Late Night Wow: Hoop Magic

European Roadshow: Obama’s Germany Itinerary Ruffles Feathers in France, UK

From Der Spiegel:

“The French and British feel that Germany is getting too much attention,” a source told SPIEGEL ONLINE. This could prove to be a prickly issue considering traditionally close British-American ties. The Brits are also an important part of the US-led alliance in Iraq. Resentment has been stirred in London because Obama is no longer starting his Europe trip in the British capital as was initially planned. French President Nicolas Sarkozy, for his part, has demonstratively pursued a path of political rapprochement with Washington following years of antagonistic relations between former President Jacque Chirac and George W. Bush.

Barack Obama’s visit to Berlin has upset officials in other European capitals who feel the presumptive Democratic Party presidential candidate is slighting their countries. The French and British are feeling neglected.

Barack Obama is making Germany the major focus of his trip to Europe this week, a choice that is being viewed with some displeasure in Paris and London. One day after the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential nominee officially announced his plan to hold a speech at the Siegesäule, or “Victory Column,” in Berlin, SPIEGEL ONLINE also obtained information about his preliminary European agenda.

One-on-one meetings for Obama have now been confirmed with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier. But so far he is only including time in his stops in Paris and London for French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. A decision still hasn’t been made on whether the Democratic candidate will meet with the foreign ministers of those countries.

The source said this had caused additional irritation in government circles in Paris and London. High-ranking politicians there are already annoyed that the controversy about Obama’s desire to hold his speech at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate had distracted attention from the purpose of his European visit — to outline his vision for trans-Atlantic relations.

Obama is currently in Afghanistan and plans to continue his trip to Iraq — followed by stops in Israel and Jordan as well as visits to Berlin, Paris and Loendon.

“The French and British feel that Germany is getting too much attention,” a source told SPIEGEL ONLINE. This could prove to be a prickly issue considering traditionally close British-American ties. The Brits are also an important part of the US-led alliance in Iraq. Resentment has been stirred in London because Obama is no longer starting his Europe trip in the British capital as was initially planned. French President Nicolas Sarkozy, for his part, has demonstratively pursued a path of political rapprochement with Washington following years of antagonistic relations between former President Jacque Chirac and George W. Bush.

Obama’s team has left no doubts about the fact that it considers German Chancellor Angela Merkel to be the strongest leader in Europe at present. Their reasoning: Sarkozy hasn’t been in office long enough yet and Brown has been swept up in a domestic crisis. US Congressman Robert Wexler, a Democrat, recently spoke on behalf of Obama on Germany’s N-TV cable news channel, emphasizing that German-American relations were the “most established.”

But not even the Germans are totally satisfied. They are calling for further one-on-one meetings with Obama — conversations that, according to information obtained by SPIEGEL ONLINE are not very likely to happen. If he keeps to his itinerary, Obama will meet German politicians before he gives his speech on Thursday evening.

But Randy Scheunemann, foreign policy advisor to presumptive Republican nominee for John McCain, accused him in a SPIEGEL interview of not setting aside sufficient time to meet with other European leaders. “Obama is giving his first major speech in Berlin before having met with French or British leaders,” Scheunemann said. “I don’t know if (the speech will) even be delivered before his meeting with German leaders. Clearly he is not taking into account what they say. It is a campaign prop.”

And though Obama’s words may appear exceptionally harmonious during his trip, they cannot cover up the fact that he may also find strong words about Germany’s engagement in Afghanistan. In an interview with SPIEGEL, Obama’s leading foreign policy advisor Susan Rice said: “Neither Germany nor the US has the luxury of assuming that we can skate by on half-measures in Afghanistan and Parkistan and not risk suffering the consequences.” She added that the “US has to put more resources and troops into Afghanistan, and NATO should do the same, while, to the greatest extent possible, lifting operational restrictions.”

Kurt Beck, the chairman of Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) offered a reserved response to Rice’s statement. “As far as expanding the mission is concerned, no more can be done,” he said on Sunday.

Vive L’Invasion! American Burgers Have Invaded The French Capital

From The New York Times:

“It has the taste of the forbidden, the illicit — the subversive, even,” said Hélène Samuel, a restaurant consultant here. “Eating with your hands, it’s pure regression. Naturally, everyone wants it…”

“Another thing I’ve noticed is that the muscled guys order the boeuf double with bacon, egg and fries, and a Diet Coke,” he said. “Then they share a cheesecake. They don’t want to gain weight.”

Also, he explained, Parisians don’t really understand about drinking a milkshake with the burger. They order it as dessert.

EVEN if you couldn’t be on the Champs-Élysées for Bastille Day on Monday to watch seven parachutists float down in front of President Nicolas Sarkozy, you can still celebrate the greatness of France with a new local tradition.

Eat a hamburger.

Beginning a few years ago but picking up momentum in the past nine months, hamburgers and cheeseburgers have invaded the city. Anywhere tourists are likely to go this summer — in St.-Germain cafes, in fashion-world hangouts, even in restaurants run by three-star chefs — they are likely to find a juicy beef patty, almost invariably on a sesame seed bun.

“It has the taste of the forbidden, the illicit — the subversive, even,” said Hélène Samuel, a restaurant consultant here. “Eating with your hands, it’s pure regression. Naturally, everyone wants it.”

It is a startling turnaround in a country where a chef once sued McDonald’s for $2.7 million in damages over a poster that suggested he was dreaming of a Big Mac. Hamburgers were everything that French dining is not: informal, messy, fast and foreign.

But as French chefs have embraced the quintessentially American food, they have also made it their own, incorporating Gallic flourishes like cornichons, fleur de sel and fresh thyme. These attempts to translate the burger, or maybe even improve it, strongly suggest that it is here to stay.

“It’s not just a fad,” said Frédérick Grasser-Hermé, who, as consulting chef at the Champs-Élysées boîte Black Calvados, developed a burger made with wagyu beef and seasoned with what she calls a black ketchup of blackberries and black currants. “It’s more than that. The burger has become gastronomic.”

Some of the most celebrated chefs in the city have taken up the challenge. Yannick Alléno, who earned a third Michelin star in 2007 for his precise, rarefied cuisine at Le Meurice, serves a thick, succulent hamburger at his casual restaurant, Le Dali. Mr. Alléno’s baker, Frédéric Lalos, a winner of one of the country’s fiercest cooking competitions, makes the buns. With smoked bacon, lettuce, dill pickles, mustard, mayonnaise and fries, the burger at Le Dali costs 35 euros, about $56.

Romain Corbière, the chef at Alain Ducasse’s restaurant Le Relais du Parc, in a Norman-style manor near Trocadéro, cooks a seasonal burger a la plancha. This summer Mr. Corbière, a veteran of Mr. Ducasse’s Louis XV in Monaco, is substituting a shrimp and squid patty for the beef burger he served in cooler weather.

L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon offers Le Burger, actually two small burgers topped with slabs of foie gras of almost equal size.

The only thing more surprising than the about-face in chefs’ attitudes may be the enthusiasm with which their patrons have devoured these haute burgers.

“I didn’t think we would sell so many,” said Sonia Ezgulian, guest chef at Café Salle Pleyel, which Ms. Samuel opened last fall in an airy, modernist space inside one of Paris’s most prestigious concert halls.

On some days, as many as a third of her customers order the burger, which is offered alongside Mediterranean-inspired dishes like sea bass with fennel confit and pistachios. “Sometimes we say we have no more,” she said. “It’s just too much.”

When a new guest chef replaces Ms. Ezgulian at the end of August, he will keep the burger on the menu. It’s in his contract.

IT is not as if hamburgers were unknown in Paris. American restaurants here like Joe Allen have long served them. Ms. Grasser-Hermé ate her first in 1961 at the American Legion, 11 years before McDonald’s unveiled its golden arches in France. But with few exceptions the local burgers were flat, overcooked and shunned even by American expatriates.

Other forms of ground or chopped beef have been enjoyed here for years as well. Butchers sell kilos of ground meat destined to become steak haché, a pan-seared patty made with lean meat, pressed into an oval, and served without a bun.

And while steak tartare shows up on practically every brasserie menu, chefs now recognize that a hamburger is not simply six ounces of chopped lean beef grilled until crusty.

