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Wednesday, November 6, 2024
Tuesday, November 5, 2024
[Salon] The US election and Palestinian self-determination - ArabDigest.org guest post
The US election
Summary: in what is the most consequential presidential election in modern US history will it matter to the Middle East who emerges the winner?
On the surface it should be of great importance to the region whether it is Donald Trump or Kamala Harris who sits in the Oval Office come 20 January 2025.
Trump, it is widely presumed, is the president Benjamin Netanyahu would see as his best bet to continue his war of attrition in Lebanon and the genocide in Gaza. But the unpredictability and indeed the increasingly disturbed rants and ramblings of the former president Netanyahu once called Israel’s best friend may give the prime minister some pause for thought. (Their relationship has been strained since the 2020 election and his congratulatory call to Joe Biden which enraged Trump though in recent months Netanyahu has been at pains to patch matters up.)
Certainly, however, Netanyahu will be less than happy at the thought of a Harris presidency. As Americans go to the polls today the vice president is working hard to woo the Arab-American voters she needs, most critically in the swing state of Michigan. On Sunday at a rally in the state she acknowledged the extent of human suffering in Lebanon and Gaza:
It is devastating and as president I will do everything in my power to end the war in Gaza, to bring the hostages home, end the suffering in Gaza, ensure Israel is secure and ensure the Palestinian people can realise their right to dignity, freedom, security and self-determination.
The call for Palestinian self-determination drew thunderous applause and with polls indicating that undecided voters are shifting to Harris a win in Michigan combined with wins in two other swing states Wisconsin and Pennsylvania would in an extremely tight election give her a total of 44 electoral college votes, enough to carry her across the line and secure the presidency.
Observers wonder whether it will make any difference to the Middle East whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump wins the election
Trump’s view stated repeatedly is that he wants “the war to end quickly” and at a meeting in July at Mar-a -Lago he told Netanyahu he wanted it over by the time he returns to office. That 20 January deadline is one that the Israeli PM is unlikely to meet even in the event he wanted to. Meanwhile the former president has taken to musing about the potential of the Strip as a tourist destination for the ultra wealthy: “[Gaza] could be better than Monaco. It has the best location in the Middle East, the best water, the best everything.”
Regardless of who emerges the winner, Americans are by and large not thinking of the war in the Middle East. It is the economy and abortion rights that are determining the vote and who will become the 47th president.
Others though and principally America’s friends and foes in the region and beyond will be watching with acute interest. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has threatened both Israel and the US with “a crushing response.” Should Trump lose and embark on a second insurrection to challenge the results – this one with the potential to roil not just Washington DC but the entire country in violent protest – Khamenei may be tempted to carry out his threat. That is a scenario that would deeply alarm the regional powers Saudi Arabia and the UAE given that Israel would retaliate with maximum force, something Joe Biden was able to convince them not to do in their recent response to Iran’s 1 October missile barrage.
Observers will be wondering too that in the event of a Trump victory is there any reason to believe that his arbitrary deadline for an end to the fighting will be met? And should Harris prevail will her apparent commitment to Palestine self-determination prove to have any value beyond an election tactic to garner the votes she needs? Will a President Harris halt the flow of weapons to force Netanyahu’s hand? It seems unlikely and so the unimaginable suffering of the Palestinians and the war in Lebanon will continue while Israel and its enablers in the West carry on unravelling international law and the rules-based order upon which liberal democracy is founded.
On 7 November geo-political analyst Jon Hoffman joins the podcast from Washington to discuss US policy in the Middle East in the wake of the results.
Members can leave comments about this newsletter on the Arab Digest website
[Salon] A big legal win for Western Sahara's Polisario Front - ArabDigest.org Guest Post
A big legal win for Western Sahara's Polisario Front
Summary: the Court of Justice of the European Union has blocked the EU’s inclusion of Western Sahara in its trade and fishery agreements with Morocco, potentially opening the way for a diplomatic solution to a decades old dispute.
We thank Hugh Lovatt a senior policy fellow with the Middle East and North Africa Programme at the European Council on Foreign Relation and ECFR for permission to publish today’s article.
On 4 October, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) handed another historic win to the Sahrawi national liberation movement, known as Polisario Front, in its struggle to end Morocco’s occupation of Western Sahara. The court blocked efforts by the European Commission to include the territory in the European Union’s trade liberalisation and fishery partnership agreements with Morocco.
The decision comes as an emboldened and well-armed Morocco continues pressing its international claims to Western Sahara. In July, it secured the endorsement of France’s president Emmanuel Macron for its “present and future” sovereignty over the territory it occupied in 1975. Meanwhile, Polisario forces continue their military attacks against Moroccan troops stationed along the sand berm which divides the desert territory.
Long-term legal battle
Since 2012, Polisario has fought a legal battle to exclude Western Sahara from the EU’s trade liberalisation and fishery partnership agreements with Morocco: its adversaries include the European Commission, the EU Council, and EU member states such as France and Spain.
In backing Polisario, the Grand Chamber – the CJEU’s highest court – re-confirmed two inter-related legal determinations: first, that Western Sahara’s status as a non-self-governing territory “separate and distinct” from Morocco means that the EU cannot recognise Moroccan sovereignty over the territory or include it in bilateral agreements; second, that Morocco needs to obtain the consent of the Sahrawi people when entering into agreements relating to their territory and ensure that they benefit from the exploitation of their natural resources.
The CJEU rejected the argument put forward by the commission and European External Actions Service that it secured the consent of the “population” of Western Sahara, as this conflated indigenous Sahrawis with Moroccan settlers. As the court pointed out, the territory’s population is different from the Sahrawi people, which includes Sahrawis still in Western Sahara and those now outside the territory – including in Polisario-run refugee camps in Tindouf, southern Algeria.
EU capitals may view the ruling as a political headache given their desire to placate Rabat. Despite recent warnings, they refused to plan for what comes next, instead trusting the commission’s legal analysis and assurances that it would triumph at the CJEU.[1] Having exhausted the appeals process, and run out of legal ploys to maintain Western Sahara’s inclusion in a way that would placate Morocco, the commission must now confront the difficult reality that it has created.
But by upholding international law in its trade relations and giving diplomacy a chance, the EU could help broker a pragmatic deal between Morocco and Polisario that provides long-term economic and diplomatic benefits; and supports UN-led diplomacy which has made little progress in resolving the Western Sahara conflict.
King Mohammed VI's official map, which includes the Western Sahara, is available on the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs official website
Economic blow
The CJEU’s annulment of the fishery partnership agreement predominantly hurts EU fishermen who can now no longer fish in either Western Saharan or Moroccan waters. Morocco also stands to lose €40m per year in EU funds, including financial support to develop its fishing industry in the Western Sahara territory. Invalidating the extension of the trade liberalisation agreement to Western Sahara will disproportionally impact Morocco. As a result, fish and agricultural exports from Western Saharan to the EU will lose access to preferential trade tariffs.
Western Sahara fruit grown by Moroccan producers will become more expensive and less able to undercut similar products grown in European countries. This loss of competitiveness may hit foreign investment into Western Sahara’s agricultural sector and dent the profits of Moroccan businesses, many of which are reportedly tied to the king and his associates.
Separate to this, the court also ruled that products such as tomatoes and melons exported from Western Sahara must be labelled as such “so as to avoid misleading consumers as to the true origin of those goods”. For Morocco, this will be a painful change, given that the country retains strong ideological claims to the Western Sahara territory.
Future relations with Western Sahara
With time, the court’s decision will resonate far beyond agricultural exports and fishery access. The EU’s legal obligations will inexorably impact all existing and future EU-Morocco agreements, including scientific and technological cooperation, green energy development, and European Investment Bank investment. These agreements could eventually be blocked if they do not fully and effectively exclude Western Sahara or receive the consent of the Sahrawi people. This would represent another huge victory for Polisario which hopes to gradually undermine the economic and financial interests that underpin Morocco’s hold over the territory.
