Today, brings news that Dirar Abusisi’s academic advisors in Ukraine have further dented the Israeli charges against him which claim that he led an undercover life as Hamas’ chief rocket designer in Gaza. The two professors who supervised his actual research on electrical power plants have both said neither of them had any involvement with rocket technology as the indictment claims and that neither taught at the military school which Israeli intelligence claimed schooled him to become Hamas’ Rocket King. In fact, the school doesn’t exist. When asked to explain the discrepancies by Haaretz the prosecutor spoke eloquently: No comment. Speaks volumes, no?
Former professors of a Palestinian engineer captured in Ukraine and sent to Israel to face charges that he built missiles for the militant group Hamas, have refuted allegations in his indictment that he was taught weapons systems during his university studies.
…Konstantin Petrovich Vlasov told The Associated Press that Abu Sisi was his doctoral student in civilian electricity systems at the Kharkiv National Academy of Municipal Services in the mid-1990s, but denies he was taught about weapons.
…Vlasov, an expert in civilian electrical and mineral processing systems, said he had no connection to the military, never sent any of his students to a military academy and has never even seen a missile.
“This is all lies, there isn’t a single word of truth in it,” Vlasov, 80, said in a telephone interview. ”I have never lectured at any military academy and never had anything to do with anything military. I have only seen missiles on TV.”
Vlasov initially supervised Abu Sisi’s doctoral work, then moved to the Russian city of St. Petersburg and handed AbuSisi over to another professor at the academy, Filipp Govorov.
Abu Sisi’s dissertation on the use of transformers in city electricity grids, viewed by the AP at Ukraine’s national library, lists Govorov as Abu Sisi’s Ph.D. adviser.
Govorov also dismissed the charges against Abu Sisi.
“They said that he allegedly dealt with rockets, but what we did had nothing to do with it,” Govorov told the AP.
I reported this here weeks ago and it’s good to hear Abusisi’s faculty advisors confirm it. Now, let the Mossad disprove what these teachers claim by displaying photos of them standing next to missiles or of their classroom blackboards filled with calculations about rocket fuel and navigation systems. They should be able to provide such evidence if the story they’ve concocted has any validity.
The AP story also repeats a fact first reported here that the main professor accused in the indictment isn’t even named properly. It entirely omits his last name using instead his patronymic (father’s name). It would be as if someone called me “Richard son of John.” Who could tell who this was? Again, very sloppy work by the intelligence goons who patched this story together.
The accused/victim’s lawyer, Tal Linoy, has revived an interesting theory explaining the Mossad’s pursuit and rendition of Abusisi, one that we heard quite a bit earlier in the history of the case. It was a theory expounded by Israeli reporters never offering any other proof than the rumor they heard, likely from an intelligence official. The story goes that Abusisi, through his affiliations with Hamas, somehow had privileged information about the whereabouts of Gilad Shalit. We never heard any substantiation for this belief and it was never raised in the indictment.
But if the Mossad did believe Abusisi knew something about Shalit this would explain the extraordinary lengths it went to kidnap and render him from Ukraine to Israel. It’s this part of the kidnapping I’ve never understood:
Abu Sisi’s Israeli lawyer, Tal Linoy, says he believes Israeli authorities detained Abu Sisi based on an erroneous tip that he had information about the whereabouts of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier captured by the Gaza militant group Hamas nearly five years ago.
After that proved wrong, the government is now trying to save face, the lawyer said; he provided no evidence for his theory.
“I think they took him by mistake,” Linoy said. “Now this fire needs to be put out, because … the image of the state, the government and Israeli special services is at stake. They needed to dig something up.”
I was tickled by all the naysayers and doubters who wrote comments here accepting at face value the claims of the State about the victim. Of course, the argument went, it justified kidnapping him if he was the mastermind behind all those rockets hitting Sderot. But, I replied, what if he wasn’t? And he isn’t.
I knew the charges to be false based on my own research. The professors’ statement hammers even more nails into the coffin of the prosecution.
As I reported earlier, the Israeli indictment is a tissue of lies which Dirar’s brother, Yousef, told me he concocted under the duress of interrogation. The reason why the story is full of discrepancies and invetions is that Dirar created a fiction that would satisfy his interrogators. Apparently, the investigators didn’t bother to do even the remotest due diligence to verify the “facts” Dirar offered them. That’s why Israel put out such an embarrasssing legal document. But only embarrassing to those of us who know better. Israeli intelligence operatives apparently aren’t so easily embarrassed.
I wondered why the professors haven’t made such a statement before this until I thought that they teach at state-affiliated educational institutions, which could make their positions untenable if they brooked the authorities. Given that very senior Ukrainian ministers and intelligence officers have been implicated in this affair, it can’t have been easy for these professors to come forward.
Both Israel and Ukraine will face international demands for accountability in this matter. If the prosecution is shown to be false and Israel is shown to be covering up its original error it will redound to both nations disfavor. There will be legal cases brought and demands for compensation just as Turkey has brought against Israel for the Mavi Marmara disaster. From the looks of it, both countries may be paying for their egregious behavior for years to come. Ukraine stands the most to lose since it is a signatory to European treaties which cover such illegalities as its agents and officials engaged in. But Israel will not get off easily either.
