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The War of Ideas in the Middle East
I'm glad to see that the letter from the U.S. Campaign and the other groups notes that Israel systematically discriminates not only against "Palestinian-Americans, Arab-Americans, Muslim-Americans" but also against "other U.S. citizens from all ethnic and faith backgrounds who support Palestinian human and national rights." I'm sad to see, though, that Alex's intro and conclusion again (as in the last post on this issue here) frame the problem as one affecting only Palestinian- and other Arab-Americans.
No question, the Israelis treat the latter groups the worst, by far, but it's also outrageous that they often exclude and routinely hassle U.S. citizens who aren't of those backgrounds, notably people of color, Muslims, activists for Palestinian rights, or just critics of Israeli policy. In addition to Richard Falk, I believe the Israelis have barred Chomsky and Finkelstein, and I know they've excluded lots of people who've worked with the International Solidarity Movement.
Even when some critics are ultimately allowed in, they're subjected to all kinds of delays and indignities. Take little old me: so far, I haven't been excluded (though I'm not sure that will hold if I go back, since I got arrested in Hebron last time I was there). But every time I've gone there (via the Allenby Bridge from Jordan, since a very unpleasant experience at Ben Gurion Airport on my first visit), as soon as the young women scan my passport, they call the security people, who take me away some back room, question me, move me to another room, strip-search me, move me to another room, turn my suitcase upside down and dump everything out, and so on and so on - for three, four, or five hours. This has happened so often that the guy in charge there and I have come to recognize each other - he fancies himself an intellectual and always makes comments about the books I bring. Last time, when he was throwing the contents of my suitcase around, I asked him why. He smirked and said "Security - you might be carrying explosives!" I pointed out that if I did want to bring in explosives, I certainly wouldn't put them in my suitcase, after all my experience with his searches. Even he chuckled at that. But that's all he'd need to say to satisfy the terms of Boxer's bill - no matter how ludicrous the idea that a 67-year-old retired journalist is a threat to Israel's security!
These hassles are minor, of course, compared to what many other s face. But politically, in trying to mobilize people against the AIPAC/Boxer bill, I do think it's important to always make clear that the issue is not only for Palestinian- and other Arab-Americans. Don't you agree, Alex?
Bob Egelko definitely did a great job with that story, but I'm afraid Phil's comments require a couple of clarifications. Bob works not for the Associated Press, but for the San Francisco Chronicle, which ran the story yesterday. The Sydney Morning Herald, to its credit, picked up the piece, at least online, and their site credits AP, so maybe the AP had something to do with distributing it, but it doesn't appear that it went out over the regular AP wire. I just searched AP.org for "Sandra Tamari" and, separately, for "Bob Egelko," and neither search produced any hits. And when I searched on Google News for "Sandra Tamari," the only instance of this story that came up was the Sydney paper.
In other words, this story is not getting the wide distribution it deserves. While there has clearly been some progress in the mainstream media, let's not get carried away - we still have a very long way to go.
Thanks for a nice post, @WomanUnveiled, but lest there be any doubt, I'd suggest changing the last sentence from passive to active voice: Israel assassinated Kanafani in Beirut in 1972.
For details, see
link to beirut.indymedia.org
I agree with you, Max. The mental illness is called Zionism.
Another place to give the Newseum a piece of your mind is their Facebook page:
link to facebook.com
The Atlantic Wire has a somewhat interesting piece by J.K. Trotter called "Why the Newseum Changed Its Mind About Honoring These Dead Cameramen." A choice tidbit:
The "media contact" on the Newseum's abject "update" is:
Jonathan Thompson, manager of media relations
202/292-6353
jothompson@newseum.org
I just left him a message.
@richb: the "smoking gun" video you link to is about the first chip that Intel marketed as the Core i7, which was codenamed (and known in the industry as) Nehalem. There's absolutely no doubt it was designed in Hillsboro, Oregon - your video is only one of dozens of authoritative sources attesting to that.
The problem is that "Core i7" is actually just a marketing term - it's the brand Intel has since 2008 slapped on its most powerful PC processor at any given point in time, even though the design changes every couple of years. There have now been three generations of chips branded as i7, and while the first was designed in Oregon, the second i7 ("Sandy Bridge) and the third and current version ("Ivy Bridge") were designed in Israel - specifically, at Intel's Haifa Design Center. Sandy Bridge was originally codenamed Gesher, after a small, now-defunct party that split off from the Likud.
A fourth-generation i7, code-named Haswell, is due out next month, and the lead designers of that one apparently were in Oregon, though Intel is said to be moving to a model that moves more collaboration in new designs among its various design centers, and I'm sure the Israelis helped with Haswell.
So if Hawking has the latest i7 that's on the open market today, the fact is that it was designed in Israel. But since Intel apparently supplies him with equipment (to make sure he doesn't adopt something with AMD processors, as he did once before), it's quite possible that he already has a pre-release "Haswell" i7; if not, he's likely to get one soon. When he does, he'll no longer have a chip designed primarily in Israel - until/unless Intel comes out with another one for which Haifa took the lead.
Politically, all this is meaningless, IMO. It's indisputable that Intel's facilities in Israel have made important contributions to the company's fortunes, especially over the last decade. So what? It's no excuse for apartheid.
See my comment at link to mondoweiss.net
for more on the history of the i7 line, including links to Intel sources.
I don't know the details, so correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that Change.org charges organizations for petitions but lets individuals post them for free. This one seems to have been started by an individual.
Mike Coogan concluded: "If Senator Boxer really wants leverage to assist U.S. travelers, she should propose an amendment specifying that unless and until Israel ends its practice of systemic discrimination based on race, religion and ethnicity, it will not be granted entry into the visa waiver program."
Good idea, but make it "unless and until Israel ends its practice of systemic discrimination based on race, religion, ethnicity, and political opinion." Why give them a pass for hassling and excluding non-Arab, non-Muslim Americans (including Jews as well as non-Jews) simply for being critical of Israel?
Otherwise, excellent work on this, Mike Coogan.
That's fascinating - thanks Tree and especially HarryLaw for posting.
With regard to the design of the Core i7, though, the picture is actually a little complicated. It's true that the original Core i7, codenamed Nehalem, was designed by the Hillsboro, Oregon, group. (Among many other sources, see the Intel-produced video "Making of Intel Core i7.") But:
a) the Nehalem microarchitecture, though it had some real advances, was a step on an evolutionary line that runs back through the earlier Core designs back to the Pentium M, a.k.a. Centrino, which was developed at Intel's Haifa design center (and was codenamed Banias, a spring and archaeological site in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights). That chip actually saved Intel's bacon, so to speak - their previous flagship product, the Pentium 4, turned out to be a bust.
b) Since the original, Hillsboro-designed i7, there have been two subsequent generations bearing the same marketing name, codenamed Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge, and those were designed and managed out of Haifa. In fact, Sandy Bridge originally had a Hebrew codename, as explained in this choice tidbit from an Intel website:
Intel is introducing a fourth generation of the i7 (and i5) next month, and it's my understanding that Hillsboro was the lead for that design, although I'm sure Haifa played some role and some of the manufacturing will be done in Intel's Fab 28 in Kiryat Gat, Israel (which was, incidentally, the subject of the column that led to the end of my career in tech journalism).
Overall, there's no denying that Israelis have played a key role in Intel's fortunes, especially over the last decade. In fact, the former head of the Haifa design center, David Perlmutter (who goes by "Dadi") has been promoted all the way to "Executive Vice President; General Manager, Intel Architecture Group; Chief Product Officer." Recently he was supposedly a contender for the CEO job, but he didn't get it.
Needless to say, none of this excuses Shurat HaDin's sick comments about Stephen Hawking - nor, above all, 65 years of ethnic cleansing!
Haaretz columnist Bradley Burston also has a piece about the rabid reactions of the Israeli right. Another example he gives: Steven Plaut, a professor of business finance and economics at the University of Haifa, wrote "I suggest that the people of Israel send Hawking for a free trip on the Achille Lauro!!" - a reference to the 1985 incident in which Palestinian fighters commandeered an Italian cruise ship, apparently murdered a disabled American Jewish passenger, and threw his body overboard:
I'm mostly with you, kma. In fact, in the first draft of my piece I also objected to Glass's intro - that whole bit about people interpreting things differently, the whole "two narratives" thing, always serves liberals as a convenient excuse for not confronting the plain facts of the situation. Your message makes me regret cutting that part out.
It's also absolutely true that the piece would have been stronger if she'd given more time to the people of Nabi Saleh themselves, in particular to explain why they protest in the first place.
