Mideast Media Sampler 11/18/11

From DG:

1) Why do rational people make irrational decisions?

If you follow baseball, like I do, you've probably noticed that baseball has changed a bit in the past 20 years. Whether it is the way teams evaluate player or reporters cover the game, statistical analysis is playing a bigger role in baseball. Bill James, who spurred this revolution in baseball, wrote the following observations:

“Baseball men, living from day to day in the clutch of carefully metered chance occurrences, have developed an entire bestiary of imagined causes to tie together and thus make sense of patterns that are in truth entirely accidental,” James wrote. “They have an entire vocabulary of completely imaginary concepts used to tie together chance groupings. It includes ‘momentum,’ ‘confidence,’ ‘seeing the ball well,’ ‘slumps,’ ‘guts,’ ‘clutch ability,’ being ‘hot’ and ‘cold,’ ‘not being aggressive’ and my all time favorite the ‘intangibles.’ By such concepts, the baseball man gains a feeling of control over a universe that swings him up and down and tosses him from side to side like a yoyo in a high wind.” It wasn’t just baseball he was writing about, James continued. “I think that the randomness of fate applies to all of us as much as baseball men, though it might be exacerbated by the orderliness of their successes and failures.”

The letter quoted here, was written to Amos Tversky. Tversky and his colleague, Daniel Kahneman described thought processes that explained why people would make bad decisions even if they seemingly had all the necessary information and expertise to make good ones.

Michael Lewis (of "Moneyball" fame) caught up with Dr. Kahneman and got him to describe his conclusions. Writing for Vanity Fair, Lewis explained (h/t Rob Neyer):

Kahneman walks the lay reader (i.e., me) through the research of the past few decades that has described, as it has never been described before, what appear to be permanent kinks in human reason. The story he tells has two characters—he names them “System 1” and “System 2”—that stand in for our two different mental operations. System 1 (fast thinking) is the mental state in which you probably drive a car or buy groceries. It relies heavily on intuition and is amazingly capable of misleading and also of being misled. The slow-thinking System 2 is the mental state that understands how System 1 might be misled and steps in to try to prevent it from happening. The most important quality of System 2 is that it is lazy; the most important quality of System 1 is that it can’t be turned off. We pass through this life on the receiving end of a steady signal of partially reliable information that we only occasionally, and under duress, evaluate thoroughly. Through these two characters the author describes the mistakes your mind is prone to make and then explores the reasons for its errors.

What does this have to do with the Middle East?

Read Barry Rubin's latest column:

I’ve come to realize a hitherto hidden dimension of why it is so hard for Western establishment figures (policymakers, journalists, and academics) to understand the Middle East. It is the conflict between the thirst for good news and the reality of bad news. 

Being optimists (based on the relatively good course of their own societies?) and believing that positive change is really easy if people only put their minds to making it happen (ditto and also liberal thinking), they exaggerate any sign that things are getting better. 

Moreover, contemporary thinking trembles in horror about saying anything critical about Third World peoples (racism, Islamophobia) while it is considered noble to criticize “ourselves.” On top of that is the assumption that no one can really be radical. They are just responding to past mistreatment and will revert to being moderate the minute the oppression is corrected.
So constantly we are led to an artificial optimism that ignores threats or even converts them into benefits.

Prof Rubin is effectively describing a collective of "System 1" thinkers dominating field of Middle East studies, diplomacy and journalism.

2) Family reunited

Ten years ago, then PM Ariel Sharon gave a wonderful speech at the Gruenewald Railway Station in Germany:

Here at Gruenewald railway station, on these platforms, in November 1942, three children of the Bobkar family - Maly, Hala and Abraham - stood here by themselves.  

Perhaps the two older sisters held their seven-year-old brother by the hand. 

They stood here without mother or father and the train came. The transport number was #23, the destination was Auschwitz, they were among the first. The Wansee Conference had taken place not long before, on the other side of the forest.

The Bobkar children, as Sharon told, were on the way to their deaths.

I was reminded of Ariel Sharon's speech when I read, Long lost cousins unite in Israel thanks to family photo uploaded to online Holocaust database. The stories have a common element: young children alone facing the Nazis. But in the case of Nahum and Yaakov Korenblum, they survived. Though they never met again, now their children have.

In 1958, shortly after Yaakov moved to Israel, he and his wife filled out a page of testimony at Yad Vashem commemorating his dead parents. Nahum had meanwhile settled in Ukraine, where his surname was mangled into Koramblyum. For the rest of their lives, the brothers searched for each other in vain, the paper trail often coming to a dead end because of the differing spellings of their names. 

In 2006, Yaakov’s daughter, Bracha Fleishman-Korenblum, updated the online entry, attaching an old black-and-white photo of her grandparents and four of their children — including Nahum and Yaakov. 

Two months ago, one of Nahum’s American grandchildren stumbled upon the entry and was shocked to recognize his grandfather in the picture. He reached out to the Korenblum clan in Israel and a reunion was put into motion.

3) The Iran Mexico axis 

A few weeks ago it was reported that a couple of Iranians had plotted to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States. The Iranians were intending to enlist a Mexican drug ring to carry out the hit. But what was the connection.

This week the London Times reported (h/t Honest Reporting) that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards were engaged in the international drug trade. A shorter version of the article appears to have been published in the Australian.

Iranian sources, including a former IRGC intelligence officer, have named two senior figures within the Guard involved in the drug trade. Abdullah Araghi, the IRGC commander for Greater Tehran, is alleged to have extensive connections with gangs in Eastern Europe. Mohsen Rafighdoost was head of the IRGC in the 1980s and has maintained close contact with the organisation since retiring. 

Sajjad Haghpanah, a former investigator with the IRGC's domestic intelligence division, said drug trafficking was endemic within the unit. 

"There are several commanders involved in smuggling narcotics. Raw opium or morphine is smuggled in from Afghanistan and developed in labs inside Iran," said Mr Haghpanah. "They work with criminal gangs to move it overseas. They have their own ships, aircraft and haulage companies, everything needed for import and export. Their power is limitless."

Is this where the suspects first came into contact with drug gangs?


4) NGO proliferation

In a recent article about NGO legislation in Israel, Professor Gerald Steinberg of NGO Monitor is cited:

Gerald Steinberg, the group’s president, said, however, that he opposed the two new bills under consideration. He added that he suspected they would not survive.  

... He said that European governments spend more per year on left-wing Israeli and pro-Palestinian groups than their total contributions to nonprofit human rights groups in other countries in the Middle East.  

“We estimate that together, this amounts to between $75 and $100 million from European governments to Israeli and Palestinian groups annually, far exceeding funding for human rights and democracy organizations in the rest of the region,” he said.

That's a pretty ridiculous focus on Israel. Daled Amos provides (NGO Monitor's) chart. It looks like a number of people are well paid for digging up damaging information against Israel and then being a primary source for news stories.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Middle East and Media Bias.