What a difference framing makes

The current turmoil in the Middle East is, amongst other things, one long vindication of Zionism. Given that, to many folk, Zionism has no meaning other than "Israelis being nasty to Palestinians", some explanation is in order.

European Zionism

Zionism was founded by Viennese journalist Theodore Herzl (1860-1904). Observing the trial of French officer Alfred Dreyfus and the rampant Jew-hatred in the French Republic--the land of liberty,  equality, fraternity--Herzl concluded that Jews were not safe in Europe, and so conceived the notion of a Jewish homeland as an active political project. A place of defence and refuge. 

Theodor Herzl

Of all modern ideologies, none had its founding proposition more thoroughly vindicated than Zionism, as the Holocaust proved that, verily, Jews were not safe in Europe. The lead-up to the Holocaust, as countries such as the US and Australia declined to be the mass Jewish refuge required, helped to energise Zionism. The horror of the aftermath of the Holocaust, in a broken Europe, did so exponentially more. 

Hence the post-war migration of European Jews to the British Mandate of Palestine and the UN-sponsored division of Palestine into a putative Jewish and Arab state. Then followed the refusal of Arab states to accept either a Jewish or a Palestinian state. Thus the Israeli War of Independence (Nov. 1947-July 1949) and the creation of the state of Israel. The war included a mass exodus of Palestinians, the most dramatic event of which was the Deir Yassim massacre of 107 Palestinian civilians by Zionist paramilitary groups, condemned at the time by official Israel, although it was clearly operationally useful in consolidating a Jewish-majority state.

This was followed by the 1956 Suez War, where Israel occupied and then returned territory. Then the 1967 Six Day War, which left Israel with the Golan Heights, the West Bank, Gaza and the Sinai. All territory it declined to return. Then the War of Attrition (1967-70). Then the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Then the 1979 Egypt-Israel Peace Agreement, whereby Sinai was handed back to Egypt. The one and only time that Israel relinquishing territory has resulted in a peaceful border.

Israel was also drawn into the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990). This included the South Lebanon Conflict (1985-2000), which resulted in an Israeli withdrawal from Southern Lebanon. This strategic Hezbollah victory has since led to further conflicts across that border between Hezbollah and Israel, most notably the 2006 Lebanon War. In 2005, Israeli unilaterally withdrew from Gaza and dismantled all Jewish settlements therein. Hamas subsequently took over Gaza, and used as a base from which to attack Israel, leading to the 2008-9 Gaza War and the 2014 Gaza War. 

So, Israeli experience over the last 15 years is that territory they withdraw from is used as base to attack them. Not exactly an encouragement for further withdrawals. 

This is the framing (minus the point that withdrawal means attacks) that people are generally somewhat familiar with. Israel as "alien" European settler state "imposing itself" on the Middle East. Israel as Jewish apartheid lebensraum state. It is the framing that the mainstream media overwhelmingly uses--Israeli politics get reported, Palestinian politics very little; Israel acts, Palestinians suffer. Happenings that conflict with the framing are ignored or glossed over.

Middle Eastern Zionism

Except that framing, and even the above history, leaves more than half the story out. The story of Middle Eastern Jews. The story of Palestinian politics. 

Palestinians killing Jewish civilians is an enduring picture of Palestinian terrorism; something that used to do a great deal to harm the Palestinian cause in the West and still does something to maintain support for Israel. It is often presented as "asymmetrical" warfare--the weapon of the weak (Palestinians) against the strong (Israel).

The only problem is that massacring Jewish civilians was an Arab/Palestinian tactic back when Jews were a minority in Mandatory Palestine and there was no Jewish state. Such as the 1929 Safed riots (18-20 Jewish dead), the 1929 Hebron massacre (67 Jewish dead and the end of Jewish presence in the city) and the 1939 Tiberias massacre (19 Jewish dead).

Jewish militias also got into the killing game, though they often targeted occupying British authority (police, soldiers): most famously in the King David Hotel bombing. The aforementioned Deir Yassam massacre was part of a series in both directions during the Israeli War of Independence. On the Jewish side, the killings hardened the determination to form Israel.