I think I disagree with you, though, about what Updike is trying to communicate about "mapping." To say such tactics may be effective to some degree in intimidating people, and therefore may have contributed to the relative calm Jewish Israelis have enjoyed over the last years, is not necessarily to approve of them. In fact, my guess is that these tactics do sound "sick and twisted," as you put it, to her - I think she was just trying to head off a justification the Zionists might offer. But maybe I'm giving her too much credit...
>are you saying that Ira Glass did not produce this or consent to its
>being produced and reported on his show?
No, Tokyobk, I'm not saying that at all - I'm quite sure it wouldn't have aired without his approval.
I'm just suggesting that Glass has a kind of personal stature and authority with much of his audience that no one else on the show does - not even Updike, who's been there from the start, has occasionally filled in as host, and has won a slew of prizes in her own right. So if Ira Glass himself were to do a piece in one way or another exposing the horrors of the occupation, that would have more impact on public opinion, at least in certain strata, than anything Updike or anyone else on his staff could do.
I agree that G4S's recent statements were stronger than the 2011 statement. Let's hope that this time they really do what they say and, further, get out of Israel altogether. But in view of their weaselly behavior after the 2011 statement and even more clearly after the predecessor company announced in 2002 that it was leaving the West Bank but never did, I think a good bit of caution is in order.
As to the history, while most of us here may not have had any awareness of G4S until recently, folks in Europe have been on the case much longer. The predecessor company's short-lived withdrawal from the West Bank in 2002 was, according to Nieuwhof, a response to criticism from the then Foreign Minister of Denmark. The 2011 statement was a response to an exposé and public campaign launched in November 2010 by DanWatch, a Danish activist organization; a presentation by people from WhoProfits.org that same month at the Russell Tribunal on Palestine in London (included in the book Corporate Complicity in Israel's Occupation; and then a detailed report from WhoProfits in early 2011.
In other words, while this recent announcement is a response to public pressure, so too were the previous announcements that turned out to be pretty much meaningless. As I said, I agree that this one represents more of a commitment (at least compared to the 2011 one), and the BDS movement is bigger, but weasels are weasels....
I too was excited about this when I read the Financial Times report the other day, but then I read Adri Nieuwhof's report in the Electronic Intifada, which points out that G4S made similar announcements way back in 2002, then again in 2011. On both occasions they were responding to public pressure, but both times they quickly backtracked.
The lesson: unless people stay on their case, they'll again reverse themselves, and they won't give up the contracts in Israel.
Interesting that the UN HRC report says Furkan had dual citizenship.
On the other hand, his father, Professor Ahmet Dogan, has said in several interviews that Furkan did not have Turkish citizenship. Here's one of them: "Furkan was a U.S. citizen. He did not have Turkish citizenship. He could have taken Turkish citizenship at any time after he turned 18 but he had not done so."
> One of those Turkish citizens was also an American, young Furkan Dogan.
Actually, Furman Dog an was not a Turkish citizen - he was born in the USA, and according to his dad, this is the only country he was a citizen of.
(Posted from a sitting in SF against the Keystone XL pipeline.)
As Dave Zirin pointed out on Democracy Now this morning, we should also add Mogadishu (Somalia) to the list of places we grieve for. See, for example, "Dozens killed in attacks in Somali capital"
link to aljazeera.com
All the press accounts of this issue that I've seen, including Mike Coogan's and Glenn Geenwald's, highlight the issue of Israeli discrimination against Palestinian-, Muslim-, and Arab-Americans. Same goes for the State Department travel advisory. But there's another element to the picture: Israel has also on many occasions barred entry to U.S. citizens who are not of Palestinian, Muslim, or Arab origin, but are simply known or suspected activists in support of justice for Palestine.
Since Israel considers any such activism a "security threat," Boxer's bill would do nothing to deter the Israelis from this kind of discrimination, too.
This is a couple of days old, evidently, but I just noticed it and don't see it mentioned here: the International Herald Tribune website has a nice remembrance of Anthony Lewis by Raja Shehadeh, the writer and lawyer from Ramallah:
link to latitude.blogs.nytimes.com
Today's Morning Edition (4/1/13) has a feature, reported by Ina Jaffe, about a 31-year-old blogger and photographer named Ari Seth Cohen, whose "idea of heaven is to wait in the freezing cold on a street corner in the middle of Manhattan hoping a fabulous-looking older woman passes by," then shoots her picture. Assuming, of course, that he has succeeded in convincing the subject that "he's not a weirdo"...
I wonder whether this is an April Fool's joke, or just another illustration of NPR's idea of "human interest"?
link to npr.org
Major news from today's Morning Edition: "Reviving The Spirit And Schmaltz Of The Jewish Deli," about a restaurant in Dupont Circle.
link to npr.org
With respect, RoHa, I think you are misreading Sheizaf. He is not saying that continuing the occupation, etc., is rational in any positive moral sense, simply that it appears the most sensible course from the perspective of Israeli political leaders concerned with holding on to their jobs, perks, and power (and their lives). His argument is that if they were to push for any serious change to the status quo, many if not most of their constituents and of the Israeli elite (and, I'd add, the rich right-wing American Jews who fund all those pols) would turn on them and, one way or another, try to drive them out of office. If you read the full text, he explains that that's what happened to Rabin, even to Netanyahu after he signed the Hebron agreement, and to Sharon when he decided to do the Gaza "disengagement" (though in that case he didn't get driven out of office - unless someone caused his stroke). You could also add Barak and Olmert to the list, just for the positions they put forward in their negotiations with the PA, even though neither actually concluded an agreement. (No doubt Olmert was corrupt, but no one worried about that until he got involved in the negotiations.)
And just to anticipate an objection someone is likely to make, I'm pretty sure that Sheizaf wouldn't argue that whatever changes these guys made or contemplated were necessarily real steps toward justice, just that they represented change from the arrangements that were in place when they took office.
If anyone's interested, Sheizaf laid out this "rational choice" argument more fully at
link to 972mag.com
My own view is that his argument is true as far as it goes, except that it implies that the Israeli leaders had or have no commitments of their own except to their own careers, so if somehow, some day, there got to be broad political support for change in Israel's policy toward the Palestinians, they'd cheerfully, "rationally" move in that direction. That might be true on some tactical issues, but not on the big picture - they're all dedicated Zionists, committed to the tribalist goal of stealing as much as they can get away with for the Jews and keeping the Palestinians under their boots (unless they can find a way to get rid of them altogether).
Yes, now that you point it out, I'm pretty sure Ma'ale Ha-Zeitim is what he said. Thanks.
Thanks for this, Phil. I've always thought that one factor contributing to the Zionists' success in winning a large degree of popular support in the U.S. is Americans' subconscious awareness that we too live on stolen land and owe our prosperity to ethnic cleansing.
Just for the record, re Mr. Moya-Smith's comment about the Lakota being a different people and culture from the Seminole, there's an interesting story there: the Seminole did not exist as a people before the white people came. They're an amalgam of native people from various tribes, predominantly but not exclusively Creek, and escaped African slaves. The name is supposedly a corruption of cimarrón, a word the Spanish used for runaways or "wild people." Over time they developed a separate identity, but the feds didn't recognize them as a tribe until the 1950s.
The blurbs on Amazon for Abrams' book are a hoot: Richard B. Cheney, Henry Kissinger, Joe Lieberman, Alan Dershowitz, John Lewis Gaddis (Yale professor), Wall Street Journal, and Jennifer Rubin.
Glad to have Professor Slater make explicit the satirical nature of his piece - I thought so, but, frankly, wasn't entirely sure. Yes, "Nazi Germany was much worse than Israel. What a relief!"
This seems like a fitting occasion to recall the parallel images compiled by Norman Finkelstein in the wake of Operation Cast Lead - check them out at
link to countercurrents.org
(They were originally posted on Finkelstein's site
link to normanfinkelstein.com
but at least for me the images no longer load from there.)
Along similar lines, recall the Adbusters article that the Zionists tried to use to crucify Professor William Robinson of the University of California at Santa Barbara:
link to sb4af.wordpress.com
Still more sympathetic discussion of '5 Broken Cameras' on NPR: on today's (Thursday, Feb. 14) 'Talk fo the Nation,' Neal Conan talks with film critic Bob Mondello about the Oscar-nominated documentaries.
link to npr.org
(This is different from the Feb. 6 'Talk f the Nation' segment Chris O. linked to yesterday.)
