The Other UN Story

 

The chances are, Gentle Reader, that you’re well aware of the recent visit of President Trump to the United Nations.  You’ve read about his whining about the escalator, the teleprompter, and the sound system (“triple sabotage”), and about his speech, which was rambling, narcissistic, xenophobic, condescending, and mendacious—exactly as expected, in other words.  Of course, the UN says that Trump staffers were responsible for both l’affaire d’escalator mécanique and for the teleprompter problem.  Curmie doesn’t necessarily believe them, but when the choice is between someone you’re not sure about and someone any sane person would actively distrust…

But that’s not the UN story Curmie wants to talk about.  Rather, it’s about the walkout, pictured above, prior to a speech by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  There’s more coverage of the imaginary slights to Trump, or rather his obsession with them, than about what should have been the top UN-related story of the week.  As noted above, Trump neither said nor did anything unexpected.  Neither did Netanyahu, whose fiery speech dismissed accusations of genocide in Gaza; condemned the recent recognition of a Palestinian state by nations like the UK, Canada, and Australia; and promised to “finish the job” of eliminating Hamas.

The suggestion in a New York Times article that what Netanyahu didn’t say—there was no mention of annexing the West Bank, for example—may be the true story here is intriguing, especially in light of the peace proposal drafted by the Trump administration.  Curmie is anything but a fan of 47, but if he can indeed get buy-in from both Likud and Hamas, that would be a major achievement.  This will, of course, be believed when seen, and past experience suggests that Trump is seeking a distraction from the Epstein files touting an agreement negotiated with only one side, and to which the other side has precisely zero chance of agreeing.

This essay isn’t about what Netanyahu said or didn’t say, however.  It’s about that walkout.  The first thing to notice is that there was no similar display two days earlier when Donald Trump addressed the delegates.  Trump, after all, is a primary reason, if not the primary reason, that Netanyahu can behave the way he does.  Trump has also interfered in the domestic affairs of other nations (Brazil, Argentina…); ordered the killing of the crew of a Venezuelan fishing boat in international waters because of mere suspicion that it might have been carrying drugs; threatened to annex Greenland (from an ally!) and Canada (!); made a sport of insulting foreign leaders (e.g., Zelenskyy) and reneged on promises made in the name of this country; and, since neither Congress nor SCOTUS are interested in doing their jobs, single-handedly enacted and retracted tariffs with less self-control than a two-year-old on a sugar high.

Even if you take issue with one or more of the items in the last paragraph, Gentle Reader, you must grant that there are a fair number of UN delegates who would rather be doing virtually anything else than listen to Trump ramble incoherently for an hour.  But there they sat, or at least we saw no news stories to the contrary, and one suspects that we would have.  So, why did they stay?  Out of respect?  Fear?  Sense of responsibility?  Masochism?  Curmie declines to speculate further.  But it does throw some light on the motivation for the walkout before Netanyahu’s speech.

Let us take as given that the situation in the Middle East, especially as regards Palestine, is complex and contradictory, and that one’s attitude towards that part of the world is likely to tell us at least as much about the spectator as about the spectated.  The Hamas attack just short of two years ago was horrific, and the refusal to release the remaining hostages is unconscionable.  Israel’s response is nevertheless disproportionate, and the only question is whether intentionally starving innocent children is nonetheless ethical, given that there are different rules at play in war than in peace.

Curmie first wrote about the area on his old blog (yes, on LiveJournal) in the immediate aftermath of Hamas winning the election in Palestine over 19 years ago.  He described the moment as “it's put up or shut up time for them, unless they are truly stupid enough to try to subvert the democratic movement that brought them to power.”  Alas, they did prove to be that stupid, although as Curmie wrote in a 2010 piece on attempts by relief organizations to run an Israeli blockade and deliver food, medicine, and other items to Gaza, Curmie had “overlooked the possibility of an Israeli initiative which would allow Hamas to pass the blame—legitimately, or with at least a claim to legitimacy—to the very government they so vehemently oppose.”

If Curmie had to pick his favorite essay on Palestine, it would be this one from 2014, invoking the story of the six blind men and the elephant.  In the fable, each of the blind men engages with a different part of the pachyderm, declaring with certainty that he has encountered a rope (the tail), a pillar (a leg), a solid pipe (a tusk) and so on.  Notice that each of them is completely honest and fundamentally logical in his assessment, which, of course, is at best incomplete.

