Well-Made World 38

In another piece for the LRB, Henry Siegman sets things straight in terms of Israel/Palestine, discussing the truce (rather than ease restrictions in Gaza during the truce, he explains, Israel tightened its hold on the city, while Hamas was acknowledged to be quite effective in preventing rocketfire, including from groups like Islamic Jihad); Hamas on the terrorist list (Siegman reminds us that when it became a political party, Hamas publicly ended its suicide bombings and kassam fire, until the blockade); and the conception that Israel is acting as part of a widespread "war on terror" (as he writes, "It is too easy to describe Hamas simply as a ‘terror organisation’. It is a religious nationalist movement that resorts to terrorism, as the Zionist movement did during its struggle for statehood, in the mistaken belief that it is the only way to end an oppressive occupation and bring about a Palestinian state. While Hamas’s ideology formally calls for that state to be established on the ruins of the state of Israel, this doesn’t determine Hamas’s actual policies today any more than the same declaration in the PLO charter determined Fatah’s actions").

In other news, the NYT reports today that layoffs are expanding to sectors of the economy such as manufacturing, retailing and information technology. To this end, we have a piece from NE favorite Paul Craig Roberts on the next real estate crisis, which, he argues, will hit commercial real estate. His answer to the question of the hour--who will finance the next wave of debt in the US, once Obama brings the deficit to the $3 trillion mark?--is Americans, via inflation.

Obama in Jerusalem

On the occasion of Senator Barack Obama's recent world travels (which brought him to Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel and the Occupied West Bank, and Germany, and will soon see him in Britain and France), we point you to an editorial written for the Guardian by the Electronic Intifada's Ali Abunimah. Pressure from the Israel lobby (in the form, as always, of Alan Fucking Dershowitz) has caused Obama to distance himself even from someone as "establishment" as Zbigniew Brzezinski--do we detect the long arm of a rejuvenated (and sadly ignored) Jimmy Carter and his calls for a "new role" in the world for America? On his visit to Israel--which included the better part of one hour spent with Mahmoud Abbas in occupied Ramallah--Obama sought to reassure Ehud Olmert, Shimon Peres and the Israeli public that his commitment to the safety, security, and right to "self-defense" (that old reality-twisting litany) of the State of Israel ought not to be doubted. The obligatory references to the dangers of a nuclear Iran (despite a recent "slap in the face" of Israel delivered by America) were also made. Nothing, as Abunimah points out, about a freeze on settlements, dialogue with Hamas, or negotiation of the refugee problem.

In a separate editorial, the Guardian points out that while Obama's visit may have done some good for his shaky reputation as "friend of Israel," it did nothing nothing for peace in Israel/Palestine. And, as the New York Times reports, not many people in the Arab World expect this to change.

Late add: Nicholas Kristof offers this uncharacteristically lucid, accurate, and politically practical editorial in today's New York Times, saying that what Israel needs from Obama is "tough love."

Mahmoud Ahmedinejad at Columbia

Much has already been made of Ahmedinejad's visit to Columbia, which passed yesterday. After cancelling his invitation by Lisa Anderson last year, it's been obvious that Lee Fucking Bollinger couldn't have kept his well-worn, if inconsistent--we're reminded of the row over Jim Gilchrist and his proto-fascist "Minutemen" last year--First Amendment cred by bailing on Ahmedinejad two years in a row. Sure enough, L.F.B. was quick to pat himself on the back for going out on such a limb in upholding Ahmedinejad's right to speak--though he also, of course, found time to mouth the Bush administration's line about Ahmedinejad being the leader of a "state sponsor of terror," how Iran's helping fight a "proxy war" against the US in Iraq, blah blah blah. For his performance, Bollinger even managed to win the approval of AIPAC.

