Category Archives: Issues

The Tea Party’s ‘utopian market populism’

Jefferson Morley writes: In his new book, “Pity the Billionaire,” Tom Frank turns his mordant eye on the unlikeliest political development of the Obama presidency: how the crash of 2008 served to strengthen the political right. The deregulation of Wall Street, championed for 30 years by right-wing leaders, had led to an economic catastrophe so frightening that the country elected a liberal Democrat to the presidency. Yet two years later, the most conservative faction of the Republican Party, the Tea Party, had taken effective control of the House of Representatives, the regulation of Wall Street had stalled, and the champions of economic deregulation in Washington had emerged stronger than ever.

Frank, author of the bestselling book “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” provides a pithy and nuanced explanation of what he calls the “hard-times swindle.” He spoke with Salon from his father’s home in Kansas City, Mo.

Early in the book, you describe the moment in the spring of 2009 when free-market economics had been so thoroughly discredited that Newsweek could run a cover story proclaiming, “We’re all socialists now.” What happened? Why did that moment dissipate?

I saw that cover so many times [at Tea Party events]. For these people, that rang the alarm bell. I think the AIG moment [when the bailed-out insurance behemoth used taxpayer relief to dole out huge bonuses to its executives] was in some ways the high point of the crisis, when [the politics] could have gone either way. There was this amazing public outrage, and that for me was the turning point. Newsweek had another cover, “Thinking Man’s Guide to Populism,” and I remember this feeling around the country, that people were just furious. Somehow the right captured the sense of anger. They completely captured it. You could say they had no right to it, but they did. And one of the reasons they were able to do it was because the liberals were not interested in that anger.

I’m speaking here of the liberal culture in Washington, D.C. There was no Occupy Wall Street movement [at that time] and there was only people like me on the fringes talking about it. The liberals had their leader in Barack Obama … they had their various people in Congress. But these people are completely unfamiliar with populist anger. It’s an alien thing to them. They don’t trust it, and they have trouble speaking to it. I like Barack Obama, but at the end of the day he’s a very professorial kind of guy. The liberals totally missed the opportunity, and the right was able to grab it.

Looking back on it, I feel like people like myself were part of the problem. We sort of assumed with the Democrats in power, the system would correct itself.

One of the problems with liberalism in this country is that it’s headquartered in Washington and its leaders are a very comfortable class of people. Washington is one of the richest cities in the country, maybe the richest. It’s not a place that feels the crisis, that feels the economic downturn. By and large, the real estate market stayed OK. The city continued to boom. The contracts continued to flow. What we’re talking about here is the failure of modern liberalism. At one time it was a movement of working-class people. The idea that liberals wouldn’t feel economic pain was ridiculous. That’s who liberals were. No more. [Continue reading…]

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Remote warfare for an ‘oddly passive’ president

The Washington Post reports: When Obama was sworn into office in 2009, the nation’s clandestine drone war was confined to a single country, Pakistan, where 44 strikes over five years had left about 400 people dead, according to the New America Foundation. The number of strikes has since soared to nearly 240, and the number of those killed, according to conservative estimates, has more than quadrupled.

The number of strikes in Pakistan has declined this year, partly because the CIA has occasionally suspended them to ease tensions at moments of crisis. One lull followed the arrest of an American agency contractor who killed two Pakistani men; another came after the U.S. commando raid that killed bin Laden. The CIA’s most recent period of restraint followed U.S. military airstrikes last month that inadvertently killed 24 Pakistani soldiers along the Afghan border. At the same time, U.S. officials have said that the number of “high-value” al-Qaeda targets in Pakistan has dwindled to two.

Administration officials said the expansion of the program under Obama has largely been driven by the timeline of the drone’s development. Remotely piloted aircraft were used during the Clinton and Bush administrations, but only in recent years have they become advanced and abundant enough to be deployed on such a large scale.

The number of drone aircraft has exploded in the past three years. A recent study by the Congressional Budget Office [PDF] counted 775 Predators, Reapers and other medium- and long-range drones in the U.S. inventory, with hundreds more in the pipeline.

