Isn’t it interesting that only in the last days of the campaign is the radioactive question of U.S. policy in the Middle East finally getting into the ring. The Times followed up on McCain’s radio interview where he likened Rashid Khalidi to a neo-Nazi. The Wall Street Journal is also building the Khalidi fire. And here is a screed by Larry Greenfield, who heads the Republican Jewish Coalition in California, attacking Mel Levine, a former AIPAC-loving congressman, as an anti-Zionist Jew because Obama is supported by the progressive left:
The Jewish left is therefore playing with fire by stirring up some anti-Israel voices in left-wing churches and academe and blogs through lies, smears and innuendo. They have targeted the RJC and let loose hostility against Jews and Israel.
I hope the media finally get to this issue, and that McCain gets a big Jewish vote. Because Greenfield’s militancy actually represents a sizeable constituency in the Jewish community: the pro-Iraq-war, one-Jerusalem crowd. But if this issue never gets play, and Obama gets more than 75 percent of the Jewish vote, that religious ideology will remain uninterrogated, and Greenfield’s statement about consensus will remain true, and ardent Zionism will thereby maintain its political cover in the “liberal Democratic” Jewish community; the debate over America’s involvement in Palestinian human rights violations won’t happen, because the lobby in both parties doesn’t want it to happen. President Obama will have been successfully colonized by Dershowitz and pro-AIPAC, pro-Iraq Mel Levine, and therefore will find it difficult/impossible to come out against the occupation. This is my former crush Debbie Wasserman-Shultz’s game, and Dershowitz’s too: Go with the winner, and claim Obama for Israel!
By contrast, let’s say the Khalidi story hits the fan, and the LA Times release more info on that evening in Chicago 5 years ago, and Rashid Khalidi goes on national television to talk about Palestinian dispossession, and Sue Dravis is interviewed about Obama telling her that Palestinians suffer the most– and as a result Obama gets a low Jewish vote, say 60-70 percent. He will then owe less to the lobby, and the election will help dispatch the idea of “the Jewish vote” (i.e., Israel). Not that pro-Israel Jewish money and media support won’t remain important factors in Obama’s political calculus–but at least he will have more wiggle room. So I’m hoping that the issue gets into play, and Jews and Americans are asked to take a stand on a unified Jerusalem, and an apartheid West Bank– and Obama is forced to do so too. I’m with Greenfield on that.
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This is a big bind for Obama. The Neocons are calling his hand. Will he throw the Zionists under the bus, or Khalidi and the Palestinians? He will almost certainly do the latter, which is really going to anger and disillusion his Left base. But this is the fault of the left-liberals themselves, who have pandered to the Zionists for years. It's ironic, isn't it: The Democrats are now getting burned for becoming so reliant on the Jewish Zionist “liberal” money men and brain trust, and the GOP has been royally burned by getting interwoven with Jewish Zionist Neocons.
This is ultimately what happens to parties and people that have no principles and put foreign causes and agendas ahead of their own countries. In my view, it’s just-deserts for both. The problem is that one of the two is still going to take the White House, and both will still take Congress. So the Zionists win either way.
"He will almost certainly do the latter, which is really going to anger and disillusion his Left base."
I don't think so Ed. Although Zionism and its agenda are starting to finally be outed in many "left" circles, it hasn't been infiltrated enough yet to cause any widespread disillusionment among his base. Most of his base knows next to nothing about Palestinian suffering and Israeli brutality.
I think he'll continue the rational and righteous statements that he has made.
It will pass.
They are playing the bigotry card, in the last week, in desparation.
Powell's condemnation notwithstanding.
It is a dividing issue, and you PHIL are making it moreso.
You are taking your version of a low road on it, and one can only hope then that the population that listens to your voice is small.
If you took a high road, rather than the idiotic "Dershowitz supports Obama, silence him" track, I'd have more respect.
Sometimes you speak like McCain, reckless, from the hip.
Most of the leftie Arab-Americans I know were long ago disillusioned by Obama. I personally have trouble with the knowledge that he cheered on Israel in its butchery of July-August 2006. If he threw the Palestinians and Khalidi under the bus this time I think the leftie Arab-American reaction would be: again?
Sorry but that's the truth. And I'm voting for him, too. I'm just not starry-eyed about him.
What sickens me about all of this is how a decent man, Rashid Khalidi, is being vilified in the press. My father went to his grave believing that Americans and Israelis just want to grind Arabs into the dust, destroy Arab culture, and humiliate and subject all Arabs everywhere. Dad kept account of all the Arab-American professors he knew, men of the generation before Khalidi, who were blacklisted or denied tenure or never hired at all because they were too Arab. He felt that anti-Arab racism was a huge assault on the dignity of Arabs everywhere. I used to argue with him about his fears. I felt he was exaggerating. I believed things were getting better in America.
I am just sickened that Khalidi is suffering this public excoriation based on NOTHING. Glad to see Scott Horton speaking out on his behalf in Harpers' today. I hope we hear from Juan Cole by tomorrow, too. He usually publishes in the middle of the night.
Where are Khalidi's colleagues? The president of Columbia? When is the academic community going to stand up for him?