Amir Oren is one of Haaretz’s most artful journalists when he addresses sensitive security-related matters. In his current story (Hebrew, English here), if you read between the lines and put 2+2 together, you’ll understand that Oren is telling us with a wink and a nod that a few of Israel’s Wise Old Men (not all are old, and some haven’t always been wise, but in this case they were) frustrated a plan by Bibi Netanyahu to attack Iran in 2010. This accords with statements made recently by Meir Dagan in which he frets that with the removal from office of virtually the entire military and intelligence leadership over the past few months, there remains no one who will represent an honest and pragmatic voice regarding Israeli policy toward Iran.
Oren’s story is a partially imaginary account of the aftermath of Bibi Netanyahu’s 2011 attack on Iran (which he ominously calls the “first” Iran war). He imagines a national commission of inquiry appointed to examine why Bibi insisted on going to war despite the warnings of his military and intelligence echelons; and why he violated established law and precedent in doing so. Among the tidbits that reveal the outline of the real attack is Oren’s statement that Bibi got his cabinet council to approve a limited military operation, while his real intent was to commence a war against Iran.
I say the account is “partially imaginary” because Oren slips into his account events that really did happen. For example, he reveals that in 2010 Meir Dagan, Gabi Ashkenazi, Yuval Diskin, Shimon Peres and IDF senior commander Gadi Eisenkrot tried to foil a plan by Bibi to attack Iran (in reality they appear to have succeeded at least at the time, in Oren’s imaginary plot they failed).
Through liberally quoting portions of the Winograd Commission findings about the 2006 Lebanon War dealing with the responsibilities of the national military and political leadership to conduct war responsibly, Oren makes clear that in the eyes of Bibi’s opponents his actual Iran war plans would’ve caused Israel to fall into the same trap it faced in Lebanon. And that’s precisely why the Wise Men opposed Bibi. Now, these are some of the same guys I’ve railed against in the past for their various crimes of omission and commission. But if they did what Oren alludes to, then they performed precisely the role that leaders should–they stood in the way of a monomaniacal leader intent on taking Israel into a war that promised potentially disastrous consequences for Israel.
The Haaretz reporter implies that when Bibi and Barak presented their military plans to these leaders they balked and questioned their “legality.” They invoked the dramatic refusal of Gen. Yisrael Tal to accept an order from Defense Minister Moshe Dayan to resume Israel’s war against Egypt, a refusal which led to cancellation of the plans.
Oren adds a profound touch of irony when he notes that the deliberations of the fictional commission were interrupted when the din of air raid sirens and the thunderous roar of incoming Iranian Shihab missiles forced them to scramble into an air raid shelter.
In case any of you are wondering why the reporter couldn’t write the story straight, consider how many ways in which such news would violate Israeli censorship and gag orders.
Maariv fleshes out the real events (Hebrew) on which Oren bases his imaginary story, saying that Dagan’s real break with Bibi and Barak occurred a year ago during discussions among the senior ministerial committee of an attack on Iran (which the Mossad chief opposed). The report says that during these deliberations Dagan came to believe that the two leaders were intent on getting Israel into a “dangerous military adventure in Iran.” Now that those who opposed the attack have departed the scene Israel’s former top spy worries that “there is no one to stop them.”
Dagan has been attacked viciously by Bibi’s henchman as someone who is “insane” (a term apparently used by the prime minister himself to describe his formerly trusted intelligence chief) and seeking to topple the government; and that he’s destroyed whatever deterrent Israel had over Iran by opposing such a war. As a loyal servant of the State, the veteran Israeli intelligence officer would have to have weighed this possibility seriously and carefully. No one could dismiss lightly such criticism, nor would Dagan. There can only be one reason why he would take such a drastic step by criticizing Bibi so intensively (in three separate statements) and publicly: he really believes the prime minister intended and still intends to go to war against Iran. And he believes such a war would be an utter disaster should it happen.
The split we’re seeing here rarely happens in Israeli politics. Usually, at least superficially, the military, intelligence and political echelons circle the wagons when it comes to the important life or death issues. There is rarely anyone with the guts or courage to stand against the prevailing consensus. So what we’re seeing with Dagan’s cri de coeur may be historic and certainly is dramatic. The question is–can Dagan prevail? Can he derail a government plan to attack Iran? But even if he can’t, he is setting himself up as the sole sane one who resisted temptation and tried to speak truth to power. This should stand him in good stead politically if there is anything left of Israel to lead should Bibi-Barak take Israel into its next foolhardy military adventure.
A newly released Wikileaks cable (original here) indicates that the U.S. warned Israel as far back as 2008 not to do business with the very shipping company to which Ofer Brothers sold the Raffles Park, because the shipping line was an Iranian front. The cable warned that IRISL was masking its activities in order to avoid sanctions:
– IRISL is increasingly employing deceptive measures to disguise the end user, and/or destination of its cargo, and IRISL’s involvement in the transaction.
This appears to be precisely what happened when Ofer Brothers sold the ship to another party which promptly turned around and sold it to IRISL, which was then able to use it to transport cargo to Iran that presumably would violate the international sanctions regime.
The following passage from the Haaretz article exposes what appears to be the almost colossal incompetence of the Israeli foreign ministry:
A senior source in the Foreign Ministry conceded that not enough steps were taken in recent years by the Foreign Ministry, the Finance Ministry and the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor to explain the sanctions against Iran to the private sector. The official said this was because no legislation or cabinet decision had been enacted on the matter.
