LobeLog.com

(LobeLog contributors have written about the anti-New Israel Fund (NIF) campaign here, here and here.)

(Videos recorded by Rachel Tabachnick; more videos coming shortly.)

On the evening after two days of talks between US Special Envoy for the Middle East George Mitchell and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Netanyahu appeared onstage with the far-right Texas-based Pastor John Hagee in Jerusalem.

The occasion was Hagee’s Night To Honor Israel, an event the preacher typically organizes as a forum to tout his ministry’s millions in donations to Israeli organizations and to level bellicose rhetoric against Israel’s perceived enemies.

On this evening, Hagee called Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “the Hitler of the Middle East” and denounced the Goldstone Report as “character assassination by an unbiased and uninformed committee.”

Netanyahu welcomed the crowd of 1000 American evangelicals to Jerusalem, a city he described as “the undivided, eternal capitol of the Jewish people. Then, he told them, “I salute you! The Jewish people salute you!” He used the rest of his speech to call for “tough, biting sanctions” against Iran that “bite deep into its energy sector.”

Hagee and Netanyahu appear together on stage:

In the audience were top-level members of the Israeli government, from Ambassador Michael Oren to Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat to Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon. Also present was Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, the chief rabbi of the illegal West Bank settlement of Efrat who gained notoriety for lobbying President Bill Clinton to pardon his friend, fugitive billionaire Marc Rich. Ayalon had stirred controversy days before when he refused to meet with a US congressional delegation brought to Israel by the progressive Jewish group J Street. Continue Reading »

Tom Friedman has got his head stuffed so far up his own derriere that even his erstwhile sometime-allies, the neoconservatives, are calling him out. On National Review Online, self-loathing neocon — or neocon denier, depending how you look at it — Jonah Goldberg comes through with his take down of Friedman. Goldberg, who, needless to say, is not my favorite columnist, lays mostly into Friedman’s green crusade and China-hugging, failing to mention his bumbling appraisals of the Middle East, which have worked rather in the neocons’ favor. But he is gracious enough to note the work of the left, paying homage where any good Friedman watcher must: at the feet of Matt Taibbi.

Attacking Friedman’s writing style is something of a bipartisan pastime. The gold standard of the genre is Matt Taibbi’s 2005 New York Press disembowelment, “Flathead.”

Forget that he doesn’t give mention to Taibbi’s excellent 2009 NY Press follow-up, “Flat N All That,” chronicling the horrors of Friedman’s Hot, Flat and Crowded. Goldberg hits many of the right notes that any good critic of the most influential columnist in Washington should. Take, for example, Friedman’s nonsense mixed metaphors:

Consider this classic line from his book The World Is Flat: “The walls had fallen down and the Windows had opened, making the world much flatter than it had ever been — but the age of seamless global communication had not yet dawned.” (Just for the record, the capitalized “Windows” is a reference to the operating system. That makes it crystal clear, right?) Or consider this sentence from his latest epic, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: “The demise of the Soviet Union and its iron curtain was like the elimination of a huge physical and political roadblock on the global economic playing field.”

Playing fields do not have roadblocks; windows in fallen walls, even when opened, do not reveal much. Of course, the reader understands what he is reading, just as the diner might grasp that he is eating possum scat — but that doesn’t really excuse the cook.

Ha! I have to admit that perhaps I’m not Goldberg’s intellectual equal — I sometimes can’t follow Friedman’s literary gymnastics (more like freak-show contortionist stuff). But Goldberg’s own metaphor is plain as day: Tom Friedman’s logic is “possum scat.”

Continue Reading »

Two weeks ago I blogged some meandering thoughts on “government-in-a-box,” a neologism for the “hold, build” part of international forces’ counterinsurgency strategy of “clear, hold, build” in the Afghan town of Marja.  I concluded that perhaps the contents of the box, at the time shrouded in mystery, were irrelevant and that the strategy was wrong headed from the get-go.

