It must take a certain dogged kind of chutzpah to be Condi Rice. I mean, there she has been for the past eight months doing everything she could to undermine the Hamas government in Palestine, including quite evidently condoning the Israelis’ continued use of quite disproportionate levels of lethal violence there, and their maintenance of the savage blocade around Gaza… But today, there was Condi in Egypt calling “bravely” for an end to the current intra-Palestinian violence:
- “Innocent Palestinians are caught in this violence,” Ms Rice said.
Well yes, Ms. Rice. But 15 times as many innocent Palestinians have been killed by Israel in the past eight months— and when did you ever speak out about that? Or when did you ever threaten to make any portion of the US’s extremely generous aid to Israel conditional on Israel ending its policy of killing and tight economic strangulation of the Palestinians?
Some figures from B’tselem: The number of Palestinians killed by the Israeli security forces in the OPTs since February 1, 2006: 431. Number of Israelis killed by Palestinians in the OPTs and inside Israel since February 1: 20. (Aggregated from 1 + 2 + 3 + 4)
This past summer, it also took a special kind of chutzpah for Rice to profess her strong support for the government and people of Lebanon at a time when she was actively conniving with Israel in every possible way to enable the continuation of the IDF’sbrutal assault against the country and its people– and when Lebanese PM Fouad Siniora was tearfully begging the whole world to help put in place a speedy ceasefire.
Well, once again now, “heckuva job, Condi”, eh?
Matters do currently seem fairly precarious inside the OPTs. Ten people have died in Fatah-Hamas clashes there in the past couple of days. (That, at a time when Israel has also continued its attacks against Gaza. All completely tragic.) And now the out-of-control Al Aqsa brigades are reportedly threatening to kill three top Hamas leaders. Luckily Abu Mazen and Ismail Haniyeh have both called for an end to the violence. But you really have to wonder who is arming and funding the Aqsa Brigades these days…
However, the pollsters from the (currently pro-Fateh) Jerusalem Media and Communication Center were able to get out and about in the days between Spetmber 19 and 22, when they conducted a poll of Palestinian opinion.
Many of the answers there are very interesting. If you go down to the bottom, Q. 28, “Which Palestinian faction do you trust the most?” you see the answers were neck-and-neck: Fateh– 30.7% and Hamas–29.7%. Hamas has certainly lost some support since the elections in late January, when they won 44% of the popular vote. However, things don’t look too great for Fateh in the event of new elections, either… And especially if people vote on the basis of personalities. In response to Q. 27, “Which Palestinian Personality do you trust the most?”, Haniyeh came top with 18.9%, followed by Abu Mazen with 14.5%. (Both those questions were “open” in structure. For Q. 27, 1.2% of respondents even said Yasser Arafat!)
But given the comprehensive nature and the viciousness of the pressure that Israel and the US have maintained on the Palestinians since January, it is notable that so many Palestinians there are still prepared to stick up for Hamas.
Does the “international community” intend to carry on punishing the Palestinians until they can force the whole people to their knees and “win” a return of Fateh to power? I certainly hope not. The “punishment” the Palestinian people have already suffered has already been quite unconscionable.
Here’s my best suggestion for a way out of the current impaase: The UN Security Council should organize a final, authoritative, and comprehansive Arab-Israeli peace conference, like Madrid in 1991 but under specifically UN auspices and to be held on the basis of international law and the existing UN resolutions… And then, all the Security Council members together should structure the incentives they offer to the Middle Eastern parties in such a way as to secure their good-faith participation in this negotiation.
And then, let us the world see who would come to this conference. On what possible grounds could anyone who professes to uphold international legitimacy object to such a plan?
Does the U.S. profess to uphold international legitimacy? Does Israel? Call me jaded, but I don’t think international law, UN resolutions, or world opinion make much of a difference these days. And it’s not just the cynical manipulators in power who are making the UN obsolete. Even people who are deeply concerned about human rights — as in Darfur, for example — are pressing Bush to circumvent the UN Charter and other international guarantees of soverignty to invade the Sudan.
