to Jewish identity emerging from a "common mental construction."   Certain implications flow from such an understanding, including the fact that being Jewish, for many Jews, is a choice.  As such, intermarriage rates approaching 50% are understandable, considering the difficulties historical and present, that are exacted on the Jew.  A second implication is that along with all the other, well know reasons for anti-Semitism, especially the Jews ideal position as universal scapegoat, the fluidity of Jewish identity threatens those with poorly defined identities (or defects in their "ego boundaries") and feeds into pre-exiting paranoid and quasi-paranoid mental states and structures.

A major potential flaw in Yehoshua's thesis  relates to the state of Israel.  If it is the constructed nature of Jewish identity that facilitates its use by anti-Semites, then the establishment of a fixed location with defined borders should decrease the Jews propensity to be appropriated by the anti-Semite.  For forty years after the horrors of the holocaust shamed much of the world into making overt anti-Semitism an anathema, this thesis held.  However, the last 20-30 years have seen an upsurge in anti-Semitism almost identical to the structured anti-Semitism of the Nazis, within the Muslim and Arab world and enabled by large swaths of the international Left.  Interestingly, the recent return of overt anti-Semitism coincides with Israel's victory in war and resultant diffusion of her borders.  (Correlation does not imply causation; Arab anti-Semitism has multiple other roots, including the threat Israel poses to the supremacy of Islam in both religious and ucltural terms.)  Yehoshua also suggests that even with the existence of Israel and the ingathering of so many Jews to that tiny nation, Jewish identity remains deeply connected to a diaspora:

I have not the slightest doubt that the re-grouping of part of the Jewish people in Israel has considerably and blessedly restricted the degree of virtuality and imagination that constitute the classic Jewish identity. The basic elements of nationalism--territory, language, and a real and actual framework of communal life--despite their youth from a historical perspective, are already present and actual in the Jewish state, and there is no need to activate the imagination in order to create them. However, Israel is still deeply bound to the Jews of the exile. And even if its real existence allows the Jews to moderate the imaginative aspects of their identity, the cultural dynamics of the post-modern world have the opposite effect and allow them to broaden the space of their indeterminateness. This is also the case with Israel itself, which since the Six Day War has blurred its borders and dragged itself into a deeply symbiotic and ill-defined relationship with the Palestinian people and, through this, with the greater Arab and Muslim world--a complete regression from the first important achievements of delineating the borders of Jewish national identity at the founding of the state. Thus, we have returned to the old and dangerous Jewish patterns, fostering the virtuality and indeterminateness to which deranged enemies are so dangerously attracted

Indeed, accompanying the reasonable political criticism (justified or not) leveled against the policies of the Israeli government, the sort of criticism based more or less on accepted political and moral criteria, we find the residue of venom, fantasy, and imagination that is reminiscent of classic antisemitism. This new mix, with its sediment of traditional Jew-hatred, is creating a wave of antagonism capable of legitimizing ruin and destruction.

The world's largest population of diaspora Jews resides in America and this is where the discussion of the connection between anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism starts.

Anti-Semitism and Anti-Americanism: Part I

In the Spring issue of Azure magazine, there is a translation of a fascinating and thought provoking article from 2005 by A. B. Yehoshua titled An Attempt to Identify the Root Cause of Antisemitism:

Editor’s note:

The following essay was originally published in the Hebrew journal Alpayim in 2005 and provoked an intense public debate. Its author, the renowned Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua, undertook a demanding task: to decipher the most disturbing riddle of Jewish history, to analyze and describe the quintessence of antisemitism in its various historical and cultural incarnations. Yehoshua’s thesis disputes the general intellectual consensus on antisemitism, which denies that there is any single or unique root to the phenomenon. He asserts that it is the unique structure of Jewish identity which has given birth to the venomous reaction of antisemitism-and he offers a way out of this impasse. Yehoshua’s position has outraged many but also given them much to think about, AZURE is proud to present an English translation of this essay, which embodies Zionist thought in its most daring form.

