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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Robert Wargas</title>
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		<title>Will There Be a Third Intifada?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/robert-wargas/will-there-be-a-third-intifada/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=will-there-be-a-third-intifada</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/robert-wargas/will-there-be-a-third-intifada/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 03 Jun 2011 04:09:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Robert Wargas]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Afternoon Edition]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=95177</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The unilateral push for Palestinian statehood may play a role. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Picture-2.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-95182" title="Picture-2" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Picture-2.gif" alt="" width="375" height="306" /></a></p>
<p>Back in March, the social site Facebook took down a page calling for a Third Intifada, or “uprising,” against Israel. The page had all the necessary embellishments for an expression of radical rage: a fist, for instance, colored red, white and green, raised in the style of leftist solidarity. There was also a religious prediction: “Judgment Day will be brought upon us only once the Muslims have killed all of the Jews.” These sentiments were attractive enough to net the page more than 340,000 fans.</p>
<p>Acknowledgements of such fanaticism have crept into the press lately, but they have largely been ignored. <em>The Jerusalem Post</em> has reported that “seventy percent of Palestinians expect a third intifada similar to those of 1987 and 2000 if Israeli-Palestinian peace talks fail.” The article then assures us that twenty-five percent said they oppose another intifada; notwithstanding, the numbers do reveal a kind of begrudging acceptance of a culture of perpetual rage among Palestinians, whether they support it or not. For instance, the recent “Nakba Day” skirmishes in the Golan Heights and along the border with southern Lebanon were born of the same nothing-to-lose psychosis as last year’s flotilla incident, and this type of thinking has not been exhausted. One Palestinian official, Nabil Sha&#8217;ath, said a few days ago that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu&#8217;s speech before the U.S. Congress could have been construed as an act of war. Sabri Saidam, deputy speaker of the Fatah Council, threw in his own innuendo. According to the Huffington Post, Saidam predicted that the recent border violence is only a &#8220;rehearsal&#8221; for other uprisings. He even mentioned the likelihood of a &#8220;third intifada,&#8221; although it&#8217;s not clear from the context of the article whether he supports the idea or is simply anticipating it.</p>
<p>This brand of rhetoric is nothing particularly new or interesting; what is significant, however, are the context and circumstances. Come September, when the Palestinians apply for membership to the United Nations, they will once again find themselves in a situation in which defeat might be more valuable than victory. Technically, a vote in their favor at the UN would not confer statehood as such, only membership into the body. But a vote for membership would mean a <em>de facto </em>Palestinian state, with the &#8220;international community&#8221; sanctifying the so-called 1967 borders. This stunt is almost certain to fail, and the Palestinian leaders know this and perhaps even desire it. To be successful, the motion for membership would first have to clear the Security Council (with United States veto power) in order to be brought to a vote in the General Assembly.</p>
<p>Some countries, like Spain, have already declared their support for recognizing Palestine as a member of the UN. The decrepit and double-dealing Arab League has done so as well. This works out especially well for Amr Moussa, the league&#8217;s secretary general, who gets to beef up his credentials for the Egyptian presidency by using the U.S. and NATO to do his organization’s wetwork in Libya, while also croaking out criticisms of the West and Israel on the side. In this way, he simultaneously gets to benefit from and denounce Western interventionism, offering everything to everybody.</p>
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		<title>Intellectuals and Society</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/robert-wargas/intellectuals-and-society/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=intellectuals-and-society</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/robert-wargas/intellectuals-and-society/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 12 Feb 2010 05:02:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Robert Wargas]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[auto mechanic]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[book]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=49650</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why Thomas Sowell does not put much faith in Ph.D. degrees.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/noamchomsky.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-49655" title="noamchomsky" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/noamchomsky-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="225" /></a></p>
<p>In 1980, during a debate for Milton Friedman’s <em>Free to Choose</em> series, Frances Fox Piven, of Cloward-Piven infamy, tried to lecture Thomas Sowell on race and economics. Her contention was that equality of opportunity had failed and what black people needed was a strong dose of socialism. “That’s why equality of results became an issue…for black people in the United   States,” she said, “and they expressed their concern….”</p>
<p>“No, you expressed it, damn it!” Sowell shot back. “It’s what you choose to put in the mouths of black people.”</p>
<p>The moral of the story is that Thomas Sowell does not put much faith in Ph.D. degrees. Three decades later, at age seventy-nine, he once again pounces on armchair theorists and assorted ivory-tower types in his newest book, <em>Intellectuals and Society</em>. Sowell identifies his targets as “people whose occupations deal primarily with ideas.” In other words, ideas are the finished products of their labor. This category could include writers, philosophers, and the literature professor who thinks <em>Hamlet</em> is about a young man struggling with the horrors of capitalist society.</p>
