Some place in the prints this morning, I saw President Obama characterized as bi-racial. It led me to thinking about the way we read men and women with different proportions of blackness in them. Pretty much up to now, it was the Nuremberg Law model: a little bit of Jewish blood, you're Jewish … a little bit of black blood, you're black.

A few weeks ago, in an extraordinary piece, John McWhorter parsed the meaning of "African-American" and found it utterly useless or, worse yet, a lie. "Black" is less and less a scientific category and becoming less and less a sociological category, as well. But, as a political term, the word has a tonic resilience because there are rewards in the system for those who can or want to rely on them. And, hey, I'm not getting morally huffy. If bankers can arrange for affirmative action, there's no reason that descendants of slaves or people who think they're descendants of slaves should be prevented from sharing in the small potatoes that status provides. Whether there is internal and intrinsic justice in that system is another matter altogether.

In any case, Sheryl Gay Stolberg published an article, "For Obama, Nuance on Race That Invites Questions," in Monday's Times. From the headline, you could discern nothing. But the piece revolved around how their black brother, the president, was treating their problems and their issues. Alas, many of the people referenced by Stolberg wreaked of deceit--which testified to the accuracy of her writing.

The Rev. Al Sharpton is cited--I'd guess at his own suggestion--as "working with Mr. Obama to close the achievement gap in education." What possibly could that phrase mean? Obama is not out of his mind, and neither is Arne Duncan. In any case, Sharpton gave the president a pass: "[He] says the president is smart not to ballyhoo 'a black agenda'." Sharpton is now a heretic to his own beliefs. Of course, he is also a charlatan and a crook.

Others are harsher with Obama: Representative Elijah E. Cummings; Georgetown sociologist Michael Eric Dyson, whose scholarly credentials are inversely proportional to his monstrous output; the black writer Earl Ofari Hutchinson sums up the president's critics in characterizing his strategy as "disingenuous at best, and an insult at best." In my eyes, these constitute a big compliment for Obama.

Unquestionably, however, there is a rift opening up between the White House and the black population. I'd like to see this studied, with an eye to grasping whether the rift is equally evident across the rungs of blackness. I have no guesses. We will already see some of this in the Congressional elections. Two questions to pose: Will black Americans vote against their economic interests? Or will they just stay home?

Nearly a year ago, Attorney General Eric Holder did a little incendiary work of his own by calling Americans "a nation of cowards" on racial matters and saying that we should start a public conversation on the subject. Apparently, his boss has had no intention of doing this. So maybe Holder should start his little confab with the prez. But there are character matters inhibiting such an initiative. As John Judis proved to me the other day, Obama “is a yuppie," not the sort of fella to start big chatter about race.

Now, my guess is that Holder will be the first administration official (after poor, devoted, and innocent Greg Craig) to be asked to walk the plank. After all, the AG is the one responsible for arranging to hold the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in half of lower Manhattan; he's persisted with the Guantanamo fantasy; and he was also the official who turned baby-face Abdulmutallab into a civil prisoner with a civil trial, Miranda rights and all. Yes, Obama sanctioned all these actions. But you don't expect him to walk the plank, do you? That's for underlings.

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There are many factors which have determined and over-determined the miserable history of Haiti, to which almost everybody had become accustomed. The recent plague, however, provoked a moment of pity ... and also of self-pity, which manifested itself by Haitian anger against the aid providers who did not act fast enough or did not bring the right equipment or did not bring sufficient aid-workers. Or imported clothing when they should have brought water or food. This is the understandable petulance of people who usually expect nothing and then suddenly become the cause of the moment, the recipients of a largesse that will not last.

The very issues of development and underdevelopment are heavily laden with ideology. Not just prescriptive of ideologies of left and right. But utilitarian models, supposedly neutral. Like a United Nations administration of help and reconstruction, as if anything sponsored by the U.N. would be anything but corrupt, inefficient, confused, and racialist.