The Foreign Ministry learned in February 2011 that the U.S. government was about to impose sanctions on Ofer Brothers, but did not approach the administration with regard to the company.
Israel learned four months ago that one of Israel’s largest conglomerates was to be placed on a U.S. blacklist and it did nothing. Say what? Is that believable? If it’s true, it’s yet another nail in the coffin of Avigdor Lieberman’s leadership of the MFA. Would you buy a used car or ship from the guy?
Of course, it’s entirely possible that if Ofer Brothers was providing regular access for Israel’s spy agency directly into Iran, as an Israeli source told me, that Israel WOULD ignore the blacklist warning because the benefit to Israeli intelligence was so great. I wonder whether the U.S. government had any inkling that Ofer Brothers were providing such access to Iran? And would they have placed the company on the blacklist if they knew?
Naksa Day wounded protester dragged to safety (Nir Elias/Reuters)
Today and Nakba Day may go down in the recent history of the Israeli-Arab conflict as two days in which Israel massacred unarmed Arab civilians in cold blood thus meriting a war crime investigation. Approximately 600 Palestinian supporters massed today at Quneitra and Majdal Shams on Israel’s Golan border and attempted to repeat their earlier crossing of the border on Nakba Day a few weeks ago. They were met with three battalions of IDF soldiers, police and attack dogs. When the protesters were still on the Syrian side of the border, IDF snipers opened fire on those within 200 meters (600 feet). Arab children approached the fence as a group and they too were fired upon and wounded.
The IDF is claiming, as usual with no supporting evidence, that a demonstrator threw a Molotov cocktail which landed in a mine field and ignited a mine, which killed most of those who died. The video of the event should easily prove or disprove this claim.
Here is the typical lame, mealy-mouthed garbage that passes for IDF justification for its murderous behavior:
“Our firing was measured and cautious,” a senior Northern Command officer said. “We tried to avoid casualties, but at the same time, we’re not willing under any circumstances to allow them to damage the border [fence] or cross it.”
The use of live fire was justified, he added, because this is an international border, and “sovereignty must be upheld at any cost.”
Qalandia activists place their bodies between IDF 'skunk truck' and protesters in act of non-violent resistance (Ahmad al-Nimer)
Interesting that the officer mistakenly claims that this is an “international border,” which it isn’t. It is a disputed border with Israel clinging to territory it conquered and stole from Syria and which it refuses to return despite the fact that Syria has expressed multiple times its willingness to resolve all differences. Under international law, I believe a case can be made that Israel was not defending its own border, and that it was firing on the protesters from territory which once was Syrian and will again be as soon as Israeli leaders come to their senses and return it in exchange for long-term peace. How do you justify killing Syrians because they’re attempting to cross into territory that international law deems to be Syrian? I think Israel has stuck its fist into a hornet’s nest on this one.
Let’s be clear, given the previous massacre on Nakba Day, to kill another 22 demonstrators as Syria is claiming, while wounding hundreds more, is an out and out war crime. What’s more, there will ample video documentation of Israel’s slaughter by Syria TV. For those who may argue there simply was no other way, it must be noted that the Quneitra protest was quelled largely with non-lethal means.
Though the IDF succeeded in preventing a mass border crossing Sunday, officers voiced fears that Israel has lost the initiative
Gee d’ya think?
The slaughter at Majdal Shams is like déjà vu all over again. How many times have we seen the IDF repeat virtually the same bloody scenario (Lebanon 2006, Gaza 2009, Mavi Marmara, etc.)? It seems useless to remind the international community that repeating the same action which failed the first time (and all previous times it’s been attempted) is the definition of insanity. How long will the world allow this bloody insanity to continue before it puts its foot down and intervenes? For the love of God, vote for Palestinian statehood come September. And if Obama undermines this effort shame upon him. He presents no viable alternative. Does he want to go down in history as the American Nero, fiddling while Israel and the frontline states burn?
Moshe Ronen has just published a profile of me in Yediot Achronot, one of Israel’s largest daily newspapers. It conveys my ideas very clearly and treats my work and blog with respect, for which I’m grateful. It’s important, for example, for people to know that I oppose terror, whether Israeli or Palestinian, and that I don’t oppose the fight against terror…as long as it respects international law.
I credit Moshe not only for believing it would worthwhile to interview me, but also for fighting for publication of the story over the past few weeks when its fate hung in the balance.
I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop and half expect someone’s going to interview me and write a piece that’s a hatchet job. But this is the third profile written (previous ones were published in Ha’Ir and Walla) and all of them have been excellent. It’s also ironic that this is the third major profile of my work published in Israel, but as far as American Jewish publications…I can’t even buy a cup of coffee. Blackballed both from The Forward and JTA (except the occasional mention by a gutsy Ron Kampeas).
I’ll offer a link to the online version of the article when I have one. In the meantime, Hebrew speakers can read the pdf version.