The European Commission and council have often subordinated Sahrawi self-determination and international law to their desire to maintain close bilateral relations with Morocco. Its government has effectively exploited the EU’s interests for its own benefit, for example by leveraging migrant flows to European shores to successfully force EU policy changes. But with its hands tied by the CJEU, the EU now has only two solutions.
First, the most straightforward and legally acceptable solution is for the commission to ensure that all present and future agreements with Morocco fully and effectively exclude Western Sahara. This would allow for the continued deepening of EU-Morocco ties. But Rabat has repeatedly warned that excluding Western Sahara from EU agreements and legal instruments “could renew the ‘migration flows’ that Rabat has ‘managed and maintained’ with ‘sustained effort.’”
Second, the EU could obtain the consent of the Western Sahara people – as represented by Polisario – to the agreements. The EU and member state officials have previously ruled this out, given Morocco’s strong aversion to Sahrawi self-determination and Polisario. But although negotiating new arrangements with Morocco and Polisario would be difficult, it is the only legal basis for maintaining trade relations with Western Sahara and avoiding the potential paralysis of EU-Moroccan relations.
Reviving diplomacy
Sustained efforts by the commission, supported by the council and its member states, to supress Sahrawi self-determination have detrimentally impacted the prospect of resolving the Western Sahara conflict. The UN’s former personal envoy for Western Sahara, Horst Köhler, reportedly made this point in May 2018, warning that the EU’s trade policy was undermining his pursuit of peace.
Now the EU could reverse this power imbalance. Rabat faces the prospect of losing core aspects of its bilateral relations, or having to U-turn by accepting the exclusion of Western Sahara from its partnership with the EU. With no better option, the Moroccan government might become more amenable to a face-saving solution that allows for deepening ties with Europe and preserving Moroccan business interests in the Western Sahara. But the EU will need to face down Moroccan bluster; and the Sahrawi people will need to provide their consent.
Polisario could be open to a shared economic arrangement under the right conditions, including EU financial compensation and the commission’s recognition of Sahrawi rights over their natural resources.[2] This could build on Polisario’s 2007 proposal regarding a mutually acceptable political solution that includes “advantageous [economic, commercial and financial] arrangements” with Morocco during an interim period leading to full independence.
The EU and its member states could use these diplomatic and economic levers to push both parties towards a compromise solution, in line with the legal requirements set out by the CJEU. This approach would support peace-making efforts led by UN envoy Staffan de Mistura to end the Western Sahara conflict.
Despite its political gains, Morocco will not be able to rewrite international law to supports its claims or provide a lasting solution to the conflict. Nor will Polisario achieve outright independence through its return to war. Ultimately, hard-nosed, UN-led diplomacy supported by the EU remains the only viable pathway. Given the ideological distance between the parties, this should aim to coax Morocco and Polisario towards a “free association” proposal for Western Sahara – a pragmatic and legally sound ‘third way’, between outright independence and autonomous integration into Morocco, for fulfilling Sahrawi self-determination.
An EU-negotiated trade liberalisation and fishery partnership agreement between Morocco and Polisario could start to lay the economic foundations for a future “free association” agreement. Such an ambitious gambit will require European countries to hold the legal line – and not cave into blackmail, for example regarding migration flows – when engaging with Rabat. They should accept that securing deeper relations with Morocco is contingent on upholding international law and Sahrawi rights.
[1] ECFR Western Sahara Strategy Group meeting with European officials, Berlin, November 2021
[2] Author’s conversations with Polisario officials since 2020, including meetings with senior Polisario officials in Tindouf, Algeria, September 2022
Note: The European Council on Foreign Relations does not take collective positions. ECFR publications only represent the views of their individual authors.
Members can leave comments about this newsletter on the Arab Digest website
Monday, November 4, 2024
[Salon] Slaughter of Civilians In Gaza and Lebanon Is Violating Both U.S. and International Law by Allan Brownfeld Guest Post
Slaughter of Civilians In Gaza and Lebanon Is Violating Both U.S. and International Law
By
Allan C.Brownfeld
————————————————————————————————————————
As of the end of October, the Biden administration has received nearly 500 reports alleging that Israel used U.S.-supplied weapons for attacks that caused unnecessary harm to civilians in Gaza, but it has failed to comply with its own policies requiring swift investigations of such claims. Some of these cases are said to be violations of both U.S. and international law.
Despite the State Department’s Internal Civilian Harm Incident Response Guidance, which directs officials to complete an investigation and recommend action within two months of launching an inquiry, no single case has reached the “action” stage, U.S. officials told the Washington Post.
Critics of the Biden administration’s provision of massive armaments to Israel, which has led to the death of at least 43,000 people, mostly civilians, say that the administration has been unwilling to hold Israel accountable for the staggering casualty toll.
“They’re ignoring evidence of widespread civilian harm and atrocities to maintain a policy of virtually unconditional weapons transfers to the Netanyahu government,” said John Ramming Chappell of the Center for Civilians in Conflict.
In October, after an Israeli strike on an apartment building killed more than 90 people, including 25 children, the State Department said it was seeking a “full explanation” from Israel. In the past, Israel explained attacks on schools, hospitals, churches and mosques by claiming that terrorists were hiding in these locations. The majority of the dead have been women and children.
An increasing number of U.S. officials have resigned to protest U.S. involvement in Israel’s assault on civilians. Mike Casey, who worked on Gaza issues at the State Department’s Office of Palestinian Affairs in Jerusalem, said that senior officials routinely gave the impression that their goal in discussing any alleged abuse by Israel was to figure out how to frame it in a less negative light. Casey said: “There’s this sense of, “How do we make this okay? There’s not, ‘How do we get to the real truth of what’s going on here?’”
The first State Department official to resign in protest of U.S.policy toward Israel’s assault on civilians in Gaza was Josh Paul. he worked for the State Department for more than 11 years and was a director in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, which is responsible for U.S. military assistance and arms transfers. In a talk before the Committee for the Republic in Washington, D.C., he said that the U.S. Government ignores two amendments to the 1961 Foreign Aid Act, known as the Symington and Glenn amendments, which ban aid to clandestine nuclear powers. Israel has a secret nuclear weapons arsenal that is ignored, through a policy of nuclear ambiguity, by the U.S. Government to allow military support to Israel to continue.
There is also, Paul noted, the Leahy Law which requires a careful examination of how and when U.S. provided weapons are used “in gross violations of human rights.” When that is the case, the sale or transfer of weapons is supposed to be denied. In Paul’s view, Israel, which is committing war crimes out in the open, is uniquely exempt in practice from such examination. President Biden, Paul points out, has deployed in Israel a $1.15 billion Terminal High Altitude Area Defense System (THAAD) missile defense system to be manned by roughly 100 American soldiers on the ground. This, said Paul, creates a potential tripwire situation leading to an escalation and a larger war if American soldiers are killed in an Iranian attack.
In his resignation letter, Josh Paul wrote: “We cannot be both against occupation and for it, we cannot be both for freedom and against it. And we cannot be for a better world, while contributing to one that is materially worse.”
Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. military aid since World War 11, and the Biden administration has provided it with at least $17.9 billion in military aid in the past year alone, according to a recent study by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. But despite growing alarm by U.S. officials about Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza and Lebanon, apart from one delayed shipment of 2,000 pound bombs, aid has continued to flow without interruption.
William T. Hartung, an expert on the arms industry at the Quincy Institute, said “it’s almost impossible” that Israel is not violating U.S. law, “given the level of slaughter that’s going on and the preponderance of U.S. weapons.” Sarah Yager, the Washington director of Human Rights Watch, says, “It’s a year in. When is the United States going to put its foot down?”
