Impotent Bystanders

Weekly Review: The Mideast explodes. Think Europe can succeed where the US has failed? Think again

Before US President Bush finally figured out a way to cover for his complete befuddlement regarding the relentlessly spiraling violence in the Middle East -- namely, send Colin Powell -- Europeans, like much of the rest of the world, were getting antsy and angry over the deafening silence coming from Washington. Hours before Bush strode out of the White House with Powell in tow, European Commission President Romano Prodi declared that US peace efforts had failed. It was time for the US to step out of the way and give Europe a shot at it. Then, the European mission failed, too.

A sampling of mostly American reaction to Prodi's outburst over at the online community Plastic is both fun and telling. Several members got a good snicker out of the very idea of Europe stepping in. "After their success in the Balkans," "bitter engineer" dryly remarked, "I was asking myself when European diplomats would start to apply their skills to the Israeli-Palestinian issue." Picking up on the tone, others commended past European peace efforts such as the delineation of boundaries between Iraq and Kuwait, India and Pakistan ("while leaving the thorny issue of Kashmir to resolve itself," adds "Mad Professor") and settling disputes within Europe itself, e.g., Northern Ireland.

But an almost equal number of Plastic members spoke up in defense of Europe entering the fray -- and without the sarcasm. The gist: "Someone must intervene," as Tim Malieckal puts it, because, Powell or no Powell, "Bush is way out of his league."

On Thursday, then, Josep Pique, foreign minister of Spain, the country currently presiding over the EU, and Javier Solana, EU commissioner for common foreign and security policy, landed in Jerusalem. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon refused to meet with them and they couldn't meet with Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat either because, well, Sharon wouldn't let them. He stuck them instead with the booby prize, a chat with Shimon Peres, ostensibly but rather ineffectively Israel's foreign minister.

Even as George Bush yelped, "Enough is enough," Israeli tanks kept right on rolling on through the West Bank and the European emissaries flew home. Bush has since upped the ante, calling for an Israeli withdrawal from the towns its occupied "without delay," but the tanks keep on rolling. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung commented in its weekend edition, "Because the United States has not been able to get anywhere with Mr. Sharon either, at least this time, the EU has failed with honor."

Maybe. Many agree that the world would benefit from at least a second major power on the international stage to offset the often reckless and unilateral global policeman act the US has been performing of late (see What the World Needs Now). But in this particular corner of the globe, the EU's free trade agreement with Israel and the few hundred million euros a year in aid to the Palestinian Authority is small change indeed next to the US's couple of hundred million annually to the PA and an estimated $84 billion investment in Israel since the country's founding. And if you can't buy enough influence to keep the suicide bombers from roaming Jerusalem and the tanks from rolling over the occupied territories with that kind of money, you can pretty well bet no other party in the world will get too far, either.

In Telepolis

Naturally, the Middle East has been a hot topic all week at Telepolis, too. "One suspects that for the Germans, especially for those who cast themselves on the left, the conflict in the Middle East is an ideal projection screen, a political laboratory, a fertile garden of proclamations," writes Marcus Hammerschmitt in a blistering attack on the naive one-sidedness he finds, among other places, at Indymedia.de. When "anti-German" leftists fall in line with "anti-German" right-wingers in blind opposition to Israel, Germany's own past be damned, what you've got, according to Hammerschmitt, is an Axis of Idiots. It's hardly a surprise that his article has set off a storm of reaction in the Telepolis forums.

Filing from Ramallah, Peter Schäfer describes how some Palestinians are managing to communicate and get word out to the world regarding their dire situation despite Israeli attempts to shut off their access to the media, including the Net.

Peter Nowak reports on Jewish organizations in Israel and around the world protesting the brutality of the Israeli occupation.

And Florian Rötzer analyzes an odd set of numbers. While 40 percent of Israelis oppose the occupation itself, a vast majority support the war. Sharon knows what Bush has learned in Afghanistan, suggests Rötzer: once the first shots are fired, a population will nearly always close ranks behind its leader.

In English

Hungary's National Security Service has been barnstorming ISPs' "back doors" in order to eavesdrop on Net traffic. Not just recently, reports John Horvath, but for years.

Elsewhere

"Even now, Nietzsche remains something of a fate, demanding of his readers the courage to face the crises of his epoch, in which mankind first discovered itself alone in a godforsaken world." Something of the melodrama of her subject seems to have infected Claudia Roth Pierpont's review of Rüdiger Safranski's Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography in The New Yorker.

Still, it's riveting stuff. "When the world convulsions began, in 1914," writes Pierpont, "his works were often credited for what one English bookseller termed the 'Euro-Nietzschean War,' referring both to the war's outbreak and to the stunning brutality with which it was being fought." Suppose, "Taki" wondered the other day in The New York Press, the Germans had won "The Great War"? Plastic members have been having a field day with "Taki"s assumptions that the world would have been a better place.

Online Journalism Review senior editor J.D. Lasica introduces a special feature on Europe with the claim that many European efforts "now rank among the best news sites in the world."

Still far from a sure thing, it looks as if the banks are going to shut out Murdoch and Berlusconi from gaining a foothold in the German mediascape by having the collapsed Kirch media empire placed in insolvency (see Fattening the Vultures). Follow developments as The Financial Times regularly updates its thorough special report and read up on the broke media magnate Leo Kirch at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Finally, two noteworthy bits from another, bigger German media house. "Our solution now is to completely take over Napster," Bertelsmann CEO Thomas Middelhoff says. In one door and out the other; Bertelsmann may back out of ad deal it once made with Terra Lycos, a decision that may have sparked the departure of Wired News editor George Shirk.