It seems the U.S. and its local viceroys — the regional, provincial and local government officials appointed by the occupation-supported government in Kabul — also lost their interest in the particulars. If not, perhaps they would have better vetted their appointee in their “showcase city,” as the New York Times put it (never mind that it’s a “city” of less than 50,000). The Times says today that:

News reports in the Western media say that Hajji Abdul Zahir, the newly appointed district chief of Marja, served jail time in Germany on charges of stabbing his stepson. Mr. Zahir… denied the reports to other media.

…A NATO spokesman in Kabul, speaking on behalf of Mark Sedwill, the senior NATO civilian official in Kabul… quoted Mr. Sedwill as saying, “This country is not going to be run by choir boys.”

The article says that local Afghans don’t care about his “family problems” either, as a former Taliban turned district chief of a nearby area characterized Zahir’s apparent filicidal attempt. The locals just want good governance. I’m curious to see how this “government-in-a-box” — complete with paper trail — works out. But if I was disgruntled Afghan, hoping for order, services, and justice, I wouldn’t be holding my breath.

In a typical rant, The New Republic editor/publisher Marty Peretz prefaced a rambling declaration of victory in Iraq with these charming words:

There were moments–long moments–during the Iraq war when I had my doubts. Even deep doubts. Frankly, I couldn’t quite imagine any venture requiring trust with Arabs turning out especially well. This is, you will say, my prejudice. But some prejudices are built on real facts, and history generally proves me right. Go ahead, prove me wrong.

Peretz is quoted by Glenn Greenwald, who says most of what needs to be said about Peretz’s latest display of bigotry. I’m sure we can expect a 4000-word J’accuse from Leon Wieseltier condemning his boss’s racism any day now.

In any case, if one views Peretz’s post now, one finds that the offending sentence has been changed, without any indication that it used to read differently: Continue Reading »

While this is not by any means the most egregious example, recent complaints by neo-conservatives about the Obama administration’s neutrality in the ongoing dispute between Argentina and Britain over the sovereignty of the Falkland/Malvinas Islands — now heating up over London’s recent launch of oil-drilling operations in the vicinity — offer yet one more illustration of their tendency to revise history when it suits their narrow political purposes.

Thus, the Weekly Standard’s snarky ‘Scrapbook’ this week (not available on the web without a subscription) argues that Obama’s position, as set out by the State Department last week, is of a piece with all kinds of other examples of “appeasement” his administration has practiced since coming to power.

“Since he was sworn into office last year, to world-wide acclaim, the 44th president of the United States has shown an astonishing predilection for cultivating our enemies (Iran, North Korea, Venezuela), appeasing the Putin regime in Russia, the People’s Republic of China, and the Assad kleptocracy in Syria, and throwing our friends and allies (Poland, the Czech Republic, Honduras, NATO, Israel, the G-8, India, Germany, Italy, etc.) under the bus, or giving them the back of his hand — choose your metaphor.

The latest example is the State Department’s pronouncement that the United States is strictly neutral on the question of British sovereignty over the Falkland Islands. ‘We are aware not only of the current situation,’ says a Department spokesman, ‘but also of the history, but our position remains one of neutrality. The U.S. recognizes the de facto U.K. administration of the islands but takes no position on the sovereignty claims of either party.’

This not-so-rare instance of State Department bumptiousness is guaranteed not only to infuriate all sides in the British polity, but also to leave the inhabitants of the Falklands feeling a little nervous. After all, the ‘history’ to which State eludes is the 1982 invasion by the brutal Argentine junta, and the ‘current situation’ is the combination of threatening noises from Argentina’s latest ruler – the erratic leftist Cristina Kirchner — and her best buddy in the hemisphere, Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. In The Scrapbook’s view, by pointedly refusing to support the British in this instance, the Obama administration is effectively siding with the unstable/hostile Kirchner regime and with Chavez.”[Emphasis Added]

“…Now that Kirchner and Chavez know that Barack Obama has washed his hands of this one, it is entirely possible that the Falklands war of 28 years ago could be repeated.” Continue Reading »

In a guest post for LobeLog, Max Blumenthal reports on blogger Pamela Geller’s attendance at an Israel Apartheid Week event at Columbia University in New York, her smear campaign against speakers, and her own ties to far-right European groups. (Regular LobeLog contributors have investigated Geller’s ties to other far-right groups here, here, here, here and here.)

