Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 317

The Kid Who Got Arrested for Making a Clock Goes to Qatar

Last month, 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed’s attempt to impress his teacher with a homemade clock landed him in handcuffs when officials at his school in Irving, Texas, thought it resembled a bomb and called police. His treatment resulted in international headlines, a heated debate over anti-Muslim bias, invitations to visit Facebook, Google, and the White House, and, now, a decision to move to Qatar where Mohamed was awarded a full scholarship.

“Ahmed is the latest recipient of a scholarship from the Young Innovators Program which supports young, exceptional Arabs by offering educational opportunities in Qatar,” the Qatar Foundation, the organization that awarded the scholarship, said in a statement. “The program encourages recipients to follow their aspirations in education while fostering a culture of innovation and creativity.”

Mohamed and his family will move from Irving to Qatar in the near future. Mohamed had visited the country, along with Saudi Arabia, earlier this month amid a whirlwind of publicity surrounding his story, and toured the Qatar Foundation’s facilities. The foundation has partnerships with several Western universities, including Carnegie Mellon, Texas A&M, and Northwestern, which have satellite campuses there.

“I was really impressed with everything that Qatar Foundation has to offer and the campuses are really cool,” Mohamed said in the statement. “I got to meet other kids who are also really interested in science and technology. I think I will learn a lot and also have lots of fun there.”

The Dallas Morning News reports that schools from across the country had tried to woo Mohamed, but it was the Qatari offer “that most intrigued the family.” The newspaper reported that Mohamed will study at the Doha Academy while his siblings find schools in Doha, the Qatari capital.

“Looking at all the great offers we’ve had, it’s the best decision,” Eyman Mohamed, his 18-year-old sister, told the newspaper. “They even have Texas A&M at Qatar … It’s basically like America.”

In an interview with the newspaper, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, the teenager’s father, said: “We are going to move to a place where my kids can study and learn and all of them being accepted by that country.”

Despite all the goodwill fostered in the wake of his infamous arrest, some aspects of Mohamed’s recent activity have not escaped controversy. During a trip to Sudan, his father’s native country, Mohamed met and posed for pictures with President Omar al-Bashir, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes in Darfur.

Mohamed’s new affiliation with the Qatar Foundation is not necessarily beyond reproach either. A mosque affiliated with the foundation’s Education City campus, where Mohamed will be studying, has been accused of hosting radical “hate-preachers” with legacies of anti-American and anti-Semitic sermons.

Biden’s Bid for a Legacy: A Moon Shot for Cancer

For Joe Biden and his inner circle, it always seemed that the crowning achievement of his long, successful political career would be the presidency. As a senator from Delaware, Biden got close—he ran for the Democratic nomination in 1988 and 2008, and flirted with runs other times. He helped Barack Obama win the White House and keep it for a second term. But with today’s announcement that he won’t campaign for the presidential nomination in 2016, Biden is left to find another capstone to his career.

In his statement in the Rose Garden, the vice president offered a good indication what that will be: the fight against cancer. He ticked off many areas he remains interested in—the skeleton of the campaign he won’t run—like helping the middle class, campaign-finance reform, LGBT rights, income inequality. But the most impassioned and personal passage were his comments about the disease that killed his son Beau this spring:

I believe we need a moon shot in this country to cure cancer. It’s personal. But I know we can do this. The president and I have already been working hard on increasing funding for research and development because there are so many breakthroughs just on the horizon in science and medicine, the things that are just about to happen, and we can make them real, with an absolute national commitment to end cancer as we know it today. And I’m going to spend the next 15 months in this office pushing as hard as I can to accomplish this, because I know there are Democrats and Republicans on the Hill who share our passion—our passion to silence this deadly disease.

Biden continued, “If I could be anything, I would have wanted to be the president that ended cancer, because it’s possible”—a fitting bridge between the old dream of The White House and his new goal.

It is also fitting that Beau Biden’s untimely death, which played a major factor in Biden’s tortured decision-making process, should shape the blueprint for his father’s final act on the national stage. Beau Biden was 46 when he died in May, struck down by cancer. A veteran of the Iraq war and the attorney general of Delaware, Biden was widely respected—by no one so much as his father. In the months after Beau Biden’s death, it became clear that his illness had pushed aside his father’s consideration of a presidential bid. But it also emerged that Beau Biden had urged his father to run for president. The emphasis on the dying son’s wish as a central element of a Biden bid for president rankled some observers.

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Biden Bows Out

“Beau was our inspiration,” Joe Biden said Wednesday. While his family was finally ready for him to make a run, he said, he felt he’d missed his window to enter—likely true, given the disadvantage he would have faced in organizing a campaign, building a field organization, getting on ballots, and raising money.

The inspiration could still lead the vice president to have a great impact on cancer research. It might also help fulfill a promise that Obama and Biden made during the 2008 presidential campaign to double federal funding for fighting cancer. The administration failed to do that within the five-year timeline it had promised.

The scientific challenges of winning a war on cancer aside, Biden would be uniquely well-suited to leading the political fight. The public is, unsurprisingly, heavily in favor of funding for cancer research. There are plenty of things the public favors that end up getting stuck in Congress, but the widespread sympathy for the Biden family and the bipartisan respect for Beau Biden would make it very tough for anyone to say no to the vice president. Joe Biden has plenty of experience with the levers of Congress, too, having spent almost four decades in the Senate.

