Ephemeral Enemy

In his loaf of lechem-sized novel of the CIA, “Harlot’s Ghost”, Norman Mailer traces the undercover upbringing of his young cold warrior and recruit Harry Hubbard through the spy vs. spy world of espionage. In one memorable section, while learning the ways of subterfuge and duplicity, Harry must associate colors with numbers. When he sees a red wall, behind a gray table with an orange lamp, it represents 586.

For anyone else, the colors and furniture arrangement would mean nothing. But to a spy, it could be the code to any number of potentially ominous outcomes.

What appears as nothing particularly significant to an ordinary person, actually has incredible stakes to code-breakers, CIA and Mossad.

Fast forward sixty-years and the same Cold War concept applies to today as the very essence of modern terrorism is to cloak evil behind a mask, whether Islam, Palestine or some warped version of a universal ideal like freedom. In reality, those notions are only ephemeral shrouds to cravenly hide the deeper-seeded hatred toward Jews and the west.

Striking at its cultural heart, known for its populous Jewish citizenry, where the lights of western commercial marquees emblazon the sightlines of Broadway, the Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad came within a hair’s breadth of a show stopper, stabbing right through it.

Young Faisal is a naturalized U.S. citizen from Pakistan. But his bomb-making training reveals his affiliation with Pakistan’s Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). The latter is the same group that attacked a Jewish Center in Mumbai. Meanwhile, the former plotted to attack the Danish Newspaper in Copenhagen for running the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad

While running around the cross-streets of 45th and Broadway in an Islamic Jihad get-up would’ve surely tipped off the street vendors, Shahzad’s disquise was an Americanized persona - the perfect veil. How cunning.

The modus operendi of this cowardly ilk is “hiding”. Now train your camera telescopically. When and if Iran actually attempts a nuclear attack on Israel, it won’t be from a missile launched from within their borders. They are far too spineless. They’ll hide behind one of their proxies such as Hezbollah. It won’t be a rocket for all of the world to see and trace its vapor cloud, but via a tunnel underground.

Iran is the world's foremost state sponsor of terrorism. Why would their successful precedent change? Were Iran to acquire a nuclear device, their means of delivery targeted upon Israel would remain the same.

Why would Iran claim responsibility and risk immense retaliation and utter obliteration, instead of igniting their lethal device through some third or fourth party?

When the US Marine barracks in Lebanon were bombed in 1983 and 241 US servicemen were killed Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility. It’s suspected that actually Hezbollah, who in turn received help from the Islamic Republic of Iran, were responsible.

But I ask you, whom did we attack in response?

Likewise since then, Iran has transferred sophisticated short-range rockets to both Hezbollah and Hamas. Both terrorist groups have used them to kill Israeli civilians in past wars.

Due to the very nature of these and other craven acts, the enemy hides cowering behind a cloak of anonymity knowing that Israel and the United States won’t risk an all out international war to exact revenge. Their modus operendi is too ephemeral and more often than not, ghostlike, they slip away.

Mailer captured the Cold War not with an epic about massive warheads pointed across oceans, but revealed it through the hidden world of the CIA.

Finding Faisal’s Pathfinder was fortunate. Capturing him was shrewd. But taken on a larger scale, today’s counter-terrorism efforts should look for what’s concealed right in front of them. Appearance and reality are by definition, paradoxically in conflict.

Inglorious Zionests

Adolf Eichmann was captured fifty-years ago, on May 11th 1960 outside of Buenos Aires. Eleven days later he was on Israel’s soil and on May 23rd Prime Minister David Ben Gurion stood at the podium of the Knesset and announced to a hushed crowd his news.

Eichmann’s capture reignited the world’s outrage over the Holocaust. Up until that time, many desired to move on. After all, Israel had plenty of new and more immediate problems.

As Yom HaShoah folds into Yom HaAtzmaut and we turn from commemoration to celebration, I’m struck by the transition in outlook that took place from Israel’s statehood to the young country’s heroic marvel.

Notably, there’s a similar transition in cultural attitude that’s taking place today.

