Mondoweiss

Ethnic Profiling in Journalism

Wednesday's Times had an article on an arrest in a terror case that took pains to identify the suspect's ethnicity:

Federal authorities in New York announced that a Swede of Lebanese descent [my emphasis], wanted in connection with establishing a terrorist training camp in Bly, Ore. in 1999, was extradited to the United States on Tuesday.

Officials said the defendant, Oussama Abdullah Kassir, was taken into custody in the Czech Republic by FBI agents...

Myself, I am very curious about the ethnic/religious background of people in the news. God knows I bring up the Jewishness of public figures all the time. At a news conference today, Nancy Pelosi was asked her opinion of some purportedly-offensive cultural event in California in light of her being a Catholic. I thought it was a good question. I'm just surprised by the fact that ethnic background is the very first thing the article says about the guy. Presumably because that explains his role in a terror connection. My friend Dan Swanson, who pointed it out to me, says there's a double standard at work; do newspapers label Scooter Libby's Jewishness? Would they ever do so in the first paragraph?

Speaking of which, I always wondered about Libby's poetic email to Judy Miller that became evidence against him:

Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them. Come back to work---and life.

Which roots were those?

 

      

Leftists and Realists in a Tree, K-i-s-s-i-n-g

One of the interesting things about Walt & Mearsheimer's book is their reliance on the left. Their citations overflow with lib-lefters, from Counterpunch to the Nation to J.J. Goldberg to Michael Massing. Leftwing rabbi Michael Lerner has embraced W&M. But Walt & Mearsheimer are realists. That means they're not particularly idealistic about international behavior. The world is an anarchic place, in their view, and states will do anything to protect themselves. Israel got the bomb, now Iran wants it, that's how international relations work...

Trita Parsi's book on Iran marries the same two crowds. Former neocon Francis Fukuyama (who describes himself as an idealistic realist) was Parsi's scholarly mentor. And Parsi was helped by Roane Carey, a longtime editor at the Nation. At Parsi's event the other day, the panel included progressive M.J. Rosenberg, and Michael Hirsh, who certainly sounded liberal. In the audience was American Conservative editor Scott McConnell.

This is the new alliance in American intellectual life, and it is potentially transformative. Zbig Brzezinski, meet Barak Obama.

We have the neocons to thank for this entente. The neoconservatives are true radicals, revolutionaries (when it comes to other societies!). They made an alliance with neoliberals like Thomas Friedman and Kenneth Pollack and Hillary Clinton, partly because they come from the same meritocratic culture, and share a regard for Israel. The neocon columnist David Brooks said it best a few months back, when he said that there was going to be a political shuffling between the two parties, with globalist idealists going to one side and isolationist realists to the other.

The globalist revolutionaries got us into Iraq, of course; and Iraq is the glue for the realist/leftist coalition. All of us who opposed the war feel vindicated by the tremendous unending suffering it has caused. Even now, I know some globalists who will say, "Well Iraq might still turn out well...." They seem to me morally obtuse, indifferent to Arab lives. The left has lent its moral focus to the realists. Walt and Mearsheimer's book is animated by a deep concern for Palestinian human rights. And maybe we leftists will learn hardheadedness from the realists.

The Politics of Ahmadinejad's Holocaust Denial

The Hopkins event about Iran the other day in Washington was a Realist event. It was led by Francis Fukuyama, who has left neoconservatism for his own brand of realism. And the discussion revolved around realist scholar Trita Parsi's book on Iran and Israel, Treacherous Alliance, which describes the rivalry between the countries as a strategic power struggle, in which ideology tends to be so much rhetoric. Parsi pointed out that in 1980, even as Iran was publicly calling Israel "a tumor" that needed to be removed from the Middle East, Israel's foreign minister was urging the U.S. to get over its differences with Iran and embrace Iran in its war against Iraq. Our differences: at the time, Iran was still holding our hostages!

Parsi's thrust was that some degree of nuclear capability on Iran's part is inevitable. Iran doesn't even know whether it wants a bomb, but it wants the fuel. Michael Hirsh of Newsweek echoed this; he said that the best outcome was a deal in which Iran got "some kind of capability... under an international consortium." A pragmatic president like Hillary Clinton would make such a deal, he predicted, if we haven't bombed Iran by then...

M.J. Rosenberg expressed a Jewish point of view. His comments warmed my heart because they were openly Jewish, he spoke of "my people, the Jews." There was no attempt to dissimulate, which is what the neocons do. Because they have power, they hide their Jewish agenda. It's generated suspicion, rage, The Israel Lobby (and thrown me back into my Jewishness).

