[ART CRITIC] SUMMARY COMMENT ON THE POETICS AND POLITICS OF THE GRASS ISRAEL POEM

[der getreue-koreptitor]

*SUMMARY COMMENT ON THE POETICS AND POLITICS OF THE GRASS ISRAEL POEM*
* also posted at*

*http://summapolitico.blogspot.com/2012/05/blowing-taps-for-ever-so-revealing.html*
*
*
*http://artscritic.blogspot.com/2012/05/summary-comment-on-poetics-of-grass.html*

*I DO A BANG UP JOB
IF I MUST SAY SO MESELF
SCOTT THINKS OF "EMASCULATING" JOSEF JOFFE
IF MATTERS COULD ONLY BE SO SIMPLE!*













/_SUMMARY &a mp;n bsp;
COMMENTS ON THE GRASS CONTROVERSY_/*/__/*

/_A=_/_Description-1; **_
_B=Context-20**_
_C=The Blow by Blow-25;**_
_ D=Grass as Moral Interventionist-32; E=Poetics-45**_
_NOTES-50**_
_The Poem, in English and German-39_*__*

_A_*__*
On April 4, 2012 the S.Z. [_Sueddeutsche Zeitung_ and in Italian
_Repubblica_ and in Madrid _El Pais_ publish a Günter Grass poem
entitled "What needs to be said":**

LINKS to the archive for the entire controversy*
**http://goaliesanxiety.blogspot.com/2012/04/gunter-grass-what-must-be-said.html***

And to treasury of pieces on the political fallout, and to the original
text:
*http://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/gedicht-zum-konflikt-zwischen-israel-und-iran-was-gesagt-werden-muss-1.1325809***

*http://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/nach-debatte-um-sein-gedicht-grass-praezisiert-kritik-an-israel-1.1327719***

*http://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/schriftsteller-verteidigt-israel-kritik-grass-geisselt-gleichschaltung-der-meinung-1.1327017***

*http://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/grass-gibt-nicht-nach-aus-freundschaft-und-sorge-um-israel-1.1327095***

*http://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/debatte-um-grass-gedicht-auf-kosten-des-verstandes-1.1327756***

*http://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/guenter-grass-reagiert-auf-israels-einreiseverbot-wie-bei-minister-mielke-1.1330251***
**
*http://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/umstrittenes-grass-gedicht-von-einem-land-das-sich-selbst-misstraut-1.1328554***

*and to various ensuing discussions**

A compendium of critical opinions
**http://summapolitico.blogspot.com/2012/04/part-synopsis-of-grass-poem-controversy.html***
*
And of positive takes
http://summapolitico.blogspot/05/defense-of-beast-post-mortem-part-ii-of.html

THE DEVELOPING CODICIL*For a discussion of the poetics of the poem and
the controversy surrounding that aspect, there is**
*

**http://artscritic.blogspot.com/2012/05/guenter-grasss-notorious-poem-poetics.html***

For Scott Abbott's take there is**
*http://goaliesanxiety.blogspot.com/2012/06/gunter-grass-bombshell-poem-what-must.html***


I could also follow how the story played in Italy and Spain and in
France, but did not. The above links allow you to survey the battle
field, "rife with opinion, reading is dear!" As I wrote in a comment I
left at the Financial Times [June 8]**
http://blogs.ft.com/the-world/2012/06/europes-shame-is-gunter-grasss-shame/**
and there was yet another utter misreading and regurgitation of
received opinion at the Minnesota Paper a joint enterprise with the
Christian Science monitor.**
http://www.minnpost.com/christian-science-monitor/2012/06/rumors-german-israeli-nuclear-missile-deal-pique-debate-special-re**
The controversy has reached the provinces and it is time to put it to
bed. Links in the archive*
**http://goaliesanxiety.blogspot.com/2012/04/gunter-grass-what-must-be-said.html***

It has been a fascinating controversy, not just for the poem but for the
fractures that Grass's detonator revealed. The matter is not encouraging.**

=======================================**


Grass starts out:**

*Why have I kept silent, silent for too long
over what is openly played out
in war games at the end of which we
the survivors are at best footnotes.*
*It's that claim of a right to first strike
against those who under a loudmouth's thumb
are pushed into organized cheering---
a strike to snuff out the Iranian people
on suspicion that under his influence
an atom bomb's being built. *
*[German and English as footnote # 1, at the beginning of Section II]*
Subsequent to this funereal opening the poem elaborates several times on
the theme of silence and no longer being so, foretells its own damnation
for being regarded as anti-Semitic, contorts itself into contrition not
only for his country's unique crime, [the self-immolation of a
civilization, I would say, from which it will never recover] but also
for the mark of Cain that attaches to him, that he has assumed; then the
text proceeds to provide the good news of German sales of Dolphin Class
submarines, at cut-rate as part of the ongoing reparation for said
irreparable crime, capable of heaving rockets with atomic warheads,
confirmed June 3^rd by the Spiegel investigative team. **
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/report-german-officials-confirm-submarines-sold-to-israel-can-fire-nuclear-tipped-cruise-missiles-1.434080**
What was the good man thinking when he put these various components
into his pipe? What was he smoking?**

*Description:
9356c6fd734f32f42e3163fafc8bd838v1_max_440x330_b3535db83dc50e27c1bb1392364c95a2***
The poem among political poems is unique of its kind and lands like an
atomic dart at no end of news desks; but, also for its mix of, an
American might say, Robert Lowell-like personal elements with editorial
and daily news content, produces confusion, consternation, instant
judgments are passed, and knives are unsheathed. Yet, you could also
find it immediately parochial. **
As the University of Marbach professor Thomas Anz **
http://www.literaturkritik.de/public/rezension.php?rez_id=16571
and see
*http://www.literaturkritik.de/public/online_abo/forum/forumfaden.php?rootID=144***
*for the entire discussion there, also the link to Professor Hinderer's
piece and Esther Dischereit's comment. ***
points out - **
*Das wenige Tage vor den Osterfeiertagen erschienene Gedicht "Was gesagt
werden muss" von Günter Grass hat zu vielen empörten Reaktionen
provoziert, obwohl es ungemein vorsichtig ein Problem aufgreift, das
viele andere längst ähnlich angesprochen haben. Wie kommt es, dass ein
ganz offensichtlich in der pazifistischen Tradition der Friedensbewegung
und der Ostermärsche stehendes, auf Völkerversöhnung und -verständigung
zielendes Gedicht derart feindselige Reaktionen hervorruft? Und zwar
genau jene, die es antizipiert und denen es vorbeugend entgegenarbeitet?***