“No, that would be an error,” said Ms. Grasser-Hermé.

“A hamburger is the architecture of taste par excellence,” she explained. “The meat needs to be a mix of fatty and lean. Not raw, not rare. It must be medium rare. At the same time the bread needs to be smooth, tepid, toasted on the sesame side. I like to brush the soft side with butter. There needs to be a crispy chiffonade of iceberg lettuce. Everything plays a role.”

In developing the Salle Pleyel burger, Ms. Samuel and Ms. Ezgulian felt the weight of tradition. “We’re a little terrified of making a mistake,” said Ms. Samuel. “We cling to things like the soft buns, sweet-and-sour pickles, onions, tomatoes, cheese. We need these guideposts because we don’t have the history, the context. Otherwise, for us, it’s not a burger. It’s a hot sandwich.”

Yet Ms. Ezgulian has taken some liberties. The current version of her burger is a riff on steak tartare. She’s kneaded a mixture of chopped sun-dried tomatoes and tangy cornichons and capers into the ground meat. Parmesan shavings stand in for the usual Cheddar.

Céline Parrenin, a co-owner of Coco & Co, a two-level place devoted to eggs that opened in St.-Germain last year, didn’t feel any such compunction when she and her business partner, Franklin Reinhard, invented the Cocotte Burger. The Cheddar cheeseburger, with pine nuts and thyme mixed into the meat, sits on a toasted whole-wheat English muffin pedestal. In a wink at the restaurant’s egg theme and recalling the time-honored steak à cheval, a fried egg is placed on top.

All the chefs are making hamburgers for the first time, and they are uncertain about the exact cuts of beef they are using. Mr. Alléno, for example, simply relies on his butcher, Yves-Marie Le Bourdonnec, whose shop, Le Couteau d’Argent, is in the Paris suburb Asnières.

For Mr. Alléno’s burgers, Mr. Le Bourdonnec delivers a mix of chuck and beef rib. But the butcher thinks the American T-bone steak is an ideal cut. The T-bone does not exist in France, but to make his point, Mr. Le Bourdonnec made his own. He combined a piece of filet, which is tender but less flavorful, with a piece of contrefilet, which is marbled and tasty, but slightly less tender.

Using a long, razor-sharp knife, he sliced the meat into quarter-inch dice, chopped it fine with a cleaver and shaped it into patties, to be cooked rare in a hot skillet filmed with olive oil. No bun, no pickles, no cheese, no special sauce; only a few grains of fleur de sel.

“What you have is texture and the flavor of meat,” he said. “No artifice.”

“That’s not a burger, Papa,” pointed out his 13-year-old son, Paul. “There’s no bread.”

HOW did the dripping, juicy hamburger come to be one of the signature dishes of Paris? For one thing, expatriate French chefs reinventing American classics in the United States made it safe for their countrymen to try it back home.

“I didn’t have this burger culture,” said Ms. Samuel. “A hamburger, what’s that? I didn’t get it. Then I tasted it at DB Bistro Moderne,” she said, speaking of Daniel Boulud’s restaurant in Midtown Manhattan. “If Daniel hadn’t done it, maybe I wouldn’t have either. He helped me understand.”

Mr. Corbière grew up with burgers, but he didn’t think of putting one on the Relais du Parc menu until he tasted Laurent Tourondel’s Black Angus burger at BLT Market in New York last October.

Both Mr. Tourondel and Mr. Boulud laughed when they were told that they had helped the hamburger conquer Paris.

“I think it’s shocking, but at the same time the French are realizing that a burger is real food, it’s good,” said Mr. Boulud.

Mr. Tourondel grew up in a small town where, he said “nobody ever saw a burger until 10 years ago. Everybody was against it, but everybody goes to eat it.”

Whether the interpretations are classical or whimsical, Americans would probably recognize most of the burgers in Paris. They might be flummoxed, however, by the etiquette associated with eating them.

Ketchup does not automatically come with a burger. If requested, it may appear in a porcelain bowl. At the Café Salle Pleyel, servers do produce a ketchup bottle on demand. At lunch there one recent day, a businessman shook the ketchup onto his plate, then, taking a knife in his right hand, spread the condiment onto a forkful of hamburger in his left hand before lifting it to his mouth.

Alicia Fontanier, the co-owner and chef at the tiny gourmet bar Ferdi on the rue du Mont-Thabor, laments that many of her customers insist on using silverware. Ms. Fontanier is the sister of Maria Luisa Poumaillou, who owns a couple of boutiques down the street, and many of the socialites, expatriate international types and fashionistas who shop there invariably stop in for her burger, the Mac Ferdi, and guarapita de parchita, a potent drink of cachaça and passion fruit juice.

“Eating with your hands is part of the pleasure,” Ms. Fontanier said, seated in a dining room decorated chiefly with her 15-year-old son’s childhood toy collection. “But nine out of 10 people use knife and fork. I’m happy not to see it. I’m in the kitchen.”

At Floors, a three-story diner in a former printing shop near Sacré-Coeur that features custom burgers, Emil Lager, a waiter, said that many of the diners seem self-conscious about ordering.

“Another thing I’ve noticed is that the muscled guys order the boeuf double with bacon, egg and fries, and a Diet Coke,” he said. “Then they share a cheesecake. They don’t want to gain weight.”

Also, he explained, Parisians don’t really understand about drinking a milkshake with the burger. They order it as dessert.

In Praise Of Mavericks: “A true professional will strive to do something, not be someone”

From The Armed Forces Journal:

Civilians who serve as defense secretary rarely inspire the military men who serve in uniform. It is the profession of arms itself that has the job of exhorting, leading and studying the art of war. From time to time, however, it becomes the job of the civilian overseer to deter the military from stagnating and to prompt it to keep up with the times to serve the needs of modern war. We live in one of those times.

Robert Gates felt called upon to prompt uniformed officers accordingly when he addressed Air War College students at Maxwell-Gunter Air Force Base in April. His speech was more than a prompt; it was an inspiration. “The Armed Forces will need principled, creative, reform-minded leaders” who “want to do something, not be somebody,” Gates said.

The secretary continued by quoting Air Force Col. John Boyd: “If you decide to do something, you may not get promoted, and you may not get good assignments, and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors. But you won’t have to compromise yourself.”

For a defense secretary to quote a maverick colonel who left the Air Force as a pariah was a bold and risky step. But like the fighter pilot he quoted, he turned into the fight by describing Boyd as “brilliant” in his abilities “to overcome bureaucratic resistance and institutional hostility.” The secretary referred to Boyd as “a historical exemplar,” tracing his impact on our military from 30-year-old captain through to his continued intellectual contributions after retiring in 1975. And he praised Boyd for more than his intellect. He championed his character, quoting the colonel, who said, ”One day you will take a fork in the road. … If you go [one] way, you can be somebody. You will have to make compromises and you will have to turn your back on your friends. But you will be a member of the club and you will get promoted and get good assignments. Or you can go [the other] way and you can do something — something for your country and for your Air Force and for yourself.”

After they graduate and leave Maxwell, Gates warned the students: “You, too, will eventually face Boyd’s proverbial fork in the road. You will have to choose: to be someone or to do something.”

I knew Boyd as a colleague, a mentor and the most loyal personal friend. His contributions to the strength of our country ranged from airplane design through tactics and strategy air and ground, and the ethics of leadership.

THE PROFESSIONAL CLASS

We can consolidate all of the secretary’s descriptions into a single word: professional. That’s what Boyd was. And he was one because of what he did. “Professional” is a word we bandy about carelessly, so much so, we lose track of its meaning. Boyd exemplified its meaning.

It was during the European Renaissance that the professional class emerged and defined itself. It was during the Renaissance that the birthright nobility began to give way to a society led by persons respected for their merits — for what they did instead of who they were. Each profession had standards for entry, they professed something, and their study of it was daily, continual and life-long. They served their society. Medicine, law, the clergy and military leadership became during the 15th and 16th centuries — and still stand as — the classically defined professions. When we speak of a professional ball player or a professional musician, we are corrupting the term, for it means far more than getting a paycheck for what you do. A profession must be applied for and joined after being accepted, and its moral standards are as important as its philosophy.