Starting at about 7 minutes, 10 seconds into this segment, Mondello says "It's a really, sort of wrenching picture about that, the whole dispute over the settlements, that are, in the eyes of the Palestinians, are encroaching on their land and basically taking it over. It's a very powerful documentary - it would be hard to watch this and not be sort of enraged at what's happening there and the powerlessness of the people who are, you know - like this guy, who is just, his house is in the way." Conan follows: "And is brushed aside, and their complaints are not listened to, and story of his friends, one of whom is killed..."
At 16 minutes Conan cites 'The Gatekeepers' as "one film many tout as the likely winner." Mondello responds, "And boy, is it powerful."
Surprisingly "balanced" coverage of this issue on NPR's Morning Edition this morning - complete with a bit of audio about anti-SodaStream demonstrators in Boston singing about war crimes!
link to npr.org
This is great news - she can do far less harm at PEN than at Amnesty!
Note, though, that the post is incorrect in saying that Nossel held "the top job at Amnesty International." She was Executive Director of the U.S. branch, Amnesty International USA. The top job at Amnesty International overall is Secretary General. That position has been held since 2010 by Salil Shetty.
Turns out that AI USA actually announced Nossel's resignation back in mid-December, though that development doesn't seem to have gotten much attention at the time. (A Google search turns up basically nothing about it from December except this post from a blog run by CodePink's Maine coordinator, which includes a letter from AI-USA's chairman announcing the resignation.) Nossel had started work there last January (not six months ago, as stated above). If anyone knows the back story on her resignation after less than a year on the job, do tell!
I have to laugh at all those media types (both U.S., Israeli, and other) who have been obsessing for months about Naftali Bennett, when the real winner turns out to be Yair Lapid, to whom they paid virtually no attention!
For anyone who hasn't seen The Great Book Robbery, it's available on Vimeo. Alternatively, a slightly abbreviated version (48 minutes instead of 57) that was shown on Al Jazeera a few years back is on YouTube.
Of course, the really honorable thing to do is to buy the DVD from the movie site Annie links to, but that will set you back 38 Euros.
Incidentally, Brunner, who works for Dutch TV, has made a bunch of other documentaries that are worth seeing, including a good one about the Nakba, a couple about the Wall, one about the Lobby, and so on. Most of them seem to be available (though in a few cases only in teaser form) at this Vimeo index page.
> Likud Beiteinu is merely an amalgam of corrupt hacks, bloated ethnics and would be Jacobins.
Boy, is that ever an insult to the real Jacobins!
What in fact does your friend mean by that term?
Thanks for the interesting Michaelson link, Dickerson.
>100 years of Israeli 18-year-olds risking their lives at checkpoints
Ah, so that's the problem with the checkpoints! Who cares about the disruption, delay, humiliation, etc., those 18-year-old Israelis impose on the Palestinians? Not to mention that it's the lives of the latter that are at much greater risk.
I myself am no fan of the kind of two-state solution the "international consensus" contemplates - to me it would be a gross historical injustice, above all to the refugees. But (speaking only for myself) I'd characterize the three proposals you mention - the Clinton parameters, the "Geneva Agreement," and the terms Olmert and Abbas were discussing - as serious, if to varying degrees incomplete, attempts to implement that "consensus." But beyond the problems with that whole approach, the trouble is that it's inconceivable, in the world as it stands, that those plans would actually be implemented. It's not just Netanyahu who stands in the way - who in Israeli politics is prepared to push any plan like those, and where among the Israeli public would they seek political support? The settlers and the rest of the right would resist with all their considerable might, and the so-called center wouldn't dare buck them even if they wanted to (which they don't seem to). I doubt even Meretz would go along, and they're nothing.
Hypothetically, the Americans could force them to go along, just as Eisenhower forced Ben Gurion to give up first the Sinai, then Gaza in 1957. But at this point that's no more conceivable than the Israeli leadership deciding to do it themselves.
The EU Consul Generals' report Halper refers to hasn't been released to the public, but a bunch of European reporters got to read it and reported extensively about it last January. Joe Catron quoted from several of those articles in a post here:
link to mondoweiss.net
This post, like so many others here, assumes a distinction between a two-state-solution and a bantustan plan. But to my mind there's no such distinction: a bantustan - a small Palestinian entity, not just demilitarized, but fenced in and fragmented by settlements, military installations, buffer zones, roads, and so on, with its borders, airspace, electromagnetic spectrum, etc. under permanent Israeli control - is what most Israelis have always had in mind when they've contemplated a two-state solution. And in that sense - as I argued here - the two-state solution is anything but dead.
For most of them, including Netanyahu, that plan is of course their third choice. First would be "transfer" - expulsion of all Palestinians from the West Bank (and from '48 Israel, and Gaza too) - if they could arrange it and get away with it. Second choice is just letting the status quo drag on - why not, from their point of view?
But if they can't figure out how to pull off #1, and #2 somehow ceases to be sustainable (though I see no sign of that actually happening), the next best bet is to annex Area C (62 percent of the West Bank, including the settlements and the Jordan Valley), retain all or virtually all of greater East Jerusalem, and let the Palestinians have a state, in the sense described above, in what's left. As Moshe Ya’alon, Netanyahu’s deputy prime minister and minister of strategic affairs, put it year or two back: "if they [the Palestinians] want to call it a state, let them call it that. If they want to call it an empire, by all means. We intend to keep what exists now and let them call it whatever they want.”
In that sense Rudoren, Kershner, and the rest of the MSM are perfectly right in saying Netanyahu supports a two-state solution!
As far as I can see, the only Israelis who disagree with that vision are a) a small and shrinking minority on the left that takes semi-seriously the idea of basing the Palestinian state roughly on the 1967 borders, and b) a small but growing minority who favor annexation of the entire West Bank, with its Palestinian population either "transferred" to Jordan or allowed to stay but in a state of permanent, formalized third-class citizenship.
Nice essay. Just want to point out that Ms. Abarbanel's parenthetical reference to Purim doesn't tell the half of that story: yes, as she notes, the Jews got Haman and his ten sons killed, then hanged for plotting to kill the Jews. But according to the Book of Esther (9:12), they also killed another 500 other people - all "terrorists," no doubt - in the Persian capital, Shushan (Susa). And when the Persian king Ahashuerus asked Esther what else she wanted, she requested and got permission to continue the killing the next day, during which the Jews killed another 300 people in Shushan (9:15) and 75,000 in the provinces (9:16).
And then they had a feast...
It's true that the card has been around for a while, but it's still very useful. For years now some of us in the Bay Area - organized by NorCal Sabeel, I believe - have held an vigil in Union Square (the heart of the shopping district) in San Francisco on Christmas Eve or some other day shortly before Christmas, and we've handed out copies of that card. Generally speaking, it gets a sympathetic response.
Remember that in October, 2011, NPR dumped a show called "World of Opera" because host Lisa Simeone took part in Occupy DC. Applying the same principle n light of Siegel's role in this forum, I think NPR now needs to dump "All Things Considered."
I don't question Munayyer's analysis, as far as it goes, but it strikes me that in a way, implicitly, it lets the non-settler Israeli public off the hook. The two-state solution is dead not just because the settlers are now a crucial swing bloc and "politicians' desire to win the bloc is driving the entire polity to the right," but also because the Israeli public as a whole - non-settler as well as settler - and all the Jewish parties have moved dramatically to the right since at least the year 2000. That includes even those parties, such as Labor and Meretz, that have little hope of winning significant support from settlers.
(A very prescient book on this rightward drift, still worth reading IMO, is Michel Warschawski's Toward an Open Tomb: The Crisis of Israeli Society, which was written shortly after the breakdown of the Camp David negotiations and the outbreak of the second intifada. What he argues, as I recall, is that the Israeli center and most of the "left" never really had any grasp of the Palestinian perspective. They were for peace as long as they thought they could have it on their terms. When the Palestinians refused to accept those terms and instead renewed the intifada, virtually all elements of the Jewish polity bought Barak's line that "there is no partner for peace" and said, in effect, "to hell with them.")
As for the assertion - apparently from Phil rather than Munayyer - that Kadima "has supported a two-state solution," well, yes - the kind of two-state "solution" I wrote about here - i.e., a Palestinian statelet that's little more than an archipelago of bantustans hemmed in all around by Israeli settlements, military bases, Jewish-only roads, etc. Let's not forget that Kadima was created by the butcher Ariel Sharon!
Update re B'nai Jeshurun, from JTA:
Wonder what happened - did the right wingers threaten to break their kneecaps? kill their kids? or just pull their funding?
