Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

In the Barack Obama-Jeremiah Wright affair, a tragedy of sorts is playing itself out before our eyes. We have the first African-American presidential candidate in American history who has a serious chance of capturing the nomination of his party and the presidency itself.

Because of this, there is an underlying nervousness among Americans about what it might mean. This nervousness may be in the process of turning into a backlash much like the one that confronted Martin Luther King is his civil rights struggle in the 1960s and ended with his assassination. There are white people who don’t want a Black man to lead them. They won’t say that, of course. To admit this would generate accusations of racism. And perhaps some of those who have been smearing Obama genuinely see themselves as performing a service to the country by pointing out the candidate’s alleged weaknesses.

There is no doubt that Hillary Clinton is a formidable candidate who brings much to the table and might make a credible president. But there is also no doubt that she and her supporters have helped turn the campaign into Sherman’s March to the Sea, a scorched earth, take-no-prisoner battle to the death. Is Hillary responsible for the unseemly media spectacle that has played itself out over the past four days in which Jeremiah Wright has unburdened himself of so many astonishing (at least to whites) prejudicial notions? Is she responsible for Obama’s chastened speech today in which he renounced his former minister? No, she and her surrogates are not responsible for this proximate event. But they are responsible for much that led up to it. For there would be no controversy–or at least it would be a different level of intensity–if she hadn’t tried to turn it into Obama’s defining “character moment.”

In the Jewish community, the mud has been slung fast and furiously for months now. The latest comes from a major leader in the Los Angeles Jewish community who is a Clinton “bundler” (in the words of Variety’s political blog), Daphna Ziman. She attended a fundraising event addressed by the local director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (and also a black minister). Ziman accused the minister of blaming Jews for the negative portrayal of blacks in Hollywood films. In a subsequent e mail sent to 50,000 of her “closest” Jewish confidants by way of the mailing list of the pro-Israel group, Stand With Us, Ziman called him an anti-Semite and linked him to Rev. Wright. In a separate e-mail, she claimed that Obama’s “movement is out to destroy us [Jews].” This incident was further amplified by the right-wing online news outlet, Pajamas Media and the Republican Jewish Coalition.

Clinton’s campaign hasn’t said a word about Ziman’s outburst (which wasn’t the first time she expressed what I call Jewish Obamaphobia). When the Clinton campaign winks at such hysteria, aided and abetted by Republican groups and conservative media outlets, it makes you wonder just whose side is she on (and just who is on her side)?

I’m astonished that hardly anyone in the U.S. media is asking the question: why is Barack Obama responsible for his minister’s statements or views? Why is Obama a lesser human being or candidate because the leader of the church he belonged to says things others find objectionable? Obama opponents respond by claiming that Obama has identified so closely with Wright that it is legitimate to question whether the former holds the same views as the latter. As Obama correctly noted, Wright is (or now “was”) his minster, not his political advisor. Does anyone seriously believe that Obama will pursue an AIDS policy based on Wright’s views that the U.S. government had the capacity to spread the scourge in the black community? Or that Obama’s policies toward terrorism will be guided by Wright’s views that U.S. terrorism justifies Al Qaeda terrorism against U.S. targets?

You’d have to be a certified paranoiac to believe such things. And it’s the tragedy of this electoral season that many Americans appear to do so.

Since we’re examining the views of Obama’s minister, why doesn’t anyone vet the statements of Hillary Clinton’s or John McCain’s ministers? More importantly, why doesn’t John McCain have to explain the support provided to him by evangelical super-Israel-patriot, John Hagee, who believes Israel and the U.S. should attack Iran; not to mention he hates the Catholic Church (the “Great Whore”) and predicts two-thirds of Jews will be killed in the End Times. I have read many of Hagee’s more outrageous ideas and he’s at least as nutty as Wright, if not more so. Yet McCain hasn’t paid any price.