Curmie wrote:

Curmie has three real-life Jewish friends (at least two of whom have commented on the CC Facebook page) who have threatened to unfriend anyone who publicly supports Hamas. Curmie also has friends, especially in the UK and Ireland, who are not only supporting but organizing boycotts of Israeli goods. None of these folks are bad people, or even particularly narrow-minded. They are just grabbing a tail and can’t imagine how someone could possibly describe the elephant as being wall-like.

Moreover, not only can good, compassionate, people disagree about how to proceed, but we must reject false dichotomies.  As Curmie has mentioned several times (here and here, for example) it is perfectly possible to support humanitarian aid in Gaza for suffering people without supporting Hamas.  It is possible to argue against the Israeli government without being antisemitic, just as it is possible to condemn the policies of Kamala Harris without being sexist or racist. 

It is also possible, without sanctioning a governmental policy that could legitimately be described as a war crime, to understand the disquiet, even thousands of miles away from the Middle East, of American (British, French, etc.) Jews, who not without reason regard the October 7 attack of two years ago as a symptom of a global assault on their culture that has been going on for millennia. 

All of the above is a long-winded introduction to a basic point.  The way out of this morass is through argumentation, which is, of course, the very purpose of the UN to begin with: better a war of words than a war of missiles.  A week and a half ago, Curmie wrote about the attempt by a collection of student groups to disinvite an Israeli actor/director who was scheduled to give a lecture at Michigan State University: “In particular, students’ unwillingness to even listen to opposing viewpoints is deeply disturbing.”

But those are college kids.  Curmie spent half a century in which the majority of the people with whom he came in contact were post-adolescents.  Those folks are trying to find their way in a world they’re only beginning to understand.  They’re exposed to people and ideas the like of which they’ve never encountered before.  It’s unfortunate, even “disturbing,” that they are so tempted to exclude The Other, but openness to the hitherto unknown, at least to the point of allowing alternate points of view to be expressed, is part of the maturing process, and is, in Curmie’s opinion, one of the principal benefits of college. 

The delegates who so ostentatiously walked out before Netanyahu’s speech aren’t college kids.  They’re adults, and representatives of their nations.  It might not be asking too much to expect them to act like it.  Curmie wouldn’t walk across the street to hear Benjamin Netanyahu speak, but that isn’t Curmie’s damned job.  It is theirs.  Their entire raison d’être is to listen to someone with whom they disagree, search for points of accord, and try to make the world a better place for everyone.

They couldn’t be bothered, opting instead for what they undoubtedly believed was virtue-signaling but was really simply an abdication of responsibility.  But, just as that law student at Cal-Berkeley back in the spring of ’24 did her cause more harm than good by being an entitled ass, so did these yahoos hurt their cause by seeking attention rather than solutions.

As noted above, disagreeing with the Israeli government doesn’t mean you’re antisemitic.  But if you claim to be a diplomat, refusing to listen to the Israeli PM when you endured a harangue by Donald Trump pretty much means that you are.  

 

On Campus Protests, With a Stroll through Curmie's Memories

UCLA, this week

Can it really be almost nine years ago when Curmie wrote about his experience at the May 4 Museum at Kent State University, and the memories that visit engendered?  Apparently so.  The murders (yes, Gentle Reader, murders) by National Guardsmen of four students on that campus 54 years ago today was only the beginning of the process by which teenaged Curmie came to be wary of anyone with a uniform and a gun. 

The subsequent revelations of what actually happened and therefore of the prevarications of the politicians and news media alike were the confirmation that Curmie’s worst suspicions were accurate, but that voyage into (self-)awareness was triggered—if you’ll pardon the expression—by those shootings.  Two more deaths at Jackson State eleven days later, this time perpetrated by police instead of the National Guard in an even more outrageous display of recklessness, made it clear that those First Amendment rights we’d all heard about in school weren’t all that absolute. 

