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Donna Shalala, former U.S. cabinet secretary and distinguished university president. As far as Israel is concerned: A-Rab.
This is the type of Alice in Wonderland universe in which Israel currently exists. Donna Shalala, former Health and Human Services secretary under Bill Clinton and currently president of the University of Miami, participated in an American Jewish Congress anti-BDS dog and pony show in Israel recently. On leaving Israel, she was stopped at Ben Gurion Airport by security goons who had not received word that she was supposed to have VIP status and not be harrassed as usually happens to other travelers with Arab names like hers.
This incident is rich in irony of course. But the real kicker and the one that shows the psychological power of denial at work in Israeli officialdom is this:
An IAA [Israel Airport Authority] spokesperson reported in response: “This incident is unknown to us. We performed a thorough check. There was no contact made with us or any other body. No unusual events were registered at Ben Gurion Airport, and we have no idea about this incident, which, from our perspective, never happened.”
Of course there were no “unusual events” registered because it is entirely usual for the security goons to routinely harrass travelers such as Shalala. You’d think that even if they didn’t have her on a VIP list that just hearing her recount her job title and the tour she had just participated in in Israel would be enough to make the numbskull who questioned her realize his or her mistake. And why would Israel care about someone LEAVING Israel? I can understand possibly exercising caution about someone entering the country. But leaving?? This seems utterly gratuitous harrassment. Sorry to say it seems to be SOP as far as Israel’s security apparatus is concerned.
I don’t suppose anyone in the Israeli government might want to apologize to her, given that she was there to support their BDS hasbara efforts, misguided as these might be?? Guys, this was your friend, someone who was singing from the hasbara handbook and this is the way you treat her? Imagine how they treat people they know are the bad ‘uns.
Tags: bds, ben-gurion-airport
The irony is that Shalala was representing a group opposing BDS against Israel.
They stopped and detained her because of her Arab name.
I’m sure Obama will send a letter to Israel apologizing for inconveniencing them.
I wonder what Shalala has to say about this.
“In a statement released today, Shalala took it in stride. “While I was inconvenienced, Israel’s security and the security of travelers is far more important. I have been going in and out of Israel for many years and expect to visit again,” she told the Chronicle.”
Sounds like some major harassment going on there. I’ll bring your attention to one sentence from the article: “The incident was raised Wednesday during a discussion convened by Deputy Foreign Ministry Ayalon to discuss treatment of VIPs at Ben Gurion Airport.” In other words someone leaked this story, blowing it out of proportion, in order to apply pressure so that his opinion on the policy change is accepted.
And you don’t think that someone in the gov’t might’ve already apologized privately to her & profusely, thus allowing it to simmer down for her. Trust me, if you were Donna Shalala you would not brook some 23 yr old security goon asking the types of obnoxious questions & making the types of nasty insinuations you KNOW they make.
Danny Ayalon has not interested in doing anything nice for Donna Shalala, period. Her politics are about as far fr. his as they can be. I don’t believe AYalon had anything to do with this & it certainly would be a direct violation of his political principles to say there is too much security at Ben Gurion & that Arab passengers should be treated better there. Try again.
I didn’t say Ayalon leaked this. It is more likely someone opposed to Ayalon.
There is absolutely no evidence that she was abused or humiliated. She was inconvenienced and she still made her flight. That’s why at Ben Gurion airport they recommend arriving three hours early. the ynet article does say she claimed to have been asked invasive and humiliating questions but they do not quote a source. Did ynet interview her themselves or are they relying on a unnamed source who may have other motives for leaking this story.
BTW, if you try to enter Israel there are two options. The more likely one is they won’t let you in, rightly so. The other option is that they let you but keep you under secret surveillance to try to find out who Israeli leaks are.
In any case, bless the Israeli security apparatus working day and night at a thankless job which so far has kept me and my family and all other Israelis, Jewish or not, relatively safe in light of the threats waged against us.
You mean aside from the fact that the Ynet reporter specifically & explicitly says that Shalala felt humilitated by the experience and that the questions were humiliating. Besides, if Israel were a large powerful country and the U.S. a small one much like Israel and the president of the Hebrew University visited our country how would you feel if the FBI stopped him for questioning and asked him about the origin of his Jewish name & other insulting questions. Wouldn’t bother you in the least I presume.
I want to be clear that you just advocated that Israel refuse me entry. Did you really say this? Because if you did you’re gone from this site. So be honest. I’ll give you a chance to reply honestly. But if you wrote what I think you did then you have no right to share this site w. me or anyone else here.
I’m going to ban you. But you may communicate with me via e mail if you have anything extenuating to add that might make me change my mind.
But it hasn’t. Neither the Israeli security apparatus or IDF has kept you safe fr. terrorism.
“BTW, if you try to enter Israel there are two options. The more likely one is they won’t let you in, rightly so. The other option is that they let you but keep you under secret surveillance to try to find out who Israeli leaks are.”
Wow, what a paranoid country.