the tract's most even-handed assessment - when it became evident that no
one seemed to give the text a /_reading_/ but only reacted to its
provocative editorial parts -- tht the poem is in the tradition of
Easter and Pacifist peace movement. **
As the fine professor Walter Hinderer pointed out, also at
_Literaturkritik_, the poem is not only in the above tradition but is
the secularized version of an Orphic religious poem and it took yet one
further several stellar professor, Detering of Tubingen, to exercise the
poetics of the beast **
http://www.cicero.de/salon/guenter-grass-gestischer-rhythmus-prosaische-metrik-lyrische-hochstapelei/48966**
and point out that, no matter whether you agree or disagree with the
poem's proposition, it hoes an honorable poetic tradition, that of
Brecht's arythmic rhymeless free verse **
/Über reimlose Lyrik mit unregelmäßigen Rhythmen/**
*http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CEcQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fs247566901.online.de%2Findex.php%3Foption%3Dcom_filecabinet%26task%3Ddownload%26cid%255B%255D%3D192&ei=nRzNT4vWBZGm8gSW-r3VAQ&usg=AFQjCNEJq7aJcBbD1M-5AXBVaXQ8VxThCQ&sig2=CKvTfHN2lrVftkngUEkk_g*
<http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CEcQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fs247566901.online.de%2Findex.php%3Foption%3Dcom_filecabinet%26task%3Ddownload%26cid%255B%255D%3D192&ei=nRzNT4vWBZGm8gSW-r3VAQ&usg=AFQjCNEJq7aJcBbD1M-5AXBVaXQ8VxThCQ&sig2=CKvTfHN2lrVftkngUEkk_g>**
it is a text that is full of tension, in its metrics as well in the
relationship of the personal and the objective nature of its subject,
war, politics, U-boats, atomic rockets. **
I myself would suggest that Grass's verse is lent extra tension with the
pathos of its opening and its general funereal tone, which has
Hoelderlin at its back, as became clearer with the second political poem
that Grass issued, toward the end of May, accusing Europe of being
niggardly in its treatment of its patrimony, Greece
http://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article106379438/Europas-Schande-Ein-Gedicht-von-Guenter-Grass.html
and here you can hear Grass read it both in German and in English
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1PnvcX4G3c**
Put to the side for the time, or forever, whatever easy time you may
have charging Grass with grandiose self-importance: he is TRYING for a
Hoeldernisque earnestness. Hoelderlin, Brecht -- a great formality, an
easygoing-seeming free verse, emotionality, *objective political
concepts... lie uneasily together. Therefore*I agree with Detering and
others that criticism of the _poem as a poem_ begins at that
intersection of subjective elements with the editorial political
language and reference to daily events, and those who have already
voted: you might give the matter more thought, if only for the sake of
political poetry.*For one matter has not been addressed, and it lies at
the heart of the attacks against the poem: _it's ambiguity mixed with
straightforward entirely unambiguous assertions_ into a world ruled by
the Manichean dichotomy friend/ foe. No wonder the defensive aggressive
so insecure Netanyahoo & Co. are so upset! After all, this may be the
most effective political poem in the West in a very long time. And it is
for reasons of _aesthetic impurity_. I mean, the poem might also screech
expressionistically, with ample justification for the prospect it
envisions, and don't think Grass does not know the available repertoire.***
*The Grass poem thus conjures out of the past the ancient rules for what
is permissible in poetry and what is not. Judging by the response of the
fairly numerous aesthetes - Gruenbein [crude], Menasse [unpublishable
without the name of its author], Reich-Ranicki [dreadful],
Struck-Keuschnig and many another - whom the poem rubbed the wrong way
for aesthetic reasons -- indeed, aside "old ink" and one or the other
touch it is devoid of the accustomed usual verbal felicities - allowing
or forcing them - whatever - to ignore its grave subject matter - the
poem is unsuccessful; it upsets them to such an aesthetic degree that
they dismiss it for that reason. One might get one or the other of these
worthies to concede Grass a few points if they slowed down their reading
to the pace that the poem establishes, but I doubt that anyone of them
would fall sufficiently in love with it to concede its political import.
To be upset and on such a deep aesthetic level is not part of their
expectations of what poetry should do to their pleasure principle. They
prefer to be "verzueckt", as is Struck-Keuschnig's want. Which brings me
to the proposition, what if the poem had been as great as one of the
great political poems that still resound? I could go on at some length
on political poetry, since I write it myself, but this link to a fine
piece by Sarah McGuire will have to do *
*/http://www.poetrytranslation.org/articles/95/****//*
In the bye and bye it occurred to me that the creator of the fabled
Oskar Mazerath, himself a person of small stature, with the weening
ambitions of dwarves, might not only be versed in Brecht's free verse,
but, as small persons need to be, also had learned slyness from the so
sly Bert Brecht. MIGHT, I say, for we may never know what Grass intended
with his most provocative line:**
*"a strike to snuff out the Iranian people""*
Most certainly, the Netanjahu/ Liberman government, which Grass then
allowed he had had in mind, had never voiced the intention to snuff out
the Iranian people with a its planned first strike of its atomic
facilities. Was Grass a bit ahead of himself envisioning the final
outcome of what started as a first strike after the oft-reported war
games? However, as we know, Israel does assassinations of Iranian atomic
scientists, the American president is into assassinations himself, for
breakfast he goes over the hit-list with his national security council
and approves each killing personally, sometimes no matter whether child
and wife of a presumed "grrist" will be droned to death, too. Our
President is also into cyber warfare "stucknis" or "flame" or whatever
these exotics are called. Here the link to Misha Glenny in the Financial
Times musing on the huge mistake made with this kind of warfare. **
*http://www.ft.com/cms/s/6b674600-afc7-11e1-a025-00144feabdc0,Authorised=false.html?_i_location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F0%2F6b674600-afc7-11e1-a025-00144feabdc0.html&_i_referer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcomment*
<http://www.ft.com/cms/s/6b674600-afc7-11e1-a025-00144feabdc0,Authorised=false.html?_i_location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F0%2F6b674600-afc7-11e1-a025-00144feabdc0.html&_i_referer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcomment>***
***
The American President playing war games as though he were still a kid
in an arcade. Or it it the Mau-Mau coming out in him now that he is
reading Kagan -- you can see where Grass might have taken his poem if he
were less parochially oriented. Grass's diatribe, for that is what the
so composed poem is too, might easily have been twice as long if had
addressed the powers that be behind the Netanyahu / Liberman gang. And
what of it, if the poem does not subscribe to the going, fussy aesthetic
imperialist criteria, what if it is a bit crude and simple, and
intentionally lightly freighted? If only folks were as upset by the
subject it addresses as they are by the form Grass takes. The immense
media effort taken to avert the subject of the poem and to foist
anti-Semitism on to Grass, to make Grass's youth the subject, and avert
the subject he addresses!**
* However, it is a poem with a shadow... how many poems have
shadows... echoes... some very great ones of course do, too... that
accompanied the new German President, Gauck, to Israel. You can declare
a poet persona non grata, but not his shadow.*****
http://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/ausland/besuch-in-israel-gaucks-praesenz-11767435.html**
What _was_ Grass thinking or suggesting by his most contentious
line? The result of the dissemination of all that destroyed atomic
material? **
The poem is evidently provocative in the extreme, we can't tell whether
Grass who wrote the poem in a Brechtina manner also absorbed some of
Brecht's slyness in ending up being enviably provocative. I myself don't
think so, I think Grass bumbled into a far greater controversy than he
had anticipated, and venture that guess because Grass didn't tie the
links between the US Neo-Cons, the US Congress and AIPAC and Netanjahu /
Liberman into the airtight warmonger imperialist reprise case as he
might have. Grass is bringing the news, but it is mostly old news, we've
been hearing of the first strike against Iran for years, it would follow
two other first strikes, against an Iraqi and a Syrian atomic reactor,
it actually was on the past January 2012, Netanjahu had just been in
Washington in March to pitch the same game plan. It is old news but for
the Dolphin class U-boats and their ability to deliver rockets with
atomic war heads, a capacity just confired by Der Spiegel on Sunday
June the 3rd The puzzling line - **
*_"a strike to snuff out the Iranian people.."_*
got everyone's attention but especially Netanjahu's, and I am still
wondering whether our Tiger Tank turret gunner would be U-Boat captain
may have some secret knowledge...or maybe Bibi thinks he might have,
Bibi and his crowd not merely insecure. A first strike would lead to a
conflagration where the U-Boats fired their atomic warheads? A first
strike that immediately employed nuclear weapons --"let's not fuss
around if we are going to do it, let's get it over with at once"?
Netanjahu could say with a clean conscience: it is the Iranians, or A.
who has spoken of eradicating Israel from the map, we have never uttered
anything along the line, especially not against the Iranian people as a
whole. **
The other bone of contention and opportunity for the attack dogs were
the lines:*__*
*"under a loudmouth's thumb are pushed into organized cheering" *
Amindebejad may not be the monster that Western propaganda makes him out
to be, he may indeed be more demagogue than monster, yet he is also a
lot more than your Maltese barking from Big Bertha's lap. He is more
than just a useful idiot for propaganda purposes. The revolutionary
anti-imperialist Islamic fervor that empowers him is not be discounted.
Nor ought Israeli anxiety to be discounted, no matter the degree to
which Israeli demagogues exploit it.**
Professor Hinderer points out in his piece in Literaturkritik that
Grass tends to be a bit tendentious in other poems, too. Professor
Suesselbeck, also at this one sane venue, has pointed out that Grass has
been obsessed with an Atomic apocalypse for many years. **
Günter Grass might have merely written an encyclical along the lines
of his final stanza:**
*Only thus can one give help
to Israelis and Palestinians---still more,
all the peoples, neighbor-enemies
living in this region occupied by madness
---and finally, to ourselves as well.*
Or been so grandiose as to pass a "Günter Grass U.N. Resolution." But in
that event WE WOULD NOT HAVE HAD A SCANDAL, WE WOULD NOT BE ARGUING
ABOUT THE POEM. It would not have been a successful intervention, a
success de scandal that caused consternation in two governments that are
very close. None of this would have happened. For in every other respect
the poem's facts are indisputable! Grass could even have drilled them
home far more forcefully as no end of people are doing instead of taking
this funereal approach. **
Or did our old diver[CAT AND MOUSE] with those Navy connection come on
something even more dire? At any event, warning of the apocalypse
appears to have cost him a lot of pathos and emotional wrenching,
whereas you and I might just give a horrendous shriek instead of putting
ourselves through all that art effort. **
Utterly, deadly serious, yet sly? Or perhaps Grass just bumbled
into the controversy? Did not mean to be provocative? His warning *"the
verdict of "Antisemitism" is well known"*would seem to militate against
that supposition. **
***My fourth professorial authority of Germanics, Jan Sueselbeck, also
mentions in his piece in Literatur Kritik ***
*http://www.literaturkritik.de/public/rezension.php?rez_id=16633****Was
geantwortet werden muss*****
*Grass's poetics lectures at Frankfurt's Goethe University in the 90s,
finds that Grass cannot be said to be up to snuff of Adorno's [always
misunderstood] suggestion that poetry could no longer be written
subsequent to the Shoah [my reception of it, and it appeas to be Grass's
too, is that as a measure the end of civilization is a moment that must
always be with you], and finds that maybe Grass, although not
anti-Semitic, may have "a problem with Jews" as several other Jewish
acquaintances of Grass mention along the way. *
*_I have indicated previously and do so once more that I think it is
entirely irrelevant to the subject at hand whether Grass happens to be
either overtly or unconsciously anti-Semitic._**_What he stated,
editorially, is first of all something that had been known for years, so
even if an aging SS general stated it, it would still be the case that
various Israeli governments have been contemplating a first strike, and
it is more than likely that President Obama will greenlight such an
attack after the fall elections, so we can gather from Martin Indyk,
twice US ambassador to Israel._*
http://www.brookings.edu/research/interviews/2012/05/28-middle-east-indyk**
*Sueselbeck also hints that Grass may have notions about Germans being
victims that do not subscribe to the official line. Again, a matter that
may or may not be the case, but is irrelevant, since Grass envisages a
worldwide catastrophe - why hasn't Grass also been accused of secretly
belonging to a some Christian sect that believes in the "rapture"
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_eschatology
http://finalbookofdaniel.com/secondcoming.html*. *
*After all, Schirrmacher of the FAZ *(4.4.12)*proceeds to find a huge
secret in the poem because he learned in school that poems have secrets,
and so if you can't find it, make it up. As Professor Detering says with
marvelous efficiency, the kinds of readings that Schirrmacher and Joffe
[see anon] project into the poem's back cannot be "falsified." True, all
you can do is repeat these phantastic suggestions, or make up one of
your own. But what an immense effort to destroy the poem and the poet?*
*Aren't we living in a world, at least in the U.S. where Tony Kushner
can turn Brecht's _Mother Courage_ into yet another gay _Cabaret_ and
everyone is delighted that we can kiss Brecht's pathos goodbye as well?*

=B=**
The Context**
I have more than alluded to the context [s] into which Grass dropped his
bomb shell. Thus a sketch and substantial footnote for the context into
which the Grass poem issued may elucidate why it continues to be an
irritant two month after publication, one that Grass himself keeps
igniting with yet another political poem [*Grass verurteilt in Gedicht
Umgang mit Griechenland - Yahoo ...**
Nachrichten Deutschland lesen. Nach seinem umstrittenen
israel-kritischen Gedicht hat sich Literaturnobelpreisträger Günter
Grass in einem neuen Poem zur ...
de.nachrichten.yahoo.com/grass-verurteilt-gedicht-umgang-gr...
"Europas Schande" - Günter Grass dichtet wieder
Nach seinem letzten, durch Bürger und Medien zwiespältig aufgenommenen
Werk "Was gesagt werden muss" (ShortNews berichtete), hat Günter Grass
ein
...www.shortnews.de/.../Europas-Schande-Gunter-Grass-dichtet-...Grass
liest Gedicht "Europas Schande" | NDR.de - NDR Kultur
Günter Grass mischt sich erneut in die internationale Politik ein: Der
Literaturnobelpreisträger aus Lübeck kritisiert nun Europa für seine
Griechenlandpolitik.
**www.ndr.de/ndrkultur/grass197.html*
<http://www.ndr.de/ndrkultur/grass197.html>**
*
Gunter Grass stands by poem about Greece and Europe -
KathimeriniGermany's Nobel literature laureate Gunter Grass has
confirmed he wrote a poem which attacked Europe for its treatment of
Greece. The poem, called " Europe's
...**www.ekathimerini.com/4dcgi/_w_articles.../2012_444146*
<http://www.ekathimerini.com/4dcgi/_w_articles.../2012_444146>*]***
the threat I suppose being that Grass will become a kind of
"extra-parliamentary poetic opposition" of one. Just goes to prove I
suppose that a Nobel Prize and a considerable body of work can haunt
those in power, we are reminded of Stalin's wanting to censor the
Shostakovitch symphonies and many similar attempts through the ages.**
To date, various German attempts to neutralize his poems with satire
have fallen flat, in my estimate, but for a single highly amusing light
touch one on German radio that in a long report on the state of the
country merely alludes to Grass's endeavor by periodically chiming in
"Günter Grass is said to be writing a poem about it."
http://www.dradio.de/dlf/sendungen/corso/1772164/**
As of this writing early June 2012 -- the Israel poem is shadowing the
new German president, Gauck's visit, to Israel and Palestine. **
In March 2012, Netanyahu came to Washington to receive yet another green
light for a pre-emptive attack on Iran, he had had it once in January,
but it was called off. Election year-wary Obama did not green-light him,
but told him that come what might Israel had the U.S.'s "back", and as a
parting gift gave him a vase full of Rose Garden daffodils, no, a few
plane loads full of bunker busting bombs. Netanyahu went back to Israel
but not before addressing the U.S. Congress and AIPAC, both
organizations backed his war which you can find recorded and accessible
via Youtube and AIPAC.**
And just in case anyone forgot John McCain Indian Fighter's refrain
"Bomb bomb bomb Iran" of four years ago, or the slogan "Wimps go to
Bagdad, real men go to Teheran", here is our very own Max Boot of the
Council of Foreign Relations this year*
**http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204632204577130834200656156.html***
3-See the extensive Context Footnotes: ****
It is the consequences of a then --Spring 2012 - immediate first strike
scenario is what troubled Gunter Grass to launch his I imagine
intentionally provocative intervention. Perhaps he is just a vain aging
showboat as which the fine poet Durs Gruenbein and lots of other
home-boys like Karasak and Rudi Dutchke, whom it afford the opportunity
to be back in the news themselves at least in this fashion, to accuse
Grass, saying, Hey Günter, it's time to shut up. "Ta geule!" a character
in Handke's latest spectacular novel, THE GREAT FALL would shout, and
magnificently written, his joy in writing makes me want to live.
However, just as that nearly congenital exhibitionist Handke invariably
really has something to show, isn't just a loudmouth, GG's wooden mallet
usually hits the big bass drum.**
The situation in Israel, however, to provide just a hint or two, is
more complicated than in the U.S. for Netanjahu and the Netanjahu
doctrine. Far more restraint than from the imperium whose 3 billion
dollar year aircraft vassal Israel, the tail that might wag the dog, is,
plus yearly "supplementals." Also, negotiations with the Iranians have
resumed, whether for real or merely for show and yet an even better
excuse for a first strike --we can speculate, that is all. BUT HEY,
GRASS IS NOT WORKING IN THE DIPLOMATIC CORPS, HE DOES NOT HAVE THE
GRUESOME JOB OF WRITING EDITORIALS, although the integration of
edititorialeeze with emotionally subjective lines... appears to have
been a problem. A pure lyric it sure is not. And where pathos enters the
pathetic fallacy is just one keystroke away.**

