Writing in The New York Times, Peter Beinart, an editor of Jewish Currents, provides this assessment of the Biden administration’s policy toward Israel: “Through his unwavering backing of Israel, President Biden has effectively supported its unequal treatment and oppression of Palestinians—-especially in Gaza—and undermined the ethical rationale of his presidency…Israel’s political system is explicitly based on religion and ethnicity…Most of the Palestinians under Israeli control—-those in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip—-can’t become citizens of the state that dominates their lives.”
When it comes to Israel, declares Beinart, “Mr. Biden hasn’t supported equality under the law. The war in Gaza has made that contradiction impossible to ignore. It is most glaring when Biden expresses deep empathy for Israeli suffering but relative indifference to the far larger number of dead Palestinians, or when his administration seems to distinguish even between American citizens, showing more concern for those murdered by Hamas than those killed by Israel’s military.”
The Biden administration says it believes in a two-state solution and the creation of a Palestinian state. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu says there will never be a Palestinian state and members of his Cabinet call for annexing the West Bank and expelling it’s indigenous population. Still, massive U.S.aid flows and Israeli violations of U.S. and international law are ignored. This irrational policy does not serve the interests of Israelis, Palestinians or Americans.
From ‘Clingers’ to ‘Garbage’—Why the 16 years of Vilification? › American Greatness - Guest Post
From ‘Clingers’ to ‘Garbage’—Why the 16 years of Vilification? › American Greatness
Who actually are the “garbage” people?
Are they one and the same with Joe Biden’s “semi-fascists,” “chumps,” and “dregs of society?”
Or Barack Obama’s “clingers?”
Do they include Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” and “irredeemables?”
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Are they FBI grandee Peter Strzok’s Walmart shoppers who “smell?”
Over the last decade-and-a-half, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Harris-Walz, and a host of other self-described elites have variously invented a wide range of smears and slurs—but about whom exactly?
Who are these people that leftwing politicians have so vehemently derided—and why?
They include Trump supporters, of course, or what Biden also dubbed “ultra-MAGAs” and Tim Walz called “fascists,” now without the prior qualifying prefix “semi.”
In general, these adjectives of disdain denote about half the country according to the results of what will soon be the last three presidential elections.
This half is more rural than urban, characterized by larger than smaller families, more high-schooled diplomaed than college degreed, and more conventional and traditional than vanguard and trend-setting.
Statisticians tell us that the new non-clinging Democratic Party finds its greatest support from those who earn less than $50,000 and those who make considerably more than $100,000. These are the rich/poor bookends that surround the reformed Republican party in between.
So, in terms of generalized income and earnings, the left is now the party of the well-to-do professional and credential class and the rich, along with the subsidized poor. The Republicans, by contrast, are increasingly represented by the middle classes.
The Democratic top dogs are most likely to embrace agendas that never garner 51 percent of public support—vast reductions in gas and oil to lessen “climate change,” open borders to welcome in the world’s needy, the government promotion of a third, transgendered sex, abortion on demand without restrictions, the reifications of various critical (race/legal/penal/modern monetary) “theories,” and radical changes in the current system (ending the Senate filibuster, the Electoral College, the nine-justice Supreme Court, the 50-state union, etc.).
Two truisms stand out about the elite boutique agenda: one, when these theories are implemented—often by the courts, and the permanent and unelected administrative and bureaucratic state—the architects of such experimentation do not really feel the inevitable deleterious consequences.
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the Silicon Valley masters of the universe, the professors of law, the corporate CEOs, and the Bill Gates of the world really don’t care much whether gas is at $3 a gallon or $6, or Romex wire is $39 a spool or $150.
Illegal aliens do not go to their children’s schools or crowd the offices of their concierge cardiologists and oncologists, much less dump trash on their streets and curbs.
They are strong supporters of teachers’ unions, despising the very idea of charter schools and homeschooling. And yet they send their children more often to private schools where students are not the lab rats of the public school system.
Their ideology is the fruit of their privilege and so is often more utopian and abstract. Given that if it results in economic, social, and cultural damage to millions, they will certainly avoid the ensuing flotsam and jetsam.
The fallout from defunding the police falls upon the inner city, not the privately patrolled Presidio Heights or the secluded sorts in Martha’s Vineyard.
Given their income and status, the new Democratic credentialed and moneyed classes do not care about the struggle of others to live one more day, clinging to the middle-class vestiges of their parents’ era. Instead, for the anointed who have transcended the fear of not filling up their tank or coming up short on monthly rent and power bills, it is not hard to mandate job-killing EVs or to chuckle over biological boys in girls’ locker rooms and pride flags flying from the abandoned American embassy in Kabul.
By the same token, the poor count on the left’s largesse to cushion themselves from the damage of their own party’s dreams turned into nightmares. Various food, housing, medical, legal, and educational subsidies to the poor are testaments that the left’s own agendas stagnant upward mobility and confine the poor to permanent poverty.
In a cynical sense, left-wing elites square the circle of the guilt over their privilege through government subsidies for those whom they’d rather not necessarily live next to or have their children attend school with. In other words, they find them useful rather than empathetic. They welcome in millions of illegal aliens—as long as they don’t camp out at Yale, the Hamptons, or Malibu Beach.
Not so the struggling middle classes. Modern theories can result in hyperinflation that can ruin them or easily send them into the ranks of the government-subsidized poor. They are conservative in wanting a secure border, legal-only immigration, affordable food and energy, safe streets, and equality of opportunity rather than of result, because they have no margin of error, lacking the wherewithal of secure home zip codes, or the perks of gargantuan grocery bills at Whole Foods, or a new foreign car every two years.
Such conservatism is reflected in the worldview of the clingers and irredeemables. They accept not cosmopolitism but 2,500 years of nationhood that remind them there can be no nation without borders.
There can be no modern comforts and security without access to affordable food and energy. There can be no public society without safe streets—and indeed, not even public places without sanitation and common decency.
So, the great middle class is wary about falling at the hands of others into government dependency and even more fearful of destroying what has worked over the ages. They resist experimenting with the unknown, especially when thought up and designed by those who will easily ride out the ensuing disasters when such harebrained schemes inevitably fail.
These chumps, fascists, and garbage people know that their advantages in numbers are outweighed by the Eloi’s absorption of institutional and government power. So, in depression, they often shrug and drop out. They assume wisely that the network news, the New York Times and Washington Post, Hollywood, and the corporate boardroom are mere extensions of the utopian and cultural left, who despise them for ignoring their supposed betters.
They pass on watching the Emmys, Oscars, Tonys, and Grammys. They are deaf to the top-down sermons from an Al Gore, John Kerry, the Clintons, the Obamas, or Joe Biden, which assume the grubby majority is either too ignorant or amoral or both to know what is good for them and so must be shamed, smeared, and slurred rather than won over by argumentations and persuasion. Is not the 2024 election about just that—the haughty who sermonize and those weary of being lectured?
The dregs could care less who is president of Harvard or how many letters and titles follow a professional’s name—except to confirm to themselves when watching or hearing such people that our elites increasingly have neither common sense nor integrity. A high school history teacher could have answered congressional questioning on race, anti-Semitism, and bias far more effectively and adroitly than a deer-in-the-headlights, clueless Harvard president Claudine Gay.
Yes, the semi-fascists are lectured that they are racist, sexist, and xenophobic. They are damned by the credentialed as “white privileged” who “rage,” as they dutifully go off to Iraq and Afghanistan to die in combat at double their numbers in our demographics.
They are advised of their toxic illiberality and bigotry, even as their children lack the race, gender, and ethnicity advantage accorded to the so-called Other and the inside edge that money, influence, and status provide for the elite.
What has recently brought this great divide to a head and exposed the fury of the elite is resurgent anger at the newfound impudence of the deplorable class, or the notion that they would dare call the dishonest media the “fake news” or suggest that “fit-as-fiddle,” “smart-as-a-tack,” cognitively challenged Joe Biden is the proverbial emperor with no clothes.
Who are these arrogant who pack the 20,000 seats of Madison Square Garden even after the good people have warned that they were mindlessly reenacting Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will?
