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Netanyahu is threatening war, wants the US to threaten war. You may want to be very charitable towards Netanyahu and believe that the *real* motive is to increase diplomatic pressure, but you can't blame other people for calling him out on what he plainly said.
Are you saying that Netanyahu's point isn't to promote war on Iran, which necessarily results in mass-murder of Persians?
Yeah, that really got me. Blankfort gets so much crap for talking about what Zionists did during the time of Nazi rule, and Nazi attitudes towards them, and then Hoenlein goes and throws a stinker like this one?
My main response to this is that I just don't see American attitudes towards Jews changing in the way you're worried about. Things may be very different in the UK. In the US, it's not lost on anybody that many if not most of the main critics of Israel are Jews. I would be extremely surprised if many Americans started to think of "Israel firster"ism as a natural consequence of strong Jewish identity, rather than as an eccentric political view. If anything, I think most Americans underestimate, or don't want to think about, the extent to which anti-Arab and pro-Israeli attitudes have been entrenched in Jewish culture in the US, and how this is different from how they have been entrenched in Christian-American culture (yes, I know the two overlap to a great extent...). This makes the term "Israel firster" innocuous in the current cultural context. In other words, I just don't think there's anything to worry about here.
Even as regards "how we want to win", saying "Israel firster", even with the implicit opposition to "America firster", does not (in the current American cultural context) reinforce the idea that it's morally preferable to support your own country's interests over others. "America firster" still sounds like almost a jingoistic epithet to my ears, and the term "Israel firster" being thrown around a lot won't change that. What the term does do is point out exactly what HRK said above: "certain talking heads out there revolve a lot of politics around what’s good for Israel–and we need take that into account when we’re judging their stories." Calling people out as Israel firsters--and these are typically people who engage in the most flamboyant jingoistic "America rah rah" rhetoric--draws attention precisely to how artificial the idea of natural interest is.
But it also reflects the fact that even if criticism of Israel's occupation can no longer be credibly dismissed as 'antisemitic', "Israel Firster", with its resemblance to the charge of "dual loyalty" that has long dogged Jews, is more difficult to defend.
I don't know about the individuals with positions of responsibility in CAP, &c., but this sounds way wrong to me. I think Josh Block would have attacked CAP and MM no matter what terms they used. I don't think he & supporters would have felt any less emboldened to accuse them of anti-Semitism. So no, I don't think the public discourse has reached a point where you can safely criticize Israel, and US Israel policy; where nobody will accuse you of being an anti-Semite for doing this as long as you use the right wording. They (Josh Block and friends) were going to level this charge one way or another.
re 'they used to distance themselves from Israel before 1967'
Really, this is grasping at straws. People's attitudes and allegiances change, but that doesn't mean they are insincere or calculating. People who saw that Israel could be a military powerhouse developed an attachment to Israel. That does not mean this attachment is insincere and fleeting. They saw that the Jewish state could be a military powerhouse, and once that was demonstrated, they became devotees, because it speaks to something in their cultural identity as Jews (who are stereotypically supposed to be physically weak, un-martial, &c. &c.). The political structure in the US favors neo-colonialism and neo-imperialism, and there is imperialistic ideology, and ideological attempts to make imperialist policies palatable, but that does not mean people are individually motivated by "imperialism". That is a serious category error, it's confusing the political structure with the cultural symbols that people are attached to. It's also not the case that the neo-imperialist political structure is completely inflexible, that policy can't be manipulated by rhetoric, cultural forces, &c.
I would get concerned if the epithet "Israel firster" became ubiquitous, was thrown around all over the nightly news and Sunday talk shows, but that's not going to happen in the foreseeable future. And Josh Bock and company aren't attacking people who said "Israel firster" because they said "Israel firster", and CAP didn't back down because that term was especially problematic. It's quite simply about whether it's okay to criticize Israel at all.
I disagree, this isn't asking too much. The front page sets the tone, and while there are people who find the whole site inherently offensive, and obviously Donald isn't calling for people to stop making any general comments about Jewish organizations or other controversial positions that are par for the course on this site. There is a difference between doing that, and saying things that make one sound enthusiastic about a bloodbath in Israel, or other things that reasonable people could understand to favor violence.
I think you and Donald and Chu (above) are all correct. Yes, this certainly seems (at least to me) like a conflict of interests. The money involved seems to be small potatoes, but the real reason why probably no-one thought twice about it before is that the conflict of interests that this is supposed to expose is identical to Bronner's already obvious ideological bias. I mean, does anybody seriously think that Bronner is only putting out a pro-Israel PoV because of his relationship with Lone Star Communications?
What I think is the salient point is that the NYT doesn't see any problem with the fact that their Jerusalem correspondent's own point of view is so consonant with that of an organization that is essentially a propaganda outfit.
This is definitely a better home than dkos. Welcome!
simoned: if you want a place to write, you could also try Jadaliyya.