Until a few years ago, it seemed that the narrative of the Israeli-Arab conflict was determined mostly by Israel: there was the miraculous vote in the UN General Assembly recognizing the partition. Then the even more miraculous 1948 War of Independence, which established the State of Israel. Yes, there was the momentary setback of the 1956 Suez War, whose victorious territorial prize of the Sinai was wrenched from Israel’s hands by Pres. Dwight Eisenhower. But the Lord’s miracles continued in 1967 as Israel reunited the nation’s eternal capital, Jerusalem. The sparks of Messianic redemption were also sown by the return to our Biblical ancestral lands in places that came to be called by many in Israel, Judea and Samaria. Israel affirmed its rendez-vous with Jewish destiny by returning its sons and daughters to these Biblical holy places in Shechem and Hebron, where they became latter-day versions of the pioneers of the 1920s who “cleared the land and drained the swamps.”
There wasn’t much room in all this history, destiny, and messianic redemption for the narrative of the “loser.” Israelis, the most humane among them, could afford to acknowledge the sins that enabled the triumphs of Israel. These visionaries bucked the national consensus, but they were swimming upstream and against the prevailing winds. Over time, their voice became thinner and thinner until it was mostly snuffed out in the shouts of triumph from the Israeli nationalist camp.
But over the past decade or more, the tables have turned. With the onset of the Intifadas, Palestinians began to make a claim to a narrative of their own. It wasn’t just a story they proclaimed for themselves. They asked the rest of the world to acknowledge it as well. Slowly, ever so slowly, the world has turned from intense admiration of Israel’s achievements to recognition of the moral cost of those victories.
In the past 11 years, we have gone through two Intifadas, wars in Gaza in (2009) and Lebanon (2006). With each of these new developments in the Palestinian national struggle, Israel’s narrative receded and the Palestinian’s advanced.
Though the term Nakba has existed for decades, few outside the Arab world have been willing to acknowledge either it or the historical event it denotes. Until now. The historical truth of this tragedy can no longer be mitigated or denied as it has been for so long. Israel has tried to stick its finger in the dyke in order to suppress awareness. It was sung the praises of its own national myth attempting to drown out those who paid the price for Israel’s joy. But there is about the Nakba, what James Joyce called an “ineluctable modality of the visible,” something which can no longer be denied, a fundamental truth that has been repressed far too long.
Now, the tender shoots of the Arab Spring have burst forth. On Nakba Day last month, Palestinian supporters overwhelmed four Israeli borders demanding that the injustice of the Nakba be redressed. Tomorrow, many of these same protesters will do it again, this time to commemorate the Palestinian loss represented by the 1967 War. They’re calling it Naksa, the Setback. Perhaps slightly less tragic than Nakba, or Catastrophe. But the aggregation of these terms strengthens the sense of a wrong that cannot be denied.
News stories today indicate that Hezbollah has asked for protests on the Lebanese border be cancelled. So we don’t quite know what the dimensions of the event will be. But there is one thing of which you can be sure. The dimensions of this struggle will grow day by day, protest by protest. And as they do, Israel’s case will grow weaker and weaker.
The very notion of such a bribe is insulting both to Turkey and to the Israeli-Arab peace process. Can a nation be bought? Can peace be bought? For a mess of porridge? What does Obama take Turkey for? This is a proud nation that can’t be taken in by charades. Its leader, Pres. Erdogan is no fool. He ought to tell the U.S. and Israel that it knows what the price of peace is and when those two are ready to pay, then they have his phone number, as Secretary of State Baker said during the Bush administration, and should call. Until then, they should stop wasting everyone’s time with makeshift measures and blandishments like peace conferences. What good is such a meeting when Israel isn’t ready to deal?
As I wrote in my latest contribution to Truthout, a September date with destiny is looming for Palestine in the UN General Assembly. This is yet another incremental advance of the cause of Palestine and another nail in the coffin of the Occupation. From my reading of UN processes, the Security Council can delay but not deny Palestinian statehood. It’s only a matter of time. As Meir Dagan has been saying lately, time is not on Israel’s side. The longer it delays the worse the deal it will get.
I should make clear that I’m not talking about erasing the Israeli narrative or expecting Israelis to grovel at the feet of those they’ve injured. The Israeli narrative is still valid. All those achievements are laudable, something Israel and the Jewish people can be proud of. But not at the expense of Palestine. Not if Palestine must be denied. What the world demands is that there be two legitimate narratives neither of which eclipses or demeans the other. Two equal narratives. When Bibi Netanyahu or whoever is the Israeli PM at the time can do that, he knows Mahmoud Abbas’s phone number. He can call.
How we can stop worrying and learn to 'love' the Iranian bomb
Seymour Hersh’s article in the New Yorker, Iran and the Bomb, is stirring up great interest, because he argues that the latest National Intelligence Estimate, released last February, says that essentially nothing has changed since the last (2007) NIE. In other words, just as the earlier report said it appeared Iran had ended its nuclear weapons program in 2003 (after Iran’s arch-enemy Saddam Hussein was overthrown), the new version could find no definitive evidence showing that Iran had resumed its effort.
Now, this is an incredibly controversial claim just as the 2003 report was. Then, Bush and Cheney railed against the notion that everything they’d been saying about demon Iran was wrong. Now, the 2010 NIE contradicts almost every basis of current U.S. policy toward Iran. That’s why Obama’s staff have anonymously (no courage among this lot) smeared Hersh’s work in Politico as little better than a school “book report.”