Just by way of background, it may or may not be relevant that Winona La Duke's mom was Jewish (née Betty Bernstein), and after her parents separated, it was the mom who raised Winona. From Wikipedia:
Thanks for a good report. One small correction: Monday's demonstration at the Israeli Consulate in downtown San Francisco was not the second at that location during the current assault on Gaza, but the third: a couple of hundred of us were out there last Thursday, and then two or three times that many on Friday.
Congratulations, Alex. Is Allison Deger also going to continue as assistant editor, or is she moving on?
Miura: I'm not sure what you intended to communicate with that out-of-context quotation about the NYRB. For those who didn't bother to follow the link, it goes to the transcript of a talk by Noam Chomsky about Norman Finkelstein's exposure of Joan Peter's From Time Immemorial as a fraud. Here's a more extensive excerpt:
Perhaps choosing to say nothing about a book they knew to be a fraud was an "intelligent" reaction on the part of the NYRB editors, in terms of protecting their jobs and their status in the Zionist-dominated market they serve. I guess it was better than giving the book the kind of rave the New York Times and so many other publications did. But that choice was hardly a sign of courage or integrity. On the contrary!
On the other side of the ledger, I do appreciate their providing an occasional outlet for David Shulman, who writes marvelously but seems to get almost no play in other media. Maybe they print him because he's still a Zionist, of sorts, but at least he's honest about what's actually happening on the ground, and beyond that - beyond even Gideon Levy and other Israelis with open eyes and hearts - he actually puts his body on the line, on a regular basis, in support of his liberal convictions.
Interesting piece, but, at least when I lived in Dorchester, author Marc Fisher would have gotten his ass kicked for calling it "a neighborhood of south Boston"! And he'd probably get an even nastier response to that line if he took it to Southie.
BTW, the Boston Globe also ran a pretty good profile of Adelson last spring: link to bostonglobe.com
I guess it's positive, in a sense, that Simes is offering this advice to Romney, but his defense of Mubarak is grotesque. An "imperfect democrat"? Right, like I'm an imperfect Hindu.
I'm torn, Seafoid - I appreciate your perspective, and I certainly admire the work of Gideon Levy, Amira Hass, and occasionally some of the other reporters and columnists. But on the whole the paper doesn't actually cover the occupation very well, at least in English (and I'd guess it's even worse in Hebrew). Just compare what Haaretz has from the West Bank and Gaza on any given day to the same day's coverage at imemc.org (where I once was a volunteer editor) or the Palestine News Network or Ma'an (which isn't to say those sources don't have their own problems and limitations).
Besides, I find most of Haaretz's stories are written from inside "the Israeli consensus" - i.e., they are pervaded by Jewish ethnocentrism. They have minimal coverage of the lives and opinions of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship. While they do sometimes print things from Avnery, they routinely ignore or disparage or condescend to the activists I most admire (the Palestinian popular committees and Stop the Wall groups, the BDS National Committee, the ISM, the Anarchists Against the Wal, Ta'ayush, etc.). On Iran, even when they are critical of Netanyahu, it's usually tactical ("this isn't good for our image") - they don't seem to recognize the profound mendacity, immorality, illegality, and sheer cynicism of the whole campaign.
So, weighing up the whole picture, I come down against giving them money.
Those who (like me) refuse to pay Haaretz can find the full text of Gideon Levy's first article on this survey - the one that's "all facts and figures," in Allison's words - at link to pakistankakhudahafiz.com
Thanks, Google News!
Come on, Dan and Annie - you gotta read it all to understand what's going on here.
Thanks, but the red button isn't producing anything for me. Anyone else seeing English captions?
By writing that "in the territory under Israel's jurisdiction a situation of apartheid exists" immediately after reporting that Jews are no longer a majority in that territory, Akiva Eldar seems to imply that apartheid exists only when a minority rules over a majority. That's wrong: the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid makes no mention of majority or minority rule, nor does it limit the scope of the term apartheid to situations that closely resemble the South African model. Here's how Article II of the Convention defines apartheid:
In other words, Israel has been an apartheid state since its foundation in 1948.
Funny, I thought of posting something about it here at the time, but I decided it was outside MW's scope. Whatever. Better late than never....
Friendly suggestion, Annie: spend less time wallowing in ridiculous MW comment threads and more getting out and about the Internet, if not the real world! The "Living Under Drones" report and video came out on Sept. 25 and got wide publicity at the time: The Independent wrote: "The product of nine months' research and more than 130 interviews, it is one of the most exhaustive attempts by academics to understand – and evaluate – Washington's drone wars. And their verdict is damning." Democracy Now had an excellent segment on it. Al Jazeera held a debate between one of the report's researchers and a hugely annoying Beltway professor named Christine Fair. Though the NY Times covered the report only online, as far as I can tell, the LA Times had a long and very good story about it in print and a follow-up op-ed by an attorney for Reprieve who worked on the report, plus yesterday a reply by some idiot trying to justify the U.S. drone program by citing Malala Yousafzai, the 14-year-old Pakistani girl recently shot by the Taliban.
On the other hand, I have to give you credit for beating NPR to the punch: they have yet to mention the report. Instead, on the very day it was released, they devoted four minutes, 21 seconds to a segment called "National Security Experts Go Rogue For 'Drone Smackdown'," an utter obscenity about two Beltway types (both Jews, one married to a woman who used to be Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs and now heads of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution) taking their kids to the park and trying to crash each other's toy remote-controlled planes.
Check out Khalil Bendib's cartoon about Netanyahu and his red lines at
link to bendib.com
Thanks, Exiled. Since you ask what I propose, I'll just say that I agree completely with your analysis of what should be happening.
The only thing I'd add, building on your acknowledgment that a bi-national state is a long shot, is that the Israelis are virtually certain to resist that idea with even more ferocity than they've resisted the two-state idea. Things change, and I try to maintain some optimism, but considering that no one has been able or willing to impose a two-state solution on the Israelis, it's not at all obvious, to say the least, from whence the Palestinians and their supporters are going to get the power to overcome the much stiffer opposition facing any plan for a single state (except with virtually complete "transfer").
I also think it's important in any conversation about outcomes for those of us who aren't Palestinian to remember that self-determination includes the right to make compromises, even with respect to issues we might consider matters of fundamental justice and morality. It's all too easy for people living comfortably (in most cases) thousands of miles away to tell them to hold out for this or that. The problem, of course, (actually one of many) is who gets to make the compromises when there's no legitimate representative of the whole people. (The PLO claims to be just that, and the UN has accepted that claim, but in its current form it doesn't seem to me to be the legitimate representative of anything except one wing of the West Bank elite.)
"Jewish chauvinism" is a good phrase, but do we really want to dignify it by calling it a religious impulse?
Max does a good job summarizing what we think we know at this point, but at least for now he appears to be accepting the proposition that "a strange collection of rightwing Christian evangelicals and exiled Egyptian Copts" is responsible for the movie. I'm not convinced that's the whole story...
Seanmcbride wrote: "Why can’t the mainstream media, with all their resources, do this kind of research?"
It's not often that I speak up in defense of the MSM, but in this case it's the AP that's leading the way with this story, and now the Long Beach Press-Telegram has added some new details, and they're about as mainstream as it gets. I appreciate that Alex, Max, and other bloggers are adding useful background, context, links, etc., but so far it's the MSM folks who've done the real investigative work here.
The big question that no one, mainstream or otherwise, has yet addressed is where the money came from. It probably wasn't the $5 million "Bacile" originally claimed, but it's not cheap to hire actors, rent a studio, etc., and from what we know of Nakoula and Abdelmasih, it seems pretty doubtful they'd have had the resources to do it.
As to why the AP and WSJ originally went with the Bacile story, again I find myself defending them. After the attack in Benghazi they were suddenly dealing with an urgent story, and Sam Bacile, as the name on the You Tube upload, was a primary person of interest. Once they succeeded in tracking him down, and he acknowledged a role in making the film and added a bunch of details, it makes sense to me, as a former reporter, that they reported what he told them, rather than holding the story up pending research into his background. At least in the case of the AP, they obviously moved right on to investigating his claims, and they appear to have done a good job with that, and within a few hours they put out the follow-up piece about what they'd found. That's the way the AP at its best works - multiple updates as a story unfolds.
So from my point of view it's not fair to slam them for not knowing everything from the beginning. The question is whether they'll keep digging into the story and find out who was behind these crazy Copts, or let it drop and leave the impression that they alone are responsible.