For some reason – maybe it is by default compared to her colleagues – Condi has become the MSM darling of the administration. They even regularly talk about her rising support for the presidential nomination. Hardly ever does anyone bring up the kind of little problems – like lying, or being one of the architects of the totally failed Iraq policy – that you mention. Nor does anyone seem to blame her for our totally failed policies on Iran, North Korea, or the rest of the world. Why does she get this free ride?
The outcome of any UN conference is easy to foretell: both sides would insist on acceptance of its conditions as a precondition of attendance. The Israelis would want recognition and renunciation of violence. Hamas would want right of return and refuse to recognize or disarm. Much of the General Assembly would favor a plebiscite, whose outcome would entail either a one-state with majority rule or a dual state with parity. Until a majority of Israelis accept this outcome, don’t imagine it will be endorsed by AIPAC or admissible in US discourse. It’s easier to imagine re-election of Foley.
Rice knows the game: praise your boss, tow the line, recognize where the dollars are, stay loyal, and be rewarded. Hamas does not endow any universities or think tanks. It does it control corporate board appointments. No Hamas leader would place on a “whom do you trust?” poll of American voters.
W does not want to hear anything but praise and reinforcing comments. He even invites Henry K. to drop by “any ole time,” just to be encouraged to stand tall and true and outshine Dad.
Clinton gambled on a peace settlement and it fizzled in months. Rice would have to negotiate with adversaries even more implacable than before.
Unfortunately, there are many on both sides that do not want an amicable settlement. Meanwhile, one of the sides is guaranteed indefinite US support. Ergo: status quo.
Clinton gambled on a peace settlement and it fizzled in months.
In all the tired, rehashed verbiage on Mideast peace conferences, the above 11 words posted by jkoch, sadly, speak volumes about present prospects for success.
Jkoch, I am precisely not urging that Condi or any American be the one put in charge of this diplomacy. The US government is far, far too implicated both as a conniving ally of one side and as a failed peace broker over many years now to have any credibility as lead peace broker.
If we could get Congress to even start to put any degree of peace-process-related conditionality on the aid it continues to shovel to Israel, then maybe you could start to talk about a credible US role. I am not holding my breath for that.
As for Clinton’s record: all he did was fiddlaround with tiny subsets of subsets of always avowedly “interim” issues– essentially, wasting time while Israel continued to pursue its settlement project at full blast in the West Bank throughout the 1990s– until finally, just a few weeks before the 2000 election, Barak persuaded him to try somethng a little more ambitious. Ways too little, ways too late. A far from heroic record.
It doesn’t matter how extreme, how anti-American, how close to Iran, and how violent the Palestinians get, there is always a Condi or Solana looking for a way to reward them with money or legitimacy.
Chutzpah is begging for aid while spitting at the hand that feed you. More money has gone into supporting these mofos than the entire Marshall Plan with nothing other than AK-47s to show for. How come there is no money for food but there is always money for munitions?
Worth reading:
Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights–Report on violations of international humanitarian law and human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, submitted by John Dugard, Special Rapporteur, pursuant to Human Rights Council decisión– 05/09/2006
70. “In effect, the Palestinian people have been subjected to economic sanctions – the first time an occupied people have been so treated. This is difficult to understand. Israel is in violation of major Security Council and General Assembly resolutions dealing with unlawful territorial change and the violation of human rights and has failed to implement the 2004 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice, yet it escapes the imposition of sanctions. Instead the Palestinian people, rather than the Palestinian Authority, have been subjected to possibly the most rigorous form of international sanctions imposed in modern times. It is interesting to recall that the Western States refused to impose meaningful economic sanctions on South Africa to compel it to abandon apartheid on the grounds that this would harm the black people of South Africa. No such sympathy is extended to the Palestinian people or their huan rights.”
Two links to the report:
http://ap.ohchr.org/documents/dpage_e.aspx?m=91
http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11&ar=543
The article by Walter Russell Mead in the current edition of Foreign Affairs describes all too clearly what has happened to American foreign policy in the middle east. The policy is being run not by pragmatism or realism or humanism, but rather by evangelicalism. Under this view, the US is more pro – zionist than the majority of Israelis. There is no solution when one side believes that it is doing God’s work. Whatever is happening to the Palestinians is no less than what the Bible says they deserve for opposing Israel. Is it any wonmder that our policy is so divorced from reality? Is it any wonder that we are so isolated from the rest of the world except for those we can bribe, threaten or seduce?
