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.

Inauguration Day News

Watching TV in a hotel room in Chicago this weekend, No Empires learned from a scroll on CNN that "History Will Happen in 48 Hours." Ok. But now that it's happened (and yes, Michelle Obama donned a yellow Isabel Toledo number, while Aretha wore a sort of fantastic hat), we can point you to Kevin Alexander Gray's piece on Obama, black American national heros, and the US, the country that Martin Luther King Jr once called the "greatest purveyor of violence in the world." Reminding us of King's rising unpopularity towards the end of his life due in part to his outspoken opposition to the war in Vietnam, Gray suggests that we remember King for something more than "I have a dream", particularly in light of the Gaza massacres. Certainly something to keep in mind while dancing to Beyonce and U2/reading Maureen Dowd.

And speaking of Gaza: Israel's High Court of Justice lifted the ban on Arab parties in the Knesset today; Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the UN, as well as about 300 other human rights groups, are claiming that Israel used white phosphorous in its attacks on Gaza and are calling for war crimes investigations.

Despite all of the "victory" talk by supporters of the Gaza massacres, Joseph Massad questions Israel's "right to defend itself", just as Khalid Mish'al and Bashir Abu-Manneh explain that the massacres will not weaken Hamas.

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."

2008

As the Senate passes George Bush's domestic eavesdropping program, 2+ years after it was introduced, and with the new-found support of Senator Barack Obama--who had once claimed he fully intended to vote against it, rejecting the false dualities of the "strong on terror" discourse--we'd like to take a minute to reiterate something we've found that the ultra-left in America has failed repeatedly to understand. We do understand ("appreciate" is not the best word) that, in running a national campaign, Obama ought to be expected to hover somewhere around the center. Any policy statement that radically breaks from the mainstream would torpedo his candidacy months before the general election. And Obama does represent a yearning among the bulk of American voters for radical change. That he will inevitably disappoint those blindly expecting a radical transformation is also something that must be accepted. However, in supporting an unprecedented expansion in the Executive's spying capabilities, as in, for example, calling for East Jerusalem to remain the undivided capital of the State of Israel (to take examples from Obama's recent domestic and foreign policy stances), Obama seems to go above and beyond the call of a mediocre "centrist" politics. And his going out of his way yesterday to remind his supporters--who are increasingly uneasy with his recent moves--that he is "no doubt" a "progressive"--is simply no consolation whatsoever.

'The presumptive Democratic candidate for President, Barack Obama'

More than the disingenuousness of his previous foreign policy statements, Barack Obama's speech at this year's AIPAC conference the day after securing the Democratic nomination for President highlights the inevitable rightward shift that his campaign, at least in tone, will continue to make as November approaches. Below, in two parts, Aijaz Ahmad unpacks Obama's statements to the Israel lobby.

No one ought to be surprised by Obama's unequivocal stance; as even Jon Stewart points out, "you can't say anything remotely critical of Israel and still be elected president." Of particular interest for us is the reaction of the Palestinian leadership to Obama's speech, notably that of Fatah negotiator Saeb Erekat. Erekat has the audacity to say that Obama's speech was "the worst thing to happen to Palestinians" since the Six Day War, thus completely obscuring his own Fatah party's comprador role in the years since Oslo, not to the deepening political and humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
Moreoever, as Aijaz notes, Gaza is likely to be conveniently forgotten when the borders of the putative "cohesive and contiguous" Palestinian state are drawn.

In the second video below, Aijaz further analyzes Obama's language at the AIPAC conference, which includes the suggestion that Iran, not Iraq, would have been the 'right war,' and a call for greater unilateral action, 'outside of the United Nations,' on the part of the United States. As Aijaz tells us, 'with liberalism like this, no one needs the neo-cons.' Videos are below.

AS the transformation of Barack Obama nears its completion, Uri Avnery finds that last week's AIPAC spectacle confirms in full even the most "extreme" conclusions drawn by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in their seminal The Israel Lobby, published late last year--a book that Obama had already denounced for its critique of the increasingly "special" relationship between the State of Israel and the US.
Part I


Part II

Well-Made World 25

We're generally of two minds about Frank Rich, but his NYT opinion piece this past Sunday, whose title borrows from Joe Biden's pitch-perfect one-liner on Rudy Giuliani, is a worthwhile read. Rich muses on the idea that, for all of its swaggering and bluster, if the Bush administration does not wage an attack inside Iran, it could spell curtains for any Democratic hope of winning the White House next year.

Speaking of Giuliani, here's what he had to say recently about an old pal (guess who!):
"Sure, there were issues, but if I have the same degree of success and failure as president of the United States, this country will be in great shape."
Meanwhile, that old pal's legal troubles just won't go away...