We'd like to direct your attention to the Washington Post's Global Power Barometer, which summed up national and global reaction to Bollinger's "introduction" and Ahmedinejad's speech this way:

• Conservative and heartland America papers by and large praised the very tough introduction of Columbia University President Lee Bollinger and strongly criticized the performance of the Iranian President.
• Analysts with an understanding of the global stage were fairly uniform in their view that while President Bollinger played well to those who criticized his decision to invite President Ahmadinejad in the first place, his introduction played perfectly into the hands of the Iranina President and Iranian hard liners. The take of these analysts was that while a Tim Russert (NBC Meet the Press host) style inquisition could have taken the Iranian President apart, Dr. Bollinger's approach turned him into a sympathetic figure and violated just about every Middle East tradition, thereby enhancing President Ahmadinejad's stature in Iran and the region. Consensus: Thanks to Bollinger, Ahmadinejad won on the global stage.
• GPB take: While the GPB understands the pressure President Bollinger was under, his response was symptomatic of the ignorance even educated Americans have about playing to the myriad of cultures spanning the Middle East and the world. To date that extraordinary cultural ignorance has cost the US thousands of US lives, trillions of taxpayer dollars and the presitge of the US throughout the world. It is the primary reason the US is at the bottom of the GPB scale in terms of its ability to move the global agenda. Hopefully, at some time in the future, American politicians (and university presidents) will learn that being truly tough and winning on the global stage requires the discipline to realize you need to move those who are your adversaries not those who compose your base. The Iranians learned that a very long time ago, which is why they came out ahead today with the audiences that will determine US success or failure in the Middle East.

Let's be clear--we have very little sympathy for Ahmedinejad's abrasive, one-liner style, which only seems to increase in intensity the more he comes under fire in his own country; and Holocaust denial holds for us about the same water as those who claim, as Benny Morris bizarrely now does (but for many years did not), that Palestinians in 1948 left their homes and land entirely of their own will, or at the urging of neighboring Arab states, rather than under the threat of forced expulsion or death from Haganah forces.

It's enough to say that Iran's president is a provocateur without equal on the world stage, and that his wide popularity in the Arab and so-called "developing" world is a result of his unflinching willingness to decry question America's untrammeled power. That said, we are of the mind, with Juan Cole, that Ahmedinejad is a "bantam cock of a populist", whose real (and only) authority lies in the regional strength that Iran has been flaunting ever since the American misadventure in Iraq went awry, irrespective of what date one wishes to put on the beginning of the present nightmare. Iran is a real political force to be reckoned with in today's Middle-Far East, as much as Hezbollah and Hamas, independent of lazy and unfounded US claims of patronage between the former and the latter two. In fact, the US is directly responsible for this unprecedented shift in the balance of power. Yet Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas, are continually deemed unfit as partners in dialogue, let alone as important political actors.

All this being said, a balance sheet deserves being drawn, at least to flesh out our own feelings on Ahmedinejad. Let's ignore the crowds of (partly bussed-in) protesters crowding College Walk and the paths to Butler Library and Lerner Hall; pictures in the New York Times of some of them holding up the painfully predictable "Iran funds Hamas"placards--the same we've seen at "Salute to Israel" parades on Fifth Avenue--is enough to pass their presence off as demagoguery and plain political infantilism.

The rub is, when Ahmedinejad says rightly that "We need to still question whether the Palestinian people should be paying for" the Holocaust--referring to Israel's repeated, often implicit assertions that the crimes of Nazi Germany ought to justify its 40-year old illegal occupation and brutally violent denial of the right of Palestinian self-determination--he still fucks this up by saying that the undeniable fact of the Holocaust ought to be called into question. Looking to make a plainly historical point, Ahmedinejad lapses into asinine ideology.

He finds himself on solid ground once again that Iran cannot formally recognize the state of Israel "because [the Israeli state] is based on ethnic discrimination, occupation and usurpation and it consistently threatens its neighbors." Again, this helps account for his oft-wavering popularity at home and abroad. Ahmedinejad's on the money as well when he points out the brazen hypocrisy of Europe and America's desire to control or curtail Iran's nuclear programs.