Hersh reveals that U.S. intelligence analysts believe that when Iran was developing its nuclear weapons program, the purpose was not to deter an attack from Israel or the U.S. as Bibi Netanyahu claims, but against Iraq, which the Iranians believed was developing a bomb (just as Bush believed, remember WMD?). This accords with a number of analyses I’ve read, which say that Iran historically is most threatened by its regional neighbors. It fought a costly eight-year, war-to-the-death against Iraq and logically, the primary reason for building a bomb would be to protect itself from attack from that quarter, and not from Israel.
Meir Dagan, Israel’s recently departed Mossad chief, doesn’t quite agree with Hersh. Lately, he’s been saying that Iran is trying to develop a bomb and that it will do so. But perhaps most radical of all (compared to Hersh at least) is Dagan’s contention that Iran will get the bomb, but that this will not mean the end of the world; or as Terry Southern put it, “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” For Dagan, the key is negotiating a modus vivendi with Iran so that each country can live in peace despite the fact that they may have enough firepower to obliterate the other. This is quite a radical thought inside Israel for many reasons, but perhaps most critically it means that Israel’s former top spy believes that Iran, even the brutal regime currently in power, is composed of rational leaders with whom an understanding may be negotiated.
No, Dagan hasn’t said this explicitly, perhaps because it would further isolate him among the intelligence community he once headed, but it flows logically from all his other statements on the subject. In fact, Bibi’s minions have begun doing just that, actually accusing Dagan of being “insane” (Hebrew) for single-handedly (supposedly) destroying Israel’s military option with his statements.
The New Yorker writer quotes a former British foreign service officer almost precisely echoing Dagan:
One of [his] worries is that Netanyahu “might take a pot shot” at Iran, as the former adviser put it. “Everything in London is now about containment and the notion that if the Iranians get a bomb we’ll have to live with it. I believe that the Iranians do understand the logic of nuclear deterrence, but the Israelis do not. London believes we cannot allow containment to be seen as a policy of failure”—in terms of a fallback policy for dealing with Iran. “And so we’re trying to shift the public perception of deterrence so it is seen as a good. The Brits are really concerned about the Israelis, and what they might do unilaterally.”
One of Hersh’s most incisive criticisms of current U.S. policy is that we are exploiting the supposed Iranian nuclear weapons program in order to advance our own political goals of bringing Iran to heel:
Donilon said that Iran’s nuclear program “is part of a larger pattern of destabilizing activities throughout the region. . . . We have no illusions about the Iranian regime’sregional ambitions. We know that they will try to exploit this period of tumult and will remain vigilant. . . . The door to diplomacy remains open to Iran. But that diplomacy must be meaningful and not a tactical attempt to ward off sanctions.”
America’s sanctions policy thus is increasingly aimed, as Donilon indicated, at changing Iran’s political behavior, and the spectre of nuclear-weapons development has become a tool for accomplishing that goal.
The Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist draws an apt historical analogy to prove the likely failure of the U.S. led international sanctions regime against Iran. He points to fifty years of American sanctions imposed on Castro after he took power in 1959. Just as these policies led to no significant change in the Communist regimes policies and certainly did not topple it; so we can assume the punitive sanctions on Iran will have similarly minimal effect. All sanctions do is allow Obama to save face by claiming he’s doing something about the supposed problem. This covers his right flank from attack by pro-Israel and Republican forces looking to shrey, as conservatives did in 1949 (“who lost China”), when Iran gets a bomb: “who lost [a WMD-less] Iran?”
From the New Yorker essay emerges a prominent Iranian fear that deters a pragmatic future policy–that is, that Israel and the U.S. are intent not just on forcing Iran to end its nuclear program but on regime change. There is a realist caucus consisting of former State Department official Tom Pickering and others who’ve undertaken Track II talks with Iran and this is one of the most glaring concerns raised by the other side. Thankfully, Pickering, who has unfortunately not been able to get Obama’s ear for his efforts, would tell the president if he could meet him, both to end any U.S. efforts in this direction and discourage Israeli efforts as well.
Hersh does acknowledge a camp that believes that while Iran may be pursuing nuclear research and development, it is not doing so with the intent of weaponizing, but rather of going right up the edge and stopping. So that it would have the capacity to make a bomb if it felt it needed to do so, but it would not actually have a bomb. At a conference I organized on Iran-Israel relations, one of the speakers noted that Japan is a nation that has followed this policy. Curious how you never hear anyone complaining that Japan poses a nuclear threat to China and its region. Yes, Japan’s leaders are perceived as more rational than Iran’s. But to believe Iran’s leaders are prepared to incinerate their cities in order to achieve the goal of ridding the world of Israel, carries such pathology to ridiculous extremes. Bibi may convince himself that this is true, but there’s no law saying we have to jump off the bridge with him when he takes the plummet into such murky waters.
KATE AND ANNA McGARRIGLE
Vocal duo, songwriters, guitarists, pianists, accordionists, banjoists. Anna, born Montreal, Quebec, Canada, December 4, 1944. Kate, born Montreal, Quebec, Canada, February 6, 1946.
Kate and Anna McGarrigle have not achieved the level of popularity and record sales of contemporary performers such as Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris, the Roches, Leonard Cohen, or Maria Muldaur, but they comprise one of the most musically and lyrically gifted sister folk duos originating in the early 1970s second- generation folk-pop movement. They went their own musical way, never slavishly imitating anyone for the sake of tagging onto a popular style. Because of their iconoclasm they are all the more adored by their devoted musical followers.
