Khamenei Adopts a Wait and See Attitude to Obama March 22, 2009
Posted by rogerhollander in Israel, Gaza & Middle East, Media.Tags: corporate media, foreign policy, Iran, iran boycott, iran media, iran negotiations, iran nuclear, juan cole, Khamenei, Middle East, mojahedin, neoconservatives, president obama, roger hollander, sunni terrorism, us israel
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Informed Comment
Thoughts on the Middle East, History, and Religion
Juan Cole is President of the Global Americana Institute
www.juancole.com, March 22, 2009
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Saturday, “Of course, we have no prior experience of the new president of the American republic and of the government, and therefore we shall make our judgment based on his actions.”
The US corporate media mysteriously interpreted Khamenei’s words as a rebuff to Obama, but in light of the phrase I just quoted, I can’t understand how they reached that conclusion. Certainly, he did say repeatedly that Iran has had a pretty horrible experience with the United States, and that it would take more than some nice words to change Iranian minds about Washington. You could say that this was a grumpy old man response to Obama’s call for engagement. But you can’t call it a rebuff, since Khamenei explicitly says that he has no basis for making a judgment about the Obama administration as yet, and will respond to its actual concrete policies.
Interestingly, the French news agency, Agence France Presse, got the story right, entitling their article, “Iran ready to change if US leads way: Khamenei.”
And, the Iranian PressTV had an even more enthusiastic headline: “Iran vows response to real US change.”
He said that the Iranian public would be offended if anyone addressed it with a discourse of carrots or sticks. That was when he immediately excused Obama from any such charge, saying the latter had a clean slate.
Elsewhere in the address he pledged, in AFP’s translation, “If you change your attitude, we will change our attitude.”
Iran’s leader pointed out that the name of the US in the world at large is mud because of offensive US policies (he is probably thinking of wars of aggression, torture, etc.). He counsels that the US should change its behavior so that gradually its would gain the esteem of the world.
Khamenei did specify the practical steps the US might take to show it was in earnest.
1. He implied that the US was behind Sunni terrorism against the regime in Iranian Baluchistan near the the Pakistani border (Baluch are Sunnis and tribal and dislike the Persian, Shiite government in Tehran. Some observers have accused the US of fomenting terrorism among such minorities, and Khamenei appears to accept the theory).
2. He implicitly complained about continued US support for and use of the Iranian terrorist group, the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), whose base in Iraq (given them by Saddam to harass Iran) the US continues to maintain and guard despite the Iraqi government’s desire to close it down and expel the Mojahedin. The US State Department has declared the MEK a terrorist organization, but the Pentagon is said to still deploy its members for covert ops inside Iran. In these two points, which are allusive in the speech, he is essentially accusing the US of being a major sponsor of terrorism.
3. He complained that the US continued to accuse Iran of sponsoring terrorism.
4. He complained that the US continues to accuse Iran of trying to build a nuclear bomb. (Khamenei and all Iranian government officials strongly deny that charge, saying they only have a civilian research program for energy purposes; US intelligence assessments back Khamenei up on all this, but the Washington politicians still routinely speak of taking strong measures stopping Iran from getting the bomb. Khamenei views such talk as a threat of aggression and sees the nuclear issue as a mere pretext for US neo-imperialism. The US dominated Iran during and after WW II and made a pro-monarchy coup in 1953, saddling the country with a megalomaniac shah who was subservient to US interests, until the 1979 Islamic Revolution).
5. He complained of continued US economic sanctions and boycotts.
6. He complained of US support for Israel.
This speech laid out the initial Iranian bargaining position. It has everything but the kitchen sink, and maybe it even has the kitchen sink. It is like in a US department store when the salesman tells you the refrigerator is $1200 but in fact you can bargain him down to $1050.
Khamenei also warned Obama to listen directly to Khamenei’s own words: “Contemplate carefully my words. You must under no circumstances give them to Zionists to translate. Rather, consult with righteous persons.” Well, the crack about Zionists is unfair, but Khamenei is obviously correct that his speech will be distorted by the Neoconservatives who desperately want the US to go to war against Iran.
I hope Obama will in fact get a good translation and analysis of the speech, which is far more welcoming of a potential change in Washington, and shows far more willingness to negotiate, than the corporate media in the US are reporting.
Daniel Brumberg points to Iranian desires for a concrete set of achievable proposals and impatience with a vague “process” of open-ended talks. It should be remembered that the would be a domestic cost for hardliners to pay if they opened to the US, and the cost would be perhaps unbearable if they brought nothing back from the negotiations in the end.
