Monthly Archives: August 2010

CIA wants to cover up US war crimes in Yemen

A missile strike on December 17 in Yemen last year that killed 41 people including 21 children and 14 women was most likely the result of a US cruise missile strike — an opening shot in a US military campaign that began without notice and has never been officially confirmed.

Amnesty International says it has obtained photographs apparently showing the remnants of missiles known to be held only by U.S. forces at the site of the air strike against al Qaeda suspects.

“The Yemeni authorities have a duty to ensure public safety and to bring to justice those engaged in attacks that deliberately target members of the public, but when doing so they must abide by international law,” said Malcolm Smart, Amnesty International’s Director for the Middle East and North Africa Programme. “Enforced disappearances, torture and other ill-treatment, and extrajudicial executions are never permissible, and the Yemeni authorities must immediately cease these violations.”

“It is particularly worrying that states such as Saudi Arabia and the USA are directly or indirectly aiding the Yemeni government in a downward spiral away from previously improving human rights record.”

The Washington Post now reports that the CIA is likely to have a larger role in President Obama’s expanding war in Yemen.

Proponents of expanding the CIA’s role argue that years of flying armed drones over Pakistan have given the agency expertise in identifying targets and delivering pinpoint strikes. The agency’s attacks also leave fewer telltale signs.

“You’re not going to find bomb parts with USA markings on them,” the senior U.S. official said.

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How Pakistan shut down Afghan-Taliban peace talks

In the New York Times, Dexter Filkins reports:

When American and Pakistani agents captured Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban’s operational commander, in the chaotic port city of Karachi last January, both countries hailed the arrest as a breakthrough in their often difficult partnership in fighting terrorism.

But the arrest of Mr. Baradar, the second-ranking Taliban leader after Mullah Muhammad Omar, came with a beguiling twist: both American and Pakistani officials claimed that Mr. Baradar’s capture had been a lucky break. It was only days later, the officials said, that they finally figured out who they had.

Now, seven months later, Pakistani officials are telling a very different story. They say they set out to capture Mr. Baradar, and used the C.I.A. to help them do it, because they wanted to shut down secret peace talks that Mr. Baradar had been conducting with the Afghan government that excluded Pakistan, the Taliban’s longtime backer.

In the weeks after Mr. Baradar’s capture, Pakistani security officials detained as many as 23 Taliban leaders, many of whom had been enjoying the protection of the Pakistani government for years. The talks came to an end.

The events surrounding Mr. Baradar’s arrest have been the subject of debate inside military and intelligence circles for months. Some details are still murky — and others vigorously denied by some American intelligence officials in Washington. But the account offered in Islamabad highlights Pakistan’s policy in Afghanistan: retaining decisive influence over the Taliban, thwarting archenemy India, and putting Pakistan in a position to shape Afghanistan’s postwar political order.

“We picked up Baradar and the others because they were trying to make a deal without us,” said a Pakistani security official, who, like numerous people interviewed about the operation, spoke anonymously because of the delicacy of relations between Pakistan, Afghanistan and the United States. “We protect the Taliban. They are dependent on us. We are not going to allow them to make a deal with Karzai and the Indians.”

My question: Did the New York Times really need six months to piece this story together?

Back on February 17, I wrote a post headlined: “Was the arrest of the Taliban’s second-in-command a strategic blunder?” This is what I wrote:

The capture of the Taliban’s second in command, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, has been hailed as a huge blow to the Taliban but it may turn out to deliver an even bigger blow to President Obama’s hopes for an early withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan.

Hajji Agha Lalai, former head of the Afghan government-led reconciliation process in Kandahar, who has dealt with members of the Taliban leadership council for several years, said Mullah Baradar was “the only person intent on or willing for peace negotiations.”

Last month Baradar facilitated an inconclusive meeting in Dubai between midlevel Taliban commanders and Kai Eide, the departing top UN official in Kabul, according to McClatchy newspapers.

Saeed Shah reported:

According to Vahid Mojdeh, a former Afghan official who worked under the Taliban, Baradar was instrumental in reining in insurgent violence, by banning sectarian killings and indiscriminate bombings.

“Baradar was an obstacle against al-Qaida, who wanted to make an operation in Afghanistan like they did in Iraq,” Mojdeh said. “But Baradar would not allow them to kill Shias” – the minority Muslim sect – “or set off explosions in crowded places.”

Pakistani analysts said Baradar’s capture suggested either that Islamabad had abandoned its attempt to promote peace talks or the Taliban number two had fallen afoul of the Pakistani authorities. Analysts said Baradar was the most likely point of contact for any future talks.

“This is inexplicable. Pakistan has destroyed its own credentials as a mediator between Taliban and Americans. And the trust that might have existed between Taliban and Pakistan is shattered completely,” said Rustam Shah Mohmand, a former Pakistani ambassador to Kabul after the overthrow of the Taliban.

The capture of Mullah Baradar has been widely reported as the result of a coordinated operation between the US and Pakistan, but so far the story seems very murky.

On Tuesday, February 9, the New York Times reported:

Pakistan has told the United States it wants a central role in resolving the Afghan war and has offered to mediate with Taliban factions who use its territory and have long served as its allies, American and Pakistani officials said.

The offer, aimed at preserving Pakistan’s influence in Afghanistan once the Americans leave, could both help and hurt American interests as Washington debates reconciling with the Taliban.

Pakistan’s army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, made clear Pakistan’s willingness to mediate at a meeting late last month at NATO headquarters with top American military officials, a senior American military official familiar with the meeting said.

The report said that General Kayani rebuffed US pressure to expand operations against the Taliban in North Waziristan because “the Pakistani Army still regarded India as its primary enemy and was stretched too thin to open a new front.”

Within days we learn of Mullah Baradar’s arrest in Karachi, Pakistan. His capture could cripple the Taliban’s military operations, at least in the short term, says Bruce Riedel, an adviser to the Obama administration. Others in Washington describe this as a huge blow to the Taliban.

But the New York Times now reports:

The arrest followed weeks of signals by Pakistan’s military chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani — to NATO officials, Western journalists and military analysts — that Pakistan wanted to be included in any attempts to mediate with the Taliban.