If you haven't seen it, check out the latest exciting installment in the Associated Press's efforts to track down "Sam Bacile." link to hosted.ap.org
They got to a California Coptic Christian named Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, who copped (sorry!) to federal bank fraud charges in 2010. He denied that he's "Sam Bacile," but he acknowledged a role in making the movie, and the story presents several suggestive bits of evidence that he may be the person who posed as "Sam Bacile" - starting with his middle name, which he tried to conceal, and the fact that the cellphone number on which they reached "Bacile" is linked to the address where they found Nakoula.
Even if "Bacile" is really Nakoula , we obviously don't know the whole story here...
One note of interest: On Democracy Now this morning, Amy Goodman explicitly cited that AP article and read extensive excerpts from it, including the description of Bacile as an "Israeli filmmaker" - but she left out the bit about the 100 Jewish donors. This is not the first time we've seen her reluctance to deal with the realities of the wealth, power, and politics of American Jews.
I'm with Joe Catron, though - I don't think we really know who this "Bacile" guy is. It's quite striking that there seems to be nothing about him online before this incident.
The AP describes Bacile as "a California real estate developer who identifies himself as an Israeli Jew."
That story is posted on the NPR site, but so far there's been no mention of Bacile and his funders on NPR's broadcast reports.
The Wall Street Journal reported:
The initial report on the New York Times site, citing the WSJ, repeated those bits, but they're not in the Times' latest story on the situation.
>Anti-Semitism is a 2000-year-old ideology that sees Jews as ...
>master manipulators who control global finance... and the media.
So, Ms. Satter, it's anti-semitic to describe the world as it (largely) is?
Just went to +972 to read the Regavim article, but I was stopped in my tracks by a headline to another article on that page: "Migron evacuation proves Israel's land policy is political."
Whoda thunk it?
Hey, Annie, check out Urban Dictionary's definition of the expression "in like flint":
:-)
Chris McGreal, who used to be the Guardian's correspondent in Israel/Palestine, has a good column about the Corrie case:
He also recounts an interesting interview he did a few weeks after Rachel's death with Col. Pinhas "Pinky" Zuaretz, the IDF commander in southern Gaza at the time and apparently the chief witness for the military at the trial.
And he tells about what happened in 2001 after an 11-year-old Palestinian kid was shot and killed by an Israeli soldier while playing soccer in Rafah:
Maybe someday, insha'allah, we'll get an equivalent document showing what the IDF actually knows about the death of Rachel Corrie...
I'm sure it won't be on the front page, but I have to say the New York Times story on the verdict, by Jodi Rudoren and Danielle Ziri, is not bad at all.
As'ad AbuKhalil has an interesting discussion of this piece, under the heading "Judith Butler: why so defensive, Judith?," over at his Angry Arab site.
link to angryarab.blogspot.com
The Treviño affair continues to reverberate. Yesterday the Guardian's "readers' editor," Chris Elliott, weighed in the controversy. Ali Abunimah responded here, noting that Elliott's "column evades substantive questions about the newspaper’s responsibility not to enable bigotry even as it offers readers diverse points of view."
The controversy even made today's New York Times. On the whole, the story, by one Noam Cohen, is a fair summary. My main criticism: although the story (in contrast to the original response from the Guardian editors) notes that Abunimah brought to light "many" tweets from Treviño, it quotes only the one about him being "cool" with the IDF shooting flotilla participants. While that one may have been the most egregious, quoting a couple of the others would have made much clearer that the issue wasn't a one-time "gaffe," but a clear and consistent pattern of thuggery.
Cohen, though, elicited a great quote from Glenn Greenwald, who called his now-former colleague “among the lowliest, most extremist cretins that exist.”
Latest from Ali Abunimah: "Shahed Amanullah, Senior Advisor for Technology at the US Department of State, tweeted, “The writings of my friend @jstrevino deserve to be engaged, not suppressed.”
Ali's response: "Would @StateDept advisor @shahed ever dare say that someone calling for Israeli civilians to be killed should be "engaged"?"
Amanullah “works on digital diplomacy projects for the Special Representative to Muslim Communities, who reports directly to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton” according to his Linkedin profile.
I was confused about this, and I suspect other people might be, too, so as a public service here's what I just discovered on the About page of the Scott Horton Phil is talking about: "He is a fan of, but no relation to the lawyer from Harper’s." It's the latter Scott Horton, a law professor, who writes the excellent "No Comment" blog about the law, torture, "national security," Central Asia, and other subjects.
A fun tidbit: back in 2007 Scott Horton the radio host interviewed Scott Horton the law professor and blogger.
Richard Silverstein summarizes an article (evidently published only in Hebrew) by Roni Shaked, a former Shin Bet guy who's now Yediot Aharonot's "Palestinian affairs correspondent." No surprises to anyone who's observed Israel without blinkers, but interesting that someone like Shaked is saying this stuff in a publication like Yediot:
Note the contradiction in his logic: if it’s job of the cops to look the other way, then they're not failing when they do just that - they're doing exactly what they're paid and instructed to do.
Thanks, Ned. Certainly you're right that "sometimes [Jewish] ownership makes a difference, and sometimes it doesn’t," but I think we can very safely say - can't we? - that on the whole Jewish ownership of so much of the media tends to help the Zionist cause. Not so much (I'd say) because the owners intervene directly in editorial decisions, though surely that does happen occasionally, but more because of the kind of people they're apt to hire to run their outlets, and the people those bosses in turn hire for editorial positions, and the people those editors hire (and fire) as reporters, and so on.
Put all that together, and the plain truth is - as I and many others can testify from personal experience (in my case at a paper that wasn't Jewish-owned) - that people who don't buy the Zionist line don't last long unless they learn to keep quiet about it. By the same token, if Obama were to put any public pressure on Israel - even to suggest the obvious fact that attacking Iran is loony - you can bet he'd catch hell from a lot of the media.
In the case of the LA Times, though I don't read it regularly, I think you're right that they've printed more criticism of Israel than most American papers, but I have the impression that it's only on the op-ed page, and that their news coverage and official editorial positions are the usual pro-Israel stuff - am I right? And don't they print plenty of pro-Israel op-eds, too - way more than the occasional Palestine-friendly ones?
I guess it's to Zell's credit, in some sense, that there's ever anything by Makdisi and such, and it does support your point that ownership isn't everything, but I don't think it in any way undermines the general point I was trying to make: that when the pols pander to the Israelis, they're not after Jewish money and Jewish votes, but also the blessing of the Jewish opinion-shapers.
I very much appreciate Phil's effort, in this post and previous ones, to make the case that the pols' pandering to the Jews is more about money than votes. We shouldn't forget, though, that Obama et al. do have reason to worry about Jewish voters in the swing states, such as Pennsylvania and especially Florida. Sure, most of them will vote Democratic, but even a marginal switch of Jewish voters to the Republicans could determine the outcome in these closely divided states, which in turn could determine who wins the Electoral College.
That said, I have a more important concern about the votes-or-money frame, because it omits another critical explanation for the pandering: Jewish power in the media. Raising this issue will bring on the accusations of anti-semitism even faster than talking about the money, but let's face reality: Jewish families own much of the elite media (including the NY Times, Washington Post, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, etc.). Not only in those outlets, but also in others owned by publicly traded corporations (the TV networks) and in the "public" media (especially NPR), Jews are hugely overrepresented on the reporting staffs, but even more in key editorial and management positions. And if you look at the Beltway punditocracy, it's overwhelmingly Jewish.
Probably only a minority of these people are hardcore Zionists, but I'll bet virtually all of them are influenced to one degree or another, even if only subconsciously, by Obama's abject courting of the Jews - even those who are Republicans are less critical because of it. Many if not most of them would certainly be bent out of shape if Obama actually put any pressure on the Israelis, or even expressed any criticism of them.
Yet another post today (Tuesday) from Ali Abunimah (who by the way deserves all the credit for noticing and very effectively exposing the Guardian's hiring of Treviño): "Guardian offers bizarre new defense for hiring Islamophobic murder-inciter Joshua Treviño."
Blood lust? Perhaps the pic was taken as he heard the news about the murders on the Mavi Marmara.
Ali Abunimah has yet another post about Treviño at the Electronic Intifada tonight. This one features a June 3, 2010, tweet from him about Furkan Dogan, the young American the Israelis killed on the Mavi Marmara: "There are some Americans we’re better off without. Furkan Dogan is one of them."
Meanwhile, readers of the Guardian website continue to speak out about Treviño in response to his inaugural column (in his new role, whatever it is) today.