Kate and Anna were born in 1940s Montreal. An older sister, Jane, also sang professionally with them for a short period. They grew up in St. Saveur-des-Mont, in the Laurentian Mountains of Quebec, about forty-five miles north of Montreal. Their interest in music came from their father, Frank, and his side of the family. Frank’s father became the first movie theater exhibitor in New Brunswick around 1906, according to an article by Mike Regenstreif, Kate & Anna McGarrigle: On Their Own Terms (in the February-March 1997 issue of Sing Out!). Between screenings, the young Frank and his sister, Anna, would sing Stephen Foster tunes and turn-of-the-century parlor songs.
“Music was always there at home,” Kate told Regenstreif. “My father would sit at the piano at night and play those songs. At parties, somebody would get up and sing, and my father would accompany them and sing the harmony. There were lots of friends and uncles and each would get up and give their big song.”
Kate continued, in an interview with Richard Silverstein: “We were children of the middle class. My dad played funny ditties and drinking songs from the 1930s. We didn’t really have an Irish folk tradition even though we were half Irish. . .There was no Irish folk tradition because they were subsumed under the prevailing English Canadian culture. The French, on the other hand, were quite the opposite. As an oppressed people, it was quite important for them to remember their language, history, and music. No conqueror would take that away from them.”
The McGarrigle sisters’ mom, Gaby, was also musical. She once played violin in the Bell Telephone Orchestra. Gaby loved the old music hall songs that were popular in the era after she was born (1904). The daughters told Regenstreif the story of their mother accompanying her father to the burlesque shows at Montreal’s legendary Gayety Theatre during World War I: “Gaby’s dad was French Canadian and didn’t understand English that well and she used to go to translate for him. ” One morning during that period, she came to school quite late. “Gabrielle, why are you late?” demanded a nun. “I had to go to the Gayety with my father,” she replied, to the consternation of her classmates.
The young McGarrigle sisters took piano lessons from the nuns of St. Saveur. At the age of ten, Kate remembers her dad showing her guitar chords. There were also a ukulele, a banuke (a banjo with a ukulele neck), and a zither around the house. In the 1950s Kate and Anna listened to popular music of the era: Carl Perkins and the Everly Brothers. “Janie had gone away to boarding school in Ontario when she was fourteen, and she really got into country blues and folksongs as well as McGarrigle originals. music. She introduced us to a lot of songs that otherwise we might not have heard,” Anna told Regenstreit. On Saturday nights “on a good night, the clear signal [of WWVA] from Wheeling, West Virginia, crossed hundreds of miles and international borders” to be heard by two sisters hungry for this music from another world. In the 1960s the McGarrigles were Montreal high school students. They once sneaked out of the house to see a Pete Seeger concert with an older friend of whom their parents disapproved. They discovered folk music and from that moment Kate wanted her own banjo. Then they saw the Weavers and quickly formed a folk- singing trio with a high school friend. They sang songs like Swing Low, Sweet Chariot and appeared at the Finjan, an early-’60s Montreal coffeehouse owned by Simon Asch.
In 1962, they met Peter Weldon and Jack Nissenson, members of a Montreal traditional folk group called Pharisees. Weldon and Nissenson knew folk legends like EwanMacColl and Peggy Seeger. They even owned Montreal’s first Joseph Spence albums. The McGarrigles joined Nissenson and Weldon as the Mountain City Four. Kate told Silverstein: “We entered into the folk scene through the records of Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. But when we met Nissenson and Weldon, they introduced us to music at the sources and said, Forget about Joan Baez! Go to the sources at all times. Don’t copy styles, just learn the original music.’ I think that’s why we have an original sound. We didn’t try to imitate anyone, with the possible exception of Dylan, who everyone tried to imitate at one time or another.” While performing with the Mountain City Four, Kate and Anna began singing traditional standards like Willie Moore; Carter Family songs like Lonesome Valley; French Canadian songs like V’La L’Bon Vent; contemporary folksongs like “Land of the Muskeg”; and Arthur Crudup’s Mean Old ‘Frisco” In the Montreal folk scene, the McGarrigles met Galt McDermott, who later composed the music for Hair; Broadway’s first rock musical. McDermott songs No Biscuit Blues and Cover Up My Head made it onto the McGarrigles’ second and third Warner Brothers albums, Dancer with Bruised Knees and Pronto Monto.
Eventually, Chaim Tannenbaum, Dane Lanken (who later married Anna), and others joined the Mountain City Four. Meanwhile, Kate studied engineering at McGill and Anna took painting courses at L’Ecole Beaux Arts. It was during this period they met the French lyricist Philippe Tatartcheff, who studied at McGill and eventually completed his Ph.D. at the Sorbonne in Paris.
Kate decided to pursue a musical career in New York after college. She and Roma Baran formed a duo with Kate on piano and Roma on guitar, performing old blues and folksongs as well as McGarrigle originals. They played the Gaslight and Gerde’s Folk City in New York. They received a record offer but turned it down. In this period, both Kate and Anna began to write their own songs. Anna’s first song was Heart Like a Wheel. Incredibly, (when one thinks of the song’s subsequent popularity after it was recorded by Linda Ronstadt), Anna had no performing ambitions. The way Anna tells it, her lack of interest in performing helped her hone her writing skills. Kate’s musical maturity came slower, until, inspired by the burgeoning folk songwriting scene, she wrote The Work Song and one of their most haunting ballads Talk to Me of Mendocino.