Challenging the Realists on Ahmadinejad, Rosenberg said, "I lose my calm rationality... [this] is really scary stuff." He elaborated: "I know the Israelis pretty well. They will put up with lots of criticism. There is probably nothing you can say about Israel as a state that they haven't heard before.. and are prepared to swallow." But the Holocaust denial crossed a line. Even the Palestinians honor the Jewish experience in Europe. " When Ahmadinejad sought nuclear capability and meanwhile was denying the Holocaust, it appeared that he was going to "destroy the survivors of the self-same Holocaust that you say didn't take place!"

Hirsh and Parsi were calmer. Hirsh said that on his visit to Tehran earlier this year, he found intellectuals and politicians more willing to trash Ahmadinejad in private meetings with him than the similar class in Washington is wont to go after Bush. He felt that Ahmadinejad had turned down his anti-Holocaust rhetoric in his speeches this week.

Parsi echoed this. He said that the Holocaust denial had caused a "tremendous amount of anger" in Iran's Jewish community. That community has always been "agnostic" about Zionism and accepted its government's criticism of Israel. But "what Ahmadinejad did was to cross a red line" in the Iranian discourse. There has been pushback--uncovered in the U.S. Parsi described Op-Eds in Iranian newspapers criticizing Ahmadinejad and television shows describing the suffering of Jews in Europe during World War 2. One show told about an Iranian diplomat who had helped French Jews escape the Holocaust. "That is something happening right now in Iran," he said.

Meantime, Iran's Jewish population has gone from 100,000 in '79 to 25,000 now, he said. I gotta finish the book to find out why...

Newsweek Senior Editor Says 'Israeli Lobby' Is Shaping U.S. Policy Toward Iran

The greatest achievement so far of Walt & Mearsheimer is that they have knocked down a wall in the American discourse: They have licensed ideas and statements that would have been impossible to imagine even a month ago.

On Monday at Hopkins's SAIS in D.C., there was a forum for Trita Parsi's fabulous book on the Iran/Israel/U.S. triangle, Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Iran, Israel and the United States. Newsweek Senior Editor Michael Hirsh, the magazine's former foreign editor, was one of the respondents, and in the Q-and-A, a Georgetown grad student asked why the U.S. was not negotiating with Iran re nukes, and whether this reflected pressure from the Israelis. Hirsh answered that the reason was "entirely ideological." The Bush Administration still adheres to the "neocon position... essentially, that by talking to a regime you legitimize it."

"As I said earlier, with North Korea, the only reason they changed their tune a little bit--'Kim Jong Il is evil'--is that they simply got too distracted by [the ongoing problems in] Iraq. And North Korea is not important enough. On Iran, considerations of the Israeli lobby and Israel do come into play to some degree, I don't know how much... But they do. It is seen as a different animal..."

I don't think Hirsh would have used the word "lobby" pre-Walt/Mearsheimer. Wow. Isn't it about time we talked about this, when we are threatening to bomb Iran? Will Hirsh put W&M on the cover of  Newsweek? 

Giuliani's Foreign Policy Adviser Calls Peace Process in Israel/Palestine "Appeasement"

I blew the post on Daniel Pipes yesterday. The point here is a simple one: Pipes says that the Oslo process is "appeasement." Israel must defeat its enemies. "There is not a single active leading politician in Israel who talks about defeating the enemies of Israel. All of the talk about reaching some resolution--it doesn't work, you postpone the ending of the war." Is this the kind of guy who should be advising a possible president of the U.S.? Scary.

Did Bollinger Disgrace Himself in Genuflecting to Lobby?

A number of thoughtful people were shocked by the lengthy hazing Columbia President Lee Bollinger administered to Iran's Ahmadinejad Monday in introducing him at the school. Chris Matthews said, "Who is this guy?" then laughed at the length of the gauntlet and said that Ahmadinejad ought to take Bollinger on the road with him, as he made the Iranian president look good.

At a forum the same day at Hopkins's SAIS for Trita Parsi's wonderful new book on Iran-- Treacherous Alliance, two journalists made the same point. Michael Hirsh, a senior editor at Newsweek, said with irony, "I think it's generally a good idea ... not to tell [a guest] that they're not welcome... Then you look crazier than Ahmadinejad, which is what he ended up looking." Hirsh said that Prezbo (as he is known at Columbia) created "sympathy" for Prezjad. M.J. Rosenberg of Israel Policy Forum said that he felt "so embarrassed" by Bollinger's laying out "the American bill of particulars" against Ahmadinejad that he had trouble focusing on the speech.

What embarrassed me is that we are now acting as if the entire world agrees with us, and we no longer are trying to play to an audience... I don't remember that ever going on in this country. Honest to God, I know Israel well, that would not go on at Tel Aviv University. This seemed almost Soviet to me. Everyone has to carry the government's line. To the rest of the world, we looked silly. I felt crummy as an American watching.