I myself proposed what would in effect be a mandate for Haiti overseen by the United States. The model could be the American occupation and reform of Japan. But, of course, Japan was already a very advanced country. So the analogy is at best flawed. To tell the truth, whether Japan or not, Haiti would be lucky to be a protectorate (against nature and against its own large-scale criminal elements) of America. No one in the U.S. is eager for such an encounter. It would be costly. It would induce resentment among the hemisphere's "progressives" like the buffoon Hugo Chavez, who is leading his oil-rich country into poverty and has already led it into despotism and worse. And the American left would denounce an American mandate for Haiti as imperialism, regardless of the processes or the outcomes. And what about the American imperialists, the Republicans? They would think it nothing less than insane.

And insane it may seem.

The Haitian narrative is interlaced with the spooky charms of voodoo: fright, inference, faith, mystery. These are not traits that are conducive to sound plans for economic development or rational political discourse. Lawrence Harrison, who once ran USAID in Haiti and now is professor at the Fletcher School of Diplomacy at Tufts, has written a short but challenging essay on the role of voodoo in Haiti's past and the dreadful mortgage it has carried over into Haiti's future. It is not a topic politicians and others who are charged with the good of Haiti are eager to touch.

But Harrison makes the point that voodoo is not a racialist explanation. But it is a cultural explanation. Cultural explanations may not explain all. But they always explain much.

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No one who has read either Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle (by Dan Senor and Saul Singer) or The Israel Test (by George Gilder) could have been surprised by the news that Israeli scientists and private investors have produced a no-nonsense electric car that meets all the myriad objections raised to other vehicles of the type.

The fact is that any model automobile can be fitted for the ever-renewable battery. Yes, it has the cumbersome chargeable option. But the real point about the battery is that, when it runs out of power (at about the time your engine would have run out of gas), you go to your battery station (instead of gas station) and exchange the exhausted one for a recharged one. This transaction will take about five minutes. And on and on.

Soon the world will be full of these cars in models from Renault (which has already signed on) to, well, everyone.

There is a "JPost TV" film clip on the Jerusalem Postwebsite that tells the story.

The Associated Press also reports on the development.

And what does this mean for the Palestinians? Nothing, nothing at all.

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First, I'm back. And back from Rome, at that. I'm not sure that modern Romans actually appreciate the antiquity amidst which they live, an antiquity that goes back eight centuries before the birth of Christianity. Which means that the Etruscans, the Greeks, and the Jews were there before, well before the Romans. In my New York city public high school--OK, it was Bronx Science, but still--I had the emperors memorized from Romulus to Romulus Augustus, and probably could then stipulate the significance of at least ten: Julius Caesar, Caligula, Titus, Claudius, Marc Antony, Diocletian, Marcus Aurelius, Caracalla, Julian the Apostate. My favorite was, of course, Hadrian the Zionist. He was more than that. But I already saw him as an ally in the past. During his rule in Rome, a graffiti artist in Jerusalem scratched into one of the huge stones of the demolished Temple Mount a couplet from Psalms 126, "When the Lord brought back the captives to Zion, we were like those who dreamed."

Rome today is a stage set. But what a magnificent stage set it is. And, as a Jew, I had (for maybe the eighth or ninth time in my life) a contempt for the Arch of Titus, which marks the dispersion of the Jews after the destruction of the Second Temple and celebrates the grandeur of the empire whose work it was.

That empire is now Italy, a society so corrupt, so inefficient, so illogical, so pompous. One of my Italian friends complained that officialdom makes it especially difficult for an honest person to pay his taxes honestly. Another reported, more or less authoritatively, that northern Italy is the richest country in Europe and that southern Italy is the poorest. Oriana Fallaci, a patriotic Florentine, once screamed at me that Italy should be carved up in two, with everything south of Rome being sent out to sea.

Still, Italy wants to be a friend of America--if Barack Obama would let it, if Obama would let any European country be a friend of America. The Italians have a nostalgia for their own imperium. Which is why they are almost always willing to send troops to wherever. Their uniforms are splendid. And they march in step.

 Still, I've long understood that in extremis I am a "tax and spend" Democrat--unhappily so, but still so. 

But I would not have cut NASA or the C-17 air transport, Joint Strike Fight components or the Army Corps of Engineers.  