Freeman Affair Puts Israel Lobby in Spotlight March 13, 2009
Posted by rogerhollander in Israel, Gaza & Middle East.Tags: aipac, america israel public affairs, anti-freeman, broder, charles freeman, congress, daniel luban, Dennis Blair, foreign policy, intelligence council, israel, israel government, israel labor party, israel lobby, jim lobe, kadima, lieberman, likud, mark kirk, mearsheimer, Middle East, neo-conservatives, neoconservatives, nic, Obama, obama administration, pat lang, roger hollander, schumer, settlement movement, stephen walt
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Published on Friday, March 13, 2009 by Inter Press Service
WASHINGTON – Although the successful campaign to keep Amb. Charles “Chas” Freeman out of a top intelligence post marked a surface victory for the pro-Israel hardliners who opposed him, the long-term political implications of the Freeman affair appear far more ambiguous.
Freeman’s withdrawal has provoked growing – if belated – media scrutiny of the operations of the so-called “Israel Lobby”, and aroused protests from a number of prominent mainstream political commentators who allege that he was the target of a dishonest and underhanded smear campaign that, among other things, accused him of shilling for the governments of Saudi Arabia and China.
For the neo-conservatives who led the charge against Freeman’s appointment, his withdrawal may therefore prove to be both a tactical victory and a strategic defeat.
At the same time, the Freeman affair has highlighted the yawning disconnect between the career professionals in the intelligence and diplomatic communities, from whom Freeman enjoyed strong support, and political leaders in Congress and the White House, none of whom came to his defense publicly.
Freeman, a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia who has been a vocal critic of Israeli policies in the occupied territories, withdrew from consideration as chairman of the National Intelligence Council (NIC) on Tuesday. He did not go quietly into the night, however, releasing a statement in which he struck back at his critics.
“I do not believe the National Intelligence Council could function effectively while its chair was under constant attack by unscrupulous people with a passionate attachment to the views of a political faction in a foreign country,” Freeman wrote.
“There is a special irony in having been accused of improper regard for the opinions of foreign governments and societies by a group so clearly intent on enforcing adherence to the policies of a foreign government – in this case, the government of Israel.”
The motives for the anti-Freeman campaign are themselves a matter of debate. Virtually all of his chief attackers were neo-conservatives, whose views generally reflect those of the Israel’s right-wing Likud Party, and other reflexive defenders of Israeli government policies. Many observers viewed it as self-evident that their hostility to him was based on his often bluntly-spoken belief that U.S. and Israel’s interests in the Middle East were not necessarily convergent.
In the media, the campaign against Freeman was waged mainly by neo-conservative organs, such as the Weekly Standard and the National Review, and by The New Republic, a generally liberal weekly that, however, routinely attacks Israel’s critics.
In Congress, it was led by politicians such as Sen. Chuck Schumer, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, and Rep. Mark Kirk, all of whom have strong ties to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a powerful lobby group whose members range from far-right supporters of the militant settlement movement in Israel to more moderate factions sympathetic to the relatively centrist Kadima and Labor Parties.
Freeman’s critics sought to portray their attacks on him as rooted not in his criticisms of Israel but in his allegedly compromising ties to Saudi Arabia and China, including his leadership of a think tank that was partially funded by a member of the Saudi royal family and his service on an advisory board of China’s largest oil company.
In the mainstream media, however, few seemed to buy into these claims. The most widely read U.S. newspapers, which had all but ignored the controversy as it raged in the “blogosphere”, attributed his withdrawal to the unacceptability of his views on Israel policy – in the process going further than ever before in putting the Israel lobby in the national spotlight.
The New York Times headlined its story “Israel Stance Was Undoing of Nominee for Intelligence Post”, while the Washington Post confirmed that AIPAC, which had insisted it had no position on Freeman’s appointment, had indeed quietly provided critical material about him to inquiring reporters.
A Los Angeles Times editorial explicitly referenced “the Israel lobby” as the force behind Freeman’s withdrawal, adding, “We do not believe that Israel should be immune from criticism or that there is room for only one point of view in our government.”
And while the Post’s editorial page, like the neo-conservative Wall Street Journal, had hosted anti-Freeman op-eds early in the campaign against him, its veteran political columnist, David Broder – long viewed as the embodiment of Washington centrism – praised the former ambassador as “an able public servant” and wrote that “[t]he Obama administration has just suffered an embarrassing defeat at the hands of the lobbyists the president vowed to keep in their place.”