In the past twenty years, we’ve evolved from films like Schindler’s List to movies like Defiance and Inglorious Basterds. Jewish characterizations have morphed from victims to strong rugged combatants in the face of threats from Nazisnow they face evil head on with brawny bravura.

Arguably too, many American’s reference point for Jewish identification is Israel. And today it stands as a source of strength - economically, militarily and according to Gallup, American’s support of Israel ranks 63% - higher than after ‘67 and just one point below its high after the Gulf War.

Still, one can’t miss the skewed news reports and factually misleading editorials blaming Israel for the ills that plague that region.

President Obama’s misdirected pressure on Israel, especially given Iran’s nuclear ambitions that each day comes closer to actuality, is of utmost concern. It presents an existential threat to Israel through either itself or one of its terrorist proxies and destabilizes the entire region.

But what if, in this postmodern world, where the line between fiction and fact splice together seamlessly (Tarantino literally has film burn Hitler and his cronies to death), the story of Eichmann’s capture and a true wish-fulfillment fantasy made real, were to be revived?

Put yourself in the director’s chair and wonder if you will, what if Mossad captured Osama bin Laden? Imagine what that would do. Who in this country could claim to be anti-Zionist then? In one fell swoop it would be an end-run around placating the Obama administration, by directly appealing to the American people and a world constituency demonstrating a vigilant determination to seek justice.

Osama is a mass murderer who on countless occasions has vowed to destroy Israel. He and his group are not only responsible for 9/11 and the murder of Danny Pearl, but al Qaida carried out a suicide attack on an Israeli-owned hotel in Kenya killing 12 people, including three Israelis and wounding 80. Israel would be justified.

In this revenge fantasy (“Inglorious Zionests”), Israel’s Herculean labor would gain so much good will, an attack on Iranian nuclear installations would not only be cleared for take-off, they’d be escorted. It would change everything.

The stunned silence that greeted Ben Gurion, would be replicated upon Netanyahu by onlookers, many not knowing if it’s live or Memorex.

If it sounds too much like a cinematic whimsy, revisit the Eichmann capture and then tell me I’m dreaming. Read Neal Bascomb’s 2009 nail-biting, historical account of the operation in Hunting Eichmann. What stands out is the resolve, the fortitude and the grit. When Israel captured Eichmann, it broke the rules. When Mossad entered Argentina, it didn’t ask permission. It went in undercover. When El Al’s Britannia secretly whisked the war criminal away, it was through an illusory cloud of mystery.

What’s amazing about the story, is how so many things could have gone wrong jeopardizing the entire operation, but because of the determination of a handful of leaders, including Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, Mossad Chief, Isser Harel and others they persevered.

In 2010, we still hunt them. John Demjanjuk on trial in Munich is 89 years-old and stands accused of aiding the murder of 27,900 Dutch Jews in Sobibor. Last month, 88 year-old, Heinrich Boere was given the maximum sentence by a German court for murdering three Dutch civilians as part of a Nazi hit squad.

But what happens when they are gone? There will still be evil in the world and our focus should be aimed at the new Eichmanns. Our lens should not be lost, but readjusted.

Jihad Jane & Friends

While the name Jihad Jane may sound like some warped Hannah Barbara cartoon character, she’s quite real and has been accused of plotting to murder an actual cartoonist, Swedish artist Lars Vilks.

You may recall his name from 2007 when he produced a drawing of Muhammad with a dog’s body. His case also follows the same controversial pattern that erupted back in 2005, when a Danish newspaper printed 12 cartoons of Muhammad. One in particular garnered a firestorm in which the Prophet is wrapped in a bomb-shaped turban. That sketch was the match which actually ignited the burning of Western embassies in a number of Muslim countries.

But the latent combustion was never quite doused out, as the heat from blond bomber, Jihad Jane (Colleen LaRose) who was arrested last year and lived outside Philly, PA now seems to have caught onto a second all-American looking femme fatale - Jamie Paulin-Ramirez from Colorado.
Ramirez was one of seven suspects arrested in Ireland just this month.

