Psychopathology -- on the individual & international level

Erev shavuot- happy holiday to all. Back with a new positing on Monday
-- elliot


A moral vacuum


We now know that around midnight on August 1, 2003, Adwan Yihya Farhan murdered Dana Bennet outside Tiberias. The Chicago-born 18-year-old was "killed for the sake of killing," said Dep.-Cmdr. Avi Elgrissi.

Farhan's criminal history, which dates back to 1994 when he was 18, includes the murders of Sylvia Molorova, a traveler from the Czech Republic, Aharon Simahov, with whom he shared a Tiberias lock-up, and a nameless man in his 40s. He committed other violent crimes including kidnapping and rape. When he was arrested, the one-time police informer was being held in a Beersheba-area jail for raping an Australian tourist.

Writing in Wednesday's Jerusalem Post, eminent sociologist Shlomo Giora Shoham noted that Adwan "displays the behavior of a typical psychopath. He doesn't have a conscience, he doesn't have empathy. He kills without reason." Triggered by a combination of nature and nurture, the psychopath's compulsion to kill is sexually-driven, Shoham wrote.

NEWS OF Farhan's capture competed for attention Wednesday with North Korea's announcement that it has abandoned the 1953 truce ending the Korean War.

On Monday, the Pyongyang regime illegally detonated a huge underground nuclear explosion - eliciting worldwide condemnation and the relaunching of the US-led multinational Proliferation Security Initiative aimed at uncovering the transfer of weapons of mass destruction to state and non-state actors.

The North Koreans' response: yet more saber-rattling. They test-fired more missiles, revved up their weapons-grade Yongbyon reactor and rallied the country's hapless masses. They then proclaimed that any stopping and searching of North Korean shipping would be viewed as "a declaration of war." They were particularly incensed at South Korea's joining the multinational initiative, launched originally by president George W. Bush on May 31, 2003. At the time, China, which along with South Korea is the only country with leverage over the North, refused to cooperate. With Washington focused on Iraq, the initiative was quietly shelved.

Analysts have been debating Pyongyang's motivation for Monday's blast. Some argue it was to solidify support for the ruling clique at a time when Kim Jong-Il, who is both dictator and deity, is fading. Others speculate that the detonation followed a pattern in which the North behaves outrageously to garner attention, and is paid off in return for better behavior.

But the explanation we prefer suggests that as a proliferator of nuclear technology to countries such as Syria and Iran, the North Koreans need to show their customers that what they're selling really works.

Though they also make ends meet by trafficking in heroin and methamphetamines, and by exporting citizens for forced labor and sexual exploitation, nuclear proliferation is the country's most lucrative export.

THESE TWO stories, breaking within a single week, show very clearly how psychopathology can exist on both the individual and the international level.

Both the serial killer and the malevolent leadership in Pyongyang are guilty of extreme immoral and antisocial behavior, the one compelled by bloodlust, the other by calculated depravity.

There are no angelic nation-states, including ours. All countries are adept at rationalizing behavior that is patently morally wrong. Ask certain European nations, for example, why they conduct billions of Euros worth of trade with a fanatical regime that threatens to wipe Israel off the map, and the reply will likely be that they are actually bolstering international tranquility.

Nations, like individuals, sometimes lie to themselves.

Not North Korea, apparently. It is unapologetic about its illegal nuclear testing and proliferation activities. It doesn't feel compelled to lie to itself about why it engages in commerce with Iran or Syria. Like the lone psychopath, its leaders are narcissists who show a reckless disregard for others, a lack of empathy and an inability to tell right from wrong.

AS WE ponder what happens when law and morality vanish, the Jewish world prepares to celebrate Shavuot tonight and Friday. By tradition, the holiday marks the giving of the Torah - the basis of law and morality in Judaism - at Mt. Sinai.

Heaven knows, we too often fall short of what is demanded of us.