Richard, being the new kid on the block, is it site policy that there will be no reply button on some of the massages ?
you stated “But it hasn’t. Neither the Israeli security apparatus or IDF has kept you safe fr. terrorism.”
with all due respect, are you privy to classified information ? are you aware of how many attacks at ben-gurion were intercepted due to the mode of operation of the security guards ? i think the answer for both questions is no. hence your claim has no ties to reality.
as for the Ynet reporter interpretation about the way someone else feels…give me a brake, he’s trying to attract visitors to his website, read what Shalala herself stated while interviewed with the chronicles.
Sometimes.
Oh please. Israel’s security services is very vocal about specific terror attacks they prevent. If they’d stopped a terror attack you’d know about it. Someone would be arrested & tried. Unless you’re claiming that the Shin Bet would disappear them w/o those legal niceties.
Well has it occurred to you that terrorism around the world has lately been perpetrated by people with Arab names, and that Israel has an obligation to ensure the security of all passangers even when they are leaving Israel? So extra checking on someone by the name of Shalala is unfortunate but understandable.
I find you downright racist, stupid and offensive & I can’t stand reading another comment by you. So you’re banned.
You know it makes, sense, Richard: the Arabs would probably never stoop to using British and Irish names, and passports, when travelling to murder someone in his bed.
And if a traveller has a non-Arab name, such as Greg Avery, Mel Broughton, Rodney Coronado or Gerard Tuit, then it’s quite obvious that they’re not terrorists.
The ALF does have a cell operating in Israel now, and Eliel’s attitude certainly explains how this came to pass despite Israel’s supposedly awesome security apparatus.
What is ALF?
Animal Liberation Front?
Or this? http://www.addic7ed.com/images/showimages/alf.jpg
Animal Liberation Front :)
I didn’t know “Netanyahu” was an Arab name.
She was there as a Hasbarachik, promoting this fascism, so she got EXACTLY the Fascism she was promoting.
She got what she deserves.
A bit of histrionics don’t you think??
Richard, my reaction to what happened to Donna Shalala was in part pretty similar to `Ali’s. It seems to me that what happened to her is pretty good comeuppance for her pandering, and I also do admit to taking a certain smug satisfaction that Israel has once again stepped in a pile of its own poo and then spread it all over the lily white carpet it lays down for itself.
If you say so!!!
Donna Shalala’s all-out support of Israel is not surprising given that she is a Maronite, and Maronites have been collaborators since Israel decided to try to control Lebanon’s politics to its advantage. It was Maronites who, at Israel’s behest and with Israel’s assistance, committed the infamous Sabra and Shatilla massacre. It was Maronites who collaborated with Israel, including serving as its proxies in all kinds of ways including acting as its torturers, during Israel’s 18 year occupation of Lebanon. Donna Shalala is one of those Maronites who adamantly insist they are not Arabs, but Phoenicians even though the Phoenicians disappeared many centuries ago.
Hey, if she’s a Phoenician then maybe she should start a special maritime program at the Univ. of Miami. That way, she can teach all those football players of hers a new sport, sailing.
BTW, the last president of the Univ. of Miami was Rita Hauser, another ardent pro Israel type with political connections.
Isn’t Miami one of the favourite places for New York Jews to go to retire? I guess it would be hard to choose anyone as president of the Univ of Miami who was not very very New Yorkly Jew!
Shirin, could you please define a “very very New Yorkly Jew!”? I’m no zoologist so I do find your taxonomy, or whatever, confusing.
That was a really, really lame attempt on my part to be cute. Looking at it now it falls completely flat even with me, and I kinda wish I hadn’t hit submit so quickly. My only excuse is that it was past midnight on a Friday night after a very, very trying week.
What has the issue that some Jews and OTHER religions may choose to retire in Miami have anything to do with the University’s president?
Considering that only a slight majority of the students are white, and of that most are not Jewish, your trying to make an issue of what?
You want to explain your rather off-color comment?
I’m honestly not sure what to make of this. Israeli security is obsessive and intrusive. But as a Jew who has often traveled to Arab countries (Egypt, Kuwait, UAE, etc) I expect to be checked and rechecked, and rightly so. I passed thru Abu Dhabi just last week on my way to India (where I am now). I spent 3 weeks in Saudi Arabia in 1996 doing technical consulting for Aramco, at the specific invitation of the Saudi government. I had an Israeli entrance stamp in my passport, which I had refused to exchange for a “clean” passport (the Saudi UN mission had a pipeline to our state dept to make the exchange in a day if I had wanted), so they issued me a diplomatic letter, send me thru diplomatic VIP lines, and obsessively never asked to view my passport…. but every colleague in-country was warned that I was Jewish and told to keep an eye on me. And I think that was the correct thing for them to do (by the end of my stay, of course, their curiosity got the better of them, so they peppered me with questions).
Maybe the real issue is that Israel’s security forces are increasingly incompetent or ill-led or under pressure or finding that they have less work to do so they need to make work?