There is yet another dimension to this tragedy. Barack Obama is an African-American candidate at the heart of whose appeal lies an ability to crossover and engage white, and all voters. His rhetoric is inclusive in a way that no previous African-American candidate’s has been. He doesn’t speak to separate Democratic constituencies or ethnic groups. He almost transcends them. At least, he did until this mess happened.

What Obama’s opponents have done is drag him down into the mud with them. They’ve said: “Not so fast buddy. You think you’re so high and mighty. You think you’re better than us. Well, we’ll teach you a thing or two about American politics. We’ll make you as small as all the rest of us.”

An American presidential candidate usually starts a career by appealing to a particular constituency. In Obama’s case it was the multiracial Chicago community which he represented in the state senate. He has tried to stay true to his African-American roots and constituents during this campaign because otherwise he would lose an important measure of authenticity.

What the Wright debacle has done though, is to threaten to unmoor Obama from his natural constituency. The candidate faces the prospect of not only alienating white voters for allegedly consorting with Wright; he may lose black support by abandoning Wright. You’re damned if you and damned if you don’t.

This is the lonely night of the soul that every presidential candidate faces and dreads. The moment when the fates seem to have turned their backs; when everything you thought was true and right and that motivated you to run is in doubt. I don’t know what the outcome will be. But Obama’s campaign is at a critical juncture. He could still win the nomination or it could just slip away from him. And even if he wins the nomination, these orchestrated attacks may conceivably have irreparably wounded him as a viable candidate in the general election.

If Hillary Clinton thinks she’s going to reap any benefit from all this she may be in for a rude shock. If Obama melts down as a candidate and she wins the nomination, she too will be wounded; perhaps even fatally so. She will certainly have lost the support of much of the black wing of the Party as well as the liberal wing. She will have to go into the general election hoping she can carry moderate-conservative Democratic voters and persuade independents and moderate Republicans to join her. In effect, she would become a version of Joe Lieberman (not exactly a beloved politician these days). In short, I think she would be an unpersuasive and inauthentic candidate. And in her victory, she will have destroyed the candidacy of one of the most promising American politicians to come along in a generation. Not an auspicious way for her to enter a general election campaign.

A slightly different form of this post was published at Comment is Free.

tags black anti-semitism, daphna ziman, hillary-clinton, jeremiah-wright, obama, obamaphobia

You may recall Hillary Clinton trumpeting the news that Palestinian school textbooks teach hatred of Israel and Jews. This so-called revelation was supposed to teach the world the perfidy of Palestinians; that they don’t want peace; that they only want to hate; and that the fault for the conflict lay at the foot of the Palestinians alone. Hillary’s ‘news’ was meant as a boon to AIPAC and the Israel-First crowd and meant to bolster her pro-Israel bona fides. In fact, two senior Jewish Federation volunteers use the charge to support their endorsement of Clinton’s candidacy.

When I first read of Hillary’s charge my response was: “So what?” I spent most of my public school education resisting the propaganda some of my teachers tried to inculcate (cf. Tom Paxton’s remarkable song, What Did You Learn in School Today?). Many students are smart enough to see through the lies that might be taught them. Besides, do we really believe that what schoolchildren learn is critical to solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

But little did I realize that I needn’t have bothered trying to explain or rationalize the allegedly defamatory Palestinian textbooks. Why? Because Hillary’s claims were not true. Diane Mason lays out the case in her own impeccable fashion at Lawrence of Cyberia and I recommend you read the entire post.

In short, Hillary relied in her charges on “research” performed by the Committee for Monitoring the Impact of Peace (CMIP), a right-wing pro-Israel propaganda outfit founded by Itamar Marcus. CMIP’s purpose, like that of MEMRI, CAMERA, Debka, and a host of other similar groups is to cut and paste media stories that are embarrassing to Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular. Many of the stories are either mistranslated, wrenched out of context, or generally twisted to place Islam in the worst possible light.