The product of years of schooling, examinations, moral discipline and tests of character, the essential elements that define a profession was, and continues to be, trust. A physician, let’s say a surgeon, works on his own. Certified by his profession, he does not need a boss looking over his shoulder or a textbook in one hand as he works. He knows his profession and we trust him with our lives. The lawyer in a courtroom thinks on his feet, able to counter arguments with the knowledge he has stored over years of study. We trust our clergy to have studied, more than we have, the tenets of our faith, and to listen to our cares and laments. “Reposing special trust and confidence in the abilities of [officer’s name]” are the words read aloud when a Marine officer is commissioned — “co-missioned” with his country and entrusted to make life-and-death decisions without supervision, continents away.

Professionals have to listen, too; the physician to his patient, the lawyer to his client, the clergyman to his parishioners, the officer to his men.

Boyd embodied these traits and held to them uncompromisingly. I learned from him, and I never offered an idea that he did not hear out in detail. The many, many ideas he injected or tried to inject into the military intellect he had invariably studied, thought out, footnoted and referenced. He did his homework — as a professional.

We can think of examples from every profession where its members have strayed from its principles. But integral to the profession’s definition is the ability to expurgate, disbar, revoke license or de-commission. This can happen when a member fails to keep up intellectually, or if he fails on moral grounds. Professionals are idealists by definition, and the Boyd I knew personified idealism.

One more adjective Gates used to describe Boyd was “maverick,” and those of us who knew Boyd understand why. Yet it is unfortunate that we have to think of him as a maverick. He should have been the norm: an independent thinker who did his own research on a daily basis and espoused his views regardless of convention because he had the courage to do so. Courage is a virtue. In the military profession, courage tops the list of virtues required and demanded. My experiences in combat demonstrated that you can’t have the physical kind of courage without the moral kind. Officers with Boyd’s degree of moral courage need to be the norm, not the mavericks. Another way of putting it is that we all need to have the courage to be mavericks when institutional thought stagnates. But we have a responsibility not to let it stagnate. And that is Gates’ stern message to our officer corps.

When I taught in our Marine Corps Professional Schools in Quantico, Va., I often alluded to the old military class of medieval times, the warriors — the knights. We called them nobility. A favorite question I asked my students to ponder was, “Have we, the U.S. officer corps in the 20th and 21st centuries, descended beneath noblesse, or ascended above it?”

The answer lies in whether or not we rise to the responsibility we incur when we dare to accept our commissions and call ourselves professionals. Gates has set the standard through his courage of conviction and the daring to articulate it. In so doing, he evoked the name of one who challenged us all to ascend beyond who we think we are, by doing the work a profession demands, in the purest sense of the term “profession.”

Apologies For The Crimes Of History: Where Do We Stop?

From The American Scholar:

The reparations-for-slavery movement in the United States, inchoate and sputtering as it is, provides a paradigm of our apologizing-for-history syndrome. Slavery today is, of course, widely if not universally condemned as an evil practice, its presence in our nation’s early days a blot on our history. Americans practiced and profited from slavery for more than 200 years, and so we should, the argument runs, however belatedly, have to pay for it. But pay whom, and how? All those who endured slavery are generations dead and cannot, like the Nazi slave laborers, be compensated. Does their exploitation, however, constitute something like a historical IOU? Is their suffering heritable, like property that can be passed down through generations?

Imagine that you attend a dinner party where you get roaring drunk, insult all the guests, break your hostess’s Tiffany lamp, throw up all over the bathroom, make crude sexual advances toward the family’s teenage daughter (or son, depending), and, in backing out of the driveway, run over a bougainvillea and the cat. Imagine further that, sincerely contrite, you write a heartfelt apology — for breaking the lamp. Imagine further still that it’s not you who pens the letter of apology, but, say, your great-grandchild; and not to your original hosts, long dead, but to their great-grandchildren, but still only for having broken the lamp.

Fifty years ago, New American Library published the Mentor Philosophers series, each with a title beginning The Age of . . . Belief, Ideology, Reason, and so on; the 20th-century selections bore the title The Age of Analysis. Had the series continued to the end of that century and into this, the volume should no doubt be The Age of Apology. Our postmodern ethos seems to hold that if anything can be proved to have happened, then surely someone needs to apologize for it.

We live amid a veritable tsunami of apology. The Catholic Church, which, of course, has much to apologize for, has, of late, offered mea culpas to Galileo, the Jews, the gypsies, Jan Hus, whom it burned at the stake in 1415, even to Constantinople (now Istanbul) for its sacking 800 years ago by the knights of the Fourth Crusade, an event for which the late John Paul II expressed “deep regret.” No wonder that a group in England, claiming descent from the medieval Knights Templars, is asking the Vatican to apologize for the violent suppression of the order and for torturing to death its Grand Master Jacques de Molay in 1314, an apology timed to commemorate the 700th anniversary of that fell deed. In America, the National Council of Churches apologized to Native Americans for Europeans’ discovering their continent and appropriating their land (but did not return any church’s specific holdings to any specific tribe). The United Church of Canada followed suit, officially apologizing to Canada’s native peoples for wrongs inflicted by the church; the native peoples, however, officially rejected the apology.

The current lieutenant governor of Illinois, Pat Quinn, personally presented the leaders of the Mormon church with a copy of his state legislature’s House Resolution 793, expressing “official regret” for the 1844 murder of Joseph Smith and the expulsion of his followers, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The language asking for “pardon and forgiveness” was toned down when certain lawmakers protested that they could not ask for forgiveness for acts that they had not personally committed — a retrograde notion, apparently, of individual responsibility. Tony Blair, as British prime minister, apologized to the Irish for his nation’s insensitivity to the plight of the victims of the Potato Famine in the 1840s. A hundred years after the event, the U.S. Congress offered a formal apology to the Hawaiians for the overthrow of their monarchy in 1893. The French parlement unanimously adopted a law stating that “the trans-Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trade, perpetuated from the 15th century against Africans, Amerindians, Malagasies and Indians, constitutes a crime against humanity”: the centuries of slavery before the 15th and the slavery of other peoples do not, apparently, constitute such a crime, at least in France.

In 2005 the U.S. Senate formally apologized for something that it had not done: make lynching a federal crime. Such a record of inaction, claimed one of the resolution’s sponsors, constituted a “stain on the United States Senate.” True enough, no doubt, but one of how many? Imagine if the United States or any other government began apologizing not only for sins of commission but for those of omission: an infinite regress of culpability.

My favorite apology so far, however, appeared in a brief Reuters account. “Villagers of the tiny settlement of Nubutautau [Fiji] wept as they apologized to the descendants of a British missionary killed and eaten by their ancestors 136 years ago,” the news agency reported. “The villagers and the relatives of the missionary, the Rev. Thomas Baker, were taking part in a complex ritual intended to lift a curse the locals say has caused an extended run of bad luck.” A cow was slaughtered and kisses given to the 11 relatives of the missionary by the village chief, Ratu Filimoni Nawawabalavu, “a descendant of the chief who cooked the missionary.” No word on whether the curse lifted.

I would never denigrate any civilized response of anyone for harm he may have done or misbehavior he may have engaged in. But apologies offered by people to their contemporaries for actions taken long before any of them were born strike me as vacuous and more than a little exhibitionistic. The events and practices eliciting apology are, in varying degrees, horrific, of course, but history is filled with others equally horrifying. Why should the pope apologize for the sacking of Constantinople but not for, say, the massacre of all the inhabitants of Jerusalem — Muslims, Jews, and even Eastern Christians — in 1009, when the city fell to the forces of the First Crusade? If the pope apologizes for the treatment of Galileo, what of the much crueler fate of Giordano Bruno or Cecco d’Ascoli, encyclopedist, scientist, and poet, burned at the stake in Florence in 1327, the fire fueled with the pages of his own books? Why should the French parlement stop with declaring post-15th-century slavery “a crime against humanity” but leave un-indicted the slavery that built the pyramids and the Parthenon and most of the other great edifices of antiquity? Or the slavery that supplied the manpower that propelled papal galleys around the Mediterranean throughout the Middle Ages and several centuries thereafter? Are not the million or more Europeans and Americans who, in the 17th and 18th centuries, were kidnapped and enslaved by the Barbary States of North Africa due an apology, too — from, say, Muammar al-Qaddafi or the king of Morocco? If the U.S. Congress starts apologizing to the Hawaiians for a treacherous regime change, what of the endless string of broken treaties with the Seminoles and the Cherokees and . . . well, with almost any tribe that managed to survive long enough for there to be a U.S. Congress to betray it? History, that is, offers so much to apologize for that the question is not where to start but where to stop. We could save time, energy, and the risk of invidious specificity by just apologizing for history itself.