Broder was not the only prominent centrist to react harshly to the anti-Freeman campaign. Others included the Broder’s fellow Post columnist, David Ignatius, The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan (who called the campaign “repulsive”), Time’s Joe Klein (“assassination”), and Foreign Policy’s David Rothkopf (“lynching-by-blog”). Freeman has also been invited as the guest of Fareed Zakaria, a regular columnist for Newsweek and the Post, on his regular Sunday CNN program on foreign policy, “GPS.”
In the end, the attempts by Freeman’s critics to make the story about anything but Israel may have backfired. Instead, discussion of the role of the Israel lobby in forming U.S. foreign policy appears to have acquired more mainstream legitimacy than ever before.
The long-taboo subject became a matter of public debate in 2006, when two prominent political scientists, the University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer and Harvard University’s Stephen Walt, published their article “The Israel Lobby”, later expanded into a book. The two argued that a powerful lobby, centered on but not limited to AIPAC, exerts a “stranglehold” on U.S. foreign policy debates and stifles any criticism of Israeli policies, to the detriment of both the U.S. and Israel.
Mearsheimer and Walt’s thesis was instantly controversial. Critics accused them of perpetuating age-old anti-Semitic tropes about the covert Jewish domination of politics. Mainstream critics of Israel have been reluctant to align themselves with the two, even when they have reached some of the same conclusions.
In the wake of the Freeman affair, however, Mearsheimer and Walt appear to be getting a new hearing. The Los Angeles Times went so far as to suggest that the attacks on them may have been overstated.
“[T]he battle over Freeman…seems to have exposed more sympathy for a Walt/Mearsheimer view of U.S.-Israel relations than one might have expected to be out there,” wrote Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard, one of Freeman’s harshest critics. “People like Joe Klein and Andrew Sullivan are now fairly indistinguishable from Stephen Walt.”
Goldfarb intended the comment as an insult, but it may nonetheless have contained a kernel of truth.
While the Freeman affair may have shifted the parameters of debate on Israel policy, it has also exposed fissures and resentments between the national security bureaucracy and the U.S. political leadership.
Some veteran observers, such as the “Nelson Report”, an influential private newsletter, compared Freeman’s treatment to the McCarthy era when long-time government Asia experts were deemed responsible for “losing China” to the Communists and hounded out of the foreign service by the so-called “China Lobby”.
Col. Pat Lang, the former top Middle East analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency who signed a letter of support for Freeman, told IPS that the saga had caused a “tentative feeling of disappointment” about the new administration within the intelligence community.
“It’s very disheartening for people who viewed Freeman’s appointment as the return to some standard of intellectual excellence or integrity”, he said, adding that Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Adm. Dennis Blair, who went to the Senate and strongly defended his appointee, may be the next target for Freeman’s antagonists as they push for alarmist intelligence on Iran.
“I’m concerned about what these characters are going to do about Blair, because Blair really stood up to them, and their general reaction to that is to wage a war of annihilation against people who do that,” Lang said.
Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/.
Where Did the Abortion Reduction Agenda Come From? February 19, 2009
Posted by rogerhollander in Health, Women.Tags: abortion, abortion criminalization, abortion reduction, adopton, anti-abortion, clurt, contraception, democratic party, evangelicals, family planning, frederick clarkson, neoconservatives, pro choice, religious right, reproductive health, right to life, robert casey sr., roe v. wade, roger hollander, sex education, unplanned pregnancies, women's rights
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Frederick Clarkson on February 16, 2009
You could say this is a story about the old adage: the more things change, the more they stay the same.
The rise of the concept of “abortion reduction” as a worthy policy goal, currently being promoted by some in the Democratic Party, has generally tracked the rise of the Party’s fortunes of the over the past few years and the accompanying decline in the likelihood that the Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade. The Democrats’ ascent, and Roe‘s resilience, has been a tough reality for antiabortion leaders to face, but they are not out of strategic and tactical options. Politics is the art of the possible.