There was a also a wider history of riots, pogroms and massacre of Jewish civilians in Arab [Muslim Middle Eastern] lands well outside Mandatory Palestine, such as the 1934 Thrace pogroms which saw 15,000 Jews flee the area, the Farhud massacre in Baghdad in 1941 (over 180 Jewish dead), the 1945 anti-Jewish riots in Tripolitania (over 140 Jewish dead), the 1947 Aden riots (82 Jewish dead), the 1947 Aleppo riots in Syria (75 Jewish dead), the 1948 Cairo bombings (70 Jewish dead), the 1948 riots in Morrocco (43 Jewish dead), the 1948 riots in Tripolitania (13-14 Jewish dead, 280 Jewish homes destroyed). All of which helped motivate Jews fleeing en masse from Arab lands to Israel and the West. About half of Israeli Jews are of Middle Eastern origin. Israel is very much a refuge for Middle Eastern Jews, not merely European ones.

Muslim and Armenian quarters just after 1909 Adana massacre.

Especially when the massacres are put in a wider context. For example, that Jews in Iran could not touch merchandise before purchasing it, as that made the merchandise "unclean" for believers. Or that massacre of non-Muslims had been very much a feature of recent Middle Eastern history.

The 1933 Simele massacre which killed at least 600 Assyrians in Iraq was a relatively mild instance. The Hamidian massacres of 1894-6 killed at least 80,000 Armenians, Assyrians and other Christians. The Adana massacre of 1909 killed another 20,000 or more. They were a prelude to the massacres during the Great War; the Armenian (1.5m dead), Assyrian (at least 275,000 dead) and Pontic-Greek (at least 750,000 dead) genocides.

The broader pattern was fairly clear--when some real or apparent enemy was giving Muslims a hard time, the local group allegedly connected to the same would be subject to massacre. Hence the upsurge in killing of Jews during the Israeli War of Independence. Mass homicide-as-protest hardly encouraged the targeted group to stick around if it had a place of refuge available.

The increasing intrusion into the Middle East of Western norms about equal protection of the law during the C19th made previous patterns of subordination seem increasingly burdensome and unacceptable to non-Muslim groups. One response was the development of Arab nationalism, which sought to provide a common identity for Arabs across religious persuasions; hence the importance of thinkers of non-Muslim or of heterodox Muslim origin in its development: such as Michel Aflaq, George Antonius, Butrus al-Bustani, George Habash, Ameen Rihani, Ibrahim al-Yaziji, Constantine Zureiq (all raised as Christians), Shakib Arslan (Druze) and Zaki al-Arsuzi (Alawite).

But there was a deeper pattern, which connects to the notion of the dhimmi. The non-Muslim who was permitted to reside in dar al-Islam, the land of Islam, but only if they accepted their subordinate status. Any agitation for equal rights broke the Pact of Umar and made them targets. The Armenian agitation for equal rights and equal protection of law was very much part of the lead-up to the Hamidian massacres.

Jewish population in various Arab countries.

But the creation of a Jewish state was seen as an offence against Arab nationalism as well, so Jews were not included in this common Arab identity. All of which gave Zionism thoroughly grounded in the realities of the Middle Eastern every bit as much emotional power and justification as European Zionism. Hence the flight from Arab lands to the West and to Israel as it soon as it was established. It is quite false to see Zionism as merely an alien intrusion into the Middle East. As American Jonah Shepp nicely puts it:

Palestinians who say that “the Zionists” must go but “the Jews” can stay need to come to grips with the fact that Zionism, at its core, is about creating a space where Jews do not need someone else’s permission to live.

Death and rejectionism
What is striking about the Palestinian tactic of targeting Jewish civilians is that it has never worked. Not as an anti-Israel strategy. It helped energise the creation of the Jewish state, to maintain support for it, to create deep scepticism about the possibility of peace with Palestinians, leading to overwhelming popular support within Israel for the recent Gaza war. As an anti-Israel strategy, it has been massively counter-productive.

Except that the tactic of targeting Jewish civilians has worked very well. As an anti-Israel strategy, it has been utterly hopeless. As a political strategy within Palestinian politics, it has worked again and again. Which is why it is persisted with. If Palestinians kill Jews, they are heroic fighters for Israel. If Israel retaliates and kills Palestinians, it demonstrates the murderous evil of Israel. In Palestinian politics, violent death is a win-win.