That's absolutely insane, I don't remember trashablanca, but Marcion? They were pretty reasonable iirc. The big problem with that site is the viciousness. People just don't get that they need to be polite and charitable to each other. Of course Israel-firsters there achieve their goal by shutting down discussion. So they have strong incentives to froth at the mouth. I think what needs to be done is to call them out on it, but without any anger, just point out what they are doing. People following the thread will see that you're right. But never, ever get involved in long tit-for-tat back-and-forth arguments. Unfortunately, I still see people from both sides getting involved in those all the time.
annie, I'm glad you found the comment helpful.
Simoned, 3 points:
1) It's definitely understandable that you wouldn't want to play the game that dkos Israel-firsters started, and write a long response about what islamophobia on dkos looks like, when there are more important things to talk about. But I wouldn't discount the possibility that the mods genuinely wanted to hear the other side of the story, and that telling them something wouldn't require matching the time and energy that Israel-firsters have put into "discovering" anti-Semites. Of course they might just be looking for an excuse to shut down discussion, but why presume that?
2) Talking about islamophobia might seem like a distraction that doesn't move us towards a deeper understanding of the dynamic within Palestine and Israel, but dkos is about US politics, and in the US, islamophobia is the story. I think most people on dkos are already persuaded about who is oppressing whom in Palestine (polls on the site consistently show this), and what's needed now is to show the vast ramifications this has for US politics. Which mainly means talking about the Israel lobby, islamophobia, conservative politics, foreign policy, and how all these relate, which is something people have tended to avoid, partly out of taking the high road, partly out of trying not to offend Jewish sensibilities. This is a difficult discussion to have, but at a certain point one just gets tired of politely pretending that American Jewish organizations and donors engage in scaremongering about Islam and try to shut down the debate about Palestine because they are all just puppets of the Military Industrial Complex. Not that cultivating a deeper understanding of Palestine and Israel themselves shouldn't be a priority, but I wouldn't write off American political discourse as a distraction, because it has a big impact on what happens in the Middle East (in other words, I agree with Phil Weiss's argument that the continuation and expansion of the Israeli occupation is essentially an achievement of the American Jewish community).
3) None of those things you mentioned makes the dreaded Israel-Nazi comparison. They could be willfully misinterpreted, of course (and a lot of things could be).
I don't think there's a deliberate policy of trying to eliminate Palestinian and pro-Palestinian voices. My experience has been that what people get in trouble for is not following the rules that the site admins or moderators (i.e. Meteor Blades) lay down. The rules are simplistic and ad hoc, because it's simply hard to make those kinds of rules even in the best circumstances, and in this case the rules come from an only sort-of-informed moderator responding to demands by a motley handful of site users. But, the admins take them very seriously. By and large, you can avoid getting in too much trouble if you make a show of respecting them. If you argue carefully and stay on point, you can generally avoid getting (successfully) accused of anti-Semitism. simone daud failed to do this--he made comparisons between Israel and the Nazis, which probably even the admins would tell you isn't necessarily inherently wrong all the time, but it's a rule they introduced in order to cut down on flame wars, and they want it to be respected.
This is part of a much bigger problem the site has, which is that since Obama's inauguration, the whole site has become very bitterly divided between people who criticize Obama and people who want to defend him and blame his critics for empowering the Republicans. (Marcos and most of the site's front page writers are much closer to the "criticize Obama" camp than to the "defend Obama" camp.) So they are trying to deal with this larger issue of lack of comity on the site, which has been getting worse and worse despite everything they have tried to do, Palestine is a side issue for them which has a (IMO undeserved) reputation for being exceptionally contentious.
The other issue is that by and large pro-Palestinian users tend to focus on introducing new info and making arguments, instead of focusing their energies on attacking other site users, whereas pro-I users say very little about the issues, but spend a lot of time chasing after anti-Semitism. The problem with this is that what the moderators then see is a lot more and better-supported complaints about anti-Semitic users and comments than about islamophobic or anti-Arab users. This would probably change if pro-Palestinian users of the site were to invest a lot more time into identifying the patterns of abuse and abusive users, on par with what pro-Israel users already do. I think part of the reason they haven't comes from a desire to take the high road and keep discussion going, and see anti-Semitism as a distraction. But there are (IMO) easy-to-spot patterns of abuse by individual users and groups of users, and it wouldn't hurt to call these out more, and to be more disciplined WRT the rules of discussion. Another reason this is hard to do is because it means pro-Palestinian users have two things to do instead of just one--identify abuses from the other side AND carry on a facts-based discussion--the latter is something pro-Israel users don't have to do, because they achieve their goals simply by shutting down discussion. But I think it would go a long way towards making the site a safer place to discuss Israel-Palestine politics as well as making things easier for the site's often-overwhelmed management by making it harder for people to conduct flame-wars.
You're the one who used the word "nefarious", and it's a blatant attempt to put words in Phil's mouth. So let's just stop this right here. Nobody said Jewish influence is "nefarious", or that Jews have less of a right to donate money to influence the political process than other people. Let's get that out of the way now and move on...
Haytham, if you get around to writing that nasty response, could you include any evidence you know of that the rebels include a substantial al-Qaeda contingent? Because that smells like bullshit to me. But if I'm wrong, I'd like to know.