Abortion reduction, currently being sold as the “common ground” between the pro-choice and anti-abortion camps, has its roots in anti-abortion strategy developed over several months in 1996 by a coalition of 45 anti-abortion and religious right leaders. The America We Seek: A Statement of Pro-Life Principle and Concern was also signed by several Democratic-leaning activists, most significantly, former Governor Robert Casey Sr. of Pennsylvania (father of the current Senator Robert Casey Jr.). The manifesto was published the May 1996 issue of the flagship journal of Catholic neoconservatism, First Things (edited by the late John Richard Neuhaus); in The National Review; and on the web site of Priests for Life, headed by the militant Fr. Frank Pavone. The source of the opportunity to reduce abortions, they found, resided in the holdings of 1992 Supreme Court decision in Casey v. Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania, named for the former governor.
Among the forty-five were also some of the leading proponents of abortion reduction ideas now ascendant in Democratic Party circles: Jim Wallis of Sojourners; Professor David Gushee, then of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Ron Sider of Evangelicals for Social Action.
“Now, as pro-life leaders and scholars,” they declared, “we want to propose a program of action…” And the core of that program was abortion reduction by erecting barriers to access to abortion “in all 50 states” and creating incentives for women to carry unplanned pregnancies to term.
While the signers agreed that the regulations upheld in the Casey decision do “do not afford any direct legal protection to the unborn child,” they emphasized that “experience has shown that such regulations–genuine informed consent, waiting periods, parental notification--reduce abortions in a locality, especially when coupled with positive efforts to promote alternatives to abortion and service to women in crisis.” [Emphasis added]
Abortion Reduction and Criminalization
This was, however, cast in the context of wider goal of criminalization. Having declared abortion to be among other things, child killing, an act of “lethal violence,” and a usurpation of the rule of law, the signatories added: “Any criminal sanctions considered in such legislation [then being considered by Congress] should fall upon abortionists, not upon women in crisis.” They further urged Congress to “recognize the unborn child as a human person entitled to the protection of the Constitution.”
They believed that “a broad-based legal and political strategy is essential,” and therefore, found “no contradiction between a rigorous adherence to our ultimate goal and the pursuit of reforms that advance us toward that goal.”
“Legal reforms that fall short of our goal,” they concluded, “but which help move us toward it, save lives and aid in the process of moral and cultural renewal.”
Other prominent signatories, led by host George Weigel of the Ethics and Public Policy Center (the official biographer of Pope John Paul II) included Catholic legal scholar Robert P. George of Princeton; Harvard Law professor Mary Ann Glendon, (whom George W. Bush would appoint as Ambassador to the Vatican), James Dobson of Focus on the Family, Ralph Reed of the then-powerful Christian Coalition, law professor Michael W. McConnell of the University of Chicago; Beverly LaHaye of Concerned Women for America; William Kristol then of the Project for the Republican Future, now a contributor to Fox News, and Jean Bethke Elshtain, a political philosopher at the University of Chicago, and currently a co-chair of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
While this top drawer coalition of antiabortion leaders of the day did not mention sexuality education and contraception as legitimate means of preventing unwanted pregnancies (and thus “abortion reduction”), at least three of them went on to play prominent roles in the development of the “common ground” agenda on abortion reduction recently announced by the Democratic Party-aligned DC think tanks, Faith in Public Life and Third Way, in their document Come Let Us Reason Together: A Governing Agenda to End the Culture Wars (CLURT). This document highlighted sexuality education (with an emphasis on abstinence), access to contraception, and economic supports for adoption, as areas of “common ground” on abortion.
CLURT did not mention erecting further barriers of the sort legitimized in the Casey decision. Nor did it address the need to provide for better access to abortion care, which unavailable in 87% of the counties in the United States, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
Among the seven principal authors of CLURT, Ron Sider of Evangelicals for Social Action also signed the 1996 antiabortion manifesto; while David Gushee, now of Mercer University states in his curriculum vitae that he “participated in the drafting” of the document. Jim Wallis of Sojourners signed both.
“Public policy has its limits,” Gushee declared at the January 15th press conference announcing CLURT. “We call for abortion reduction. I support this because I believe that one of the things that must not be done to human beings is to abort them; and yet those facing crisis pregnancies need help to create the conditions in which they can sustain and protect the lives for which they are now responsible.”
Abortion Reduction Reductionism
What is remarkable is how one of the signature antiabortion tactics of the 1990s has now migrated into the Democratic Party under the guise of offering “common ground.” Abortion reduction was once a matter of preventing people from exercising their right to receive and to provide abortion care. Now a few politically savvy Protestant evangelicals and an apparently growing number of Democrats pols are willing to redefine historic ideas of the role of sexuality education and family planning in terms of abortion reduction.
