FE Felson writes:
Don't ask me how I ended up on his site at 12:45 AM, but I was just looking through a Rush Limbaugh speech from 10/07 in which he casually mentioned Malcolm Hoenlein how het set up Rush's (only, I assume) trip to Israel, back in '94. It's a very small but telling example of the lobby at work. I'm quite sure Rush talked to no Palestinians on his trip and made no effort to see Gaza or the West Bank or to learn anything about the Palestinian perspective. And I'm sure he hasn't gone to Gaza or the West Bank since. I'd be very interested to know if Hoenlein is the one who suggested the Israel trip in the first place. (He talks about going to the wedding of Hoenlein's daughter, and how everyone who's anyone was there.)
Rush:
"It's the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. His name is Malcolm Hoenlein, and when I went to Israel in 1994, he arranged the trip in a four-day, whirlwind, meeting everybody that was anybody in the government, in the Mossad. I had special briefings, went up to the Golan Heights, and the Mossad. It was just unbelievable."
Max Blumenthal’s latest video has created much controversy and debate that we’ll try to cover here on the site. F.E.Felson sent us one response:
Not surprisingly, the skeptical response to Max Blumenthal’s latest video has been one of casual dismissal: OK, so he went and found some drunk
frat boys hanging out together and filmed them making crude racial
remarks. Not pleasant stuff, but not a huge deal, either.
“Man
listen, hand me a fifth of Henny, a video camera, and an hour, and I’ll
show you Negroes claiming that God’s messenger lives in a space-ship
orbiting the earth,” Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in his Atlantic blog.
Others
have drawn a parallel to Sacha Baron Cohen’s 2006 movie “Borat,” in
which a group of inebriated fraternity brothers from the University of
South Carolina yuk it up
about Jews, blacks and slavery. It wouldn’t be fair to call them
representative of American society, the thinking goes, so why should we
read anything more into what a handful of boozy Israelis and American
Jews in Jerusalem say?
Well,
I have one suggestion why we should: because the man who is Israel’s
new foreign minister, and who very nearly became its new prime minister
this spring, is an absolute, unqualified bigot. Avigdor Lieberman’s
rise (along with Benjamin Netanyahu’s resurgence) is confirmation that
the mood in Israel (and among its ardent American supporters) toward
the Arab and Muslim worlds has darkened dramatically. His rhetoric is
as nakedly racist as George Wallace’s was in America 40 years ago—and
he is now Israel’s ambassador to the world.
I
don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest that the basic attitudes and
instincts that the ignorant, drunk racists in the video express are
products of the same culture—in Israel and among its American
backers—that has given rise to Lieberman, a culture that de-humanizes
Arabs and Muslims and vilifies anyone (especially a black American with
a Muslim middle name) who would dare challenge the dominant “Israel
good/Arabs bad” narrative. Their parents’ and grandparents’ generations
mask the rawness of these attitudes with sterile-sounding terms like
“demographic problem” and “security fence,” but beneath it all is the
same basic de-humanization that these kids are expressing. I suspect
this video is a symptom of that culture.
But
who knows — maybe some of these kids’ parents are actually enlightened
on the Israeli/Palestinian question, and would be appalled to hear what their sons are
saying. Maybe this really is nothing more than drunk guys trying to
out-macho each other—just like in “Borat.” But even if that’s the case,
we are still left with the fact that one of the most powerful and
popular elected officials in Israel embraces the same racism that they
are voicing. And unlike this video, his rise can’t be explained away as
some isolated, meaningless aberration.