As Hillary Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner in the presidential race and Biden’s colleague in the Obama Cabinet and, before that in the Senate, put it: “I am confident that history isn’t finished with Joe Biden. As he said today, there is more work to do. And if I know Joe, he will always be on the front-lines, always fighting for all of us.”

Successfully overseeing a major push for federal cancer funding would crown Biden’s career. Depending on the impact, it could become his most lasting legacy—looming larger than eight years as vice president, or his tenure on the Senate Judiciary committee, where he oversaw the Violence Against Women Act, the 1994 crime bill, and Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas and Robert Bork. As much as Biden may have wanted to be the president who ended cancer, being the vice president who ended cancer would be none too shabby a consolation prize.

Chris Rock Is the Host the Oscars Needs

The 2015 Oscars bordered on self-parody, so perhaps the Academy is hoping to get on the right side of the joke by hiring Chris Rock to emcee the show in 2016. The last few years have seen a slew of mediocre performances in the much scrutinized job, considered a poisoned chalice by most comedians. But Rock, who hosted the ceremony in 2005, has the experience, the acidity, and the big-ticket presence to take the gig, and on paper seems like one of the wiser hires made in recent years. One thing’s for sure: There will be 100 percent less magic tricks than the last go-around.

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The 2015 Oscars Played It Safe, Even as Winners Protested

It’s perhaps unfair to pin the hiccups of the last Oscars entirely on Neil Patrick Harris, who got caught up in a mirthless bit about some “Oscar predictions” he’d put in a sealed envelope onstage. But Harris’s performance underlined a larger problem the Oscars has repeatedly experienced in recent years: The awards show is best in the hands of a tried-and-true host, rather than an actor relying on scripted gags. There are exceptions to this rule—Hugh Jackman caught lightning in a bottle in 2009, and Billy Crystal’s vaunted return in 2012 was a dud—but in general, it’s safest to go with an A-list comedian. In the last 10 years, the best hosts have been Ellen DeGeneres, Jon Stewart, and Rock, and Rock is the only one who’s yet to repeat his stint.

Recent duds included the Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane (the less said about his song-and-dance numbers, the better); the stiff combo of Anne Hathaway and James Franco; and Harris, who did fine work hosting the Tonys and Emmys but was caught flat-footed on the Dolby Theatre stage. Stewart (who hosted in 2006 and 2008) and DeGeneres (2007 and 2014) both did well their first time around and even better the second, assisted by their own stable of joke-writers. Rock’s work in 2005 was praised but some of his jokes certainly bruised egos in the room—Sean Penn memorably insisted on praising Jude Law as “one of our finest actors” onstage after Rock mocked the Brit’s dim star power.

Still, that caustic edge may be just what the Oscars needs. The last ceremony came under fire for an unfortunate combination of optics—the snubbing of Selma in several major categories and the fact that all 20 acting nominees were white. The announcement that the Best Picture winner was Birdman provoked insta-scoffs, and the show got its lowest ratings in six years. Harris even admitted he had done a poor job hosting on Twitter, and the show’s producer, Dave Hill, said that he was eyeing “a team that’s already well-known” for the 2016 ceremony.

Perhaps he meant Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, whose work at the Golden Globes had routinely eclipsed every Oscar host in recent years, or a more a left-field choice like Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele. In the end whomever Hill was thinking of didn’t come to fruition, but his choice of Rock is the perfect mix of a safe pair of hands and a necessary shake-up. No doubt Rock will tell the same kind of confrontational jokes that earned him plaudits and criticism in 2005, but he’s proven that he’s comfortable on the biggest stage of awards season.

Still, the announcement represents a holding pattern of sorts. For years, the Oscars functioned with a strong rotating stable of hosts: Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg, and Steve Martin. All three are now semi-retired, but a new group hasn’t yet been anointed. DeGeneres will always be a solid bet. Stewart is certainly free, but he may not be available (his career plans post-Daily Show remain unclear). Other talk-show hosts like Stephen Colbert or Jimmy Fallon would be solid picks, but the hosting network, ABC, has seemed reluctant to promote its rivals’ stars. The Academy is still looking for fresh talent, and should maybe follow Rock’s example—he recently directed Amy Schumer’s HBO comedy special, and loaded his 2015 film Top Five with young up-and-comers. If only the Oscars could be so forward-thinking.

The Window Closes for Joe Biden

In the end, Joe Biden simply ran out of time.

Announcing his reluctant decision to forego a presidential campaign in 2016, the vice president made abundantly clear how badly he wanted to make a third and final run for the job he’s long sniffed but never could grasp. His family, while still grieving over the loss of Biden’s eldest son, was finally on board. Biden had a message and even a compelling stump speech—if anyone doubted so, he delivered it on Wednesday in the Rose Garden, with President Obama and his wife Jill standing by his side.

But ultimately, Biden came to the same conclusion that many in the Democratic Party had reached as his period of vacillation extended from weeks to months, and then several agonizing days more. “Unfortunately, I believe we're out of time, the time necessary to mount a winning campaign for the nomination,” the vice president said. “But while I will not be a candidate, I will not be silent.”