As to whether they will serve the interests of NATO, I'm sure that they will, at least to some extent, but that doesn't mean the whole thing was a NATO operation to begin with.
Was Libya actually littered with depleted uranium and was the civilian infrastructure actually damaged a lot? By quick googling, I see reports of one May 15 comment by a NATO general that they should go after civilian infrastructure in govt-held territories. I also see a report in al-Jazeera that they did go after military infrastructure (bunkers, ammo depots, &c.). Nothing else turns up about them going after civilian infrastructure, other than a video labeled "carpet bombing" that afaict doesn't actually show carpet bombing. But I guess in the next few weeks we'll start to find out if that's true.
I predict no new restrictions on women, no military base (NATO or otherwise), and no low-level civil war, and probably some privatization within the next year, but not out-of-control surrender of the country's assets to foreign companies, at least not beyond what Qaddafi already did.
Sure you will be glad if your prediction was wrong, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a bad idea to make the prediction in the first place. Accurate, careful prediction is intrinsically valuable, it reduces our credibility if we make bad predictions based on insufficient evidence. We are supposed to be reality-based, we shouldn't make knee-jerk judgments. It's not a question of the US's intentions being noble or ignoble, it's a question of how exactly are they trying to pursue their agenda.
"It gives the impression that the US has no objections to racism or to discrimination against women, that the US doesn’t care whether people starve to death or die of preventable diseases, but is desperately keen to continue producing nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons in order to impose economic and social systems on other countries."
Yes it does.
Were you expecting people to condemn them? Obviously it's a tragic thing that is happening, but what specific response did you expect here? I would like to hear more about how widespread these abuses are. I also would add that as terrible as it is, it doesn't really tell us much one way or the other about the nature of the rebellion, other than that the country is in some degree of disorder now, which, duh. Still nothing like Iraq in 2004-7.
The references don’t specifically support the assertion? So what. Rather elementary logic supports the conclusion, your sophistry concerning sources, reference, etc, a diversion from the obvious reality of the situation.
In other words, "no I/he didn't actually provide you with evidence for my point, but it's obvious anyway so you should believe me?" No, in fact I don't think it's all that obvious. It's not sophistry to ask for evidence. But sorry to confuse you with Daniel Rich.
More specifically, there's a huge difference between saying the rebels are actual mercenaries who were working for a foreign power and who weren't representative of how Libyans felt about Qaddafi, and calling them "de facto mercenaries" because their cause happens to coincide with US interests at the moment.
The problem with Blum's article is that he sees it as a contradiction that the Libyan uprising was both a genuine protest movement and that it furthers US interests. Blum also says some positively stupid things, like calling the Libyan rebels "monarchists" because they flew the pre-Qaddafi flag. It doesn't follow that the whole movement to oust Qaddafi was manufactured, just because NATO's motives are not humanitarian, and Qaddafi actually did some good things. And maybe Libyans have priorities other than the global struggle against US hegemony. The "struggle against US hegemony" is a cause that could be coopted or abused (as Chavez, Putin, Khamenei, &c. have done), just as the "struggle for freedom" has been coopted/abused by the US.
Calling the rebels "mercenaries" doesn't clarify anything. The "key rebel leadership" you mention have not always been in power in the rebel movement. Jibril became chairman of the council only in August. He's just one guy. Where is evidence that others are neoliberal-sympathizers? Could the council have been bought out or influenced by the US? Sure. But I doubt that Libyans will simply submit to a NATO takeover of their country, complete with military bases.
I don't know how that last one could be hard to understand. My point is that I don't believe the CIA tortures people simply because they're bad, the fact that the CIA tortures somebody definitely isn't evidence that they are bad, and it's disturbing that you would suggest this is the case. I mean, "so bad the CIA tortured him"? Really?
My overall objection is that you are making a strong claim without providing evidence. I mean, you are claiming that the rebels are "NATO rebels" whose dominant ideology is islamist. And you haven't given any evidence for either claim, except that one guy is supposed to have Taliban links. That proves nothing about the rebels in general.
"He was so bad that when the CIA got hold of him 2002 they tortured him "
This line speaks volumes.
A stopped clock is right twice a day. The US is definitely not on the side of the angels, I would be amazed if anybody here thinks it is, but that doesn't mean every single thing it ever does is wrong.
Because God forbid Arabs should take up arms and sacrifice their lives for freedom! Only Americans do that!
"They don’t even discuss how much the rebels depended on NATO firepower.”
Well, you have certainly lowered the bar, haven’t you? Can you recall the ostensible reason for this “humanitarian” intervention? Gaddafi was supposedly about to overrun the “rebels” and perpetrate a massacre. Remember?"
I do remember, but the articles don't make that argument. And, c'mon, how can you seriously cite an article from the Daily Mail as proof of anything? And then talk about lowering the bar?
I agree that NATO firepower was decisive, that the rebels might not have won if Qaddafi's tanks &c. had not been neutralized. But that is not the same as saying the rebels were mercenaries, or that they lacked popular support. And how can the rebels both be mercenaries and un-trained, ineffective fighters? Wouldn't the latter fact lend support to the argument that they had popular support?