Yet, as we saw again this week, when the shackles of a higher moral code are absent, the world becomes even more dissolute, brutish and riddled with delusions of grandeu

Tzipi Livni & Bibi Netanyahu ...the saga continues

The loyal opposition


For the first three decades of the state, Menachem Begin was Israel's sole leader of the Knesset opposition. Since 2000, however, Israel has had nine opposition heads. Today's politics may be more volatile, but it's less ideologically coherent. Political campaigns increasingly center on the leader's personality and character.

It is amid this ambiance that the four-year-old Kadima Party has been either governing, under Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert, or leading the opposition, under Tzipi Livni.

Just months into this role, Livni has formed a "shadow team," not quite akin to the British concept of the "shadow cabinet" - yet complete with shadow ministers and area experts to basically parallel Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's cabinet.

Since Kadima is a relatively new party, the idea is intended to help it develop positions on a range of issues. With any luck, novice "shadows" will become sufficiently proficient in their areas of responsibility to produce informed critiques. From a morale point of view, the idea is to diminish opposition MKs' feeling that they are wasting away in the political wilderness.

The scheme, for example, calls for Shaul Mofaz to shadow Defense Minister Ehud Barak. Ronnie Bar-On shadows Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz. Meir Sheetrit shadows Interior Minister Eli Yishai. Avi Dichter shadows Internal Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch… and so on down the line.

Area experts include Otniel Schneller on how to bridge Judaism and democracy. Yohanan Plessner will examine the Tal Law and national service. The party has also designated liaisons for Gush Katif evacuees, Diaspora affairs, Negev and Galilee development and Beduin concerns.

It's an altogether splendid idea that could generate a level of reasoned criticism and hone policy expertise. So we'd like to believe it's more than a gimmick developed by Livni's political consultants. The credibility of the plan, a revolutionary rethinking of how opposition politics should work, would have been enhanced had it not been disseminated via a Monday night press release issued by the party's spokesman. Nevertheless, we credit Livni with the approach and encourage her to actualize it.

IN HER new role, Livni is to be commended for generally recognizing that politics stops at the water's edge - meaning criticism of government policies should be tempered while abroad, or addressing foreign audiences. She acquitted herself well in telling a recent AIPAC audience that in regard to Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons, there are no policy differences between the government and the opposition. She also appears to be in synch with Netanyahu on how to handle Hamas in Gaza.

On the Palestinian track, however, in a recent Newsweek interview, Livni labeled the Netanyahu government "very right-wing." Asked how an international audience should understand the categorization, she replied that "just saying no" doesn't take into account a new camp of Arab moderates.

Speaking on Army Radio Monday she was understandably more explicit: "This government doesn't want to talk. It is dragging its feet in an attempt to refrain from renewing contacts with the Palestinians," and concluded that Netanyahu's policies are already leading toward a "diplomatic collapse."

We don't begrudge Livni the need to differentiate Kadima from Likud. But she'd be both more credible, and more effective in the international arena, if she noted that she herself engaged these same Arab moderates with not much to show for it, and that at the end of the day, her policy differences with Netanyahu are not all that substantive.

Like Netanyahu, she would wait until after an agreement on final borders before dismantling any settlements. Livni, no less than Netanyahu, opposes unfettered Palestinian sovereignty - and if we've got that wrong, Ms. Livni, do enlighten us.

While saying he does not want to rule over the Palestinians, Netanyahu won't commit to the "two-state solution" until he knows what that entails for Israel's ability to defend itself.

Here Livni's public diplomacy style is wiser. By forthrightly espousing the two-state solution, she places the onus for opposing an end to the conflict where it belongs - on the Palestinians. After all, it's their intransigence - on borders, refugees and recognition of Israel as a Jewish state - that's prevented a deal.

She can enhance her stature as leader of the loyal opposition by making that clear, at every opportunity.

He ain't mad...

Got busy Tuesday & didn't get around to posting this...

Pyongyang lesson


Say that in response to North Korea's detonation on Monday of a Nagasaki-like nuclear blast, the world declares: "Enough is enough."

