Daily Archives: April 21, 2008

CAMPAIGN 08: Down with the plutocracy!

Obama’s touch of class
By Thomas Frank, Wall Street Journal, April 21, 2008

It is a stereotype you have heard many times before: Besotted with latte-fueled arrogance, the liberal looks down on average people, confident that he is a superior being. He scoffs at religion because he finds it to be a form of false consciousness. He believes in regulation because he thinks he knows better than the market.

“Elitism” is thus a crime not of society’s actual elite, but of its intellectuals. Mr. Obama has “a dash of Harvard disease,” proclaims the Weekly Standard. Mr. Obama reminds columnist George Will of Adlai Stevenson, rolled together with the sinister historian Richard Hofstadter and the diabolical economist J.K. Galbraith, contemptuous eggheads all. Mr. Obama strikes Bill Kristol as some kind of “supercilious” Marxist. Mr. Obama reminds Maureen Dowd of an . . . anthropologist.

Ah, but Hillary Clinton: Here’s a woman who drinks shots of Crown Royal, a luxury brand that at least one confused pundit believes to be another name for Old Prole Rotgut Rye. And when the former first lady talks about her marksmanship as a youth, who cares about the cool hundred million she and her husband have mysteriously piled up since he left office? Or her years of loyal service to Sam Walton, that crusher of small towns and enemy of workers’ organizations? And who really cares about Sam Walton’s own sins, when these are our standards? Didn’t he have a funky Southern accent of some kind? Surely such a mellifluous drawl cancels any possibility of elitism.

It is by this familiar maneuver that the people who have designed and supported the policies that have brought the class divide back to America – the people who have actually, really transformed our society from an egalitarian into an elitist one – perfume themselves with the essence of honest toil, like a cologne distilled from the sweat of laid-off workers. Likewise do their retainers in the wider world – the conservative politicians and the pundits who lovingly curate all this phony authenticity – become jes’ folks, the most populist fellows of them all. [complete article]

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NEWS & EDITOR’S COMMENT: Hamas’s truce offer

Meshal offers 10-year truce for Palestinian state on ’67 borders
By Barak Ravid, Haaretz, April 21, 2008

Hamas’ political leader Khaled Meshal on Monday said Hamas would accept a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip along Israel’s pre-1967 borders, and would grant Israel a 10-year hudna, or truce, as an implicit proof of recognition if Israel withdraws from those areas.

Meshal’s comments were one of the clearest outlines Hamas has given for what it would do if Israel withdrew from the territories it captured in the 1967 Six Day War. He suggested Hamas would accept Israel’s existence alongside a Palestinian state on the rest of the lands Israel has held since 1948.

However, Meshal told reporters in Damascus that Hamas would not formally recognize Israel.

“We agree to a [Palestinian] state on pre-67 borders, with Jerusalem as its capital with genuine sovereignty without settlements but without recognizing Israel,” Meshaal said.

“We have offered a truce if Israel withdraws to the 1967 borders, a truce of 10 years as a proof of recognition,” he said. He said he made the offer to former U.S. President Jimmy Carter during talks Friday and Saturday in the Syrian capital. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — It’s not going to happen, but just suppose Israel was to accept Hamas’s offer of a 10-year truce for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza with East Jerusalem as its capital. Imagine that without the burden of an Israeli occupation or an economic siege that Palestinians could devote their attention to the construction of their own sovereign state. The responsibility of a Palestinian government would then fall squarely on its ability to adequately serve its own people – not its capacity to negotiate with or resist the Israelis. The challenge of that decade would clearly be to improve the lives of ordinary Palestinians. The test of whatever political leadership held power would be its ability to deliver on its promises. To imagine that Hamas would use the peace in order to put together a longterm military plan to later challenge Israel seems fanciful. If they did so they would swiftly marginalize themselves out of existence.

So why should all of this be something we can only imagine? Because the real political challenge is not to persuade Hamas to accept a two-state solution, renounce violence or recognize Israel. The real challenge is for Israel to dismantle the settlements. It’s far easier to perpetually blame the Palestinians than to wrestle with an issue that has been relentlessly expanded towards a point where it could be regarded as irreversible.

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NEWS & EDITOR’S COMMENT: Hamas’ recognition of Israel

Carter: Hamas will accept Israel
BBC News, April 21, 2008

Former US President Jimmy Carter has said that Hamas is prepared to accept the right of Israel to “live as a neighbour next door in peace”.