On Hardball, Pat Buchanan  laughed that Bollinger was trying to please his "donors." Having spent weeks at the school working on a story earlier this year, I think there's truth in that. Columbia's world is a very Jewish one, and its biggest backers would seem to be party-liners, include New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, who created the building that contains Hillel on campus. Bollinger is an eminent free-speech scholar, who distinguished himself leading the University of Michigan, when he originated creative affirmative-action policies. His speech so hurt him that I would like to think that it will mark the high point of the Israel lobby in the U.S. How painful to see a good man so nakedly corrupted. 

Some Impressions of Giuliani's Adviser, the Brilliant Extremist Daniel Pipes

Give the devil his due, the true star of the Philadelphia synagogue event I went to a week ago was Daniel Pipes. Pipes was the most physically impressive of the speakers, at about 6-6 it would seem, and true to his name, lean as a rail. He was the most logical, cold, and presentable.

The shock is in his ideas. Pipes is an extremist, and a foreign policy adviser to Giuliani. Pipes thinks that we are pussyfooting in the Middle East. There are “those who want to appease and those who want to win… those who seek resolution, and those who seek victory." Peeps Pipes: "The word victory has disappeared from our discourse.” Israel is pussyfooting with the Arabs. He says that there is not one leader in Israeli politics who does not think that the Israelis will have to make a deal with their neighbors, and Pipes says that a deal would be foolish and postpone war. Are these ideas in the American interest?

"All the talk of reaching a resolution. It doesn't work. If you reach some kind of resolution, you postpone the ending of the war," pipes up Pipes. Rabin was wrong to say that Israel must make peace with its enemies. You make peace with "former enemies." Enemies must be defeated and broken and made to understand that they have lost, not negotiated with. “They must give up... We must not appease, we must win.”

Wild applause from the old, scared crowd. Appeasement is a Holocaust term. And the Third Reich looms over everything. Pipes said that we could no more make peace with Saddam or Ahmadinejad than we could have with the Nazis. Islamofascism is "Islamo-Nazi-fascism." Holocaust-consciousness is emblematic of the American neocons. They utterly blur the Nazis-in-Germany and Islamic-radicals-in-the-Muslim-world. They play on Eastern-European Jewish memory/paranoia. 

Pipes says that it will be easy to "physically" defeat our enemies. The real battle, he says, is on the political battlefield--in an American argument over how far we should go. Clearly, he is losing. Pipes is completely out of the American mainstream. An armchair intellectual, he is prescribing militarism to societies beleaguered by militarism. In Israel the young people have to take off a year after their military service and smoke weed in Argentina with other Israeli vets, just to decompensate for the years as occupiers and checkpoint guards.

It would be unfair not to cite Pipes's brilliance. He had two wonderful riffs. In Europe, he said, the rightwing parties have ceased to be the haven for neo-Nazis and antisemites; that they are so focused on Muslim immigration that “they are losing interest in Jewish issues…. And Jews in Europe are beginning to vote for rightwing parties” Huh. Sort of like Jews voting Republican here. (Were those enemies humiliated, or did they just come around?)

The other great point he made was about Muslim history. “Through fourteen centuries of Islamic history” Jews have preferred to live in Muslim societies than Christian ones. Over and over again, Jews fled Christian societies for Muslim ones. But 1945 was the turning point. “You see a switch. When for 1300 years it was the other way.” Jewish life in Muslim societies was better: we were understood and integrated. Jewish figures were part of Muslim society. Maimonides in the Egyptian court, compared to Rashi, excluded from French life. “The situation is new. It could very well be a temporary one. It is very much a reality.”

Some Arabs say the same thing: For centuries we got along. What is Pipes leaving out of the picture? Israel's birth, in which the crimes of European antisemitism were--as Ahmadinejad said on our national television the other night!--made the problem of the Arab world, through Jewish emigration and political nationalism. Americans have to cool this region down by acknowledging the grievances on both sides. That means: marginalize Pipes!   

A Jewish Writer Says Senate Should Investigate Neocon Abrams Re Dual Loyalty

On Huffpo the other day, David Bromwich gave Walt and Mearsheimer a laudatory read and expressed shock at the quote they offer from Bush's Mideast policy guru Elliot Abrams:

How mad is Elliott Abrams? If one passage cited by Mearsheimer-Walt is quoted accurately, it would seem to be the duty of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to subject Abrams to as exacting a challenge as the Senate Judiciary Committee brought to Alberto Gonzales. The man at the Middle East desk of the National Security Council wrote in 1997 in his book Faith or Fear: "there can be no doubt that Jews, faithful to the covenant between God and Abraham, are to stand apart from the nation in which they live. It is the very nature of being Jewish to be apart--except in Israel--from the rest of the population." When he wrote those words, Abrams probably did not expect to serve in another American administration. He certainly did not expect to occupy a position that would require him to weigh the national interest of Israel, the country with which he confessed himself uniquely at one, alongside the national interest of a country in which he felt himself to stand "apart...from the rest of the population." Now that he is calling the shots against Hamas and Hezbollah, Damascus and Tehran, his words of 1997 ought to alarm us into reflection.

