Joaquín Torres-García: Constructing Abstraction with Wood
San Diego Museum of Art
Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective
Tate Modern
Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection
Hirshhorn Museum
If you're looking for a careful breakdown of the various allegations against the IPCC that have been swirling around over the past few weeks, then check out this RealClimate post. At this point, it seems like the only glaring error that's been uncovered in the IPCC's climate reports is that statement about Himalayan glaciers melting by 2035—a goof, yes, though hardly anything that's fatal to the broader body of climate research.
More atrocious details from the Guinean junta's recent crackdown on protesters—of women knifed, whipped, and raped repeatedly by soldiers—surfaced in the Times yesterday. Until recently, the former French colony of approximately 10 million had a reputation for being among the most stable of its West African neighbors.
There’s no doubt that the IOC’s decision last week marks a huge symbolic victory for Brazil, South America, and the rest of the developing world. But could the arrival of the 2016 Olympics do more harm than good for Rio de Janeiro’s poorest residents? It could depend, in part, on how the Brazilian government plans to beef up security in advance of the Games.
Security crackdowns in Rio de Janeiro have often amounted to police raids on the 
sprawling shantytowns, home to a third of the city’s population, where drug traffickers have ensconced themselves. The resulting gun battles have killed scores of innocent bystanders--predomi
nately poor and working-class residents of the favelas--thus contributing to the stunning 2,069 murders that happened in Rio last year. Yes, the traffickers themselves are ruthless, exerting a mafia-like control over the shantytowns they occupy and burning buses full of civilians to retaliate against police pushback. But Brazilian police have fed the cycle of violence by acting outside the law, committing extrajudicial killings and massacres that human rights groups and the U.N. itself have denounced. (Off-duty police officers have even taken to forming their own gang-like militias, which now control some 15 percent of Rio’s slums.) It’s a legacy of Brazil’s oft-forgotten military dictatorship, whose worst atrocities were often carried out by the country’s division of “military police” and who were never held accountable for their crimes. As a result, certain divisions of the military police have continued to act with impunity in an otherwise burgeoning democracy--and the favela crackdowns bring out their worst instincts.
I don't know how many head-of-state nut cases arrived in New York for the annual meetings of the United Nations General Assembly. But surely there are many others besides Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Muamar Gaddafi. There is a class of rulers from Africa, for example, who govern recklessly in behalf of themselves but under the cover of one or another form of millenarianism. (The brutal clowns of South America are a bit different. They still believe that Fidel Castro is a model for building the good society.) This is, I suppose, the revenge of ideology over the London School of Economics.
Tensions are rising across South America this month as Venezuela signed three oil deals with Iran and a 2-billion-dollar arms deal with Russia, causing U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to speculate about a possible arms race.
The phrase, "a government in Tel Aviv," does not come from an article written in 1948 during which the provisional government of Israel had, in fact, headquartered itself in the city then only 40 years old. Not at all. The phrase is from a Financial Times editorial published in print on July 21, 2009. It has been rankling me ever since I read it on the airplane to South Africa. But it's not the sentence in which the phrase was enmeshed that rankles me: "There are signs the American Jewish community is increasingly exasperated with a government in Tel Aviv more disposed to brinkmanship than real negotiation." First of all, there are no such real signs at all. Maybe George Soros thinks that the "J-Street" fantasy is actually a budding mass movement. I doubt, however, whether even he or anyone else really believes this. Secondly, it is clear--and has been clear for years--that the FT despises Israel and that the paper takes the opportunity to revile the Jewish state in even its most pedestrian news reports. In a way, then, there is nothing new here. But this deliberately false and insulting nomenclature has a history and a context which I do want to explore.
So let's begin with the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, passed by the General Assembly on November 29, 1947. It approved the creation of "a Jewish state" in Palestine and "an Arab state" in Palestine, the whole of which had been governed by a British Mandate since the early twenties. (I note here and not for the first time that the second polity envisioned was not called "a Palestinian state" because very few people--even Arabs and especially Arabs in Palestine--thought there really existed a Palestinian nation. You already know my heresy: I believe that one of the fundamental impediments to peace is the failure of many Palestinians to believe in their own peoplehood. Otherwise, they would have long ago accepted any one of several generous formulae to solve their "problem.")
The return to Zion--that is, the return to Jerusalem--was one of the cardinal tenets of Zionism, however much many of its leaders and followers distrusted the messianic idea that was submerged in the very idea of Jewish politics in Palestine. In any case, the Zionist movement as a whole insisted that parts of Jerusalem be apportioned to the yet-to-be-born state. Still, the big powers and the many Catholic countries of South America and Europe would not agree. Remember: the Vatican of Pius XII--no friend of Jews, he--was a real power in world politics in those days. As a result, the very idea of partition was intimately linked, even premised on the internationalization of Jerusalem, a corpus separatum, as the U.N. lawyers called it. The Jewish Agency for Palestine accepted it, as any sane political movement would have done. Sovereignty was more important than this piece of territory or that. Who knows how the nostrum of internationalization of Jerusalem would have worked in reality? But it never had a chance. The Arabs rejected it all and went to war. An armistice set the frontiers down the middle of Jerusalem as it did in the rest of Palestine.
It got dry, and that must be the influence of global warming. Wait--then there were downpours, which proved the greenhouse effect. A monster hurricane crossed North Carolina; global warming must be the cause. No, wait--out comes a book about the most deadly hurricane in U.S. history, which hit in 1900, long before there was greenhouse gas buildup. Snowfall has decreased some in recent years, and that must prove global warming. But wait--when cities were snowed in during the winter of 1996-1997, commentators blamed greenhouse disruption.
This week’s TNR cover story by James Mann deals with the vexing problem that China poses to the community of nations—and to the young Obama administration. Mann observes that, even as China has opened up economically, it has pursued an aggressive foreign policy. Writing in TNR thirteen years ago, Peter Beinart anticipated this situation.