The left believes that either racial victimization or money should guarantee privilege and so despises those qualifying for neither. In the elite’s view, the working class so often lacks the romance of the poor and non-white, but worse still, the culture and pretensions of the progressive Übermenschen.
Finally, the unspoken irony of this divide is that the self-professed elite know that they are not the elite by any definable standard or meritocracy. Yale gives a higher percentage of A’s on spec to its students than do trade schools and junior colleges.
Today’s supposedly brilliant Columbia student would likely struggle to earn an objectively graded C on a state college’s standardized, multi-choice history exam.
Those who run the Washington Post or NPR are less competent, worldly, and knowledgeable than the chumpy and dregsy sexagenarian who publishes a small town’s weekly newspaper.
The average salesman and electrician can far better spot fraud and deceit than an Anthony Fauci or Peter Daszak. And the tractor driver is more likely not to lie under oath than a John Brennan, James Clapper, or Andrew McCabe. The lineman working with high voltage is far more likely to err on the side of safety with the lives of others than the executives of Pfizer or Moderna.
In a wider sense, the deplorable class believes it can still build reliable pipelines, frack, truck our nation’s goods, and clean up after a hurricane. But it has utterly lost confidence that the best and the brightest at the Pentagon can win a war, at Boeing can craft a safe jet, or at NASA can send astronauts safely into space and back in the fashion of their grandfathers more than half a century ago.
This election is about many things—left/right issues, of course, and the peculiar personalities of Trump and Harris perhaps.
But it will likely be defined by those who are not just tired of being smeared as the underbelly of America but, far more unforgivably, are beginning to enjoy and mock the disparagement from those who have never earned the right to smear anyone but themselves.
Who’s the Fascist? | City Journal - Guest Post
Who’s the Fascist? | City Journal
We’re told that the 2024 presidential election will decide whether America descends into fascism. But there’s a great deal of confusion about what this term means, and which candidate is likelier to lead us there.
Fascism is now routinely used to describe conservatives, but that’s only because of what Tom Wolfe called “the greatest hoax of modern history.” The original fascists were leftists. Benito Mussolini started his political career in the Italian Socialist Party, and Adolf Hitler’s Nazis took their name from “National Socialists.” Unlike their Communist rivals on the Left, those dictators didn’t directly seize the means of production, but they believed that a strong central government should direct the economy and the rest of society: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state,” in Mussolini’s words.
Mussolini’s principles and policies were widely admired and emulated by progressives in America during the 1920s, and the underlying philosophy—a society planned and regulated by “experts”—is still shared by today’s progressives, as Jonah Goldberg showed in his 2008 book, Liberal Fascism. But after the horrors of the Holocaust, progressives rewrote history by reclassifying fascism as a right-wing movement. Since then, they have deployed the term against every Republican presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan—including, of course, Donald Trump.
It’s true that Trump often sounds like an authoritarian, particularly when he’s misquoted by the legacy media (like the recent false accusation that he vowed to unleash the military on his political enemies). Democrats were appalled by his statements during the 2016 campaign about locking up Hillary Clinton, but his Department of Justice (unlike Joe Biden’s) didn’t actually try to imprison his political opponent. How does his record on authoritarianism compare with his rhetoric—and how does it compare with Kamala Harris’s record?
As president, Trump repeatedly denounced and threatened the press, vowing several times to sue the New York Times and calling for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to revoke broadcasters’ licenses because of the networks’ “partisan, distorted and fake” news coverage. But the FCC didn’t revoke any licenses (it has no authority to punish broadcasters for partisanship), and his one lawsuit against the Times was dismissed. The closest Trump came to actual censorship was the temporary revocation of CNN correspondent Jim Acosta’s White House press pass, which was restored by a court order. During the 2024 campaign, Trump has repeated those threats against the broadcasters’ licenses and filed a suit against the CBS news program 60 Minutes, accusing it of “election interference” for editing its interview with Harris. Thanks to the First Amendment protections that broadcast journalists enjoy, there’s no reason to expect Trump’s latest threats to have any more impact than the previous ones.
The Biden administration has proved a more effective censor. The administration successfully pressured social media platforms to silence eminent scientists who accurately documented the futility and harms of White House pandemic policies. The administration then created a Disinformation Governance Board, which prompted so many comparisons to the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984 that it was shut down. Yet, the administration proceeded to put Vice President Harris in charge of a White House task force to combat online “disinformation campaigns” and “abuse” directed against “government and civic leaders.” It also helped fund a British group producing the influential Global Disinformation Index, which steered advertisers away from conservative news outlets. These actions led one critic to call the Biden White House the most anti-free-speech administration since that of John Adams (which sent newspaper editors to prison), and there’s little indication that a Harris administration would change course. Her running mate, Tim Walz, has declared (wrongly) that the First Amendment does not protect “misinformation or hate speech.”
Trump’s greatest power grab occurred during the pandemic, which saw the imposition of the most authoritarian measures in American history. Unprecedented restrictions of individual liberty caused massive social and economic damage. Technically, the lockdowns and most other restrictions in 2020 were the doings of state governors, not Trump, but the governors were responding to pressure from his administration. Though Trump himself soon began calling for the lockdowns to end and for schools to reopen, the White House officials overseeing his Covid policies, Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci, continued successfully pressuring governors to extend the restrictions. Trump did have the good sense to consult with scientists critical of the restrictions—notably Scott Atlas of the Hoover Institution, the lone dissident on the White House Coronavirus Task Force, who advised him to overrule Birx and Fauci. But Trump and his political team feared taking such action in an election year.
Atlas and others (including the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025) have urged the next president to make sweeping reforms in the federal health bureaucracy to prevent it from repeating its disastrous mistakes during the next pandemic. Atlas says he is confident that Trump recognizes the mistakes and would be eager to make the reforms. But Harris seems an unlikely reformer. She and Biden have continued to insist that the pandemic restrictions were necessary.
When Biden took office, he not only retained Fauci but promoted him to be his chief medical advisor. With Harris’s enthusiastic support, Biden instituted another unprecedented authoritarian measure: vaccine mandates for all federal employees, including members of the military, as well as more than 80 million workers at private companies. The administration even insisted, unlike European governments, on needlessly mandating vaccines for workers who already had natural immunity due to a prior infection. The ostensible public-health justification for this coercion was to stop the spread of the virus, but the vaccines did not actually prevent transmission. Critics argued that it was unethical to force vaccines with rare but serious side effects on younger American adults at minimal risk from the virus, but the administration persisted (and this year, Harris mandated vaccines for all her campaign employees.) The Supreme Court eventually overturned the mandate for private companies, ruling that the federal government had no authority to compel those workers, but by then many of them had already lost their jobs.
For an alleged wannabe dictator, Trump badly blundered in his choices for the Supreme Court. Those three conservative justices went on to help form majorities in landmark decisions limiting the power of the federal government and the president. The rulings shifted authority back to the states and severely curtailed the power of the executive branch—much to the dismay of Harris. In her criticism of the court’s decision last June overturning its 1984 Chevron decision, which makes it easier for citizens to challenge regulations by federal agencies, she warned that it would limit the power of “federal experts” to issue “commonsense rules.”
Harris’s idea of commonsense rules presumably includes mandates from the Green New Deal, which she co-sponsored in the Senate. The plan to eliminate fossil fuels never had any chance of being passed by Congress, but the Biden administration has quietly advanced this agenda by creatively using federal agencies to promote and subsidize “sustainable energy,” stymie oil and gas production, and force automakers to switch to electric vehicles. Harris is firmly committed to the goal of achieving “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050, which would be the most costly project in history and give central planners vast new powers to manage the economy and the lives of citizens.
Whether or not you want to call that fascism or just plain old authoritarianism, it would probably appeal to Mussolini.
Is the Future of Our Democracy at Stake? | Power Line - Guest Post
Is the Future of Our Democracy at Stake? | Power Line
Is the Future of Our Democracy at Stake?