=C=*__*
_The Blow by Blow_*__*
Within hours of the poem's publication, nay prior to it, Deryk Broder [a
former chief pornographer of the St. Pauli red-light district in
Hamburg, now working for the Springer Paper _Die Welt _in Berlin, who --
as he later admitted - had got a stock tip from Munich, and who may even
have been alerted to the poem's existence by his friend Josef Joffe,
editor in chief of _Die Zeit,_ who had turned down the poem] started the
piling on. "Educated anti-Semitism."*Broder in "Die Welt" (4.4.12)*inDIE
WELT. And he continues to two months later. Broder is now in my maternal
ancestral province, in the Lausitz! And he convicts Grass once again of
anti-Semitism because Grass states that Israel is a threat to peace! It
appears the audience was non-plussed by his advice to forget about
Auschwitz, and that the Jews already had. Mr. Broder is a clown, Mr.
Joffe is a died in the wool Nazi I think.
http://www.lr-online.de/regionen/weisswasser/Hoert-endlich-auf-euch-zu-erinnern;art13826,3827154#formular**
From Broder the accusation zips to [or bounces back and forth] to his
friend Josef Joffe ZEIT (4.4.12)[what WAS Grass thinking in even
submitting it to him? Or did he think his name couldn't be turned down?]
to F.A.Z. co-publisher Schirrmacher F.A.Z. (4.4.12)*,*to Tobin at
Commentary, Heilbrun at the National Interest, co-founded by Joffe, to
the New Republic who enlist hireable gun J. Herf, to The Weekly
Standard, to the Wall Street Journal, Joffe again, my all-purpose bête
noir, this time in his frothiest Amurrican [see anon],
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304299304577347871489771432.html#**
to Bernard Henry Levy at Huffington who suggested other countries worthy
of peace efforts and for once has no sense of what "immediate" means...
Back to the FAZ who trumpet the allegedly universal U.S opposition to
the poem back to the US which announced the universal opposition to the
poem**
*http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/das-israel-gedicht-von-grass/amerikanische-reaktionen-auf-grass-gedicht-eine-ineffiziente-denunziation-11712035.html***
the charge of anti--Semitism bounces, a self-confirming and quickly
self-congratulatory daisy chain, a forever hermetically sealed
echo-chamber, overwhelmed, sought to ruin Grass Easter bonnet bomb --
turn it against him, make him the issue not the issue that troubled him
and so many others -- it's really interesting to follow the time line of
this - and not a once was the poem even quoted, not one line! But in the
Atlantic where the poem then stands accused of not being pretty by the
pretty pretty girl who has not the faintest of the barnacles that attach
to it -- to Netanyahu in Israel, who condemned the poem at least a half
dozen times, "How dastardly to put Israel and Iran on the same moral
plane", press conferences, interviews, zeroing in on its most
contentious line "*a strike to snuff out the Iranian people"*no matter,
no not one iota of a matter or cognizance taken of Grass's attempt to
self-inoculate himself against the attack writing *the verdict of
"Antisemitism" is well known*. No dice! He is declared persona non
grata in Israel, a self-perpetuating echo-chamber, it admits of no
opposition, or mention of disagreement, and comments to that effect are
quickly expunged if they happen to appear long enough for Google to
cache them. [As it did mine at the WSJ, but whose 72 comments where then
reduced to 12 with the "revised" version of the Joffe!] It was a nearly
unique experience for me to watch the creation of a self-censoring
bubble. I say "nearly", because I had noticed something over the course
of a far longer time line with Handke's impermissible interventions in
matters Serbian, but at that time there was no Google and no Google
spiders, I had to tie 12 search engines together and pretend I was my
great grandfather with his horses and his carriage!**
The masses of support that Grass's poem is acquiring is taken no notice
of, at most a brief acknowledgement of Jakob Augstein writing in Der
Spiegel.
*http://summapolitico.blogspot/05/defense-of-beast-post-mortem-part-ii-of.html***
contains a list of several dozen intellectuals of real import who came
out to support Grass. In the U.S. among noteworthy publications with
on-line presence, Salon did, so did Mondoweiss, the World Socialist
Journal, Huffington then ran a fine piece by a British "Independent"
Journalist. **
Yet, First Amendment rights for the sealed echo-chambers are intact.**
The news spreads to the lower reaches, Bloomberg, Atlantic, the Daily
Beast. Aldaily, allegedly under the non-censoring auspices of The
Chronicle of Higher Education, picks it up and passes on the dregs...
Within four weeks the scandal reaches the provinces where it will stick
the way I found ancient American now de-mode words and institutions and
vehicles stick around in Mexico, not only the /yarderos/, the clunkers
that are bought by the yard at yard sales, but "unisex" barbershops or,
most wonderfully, expressions such as "okey-dokey" -- indeed so much
better than the boring "oh kay" - that it became a fad, that is residual
there, in Mulege (Moo-lay-hay) of which Linda Ronstad sang "/besame
muchos/..." and where Woody Allen and Madonna scandals become ageless.
The little girl at The Atlantic plaints that this is not the prettiest
prose**
*http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/04/gunter-grasss-controversial-poem-about-israel-iran-and-war-translated/255549/**/__/*
but at least provides a translation of the poem, with a bit of
rudimentary reporting. Bloomberg does not beat around the bush "*Guenter
Grass, the German writer and recipient of the**Nobel Prize*
<http://topics.bloomberg.com/nobel-prize/>***in Literature, brought
forth last week an odious little poem that focuses on the threat to
world peace posed by the Jewish state, and congratulates its author for
the courage to point out this truth**."
**http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-09/israel-iran-history-holocaust-perverted-in-grass-s-poem.html#disqus_thread*
<http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-09/israel-iran-history-holocaust-perverted-in-grass-s-poem.html>**
If Bloomberg does not do the trick with its description as an *"**odious
little poem * there is the FAZ recommended
http://heebmagazine.com/the-poetry-of-gunter-grass/35078"
*"For some reason, people still care about what Günter Grass, German
author and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, has to say about
things. He wrote some novels more than fifty years ago that he somehow
was able to convince people were good, even if they were just
overwrought and overhyped piles of nothingness. Germany thinks of Grass
as its own Philip Roth, even if he is in reality just a second-rate copy
of Thomas Mann, with cookie-cutter grotesqueness instead of stiff
philistine blathering."*
Thus the dirty deed done to Grass will persist equally long, I know that
the dirty deed that the allegedly stellar Bob Silvers committed on Handke,**
http://handke-discussion.blogspot.com/2009/12/letter-to-robert-silvers-ny-review-of.htmlor
that Robert Wilson of _The American Scholar _committed when Handke **
http://handke-discussion.blogspot.com/2007/03/b-c-reverse-of-initial-posting-of-open.html**got
out of line with his defense of the Serbs from one-sided blame, using
third stringers J.L. Marcus and Michael McDonald, leads an equally vivid
underground life among the nearly infinite long list of regurgitators of
opinions -- say in THE FASTER TIMES [!] universal lethargy in discrete
quantities. Choked by the gossip vine. Effluent breeding weeds in lakes
depriving the water of oxygen. In the instance of Grass it may be that
"heeb," recommended by the FAZ in their eagerness to find support for
their take on the poem, will have the last word; who needs anti-Semitism
if you have "heeb"! It is not so much the dreadful journalists as the
editors who employ them, and the publishers who employ these editors to
commit constant perjury.**
Fox of course was in on the case as well.
*http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/04/23/banging-tin-drum-for-iran-and-against-israel/*
*And here a few other links*
***COMMENTARY, TOBIN
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/04/05/gunter-grass-iran-and-anti-semitism/

4 NATIONAL INTEREST, HEILBRUNN
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/jacob-heilbrunn/the-gunter-grass-anti-semitism-debate-6751


**http://mondoweiss.net/2012/04/the-intellectual-cowardice-of-gunter-grasss-critics.html**/__/*
*http://www.derisraelit.org/2012/04/was-gesagt-werden-muss-solidaritat-mit_06.html**/__/*

