RUTHFULLY YOURS

It’s the Maths, Stupid I’ll share 2 of my life-long basic positions:The UK left is where I both belong and feel “safe”. Qualitative analysis is where it’s at, not the hard edged cold world of quant.

We’ll return to these.

My family are socialists. The Labour Party is the natural home of the working classes – which is where I’m from. Ok, I confess. I was briefly a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain in the heady days of Marxism Today. Seems we ended up with political post-modernism so I’m sorry about that. Joined the Labour Party then left it after hearing Ed Balls mention immigration 6 times in the space of 4 minutes.

Half-Jewish and entirely secular on all fronts, I grew up in North West London. At school there were fights in the playground when I was called “Yid” and worse. My name marked me out – it practically yelled it out – as Jewish, even though I was of course only half-Jewish. I pretty much always lost those fights.

Later on I married a Jewish woman and now have a son who is, of course Jewish.

As a politically active student I recall a sense of unease at NUS conference & on campus when groups of keffiyah-wearing students from “other political groups” seemed to be just a bit too interested in the Middle East.

After my student days I joined that group of people who – whilst not politically active day-to-day- knew exactly where right and wrong lived. Whilst we bemoaned the retreats from socialism of the Blair & Brown years, we remembered what it was to live though 18 years of Conservative government. So we never, ever voted anything other than Labour despite some friends moving off to the Greens or seeking other radical homes.

Blaming the West has become the most pervasive method of teaching for many Middle East studies departments, which are becoming the heart of pop-culture academia. Efraim Karsh, a distinguished professor of Middle Eastern studies at Bar-Ilan University and professor emeritus at King’s College London, in his latest book The Tail Wags the Dog: International Politics and the Middle East, dispels this myth.

“Britain’s ‘original sin,’ if such was indeed committed, lay not in the breaking up of Middle Eastern unity but in its attempted over-unification.” Overall, the blunders of the great powers were in trying to impose their own wishful thinking instead of obtaining a real understanding of the Middle East.

Unpopular truths abound. Karsh shows that descriptions of the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916, the secret bargain between London and Paris to divide the Middle East into spheres of influence, “as the epitome of Western perfidy couldn’t be further from the truth.” In fact, rather than being aimed at suppression of the Arabs, the agreement “constituted the first-ever great-power recognition of an Arab right to self-determination.”

Todd Haynes, the director of “Carol,” is a lover of pulp fiction. Past credits include Mildred Pierce and Far From Heaven, two weepy period films about women in familial straits and “Carol,” adapted from an autobiographical novel by Patricia Highsmith, follows in this tradition. Not having read the novel, I can only comment on the plot and characters as presented in this film version set in the 50’s in New York.

Played by Cate Blanchette, Carol is an elegant wealthy socialite who goes Christmas shopping in her mink coat and full maquillage. At the doll counter she meets Terese, a salesgirl played by Rooney Mara wearing a Santa hat and a blank expression that’s either boredom or inexperience. We soon see that Terese lives in what is meant to be a cold-water flat that has no radiator or phone; she lights the oven for heat and receives her calls from the pay phone in the common hallway. Incongruously, the set designer has made this cold-water flat a generously sized 3 room apartment that is fully furnished. This is the first in a string of details that don’t ring true, either to the characters or the period of the 50’s. Terese is a blank slate – we know nothing about where she’s from, whether she has a family or a backstory – only that she has taken a few pictures and might want to pursue that interest at some time in the future. Though she’s a naïve young salesgirl, she is pursued by a wealthy young man who wants to marry her and take her to Europe – two offers that she instinctively spurns though we’re not sure why.

This was an interesting Center for Security Policy briefing on American policy and Iraq, Libya, and Syria.

“Fourteen years after 9/11 we are worse strategically than where we were on 9/11,” stated former Congressman Pete Hoekstra at a November 13 Center for Security Policy (CSP) Washington, DC, briefing. A pleasant view from offices overlooking Washington, DC’s National Mall on a sunny day was perhaps the only bright spot during panelist presentations on a volatile Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region before some 20 CSP affiliates.

Hoekstra began this MENA tour d’horizon with Libya, where Americans “as a country snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory” by overthrowing Muammar Ghaddafi’s dictatorship in 2011. By 2003, American confrontation for over 30 years with had convinced a once dangerous adversary to cooperate with the United States and avoid the fate experienced by Ghaddafi’s peer in Iraq, Saddam Hussein. “When we decided to take him out he was doing everything we had asked him to do and had been doing it for eight or nine years,” stated Hoekstra, who met with Ghaddafi three times between 2003 and 2009.

Hoekstra cited several improvements in Ghaddafi’s behavior, such as reparations payments to victims of his regime’s terrorism like those of the 1989 Pan Am 103 bombing. “His nuke program was crated up, shipped to the United States,” and is “now sitting in a warehouse next to the Ark of the Covenant fromIndiana Jones,” Hoekstra commented comically. Ghaddafi also engaged in critical intelligence cooperation with the United States on the basis of having “been fighting radical jihadists for decades.”