Almost from the moment Obama won a second term, Biden’s desire to succeed him had collided with the widespread doubts about whether he could mount a viable campaign. Would he really challenge Hillary Clinton, who was vying not only to become the nation’s first woman president but who had been his close colleague both in the Obama Cabinet and, before that, in the Senate? Clinton’s struggles certainly opened that door, but never quite wide enough.

Beau Biden’s death from brain cancer in late May brought the nation’s sympathy to the Biden family and, somewhat improbably, offered a new rationale for a candidacy. Reports surfaced that it was Beau’s dying wish that his father make another run. Yet the tragedy also renewed doubts about whether a grieving Biden was up to the rigor of a presidential bid.

“But while I will not be a candidate, I will not be silent.”

The speculation persisted, reaching an almost-comical fever pitch in recent days as Biden’s camp repeatedly left allies and reporters alike with the impression that he would make a dramatic entrance into the race. The head of the International Association of Fire Fighters, Harold Schaitberger, told reporters his union was preparing as if Biden was going to announce his candidacy. A backbench Democratic congressman tweeted that Biden was in. Reports circulated that Biden’s advisers were scouting office space in Washington.

As recently as Tuesday, the vice president delivered a speech seen as a none-too-subtle dig at Clinton. He challenged her account of the recommendations that the two of them made to Obama before the president ordered the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011, and he implicitly criticized her remark during the first Democratic debate that Republicans were her “enemies.”

But after Clinton’s solid debate performance last week and with filing deadlines rapidly approaching, Biden concluded that his window had finally closed, as he knew all along that it might. “I know from previous experience that there’s no timetable for this process,” he said. “The process doesn’t respect or much care about things like filing deadlines or debates and primaries and caucuses.”

Still, the ever-voluble Biden had some things to say, and he plans to continue saying them for the next 15 months. First and foremost, he said, Democrats should run firmly on Obama’s record. “This party, our nation, will be making a tragic mistake if we walk away or attempt to undo the Obama legacy,” Biden said. “The American people have worked too hard, and we have have come too far for that. Democrats should not only defend this record and protect this record. They should run on the record.”

The vice president then outlined the platform he would have run on, had he run. Many of the items are similar if not identical to proposals that Obama, Clinton, and Bernie Sanders have already made. It would center on lifting up the middle class and reducing income equality. Biden would have pursued campaign-finance reform, criminal-justice reform, free public-college tuition, and a more progressive tax code.

If there was a difference, it was a difference in tone, and it echoed the promise of fixing Washington that Obama made eight years ago but—whether the fault was his or not—could never deliver on. “I believe that we have to end the divisive partisan politics that is ripping this country apart,” Biden said. “And I think we can. It’s mean spirited, it’s petty, and it’s gone on for much too long.”

Here Biden notably repeated his jab at Clinton, signaling that while his decision might come as a relief to her campaign, he might not immediately become her surrogate. “I don’t believe, like some do, that it’s naive to talk to Republicans,” the vice president said. “I don’t think we should look at Republicans as our enemies. They are our opposition. They’re not our enemies. And for the sake of the country, we have to work together.”

In a proposal that recalled Beau’s struggle, Biden said the country needed “a moon shot” to cure cancer. “If I could be anything,” he said wistfully, “I would have wanted to have been the president that ended cancer, because it’s possible.”

Biden concluded his speech with an appeal to the dignity of individuals and the optimism of the nation as a whole.

There are too many people in America—there are too many parents who don’t believe they can look their kid in the eye and say with certitude, “Honey, it’s gonna be okay.”

That’s what we need to change. It’s not complicated. That will be the true measure of our success, and we’ll not have met it until every parent out there can look at their kid in tough times and say, “Honey, it’s gonna be okay,” and mean it.

“And when we do,” Biden added, “America won’t just win the future, we will own the finish line.”

In statements, Democratic Party leaders and the vice president’s would-be rivals praised his long career in government and said he would have been a welcome addition to the 2016 race. And indeed, one last Biden candidacy would have been nothing if not compelling—if only he had launched it in time.

'Illegal' Tax Deals in the EU

The European Commission has found tax advantages that Netherlands gave Starbucks and Luxembourg gave Fiat Chrysler’s financial unit illegal. The decision could have far-reaching implications for multinational companies and the tax agreements they have with countries in the European Union.

Here’s Margrethe Vestager, the European commissioner for competition, explaining the decision on Twitter:

Lux to recover € 20-30 mill from Fiat FT, NL to recover € 20-30 mill from Starbucks Manufacturing - unpaid taxes due to illegal state aid.

— Margrethe Vestager (@vestager) October 21, 2015

Tax rulings that artificially reduce a company's tax burden are illegal. All companies should pay their fair share of taxes.

— Margrethe Vestager (@vestager) October 21, 2015

In a statement, Vestager added: “The decisions send a clear message: National tax authorities cannot give any company, however large or powerful, an unfair competitive advantage compared to others. For most companies, especially the small and medium-sized, I hope this is a reassuring message—for those who have paid their fair share in tax.”

The sums involved are not large. For instance, in the Luxembourg case, the EC said, the tax ruling had reduced the tax burden of Fiat Chrysler’s financing arm by between €20 million and €30 million ($22.7 million to $34 million). Here’s more:

This is because the tax ruling accepts an extremely complex and artificial methodology to calculate Fiat Finance and Trade’s taxable profits, which cannot be justified by economic reality. As a result Fiat Finance and Trade only paid taxes on its underestimated profits. The Commission’s analysis showed that its taxable profits in Luxembourg would have been 20 times higher if the calculations had been done at market conditions.