Poor poor poem, written defenseless, no one will engage its proposition,
or Grass's extraordinary contrition. **
*But why was I silent for so long?
Because I thought my origin,
marked with an ineradicable stain,*
for having been, my opinion, just another member of the brother horde,
another child soldier whom their fathers send out to war, until too few
of them see the light, is ignored. Nay, the one real Nazi in the crowd
who really rubs his nose in his adolescent mistake is Josef Joffe the
virulently hyper-ventilating German journalist Neo-Con in the highest
standing, the suave ingratiating Josef Joffe, as which I experienced him
here in Seattle at the U.W. about a decade ago, co-founder of the
National Interest, member of the Hoover institute in who in my assembly
of the negative takes on the poem **
*
**http://summapolitico.blogspot.com/2012/04/part-synopsis-of-grass-poem-controversy.html***
serves as an all purpose voodoo doll, for being the most exorbitant
projector. The best _German_ of the lot was Schirrmacher. ""Es ist ein
Machwerk des Ressentiments, es ist, wie Nietzsche über das Ressentiment
sagte, ein Dokument der ,imaginären Rache'einer sich moralisch
lebenslang gekränkt fühlenden Generation."
http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/das-israel-gedicht-von-grass/eine-erlaeuterung-was-grass-uns-sagen-will-11708120.html**
Once more, the excellent Tubingen professor Detering comes to the rescue
of my sputtering prolixity and points out that the phantasmagoric
projections of anti-Semitism and /resentiment/ with which Joffe and
Schirrmacher shower the poem cannot be "falsified"; indeed, all you can
do is duplicate them ad infinitum and /ad nauseam./ Nor can you possibly
defend against them. **
Joffe is both clever and vicious the way he seeks to defuse the various
charges of Fascism that it is so easy to lodge against some Israelis. A
suave Spaniel as which I experienced him here in Seattle, a bit more
than a decade ago -- oh what sorry level Die Zeit has sunk to. Yes, if
there is a Nazi in the house it is Josef Joffe, the spaniel, the sucker
up to the Neo-Cons as which my antennae spotted him at once at a lecture
here at the University of Washington more than ten years ago,**not quite
up to Goebbels or _Der Stuermer_ snuff, but a useful right hand, a good
whip. Whereas his pal Heilbrun at_The National Interest _is merely
inflamed by Grass's carefully wrought and emotionally wrenched piece,
Joffe hyperventilates in this WSJ piece. If I were Goebbels I'd use him
as my Doberman. There's a man to my liking, no compunctions! He know
where the power of the world resides and he will be part of a odd coming
together of American imperialist hubris, German guilt and
Americanization and Israeli ambitions.**
Here pointby pointcomments on the none-too-subtle Joffe: **
ZEIT (4.4.12) and
inhttp://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304299304577347871489771432.html#
*Nobel laureate Günter Grass, 84, is a **poster boy of "re-education,"
**America's therapy for post-Hitler Germany. Or he was. In 2006, this
chest-thumping anti-Nazi laid bare his long-concealed **career **in the
Waffen-SS. Had Mr. Grass sprung the shocker a decade earlier, his 1959
novel "The Tin Drum" would still **shine forth as a masterwork, **but
without the Nobel Prize, which he was awarded in 1999.*
*Neither has Grass ever been any kind of poster boy, nor is his gradual
enlightenment to where he found himself subsequent to Spring 1945 in any
way comparable to the forced re-education that communist regimes
practiced. Or Romney pere's "brainwashing" to lower myself to Joffe's
level for the moment.*
*Joffe is not aware it seems that he does his argument little favor by
characterizing being drafted into the SS for a few months or even
volunteering as a teenager as a career. However, Joffe is just clever
enough, as compared to "heeb" not to demolish _The Tin Drum_ in the
course of his Bombardino Demolition Co. act.**

"/Just before Easter this year, Mr. Grass launched a bigger bombshell, a
poem titled "What Must Be Said." The gist: For too long, the poet had
been /**/cowed into silence /**/by what he calls the "verdict of
anti-Semitism."/***
*Well no, Grass had not been "cowed", he had been, or the personae of
the poet, had been humbled into a quandary, of being a guilty German
finding himself in a position where he felt he needed to criticize the
successors and survivors of endangering the peace. What one might want
to criticize is the presumptuousness of being "the conscience of his
people." **
*
*/"But in his /**/dotage/**/, he finally dared speak out against the
/**/diktat/**/because Israel was readying a "first strike" that would
"extinguish" Iran and the "fragile world peace." Germany, though, would
"share the guilt" because it was arming Israel with nuclear-capable
U-boats."/*/**/
"*dotage": really, Joffe, you lowlife, must you sink that low? And call
agenbite of inwit "diktat" is on the same gutter level.*
*/Thus did the bard go into battle against "hypocrisy" and "lies." Never
mind that Iran is routinely threatening Israel with eradication.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is but a "loudmouth," /**/a lamb in wolf's
clothing"/*
*"a lamb in wolf's clothing", Grass is saying nothing of the kind, and
to repeat myself, see above, Grass indeed might have made the line *
*"against those who under a loudmouth's thumb
are pushed into organized cheering---" *
*Even stronger and less equivocal, but a "lamb's" thumb does not push
anyone into organized cheering. Mr. Joffe desperately wants to maintain
the fiction that Amindebejad is the same as Iran and perpetuates what
even the Israelo deputy prime minister admits are mistranslations of the
Persian, useful mistranslations -- and that is what is "routinely"
repeated to justify the planned first strike. **

***
*/"Was this anti-Semitism, as Emmanuel Nahshon, Israel's envoy to
Germany, intimated? The poem, Mr. Nahshon explained, was in the
"European tradition" of sticking the Jews with blood libel/**/just
before Passover. Once it was matzo made with the blood of Christian
children. Today, the "Iranian people" were "slated for extinction" by
Israel./**Mr. Joffe might have taken recourse to his friend Broder, but
he needs an authority to create an analogy out of whole cloth. And he
finds a fellow fantast in Emmanuel Nashon who appears to have no
knowledge of Grass pacifist heritage of Christian Easter custom -- as
Joffe himself, however does, and of course conveniently ignores because
it would explode his polemic.*
Enlarge Image
Description: Joffe
Description: Joffe

*/After the Holocaust, traditional anti-Semitism is out. Jews are no
longer fingered as Christ killers, usurers and despoilers of/**//**/the
Aryan race./*
*/But Mr. Grass's indictment is rife with post-Shoah analogues.
/**/Carefully coded/**/, it pins on the Jewish state what used to be
applied to Jews throughout the ages."/*
*It keeps puzzling me why someone who so manifestly foists then must
accuse someone else of foisting and doing so in "careful code?" Anyhow,
"careful code" would be beyond someone like Joffe!***
*/"We are not talking here about criticizing Israeli policy, a
legitimate pursuit. Mr. Grass now charges Israel with concocting the
greatest possible evil/**/: a nuclear Holocaust to be visited on Iran
and the entire world."/**//*
*Well no: Grass does nothing of the kind, again see above, but envisions
a conflict that starts with a first strike developing into, ending in a
nuclear catastrophe. Not that insane a fear to voice I would say under
the circumstances of Nethanjahu and American threats and actions. Again:
Grass is not your usual irresponsible WSJ editorial writer, he is a
seer-poet! Mr. Joffe is stuffing his eyes and ears. ***
*/"Even as Mr. Grass touts his "attachment" to Israel, /**/recalling the
my-best-friends-are-Jewish refrain/**/, he casts the tiny country as an
/**/überpower."/*
*Again, Grass does nothing of the kind, however Joffe's modus operandi
of mischaracterization and then attack of the mischaracterization
continues apace. Grass volunteered to fight for Israel during the six
day war, he has visited and has friends there, and many other Jews are
his friends, whether best or not I would not know.*
*/"Apart from threatening the globe, Mr. Grass imagines, Israel
/**enslaves 80 million Germans//**/by wielding the Shoah to gouge
U-boats out of Berlin and to suppress "what must be said."/*
*Herr Joffe as compared to Grass, has not been "smoking", he has been
taking Peyote at his institute at Stanford! After all, I did my graduate
work there within sight of the Hoover Tower! There are those who create
straw tigers, Mr. Joffe creates straw elephants, and it is not the man
Irving Howe once described to me as dancing like an elephant. And then
Herr Joffe says***
*"/This is mendacity to the max, "/*
*As indeed it is! To create papier mache elephants out of whole cloth.
Maybe Mr. Joffe would be more gain and usefully employed in a circus? Or
as an entertainer in a madhouse?**//*
*/"for critical coverage of Israel is a staple of the German media.
/**/But the falsehood is a necessary part of the indictment/**/. If we
could only speak out, insinuates Mr. Grass, we will save the planet by
defanging Israel. By eliminating its nukes through a "permanent control"
regime, we will bring peace to the "demented" Middle East and "help
ourselves" to boot."/*
*Again, Grass says nothing of the kind, and that is why Murdoch's WSJ
did not see fit to publish the poem side by side with Joffe's vile
Murdochian garbage. *
*"/The motive is unbearable guilt feelings, /**/though Germany has
evolved into a model democracy since 1945. How to regain moral worth? By
projecting culpability onto Israel."/*

*Grass does appear to write out a sufficient sense of guilt that does
not wish to see a repeat of culpability. "Unbearable" [?]-- again Joffe
writes things he has not the faintest of. I will stop here. Mr. Joffe
now proceeds to fish and find a number of red herrings, which
unfortunately seem to be real. Let me, from an analytic perspective, say
that "victims do not make for the nicest people." Otherwise, ask Peter
Brooks to revive "Les Ics".**//*
*/"The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz," runs a quip
ascribed to Zvi Rex, an Israeli psychiatrist. You don't need a shrink to
deconstruct this defense mechanism. Our grandfathers did it, but the
Israelis, who won't let us forget, are just as bad. Three classics are:
"They are the new Nazis," "Gaza is like the Warsaw Ghetto," and "We
learned our lesson, the Israelis did not."/*
*Thus, the accounts are squared, with a tidy moral surplus left over for
Mr. Grass and his new friends on the far left and far right. The good
news is that the poem did not play well in the middle. For the past two
weeks, the media have weighed in against the bard, saying "what must be
said" in a very different way: that he had breached a 70-year-old moral
consensus, that he had turned the moral universe upside-down by casting
Israel as aggressor and Iran as victim.*
*The bad news oozes out from the underground. Go to the website of any
paper that has run critical pieces on Mr. Grass and read the comments,
thousands of them. By a rough count, 90% cheer Mr. Grass. "At last!" is
but the mildest applause.*
*The arsonist has lost the battle aboveground. Yet below, he is the
redeemer who has finally struck a blow against those---Israel, Jewry,
the political class---who rob Germany of dignity and freedom.*
*Germany in 2012 is a normal country, a solid liberal democracy. The
norm for Europe is for 15%-20% of the population to possess opinions
labeled by the pollsters as "latent" anti-Semitism. Germany is not an
outlier, but mainstream. Considering the past, that is reassuring.*
/Mr. Joffe is editor of Die Zeit in Hamburg, senior fellow of the
Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies and fellow of the
Hoover Institution, both at Stanford./**
*/A version of this article appeared April 17, 2012, on page A13 in the
U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Gunter
Grass's Tin Ear./*
As opposed to Susan Sontag's AGAINST INTERPRETATION the likes of Broder,
Schirrmacher and Reich-Ranicki fly the flag of ONLY INTERPRET, that way
you never lose an argument. Fabuloso! Schirrmacher brilliantly
constructs an airtight mental kennel for himself. I had noticed as much
before, on the occasion of the controversy stirred by Handke's odd way
of seeing to _Justice for Serbia_ in the early 90s, and its several
repeat comings. I think Schirrmacher is a clinical case. Joffe is
something worse, and the sad thing is that he is the editor of a once
stellar weekly that was founded by one of the few members of my family
of whom I can be genuinely proud, Marion Doehnhoff. However, I
congratulate myself of my shit detector. Joffe here writes exactly as
you would expect a spaniel like that to write. *//*
The Neo-Cons all sought to shout down, destroy the poem by shouting
anti-Semitism, we allow criticism of Israel the more the merrier, but
not from you "you SS careerist"! We don't care about your contrition. In
your case we see the return of the repressed in all its Nazi horror,**

thank you Dr. Freud, we don't really like or read or understand you,
but thank you for the odd useful concept! We'll instrumentalize it as
we will every other. It sure comes handy time and again! Yes, at Pessach
the Jews are invariably accused to the worst. To hell with you and your
Easter peacenik marches! Ships passing in the night with few lights.
_Grass and his poem aren't the real story, I don't think, but why his
opponents are so hysterical._*For**__*I think I may be the only one to
whom it has occurred that it is entirely irrelevant who points out
matters that are publically known -- however, Grass doing so, he stepped
on very tetchy toes. Why so tetchy is the question, isn't it?*__*
**
=====================**