Just as there is no excusing treating the Holocaust as "theory" rather than historical fact, there is no excusing his ludicrous assertion that "[Iran doesn't] have homosexuals like in your country"--though this doesn't at all give free license to gay and lesbian rights activists to join in the war-mongering chorus in Morningside Heights. (An aside: please see Joseph Massad's Desiring Arabs, referred to elsewhere on this site, for more on how the "Gay International" ends up universalizing repressive norms of what behavior is and is not "gay" in the name of its own normative ontology.)

Well-Made World 21 (a Transatlantic strike)

Late (or early?) edition UPDATE:

The sky gets darker the longer the Giuliani campaign increases its viability. Why this endlessly greedy, self-aggrandizing, par-for-the-course asshole would want to abandon his uber-cushy private sector job for the paltry paycheck of President is a bit unclear--though it's been obvious for some time that he's ready, finally, to leave old buddy Bernie Kerik (who has been, more recently, and in order: failed candidate for Homeland Security; head American cop in Iraq [for 4 months]; and potential tax-fraud indictee) by the wayside. It seems people, and their convictions/affiliations, really can change. Giuliani, who, as mayor, was a fierce gun control advocate--one rare point of agreement between us and him--is now doing his all to woo the N.R.A., even going so far as to say that 9/11 has put "a whole different emphasis on what America has to do to protect itself.” (Though it's arguable that one of Rudy's spokesmen went even further in his clarification of this remark; see the end of the article.)

Ahmed Yousef, political advisor to (unconstitutionally) sacked Palestinian PM Ismail Haniyeh, has written an editorial for Ha'aretz in which he puts forth a position which should be plainly obvious, yet given American coverage of the subject, is woefully anything but: that the political stalemate, at the "official" level in Israel/Palestine, as well as final status issues pertaining to the Israeli occupation, can only be solved with an inclusion of Hamas in multilateral dialogue. Yousef points out that the purportedly-total animosity between Hamas and Fatah, deployed to great effect in the Western press by Mahmoud Abbas and fellow coup-makers, is nowhere near as all-encompassing as it would seem. He concludes rightly that, far from being spokesmen for the radical Islamist avant-garde in the Arab world, Hamas is working to curtail extremist trends by offering a widely popular--among occupied Palestinians, if not the Arab world more broadly--and secular platform for peace between Israel and occupied/displaced Palestinians. Something tells us that the sound logic of Yousef's proposition will find scant audience in the circles of Bush, Olmert, and Abbas; in particular with Bush, as it flies in the face of the deeply deluded neocon logic he's done so much to propogate.

Speaking of which delusion...
In his latest piece for commentisfree, William Dalrymple argues (quite even-handedly, NE might add) for a strain of American/British foreign policy less resistant to political Islam, pointing out the neo-conservative response has done nothing but guarantee the rise of what they hysterically call "Islamofascism." Like many commentators before him, Dalrymple contrasts neo-con foreign policy (considered by frightening numbers of people in the countries NE call home a legitimate reaction to the threat of "Islamofascism" and the rise of "jihadism") with what anyone NE can respect would consider a self-fulfilling prophecy. As neo-cons consider the growing numbers of Muslim representatives in democratic governments proof of a problem in need of a solution, NE is reminded of pre-emptive warfare, a neo-con trope that is, apparently, no longer necessary.

Well-Made World 19

For the NLR, Alex Cockburn has expanded a piece from Le Monde Diplomatique--which we linked to several weeks back--on the state of the American anti-war movement. Cockburn writes on the recent history of anti-war and left groups in America, both popular and marginal, and details the ineptitude of the splintered coalitions opposing the Iraq war, finding much fault with the mainstream anti-war movement's "occasionally petulant subservience" to the Democratic party since 2003.