Your final sentence makes a lot of sense to me.
She deserved to be sodomized by Captain George. Nothing more grotesque than an Arab friend of Fascist Israel.
Sorry for the image Richard.
While I do not absolve Maronites (or Israelis, or Palestinians or Americans or Syrians) of war crimes, the Maronite way of thinking is arguable but and thus understandable, thus not grotesque. Also, I think any individual has the right of his or her own opinion as long as it is based on facts.
The Muslims abrogated the delicate power-sharing agreement that had long been in place in Lebanon. Yes, the Maronites were/are the wealthy class. Yes the Muslims were the underclass, and had/have greater population, so the death of that phase of Lebanon’s history was inevitable. But it was an ugly death — and the Maronites certainly don’t blame themselves for the ugliness (although they more-or-less invited Israel in as their protectors as it got ugly, not that Israel needed that excuse).
Muslims, the underclass, can certainly argue they had no choice of course, and they also have a good argument. But again, it is not grotesque to disagree, I think, and most Maronites seem to disagree.
What is clear is that Israel has cited Lebanon’s sorry history as justification for the forcing the original “soft” partition on Palestinians: Partition better than power-sharing. Again, I don’t happen to agree (two different sets of populations and two different European overlords/mandate holders). But it is easy to see why the argument is enticing.
Who created Lebanon, what was the motivation for configuring its geography as they did, and who was calculated to benefit from it? The answer to parts one and three of the question is “not the Lebanese”. And who designed the political system that died such an ugly death? Again, not the Lebanese.
Shirin,
I think that is a bit arch. The French were the mandate holders and the local elites on all sides created the power-sharing. For the period, that was pretty “democratic.” Also, the resulting government was a stable (for the region) and successful democracy with high per capita income. It was certainly a better model than the typical regional princely oligarchy or Ba’athist military dictatorship.
Yes, the Christians got most of the benefits (as they did in Palestinian society, BTW, even before Israel’s creation). Yes, the US Marines landed twice (in the 50s and 80s), but both Arabs and Christians signed on to the deal for a long time, at the voting booth.
I certainly get the feeling the Lebanese would muddle through better without Syrian, Israeli and Iranian support for the various factions.
(BTW, I’m scheduled to attend a technical conference there late this year and will try to line up some reporting time with many of my former students who live there, but it is not likely I’ll get out of Beirut.)
You seem a little too even-handed for most of the commenters here, Steve.
They seem to prefer the one-dimensional approach
Gibson,
Just to be clear I try to base my posts on facts as I know them, not polemics. That’s not always welcome here, and thus I post infrequently. But since the mid-90s Israel’s government has clearly been the biggest barrier to peace in the region — even given Arafat’s performance at the end of the Clinton Administration. And I don’t want to lose sight of that key point, even when sideshows like this pop up (as they do frequently).
Civilians on both sides have paid dearly — and 10 times as many civilian deaths have been Palestinian than Israeli. Add to that the Lebanese and so forth. It is a moral outrage. G_d, called by any name, has to be more than a little annoyed at supposed adults who play with bullets and bombs and jockey for the high ground in the court of world public opinion — and in G_d’s name, no less.
Wow, Andrew, that’s disgusting. I thought this was a civilized blog where thinking people could make comments. Wishing someone to be sodomized is just plain sick.
I don’t like her, either, but I don’t wish sexual violence on people just because their ideology clashes with mine.
Sexual violence has been used by Israel’s Security Services against Arab men and women since the inception of the state. Read about Rasmyieh Odeh…. Shalala and you should know this!!!… When your ideology supports an evil occupation and surreal violence I have evey right to at least wish hell upon your butt!
Now me wishing the same on a supporter of Israel might be disgusting but so is Israel.
Sorry?! I would hope so, and would hope this posting would be deleted by our host.
If Shirin prefers me to delete the comment I will. But I think her explanation of what happened is quite sufficient.
Shirin didn’t refer to sodomy; Andrew did.
Hopefully Donna Shalala has a more than an average IQ to learn for this humiliating experience, and to understand what it means to be an Arab under the Israeli apartheid regime. Dr. Shalala it is so grotesque, as someone said on this forum, to be an Arab supporter of fascist Israel!
I don’t find words like “fascist” to be very useful or illuminating. They’re more grandstanding, point scoring words.
Considering how Israel treats its OWN loyal army-serving citizens who only happen to be Bedouin, this is not the least bit surprising.
[...] An American university president and Clinton-era cabinet member with an Arab name visits Israel to support the latest anti-BDS hootenanny… and gets harassed at Ben Gurion Airport. The best part? This wacko utterance from airport security: An IAA [Israel Airport Authority] spokesperson reported in response: “This incident is unknown to us. We performed a thorough check. There was no contact made with us or any other body. No unusual events were registered at Ben Gurion Airport, and we have no idea about this incident, which, from our perspective, never happened.” [Tikun Olam] [...]