Mrs. Clinton’s statement was intended to clarify her remarks in Jerusalem, which had left some of her aides nonplused because she had not voiced the administration’s official position that settlements are illegitimate.

Though not a core subject in peace negotiations, Jewish settlements are a charged issue for Israelis and Palestinians because they involve building in areas that both claim as their ancestral lands.

How not to start the day: read bits like this in the Old Gray Lady, wonder why they go to pains to misinform. The words occupation, occupied land, international law, violation of international law, land seized in war, illegal annexation and the like were axed, because the Times doesn’t want you to think of the conflict like that. It’s about ancestral land claims and, in fact, colonies housing a half million Jews on the occupied West Bank (very much including East Jerusalem) are not a core subject in this nebulous thing called the peace process. No, they’re not.

Instead read this interview with Rashid Khalidi on CFR.org. He says very clearly what many others have on the need to negotiate confront the settlements:

The point is, though,that settlements were designed expressly to make a negotiated resolution of this conflict impossible. We have to accept this. They’re not just there because they happened to grow like mushrooms on hilltops. They were scientifically planned so as to cut Jerusalem off from its hinterland. They were scientifically planned to cut the West Bank into pieces. They were scientifically planned to prevent movement from point A to point B. As long as these objectives are achieved, there’s not a West Bank state. There is not sovereignty, there is not contiguity, there is not economic viability.These huge settlements have to either be removed or enormously shrunk or subjected to some other arrangement whereby the objectives for which they were established are defeated. I’m sure it would be hard for an Israeli government but otherwise you won’t have a deal, or you’ll have a deal that collapses immediately and then everybody will go back and say “well we told you so.” I’m telling you now, if you don’t deal with the root issues caused by the settlements you won’t have a viable deal.”

Filed under: America, Israel/Palestine, Media , CFR, misinformation, New York Times, Rashid Khalidi

Read Mondoweiss

An excellent blog on Middle Eastern politics and ideas. Recently, it posted this analysis of the lack of coverage and courage in leading American papers on the fallout of the Goldstone report and the continued legacy of Israel’s war on Gaza on the left in America (that is, its vaunted editors and writers don’t want to talk about it. One exception being Harper’s) :

The New York Times is covering the Goldstone Report. Where is it covering it? Well: the furor over the report among Palestinians. We’re pretty sure this is a good story. Neil MacFarquhar is on it. But it’s really not The Story, it’s just an angle of a hugely-important international story, and the only angle the Times is covering.

Here’s what the Times refuses to cover:

–the furor over the Goldstone report on the part of the Israel lobby in the U.S., and the pressure it’s put on the Obama administration, number one. Even J Street has been quiet about the Goldstone report, while it puts out a statement applauding an Israeli Nobelist.

–and what about the political jockeying over the report, the decision by the Obama administration to bury it and make the Palestinian Authority do the dirty work? Important story. Nothing. Mike Hanna of the Century Foundation said two weeks ago that the report’s troubling findings were going to be very “tricky” diplomatically for the Obama administration. He was right. He knows what’s gone down. Why isn’t the Times calling him for comment?

–the incredible discomfort that Goldstone, a Jewish judge who denounced apartheid, has created among liberal American Jews who know that Gaza was a horror but are afraid to face these facts. Nine dead Israelis, 1400 dead Palestinians: of whom the majority were civiilans. The Israelis destroyed the only remaining flour mill, destroyed chicken farms with bulldozers, and dropped white phosphorus on children. American Jews were never silent about napalm in Vietnam. Here they are tonguetied and helpless, and the Times is helping them to avoid this important question by suppressing the news.

–Nothing in the Times about the many Jews here who have supported Goldstone, including Jews Say No!

–No editorial yet in the Times.

This is about discourse suppression. It is related to the fact that the New Yorker, the leading cranial IV for the Establishment, has said nothing at all about Gaza in 10 months. No: Gaza and the persecution of the Palestinians there is an untidy embarrassment to  the liberal Establishment.

The New Republic has actually been more responsible than the Times and the New Yorker here. By publishing raving maniacs like Michael Oren and Yossi Klein Halevi, it has at least informed its readers where it hurts, that this is ideologically disputed territory. The Times has told its readers, Only Palestinians care about this. More mush from the wimp.

