Israel, US, and “the lobby”-3: The silence in the US

(See part 1 and part 2.)

It is undoubtedly the case that most Americans, especially those who are critical of Israeli government policies, find it difficult to discuss the US-Israel relationship in the same way that they might discuss, say, the US-Pakistan relationship. Ira Chernus writes about how non-Jews in the US are reluctant to talk about Israel-Palestine issues, and gives them advice in an article titled How to talk to your Jewish friends, an article that was triggered by the appalling lack of action by the US government when Israel unleashed its massive assault on Lebanon in the summer of 2006, and the silence of Americans who failed to demand that the US government call for an immediate ceasefire to stop the killing. Condoleeza Rice’s statement that the death and destruction caused by the fighting in Lebanon signaled the “birth pangs of a new Middle East” was as grotesque a statement in the midst of crisis as was Marie Antoinette’s reputed “Let them eat cake.”

Chernus says:

When one hears criticism of any action of Israel by elected officials and the mainstream media in the US, it is almost always very cautiously worded and qualified by saying that the other side is worse. It seems as if public officials and media personalities in the US are afraid that criticizing Israel government policies is to risk being called anti-Jewish, although Jews as people, the people of Israel, and the actions of the Israel government are three different things and one can criticize the third without inferences being drawn about the other two. One has to look to the peace movements in Israel (10,000 of whom marched in Tel Aviv against the invasion of Lebanon on August 5, 2006) for criticisms of the actions of the Israeli government.

This is not the case in the rest of the world. The Economist magazine gives two main reasons for the near-unanimity of almost unconditional support among US elites for anything that Israel does.

Why is America so much more pro-Israeli than Europe? The most obvious answer lies in the power of two very visible political forces: the Israeli lobby (AIPAC) and the religious right. AIPAC, which has an annual budget of almost $50m, a staff of 200, 100,000 grassroots members and a decades-long history of wielding influence, is arguably the most powerful lobby in Washington, mightier even than the National Rifle Association.

“Thank God we have AIPAC, the greatest supporter and friend we have in the whole world,” says Ehud Olmert, Israel’s prime minister. The lobby, which is the centrepiece of a co-ordinated body that includes pressure groups, think-tanks and fund-raising operations, produces voting statistics on congressmen that are carefully scrutinised by political donors. It also organises regular trips to Israel for congressmen and their staffs.

What Chernus says is true. One is far more likely to find critiques of Israeli government actions in Israeli newspapers like Ha’aretz than in the mainstream US media. As another example, see this blistering critique titled Stop the Jewish Barbarians in Hebron of the way that Arabs are being treated in Hebron, that appeared in the Jerusalem Post by Yosef Lapid, a holocaust survivor and former Israeli justice minister.

When we decide, and rightly so, to never under any circumstances compare the behavior of Jews to that of Nazis, we are forgetting that anti-Semitism only reached its height at Auschwitz. It had existed, was active, frightening, harmful and disgusting. . .in the years that preceded Auschwitz too. And behind shuttered windows hid terrified Jewish women, exactly like the Arab woman of the Abu-Isha family in Hebron.

It is unthinkable that the memory of Auschwitz should serve as a pretext to ignore the fact that living here among us are Jews that behave toward Palestinians exactly the way that German, Hungarian, Polish and other anti-Semites behaved toward Jews.

I am not referring to crematoria or pogroms, but rather to the persecution, hounding, stone-throwing, undermining of livelihood, scare tactics, spitting and contempt.

It was all of these things that made our lives in the Diaspora so bitter and harrowing, even before they began the wholesale killing of Jews. I was afraid to go to school because little anti-Semites lay in wait on the way and beat us. In what way is a Palestinian child in Hebron any different?

This kind of article shows the wide range of discussion that exists in Israel, but one would be hard pressed to find its equivalent in the mainstream press in the US. Critics of the AIPAC lobby charge that it is responsible for stifling the debate in the US and as a result the search for meaningful solutions to the problems in the Middle East have been hindered, leading to the chronic instability and violence.

But the signs are that this situation is changing.

Next: How the Mearsheimer-Walt article and Carter book has broadened the discussion.

POST SCRIPT: What do you mean, three days on the cross?

Yesterday, Mr. Deity explained the reasons for allowing so much suffering. Today he asks Jesus for a really big favor.

Tomorrow: Mr. Deity has trouble turning on the light.

Israel, US, and “the lobby”-2: An old state with an adolescent mentality

(See part 1 here.)

Tony Judt, one of the panelists in the public debate I wrote about earlier, was himself the center of another furor concerning the Israel lobby. Judt had strongly criticized the American intelligentsia (including those who call themselves liberals) and the Bush administration for its failures in Middle East policy.

On October 3, 2006, Judt was scheduled to give a lecture titled “The Israel Lobby & US Foreign Policy” before a public audience at the Polish Consulate offices in New York, which often sponsors such kinds of forums. But according to reports, the event was cancelled after the consulate received a phone call from Abraham Foxman, national director of the ADL. This led to many academics protesting at what they perceived as censorship, with over a hundred of them writing an open letter, suggesting that the ADL was trying to silence a critic of its lobbying efforts.
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Israel, US, and “the lobby”-1: Apartheid in the occupied territories?