In this particular case, CMIP’s research and conclusions are entirely wrong. While there are some textbooks used by students which deride Jews and Israel, they are old Jordanian and Egyptian publications and they are being used because Israeli administrators prefer not to allow Palestinians to use textbooks created by the PA for fear that this might mean recognition of a Palestinian claim to sovereignty. Actual Palestinian textbooks do NOT contain any of the slurs documented by CMIP.

To the CMIP charge that classrooms display maps missing the State of Israel, non-partisan academic investigators note that the maps are GEOGRAPHIC, and not political or national maps. In other words, they don’t show the boundaries of ANY country.

Diane also notes that in an interview a CMIP director acknowledged that he does not think that Palestinian textbooks are guilty of incitement against Israel or Jews. There goes Clinton’s argument. There is much more to the story of course which you may pursue at Diane’s site.

But let’s return to the question why any of this is important considering that Hillary’s errant claims are several years old. The reason why this is entirely relevant is that Hillary is running for president on a hawkish, pro-Israel agenda. She has never renounced these false claims. She continues to raise them in Jewish venues as if they are true.

Clinton has a first-rate staff that I’m sure researches all of the claims she makes to test their accuracy. It would be extremely easy for her to investigate the Palestinian textbook claim and discover that it is false. Yet she does not do so. So much for a concern for truth. So much for a sensitivity to the Palestinian educational system which she has slandered for political advantage.

In other words, this is a candidate who uses a sledge hammer when it comes to discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict when a scalpel is required. Do we trust her to understand the nuances, complexity and ambiguity of the issues involved? Do we trust her to be an honest broker in bringing the two sides together should she become president? I know I don’t and this issue confirms my doubts.

Writing just after the New Hampshire primary, in which Clinton displayed deep emotion in responding to sexist attacks against her, Mason writes:

Like many people, I’ve been disgusted by the sexist attacks that you have faced in the primaries so far, and will no doubt continue to face the closer you get to the Presidency. It must be very difficult to be the first serious female contender for President, and to see your candidacy belittled by big-mouthed pundits who…demean you just because of who you are. We could all see how much that hurt you when you teared up in New Hampshire. But have you never stopped to consider that you have made a political asset out of demonizing and defaming Palestinian Arabs, even though racist rhetoric hurts its target just as much as sexism hurts you? You have made a decision that it is all right to do to others what is obviously painful when it is done to you, just so long as there is some political advantage to be had.

I look at how much you are hurt by the sexist rhetoric you face, and I want to feel sorry for you. But then I look at how easily and how repeatedly you demonize Palestinians just because you have calculated that it will win you some votes…

tags center-for-monitoring-impact-of-peace, hillary-clinton, itamar-marcus, palestinian-textbooks-teach-hatred-of-israel

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton on Sunday sought to slow the momentum of Senator Barack Obama heading into the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday by pointedly challenging…the assertion that he is the only candidate who would bring about change.

“You campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose,” Mrs. Clinton said, urging voters to take a second look at the race. “We need a president who knows how to govern, who will bring us together as a country to find common ground, but who also knows how to stand our ground.”
–New York Times

Unfortunately for Clinton, you only get to govern by winning a campaign. She, unlike Obama, seems to have missed out on the poetry part. That’s why she lost Iowa and is in danger of losing New Hampshire.

tags campaign-in-poetry-govern-in-prose, hillary-clinton, obama-leads-new-hampshire-primary

I couldn’t believe the puffery in today’s NY Times’ Republicans Hail Colleague Who Fought Bush on Ports (the article is nowhere to be found on the Times website nor in Google News so I don’t have a link; by the way, I’ve never seen such a thing happen before at Nytimes.com. UPDATE: there is now a link as of 3/12) making Peter King out to be a maverick new Republican kingmaker because of his “leadership” opposing the Dubai Ports Deal. And King relishes his newfound celebrity in the most disgusting way:

Mr. King–who CNN dubbed “King of the Ports”–often sounded as though he could hardly believe the rapid and unexpected turn of events. “I have to keep pinching myself on all this stuff.”