Even before the arrest of the Taliban commander, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a senior Pakistani intelligence official expressed irritation that Pakistan had been excluded from what he described as American and Afghan approaches to the Taliban.

“On the one hand, the Americans don’t want us to negotiate directly with the Taliban, but then we hear that they are doing it themselves without telling us,” the official said in an interview. “You don’t treat your partners like this.”

Mullah Baradar had been a important contact for the Afghans for years, Afghan officials said. But Obama administration officials denied that they had made any contact with him.

Whatever the case, with the arrest of Mullah Baradar, Pakistan has effectively isolated a key link to the Taliban leadership, making itself the main channel instead.

While Washington denied prior negotiations with Baradar, a US intelligence official in Europe claimed otherwise:

“I know that our people had been in touch with people around him and were negotiating with him,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the issue.

“So it doesn’t make sense why we bite the hand that is feeding us,” the official added. “And now the Taliban will have no reason to negotiate with us; they will not believe anything we will offer or say.”

Update (2/17/10): In an interview on NPR Ahmed Rashid speculated that now that Baradar is in custody he could be in a better position to negotiate. Why? Because he’s not going anywhere?

Much more plausible is that the Pakistanis pulled him in — Rashid acknowledges that Baradar’s whereabouts have never been unknown to the ISI — because they didn’t want to be cut out of the negotiating loop by Americans negotiating directly with the Taliban. In other words, Pakistan is not willing to see a deal agreed to end this war without being able to dictate some of the terms.

If that is the case, no wonder The White House asked its news outlet (the New York Times) to sit on the story for a few days while they decided how it should be told.

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Liberal defenders of “mosque” get it wrong

Aisha Ghani points out that much of the liberal defense of Park51 requires that the center be shown as presenting a sanitized form of Islam.

[I]t is clear that the kindergarten logic of “hear no evil, see no evil” is being utilized in order to sway public opinion in favor of the Center, but while the success of these maneuvers remains to be seen, its damage is immediately apparent. The message being sent is loud and clear: if Park51 ‘sounds’ nothing like mosque, claims to ‘be’ nothing like a mosque, and, ‘looks’ nothing like a mosque, then, and only then, does it emerge a defensible endeavor within the United States.

Apart from the fact that these maneuvers do little by way of providing Americans with a reason to be self-reflexive — that is, to ponder the possibility of coexistence with Muslims without requiring, first, that those Muslims sanitize their identities and their places of worship — yet another danger exists in the fact that if these additives, this supplementary discourse (of community center and interfaith dialogue) continues to be the basis upon which Park51 emerges worthy of defense, then on what grounds will other mosques — which do not claim to be anything more or (perhaps, in Park51’s case) ‘less’ than a mosque — be defended?

Other red flags emerge when we take note of how Imam Rauf and Daisy Khan’s ‘personal’ relationship to Islam (a relationship that associates itself with ‘sufi’ ideology and is identified as ‘moderate’ Islam) has been ascribed to Park51. When these disclaimers are showcased in the media, they are presented not as interesting facts about two individuals, but as some of Park51’s most ‘appealing’ features, a major ‘selling point’ in subsequent liberal discourse.

The narrative of fitting in, of assimilation and integration that is being established through Park51 produces a dangerous set of ‘if, then’ contingencies that we should all be wary of, and which index the precise problem of this moment in American history; a moment in which the terms and conditions being articulated in the Park51 debate have, in fact, already been established as the ground rules for determining who gets recognized as the ‘right’ kind of Muslim in America. Sadly, this ‘conditional’ recognition also suggests that only the claims of certain kinds of Muslims will be recognized as legitimate or worthy of defense.

(H/t Pulse.)

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When misanthropy and philanthropy go hand in hand

In a society that trumpets its faith in equal opportunity, freedom and the power of the people — government of the people, by the people and for the people, and all that — it’s ironic that again and again, we discover that some of the most powerful people in America are men (invariably men) who we’ve never heard of — men such as Charles and David Koch. It isn’t modesty that makes them keep out of sight.

Their father built his wealth by helping create an oil industry for Joseph Stalin. Later, Jane Mayer tells us in her New Yorker feature:

In 1958, Fred Koch became one of the original members of the John Birch Society, the arch-conservative group known, in part, for a highly skeptical view of governance and for spreading fears of a Communist takeover. Members considered President Dwight D. Eisenhower to be a Communist agent. In a self-published broadside, Koch claimed that “the Communists have infiltrated both the Democrat and Republican Parties.” He wrote admiringly of Benito Mussolini’s suppression of Communists in Italy, and disparagingly of the American civil-rights movement. “The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America,” he warned. Welfare was a secret plot to attract rural blacks to cities, where they would foment “a vicious race war.” In a 1963 speech that prefigures the Tea Party’s talk of a secret socialist plot, Koch predicted that Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the President is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.”

The principal heirs of the Koch fortune who now run Koch Industries (“the largest company that you’ve never heard of”), Charles and David Koch, have been described as “the billionaires behind the hate,” for helping spawn the Tea Party movement and “the Standard Oil of our times,” for their efforts to thwart government regulation.

With his brother Charles, who is seventy-four, David Koch owns virtually all of Koch Industries, a conglomerate, headquartered in Wichita, Kansas, whose annual revenues are estimated to be a hundred billion dollars. The company has grown spectacularly since their father, Fred, died, in 1967, and the brothers took charge. The Kochs operate oil refineries in Alaska, Texas, and Minnesota, and control some four thousand miles of pipeline. Koch Industries owns Brawny paper towels, Dixie cups, Georgia-Pacific lumber, Stainmaster carpet, and Lycra, among other products. Forbes ranks it as the second-largest private company in the country, after Cargill, and its consistent profitability has made David and Charles Koch — who, years ago, bought out two other brothers — among the richest men in America. Their combined fortune of thirty-five billion dollars is exceeded only by those of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry — especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.” The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies — from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program — that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.

In a statement, Koch Industries said that the Greenpeace report “distorts the environmental record of our companies.” And David Koch, in a recent, admiring article about him in New York, protested that the “radical press” had turned his family into “whipping boys,” and had exaggerated its influence on American politics. But Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan watchdog group, said, “The Kochs are on a whole different level. There’s no one else who has spent this much money. The sheer dimension of it is what sets them apart. They have a pattern of lawbreaking, political manipulation, and obfuscation. I’ve been in Washington since Watergate, and I’ve never seen anything like it. They are the Standard Oil of our times.”

