Israel’s defenders explain to Rashida Tlaib that it’s not anti-Semitic to criticize Israel, so long as you say it’s a vibrant democracy. So the oppression of millions of Palestinians is a golden opportunity for Israelis to show off their country. The bigotry is the same as justifying slavery by the fact that Lincoln and Douglas debated it, and Frederick Douglass was able to get in one word edgewise.
Liberals want leftwing votes, but they dismiss leftwing goals. Michelle Goldberg says Democrats must “court” nihilistic leftists, but what does courtship mean? Supporting a warmonger, Hillary Clinton, because she’s a foreign policy genius. And the same on health care and the climate crisis: we are supposed to settle for policies that are at best inadequate and at worst catastrophic. Who are the nihilists here?
“Israel has a right to exist” is a rationalization of ethnically cleansing Palestinians. “Israel has a right to defend itself” is a rationalization of slaughtering Palestinians. The mainstream is filled with dehumanizing anti-Palestinian tropes, and it has never occurred to any of the mainstream liberal critics of Ilhan Omar to write about them. They need to get out of their bubble and see how America looks from the Middle East.
One snarky tweet about the Israel lobby buying politicians, and the sky falls in; Congresswoman Ilhan Omar is widely accused of anti-semitism. But no one in the political class sees it as a problem when Israel shoots Palestinian protesters. And that’s the sincere root of the US love for Israel: unconscious racism against Palestinians.
Donald Johnson punctures the melodrama over the latest report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. Nothing the Russians did even comes remotely close to the lies and misinformation and deceptive reporting that Americans inflict on each other. The Russians aren’t the ones who persuaded many Americans that global warming is a hoax. The Russians aren’t dividing our society.
Bari Weiss, an opinion editor at the New York Times, asserts that the three heads of the “dragon” of anti-Semitism are white nationalists, Islamists and leftwing anti-Semites who masquerade as anti-Zionists. As if leftwingers who support Palestinian human rights are just as dangerous as neo-Nazis who kill Jews.
Senator Cory Booker’s endorsement of the Israel Anti-Boycott Act following the massacre in Pittsburgh can only be described as a cynical use of real antisemitism as an excuse to dismiss Palestinian rights so as to further his political career.
The Times’s Max Fisher writes a long article rationalizing the indifference of Western elites to the Yemeni slaughter by Saudi Arabia by saying that it’s much easier to relate to the death of one person, Jamal Khashoggi. Yes except that the Times had no problem relating to faceless victims when it’s Putin and Assad. Thus is propaganda justified.
Getting Americans to be honest about our war crimes is like pulling teeth. After leaving the Yemen war completely out of his book on foreign policy, Obama aide Ben Rhodes finally admits “We were wrong” to trust the Saudis by supplying them with arms for their onslaught on Yemeni civilians. Of course he blames Trump for being even worse.
Thank god for NYT columnist Tom Friedman for blurting out the elites’ real view of the Middle East: the likely murder of his Saudi friend Jamal Khashoggi was worse than the Saudi-perpetrated Yemen genocide. And PS, his newspaper was sponsoring a conference in Saudi Arabia.