The Washington Post had an interesting article that said how in 1941, David Ben-Gurion, one of the founders of Israel came to Washington DC and spent ten weeks in a hotel trying his best to get just a fifteen minute meeting with President Roosevelt to press the case for creating the state of Israel. He failed. The article used this to chart the steep rise of Israel’s influence in the US since then.

Discussions about the extent of this current influence, and whether it is a good thing for the US, Israel, or the Middle East in general was brought center stage in March 2006 by the article The Israel Lobby by academics John Mearsheimer of University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard. (I have written about this before here.)
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The Bible as history-6: The Bible as propaganda tool

(For the earlier posts in this series, see part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5.)

Few people read the Bible cover to cover. That is understandable. For one thing, it is very long. Second, the language is hard to follow. Third, it can be quite confusing with lots of characters and places involved, even more so than a Tolstoy novel. Fourth, interspersed with the stories are huge and boring chunks that are of two kinds: one consists of sequences of ‘begats’, which trace the genealogy of people, and the other consist of rules that god has said that people should live by.

So while the Bible is the best selling book of all time, it is also probably the least read. It is kind of like the religious equivalent of Steven Hawking’s A Brief History of Time.
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Christians and Christianists

Many Christians have problems with people like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell and James Dobson, and resent their mixing up church and state, the spiritual and the secular. For example, in remarks on Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on the August 22, 2005 broadcast of his TV show 700 Club, Robertson essentially called on the US government to murder Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, although he used the word “assassination” and the euphemism “take him out” instead of the more blunt but accurate word murder.

ROBERTSON: There was a popular coup that overthrew him [Chavez]. And what did the United States State Department do about it? Virtually nothing. And as a result, within about 48 hours that coup was broken; Chavez was back in power, but we had a chance to move in. He has destroyed the Venezuelan economy, and he’s going to make that a launching pad for communist infiltration and Muslim extremism all over the continent. You know, I don’t know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war. And I don’t think any oil shipments will stop. But this man is a terrific danger and the United … This is in our sphere of influence, so we can’t let this happen. We have the Monroe Doctrine, we have other doctrines that we have announced. And without question, this is a dangerous enemy to our south, controlling a huge pool of oil, that could hurt us very badly. We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability. We don’t need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator. It’s a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with. (my emphasis)

Basically, when Robertson says that “we” should kill Chavez, he is asking the US government to do it.

Many, if not most, Christians in the US were repulsed by Robertson’s comments and some were quick to say that he was not a Christian because of the actions he was advocating. But if we cannot pin the label “Christian” on him, what exactly is he? The label ‘radical cleric’ was tried for a while but did not catch on.

Way back in 2003, the blogger Tristero came up with a good name, suggesting that the term Christianist be used to describe people like Robertson and Falwell and Dobson.

Christianist and Christianism are best understood as being in parallel with Islamist and Islamism. We have all become familiar with the term Islamist which has to be distinguished from the label Muslim. The latter represents anyone who is an adherent of the religion of Islam. Islamism is a political movement inspired by the religion Islam and which seeks to make principles based on its interpretation of Islam the basis for the organizing of civil society. In this terminology, the Taliban are Islamists but most Muslims are not. As Tristero emphasizes, Islamists are not necessarily violent although some high profile Islamists like Osama bin Laden are.

So thus Christianism is a political movement inspired by the religion Christianity and which seeks to make principles based on its interpretation of Christianity the basis for the organizing of civil society, and Christianists are those who pursue such a policy.

The advantage of this kind of labeling is that is avoids having to make judgments about who is a true believer and who is not. Whether one has the right to adopt the label of Christian may be viewed by some as a moral issue, depending on whether one is living according to the principles of Christianity, which was why some people said that Robertson cannot be a Christian when he calls for the murder of foreign heads of state.

But applying Tristero’s system of labels removes this judgmental question. While there may be disagreements about whether Robertson is a “true” Christian or not depending on your tastes, he is definitely a Christianist since he clearly wants to run this country according his version of Christianity. Similarly while Muslims may debate whether Osama bin Laden is a “true” Muslim or not, it is pretty clear that he is an Islamist.

This seemed to me to be such a useful terminology that I was surprised that when Andrew Sullivan used it casually in this sense last November, it provoked angry charges in the blog world (from Glenn Reynolds and Ann Althouse and Hugh Hewitt) that it was insulting to Christians and even “hate speech” (although Sullivan himself is a practicing Catholic). Even more oddly, as Glenn Greenwald points out, these charges of bigotry against Sullivan came from the very people who routinely use the term ‘Islamist.’ Greenwald reminds us that:

Tristero made the same basic distinctions made by Sullivan, which Althouse, Reynolds and Hewitt are incapable of understanding (or unwilling to understand, though I think it’s the former) — namely, that Christians (like Muslims) can be divided into three groups: (1) those who believe in the religion (“Christians/Muslims”); (2) those who seek to have their religious beliefs dictate politics and law (“Christianists/Islamists”); and (3) those who are willing to use violence to enforce compliance with their religious beliefs (“Christian fascists/Islamofascists” – or “Christian terrorist”/”Muslim terrorist”).