In the days leading up to Israeli Apartheid Week’s opening event at Columbia University, leading anti-Muslim blogger Pam Geller posted an image of an SS officer with the name of one of the event’s speakers, Ben White, emblazoned on his uniform. (The image recalled placards held by far-right settlers depicting Yitzhak Rabin in an SS uniform just days before he was assassinated.) Geller was among the crowd at the Columbia event, making sure to catch White’s eye as he walked to the podium to speak. He told me that she mouthed to him, “You’re a Nazi.” The day after the event, Geller posted another characteristically juvenile screed describing White as “Nazi boy.”

There is little reason to engage a figure like Geller on the merits of her deranged characterizations. And it would be unfair to ascribe crude views like hers to the established pro-Israel groups working to discredit Israeli Apartheid Week. Their tactics are slightly more sophisticated, even if they have also demonstrated a reluctance to engage White and other participants on the facts about Israel’s systematic dispossession of the Palestinians. (Canadian pro-Israel students have united around a vaguely pornographic counter-campaign called “Size Doesn’t Matter” that invokes insecurities about penis length and equates traveling to Israel with the pleasure of oral sex.)

Geller’s attacks on White are worth discussing only in light of their irony. She is, after all, a fervent supporter of a British fascist group comprised of soccer hooligans and skinhead thugs who have delivered sig heil salutes en masse at their rallies while also displaying Israeli flags — a most bizarre melange. Geller’s endorsement of the shadowy fascist group, called the English Defense League, highlights the reorganization of the British far-right around an anti-Muslim, pro-Zionist platform designed to cultivate alliances with influential online fanatics like her.

On the same day Geller posted her smear of White, she promoted a rally in defense of the Dutch anti-Muslim extremist Geert Wilders by the English Defense League (EDL) (Wilders has called for a “head rag tax” on Muslim women who wear hijab).

“How I wish I could be there to stand with the English Defense League,” Geller pined.

Continue Reading »

It’s now really quite clear that long-time neo-con heartthrob, Ahmad Chalabi, has been doing the bidding of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in Iraq. The latest on that subject was published Thursday by the Washington Post’s David Ignatius who apparently was given an unclassified summary of alleged Iranian efforts — in which Chalabi has apparently played a key role — to influence the upcoming March 7 elections. See Marc Lynch’s recent post on Chalabi’s continuing machinations.

The question is this: if the neo-conservative hawks, who played such a necessary — if not quite sufficient — role in getting the United States to invade Iraq in 2003, so misjudged Chalabi, why should they be taken seriously on what to do about Iran, or just about anything else in the Greater Middle East? After all, this was the man on whom they relied, by their own admission, so much for their understanding of Iraqi and regional politics. (“Meeting him helped our intellectual juices to flow,” the Hudson Institute’s Meyrav Wurmser, whose husband David would go on to write the case for overthrowing Saddam Hussein at the American Enterprise Institute and later served as a top adviser to John Bolton and Dick Cheney, told Aram Roston.) And if they don’t even now admit that maybe they made a very big mistake – that maybe Chalabi was not a true democrat in the Jeffersonian tradition, or that maybe he was not, as Reuel Marc Gerecht described him in 2002, as “among, the truest … of [Washington's] Iraqi friends,” or that he may indeed have been working closely with the IRGC for some considerable period of time – why should they expect anyone to take them seriously when it comes to their policy prescriptions throughout the region? Continue Reading »

The invaluable Paul Woodward of War in Context has been closely following the assassination of Mahmoud al Mahbouh in Dubai. The story’s been unraveling like a brilliant spy novel (or not-so-brilliant spy) right on Paul’s blog, where he’s been highlighting news clips and giving his usual incisive commentary.

Though Israel has staunchly denied any involvement, all signs seem to point to Israel’s Mossad as the culprits of the hotel room murder. And it looks like they tread about as lightly as a Merkava.