Odd that. Those depraved Palestinians still haven’t turned into Finns. This despite the untold advantages they have been afforded by Israel over the years.
By what warped logic do supporters of Israel back the pursuit of policies in the Gaza Strip and West Bank that will almost inevitably turn them into failed states? How do chaos and suffering on Israel’s borders enhance its security?
Or its standing in the world?
the US is more pro – zionist than the majority of Israelis.
When US was less “pro – Zionist” to say now its more?
Americans do not seeing this just recently,not all them, a small proportion of Americans realise this but the majority still believes and support Israel and its actions in ME “Blindness support”.
“What a blind person needs is not a teacher but another self.” – Helen Keller
DCI/PS invited to address the 43rd Session of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child
http://www.dci-pal.org/english/display.cfm?DocId=549&CategoryId=1
Jack,
I find your interpretation of Mead’s argument interesting, to say the least.
Nowhere does Mead even suggest, let alone explicitly state, that US policy is “being run not by pragmatism or realism or humanism, but rather by evangelicalism.” The opposite is quite the case. Apart from the fact that Mead’s argument is that policy is influenced by evangelists (a far cry from being run by evangelists), he clearly sums up by pointing out that there need not be a conflict between pragmatism, realism or humanism and evangelists. He even discusses how this could be achieved.
Perhaps the following also escaped your attention:
Conspiracy theorists and secular scholars and journalists in the United States and abroad have looked to a Jewish conspiracy or, more euphemistically, to a “Jewish lobby” to explain how U.S. support for Israel can grow while sympathy for Israel wanes among what was once the religious and intellectual establishment. A better answer lies in the dynamics of U.S. religion. Evangelicals have been gaining social and political power, while liberal Christians and secular intellectuals have been losing it.
Jewish conspiracy or, more euphemistically, to a “Jewish lobby”
Correction here, (“Zionist conspiracy or, more euphemistically, to a “Zionist lobby”) there is difference do not generalise things JES
“This fall, the Muslim and Jewish sacred months of Ramadan and Tishrei (holy month of the High Holidays: Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Sukkot) will converge. Families that have both Muslim and Jewish members might draw on the spiritual focus of these intertwined sacred seasons to renew the Spirit in their own lives and to bring their communities of origin closer together.”
When Ramadan and Rosh Hashanah Meet
http://www.interfaithfamily.com/site/apps/nl/content2.asp?c=ekLSK5MLIrG&b=297376&ct=2910759
Meanwhile…
A Jordanian newspaper talks about signs of a crackdown on Shiites in that country, kicking off the “Sunni versus Shiite” aspect of the new US strategy for the region (Sunni regimes versus the Shiite menace…) You read it here first…
Loving Condi in Baghdad, what anise sun rise in Baghdad by her SUUPRIS visit…
BAGHDAD (Reuters) – U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice flew into Baghdad on Thursday for a surprise visit to press Iraqi leaders to resolve their differences and ease raging sectarian violence that has killed thousands.
While Condi in Baghdad hospital in Baghdad now working ground for the Death Squads, meanwhile The Iraqi government late Tuesday recalled an entire national police brigade from northwest Baghdad for complicity with death squads, a U.S. official said Wednesday.
US General William Caldwell said:
” The U.S. military discovered the problem of the police brigade during its broad brigade-by-brigade assessment of police in Baghdad, the U.S. spokesman said.
Caldwell disclosed that some 800 to 1,200 officers would be removed from posts in northwestern Baghdad and sent to a U.S. military forward operating base for “anti-militia and anti-sectarian” training. ”
Hmmm, more training for the Death Squad members!! They are killers why should be giving then training? Why they “sent to a U.S. military forward operating base” so they protected in other words.
I think Rice visit of ME will see the new developments:
1- The Kurds will taking Kirkuk City while they build up for this for awhile, and yesterday they sent a team from Kurdistan Parliaments to UN first step of recognition and new body their, also the latest agreement of the ceasefire with turkey by Turkish Kurds opposition.
2- The federalisations bill will be reading soon again so there is pressure to be past and deployed soon.
A Jordanian newspaper talks about signs of a crackdown on Shiites
Read this more interesting story ..