Uncle Sam is a serial mass-murderer. Documentation? Read Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman, Tariq Ali, Arundhati Roy, William Blum, John Pilger, etc.
Of course Uncle Sam is a serial mass-murderer, and the US and other powerful countries will do everything they can to loot Libya now that Qaddafi is gone. But that doesn't mean the rebellion against Qaddafi was phony (and by the way, the protests went on peacefully for more than just "days" before they took up arms).
"They seem to me to be motivated by ideology — it is just that it not an ideology that either you or I should support."
What is the evidence that more than a few of the Libyan rebels are islamists? Naming one guy who's an islamist doesn't prove anything, neither do accounts of rebels shouting "Allahu Akbar".
Bad citation. Neither of those links says anything about Libya's rebels, much less that they are "mercenaries". They don't even discuss how much the rebels depended on NATO firepower. The Daily Mail article does show a rebel with a headscarf who it says shouted "Allahu Akbar", though, so I guess that proves your "Libyan rebels are terrorists" claim, right?
One terrorist or al-Qaeda sympathizer having an important position in the Libyan rebel army says nothing about the overall direction the new government will take. Desperate times make for strange bedfellows. The Muslim Brotherhood protesters also played an important role in the Midan Tahrir when things got violent, because they were willing to go toe-to-toe with government thugs and help the other protesters organize to fight them. That doesn't mean the Tahrir protests were all just a Muslim Brotherhood plot.
This whole argument that the Libyan rebels are Muslim fundamentalists sounds a lot like the concern trolling by American Zionist organizations about the Arab Spring.
"The “rebels” were basically mercenaries totally dependent upon US/NATO firepower, equipment, logistics, helicopter gunships, drones, and special ops forces for victory."
Citation needed.
"When there is a Democrat in the White House, liberals don their holier-than-thou mantle to support wars to “save lives,”"
Who are the liberals cheering for Obama's drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan?
Do you think the Wikileaks document showing Qaddafi was a CIA asset, who tortured "terrorists" on behalf of the US, was faked?
All the arguments I see against the NATO intervention in Libya are about the bad intentions of the US, as if the US's intentions are the only thing that matters in the world.
"Finally, all of this was conducted by a rebel militia that is led by an Islamist who got his training fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan "
Oh noes! The Libyan revolution is just a cover for an islamofascist takeover, just like the rest of the Arab spring!
William Kristol, is that you?
Christ on a fucking cracker. You STILL didn't acknowledge what I repeatedly said was my key point, which is that the lobby's influence has been decisive. Not that they have influence (yes, everybody did know that), but that their influence has been greater (and more harmful) than most people realized.
"Nefarious influence" has nothing to do with this discussion at all, pure red herring, attempting to put words in their mouths. The question, to pose it in more detail, is: was their influence great? did it run with or against the influence of other lobbies like oil companies, arms manufactures? how did it compare to the influence of other lobbies in effectiveness (esp. those that make up the MIC)?
Whether or not this lobby's influence is especially harmful to the country hinges on these questions. And this is a reasonable thing to ask. Not whether the Israel lobby has a right to exist (hah), that is, whether Jewish organizations have a right to lobby in this way (of course that itself is a more specific legal question, but I think most people would hold that they do have such a right--that the lobby is by and large legitimate, in this sense). Yes, they have the right to lobby in this way, but the impact of their lobbying has been very bad for the Palestinians, for the world, for the US, and all right-thinking people should oppose it. "You're allowed to be wrong, but I'm allowed to tell everybody you're wrong" and all that.
You never addressed the main point of my comment, which is that I take the main point of the Walt & Mearsheimer thesis to be that the Israel lobby has been decisive in shifting US policy against the Palestinians and other Arab countries (e.g. Iraq). Their point is not merely that the lobby exists, was well-organized, &c. (that was always obvious), but that it has been decisive. Is it reasonable to argue that the Israel lobby has had a decisive influence on US policy, or does even that amount to accusations of dual loyalty? Even if "implications of the structure and details of... parts of their book" included accusations of dual loyalty, &c., (I don't believe they did, but supposing that were the case), isn't that "third rail" still something distinct from the claim that the Israel lobby has had decisive influence on US policy?
I believe that the following two arguments:
1) the Israel lobby has wide support among Jewish Americans (not universal or even, necessarily, majority support, but wide support) and, especially, among American Jewish organizations
2) the lobby has been decisive in shifting US policy in various ways
do not themselves imply an accusation of dual loyalty against Jewish Americans in general, in fact I doubt you or anyone else would even try to argue that they do (because it's an obvious lost cause). What I see instead is you and others shooting the messenger, accusing them of raising the specter of dual loyalty, or whatever, without acknowledging the arguments they have made. And it's hard to avoid the conclusion that what you really object to are these two arguments, and since you can't refute them directly because there is too much evidence in their favor, you attack the messenger instead.
I can't help but respond to this "the Civil War wasn't about slavery"-level historical revisionism here:
Phil has also whined about he stepped onto the third rail, in endorsing the Walt/Mearsheimer thesis.