Also, tacked onto a piece for Counterpunch on Nuri al-Maliki is a reaction to Cockburn's criticism of the anti-war movement from the Institute for Policy Studies' Phyllis Bennis. Bennis takes issue in particular with the notion, proposed by Cockburn in his original piece, that it would behoove the left in the US to humanize Iraq's multifaceted resistance. Bennis complains that because the Iraqi resistance lacks a cohesive and demonstrable central authority (unlike the FMLN, or the African National Congress), it lacks accountability to the population of Iraq (who bear the brunt of the America's aggression, as well as of the resistance) and so does not deserve the support of anti-war sympathizers in America. It's puzzling, if not plain stupid, that Bennis could possibly expect an El Salvadorean-style resistance authority after six years of the Bush administration doing everything in its power to exploit deep-seated ethnic tension in Iraq. Bennis also makes the point that, because some actions taken by the resistance are morally reprehensible, no further attempt at humanizing the resistance are necessary, or even warranted. Cockburn then responds. Read on.

George Bush has recently likened the situation in Iraq, and the consequences of a troop withdrawal, to the fate suffered by millions of Vietnamese following the end of the war there. The New York Times claims that "Mr. Bush is challenging the historical memory that the pullout from Vietnam had few negative repercussions for the United States and its allies." Bush mentions the Khmer Rouge and the "killing fields" of Pol Pot, but neglects the fact--pesky historical memory! motherfucker!--that, had Richard Nixon heeded the antiwar movement, the war would've ended in 1969, and the "secret" war in Cambodia, which paved the way for Pol Pot by completely destroying the country, would've never taken place.

Munir Chalabi has written a crucial piece of analysis of the Iraqi oil law, which remains stillborn.

Here's a trio dealing with fallout from the recent Hamas putsch/Fatah coup, and it seems that Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad combined may yet outflank post-Oslo Arafat's desperate ineffectivity and enslavement to US-Israeli diktats. Amira Hass, an NE hero and an Israeli woman who has lived in and reported from Gaza for over a decade, gives us the latest from Israel's wet-dream of a "Palestinian state." Amira is characteristically even-handed in reporting the Palestinian political civil war, faulting

Israel, the occupier that shirks its obligation as an occupying power; the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, which is abandoning its citizens while continuing to try to ostracize the majority movement and make it fail; Hamas, which boasted about "liberating" Gaza and uses Qassam fire and declarations of "resistance" to escape its political and economic failures; the donor states, which use (generous) donations to cover up political powerlessness; and the United States, which is leading the boycott campaign [against Hamas] and supports Israel.

Exiled ex-Israeli MK Azmi Bishara, writing for al-Ahram Weekly, draws historical, political, and moral parallels between apartheid South Africa and the occupied Palestinian territories. This is a concern, of course, pursued in recent decades by Maxime Rodinson, Edward Said, Norman Finkelstein, Nelson Mandela, Ramzy Baroud, Jennifer Loewenstein, and others. Bishara remains under threat of arrest, were he to return to Israel, due to accusations that he provided tactical support to Hezbollah during last summer's Lebanon war, charges with both Bishara and Hezbollah have stringently denied.
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article8962.shtml

Alistair Crooke on the future of Palestine

The current situation in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank has been treated with (characteristic) obfuscation, over-simplification, and all-round poor analysis in the Western media. No Empires would like desperately to direct your attention to an article by former UN envoy Alastair Crooke in the most recent edition of the London Review of Books. In a timely and sober analysis, Crooke not only hits precisely on the ways in which the governments of Europe, Israel, and the United States have, since January 2006, created the conditions for recent developments; he also, accurately, characterizes Hamas and Hezbollah as "moderate Islamist groups," with specific and local political aims, and broad grass-roots popularity--a welcome respite from the blanket treatment of these movements in the Western press as "terrorist organizations" or "militant Islamist groups," or any similarly inappropriate ideological description. No Empires implores you to read Crooke's piece.