Kent State, 54 years ago today

It’s all too easy to forget that non-participants were among the casualties at Kent State.  One of the students who died was ignoring the protest and simply walking to class.  Another was watching from a distance; he was enrolled in ROTC.  I think we can take it on faith that he posed no threat to the Guardsmen.  The nearest of those killed was 85 yards from the shooters.  Eleven of the thirteen students who were killed or injured were shot from behind.  The list of things that aggravate the atrocities committed by the National Guard goes on and on.

But something else I wrote about from my dorm room on the Kent State campus sticks in my mind: “I fear there couldn’t be a Kent State today. Yes, I fear that, because such a declaration betrays a profound and disturbing apathy among today’s post-adolescents.”  That observation, referring to the protest, not the shootings, of course, may have been true then, but as literally scores of rallies, walk-outs, and encampments around the country in recent weeks have made clear, today’s youth isn’t as passively disengaged as we might have thought.  Several professors, Curmie’s Facebook friends, have posted of late about the anger of their students. 

Curmie confesses himself shocked that there have as yet been no deaths and few if any serious injuries linked to pro-Palestinian protests; we’ve come pretty close, though: witness the treatment of a journalist covering events at the University of Texas at Austin.  We’re about a half step away from increased police violence.  If the terms of that “man or bear” meme that’s making the rounds of late were changed to “cop or civilian,” Curmie confesses he’d need a moment to consider his options.

Anyway… you can see Curmie’s musings on Kent State in the piece linked above, or in this one from two years ago today.  But I thought today I might take a stroll through other memories.

Curmie was just a little too young to have participated in (or chosen not to participate, as the case may be) protests concerning the Vietnam War.  He had a draft card and a random number (4… ouch!), but he was in the first year in which no one was drafted. 

I did, however, experience a college campus in many ways before becoming a student.  My father was president of one of the SUNY colleges, and we lived on campus; the view out my bedroom window was of two dormitories and a dining hall.  I also attended the campus school associated with the college. 

I don’t remember the exact circumstances by which I found myself sitting on the lawn in front of one of the main campus buildings on the first Earth Day, twelve days before the events at Kent State.  What I do remember was listening to some student ramble on about how no one in the college administration, least of all the president, cared about the environment.  I finally had enough, and responded that I was confident that he did indeed care.  “How would you know?” smirked the student to this long-haired junior high kid.  “Because I’m his son.  He’s been a conservationist all my life, and he has a PhD in Botany.  I think his credentials are probably as good as yours.”  (Curmie was a snarky SOB even then.)

There was also a time when my mom asked me to take a letter or something up to someone (not my dad) in an office in the administration building.  Unbeknownst to either of us, students had taken over the building.  They barred my way to the elevator and to the stairs.  I shrugged and went back to apologize to my mom for the non-delivery.  She was very happy that no one knew who I was; in retrospect, I think her fears were probably misplaced, but there’s a difference between “probably” and “certainly.”

My other memory of being the president’s son came a little later (I think… timelines from a half century ago get a little blurry sometimes).  I was sitting in the kitchen with my mom when someone threw a rock through the dining room window.  As it happened, a campus policeman saw it happen and apprehended the perpetrator almost immediately.  He brought kid to the door to ask what my dad wanted to do. 

They asked this young man why he’d vandalized the house.  Turns out, he was demanding 24-hour visitation (there had been a curfew for men to be out of women’s dorms and vice versa).  My dad asked, simply, how he was supposed to know that from a baseball-sized rock amidst the glass shards on our dining room floor.  The look on that guy’s face when he realized that he had no answer to that question!

There weren’t any significant protests, at least that I can recall, in my own college days.  There was a smallish anti-National Front (a far-right party in the UK) rally at the University of Birmingham when I was doing my MA there, but it was literally nothing to write home about. 

We move on to a different event and to responses that weren’t centered on a college campus but certainly affected students both here and abroad.  When Iranian students seized the American embassy in Tehran, holding dozens of people hostage, Curmie was teaching at a small church-related college in Kentucky.  One of the school’s star soccer players was beaten up rather severely by a gang of local yahoos, simply because he “looked Arab.” 

