Israeli Blood for Arab Promises?

A new book by Alex Beam about the genesis of Hutchin's and Adler's "Great Books" concept was reviewed by James Campbell in the New York Times today. I had the good fortune to serve on the Board of St John's College for nine years and can attest to the fact that "The Great Books" concept and the Socratic method of teaching are alive and well. St John's prides itself, as it should, in helping youth learn to reason - a commodity American culture needs to restore. (See 1 below.)

With all the renewed talk about peace in the Middle East and the implementation of the Saudi Plan the concept of trading Israeli blood for Arab promises is also alive and well and apparently being revisited. (See 2 below.)

Is this hype or is it for real - al Qaeda attacking the U.S. again and in a much more spectacular way than 9/11? (See 3 below.)

MAore advice for Obama on how to reach out to Iran. (See 4 below.)

Elad explains to "sane Arabs" Israel has not struck back at Hamas but will. Elad writes Hamas has mis-interpreted Israel's reticence as weakness. In fact, it would seem, Elad is saying Israel is biding its time and will act decisively on its own terms and at its own time of choosing.

Perhaps Elad is right and I have bought into Hamas' mistaken view but it pains me to see any democracy cow towing in the face of attacks.(See 4 below.)

Dick




1) Heavy Reading
By JAMES CAMPBELL


The humble book has survived many attacks on its integrity over the centuries, whether from tyrannical clerics or fearful governments or the new electronic wizard that promises a peculiarly modern “pleasure of the text” via limitless accessibility. Nevertheless, publishers continue to produce books, while countless numbers of people read them and — a word that crops up frequently in relation to books — love them.

A GREAT IDEA AT THE TIME: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books
By Alex Beam

Illustrated. 245 pp. PublicAffairs. $24.95



In the middle of the last century, a committee of commercially minded academics came up with its own strategy to undermine the enjoyment of reading. With the backing of the University of Chicago, Robert Maynard Hutchins, Mortimer Adler and a few others whittled the literary, scientific and philosophical canon down to 443 exemplary works. They had them bound in 54 black leatherette volumes, with the overall designation Great Books of the Western World, then hired genial salesmen to knock on suburban doors and make promises of fulfillment through knowledge. In a postwar world in which educational self-improvement seemed within everyone’s reach, the Great Books could be presented as an item of intellectual furniture, rather like their prototype, the Encyclopedia Britannica (which also backed the project). Whereas the Britannica justified its hulking presence in the home as a reference tool, however, the Great Books made a more strident demand — they wanted to be read. Unfortunately, once opened, the volumes were forbidding. Each was a small library in its own right, with slabs of text arranged in monumental double columns. The Great Books of the Western World were what books should not be: an antidote to pleasure.

The great minds behind the Great Books were Hutchins and Adler. Hutchins was a precocious academic administrator — dean of Yale Law School at age 28, president of the University of Chicago at 30 — Adler a philosopher of ideas, author of works like “How to Read a Book” and a man who, in the words of Joseph Epstein, a colleague in the 1960s, “did not suffer subtlety gladly.” The Great Books project was many years in the making and was intertwined with Hutchins’s desire to reform the humanities curriculum at Chicago, but in 1952, after years of planning and bargaining with fellow members of the Great Books team — “If Dickens goes, Melville goes” (Dickens did; Melville didn’t) — he and Adler saw their dream become a well-upholstered reality.

In “A Great Idea at the Time,” Alex Beam presents Hutchins and Adler as a double act: Hutchins the tall, suave one with a gift for leadership; Adler “a troll next to the godlike Hutchins,” with a talent for putting students to sleep. Making the acquaintance of Hutchins through his works was, to Beam, “like falling in love.” By contrast, “to be reading Mortimer Adler’s two autobiographies and watching his endless, self-promotional television appearances was a nightmare from which I am still struggling to awake.” As an appendix to the Great Books, Adler insisted on compiling a two-volume index of essential ideas, the easily misspelled Syntopicon. A photograph in “A Great Idea at the Time” shows Adler surrounded by ­filing-cabinet drawers, each packed with index cards pertaining to a separate “idea”: Aristocracy, Chance, Cause, Form, Induction, Language, Life and so on. The cards registered the expression of those ideas — Adler arrived at the figure of 102 — in the Great Books of the Western World.