Kate and Roma’s musical breakthrough came at the 1970 Philadelphia Folk Festival, where their Saturday night performance drew a rave New York Times review. They opened for Jerry Jeff Walker at the Gaslight. When Jerry Jeff heard their closing tune, Heart Like a the Wheel, he asked for a demo tape to send to Linda Ronstadt, who was putting together songs for a solo album. In 1971, Roma and Kate split up. Roma returned to school and Kate married Loudon Wainwright III, who covered We’ve Come a Long Way. Maria Muldaur covered The Work Song. The group McKendree Spring recorded Heart Like a Wheel in 1972. Kate and Anna’s big break came in 1974, when Ronstadt put Heart Like a Wheel on her album by the same name. Maria Muldaur invited Kate to sing harmony on a gospel song for one of her records. Muldaur also chose to sing Anna’s Cool River, for which producer Joe Boyd asked Kate to play piano. As Regenstreif recounts, when Kate told him she didn’t know the piano track, he said, “What do you mean you don’t know it? You wrote it!” She explained that Anna, her sister, wrote the song. Soon Anna said good-bye to her coworkers in Montreal and boarded a plane to L.A. When they entered the studio to make a demo tape for Warner Brothers, they didn’t know each other’s tunes very well because they hadn’t performed together in years. “It was that afternoon [in 1974] that we became Kate and Anna McGarrigle,” Kate told Regenstreif.
In May 1974, Warners offered them their first record contract. During 1975, they recorded their first album; Kate and Anna McGarrigle. The McGarrigles and their two producers, Greg Prestopino and Joe Boyd, had conflicting musical visions during the recording process. “Warner, at first, thought we could become the next Laura Nyro,” Kate told Silverstein. “They saw us as soulful piano player chicks. When we first got into studio, there were fights between Greg, who wanted to have a pop sound with no folk instrumentation, [and] Joe (who claimed to have created the English folk-rock sound), who wanted an eclectic folk-pop sound. When they recorded Anna’s ‘Complainte Pour Ste. Catherine,’ for example, we heard it Cajun,” Kate recalls. “Greg heard it pop and Joe heard it reggae.”
Remarkably, they completed the album, which has gone down in history as a classic. It made an auspicious debut in February 1976. Stereo Review named it Record of the Year, and Melody Maker called it Top Rock Album.
The McGarrigles had a surprise in store for record executives who saw them as the “next Nyro.” It was their “quaint” idea to put childraising before their career. They never toured to support their first album- certain death for a new release-because Kate was pregnant with her second child when it came out. They went so far as to hire a band of studio musicians and book a series of dates at a Boston venue, but when they were dissatisfied with the band, they decided to bag the tour. Similarly, as they completed their second and third albums, Anna’s two pregnancies complicated plans for extensive touring-enough to drive record executives to an early grave.
The debut album contains the gorgeous Talk to Me of Mendocino, a description of a cross-country car trip in which the songwriter takes leave of the mountains of Quebec and other natural markers of her youth, only to come face-to-face with the majestic power of the Mendocino redwoods: Talk to me of Mendocino / Closing my eyes I hear the sea: / Must I wait? Must I follow? / Won’t you say: Come with me? Rarely have poetic image, natural sound, and musical setting wedded so touchingly.
In 1976, Kate’s marriage to Loudon Wainwright ill ended. Returning home to Montreal with her young children, Rufus (who now has a successful recording career) and Martha, she began to collaborate more closely with Anna. They made Dancer with Bruised Knees (1977), which contains the gothic, alternately charming and horrifying Perrine Etait Servante, in whose lyrics you have the diabolical charm of the McGarrigles’ star-crossed lovers mixed with the no- nonsense “make something funny and useful out of a hard life” attitude, which represents traditional French Canadian life.
Pronto Monto (1978) contained the wonderfully quirky NaCl, a song dedicated to the romantic possibilities inherent in physical chemistry: Just a little atom of chlorine, valence minus one / Swimming through the sea, digging the scene, just having fun . . .
They toured sporadically, joining Bonnie Raitt, playing New York’s Bottom Line, and doing foreign gigs in England and Holland. In 1980 they played Carnegie Hall and were featured in a National Film Board of Canada documentary.
Also in the 1980s, they released The French Record (1981) and Love Over and Over (1983) (re-released on CD in 1997 by Rykodisc). The former was originally commissioned at the height of the Québécois separatist movement. Says Kate: “There was a French-Canadian record company which wanted to extend a hand of friendship to us and asked us as English Canadians to produce a record for a French audience. It was a political gesture in a sense. The odd thing is that it never came out in France and we’ve never played in France and weve never played in France!”
When asked why, Kate suggests, “I think their music can be insular. Also, with few exceptions, music doesn’t play that large a role in French culture. You just don’t hear in French music the kind of cross-fertilization that you hear in American music, for example. If you listen to Chuck Berry, the influence of New Orleans blues is unmistakable.”
The French Record contains one of their finest efforts, a rocking Cajun rendition of Complainte pour Ste. Catherine, and their first collaboration with Philippe Tatartcheff.