The Democrats are trying to run on the issue of “democracy,” which polls tell us ranks around fourth in voters’ rating of issues. It has never been clear what Democrats mean by claiming that Our Democracy™️ is on the ballot. Ironically, though, in a very real sense it is.
I have been in Europe for the last couple of weeks. A few days ago, I had a conversation with a young businessman from Amsterdam who happened to be sitting next to us at dinner in a Paris bistro, with his French girlfriend. He expressed dismay that the President of the United States could be an “idiot,” referring to Kamala Harris. That would be terrible, he thought, for the U.S., but also for Europe. He didn’t understand how someone of Harris’s obvious lack of ability could become a serious contender for the White House. I explained the (very different) roles played by Willie Brown and Jim Clyburn.
But is it really terrible for our president to be an obvious incompetent? Some would say No. We have not had a functioning president since early in Joe Biden’s term; perhaps we have never had a real president from the day he was inaugurated. And even when Biden’s senility was revealed beyond dispute in the presidential debate, no one except a handful of conservative pundits and politicians seriously thought he should be removed from office. We had gotten along without a president for years, why worry about it now?
Kamala Harris would be a worthy successor to Joe Biden. While not senile, she is so untalented and so uninterested in any matters of policy–the most she can do is mouth left-wing platitudes, from which she is happy to retreat if they become a hindrance–that she could not, in any real sense, function as the president. The government would be run, as it has been for nearly four years, by the Deep State, the permanent bureaucracy, Washington insiders, the White House staff, Democratic Party oligarchs–describe the group how you will. The transition from the senile Joe Biden to the clueless Kamala Harris would be seamless.
This is the subject of Glenn Reynolds’ current column in the New York Post:
Independent journalist Glenn Greenwald recently tweeted, “The US has no functional president and has not had one for months, and it’s barely noticeable and barely matters because there’s a permanent unelected machine that runs the government.”
***
And of course a whole collection of bureaucrats, interagency committees and even lobbyists (who often write federal legislation and agency regulations) may be basically steering the ship of state in the absence of an actual captain.
What’s surprising, though, is how little anyone seems to care.
***
[M]aybe it’s just that those currently running the government like this president-less setup.
They have power without responsibility and without meaningful accountability.
No doubt careers are being built, lucrative contracts are being let, and favors are being traded in ways that would be much harder to pull off with a fully functioning brain in the Oval Office.
***
The coming election offers a stark choice between a chief executive who will govern as an executive, and one more likely to serve as a colorless tool of special interests.
The special interests would prefer the tool.
If you read Glenn’s whole column, he is a little more sanguine than I am. I think that our democracy is rapidly circling the drain. There is progressively less relationship between policies that our government follows, especially at the national level, and wishes expressed by voters. We never voted for open borders, for DEI, for “trans” madness, for the destruction of reliable energy and our electrical grid. Most important decisions are made out of sight, and only nominally by those for whom we have voted.
Regardless of whom we elect, the permanent government will continue to press for ever more statist policies, the purpose of which is to expand the power of the state at the expense of the individual. It is notoriously difficult for Republican presidents to control the executive branch for which they are constitutionally responsible.
This year’s election is a critical point at which voters can try to stop the juggernaut of left-wing policies that they never chose. And in Donald Trump, we have a deeply flawed champion, but one who at least understands the problem and is committed to trying to solve it. It may be that 2024 is the people’s last, best hope to stop the tide of ever more powerful and intrusive unelected government.
And so, in a way completely different from what the Democrats propose, our democracy really is on the ballot this year.
Sunday, November 3, 2024
Resistance Is a Just Struggle - Opinion - Haaretz.com - Guest Post
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2024-11-03/ty-article-opinion/.premium/resistance-is-a-just-struggle/00000192-ee0c-d3da-a5b7-ff1ea6fa0000
Resistance Is a Just Struggle - Opinion - Haaretz.com
Gideon LevyNov 3, 2024
The decades-long battle for Palestinian freedom is among the most just struggles in the world today. The means that some of them employ are among the most heinous.
The means that Israel employs against them are equally and sometimes even more heinous, certainly in quantitative terms.
The Palestinians use abhorrent terrorism as a means to a just end and, in the case of Hezbollah and Hamas, also towards ends that are manifestly unjust; those of religious fundamentalism. Terrorism is a weapon of the weak and desperate, which does not necessarily give it legitimacy.
Schocken, call them by their name – terrorists
Beatings, humiliation and torture: The IDF's night of terror at a Palestinian refugee camp
If Sinwar was a devil, what does it make Israel?
Israel uses its formidable military power to suppress their rights and their resistance. The fact that it does this by means of an army, not a terrorist organization, does not make its actions legitimate. Most of its actions in the past year were not legitimate.
Recent remarks by Haaretz's publisher, Amos Schocken, entered this picture – which in my view is clear and not at all complex – and set off a storm. His subsequent clarification, stating that Hamas does not belong to the category of freedom fighters, should have calmed the storm. But there are those who seek to heighten it.
There are those who seek to take revenge on Haaretz and want to see it shut down. The last established media outlet reporting the whole truth, especially over the past year, irritates many, and now they have an opportunity to retaliate.
But the criticism of Schocken's statement crossed ideological lines. Among the right, which would like to see a state with one TV channel and one newspaper under close supervision, there are also many in the opposing camp who were upset by the term "Palestinian freedom fighters." That's where the debate should be.
Ravit Hecht wrote that it is not only Benjamin Netanyahu's Israel that calls those who commit crimes against humanity terrorists. "We, the opponents of Kahanism and the government of Jewish supremacy, call them that. Because that is what they are."
But crimes against humanity are now being committed by both sides. In view of what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank, no one can deny this anymore. Is Israel a terrorist state? The measures that Israel takes do not abrogate its right to defend itself.
It has this right, but it has no right to utilize the means it is employing. Palestinians have a right to fight for their rights and their liberty, and they must not commit crimes against humanity. Hecht's definition of her camp as "the opponents of Kahanism and the government of Jewish supremacy" also blemishes the truth and beautifies Israel's center left. Israel has never had a government that is not a government of Jewish supremacy, because it has never had a government that is not Zionist.
Hecht and that camp which agrees with her err in their basic stance toward the occupation and Zionism. This is how Hecht describes the situation: "Yes, Israeli security forces have been harassing innocent Palestinians … includ[ing] minors ... as part of the tragic reality of controlling another people."
It is the security forces that are harassing, not the entire State of Israel; "often," instead of "always." This is the essence of the center left's cloying "how beautiful we are." It's the "security forces" who harass, as if they were a separate, independent entity rather than the heroes and the sacred cows of all Israelis, especially in the center left.
The truth is that we all, down to the very last leftist, are culpable, because it is not the security forces who are harassing but rather the State of Israel; and not "often" but always, by the very definition of occupation. Hecht and her ilk still believe in an enlightened occupation.
If only the security forces would harass a little less often, everything would be fine. But there is no occupation without harassment. Harassment is the essence of the occupation. An occupation of this kind provokes resistance. There has never been an occupation that did not provoke resistance. This resistance is called a struggle for freedom, and no struggle could be more just. It has no other name.
Saturday, November 2, 2024
Genocide. Diplomicide. Militarism... Revulsion growing worldwide.
Genocide. Diplomicide. Militarism... Revulsion growing worldwide.
https://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward/preview?u=6051805ea28d7ad24c553979e&id=c783f41fc5
Dear friends--
The news from Gaza, Iran, Lebanon, and other points across West Asia about the results of the continuing US-Israeli aggressions against the region is all deeply, deeply disturbing. Nevertheless, I hope this finds you well, and your spirits strong enough continue to work to build a better world.