Hutchins and Adler’s Great Books were a mixture of books you wouldn’t dream of reading; books you think you ought to read but know you never will; and many books that, if you haven’t read them already, you would admire and possibly enjoy. The last category included the “Iliad,” works by Chaucer and Shakespeare, “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” a few novels — “Tom Jones,” “War and Peace” — and various works of philosophy. The commercial aspect played on the common desire to harbor all of knowledge — Euclid, Kepler, Bacon, Descartes, Hume, Adam Smith, to name but a few — under one roof.

The texts were presented, however, without annotation, which would prove a hindrance even in the case of relatively accessible works, like Shakespeare’s sonnets. The 54 volumes contained practically nothing written in English in the previous 100 years (two works by Charles Darwin, one by William James), but heaps of Plato and Aristotle, some alarming medical remedies of Hippocrates — “Make the irons red-hot, and burn the pile until it be dried up” — and column after column of ancient science, of little interest to anyone but specialists, who would have equipped themselves with more advanced texts anyway. When asked for his views on which classic works to include among the Great Books, the science historian George Sarton pronounced the exercise futile: “Newton’s achievement and personality are immortal; his book is dead except from the archaeological point of view.”


Hoping to offer the reader what many of the Great Books fail to provide — entertainment — Beam falls over himself in the effort to be breezy and upbeat. No Mortimer Adler, he. “It is hard to resist poking fun,” he writes, and resistance is easily overcome. “From the culture’s point of view, Adler was a dead white male who had the bad luck to still be alive.” When reporting that “War and Peace” was among the selections of Hutchins and Adler, Beam fails to resist adding “no ‘Anna Karenina’; too readable!” His plain-man slangy style, which will be appreciated by fans of his column in The Boston Globe, is just as likely to be off-putting to others. Hutchins and his colleagues, Beam writes, “signed a pact with the devil of commerce” and “hawked their books” the way their ad man, William Benton, sold Crest toothpaste. “Forget that it cleans your teeth; you’ll be popular! Wisdom of the ages, schmisdom of the ages. Forget about learning — your boss will be impressed, women will seek you out (‘Oh! You’re reading Fourier’s “Theory of Heat.” . . . How fascinating!’), your kids will get into college, and so on. . . . Soon enough the Great Books were synonymous with boosterism, Babbittry, and H. L. Mencken’s benighted boobocracy. They were everything that was wrong, unchic and middlebrow about middle America.”


If not a great book, “A Great Idea at the Time” acts as a good guide to the rise and fall of the project. For a brief period, the Great Books were at the heart of the curriculum at Chicago, and continue to feature strongly elsewhere. In one of the reportorial chapters toward the end of his account, Beam visits St. John’s College in Annapolis (it also has a campus in Santa Fe), which still operates a teaching program based on “all Great Books, all the time.” In 70 years, little has changed at St John’s. “If a boy or girl wants to attend medical school,” Beam writes, “that means an additional year . . . of memorizing facts in conventional biology and chemistry classes, not learning the ‘truth’ behind the science, Great Books-style.”

Hutchins and Adler foresaw many obstacles on the way to ushering the Great Books into classrooms and living rooms, overcoming them by persistence, financing — the compilation of the Syntopicon alone took eight years — and a not always likable self-belief. But not even the distilled wisdom of the 54 volumes could have helped them predict that by the 1980s students on campuses throughout the United States would be forming groups and chanting, “Hey, hey! Ho, ho! Western culture’s got to go!” sometimes with support of politicians. By then, the Great Books notion had fallen from its commercial and academic high point to being the focus of readings groups. Beam relates his own adventures in one of the “850 active chapters” of the Great Books Foundation, discussing Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Frost and other writers overlooked even in the updated edition of 1990. The Great Books of the Western World are not what they were. But the world’s great books, in some mysterious, muddled way, endure.

2) 'Obama to endorse Arab Peace Plan'

The Arab Peace Initiative, based on the Saudi peace plan of February 2002, calls for a full Israeli withdrawal from all territories taken in the Six Day War, including east Jerusalem, in exchange for normalizing ties with the Arab world.

Quoting an adviser to Obama, the report states that during his visit to the Middle East in July, the President-elect said Israel would be "crazy" to refuse a deal that could "give them peace with the Muslim world."

According to the paper, Obama's advisers feel that the time is right for such a deal as Arab countries fear rising radical Islamic movements and a potentially nuclear Iran. They have reportedly told Obama he shouldn't lose time and must begin pushing his policies within his first year in office while he still enjoys maximum goodwill.

Senior Jerusalem officials last month dismissed a sudden surge of interest both in Israel and abroad in the initiative, saying it was a function of both a diplomatic process that has stalled and the transition periods in Israel, the US and the Palestinian Authority.