Continue Reading »

Phil Weiss has been doing some great research on Columbia Law School dean David Schizer’s “Lawfare Project.”  The group has an upcoming conference in March—which looks to be a Goldstone-bashing-fest judging by its list of speakers—but has been very quiet about who actually founded, or belongs to, the project.

Yesterday, Phil passed along the information that the website’s domain name was registered by Roslyn Singer of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, a group which serves as a hub for the Israel Lobby.

They characterize themselves as, “a central address for key American, Israeli and other world leaders to consult on issues of critical concern to the Jewish community.”

An interesting connection for the Lawfare Project to choose not to disclose, but a closer examination of their domain name and webhosting reveal a number of additional links.

I looked up the Lawfare Project’s domain name using the Robtex tool.  It showed the domain name shares an IP address with:

http://childrensrightsinstitute.org

http://shimshonhitech.com/

http://nysun.com/

and
http://swine-flu-information.info/

Continue Reading »

On Monday, the Electronic Intifada (EI) website published a report on a speech that right-wing Middle East scholar Martin Kramer gave at Israel’s Herzliya security conference earlier this month. In the speech, Kramer called for a cut-off of United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) humanitarian aid to Palestinian refugees, and endorsed Israel’s ongoing siege of the territory, on the grounds that these measures would help curb the allegedly excessive Palestinian birth rate. “Israel’s present sanctions on Gaza have a political aim—undermine the Hamas regime—but if they also break Gaza’s runaway population growth—and there is some evidence that they have—that might begin to crack the culture of martyrdom which demands a constant supply of superfluous young men,” Kramer said. The EI report argues that Kramer’s statement “appears to meet the international legal definition of a call for genocide,” since the 1948 UN Genocide Convention defines the term to include “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group” that is targeted. Kramer has responded to the charges here, although he does not help his case by accusing his critics of being “death-to-Israel” types who “daily call for Israel to be wiped off the map.”

However, as Kramer admits, the idea of slashing the Palestinian birthrate by ending UNRWA aid does not originate with him, and he “credit[s] Gunnar Heinsohn for making a much more detailed case for it,” as well as for coining the term “superfluous young men.” Heinsohn, a German academic at the University of Bremen, made the case in more depth in a Wall Street Journal op-ed published in January 2009, at the height of the Gaza war. I meant to write about Heinsohn’s article at the time, but the Kramer controversy is as good a time as any to revisit it. (The New Left Review has more background on Heinsohn and his politics.)

Heinsohn argued that by providing humanitarian relief to the population of Gaza, UNRWA (and by extension its western funders) are fueling a “youth bulge” that provided a steady supply of violent and superfluous young men, and thus the West is “unintentionally financ[ing] a war by proxy against the Jews of Israel.” He called for UNRWA to end assistance to Gazans born from now on, although (perhaps to avoid the grim implications of his argument) he refrained from calling for a cut-off of aid to already living Gazans. Still, the UNRWA humanitarian aid has been virtually the only thing keeping the population of Gaza alive since the imposition of the blockade, and it is not clear what Heinsohn imagines will happen to Gazan children born under the siege who are denied UNRWA aid. (Or perhaps it is clear, but not terribly pleasant to think about.) Whether or not Heinsohn’s proposed policies meet a legal definition of genocide, these sorts of population-control measures targeting “undesirable” ethnic groups have a revolting history, and have been a hallmark of fascist regimes in particular; such ideas, as Leon Wieseltier recently wrote in a very different context, have “a provenance that should disgust all thinking people.”

What’s the punch line? According to his bio, Heinsohn is the head of something called the “Raphael Lemkin Institute” at the University of Bremen, which bills itself as “Europe’s first institute devoted to comparative genocide research.” Lemkin, of course, was the Polish-Jewish lawyer who fled the Nazis, coined the word “genocide,” and figured as one of the heroes in Samantha Power’s book A Problem From Hell.

The fact that the head of an institute bearing Raphael Lemkin’s name is calling for these frankly fascistic population control measures against the Palestinians is among the most revealing signs of the way that the memory of the Holocaust has been abused by a particular strand of militarist and virulently racist right-wing politics.