An article by Jonathan Weisman in the Wall Street Journal and another by Jackie Calmes in the New York Times explain both the economics and politics of the budget.

The Financial Times is the six-day-a-week newspaper of the Pearson Publishing Group. It is, then, the sister of The Economist. Both are widely read, although the weekly magazine--that is, the latter journal--no longer has much competition in the English-speaking world. (And certainly not from Time or Newsweek.)

Ten years ago, in a TNR piece about The Economist, Andrew Sullivan pointed out a particularly noxious passage in the magazine’s pages. Here’s what he wrote back then:

Other vestigial Brittery abounds, including the usual condescension to Israel. Here's a sentence from the April 10 editorial on the Balkans: "Such outrages the expulsion and mass murder of Kosovar Albanians have happened before--in Bosnia, Rwanda, the Soviet Union, Palestine, and all too many other places, and the ethnic cleansers have got away with their crimes." Palestine? In one English flick of the wrist, the magazine equates the foundation of Israel with Stalin's terror.

The Financial Times has been no less egregious. I’ve been following the coverage of Israel by the FT on both its news and editorial pages for years. You can read some of my more recent Spine postings on that subject here, here, here, and here.

What’s interesting about the FT on Israel is that its reportage and its opinions are drawn from absolutely identical perspectives, its daily coverage steeped in the same social and cultural biases that animate its utterly subjective and jaundiced views. These views are, then, an inheritance from British imperialism’s impatience with the Jewish insistence that space be made for them, the Jews, in the disentangling of the Ottoman Empire (and specifically in Palestine, where the Jewish nation began).

My favorite instance of FT bias is its insistence on calling Tel Aviv the capital of the State of Israel. In this little obsession can be seen the newspaper’s resistance to 61 years of fact that the functioning and symbolic capital is Jerusalem. Its cabinet sits there. Its legislature meets there. Its Supreme Court renders judgment there. Foreign diplomats present their credentials there, however much some of their governments would prefer that ceremonial and official business be done in Tel Aviv. No Christian church--Armenian, Russian Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Coptic, Abyssinian, Anglican, Lutheran, or Mormon--thinks it can do its business with Israel in Tel Aviv. And even the Muslim waqf knows that its grand and routine dealings are to be carried on in the city where David and Solomon reigned. But, if you read the FT, you would think otherwise. OK, the FT is on the Arabisant side of this historic quarrel. But, if it can’t get the most essential facts right, what worth can we assign to its news and views in which complexity and intricacy are the norms?

A British group named Just Journalism has just completed a study of last year’s Financial Times editorial coverage of the Arab-Israeli dispute, that century-old conflict between the Jews and Arabs of historic Palestine. Below is a precis of the research. You can read the full report here. There is not a single exaggeration in any of it.

As you understand, I’ve been pondering Pearson and its ugly prejudices against Israel for some time. Why is this array of lies, now festering on the British left, still entrenched in one of capitalism’s most trusted publishing companies? I have no response to this urgent query.

But I have--actually, just by chance--discovered one possible explanation. Marjorie Scardino, an American who is now the chief executive of Pearson and was for years the head of affairs at The Economist, has a weird association with a weirder charity which also is preoccupied with the long Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is the Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter Center, on whose credit card the former president travels. It has been supported by so many Arab governments and Arab zillionaires that one can hardly trust its views. But it does have views ... on nearly everything. Still, its opinions on Israel put it near the frontier of crackpots. And, I guess, that’s where Ms. Scardino is also comfy.

* * *

Financial Times’s editorial coverage of the Middle East blames Israel as key cause of problems in the region 

London, UK, 28 January 2010 – Just Journalism today publishes ‘Financial Times 2009: A year of Middle East editorials’. The report is an analysis of 121 editorials published in 2009 in the paper and on its website. It shows that during the course of last year Israel was identified as the main cause of problems in the Middle East.

The study shows that threats against Israel’s existence issued by Iranian President Ahmadinejad were ignored in the paper’s editorial column, yet the prospect of an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities was referred to on numerous occasions.

The FT also downplayed other factors in the conflict such as terrorism and the political split between Hamas in Gaza and Fatah in the West Bank.