"Whenever the process stalls, there will be those who will pull out the Saudi plan," one senior official said. "And the Saudis have an interest in pushing this out there now, to put on a 'constructive face' with which to greet the new US president."

3)Al Qaeda says order given for US attack “far bigger than 9/11”


Counter-terror sources report US president-elect Barack Obama, European and Russian heads of state in Washington for the G20 conference over the weekend were briefed about a probable early al Qaeda attack.

Obama and his team have been advised that a new al Qaeda strike is highly probable in the United States or against a key US target in Europe, North Africa or the Middle East.

al Qaeda’s Yemen base, a reliable barometer for Osama bin Laden’s schemes, issued a Directive to All Fighters in Arabia on Nov. 9 presaging a major operation in the United States that will “change the political and economic world” and be “far bigger than 9/11.”

The notice said “the operation is very near” and “precise instructions were in the hands of “the fighters, who are already on their way to America” armed with bin Laden’s orders. The pretext offered for the attack is the rejection by the US and Europe of al Qaeda’s four-year old truce offer whose original pre-condition was the withdrawal of their armies from Iraq and Afghanistan.

The day after the new president’s election, al Qaeda issued a little-noticed statement declaring Barack Obama a murtad, i.e. an apostate whose betrayal of Islam is judged the most heinous. Believers have the duty to execute a murtad unlike other non-believers whose death sentence is optional.

Thursday night, Nov. 14, Central Intelligence Director Gen. Michael Hayden said: “Al Qaeda, operating from its safe haven in Pakistan’s tribal areas, remains the most clear and present danger to the United States.” He was addressing a Washington think-tank.

“Today, virtually every major terrorist threat that my agency is aware of has threads back to the tribal areas. Whether it is command and control, training, direction, money, capabilities, there is a connection to the FATA (Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas.)”

Hayden also mentioned Yemen and Somalia as important al Qaeda theaters of operation.

In private, most heads of the intelligence agencies fighting al Qaeda admit that an attack on the United States or major American interest outside is only a matter of time.

4) Analysis: How Obama should reach out to Ayatollah Khamenei
By MEIR JAVEDANFAR


Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's congratulatory letter to Barack Obama has increased the likelihood that the two sides will approach each other and start negotiations sometime in the future.


However, one must not overlook the fact that Ahmadinejad isn't the most powerful man in Iran - Ayatollah Ali Khameini is, and Obama should approach him, instead of Ahmadinejad or whoever Iran's next president happens to be, because Iran's foreign and nuclear policy are determined by the Supreme Leader.

But what is the best way to ensure that Khameini takes him up on the offer?

Mehdi Khalaji, a senior fellow at The Washington Institute For Near East Policy (WINEP), focusing on the role of politics in contemporary Shi'ite clericalism in Iran and Iraq has made the following sound recommendation:

"A bold and direct US offer to Ayatollah Khameini, such as proposing that a top US official meet with him in his Teheran office, would put Khameini in a difficult position. It is possible - although not likely - that he would accept, especially if he believes that Iran faces a direct threat from economic failure or Israeli attack, or if he thought that American officials would treat him respectfully and end US pressures on his regime.

"But even if he refused to meet, the United States, having tried to solve the problem through diplomacy at the highest level, would most likely find it easier to reach consensus with its strategic allies to increase sanctions on Iran."

Some in the past have accused WINEP of being a right-wing conservative think-tank, but even if that were true, this article would still show that dialogue with Iran is now becoming a bipartisan decision. This is a welcome change in US foreign policy, the fruits of which can be enjoyed by both the people of the US and the Middle East.

4) When will Israel respond?
By Moshe Elad

Sane Arab world fails to understand why Israel refrains from hitting Hamas


I’ll start with the bottom line: The moderate and sane Arab world is expecting an Israeli blow against Hamas’ leadership, including its organizational infrastructure and resources. In the face of what’s been happening recently, there is quiet and anxious expectation for “Israel to respond already,” because the Arabs are uneasy about seeing Hamas creating a balance of terror vis-à-vis Israel.


One of the main arguments of Hamas heads vis-à-vis Yasser Arafat was that as Palestinian Authority president he failed in creating such balance of terror. The angry Arafat prided himself in the 1990s on “Barghouti’s Tanzim,” a militant group comprising thousands of gunmen who “objected” to peace with Israel; thereby, Arafat could claim that simultaneously to the peace process, the PA is also leading some resistance.