<p>These intellectuals are different from others not only because of their interests, but because of their method of operation and the incentive structure that comes with it. Unlike carpenters, who produce tangible goods, or scientists, who produce theories that must be tested against results, the dealer in pure ideas is cut off from the normal feedback mechanisms that filter faulty notions out of the intellectual landscape. An auto mechanic who can’t fix transmissions is bound to go out of business, just as a civil engineer who designs a bridge that collapses is apt to suffer some problems with his career.</p>
<p>Not so with intellectuals. “Not only have intellectuals been insulated from material consequences, they have often enjoyed immunity from even a loss of reputation after having been demonstrably wrong.” Their insularity can also lead to dilettantism, as the intellectual is not constrained from wandering into fields completely outside his or her own. The pattern is clear: Chomsky the linguist becomes Chomsky the foreign-policy wonk. Michael Eric Dyson the minister becomes the expert on everything racial. Your anthropology professor becomes an expert on healthcare economics.</p>
<p>Though his main topic is focused, Sowell’s context is wide. He discusses economics, war, the law, the media, politics, and race. For decades, these subjects have been the canvases on which intellectuals have painted their grotesque portraits. Sowell documents not only the disastrous ideas themselves—straight out of the mouths of characters like John Dewey—but discusses why those ideas have failed so miserably.</p>
<p>Sowell is one of the greatest debunkers of our time, capable of laying waste to vast fields of demagoguery through slash-and-burn logic and empiricism. No one throws the wrench in the leftist chain quite like him. The most devastating chapter of the book is the one entitled “Intellectuals and Economics,” in which Sowell obliterates common claims about “income distribution,” poverty, and inequality. His <em>bête noire</em> is the person for whom evidence is merely optional filigree. (Who needs evidence when one is flying under the banner of “social justice”?) Bromides about the “widening gap” between rich and poor don’t consider that individuals are constantly moving between income brackets, as Sowell illustrates. Looking merely at statistical abstractions creates the illusion that “the rich” and “the poor” are merely static, immutable categories, rather than mere classifications through which many different people are constantly passing.</p>
<p>Intellectuals’ perverse desire to see some sort of “plan” imposed on society has made for a decidedly sordid history of their ilk. The Progressives of the early twentieth century, for instance, were bona fide racists, and the academic extension of their ideas was the eugenics movement. It comes as no surprise, then, that the revolutionary creeds of Italian Fascism and German National Socialism were especially intriguing to the intelligentsia, despite their being mislabeled today as “conservative” or “right wing” movements. Sowell reminds us that these ideologies were originally considered left wing by the intellectuals themselves. Lincoln Steffens, who glorified Soviet Communism, also reserved praise for Mussolini. Other radical socialists who shared his sentiments included British novelist H.G. Wells and American historian Charles Beard.</p>
<p>Still more saw the ultimate promise of collectivism in the Nazi movement. During the 1920s, W.E.B. Du Bois, prominent black historical figure and devoted communist, became so fascinated with Nazism that he decorated the magazine he edited with swastikas. This love affair was not a one-night stand, either. As late as 1936, Du Bois remarked that “Germany today is, next to Russia, the greatest exemplar of Marxian socialism in the world.”</p>
<p>The ease with which intellectuals migrate from one squalid “ism” to another has necessitated some revisionism on their part. It was only after the West fully realized the horrors of the Italian and German dictatorships that the intellectual Left disowned them in a massive act of historical face-saving. Writes Sowell: “The heterogeneity of those later lumped together as the right has allowed those on the left to dump into that grab-bag category many who espouse some version of the vision of the left, but whose other characteristics make them an embarrassment to be repudiated.”</p>
<p>If there’s any weakness with the book, it’s that Sowell is himself an intellectual, making it easy for left-wing bloggers to dismiss him even if they can’t refute the book’s arguments. There are differences, however, between this book and the putrid machinations of a Noam Chomsky or a Cornel West: Those intellectuals are so sure of their ideas they have no doubt they’d make the perfect blueprint for society. Sowell, on the contrary, has never advocated anything except leaving people alone. Also, part of intellectuals’ decidedly anti-intellectual strategy, as Sowell points out, is their inoculation against empirical evidence. That socialism killed millions in the twentieth century, and that quasi-socialist policies have wiped out inner cities in America, makes no difference to the tenured cultural studies professor.</p>
<p>Sowell, then, while being an intellectual according to his own definition, is in practice far more scientific and accountable. His awareness of human fallibility is straight out of Burke or Hayek. The absence of this quality in radicals is what makes today’s intellectual climate so uninviting. Sowell writes: “Because the vision of the anointed is a vision of themselves as well as a vision of the world, when they are defending that vision they are not simply defending a set of hypotheses about external events, they are in a sense defending their very souls—and the zeal and even ruthlessness with which they defend their vision are not surprising under these circumstances.”</p>
<p><em> </em></p>
<p><em>Robert Wargas is a writer and graduate student who lives on Long Island, NY.</em></p>
<p><strong>To order Intellectuals and Society, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Intellectuals-Society-Thomas-Sowell/dp/046501948X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1265783449&amp;sr=1-1">click here</a>. </strong><em><br />
</em></p>
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