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Iran enhances its capacity to shut down the global oil supply

The lesson of the famous Millennium 2002 Challenge was that a cumbersome military machine that over-invests in high tech weaponry is vulnerable to swarming attacks. In the $250 million war game such an attack resulted in most of the US fleet being sunk within hours.

With the development of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter — the most expensive defense program ever — going ahead, it looks like the Pentagon is still stuck in the past. Iran on the other hand — the country that grasps the jugular vein through which most of the world’s oil supply flows (the Strait of Hormuz) — today made clear that it knows exactly how to flex its muscles in that arena and it will do so with vessels designed for lethal swarming.

AFP reports:

Iran began mass-producing two high-speed variants of missile-launching assault boats on Monday, warning its enemies not to “play with fire” as it boosts security along its coastline.

The inauguration of the production lines for the Seraj and Zolfaqar speedboats comes a day after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad unveiled Iran’s home-built bomber drone, which he said would deliver “death” to Iran’s enemies.

The United States expressed concern about the Islamic republic’s growing military capabilities.

Iran’s state news agency IRNA reported that the Seraj (Lamp) and Zolfaqar (named after Shiite Imam Ali’s sword) boats would be manufactured at the marine industries complex of the defence ministry.

Defence Minister Ahmad Vahidi opened the assembly lines, saying the vessels would help to strengthen Iran’s defences, IRNA said.

“Today, the Islamic Republic of Iran is relying on a great defence industry and the powerful forces of Sepah (Revolutionary Guards) and the army, with their utmost strength, can provide security to the Persian Gulf, the Sea of Oman and Strait of Hormuz,” Vahidi said.

He issued a stern warning to Iran’s foes.

“The enemy must be careful of its adventurous behaviour and not play with fire because the Islamic Republic of Iran’s response would be unpredictable,” IRNA quoted him as saying.

“If enemies attack Iran, the Islamic Republic of Iran’s reaction will not be restricted to one area. The truth of our defence doctrine is that we will not attack any country and that we extend our hand to all legitimate countries.”

Meanwhile, in yet another response to Jeffrey Goldberg’s prediction of an Israeli attack on Iran, the former UN chief weapons inspector, David Kay, suggests that Israel is using the issue in order to press the Obama administration to ease its pressure on settlements and the need to make concessions to the Palestinians.

… Israel is engaged in psychological warfare with the Obama administration — and it only partly concerns Iran.

With regard Iran, Israel clearly understands that any unilateral military action it took against Iran without U.S. knowledge and support could have consequence of strategic importance for Israel and might even make an attack on Iran of limited benefit. Israel would much rather have the U.S. with it in an attack on Iran, or, even better, would be if the U.S. executed the attack entirely on its own.

But beyond Iran, of probably greater importance to the current Israeli government is avoiding the Obama administration pushing it into a choice between settlements and territorial arrangements with the Palestinians that it is unwilling to make and permanent damage to its relationship with the U.S. Hyping the Iranian nuclear program and the need for early military action is a nice bargaining counter. The U.S. certainly cannot join or lead an attack on Iran while pushing the Israeli government to the brink on settlements and concessions to the Palestinians. Or if the U.S. wants to avoid an imminent Israeli strike, it must make concessions to Israel on the Palestinian issues.

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The perception-management trap: confusing appearances with reality

The charismatic American Muslim cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, who now lives in hiding in Yemen and is a target for assassination by the CIA, has predicted: “The West will eventually turn against its Muslim citizens!”

His prediction appears to be coming true.

In the current climate of escalating rhetoric through which hostility towards Muslims is now being unleashed across America, there is a tendency to pay greater attention to the fact that this makes America look bad, than that it reveals real fractures and failings inside American society.

Responding to the Manhattan Islamic-center controversy, Evan Kohlmann, an independent terrorism consultant at Flashpoint Partners who monitors jihadist websites, told the Wall Street Journal: “We are handing al Qaeda a propaganda coup, an absolute propaganda coup.”

But what if we could be assured that hatred of Muslims did not increase the risk of terrorism? Should we be any less concerned?

A couple of years ago, ABC‘s Prime Time conducted a revealing experiment to see how ordinary Americans respond to expressions of hostility directed at American Muslims. Watch the video below:

As encouraging as it might be to see that twice as many individuals tried to correct an injustice rather than supported it, the silent majority did nothing. And keep in mind: this was in response to the mistreatment of an American Muslim. Muslims born elsewhere who may speak little or no English can only fare worse in similar circumstances.

The pernicious effect of political correctness is that it exaggerates the value of cosmetic changes. A socially acceptable code can prevail, yet barely beneath the surface, bigotry festers both in spite of and to some extent because it no longer finds free expression.

The current up-swell of hatred towards Muslims in America says, I would contend, less about changing sentiments than it does about people’s willingness to express what they previously thought they must conceal. We should be less concerned about what people are now saying than what this reveals about what they think.

Glenn Greenwald comments on the demonstration that took place in Manhattan yesterday, as shown in this video:

The animosity and hatred so visible here extends far beyond the location of mosques or even how we treat American Muslims. So many of our national abuses, crimes and other excesses of the last decade — torture, invasions, bombings, illegal surveillance, assassinations, renditions, disappearances, etc. etc. — are grounded in endless demonization of Muslims. A citizenry will submit to such policies only if they are vested with sufficient fear of an Enemy. There are, as always, a wide array of enemies capable of producing substantial fear (the Immigrants, the Gays, and, as that video reveals, the always-reliable racial minorities), but the leading Enemy over the last decade, in American political discourse, has been, and still is, the Muslim.

That’s why the population is willing to justify virtually anything that’s done to “them” without much resistance at all, and it’s why very few people demand evidence from the Government before believing accusations that someone is a Terrorist: after all, if they’re Muslim, that’s reason enough to believe it. Hence, the repeated, mindless mantra that those in Guantanamo — or those on the Government’s “hit list” — are Terrorists even in the absence of evidence and charges, and even in the presence of ample grounds for doubting the truth of those accusations.

And there’s no end in sight: the current hysteria over Iran at its core relies — just as the identical campaign against Iraq did — on the demonization of a whole new host of Muslim villains.