China, the North's only ally, cuts off fuel and seals its border. South Korea halts humanitarian aid. NATO warships, backed by Russia's Pacific fleet, enforce a total blockade.

How might North Korea react? Perhaps by invading the South; perhaps by exploding a nuke over Seoul. Or perhaps the regime would begin to gasp its last, as millions of starving northerners stormed the Chinese and South Korean borders.

The sudden, forced reunification of the peninsula would saddle the modern, affluent South with incredible logistical problems - foremost among them how to feed a backward, impoverished population and integrate it into their hyper-modern society.

In other words: At this late stage, decision-makers are likely to find meaningful action totally unpalatable.

IT HAS no doubt been instructive for Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to observe the civilized world's reaction, over the years, to North Korean provocations.

After revving up their nuclear program around the time of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the North Koreans conducted an underground nuclear test on October 9, 2006. Following an outcry, they pretended to abandon their program and duly obtained a range of economic and diplomatic payoffs. In October 2008, the Bush administration removed North Korea from the State Department's list of countries which sponsor terrorism.

Western intelligence analysts think the 2006 test, which registered with the magnitude of a 4.2 earthquake, may have been a dud. As David E. Sanger of The New York Times writes in The Inheritance, "The yield was below a kiloton, far less than a tenth of the power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima."

Not so yesterday's blast, estimated at 4.5 to 5.3 magnitude.

North Korea is a hereditary dictatorship led by Kim Jong-Il, who followed his father, Kim Il-Sung. He will likely be replaced by his son Kim Jong-Un.

The masses suffer unspeakable deprivation - during the 1990s hundreds of thousands died of famine and disease - while resources are directed to the military-industrial complex and propaganda. A cloying personality cult has transformed the leader into a deity, while xenophobia and racial supremacy lead people to fear change.

North Korea purchased centrifuges and, possibly, uranium from Pakistan. It raises money by selling what it knows about building missiles and atom bombs. For 10 years - under the nose of American intelligence - it built Syria's al-Kimbar nuclear facility in the Euphrates Valley, a mirror image, writes the Times' Sanger, of the North's own Yongbyon reactor.

As the Bush administration was obsessing over Saddam Hussein's non-existent nuclear weapons, North Korea was preparing to transform next-door Syria into a nuclear power. Mercifully, on September 6, 2007, the nearly completed reactor was smashed by the Israel Air Force before it could be fueled.

Pyongyang and Teheran share their nuclear know-how. Iranian scientists were reportedly present at the October 2006 detonation and, we assume, observed Monday's blast too. By learning from the North Koreans, the mullahs may be laying the groundwork - literally - for an underground nuclear explosion of their own.

KHAMENEI knows that while the West spins its wheels, Iran's quest for nuclear arms proceeds apace. "Fate changes no man, unless he changes fate," he's fond of telling acolytes. And yet, he can't afford to be sanguine.

True, Iran's nuclear sites are scattered throughout his vast territory, providing redundancy and concealment from attack. True, too, complex problems such as fuel-making, bomb-building and weapons delivery are being successfully addressed.

Still, the ayatollah worries. It's not inconceivable - even at this late stage - that he could be forced to freeze Iran's program. What if the new American president runs out of patience, sooner rather than later? What if Barack Obama convinces Europe, Russia and China that the world can't afford another North Korea on top of an unraveling nuclear Pakistan? Certainly not one whose imperial ambitions are fueled by high-octane religious extremism.

Realistically, Khamenei reassures himself that the prospects of crippling sanctions don't figure even remotely on the international agenda. Still, he will sleep a lot more soundly once stopping Iran becomes as unthinkable as trying to roll back nuclear-armed North Korea.

We have a suspect

A patient enemy


One solitary Arab country has never been under absolute Muslim hegemony: multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and religiously heterogeneous Lebanon. For this, it has paid a price - even before Persian Shi'ite radicals took power in Teheran in 1979 and set up Hizbullah in 1982.