The Guardian's US correspondent, the wonderful Gary Younge, spoke recently with Angela Davis, who comments eloquently on, among other things: the current state of race relations in the United States; the incorporation of her iconic image into American popular culture (akin to the t-shirtization of Che Guevara); the regressive nature of the political appointments given to Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice; and the candidacy of Barack Obama, who, she says, represents "a model of diversity as the difference that makes no difference, the change that brings about no change."

Terry Eagleton v. Martin Amis/Barack Obama is a fabricator and you must not vote for him.

Martin Amis has been given a position at the University of Manchester, teaching Philip Roth and Vladimir Nabokov, whose influence Amis has boringly worn on his sleeve for two decades. Manchester also happens to be Terry Eagleton's employer. To add to this, Eagleton has taken the opportunity, in a new Preface to his classic Ideology: An Introduction (reprinted by Verso this year) to take Martin Amis to task for his unabashedly reactionary turn following September 11, as well as to point out that Amis the Younger seems to be inheriting the most xenophobic and idiotic traits that his father, Kingsley, ever exhibited.

We are of the mind that both Amises have written, between them, at least two good novels (chronologically, Lucky Jim and London Fields). Yet Amis the Younger's war-mongering turn in recent years is thoroughly inexcusable, not to mention patently racist. In a quote that could have been come straight from the mouth of Christopher Hitchens (who has also, as we're sure you're aware, gone off the deep end in the past decade), novelist Martin Amis offered this answer to a question about whether his creative writing courses would have a particular theme: "If all this does turn out to have a theme, it'll be, "Don't go with the crowd, don't do anything for the crowd, don't be of the crowd or with the crowd." Yet Amis is fooling no one. An apt slogan for the corruption of critical thinking, this quotation could be the motto of a particularly unpalatable contrarian attitude by which the likes of Amis and Hitchens justify their newfound reactionary sensibilities in the wake of 9-11. If Terry Eagleton and Martin Amis do end up in a hallway scuffle at the University of Manchester, we at No Empires know which of the two we'll be rooting for.

Echoing the first-ever No Empires post, No Empires still hates Barack Obama. We'll leave you with an excerpt from an article by Paul Street on America's most accessible black man; yet also its most dangerous, as he seems willing to ignore the entire miserable history of white supremacism and the black experience in America:

In Selma, Alabama last March, Obama claimed that the Civil Rights Movement's heroic struggles in Selma (site of a famous 1965 voting rights march) and Birmingham (home to an epic 1963 desegregation battle) sent out ripples of socially progressive change that permitted his black father (Barack Obama, Sr.) and white mother to "get together" and conceive "Barack Obama Jr." Behold the following incredible passage from Obama's speech at the fabled black church Brown Chapel in Selma:

"Something happened back here in Selma, Alabama. Something happened in Birmingham that sent out what Bobby Kennedy called, "Ripples of hope all around the world." Something happened when a bunch of women decided they were going to walk instead of ride the bus after a long day of doing somebody else's laundry, looking after somebody else's children. When men who had PhD's decided that's enough and we're going to stand up for our dignity."

"That sent a shout across oceans so that my grandfather began to imagine something different for his son. His son, who grew up herding goats in a small village in Africa could suddenly set his sights a little higher and believe that maybe a black man in this world had a chance."

"What happened in Selma, Alabama and Birmingham also stirred the conscience of the nation. It worried folks in the White House who said, "You know, we're battling Communism. How are we going to win hearts and minds all across the world? If right here in our own country, John, we're not observing the ideals set forth in our Constitution, we might be accused of being hypocrites." So the Kennedy's decided we're going to do an air lift. We're going to go to Africa and start bringing young Africans over to this country and give them scholarships to study so they can learn what a wonderful country America is."

"This young man named Barack Obama [Sr.] got one of those tickets and came over to this country. He met this woman whose great great-great-great-grandfather had owned slaves; but she had a good idea there was some craziness going on because they looked at each other and they decided that we know that the world as it has been it might not be possible for us to get together and have a child. There was something stirring across the country because of what happened in Selma, Alabama, because some folks are willing to march across a bridge. So they got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born. So don't tell me I don't have a claim on Selma, Alabama. Don't tell me I'm not coming home to Selma, Alabama. I'm here because somebody marched. I'm here because you all sacrificed for me."

Too bad Obama was born four years before the Selma struggle in the relatively multicultural island state of Hawaii, where there was nothing all that shocking about a white woman marrying a graduate student from Kenya!

I cannot explain the line about "men who had Ph.D's.