One other point. Mainstream liberals are quick to call for people to speak out on Third World countries and once upon a time in Eastern Europe when human rights are suppressed. It’s easy to condemn the Soviet Writers Union or ministries in Africa for not speaking out against genocide. What’s hard is to report and speak out on issues that cause your own readers to squirm. The true measure of intellectual courage is, you go ahead and do it anyway. The Washington Post, the Times, the New Yorker and others have failed this test.

The photo is of posters in Gaza, which read “To the trash dump of history, o traiter Mahmud Abbas.” From Reuters, via the Angry Arab.

Filed under: America, Israel/Palestine, Media , Gaza, Goldstone, Mondoweiss, New York Times

‘Bill Clinton is Syrian’ and other tales of Obama’s speech from Damascus

The traffic flowed through Damascus last Thursday, peaking as always in the early afternoon. There was little buzz about President Obama in Cairo, and given all the packed taxis and microbuses clogging the street, it was a typical day in Damascus – and no special arrangements to watch the speech.

“Of course I know,” taxi driver Adnan replied when asked about Obama’s visit to Cairo University. “He was in Saudi yesterday.”

The oil-rich kingdom is hardly popular here, owing to its mass accumulation of crude cash, its support for Sunni fundamentalism, and its closeness with America.

“Obama goes to Saudi, he goes to Egypt. He goes to Turkey and soon enough he’ll go to Israel,” Adnan complained. “But he doesn’t come here.”

Before an American ambassador returns to Damascus, before US sanctions are lifted, average Syrians will likely continue to ignore gestures of American oratory and reconciliation.

More of my recent HuffPost.

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Filed under: America, Egypt, Israel/Palestine, Syria, Writing , Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Cairo, huffington post

American-made death squads

Another side of the American remaking of Iraq, from the Nation:

As Hassan tells it, it was a quiet night on June 10, 2008, in Sadr City, Baghdad’s poor Shiite district of more than 2 million people, when the helicopter appeared over his house and the front door exploded, nearly burning his sleeping youngest son. Before Hassan knew it, he was on the ground, hands bound and a bag over his head, with eight men pointing rifles at him, locked and loaded.

At first he couldn’t tell whether the men were Iraqis or Americans. He says he identified himself as a police sergeant, offering his ID before they took his pistol and knocked him to the ground. The men didn’t move like any Iraqi forces he’d ever seen. They looked and spoke like his countrymen, but they were wearing American-style uniforms and carrying American weapons with night-vision scopes. They accused him of being a commander in the local militia, the Mahdi Army, before they dragged him off, telling his wife he was “finished.” But before they left, they identified themselves. “We are the Special Forces. The dirty brigade,” Hassan recalls them saying.

The Iraq Special Operations Forces (ISOF) is probably the largest special forces outfit ever built by the United States, and it is free of many of the controls that most governments employ to rein in such lethal forces. The project started in the deserts of Jordan just after the Americans took Baghdad in April 2003. There, the US Army’s Special Forces, or Green Berets, trained mostly 18-year-old Iraqis with no prior military experience. The resulting brigade was a Green Beret’s dream come true: a deadly, elite, covert unit, fully fitted with American equipment, that would operate for years under US command and be unaccountable to Iraqi ministries and the normal political process.

More.

Filed under: America, Iraq, Media , Death Squads, Iraq Special Operations Forces, occupation, The Nation

Better reactions to Obama

Sifting through all the reaction pieces — and posting here for the first time in a while — I found this op-ed by Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif. 

The Egyptian state is doing pomp, and relieved (because of the security lockdown) of traffic and noise Cairo is playing along: the morning light is clear and free of dust, the flame trees are magnificent with their crowns of red massed flowers.

Writers life Soueif often make the best commentators:

Obama did what many of us hoped he would not do: he accorded faith a central position in the relationship between our different parts of the world: rather than human beings with different histories and different political interests and ambitions – and despite a quick acknowledgment of colonialism – we were essentially people of different faiths who would now make nice with each other. And such is our beleaguered state of mind here in this part of the world that every time he quoted the Qur’an, he was applauded. But then again, it seemed that it was the same 200 or so people who were putting their hands together – to less effect each time.

