Bear with me a second, I think these dots are worth connecting.
On September 12, the Woodrow Wilson Center, which is run by Jane Harman, the former California congresswoman who is Israel-right-or-wrong, is holding a session on Macedonia called, Ethnocracy Instead of Democracy in Macedonia. Bad things happening:
Over the last four years, the government strongly protected nationalist projects and ethnic alliances, rather than the rule of law.
Now a few days after that, on September 13, the Wilson Center is holding a discussion of the Palestinian statehood initiative at the U.N., titled, "September Crisis or Compromise..." Check out the event below. You'll see one Lebanese-American (Hussein Ibish, per wikipedia), and three Jews, one of them an Israeli, weighing this question. Is that fair? And who will support Palestinian statehood among these men, maybe Malley? Ibish is agin' it.
The Joseph and Alma Gildenhorn Middle East Forum
of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center
presents
September Crisis or Compromise:
The Palestinians, the UN, and the Peace Process
with
Nahum Barnea
Chief Political columnist, Yedioth Ahronoth
Hussein Ibish
Senior Fellow, American Task Force on Palestine
Robert Malley
Program Director for Middle East and North Africa, International Crisis Group
Aaron David Miller
Public Policy Scholar, Woodrow Wilson Center
The much anticipated UN Palestinian initiative this month has sparked enormous controversy and concern. Some fear it; others welcome it; and many just don’t think it matters much. Join us as four veteran analysts and observers of Arab-Israeli politics offer their insights about Palestinian, Israeli, and American strategies and reactions to this month’s developments.
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
9:30 - 11:00 a.m.
6th Floor Flom Auditorium
Woodrow Wilson Center
Cute. reminds me, again, not to give when Woodrow Wilsons, who kindly supported me for one year of graduate school, when they next come by with hat in hand. Maybe, like JPost, they know that their bread is buttered on the right-wing side.
Ridiculous. Nonetheless, some clueless idiots will take this line-up seriously.
They have to pick Establishment types. The Jewish angle is self-explanatory.
The Arab angle is self-explanatory (Hussein Ibish LOL).
Can Hussein Ibish actually walk around in the West Bank without a security detail? Doesn’t he really prefer to pontificate as “our” Palestinian in Washington DC?
The LOL’s seem to be deserved.
Ibish does not walk around in the West Bank. He spends his time burnishing the bottoms of the lords of Washington, but not by walking. The last time I saw him he was unable to look down and see his feet. The American Task Force for Palestine (ATFP) is to AIPAC and the Zionist establishment what the Washington Generals were to the old Harlem Globetrotters, winning six games and losing more than 13,000, according to Wikipedia. They were on the court to give the audience a feeling that the Globetrotters had some competition although everyone knew the outcome in advance. (Before black basketball players were accepted in the NBA, the Globetrotters offered the only postgraduate opportunities for black stars to make a living, such as it was, on the basketball court.)
Before Ibish was with the ATFP he worked for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) which invited Colin Powell to address its national convention during the first Gulf War (along with Michael Lerner!). When the SF Bay Area chapter complained about the speaker selection, Ibish threatened to suspend the chapter from the national organization. No major Arab-American organization has had a leader committed to justice for Palestine since former senator James Abourezk and attorney Abdeen Jabarah were at the ADC and that was a long, long time ago..
Jim Zogby, for founded the Arab American Inst. was once among that group until he decided to play the same game as Ibish, only in a more sophisticated way. It was Zogby who advised Rev. Jesse Jackson not to raise the issue of Palestinian statehood at the Democratic Convention in 1988–the year of the Intifada– despite the fact that resolutions supporting Palestinian statehood had been passed by seven state conventions. When I wrote a critical piece on him in the Middle East Labor Bulletin in the 90s, entitled, “If you can’t beat them, join them,” Zogby complained that I was being unfair and that he had to feed his family.
I think it’s called doublethink.