Just Journalism advisory board member Robin Shepherd, author of ‘A State Beyond the Pale: Europe’s Problem with Israel’ and Director of International Affairs at The Henry Jackson Society, said: ‘This report demonstrates that the FT has repeatedly disregarded salient facts when it comes to the Middle East and disproportionately blames Israel for the region’s woes.’

‘For a paper that prides itself on its high standards as an opinion-forming publication, it is regretful that much of the broader argumentation and wider context is being omitted.’

‘The sidelining of Ahmadinejad’s public threats against Israel in its discussion of Iran-Israel relations indicates a narrow approach in which Israel is usually viewed as an instigator of aggression but not a victim of it.’

‘It was a surprise to see how sympathetic the FT was towards despotic regimes like Saudi Arabia given that its criticism of Israel was so harsh.’

‘These findings may surprise the FT’s readers, who tend to regard the FT as relatively apolitical compared to the other broadsheets.’

The report was submitted to the Financial Times for comment but Just Journalism has not yet received a response to the findings.

For more information about the key findings from the report, please see the executive summary:

Executive Summary

§ The FT views Israel as primarily responsible for the perpetuation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while downplaying other factors. In particular it places the role of settlement-building in the West Bank above any other single factor affecting the conflict. Settlement-building is referred to as ‘colonisation’ in nine editorials

§ Other aggravating factors such as terrorism, disunity within Palestinian ranks and a failure to accept Israel as a Jewish state are downplayed. Neither of these last two are addressed as areas of legitimate concern for Israel; rather, both are viewed as ploys by Israel to ‘change the subject’

§ The editorial coverage over the past year reflects a gradual shift away from the view that Iran’s nuclear intentions might be peaceful towards the conclusion at the end of 2009 that they are not

§ The prospect of an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities is referred to in five editorials; yet no Financial Times editorial in 2009 makes reference to the threatening rhetoric from Iran’s President Ahmadinejad against Israel

§ The publication backed the Goldstone Report, which described the Israeli military operation as ‘a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population’. The Financial Times described Israel’s actions in Gaza as ‘disproportionate’ in four editorials

§ Israeli political leaders are depicted as ‘irredentist’, ‘hawkish’, and ‘ultra-nationalist’. In contrast, Palestinian leaders are portrayed as ‘moderate’ and ‘conciliatory’, if corrupt

§ Israel’s total military and civilian withdrawal from Gaza in August 2005 is not viewed as a meaningful Israeli concession, rather it is seen as inadequate at best, and a cynical ploy at worst

§ The Arab world is portrayed as having made a substantial effort for peace in the broader Arab-Israeli conflict. The Saudi Peace Initiative of 2002 is touted in seven editorials and the newspaper expresses sympathy with the recent Arab refusal to meet Israeli concessions with Arab concessions

§ Mixed attitudes towards the nature of Arab regimes are displayed. The newspaper attacks the West – the US in particular – for backing ‘an ossified order of … Arab strongmen’ typified by the Mubarak regime in Egypt; however, Saudi Arabia is spared harsh criticism, particularly regarding its human rights record

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A Saudi woman journalist promotes a liberal reform of polygamy.

United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, against which I warned long ago, passed unanimously on August 11, 2006. Two days later, the Israeli cabinet approved the motion 24-0--but with one astute minister abstaining. For whatever it is worth, I thought (and wrote) that the restrictions on Hezbollah (and, more than inferentially, on both Syria and Iran) meant less than nothing. Control of the smuggling of arms to Hezbollah and of the reintroduction of Hezbollah men into southern Lebanon was delegated to UNIFIL, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, which had been an interim operation since 1978 ... and a useless operation at that. Utterly useless. And this was the case whether the soldiery was Tonga’s or Spain’s.

Tzipi Livni, the Israeli foreign minister during the Lebanon war, formed a sisterhood with Condi Rice, and together they panicked the Council into passing a measure that was bound to fail. UNIFIL had no authority and few men. Hezbollah very quickly began to test 1701 and found that the path was clear for any and every violation it wanted to commit.