In 1958, for instance, Sunni nationalists tried to force the country into the pan-Arab orbit under Egypt's Abdul Gamal Nasser. The Christians, then less fragmented, more numerous and wielding clout, said no and were backed by president Dwight Eisenhower.

By 1975, civil war had pitted Muslims against Christians, drawing in the PLO, Syria and Israel; it lasted into the 1990s.

Only two months ago, Damascus opened an embassy in Beirut, which suggests it may have abandoned the claim that Lebanon is part of Greater Syria.

Israel, needing to defend its northern border - first against Palestinian incursions, more recently against Hizbullah - has repeatedly been drawn into the quagmire.

This is the context for Lebanon's election campaign, which culminates on June 7. It is being waged in 26 districts for 128 parliamentary seats. Iran's proxies are led by Hizbullah (fielding only 11 candidates) and include Nabih Berri's (Shi'ite) Amal and Michel Aoun's (Christian Maronite) Free Patriotic Movement. They're competing against the Sunni-led "March 14 coalition" backed by Saudi Arabia and headed by Sa'ad Hariri. Other members include the mercurial Druse leader Walid Jumblatt and former Phalangist chieftain Samir Geagea.

The election is "free," but not cheap. One voter told The New York Times: "Whoever pays the most will get my vote. I won't accept less than $800."

It costs money to pay your opponent to drop out, to purchase positive news coverage, and to fly in expatriates. To help citizens remember to whom they owe allegiance, the parties helpfully provide them with prepared ballot slips.

TWO BIG news stories frame the lead-up to the voting. Hizbullah and its allies say they've uncovered a spy ring working for Israel (21 local suspects arrested, several others reportedly having fled to Israel). The disclosures, Hassan Nasrallah declared in a campaign message, prove that his movement can best face down "the Zionist enemy."

The other big story, revealed over the weekend in Germany's Der Spiegel, is the surprise revelation that an independent (partly UN-funded) tribunal investigating the February 14, 2005, assassination of Rafik Hariri will lay the blame at Hizbullah's - not Syria's - doorstep. German investigators will reportedly name as the mastermind Hajj Salim, Imad Mughniyeh's replacement, who reports directly to Nasrallah and Gen. Kassim Sulaimani in Iran. Hariri was murdered, Der Spiegel speculates, because Nasrallah felt threatened by the Sunni billionaire's broad-based popularity. Hizbullah claimed the story was intended to divert attention from the Israeli "spy networks."

Even the rosiest election result scenario - a slight gain for the anti-Iranian bloc - would not fundamentally shift Lebanon's alignment of forces. The prime minister, as always, will be a Sunni, the president a Christian and the parliament speaker a Shi'ite. Sorry to say, Hizbullah will remain the dominant social, political and economic movement - regardless of how many seats its partisans capture. It has the guns, the cash and the backing of a ruthless regional power. It seeks to change the constitution and ultimately capture de-jure control of the country.

It's hard to see how US Vice President Joe Biden's Friday visit to Beirut, coming on the heels of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's trip last month and aimed at tacitly bolstering the relative moderates, did much good. The last thing the "moderates" need is to be publicly embraced by Washington. They know that the West has been loath to confront Hizbullah or its patron, and that's what matters.

In February 2005, in the wake of the Hariri murder, tens of thousands of Lebanese demonstrated in the streets, eventually forcing Syria to withdraw its troops from the country. There was a fleeting sense that, just maybe, the forces of extremism had been routed. But the following month, Hizbullah massed far greater numbers, dashing hopes that popular sentiment alone could overcome the Iran-Hizbullah behemoth.

Rather than going for an overt power grab, Hizbullah is slowly metastasizing deep inside Lebanon's body politic. The process offers a sobering glimpse into Iran's regional modus operandi and its patient imperial designs.