This may turn out to be one of the most important tests of Barack Obama’s presidential leadership. His inclination and that of his political advisers is likely to lean heavily in favor of weathering out the storm — especially since he appeared to walk back from his initial intervention. But the test of leadership is the willingness and ability to act in conformity with the dictates of the circumstance and not those of political prudence.

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The Ground Zero mosque that was there before Ground Zero

Masjid Manhattan wants to keep a low profile — which is understandable. At the top of their home page is a bold disclaimer:

Please be advised that we are by no means affiliated with any other organization trying to build anything new in the area of downtown Manhattan.

That blanket disclaimer is their way of distancing themselves from the controversial Park51 project (aka Cordoba House, aka the Ground Zero mosque).

It’s sad that Masjid Manhattan feels the need to do this when it could reasonably describe itself as the Ground Zero mosque that was there before Ground Zero.

If two blocks away from the site of the World Trade Center can be described as “at Ground Zero” then so can three blocks away.

Do those who now object to the construction of a new Islamic center also favor that the existing mosque be removed?

In all likelihood, most Americans who object to Park51 don’t even know that there is already a mosque nearby — one that opened the same year as the World Trade Center and now lacks sufficient space for all those Muslims living and working in the area who wish to gather for prayer. Neither would they know that one of the staunchest defenders of the project is the Jewish Congressman who represents the district, Jerry Nadler.

Unlike the rest of the Democrats in the New York congressional delegation, who have said as little as possible about the issue, Nadler has unabashedly supported the congregation’s right to build the mosque.

“It’s only a slap in the face if you think that the people in the congregation are responsible for al-Qaeda,” Nadler said as he sat in his office, where outdated posters, some featuring the Twin Towers, hung on the wall.

A staunch defender of Israel, Nadler said that it is logical that he is fighting for the rights of a Muslim congregation that he said he might very well vehemently disagree with. “Jews, of all people, should know that we have to support religious liberty,” he said. “Because if you can block a mosque, you can block a synagogue.”

And lest there be any doubt that the current controversy has been fomented by political opportunists, Frank Rich notes:

We owe thanks to Justin Elliott of Salon for the single most revealing account of this controversy’s evolution. He reports that there was zero reaction to the “ground zero mosque” from the front-line right or anyone else except marginal bloggers when The Times first reported on the Park51 plans in a lengthy front-page article on Dec. 9, 2009. The sole exception came some two weeks later at Fox News, where Laura Ingraham, filling in on “The O’Reilly Factor,” interviewed Daisy Khan, the wife of the project’s organizer, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. Ingraham gave the plans her blessing. “I can’t find many people who really have a problem with it,” she said. “I like what you’re trying to do.”

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The new anti-Semitism

Joshua Holland lays out some of the evidence that a wave of Islamophobia is sweeping America.

In May, a man walked into the Jacksonville Islamic Center in Northeast Florida during evening prayers and detonated a pipebomb. Fortunately, there were no injuries. (If the man had been Muslim and the House of worship a Christian church, the incident would have garnered wall-to-wall coverage, but while the story got plenty of local press it was ignored by CBS News, Fox, CNN and MSNBC.)

It was the most serious of a series of incidents in which mosques far from the supposedly hallowed earth of Ground Zero have been targeted. A mosque in Miami, Florida, was sprayed with gunfire last year. Mosques have been vandalized or set aflame in Brownstown, Michigan; Nashville, Tennessee; Arlington, Texas (where the mosque was first vandalized and then later targeted by arsonists); Taylor, South Carolina; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Eugene, Oregon; Cape Girardeau, Missouri; Tempe, Arizona; and in both Northern and Southern California. A mosque in a suburb of Chicago has been vandalized four times in recent years.

In May, an Arab man was brutally beaten in broad daylight in New York by four young men. According to the victim’s nephew, “They used the bad word. ‘The mother bleeping Muslim, go back to your country.’ They started beating him and after that he don’t know what happened.” A Muslim woman in Chicago was assaulted by another woman who took offense at her headscarf. A Muslim teacher in Florida was sent a white powdery substance in the mail. In San Diego, a man in his 50s became so incensed by the sight of an American of Afghan descent praying that he assaulted him after screaming, “You idiot, you mother f**ker, go back to where you came from.”

Just imagine if the targets described above were not mosques and Muslims but Jews and synagogues. Abraham Foxman and the Anti-Defamation League would be leading the charge demanding Congress, opinion-makers, public-policy makers, the media and all Americans of conscience to take a stand on what would be described as one of the most urgent moral issues of our time.

Daniel Lubin, writing in The Tablet, sees the up-swell in Islamophobia as a “new anti-Semitism” and notes that:

[M]any of the tropes of classic anti-Semitism have been revived and given new force on the American right. Once again jingoistic politicians and commentators posit a religious conspiracy breeding within Western society, pledging allegiance to an alien power, conspiring with allies at the highest levels of government to overturn the existing order. Because the propagators of these conspiracy theories are not anti-Semitic but militantly pro-Israel, and because their targets are not Jews but Muslims, the ADL and other Jewish groups have had little to say about them. But since the election of President Barack Obama, this Islamophobic discourse has rapidly intensified.

While the political operatives behind the anti-mosque campaign speak the language of nativism and American exceptionalism, their ideology is itself something of a European import. Most of the tropes of the American “anti-jihadists,” as they call themselves, are taken from European models: a “creeping” imposition of sharia, Muslim allegiance to the ummah rather than to the nation-state, the coming demographic crisis as Muslims outbreed their Judeo-Christian counterparts. In recent years the call-to-arms about the impending Islamicization of Europe has become a well-worn genre, ranging from more sophisticated treatments like Christopher Caldwell’s Reflections on the Revolution in Europe to cruder polemics like Mark Steyn’s America Alone and Bat Ye’or’s Eurabia.

It would be a mistake to seek too precise a correspondence between the new Islamophobia and the old anti-Semitism, which differ in some key respects. Jews have never threatened to become a numerical majority, or even a sizable minority, in any European country, so anxiety about Jewish power naturally gravitated toward the myth of the shadowy elite manipulating the majority from behind the scenes. By contrast, anti-Muslim anxiety has focused on the supposed demographic threat posed by Muslims, in which the dusky hordes overwhelm the West by sheer weight of numbers. (“The sons of Allah breed like rats,” as the late Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci put it.) It may be that in many ways this Islamophobia shares more of the tropes of traditional anti-Catholicism than classic anti-Semitism.