Much of their recording during the 1980s came about through happenstance. The mid-1980s were a fallow time for the McGarrigles and their relationship with the industry. After a National Public Radio interview, a Private Music executive called and offered them a contract to make Heartbeats Accelerating, which came out in 1990. “Musically, Anna and I like all different styles of music. Heartbeats Accelerating was written completely on synthesizers. But the record company wanted more of a folk sound, so we toned it down for them.”
Kate bemoans the stresses and strains of a large touring band. “For a while that was fun,” she told Regenstreif. “But then it got to be less fun. We couldn’t say to so-and-so on the drums, ‘Why don’t you sit this one out.’”
The McGarrigles are sometimes compared to another folk-pop sister group, the Roches; in a strange coincidence, Loudon Wainwright later married Suzzy Roche. While the Roches are a trio of New Jersey native Irish-Americans whose first musical encouragement came from Paul Simon, the McGarrigles are usually a duo, except when sister Janie sings with them. The lyrics of both are lushly, even tragically, romantic. The Roches have slicker production values, and their sisterly harmonies are breathtakingly beautiful. Many listeners who enjoy the McGarrigles will also find themselves taking to the Roches.
Matapedia was the first new McGarrigle recording in six years. Bob Franke, the great songwriter, wrote an homage to the album: “Anna’s Goin’ Back to Harlan celebrates the role that traditional music took in the lives of those of us who first discovered it in the mid-1960s. The myths it offered were not the ones that our parents, damaged by the traumas of World War and Great Depression, sought to create. Ozzie and Harriet had little to offer us compared to the likes of Lord Thomas and Fair Ellender. The original singers of these songs had a different relationship to history and culture than our parents did.”
The McGarrigles’ songwriting is drenched in musical and lyrical references to traditional songs and heroes, from Shady Grove to Barbara Allen. “Anna and I make references in our own songs to traditional folk songs because these people lived lives of great drama,” Kate told Silverstein. “In modern life, you cannot find the same pure passion and romance. Yes, people love and die today, but where is the grand passion that unites the hearts of Barbara Allen and her lover?”
Kate’s brilliant Jacques et Gilles speaks to us in two ironic contexts. Again, to quote Franke: “She creates a myth-to a wonderful variation on the tune of the old nursery rhyme ‘Jack and Jill’-that turns a loving but not flattering eye on her mill worker forebears. In doing so she crosses a line, becoming a social historian, coming to terms with her history, [and becoming in turn] something of a tradition-bearer herself.”
Kate described how she came to be interested in the New England mill towns that she writes about in Jacques et Gilles: “I came to write it because of my interest in Jack Kerouac and On the Road. Ten years ago, I realized the similarities in Kerouac’s and my own backgrounds. Though he was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, his family came from the same Quebec region as mine. Like him, I learned French in school and spoke English at home. Both of our upbringings were terribly insular. Our contact with the outside world was minimal. Perhaps that’s why he wrote a book about traveling. But you’ll recall that all his traveling, searching for a better life, ended up back in his mother’s home, where he died a terrible death.
“I didn’t come to understand any of this until I took a trip to Lowell. I brought along a video camera and asked a local woman for permission to film the local cemetery, where Kerouac is buried, from her balcony. When we got to talking, I realized how similar her background was to Kerouac’s and my own. She was born in the States, yet she knew almost no English and spoke only French. I found it amazing that you could live in this country for so long, yet still be apart from it. This woman lives through French Canada. Those are the only photographs on her wall.
“It wasn’t until I began doing research on this subject that I discovered that fully half the population of French Canada left for the factory mills of New England! That’s an astounding fact, yet very few people are aware of it. Despite these huge numbers, French Canadians have had nowhere near the impact on the greater American culture that Italian, Irish, and Jewish Americans have. There are no traces of their cuisine, language, customs, etc. I think Kerouac responded to this insularity by writing On the Road. Yet his search for freedom and liberation ended with death.”
In the McGarrigles’ 1998 Rykodisc release, The McGarrigle Hour, they have created yet another under-stated musical masterpiece. They hit upon the brilliant idea of integrating all of the values in life that they hold dear, most notably family and music, in a single musical recording. As Jane McGarrigle states in her liner notes: The McGarrigle Hour reunited many of the same people who worked on the first Kate & Anna record in 1975.” It also brings together the sisters with their respective spouses, an ex-spouse (Loudon Wainwright III); their children, including Rufus and Martha Wainwright; several distinguished musical interpreters (Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris); and current and former musical collaborators (including Joe Boyd, producer of their first two recordings).
The song selection, too, epitomizes the celebrated McGarrigle eclecticism: new versions of previously recorded material (Talk to Me of Mendocino and NaCl), plus the old pop standards like Gentle Annie (Stephen Foster) and What’ll I Do (Irving Berlin). Unlike Matapedia, there is no newly written here; but neither is there anything stale or nostalgic about this record. It gives fresh new perspective on individuals we felt we knew all along.
In a professional music business increasingly dominated by a frenzy for the next sensation or smash hit, Rykodisc deserves enormous credit for its commitment to the McGarrigles’ musical canon.
In addition to releasing their previous Matapedia, it re-released on CD such long-out-of-print titles as Kate & Anna McGarrigle, Dancer with Bruised Knees, The French Record and Love Over and Over.
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