Also on the Guardian’s website was this op-ed by Ali Abuminah. Cheers for the British press. 

Once you strip away the mujamalat – the courtesies exchanged between guest and host – the substance of President Obama’s speech in Cairo indicates there is likely to be little real change in US policy. It is not necessary to divine Obama’s intentions – he may be utterly sincere and I believe he is. It is his analysis and prescriptions that in most regards maintain flawed American policies intact….

… Nowhere were these blindspots more apparent than his statements about Palestine/Israel. He gave his audience a detailed lesson on the Holocaust and explicitly used it as a justification for the creation of Israel. “It is also undeniable,” the president said, “that the Palestinian people – Muslims and Christians – have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than sixty years they have endured the pain of dislocation.”

Suffered in pursuit of a homeland? The pain of dislocation? They already had a homeland. They suffered from being ethnically cleansed and dispossessed of it and prevented from returning on the grounds that they are from the wrong ethno-national group. Why is that still so hard to say?

Filed under: America, Israel/Palestine, Media , Ahdaf Soueif, Ali Abuminah, Cairo, Guardian, Obama

Syria e-mailing, etc.

That Syrian nuclear plant bombed by Israel last year was probably built with American money. Seymour Hersh quoted emails from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for the New Yorker. It was a strange news week. On the latter, much of Hersh’s piece was full of the usual quotes from connected sources, though there wasn’t a huge amount of revelation. The best part, in my mind, combined substance with discrete Syrian charms:

Farouk al-Shara, the Vice-President of Syria, was, as Foreign Minister, his nation’s chief negotiator at Shepherdstown. When he was asked whether Syria’s relationship with Iran would change if the Golan Heights issue was resolved, he said, “Do you think a man only goes to bed with a woman he deeply loves?” Shara laughed, and added, “That’s my answer to your question about Iran.”

Filed under: America, Media, Syria , e-mail, New Yorker, nuclear program, Seymour Hersh, Wall Street Journal

Harper’s Weekly Review

Which I read in an email digest for writing like this:

Pope Benedict XVI visited Africa. In Angola he warned against witchcraft, corruption, and condoms, and two girls were trampled to death at a stadium where he appeared. “I entrust them to Jesus,” he said, “so that he welcomes them into his kingdom.” Pygmies in Cameroon built a ceremonial hut outside the apostolic nunciature in Yaounde and presented the Pope with a basket, a cloth mat, and a turtle. A 34-year-old army-backed DJ, Andry Rajoelina, was inaugurated as president of Madagascar, dissolved parliament, and promised to hold elections within two years. A pink baby elephant was discovered in Botswana. A massive earthquake off Tonga triggered an underwater volcanic eruption that unleashed a 13-mile-high plume of smoke. “We are quite lucky,” said Tonga’s chief seismologist, “not to get a tsunami.”

Read more and subscribe here.

Filed under: America, Media , Harpers, Weekly Review

and in a US paper no less

The novelist Ben Ehrenreich on the opinion page of the Los Angeles Times:

It has been argued that Zionism is an anachronism, a leftover ideology from the era of 19th century romantic nationalisms wedged uncomfortably into 21st century geopolitics. But Zionism is not merely outdated. Even before 1948, one of its basic oversights was readily apparent: the presence of Palestinians in Palestine. That led some of the most prominent Jewish thinkers of the last century, many of them Zionists, to balk at the idea of Jewish statehood. The Brit Shalom movement — founded in 1925 and supported at various times by Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem — argued for a secular, binational state in Palestine in which Jews and Arabs would be accorded equal status. Their concerns were both moral and pragmatic. The establishment of a Jewish state, Buber feared, would mean “premeditated national suicide.”

The fate Buber foresaw is upon us: a nation that has lived in a state of war for decades, a quarter-million Arab citizens with second-class status and more than 5 million Palestinians deprived of the most basic political and human rights. If two decades ago comparisons to the South African apartheid system felt like hyperbole, they now feel charitable. The white South African regime, for all its crimes, never attacked the Bantustans with anything like the destructive power Israel visited on Gaza in December and January, when nearly1,300 Palestinians were killed, one-third of them children.