The following is from an op-ed by Rebecca Vilkomerson, executive director Jewish Voice for Peace, just posted at the L.A. Times website:
Jodi Rudoren has a long piece about this in Thursday's NY Times, with a very detailed description of their arrival at Ben Gurion Airport.
My favorite part is a quote from Netanyahu's speech of greeting to them: “You’ve decided to defend the Jewish future,” he told them. “In previous times, for almost two million years, the Jews could not defend themselves.”
Who knew there were Jews two million years ago? I can see it now: "Judeopithecus" fleeing from the constant attacks of Australopithecus bands. You may have read that hominids lived only in east Africa in those days, but thanks to Netanyahu, we now know that's wrong: since Jerusalem is the "eternal" capital of the Jews, they had to be there already, no doubt praying on the Temple Mount....
Another example of settlers stealing Palestinian olive trees, from a report in Ma'an News this week:
>Trees that massive you don’t just pluck out of the ground, toss into your pick-up
>truck and drive off with. I imagine that digging them up and relocating them
>would be a fairly substantial and costly undertaking.
You are absolutely right on that score, Eljay - it is a substantial and costly undertaking. That's why they need contractors with huge cranes, Caterpillar earth movers, and heavy trucks - plus armed settler guards. Don't believe it? Look at the pictures here of the clearing in 2004 of olive grows that belonged to the people of Jayyous, in the Qalqilya district, to make room for expansion of the Zufim settlement. The contractors bulldozed the smaller, scraggly trees, but the ones they thought would fetch a good price - ones that were straight and full - they carefully picked up with their scoops and cranes, preserving lot of roots and the earth around them, and placed them in the big trucks for transport to settlements or Israeli towns. The guard on the project, seeing that the guy who took those pictures (from the Ecumenical Accompaniment Program) was so interested in the trees, even offered to sell him a few!
If you were to spend some time in the West Bank - with Palestinian villagers, not your settler comrades - you would know that this kind of tree robbery happens regularly. The only thing unusual about the Jayyous incident was that someone with a camera was there to document it.
I'm not suggesting that you have to boycott all Kraft products, Dickerson, but since you mention that you drink a lot Crystal Light, you might be interested in this bit from the Sodastream press release announcing their deal with Kraft to license several Kool-Aid flavors: "These complement the existing co-branded portfolio, which includes several varieties of Crystal Light, the leading powdered drink mix, and Country Time, the number-one U.S. lemonade brand."
What's your evidence that Sodastream "has removed its plant from the illegal settlement," Yehoshua? We know they've had a plant in the Negev for several years, and their spokespeople, when pressed, sometimes claim that's where they manufacture the soda machines. But at least as of last fall it was a lie. The (Israeli) Coalition of Women for Peace sent people to both sites to see for themselves. Here's their report:
By saying "My crossing between Hebron's two zones also reinforced the racial-ethnic basis of the city's division," "Rather than battling this segregated hierarchy, I perpetrated [perpetuated?] it," and "Neither a Palestinian civilian nor a leftist visitor can cross the lines without normalizing them," Julian Phillips seems to be saying that Americans and other internationals shouldn't visit Hebron, or at least shouldn't cross into "H2," the part of town that encompasses the Old City and surrounding neighborhoods, where about 30,000 of Hebron's Palestinians and 500-800 fanatical settlers live.
If that's what he means, I have to disagree. I lived in H2 - specifically, in Tel Rumeida, the hillside next to the Old City that Phillips mentions - for two months in 2006. I was part of the Tel Rumeida Project, a now-defunct initiative to establish an international presence in the neighborhood in hopes of deterring or at least documenting the settler attacks that go on there almost every day. Our apartment was next door to the Tel Rumeida settlement, at the top of the hill, and just up the hill from the Tel Rumeida checkpoint. Our de facto leader and principal liaison to our Palestinian neighbors was Issa Amro, a Hebron resident who is now the coordinator of Youth Against Settlements. Most of our volunteers actually came from the International Solidarity Movement, and we worked in coordination with the Christian Peacemaker Teams group that lived in the Old City.
Aside from teaching a few English classes and doing some entertainment (a couple of our people were really good at "fire dancing," and one was a juggler), our main "work" was hanging out on the streets with cameras and phones, especially in the places where settler attacks were most common - near the checkpoint, on Shuhada Street, and on the hillside by the Qurtuba School. When there was an attack - most often, settler kids throwing rocks at Palestinians - we tried to get between them, take pictures, and call our comrades for reinforcements. We also spent a lot of time on the path to the school, in hopes of protecting some workers (paid by TIPH) who were trying to make it safer for the teachers and students and of deterring the settlers from ripping up the work. And when the settlers attacked or soldiers raided people's homes, they'd often call us, and we'd rush over.
Was it "transgressive"? I can't claim that. In fact, most of the time I felt pretty useless - we couldn't be everywhere all the time, and it often seemed that even if the settlers didn't attack when we were there, they'd just wait until we weren't around to do their thing. (I spent countless hours in the hot sun by that path, but the settlers would rip up the work every few nights.)
Still and all, our Palestinian neighbors told us over and over that there really were fewer attacks on them when we were around. (If that's true, it's partly just because we were a tempting diversion - some of the settlers got so into stoning, cursing, kicking, and spitting on us internationals that they had less time and energy to bother the locals.) They also told us that having us around helped them feel a bit less isolated from the world.
Of course, maybe they were just being polite, and who knows what the people we didn't talk to really thought about us.
But if nothing else, it was an extremely intense and powerful experience for me and, I think, for every one else who participated. We were all pretty committed to the cause already, or else we wouldn't have been there in the first place, but the experience certainly deepened my understanding of the occupation and Israeli racism, and to this day it continues to fuel my rage and determination.
And it gave me a lot to talk and write about. Justin Phillips said the Palestinians who took the time to tell him their stories were under the "illusion" that he could "amplify their voices in a way that their neighbors could not." I don't know about "amplify," but what we could do, and have done a lot, was tell some of their stories, and our own, to our fellow Americans - something they and their neighbors, unfortunately, don't get much chance to do.
It sounds like Phillips was there only a day or two, and that's the case with most internationals who go there. Obviously that kind of visit doesn't give you the depth of experience longer-term volunteers get. But - as his post here shows - he did learn quite a bit about the situation, and I trust he's writing about it on his blog, talking to college classmates, and finding other ways to share what he learned.
So what's wrong with that? Seems to me that having more people experience the realities over there and communicate what they learn when come home is all to the good. "Normalization" is an abstraction; education and activism based on personal experience are concrete contributions to the movement.
Though the JTA guy emphasizes the similarity between the Dayan and Danon positions, I see a significant difference between them. Dayan, the settler spokesman writing in the Times, explicitly calls for the annexation of all of what he calls "Judea and Samaria," including the areas still populated by Palestinians:
Whether he wants to expel ("transfer") the Palestinians or just keep them in a permanent state of apartheid subordination isn't clear.
By contrast, Likud MK Danon wants "the maximum land with the minimum Arab population" - i.e., "annex the Jewish communities of the West Bank" (emphasis added), while the "Palestinian residents of the West Bank… would continue to live in their own — unannexed — towns," presumably with the PA or something like it continuing to manage and police them under Israeli supervision and the rest of the world covering the expense..
The interesting thing about this distinction: once you bring the settlers' take-it-all perspective into the mainstream discussion, Dayan's we'll-just-take-what-we-want line becomes the "centrist" position, a "compromise" between the two "extremes" of complete annexation and a territorial division along anything even remotely resembling the 1967 lines. I'll bet it won't be long before Netanyahu comes out with the same plan - and frames it the same way. (After all, he and Danon are in the same party.) And whoever is in the White House, Washington will lavish all kinds of praise on this scheme for its "balance" and "moderation."
Not to be too cynical or conspiracist, but perhaps this explains why the N.Y. Times chose to print the settler position at this point.
Good grief! It's break time at the Sonoma County Human Rights Commission hearing on Veolia, I go outside to check my mail, and I find myself accused of having been a member of the Weather Underground! I don't have time to respond at length, but before this goes any further, let me just say I was never part of anything Weather, underground or over. Wherever did you get that idea, ToivoS?
Nice piece, Allison. I've been a reader of Cockburn for decades, and a fan of much of his work, and I too will miss his voice.