The link was sent to me by Siggy, who shares my interest in understanding the psychopathology of anti-Semitism.  Yehoshua's thesis is remarkable and fits well into the psychoanalytic understanding of paranoia, of which anti-Semitism is a subset.  However, I suspect my reaction to the article will surprise Siggy, who is an expatriate Brit becoming more American by the day.

First, some explication of Yehoshua's article is in order.  He starts from the position of exploring what it means to be a Jew and has a rather unusual take on the subject.  Where most national and/or religious identities depend on shared language, ethnic/genetic origins, or geographic propinquity, Jews only in a very attenuated way share these traits.  It is true that Ashkenazi (of Eastern European provenance) Jews share certain genetic traits, yet Sephardic Jews (with their genetic roots in the Middle East) are no less Jewish.  Further, although there are significant hurdles to conversion, a Jewish convert who identifies as a Jew is considered no less a Jew than one born to the faith. 

(It is also true that among some ultra-Orthodox Jews there is reluctance to accept Conservative or Reform conversions; this is currently a major issue being worked out in Israel.  Of note, Israel is a Jewish state and the Orthodox Rabbinate runs the religious affairs, while at the same time the people insist on a secular political state.  In this confrontation the ultra-Orthodox are likely to lose, even if they prevail  in the short term.)

Ultimately, Yehoshua concludes that the quintessence of Jewish identity is a protean amalgam with indistinct borders.  He quotes Sigmund Freud, a secular Jew who derided religion as superstition, but felt bound to the Jewish people nonetheless:

What bound me to Jewry was (I am ashamed to admit) neither faith nor national pride…. But plenty of other things remained over to make the attraction to Jewry and Jews irresistible-many obscure emotional forces  [which] were the more powerful the less they could be expressed in words, as well as a clear consciousness of inner identity, the safe privacy of a common mental construction.

Yehoshua correctly notes that the idea of a "common mental construction" is extremely powerful yet impossible to confine:

The Unconscious Roots of Media Bias

[Update at end]

Although many of us would prefer that the New York Times would fade away into irrelevance, the unfortunate fact is that the Times is one of the very few media organs that determines the media narratives of the day.  For that reason alone, as well as its proficiency as a quintessential mouthpiece of modern (il)liberalism, what appears in the pages of the New York Times still matters.  Over the weekend, Nicolas Kristof wrote of The Two Israels.  His op-ed piece was so unconsciously one-sided and so typically unaware of its own biases as to beg the question of what it means to be a journalist and political thinker:

To travel through the West Bank and Gaza these days feels like traveling through Israeli colonies.

You whiz around the West Bank on new highways that in some cases are reserved for Israeli vehicles, catching glimpses of Palestinian vehicles lined up at checkpoints.

The security system that Israel is steadily establishing is nowhere more stifling than here in Hebron, the largest city in the southern part of the West Bank. In the heart of a city with 160,000 Palestinians, Israel maintains a Jewish settlement with 800 people. To protect them, the Israeli military has established a massive system of guard posts, checkpoints and road closures since 2001.

...

“For years, Israel has severely oppressed Palestinians living in the center of the city,” notes B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights group, in a recent report. The authorities, it adds, “have expropriated the city center from its Palestinian residents and destroyed it economically.”

Ed Bialek, who contributes to a newsgroup to which I belong, asked, with appropriate umbrage, some quite reasonable questions, summing up to the key question, does Kristof (and by extension, the Times) know any history at all?

No Blogging This Week

A number of projects are heating up this week and blogging will be on hiatus at least until Monday. 

As well, I do plan to return to The Arab Mind series in the near future, but that requires a degree of research and time that I do not have right now.

No Blogging Today

Time, time, time...

Five MInutes to Midnight?

In January of 2007, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that they had moved the "Doomsday Clock" forward form 7 minutes to midnight to 5 minutes to midnight. 

IT IS 5 MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT

2007: The world stands at the brink of a second nuclear age. The United States and Russia remain ready to stage a nuclear attack within minutes, North Korea conducts a nuclear test, and many in the international community worry that Iran plans to acquire the Bomb. Climate change also presents a dire challenge to humanity. Damage to ecosystems is already taking place; flooding, destructive storms, increased drought, and polar ice melt are causing loss of life and property.