In fact, everyone intelligent I know already regarded the Israel lobby as considerable and manipulative. Phil, like Larry, took an acceptable thesis a giant step further, into the shithouse.
Richard, you've got a bit of a fallacy of the excluded middle problem here: you're making it sound as if the M&W thesis was generally accepted, and Phil is only being criticized for "counting" (since that seems to be the new talking point against Mondoweiss). Either that, or the M&W thesis made people upset, whether or not there were also other things Phil that also made people upset. The M&W thesis goes beyond saying that the lobby is important--they claim it has been decisive in turning US policy against Arabs and Muslims. I doubt that it was generally accepted among "everyone intelligent" you know two or three years ago.
So, which is it? Because if the M&W thesis is now conventional wisdom, then that's a big change, and should be acknowledged as such. And this blog probably played a role in bringing it. If not, then I'm not sure how you can say that Phil wasn't mainly attacked for embracing the M&W thesis.
Of course, hophmi hasn't answered this yet, and can't, I think. Too bad the conversation took a wrong turn, starting at annie's poorly-worded point about how it's more appropriate to compare BDS to the Jewish boycott of Nazi Germany than to the Nazi boycott of Jews.
So the claim that BDS is only used against Israel is not only irrelevant, but actually wrong. Good to know.
So what would be the right way to use sleep deprivation on children kidnapped out of their beds by the police between 12 AM and 5 AM?
Actually, in Mexico, there is a kind of low-level civil war going on because of the drug trade.
"but I have a feeling the Kurdish nationalism in Turkey and Iraq is manufactured externally"
Maybe encouraged from outside, but not manufactured. Also, Turkey's treatment of the Kurdish minority has been absolutely shameful, they have basically tried to eliminate the Kurdish language, literature, and culture, and force Kurds to assimilate. Incidentally, the idea of creating a Kurdish state would not have been possible were it not for the Armenian genocide.
MRW: I agree with your overall point, but there are a lot of differences between the 60s and 70s and the late 2000s, in terms of how Americans would perceive any particular trend relating to Islam/the Muslim world. Part of it is the Zionist/neocon war drumbeat, but there's also the Iranian revolution of 1979, and various things that happened throughout the 80s and 90s, and 9/11. Yes, Zionism played a big part in shaping how many of these events were perceived, especially in the last 20 years, but I'm skeptical that Zionism had a decisive impact on how the Iranian revolution and all of its fallout were perceived. Neocons and Zionists have had a lot of time in the meantime to perfect "islamofascism" and other devices, and the Republican party and the whole conservative movement changed a lot between 1990 and 2010. It's not just a matter of "the Zionists weren't so active then, they're active now".
This is a bizarre line of reasoning. Is your point that occupation is necessarily less bad than apartheid? I suppose an occupation *could* be less bad than apartheid, but certainly not all of them are, and a decades-long occupation that involves trying to run most of the population off of most of their land is, very bad as occupations go, and accomplishes most of what apartheid (referring to the whole system in South Africa, not just one specific set of laws) was meant to accomplish. But if this wasn't your point, than why make the distinction in the first place? Your argument looks like terminological pedantry masquerading as superior insight.
I'm sure it is race, and maybe also about these "Jews" being as unlikely to connect/have as little relation to Palestinian Arabs as possible. Race (bringing in Russians, rather than, say, Latin Americans) is just one way of ensuring that the general population of Israeli "Jews" remains apart.
Amen to that, partly because we need to respect & acknowledge atheism as a belief choice, but also because the "Arabs vs Jews" dichotomy by all accounts has a strong racial/cultural component, it's not only/mainly about what one believes.
At the risk of feeding the troll, I'd like to ask, rhetorically, why the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Associations is so feverishly obsessed with Iran and promoting sanctions on Iran? The US's "peaceful" sanctions include a blockade on civilian aircraft parts that contributed to a recent plane crash that killed hundreds, but somehow, anyone who wants to deprive Israelis of Lady Gaga concerts is an anti-Semite....
Anyway, considering how much questions of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty came up in debates over whether the US should support Mubarrak, it's hard to take anyone seriously who thinks the US doesn't support some dictatorial regimes in the Middle East in order to promote "Israeli interests".
His so-called "public waterboarding" where he underwent the torture for less than thirty seconds, knowing the whole time that he could stop it anytime he wanted to just by dropping a rag, just like in BDSM games people do for fun, was a transparent publicity stunt designed to give him cover to change his position on torture after it became inconvenient. I wouldn't call him brilliant on religion either.
CODEPINK works for Hamas? That's pretty amazing. And by "amazing", I mean "baloney".
Maybe Medea thinks that it is the right thing to do to reserve ALL criticism for the more powerful of the two main parties in the conflict (and it is blindingly obvious who is more powerful, and the difference is enormous). I don't necessarily agree with that, but it's not even remotely similar to working "for" Hamas. (And "working in relatively close harmony with", is just weasel words that imply "working with Hamas", so, same thing.)
"The flotilla’s goal is helping the people Hamas promised to help. The people Hamas won an election promising to help."
