Mondoweiss

When Is a Hiker a Gunman? When Is a Gunman a Terrorist?

Jerome Slater, author of an important paper on
the American press's failures to tell us just 
how bad life is in Palestine (in stark comparison
to the Israeli press's achievement in the same area),
has offered me another critique of recent Times coverage: 

Until fairly recently, the New York Times customarily simply
reported, without comment, whatever U.S. government spokesman
or politicians running for office claimed about this
or that, no matter how obviously false or distorted the 
statements. Lately, though, no doubt in response to the 
increasingly widespread criticism of this practice, the Times
has occasionally been adding its own corrective commentaries
within the news stories, sometimes slyly, sometimes in 
straightforward fashion.

Not when it comes to Israel, though. In this morning’s
Times, Steven Erlanger

'Charlie Wilson's War' Cites Power of Israel Lobby. Who Gave Them Permission?

I saw "Charlie Wilson's War" last night. B+. It was too one-note for me. But any Hollywood film that tries to deal with foreign policy gets kudos here.

Also, I was pleased to see that the film touches on my favorite subject, the Israel Lobby. Charlie Wilson, a Democratic congressman from East Texas (played by Tom Hanks), tells a rightwing socialite (Julia Roberts) who is pushing him to back the mujahedin resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan that he can't give arms to Muslims because of "the Jews." How many Jews are in your district? she asks. Seven. But those Jews don't matter. It's the Jews in New York and L.A. who support his campaign because he's a friend of Israel, he says. Of course, Wilson is determined to arm the resistance, so he gets both the Israelis and Egyptians on board, and visits Jerusalem and Cairo. The film then addresses a second cliche about Israel/Palestine. When the Egyptian and Israeli start quarreling about history, Charlie Wilson wearily says, "Oh not that again," and asks them to put aside their ancient differences for the sake of the Afghan resistance.

I found it bracing that the film so openly acknowledged the importance of Jewish money in Congress. You could say that this openness was created by Walt and Mearsheimer, with their brave book. The alternative theory is that director Mike Nichols is Jewish, and so apparently is screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (sure is good to see Hollywood making room for my people!) and it's O.K. for Jews to talk about the lobby, especially if it's shtik. Alan Dershowitz wrote all about the power of the lobby in Chutzpah, then when Walt and Mearsheimer dared to take up the subject he called them antisemites. Philip Roth talked about the lobby in The Counterlife, Saul Bellow in his Jerusalem book. That was OK, till two gentile scholars decided to look into it. The author Jeffrey Goldberg has displayed something of the same attitude. The famous quote Goldberg extracted from an AIPAC lobbyist, saying he could get the signatures of 70 senators, or congressmen, on a napkin by the next morning, was an important contribution to our understanding of the lobby. But at a Yivo event last month, the reporter condemned Walt and Mearsheimer as antisemites (according to a friend's transcription).

To me it's one of the most specious parts of this book is their constant denials.... [T]hey don't define anti-semitism. But then they deny that they themselves are anti-semitic. It doesn't matter one whit what you say.... It's not up to a white person to tell a black person what is racist and what is not. And is not up to a non-Jew to tell a Jew what is anti-semitic. I think that cultural, political autonomy means that we get to define what we think is anti-semitic. And these protests in the book about how much they're not anti-semites are completely unconvincing to me.

The fascination here is the comparison of Jews to blacks in the south. We are victims, so we get to name our oppressors. As an autonomous ethnic group, we are accountable only to ourselves. It's completely out of step with millennial America, where Jews are part of the establishment and have true power, the ability to influence others' lives. It would be nice to see more responsibility. Maybe Charlie Wilson signals a change.

P.S. One other thought. Charlie Wilson's big epiphany in the movie comes when he views the suffering of Afghan refugees at a vast camp in Pakistan. He is moved to action. As the activist Hilda Silverman likes to point out, movies have made a lot of the D.P. camps to which Jewish refugees were confined in the years after WWII. When will someone do a movie showing the camps to which Palestinians fled during the ethnic cleansing of '48? When will Americans be moved by that human story?

Ruth Wisse and Joe Lieberman, Liberals.

Here is something else about Ruth Wisse. You can see that she is going to be hosted at the San Francisco Jewish Community Center this spring as part of a program from the Jewish Forward, a generally progressive newspaper. Does the Forward endorse her ideas of young American Jews serving Israel as an intellectual army in the U.S.? Abe Foxman, who has opposed recognition of the Armenian genocide, is also on the Forward's list. What is the Forward promoting here?