Filed under: America, Israel/Palestine, Media , Ben Ehrenreich, Zionism

No change

Chas Freeman’s chance to run the National Intelligence Council will never come, because Freeman withdrew his name under a smear campaign by Israeli lobbies in Washington and their eager acolytes in Congress, in print, and on television. Maybe some in the White House decided to embarrass themselves and sink their own appointment? Who knows what difference he would make. Would his astute, mild criticisms of American-Israeli policies and accurate readings of regional disgust with West Bank colonization have led in one way or another to, say, American pressure on Israel to stop settlements? Or to broker regional peace through the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative? To prep another Arab leader to act like Sadat and fly to Jerusalem, or, better yet, an Israeli prime minister to fly to Beirut or Damascus as a gesture of peace? The last is never happening, but we can dream right?

Either way, Freeman’s name is withdrawn and the powers that be in the corners of Washington that don’t have ballots keep a hold over American foreign policy. Among those politicians in AIPAC’s pocket who took such personal offense to Freeman’s appointment was Chuck Schumer, whose offense sent out this:

“Charles Freeman was the wrong guy for this position. His statements against Israel were way over the top and severely out of step with the administration. I repeatedly urged the White House to reject him, and I am glad they did the right thing.”

As Talking Points Memo summed it:

[Freeman] was a former Ambassador to Saudi Arabia and is close to the Saudis. The real rub, the basis of the whole controversy, however, is that he has been far more critical of Israeli policy than is generally allowed within acceptable debate in Washington.

Freeman posted a message to Foreign Policy’s blog last night announcing his resignation. All the headlines now talk about his “blasting the Israel lobby on his way out.” Mabrouk, as he should. Especially heret:

There is a special irony in having been accused of improper regard for the opinions of foreign governments and societies by a group so clearly intent on enforcing adherence to the policies of a foreign government – in this case, the government of Israel. I believe that the inability of the American public to discuss, or the government to consider, any option for US policies in the Middle East opposed by the ruling faction in Israeli politics has allowed that faction to adopt and sustain policies that ultimately threaten the existence of the state of Israel. It is not permitted for anyone in the United States to say so. This is not just a tragedy for Israelis and their neighbors in the Middle East; it is doing widening damage to the national security of the United States.

Here’s to America’s shooting itself in the foot, again. The Israelis will make Avigdor Lieberman their foreign minister while Chuck Schumer and others hold the reigns on Middle East thought in Washington.

Filed under: America, Israel/Palestine , Chas Freeman, Israel lobby, National Intelligence Council

Because Rockets = Macaroni

“When have lentil bombs been going off lately? Is someone going to kill you with a piece of macaroni?” asked Congressman Brian Laird. It was only after Senator John Kerry, the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, raised the issue with Defence Minister Ehud Barak after their trip last month that Israel allowed the pasta in. Macaroni was considered a luxury item, not a humanitarian necessity, they were told. The total number of products blacklisted by Israel remains a mystery for UN officials and the relief agencies which face long delays in bringing in supplies. For security reasons such items as cement and steel rods are banned as they could be used by Hamas to build bunkers or the rockets used to target Israeli civilians. Hearing aids have been banned in case the mercury in their batteries could be used to produce chemical weapons.

From the Independent. Finally John Kerry says something, and I start feeling a bit better about that stint as a “Finance Volunteer” during the ‘04 DNC in Boston (though it was worth the free ticket to the convention the night some guy named Barry Obama gave the keynote address).

Filed under: America, Israel/Palestine, Media , blockade, Gaza, Independent, John Kerry, macaroni, pasta

A suggestion for the eventual ambassador

Cultural immersion / Nostalgia:

“Original 1859 Photograph of the American Vice Consul to Damascus Michael Mishaka holding a bible. He was a Protestant Christian.” [MidEastImage]

Filed under: America, Photos, Syria , Ambassador, Consul, Damascus, Diplomacy

John Updike dies, and Gods still don’t answer letters

“In 1976, Cheever received a false report that Updike had died and was moved to record the following tribute in his journal.” [From the New Yorker]