David, it's an accurate quote. I've played a role in this one. In 2000 or 2001, I was talking to Hussein Ibish, then of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, when he told me what Abrams had written in his '97 book. I got the book at the Strand and wrote a big piece about Abrams's Jewish-separatist views that ran at the top of the front page of the New York Observer (hail to my editor, Peter Kaplan!). I sent a copy of the piece to Abrams (ahead of time, as I recall); he declined to respond. I wrote that it was fine with me if Abrams was running Transportation policy, keep him away from the Middle East. No one called for a Senate investigation, alas.

At the pow-wow I had with progressive Zionists a couple months back, Dan Fleshler implored me not to use terms like "dual loyalty." An anti-semitic canard, presumably. Well, concerns about dual loyalty were at the heart of leading Jews' concerns about the character of the Jewish state up through the 1950s (long before we went to war in Iraq). Here is the head of the American Jewish Committee warning Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion not to urge American Jews to move to Israel, in 1950:

“You are a realist and want facts and I would be less than frank if I did not point out to you that American Jews vigorously repudiate any suggestion or implication that they are in exile. American Jews—young and old alike, Zionists and non-Zionists alike--[my emphasis] are profoundly attached to America,” oil mogul Jacob Blaustein said. “To American Jews, America is home… They believe in the future of a democratic society in the United States under which all citizens, irrespective of creed or race, can live on terms of equality.”

Today mainstream Jewish attitudes have moved so far away from Blaustein out of concern for Israel (post-'67 and '73) that the political philosopher Michael Walzer can declare at the Center for Jewish History that Israel has ended our exile, and that we Americans are members of a nation that includes Israel; and the audience can cheer.

It is a beautiful thing that progressive Jews are now challenging these ideas. The amazing Orthodox academic, pseudonymous  "Jeremiah Haber" has  questioned the legitimacy and necessity of the Law of Return (by comparing it to other nations' policies) and said that Israel must become the country of its citizens. On the TNR website, John Judis has bravely accused American Jewish organizations (including Blaustein's AJC) of demanding "dual loyalty" of Jewish writers. (What about your boss Marty Peretz, John?) And now Bromwich (who I am guessing is Jewish) is fairly calling for a Senate inquest into a neocon's statement of devotion to Israel.

Jews are great thinkers! And who let us think--Walt and Mearsheimer!

At least two negative reviews of W&M have harped on the dual loyalty claim. Scary-smart (but mostly scary) Gabriel Schoenfeld said in Commentary last year that this is what W&M had accused Jews of. The Times book review of W&M by eminence-grise Gelb was titled, "Dual Loyalties." A fair question. Let's have it out.

When Will Hillary Apply 'There Is No Military Solution' to Israel/Palestine

The other day on "Meet the Press," Senator Clinton told Tim Russert that there is no military solution in Iraq, that the war requires a political solution, presumably a just division of power and resources (as Ambassador Crocker said to Congress lately). So much for the war on terror.

Consider the history of violence in Israel/Palestine. Arabs have had a violent response to Jewish immigration and territorial expansion for 75 years, since '29. They rose up against partition in '47, they rose against the Jewish state in '48, to "strangle Israel at its birth," as this writer states. As Tony Judt has noted, Israel started the '67 war, countering an Arab rise. But the Arabs re-rose in '73, in part to reclaim territory lost in '67. By then, the settlements of what Begin now called "Judea and Samaria" had begun. The Palestinians rose in the first intifadah and the second. They became suicide bombers-- much like the Iraqis who Hillary says require a political response.

And in that whole process, the Arab hold on Palestine went from more than half, to about half, to 22 percent. And now less than 22 percent, as the choice land of the West Bank and Jordan valley is colonized and walled off. There is no military solution.

Why Columbia President Bollinger Should Be Celebrated for Inviting Ahmadinejad

--Bollinger shot down an invitation from leading school officials to Ahmadinejad a year ago, censoring a point of view that scholars wanted to hear. He has nobly reversed that judgment.

--Ahmadinejad will be traveling to the heart of the Jewish intellectual world in Manhattan. Bollinger is sure to engage him on issues of concern to Jews: his Holocaust denial, his threats to Israel, and the meaning of his famous phrase, wiped from the pages of history. There may actually be some meaningful dialogue (I pray).

--Americans may learn some things from Ahmadinejad. How Iran sympathized with us after 9/11 and supported our (completely justified) invasion of Afghanistan. How the large Iranian-Jewish community is treated. The significance of the Palestinian experience to the Islamic world...