Wow, this article and the subsequent comments barely stopped shy of actually calling out Hussein Ibish as an “Uncle Tom”.
Still, Phil couldn’t resist slipping into ebonics to describe Ibish’s position.
Sometimes you guys are simply shameless.
Also I looked up Robert Malley. I’m amazed that you would lump him in as one of “3 Jews”. It seems undeniably racist of you Phil to ignore his record in criticizing Israel and meeting with Hamas just to define him by his religion and assume you understand his position.
This is one of the weakest posts you’ve put up in a while and the casual racism it contains just slides by uncommented on for the most part. Very poor.
GF,
Apart from the expression “agin’ it” (which is not “Ebonics”, but a common expression in US English, as in “are you for it/us or agin it/us”), where do you see the Uncle Tom implication?
Malley is probably the closest thing to an advocate of a Palestinian position on the panel, but – and this is Phil’s point – he is not a Palestinian. Palestinians are conspicuously absent from mainstream discourse (media, academia, government) about Palestinian issues, whereas Jews and Israelis are conspicuously present.
What would you say to a panel of 3 Palestinians (one of them rather pro-Israel) and an anti-Zionist non-Israeli Jew, on the topic “Israel, International Law and the Peace Process”? And what would you say were it the norm to exclude Israeli and Zionist Jews from mainstream discourse on Israel and Zionism, preferring to hear from Palestinian and Arab experts on Israel?
The point about there being no Palestinians is well made. The point about three of the participants being Jewish is unnecessary and casually racist. As far as I can tell this is not a political rally, but a discussion. The organizers are under no obligation to anyone to make up their panel in any way other than the one that suits them. They are certainly not beholden to Phil Weiss to build a panel for him to approve (as impossible as that would be).
As for the attacks on Hussein Ibish:
Ibish doesn’t identify himself as a Palestinian. The racist assumption that he should by virtue of being a Muslim-American is astonishing for a site as liberal as this.
You can say that Phil wasn’t using Ebonics, but I don’t believe he would have used the same language if he were talking about any of the other participants. Phil has a history of gender and race insensitivity which surfaces at surprising moments.
GF,
It’s not about obligation. The Woodrow Wilson Center is free to invite Huey, Dewey, Louie and the Beagle Boys to discuss cold fusion if they like. The point is about mainstream discussion of I/P and how it is both sorely lacking in Palestinian voices, and dominated by Jews and Israelis. The fact that three of four panellists are Jewish (one of them an Israeli) is thus a relevant remark, regardless of the opinions they may or may not hold. It’s about the domination of discourse. Would you shout “casual” sexism, if someone were to point out that a panel on feminism and gender-relations is made up entirely, or overwhelmingly of men? Do you really not see a problem here?
The commenters’ remarks about Ibish have nothing to do with where his loyalties should or shouldn’t lie because happens to be an Arab or a Muslim, but with his own controversial track record, from the days of the Electronic Intifada to the American Task Force on Palestine.
Phil has a history of gender and race insensitivity
Really? A couple of slips in the thousands upon thousands of words he has written on this blog? I can’t think of anyone (myself included) who would have done better. A cheap and irrelevant shot on your part.
Are you sure that “agin” really means what you think it does in this context? If not, I think you owe Phil an apology.
How casuallty racist of you to describe anything that is not the Queen’s English as being black.
Casual racist.
(Is that your new thing? Call not-racist things “racist” in order to deflect from the casual racism of Israelis?
Zionism is racism.
I know, isn’t that absurd? Like it wouldn’t be racist if it were three British experts talking about conditions in Northern Ireland, and the focus was on Irish terror there!
Pointing out when racists dominate a conversation is NOT racism just because the racists all happen to belong to the same ethnicity.
Harman along with her late husband, is of the class we call the super-rich. When Harman was brought in to run the center, those in charge knew full well, you pay for what you get. Harman would be footing the bill which meant she had the right to call the shots. No one should be surprised what the “liberal” Harman does with her money.