But if the tropes do not always line up, there is some notable continuity in the players involved. One of the most striking stories of recent years has been the realignment of segments of the European far right behind a form of militant support for Israel.

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The man who won the war in Iraq

After Moqtada al-Sadr’s recent meeting with Ayad Allawi — a top contender for the prime minister post in Iraq — Babak Dehghanpisheh considers Sadr’s current position as a kingmaker in Iraqi politics and his larger ambitions.

Sadr can, rightfully, claim that his movement is one of the few on the Iraqi political scene that’s homegrown. Compare this to the Sadrists’ top rivals in the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI). For years, they’ve tried to fight the image that they were brought in on American tanks and are beholden to both Washington and Tehran, even changing their name because the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq sounded too Iranian. They tried appropriating the image of Iraq’s most senior cleric, Ayatollah Ali Sistani, to woo more supporters (there are still posters up around Baghdad showing the late ISCI leaders Ayatollah Mohammad Baqer Hakim and Abdul Aziz Hakim beside Sistani). Nothing worked. ISCI got wiped out at the polls in March and also had a pretty dismal showing during provincial elections last year.

The Sadrists, by contrast, aren’t going anywhere — which puts Washington, among others, in a bind. Sadr’s supporters are more than just a political party. The cleric is clearly following the Hezbollah model, creating a populist political movement backed by a battle-hardened militia. The language Sadr uses when discussing the U.S. presence in Iraq — resistance, occupation, martyrdom — could easily have been taken from a speech by Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah. All this has discouraged U.S. officials from holding talks with Sadr — something they’ve never done since 2003. It’s not exactly like Sadr has gone out of his way to open up a dialogue, either. In fact, Sadr and many of his top aides have made it clear that the Mahdi Army won’t disarm as long as there are American troops on Iraqi soil.
[…]
Sadr’s ambitions don’t cover Iraq’s domestic agenda alone. His high-profile trips to Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere indicate that he wants to be seen as a prominent regional player. He would like to promote his Mahdi Army as a member of the so-called “axis of resistance” made up by Hezbollah and Hamas, both of which have made their names by confronting the United States and Israel.

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Obama administration carries on the peace talks “tradition”

If you’re wondering how seriously to take the latest peace process gambit, this, from the Los Angeles Times, sums up the spirit of the latest move:

One White House official on Friday described peace talks as a “tradition” in which every American president must participate.

“This is something that there has been a long-standing U.S. commitment to engage with the Israelis and Palestinians on,” said John Brennan, assistant to the president for counter-terrorism and homeland security. “Previous administrations have dedicated much effort and energy to this, and the Obama administration is carrying this tradition on.”

Pardoning a Thanksgiving turkey, the National Christmas Lighting Ceremony, and sponsoring peace talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians — these are among the varied and wonderful traditions followed by American presidents and Barack Obama is no exception.

The New York Times strikes a more somber tone:

There is little confidence — close to none — on either side that the Obama administration’s goal of reaching a comprehensive deal in one year can be met.

Instead, there is a resigned fatalism in the air. Most analysts view the talks as pairing the unwilling with the unable — a strong right-wing Israeli coalition led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with no desire to reach an agreement against a relatively moderate Palestinian leadership that is too weak and divided to do so.

“These direct negotiations are the option of the crippled and the helpless,” remarked Zakaria al-Qaq, vice president of Al Quds University and a Palestinian moderate, when asked his view of the development. “It is an act of self-deception that will lead nowhere.”

And Nahum Barnea, Israel’s pre-eminent political columnist, said in a phone interview: “Most Israelis have decided that nothing is going to come out of it, that it will have no bearing on their lives. So why should they care?”

That such a dismissive tone comes not from the known rejectionists — the Islamists of Hamas who rule in Gaza and the leadership of the Israeli settler community in the West Bank — but from mainstream thinkers is telling of the mood.

Some Israelis who have spent their professional lives on peace talks with the Palestinians were upset by the fear that failed talks could prove worse than no talks. Yossi Beilin, for example, who left politics in 2008 after years as a leftist member of Parliament and government minister, said Friday that the Obama administration was wrong to set a one-year goal without consequences.

“I think this is a huge mistake by the U.S. administration,” he said by telephone. “There is not a chance in the world that in a year — or two or three — peace can be achieved. The gap between the sides is too big. Netanyahu did not come to power to divide Jerusalem or find a solution to the Palestinian refugees.”

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Pakistan flooding exposes our perverse priorities

At Foreign Policy, Colum Lynch writes:

Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi presented the U.N.’s members with a stark challenge: Help Pakistan recover from its most devastating natural disaster in modern history or run the risk of surrendering a key front in the war on terror.

“This disaster has hit us hard at a time, and in areas, where we are in the midst of fighting a war against extremists and terrorists,” Qureshi warned foreign delegates, including U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, at a U.N. donor’s conference on the Pakistani flood. “If we fail, it could undermine the hard won gains made by the government in our difficult and painful war against terrorism. We cannot allow this catastrophe to become an opportunity for the terrorists.”

Qureshi provided one of his darkest assessments to date of the political, economic and security costs of Pakistan’s floods, which have placed more than 20 million people in need of assistance, destroyed more than 900,000 homes and created financial losses of over $43 billion. “We are the people that the international community looks towards, as a bulwark against terrorism and extremism,” he said, adding that Pakistan “now looks towards the international community to show a similar determination and humanity in our hour of need.”

“[A] humanitarian disaster of monumental proportions,” says US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; renewed evidence of the devastating impact of global warming — but what’s the real danger? The threat that should worry all Americans? Terrorism.

This — the word “terrorism” — has become a mind-numbing drug that cuts us off from humanity and even the fate of the planet.

In a gesture presumably designed in part to pacify American fears, the Pakistani government announced today it will clamp down on the relief work of Islamist charities, even though they have responded to the crisis more effectively than the government itself. The move would seem likely to even further alienate a population that already feels abandoned by its own government.