Used in this way, along with economic supports for pregnancy and adoption, pro-choice politicians including President Obama use the term and its close variants to show pro-lifers that they can better reduce the number of abortions than anti-choice Republicans.
It is clever politics. But there is more to it. There are profound differences just underneath the surface of a seemingly minor tug of war over semantics. These differences are blurred by the invocation of common ground language. The difference was cast in sharp relief last year during negotiations over the wording of the Democratic Party Platform position on abortion. Prolife evangelicals led by Jim Wallis (and CLURT co-author Joel Hunter) disagreed with pro-choice leaders over language that sought to reduce the need for abortion as distinct from the number of abortions. In the end, the platform unambiguously supported Roe and recognized the need for abortion. In exchange, the platform also called for greater support for women who seek to carry their pregnancies to term and for the adoption option. But the platform avoided the term “abortion reduction.”
But have Gushee, Wallis and Sider changed their views? In 1996 they believed that there is never a “need” for abortion; rejected the idea that it is ever a moral choice; and unequivocally stated that criminalization was a goal of antiabortion legislation — even while they also pursued abortion reduction tactics under the rubric of Casey. Today, they face different political circumstances and the Democrats have made some accommodations in the platform that will likely be implemented in legislation.
The CLURT statement joins a few pro-choice think tankers with a few prominent moderate evangelicals in agreeing on broad principles related to sexuality education and family planning. But that’s it. Why then, is it important?
It is important because of the prominence of these groups in seeking to define what a faith-based, common ground “governing agenda” might look like. But it is significant also because of what it does and what it does not do.
First, in its summary language, CLURT seeks to have it both ways, papering over vital differences with the slight of hand of language.
“Reducing abortions (reducing abortion through reducing unintended pregnancies, supporting pregnant women, and increasing support for adoption)” [Bolding in the original]
Second, the pro-choice agenda has always been about expanding access to abortion such that everyone who needs one can get one; and emphasizing that there should be comprehensive sex ed and access to contraception so that women and girls can control their own reproductive future and will not have to make the choice between termination and carrying a pregnancy to term. But unlike the Democratic Platform, there is nothing in the CLURT statement that acknowledges the right to or need for abortion — let alone that universal access is a dream that is far from realized.
Third, there is nothing in the CLURT document that suggests that Gushee, Wallis and Sider and their ant-iabortion allies will not pursue Casey-based policies that erect obstacles to abortion in the name of reduction, in those states where it is politically possible to do so.
That these leaders were able to agree in principle on sexuality education and family planning is no small thing. But it is not the same thing as finding common ground on abortion nor does it reflect a commitment to reducing barriers to abortion or in any way increasing access.
The concept of “abortion reduction” as a public policy has come a long way since 1996, and at the same time, no distance at all.
US-Israel Rift Undermining Some Long-Standing Taboos March 15, 2010
Posted by rogerhollander in Foreign Policy, Israel, Gaza & Middle East.Tags: aipac, David Petraeus, glenn greenwald, israel, israel lobby, Middle East, mike mullen, neoconservatives, netanyahuy, obama administration, roger hollander
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The rather extraordinary dust-up between the U.S. and Israel has, among other benefits, shined a light on two of the most taboo yet self-evidently true propositions: (1) our joined-at-the-hip relationship with Israel is a significant cause of anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world, fuels attacks on Americans, and entails a very high price for the U.S. on multiple levels; and (2) many American neoconservatives have their political beliefs shaped by allegiance to Israel.
As for the first: not only did Joe Biden tell Prime Minister Netanyahu that Israel’s actions are endangering U.S. troops in the region, but — more important — as Foreign Policy‘s Mark Perry reports, both Adm. Mike Mullen and Gen. David Petraeus within the last couple of months stressed the same causal connection to Obama officials: “Israel’s intransigence could cost American lives.” It’s rather difficult to maintain the fiction that only fringe Israel-haters see the connection between our support for Israel and Muslim hatred toward the U.S. when two of America’s most respected military officials are making that case explicitly. Moreover, the Mullen/Petraeus alarm is almost certainly what accounts for the Obama administration’s sudden (and commendable) willingness to so publicly oppose Israel. As Perry says: “There are important and powerful lobbies in America: the NRA, the American Medical Association, the lawyers — and the Israeli lobby. But no lobby is as important, or as powerful, as the U.S. military.”