Because Phil, you are interested in the politics of this, but I am feeling the horror of what Khalidi and his family must be going through at the moment. Is he worried about walking down the street in New York? Are his colleagues sending him messages of support? Or is he just letting it roll off his back? But I'll bet his children are pissed off and feel horrible.
If a Jew were excoriated like this the Anti-Defamation League would be all over it. It's grotesque.
"If a Jew were excoriated like this the Anti-Defamation League would be all over it. It's grotesque."
But Richard Witty's untroubled. He thinks it's no big deal; we're making too much of it, he says.
What a creep.
Leila,
You are being appealed to by McCain as well. The intent is to heighten distrust, and compel the impossibility of reconciliation or any healing of attitude or relationships.
I have not heard Obama EVER state that he disrespected Khalidi. (I don't know Khalidi at all.)
In reading about him last night, I also found info on Edward Said's friendship with an Israeli conductor, Daneil Borenbeim, with whom he founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra.
It takes a focus to cut through the either/or approach.
"I personally have trouble with the knowledge that he cheered on Israel in its butchery of July-August 2006."
Did he in fact? Or, only in nuance?
The therapeutic process is intended to uncover the motivating feelings that underlie reactions and as they play in a relationship.
The most difficult job for a therapist is to retain that focus, so that realizations about others' feelings aren't subsequently used as a weapon.
A confidence betrayed.
Its difficult in a bad marriage to not do that, to instead remember that the goal is mutual respect (respect of oneself AND the other).
Politics of invocation of angers and pains don't accomplish healing particularly well.
But, if you are on a healing track re:Israel, and NOT on a resentment track, then I hope that when revelations of Israelis' feelings (as feelings) are uncovered, that you respect them (as feelings), as I hope you confidently convey your feelings (as feelings) assuming that they will be heard and respected.
Always a joy to see Phil's cynically funny attempts at fake it till we make it, countered by his friend the self-declared preacher man. Who has one significant feature in all his dignified cautioning: the absolute absence of wit. While Phil can be wickedly funny.
See, see: I also found info on Edward Said's friendship with an Israeli conductor, Daneil Borenbeim,
These are of course basics to some of us.
Daneil Borenbeim (sic) see above.
Daniel Barenboim, a mensch. Not that I expect the witless to pay attention on the spelling of people's name's. It was a very deep friendship, by the way. I've heard Daniel say they were in phone contact on an almost daily basis, as long as Said lived.
2) In the early 1990s, a chance meeting between Mr. Barenboim and the late Palestinian-born writer and Columbia University professor Edward Said in a London hotel lobby led to an intensive friendship that has had both political and musical repercussions. These two men, who should have been poles apart politically, discovered in that first meeting, which lasted for hours, that they had similar visions of Israeli/Palestinian possible future cooperation. They decided to continue their dialogue and to collaborate on musical events to further their shared vision of peaceful co-existence in the Middle East. This led to Mr. Barenboim's first concert on the West Bank, a piano recital at the Palestinian Birzeit University in February 1999, and to a workshop for young musicians from the Middle East that took place in Weimar, Germany, in August 1999.
I've met Edward Said, and can see how Mr. Barenboim would befriend him.
Barenboim remained a Zionist though, and although he, like I, relate primarily as human to human in the real world, to the extent intentionally divisive political stands were taken, I'm sure their relationship experienced periodic strain.
I can't see a Jew accepting ANY apology for terror as even understandable, as he rejected any apology for collective punishment.
I sited the relationship of the two, their project, as an example of efforts that bridge the either/or, that REJECT politics as the subject, and instead inform of common humanity, while still living in intentionally different communities.
Both Ed Said and Barenboim were urban characters, favoring the haunts of cosmopolitan cities more than provincial olive groves or settlements.
It is an example of areas of life that intersect, that are cosmopolitan, with no other significance or purpose.
Culture, agriculture, ecology, public health, etc.
Barenboim remained a Zionist though, and although he, like I, relate primarily as human to human in the real world, to the extent intentionally divisive political stands were taken, I'm sure their relationship experienced periodic strain.
It always helps to spell someone's name correctly before one misuses him for one's own tale. I doubt that for D.B. Zionism come before humanism. That's the core of his story. And it caused him quite some trouble in Israel.
You are one of the most over-conform self-righteous persons without the tiniest spark of humor, I ever met on the web. You cannot let your patronizing preaching armor down for one second, can you? Can you relax for one second and join people's ridicule of you for a big freeing laughter? It would be the only thing that could make your preaching successful.
When I'm heard and respected, we can laugh.
When I'm ridiculed, I'll defend.
There is a lot of humor in my posts, often, which perhaps you don't perceive.
Hey Witty, between the BIG SOLID FACT Dump and the hissy gaseous emission, lies the squeaky nuance. l
All Phil is saying is it would be nice for a real full-blown public debate easily accessible to the masses on our unbalanced and not even slightly moral foreign policy. Obama should take up that Israel card McCain-Palin just played–never a better time than now.
check this out
http://buzz.yahoo.com/article/1:32c609e497ff10c8fd2691b61bbae8dc:ccba02a439d34ba5f6137cbc7a3624e8?usc=1
The best case scenario would be that Obama wins by such a landslide that he feels beholden to NO interest groups.
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