Leading to a Palestinian politics divided between corrupt ex-terrorists (Fatah) and explicitly genocidal current terrorists (Hamas). (An English translation of Hamas's founding Covenant is here.) Noting that genocide is not an alien intrusion into Middle Eastern politics: on the contrary, the Muslim Middle East has been a pioneer of modern genocide. 

As the Islamic State is currently reminding us. As did the Islamist regime in Sudan with Darfur.

Overlords or victims
Maronite-dominated Lebanon, Alawite-dominated Ba'athist Syria, Sunni-dominated Ba'athist Iraq and Israel were all manifestations of the same logic--if you are a minority group in the Middle East, you are either overlords or victims. So, better be overlords and control the state.

Except Israel is the great exception--Jews are very much a majority within Israel. It is also the only stable democracy. Because Jews are very much a majority within Israel. It has not collapsed into civil war. Because Jews are very much a majority within Israel. Israel is a majority Jewish state, and that makes a profound difference.

When the Jews first started migrating in serious numbers to Ottoman-controlled Palestine, they brought capital with them, raising the value of land and labour in the area. Under British rule, the trend accelerated. The rising wages and commercial opportunities encouraged movement of non-Jews to the area. A proportion of current Palestinians only have any connection to the land of Palestine at all because the Jews came. Which is why the definition of a Palestinian refugee is any who lived in Palestine for 2 years or more prior to May 1948, or is descended from someone who did. (Pausing here, the notion of multi-generation hereditary refugees is an interesting one in itself: but Israel accepted and integrated its Jewish refugees; the Arab world prefers to keep the Palestinians as permanent refugees, stateless sticks to beat the Zionist entity with--it is easier for a Palestinian to become a citizen of the US or Australia than most Arab countries.)

Amin al-Husseini

There were those in the Palestinian community who thought cooperation with the newcomers who were bringing opportunities with them was worth exploring. But the influx of new workers and rising wages undermined the debt bondage which was the conventional form of subordination to the landlord class in the area. Jews-as-enemies suited both religious leaders--operating as gatekeepers of righteousness--and a landlord class threatened by modernity. Hence the role of Haj Mohammed Effendi Amin el-Husseini (c.1897-1974), the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, in setting the dominant and enduring model of Palestinian politics of death and rejectionism.

One that proved to have enduring appeal in the wider Arab world--the Zionist entity became the perfect scapegoat, the way to redirect anger from the failings and oppressions of Arab regimes. Or just Arab failings generally.

Not on offer
To concerned Westerners, and the dwindling Israeli Left, it seems obvious that the only moral solution is for Israel to accept Palestinians as worthy of equal protection of the law. As Israeli journalist and writer Noam Sheizaf declares:

The two-state solution is not a progressive cause and neither is a single-state solution — they are just possible means to an end. The only possible goal for progressive politics in Israel/Palestine can be full human, civil and political rights for everyone living on this land. ...
I support equal rights for all people living in this land, between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. 

Or as American Jonah Shepp writes:

The Israeli right remains convinced that the Palestinians must learn to accept Israel before the occupation can end. That is about as convincing as someone claiming in 1960s America that the end of segregation would have to wait until black people stopped resenting white people. Peace is nearly always made between leaders before it is made between peoples. Israel is no exception to this rule; claiming otherwise just avoids the issue. And Israel must take the lead on this, precisely because the balance of power is so lopsided.

In fact, the problem is much deeper than accepting Israel. It is accepting. Accepting Jews, Christians, Shia, Yezidis, Alawites, Kurds ...  The Middle East has been a pioneer of, and continuing arena for, genocide not because Jews exist, nor because the Jewish state exists, but because the idea of different-but-equal has so little resonance. After all, Jews are not even close to the majority victims of genocide in the region, which became a modern pioneer of genocide well before the Jewish state seemed a serious prospect. What is different about the Jews is that they are the only local minority who has found an effective solution (thanks crucially to the influx and skills of European Jews). Although the Kurds would like to copy them. With the Peshmerga having the role of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). Aspirations that has official and popular support in Israel.