In the case of the Netherlands, the EC said, Starbucks’s tax burden since 2008 was reduced by a total of between €20 and €30 million. As a result of Starbucks’s structure in Europe and its arrangement in the Netherlands, the EC said, the company’s “taxable profits in the Netherlands are substantially reduced.”

The royalty shifts the large majority of its profits—which cover coffee but in reality are largely generated from tea, pastries and cups etc.—to the group company in the UK. This company is not liable to pay corporate tax in the UK, nor in the Netherlands.

Here’s how the deals worked, according to The Guardian:

Starbucks has for years made Amsterdam the heart of its European operations, while Fiat set up group financing activities in Luxembourg. Income from many other countries was shifted into the Netherlands and Luxembourg via interest, royalties and other intra-group payments. Starbucks and Fiat had separately set up complex tax avoidance structures there that meant their income was subject to very low rates of tax. …

Brussels competition officials have no powers to challenge generous tax deals offered to multinationals directly. They are only able to intervene if it can be shown that a specific deal was offered to one multinational and not made available to competitors.

The decision by the EC, which is the executive arm of the EU, is expected to be appealed. Luxembourg, in a statement, said it “disagrees with the conclusions,” adding the Grand Duchy “will use appropriate due diligence analysis to the decision of the Commission as well as its legal rationale.” The Netherlands, in a separate statement, said the “Dutch cabinet is somewhat surprised about the decision.” It added the EC’s decision will be studied before the next steps are decided—a process that will take a few weeks. Starbucks also said it would appeal. An appeals process could take years.

Nonetheless, the EC’s decision has implications far beyond the two companies—and the two countries named on Wednesday. The Wall Street Journal points out that “hundreds, possibly thousands, of companies have used Luxembourg’s holding-company rules to reduce their tax burden from the country’s official 29% rate to almost nothing.”

Regulators are also investigating similar arrangements involving Apple in Ireland, Amazon in Luxembourg, and AB InBev, the world’s biggest brewer, in Belgium.

The Scariest Thing About the Goosebumps Movie

Spoilers ahead for the film Goosebumps

In the 10th book in the original Goosebumps series, The Ghost Next Door, Hannah Fairchild is a tween on summer vacation with nothing to do but ride her bike and suspect her new neighbor of being secretly dead. It’s very much a 1993 book—she’s upset at her best friend who’s away at camp and ignoring her letters—and it doesn’t age as well as other beloved children’s books might, with a dragging story, very little action, and goofy cliffhangers. (At the end of one chapter, Hannah thinks there’s a hooded demon on her bed. At the start of the next, she sees it’s just a coat.)

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Horror for Kids

So compared to The Ghost Next Door, the Goosebumps film adaptation starring Jack Black as the author R.L. Stine seems impressive. It’s got a slick adventurous feel, good scares, clever all-ages humor, and the right balance of sincerity and self-deprecation. But in another, crucial way, the earlier book feels like a much more modern work, despite being 22 years older.

The book inspired the film’s character of Hannah Stine, the author’s teenage daughter who teams up with her new neighbor Zach when the monsters in her father’s books come to life. But book-Hannah achieved a surprising amount of depth and agency in the story’s 124 pages, aimed at those with a fourth-grade reading level, no less. Meanwhile, the film reduces her to a thinly written, uncomplicated girl destined to serve only as a love interest to the main hero. In doing so, it betrays the ethos of gender equality built into the book series from the very start, and one element that made the Goosebumps series such a mega-selling phenomenon.

* * *

“The secret of Goosebumps … was it was the first book series to appeal equally to boys and girls,” Stine told The Washington Post in 2012, on the 20th anniversary of the series, which has sold over 350 million copies. “In fact, these books were originally done for a girl audience. And then the fan mail started coming in, and it was half from boys.” Anyone who read just a handful of Goosebumps books in elementary school would find this bit of trivia unsurprising. Stine’s books regularly featured both boys and girls as likable protagonists fighting killer cameras, werewolves, or ventriloquist dummies.

The Goosebumps film likely intended to do the same—and rightly so, considering its audience on opening weekend was split evenly between males and females—but it fumbles most significantly with how it portrays its young heroine. The first big twist reveals that Hannah (Odeya Rush) is one of her father’s creations—a book character come to life. Stine tells Zach he wrote Hannah to be a good, normal teenage girl, someone to love and to act as his companion. Zach, who has a growing crush on Hannah, is devastated but agrees to hide her true identity. But it turns out that Hannah already knows: “A girl can only have so many 16th birthdays,” she tells Zach near the end with surreal matter-of-factness, before she’s swept back into a book along with the other monsters. Then comes the second twist: Stine surprises Zach by writing Hannah’s character to life again and destroying the book she came from, to guarantee she will never return to its pages. This is the happy ending; the fact that Zach will grow older and Hannah won’t doesn’t seem to be an issue.

The film dwells more on Zach’s sense of loss and existential frustration when he learns about Hannah. Meanwhile Hannah seems unrealistically at peace with it all—even though she’s kept trapped in her house, homeschooled by her paranoid dad, and forced to relocate countless times. She’s brave, funny, accessible, magical, and beautiful in the way only idealized girls can be. And she doesn’t have a say in her return to her book—Zach only realizes her fate once it’s too late. The film doesn’t try hard to make the case that Hannah’s as “real” as anyone else despite being from a book, though it easily could have. That’s Goosebumps’s implicit premise when it comes to the monsters, after all.