Jordan’s King Risks Shah’s Fate, Critics Warn
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-jordan1oct01,0,497060.story?track=mostemailedlink
Bush suggested that when history is written the conflict in Iraq will be looked back on as “just a comma
.”
JES –
The last time I looked, US foreign policy was being “run” by George W Bush and Condi Rice. Do you not know that they are both extreme evangelicals? The only way this administration’s policy in the middle east, particularly toward Israel, makes any sense is if it is being driven by religous beliefs, not by political or diplomatic concerns (yes, and a little oil concern thrown in by the behind-the-scenes Cheney crowd)
Do you not know that they are both extreme evangelicals?
Indeed. i’ve heard Condi Rice is a Presbyterian, religion of arch-theocrat David Hume.
Funny how membership in the blandest Christian sects evokes such outrageous bigotry.
The conflict in ME between Palestine and Israel is a political and social question that can be discussed and resolved politically and socially. Also according to international laws and accords.
The Arab/Israeli conflict it’s not a religious conflict, its not, it’s wrong and not right but most the Israelis and Israel propagandist for years used and push to that naive view, in same talken they lobbing in this direction for long time.
The reality it’s neither Islam/Judaism conflict, nor its Islam/Christian conflict at all, whatever someone or groups trying to push this view its misinformed view or have their personal agendas.
If we need discusses and to solve this conflict we should think first ITS A POLITICAL AND SOCIAL CONFLICT. By saying other things here and there this just mangling with words and really misinformed discussions and hopeless.
Jack,
Nice inerpretation, but, just as your “interpretation” of Mead’s article, hardly relevant.
BTW, isn’t Jimmah “The Idjit” Carter also an “extreme evangalist”?
JES, I’ve often wondered why you think it’s clever to refer to Carter as “The Idjit.” Perhaps you could explain, so we can all enjoy the joke.
Well John, perhaps it’s because I consider him to have been the most feckless, ill-equipped and dangerous president of the 20th century, who managed to micromanage the US to new lows globally. I also believe that his vacillation and lack of predictability probably brought the world closer to nuclear holocaust than at any other point in history.
James Earl Carter used to refer to himself as a “nucular engineer”, yet none of the wise people here found that funny at the time, I bet. He also liked to talk about being “born again” and having found “Jesus”, and “having committed adultary in his mind”, and of the importance of “ethnically pure neighborhoods”, but this didn’t seem to disuade the Nobel Prize Committee.
Jimmy Carter surrounded himself with bumpkins as advisors. He relied on the likes of Jodie Powell and Hamilton Jordon, and even sent the latter to negotiate over the hostages in Iran – probably extending their stay under the hospitality of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by months.
His response to Soviet aggression in Afghanistan was to rear up on his hind legs and … boycott the Moscow Olympics.
He sat back idly while the clerics took back their awqaf in Iran and then took over the US embassy and took scores of Americans hostage, and when he finally did act, he vetoed the military’s request for backup forces, almost ensuring the deaths and tragedy that took place in the Iranian desert. In this respect, Jimmy Carter was very much the midwife of fundamentalist Muslim terror.
No, John, I don’t think that anything about Jimmah Carter is either a joke or funny, and I think that the reason that people took to him so quickly as an ex-president was because they were so relieved that he was no longer in a position to screw things up.
Perhaps this is apropos to this discussion and perhaps not, but everyone should read the Christian Science Monitor commentary of 10/6/06 on the Amish response to the tragedy in their community.
Alison Weir’s got a piece up on Counterpunch that is crying out for the widest possible exposure/circulation.
She’s one of the founders/editors of the If Americans Knew website. She’s a brave, principled, fully human individual.
The Counterpunch piece is at:
http://counterpunch.org/weir10062006.html
And the following bit of American “brownshirt” loathsomeness – and the subsequent cowardice and cravenness it triggered – also needs to be bruited far and wide.
Historian Tony Judt, a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and director of the Remarque Institute at NYU, writes,
I was due to speak this evening, in Manhattan, to a group called Network 20/20 comprising young business leaders, NGO, academics, etc, from the US and many countries. Topic: the Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. The meetings are always held at the Polish Consulate in Manhattan.