Thank God it's Friday

The week that was

An FBI sting operation led to Wednesday's arrest of four Muslims in New York City charged with plotting to blow up the (Orthodox) Riverdale Jewish Center and the (Reform) Riverdale Temple in the Bronx. Lev Dassin, acting US attorney for the Southern District of New York, said the men had "selected targets and sought the weapons necessary to carry out their plans."

Besides the uncovering of the Riverdale plot, this week brought some other good tidings for which we are grateful: The Obama administration decided to fund the entire Arrow-3 anti-missile program now in development; US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told Al Jazeera that there would be no European-like flirtation with Hamas by Washington, saying: "Hamas has to comply with not only the Quartet principles but the underlying principles of the Arab Peace Initiative." Finally, the president made it clear that his efforts to dissuade Iran from building nuclear weapons would not carry on beyond the year; and that - as he told Newsweek - all options were on the table.

YET there's no papering over the differences that emerged this week in the wake of Binyamin Netanyahu's meeting with Barack Obama.

The president supposes Israeli concessions on the Palestinian track can help stop the Iranian bomb. The reality: With the mullahs' power ascendant, Hamas and radical Fatah factions have no reason to moderate their line. Obama wants a complete settlement freeze, West Bank checkpoints lifted, outposts removed, and the criteria regarding what passes into Gaza loosened.

Yesterday's dismantling of Maoz Esther, near Kochav Hashahar -- a non-authorized outpost reportedly built on private land -- belatedly begins to addresses the outpost issue. And Netanyahu is committed to not creating new settlements. But mainstream Israel will not tolerate a "settlement freeze" in metropolitan Jerusalem.

Personally speaking, I don't want to see a freeze in the settlement blocs either. In fact, so long as the state invites people to live over the Green Line, I don't know how we can expect them -- no matter which community they live in -- to freeze their lives. What if there is a need to expand an apartment or home because of a new baby?

The elimination of more checkpoints - a life-and-death decision - needs cautious handling, as does the question of what passes into Gaza.

It was no secret that the administration was working on a peace plan. But it is unsettling that more of it was leaked to the London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi than, apparently, was revealed to Netanyahu.

And yet the details, if accurate, break little new ground. Obama reportedly wants a Palestinian state alongside Israel and stresses it must be demilitarized - something George W. Bush failed to emphasize. He tells the Palestinians to abandon demands for the "right of return." The fate of Jerusalem, he says, must be decided by the parties (though the holy basin should be placed under UN stewardship). He reportedly calls for land swaps to compensate the Palestinians for settlement blocs, thus implicitly embracing the "1967-plus" letter Bush gave Ariel Sharon in 2004. He's also pressing moderate Arabs to push the Palestinians to be more compromising.

In that Al Jazeera interview, Clinton was asked whether the settlement freeze meant Obama wanted to roll Israel back to the 1949 Armistice lines. Her answer: "First, we want to see a stop to settlement construction, additions, natural growth - any kind of settlement activity. That is what the president has called for. We also are going to be pushing for a two-state solution which, by its very name, implies borders that have to be agreed to…"

We read that as a "no."

It is unlikely in the extreme that the PLO will accept Obama's blueprint, despite the moderate-sounding tone lately adopted by Nabil Abu Rudaineh, Mahmoud Abbas's spokesman. Fatah is horribly fragmented: The old guard doesn't want to loosen its grip on power. Its pragmatists and hard-liners are arguing over how to negotiate with Israel. And the younger generation wants to officially reverse Fatah's commitment to end terror if Israel doesn't capitulate to its demands.

Meanwhile Hamas, ever more popular, bides its time, waiting for the West to reconstruct Gaza for it.

RATHER than get into a huff over Obama's demands, which are basically in harmony with the policies of his predecessors, Israel needs to ensure that it does not allow itself to be depicted as the obstacle to peace.

The good news is that Netanyahu is making a beginning at stressing what we are for - letting the Palestinians rule themselves. And by trying to get the Palestinians to acknowledge Israel's legitimacy as a Jewish state, he is correctly addressing the root cause of the conflict.