Now, of course, Hassan Nasrallah’s well-outfitted army is raring to go. It is now fully recognized as a legal militia but outside the jurisdiction of the ministry of defense. So it is really Nasrallah’s militia, and he has everybody else in the government, from Prime Minister Saad Hariri (once thought independent) to the constitutionally mandated Maronite president, Michel Suleiman (a former general), frightened out of their wits. Ordinary folk are praying that there won’t be a war.

But an important figure in the Obama administration, Jeff Feltman, assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, told the London-based Arabic daily, Al-Hayat, that the danger of another war follows on the depth and extent of Hezbollah’s rearmament. A report by Avi Issacharoff on this article was published in Ha’aretz.

Jonathan Spyer extends the analysis to the prognosis for Syria and Israel, based on the mercurial situation in Lebanon, in a policy paper for the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center. 

Alas, the administration in Washington above Feltman continues in its see-nothing, do-nothing approach to Syria and Lebanon, only making both states feel that they have successfully pulled the wool over American eyes.

I am glad Joe Klein tried to take me to task for criticizing the president about his not giving Israel the respect it deserved for its efforts in Haiti. And, boy, did it deserve that respect! But, in fact, Obama passed over Israel entirely in his enumeration of especially worthy aid providers. Here’s what Bill Clinton said about Israel’s contribution: “I don’t know what we would have done without the Israeli hospital in Haiti.” Israel’s operational unit was, Clinton noted, the only facility capable of performing surgeries and advanced examinations. Meanwhile, that unit is staying on with a change of personnel and is relocating its field hospital to an orphanage. CBS, in a moment of exaggeration, called the Israeli facility the “Rolls-Royce” of the entire aid effort.

Despite his carping, Joe concedes that I was correct. That, in fact, the president should have mentioned Israel and should do much more with the Jewish state to balance his courting of the Arab world (which hasn’t done his presidency or his policies any good).

So what is Klein’s bitch with me? He writes in his “Swampland” blog--yes, that’s what it’s actually called, and I must concede that it’s aptly titled--that Obama’s omission had no meaning and was not the result of any decision at all. So what was it? It was “an oversight.” Oh, I see. This administration which crosses every ‘t’ and dots every ‘i’ just forgot to mention Israel. You know what I say to that? Bullshit!

And then, in a postscript, he tells us that Saudi Arabia has made the third largest monetary contribution to the cash campaign for Haiti. To tell you the truth, I don’t believe it. But, even if the Saudis have promised anything like the amount alleged, I deeply suspect it will be like the money Riyadh pledges to the Palestinians.

I've just read the transcript of the president's remarks about Haiti, the ones he made on January 15. He noted that, in addition to assistance from the United States, significant aid had also come from "Brazil, Mexico, Canada, France, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic, among others." Am I missing another country that truly weighed in with truly consequential assistance? Ah, yes. There it is. Right there "among others." Yes, the country to which I refer is "among others," that one.

The fact is that, next to our country, Israel sent the largest contingent of trained rescue workers, doctors, and other medical personnel. The Israeli field hospital was the only one on the ground that could perform real surgery, which it did literally hundreds of times, while delivering--as of last week--at least 16 babies, including one premature infant and three caesarians. The first 250-odd Israelis were real professionals, and they were supplemented by others, also professionals. And to these can be added the many organized Jews from the Diaspora who, in solidarity with Israel, also went on a work pilgrimage, an aliyah, in solidarity with Haiti.

It's not that Israeli participation in the Haiti horror was being kept secret. I myself saw it reported several times on television—on ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN.

So didn't Obama notice? For God's sake, everybody noticed the deep Israeli involvement. I understand that Obama doesn't like Middle East narratives that do not contain "one side and the other side" equal valence. But he couldn't have that here. The Arabs don't care a fig, not for their impoverished and backward own, and certainly not for strangers. That's why their presence in Haiti amounted to a couple of bucks from Saudi Arabia and maybe from some other sheikhs.

An afterthought: Who would want Arab participation in the rescue effort? This was serious work and dangerous work. Amateurs weren't welcome.

Yes, I think that the labors of the Israelis were edited out of Obama's speech, either by his speechwriters (who have made dissing Israel their forté) or by his own oh-so-delicate but dishonest censoring mechanism.