The man is a demagogue and xenophobe to boot. What does he have to be proud of?

The Washington Post appears to agree with me. Only they take the entire grandstanding Congress to task for its egregious performance over the past two weeks in its editorial, Happy Now?:

THEY SPEND drunkenly…fail at oversight and…can’t stop the administration from abusing detainees or tapping phones. But never call the members of Congress powerless: Yesterday, in the exalted name of anti-terrorism, the Senate rebelled against its Republican leadership and joined the House in a vote to prevent a company based in a moderate, friendly Arab country from making a minor investment in the United States. When it became clear that some such blocking measure would pass, Dubai Ports World threw in the towel, announcing that it would sell all of its U.S. operations…and do business elsewhere.

…This [Dubai Ports World] investment always was a business decision, not the early stages of a covert attack on Baltimore. Quite rightly, the company and its Dubai-based owners…didn’t want their country’s and their company’s names dragged through the mud, so they cut their losses.

The Post lays out the pernicious “message” that Congress is sending to Arab nations and businesses and the damage that may be done to U.S. security and economic interests throughout the region from such stupidity:

…Our brave new Congress has achieved more than the irrational spiking of one business deal. It has also sent a clear message to the Arab world: No matter how far you move along the path of modernization and cooperation, Americans may be unable to distinguish you from al-Qaeda. Dubai welcomes hundreds of ship visits every year from the U.S. Navy and allied ships. It has worked with U.S. agents to stop terrorist financing and nuclear cooperation. But none of that mattered to the craven members of Congress–neither to the Democrats who first sensed a delicious political opportunity nor to the Republicans who then fled in unseemly panic. As to long-term damage to the United States’ security, economy and alliances? Not of concern to the great deliberative body.

No one should underestimate the potential damage. Any government in a Muslim-majority country will have to ask itself: Why take the risk of friendship? If governments find no good answer to that question, the fight against radical Islamic terrorism will suffer. Meanwhile, Arab investors may think twice before putting their money in a country where their companies risk expropriation…Arabs are rapidly becoming a major supplier of foreign capital. This isn’t a good moment for Americans to discourage foreign investment, given the nation’s dependence on foreign capital (see: Congress, drunken spending by). Nor will the message — that foreign ownership was unobjectionable when it was British but intolerable when it was Arab — do much to advance U.S. efforts to promote equitable investment rules for its own companies abroad.

Here the Post dishes out special opprobrium for the Congressional leaders who led the charge and warns those in Congress who try to ‘Monday morning quarterback’ the disaster that they have nowhere else to look but in the mirror for the cause:

Over the next few days, many excuses for this fiasco will be offered, by those who should have known better, by those who know better already and by those who may awake to the embarrassment of their mass hysteria. Some will blame the president, because he politicized the discussion of terrorism or was highhanded in threatening to veto a bill banning the sale. But if Congress can’t do the right thing in the face of such provocations, it is lamer than the excuses themselves.

Some, meanwhile, will blame the public, because opinion polls showed overwhelming objections to this deal. But it was Congress that brought this matter to public attention; here we think, for example, of the cynical actions of two Democratic senators from New York: Hillary Rodham Clinton and Charles E. Schumer, who heads his party’s effort to win back control of the Senate in this year’s elections. Congress falsely portrayed the deal as the “purchase” of U.S. ports. Congress failed to tell the public that port security is run by the U.S. Coast Guard, not the men who pay the salaries of the (overwhelmingly American) longshoremen. Congress created this storm, in other words, and then toppled in its wind.

A hat tip to Villainous Conspiracy and Emirates Economist.

tags anti-Arab, charles-schumer, dubai-ports-deal, hillary-clinton, national-security, peter-king, port-security, u.s.-congress, u.s.-xenophobia, washington-post

The NY Times notes today that U.S. Senators Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer and Robert Mendendez are polishing their anti-Arab credentials in a rather arcane local issue that has broad international ramifications:

[The senators] added their voices to objections about the Bush administration’s approval of a deal that will give a Dubai company a central role in operating ports in New York and around the country.