After meeting Hamas leaders last week in Syria, he said it was a problem the US and Israel would not meet the group.

His comments came as the Israeli army launched a formal investigation into the death of a Reuters cameraman killed in the Gaza Strip last week. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — In an op-ed in the Washington Post last week, Mahmoud al-Zahar, a co-founder of Hamas, wrote: “A ‘peace process’ with Palestinians cannot take even its first tiny step until Israel first withdraws to the borders of 1967; dismantles all settlements; removes all soldiers from Gaza and the West Bank; repudiates its illegal annexation of Jerusalem; releases all prisoners; and ends its blockade of our international borders, our coastline and our airspace permanently.”

The Post’s editorial board, in an effort to disassociate itself from the piece that it had freely chosen to publish, wrote: “On the opposite page today we publish an article by the ‘foreign minister’ of Hamas, Mahmoud al-Zahar, that drips with hatred for Israel, and with praise for former president Jimmy Carter. We believe Mr. Zahar’s words are worth publishing because they provide some clarity about the group he helps to lead, a group that Mr. Carter contends is worthy of being included in the Middle East peace process.”

Is the Post afraid it might suffer the same level of condemnation that Rev Jeremiah Wright’s church has had to suffer for reprinting an op-ed that the Los Angeles Times published of its own free will? I doubt it. On the contrary, this seems like a perverse celebration of freedom of speech among those who are afraid to listen.

What the Post’s editors chose to ignore — and this begs the question: did they actually read Zahar’s piece? — was that Hamas was making a de facto declaration of Israel’s right to exist. What Zahar laid out as preconditions for negotiations would to most observers look like the end point rather than the beginning of a peace process, yet the mere fact that he posits an Israel existing inside its 1967 borders as a viable negotiating partner, challenges the widely-held belief that Hamas has one and only one objective: the destruction of Israel.

Carter meeting sparks new debate over engaging Hamas
Mark Perry (Conflicts Forum) and Robert Satloff (Washington Institute for Near East Policy), NewsHour, PBS, April 18, 2008

MARGARET WARNER: Mark Perry, should Jimmy Carter have met with Khaled Mashal and, if so, to what end?

MARK PERRY, Conflicts Forum: Absolutely he should have met with him, and here’s why. There are three very good reasons.

First, Hamas won an election in January 2006 in the Palestinian Authority, and it wasn’t even close, and it was the most transparent, open and fair elections in Arab world history.

Second, they retain prestige among the Palestinian people. All polls show that they retain their strength.

And, third, most recently, their leaders have been showing real moderation. They want an opening to the United States. This is their opportunity, and Jimmy Carter is capitalizing on that. We should be talking to Hamas. [complete article]

Our reign of terror, by the Israeli army
By Donald Macintyre, The Independent, April 19, 2008

The older ex-soldier is Yehuda Shaul, who does indeed “know how it is in Hebron”, having served in the city in a combat unit at the peak of the intifada, and is a founder of Shovrim Shtika, or Breaking the Silence, which will publish tomorrow the disturbing testimonies of 39 Israelis – including this young man – who served in the army in Hebron between 2005 and 2007. They cover a range of experiences, from anger and powerlessness in the face of often violent abuse of Arabs by hardline Jewish settlers, through petty harassment by soldiers, to soldiers beating up Palestinian residents without provocation, looting homes and shops, and opening fire on unarmed demonstrators.

The maltreatment of civilians under occupation is common to many armies in the world – including Britain’s, from Northern Ireland to Iraq.

But, paradoxically, few if any countries apart from Israel have an NGO like Breaking the Silence, which seeks – through the experiences of the soldiers themselves – as its website puts it “to force Israeli society to address the reality which it created” in the occupied territories. [complete article]

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NEWS & VIEWS ROUNDUP: April 21

Which came first: memos or torture?
By Scott Horton, Los Angeles Times, April 21, 2008
John C. Yoo likes the limelight, but it’s causing him some grief. Of the half a dozen lawyers who played important roles in a Bush administration decision to legalize the use of highly coercive interrogation techniques, only Yoo has emerged as the public face — and target — related to the policy.

In 2002 and 2003, Yoo was second in command at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and wrote two memos, one for Alberto R. Gonzales and one for the Pentagon, that provided broad legal authority for the use of extreme measures in the questioning of wartime detainees. In one famous phrase, the memo to Gonzales concluded that only techniques “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death,” could be considered torture. The 81-page Pentagon memo, declassified April 1, contained similar language and added fuel to the fire over torture and the White House. Through it all, Yoo has defended his position in the media.