On the other hand, there's an unpleasant fact I think we have to face: he was dead wrong on what I consider the defining issue of our time and the greatest challenge humanity (not to mention other species) has ever faced - global warming. It's not just that he refused to accept the overwhelming evidence and the views of nearly all climatologists, but that in making his case he relied entirely on long-discredited theories and "experts" who were actually kooks, cranks, and corporate shills. He blithely dismissed the whole thing as a hoax and simply refused to address the science.
For all his many virtues, those are not the marks of a great journalist or a true progressive. This may be harsh, but here goes: if someone was a brilliant writer on other issues but supported, say, slavery or fascism, I doubt we'd see all these uncritical tributes, but if we could quantify human suffering, it seems very likely that global warming will cause a whole lot more than either of those terrible historical phenomena.
If anyone wants to review his position on this, try "The Sad Case of Alexander Cockburn" at Climate & Capitalism (motto: "Ecosocialism or barbarism: there is no third way"). And if that's not enough, Znet has a multipart debate between him and George Monbiot and others.
In addition to sending a supportive email, I just made a donation on Ms. Garcia's website, and I urge all MW readers who can afford to to do likewise!
In my note I promised her another, larger donatio soon if she sticks to her guns and doeesnt cave in to the thugs.
Small technical suggestion: the link to the presentation says it's a PDF, but in fact (as stated in the text) it's a PowerPoint file, not a PDF. Since a lot of us don't have PowerPoint, at least not on the device we're reading this site from, but most folks can open PDFs, it would be good to make a PDF version available.
Michel Chossudovsky recently published a piece called "Confronting Iran, Protecting Israel: The Real Reason for America's War on Syria," which draws heavily on an article in Foreign Policy by James P. Rubin, former spokesman for Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (and husband of Christiane Amanpour):
A little tidbit from a piece I wrote in 2008 about Intel's chip factory in Kiryat Gat, Israel:
>Olympic Games [code for Israeli-U.S. computer initiative aimed at Iran].
"initiative"? Come on, Phil, skip the namby-pamby euphemisms and call it what is: an attack. We now know it wasn't just spying on or messing up the Iranian centrifuges - it was actually destroying them, just as effectively as (if not more so) a cruise missile or bunker buster would have.
In other words, an act of war.
Well said, Woody, even though I'm personally of the "no gods, no masters" persuasion. As I think back on my supposedly excellent education in the humanities and social sciences, one of the things that amazes me is that the assumption that the invention of monotheism was some great advance in civilization was simply taken for granted, in every discipline at every level. Not only was that idea never questioned, it was considered so self-evident that it didn't even need to be explained - even though it's not actually obvious why, if you're going to believe that invisible spirits control the world, it's more sophisticated or otherwise better to think there's only one of them.
As a resident of Alameda County, I've been on the phone to the offices of the county supes to protest the pulling of the proclamation, and I've learned a few interesting things:
1) The staffers I talked to were of course very discreet and non-committal, but several of them managed to make it unmistakably clear that they agreed with me that this move was outrageous and that those opposing the proclamation are bigoted maniacs.
2) Any supervisor has the right to pull an agenda item for two weeks, after which it can be brought up again. In this case, the perp was Supervisor Nate Miley, an African-American and former community organizer (bit of a pattern here!) who lives in Oakland, but whose district is primarily in the Oakland hills and suburbs such as Castro Valley and Pleasanton - i.e., largely rich white people. here are a video and transcript of a recent campaign debate in which he explained that he paid his dues to several high-class clubs out of campaign funds because he needed to get away from constituents trying to talk to him. (Apparently most of his constituents don't mind - he was re-elected yesterday with 72.4 percent of the vote.)
You can send him your comments at this web page, call (510) 272-6694, or (for those stuck in the 20th century) fax (510) 465-7628. Obviously, it's especially important that he hear from residents of Alameda County. And for what it's worth, no matter what one thinks of Miley and what he did yesterday, I personally think that firm but polite messages are likely to be more effective than abuse.
3) It's not clear whether or to what degree the other supes are prepared to stand up to Miley and the Zionists and bring the resolution back in two weeks. It can only help, though, to commend and encourage Wilma Chan, the supervisor who introduced it in the first place, who is a genuine progressive. Her contact page is here, or phone (510) 272-6693, or fax (510) 268-8004.
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While we're on the subject of the Alameda County supes, folks outside the Bay Area maybe amused to learn about a juicy scandal involving another one of them, Nadia Lockyer, glamorous wife of California State Treasurer and former Attorney General Bill Lockyer, who in effect purchased a seat on the board for her. Unfortunately, she had to resign a few months ago in the wake of a bunch of revelations about her methamphetamine addiction and a prolonged and tumultuous affair with her pusher, including a sex tape, explicit text messages, and X-rated photos found on her computer. Part of the story is here - google her if you want more.
Evil and ugly as Pamela Geller is, she's really not the problem in this episode: the problem is the Alameda County supervisors - all of them professed liberals, to one degree or another - who so cravenly bowed to such blatant bigotry.
>You would think the promoters of this film would want to show it in an area which has the greatest potential influence on whether it gets considered for the Oscars.
I'm sure they do want to show it in Southern California. Where a film is shown is a function not of where the distributor would like to show it, but of where theater bookers agree to do so.
>Two thirds of California’s Jewish population live in Southern California.
Maybe that's what you're missing - theater owners may be scared to show it.
But it's just the beginning, and I'm sure they'll line up additional showings. In fact, I bet it will get at least some SoCal showings. The New York Times review, lame as it was, will probably help clear the way. And a lot will depend on the turnout at the initial showings.
from the Five Broken Cameras page at the website of the distributor, Kino Lorber:
A little more play for this story: Dore Stein, host of Tangents, a world music/fusion program on KALW-FM in San Francisco, just read excerpts (with credit to Phil and MW) from the original post here about Sandra Tamari during "Gaza Corner," a segment about Palestine and related issues he's done at 11 p.m. every Saturday since the Israelis attacked the flotilla in 2010. He's also reposted the article, complete with the lovely picture of Ms. Tamari and Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, at the show's website.
>The Boston Globe, Seattle Times and many other outlets have published this important story
It's great that this story is getting as much play as it is, but remember that "published" is an ambiguous term nowadays: the fact that an article appears on a newspaper's website doesn't necessarily mean that it was printed in the paper in question. In fact, because cyberspace is effectively unlimited, many papers have feeds that automatically post everything from the AP, at least within certain categories, to their websites. But when it comes to print, where space is finite, and increasingly tight, they are necessarily much more selective, and the ideologies and perceived interests of the publishers and editors come into play. In the case of Israel, we all know what that means
nytimes.com puts a note (in very tiny print) indicating that a story appeared in print at the bottom of its posts of such stories (and when folks here say the Times has published something, I wish they would make clear whether they mean in print or just online). Unfortunately, not all papers provide such info, but generally when you see an AP story at a newspaper website, you can't assume it appeared in print. In this case, I hope I'm wrong, but I'd be surprised if this story appeared in the print editions of the Boston Globe or the Seattle Times.
Of course, the significance of all this diminishes by the day as paper newspaper circulation declines and people increasingly get their news online. Still, so much appears online that having a story among the hundreds published every day on a newspaper website doesn't have the same significance - doesn't reach as many people - as if it had appeared in print.
Nevertheless, I don't mean to poo-poo this: it's fabulous and important that Federman and Hadid did this story, and did it so well, and that the AP bosses let it go out to all those websites, and that Gawker, Tablet, etc., have picked it up.
Speaking of fascist ducks, here's the beginning of a piece entitled Israel: It’s called fascism posted just last week by the wonderful Michel Warschawski of the Alternative Information Center in Jerusalem and Beit Sahour:
Aside from the video interview and the articles that others have recommended, Miko Peled also has a new book called The General's Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine from Helena Cobban's Just World Books. I was hesitant about it, because I've had more than enough of anguished liberal Zionism, but I bought it anyway, and I'm glad - he really gets it, and it's a wonderful book.
As I was looking for the book's page, I came across the following about Peled's upcoming visit to the East Coast:
Nine people in the picture but only eight names in the caption - the woman to the right of Madonna (i.e., on Madonna's left) isn't identified. Anyone know who she is?
I haven't read the books Lysias mentions, so I can't compare, but I learned a lot from Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles Under German Occupation, 1939-1944, by Richard Lukas.
>>Last week we did a couple of reports on the Senate's unanimous passage
>>of a rightwing Republican's amendment
Yo, Phil - it was just the Senate Appropriations Committee, not the whole Senate. Last week Alison said it was "the U.S. government." How come you guys are having such a hard time getting this right? At least Alex got it right (and Pipes).