In fact, he had a close family member (Curmie thinks it was his father, but he may be misremembering) who was part of the Shah’s inner circle.  If there was anyone in the state who was disinclined to support the Ayatollah Khomeini and his minions, this was the guy.  That, of course, would have meant nothing to his subhuman attackers.  Similar scenaria played out across the country in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, too, of course.  Bigots do tend to be stupid in other ways, as well.

Cornell, 1985

The other incident involving large numbers of students that Curmie witnessed first-hand was the “shantytown” erected on the Arts Quad of Cornell University in 1985.  Curmie was working on his PhD there at the time.  The encampment was located between the theatre building and the library, so I walked past it a lot, and the window in my carrel in the library looked out over it.

The idea was to force the university to divest from companies doing business with a particular foreign country.  Today, that nation is Israel.  In 1985, it was South Africa, which was still operating under the apartheid system of radical racial discrimination.

Whatever we think of the students’ intentions, the protest itself was silly: a bunch of privileged kids “roughing it” for a few hours at a time.  The joke on campus was that after doing their shift, the protesters would drive the BMW daddy gave them for their 18^th birthday back to their apartment for a hot shower and a change of clothes before heading to the Moosewood (an iconic vegetarian restaurant, apparently still in business now) for lunch.

Predictably, the Cornell trustees did not divest in 1985, but there is some chance that the short-term rejection of student demands was the result of not seeming to give in to the strategy; considerable but not complete divestment did indeed take place in subsequent years before the gradual but inexorable disintegration of apartheid in the early ‘90s.

So now there are protests and demands for divestment happening on college campuses across the country.  There have been hundreds if not thousands of arrests but, as noted above, mercifully few injuries and no deaths… so far.  The issues at play—that is to say, the issues motivating the protests—are complex, and no one, certainly neither Hamas nor the Israeli government, looks good in all this. 

As Curmie noted months ago, neither side gives a proverbial shit about the Palestinian people, whose plight is worsened by the belligerence and bellicosity of both combatants.  Like the upcoming presidential election in this country, it’s not a question of who’s better, but who’s worse.

Moreover, some of the protests cross the line into illegality; others are being illegally suppressed.  Curmie keeps coming back to “context,” a term which has become anathema to the pro-Israel faction of American society.  If demonstrations do indeed threaten a part of the student population—not their belief system, their sensibilities, or the continued existence of a foreign country or its government, but them—then shutting down that protest or even arresting the participants is absolutely in order.  The same is true for violations of reasonable campus-specific time, place, and manner policies.

But 1^st Amendment rights to freedom of speech mean less than nothing if they apply only to non-objectionable speech.  If that speech does not represent a true threat, if it is not “severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive,” it’s protected speech.  (Both “and” and “objectively,” as opposed to “or” and “subjectively” are significant terms here.)  True, private institutions can set their own rules—as Alex Morey of FIRE said on a webinar this week, you don’t go to BYU expecting the same freedoms you would be guaranteed at a public university.  But if your mission statement offers essentially the same commitment to intellectual freedom as the 1^st Amendment does, you damned well ought to live up to your promises.

Anti-semitism is abhorrent.  Islamophobia, which to be honest Curmie has seen considerably more of on college campuses, is, too.  But mere expressions of hatefulness are protected.  Curmie thinks the benefits of such a policy outweigh the disadvantages.

So, what is the analogy to what we’re seeing today?  The demonstrations against the escalation of the Vietnam War into Cambodia?  Well, they were pervasive and fervent, but what was being protested affected American college-aged men (in particular) directly.  That’s not happening now.

The Civil Rights movement?  Sort of, to the extent that violating the law was seen by participants as ethically unproblematic.  Willingness to risk arrest for one’s beliefs is simultaneously admirable and naïve.  Those who have only the law on their side are not heroes, but they do have some moral authority.  Still, we tend to prefer Martin Luther King, Jr. to Bull Connor.

The divestment protests of the ‘80s?  Well, that seems to be the goal of many if not most of today’s protesters.  They can hardly expect to influence the actions of the Israeli government, and the US response has been sufficiently irresolute that it’s difficult to criticize except for that wishy-washiness.  We’ll also see whether the energy of the demonstrations can be upheld when campuses are, relatively speaking, empty over the summer.  More relevantly, no serious person could argue that apartheid was anything but deplorable.  Israel may not be without fault in all this, but they’re not the embodiment of evil, either.