Compare this to The Ghost Next Door: The twist is that Hannah Fairchild herself is the ghost, and the revelation has more of an impact since she’s the protagonist, not the pretty sidekick and love interest. When she learns she died in a fire along with her whole family and was left stuck on earth without realizing it, the book makes an effort to carve out her disorientation and sense of grief.

Now, Hannah understood why sometimes time seemed to stand still, and sometimes it floated by so quickly. Ghosts come and go, she thought sadly.

And:

It was all beginning to make sense to Hannah. The dreamlike summer days. The loneliness. The feeling that something wasn’t right.

Even earlier in the book, Hannah’s self-aware and determined—she agonizes over whether she’s doing the right thing by spying on her neighbor, she worries that he’ll think she’s crazy before concluding that maybe she is crazy. The film instead transfers all this emotional and psychological turmoil to Zach and Stine. And while movie-Hannah’s fate is controlled in the most literal sense by the men and boys in her life, book-Hannah picks her own destiny. When her neighbor is trapped in a burning house near the end of the book, she rushes into the flames to save him in an act of sacrifice that sets her free.

The film gives short shrift to its other female characters, too. The wonderful Amy Ryan (The Office, The Wire) plays Zach’s mom, but spends little time on screen influencing the plot. Jillian Bell (22 Jump Street, Workaholics), is hilarious as usual as Zach’s aunt, but her character is painted as man-crazy and desperate—and she later ends up with Stine. Zach’s dorky friend Champ has a crush on a popular girl, who appears once to make fun of him and then a second time for Champ to rescue her—and to reward him with a kiss.

Of the 10 highest-grossing films in 2015, two are kid-friendly and feature female leads: Inside Out and Cinderella. Goosebumps feels caught between the two. Its source material is a lot like Inside Out—deeply interested in the thoughts and emotions of girls. But the film itself is a lot more like the traditional and unabashedly heteronormative Cinderella—all the main characters end up in some kind of romantic relationship, which detracts from the already flat depictions of its women and girls. So when the climax of Goosebumps ends with Stine, Zach, and Champ standing around the closed book that swallowed up Hannah, it almost doesn’t matter that she returns a couple scenes later. By that point the film has already shown it doesn’t think she’s real, anyway.

Germany Clarifies: We’re Responsible for the Holocaust

In the surreal course of less than 24 hours, a controversy featuring the leaders of Israel and Germany over the history of the Holocaust has gone full circle.

On Tuesday evening, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ignited a firestorm with comments made at a Zionist Congress meeting suggesting that Haj Amin al-Husseini, a Palestinian religious leader who held the title of Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in the 1920s and 1930s, had inspired Hitler to enact the Final Solution, a policy that led to the deaths of more than 6 million Jews during World War II. Here is the remark in question:

Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews. And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, “If you expel them, they’ll all come here.” “So what should I do with them?” he asked. He said, “Burn them.”

The assertion was quickly denounced by Israeli historians and politicians as well as Palestinian leaders. Inevitably, the remark also spawned a Twitter hashtag #bibihistorylessons, which included responses like this:

Hindenburg destroyed by Palestinians in a dastardly terror attack #BibiHistoryLessons pic.twitter.com/QZBFBGJ4VP

— Peter Feld (@peterfeld) October 21, 2015

On Wednesday, remarkably, Germany responded as well. When asked about Netanyahu’s comments, Steffen Seibert, a spokesman for German Chancellor Angela Merkel, reiterated German culpability for the Holocaust:

All Germans know the history of the murderous race mania of the Nazis that led to the break with civilization that was the Holocaust.

This is taught in German schools for good reason, it must never be forgotten. And I see no reason to change our view of history in any way. We know that responsibility for this crime against humanity is German and very much our own.

It is true that Haj Amin al-Husseini was both an important ally of Hitler and a vicious anti-Semite. Writing in The Atlantic last week, Jeffrey Goldberg noted how al-Husseini’s anti-Jewish incitement regarding the status of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem has echoes in the ongoing violence in Israel and the West Bank.

On Wednesday, as Netanyahu sought to clarify his remarks, he explained that he never intended to give Hitler a pass for the Holocaust:

I had no intention to absolve Hitler of responsibility for his diabolical destruction of European Jewry. Hitler was responsible for the Final Solution to exterminate six million Jews. He made the decision.

Netanyahu also doubled down on his claim that al-Husseini bears some responsibility for enabling Hitler:

It is equally absurd to ignore the role played by the Mufti, Haj Amin al -Husseini, a war criminal, for encouraging and urging Hitler, Ribbentropp, Himmler and others, to exterminate European Jewry. There is much evidence about this, including the testimony of Eichmann's deputy at the Nuremberg trials, not now, but after World War II.

Regardless, Netanyahu, a historian’s son, may have squandered his credibility here. As The New York Times noted, Israeli historians were among the most strident in rejecting Netanyahu’s speech. Professor Meir Litvak of Tel Aviv University called the remarks “the height of the distortion of history.” He added:

Hitler did not need Husseini to convince him. Hitler spoke of the destruction of the Jews in his famous speech in 1939, in which he prophesied that if war will break out and the Jews started it, the result will be the destruction of the Jewish race. He repeated these declarations.