This sounds like reasonable and neutral and useful language to me. And it looks like these labels are going mainstream. So we might soon see analogous words popping up for Jews and Hindus and Buddhists and people of other religions who similarly believe that their versions of their own religious beliefs should determine public policy for everyone, and thus control the nature of civic life.

POST SCRIPT: The Mac cult

It has been alleged that Mac users are like a cult, slavishly loyal to the brand and unthinkingly hostile to alternatives. I too use Mac computers and like them a lot. I cannot see myself ever switching to another operating system. But I do not quite see myself as a Mac cult member, mainly because I am not an avid adopter of new technology. I do not have an iPod or even a cell phone and only started using a (very basic) PDA because my work requires it.

So I was bemused at all the fuss about the announcement last week about Apple’s new iPhone which combines the features of a cell phone, iPod, and web browser. I saw the news items and kind of shrugged it off. But then I went to the Apple website and saw the presentation by Steve Jobs about the new device and understood the reasons for the hype. There is no doubt that Apple does three things very well. Its devices are undoubtedly pleasing to the eye, they are easy and intuitive to use, and they have very imaginative marketing. The iPhone really is a very cleverly designed device.

After watching Jobs talk about the iPhone and showing what it can do, even I thought it would be nice to have one. Of course, there is not a chance that I will spring $500 or so for it, because basically I do not want or need a cell phone or an iPod. But the fact that even someone like me was so drawn to the device says something about the power of Apple to make something that people feel they must have.

See Jobs’ introduction of the iPhone at MacWorld and judge for yourself. It is quite a show.

Rudeness on the web

The mass media tends not to probe too deeply into sacred cows (like religion and patriotism) and when it does so, seems to carefully select only those targets which will not alienate the majority of its customers. People writing on the internet, however, are much more likely to skewer a broader range of ideas, which is something that I welcome.

While public figures have long been fair game for ridicule even in the traditional mass media, a trickier issue arises with the internet, which has created a whole new class of what might be called semi-private individuals. We now have people who are not public figures in the traditional sense of the word writing in personal web pages and blogs which are, in effect, public but often the material is intended for a limited audience. When people write about the minutiae of their lives, their meetings with friends, their children’s achievements, etc., they are in a different class from a politician who makes a speech that is reported in the newspapers or broadcast on TV. While the politician is clearly a justifiable target for close scrutiny and their ideas are open to ridicule, should the same hold true for the average poster on Facebook or the obscure blogger?
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Remembering the legacy of Martin Luther King

(On this day in which we remember Dr. King, I thought I would repost something that I wrote last year.)

It is good on a day like this to recognize the importance of resurrecting an essential aspect of the message that Dr. King sought to convey. It is clear that there is a need to remove the layers of gauze that have covered his legacy and blurred the increasingly hard edged vision that characterized the last years of his life.

Most people focus primarily on his “I have a dream speech” given at the March on Washington in 1963. It is important to realize that he did not retire after that oratorical triumph but went on to speak and act in ways that were often different from his pre-1963 positions. His new emphasis on a class-based analysis of American society, his drive to unite the problems of black people with poor and working class white people, coupled with his opposition to the war in Vietnam, were a radical departure from a purely race-based civil rights struggle, cost him some support and alienated some former allies, and are what some believe precipitated his assassination.
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Challenging the sacred

Author Salman Rushdie recently reflected on an aspect of his own education, in opposing an attempt by the British government to pass legislation for a ban on incitement to “hatred against persons on racial or religious grounds.”

At Cambridge University I was taught a laudable method of argument: you never personalize, but you have absolutely no respect for people’s opinions. You are never rude to the person, but you can be savagely rude about what the person thinks. That seems to me a crucial distinction: You cannot ring-fence their ideas. The moment you say that any idea system is sacred, whether it’s a religious belief system or a secular ideology, the moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.

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Bush speech on Iraq

I almost always avoid watching formal speeches live. You have to listen to a lot of verbiage before getting to the gist. I find it far more efficient to read the transcript afterwards, though that means I miss the nuances that the spoken words provide. But since Bush’s latest speech was highly advertised as showing a new way forward, I tuned in. You can read the transcript here. As far as I can tell, there was little that I would consider ‘new’ but this may be my fault for being a policy wonk and following this topic closely. Maybe others will find it new and hopeful.
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When god talks to people

When things look grim in the world, you can always look to Pat Robertson to cheer things up with some new lunacy and he rarely lets you down. Just recently, Robertson said that god has been speaking to him again and there is much merriment in the country. According to CNN:

Evangelical broadcaster Pat Robertson said Tuesday that God has told him that a terrorist attack on the United States would cause a “mass killing” late in 2007.

“I’m not necessarily saying it’s going to be nuclear,” he said during his news-and-talk television show “The 700 Club” on the Christian Broadcasting Network.

“The Lord didn’t say nuclear. But I do believe it will be something like that.”

Robertson said God told him about the impending tragedy during a recent prayer retreat.

God also said, he claims, that major cities and possibly millions of people will be affected by the attack, which should take place sometime after September.

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