In Book II of Gulliver’s Travels, Lemuel Gulliver gives an account of the history of his age (the late 17th and early 18th centuries) to the wise but utterly bemused king of the race of giant Brobdingnagians. Appalled by what he hears, the king adjudges Gulliver’s history to be “only an heap of conspiracies, rebellions, murders, massacres, revolutions, banishments, the very worst effects that avarice, faction, hypocrisy, perfidiousness, cruelty, rage, madness, hatred, envy, lust, malice, or ambition could produce.” On the evidence of Gulliver’s account, the king concludes that humans constitute “the most pernicious race of odious little vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl across the surface of the earth.” No account of any era of human history before or since would, most likely, convince the king to revise his opinion. Jonathan Swift, the voice behind the Brobdingnagian mask, was no great lover of mankind — though he claimed to love heartily John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth — so his rendering of our history might be considered suspect. But then there is the testimony of the great 19th-century historian Lord Acton, he of “absolute power corrupts absolutely” fame: “Neither paganism nor Christianity ever produced a profound political historian whose mind was not turned to gloom by the contemplation of the affairs of men.” Or this from an editor of The New York Times Book Review, recently surveying the classical works of American history: “[H]istory is not the benign story of inexorable progress Americans like to believe in. Rather, it’s a record of unjustified suffering, irreparable loss, tragedy without catharsis. It’s a gorgon: stare at it too long and it turns you to stone.” Homo homini lupus, Freud cites in Civilization and Its Discontents: man is a wolf to man. “Who,” he asks, “in the face of all his experience of life and history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?” One need not subscribe chapter and verse to such pessimistic readings of the past (although I, on most days, do) to acknowledge that its annals are overrife with horrors, crimes, and cruelty. Except for reasons of political expediency and publicity, how would we cherry-pick from this long and dismal record which enormities merit apology?

Another recent news item, this from Agence France-Presse, dateline Cairo: “A court ordered 96 tenant farmers to pay back rent for the years 1923 to 1936 after finding for the landlord in a 69-year-old suit that lawyers said marked a new record even for Egypt’s slow-moving justice system.” The judgment, for $64, went against the farmers, all now dead, who had withheld payment in a rent strike, but “the court ruled that the law still required the original tenants’ grandchildren to pay. An appeal remains possible.” This case could serve as an admonitory reminder of the wisdom of declaring a statute of limitations on historical crimes and misdemeanors, of limiting liability to the actual perpetrators, of not visiting the sins (or the back rents) of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, down through the ages. Of course those who are literal victims of historical events deserve an official apology and a good deal more. For instance, from World War II: the Nisei interned in this country after Pearl Harbor; the slave laborers in Germany under the Nazis; and the so-called comfort women, perhaps as many as 200,000, mostly Korean, forced into prostitution by the Japanese. The interned Japanese Americans were, in fact, financially compensated: $20,000 for each of 82,250 claimants, for a total of $1.65 billion. And some 56 years after the fall of the Third Reich, German businesses that had used slave labor then — 6,000 companies, including DaimlerChrysler, Bayer, Bertelsmann, Deutsche Bank — agreed to pay half of $4.5 billion in compensation, the other half footed by the government. Payments range from $2,000 to $7,000 per individual, depending on the duration and condition of their servitude. These attempts at reparation may seem too little and too late, since many of the victims are dead, and less than altruistically motivated; but they do represent actions by the (more or less) responsible parties to indemnify the specific individuals harmed, not gestural feints toward now-empty victim categories. (The Japanese have delayed any payments to the comfort women; one suspects they count on all of the women dying before they get around to it.)

Our mania for apology stems from a radical sort of “presentism”: the belief, in practice, if not fully articulated, that the actions and actors of the past should be evaluated, and usually condemned, by present-day standards. In our relativistic age in which advanced opinion notoriously eschews universals and absolutes, the criteria obtaining at the moment in Cambridge and Chapel Hill, Ann Arbor and Palo Alto, Austin and Madison seem to have more than contingent status. The criteria appear perilously close to absolutes, the sort of absolutes obeisance to which allows moderately competent graduate students in sociology or culture studies to relish their moral superiority to almost any denizen of the benighted pre-Foucault past. One has only to listen to the incredulous-to-hostile laughter that, at academic conferences, greets the opinions of, say, Henry Adams or Thomas Carlyle on the mental capacities of women, or of Hegel or Hume on Africans, commonplace a century or two ago, to understand how relative our relativism really is.

Presentism wants not only to judge the past by the criteria of the present, but, in a complete failure of historical imagination, can’t conceive of the criteria of the future being radically different from today’s. A coercive dystopian future (as in the Republic of Gilead in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, where women are re-relegated to the home and doctors who once performed abortions are hanged) can be imagined, for it’s really the projection of the Old Testament past into a third Bush-Cheney term. Such images of the future tend, in fact, to be atavistic. But can we imagine something unprecedented shaping our future? If the peta imperative, for example, were to become our dominant ethos by, say, 2107, at which time no law-abiding soul would ingest animal parts or products or wear their skins and would recoil in horror at the thought that his ancestors had, what sort of apologies for history would then be forthcoming? To all the leashed canines run around in circles for the pleasure of dog lovers at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show or the thoroughbreds in the Kentucky Derby? To all the rats martyred in labs, victims of “science” — or, worse yet, “beauty”? To every pig rendered pork chops, to every mink become a coat? Will the roster of great villains of the past expand to include Colonel Sanders, Oscar Mayer, and Manolo Blahnik? Will dogcatchers become the 22nd century’s version of the Gestapo, our zoos its gulag, remembered with shame? The Hartford Courant has abjectly apologized for publishing ads in the 18th and 19th centuries for the sale of slaves; in the next century will they apologize for having run ads for puppies for sale?

The certain-to-be-made objection that such far-fetched examples trivialize real historical events only proves my point that few can seriously envision a future value system radically different from our own, just as, a century ago, few could have imagined Christopher Columbus charged with genocide or Lincoln branded a racist. Who, then, could have envisioned school boards renaming their Jefferson Highs because the eponym owned slaves, or regents jettisoning their university team logos as offensive to Native Americans? As Stacy Schiff wrote last year, “You can go to bed as an apostle of liberty, the author of the Declaration of Independence, to wake up as a slave-owning, mealy-mouthed misogynist.” Only 50 years ago, when I was a student in one of them, all eight of the then-segregated all-white high schools in Houston, Texas, were named after heroes in the Texas war against Mexico or officers of the Confederacy, including Jefferson Davis; recently an African-American superintendent of the district was succeeded by a Hispanic. In 1873 the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in Bradwell v. Illinois that women did not have the right to become lawyers: “The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life,” the court held. “The paramount destiny and mission of women are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator.” The court would probably not rule so in this era, particularly a court that includes Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Things change. Some things change in a hurry.

If certain trends metastasized, a hyperplutocratic era might arrive, with Ayn Rand as its principal deity and Friedrich Hayek as her prophet, when the devout would all wear gold dollar signs around their necks. In such an age, instead of agitation to pay reparations to descendants of those who had been held in slavery, the politically correct opinion would concur that the descendants of the slave holders are the ones who should be indemnified, their ancestors’ property having been confiscated without their consent or proper compensation. Such presentism then prevailing, strong sentiment would exist to send the 13th Amendment the way of the 18th and to declare Jefferson Davis’s birthday a national holiday.

The reparations-for-slavery movement in the United States, inchoate and sputtering as it is, provides a paradigm of our apologizing-for-history syndrome. Slavery today is, of course, widely if not universally condemned as an evil practice, its presence in our nation’s early days a blot on our history. Americans practiced and profited from slavery for more than 200 years, and so we should, the argument runs, however belatedly, have to pay for it. But pay whom, and how? All those who endured slavery are generations dead and cannot, like the Nazi slave laborers, be compensated. Does their exploitation, however, constitute something like a historical IOU? Is their suffering heritable, like property that can be passed down through generations?