Barack Obama is stuck with another of his campaign pledges. There are still nearly 200 prisoners in Guantanamo. I, for one, do not care if they are moved to a jailhouse in Illinois. But I still wonder what is wrong with that tip of Cuba (which happens to be U.S. territory) functioning as a penitentiary.

In any case, the deadline that candidate Obama set for President Obama to meet--the end of last year--has now passed. And, given the administration’s dire electoral and legislative troubles, I doubt that the president and his attorney general are about to engage the Congress and the people about shutting down Guantanamo, however late or early they can engineer a move--if they can ever.

For the emotional gratification of his supporters, the Democratic nominee argued that photographs from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo were recruiting tools for Al Qaeda--as if the terrorist international required visual proof of the evils of the United States. Anyway, it was not an argument; it was a hymnal. It made the cheery also seem worthy.

Well, Abu Ghraib is now Iraq’s, and the Iraqis have refurbished it. But who can guarantee that any Arab polity will exclude torture as a tool of governance or a means to justice?

Which leaves us with Guantanamo.

Of the 196 detainees now imprisoned on the beautiful Cuban coast, nearly 50 have no hope of being freed and also no prospect of being tried. These inmates are, as Charlie Savage reported in yesterday’s New York Times, “too difficult to prosecute but too dangerous to release.” This is a body blow to the pomposity with which the Obami had insisted that everyone is entitled to a fair trial.

But is not only these prisoners who are strung between the Scylla and Charybdis of judicial action and non-action.

There are also about 110 detainees who were set to be sent to other countries for possible release. There are many countries that won’t have their sons back. And there are several countries where one can guarantee that they’d be tortured. Others from a similar cohort had already been coolly dispatched to Yemen, where evidence mounted that at least some (and perhaps many) of them had been embraced by the ideological blanket of Al Qaeda. The Obama Justice Department is no longer releasing prisoners to Yemen, which is now--and has for several years been--a center of jihadism.

Then there are nearly 40 prisoners whom “the administration has decided ... should be prosecuted for terrorism or related war crimes.” But how should they be prosecuted? In civilian court? Or by military commission? Frankly, I don’t understand the difference in reasoning for one or the other.

Except this: In a civilian court, defendants like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed could easily turn the proceedings into propaganda sessions. I also can imagine an inconclusive verdict.

For other objections to a civilian court for KSM and his fellow murderers, see the op-ed by my friend James Q. Wilson in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal.

The man's name is Abdulhakim Muhammad, although it used to be Carlos Bledsoe. From his picture attached to an article on CNN.com, he looks like an African American. A native of Memphis, where presumably he converted to Islam, he had gone to Yemen for 16 months. To do what? Teach English, learn Arabic, and find himself a Muslim bride. Which he did.

Abdulhakim says he teamed up with "Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula" in Yemen, from which he was deported back to America. He apparently had overstayed his Yemeni visa and was traveling on a fake Somali passport. No one knows whether any American government official questioned him on his return--even for a moment.

On June 1 last year, four months after his forced repatriation, Muhammad "used a semiautomatic rifle to gun down two soldiers--Pvt. William A. Long and Pvt. Quinton Ezeagwula--while they were standing outside a military recruiting station in Little Rock," killing the first and wounding the second. Ezeagwula is a black man. A dispatch by James Dao in today's New York Times gives you the whole story.

After his arrest, Muhammad pleaded "not guilty" but accepted responsibility for the shootings. The case got almost no attention.

But, in a two-page note handwritten in pencil to the judge, dated January 12, Muhammad asked to change his plea to guilty. "I wasn't insane or post traumatic nor was I forced to do this Act," which was "justified according to Islamic Laws and the Islamic Religion. Jihad--to fight those who wage war on Islam and Muslims."

A second Dr. Hasan? Maybe. Yesterday, I posted a Spine about a report by Senator Kerry's Foreign Relations Committee staff detailing the adventures of 36 American Muslim prison converts who went on pilgrimage to Yemen--that is, on pilgrimage to Al Qaeda.

So much for those who tell us that there are no American terrorists.