I call the genocide and military campaigns being waged against West Asia's indigenous peoples "US-Israeli" because of the deep complicity of the Biden administration in every aspect of what the Israeli military has been doing. That has included:
the recent dispatch of U.S. service-members to Israel in the USAF fighter jets recently sent there, who join those staffing the THAAD high-altitude interception system sent there earlier;
the constant contribution that US (and UK) surveillance and other intel systems have made to the Israeli military's operations; and of course
the continuing "ironclad" political protection that Washington has given to Israel in all the authoritative decisionmaking bodies worldwide.
The results, as we know, have been catastrophic for the people of Gaza and extremely damaging for communities throughout the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iran, and Iraq.
I'm going to write a bit more about Iran, below. But the crisis and tensionsthat Israel has deliberately spread throughout the whole of West Asia still all has its origins-- and the crucial key to any de-escalation-- firmly rooted in Gaza.
Gaza's crisis intensifying
In Gaza, it is not "just" the food system that has been strangled by Israel's military, per the graphic that I showed above. All the other systems essential for the maintenance of human life have also come under systematic Israeli attack there. We have heard a lot about the destruction of Gaza's hospitals and basic medical facilities... And on the same UN-OCHA chart from last Tuesday (PDF here) from which I took the "truckloads" numbers, I found this report about the extreme shelter crisis in Gaza:
Read every item on that list carefully. And know that winter is already starting to hit Gaza Palestinians clustering in their crude tent/shelters on the beaches, many of them having access now-- after repeated "emergency" displacements-- to only a few, now very ragged items of summer clothing.
As I have argued repeatedly, the crisis that Israel (with strong US-NATO backing) has inflicted on Gaza's people is not just "humanitarian", such as might have arisen from a "natural" disaster. It is entirely man-made and intensely political. And it can only be ended by determined and effective political/diplomatic action to Achieve the Ceasefire and End the Israel Occupation that has plagued Gaza's people-- and their confrères in the West Bank-- for 57 years now.
(Indeed, I now consider that the work that my JWE board colleagues and I have put into our "Understanding Hamas And Why That Matters" project constitutes, at one level, a radical plea for effective diplomacy...)
Throughout the 55 weeks of the current Gaza-Israel crisis we have seen that the United States, which has almost single-handedly dominated global politics since 1991, has not only been diplomatically quite ineffective... It has also continued to shower the Israeli military and their attendant political system with arms, arms, more arms, money, intelligence assistance, and solid support at the U.N. And by doing that, it has ensured the failure of any diplomatic "performances" that Pres. Biden or his cabinet members might have put on for public consumption.
That's why I put my newly-minted term "diplomicide" into the subject line of this newsletter. This U.S. administration has been systematically killing the whole concept of diplomacy ever since October 8, 2023.
And it is not just the death of diplomacy. What the Palestinians and others in West Asia have been experiencing over the past year has often felt to many of them to be death by diplomacy.
Yesterday, my dear, brave, talented friend Laila El-Haddad posted onto Instagram the photo and commentary you see here.
These are very far from the first members of Laila's family who have been slaughtered during the current genocide. But this latest slaughter came while Sec. Anthony Blinken was in Israel, putting on the eleventh performance of his grotesque "watch me while I pretend to do U.S. diplomacy" show during the current crisis.
And still, some Gaza Palestinians continue to exude-- and to urge the further spreading of-- a world-transforming spirit of radical hope...
In the face of genocide: a document of shame - Pearls and Irritations - Guest Post by Jafar Ramini
In the face of genocide: a document of shame - Pearls and Irritations
https://johnmenadue.com/in-the-face-of-genocide-a-document-of-shame/
In the face of genocide: a document of shame
By Jafar Ramini
Nov 2, 2024
Lord Arthur Balfour accepts cheers from crowds in Tel Aviv, March 26, 1925. He traveled to Palestine to attend the opening of Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 1917, as British Foreign Minister, he issued the Balfour Proclamation which advocated the es (BSLOC_2017_1_184) Contributor: Everett Collection Historical / Alamy Stock Photo
Today, November 2nd is the 107th anniversary of one of the darkest days in the bloody history of the British Empire. For exactly 107 years ago today the then British Foreign Secretary, Lord Arthur Balfour, a Christian Zionist Lord wrote a personal letter to Lord Walter Rothschild, a Jewish Zionist Lord, in which he gifted him Palestine as a ‘homeland’ for the Jews.
The fact that Palestine at the time was not under British rule, that they had no deed to it or mandate and had no right to gift it to other people, did not bother his Lordship. Palestine, at the time, had been an Arab country for many centuries, populated by Arab Muslims and Christians (95%) with a small minority of Jews (5%) Yet, despite the caveat in Lord Balfour’s letter which reads, “it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the non-Jewish communities in Palestine”, all 95% of the population, Lord Balfour and his peers and Zionist Christian colleagues had no intention of honouring this caveat. The interests of the Empire must be served no matter what. As he said, in private of course, to Lord Curzon, who succeeded him:
“Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, and is of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”
What prejudices was his Lordship referring to, I wonder? Didn’t we, in Palestine, Moslems, Christians and Jews, live together in peace and harmony for centuries? Instead, Lord Balfour conveniently forgot his own prejudices and those of his peers and countrymen, when in 1905, as Prime Minister of Great Britain, he introduced ‘the aliens bill’. The main purpose of which was to prohibit the entry into the UK of immigrants, especially the impoverished Jews of Eastern Europe.
What better way to get rid of them than to send them to Palestine? A glaringly obvious case of NIMBY or Not In My Backyard.
Jewish Israeli historian and Oxford Professor, Avi Shlaim described the Balfour Declaration as “ both immoral and illegal”. Yet the British Raj in the person of the then Secretary of State for Colonies, Winston Churchill, continued to show utter disregard for the wishes and aspirations of the Palestinians. In 1937, Churchill’s remarks, after the Peel Report, were as racist and dismissive of the Palestinian Nation as could be.
“I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly-wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”
The intentions of the Jewish Zionists was made clear by the father of right-wing Zionism, Vladimir Jabotinsky who in his essay of 1923, ‘The Iron Wall – Us and The Arabs’ made it clear that force was the only way to create the Zionist dream in Palestine. He wrote:
“ Zionist colonisation must be carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonisation can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population – an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy.”
This Iron Wall policy, aided and abetted by first, the then colonial power, Great Britain, and adopted and continued by the now prevailing power, the United States of America, has been the modus operandi of concurrent Israeli governments. The so-called war of independence in 1948, the tripartite (Israel, France and Britain) attack on Egypt in1956, the six-day war of 1967 all were designed to acquire land by force and compel the Arabs to accept a ‘fait accompli’ from a position of weakness.
As a result we have the 1979 Camp David peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, the 1993 Oslo Accord between the Palestine Liberation Organisation and Israel to be closely followed by the 1994 Wadi Araba peace treaty between Jordan and Israel. All reached and signed from the point of strength on the Israeli side and the point of weakness on the Arab side.
During Donald Trump’s first Presidency, the fragmentation and division in the Arab world was brought to unprecedented levels by the so-called Abraham Accords, calling for normalisation between Arab countries and Israel. President Trump, in a side-ways jibe to those various Arab leaders, singled out the most powerful and richest of all, Saudi Arabia, when he said, “We protect Saudi Arabia. Would you say they’re rich? And I love the King, King Salman. But I said, ‘King, we’re protecting you. You might not be there for two weeks without us. You have to pay for your military.” Fearing the truth of this statement many Arab leaders, UAE, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco instantly fell into line, and signed those humiliating accords. What stopped Saudi Arabia, in my opinion, was when Hamas breached the Iron Wall on October 7th 2023, attacking Israel, and the savage and sadistic response of the Israeli army which still continues.
General Moshe Dayan, Israel’s most celebrated general and hero of the 6-day war, once said, “Israel must be like a mad dog. Too dangerous to bother.”
Now the mad dog has sunk its fangs into Lebanon. With the same savagery and brutality as it inflicted on Gaza.