Israeli PM Ehud Barak made a two-state offer to Yassir Arafat at the 2000 Camp David summit. Arafat made no counter-offer. And so the entrenched pattern of Palestinian politics continued. It is all very well for folk to say Israel must take the lead, but Israelis have no reason to believe that any peace deal is possible. As Israeli journalist Matti Friedman points out,

The fact that Israelis quite recently elected moderate governments that sought reconciliation with the Palestinians, and which were undermined by the Palestinians, is considered unimportant and rarely mentioned.

Without death and rejectionism, what is there to Palestinian politics and Palestinian identity? Not enough, apparently. The demand to be overlords, without the power to make themselves such, bedevils Palestinian politics.

Which leaves Israel with what exactly? To relinquish territory it can expect to be attacked from? It cannot unilaterally declare peace. And retaliation may feed the dynamic of death, but so does not doing so, while reverting Jews back to the role of powerless victims Israel exists to deny. The murderous civil was of Sudan, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq demonstrate that stopping being a Jewish-majority state is the road to disaster. The continuing existence of the IDF is not negotiable. 

Or does Israel just decide to grab what it can when it can? Not an admirable position, but an understandable one. 

"Correct" moral responses are "obvious" if you frame the issues narrowly enough. But Israel lives in the complete Middle East, not a conveniently packaged version of it.


[Cross-posted at Skepticlawyer.]

Avoidance

There are few markers of the pervasive intellectual dishonesty of much of the progressivist intelligentsia, than their willingness to state or imply other folk are fascists except for brown-skinned folk who actually are.

This thought was prompted by an engaging essay on cultural tensions in Iran. The essay takes a hopeful view that the mullahocracy is too antipathetic to powerful currents in modern Iranian culture to survive: a comforting thought.

It was the following passage which prompted the above thought:

Recent remarks by Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Lebanon’s Hezbollah, that Iran’s leaders in the last thirty years are all, in fact, Arabs and that their claims of being descendants of the prophet (symbolized by the black turbans they wear) reassert their Arab blood show clearly the continuing tensions between Persian identity and the Islamism of the rest of the Shia Middle East. Nasrallah needs to convince his followers thus that these Arab brothers have left nothing of a “Persian culture” to survive. These controversial comments indicate both the prevalence among ordinary Arabs of this view that Shiism might be an “un-Islamic invention”—and Iranian in origin. To justify his fealty to the country’s current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Nasrallah had to first make him an Arab.

That one of the sicknesses that infects Arab thought is self-conception as a master-race has long been clear. Indeed, dates as far back as the Ummayyad Caliphate. Yet the passage is a pertinent reminder, if one is aware of the wider context, of just how fascist Hezbollah (and, for that matter, Hamas) really is.

Of course, if one admits Hezbollah and Hamas are armed fascist movements, that makes Israel look better and one of the rules of much of the modern progressivist intelligentsia is that The Jewish State Is Always Wrong. Which is much easier to hold to if you romanticize its enemies rather than if you look at them in any sort of clear-eyed fashion (and not calling Hamas or Hezbollah fascist is romanticizing them).

The broader habit of romanticizing Israel’s enemies definitely extends to the Palestinians. So statements such as:

We are now in the 92nd year of a peace process in which the Palestinians are the first people in history to be offered a state seven times, reject it seven times, and set preconditions for discussing an eighth offer

are in incredibly bad form.

But the Western progressivist intelligentsia has long displayed, in Clive James’s lapidary phrase, “enormous resources of inattention”. Something that works overtime when it comes to received wisdom about the Middle East.

Still, such failing is hardly theirs alone. Abbas Milani’s own essay has a form of it. He makes much of Khomeini’s duplicity: promising sweetness and light when aspiring to power and cracking down savagely when he achieved it.

But Khomeini was, above all else, a Quranic literalist. He had the perfect example for such behaviour: the Prophet himself. Before power, Khomeini was acting as the Prophet of the Meccan suras spoke and acted. After achieving power, Khomeini acted as the Prophet of the Medinan suras spoke and acted, if in a modern context.

I have no doubt that Khomeini was a sincere follower of the Prophet. That included in his revolutionary strategy. But to admit that Khomeini was just following the Prophet’s example is to suggest a deep canker at the heart of Islam. And perhaps, even now, Milani just does not want to go there; at least not publicly.

Regimes have their own logic

This extends a comment I made here.


Rhetoric is how a leadership communicates publicly with its supporters and reaches out to undecideds. The trick is to work out what it is communicating.