Or is this a return of those students from Curmie’s youth, smug in their fervency and their ignorance, and committed to a strategy that not only won’t change anything but literally cannot do so?  Yes, there are those who are protesting for the sake of doing so, or for virtue signaling, or to meet boys/girls.  Or, perhaps, as the Prophet Mick Jagger suggested, “to get [their] fair share of abuse.”  That song?  “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”

Yes, there are elements of all of these.  But this round of protests seems very much to be its own phenomenon.  Here’s hoping that there are no casualties, including the Constitution.

 

Roger Waters, Pink, Nazis, and Freedom of Speech

There are lots of more important issues than Curmie’s topic du jour: the fact that we have even contemplated not raising the debt ceiling; Texas’s attempting to wrest the title of Most Embarrassing State from Florida (Tennessee is still in Honorable Mention territory despite their best efforts); further incursions on freedom of expression from authoritarians on the left, the right, and the simply megalomaniacal; well, you get the picture. 

A disturbing but not illegal image.

Curmie may or may not address one or more of these issues in the days ahead, but for now, let’s talk about former Pink Floyd composer-bassist-frontman Roger Waters, who ran afoul of German police for wearing a “Nazi-style uniform” (that’s The Guardian’s term) at a recent concert in Berlin. 

Germany, for understandable reasons, is more than a little sensitive about anything suggestive of Nazism. They take their restrictions too far, in Curmie’s opinion, but what is, is. Any display of Nazi regalia is verboten; an exception is made “for educational purposes and in artistic contexts.” 

OK, but this isn’t Nazi regalia. It is clearly intended to be evocative, but there’s a difference between a swastika and the crossed hammers of the fictive world of “The Wall.” The latter, Waters’s creation, ranks alongside The Who’s “Tommy” as the greatest concept albums of the rock era, and is the best-selling double album of all time (yes, beating the Beatles’ White Album for that honor). 

The 1982 film version featuring Boomtown Rats frontman Bob Geldof as Pink, the lead, makes the plotline clearer than the album might. The song at the center of the controversy, ”In the Flesh,” appears in “The Wall” as a hallucination: in a fit of despair, Pink imagines himself as a Nazi-like demagogue. When the nightmarish visions subside, Pink screams “Stop!”, suggesting that not only does he recognize what has just transpired as an illusion, but that he wants no part of it. He continues that he wants “to go home / Take off this uniform / And leave the show / But I'm waiting in this cell / Because I have to know / Have I been guilty all this time?” This is not in the same area code as a rallying cry for Nazism. 

Officials in Frankfurt attempted to shut down Waters’s show there before it happened, accusing the singer-songwriter of being “one of the most widely known antisemites in the world.” They failed; Waters would have us believe that the decision was based primarily on the recognition that the Pink persona was a “scathing critique” of the Nazis. Taken out of the context of the entirety of “The Wall’s” plotline, this isn’t abundantly clear, but the court did determine that the performance “did not glorify or relativise the crimes of the Nazis or identify with Nazi racist ideology.” 

Even more importantly in Curmie’s mind, though perhaps not in the German authorities’, was the determination that the performance, in character, of a song from one of the seminal albums of the past half-century, must be “viewed as a work of art,” and therefore exempted from sanction, despite its “symbolism manifestly based on that of the National Socialist regime.” 

Of course, there are ethical concerns that extend past mere legalities. Waters has indeed, for many years, been accused of anti-Semitism, largely because of his pro-Palestinian stance. This allegation has historically been based on a conflation of Judaism and the Israeli government. It is perfectly possible to oppose the latter without bearing any animosity toward the former, and there is little to indicate that Waters is incapable of making the distinction. 

Still, there is a segment in the show that highlights the names of those killed by government authorities, thereby linking Anne Frank with Shireen Abu Akleh, described by the Guardian as “the Palestinian-American journalist who is believed to have been shot dead by an Israeli sniper in May 2022.” 

Israel’s UN Ambassador, Danny Danon, is correct that the linkage between Frank and “a journalist shot while in an active combat zone” is more than a little strained, but labeling Waters “disgracefully one of the biggest Jew haters of our time” is equally overblown. He’s a government official, so his willingness to ascribe a criticism of his government as inherently antisemitic is self-serving at best, and borders on proving Waters’s point about Israeli authoritarianism. Surely every American voter has complained in speech or print about some action of the current President or his predecessor; that doesn’t make us all unpatriotic. Neither does criticizing the Pope or an Ayatollah makes one anti-Catholic or anti-Islam. 

Waters does support the BDM (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement against Israel within the context of an “anti-war, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian, anti-establishment movement.” Again, criticizing the Israeli state isn’t inherently antisemitic. 

That said, an article on the Hot Air website declares that “Waters is secure in the belief that a Jewish ‘cabal’ runs the world. Conservative Jewish donor Sheldon Anderson (sic.), for instance, is a ‘fascist’ ‘puppet master’ who is ‘filling the coffers and pulling all the strings.’” (It is difficult to determine the sincerity of Waters’s subsequent apology for the remarks about Adelson in particular.) 

Waters is performing back in his native England now, and there’s apparently a fair amount of opposition to that series of concerts, as well. Jewish groups like the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the National Jewish Assembly, and the Campaign Against Antisemitism have, respectively, labeled Waters’s appearances as political rallies rather than concerts, called upon the government to condemn Waters, and launched a petition to stop venues from hosting his performances, both live and filmed. 

If Waters seeks to avoid controversy, he’s going about it all wrong. Certainly, opening his UK tour with a ten-minute screed about his mistreatment in Germany, a condemnation of the British newspapers The Telegraph and The Times, and challenging his doubters with “If you’re one of those ‘I love Pink Floyd but I can’t stand Roger’s politics’ people, you might do well to fuck off to the bar” is unlikely to tamp down any controversy. 

Waters is no stranger to the kind of whirlwind that now surrounds him, and those of a cynical disposition might suggest he likes it that way. It is not a criticism of Waters to note that the facts that he’s still performing the 44-year-old “In the Flesh” and that he hasn’t had a hit as a solo artist in over 30 years suggests that he’s living on past glory. In the spirit of “there’s no such thing as bad publicity,” then all this kerfuffle may well work to Waters’s advantage. 

Curmie grew up in the United States, where there’s a First Amendment that would (or at least should) guarantee Waters’s legal right to perform even potentially offensive material. Those rights are, as Curmie has suggested many times, currently under attack from both the left and the right, but to some extent it has been ever thus. 

I was just beginning to follow the news even a little when the Selma to Montgomery march took place in 1966; the first presidential election in which I took anything approaching an active interest was marred by the events at the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968; I have long regarded Kent State in 1970 as a life-changing moment. None of these historical moments are shining examples of adherence to First Amendment principles. 

More recently, there have been abuses by police and protesters alike surrounding the invasion of Iraq, the tearing down of statues of Confederate leaders, the death of George Floyd, the Dobbs decision, and a host of other instances in which citizens responded negatively to something that was happening. 

No, these demonstrations were not without incident, but the spirit of peaceful protest remains, and Curmie will always regard the guarantees of the First Amendment as the most powerful beacon of American exceptionalism. 

Roger Waters, whatever we think of his music or his politics, would be on more solid legal footing on this side of the Atlantic. He should still be safe in Europe, but it’s important to note that some 52 anti-monarchists were arrested in his homeland for peacefully protesting the coronation of Charles III. 

Curmie also calls to mind a moment in his own life from 30-ish years ago. My cousin was coaching his son’s little league team. The players were just old enough to have an umpire call balls and strikes. I happened to be behind the bench when one of my cousin’s players was called out on strikes on a pitch I, too, thought was several inches high. The boy started to complain; my cousin pulled him aside and said that with two strikes, if it’s close enough that an umpire even might call it a strike, swing. The kid nodded, and rapped a double his next time up on a pitch that was a good six inches outside. 

Roger Waters might be right that what’s being thrown at him isn’t even close to the strike zone, but he needs to be aware that there’s always going to be an umpire (like this guy) who’s going to call you out just because. But coming out swinging isn’t exactly the answer, either. The best course of action would seem to be avoiding picking up two strikes. 

Controversy sells tickets, but there’s always a risk involved. Your call, Roger.