Despite all of this, we the Palestinian people, having suffered immensely for the last century or so, are still standing fast, resisting our occupiers, resisting our rulers, resisting the betrayal of our so-called Arab and Muslim brethren and all the pressures that have been brought upon us by all, especially by the United States of America.
In the last year, in the face of a genocide unfolding in front of their very eyes, western opinion is changing. Everyday we witness hundreds of thousands of citizens of the world going against their governments’ wishes and policies and marching in the streets, calling for justice and freedom for Palestine. What Israel has been getting away with for 76 years, with impunity, might be coming to an end. This tide of change is most noticeable amongst the young and in particular, the Jewish younger generation in the US who are saying “not in my name’ and asking the question, “If not now, then when?”
“The tragedy in Palestine is not just a local one; it is a tragedy or the world, because it is an injustice that is a menace to the world’s peace.”
Arnold Toynbee, British historian.
Zionists’ inflammation of antisemitism - Pearls and Irritations - Guest Post by Ali Kazak
Zionists’ inflammation of antisemitism - Pearls and Irritations
Zionists’ inflammation of antisemitism
By Ali Kazak
Nov 2, 2024
The primary focus of the Zionist movement and the Israeli lobby is not combating anti-Semitism but rather combating critics of Israel’s colonial apartheid regime and the crimes it is perpetrating against the Palestinian people.
Zionists deliberately conflate Judaism with Zionism and assert every Jew is a Zionist, while Israel, on the other hand, calls itself a Jewish state. So when some people are deceived and view Israel’s war crimes against the Palestinians as Jewish crimes and hold Jews accountable, the Zionists vehemently denounce them and scream anti-Semitism.
By conflating Judaism with Zionism, committing their crimes and hiding behind the Jewish people, the Zionists intentionally blame Jews for the crimes Israel is committing in their name; in doing so, they instigate resentment, hatred and hostility toward Jews.
Through this conflation, they also seek to achieve a number of other goals: brand critics of Israel as anti-Semites to silence them, launch campaigns to outlaw opposition to Israel under the banner of anti-Semitism, detracting attention away from Israel’s war crimes to “the threat of anti-Semitism”, inserting fear in the hearts of Jews to pressure them to immigrate to Israel and tighten control over Jewish institutions.
However, people’s reaction is; if opposing Israeli colonialism, war crimes, apartheid and ethnic cleansing is anti-Semitism, then I am proud to be anti-Semitic. This is best expressed by the renowned Australian author, speechwriter, and film director the late Bob Ellis in his letter printed in The Australian newspaper on 29 October 2003: ‘Is it anti-Semitic to say it is wrong to bulldoze apartment blocks and leave the tenants with nowhere to live? Then I swear on the head of my grandmother Rachel Larkman that I am anti-Semitic too…’
Associating Jews with Israeli crimes, combined with the new Zionist definition of antisemitism, shows how little interest the Zionists have for Jews, not caring about the harm that causes them as long as it serves the Zionist colonial project in the heart of the Arab world.
In fact, the father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, didn’t perceive any conflict with anti-Semites. He even asked for their assistance and considered them allies for his colonial project in Palestine. In his diaries, he wrote, “The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.”[1]
Since Israel is a settler colonial project, Jewish immigration is fundamental to its existence; without anti-Semitism, there would be no motive for Jews to leave their homelands and immigrate to Israel; that is why the Zionist project needs anti-Semitism to force Jews to go to Israel to keep it alive.
Yoav Litvin, an Israeli-American doctor of psychology neuroscience, wrote, in an article titled “Ethical Jews reject Zionism”, that “Zionists have always had an interest in fomenting anti-Semitism worldwide, with the goal of driving Jewish immigration, preferably white, to Palestine/Israel as a means of battling the Palestinian ‘demographic threat’.”[2]
The New York Yiddish newspaper Kemper, quoted the editor of Davar, a newspaper of the Israeli Socialist Labour (Mapai) party, in 1952, writing, “I shall not be ashamed to confess that if I had the power, as I have the will, I would select a score of efficient young men-intelligent, decent, devoted to our ideal and burning with the desire to help redeem Jews … The task of these young men would be to disguise themselves as non-Jews and plague Jews with anti-Semitic slogans such as ‘Bloody Jew’, ‘Jew go to Palestine’, and similar intimacies. I can vouch that the results in terms of a considerable immigration to Israel from these countries would be ten thousand times larger than the results brought by thousands of emissaries who have been preaching for decades to deaf ears.”[3]
In an article by Amos Oz published in the Israeli daily Davar on 17 December 1982, he used the abbreviation Z. for a person he interviewed following Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, who it is believed to be General Ariel Sharon, telling him, “Let me tell you what is the most important thing, the sweetest fruit of the war in Lebanon: It is that now they [the gentiles] don’t just hate Israel. Thanks to us, they now also hate all those Feinschmecker Jews in Paris, London, New York, Frankfurt and Montreal, in all their holes. At last they hate all these nice Yids, who say they are different from us, that they are not Israeli thugs, that they are different Jews, clean and decent…. The Yid has been rejected, not only did he crucify Jesus, but he also crucified Arafat in Sabra and Shatila. They are being identified with us and that’s a good thing! Their cemeteries are being desecrated, their synagogues are set on fire, all their old nicknames are being revived, they are being expelled from the best clubs, people shoot into their ethnic restaurants murdering small children, forcing them to remove any sign showing them to be Jews, forcing them to move and change their profession.
“Soon their palaces will be smeared with the slogan: Yids, go to Palestine! And you know what? They will go to Palestine because they will have no other choice! All this is a bonus we received from the Lebanese war. Tell me, wasn’t it worth it?”[4]
Thus, while Israeli leaders see the agitation of anti-Semitism as “worth it” and view anti-Semites as allies, as Herzl stated, and the more terrible anti-Semitism there is, the more beneficial for Israel, an increasing number of Jews around the world started to recognize the reality of Zionism and the Israeli regime it created in Palestine.
The Zionists claim they wanted to create a state where Jews would feel safe, but in reality, they created an entity more dangerous for Jews to be in than any other country. It is much safer for Jews to be in New York, London, Sydney and Melbourne, than be in Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem.
Recent events have shown the fragility of this regime, unable to protect itself despite being heavily armed to the teeth with the latest and most advanced American weapons, when a few Hamas fighters with light armaments inflicted a significant blow on its military units and security forces on 7 October. Israel was also unable to defend itself from Iran’s retaliation. It had to seek assistance from the United States, European countries and even Arab regimes for protection. In addition, the US sent American troops and deployed the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense System (Thaad) to protect Israel, providing it with over $24 billion (36 billion Australian dollars) and an air bridge supply of weapons, without which Israel would not have been able to sustain its aggressive war.
That is why the overwhelming majority of Jews refuse to immigrate to Israel, and a lot of Israelis are leaving which represents a fatal failure for the entire Zionist project.
This explains the escalation of Israel, its lobby and the Zionist-controlled Jewish organisations’ campaigns to conflate Zionism with Judaism and accuse Israel’s critics as anti-Jews, claiming “the rise of anti-Semitism” and consolidating their outdated propaganda that Jews are threatened in their homelands and need Israel as “a safe place”. At a time when Israel not only can’t protect Jews, but is seeking outside protection!
Since the inception of political Zionism in 1897, prominent spiritual, secular and political Jewish leaders, including the highly respected Australian Jewish Governor-General Sir Isaac Isaacs, opposed Zionism, and the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, viewing Zionism as a deceitful savior and a potential danger to Jewish welfare, safety, and a resurgence of anti-Semitism. They ridiculed Herzl’s premise that Jews were a nation; some even believed Herzl was “mentally unbalanced.”[5] William E. Hocking, a professor of philosophy at Harvard University said, he believes “political Zionists are the chief enemies of the Jewish interest in the world of tomorrow.”[6]
Today, Germany is one of the staunchest supporters of Israel. Its support is not limited to political and financial; it’s the second supplier of arms after the US, including advanced nuclear submarines, and is complicit with Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians.