I just received a call from the President of Network 20/20. The talk was cancelled because the Polish Consulate had been threatened by the Anti-Defamation League. Serial phone calls from ADL President Abe Foxman warned them off hosting anything involving Tony Judt. If they persisted, he warned, he would smear the charge of Polish collaboration with anti-Israeli anti-Semites (= me) all over the front page of every daily paper in the city (an indirect quote). They caved and Network 20/20 were forced to cancel.
Whatever your views on the Middle East I hope you find this as serious and frightening as I do. This is, or used to be, the United States of America.
The Weir piece is called, “Just Another Mother Murdered”. It is, quite frankly, iconic. As powerful in its own way as the photograph of the screaming, terrified little Vietnamese girl running down the road…having been napalmed.
JES,
Jimmy Carter also brokered the Camp David accords. And he absolutely deserves credit for that.
I think he misses the point on Hamas. It’s not a question of punishing or starving people for their choice. It’s quite simply a question of not supporting a racist and genocidal terrorist group.
But Jimmah did a lot better in office than the current occupant. No doubt about that.
A.C.,
I just checked network 20/20’s website, and it says that Tony Judt’s talk has been rescheduled for October 16th. It seems that you are spreading disinformation, and perhaps that Tony Judt is engaging in a bit of “hucksterism” to promote his awful views.
Apparently the Polish Consultate realized that it wasn’t a very diplomatic thing to host a speaker with Judt’s bizarre views. That’s not censorship, that’s common sense.
You can say whatever you want in America. You can also be confronted by counterspeech. And people can decide that they want nothing to do with speech that they find offensive or idiotic. The fact that not everyone praises people like Judt for engaging in thinly veiled conspiracy mongering doesn’t mean that there is no debate. It means that there is in fact debate.
If you are concerned about a lack of debate on the middle east conflict, I suggest directing your attention to, say, Bangladesh, where Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury, a journalist, faces charges of “sedition” for promoting friendship and dialogue between Israel and Muslim countries. He had previously been jailed, and is now being brought up on charges again. Under Bangladesh law, Choudury may even face the death penalty.
The reason America’s policy on the Mideast is different than other countries isn’t because we don’t have debate here. Rather it is precisely because we have had, and continue to have, such debate. And Americans on both sides of the political spectrum recognize the importance of supporting a democratic state like Israel against terrorist fanatics with eliminationist goals.
Both democrats and republicans are able to read what Ismail Haniyeh just said yesterday. And they realize that so long as such hateful people are on the Palestinian side in high positions, that Helena’s calls for mandatory UN conferences to extract concessions from Israel are pointless.
“His response to Soviet aggression in Afghanistan was to rear up on his hind legs and … boycott the Moscow Olympics.”
“Jimmy Carter was very much the midwife of fundamentalist Muslim terror.”
Reagan’s response to Soviet aggression in Afghanistan was to arm Osama bin Laden with stinger missiles and teach him how to win a war of attrition against a modern superpower. And you blame the current situation on Carter?
Sorry John, you’ve been reading too much Raimondo. Ronald Reagan didn’t arm Osama bin Laden with bupkis.
I blame Jimmy Carter with being a feckless fool, and, as I pointed out earlier, very much an evangelist, which is what we were actually discussing.
Joshuaو
quite simply a question of not supporting a racist and genocidal terrorist group
If we applied this to the only Democracy in ME, then it should be form long time ago be “punishing or starving people for their choice” for their supports to all crimes and mascaras done by different Israeli leaders and official supported by the majority of Israelis, isn’t?
There is saying in Arabic for you in Iraqi accent ” اِكعد اعوج واحجي عدل”
If you or other commentators short in memory read this by Ilan Pappe
“I have been teaching in the Israeli universities for 25 years. Several of my students were high ranking officers in the army. I could see their growing frustration since the outbreak of the first Intifada in 1987.”
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=10590
Also this
Ynet: UN Envoy Condemns Israeli “Ethnic Cleansing” of Palestinians
http://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2006/09/27/un-gaza/
which is what we were actually discussing.
Looks JES too worry from talking about OBL trainings history and his relations!!!