=D=**
I am not necessarily a fan of all of Grass's now customary political
interventions. It bothered me when he objected to the Reagan/ Kohl visit
to Bittburg cemetery because 40 SS men were buried there. I thought
maybe he'd agree it was time to "bury the dead." But perhaps he didn't
because he feels so dreadful for his own brief youthful SS past. What do
I know about how GG really feels? How many SS-men of any kind have
expressed that much shame -- nor did he kill anyone... And I thought
Grass was far too trigger-happy when he joined in condemnation of the
Serbs as exclusively responsible. Handke defended him from having his
books burned in Belgrade -- of course scarcely anyone in "the west"
recalls the German reprisals against the "Partisans", for every dead
German 100 Yugoslav civilians were shot. One way of making yourself
memorable for generations! Now let's see whether there will be Israeli
book burning! That would complete the circle, the people of the book
burning them!**
I happened to agree with Grass that Germany would have been better
off split into two countries, for the DDR to pursue a democratic
socialist course, and not be robbed of its, the People's Republic of
Farmers and Workers accumulated wealth of their factories and
agricultural co-operatives by the Neo-Liberal West German robbers. And
then the state has to re-start that economy after it has been robbed
clean. The banana eaters certainly received a banana where the great
majority did not anticipate it.**
=======**











=E=**
Bibi sure was stung! How many poems have been attacked half a dozen
times by a head of state, become the occasion not just for intra but for
on-going inter-governmental acrimony and apologies? Maybe Grass is
campaigning for a Nobel peace prize?**
So it is not a question of whether Grass was right or wrong but whether
this is an effective poem or not, and on that score you would have to
agree that it most certainly is, and if you look at the poem as closely
as it deserves to be regarded, and as slowly as its editorial quality
appears to have failed to make people read it, you may agree on that
score and see why, also textually. **
Nonetheless, it was judged to be a poor poem:**
*/__/**Why have I kept silent, silent for too long
over what is openly played out
in war games at the end of which we
the survivors are at best footnotes.*
*It's that claim of a right to first strike
against those who under a loudmouth's thumb
are pushed into organized cheering---
a strike to snuff out the Iranian people
on suspicion that under his influence
an atom bomb's being built.*
*But why do I forbid myself
to name that other land in which
for years---although kept secret---
a usable nuclear capability has grown
beyond all control, because
no scrutiny is allowed.*
*The universal silence around this fact,
under which my own silence lay,
I feel now as a heavy lie,
a strong constraint, which to dismiss
courts forceful punishment:
the verdict of "Antisemitism" is well known.*
*But now, when my own country,
guilty of primal and unequalled crimes
for which time and again it must be tasked---
once again, in pure commerce,
though with quick lips we declare it
reparations, wants to send
Israel yet another submarine---
one whose specialty is to deliver
warheads capable of ending all life
where the existence of even one
nuclear weapon remains unproven,
but where suspicion serves for proof---
now I say what must be said.*
*But why was I silent for so long?
Because I thought my origin,
marked with an ineradicable stain,
forbade mention of this fact
as definite truth about Israel, a country
to which I am and will remain attached.*
*Why is it only now I say,
in old age, with my last drop of ink,
that Israel's nuclear power endangers
an already fragile world peace?
Because what by tomorrow might be
too late, must be spoken now,
and because we---as Germans, already
burdened enough---could become
enablers of a crime, foreseeable and therefore
not to be eradicated
with any of the usual excuses.*
*And admittedly: I'm silent no more
because I've had it with the West's hypocrisy
---and one can hope that many others too
may free themselves from silence,
challenge the instigator of known danger
to abstain from violence,
and at the same time demand
a permanent and unrestrained control
of Israel's atomic power
and Iranian nuclear plants
by an international authority
accepted by both governments.*
*Only thus can one give help
to Israelis and Palestinians---still more,
all the peoples, neighbour-enemies
living in this region occupied by madness
---and finally, to ourselves as well.*
*Warum schweige ich, verschweige zu lange,
was offensichtlich ist und in Planspielen
geübt wurde, an deren Ende als Überlebende
wir allenfalls Fußnoten sind.

Es ist das behauptete Recht auf den Erstschlag,
der das von einem Maulhelden unterjochte
und zum organisierten Jubel gelenkte
iranische Volk auslöschen könnte,
weil in dessen Machtbereich der Bau
einer Atombombe vermutet wird.
Doch warum untersage ich mir,
jenes andere Land beim Namen zu nennen,
in dem seit Jahren - wenn auch geheimgehalten -
ein wachsend nukleares Potential verfügbar
aber außer Kontrolle, weil keiner Prüfung
zugänglich ist?
Das allgemeine Verschweigen dieses Tatbestandes,
dem sich mein Schweigen untergeordnet hat,
empfinde ich als belastende Lüge
und Zwang, der Strafe in Aussicht stellt,
sobald er mißachtet wird;
das Verdikt "Antisemitismus" ist geläufig.
Jetzt aber, weil aus meinem Land,
das von ureigenen Verbrechen,
die ohne Vergleich sind,
Mal um Mal eingeholt und zur Rede gestellt wird,
wiederum und rein geschäftsmäßig, wenn auch
mit flinker Lippe als Wiedergutmachung deklariert,
ein weiteres U-Boot nach Israel
geliefert werden soll, dessen Spezialität
darin besteht, allesvernichtende Sprengköpfe
dorthin lenken zu können, wo die Existenz
einer einzigen Atombombe unbewiesen ist,
doch als Befürchtung von Beweiskraft sein will,
sage ich, was gesagt werden muß.

Warum aber schwieg ich bislang?
Weil ich meinte, meine Herkunft,
die von nie zu tilgendem Makel behaftet ist,
verbiete, diese Tatsache als ausgesprochene Wahrheit
dem Land Israel, dem ich verbunden bin
und bleiben will, zuzumuten.

Warum sage ich jetzt erst,
gealtert und mit letzter Tinte:
Die Atommacht Israel gefährdet
den ohnehin brüchigen Weltfrieden?
Weil gesagt werden muß,
was schon morgen zu spät sein könnte;
auch weil wir - als Deutsche belastet genug -
Zulieferer eines Verbrechens werden könnten,
das voraussehbar ist, weshalb unsere Mitschuld
durch keine der üblichen Ausreden
zu tilgen wäre.

Und zugegeben: ich schweige nicht mehr,
weil ich der Heuchelei des Westens
überdrüssig bin; zudem ist zu hoffen,
es mögen sich viele vom Schweigen befreien,
den Verursacher der erkennbaren Gefahr
zum Verzicht auf Gewalt auffordern und
gleichfalls darauf bestehen,
daß eine unbehinderte und permanente Kontrolle
des israelischen atomaren Potentials
und der iranischen Atomanlagen
durch eine internationale Instanz
von den Regierungen beider Länder zugelassen wird.

Nur so ist allen, den Israelis und Palästinensern,
mehr noch, allen Menschen, die in dieser
vom Wahn okkupierten Region
dicht bei dicht verfeindet leben
und letztlich auch uns zu helfen.*
although what might constitute these stellar reporters criteria we will
never know. The fine and humane novelist Louis Begley [among those
cited earlier] who joined Grass in his dislike of Netanjahu but can't
see past his memory of the SS [Sturm Staffel] insignia [Runen], it turns
out [*"is no more a poem than a porcelain urinal could become a work of
art, just because [French Dadaist artist] Marcel Duchamp decided to
exhibit it as a water fountain,"]***hasn't the faintest about modern
poetic conventions or, like many another, never sees past the poem's
editorial aspects.**
Most puzzling was the dismissal, initially, of the poems poetic
qualities, even by writers and poets who might have seen that it was
composed in a Brechtian manner, as Detering demonstrated quite
brilliantly. Not that a Brechtian manner is any kind of guarantee of
quality, but married to a kind of emotional wrenching that a Robert
Lowell would have responded to... and with Hoelderlin's earnestness...**
What was or is it in the poem that made me, too, instantly respond more
to its editorial political content, which for me was not particularly
new, but for the Dolphin Class submarines that can fire rockets with
atomic warhead? As life-long political animal my antennae are tuned to
political trouble spots. I would submit that the very mention of day to
day or world politics in a poem instantly gets you out of a poetic frame
of mind that you don't even read this text with the kind of measure it
actually imposes. You read it the usual way the usual speed reader you
reads editorials, superficially, dismissively, it registers at a
different rung. There is lots of great political poetry in the 20^th
century, Yeats, Pound's Cantos are riddled with politics, Auden, Lowell,
Brecht, the Spaniard and Latinos, Celan... I used to be up on
contemporary poetry, about 50 years ago when I had a magazine and there
were maybe a dozen magazines literary which you needed to read to get a
sense of that. Now there are hundreds of magazine and a hundred writing
programs that do not produce political poets. Lots of political writing
of all kinds, just not political poems, except for me **
http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/custom_4.html
but none of the magazines I have tried seem to like them, just some of
my politically-minded friends. I am an occasional poet and have written
a bunch of overtly unpolitical poems about the weather in Seattle and my
feathered friends _Steeped in Seattle_ and had a good time writing them.
I would not deign or dare to make an over-all generalization of the many
strands of contemporary poetry, but to say that you find scarcely
anything that might be described as political poetry, that addresses
matters of state, of peace and war.**
Initially, I too seemed to think that its poetic qualities were
negligible, but only because the poems politics got me hot. It wasn't
until Esther Dischereit, who had a finely differentiated response to the
poem's politics
http://www.literaturkritik.de/public/online_abo/forum/forumfaden.php?rootID=144#thmsg5
and in the main archive *
**http://goaliesanxiety.blogspot.com/2012/04/gunter-grass-what-must-be-said.html***
*and I*started to dwell on its versification that I began to realize
that Brecht was its godfather, as Detering demonstrates.**
*======*
It has been, with respect to the Grass controversy, some weeks lacking
in humor of any kind. But for***author Sibylle Lewitscharoff saying: "If
Grass's text is supposed to be a poem, then have I, with the help of two
or three melodious farts after having eaten a trout, composed a new St.
Matthews Passion," to which I can only add, "sweet farts, Sibylle, or I
won't dine with you," is the only memorable truly funnee response I have
come upon. Now with a second Grass poli-poem, the one on Greece making
the rounds, I notice the poverty of various attempts in German magazines
and papers to do satire. The only good one I came on is not a
persiflage, but alludes with the refrain "and Grass is writing a poem
about it" to a series of less than earthshaking events. It has a nice
light touch, it is not aggressive or forced or klunky as are all the
others.***
*http://www.dradio.de/dlf/sendungen/corso/1772164/*******
And if you read it as slowly as the poem actually makes you read it,
and as Grass reads it you will get a different sense of it than as a
speed-reader who happens on an editorial: defenses are up, mere words
suggesting editorial content are dismissed at once as poetically
impossible, which at least helps explain or suggest an explanation to
the riddle why people instantly shift into their own political aesthetic
sphere. Surfeit, false language. Impossible. Which is why there are
times that poets resort to "agit-prop" and provocation.**
During a two month focus on this kind of event and story you of course
come upon oddities of all kind in this /ayuntamiento/ of the */_Cien
años de soledad_/**, the****Charenton of the Mind: an infinitude of
uninformedopinions, from the abysm of unrelieved Neo-Con
filthy-macnastiest of a Josef Joffe, the lack of anything classy but for
Fritz Stern in his interview in the FAZ with Felicitas von Lovenberg, as
well as cheap and easy shots from fellow poets and writers who failed to
find any merit in Grass's dirge and, like its critics, fail to
acknowledge the numerous intellecuals*****
http://summapolitico.blogspot.com/2012/05/defense-of-beast-post-mortem-part-ii-of.html*/__/*
*who took it and the issue it addressed seriously, and what little
sympathy Grass received, but from me for his awkward emotional exertions,***
http://summapolitico.blogspot.com/2012/05/summary-of-grass-controversy.html*/__/*
*Of course Islamic voices chimed in from all over; mostly supportive but
not all; most amusingly from far off Sri Lanka -- such events as****the
Grass brouhaha invariably elicit sideshow comedies - where Grass became
a Jew who criticized Israel, Iran being portrayed as pure as the virgin
Fatima!***
*Then there are instances such as Gregor Struck-Lothar Keuschnig's***