German police have arrested Jewish citizens for protesting Israel’s war of genocide – accusing them of anti-Semitism! Along with arresting writers, musicians, poets, and anyone who is anti-Zionist.
Israel and its lobby can, through their influence over the media and politicians, mislead some people for some time, but they will not be able to mislead everyone all the time. More and more people are waking up to the colonial apartheid nature of Israel, and the genocidal war against the Palestinian people, despite the Western media’s complicity in covering up Israel’s genocide.
Instead of following the golden rule of not doing to others what you don’t want to be done to you, the Zionists learned the ugliest racism and atrocities committed against them by the Nazis and Europeans and brought it with them to Palestine to practice against the Palestinians in a most brutal, hateful and sadistic manner.
They skillfully refined Nazi propaganda into a sophisticated Hasbara industry that would have made Goebbels, the architect of Nazi propaganda, envious.
Israel can commit massacres, kill thousands and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, demolish their homes and ethnically cleanse them, but it will not be able to eradicate, defeat or force a 14 million strong Palestinian nation determined to achieve its legitimate rights to surrender. Israel failed to do so in 1948, and it failed throughout 76 years of attempting to do so. Who does not see that is blind and deceiving themselves.
Even if all the Jews of the world immigrated to occupied Palestine, and all the Arab regimes recognised Israel and normalized their relations with it, the simple fact is that Israel cannot live in peace and security while it is denying the Palestinian people peace, security and their inalienable rights of return, self-determination and equality in their country.
If the Zionists were concerned about the interests of Jews and finding a safe place for them, they would have come to Palestine as friends to coexist with the Palestinian people, who were not against them coming to live in Palestine legally and peacefully as other people did, and not as colonists carrying with them hatred, racism and criminality.
The time has come for Jews to choose between living equally in security and peace with the Palestinian and Arab people in the Middle East or in the ghetto of a Zionist racist colonial state with continuing wars and bloodshed until this monstrous entity is ultimately defeated.
It is time for them to liberate themselves from Zionism and put their hands in the hands of the anti-Zionist Jews, the Palestinians and freedom loving people around the world against the common enemy, Zionism.
Sources:
[1] Theodor Herzl, The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, edited by Raphael Patai, Herzl Press and Thomas Yoseloff, New York Vol.1, 1960, p.84.
[2] Yoav Litvin, an Israeli-American doctor of psychology/neuroscience, a writer and photographer, “Ethical Jews reject Zionism”, Mondoweiss, 1.8.2018.
[3] Editor Sharon, writing in Davar Newspaper of the Israeli Socialist Labour (Mapai) party, 24.4.1952, p.2. quoted in “Kemper”, Yiddish paper (New York), 11.7.1952.
[4] Amos Oz reproduced this interview, in his book in Hebrew: Poh va-sham be-Erets-Yisra’el bi-setav, 1982, republished by Am Oved, Tel-Aviv, 1986. The interview is on pages 70-82. Amos Oz uses the abbreviation Z. for the person he interviewed, who believed to be Ariel Sharon.
[5] Moshe Menuhin, op.cit., p.39.
[6] William E. Hocking, letter published in New York Times, 23.3.1944.
https://johnmenadue.com/zionists-inflammation-of-antisemitism/
Friday, November 1, 2024
[Salon] It is time to stand up - ArabDigest.org Guest Post
“It is time to stand up”
Summary: British diplomat Martin Griffiths enunciates the costs and consequences of the world allowing Israel to defenestrate UNRWA from Palestine.
On Tuesday on BBC Radio 4’s The World at One Martin Griffiths who served as Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator at the United Nations from 2021 to 2024 described the Knesset vote to outlaw UNRWA as “deeply, deeply shocking and illegal if implemented.” The Israelis have given UNRWA just 90 days from the day that the bills were passed (28 October) to get out.
As we noted in our 25 October newsletter and as Griffiths affirmed should the Israelis be allowed to get away with a decision the Knesset voted 92-10 to implement the precedent it would set would further undermine the UN’s legitimacy and authority not just in the Middle East but throughout the world:
It sets a terrible precedent for other places who will say ‘well you didn’t object to Israel shutting sown your agency so we will do it here, thank you very much.’
For Griffiths of course the most immediate concern is the impact it will have on Palestinians who are already in a catastrophic situation stalked by hunger, disease and the ever constant fear and the devastating reality of Israeli air and ground strikes. Griffiths was asked if he saw the Knesset vote as UNICEF did, that it is “a new way to kill children.” He replied
I do. UNICEF is right to focus on children and God knows the tragedy for children is as we all have seen it day to day and it is getting worse and worse and worse. This is a new way to kill children. It is also a new way to take away hope from the people of Palestine. As we all know and I know from my own experience as a mediator you remove hope from people and they start to die because they have no horizon for themselves of for their families. So it is a new way to end the aspirations of the Palestinian people and it must be challenged. The implementation must be stopped.
Although it loudly proclaims the organisation is a terrorist front, the core reason for the Israeli effort to evict UNRWA is that it would end the refugee status for Palestinians, a key part of Israel’s vision to redraw the map of the Middle East and end once and for all the right of return while destroying any hopes for a Palestinian state. UNRWA holds the archival records for what is estimated to be one and a half million Palestinian refugees. “UNRWA,” Griffiths said “is the precise companion created to support the right of return and the future of the Palestinian people toward a two-state solution.”
However the immediate concern is that “UNRWA runs all the convoys in Gaza and will not now be able to. Its staff will now be at (further) risk.” Reflecting on how so little humanitarian aid is currently being allowed by the Israelis into North Gaza while “it is being scrubbed clear of civilian life and presence” he said that though there are other medium and long term issues that are equally important the most immediate one is the urgency of getting aid in now.
Israel has justified the vote by repeating the allegation that UNRWA staff were participants in the 7 October Hamas attack. Griffiths referred to the Independent Review Group led by Catherine Colonna, former French Foreign Minister which had noted that Israeli authorities had not responded to repeated requests for “the names and supporting evidence that would enable UNRWA to open an investigation.”
As he said: “they were very clear in their report that the evidence provided by Israel was not authenticated, not as it were court ready. No evidence was provided that could lead to a conviction.”
Former Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator at the United Nations Martin Griffiths described the Knesset vote to outlaw UNRWA as “deeply, deeply shocking and illegal if implemented.”
Griffiths expressed some optimism that the UNSC was urgently discussing the Knesset vote. On Tuesday a consensus was reached among the 15 members urging Israel "to abide by its international obligations, respect the privileges and immunities of UNRWA and live up to its responsibility to allow and facilitate full, rapid, safe and unhindered humanitarian assistance in all its forms into and throughout the entire Gaza Strip." But as Griffiths said words are not enough:
We have seen a lot of expressions of quote unquote concern coming from different parts of the world and concern is not enough because we have seen in many ways over the last year and a month that Israel does not bend to concern. Israel freely states its objectives and pursues them. It is no surprise about what they are doing. UNRWA institutions have been bombed. Their staff have been killed. Concern does not bring them back. Action is therefore what is needed.
He said that the UK should have halted weapons exports to Israel “a long time ago” and that even in the midst of the US election the Americans should too. “I would say ‘knock it off. why are you waiting so long?’
“It is time,” Griffiths said “to stand up.”
You can hear the full interview here beginning at 14’20. Immediately before Martin Griffiths is an interview with Amjad al-Shawa from the Palestine NGO Network. Considering what Griffiths had said about the removal of hope being in itself a lethal weapon it is worth quoting how al-Shawa concluded his interview:
One of my missions is to get hope mainly to the children. I am visiting the sites and you see these children who are supposed to be in school. These are traumatised children and you know they are giving me hope. I have nothing to deliver sometimes but this is the only thing: to tell the people yes we have hope, we do not lose hope.
His interview begins at 9’36. The full segment starts at 7’15 and includes a clip from Sharren Haskel the MK who was a sponsor of the two bills.
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