A Very Brief History of Israeli Leaders Looking Through Covered Binoculars

Both the relative smallness of Israel as well as the relative nearness of its enemies ensure that whenever an Israeli political leader has a crisis-related photo-op, it often includes the leader looking sternly through a pair of binoculars.

Tuesday was one such day. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu traveled to Israel’s border with Gaza following a surge in violence in Israel and the West Bank in recent weeks. Surveying west from a military outpost, Netanyahu held up a pair of binoculars and told reporters that Gaza is “under control.” The only problem was that the binocular covers were still on.

You might think this to be a minor gaffe—it probably is—but the closed binoculars photo-op gaffe has a surprisingly storied and potent history in Israel.

If you’re not convinced, consider that Netanyahu felt compelled to respond (quite muscularly) to the Israeli daily Yediot, which remarked upon the photo.

אני רוצה להרגיע את Ynet ו"ידיעות": יש לי קצת ניסיון עם משקפות. pic.twitter.com/JDu9BNtawJ

— Benjamin Netanyahu (@netanyahu) October 20, 2015

Translation: I want to reassure you Yediot, I have some experience with binoculars. (Netanyahu served as a captain in Sayeret Matkal, which is among the most elite units in the Israel Defense Forces.)

Unsurprisingly, his response triggered some criticism. Stav Shaffir, a dovish member of Israel’s Labour party, tweeted back:

I'd like to reassure you, Mr. Prime Minister, that no one ever had a doubt. We have always known that you are, at most, just an observer on the sidelines, never actually acting to improve the situation.

For obvious reasons, national perception of an Israeli leader’s ability to provide security remains a very serious thing. Last month, 71 percent of Israelis registered their disappointment with Netanyahu’s handling of the recent uptick in violence.  

A closed-binoculars moment turned out to be damaging for Amir Peretz, the former Israeli defense minister. Peretz was notably one of the only defense ministers in Israeli history to not have a wealth of military experience. (His three predecessors in the post had been generals.)

In 2006, Israel, led by Peretz and the equally unseasoned Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, fought a month-long war with Hezbollah that was widely considered to be a stalemate. Peretz’s standing suffered greatly and was made all the more worse when he was photographed here in 2007 watching a training exercise in the Golan Heights.

Effi Sharir / AP “The photographer said Peretz raised the capped binoculars three times, nodding as [Israeli Army Chief Gabi] Ashkenazi explained what he was ‘seeing,’” the AP noted at the time. The photo made the cover of a number of Israeli daily papers. A few months later, he was voted out as head of the Labor Party in favor of Ehud Barak, who then became defense minister.[image error]

Peretz was ultimately instrumental in bringing Israel's Iron Dome missile defense system into operation. It hardly helped his image. Five years later, as he was about to place third in the Labor Party elections, Peretz bragged to reporters, “I guess I could see more with those closed binoculars than a lot of those generals could see.”

Lastly, here’s Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2002 during the Second Intifada:

Nir Elias / Reuters Perhaps it was the infancy of the Internet at work or just Sharon’s unparalleled and extremely complicated reputation as a military leader, but seemingly little was said about this picture.[image error]

Politicians, Enough With the Authenticity Porn

In some sense, it was inevitable. Martin O’Malley, the governor of Maryland and a candidate running for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, went on The View and performed … a rendition of Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood.” Guesting on the talk show, O’Malley mentioned Katy Perry’s benefit concert for his rival, Hillary Clinton. Removing his blazer and lifting an acoustic guitar from where it had been placed, conveniently, next to him, O’Malley grinned, gamely.

And then: He strummed. He sang. “So, baby, now we’ve got baaaaaad blood...” The women around him—at the table, in their audience—laughed. “HEY!” they all shout-sang, helping him out.

Which was all, despite the table’s pervasive pluckiness, extremely awkward. Even the ladies of The View, themselves no strangers to musical antics, visibly cringed at the governor’s display.

And yet O’Malley, in going on a Popular Talk Show to perform a Currently Particularly Popular Pop Song, was simply ticking off boxes in a checklist that has been part of presidential politics for a very long time. Americans tend to like their politics leavened with a heavy helping of pop culture—and of music, in particular. Which is why, on a recent appearance on The Tonight Show, Carly Fiorina a-capella’ed her way through a song she wrote, she says, about her dogs. And why Mike Huckabee, a bass player, regularly sings-and-strums on his Fox News show. And why Ted Cruz, at a campaign event in Dallas in 2013, performed a version of “Amazing Grace” that was set, inexplicably, to the tune of the theme song from “Gilligan’s Island.” And why, at his inaugural gala in 2010, Chris Christie—a passionate Springsteen fan—performed “Born to Run.”

It’s also why Bernie Sanders recorded a folk album in 1987. And why, ten years later, then-First Lady Hillary Clinton—after joking about her tone-deafness—sang show tunes with Rosie O’Donnell. (“If nobody hears me, I’ll be okay,” Clinton joked.)

The candidate-crooners may well truly enjoy music. And their performances may occasionally prove to be iconic. (See Bill Clinton, sax-ing it up on Arsenio. And, much more poignantly, President Obama—at that point no longer a candidate—offering a powerful rendition of “Amazing Grace” during the funeral services of Clementa Pinckney.) For the most part, though, these displays are embarrassing. And not just for the candidates. They’re embarrassing for democracy.