The telephone rings at four. “This is C.B.C. John Updike has been in a fatal automobile accident. Do you care to comment?” I am crying. I cannot sleep again. I think of joining Mary in bed, but I am afraid she will send me away. I think I am right. When there is a little light I feed the dogs. “I hope they don’t expect to be fed this early every morning,” she says. I do not point out that John will not die every morning, and that in any case it is I who feed them. This restraint costs me nothing. When I go into the kitchen for another cup of coffee, she empties the pot into my cup and says, “I was just about to have some myself.” When I insist on sharing the coffee I am unsuccessful. I do not say that the pain of death is nothing compared to the pain of sharing a coffeepot with a peevish woman. This, again, costs me nothing. And I see that what she seeks, much more than a cup of coffee, is the gratification of a sense of denial and neglect—and that we so often, all of us, put our cranky and emotional demands so far ahead of our hunger and thirst. As for John, he was a man I so esteemed as a colleague and so loved as a friend that his loss is indescribable. He was a prince. I think it not difficult to kiss him goodbye—I can think of no other way of parting from him, although he would, in my case, have been embarrassed. I think him peerless as a writer of his generation; and his gift of communicating—to millions of strangers—his most exalted and desperate emotions was, in his case, fortified by immense and uncommon intelligence and erudition. John, quite alone in the field of aesthetics, remained shrewd. Mercifully, there is no consolation in thinking that his extraordinary brilliance presaged a cruel, untimely, and unnatural death. His common sense would have dismissed that as repulsive and vulgar. One misses his brightness—one misses it painfully—but one remembers that his life was dedicated to the description of enduring—and I definitely do not mean immortal—to enduring strains of sensuality and spiritual revelations. So the call about John’s untimely death was a fraud. I have decided, says my daughter, that it was an overambitious stringer, who saw the name on a police blotter and tried to cash in. This is a wish founded on the desirable simplicity of being charitable; one of her best characteristics. I am distempered, forlorn, and idle.

Then there is Updike’s sportswriting. The Red Sox publicly mourned the loss of their most literary fan (apologies to Stephen King). “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” opened with this:

Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg. It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934, and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between Man’s Euclidean determinations and Nature’s beguiling irregularities.

Explaining with Teddy Ballgame wouldn’t tip his cap on his last game to a Boston crowd (he hadn’t done so since 1940, apparently), Updike wrote:

But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.

Filed under: America , John Cheever, John Updike, Ted Williams

Khalidi interview in Ha’aretz

Barry Obama’s old Chicago chum Rashid Khalidi was interviewed in Ha’aretz a few days ago. On the “future of the Palestinian territories,” he said:

“Both the occupation regime and the settlement enterprise have gotten constantly stronger since the negotiating process began in 1991 – after being weakened by the first intifada. These twin processes went on steroids after the second intifada started in 2000. If these two bulldozer-like endeavors are not rapidly reversed – not halted, reversed – then there is no possibility whatsoever of a two-state solution. These processes – the consecration of the occupation regime and the expansion of settlements – have been ongoing for 41 years. I suspect that because of them, combined with the blindness of Israeli leaders and the weakness of Palestinian leadership, there is little chance for a two-state solution to be implemented. And anyone who wants to implement a real, equitable two-state solution would have to explain in detail how they would uproot all or most of the settlements. Equally difficult will be overcoming the powerful interlocking complex of forces in Israeli society that have extensive material, bureaucratic, political and ideological interests in the Israeli state’s continued control over the lives of 3.5 million Palestinians, a control that is exercised under the pretext of security.” 

Then when asked about the vacuous fever storm around his associations with Obama and his critical scholarship of Israel, Palestine and the US, he said this:

“It proved once again that to be of Palestinian origin and to be publicly opposed to the occupation and critical of U.S. policy is grounds for public defamation as a ‘terrorist.’ It attests to the survival of McCarthyite tendencies in the U.S. media and politics. It also reaffirmed that Arabs, Muslims and Palestinians specifically are still the ‘other’ in American society. A higher percentage of Arab-Americans voted for Obama than any other ethnic group besides African-Americans, and they voted in record numbers too, I believe, and yet they are still pushed aside, almost literally. For instance, two Arab-American women in hijab were removed from the camera’s gaze at one of Obama’s rallies during the election. Obama did not visit one mosque or Arab community center throughout the entire two-year campaign, and he never mentioned Arab- or Muslim-Americans in his speeches. Whatever may have been the ’strategic’ political reasons for these actions, they show the kind of atmosphere we in the U.S. live in. 