There is zero truth in that. The reason is the influence of AIPAC and the rest of the Israeli lobby which covers up Israel atrocities in Palestine and denigrates the Palestinian resistance as being “terrorist.” When people invade your land, bulldoze you homes, ethnically cleanse your people, steal your land, water and resources, kill your women and children and imprison your people at will, you have an absolute right of self defense. No one should recognize the state of Israel, it was Truman’s worst mistake, until Israel becomes a civilized nation inhabited by civilized people.
JES – Raimondo? How about TIME magazine:
“The threat of SAM attacks on U.S. airliners was acknowledged in an FAA study in 1993, which noted that as passenger and baggage screening became more rigorous, the chances of missile strikes would rise. The U.S. government’s interest in the problem followed its decision to supply Afghan mujahedeen fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan — whose ranks included Osama bin Laden and many of his al-Qaeda lieutenants — with about 1,000 Stinger missiles in the 1980s. Pentagon officials credit the Stinger with downing about 250 Soviet aircraft.”
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,395514,00.html
Better lay off the Kool-Aid JES.
But Jimmah did a lot better in office than the current occupant. No doubt about that. Joshua at October 7
A Very Bad Job? the current occupant’s Job in the current occupants own words.
http://onegoodmovemedia.org/movies/0610/ds100506presidentsjob.mov
The excellent Antony Lowenstein blog (http://antonyloewenstein.com/blog/) provides this link to a video recording of the debate in held in New York on Sept. 28 about the Israel lobby hosted by that leading US publication: The London Review of Books. (http://blog.scribestudio.com/articles/2006/10/03/the-israeli-lobby-does-it-have-too-much-influence-on-us-foreign-policy)
Mearsheimer acquits himself well and doesn’t at all come across as the Nazi that Dana Milbank described his recent Washington Post article. Judt makes a convincing case for his “awful views” and is nothing short of brilliant. A dangerous man indeed. Light relief is provided by Indyk and Ross denying the very existence of the lobby.
Alison Weir’s disturbing piece in Counterpunch makes one concerned, yet again, about the morally corrosive effects of the occupation on the occupier and those who try to justify it.
Condoleeza Rice’s lament over the current suffering of the Palestinians reached a stratospheric level of hypocrisy. The only thing to compare it to are her statements of sympathy for the Lebanese during the recent war.
It isn’t really chutzpah; she has merely learned that lying is an acceptable mode of governance and discourse, with no one in the press calling her on it.
Some thing intersing in history about “chutzpah”.
“Last term something novel occurred at the nation’s highest court. A decision of the U.S. Supreme Court used the word “chutzpah” for the first time. The decision was written by Justice Antonin Scalia in National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley, and addressed the interaction between government funding and free speech. Chutzpah is a Yiddish word connoting brazenness. A federal court in the Northern District of Illinois noted in a decision a couple of years ago that chutzpah means shameless audacity; impudence; brass. Leo Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish defines chutzpah as a Yiddish idiom meaning “gall, brazen nerve, effrontery.” But neither English translation can do the word justice; neither definition can fully capture the audacity simultaneously bordering on insult and humor which the word chutzpah connotes. As a federal district court in the District of D.C. noted in 1992 that chutzpah is “presumption-plus-arrogance such as no other word, and no other language can do justice to.”
Perhaps the classic “legal” definition of chutzpah is the closest; a person who kills his parents and pleads for the court’s mercy on the ground of being an orphan. However, in defining chutzpah in the context of American jurisprudence it is also important to note, as a court in the federal district of New Jersey did in 1995, that “Legal chutzpah is not always undesirable, and without it our system of jurisprudence would suffer.””
Joshua,
Does Baruch Goldstein qualify as a “terrorist fanatic with eliminationist goals”?
Upsharin,
Yes.
Joshua,
Good heavens, some common ground.
Heartened, I’m going to hunker down and ask you what you made of the Weir article, “Just Another Mother Murdered.”
(The thought bubble paralleling the speech bubble is: ‘jeez, good on ya, Joshua, please please surprise me again.’)
Time to do that predictable little squirt-some-more-squid-ink-jig of yours, Joshua.