One’s ability to sing or strum a guitar or play a saxophone has long served, in the cultural imagination, as a convenient proxy for coolness; it makes sense that politicians, so desperate to appeal to younger voters and in general to co-opt the “cool,” would try to capitalize on that. But many of these performances aren’t framed, necessarily, as demonstrations of coolness. (Look again upon O’Malley’s lyrics, ye mighty, and despair.) They’re meant instead, to get attention from people who otherwise might not much care about presidential politics. (Sample headlines from O’Malley’s The View performance: “Watch Martin O’Malley Sing Taylor Swift’s ‘Bad Blood’ on ‘The View’,” “Presidential Candidate Martin O’Malley Just Busted Out a Guitar and Started Singing Taylor Swift’s ‘Bad Blood’,” “Martin O’Malley Kicks Out the T-Swizzle Jams on ‘The View’.”)

But the performances are also meant, more importantly, to make a different kind of cultural point. O’Malley, today, was engaging in a time-honored ritual of American presidential candidacy: He was genuflecting at the altar of the authentic. He was showing us that he’s humble. He was showing us that he’s game. He assumed, rightly, that if he wants to win an office that will give him war powers and nuclear codes, he will first be required to Ryan Adams himself on national television.

He understood, as every politician must, that the path to the presidency is paved with small humiliations.

Which is another way of saying that politicians are, at this point, skilled participants in authenticity porn. They regularly perform human relatability, gnawing on be-sticked pork at the Iowa County Fair, sharing their iTunes lists with Rolling Stone, kissing babies, hugging moms, singing Taylor Swift on The View, and generally insisting to their potential constituents that candidates, like celebrities, are just like us.

It’s worth wondering why, exactly, Americans are so interested in the everydayness of our politicians. It’s worth wondering why we invest so much in our desire to have beers with our candidates, rather than have faith in them. It’s worth wondering why we seem to prefer politicians who are just like us rather than meaningfully better than us.

And it’s worth wondering, too, whether there’s a better way for politicians to prove that they have a soul than by covering Taylor on The View. “If music be the food of love,” Shakespeare’s Duke Orsino declared, “play on.” He added, though: “Give me excess of it; that surfeiting, the appetite may sicken, and so die.”

How Original Can The Force Awakens Be?

On Monday the new trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens dropped, and predictably, the Internet freaked out. There was a mad rush to buy tickets; wild fan theories emerged on just what might be up with the conspicuously absent Luke Skywalker; and perhaps more surprisingly, Bill Kristol offered a neo-conservative defense of the Galactic Empire. Fevers are running high as the film’s December 18 U.S. release date draws ever-closer, but there’s still so much we don’t know. Including this question: How original can the movie actually be?

David Sims: Spencer, in your analysis of the trailer, you hit on the intense waves of nostalgia coming off The Force Awakens already. The chief villain, Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), literally worships Death Vader’s melted helmet. Han Solo talks about the days of Jedi fighting the Dark Side like it’s ancient mythology. There’s all this chatter about the Death Star-like base glimpsed on the poster capable of blowing up whole solar systems. You’ve worried in the past that things look almost too familiar. But maybe that’s the meta-point J.J. Abrams is trying to make. Here’s a franchise inexorably scarred by George Lucas’s underwhelming prequel trilogy, ravaged by overuse of CGI, wooden acting, and those gosh-darn midi-chlorians. So might the only recipe for success be a return to that old-time religion?

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The Trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens Hints at an Apocalyptic War Movie

Because that’s what’s pumping people up more than anything, right? Certainly, the swell of John Williams’s score, the screaming noise of TIE Fighter engines, and the practical, tactile sense of the special effects is what revs me up. Yes, it’s very exciting to see John Boyega and Daisy Ridley getting some serious action beats, and to hear Adam Driver’s sonorous villain-voice, but it’s interesting to think about just how little we actually know about this movie’s plot. I’m fine with Abrams keeping most details under lock and key, and I imagine fans are too—but what do we know? Rey’s (Ridley) a scavenger. Finn (Boyega) is an ex-Stormtrooper. Han Solo is an old man. Luke’s missing. The Empire, rebranded The First Order, is up to no good. That’s about all we’ve got.

So I’ll take the nostalgia—though Bill Kristol’s crackpot take on the Empire might help define nostalgia’s limits. Folks, the Empire was not a liberal meritocracy, it was a galactic police state that blew up planets to quell rebellion. This is the kind of damage Lucas did with his prequel films, and the reason fans cheered when Disney bought the rights to the Star Wars franchise for billions. The Star Wars prequels essayed the fall of the Old Republic and the decline of the Jedi Order as plot dressing for its supposed grand arc: the rise of Darth Vader and the Emperor. They existed to justify his original stories, which needed no justification, and even though they portrayed the Republic as being bogged down by bureaucracy, they also paralleled the Empire’s emergence with Hitler’s sweep to power, with the Clone Wars functioning as a kind of Reichstag fire.

This might be why we need Abrams’s “greatest hits” approach. Let’s sweep away all those tortured fanboy memories, all the damage done by the prequels, and give Star Wars a chance to get back on track. What do you think?