In the case of the recent statements by Iran's Supreme Leader, it is pretty clear. The ideology of the regime remains unchanged and the US is still the Great Satan: that is, the Great Tempter, the great source of all the corrupting distractions of the modern world. Given the democratic anti-regime agitation within Iran, this is more true, not less: since full democracy gives sovereignty (which belongs to Allah) to the people. (Hence opponents can be hanged for the "crime" of "enmity against God".) The US notions of separation of church and state, of female equality, religious freedom, open sexuality and the legitimacy of the pursuit of happiness are all affronts to the fundamental principles of the Iranian regime.

For the regime to be conciliatory is to imply that the Great Satan has its positive points. This would undermine its position domestically, not strengthen it.

Whatever chance the Obama Administration's realist (in the international affairs sense) approach of engagement had (very little IMHO), it died as soon as Iranians began to make clear their rejection of the (patently) rigged Iranian Presidential election. It is not clear to me that the Administration has grasped this point. But, of course, this is always the weak point of realist analysis: it tends to take incumbent regimes as givens while not giving due weight to how foreign policy can be driven by the specific logic of a regime's nature rather than always being trumped by the logic of the state's geopolitical position.

In this case, the specific logic of the regime is that it is the instrument of Allah's sovereignty, which is universal. So its foreign policy is to promote acceptance of that sovereignty to reflect and maintain its internal legitimacy as the manifestation of that sovereignty. The Iranian regime has inevitable limitations, including being unable to evade the constraints of Iran's geopolitical position and the resources available to it. Nevertheless, the regime sees itself as a global player: in some ways as the ultimate global player.

There is nothing the US can offer the regime in any permanent strategic sense that it wants (apart from the US's submission to the sovereignty of Allah). The regime's push for nuclear weapons is the culminating military-power expression of its role as the instrument of Allah's sovereignty. What can the West offer Iran which would be worth giving that up? Which would be worth a state whose legitimacy is as the embodiment of Allah's sovereignty accepting indefinitely second rank status?

To ask the question is to answer it. Either the regime collapses or this is all going to end badly.

ADDENDA I have edited this post to make it clearer without changing the argument.

The Root of the Wild Madder

Brian Murphy is the religion correspondent for Associated Press. He is also a “Persian” carpet obsessive and has written a splendid book about “Persian” carpets, their history and the people who make them in The Root of Wild Madder: Chasing the History, Mystery, and Lore of the Persian Carpet.

The book is, in part, a travelogue. Murphy takes us to the Teheran carpet bazaar, to cities, to villages, to nomad camps across Iran and Afghanistan. We start in a field of wild madder, a key dye plant for carpets: chemical dyes had taken over to the extent that only 10% of carpets had natural dyes by 2000: the proportion is now 25% and rising, a response to consumer demand (p.5). The book ends in a Cairo shop, near the al-Hussein mosque he was visiting for a Sufi ceremony, where a shopkeeper digs up some coarse dry madder that no one has asked for a long time (p.288).

In between is a travelogue of both physical places and of people and societies. But it is also a journey through the history of carpets—particularly the Western discovery and appreciation of them—and the tangled history of the region. A time-line sets out events from 8,000BC (first settlements) to the 2004 Iranian election. History, personal experience, literature, local outlooks and culture weave together in a thoroughly entertaining narrative.

Murphy is a religious correspondent, and religious experience and practices wander in and out of the narrative. Particularly Sufism. Reading the book, it struck me that, like Tantra, Sufism developed in a society of pervasive religious rules. Like Tantra, Sufism can offer rule-breaking as release but still contained within a religious framing.

One of Murphy’s great virtues is the people speak for themselves: they are not corralled into convenient Western framings. So we do not get romantic nomads, but women who hope education will give their daughters and granddaughters better prospects. A man studying neuroscience thinks about how experience changes the brain while we seek to control the universe around us in mutual effect (P.282). The book makes clear—as more recent events have made even clearer—the popular disaffection with the theocracy, the sense of a revolution hijacked and betrayed.

At the end of the book, in the last of a series of interspersed vignettes, Murphy tells the story of Majit Enderva and three other Iranians who attempt to smuggle themselves into the EU from Turkey. Majit and two others are killed in the border minefield they accidentally come ashore in, only his best friend survives. Murphy goes to Majit’s village, where his mother presses onto him a carpet she was making during and after her son died in the hope that something connected to her son will end up in the place he died trying to get to. An ordinary, unremarkable carpet becomes a carrier of love, tragedy and connection.