This is from Professor Juan Cole’s Informed Comment blog. His springboard is a WAPO article, which is also worth reading. As is this Haaretz article – taster here (it can be found at http://www.antiwar.com, under the rubric The Mystery of America): “Does America not understand that without ending the occupation there will be no peace? Peace in the region would deliver a greater blow to world terrorism than any war America has pursued, in Iraq or Afghanistan. Does America not understand this? Can all this be attributed to the omnipotent Jewish lobby, which causes Israel more harm than good?
“The declared aim of U.S. policy in the Middle East is to bring democracy to the region. For this reason, ostensibly, the U.S. also went to war in Iraq. Even if one ignores the hypocrisy, self-righteousness and double-standard of the Bush administration, which supports quite a few despotic regimes, one should ask the great seeker of democracy: Have your eyes failed to see that the most undemocratic and brutal regime in the region is the Israeli occupation in the territories? And how does the White House reconcile the contradiction between the aspiration to instill democracy in the peoples of the region and the boycott of the Hamas government, which was chosen in democratic elections as America wanted and preached?”
And here’s Professor Cole on the Wapo piece/Judt story:
“New York University historian Tony Judt had his talk cancelled by the Polish consulate after pressure from the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League. Tony Judt supports a binational state in Israel and Palestine and peace between Israel and its neighbors, and thinks the Israel lobby is too powerful in determining the perimeters of the debate over Israeli policies in the United States.
“AJC and ADL called the Polish consulate, on the premises of which Judt was scheduled to talk for another organization. Why were they calling? To shoot the breeze? No, to put pressure. (The unspoken threat here is to turn the diplomatica nd media spotlight on the Polish role in the Holocaust). Then when Judt went public about the successful pressure that had been applied, the AJC and the ADL actually accused him of retailing wild conspiracy theories. Then AJC, at least, admitted the phone call.
“If a binational state is offensive to Judt’s critics, then they had better get used to being offended. By 2030, Israel’s own census bureau projects that about 30 percent of Israeli citizens will be Arabs if current birthrates hold. (If the Russian immigrants who came in the early 1990s, half of whom are not in any way Jewish, went back in any numbers, that statistic would be achieved even faster).
“Just as the 1920s French dream of a Christian-dominated Lebanon foundered on demographic movements in the region, so the 1930s Zionist dream of a Jewish Palestine has become increasingly problematic. Already at the level of first-graders, there is an Arab majority in the territories that made up the British Mandate of Palestine.
“The only way to avert this outcome–which would certainly produce an Israel very unlike the current one and an Israel unacceptable to far-right Likudniks with a soft spot for Stern Gang terrorism like Binyamin Netanyahu or current Foreign Minister Tzippi Livni–is either genocide against the Israeli Arabs or ethnic cleansing of them. I think an ethnic cleansing of the Israeli Arabs would be the nail in the coffin for Israeli relations with Europe, and it seems increasingly unlikely that Israel can thrive with the support of only one country (the United States).
“This issue is quite apart from the ongoing brutalization of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank by the Israeli military or from the concerted effort of Israel to keep the Palestinians in a slave-like condition of statelessness.”
Sorta puts one in mind of a wee tale about little Dutch boys and porous dikes, doesn’t it.
And for a coda, let’s just flag up those six little words in the Haaretz article: “causes Israel more harm than good.”
Does Baruch Goldstein qualify as a “terrorist fanatic with eliminationist goals”?
Yes, the Pope is still Catholic. What a strange question.
Now that we’ve cleared that up, Upharsin, do you view Al Qaeda as a terrorist group or (like 70% of Palestinians) as “legitimate resistance organization?”
“do you view Al Qaeda as a terrorist group or (like 70% of Palestinians) as ‘legitimate resistance organization?’”
Vadim, “terrorist group” and “legitimate resistance organization” are not mutually exclusive categories. We could ask Menachem Begin about that if he was still around.
Vadim, “terrorist group” and “legitimate resistance organization” are not mutually exclusive categories. We could ask Menachem Begin about that if he was still around.
I think that Vadim’s question is highly relevant and appropriate. If one defines al-Qaeda as a “legitimate resistance organization”, then they are obliged to specify exactly what it is that al-Qaeda is “resisting”, and whether their means are justified within that context.
As for Menachem Begin, who here has said that they agreed with his characterization of Etzel or of that organization’s use of terror? I certainly haven’t.