Spencer Kornhaber: The nostalgia factor has tractor-beamed me and so many others into a planet of earnest hype, but it also makes me worry about being swindled in some way. After the totally bizarre tone and look of the prequels, the sight of TIE fighters and the prospect of a trench-run scene seem as appealing as a cozy cave to hide in would be when pursued by Imperial starships. But maybe it’ll turn out that this is no cave—this is capitalism, recycling memories for dollars rather than doing what Lucas’s original trilogy did better than anything else: Use gobsmacking creativity to create a world that viewers had never seen before.

Look, the Disney movies are sequels, so of course they’re not going to feel totally new. Still I’m still struck by how much in the promo material seems like the product of a very awesome game of paint-by-numbers: a lonely desert-planet youth called to greatness; a helmeted villain wielding a super-weapon; scrappy guys in jumpsuits fighting a fascist, genocidal force (LOL and WTF at anyone who thinks the Empire were good guys—poor Alderaan was a pacifist planet!). Those tropes are related to the essential appeal of Star Wars, yes, but too much retreading would be a betrayal of the series’ pioneering spirit.

As we’ve discussed, though, there are signs of clever self-awareness about nostalgia within The Force Awakens, and it’s more than likely that there are huge curveballs to come. The racial and gender diversity in the principle cast members is new, for one thing. Maybe the advertising so far has all been a work of misdirection, and the good/evil dichotomy is not quite what you’d expect in the film (see: fan theories about Luke as villain). Perhaps there won’t be a big triumphant ending for The Force Awakens—after all, unlike when Lucas made the first Star Wars movie, everyone knows this is only one chapter in a larger story. Certainly, the filmmaking techniques won’t be straight outta 1977, however much hype there is about a return to hand-built sets and film stock.

But when I whine about wanting a sense of newness, I’m talking things that may seem more superficial but are actually essential to the Star Wars magic: character designs, sets, and effects that make you go what?! (Think of the first time you glimpsed, say, Jabba the Hutt, or the Death Star.) The closest analogue this latest trailer provided was the jungle temple’s ambling red droid—who, to be honest, reminded me a bit of another iconic robot associated with J.J. Abrams. Then again, mind-blowing inventiveness is a lot to ask for—just making a sci-fi blockbuster that competes with the Marvel machine critically and commercially is tough enough.

Sims: No, Spencer, we don’t know that Alderaan was peaceful—perhaps those were just the lies of a REBEL SPY. At least, that’s the argument posed by Jonathan V. Last in his supposedly seminal article “The Case for the Empire,” which Kristol proposed as the ur-text for his crackpot theory. “Leia’s lies are perfectly defensible—she thinks she’s serving the greater good—but they make her wholly unreliable on the question of whether or not Alderaan really is peaceful and defenseless,” Last writes. This fountain of madness might be the funniest thing that’s emerged from the trailer reveal so far.

Inventiveness is, indeed, a lot to ask for from a blockbuster, and an interesting third act might be an even higher bar to clear. Maybe The Force Awakens ends with our heroes trying to take down the planet-sized superweapon, just like the original Star Wars did, but honestly, every Marvel movie pretty much wraps up that way as well. There are definitely some moments that feel true to Abrams rather than the series he’s taking on—that trademark lens flare over Kylo Ren’s shoulder, that VFX wizardry that shows the Millennium Falcon tunneling through hyperspace—but what stuck out most prominently was the feeling of chaos, that apocalyptic vibe you mentioned.

In the original films, the Empire is pretty solidly in control, and its ships cruise around in imposing formations, while the Rebels always feel like they’re clinging to their one rickety hidey-hole, trying to stay one step ahead from death. Thirty years on, Abrams is giving us a galaxy racked with violence and death. There’s Kylo Ren and his black-clad minions wreaking havoc in the rain, the chrome Stormtrooper Captain Phasma presiding over a burning village, TIE fighters careening out of control, and lots of open warfare, not the Rebel Alliance guerrilla tactics we remember so fondly. There’s some real boldness at work there, and a sense that Abrams is setting a table for three films, rather than just his own. The Force Awakens might lean on some Star Wars greatest hits to reel old fans back in, but after that’s accomplished, there’s much more work to be done.

Kornhaber: Great point about the way the scope and mood of this film might differ from all those that came before it. This is really the most exciting thing about Disney’s plans to create an ever-expanding cinematic universe: the chance to tell new kinds of tales in a familiar but fascinating setting. I’m reminded of the teaser for next winter’s Star Wars movie, Rogue One. The video’s just a shaky bootleg featuring an old Obi-Wan Kenobi voiceover, a long landscape shot, and a creepy remix of the John Williams score—and yet I’ve watched it dozens of times. It suggests Star Wars iconography infused with a sense of dread and desperation that hasn’t quite ever been at the center of a Lucasfilm before, and that’s intriguing.

There’s potential for The Force Awakens to test some of the precepts that are taken for granted in Star Wars mythology, and really in most mythologies. Just as Bill Kristol thinks the Empire wasn’t so bad, it appears that in the rebooted Star Wars universe there are people who pine for the days of order under Emperor Palpatine. How does that happen? What does that mean? I don’t want the Galaxy Far, Far Away to get the full Chris Nolan treatment, but a Star Wars where the moral stakes aren’t always straightforward, where recognizable creatures and characters and places can still serve up surprises, might be one worth keeping.