*http://www.begleitschreiben.net/wie-waere-es-mit-ignorieren-gewesen/**/__/*

*who exists in a world where words like "verzueckt" rule the aviary
and who will see the rocket coming at the same time as Mr.McGoo, but
who has written favorably and nicely about Handk**e.*

* *

*The most, I would say only touching and heart-rending response was
the confession of a Jewish survivor and who did so by joining the
Hitler Youth [but most of whose family was exterminated] and
pretending to be/Volksdeutsch,/who states that Grass has the right to
voice his opinion and agrees with it**:*



*Grass hat das Recht zu solch einer Warnung**

Aufgrund der Tatsache, dass Günter Grass den Zweiten Weltkrieg
tiefschürfend erlebt hat und mit gerade mal 17 Jahren sogar von der
Waffen-SS einverleibt worden ist, hat er aus seiner Lebenserfahrung
ein deutliches Recht dazu, solch eine Warnung auszusprechen. Die
Tatsache, dass die israelische Regierung ihm ein Einreiseverbot
ausgesprochen hat, zeigt eindeutig, dass an Grass' Warnungen etwas
dran ist. Es wäre seitens Israel besser gewesen, zu bestätigen, keine
nuklearen Waffen zu besitzen und zu erklären, keinen Erstschlag gegen
den Iran ausführen zu wollen. Alles das hat nichts mit dem Holocaust
zu tun, sondern es geht einzig und allein um die Erhaltung des
Friedens heute.

http://www.badische-zeitung.de/leserbriefe-68/grass-hat-das-recht-zu-solch-einer-warnung--58301213.html**//*

*/_ _/*

*/_Grass has the right to voice his opinion for the very reason that
he was part of the SS as a young man and experienced what a world war
can be like... It would have been better for Israel not to have atomic
weapons and to declare that it will not do a first strike...._/*

*/_ _/*

*Occasionally, in that wasteland of officialeese, a private voice peeks
through. *Alas, Mr. Joffe and Co. would that you learn to be so generous
in your understanding!

* *

As I fade out from this project and as the scandal putters, but for
whatever updates that will be posted at**

*http://goaliesanxiety.blogspot.com/2012/04/gunter-grass-what-must-be-said.html**
**/__/*

to resume my life in the coal mine,*we can observe Grass's shadow, the
shadow of his imperfect but ever so effective, provocative poem
accompany the new German President, Gauck, on his visit to Israel and
Palestine, who, a man of great moral standing, takes an even-handed
approach, as apparently a real friend, to Israel, and I await whether
Netanjahu / Liberman will be able to deal with the same critique
issuing from someone who cannot be so easily besmirched.*

**German Jewish relation the last time I had occasion to give the matter
real thought [on translating Robert Schindel's _Whereborn_ in the
mid-90s, whose report on the situation was not encouraging] judging by
the kind of contortions that most though again not all German
officialdom put themselves through so as not to be regarded anti-Semitic
is even less encouraging fifteen years later. - A fine exception I found
to be the Minister President of the State of Mark Brandenburg, the heart
of Prussia, Herr Platzeck, SPD, where my heart beats, too, unless the
SPD compromises too much whereupon the heart swings hard left!**
*http://www.n-tv.de/politik/Ich-war-bei-uns-die-rote-Socke-article6380836.html***
Description: cleardot

**

Hitler's toxic leavings, not just a ruined culture that will never
recover. That those poor sods then should be at the mercy of the likes
of Netanjahu andheeb Liberman. I can't find either justice or irony or any
kind of moral in that. And of course the controversy not only allows
no end of cowards to spew bile at Grass, but invigorate the actual
existing anti-Semitism.**

* *

* *

Michael Roloff, June 2012**

*_NOTES_*
*_Handke, Context_*










*_Handke Note_**[from the Synopsis of the Grass Poem Controversy]*
*
**http://artscritic.blogspot.com/2012/05/guenter-grasss-notorious-poem-poetics.html***
*However, SZ, the Suedeutsche is always game for a controversy, they did
Handke's _Justice for Serbia_ back in 1993. Handke, surprisingly, fails
to enter the fray [of the Grass controversy] in this instance. He did
the time Grass revealed in _Peeling the Onion_ in 2007 that he had been
a member of the Waffen-SS, a tank gunner, small stature, good fit for
cramped spaces, U-Boats. Handke strutted forth with the worst kind of
self-righteousness, the newsfolk caught up with him in Spain [Handke had
forgotten what he had learned from Milovan Djilas] **¡**esto*
<http://dict.tu-chemnitz.de/espanol-aleman/esto.html>***es*
<http://dict.tu-chemnitz.de/espanol-aleman/es.html>***una*
<http://dict.tu-chemnitz.de/espanol-aleman/una.html>***vergüenza*
<http://dict.tu-chemnitz.de/espanol-aleman/verghtml>***!at that time
everyone knew at age 17 what the SS was, **where I felt I needed to
point out that the 30 year old Handke at times seemed not to know what
every normal 12 year old does. **
Surprising hat with everybody and his cat chiming in on the Grass
controversy Peter Handke did not. Journalists, knowing that Handke is
always good for a sexy quote, did not get anything out of him until he
and his buddy Luc Bondy started giving interviews for the mid-May 2012
premiere of _Die Schoenen Tage von Aranjuez._ Handke, a pretty bad liar,
lied, not that unusual for him, but certainly so in an instance where a
star was robbing him of some of his space in the firmament his featured
place in the lime light, big time, internationally, the Grass story
spread to India, Thailand, Japan.*
*Handke, when he finally replied to a query whether he had read the
poem, said no, he was in Paris - as though my kiosk-hound cannot find
German papers or read the translation in his daily _Le Monde_! Handke's
companion during the interview, Luc Bondy, had read the poem and was
dismissive. Handke was surprisingly generous in recalling a powerful
Grass poem of 1966 at Princeton, but then slighted Grass's
intelligence... He did pretty much the same thing in two different
interviews, he and his buddy began to look like the Bobsy Twins!*
*However, "the comeback kid" is back in good graces, his press has been
good, deservedly so, for good work, finally he won the Muehlheim Prize
for the best piece of the year after not receiving it for a number of
others where he ought to have, if he has continued to beat up women or
indulged in other nefarious proclivities we have not heard about it,
although wife Sophie Semin did look very sour in her recent Lillian
Birnbaum Photo... So why get involved in a fray that is a lose lose
proposition? Attacking Grass Handke would have found himself in the
company of Joffe, Schirrmacher, Naumann and Reichs-Kanickel -- second
raters who have given him no end of stupefying grief over the years,
Ranicki turns out to be the best of that lot, sadly. Coming out in
defense -- there was a plenty of that, but it would have made news and
not helped him. Thus "ta geule!"*
*And, as evidenced by the controversy, the last thing you want to do as
a German language author is become embroiled in a dog fight that
involves anti-Semitism. Handke briefly compared the bombing of Belgrade
to Auschwitz, a comparison rapidly apologized for, but which at the very
least demonstrated the authenticity of his pain at the final form of the
West's decimation of the 2^nd Federation. *
*Other major worthies of Grass'generation and fellow Gruppe 47 members
such as Enzensberger and Jürgen Habermas have kept their public mouths
/ta geule/, so far. Martin Walser noted, in passing, that Grass was
anything but an anti-Semite, as did a lot of goyim and Jewish friends of
his also citing the portrayal of the toy maker in _The Tin Drum._
Muschg was the first to come out in support. Rolf Hochut felt Grass
wrote and anti-Semitic poem and resigned from the German academy. I must
say I have lost track of whence this quote that hits the nail on the
head: "As political commentary the Grass poem, which isn't much good as
a poem, is something everyone knows. That something like that elicits
accusations of anti-Semitism only testifies to the apparent
impossibility of differentiating between Jews and the State of Israel,
and of the continuing unsettled nature of German guilt feelings." **/__/*
Als politisches Kommentar ist das Grass Gedicht, das als Gedicht nicht
viel taugt, eine Binsenweisheit. Das so was Anti-Semitismus
Beschuldigungen hervorruft zeugt von der scheinbaren Unmoeglichkeit
zwischen Juden und dem Staat Israel zu unterscheiden, und von der
andauernden Unausgeglichenheit des Deutschen Schuldgefuehls.