A related point. Joe Lieberman (whose daughter not long ago married Ruth Wisse's son) lately endorsed John McCain for president. McCain is anti-abortion. Lieberman presumably endorsed him because of his hawkish views on the Middle East. I see the endorsement as emblematic. Norman Podhoretz left the Democratic party in the 70s, with the other neocons. Today another iceberg is calving: Some Jewish liberals appear to be casting away traditional political concerns (abortion) for the core concern of Israel. In this way neoconservatism and Democratic neoliberalism become indistinguishable.

Fresh From Torching Iraq, Bill Kristol Eyes Europe

Neoconservative Bill Kristol is still at it. In the latest First Things, a journal about religion, he praises the writings of Yiddish scholar Ruth Wisse--who has elsewhere called for young American Jews to serve as a kind of intellectual "army" for Israel--and then offers his belief that America and Israel have utterly congruent interests:

After the attacks of September 11, no one can escape knowledge of the dangers facing the world. And as anti-Judaism, anti-Americanism, and general hostility to the West increasingly merge, the little state of Israel and the entire Jewish people seem once again caught in the crosshairs of history... [I]n a sense, we are all caught in those crosshairs. In Jews and Power, Ruth Wisse only hints at how the experience of Zionism has relevance beyond the Jews. But if Zionism is an attempt to marry power and morality—to join religion and liberalism, tradition and modernity, patriotism and principle—then America has a great deal in common with Israel. Indeed, all the people in the world who wish to stand against both death-loving Islamic fanaticism and soulless European postmodernism—what are they, if not Zionists?

So we are all Zionists now. And moral Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is a model for western democracies. And now Europe must be taken on. Its "soulless postmodernism." I don't know what this means. Probably it is because Europe is critical of Israel and didn't support the Iraq war. Does Kristol want to invade?

The latest Commentary (not yet available online) includes similar sorts of statements from and about neocons. Several letter writers say that the neocons have not gone far enough in taking on the Arab malaise. We should be targeting Saudi Arabia, says Michael Schwartz of New York. "[V]irtually every entry in [a neocon writer's] catalog of evil can be traced to a single predominant source: namely, the political, financial, and religious leadership of Saudi Arabia..." Robert Rosenkranz worries that democracy in the Middle East will only enfranchise Hamas. Allen Weingarten echoes that fear, saying that "the nub of the Islamist problem is the masses that find the minority understandable, and would not seriously counter them."

Later on in the new Commentary, there is an ad for Encounter books--a publisher with whom Kristol shares connections--picturing three anti-Arab books. One is called Decline and Fall: Europe's Slow Motion Suicide, which seems to be saying what Kristol hints at with his comment about "soulless postmodernism." Europe's good life will end because it has let in too many "prolific" Muslims. Another is called History Upside Down: The Roots of Palestinian Fascism and the Myth of Israeli Aggression. (Need I read more?)

Five years after the neocons helped push us into a disastrous war in the Middle East, it is shocking to me that 1, these sorts of statements are routinely made in the Jewish community and 2, that so little is done to expose and embarrass them. As to point 1, in the spirit of Never-again, the neocons have now merged the history of the Jews & Israel into the history of the west. So the Arabs were made the new Nazis, and Israel's war with the Palestinians and Arabs must be America's new war. Kristol's comments merely confirm that sort of Israel-centric thinking. And from one month to another Commentary basically says all Arabs are infidels.

As to 2, that is the real marvel. Why doesn't the New York Times do a weeklong series on the thinking of the neocons? Why isn't it a cover story in any number of magazines? Why aren't thoughtful reporters being paid to ask about the Israel connection. How central is Israel's fight with the Arabs to the neocon worldview? Did the discovery of a world war against Islamofascism arise in the 90s from a perception of Israel's interests? Interview Bill Kristol about this, and Douglas Feith, and Paul Wolfowitz.... How important is their Jewishness to their worldview? What did Frum and Perle mean by saying, the choice in the Middle East is victory or holocaust?

The best reporting on what I like to call the Religious Left so far has been largely incidental. There is Scott McConnell's fine piece on falling out with the neocons, in part because they regarded Palestinians as subhuman, and his church said otherwise. George Packer's discussion of feverish neocon thinking in his book, The Assassin's Gate. Michael Lind's attack on neocon ideas in the Nation. But where is the journalism that takes these very important ideas head-on? Next month, Doubleday will publish Jacob Heilbrunn's book They Knew They Were Right. An important and honest book by a former quasi-fellow-traveler, it places the neocons firmly in a Jewish social and intellectual milieu, historically. But I can tell you now that the foreground of the book, the modern thoughts and acts of the neocons, are not treated in much depth.