Nathaniel Gronewold reports:

The death toll is much smaller than in past disasters: About 1,600 are believed dead so far. But experts say initial assessments show the scale of damage and human suffering left by torrential monsoon rains over the past three weeks dwarfs the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, 2005 Kashmir earthquake, 2008 Cyclone Nargis disaster in Burma, and Jan. 12 earthquake in Haiti — combined.

“What we face in Pakistan today is a natural calamity of unprecedented proportions,” Pakistan’s foreign minister, Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi, said during a special U.N. session to address the crisis, held here yesterday. “These are the worst monsoon floods in living memory.”

Debate is heating up over what caused the catastrophe, with experts pointing to deforestation, intensive land-use practices or mismanagement of the Indus River as possible causes. But top U.N. and Pakistani government officials are now clearly pointing to climate change as the principal culprit.

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Israeli attack on Iran not imminent

If there was a ministry of information it would release reports like this: “US Assures Israel That Iran Threat Is Not Imminent.” But why would Washington need to create such an agency when the New York Times so gladly provides the service?

In a report transparently written as a quasi-official response to Jeffrey Goldberg’s “The Point of No Return,” we learn that contrary to all the feverish speculation about an imminent strike on Iran, it turns out everything’s cool.

And maybe it is — though the Times’ Mazzetti and Sanger could do more credible reporting if they made an effort not to sound like a mouthpiece for the administration.

The one priceless quote in their article comes from Gary Samore, President Obama’s top adviser on nuclear issues, who when referring to an anticipated one year “dash time” that the Iranians would need to convert nuclear material into a working weapon, said: “A year is a very long period of time.”

Israeli officials said their assessments were coming into line with the American view, but they remain suspicious that Iran has a secret enrichment site yet to be discovered.

American officials said, in contrast to a year ago, that Iran’s nuclear program was not currently the central focus of discussions between top leaders in Washington and Jerusalem. During the last visit to Washington by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in early July, the Iranian program was relatively low on the agenda, according to one senior administration official.

The next time Netanyahu takes questions from the press, maybe someone can ask him whether he agrees with the White House’s assessment about the nature of time and that a year is indeed a very long period.

Another issue the article touches upon is the breakout capacity for the long-delayed National Intelligence Estimate. Since the White House seems eager to say what the NIE will say even before its been released, can we interpret this as an effort to shape the report that is itself supposed to shape the administration’s policy?

Finally, just to be sure that the Israel lobby does not become too despondent when they hear another war might not be just around the corner (despite their best efforts), the article closes by saying:

Even as American and Israeli officials agree that the date that Iran is likely to have a nuclear weapon has been pushed into the future, that does not mean that Israel has abandoned the idea of a possible military strike.

American officials said that Israel was particularly concerned that, over time, Iran’s supreme leader could order that nuclear materials be dispersed to secret locations around the country, making it less likely that an Israeli military strike would significantly cripple the program.

So have no fear — the option of a strike is still on the table, or to be precise, at some indeterminate point in the future there might be a strike and it could happen sooner rather than later because at some point (future or past) the Iranians could hide everything and maybe they already have secret facilities in which case the opportunity to destroy them has already past. Clear?

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The 9/11 holocaust and the ground zero mosque

The monument at the hypocentre of the Nagasaki atomic bomb blast

Another way of saying “sacred” is to say “off-limits.”

Something can be sanctified by placing a barrier around it constructed from rigid taboos. The most extreme among those taboos dictates not only silence but also exclusion.

In such a way, for many Americans, 9/11 has been sanctified. The sacred idea occupies a sacred space and only those willing to display sufficient awe and reverence can be allowed to enter.

Yet there are limits on how high this sacred narrative can be raised. We do not, by and large, talk about the 9/11 holocaust — and rightfully so. To link a day on which 3,000 Americans died, to a period during which 6 million Jews were systematically slaughtered, would be absurd and obscene.

When on 9/11 Benjamin Netanyahu said it was “very good” — because it would generate sympathy for Israelis — his response would no doubt have been rather different had he been asked whether the attacks would help Americans now better understand the significance of the Holocaust.

So we don’t talk about a 9/11 holocaust. Instead, with little to no comment, the attacks have another but equally perverse association: with the nuclear devastation brought down on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

The more obvious World War Two association — with the December 7 attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 — was initially referenced through headlines that reinvoked Roosevelt’s description of that day as “a date which will live in infamy,” but beyond the date — 9/11 — the name that stuck was “ground zero.”

The rubble and dust at the crushed feet of the World Trade Center might have conjured images of nuclear devastation yet little sense that a stolen word required a buried memory.

If Americans were polled today and asked which city they associate with “ground zero,” would any answer “Hiroshima” or “Nagasaki”? Most likely, very few — even though the anniversary of the nuclear bombings has only just passed.

On August 6, a ceremony marking the 65th anniversary of the bombing that killed 140,000 people in Hiroshima, was attended for the first time by a representative of the US government, the US ambassador to Japan, John Ross. This was not the first time an American official had been allowed to attend — it was the first time an invitation had been accepted. So far, no sitting American president has ever visited Hiroshima.

Within a decade of the nuclear attacks, the Catholic Memorial Cathedral for World Peace had been opened in Hiroshima. The Japanese raised few objections to the construction a church close to the original ground zero.

Meanwhile, Pearl Harbor is being invoked once again in a vain effort to conceal the Islamophobia that permeates objections to the New York mosque.

Dr Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, and a member of the federally created United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, “insists that his opposition to the Cordoba House project is principled — that he would and has opposed similar efforts when they upset local populations.”

“There is a Japanese Shinto shine, I am told, blocks from the USS Arizona,” Land said. “That isn’t appropriate even 60 years later. Three-thousand Americans died there and they died at the hands of people acting on behalf of the Japanese Empire.”

There isn’t, in fact, a Shinto shrine near Pearl Harbor [writes Brian Beutler], though many conservatives use this hypothetical as an example of a non-Muslim shrine they’d oppose for similar reasons.

Around the same time that Western dignitaries gathered in Japan in order to commemorate the ghastly effects of nuclear destruction, another group of public figures embarked on an equally historic pilgrimage.

Eight Muslim-American imams, along with President Obama’s envoy to combat anti-Semitism, Hannah Rosenthal, traveled to the sites of the former Dachau and Auschwitz concentration camps in Germany and Poland.

