We're all going to be talking about the Obama effect. It's happenin. Soon we're all gonna be talkin like Reverend Wright. Here's Christopher Hitchens defending Khalidi, and riffing on a divided Jerusalem, occupation, the right o' return, radical settlers, and by implication, The Is lob, all at once. Beautiful:
Khalidi's family is a famous one in Jerusalem ,
long respected by Arab and Christian and Jew and Druze and Armenian, and
holding a celebrated house and position in the city since approximately the
time of the Crusades. I have had the honor of being invited to this very house.
If Rashid chooses to state that he doesn't care to be evicted from his
ancestral home in order to make way for some settler from Brooklyn
who claims to have God on his side, I think he has a perfect right to say so. I
would go further and say that if Barack Obama was looking for a Palestinian
friend, he could not have chosen any better. But perhaps John McCain has
decided that he doesn't need any Palestinian friends and neither do we. Perhaps
he thinks it's all right to refer to refugees and victims of occupation, who
have been promised self-determination and statehood at the podium of the United
Nations and the U.S. Congress by George Bush and Condoleezza Rice, as if they
were Hitlerites. How shameful. How disgusting. How ignorant.
One could go a
step further and say that many Israelis have used the words apartheid and terrorist to
describe at least some of their government's policies.
One other point: A couple years ago Hitchens attacked Walt and Mearsheimer and said that they were wrong to single out Israel/Palestine when there were border disputes of a similar character between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus and India and Pakistan too. I found his worldly glibness impressive, and helpful: it is precisely the comparison to so many other states that have quarreled, as states, that makes the dispossession of the stateless Palestinians the more unjust. Now Hitchens seems to be coming round to the right idea on this…
Christopher Hitchens, anti-Israel. Wow, news flash, stop the presses!!!!!!!!!!!!
"Rashid Khalidi's family is a famous one in Jerusalem, long respected by Arab and Christian and Jew and Druze and Armenian, and holding a celebrated house and position in the city since approximately the time of the Crusades. I have had the honor of being invited to this very house. If Rashid chooses to state that he doesn't care to be evicted from his ancestral home in order to make way for some settler from Brooklyn who claims to have God on his side, I think he has a perfect right to say so."
Say that again?
"If Rashid chooses to state that he doesn't care to be evicted from his ancestral home in order to make way for some settler from Brooklyn who claims to have God on his side, I think he has a perfect right to say so."
W
O
W
Har, har, Hitchens' snobbery wins out. He's offended that the barbarians McCain and Palin would attack a man from a house as old as the Crusades. I'm offended by the attacks, too, but I am amused at the terms of Hitchens' dudgeon. So British of him to defend a gentleman because of the length, illustriousness and property of his ancestors.
Leila, I think the point of that particular part of the diatribe was to illustrate that on one hand we have a family that has been on that land since before the Crusades, which (very possibly) will be taken away from them to make room for Joe from Brooklyn… because god said so.
Norman Finklestein wrote a brilliant thing on Hitchins. He said that generally when people in middle age abandon the ideas of their youth, it is to shift to ideas more popular with those with money and power. Hitchins is a lovely writer. He is also a bit of a whore. His shift away from neocon platitudes is a sign that their ship is sinking.
Tom,
I think Phil's hopefulness about a sea change is more of a driver.
Its that new things are possible.
And, new dialogs about what to pursue will be the important topics, RATHER than what to oppose.
Why did it take Hitchens so long to see the obvious, considering his stature?
"and by implication, The Is lob, all at once"
"By implication" isn't good enough. The Israel Lobby and its objectives must become completely transparent in this country, and it won't until more writers start doing what Phil and others do in "naming names" and connecting the dots.
Hitchens' comparison to other border disputes is laughable. Do the parties involved in said disputes have the power and resources at their disposal of the Israel Lobby? Do they have agents of their cause working at all levels of the government of the most powerful nation on earth to push their agenda?
Should the occupation of Palestine and brutal treatment of its inhabitants in order to further a racist ideology be referred to as "a border dispute?"