You haven't stated this plainly until now, but it seems to have been implied in your comments here about "helping Hamas" all along. What you're saying here is that the people of Gaza are less deserving of basic humanitarian assistance because of the faults of their government; that letting them survive/not become malnourished may a bad idea, because of the political consequences of doing so. Since Hamas doesn't pose nearly the threat to anyone that starvation poses to Gazans, one can only conclude that you consider the lives of Gazans to be worth less than the lives of Israelis.
He doesn't just not speak out about torture in the Western world, he was an outspoken supporter in the early 2000s.
"work in reasonably close harmony with" is one of the most awesome weasel words I've seen in a long, long time. It's, like, three or four weasel words linked in series. A kind of weasel word Voltron.
Count me in as someone who thinks Taxi's comment was very wrong. I know that a lot of the attempts to undermine the cause of justice in Palestine are very subtle, indirect, passive aggressive, like trying to undermine a story by drawing attention to minor flaws. I've seen that in many places. But you'd have to really be deluded to think GF's comment was one of those. It's not a matter of Taxi "drinking the koolaid" or being too hard-core a supporter, this has nothing whatsoever to do with the intensity of your support, it looks more to me like somebody having an itchy trigger finger WRT pointing out this kind of undermining, and tragicomically not getting how the correction applied to the main point of the original story.
Sorry, when I look at the characters in the U.S. that pushed that Revolution, Jewish Zionist Iranians and Shah sympathizers together with the support both financial and material that the CIA offers terrorist groups in Iran I find your post hard to swallow.
Also, since Ossama Bin Laden said the US should not invade Iraq, Iraq must have had ties to al-Qaeda. It's science!
Let's put to rest this shameful tarring of the Green movement as fomented by the CIA and Mossad. Khatami, running on a similar platform, won massively in 1997 with almost 70% of the vote. There's no reason to think people are less desirous of reform now. Besides, if the election was going to Ahmadinejad, why did the IRGC start trashing ballots? Why were some of the provincial results totally unbelievable (opposition figures' own districts voting against them by huge margins)?
And there's no contradiction between Iranians wanting to change their government, and being sincerely sympathetic to Palestinians and hostile to Zionism. Don't accept the neocon-inspired false choice that Iranians either want reform and would turn pro-American in their foreign policy, or are totally behind their government. Sure, some Iranians are behind the government, but I doubt it's even close to a majority, and it has nothing to do with the government's nuclear program or anti-Zionism or other western shibboleths.
Iranians are among those trying to join the wave, so it's not quite right to call this pan-Arabism. Also, peaceful transfer of power to the AKP in Turkey and subsequent developments, and the 2009 demonstrations in Iran both inspired demonstrators in different ways. A better term would be Middle Eastern regional solidarity. A pan-Middle Eastern-North African revolution.
Here is a contrary view: link to jadaliyya.com
And just to be clear what I mean by "contrary", the two sides of this debate seem to be people who believe social media had a significant, positive role, and people who don't.
The article explicitly challenges the idea that "The kids in Egypt hyping social media, or CNN are simply suffering the same fault of many navel-gazing social-media users lacking perspective/analysis". Anybody who's read much about how the protests developed should understand the role facebook and other tools played in organizing protests in Cairo. Nobody's saying they're more important than union activity, but that they played a complementary role.
I suspect all of us agree with all of what you said here, our points are not in contradiction.
Todd, if you've been following the protests, then I'm sure you're aware that the organizers of the protests put a lot of thought into making sure that pictures and video of the demonstrations got out to the press via twitter and blogs. Also consider how many of the signs were in English--just like was the case in Iran. Egyptian state TV wasn't going to cover the demonstrations. Sure, we weren't running medical supplies and food to the demonstrators or braving the bullets and axes of the thugs, but the demonstrators were counting on people like us to take an interest and express our support, to make it impossible for our MSM to ignore the protests the way it ignored Tunisia's until the very last minute. And to create a situation where Obama looks like an ogre if he doesn't at least profess support for the demonstrators' demands.
How embarrassing, apparently I misunderstood your comment.
Islam even influenced Medieval European culture, both for Christians and Jews. How could it not have also influenced the development of Middle Eastern Jewish and Christian culture? But I'm not saying Islam was sexist so that made Middle Eastern Christians and Jews more sexist, I think you're reading my comment that way and that's not what I meant.
Ah, alright, I guess I misread it.
It would seem that you are trying to compensate for the fact that you don't understand post-structuralist thought by being patronizing. Or, you don't have a better argument, so you're pretending to a philosophical opposition to post-structuralist thought. Those statements were perfectly clear (and not all that bold) in the context of this blog post.
I never said Islam is inherently more sexist than Christianity or Judaism, that Muslims aren't potentially just as capable of strong feminism. And anyway, how do you justify blaming Middle Eastern culture for sexism, but not Islam? It's hard to avoid drawing the conclusion from what you said that Muslims would be less sexist if they were European. Islam is part of Middle Eastern culture, and it has shaped other parts of Middle Eastern culture. It should be obvious that Middle Eastern Christians and Jews are they way they are partly because of Islam, that some things have rubbed off. And, another part of Middle Eastern culture is the historical experience of being colonized, exploited, and forcibly underdeveloped by Western imperial powers. This has resulted in poverty and a more hostile relationship between native institutions (like madrasahs & Muslim scholars of fiqh) and modern or imported institutions and ideas, including feminism.