Yet the truth is that Arafat was appreciated and admired because he did not threaten Israel with a deterring balance of terror. Hamas, just like Hizbullah – another ostracized and criticized Islamic group – was talking about a whole different kind of balance of terror. Back in those days already, it was preparing a network of bombers and recruited legions of suicide terrorists with the aim of hurting Israel as much as is possible. “Once we take power,” Hamas leaders said at the time,” we shall teach the Zionist enemy all about a balance of terror.”


They said they would do it, and they did. There are those who mistakenly interpreted Hamas’ willingness to agree to the latest lull as the interest of a boxer seeking to avoid a knockout blow by taking a break. “People in the know” claimed that Hamas was on the brink of collapse and that the lull saved it from disaster, no less. Yet now it turns out that the aspiration for a lull was a well planed tactical phase in creating a system of deterrence vis-à-vis our leaders in Jerusalem.


Overall, every move undertaken by Hamas, ranging from fund raising abroad to deploying its forces on the front lines vis-à-vis Israel, must not be received with simplistic and disparaging interpretations. When one hears the declarations made by Hamas spokespersons, and when one sees the order among its ranks, as opposed to the chaos that prevailed among Arafat’s people, it would be good to address what goes on in Gaza with a little more seriousness.


The penny dropped for decision-makers in Jerusalem recently, yet it appears it has not dropped completely. Suddenly, our leaders are concerned about the price paid by Israel in the wake of the lull with Hamas; a price that manifests itself through huge quantities of smuggled weapons meant to be used against Israel’s southern cities at the moment of truth.


So why hasn’t the penny dropped completely? Because Hamas expected Israel to punish the group for its actions militarily, rather than by using civilian means – a type of response that lacks real meaning in the Strip. Our reluctance to violate the lull despite the Qassam rocket attacks is being perceived by Hamas as an inability to target its leaders as we did in the past.


Image of weakness

Hamas interprets Israel’s conduct as grave weakness by those who sacrifice strategic principles in exchange for short-term relative quiet – therefore, Hamas is celebrating its victory. Sources in the Strip dismiss the frequent border crossing closures in response to lull violations by opposition elements. They don’t get overly excited by it, and look who they sent to respond to it in the media…the official in charge of electricity supply. The equation is clear: Israel is battling “peaceful” residents and fighting generators and supermarkets. In Hamas’ view, Israel is scared to confront the group’s leaders.


Hamas is rubbing its hands with glee: In the dilemma between enabling the group’s threatening military buildup in exchange for short-term relative quiet and the daily Qassam attacks and disruption of life in Sderot and the Gaza region, Israel chose the first option, just like Hamas hoped it would. Hamas conducts itself like a government that does not fear an IDF invasion. If in the past this was only done for domestic purposes, recently the movement has been conveying outwardly as well the achievement of creating a balance of terror vis-à-vis Israel.


Some will say this isn’t true, and that Israel still deters Hamas. However, the bombing of the Syrian reactor and the assassination of Imad Mugniyah and other terror figures, which have been attributed to Israel by the international media, have not prompted Hamas to engage in any second thoughts. On the contrary, Hamas believes that it, along with Hizbullah, serves as the only Arab bridgehead threatening Israel’s existence.


The common perception among Arab commentators is that Israel has ceased to be the “threatening Israel.” Observers are trying to figure out who advises Israel’s leaders to adopt the kind of moves we see in Gaza. Arab observers are likening Israel to a giant whose arms are tied behind its back, while it idly watches the “tunnel youth” flooding the Strip with bombs that can target Israeli communities far away from Gaza.


Venomous contempt is directed at Israeli and Egyptian negotiators, who instead of creating deterrence vis-à-vis Hamas capitulate in the face of its demands time and again, in order to secure yet another day of quiet. Israel’s leaders are portrayed as men in dresses (a hint to the costume used by Defense Minister Barak during an Israeli operation in Beirut in the 1970s,) a harsh image of weakness accompanied by idle threats.


Between the lines, we can understand that the sane Arab world objects to Hamas’ conduct, even if quietly. If there is a sort of consensus in the Arab world regarding who should not be “ruling the territories,” the answer is Hamas. Therefore, the repeated question is: How long will Israel show restraint? How far would Israel let Hamas go? That is, when will Israel announce its intention to deliver a powerful blow against Hamas leaders and its organizational infrastructure? Observers in Amman, Cairo, Rabat, and Riyadh will not be sorry to see it happening.