“These Muslim leaders were experiencing something they knew nothing about,” Rosenthal told Politico. She had many family members at Auschwitz, including her grandparents. “I can’t believe anyone walks into Auschwitz and leaves the same person. I watched them break down. I broke down in front of suitcases. … It is the cemetery of my whole family.”

The American imams later released a statement saying:

We bear witness to the absolute horror and tragedy of the Holocaust where over twelve million human souls perished, including six million Jews.

We condemn any attempts to deny this historical reality and declare such denials or any justification of this tragedy as against the Islamic code of ethics.

We condemn anti-Semitism in any form. No creation of Almighty God should face discrimination based on his or her faith or religious conviction.

We stand united as Muslim American faith and community leaders and recognize that we have a shared responsibility to continue to work together with leaders of all faiths and their communities to fight the dehumanization of all peoples based on their religion, race or ethnicity. With the disturbing rise of anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of hatred, rhetoric and bigotry, now more than ever, people of faith must stand together for truth.

Strangely, the Anti-Defamation League’s Abe Foxman and the Investigative Project’s Steve Emerson, author of “American Jihad,” lobbied U.S. officials against participating in the trip.

Perhaps if those now concerned about the Cordoba House project gave more attention to what it means to enter a sacred space, rather than how to keep others out, they would understand that a real sense of the sacred springs from keeping ones eyes open — not sealing them closed.

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Defending sacred ground

At Foreign Policy, Stephen Walt enters the fray on the Cordoba House controversy and notes that America’s founders understood that “trying to impose religious orthodoxy on the new republic was a recipe for endless strife.”

The principle of religious tolerance is not a piece of clothing that one can don or doff at will, or as the political winds shift. Indeed, it is most essential not when we are dealing with groups whose beliefs are close to our own and therefore familiar; the whole idea of “religious tolerance” is about accepting communities of faith that are different from our own and that might strike us at first as alien or off-putting. Tolerance doesn’t mean a thing if we apply it only to people who are already just like us.

The latest example of tortured reasoning on this subject was New York Times columnist Ross Douthat’s column a couple of days ago. Douthat explained the controversy as a struggle between “two Americas”: one of them based on the liberal principle of tolerance and the other based on the defense of a certain understanding of “Anglo-Protestant” culture.

In addition to glossing over the latter’s dark underbelly (slavery, anti-Semitism, anti-Catholic prejudice, etc.), Douthat’s main error was to view these two aspects of American society as of equal moral value. In his view, it’s legitimate to object to the community center because we have to respect the feeling of those Americans (including Douthat himself, one assumes) who believe that the United States is at its heart an “Anglo-Protestant/Catholic/Judeo-Christian” nation.

Even if one accepts this simplistic dichotomy, what Douthat fails to realize is that the history of the United States is the story of the gradual triumph of the first America over the second. The United States may have been founded (more-or-less) by a group of “Anglo-Protestants,” and defenders of that culture often fought rear-guard actions against newcomers whose practices were different (Jews, Catholics, Japanese, Chinese, etc.). But the founding principle of religious tolerance gradually overcame the various Anglo-Protestant prejudices, which allowed other groups to assimilate and thrive, to the great benefit of the country as a whole. The two America’s are not morally equivalent, and we should all be grateful that when those two Americas have come into conflict, it is the second America that has steadily given way to a broader vision of a free and open democracy.

The final disappointment, of course, has been the response of some prominent Democrats, despite the salutary example that Mayor Bloomberg set for them. President Obama gave a powerful defense of his own last week, and then promptly diluted his initial statement with some ill-advised waffling. (Obama’s desire to find common ground is sometimes admirable, but someone needs to remind him that when one side is right and the other is wrong, moving towards the middle is movement in the wrong direction.)

Even more disappointing was Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s cowardly dissembling, in which he simultaneously claimed to support religious freedom but said he thought the community center should nonetheless be moved somewhere else.

Here’s the challenge I would pose to anyone pushing the “sensitivity” argument: How far from the site of the World Trade Center is an appropriately sensitive distance for constructing an Islamic center? Is some place else a few more blocks away or in another city? And what kinds of construction are or are not permissible inside the sensitivity zone?

These are of course redundant questions because the sanctity of so-called hallowed ground is not the issue. This is not about sacred ground; it’s about appealing to unreasoned sentiment. The demographic where politicians (and the press) make the easiest sale is filled with people who discern more clarity in their feelings than their thoughts. If it don’t feel right what more need one think or say? This is the sacred ground — untroubled by complexity — that the mosque’s critics so jealously defend.

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“Ground Zero mosque” is the new “death panels”

Jeffrey Feldman writes:

Cordoba House is not some sudden and new issue, but the latest attempt by the Republican Party to displace meaningful political debate with pitch-fork-and-torches style mass hysteria.

The themes of these newest wave of delirium are familiar: Muslim conspiracy; infiltration by foreign terrorists; Liberal collusion.

Are we a nation ruled by mass hysteria — a nation that sees conspiracy behind every unfamiliar face? Or are we a nation that raises above the tyranny of the mob roused to rid the village of those in league with the Devil? Those are the questions that the Mayor and President should have asked, but nobody seems to be asking them.

When mass hysteria has been allowed in the past to drive public policy it lead inexorably to shameful results that destroyed lives and weakened democratic society.

William Dalrymple writes:

Feisal Abdul Rauf of the Cordoba Initiative is one of America’s leading thinkers of Sufism, the mystical form of Islam, which in terms of goals and outlook couldn’t be farther from the violent Wahhabism of the jihadists. His videos and sermons preach love, the remembrance of God (or “zikr”) and reconciliation. His slightly New Agey rhetoric makes him sound, for better or worse, like a Muslim Deepak Chopra. But in the eyes of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, he is an infidel-loving, grave-worshiping apostate; they no doubt regard him as a legitimate target for assassination.

For such moderate, pluralistic Sufi imams are the front line against the most violent forms of Islam. In the most radical parts of the Muslim world, Sufi leaders risk their lives for their tolerant beliefs, every bit as bravely as American troops on the ground in Baghdad and Kabul do. Sufism is the most pluralistic incarnation of Islam — accessible to the learned and the ignorant, the faithful and nonbelievers — and is thus a uniquely valuable bridge between East and West.

The great Sufi saints like the 13th-century Persian poet Rumi held that all existence and all religions were one, all manifestations of the same divine reality. What was important was not the empty ritual of the mosque, church, synagogue or temple, but the striving to understand that divinity can best be reached through the gateway of the human heart: that we all can find paradise within us, if we know where to look. In some ways Sufism, with its emphasis on love rather than judgment, represents the New Testament of Islam.

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In Iraq, Western clocks, but Middle Eastern time

Anthony Shadid writes:

Iraq today is replete with American-ordered deadlines, timetables and benchmarks that sought to create realities where realities never existed. The administration is leaving now on its own terms. Perhaps staying would make an already traumatized Iraq worse; much of its dysfunction dates to the American occupation and its earliest days. But the very nature of America’s departure — with no government formed, an unpredictable Iraqi military, and deep popular disenchantment with a hapless political elite — underscores one of the most enduring traits of American strategy in the Middle East.

Powerful but fickle, the United States has never seemed to understand time, at least not in the way it is acknowledged by Islamic activists willing to serve decades in jail, Syrian presidents assured that American policies will eventually change, and Iraq’s neighbors, who bide their turn to fill the vacuum left by an American departure.

Its policies — support for Israel and authoritarian Arab governments, the invasion of Iraq and war in Afghanistan — may shape sentiments toward it. But time, an American measure of it, often shapes the way it acts.

“It certainly is American politics and it is American culture, the sense that we are an impatient people,” said Ryan C. Crocker, a former ambassador to Iraq and veteran diplomat in the Arab world. “ ‘Tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, at the latest, and if that’s not going to happen, we’re going to move on.’ ”

The Middle East has long suffered under a peculiarly American notion that if the world’s greatest power wants something, it will somehow come to pass, on its schedule. In Lebanon, the Palestinian territories and Syria, the messy realities never quite fit. Since 2003, they rarely have in Iraq, either.

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Goldberg willing to bet on a “better” chance that Israel will strike Iran

Fox News reports:

Israel has until the weekend to launch a military strike on Iran’s first nuclear plant before the humanitarian risk of an attack becomes too great, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton said Tuesday.

A Russian company is expected to help Iran start loading nuclear fuel into its plant starting on Saturday, after which an attack on the Bushehr reactor could trigger harmful radiation, which Israel wants to avoid, Bolton said. So unless the Israelis act immediately to shut down the facility, it will be too late.

“Once it’s close to the reactor … the risk is when the reactor is attacked, there will be a release of radiation into the air,” Bolton told FoxNews.com. “It’s most unlikely that they would act militarily after fuel rods are loaded.”

The attack Iran story gets increasingly bizarre. Now we have neocon commentators like Bolton watching the clock as though this was some kind of sporting event and at the same time, presenting Israel as a thoroughly responsible player. While Israel might be willing to destabilize the whole region, it wouldn’t want to risk spreading nuclear fallout into the Gulf. But as Marsha Cohen points out, the risks from fallout would not simply be humanitarian — they would be economic:

Besides the catastrophic human and environmental toll of such an attack, the sea lanes through which much of the world’s oil supplies pass would be endangered.

Iranians know this. In 1980, Iran bombed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear power plant before it contained any radioactive material. Osirak was quickly repaired by the French contractors who built it. Eight months later Osirak was partially destroyed by Israeli jets, aided by Iranian intelligence.

Meanwhile, at The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg and Robin Wright are now placing bets on the likelihood of an attack — not in the next few days, but the coming months.

“By July next year, I’ll wager that neither Israel nor the United States will have bombed Iran,” says Wright.

“I, of course, believe that there is a better than 50 percent chance Israel will strike …Iran by this time next year,” says Goldberg.

Note the phrasing chosen by the man who just a few days ago expressed “profound, paralyzing ambivalence” about whether on attack on Iran would be a good idea. He doesn’t now simply reiterate his expectation that an attack is more likely but that it looks like a “better” than 50 percent chance.

Casually chosen words? Maybe, but if Goldberg was being asked how likely another 9/11 attack might be and he thought it more likely than not to happen, I doubt that he would say there is a better than 50 percent chance of such an attack, would he?

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Is Israel’s legitimacy under challenge?

Henry Siegman writes:

When a state’s denial of the individual and national rights of a large part of its population becomes permanent — a permanence that has been the goal of Israel’s settlement project from its very outset (and that many believe has been achieved) — that state ceases to be a democracy. When the reason for that double disenfranchisement is that population’s ethnic and religious identity, the state is practicing a form of apartheid or racism. The democratic dispensation that Israel provides for its mostly Jewish citizenry cannot hide its changing (or changed) character. A political arrangement that limits democracy to a privileged class and keeps others behind military checkpoints, barbed-wire fences and separation walls does not define democracy. It defines its absence.

The claim that Israel is the incarnation and defender of Jewish values is contradicted by its treatment of an Arab population that has now lived for over two generations under Israel’s military subjugation – treatment that Moshe Arens, a former Likud Defense and Foreign Minister, has warned is turning that population into a permanent underclass of “carriers of water and hewers of wood.” It is entirely at odds with Biblical admonitions and Prophetic exhortations warning against injustices committed by the privileged and the powerful against the stranger and the powerless.

Israel’s problem is not the Palestinian or Arab refusal to recognize it as a Jewish state. It is, rather, the increasing difficulty of Jews familiar with Jewish values to recognize it as a Jewish state. Rather than demanding that Palestinians declaim on Israel’s democratic and Jewish identity, or conjuring non-existent threats to Israel’s existence, Netanyahu and his government would be better advised adjusting Israel’s policies toward a people that has lived under its unforgiving military occupation in a way that honors their country’s democratic and Jewish beginnings. That would contribute far more to its “legitimacy” and to its long-range security than its present undemocratic and very un-Jewish course.

Whether it is in response to a purported campaign of de-legitimization against Israel or a more broadly defined “new anti-Semitism”, the ploy that Israel’s defenders employ is invariably the same: it is to deflect criticism of Israeli actions by treating them as attacks on Jewish identity.

It is not what we do; it is who we are — and that we are powerless to change.

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