I think one of the best (i.e. one I think the rest of the world should emulate it ), and most important features of Islam is that it dictates that believers be concerned with other people's behavior. Even if you believe, as many Sufis have taught, that religion is a personal matter, earthly justice is still an important priority for Muslims. Islam is not a monastic religion. And I think that makes it harder for any individual Muslim to say "this is how I'm practicing Islam and I don't care what the rest of you think!" because there is social pressure from other people around you. That poses a big problem for people who want to reform attitudes towards women, because sexist attitudes are an established part of the religion that a lot of people don't want to let go of. On the other hand, this sense of responsibility to protect your neighbors from both physical and spiritual dangers (as they say, "al-amr bi'l ma`ruf") is, I think, a very big reason why Muslims commit relatively few violent crimes, and are very generous to charities and to their neighbors. We have to take the good with the bad. So sexism was, and remains, historically part of Islam, just like racism has historically been part of Zionism. That doesn't mean we couldn't have a reformed Zionism that effectively rejects its racist heritage, but it is awfully cheeky of us to declare that we are not racists/sexists and expect people who previously suffered from racist/sexist oppression enabled by our ideologies to take our words at face value.
Yet another example: It's hard to dissociate "Southern pride" from racism. But, I've met black people who were outspokenly proud of their Southern cultural heritage. In particular, I remember one woman's story about how she was more successful than white northerners at relating to white southerners, because she understood the culture and to some extent identified with it. She was very much a proud southerner. There are a lot of southerners who are proud of aspects of their culture, and the South was, historically, not only affected by, but literally defined by slavery. Now, I think some of the pride people take in their Southern culture is justified, but on the other hand, it's really not the place of anyone except black people to give others credit for having de-racialized their "southern culturalism". For white people to go around saying they believe in "Southern pride" or "Southern culture," "and by the way I'm not a racist" is awfully cheeky (and yes this kind of thing actually happens--for example, a friend at a big southern university told me about a campus "diversity celebration" event organized by the admin and attended entirely by white people). Arguably, a big difference here is that a lot more is invested in arguing over the term Zionism than in Southern pride or Southern culture, that Zionists, by renouncing Zionism for "Hebrew culturalism" thus ceasing to be Zionists, are acknowledging that Zionism led to a human catastrophe. But is this the only possible way for them to acknowledge this?
To be very generous, we could, when people say "Zionism isn't racist", they are arguing that Zionism could be made un-racist, just like when people say "Islam is not sexist", understand them to be saying that Islam could be practiced in a non-sexist way, not that what devout Muslims have done in the last 200 years of history has not been sexist.* The empirical matter both of these claims ride on is that Zionism/Islam stripped of racist/sexist elements would remain attractive to some group of people--that those Zionists or Muslims who gave up (a certain form of) racism or sexism would not have compromised the constitutions of those belief systems to the point where, within a generation or two, they give up calling themselves Zionists or Muslims altogether, because the terms have lost their coherence. On the other hand, you are arguing--less generously, but justifiedly--that such a reformed Zionism would be just too different from Zionism as it exits, from the point of view of many/most of those who have been affected by Zionism, to still call it Zionism.
The more I think about it, the more I agree with your side of the argument. It's only with a certain cautious humility that I ought to ever claim that I am (that my own belief system--whatever that is--is) not sexist/racist. I can declare, with varying degrees of specificity, my opposition to sexism/racism as a principle, but nowadays (compared to 100 years ago) I don't give up much by declaring such opposition, so my declaration is, accordingly, not worth much.
Perhaps what Haber and others engaged in similar exercises should be granted is recognition of their intent to create a reformed, non-racist Zionism--and that someday this might be accepted by its mandatory objects as actually reformed, and maybe an entirely different creature because of that, but still, reformed, and (in some sense) Zionism. In any case, this new creature doesn't exist yet, and I think it's disingenuous of would-be reformers (at least in this case) to claim that all they are doing is restoring to Zionism some kind of lost purity.
Juan Cole didn't even say that. He said that neocons "have perhaps half of America’s 400 billionaires on their side". That's not the same as saying that half of America's 400 billionaires are neocons, much less talking about Jewish power/money.
link to juancole.com
(Of course, it is a legitimate question--why is it that so many billionaires see eye-to-eye with neocons?)
Not "adjacent." Two blocks away. C'mon, guys, you should know better! ;)
"an Islamic center, one that would be open to everyone, from being constructed adjacent to the site of the World Trade Center bombing."
This image of being more morally-attuned, smarter, more tolerant and open-minded, isn't just relative to Christians, it also sets up Muslims and especially Arabs as a foil. Jews are more open-minded than Christians, Arabs are the epitome of closed-mindedness, &c. For every stereotype about Jews, Arabs are seen as exemplifying the opposite of that, and for every stereotype about Arabs and/or Muslims, Jews are seen as exemplifying its opposite. Maybe the most pithy of these stereotypes is the perception of Jews as being funny (look at all the Jewish comedians) and Muslims as being humorless.