Neither quite fit the stereotypical bill, looking more like they fell out of a Dick & Jane story, than an Al Jezeera newsreel. According to her mom, Ramirez was a straight-A nursing student before abruptly hightailing it off on an assassination outing and ditching the Rockies.

Just as these same cartoonists alter depictions of Muhammad, is there not irony in the fact that Jihad Jane and her cohort shatter our image of what a terrorist looks like? Depending on who is doing the viewing both of these alterations are a shock to the familiar senses.

But as the ladies were out for blood, according to an Associated Press interview, Vilks was not interested in offending Muslims with his art, but aimed to show he could make provocative art about any topic he wanted, “There is nothing so holy you can’t offend it,” he claimed.

Commenting on their apple pie looks, a US Justice Department official said the case “shatters any lingering thought that we can spot a terrorist based on appearance.”

Unhappy and discontent with their looks and adding more distortion to the story, the blond gals went in for a makeover, donning Islamic garb including headscarves and a hijab.

Undeniably, appearances can deceive and in both cases, it’s what’s underneath that counts. Their motive reveals their mask.

In 1930’s Nazi Germany, the newspaper, Der Sturmer (The Attacker) depicted Jews as sub-human with cartoons and caricatures. The intent was to create a fear and loathing of Jews. Some may wonder, where does the expressive artist’s line end and the creepy one begin?

After all, both utilize aesthetic techniques to illustrate a point. But one has to penetrate the page to get at the culprit. It becomes less about the art and more about the artisan. Just as advertising can show beautiful imagery, is it art or is it commerce?

"Propaganda tries to force a doctrine on the whole people... Propaganda works on the general public from the standpoint of an idea and makes them ripe for the victory of this idea." Adolf Hitler wrote these words in his book Mein Kampf (1926), in which he first advocated the use of propaganda to spread the ideals of National Socialism

Currently, those words are on display at the US Holocaust Museum where they are showing Nazi propaganda to shed light on this subject. And in our own blurred world of “reality tv” it comes at the perfect time as we can’t always tell what’s a real threat and what’s not.

For example, is depicting Jews as mice in Nazi Germany offensive? In 1992 Art Spiegelman won the Pulitzer Prize for his graphic novel, “Maus: A Survivor’s Tale which recounted his father’s ordeal as a Polish Jew during the Holocaust.

Or what about R. Crumb (he’s not Jewish) who last year came out with “The Book of Genesis” published as a graphic novel. In the NY Times review in reference to Crumb’s G-d, it stated, “He is a profoundly — almost grotesquely — human-looking deity, very much the sort of being in whose image vulgar humankind could realistically come forth.”

I am not reading about any death threats aimed at him. Perhaps it’s because Jews have a sense of humor and are used to it? From Philip Roth to Mel Brooks, Jews have taken it on the chin and laughed about it louder than anyone else.

Or maybe it’s because we just understand and can see through the page and we get that their intent is not ugly – though unfortunately, some people’s reactions are.

The Magic Mountain

All Fall Down

February 26, 2010

Abe Novick
Special to the Jewish Times

“A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.”
— Thomas Mann, “The Magic Mountain”

In 1924, between the wars, Thomas Mann published one of that century’s three great novels, “The Magic Mountain.” Along with James Joyce’s “Ulysses” and Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance Of Things Past,” it stands alongside those other peaks of literary enormity and beauty.

Mann’s mountain, high up in the Alps, was a metaphor for Europe where at the top and in Davos was the sanatorium, presciently representing the illness that was to soon befall the continent.

One can’t help but think of that — Sontagian illness as metaphor — as the World Economic Forum recently met in Davos. As The New York Times, reported, “If there was one takeaway from the annual gathering of business and political leaders … it was this: trust in governments, corporations and above all banks has become as elusive as sure footing on the icy streets of this Alpine resort.”

Indeed while faith is a matter of the heart, one can muddle through life without it (see: atheism). But trust seems essential to this world. We trust the driver on the other side of the freeway is not suicidal. We trust Iran won’t carry through with its insane promises because it will be obliterated in return. And we trust our currency will not become cheap wallpaper.

When that trust disappears, we devolve. Like a contagion that infects us, we become an ailing society.