As for the second point: I’ve previously noted the glaring contradiction among neoconservatives, whereby they simultaneously (a) tell American Jewish voters to vote Republican because the GOP is better for Israel and (b) insist that it’s anti-Semitic to point out that neoconservatives are guided by their allegiance to Israel when forming their political beliefs about U.S. policy. Obviously, anyone who does (a) is, by logical necessity, endorsing the very premise in (b) which they want (when it suits them) to label anti-Semitic. Neoconservatives constantly make political appeals to Jewish voters expressly grounded in the premise that American Jews are guided by allegiance to Israel (vote Republican because it’s better for Israel), yet then scream “anti-Semite” at anyone who points this out. When faced with this glaring contradiction, their typical response — as illustratively voiced by Commentary‘s Jennifer Rubin, after she argued in a 2008 Jerusalem Post column that American Jews should vote against Obama because he’d be bad for Israel — is to deny that “that the interests of the U.S. and Israel are antithetical” and insist that “support for Israel in no way requires sacrificing one’s concerns for America’s interests.” In other words: to advocate for Israel is to advocate for the U.S. because they’re interests are indistinguishable.
Yet here we have a major split between the U.S. and Israel, with key American military and political leaders explaining that the opposite is true: that Israeli actions are directly harming U.S. interests and jeopardizing American lives. And what is the reflexive, unambiguous response of virtually every American Israel-centric neocon? To side with Israel over the U.S. AIPAC, the ADL, Elliott Abrams, AIPAC-loyal Democrats in the House, Marty Peretz, Commentary, etc. etc. all quickly castigated the U.S. Government and defended Israel, notwithstanding the dangers to Americans posed by Israeli conduct and the massive price paid by the U.S. in so many ways for this relationship (by contrast, J Street called the administration’s anger towards Israel both “understandable and appropriate”). There’s nothing wrong with taking Israel’s side per se — one is and should be free to criticize one’s own government in its foreign policy — but incidents like this make it increasingly futile to try to suppress what is glaringly visible: that (as is true for numerous groups in the U.S.) a significant segment of the neoconservative Right (which includes some evangelical Christians and some American Jews) are guided in their political advocacy by their emotional, religious, and cultural attachment to another country, and want U.S. policy shaped in order to advance that devotion.
On a related note: there has been a long-standing effort to equate those who make this observation with anti-Israeli hatred or even anti-Semitism. Two widely-cited reports did exactly that with regard to me recently: this pseudo-scholarly report from the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and this post on the blog of the American Jewish Committee, both of which hurl all sorts of ugly though trite accusations at me for daring to suggest that some American Jews are guided in their political advocacy by allegiance to Israel. I’ll just note that the author of both “reports” is someone named Adam Levick, who — with extreme, unintended irony — lists this as his biography on his Twitter account:
If you’re going to try to render unspeakable the observation that some American neocons are devoted to Israel, it’s probably best to have the crusade led by someone with a different biography. As I’ve said many times, there’s nothing wrong per se with harboring cultural affections for other countries — many individuals in the culturally diverse U.S. do — but stridently denying what is so obviously true, and smearing those who point it out, does more than anything else to make something innocuous seem nefarious.
Finally, the reason Israel engages in this conduct is because it believes (with good reason) that U.S. officials will never (and cannot) take any real action against it, and the Obama administration — as reflected by the excellent questions posed yesterday to David Axelrod by ABC News‘ Jake Tapper — at this point still seems far from ready to do so. Still, there’s no denying that the very public condemnation of Israel by the Obama administration is unprecedented at least over the last two decades, will produce benefits on its own (including sentiments like this and this being increasingly expressed even among those Obama supporters who don’t typically speak out about this issue), and will subject Obama officials to serious political pressure and attacks, from which they ought to be defended. It’s true that none of this will ultimately matter unless the administration is willing to back this up with meaningful action — i.e., serious threats to change policy — but this last week was an important and substantial first step toward that vital goal.
Many of the issues I write most about here — from civil liberties erosions and radical, lawless National Security State policies to the wars that justify them — have their roots in our involvement in the Middle East, and our self-destructive, blind support for Israel actions is a major (though not the only or even primary) factor in all of that. It’s impossible to care about the former without wanting to do something substantial about the latter.
© 2010 Salon.com
Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book “How Would a Patriot Act?,” a critique of the Bush administration’s use of executive power, released in May 2006. His second book, “A Tragic Legacy“, examines the Bush legacy.