Slavery existed in some form or other through most of recorded history in many parts of the world, from the Helots of ancient Sparta to the serfs of czarist Russia emancipated at the time of our Civil War. Many theorists, including Aristotle, wrote in defense of slavery, and Saint Paul seems to countenance it. Deplorable as the institution may now be considered, the idea that the historical balance sheet could be retroactively readjusted, centuries of injustice rectified by a more enlightened moral bookkeeping, is chimerical. Even if the kingdom of heaven on earth, as promised by prophets, utopians, and Marxists, were miraculously to arrive tomorrow, even if the last were finally to be first, none of this would compensate the dead for the misery of their lives.

Nor, obviously, did chattel slavery constitute the only form of horrifying economic exploitation. In the mid-19th-century industrial cities of England, for instance, 54 percent of working-class children died before the age of five; virtually all of those who survived would be put to work by the age of six or seven, typically for 13-hour days, and would die young. Not slaves in the strictest sense, the child laborers of the Industrial Revolution fared no better. They left fewer descendants to seek reparation, however, since most died too early to produce any. Adam Hochschild in Bury the Chains, his account of England’s abolition of slavery, points out how Parliament paid West Indian slave owners extravagant sums to free their slaves, who were then hired by the same owners to do the same work for wretchedly subsistent wages. Ira Berlin, in a review of a history of cotton, writes:

Seventy percent of the first workers to enter the cotton mills in Lowell, Mass., died of respiratory illness, later diagnosed as byssinosis, or brown lung disease. Their contemporaries who labored in the cotton fields of Alabama and Mississippi had no need to fear such lingering deaths, as their end came more swiftly and often more violently. Whether they worked for the lords of the loom or the lords of the lash, men and women — not to mention millions of children — who worked in the cotton industry were driven to an early death after a short, harsh existence.

Such instances and evidence could, of course, be extended ad extremum, over the centuries and around the world, many more recent and closer to home. But the point is not to engage in competing misery, seldom edifying, but to reiterate the premise posited at the outset about the nature of history itself. The dismal truth is, as Thomas Malthus memorably formulates it in Essay on the Principle of Population: “It has appeared, that from the inevitable laws of our nature some human beings must suffer from want. These are the unhappy persons who, in the great lottery of life, have drawn a blank.”

The practical arguments against a policy of reparations for slavery seem overwhelming. Consider people whose ancestors never owned slaves or people who came to this country long after slavery was abolished. That these people would agree to pay reparations is, at the least, implausible. The frequently heard counterargument holds that all Americans have benefited from the unpaid labor of the slaves so all should pay now (which means that the descendants of slaves would be paying reparations to themselves). But we as a nation have grown and profited from the exploited labor, at least from our more kindhearted present-day perspective, of people of every race, creed, and condition of servitude, from the indentured servants of colonial days to the migrant workers of today. Can we even begin to imagine a social mechanism that could right wrongs of this magnitude that were committed so long ago? What about a retroactive minimum wage by which descendants would receive the difference between what was paid then and what seems fair now? Obviously impossible because we could never tease out of the patchwork fabric of American culture the victim, the victimizer, and the innocent bystander. How to repay someone whose grandfather was a robber baron and whose grandmother was an immigrant servant girl? Recently, for instance, genealogists reported that Sen. Barack Obama was not only related to Jefferson Davis but numbered at least two other slaveholders among his direct ancestors.

A federal district court judge in Illinois recently dismissed an effort by descendants of slaves to gain reparations from corporations that they argued had benefited from slavery, ruling that none of the plaintiffs could show a specific link between themselves and the 17 corporations they named as defendants. The plaintiffs’ claim exemplifies “identity politics,” the belief that one has common interests with other members of a group simply by virtue of being a member of that group. In the Illinois case, that would be specifically anyone with a slave ancestor, presumably any black American except those descended exclusively from post–Civil War black immigrants. Even some who, while “passing” for white, might, if the reparations proved substantial enough, suddenly discover a great-great-grandparent who had borne the chains of bondage. The law requires something more exacting than group membership: evidence of specific harm done to the plaintiffs by their having a slave ancestor.

Although the reparations-for-slavery movement has minimal practical chance of succeeding, it raises interesting theoretical questions about apologizing for history in general. Reparations are apologies plus cash or its equivalent. Once paid to the descendants of those who suffered, will reparations have cleared the slate, righted the wrong, done justice? Why pay reparations to this generation of descendants? Why not to the next one and the next and the next after that? Why would paying and apologizing to one generation satisfy those to come? What gives some people the right to offer apologies for the city-sacking Fourth Crusaders or Joseph Smith’s persecutors or missionary-eating cannibals? And what gives others the right to accept those apologies? A letter published by a national magazine suggested “that some African-Americans favor placing their forefathers on the auction block one more time to see how much they will bring in today’s market.” Rather harsh, but one sees the point: they want a price put on the suffering of slaves, and they want it paid. To them. And when their grandchildren raise the issue of slavery and its relevance to them, what will they be told? See your grandfather. He cashed the check. The bill’s been paid.

But who are we to apologize? We assume, as I suggested, something like absolute validity for our current values, which gives us a sense of moral superiority to the benighted past. Is it justified? Charles Sanders Pierce, the American pragmatist philosopher, once defined a belief as a disposition to act. That is, you believe what you do. And what have we done, we apologizers? The 20th century, argued the poet Louise Bogan, was the worst century so far. Isaiah Berlin likewise regarded it as “the most terrible century in
Western history.” Even if, like most of my students, we relegated the first half of the 20th century, with the mass carnage and destruction of its two world wars, to the realm of ancient history, the evils of the last half century, well within the lifetime of most of us, appear quite sufficient unto the day. “Never again!” became the resolve after the revelation of the Nazi genocide, but the world has since witnessed, more or less passively, appalling crimes against humanity again and again: in China’s Cultural Revolution, in the killing fields of Cambodia, in the genocidal ethnic cleansing in Rwanda and Bosnia, and today in Darfur.

“Unless there is an immediate international intervention in Darfur, up to a million people may be dead by the end of this year,” according to the executive director of Africa Action, Salih Booker. That was 2004. In his 2005 book Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide, Gérard Prunier points out that “the European Union presented a spectacle of complete lack of resolve and coordination over the Sudan problem in general and the Darfur question in particular” and that the United Nations had been similarly ineffective. Or as Nobel peace laureate Elie Wiesel wrote last year: “In Darfur, humankind’s center of suffering today, men, women and children are uprooted, starved, tortured, mutilated, humiliated and massacred and the whole civilized world knows it. And little or nothing significant is being done to stop these massive violations of human rights.”

The same Arab Sudanese guilty of the wholesale murder and rape of the black African population also engage in slavery. Universally condemned as practiced centuries ago by dead white men, slavery is oddly tolerable today when practiced by people of color. The syndicated newspaper columnist Ken Hamblin, himself African-American, has pointed out the irony that none of the prominent African-American leaders agitating for reparations has been active in the struggling grassroots movement to combat this ongoing evil. “No one seriously disputes the fact that black slavery still exists in Sudan, but that fact seems to have had minimal impact on American blacks, the planet’s most affluent and politically influential descendants of black Africans.” Does not even the most elementary sense of moral priority suggest that they — that all of us — should focus our attention more on the plight of the living than the fate of the dead, who, after all, are beyond our help? Apologizing to Chicago for Mrs. O’Leary’s cow really ought to take a back seat to rigorously enforcing the current fire codes. The cia estimates that as many as 800,000 people around the world are now enslaved each year, forced to work without pay and against their will.

Apologies, believes Mrs. Touchett, a character in Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady, are “of no more use to her than bubbles, and she herself never dealt in such articles. One either did the thing or one didn’t.” Mrs. Touchett, stiff-backed, unsentimental, no-nonsense, whose favorite words in the English language are yes and no, is not meant to be a particularly sympathetic character, but I have always felt a guilty admiration for this tough old lady who refuses to traffic in apologies. She could well stand as the contra-Zeitgeist of our age, the antithesis to our thesis of perpetual apology. By her standard the history of our own age makes our apologies for crimes of centuries past sound hollow, fatuous, hypocritical. We might adopt as our credo a slight modification of the Gospels: Let him who is without sins of his own offer the first apology for the sins of others.