There is also, I think, an older history of Jews seeing themselves as representing a kind of "third way" between "modernity" as exemplified by Western Christendom, and "tradition" as exemplified by Asian societies. This particular self-image creates a need to be critical and dismissive of Asian cultural traditions, especially whenever those take any kind of assertive posture. There can only be one third way. So Jewish exceptionalism and Euro-American Orientalism go hand-in-hand, and produce hybrid offspring.
And more generally, these opposed stereotypes of Jews and Arabs are not just something that Jewish culture produced in the course its particular historical experiences, these shared images are the combined product of Jews' self-image, and other Americans' self-image, and of their respective ideas about each other. Americans (especially non-Jewish Americans) use these ideals/stereotypes to define our culture, in general, and to situate ourselves against the rest of the world.
I love how they very carefully call the apartheid wall a "separation barrier" or "fence" in the part about Roger Waters.
"Maybe there was no Palestinian interested in contributing."
This needs no comment.
"full of conservative or right wing european jews, no Palestinians, no left or critical jews. What do you expect? It’s because there are no prominent Palestinians, Edward Said is dead."
Again, needs no comment. But to respond, Rashid Khalidi, Ali Abunimah, to name just two. And Mustafa Barghouti for that matter. Also, why do you think it is there aren't more Palestinians with name recognition in the US? Maybe because Palestinians just aren't interested?
It would be really cool to see side-by-side pictures or video of the two protests, showing the number of people in each one and all the cameras around the right-wing protest. Maybe a split-screen with footage of one protest on each side, or just still shots. That would go viral.
darn you, I was so enjoying the ambiguity
Were perceptions of Sestak as being "anti-Israel" widespread?
okaaaaayyyyyyyyyy...
I don't mean that Jews' preference for promoting Jewish voices isn't a factor. My point is that there are other factors.
If you find it improbable that there are more people interested in the Middle East from the 2% of Americans who are Jewish than among the remaining 98%, consider how many "heritage" students there are in such programs. Much, much fewer than 2% of Americans are Middle Eastern by heritage, and yet heritage students make up a pretty large fraction (I'd guess maybe around 1/5 - 1/3) of American students in these programs. Yes, having some background in the relevant languages is a factor, but many heritage students don't speak the language in question. So yes, in industries like the media that already have a disproportionately large number of Jews relative to non-Jewish white people working in them, it doesn't surprise me that a large majority of people even interested in the Middle East would be Jewish.
It's also my experience in online forums (blogs, &c.) that a very large number of the people participating and taking a pro-Palestinian stance claim to be Jewish. I don't think that can be because non-Jews are excluded here. I mean, hell, look at the user names of commenters here--I think it's safe to say exclusion of non-Jews isn't stopping people from commenting here. But there's a lot more than 2% Jewish or Hebrew-sounding aliases.
Anyway, this is largely based on my personal anecdotal experience, which is definitely not from the 1970s. Americans in general are terrible at being aware of events in the world outside of the US, learning foreign languages, and so on. If this has changed a lot in the last 10 years, consider that the people whom that would mainly affect aren't yet in positions of cultural influence. The people in charge of the media mostly did come of age in the 70s or earlier.
What did they suggest?
I disagree, I think it's equally enabled by the sensibilities of non-Jews who just write off issues pertaining to the Jewish community as "Jewish issues" that don't concern them. I don't think it's a completely benign disinterest. I think it's the same kind of disinterest that underlies Americans' not knowing about the coup against Mosaddeq and suddenly being so surprised at the anti-American sentiment that was expressed in the hostage crisis in Iran. The difference is that Jews are a relatively powerful, successful minority in the US, and Israel is a powerful country, unlike Iran in 1978. But I think there's a kind of middle-American/bourgeois guilt mentality, where people expect the relationship between the US and any minority group to be one of oppression and discrimination, or at least always carrying the potential for those things (so we have to constantly be on guard against discrimination or oppression). So there's an unwillingness to delve deeper into the relationship between the US, Israel, and (especially) the American Jewish community, because of an expectation that to disagree in any way with what appears to be the consensus in the Jewish community would entail some kind of harmful impoliteness to a vulnerable community.
Except, as you know, the NYT writes plenty about Israel, it just strongly favors certain points of view.
I was going to name "rachel"'s comment as a splendid example of Poe's Law until I saw the follow-up.
To think that those boys might be having a "light-hearted moment" with the woman, I think you'd have to have one of those neurological disabilities that makes you incapable of reading facial expressions (like one of the more serious autism spectrum disorders). The obvious conclusion is that "rachel" knows exactly what is going on here, and gets a kick out of acting like she can convince us there's some uncertainty. It's a completely typical bullying behavior ("stop slamming your head into the locker!")
I'd go as far as to say that the caption is unintentionally hilarious. I mean, it must sound completely absurd to anyone who isn't a True Believer.