*_Notes: Context_*
*_Useful is Shulman's NYRB review of Beinart_*
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jun/07/israel-in-peril/*__*
In any case, the/Crisis of Zionism/book is by no means entirely
unoriginal: Beinart clearly has had close access to key members of the
Obama administration, and has provided the most persuasive and detailed
account of Obama's step-by-step abandonment of his previous "liberal
Zionist" principles and sympathies and his final humiliating surrender
to the Netanyahu government, the know-nothings in Congress, and the
Israel lobby
http://www.jeromeslater.com/2012/05/peter-beinarts-crisis-of-zionism-and.html?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=64d445dfb3-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
<http://www.jeromeslater.com/2012/05/peter-beinarts-crisis-of-zionism-and.html?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=64d445dfb3-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email>*/__/*

__Here are the main facts about Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, as reviewed by Beinart:*__*
.The Nakba: the expulsion (or worse) of hundreds of thousands of
Palestinians and the destruction of their homes and villages in the
1947-48 period.
. The forty-five year Israeli occupation and repression of the
Palestinians, including the ongoing expansion of the settlements in the
West Bank and their encroachment on the land, water, and agriculture of
the Palestinians---enforced by severe economic pressures, home and farm
demolitions, imprisonment, assassinations, and periodic outright major
military attacks.
. The various forms of economic, political, and social discrimination of
the Palestinian minority (the Arab Israelis) in Israel itself.
. The spread of racism, political extremism, religious fanaticism and
outright violence in Israel---including terrorism and routine police
violence against even the Jewish dissenters. As Beinart puts it, a
vicious cycle has been created, "in which illiberal Zionism beyond the
green line destroys the possibility of liberal Zionism inside it; as
survey after survey has demonstrated, there has been a rapid decline in
democratic and liberal values, and each succeeding Israeli generation,
certainly including the current one, is worse than the previous one.
. The long history of Israeli intransigence or outright torpedoing of
various opportunities to reach a two-state compromise settlement with
the Palestinians---including the last serious negotiations, at Camp
David and Taba in 2000. In his analysis, Beinart incorporates the
scholarship and the Israeli journalism as well as diplomatic memoirs
that have thoroughly refuted the standard argument that Arafat rebuffed
a generous Israeli two-state offer and then turned to terrorism and
violence. Today, no serious analysis of the events of 2000-2001 accepts
this mythology.
6. The Israeli refusal to explore the possibility of a negotiated
settlement with a Palestinian government that includes Hamas, despite
the growing evidence that Hamas is now opposed to terrorist violence
against Israel and is increasingly likely to agree to a two-state
settlement of the conflict. Indeed, not only has Israel ignored these
trends, as Beinart points out it has often provoked violence with Hamas,
especially but not limited to the massive Israeli attack on Gaza in 2008-09.
_Context footnote ctd_.


*http://thinkprogress.org/security/2011/12/01/377382/max-boot-iran/**
**The Council on Foreign Relations'Max Boot is no stranger to calling
for increasingly confrontational measures to address Iran's alleged
nuclear weapons program. But in a column in today's L.A. Times, Boot
doubles down on his calls for war while in the same breath admitting
that a military strike on Iran's nuclear facilities would only delay
Iran's acquisition of a nuclear weapon. He writes:**/__/*
*
**http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204632204577130834200656156.html***
*
By BRADLEY S. RUSSELL
AND MAX BOOT
**Iran threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz last week, in response
to U.S. and European Union moves to apply sanctions on its oil industry.
Only 21 miles wide at its narrowest point, the strait sees the passage
of roughly 28 tanker ships a day, half loaded, half empty. Some 17
million barrels of oil---% of oil traded in the world---go through this
chokepoint. If Iran really could close the strait, it would do great
damage to the world economy. But it would also damage its own already
shaky economy because Iran relies on the strait to deliver oil exports
to China and***
*/_Context ctd._/*
http://pjmedia.com/michaelledeen/2012/05/28/iran-rules/?singlepage=true*/__/*


/__/

By*Michael Ledeen*
So we had important talks with the Iranian regime and reached an
important agreement to have more important talks with them next month.
No one on our team seems the least bit embarrassed, nor do any of the
pundits who predicted that some sort of nuke deal would be agreed on.
Indeed, most of the coverage that I've seen has to do with Israel: will
they attack or not?
On the basis of my mother's dictum that repetition is the basis of all
learning, let's go through the basic principles again:
Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is not interested in a deal with the
West unless it is clearly and unequivocally a total Western surrender
that ends sanctions, confirms our retreat from the Middle East, and
acknowledges Iran as the regional hegemon;
The current game--call it "around the world in 180 days"--provides the
diplomats with good food, luxurious accommodations, and pictures in the
papers, and it leaves the Iranians free to enrich uranium, build
missiles and warheads, and kill us and anyone inclined to work with us.
That is the Real War and no Western leader ever talks about it;
CONTEXT FOOTNOTE CTD
Sanctions will neither stop the Iranian nuclear program nor stop the
Real War. Only a change in regime can accomplish that. To that end,
sanctions could be a positive force if they were combined with support
for the Iranian opposition. Just ask the Revolutionary Guards how
serious the resistance is: the RG just deployed an additional eight
thousand soldiers---some in uniform, others in plain clothes--in the
streets of Tehran.But no Western leader cares to help the Iranian
opposition, even verbally. When those leaders say "no option is off
the table," they mean some day there might be a military attack against
Iran. But financial and tactical assistance to the Iranian people
willing to actively fight for freedom is totally off any Western
strategic table;*"No solution but force ... strong military rule. Any
outbreak will bring upon the Arabs enormous suffering. We shouldn't wait
for a big uprising to start, but rather act immediately with great force
to prevent them from carrying on. ... If it's possible, we should
conquer any disputed territory in the Land of Israel. Conquer and hold
it, even if it brings us years of war. We should conquer Gaza, and parts
of the Galilee, and the Golan. This will bring upon us a bloody war,
since war is difficult for us --we don't have a lot of territory, while
the Arabs have lots of space to retreat to. But that's the only way to
survive here.

There is valuable experience [on this matter] we don't pay notice to. I
mean the Ottoman rule over the Arabs. The Turks ruled over the Arabs for
400 years, and there was peace and quiet everywhere. The Arabs hated the
Ottomans, but every little thing they did brought mass killings and
hanging in towns squares. They were hanging people in Damascus, and
Izmir ... every town had hanging posts in its center. ... The Arabs were
so badly beaten, they didn't dare revolt. Naturally, I don't recommend
the use of hangings as a show of force like the Turks did, I just want
to show that the only thing that might move the Arabs from the
rejectionist position is force."*
*============================*

*
Israel's Spy Revoly
Something has gone very wrong with Israel's posture on Iran's nuclear
program. While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister
Ehud Barak lead a confrontational approach -- including dramatic
interviews and speeches to U.S. audiences that have convinced many that
Israel might soon strike Iran's nuclear facilities -- the former heads
of Israel's intelligence agencies have come out publicly against the
government's position. First, Meir Dagan -- who headed the Mossad until
late 2010 and coordinated Israel's Iran policy -- called an attack on
Iran "the most foolish thing I've heard." In April, Yuval Diskin -- the
previous head of the domestic intelligence service, the Shin Bet --
voiced a scathing and personal critique of Netanyahu and Barak. Diskin
questioned not only the leaders' policy, but also their very judgment
and capacity to lead, warning against their "messianic" approach to
Iran's nuclear program.*
*May 18, 2012 9:38 PM***
*http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2012/05/10-israel-spy-sachs
========================*
*Lieberman's office stated in early April that peace talks will continue
when Palestinian government officials crack down on attacks against
Israelis, after which the Israeli administration will reciprocate by
freezing settlement construction or expansion in the West Bank.[24] That
position contradicts the Obama administration's new approach to the
peace efforts, where Israel is requested to freeze all construction,
including "natural growth" (i.e. "within existing construction
lines")[25] regardless of Palestinian commitments.[26] The office also
told U.S. special envoy George Mitchell that past negotiations did not
bring any real results.[26] Lieberman himself said in April, "The
situation is deadlocked, and it is not because of us".[24] He argued
that a stable, successful peace effort requires Americans to focus on
preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.[26]
Lieberman and Prime Minister Netanyahu both planned to broaden the PR
campaign overseen by the Foreign Ministry about Iran. Part of its new
campaign focuses on Tehran's abuse of human rights and sponsorship of
terrorism and also aims to appeal to those, such as the gay and lesbian
communities, less concerned with Iran's nuclear aspirations and more
fearful of its human rights abuses and mistreatment of minorities.[27]
Despite his status within the government, the Israeli police have
questioned Lieberman three times from he took office to 11 April about
the ongoing corruption investigation.[24]

**http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avigdor_Lieberman***


Courting Failure in Iran Nuke Talks


/May 28, 2012/

*In rebuffing Iran's concessions on its nuclear program, the Obama
administration is bending to hard-line neocon pressures at home and
Israeli demands abroad. But it also appears stuck on the notion of
permanent U.S. hegemony in the Middle East, says national security
expert Flynt Leverett at**www.RaceForIran.com*
<http://www.raceforiran.com/>*.*
*By Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett*
*On**/Antiwar Radio,/*
<http://antiwar.com/radio/2012/05/25/flynt-leverett-9/>***Flynt Leverett
reviewed the P5+1 nuclear talks with the Islamic Republic, noting that
President Barack Obama and his foreign policy team seem no more prepared
to deal with the major issues that must be addressed to enable a
meaningful agreement --- accepting internationally safeguarded
enrichment in Iran and recognizing that a negotiated solution will
necessarily entail significant sanctions relief ---than it was during
its p**revious attempt at nuclear diplomacy during
Just as the United States had (and has) interests in Asia, it has
"critical interests" in the Middle East. And it can only protect and
promote those interests by "having positive relations with all of the
important players in the region---and especially with Iran."***
*This, however, is "a strategic logic" that the Obama Administration
"seems no more capable of embracing than its predecessors in the Bush-43
Administration." (Or, one might add, the Clinton and Bush-41
administrations.) It is a profound "strategic failure."*
*In the interview, Flynt also critiqued myths of Iranian "irrationality"
and of the Islamic Republic as too unreasoningly hostile toward the
United States for real improvement in U.S.-Iranian relations to be
possible.*
*-2010*
*Flynt Leverett served as a Middle East expert on George W. Bush's
National Security Council staff until the Iraq War and worked previously
at the State Department and at the Central Intelligence Agency. Hillary
Mann Leverett was the NSC expert on Iran and --from 2001 to 2003 -- was
one of only a few U.S. diplomats authorized to negotiate with the
Iranians over Afghanistan, al-Qaeda and Iraq. [**This article*
<http://www.raceforiran.com/nuclear-talks-with-iran-highlight-the-downsides-of-america%C3%A2%E2%82%AC%E2%84%A2s-ongoing-quest-for-middle-east-hegemony>***was
originally published at RaceforIran.com.]***
*http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/06/books/confront-and-conceal-by-david-sanger.html?_r=1&ref=books*
<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/06/books/confront-and-conceal-by-david-sanger.html?_r=1&ref=books>**
*The stunning revelations by Mr. Sanger, The New York Times's chief
Washington correspondent, about the American role in using computer
warfare to attack Iran's nuclear program already have made headlines,
and rightly so. He persuasively shows that under Mr. Obama, the United
States government has been engaged in what one presidential adviser
calls "a state of low-grade, daily conflict."*
*The heart of this book is the chapter titled "Olympic Games," which Mr.
Sanger writes is the code name for a joint program of Israel and the
United States to insert malicious software into the machinery of the
Iranian military-industrial complex and so set back Iran's ability to
manufacture weapons-grade uranium. Specifically, in 2008 and 2009 the
software threw off the balance of centrifuges at the Natanz nuclear
enrichment center. It did so in a variety of unpredictable ways, making
it at first seem like the problems were random or the result of Iranian
incompetence. The key to getting inside the computers --- which were not
connected to the Internet --- was to load the virus into thumb drives
that Iranian nuclear technicians, perhaps unknowingly, would bring to
work and plug into the computer systems there.***
http://consortiumnews.com/2012/05/28/courting-failure-in-iran-nuke-talks/*/__/*
Sanktionen für Günter Grass
Nach dem israelischen Einreiseverbot für Günter Grass wendet sich nach
und nach die gesamte Weltgemeinschaft gegen den Autor. Grass-Häuser in
aller Welt werden geschlossen, die Botschafter nach Hause geschickt;
Politiker der Europäischen Union erwägen ein Tabak- und
Schnauzkammembargo, um Grass zu zermürben. Auch immer mehr
Schurkenstaaten gehen auf Distanz, u.a. Kim Jong Un: "Wir wissen, daß
Grass seit Jahren an einem zehnten, hochangereicherten Roman arbeitet
und dafür mit extrem haarspaltendem Material experimentiert. Damit
wollen wir nichts zu tun haben." Auch der Iran stellte die
Zusammenarbeit mit dem umstrittenen Dichter ein: "Nun gut, auch wir
wollen Israel auslöschen", so Mahmud Ahmadinedschad, "aber schnell und
relativ schmerzlos. Die Juden vorher mit endlosen Pfuschgedichten zu
quälen, das ist grausam und barbarisch."