I do not, of course, disparage serious study of history, depressing as that often proves, nor do I deny the legitimacy of passing moral judgments on the past. The view that many of the actions that constitute history are evil does not mitigate the evil of any particular action, just as the plea of the politician on the take that “everyone does it” constitutes no defense in a court of law. A single cruel act in a vast sea of cruelty remains a cruel act. To say, then, that apologies for history are always pointless and usually fatuous does not mean that we should not remain keenly aware of the abuses of the past, particularly if this awareness can help prevent their recurrence.

A kind of historical amnesia often serves nationalistic interests. In 2005, Turkey put on trial the nation’s best known novelist, Orhan Pamuk, for insulting “Turkishness.” His offense was to point out to a Swiss newspaper his country’s refusal to confront its systematic murder of a million Armenians in 1915, the century’s first genocide. And another Turkish citizen, novelist Elif Shafak, was sued in 2006 under the same law merely because a character in her latest novel, The Bastard of Istanbul, calls the same murderous episode genocide. (The Pamuk case was dropped on a face-saving technicality; Shafak’s prosecution was also dismissed.) The Japanese increasingly expunge from their history texts mention of the atrocities committed by their army throughout Asia in World War II. The so-called rape of Nanking is only the most horrifying on a long list of horrors. Various ideologies, too, edit history to fit their Procrustean beds, tendentiously snipping, tweaking, spinning, and burking what would have seemed to be immutable facts. A certain sort of pathotheology or theopathology leads some — the president of Iran, the father of Mel Gibson, an engineering professor at Northwestern University — to join neofascist historians in denying that the Holocaust ever happened. In a 1956 Grace Kelly movie, The Swan, a minor German royal, dispossessed by the Napoleonic Wars, breathlessly announces: “I’ve just read the most wonderful book. It proves conclusively that Napoleon never existed.” Many such books find readers. The deconstructionist Paul de Man, with a pro-Nazi past of his own that needed deconstructing, tutored a generation of postmodernists in the fictiveness of facts. But for the quarter million men who followed the French general to Russia and died there, Napoleon existed. And for the millions who perished in it, the Holocaust existed; it is not deniable, even in Yale seminar rooms.

Facing history — that Gorgon’s head — dead on is never easy, and at times it is almost unbearable. The clearest lesson that it teaches is that grim one: Homo homini lupus. Still it chastens, tempers, rigorously instructs, is essential. The more we know of it, the better.

But, please. No more apologies.

The Beast That Is Samir Kuntar: ‘She could not understand that it wasn’t personal’

From The Guardian:

Samir Qantar, feted as a hero of the resistance in his native Lebanon this week, was reviled as a child-murdering monster in Israel, which freed him in exchange for the bodies of two soldiers killed by Hizbullah in the raid that triggered the 2006 war. Over four years Chen Kotes-Bar, an Israeli journalist and daughter of an Auschwitz survivor, spoke to prisoner 562885 … the man behind a brutal terrorist act that is seared into her country’s consciousness. This is an account of their extraordinary conversations:

Our meetings, which began in February 2004, took place in the prison library – just the two of us, unaccompanied. Qantar spoke to me in Hebrew. He brought tea and biscuits, and he chain-smoked. Over the 29 years he spent in Israeli jails, I was the first and only Jewish Israeli woman he met and spoke to face to face.

I told him about my father, who survived Auschwitz, and about my five-year-old son. Each time I wrap him in a towel after his bath, I told Qantar, I think of Danny Haran and his daughter Einat. About the terror attack in Nahariya.

The girl’s death was a tragic incident, answered Qantar. He insisted that he had not killed her. What does it matter, I told him, you shot at them. If you had not landed on the beach at Nahariya in your rubber dinghy, Einat Haran would still be alive. He never expressed any remorse.

Qantar was born in the village of Abiya, on Mount Lebanon. “My father worked in Saudi Arabia as a chef for Albir Avila, the international hotel chain. He was a well-known chef, in high demand. He used to come home once every two months, always laden with gifts like clothes and perfumes.

“My mother is a homemaker with a very strong personality. When she decides something, that’s it – you can never change her mind. My family is Druze, secular and well off. We are three brothers and five sisters. We have a beautiful house that overlooks Beirut, with a view of the airport from the balcony. Occasionally my father took me to Beirut. When I saw the refugee camps, I asked my father what they were. He explained to me, ‘Son, those are Palestinians. The Israelis drove them out of their country, and they’re not allowed to return.”

At the age of 13, Qantar persuaded the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine to allow him to enlist. “Each afternoon at 5, a car would collect me and take me to the training camp. That’s where I shot a gun for the first time – a Kalashnikov. It was fantastic.”

Three years later, having spent 11 months in a Jordanian prison following a failed terror operation, Qantar was given leadership of a cell and assigned to attack Nahariya, an Israeli coastal town located about 10km south of Lebanon.

During that notoriously brutal attack, Qantar, then 16, dragged 32-year-old Danny Haran and his four-year-old daughter, Einat, from their apartment to the nearby beach. He killed Haran by shooting him in the back and then drowning him, while Einat watched. According to forensic evidence and eyewitness court testimony, Qantar then killed the girl by smashing her skull against the rocks with the butt of his rifle. Her mother, Smadar, hid with two-year-old Yael, but accidentally smothered her to death while trying to silence the toddler’s cries. The Nahariya attack is considered the most brutal in Israel’s history. It is seared on the collective Israeli consciousness.

“We set out on the rubber dinghy at 10pm on April 21 1979. The sea was stormy and it was cold. The journey to Nahariya took about four hours, because we travelled slowly to avoid making noise.”

Upon landing on the beach in Nahariya, Qantar and his comrades followed instructions issued in Beirut – which included finding a police officer and killing him. They knocked on the door of a private house and called out in Arabic via the intercom, frightening the inhabitants into calling the police. They killed officer Eliyahu Shachar in a hail of bullets. Qantar boasts that he alone shot 30 bullets.

They continued to a nearby apartment building – planning, said Qantar, to abduct two or three people and take them back to Lebanon. “We walked up some stairs and I kicked open the door of an apartment,” he recounted. “I told Majed [one of his co-attackers] to take the right, while I took the left. Majed opened the bedroom door and someone inside shot him twice in the forehead. He managed to say, ‘They shot me,’ before he fell.

“I doubled back, entered the bedroom and saw the man who shot Majed. He was an older guy, with a long nose. I pulled the trigger on my pistol that was equipped with a silencer, but nothing happened. I tried again, but still nothing. I tried using my Kalashnikov, but it was jammed. That guy was lucky.

“I yelled downstairs, ‘Someone get up here.’ Ali came up the stairs. I told him, ‘Toss a grenade in there, I’ve gotta fix my weapon.’ The explosion made everything go black. The guy in the bedroom disappeared. I was pretty sure he was dead, but I fired a few more shots just to make sure. Then we went downstairs. The stairwell was dark, but there was light under the door of one of the apartments. We broke in. That was the Haran family’s apartment.

“Dan Haran was standing there, looking at us. The little girl was with him. When we arrived, he was sitting on the bed, as if he were waiting for someone. But as soon as we entered the bedroom, he stood up. He started talking to me in English. I didn’t understand much; just a few words. He was trying to explain that I should not hurt him. I told my comrade in Arabic, ‘Don’t shoot.’

“I tried to calm him with gestures. I said to him, ‘Come.’ He started speaking to me in a mixture of Hebrew and English. He held his daughter tightly. The girl did not make a sound. She was wearing pyjamas. I tried to tell him to leave her there, but he did not understand. I tried telling him ‘come.’ But he did not want to come with me. I understood he was trying to give the police time to arrive. He was afraid.

“My comrade, Muhammad Ali, did not understand why we were waiting. I tried explaining to Haran again, using Arabic and hand gestures. He understood, but he was completely unwilling to come with me. I tried to separate him from the little girl. Then I heard shots outside. It was 2.45am. I said, ‘He is delaying us.’

“I grabbed him in a hurry, with the girl in his arms. I said, ‘Yalla, imshi ['Let's go, move it']. We left the building surrounding Haran, who was holding his daughter in his arms, and went to the beach. Haran kept halting and talking, trying to delay us. But we had to get to the boat. They were waiting for us in Lebanon.

“As we approached the rubber dinghy, we heard a lot of voices. Then shots were fired in our direction. We approached the boat from the rocks, and Ali took Danny on board. That’s when they started to shoot at us really hard. I returned fire, but it wasn’t enough. Ali and Danny got off the boat. I ordered everyone to take a position on the rocks and return fire. Danny was behind us. His daughter was near him. Haran waved at the soldiers and called out to them in Hebrew.

“They continued to fire heavily. I ducked down to put a fresh magazine into my rifle. Haran waved again, while they were still firing, and he was wounded.

“The little girl screamed. That was the first time we heard her. That’s it. I don’t remember anything else.

“The battle continued until around 5.30am. Ahmed was wounded in the forehead. Ali was killed. I took five bullets and lost a lot of blood. I was not focused.

“What happened to the girl? During the interrogation they told me, ‘You must admit that you wounded the girl with your rifle.’ I told them, ‘Write whatever you want.’ I did not see anything and I did not hear anything. It was total chaos there. I was focused on the goal. I don’t mind admitting to things that I did. I don’t want to admit to things that I did not do.”

Samir Qantar’s version of the events of April 22, which have been articulated here in his voice for the first time, is different from that of the security service personnel and Israeli civilians who were present.

According to the Israeli security services’ reconstruction of the incident, officer Eliyahu Shachar was killed after he got out of his vehicle and fired two warning shots into the air. Qantar’s cell responded with a massive burst of shots. A teenager who was sitting in the car, together with two more police officers, was wounded in the leg and ran to hide behind some bushes.

Also contradicting Qantar’s testimony is that of Smadar Haran, Danny Haran’s widow, who hid with Yael in a tiny crawlspace above the bedroom. She has no recollection of hearing Qantar trying to convince Danny to leave Einat behind. “It was a terrible and chaotic night, but I find it very difficult to believe that any such conversation took place,” said Smadar.

Samir Qantar and Ahmed Alabras were wounded and captured at 5.30am. Mhanna Salim Al-Muayed was killed during the exchange of fire.

During his trial Qantar denied responsibility for the murder of the Haran family, despite the evidence of the pathologist, which proved that Einat Haran was killed by the force of a blunt instrument – most likely a rifle butt. The pathologist’s report also showed that Einat’s brain tissue was found on Qantar’s rifle.

In November 1978 Qantar’s trial began and lasted for three months. “I thought it was a circus,” said Qantar. “There were 52 witnesses. I testified for 90 minutes, in Arabic. The sentence was handed down on January 29 1980. I got five life sentences plus 48 years inside. At the trial I heard for the first time the names of Eliyahu Shachar, Einat, Danny Haran and Smadar Haran, who survived.”

“Smadar took me on as her personal project. She could not understand that it wasn’t personal. I didn’t come with Lebanon with a note that said ‘Haran family.’ I came as part of a conflict in which I was convinced I had to participate. I did what I did for my people, for my country. If I sit in jail for a hundred years, I will never change my opinions. This is what I believe.

“You are all banging your heads against the wall. You are playing a zero sum game, and both sides are losing. The solution is for the stronger side to compromise. You are the stronger side. You are the occupiers. If you don’t compromise, things will not work out. Those are my opinions.”

In July 2006, Hizbullah fighters attacked an Israeli patrol and kidnapped two reservist soldiers, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev to use as bargaining chips to secure Qantar’s release. In the ensuing month-long war, 1,100 Lebanese and more than 100 Israelis were killed. The remains of the two Israeli soldiers were this week handed over to Israel in a deal which saw Qantar’s pardon and return to Lebanon.

“When the war began, I felt pride. Our people have finally begun to value human life, as you did once. I hoped the abducted soldiers were alive. I knew they were more valuable alive, and I wanted the price to be high. I heard the parents of the abducted soldiers speaking. Things like that lower the barriers. I knew that if they had released me in 2004, your soldiers would not have been abducted. There would not have been a war at all.

“You are responsible. You behaved with stupidity and arrogance. After the 2004 prisoner swap I told one of the guards at Nafha, ‘There is going to be a war over me. Remember that.’ I knew that there would be a deal and I would be released, that it was just a matter of time.

“What am I going to do now, after my release? I really don’t know. I feel as if I am going to another world. I need to sit and digest my new situation. If I had been imprisoned at an older age, it wouldn’t be so difficult. But I came to jail as a teenager.

“This is the first time I will experience life on the outside as an adult. I need to learn how to drive, to go to the bank, to buy things. I have never held money in my hand.

“The thing I need most now is privacy. In 2004, when I was supposed to be freed, I bought a house, 40 metres from the beach, in Beirut. The house is waiting. I want to be alone. I want to have my own key, so that I can come and go whenever I please, to drink coffee on the balcony, to smoke a cigarette, to go down and swim in the sea and go jet skiing.”

· This article first appeared in Ma’ariv

The ‘Purple Witch,’ Someone Else The Left Can be Proud Of

From Der Spiegel

Margot Honecker, 81, widow of hardline East German ruler Erich Honecker, received an award this weekend for services to the Nicaraguan revolution. Known as the “purple witch” in Germany, Honecker basked in the praise heaped on her and her late husband.

Beaming and raising her fist in the air, Margot Honecker, the widow of former East German ruler Erich Honecker, was feted as heroine of the revolution on Saturday by Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, who pinned an award to her chest for her work on a 1980s literacy campaign and for her late husband’s support for his regime.

Honecker, 81, reviled in Germany as the “purple witch” because of the blue-rinsed hairstyle she used to have and her harsh style of leadership in the communist German Democratic Republic, clapped, sang, waved and looked healthy and fit during the ceremony in the Nicaraguan capital Managua, which was also attended by Venezuela’s left-wing firebrand president Hugo Chavez.

She has lived in the Chilean capital of Santiago since 1992. Erich Honecker, who led the GDR from 1971 until 1989 and was accused of treason, corruption and abuse of power after the fall of the Berlin Wall, died in Chile in 1994.

He had been put on trial in Germany on manslaughter charges for ordering East German troops to shoot people trying to flee across the Berlin Wall, but he was released in 1993 because he was suffering from liver cancer, and he emigrated to Chile where he died.

Margot Honecker, a former East German education minister, accepted the “Ruben Diario” prize at a ceremony marking the 29th anniversary of his Sandinista Revolution. The ceremony was also attended by Aleida March, widow of Cuban revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara.

Rosario Murillo, Ortega’s wife, said of Erich Honecker: “He showed such solidarity and was so special and loving to the free people of Nicaragua.”

Media reports said that when Margot Honecker received the award, she turned to the crowd, raised her clenched fist and called out: “Long live the revolution, long live Nicaragua!”

The ceremony was widely reported in the German press. “She’s still kissing left-wing rulers,” wrote mass circulation Bild. “They celebrated the purple witch as if the horrific Communist Party regime and the killings at the Wall had never happened.”

‘Stoooopid… why the Google generation isn’t as smart as it thinks’

From The Times Of London:

No human being, he says, can effectively write an e-mail and speak on the telephone. Both activities use language and the language channel in the brain can’t cope. Multitaskers fool themselves by rapidly switching attention and, as a result, their output deteriorates…

The important thing,” he tells me, “is that we now go outside of ourselves to make all the connections that we used to make inside of ourselves.” The attending self is enfeebled as its functions are transferred to cyberspace.

“The next generation will not grieve because they will not know what they have lost,” says Bill McKibben, the great environmentalist…

On Wednesday I received 72 e-mails, not counting junk, and only two text messages. It was a quiet day but, then again, I’m not including the telephone calls. I’m also not including the deafening and pointless announcements on a train journey to Wakefield – use a screen, jerks – the piercingly loud telephone conversations of unsocialised adults and the screaming of untamed brats. And, come to think of it, why not include the junk e-mails? They also interrupt. There were 38. Oh and I’d better throw in the 400-odd news alerts that I receive from all the websites I monitor via my iPhone.

I was – the irony! – trying to read a book called Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age by Maggie Jackson. Crushed in my train, I had become the embodiment of T S Eliot’s great summary of the modern predicament: “Distracted from distraction by distraction”. This is, you might think, a pretty standard, vaguely comic vignette of modern life – man harassed by self-inflicted technology. And so it is. We’re all distracted, we’re all interrupted. How foolish we are! But, listen carefully, it’s killing me and it’s killing you.

David Meyer is professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. In 1995 his son was killed by a distracted driver who ran a red light. Meyer’s speciality was attention: how we focus on one thing rather than another. Attention is the golden key to the mystery of human consciousness; it might one day tell us how we make the world in our heads. Attention comes naturally to us; attending to what matters is how we survive and define ourselves.

The opposite of attention is distraction, an unnatural condition and one that, as Meyer discovered in 1995, kills. Now he is convinced that chronic, long-term distraction is as dangerous as cigarette smoking. In particular, there is the great myth of multitasking. No human being, he says, can effectively write an e-mail and speak on the telephone. Both activities use language and the language channel in the brain can’t cope. Multitaskers fool themselves by rapidly switching attention and, as a result, their output deteriorates.

The same thing happens if you talk on a mobile phone while driving – even legally with a hands-free kit. You listen to language on the phone and lose the ability to take in the language of road signs. Worst of all is if your caller describes something visual, a wallpaper pattern, a view. As you imagine this, your visual channel gets clogged and you start losing your sense of the road ahead. Distraction kills – you or others.

Chronic distraction, from which we all now suffer, kills you more slowly. Meyer says there is evidence that people in chronically distracted jobs are, in early middle age, appearing with the same symptoms of burn-out as air traffic controllers. They might have stress-related diseases, even irreversible brain damage. But the damage is not caused by overwork, it’s caused by multiple distracted work. One American study found that interruptions take up 2.1 hours of the average knowledge worker’s day. This, it was estimated, cost the US economy $588 billion a year. Yet the rabidly multitasking distractee is seen as some kind of social and economic ideal.

Meyer tells me that he sees part of his job as warning as many people as possible of the dangers of the distracted world we are creating. Other voices, particularly in America, have joined the chorus of dismay. Jackson’s book warns of a new Dark Age: “As our attentional skills are squandered, we are plunging into a culture of mistrust, skimming and a dehumanising merger between man and machine.”

Mark Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory University in Atlanta, has just written The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardises Our Future. He portrays a bibliophobic generation of teens, incapable of sustaining concentration long enough to read a book. And learning a poem by heart just strikes them as dumb.

In an influential essay in The Atlantic magazine, Nicholas Carr asks: “Is Google making us stupid?” Carr, a chronic distractee like the rest of us, noticed that he was finding it increasingly difficult to immerse himself in a book or a long article – “The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”

Instead he now Googles his way though life, scanning and skimming, not pausing to think, to absorb. He feels himself being hollowed out by “the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self – evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the ‘instantly available’”.

“The important thing,” he tells me, “is that we now go outside of ourselves to make all the connections that we used to make inside of ourselves.” The attending self is enfeebled as its functions are transferred to cyberspace.

“The next generation will not grieve because they will not know what they have lost,” says Bill McKibben, the great environmentalist.

McKibben’s hero is Henry Thoreau, who, in the 19th century, cut himself off from the distractions of industrialising America to live in quiet contemplation by Walden Pond in Massachusetts. He was, says McKibben, “incredibly prescient”. McKibben can’t live that life, though. He must organise his global warming campaigns through the internet and suffer and react to the beeping pleading of the incoming e-mail.

“I feel that much of my life is ebbing away in the tide of minute-by-minute distraction . . . I’m not certain what the effect on the world will be. But psychologists do say that intense close engagement with things does provide the most human satisfaction.” The psychologists are right. McKibben describes himself as “loving novelty” and yet “craving depth”, the contemporary predicament in a nutshell.

Ironically, the companies most active in denying us our craving for depth, the great distracters – Microsoft, Google, IBM, Intel – are trying to do something about this. They have formed the Information Overload Research Group, “dedicated to promoting solutions to e-mail overload and interruptions”. None of this will work, of course, because of the overwhelming economic forces involved. People make big money out of distracting us. So what can be done?

The first issue is the determination of the distracters to create young distractees. Television was the first culprit. Tests clearly show that a switched-on television reduces the quality and quantity of interaction between children and their parents. The internet multiplies the effect a thousandfold. Paradoxically, the supreme information provider also has the effect of reducing information intake.

Bauerlein is 49. As a child, he says, he learnt about the Vietnam war from Walter Cronkite, the great television news anchor of the time. Now teenagers just go to their laptops on coming home from school and sink into their online cocoon. But this isn’t the informational paradise dreamt of by Bill Gates and Google: 90% of sites visited by teenagers are social networks. They are immersed not in knowledge but in “gossip and social banter”.

“They don’t,” says Bauerlein, “grow up.” They are “living off the thrill of peer attention. Meanwhile, their intellects refuse the cultural and civic inheritance that has made us what we are now”.

The hyper-connectivity of the young is bewildering. Jackson tells me that one study looked at five years of e-mail activity of a 24-year-old. He was found to have connections with 11.7m people. Most of these connections would be pretty threadbare. But that, in a way, is the point. All internet connections are threadbare. They lack the complexity and depth of real-world interactions. This is concealed by the language.

Join Facebook or MySpace and you suddenly have “friends” all over the place. Of course, you don’t. These are just casual, tenuous electronic pings. Nothing could be further removed from the idea of friendship.

These connections are severed as quickly as they are taken up – with the click of a mouse. Jackson and everyone else I spoke to was alarmed by the potential impact on real-world relationships. Teenagers are being groomed to think others can be picked up on a whim and dropped because of a mood or some slight offence. The fear is that the idea of sticking with another through thick and thin – the very essence of friendship and love – will come to seem absurd, uncool, meaningless.

One irony that lies behind all this is the myth that children are good at this stuff. Adults often joke that their 10-year-old has to fix the computer. But it’s not true. Studies show older people are generally more adept with computers than younger. This is because, like all multitaskers, the kids are deluding themselves into thinking that busy-ness is depth when, in fact, they are skimming the surface of cyberspace as surely as they are skimming the surface of life. It takes an adult imagination to discriminate, to make judgments; and those are the only skills that really matter.

The concern of all these writers and thinkers is that it is precisely these skills that will vanish from the world as we become infantilised cyber-serfs, our entertainments and impulses maintained and controlled by the techno-geek aristocracy. They have all noted – either in themselves or in others – diminishing attention spans, inability to focus, a loss of the meditative mode. “I can’t read War and Peace any more,” confessed one of Carr’s friends. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

The computer is training us not to attend, to drown in the sea of information rather than to swim. Jackson thinks this can be fixed. The brain is malleable. Just as it can be trained to be distracted, so it can be trained to pay attention. Education and work can be restructured to teach and propagate the skills of concentration and focus. People can be taught to turn off, to ignore the beep and the ping.

Bauerlein, dismayed by his distracted students, is not optimistic. Multiple distraction might, he admits, be a phase, and in time society will self-correct. But the sheer power of the forces of distraction is such that he thinks this will not happen.

This, for him, puts democracy at risk. It is a form of government that puts “a heavy burden of responsibility on our citizens”. But if they think Paris is in England and they can’t find Iraq on a map because their world is a social network of “friends” – examples of appalling ignorance recently found in American teenagers – how can they be expected to shoulder that burden?

This may all be a moral panic, a severe case of the older generation wagging its finger at the young. It was ever thus. But what is new is the assiduity with which companies and institutions are selling us the tools of distraction. Every new device on the market is, to return to Eliot, “Filled with fancies and empty of meaning / Tumid apathy with no concentration”.

These things do make our lives easier, but only by destroying the very selves that should be protesting at every distraction, demanding peace, quiet and contemplation. The distracters have product to shift, and it’s shifting. On the train to Wakefield, with my new 3G iPhone, distracted from distraction by distraction, I saw the future and, to my horror, it worked.