But no sooner after the Swiss confab ended, it was revealed that Greece, the very epicenter of Western civilization and rational thought, was on the brink and threatening a domino effect, taking with it other euro currency-based economies.

Then the threatening tremors trailed back to Wall Street’s Goldman Sachs, the same banking institution that personifies the problem with trust discussed in Davos.

Last week it was reported that Goldman helped Greece obscure billions in debt. “In dozens of deals across the continent, banks provided cash upfront in return for government payments in the future, with those liabilities then left off the books,” according to The New York Times.

It remains to be seen once again: Will what happens in Europe, stay in Europe? Or will this new contagion spread, now that we are all linked and all a part of that craggy, mountainous range.

At the time of Mann’s writing, Europe was still the king of the mountain. When all of that centrality came crashing down avalanche style with the next war, only wreckage was in its wake. Having rebuilt, Germany is again the powerhouse at its peak, all eyes looking to it to rescue Greece and lift the continent out of its slide.

How ironic that the cause of that first calamity, which closed the age of reason and enlightenment, is now positioned to make a decision and contemplate the notion, in a talmudic sense (predicating it upon a country), “Whoever saves a life, it’s considered as if he saved an entire world.”

Does it work in reverse, as we enter a new era of being LinkedIn, Tweeted and “friended” on Facebook by those once oceans apart? Is it also just self-preservation and when one hurts, we all are endangered? The answer, somewhere in between, was sung and dedicated to Haiti at the opening of the 2010 Olympics with the revived “We Are The World.”

But if we choose to be tied together, whether by commerce, energy dependence or something higher, we can rise together or else when one falls off a cliff, as Europe is finding out again, we can all fall.

Play Nation

Play nation

Jan. 20, 2010
ABE NOVICK , THE JERUSALEM POST

The block letters are like colorful playthings on Google's home page. They look like candy. They're shaped like toys.

But as Google grows ever more ubiquitous and as it enters into additional areas beyond search with its acquisition of YouTube, and now mobile communications with its new Nexus One, those playful letters stand as a larger cultural marker - the fusion between work and play.

Similar to the eroding divisions between church and state, editorial and advertising, technology has melded work and play together. And, just as there are ethical concerns to consider in the first two long-standing categorical divisions, there are also ones to consider in this latest union. Is this meta-merger a good or a bad thing?

Consider first, work was usually something that was deemed real, while play was often thought of as something imagined. Work was once done mainly with the hands, play done with the mind.

But technology has morphed away from industries where we make real stuff to manufacturing information. And when we do make hardware (stuff we can hold in our hands), it's geared to carry chimerical bytes of that ephemeral information.

Nowadays and compounded with this phenomenon is the explosion of mobile technology, the imagined and the real world of work and play that have converged, are constantly within reach.

Wired recently called the last decade "The Mobile Decade": "People got increasingly plugged into an always-on, totally portable, always-connected existence." Gadgetry ranged from 2001's original iPod to 2009's Kindle 2.

For most of the previous century, it was left to Hollywood to create and export movies and entertainment around the world starting as far back as 1895 eventually culminating to become one of the US's largest export businesses. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, between 1986 and 2005, foreign sales of US motion picture and video products rose from $1.91 billion to $10.4 billion (in 2005 dollars) - an increase of 444 percent.

BUT TODAY, because it's no longer a one-way boulevard and YouTube and social media and mobile communications allow anyone and everyone to freely upload and export entertainment, that number is off the charts and is next to impossible to quantify.

The same technology that is used to transmit and watch movies and entertainment are the exact same devices that carry the images of protest from Iran and more recently the devastation and destruction in Haiti via Twitter and YouTube.

Even the side-armed stalwart to the business traveler, the Blackberry, attached at the hip like a road warrior's armament, is advertised on television with a version of The Beatles, "All You Need Is Love," a song once sung signifying countercultural values - the very antithesis of money and commerce. Now the playfulness of flower power has become intimately linked to the transactions of a global economy.

Moreover, the lead business stories in the last month have been about NBC's bouncing comedian/entertainer Jay Leno's show back to 11:35 p.m. and whether celebrity golfer Tiger Woods should still be a spokesman for corporations.

What was once a purely entertainment story has been subsumed by the business of entertainment. All the while in the consumer's mind, work and play collide, creating a new reality while supplanting distinctions that once existed.

Ethereal celebrities become equated with the businesses they represent and then suffer a messy divorce, while once and future politicians become celebrity journalists delivering the news and spin that was previously aimed directly at them.

What are the existential ramifications of life lived on this new stratum? Is it purely a matter for the individual to make the distinction? Or has work and play become ever more indistinguishable?

The philosopher Jean Baudrillard used the allegory of a map so large and detailed and laid over the territory it represents that it becomes the real and precedes the territory. It is what he calls the hyperreal.

But while there's a truth woven into the allegory, his metaphor ignores the harsh facts on the ground. Critical of his take, Susan Sontag in one of her later books, Regarding the Pain of Others, pointed out, "It suggests, perversely, unseriously, that there is no real suffering in the world." Sontag's criticism is more apt than ever, given the non-stop news footage coming out of Haiti these days.

But what neither of them has lived to see is the enormous proliferation of lenses to view what fast become historical events and that create a global hall of mirrors. Likewise, as seen and heard through the same devices that are bringing songs and movies, the world of work and play converge closer together and the newest medium's message will impact the way truth and lie are distinguished.

In the end, while Google's childlike colors evoke play, the world they open us up to can often be more like the one seen through a glass darkly.

The writer is based in Baltimore and works in communications. www.abenovick.com

Celebrigods

Unimpressed with celebrigods

Dec. 19, 2009
Abe Novick , THE JERUSALEM POST

In January, of 2009, and with the aid of in vitro fertilization, "Octomom," a.k.a Nadya Suleman, gained international attention when she gave birth to octuplets. Aided by science, she became an overnight celebrity and a worldwide sensation. Like a global traffic accident, we all slowed down to view this quasi-virgin birth.

Now as the year closes, Tiger Woods, a superstar and truly amazing sports celebrity, literally and figuratively crashed, while dragging with him his own brand and doing insurmountable damage to a number of orbital ones (Nike, Gillette, Accenture) that revolved around his persona.

It was also the year when names of politicians who claimed the moral high-ground, John Edwards and Mark Sanford, fell down from their perch.

Like Octomom, ordinary people who desired celebrity crashed through the gates of the White House, while others unhinged themselves from grounded reality (see balloon boy's dad) as they sought and entered the eternal world of fame.

LOCATED BETWEEN these two strata of manufactured earth and heaven, exists another dimension, a mythical creation generated by a mediasphere, where they'll live on in cyberspace for eternity, locked by their 15 minutes, to wander in a modern day Gehenna.

This clash of titanic proportions is a direct descendent of ancient mythology.

Today's celebrity gods, who live on a Mount Olympus in media, have a lineage that extends as far back as Zeus, who would spy a fair mortal, swoop down and have his way with her.

Tiger's trysts with mere earthly courtesans will be told and retold for as long as those ancient Homeric legends. Only now and forever they live in captured digitized bytes.

Like the Greek gods, that represented sea, war, harvest, what have you, Tiger has been heroically aligned as the embodiment of the particular products he sponsors.

Seen through the Wayback machine, the ancient struggle between hucksters of myth and those who want to be left in peace on earth is the story of Hanukka.

It is the story of a collision between Hellenism (a statue of Zeus was erected by the Syrian Greeks in the Temple) and its many gods, and the one singular Judaic God. And for a shining moment, the Jews, led by Judah Maccabee, were victorious in their resistance.

In the centuries to come, while gods and idols would continue to be worshiped, Judaism and its offshoot Christianity would disperse throughout the world, ultimately redefining the notion of God.

But as those two paths of Judaism and Christianity diverged, you won't find an individual who possesses the attribute of being both a mortal and a god in Judaism. Yet Hanukka's calendrical cousin does have God and a mortal comingling.

When John Lennon, who died 29 years ago this past month, claimed The Beatles were bigger than Jesus, the leader of the greatest celebrity band of the 1960s was knockin' a little too hard on heaven's door.

The very concept of Jesus is that he was a man and a god. Born from a virgin mother, his father was God.

Since then, no other man, god or celebrity has had the lasting influence, the durable brand recognition, symbolically represented by the cross than that of Jesus. That '70s show wasn't called Jesus Christ Superstar for nothing.

Jews who don't buy into this idea are consistent with their forbears who rejected the notion of God taking human form as described by the Greeks and later the Romans (the same guys who ultimately crucified Jesus.)

So as we sit here during the Christmas season, surrounded with unavoidable Christmas kitsch looking back on the past year, now an unwrapped present with its content strewn out, we can take pride in our culture's long battle with advertised idols, its own consistent core brand belief and its adherence to something higher.

At the same time, we need a sober reality check, because in 2010, the stories, the legends, the myths, like the show, will go on.

Jewgle

Between reading about the media’s apocalyptic, tide-altering times with “The Chaos Scenario - Amid the Ruins of Mass Media, The Choice for Business is Stark: Listen or Perish” and “Googled: The End of the World as We Know It”, I needed a safe harbor and shelter from the harsh bookish storm.

I found the brackish eddy alongside our port while on a school visit to the Baltimore Museum of Industry beside Key Highway not far from the venerable Domino Sugar plant.

Amongst the ruins of long lost labor was memorabilia with names like Allied Signal, Head and our most recently poorly departed Black & Decker, whose HQs will be exiting north next.

At the museum, children learned about the stuff we once made in this great land and how here in Baltimore we had a hand in much of it, from Henry Ford’s assembly line to printing on movable type by printing press.

Decidedly, if our harbor is ever to again be a beacon to the world, we need to plan and dam quickly for what’s to come, because this new tide of change is no longer just coming, but is already causing us to bail.

Sure, there have been monumental shifts due to innovations and inventions before, but never with the same degree of momentum surging over the gunwales.

If Noah’s flood took forty days and forty nights, the current speed of today’s change is a tsunami and will leave much of what we’ve relied on buried with the tide.

Recall Perchik’s prognostication, “A revolution is coming” in Fiddler On The Roof. I don’t have to tell you how that one turned out.

But when you are in the eye of a storm it’s difficult to know you are in one.

So take a look at Bob Garfield’s Jeremiad, “The Chaos Scenario” where he writes, “Traditional media are in a stage of dire retrenchment as prelude to a complete collapse. Newspapers, magazines and especially TV as we currently know them are fundamentally doomed…”

Or read Ken Auletta’s “Googled”, where he compares this era to other times of historic change whether the wheel, Guttenberg or even electricity and points out that what’s made this one different, is the velocity. “It took telephones seventy-one years to penetrate 50% of American homes, electricity fifty years and TV three decades. The Internet reached more than 50 percent of Americans in a mere decade.” Today that number is over 80%.

So we’ve seen how fast this sea can come in, yet it’s the speed by which it ebbs that’s most devastating. Witness how quickly investments can be cut in half, how quickly dwellings we thought we owned can enter foreclosure and how many businesses that once called Baltimore home can fast become candidates for entry into the Museum of Lost Labor.

It might seem appropriate to ask for leadership to guide us out of this current typhoon, but the whole paradox is that the power is no longer in their hands. It’s in yours and mine.

If you have a digital camera and a computer and these days everyone does, you are a reporter, a photojournalist and an ad exec.

On Youtube you can find a video of a car driving recklessly in a parking lot and suddenly, like one of those Monster Trucks it lands on top of two others. One of the crushed cars was a Hyundai. The next day, Hyundai came out to the same lot and gave the guy who owned the crushed Hyundai a new one. Hyundai filmed their act and posted it to Youtube garnering millions of hits.

What was the other car? No idea. But Hyundai was just named Best Marketer of the Year by Ad Age Magazine.

The irony is there was no ad agency, no television, no newspaper needed. Just you.

Now, pass me an oar.

Abe Novick, whose work is at abenovick.com , writes regularly for the BALTIMORE JEWISH TIMES on the intersection of American and Jewish culture.