I know, these are highly uncomfortable and pessimistic times; and my people feel skittish. But the result is that the media have not taken on these shocking and important ideas squarely. To do so would be to embarrass and marginalize the neocons. (As it is, only Walt and Mearsheimer are to be marginalized. When the Obama campaign placed an ad in the Amazon site for W&M's book, the New York Sun got Obama to remove the ad.) I think the reason is, again, that the neocons are part of the Jewish family: the dark side of it, but an empowered member in good standing, representing an aggressive response to fears shared by the larger community re Israel. "Atavistic" fears, says Richard Silverstein, yes; but prevalent fears. So the larger community refuses to repudiate these ideas; good Jewish liberals refuse to expose these ideas for what they are and where they came from. So my community remains unredeemed in the shadow of the Iraq bloodbath.

AJC's Survey About Jewish Consciousness Is Backward

The latest American Jewish Committee survey on Jewish opinion said that Jews are good liberals: overwhelmingly against the Iraq war, and mostly for a Palestinian state. Yes but by nearly 2-to-1 against the division of Jerusalem! I've already noted James Petras's sharp analysis that liberal Jews are empowering neocons to be their representatives. Richard Silverstein says this is a meanspirited analysis; he says that Jews are basically liberal but

when it comes to Israel, some atavistic Jewish impulse kicks in which closes down any possibility of understanding the Arab perspective on the conflict or what are Israel's true long-term interests.

While Eric Alterman, to his great credit, has written in the Nation that liberal Jews "allow belligerent right-wingers and neocons who frequently demonize, distort and denounce their values to speak for them in the US political arena." Alterman seems to blame the media for allowing neocon voices to prevail. Gosh, but there are just too many liberal Jews in the media for this to make sense. Myself, I blame liberal Jews. I think, ala Silverstein/Petras, that the body of liberal American Jewry is licensing the neocons as members of our family to go out and beat up the Arabs. They're the tough brother-in-law who keeps the neighborhood safe. Oh, &-$#@!, he shot someone! Oh well! you lament. But you don't do anything to restrain him; you're complicit. No wonder American Jews are for Hillary Clinton, according to the AJC survey...

I'm repeating myself, sorry. I just got around to reading the AJC survey last night and I'm surprised by something else. What is the AJC asking Jews about? 5 categories. International and domestic politics, yes, then Israel, anti-semitism, and Jewish identity. There is not a word about
the occupied territories in there, not a word about settlements. There is an overwhelming sense in the antisemitism section that antisemitism is a big issue. 87 percent of Jews think it is something of a problem or a serious problem in the United States. 98 percent think it is a problem in the Muslim world (I agree).

I blame the messenger. I feel as if the AJC is trying to wash its hands of the neocons for public relations purposes. It is incurious about other important trends. There is nothing in the survey at all about this amazing moment in American Jewish history. Nothing about Jewish wealth, success, power, or responsibility. Nothing about intermarriage. Nothing about neocons. The whole survey feels like 1971 to me. It has the feel of an outsider minority worrying about itself. Antisemitism, antisemitism, antisemitism. Look at the amazing opportunities Jews have in America! Jewry will not come into the new age of American power/responsibility until the AJC comes to grips with the real landscape that young Jews live in...

Is Bhutto Assassination a Wake-Up Call for Left?

Jimmy Carter lost his presidency in 1979 (I think that was the year), when he was shocked that the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan. He had trusted them. Shocked. Americans didn't want a naive president. They turned to Ronald Reagan.

I was shocked by Benazir Bhutto's assassination. Any fool knew it was coming, that is the not the point. It was the pure evil infamy of it. They hate democracy. Who hates democracy? Well, some elements of radical Islam. When David Axelrod of Obama's campaign yesterday hinted that Hillary Clinton was somehow responsible because she voted for the Iraq War, I thought, Don't be an idiot. (Though yes, Hillary Clinton should be rejected because she supported that hateful war and has never said she was wrong...)

I feel a need for revision. I am not saying there is a clash of civilizations, I don't believe that. I don't believe it is world war iv. But for a universalist like myself, there has been no greater nobility in the last few weeks than watching the Pakistani journalists going to jail for their freedom. They are more inspiring to me than our corporate media, most of whom wouldn't sacrifice any portion of their salaries to tell an important truth. These guys were willing to go to jail! Love them.

I am not saying that the U.S. is a righteous force. Axelrod is right, we are hated in the region for good reason. We are occupying an Arab/Muslim country, and have caused incredible suffering. One thing I take away from this is that Robert Pape's realist analysis of suicide bombing must be revised. Pape's argument in Dying to Win (as I recall; my books are packed, sorry) is that suicide bombers are responding to two conditions: occupation with religious difference. The religious difference allows them to demonize the occupier. Critically, in Pape, the suicide bomber is honored by his own culture. Streets are named after him. They are licensed freedomfighters against an occupier. Not religious fiends from a debased culture who hate modern freedom, as Paul Berman and Norman Podhoretz would have it (those advocates for the great democracy in Israel).