“This situation is linked to the problematic notion that it is acceptable to create a U.S. Middle East policy which caters to Israel – and specifically to the Israeli right – and to the concerns of powerful forces like the Israel lobby that are allied to the Israeli right, but hardly at all to Arab- and Muslim-Americans. Such a policy is based on the opinions, ‘expertise’ and allegiances of Washington insiders who are not knowledgeable about all the complex realities of the region, and are mainly sensitive to Israeli concerns. Just as an Obama administration aspires to reflect the entire country in all its diversity, so should its Middle East policy-making reflect a comprehensive set of interests and concerns, and not just one narrow range of them.” 

Above, the innocuous picture revealing the shocking details of Obama’s association with Edward Said, which lay the media groundwork for publicizing the story that Obama and Khalidi may have hung out in the professors’ lounge.

Filed under: America, Israel/Palestine, Media , Haaretz, Rashid Khalidi

“Obama’s ambiguity”

Sons are not responsible for the racism of their fathers. But they do have a responsibility to let others know that they disagree vehemently with such sentiments. This is certainly the case for individuals in public service, particularly the man President-elect Barack Obama has chosen as White House chief of staff. Yet, Rep. Rahm Emanuel has not said a word regarding the troubling statement his father made to the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv.

In a recent interview, Dr. Benjamin Emanuel asserted that his son’s appointment would be beneficial to Israel. “Obviously he will influence the president to be pro-Israel,” the elder Emanuel said, according to the Jerusalem Post. “Why wouldn’t he be? What is he, an Arab? He’s not going to clean the floors of the White House.”

The public has a right to expect Mr. Emanuel to reject such raw racism especially given the historic resonance of Mr. Obama’s victory. It’s especially important for Arab and Muslim Americans who came through the election campaign feeling they are the last group of Americans who can still be publicly denigrated.

Mr. Emanuel – whose father fought with the Irgun, the pre-state Jewish militia that carried out terrorist attacks on Palestinians and the British in the 1940s – has a hawkishly pro-Israel record. He has never publicly distanced himself from his father’s contribution to the dispossession of more than 750,000 Palestinians, nor criticized Israel’s frequent attacks on Palestinian communities that have killed and maimed thousands of civilians.

In June 2003, Mr. Emanuel signed a letter criticizing President Bush for being insufficiently supportive of Israel. “We were deeply dismayed to hear your criticism of Israel for fighting acts of terror,” Mr. Emanuel, along with 33 other Democrats, wrote to Mr. Bush. The letter asserted that Israel’s policy of assassinating Palestinian political leaders “was clearly justified as an application of Israel’s right to self-defense.” Such killings violate the Geneva Conventions, and the State Department’s human-rights report specified that there were more civilian bystanders killed in Israeli assassination attempts than actual targets in 2003.

Ali Abuminah in the Washington Times (?!). I guess if the Left can’t help them, Palestinian intellectuals have to play ball with that part of the Right that still beholds William Buckley but stopped subscribing to Fouad Ajami or Richard Perle.

In other news about the President-elect: Galilee Bedouin claim Obama as lost member of tribe

Filed under: America, Israel/Palestine, Media , Alu Abuminah, Barack Obama, Bedouin, Galilee, Haaretz, racism, Rahm Emmanuel, Washington Times

“As if on cue..”

What I wrote from an email exchange with Josh Landis on Graham Bowley’s ridiculous Times story:

“This Times story was a crock. the protest was government-orchestrated — university students and working people were encouraged or even shooed into the Square and it dispersed pretty quickly. No surprises. But the tone of the article disregards any Syrian grievances. Bowley’s last article was filed from New York, he’s cribbing off of the AP and BBC reporters here and projecting his weirdly aggressive bias thousands of miles away, based on the anonymous US officials’ story.