12 reasons to get out of Iraq
By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch, April 20, 2008
Can there be any question that, since the invasion of 2003, Iraq has been unraveling? And here’s the curious thing: Despite a lack of decent information and analysis on crucial aspects of the Iraqi catastrophe, despite the way much of the Iraq story fell off newspaper front pages and out of the TV news in the last year, despite so many reports on the “success” of the President’s surge strategy, Americans sense this perfectly well. In the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll, 56% of Americans “say the United States should withdraw its military forces to avoid further casualties” and this has, as the Post notes, been a majority position since January 2007, the month that the surge was first announced. Imagine what might happen if the American public knew more about the actual state of affairs in Iraq — and of thinking in Washington. So, here, in an attempt to unravel the situation in ever-unraveling Iraq are twelve answers to questions which should be asked far more often in this country:

Rice, in Iraq, praises moves against militias
By Erica Goode, New York Times, April 21, 2008
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, making a surprise stop in Baghdad on Sunday, praised the Iraqi government’s decision to take on Shiite militia members in Basra and in Baghdad and painted an upbeat picture of the Iraqi government’s progress toward unifying the country.

Ms. Rice, who visited the Iraqi capital on her way to a conference in Kuwait of Iraq’s neighbors, said that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s government “has made a choice to pursue militias and is willing to bear the consequences.”

Conceding that it had been “a long five years,” Ms. Rice said that Iraq had made “significant progress, remarkable progress,” however fragile, and she quoted the Iraqi president, Jalal Talabani, who said that the country was experiencing “a political spring.”

Iraqi Army takes last Basra areas from Sadr force
By James Glanz and Alissa J Rubin, New York Times, April 20, 2008
Iraqi soldiers took control of the last bastions of the cleric Moktada al-Sadr’s militia in Basra on Saturday, and Iran’s ambassador to Baghdad strongly endorsed the Iraqi government’s monthlong military operation against the fighters.

By Saturday evening, Basra was calm, but only after air and artillery strikes by American and British forces cleared the way for Iraqi troops to move into the Hayaniya district and other remaining Mahdi Army militia strongholds and begin house-to house searches, Iraqi officials said. Iraqi troops were meeting little resistance, said Maj. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, the spokesman for the Iraqi Interior Ministry in Baghdad.

Despite the apparent concession of Basra, Mr. Sadr issued defiant words on Saturday night. In a long statement read from the loudspeakers of his Sadr City Mosque, he threatened to declare “war until liberation” against the government if fighting against his militia forces continued.

A diplomat’s view on engaging Iran
Scott Simon interviews Thomas Pickering, NPR, April 19, 2008
Former Ambassador Thomas Pickering has had unofficial meetings with Iranian academics and policy advisers for the past several years on everything from the war in Iraq to Iran’s nuclear program. Pickering discusses his diplomatic efforts.

U.S. military seeks to widen Pakistan raids
By Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt, New York Times, April 20, 2008
American commanders in Afghanistan have in recent months urged a widening of the war that could include American attacks on indigenous Pakistani militants in the tribal areas inside Pakistan, according to United States officials.

The requests have been rebuffed for now, the officials said, after deliberations in Washington among senior Bush administration officials who fear that attacking Pakistani radicals may anger Pakistan’s new government, which is negotiating with the militants, and destabilize an already fragile security situation.

American commanders would prefer that Pakistani forces attack the militants, but Pakistani military operations in the tribal areas have slowed recently to avoid upsetting the negotiations.

Perceived slights have left many U.S. Muslims wary of Pope
By Robin Shulman and Keith B. Richburg, Washington Post, April 20, 2008
Pope Benedict XVI has said he would like to reach out to the Muslim community through dialogue, and Muslims were included in the pontiff’s meeting with interfaith leaders in Washington on Thursday night. But many Muslims in America remain wary, saying the pope has created the impression that he is insensitive to their faith.

On Sunday, the pope will visit Ground Zero, perhaps the most poignant symbol of the divide between the West and the more extremist elements of Islam. But interviews in New York and elsewhere indicate that even those Muslims who do not hold such radical views are critical of the pope.

Many still recall the pope’s September 2006 lecture at the University of Regensburg in Germany, in which Benedict quoted a Byzantine Christian emperor saying that the prophet Muhammad brought “things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

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