Over the weekend, in a story that has found surprisingly little resonance in the media or the blogosphere (not even listed at memeorandum) the New York Times reported that the A Q Khan network had in its possession, computer files detailing how to construct a more sophisticated and compact nuclear bomb than had been hitherto expected:

Nuclear Ring Reportedly Had Advanced Design

American and international investigators say that they have found the electronic blueprints for an advanced nuclear weapon on computers that belonged to the nuclear smuggling network run by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the rogue Pakistani nuclear scientist, but that they have not been able to determine whether they were sold to Iran or the smuggling ring’s other customers.

The plans appear to closely resemble a nuclear weapon that was built by Pakistan and first tested exactly a decade ago. But when confronted with the design by officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency last year, Pakistani officials insisted that Dr. Khan, who has been lobbying in recent months to be released from the loose house arrest that he has been under since 2004, did not have access to Pakistan’s weapons designs.

In interviews in Vienna, Islamabad and Washington over the past year, officials have said that the weapons design was far more sophisticated than the blueprints discovered in Libya in 2003, when Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi gave up his country’s nuclear weapons program. Those blueprints were for a Chinese nuclear weapon that dated to the mid-1960s, and investigators found that Libya had obtained them from the Khan network.

But the latest design found on Khan network computers in Switzerland, Bangkok and several other cities around the world is half the size and twice the power of the Chinese weapon, with far more modern electronics, the investigators say. The design is in electronic form, they said, making it easy to copy — and they have no idea how many copies of it are now in circulation. [Emphasis mine-SW]

The implications of this story are profound, effecting everything for the price of oil to the possibility of a true catastrophe occurring in the near future.  As per Amir Taheri, in all likelihood, Iran will soon have the bomb (if they do not already have one or several.)

The New Middle East Linkage

It always pays to be a pessimist when it comes to the Middle East.  The various compelling narratives which fuel the various interested parties are typically incompatible with the competing narratives of their enemies and rivals.  And that doesn't even take into account the actual realities of the competing interests.  Yet, despite the seemingly intractable nature of the Middle East, there are glimmers of hope that slip out from time to time.  Unfortunately, due to the narratives ascribed to by the international elites, the greatest likelihood remains that such hopeful signs will be mismanaged and opportunities will be lost, however, I would be remiss to ignore them nonetheless.

Martin Kramer at MESH helpfully deconstructed the myth that the central conflict of the Middle East is the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and that all other conflicts in that parlous region emerge from and are linked to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  In The myth of linkage, he lists Nine Clusters of Conflict:

First, the Arab-Persian conflict (with its origins in earlier Ottoman-Persian conflict). ...

Second, the Shiite-Sunni conflict, which goes back in various forms for fourteen centuries, and which the struggle for Iraq has greatly inflamed, both within that country and beyond. ...

Third, the Kurdish awakening, which involves a large national group experiencing a political revival in the territory of several existing states. ...

Fourth, the inter-Arab conflict among Arab states over primacy, influence, and borders—the result of disputes created by the post-Ottoman partition of the Arab lands by Britain and France. ...

Fifth, conflicts over the political aspirations of compact Christian groups with strong historic ties to the West. ...

Sixth, conflicts that arise from the quest of Arab states to preserve or restore parts of their pre-colonial African empires. ...

Seventh, the nationalist-Islamist conflicts within states, which are the result of failed modernization and the disappointed expectations of independence. ...

Eighth, numerous conflicts, centered in the Persian Gulf, generated by the addiction of the industrialized West to the vast oil resources of the region, and the need of the United States to maintain its hegemony over the world’s single largest reservoir of energy. ...

Ninth, there is conflict involving Israel, on three planes: Arab-Israeli (that is, Israel versus Arab states), Palestinian-Israeli, and Iranian-Israeli. ...

It is a long article and Martin Kramer illuminates and elucidates the issues quite clearly.  It is not inconsequential that most of these conflicts have nothing to do with Israel or the Palestinians.  Richard Fernandez, in his comment on Kramer's post, notes that the insistence on placing the Israeli-Palestinian dispute at the center and linking all other disputes to it, serves primarily a political function: