If one reads Packer's family history, "Blood of the Liberals, " one gains more than a few clues into his ideological proclivities, why he would have been eager to see Saddam Hussein fall.Also Paul Berman's latest book which has much gossip/analysis on Joschka Fischer, Bernard Kouchner, Danny The Red Cohn-Bendit, Makiya and other figures of the pro-war Left.Makiya and Edward Said were once friends, both supported the PDFLP.
Also his new book on the War, which I am still on the waiting list
at the DPL to be able to check out, wherein he relates his
relationship with Kanan Makiya, the Iraqi exile ex-Trotskyist who
wrote, "Republic of Fear, " blurbed by that neo-con, not, Michael
Rogin. Originally submitted to Verso, they passed on the ms., Rogin
arranged for U.C. Press to publish it,
http://www.firstofthemonth.org/archives/2005/07/with_friends_li.html
>...Navasky, though doesn't seem to recognize he's revealed the worst
about some of his magazine's "best friends." His no regrets pose and
narrow focus on process (legal and otherwise) make you wonder about
his ethics. But this isn't personal. The deals at the heart of A
Matter of Opinion are everyone's business. If you want to help stop
the bleeding from the War on Terror you need to be on Navasky's case.
His pre-legal war story begins back in 1993 when he agreed to publish an except from Kanan Makiya's Cruelty and Silence. Makiya's first book, Republic of Fear (1989), had called attention to the horrors of Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime before the Gulf War (and before Iraq invaded Kuwait). Cruelty and Silence confronted the broad realities of tyranny in the Middle East and exposed the failure of Arab (and "pro-Arab") intellectuals to condemn the slaughter of innocents.
The Nation excerpt placed Middle Eastern women inside "landscapes of cruelty of silence," citing instances of state-sponsored rape and honor killings. Navasky doesn't remark on the continuing relevance of Makiya's perspective at a time when Janjaweed militias employ rape as a genocidal technique in Darfur and Shiite extremists execute prostitutes in Iraq, but he credits Makiya with "powerful reporting and analysis."
Too powerful for at least one of Navasky's Nation colleagues who alerted Edward Said – "the preeminent Palestinian intellectual in the West, The Nation's opera critic and a friend of so many of my friends that I thought of him as a friend myself." Said called Navaksy to urge him to kill the piece claiming Makiya was a "mischief-maker" who wrote "false (and libelous) things about Arab intellectuals, including not least Said himself."
Navasky acknowledges it wasn't "ideal" to have an (unnamed) Nation colleague collaborating with Said in an effort to suppress Makiya's piece, but he's too easy on these would-be cultural commissars. And his ease gets harder to take when he provides the back-story of his own relationship with "Edward." (Navasky, by the way, is never on a first name basis with that mischief-maker "Makiya.")
Back in 1981, Navasky had the sort of inspiration that justifies an editor's existence. Aware that Israel was a relatively open society with an active Peace Now constituency, Navasky realized he should encourage Palestinians to explore Gandhian modes of non-violent resistance, "substituting civil disobedience for terrorism." He also recognized (as a "New York Jew") he couldn't issue the necessary Call for non-violence: "It needed a Palestinian, someone with the stature, prestige, credentials and intellect of a Said." So Navasky raised the subject with Said who was skeptical at first, asserting civil disobedience by Palestinians hadn't been effective in the past. Navasky emphasized he wasn't talking up any one tactic but calling for a non-violent Movement: "Edward liked the idea and we went our separate ways."
A few weeks later, Navasky received an article on Israel/Palestine/America from Said that was "learned, nuanced, contextual, combative, and persuasive." But: "The clarion call for civil disobedience, for passive resistance, for Gandhian nonviolence was nowhere to be found." When Navasky "gently" asked why Said had put aside their original idea, he responded:
"Didn't you read the piece?" he asked with genuine puzzlement. "It's all there on page 8."
Said had written a sentence that might be read (by those familiar with the rhetoric of Palestinian officials) to mean he was ready to accept the existence of the State of Israel. But the notion of a Palestinian protest movement dedicated to civil disobedience, in Navasky's words, "got lost in the shuffle." (Over the years, close readers got used to that Said - "the time for speaking clearly has come" - shuffle.) No-one could complain if Said had acknowledged that he wasn't ready to issue a Call for non-violence. After all, that might have been a dangerous thing for a prominent Palestinian to do (as Navasky notes). But Said's claim it was "all there on page 8" defines intellectual dishonesty.
Though not to Navasky who leaves it at: "So much for my brilliant idea." And then rushes to his next brush with celeb-intellects - "Now, 12 years later Edward was calling about Makiya." Maybe Navasky is in a rush to avoid judging the actions of his late Palestinian friend. But even if forbearance lies beneath the slick surface, his segues are bound to set off bullshit detectors.
Navasky recalls how he laid it on thick as he explained to Said why it would be "inappropriate for us to quash [Makiya's piece] as a favor to a cherished friend of the magazine (which I told him I knew was not what he was asking for)." Though of course that was precisely what Said was asking for. Navasky assured Said The Nation excerpt from Cruelty and Silence wouldn't focus on Arab intellectuals and warned that killing the piece would lead to a "minor" scandal that would "embarrass everyone involved:" "Edward took the point."
Navasky's remembrance of his own finesse is less than winning. Especially since he ends up conceding he asked Said to recommend reviewers for Cruelty and Silence though the man had announced his bias against Makiya's work. Said proposed (among others) one of his very best friends, Eqbal Ahmad. Navasky's narrative gets twisty (and windy) as he tells how Ahmad got the gig.
I would like to be able to confess that the fix was in. It wasn't. Elsa Dixler, who very much has a mind of her own, invited Eqbal Ahmad to review Makiya's book, not because his name was on the list I passed on to her (it was) …
Eqbal, who was a friend of the magazine and of mine personally, was an anti-war visionary Pakistani radical…one of those rare scholar-activists who brought his own global vision and original perspective to any issue he tackled. I always learned something new from Eqbal's writings. And when Elsa mentioned to me that Eqbal would be reviewing Makiya, I thought I could predict more or less what he would say.
Navasky's puffery ("visionary...who brought his own global vision") and compactions of self-contradiction ("It wasn't"/ "it was" - "I always learned something new from Eqbal"/ "I could predict more or less what he would say") belong to the discourse of modified, limited hang-out. And the contradictions keep coming. Navasky expected Ahmad would defend Said while allowing Makiya was right to argue Arab intellectuals (especially those in the West) ought to speak truth to power. Instead Navasky's "visionary" turned in a "hatchet job." Ahmad insisted Makiya's case against State terror in the Middle East was worthless and "took a swipe" at The Nation for publishing an excerpt from a book that "treats documents carelessly." Ahmad upped the ante by suggesting one of Makiya's key sources was under investigation for embezzling billions of dollars.
But Ahmad mis-identified that individual who threatened to sue The Nation once the review was published. Navaksy was forced to publish a correction and settle the case before it went to court. While he was trying to beat this potential libel charge by offering evidence of The Nation's "lack of malice," Ahmad ("friend of the magazine") proved to be full of himself:
[Eqbal] refused to believe there was more than one al-Sabah: "The man's a liar," he insisted. "It will make me very unhappy that I had any dealings with The Nation if you print a 'correction' of any sort."…
I explained that our libel insurance policy included a $50,000 deductible and the magazine couldn't afford it. Eqbal offered to indemnify the magazine – anything in order not to allow this "liar" to win…
Over Eqbal's vociferous objections, he argued it was Makiya's responsibility to prove his friend wasn't an embezzler [!], we published a correction.
Navasky elaborates on how The Nation came to make this correction (just as he goes on about how he handled Said's censoriousness), but he misses the import of his own story. His account of his friends' behavior bolsters Makiya's critique of their circle of "pro-Arab," "anti-imperialist" intellectuals – that "community of conscience and understanding" tenderly invoked by Said in his commentary on 9/11 (in The London Review of Books).
It's instructive to compare Said's response to 9/11 with Makiya's. Said opened his LRB piece by noting the aftermath had been an "unpleasant time" for Muslim and Arab-Americans. After focusing on "the palpable air of hatred directed against the group as a whole," he allowed "official bellicosity" against Arabs and Muslim had "slowly diminished" in America – "catastrophe and backlash" preceded "backtrack" in his interpretation. He concluded that "long-term hope" rested on dissenters' capacity to spark a "decent reconsideration" that might lead eventually to "changed policies on Palestine, or a less crazy defence budget, or more enlightened environmental attitudes."
Makiya called for a different sort of "reconsideration:"
As I wrote in Cruelty and Silence, citing the 1930s Iraqi alter ego of Tom Lehrer, Aziz Ali, Da' illi beena, minna wa feena: "The disease that is in us, is from us and within us"… Muslims and Arabs have to be on the front lines of a new kind of war, one that is worth waging for their own salvation and in their own souls. And that, as good out-of-fashion Muslim scholars will tell you, is the true meaning of jihad, a meaning that has been hijacked by terrorists and suicide bombers and all those who applaud or find excuses for them. To exorcise what they have done in our name is the civilisational challenge of the twenty-first century for every Arab and Muslim in the world today.
Makiya backs up his talk. Based in Baghdad, he heads The Iraq Memory Foundation – the most comprehensive archive of Saddam's crimes. Makiya's Foundation is digitalizing its extensive records to enable Iraqi citizens to find out for themselves all the information available on those who were disappeared by the Baath Party between 1968-2003. Intent on reaching the next generation of Iraqis, Makiya wants to ensure the murderous history of Baathism becomes a central part of the curriculum in Iraq's schools. His Foundation will help shape a new Iraqi sense of national identity:
Identity is Memory. And Memory is Identity. People whose identities are cobbled together from half-truths, or from distorted memories of who is to blame and who is blameless, are prone to commit new transgressions.
The Iraq Memory Foundation aims to teach each ethnic and confessional group in Iraq that Saddam's regime committed crimes not just against their kind but against all Iraqis and against humanity. It seeks to sublate the psychology of the blood-feud; to model an alternative to the mentality of our terrorist enemies. As Emrys Peters, anthropologist of the Bedouin feud has written, the feud is eternal.1 And the War on Terror will go on until the will-to-kill-and-be-killed is exorcized from within.
Makiya and the other Arab and Muslim humanists who have taken up his "civilizational challenge" ought to be embraced by anyone who longs for an end to the War on Terror. But the heart of A Matter of Opinion hints friends of The Nation are more likely to slander Makiya than support his radical history project. Navasky's revelations are a symptom of a larger moral failure on the Left that Brit journalist Nick Cohen has nailed:
What we have witnessed is a sinister attempt by liberal opinion to deny legitimacy to the very liberals, feminists and socialists who have a right to expect support. The authentic Muslim has become the blood-crazed fanatic rather than the reformer. The authentic liberator has become the fascist rather than the democrat. This is a betrayal on an epic scale which casts doubt on whether it is possible now to have a decent left. <SNIP>