http://www.titanic-magazin.de/news.html?tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=4882&cHash=b490c75b3c86eb0566eaedd82897fcd6

*/_===============================================_/*

*The Grass Poem Controversy
must be one of the oddest of all time.
Even the Israeli Military and Security Services
realize that the Netanyahoo/ Liberman government
poses a threat to world peace, it would be the case
even if an old SS general said so, but if Günter
Grass, who contorts himself into a knot of contrition
for having been a Teenage Werewolf Nazi provokes this government
with the same truth, it goes into tizzy! And so does
every Neo-Con within range of a news **site!*
/_ =================**_/
*Grass hat das Recht zu solch einer Warnung**
Aufgrund der Tatsache, dass Günter Grass den Zweiten Weltkrieg
tiefschürfend erlebt hat und mit gerade mal 17 Jahren sogar von der
Waffen-SS einverleibt worden ist, hat er aus seiner Lebenserfahrung ein
deutliches Recht dazu, solch eine Warnung auszusprechen. Die Tatsache,
dass die israelische Regierung ihm ein Einreiseverbot ausgesprochen hat,
zeigt eindeutig, dass an Grass' Warnungen etwas dran ist. Es wäre
seitens Israel besser gewesen, zu bestätigen, keine nuklearen Waffen zu
besitzen und zu erklären, keinen Erstschlag gegen den Iran ausführen zu
wollen. Alles das hat nichts mit dem Holocaust zu tun, sondern es geht
einzig und allein um die Erhaltung des Friedens heute.**/__/*


*Betreff*


*Re: Günter Grass: Was gesagt werden muss*





*Autor*


*Esther Dischereit*



*Datum*


*10.4.2012 12:41*




*Nachricht*

Ich wüßte nicht, dass es irgendwo zu vertreten wäre, Präventivschläge
auszuführen, die leider Teil der israelischen Militärgeschichte sind. Es
wäre auch schön, wenn Israel dem Atomwaffensperrvertrag beitreten und
Mr. Vanunu freilassen würde. Außerdem ist es eine Tatsache, dass die
israelischen Regierungen seit Jahrzehnten versuchen, die Palästinenser
in andere Länder abzuschieben oder ihrer Lebensgrundlagen zu berauben.
Der Fortgang des Siedlungsbaus ist vollständig illegal und widerspricht
dem Osloer Abkommen. Die Lieferung von Waffen in Kriegs- oder
Krisengebiete darf und soll hinterfragt werden. Ich bin nicht dafür.
Herr Grass scheint mir alles mit allem zu vermischen. Auch scheint es
fraglich zu sein, wer hier welchen Kriegstreibern den Rang abläuft. Die
Dämonisierung der israelischen Regierung als d i e Gefährderin des
Weltfriedens ist eine Merkwürdigkeit. Sozusagen als sei das Frieden,
jetzt . Israel wird bei Herrn Grass als Verursacherin der Bedrohung
bezeichnet. Das scheint mir eine Simplifizierung zu sein. Da es sich bei
dem iranischen Regime nun nicht um eine durch Friedensliebe
ausgezeichnete Herrschaftsclique handelt, die Auslöschungsdrohungen
ausstößt, kann man wohl nicht allen Ernstes von Frieden sprechen. Seit
Jahren herrscht in der Region der Status Quo. Oder Krieg. Verzicht auf
Gewalt und Etablierung einer internationalen Kontrolle - daran ist
nichts falsch, und wäre für Jerusalem als
exterritorialesgunter-grass-what-must-be-said.html
<http://goaliesanxiety.blogspot.com/2012/04/gunter-grass-what-must-be-said.html>
Gebilde sicher sinnvoll, ebenso wie die Kontrolle aller Atomanlagen. Vor
einem Krieg gegen den Iran zu warnen, ist vernünftig. Wir haben noch
immer die Lügen präsent, mit denen Großbritannien dazu gebracht wurde,
sich am Irak-Krieg zu beteiligen. Esther Dischereit




*Link to numerous if not all FAZ pieces about the poem:***
*http://www.faz.net/suche/?query=reich-ranicki+grass&offset=1&allboosted=&boostedresultsize=0&from=TT.MM.JJJJ&to=14.05.2012&BTyp=redaktionelleInhalte&author=Vorname+Nachname&username=Benutzername&sort=date&resultsPerPage=20*
<http://www.faz.net/suche/?query=reich-ranicki+grass&offset=1&allboosted=&boostedresultsize=0&from=TT.MM.JJJJ&to=14.05.2012&BTyp=redaktionelleInhalte&author=Vorname+Nachname&username=Benutzername&sort=date&resultsPerPage=20>*/__/*





--
Posted By SUMMA POLITICO to ART CRITIC
<http://artscritic.blogspot.com/2012/05/summary-comment-on-poetics-of-grass.html>
at 5/29/2012 04:53:00 PM



--
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"Degustibus disputandum est" {Theodor Wiesenthal Adorno}
"May the foggy dew bediamondize your hoosprings + the fireplug
of filiality reinsure your bunghole! {James Joyce}
"Sryde Lyde Myde Vorworde Vorhorde Vorborde." {von Alvensleben}
"Siena me fe, disfescimi Maremma." {Dante}
"Ennui [Lange Weile] is the dreambird that hatches the egg of
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--
This is the e-mail address associated with
Michael Roloff's [as "Der Getreue Korreptitor"]
http://artscritic.blogspot.com/

http://www.facebook.com/mike.roloff1?ref=name
Member Seattle Psychoanalytic Institute and Society
http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/index.html

This LYNX will LEAP you to my HANDKE project sites and BLOGS
http://www.handke.scriptmania.com/favorite_links_1.html

"Degustibus disputandum est" {Theodor Wiesenthal Adorno}
"May the foggy dew bediamondize your hoosprings + the fireplug
of filiality reinsure your bunghole! {James Joyce}
"Sryde Lyde Myde Vorworde Vorhorde Vorborde." {von Alvensleben}
"Siena me fe, disfescimi Maremma." {Dante}
"Ennui [Lange Weile] is the dreambird that hatches the egg of
experience." {Walter Benjamin, the essay on Leskov.}

http://analytic-comments.blogspot.com/

http://summapolitico.blogspot.com/



--
This is the e-mail address associated with
Michael Roloff's [as "Der Getreue Korreptitor"]
http://artscritic.blogspot.com/

http://www.facebook.com/mike.roloff1?ref=name
Member Seattle Psychoanalytic Institute and Society
http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/index.html

This LYNX will LEAP you to my HANDKE project sites and BLOGS
http://www.handke.scriptmania.com/favorite_links_1.html

"Degustibus disputandum est" {Theodor Wiesenthal Adorno}
"May the foggy dew bediamondize your hoosprings + the fireplug
of filiality reinsure your bunghole! {James Joyce}
"Sryde Lyde Myde Vorworde Vorhorde Vorborde." {von Alvensleben}
"Siena me fe, disfescimi Maremma." {Dante}
"Ennui [Lange Weile] is the dreambird that hatches the egg of
experience." {Walter Benjamin, the essay on Leskov.}

http://analytic-comments.blogspot.com/

http://summapolitico.blogspot.com/



--
This is the e-mail address associated with
Michael Roloff's [as "Der Getreue Korreptitor"]
http://artscritic.blogspot.com/

http://www.facebook.com/mike.roloff1?ref=name
Member Seattle Psychoanalytic Institute and Society
http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/index.html

This LYNX will LEAP you to my HANDKE project sites and BLOGS
http://www.handke.scriptmania.com/favorite_links_1.html

"Degustibus disputandum est" {Theodor Wiesenthal Adorno}
"May the foggy dew bediamondize your hoosprings + the fireplug
of filiality reinsure your bunghole! {James Joyce}
"Sryde Lyde Myde Vorworde Vorhorde Vorborde." {von Alvensleben}
"Siena me fe, disfescimi Maremma." {Dante}
"Ennui [Lange Weile] is the dreambird that hatches the egg of
experience." {Walter Benjamin, the essay on Leskov.}

http://analytic-comments.blogspot.com/

http://summapolitico.blogspot.com/



--
This is the e-mail address associated with
Michael Roloff's [as "Der Getreue Korreptitor"]
http://artscritic.blogspot.com/

http://www.facebook.com/mike.roloff1?ref=name
Member Seattle Psychoanalytic Institute and Society
http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/index.html

This LYNX will LEAP you to my HANDKE project sites and BLOGS
http://www.handke.scriptmania.com/favorite_links_1.html

"Degustibus disputandum est" {Theodor Wiesenthal Adorno}
"May the foggy dew bediamondize your hoosprings + the fireplug
of filiality reinsure your bunghole! {James Joyce}
"Sryde Lyde Myde Vorworde Vorhorde Vorborde." {von Alvensleben}
"Siena me fe, disfescimi Maremma." {Dante}
"Ennui [Lange Weile] is the dreambird that hatches the egg of
experience." {Walter Benjamin, the essay on Leskov.}

http://analytic-comments.blogspot.com/

http://summapolitico.blogspot.com/



--
This is the e-mail address associated with
Michael Roloff's [as "Der Getreue Korreptitor"]
http://artscritic.blogspot.com/

http://www.facebook.com/mike.roloff1?ref=name
Member Seattle Psychoanalytic Institute and Society
http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/index.html

This LYNX will LEAP you to my HANDKE project sites and BLOGS
http://www.handke.scriptmania.com/favorite_links_1.html

"Degustibus disputandum est" {Theodor Wiesenthal Adorno}
"May the foggy dew bediamondize your hoosprings + the fireplug
of filiality reinsure your bunghole! {James Joyce}
"Sryde Lyde Myde Vorworde Vorhorde Vorborde." {von Alvensleben}
"Siena me fe, disfescimi Maremma." {Dante}
"Ennui [Lange Weile] is the dreambird that hatches the egg of
experience." {Walter Benjamin, the essay on Leskov.}

http://analytic-comments.blogspot.com/

http://summapolitico.blogspot.com/

[der getreue-koreptitor]