Maybe it will go all the way through, but I'm betting it won't, or that the Senate will add some clause that allows Obama to ignore it. I seriously doubt the U.S. government, or even AIPAC, is actually ready to cut off aid to UNRWA. If they do, they'll have a major problem on their hands. I think this whole amendment is just one of the lobby's little games to put Congress through its paces.
Did the "U.S. government" really approve the Kirk amendment? My understanding was that it was just the Senate Appropriations Committee that was scheduled to debate it on Thursday, as part of the 2013 appropriation for the State Department and foreign operations. If true, that would mean it still has to go to through the full Senate, then get reconciled with the House version, then get signed by Obama.
I'm not saying it won't go all the way through, but I don't think that has happened yet.
I wonder whether the Turkish prosecutor is aware of the case of Ziad Jilani, the Palestinian murdered by the Israeli cop Maxim Vinogradov. The killing took place on June 11, 2010, just 12 days after the attack on the flotilla, and if you look closely at the killer's Facebook posts posted here on MW the other day, you'll notice that there's a clear connection between the flotilla incident and Vinogradov's murderous motivation: on May 31, the day immediately following the assault on the flotilla, his buddy Avi writes "Annihilate Turkey and all the Arabs from the world," to which Vinogradov responds "I am with you, brother, and with the help of God I will start this :)"
Given all that, I think the Turkish prosecutor should add another life sentence or at least another few thousand years to his recommended sentence for the Israeli generals.
>"Aaron David Miller called him Israel's lawyer."
Actually, Miller didn't single out Ross specifically for that title - he gave it to the U.S. peace processors generally, including himself. In 2005 he wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post entitled "Israel's Lawyer." It began "For far too long, many American officials involved in Arab-Israeli peacemaking, myself included, have acted as Israel's attorney, catering and coordinating with the Israelis at the expense of successful peace negotiations."
There's a Krav Maga Institute that happens to have its HQ in Berkeley, not far from where I live. More info here.
Unless something has escaped my memory and Mondoweiss's search engine, no one posted anything here about the BBC World Service's 2012 Country Ratings Poll, although it's been discussed in detail in recent week by the Israeli press, Electronic Intifada, Gilad Atzmon, etc. (Phil did a post on last year's version: "BBC spots sharp climb in negative view of Israel in the U.S.".)
In this year's results, based on a survey of 24,000 people in 22 countries, Israel is tied with North Korea for third place among countries that most negatively influence the word - both got 50 percent, which put them a bit behind Iran (55 percent) and Pakistan (51 percent). The U.S., Nigeria, and Kenya were the only countries where a majority of respondents said they had a positive view of Israel; overall, only 21 percent of respondents were in that category.
The results from the U.S. weren't so good, though: 50 percent of American respondents said they had a favorable view of Israel, an increase of 7 percent from last year, while the percentage saying they have a negative view of Israel decreased 6 percent to 35 percent.
The full report is here. Here's the section on Israel:
Hey, Dickerson3870, I asked once before but you didn't respond (maybe you didn't see it): what's your system for keeping track of all these articles you cite? Do you keep a full-text database? If so, what software do you use?
BTW, in case you don't know, that column you quote from was pretty clearly the key factor in my getting fired by the SF Chron, even though that didn't happen until eight months later.
You might be interested in a follow-up, entitled "The Nakba, Intel, and Kiryat Gat," that I did for the Electronic Intifada in 2008.
I understand your perspective, dalybean, and I admire your rejection of the Motorola phone. I obviously can't say for sure that the threat of a boycott played no part in the Motorola split and in Google's acquisition of the phone group, and I don't want to be argumentative. I'll just say my own sense is that the analysis you suggest enormously exaggerates our power. Motorola started planning the break-up in 2008. The conventional analysis at the time, as I recall, was that it was a move to "unlock shareholder value," as they say - i.e., they expected that the combined (stock) market value of the two companies after separation would be more than that of the old single company. The underlying problem, I believe, is that the stock price was getting dragged down by the phone business, which is both very visible and very volatile, whereas the other group of businesses - what are now Motorola Solutions - was quite profitable but not so visible to investors.
As for Google's acquisition of Motorola Mobility, Google supposedly wanted their patent portfolio as a bargaining chip to use against the several companies who are attacking them over alleged patent violations in Android. Some people say they also want the ability to design, manufacture, and market their own hardware (tablets as well as phones) in order to boost Android.
On the whole, those conventional business explanations seem more plausible to me than the idea that they were trying to avoid a consumer boycott, but who knows?
> best alternate search engine?
DuckDuckGo - no tracking, good results, clean interface, and not part of any giant corporation.
A blogger at Time.com last fall compared DDG to In-N-Out Burger:
>Do you think it is more accurate to say that Google bought the
>portion of Motorola that was a target of a consumer boycott efforts?
Before Motorola split into two companies, there were some efforts - see for example hanguponmotorola.org - to organize a consumer boycott of their phones, though as far as I know that never got very far. Since the split, the BDS campaigns I'm aware of, such as JVP's campaign around TIAA-CREF and the organizing efforts within the Presbyterian and Methodist churches, have focused specifically on encouraging divestment from Motorola Solutions, because that's the half of the former company that has continued the activities that were the grounds for the campaign in the first place - that is, the sale of communications and surveillance gear to the settlements and the Israeli military. The fact sheet about Motorola at JVP's "We Divest" site, for example, now carries the following introduction:
If you know of any organizations that are continuing to encourage a boycott of Motorola-labeled phones and/or divestment from Motorola Mobility Inc., please share, and I'll stand corrected. If there are such campaigns, I'm curious about the case they make, because I haven't seen any evidence that Motorola Mobility has any involvement with the occupation, beyond selling phones in Israel, just as Apple, RIM, HTC, Samsung, and all the other phone manufacturers do.
Believe me, I'm not saying any of this to defend Motorola Mobility or Google - they're all pigs to me. But for BDS purposes we have to be strategic about which pigs we target, and for now that seems to mean Motorola Solutions, not Motorola Mobility (now known in some circles as Googorola).
Maybe someday we'll get to the point of calling for boycott and divestment of all companies that sell their products in Israel, in which case Googorola will be an appropriate target. It's a little hard to imagine such a campaign, though, since not only all phones, but also virtually everything else Americans buy is also sold in Israel.
Motorola split into two companies in January 2011. The one Google bought was Motorola Mobility, which makes cell phones and is not on any BDS list I know of. The company that provides surveillance and communication systems for the settlements and the Israeli military, and that is the target of various divestment campaigns, is called Motorola Solutions and remains an independent company.
Not to defend Google. but we need to be accurate.
"lefty PEP moneybags Irving Moskowitz"???? What evidence is there that Moskowitz is in any sense a progressive on any issue?
I'm not ready to agree with Stevieb that "Ron Paul is in the same Zionst party that Obama is in" (nor am I a Paul fan), but the following item from Business Insider is pertinent:
@Daniel Rich,
My assertion that "there are some real differences within U.S. ruling circles about policy toward Israel" does not imply that there's a "definable group of individuals standing up for what’s right" - or for that matter an undefinable group of such individuals, although I suppose there are few individuals here and there within the ruling elite who happen to have decent positions on I/P. What this Pincus article suggests is simply that there are differences about how far the U.S. should go in funding the Israeli military at a time when even the U.S. military's budget faces some modest squeezing (not to mention social services, etc.).
A few other recent examples of disagreements related to Israel: the apparently adamant resistance of the FBI, etc., to the release of Jonathan Pollard; the indictment of Weissman and Rosen from AIPAC; Obama's attempt (however brief and half-hearted) to push Netanyahu into freezing settlement construction; and currently the refusal of the intelligence agencies, Leon Panetta, the Joint Chiefs, etc., to endorse Israel's claims about Iranian nuclear-weapons development.
None of this has much to do with "standing up for what's right" - it just means that various segments of the American elite may have views of what's in their own interest, and that of the U.S. empire and even of Israel, that don't correspond 100-percent to those of Netanyahu and the purest Israel-firsters.
This column is particularly interesting because, as Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair
put it, "Connections between Walter Pincus and the intelligence sector are longstanding and well-known," starting from his work in the 1950s for Army Counterintelligence and including various foreign missions he has admitted the CIA paid him to do. The Washington Times once wrote that people in the CIA refer to him as the agency's "house reporter."
One conclusion I think it's fair to draw from this piece: Behind the universal groveling to Israel, there are some real differences within U.S. ruling circles about policy toward Israel.
Sharon and Arafat respond to Pitts here. Highlights: