Date: 2024-08-16 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00025664
ISRAEL
THE US PERSPECTIVE ON ISRAEL AND PALESTINE
NYT: Bret Stephens ... The Anti-Israel Left Needs to Take a Hard Look at Itself
THE US PERSPECTIVE ON ISRAEL AND PALESTINE
NYT: Bret Stephens ... The Anti-Israel Left Needs to Take a Hard Look at Itself
The Israeli flag reflected in a shattered mirror.
Original article:
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
While the 'Anti-Israel Left Needs to Take a Hard Look at Itself', so also does the 'Anti-Palestinian Right'.
I was 8 years old in 1948 when the new State of Israel was being established. It was not long after the conclusion of WWII and the horrors of the holocaust and it was somewhat controversial from the 'get-go'.
I was too young during WWII to have any understanding of the nature of war, my education in the years after the war incorporated a lot of the 'lessons learned' from that world conflict. Many in my generation have a deep concern over violence and war to resolve global and local grievances and worry that many in the young generations have little concept of the true horror of war.
I have a little more than 60 years of post-graduate experiential learning and many of my positions as a young person have modified over time. Part of this has been because if have learned more over time and part has been because the world has been changing over time, especially the power and performance of 'technology'.
One of the things that has not changed very much are the characteristics of human beings and in particular the greed, stupidity and mean spirit of many of the people who have gained power and influence around the world.
During my active career I tried to 'do my best' and I had a modest level of success. Some might say I accomplished nothing and there is some truth in that. However, in my view this is a lot better than what some of the better known people have done who have had success for themselves while doing immense damage for others.
A common theme in my working life has been 'management' ... the art of 'moving the needle' to accomplish goals. It is not a new idea, but the methods available have changed over time, especially during my working lifetime.
I was a 20 year old in 1960 and it was during my professional training in London that I first worked with a business computer. I was part of the CB&Co audit team working on the audit of EMI, a major British company that had considerable technology expertise and responsible for the development of radar early in WWII. By the 1960s they had developed a 'computer' to handle 'accounting' and had deployed it with their EMI Records subsidiary. I was given the task of 'auditing' this machine / system to give assurance that its results were OK. It was impossible to 'prove' that the results were correct using conventional manual audit methods but something was needed. EMI Records had beceome a major source of profit for the EMI Group in part because it was the manufacturer and distributor of Beetle Records which was good for profits but made my work difficult and near impossible. The accounting year end was September 30th, and one of the Beetle albums was due for release on October 1st. Millions of these albums were 'in stock' at the year end (close of business September 30th) and most of these were shipped out to wholesalers and stores on October 1st leaving EMI Records with empty warehouses. Ten days later I was trying to confirm that there was a huge inventory on September 30th when the warehouse was empty when I was doing my checks! It was an impossible task because there was no 'audit trail' in the system ... the data was updated, but what had been there before was over-written! The audit manager in charge solved the problem by putting me to work working through the machine language coding that was running the computer to ensure that the 'logic' would not permit the insertion of any 'malware' into the system as well as tracking the background of the computer operators and anyone with access to the computer! By the time all of this had been done, CB&Co concluded that the computer was delivering acceptable levels of accounting accuracy and there could be a 'clean' audit report.
There have been massive changes in computer technology since my EMI audit experience. I have stayed a lot closer to the development of technology than most of the general public, but am nowhere near the cutting edge of the many technologies that are in play now in 2023.
It is clear, however, that the field of 'management' and many somewhat related disciplines have failed abysmally to upgrade and modernise to be relevant, effective and useful in the modern world. This is, in my opinion, an existential threat to humanity that needs to be taken seriously.
Peter Burgess
Bret Stephens has been an Opinion columnist with The Times since April 2017. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at The Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post. On Saturday morning in southern Israel, Hamas murdered hundreds of people at a music festival and kidnapped others at gunpoint to serve as human shields in Gaza. On Sunday afternoon in Midtown Manhattan, a speaker at a rally of pro-Palestinian and left-wing groups celebrated that atrocity — one of thousands suffered by Israelis over the past few days, which we later learned included the killing of babies and toddlers. “As you might have seen, there was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time, until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters,” a speaker said. “But I’m sure they’re doing very fine despite what The New York Post says.” He was met with cheers. I went to see the rally for myself: Would there be even perfunctory condemnation of Hamas’s methods? A brief nod of sympathy to Israel’s anguish? Some banal nod to the cause of peace and nonviolence? Not that I heard. What I saw was giddiness and gloating, as if someone’s team had won the World Cup. Hamas had perpetrated the largest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, and the crowd was euphoric. Similar scenes unfolded across the world. In London, an estimated 5,000 demonstrators gathered near the Israeli embassy and shot off fireworks toward the building. At a rally at the Sydney Opera House in Australia, chants of “Free Palestine” gave way to the underlying emotion: “Fuck the Jews.” At Harvard, almost three dozen campus groups issued a joint statement holding “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” A statement from Yalies4Palestine insisted that “Breaking out of a prison requires force, not desperate appeals to the colonizer.” Whatever else might be said about these demonstrations and declarations, give the protesters and manifesto writers points for honesty. “Pro-Palestine,” to many of them, is pro-Hamas. “Anti-occupation” is opposition to Israel’s right to exist in any form. Israelis are guilty by virtue of being Israelis, so their murder and humiliation is something to laugh at. When “Zionism Is Genocide,” as placards at the demonstration put it, then no means are too awful to put a stop to it. If twice as many Israelis had been murdered on Saturday, would it have chastened the demonstrators or made them doubly glad, by the algorithm in which the terminally self-righteous become cheerleaders for slaughter? Not all the far left was quite as far gone. The New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America had promoted the rally on social media, but Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the group’s most prominent member, denounced the rally and issued a 66-word statement in which she condemned “Hamas’s attack in the strongest possible terms.” That was followed by a demand for “an immediate cease-fire and de-escalation.” Someone should tell the New York congresswoman: To call for a cease-fire, now, is to shield the killers from consequences and deny their victims the right to effective self-defense. It is, in the language of the old left, “objectively” pro-Hamas, even as it masquerades as a call for peace. Something similar must be said about a much broader swath of the left that looks in heartfelt horror at what happened on Saturday but rarely stops to wonder whether it played any role in creating the moral and intellectual climate for what has unfolded. Editors’ Picks 8 Sex Myths That Experts Wish Would Go Away The Secret Art of Turning a Concert Into a Film (Taylor’s Version) Your Face May Soon Be Your Ticket. Not Everyone Is Smiling. I’m talking about the bien-pensant for whom anti-Zionism — not just legitimate opposition to various aspects of Israeli policy, but the denial of Israel’s right to exist in any form — is a respectable political position, rather than simply an updated form of antisemitism. I’m talking about United Nations rapporteurs and once-great human-rights organizations who traffic in the lie that Israel deliberately created an “open-air prison” in Gaza, never mind that Gaza shares a border with Egypt, or that Israel vacated the territory nearly 20 years ago only to be repaid by endless assaults from above and below the ground. I’m talking about the university presidents who stand for free speech when it comes to antisemitism but become notably censorious when it comes to other forms of controversial speech. I’m talking about the political leaders who repeatedly promise solidarity with Israel only to quickly demand restraint when Israel seeks to destroy the infrastructure by which Hamas maintains its war machine. I’m talking about narratives that seem calibrated to create the outrageous impression that Israeli soldiers deliberately kill Palestinian children. I’m talking about the people whose fury at the Israeli government never seems to abate but who barely pause to observe that Hamas is a dictatorship of religious zealots or that President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority is a fulminating antisemite. Taken separately, none of this directly threatens a single Israeli life. Taken together, it goes far to explain how Israel, the nation of the Jews, is routinely treated, as some have said, like “the Jew of nations,” with consequences spelled in blood. If some of the anti-Israel left find themselves looking on in horror at what happened on Saturday, now is a good time for them to take a long, hard look at themselves. 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Bret Stephens ... Foreign policy and domestic politics.
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