Via the author’s passion for carpets, interest in religion and respect for people, The Root of Wild Madder brings alive Persian carpets, and a fraught and complex region, in a very human and accessible way.

My Life as a Traitor

My Life As A Traitor by young Iranian exile Zarah Ghahramani, assisted by Oz writer Robert Hillman, is another book about how crap it is to be a woman under the rule of the mullahs. So it has obvious resonances with Reading Lolita in Teheran, resonances all the greater since Zarah also experiences literature as a liberation. But Zarah is much younger than Azar Nafisi, and is a student not a teacher. Her experiences are also more grim. But both books convey the oppressive misogyny of the mullah’s regime, an intimate part of a larger pattern of oppression. Not without a certain amount of humour: but that is also a weapon and a defence, a statement of life. Such as Zarah's comments on the regime giving power to teenage boys (pp.75ff).

Which, however much humour she injects into the discussion, is still a nasty form of oppression in itself. Her discussion (pp 81ff) of the high rates of female suicide (especially among young woman—very different from the Western pattern) is particularly grim. The lead-in is a young country cousin who, at 15, married a much older man from Teheran. A few months into the marriage, she attempted to kill herself by setting herself on fire. An attempt that was eventually successful, after she lingered on in hospital for some time. There is even a region in Iran where such self-immolation has become a local tradition as if to say, as Zarah says, my motive is the same as she who went before. As we read of the oppressive misogyny, it is again clear how grounded the official and pervasive misogyny is in the erotophobia of patristic monotheism where sex (unless it is procreative) separates us from God, from the divine, and—given religious authority is male—female sexuality is particularly threatening.
Read More...
As an aside, average age at marriage is a good indicator of the status of women: the younger the average age at first marriage, the more such decisions are parental and the lower the status of women; the older the average age at first marriage, the more such decisions are the couple’s and the higher the status of women. Draw a line from Trieste to St Petersburg and the average age at first marriage is higher North and West of that line and lower South and East of that line. A pattern that evidence suggests predates Christianity but continued after it, and broadly still does.

Zarah was born after the Iranian Revolution. Her father is Kurdish (therefore Sunni rather than Shi’a) and was a general in the Shah’s army, but escaped any post-Revolutionary retribution. Her mother is a Zoroastrian. One of the themes of the book is Zarah wrestling with her parent’s outlook and history.

The book’s chapters interweave two narratives, each successive chapter moving to the other narrative. The first narrative is her experience of incarceration, interrogation and torture in Evin prison: formerly where the victims of SAVAK under the Pahlavi regime were “dealt” with, now where the victims of the mullocracy go. It is brilliantly evocative of the horror and helplessness of such incarceration.

The second narrative is her life. Growing up, going to school, discovering ideas, books, memorable teachers who encouraged their students to think, socialising, discovering boys, becoming political. The prose is simple, clear and very evocative. The things she describes come alive. She both describes and wrestles with how one lives in an oppressive regime.

Each narrative ends with a car ride. The prison narrative with the drive to freedom, the life narrative with being snatched by the police.

There was a backlash against Reading Lolita in Teheran, as if President Bush II’s hostility to the Iranian regime was the most important thing to be undermined and resisted, even if it means attacking eloquent witnesses to oppression. The nasty side of “criticise ourselves first”, where the reality that the US is, as it was throughout the C20th, better than its enemies (just as, in the Middle East, Israel is better than Hamas, Hezbollah, Ba’athist Syria, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Fatah, etc.) has to be obscured to sustain the “correct” moral perspective.

But the Iranian regime is vile and oppressive and My Life as a Traitor is a vivid and highly accessible rendition of that reality. It is also an invocation of the power of good teaching, even in very trying circumstances. The dedication at the start of the book reads

This book is dedicated with love and esteem to my friend Akbar Mohammadi, whose bravery, which so greatly exceeded my own, cost him his life.

The acknowledgment at the end ends with,

… and her secondary school and university teachers are asked to accept her gratitude, for reasons that will be apparent to any reader of this book.

As they are.