Pape's sample was mostly suicide bombers on Sri Lanka and in Israel/Palestine, as I recall. There is now a much larger database. Yes, it includes suicide bombers who have attacked the U.S. forces in Iraq--an occupier with a religious difference--but suicide bombers have also attacked Shi'ites, Sunnis, etc. And now they are attacking democratic forces in Pakistan. Where is the suicide bomber who has attacked the Taliban? Or attacked Al-Qaeda?

After the Cold War, Susan Sontag famously said that the National Review was more reliable than the Nation on the Soviet Union. This time around the left must show that it is more reliable than the Weekly Standard and the New Republic about "the war on terror". We are winning this ideological battle because we have not overstated the threat, and they have, and we do not ignore the fact that the Palestinian situation is a red flag across the Muslim world. Yet we can't forget: there are forces of darkness out there.

I'm Dreaming of a Jewish Christmas

I'm pretty new to Christmas, but it seems to me that multiculturalism is transforming the religious holiday into a generic American holiday not that different from Thanksgiving. My gentile in-laws tell me that this is an old trend. Still I can't help offering the following very impressionistic observations of 2007 Christmas.

--Most tasteful Christmas display in my little town was by one of my intermarried brethren. Hey we're everywhere.
--I show up at a Christmas party and a kid shakes my hand and says, "Happy Eid."
--No grace at my wife's family's Christmas dinner. No talk of going to church. Both used to happen.
--The rising tide of "Happy Holidays" language, even from the President.
--My niece makes matzoh balls at her Christmas dinner (she loves them) and declares that she wants "a Jewish Christmas," i.e., let's order takeout Chinese and then go to the movies.

That last comment especially tells me that as Jews and gentiles mingle in the ruling class, the old rituals are being transformed. This was my most comfortable Christmas in nearly 20 of them, I don't know why, it didn't feel quite as otherworldly to me. Jewish Christmas. It doesn't matter how anti-assimilationist you are; it's going to happen....

Making Settlements Newsworthy: Pressure Mounts on Sarandon

Celebrity has its uses. Two Palestinian villages have now called on Susan Sarandon to repudiate diamond-magnate Lev Leviev. So the settlements issue is creeping into the American debate. And today already the Israeli/Palestinian talks have broken down over the expansion of Har Homa. Where is that majority of American Jews who supposedly believe in a two-state solution? Now is the time to come forward...

Anti-WASP, Anti-Jew. Assimilationist.

My wife and I were driving out to get Indian takeout for the Christmas party we were hosting when we passed the hunble house of one of our favorite friends, this very lowkey guy who does web design for a spiritual sort of thinktank. I said to my wife, you could have married him, right? And she said, that’s about the only kind of WASP I could marry. I asked her about it, and she said that she had always been somewhat anti-WASP. That she had wanted to marry out of her tribe because no one had ever placed a high value in her culture on the “Life that is not examined is not worth living,” which is the sort of life she wanted to have. She said that Jews do that more. She tended to find WASPs assumptive and smug. I said maybe it was a class thing, and she said, No she felt it was part of the culture. I was somewhat surprised but also freed by the comment. I feel a similar impatience with my native culture. It has its own kind of arrogance, a sense that because we’re the leaders of education and media and free inquiry, and we’re righteous outsiders, we don’t have anything to answer for. There is no sense of our own American reality, no accountability for our effect on foreign policy and world history due to the Jewish state, and when two professors try to bring it up, they get screamed at, called antisemites. I’m saying I couldn’t have married a Jew who was ethnocentric, not unless they were openly challenging the Jewish state’s brutal treatment of Palestinians.

I also wonder if this isn’t all rationalization; if my wife and I aren’t temperamentally the kind of people who would want out of our native cultures out of pure curiosity no matter where we were from. Sometimes I imagine being Irish Catholic, or in the Latino immigrant culture. I think I’d want out in a hurry. The mixing up’s more interesting to me.

Sarandon on the Defensive Over Bejeweling Settlement Sponsor's Gala

Who would have ever guessed that New York protests of the Israeli settlements would command media attention? Well it's happening. Susan Sarandon's "representative" has told the New York Post that the star has no "ties" to Leviev, the Russian-Israeli jeweler whose gala opening on Madison Avenue Sarandon attended. Rather lame. Sarandon should disavow the criminal settlements, and their supporters, now. Though what a pleasure to see her on the defensive on the issue.

The protesters were back earlier this week, by the way. At their latest picket of the store, last Sunday, Adalah New York, debuted a new protest song, to the tune of "Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel."

“Apartments for Jews only, Discrimination, sure!
He thinks Palestine's the problem, and Apartheid is the cure!”

Go you righteous Jews, go! The times they are a changin.