…Clinton and…Menendez said yesterday that they planned to introduce legislation to prevent companies controlled by foreign governments from buying American port operations.

The purpose of the bill would be to block the $6.8 billion sale of a British shipping company to Dubai Ports World, a port operator controlled by the government of Dubai, part of the United Arab Emirates. The British company, Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation, operates the cruise ship terminal on the West Side of Manhattan and has a half-interest in the Port Newark Container Terminal, the third-largest cargo terminal in New York harbor.

“I just don’t believe that our ports should be handed over to foreign governments,” Mr. Menendez said in an interview. Especially not to Dubai, he added, because it has a “serious and dubious history” as a transit point for terrorism.

Echoing other lawmakers in Washington who criticized the federal approval of the deal this week, Mr. Menendez cited reports that two of the Sept. 11 hijackers were from the United Arab Emirates and that some of the money that financed the attacks flowed through banks there.

Does this mean that because the CIA and Henry Kissinger colluded with Pinochet to overthrow Salvador Allende and murder tens of thousands of Chileans that Chile would be justified in forbidding any U.S. company affiliated with the government (if there was such a thing) from doing business there? How about Cuban-American terror against Cuban civilians? Should Castro forbid U.S. companies closely allied with the government from doing business? Because the Japanese Red Brigades once committed a terror attack at Ben Gurion Airport, Israel should allow no Japanese companies affiliated with the government from doing business there?

Besides, how do you blame an entire country for the acts of two of its citizens on 9/11?

I’m sorry, but I’m with the Bush Administration on this one. Our country has excellent relations with the United Arab Emirates; that country’s leadership has been among the most supportive toward U.S. Mideast policies; it has been most open to considering dialogue with Israel. So what is gained by sticking a finger in the eye of one of the Mideast’s friendliest governments?

…Senior administration officials reiterated their support for the transaction and their favorable relations with the United Arab Emirates.

The Dubai purchase passed a review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a panel composed of the leaders of 12 federal agencies and headed by the treasury secretary, John W. Snow.

Mr. Snow and Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, said yesterday that the committee had determined that the transfer would not compromise security. Ms. Rice, who is scheduled to visit the United Arab Emirates next week, described one of them, Abu Dhabi, as “a very good friend” of the United States, according to Bloomberg News.

The anti-Arab bloc in the Senate seems not able to distinguish between different Arab nations. I guess you’ve seen one you’ve seen ‘em all. No good Arab governments and only bad ones as far as they’re concerned. All those A-rabs are bad news, plain and simple.

And let’s call this one for what it is. They don’t want to prevent any company owned by a foreign government from operating a U.S. port. They want to prevent any company owned by an ARAB government from doing so. Why don’t we call it the “Anti-Arab Commerce Clause?” It has a nice catchy ring to it and accurately states the real goal of this xenophobic legislation.

Of course, we must note that each of these Senators is pandering in the basest way to the perceived interests of their Jewish constituents (but hey they don’t speak for me). I think it stinks and makes the Democratic party look like a bunch of raving Arab haters. In addition, Menendez is known for being what Jews call a hondeler (”wheeler dealer”) and I wouldn’t be surprised since the Port of Newark is within his jurisdiction that he may have some ulterior motive for opposing the new company. Perhaps he has his own ideas about who should be running Newark? And might that involve a political ally or friend? Just guessin’. Hope I’m wrong.

And if you’d like to see how paranoid and conspiratorial the right-wing blog world can get over this story, take a look at what Michelle Malkin has brewed.

tags anti-Arab, charles-schumer, Dubai, hillary-clinton, new-york-ports, robert-menendez, U.S.-ports, u.s.-senate, xenophobia