Large scale popular protests may not be permitted… a fact of politics here… but that doesn’t mean people aren’t anrgy over the raid. I haven’t talked to a cab driver here who thinks the family in Abu Kamel was connected to this shadowy Iraqi smuggler. People are genuinely angry: their country was invaded. Why would the Times doubt that?

Bowley seems to delight in scorning Syria; the government and the people, whose anger is somehow illegitimate because their protest was “apparently stage-managed by the government.” Maybe Bowley, like BBC’s Paul Wood, should actually go to Deir az-Zur, to Abu Kamel, and interview people. He’d hear outrage and the widely held view here that the Americans killed civilians. He might even interview some of the wounded, or the relatives. But it’s a story the Times doesn’t want, so they don”t send their reporter.

Why is it that all of the articles about Syria this week in the Times are filed from the States or from Baghdad? As you wrote, where is Robert Worth? Damascus is no so far from Beirut.”

Filed under: America, Media, Syria , America, anger, New York Times, protest, Syria

Get out the Jingo!

McCain’s comparison of Obama knowing Rashid Khalidi to a “neo-Nazi” meeting is disgusting, and I’m sure it’s now getting more attention in the American press than the fallout of the American Special Forces raid on Syria. Save for the New York Times blinkered story, filed from New York, cribbing off the AP’s reporter here in Damascus, about yesterday orchestrated, peaceful but vocal and undeniably angry protest against the raid. For much better reporting, try the BBC’s Paul Wood. 

Juan Cole has a long comment with many useful links on the bigotry of the attacks on Khalidi. As he writes:

McCain’s and Palin’s attacks on Khalidi are frankly racist. He is a distinguished scholar, and the only objectionable thing about him from a rightwing point of view is that he is a Palestinian. There are about 9 million Palestinians in the world (a million or so are Israeli citizens; 3.7 million are stateless and without rights under Israeli control in the West Bank and Gaza; and 4 million are refugees or exiled in the diaspora; there are about 200,000 Palestinian-Americans, and several million Arab-Americans, many living in swing vote states). Khalidi was not, as the schlock rightwing press charges, a spokesman for the Palestine Liberation Organization. He was an adviser at the Madrid peace talks, but would that not have been, like, a good thing?

Scott Horton at Harper’s writes pointedly about the demise of the conservatives at the National Review and their madhouse, Red Scare take on Obama “knowing” Khalidi. 

Of course, Khalidi has been involved in Palestinian causes. McCarthy ought to ask John McCain about that, because McCain and Khalidi appear to have some joint interests, and that fact speaks very well of both of them. Indeed, the McCain–Khalidi connections are more substantial than the phony Obama–Khalidi connections McCarthy gussies up for his article. The Republican party’s congressionally funded international-networking organization, the International Republican Institute–long and ably chaired by John McCain and headed by McCain’s close friend, the capable Lorne Craner–has taken an interest in West Bank matters. IRI funded an ambitious project, called the Palestine Center, that Khalidi helped to support. Khalidi served on the Center’s board of directors. The goal of that project, shared by Khalidi and McCain, was the promotion of civic consciousness and engagement and the development of democratic values in the West Bank. Of course, McCarthy is not interested in looking too closely into the facts, because they would not serve his shrill partisan objectives.

I have a suggestion for Andy McCarthy and his Hyde Park project. If he really digs down deep enough, he will come up with a Hyde Park figure who stood in constant close contact with Barack Obama and who, unlike Ayers and Khalidi, really did influence Obama’s thinking about law, government, and policy. He is to my way of thinking a genuine radical. His name is Richard Posner, and he appears to be the most frequently and positively cited judge and legal academic in… National Review.

And the nutjobs are about to combust.

I remember seeing Khalidi last spring at a protest at Columbia, marking the 5 year anniversary of the fall of Baghdad. Like the assembled faculty, he shouted into a megaphone and looked pretty satisfied with himself; he was even wearing aviator sunglasses. It was a bright day in April. The most ridiculous thing about these attacks on Khalidi is how “moderate” (a really unfortunate word) his views on Israel and Palestine really are. What if Norman Finkelstein had been at Chicago and chatted up Obama?

Filed under: America, Media , Israel, McCain, Obama, Palestinians, racism, Rashi Khalidi, US elections