About 30 of those aircraft have been allocated to the CIA, officials said. But the agency has a separate category that doesn’t show up in any public accounting, a fleet of stealth drones that were developed and acquired under a highly compartmentalized CIA program created after the Sept. 11 attacks. The RQ-170 model that recently crashed in Iran exposed the agency’s use of stealth drones to spy on that country’s nuclear program, but the planes have also been used in other countries.

The escalation of the lethal drone campaign under Obama was driven to an extent by early counterterrorism decisions. Shuttering the CIA’s detention program and halting transfers to Guantanamo Bay left few options beyond drone strikes or detention by often unreliable allies.

Key members of Obama’s national security team came into office more inclined to endorse drone strikes than were their counterparts under Bush, current and former officials said.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, former CIA director and current Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, and counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan seemed always ready to step on the accelerator, said a former official who served in both administrations and was supportive of the program. Current administration officials did not dispute the former official’s characterization of the internal dynamics.

The only member of Obama’s team known to have formally raised objections to the expanding drone campaign is Dennis Blair, who served as director of national intelligence.

During a National Security Council meeting in November 2009, Blair sought to override the agenda and force a debate on the use of drones, according to two participants.

Blair has since articulated his concerns publicly, calling for a suspension of unilateral drone strikes in Pakistan, which he argues damage relations with that country and kill mainly mid-level militants. But he now speaks as a private citizen. His opinion contributed to his isolation from Obama’s inner circle, and he was fired last year.

Obama himself was “oddly passive in this world,” the former official said, tending to defer on drone policy to senior aides whose instincts often dovetailed with the institutional agendas of the CIA and JSOC [Joint Special Operations Command].

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Iran and the U.S. trade threats

The Associated Press reports: Oil prices fell on Wednesday, after Saudi Arabia said it will offset any loss of oil from a threatened Iranian blockade of a crucial tanker route in the Middle East.

The U.S. Navy warned that any disruption of traffic through the vital Strait of Hormuz “will not be tolerated.”

In New York, benchmark crude fell $1.98, or about 2 percent, to finish at $99.36 a barrel.

Brent crude fell $1.71 to end at $107.56 a barrel in London.

On Tuesday Iran’s vice president said that his country was ready to close the Strait of Hormuz — a vital waterway through which a third of the world’s tanker traffic flows — if western nations embargo the country’s oil because of Iran’s ongoing nuclear program. The head of the country’s navy added on Wednesday that his fleet can block the strait if need be. His comments came as Iran held a 10-day drill in international waters near the strategic route, which is 21 miles wide at its narrowest point.

A Saudi oil ministry official told The Associated Press that Saudi Arabia and other Gulf producers are ready to provide more oil if Iran tries to block the strait. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the issue. He didn’t specify other routes that could be used to transport oil, although they would likely be longer and more expensive for getting crude to the region’s customers.

“Anyone who threatens to disrupt freedom of navigation in an international strait is clearly outside the community of nations; any disruption will not be tolerated,” said Lt. Rebecca Rebarich, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, which is responsible for naval operations in the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea.

Steve LeVine writes: Is Iran’s threat to close the Strait of Hormuz — the seaway chokepoint for some 17 percent of the world’s daily oil supply — as empty as its vow to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth? Oil traders by and large think so — a day after Iranian Vice President Mohammad Reza Rahimi issued the threat, global oil prices were sharply lower.

Traders say the main reason for their non-chalance is the extent of U.S. military forces deployed in the area. The idea is that, if Iran mines the waterway — which links the Persian Gulf with the Indian Ocean — or harasses oil tankers with its fast patrol boats (such as the one pictured above), the U.S. Navy will swiftly come to the rescue.

At the Financial Times, Najmeh Bozorgmehr and Javier Blas say we may be witnessing a reflection of Iranian politics ahead of March parliamentary elections.

Yet the characters in this latest Persian Gulf drama are among the most unpredictable on the big geopolitical chessboard. While Iran may very well be simply huffing and puffing, it is not out of the question that it would, as it has before, make trouble for oil traffic in the Strait. If it does, that would be serious stuff because of those who are dispatching the 13 oil and liquefied natural gas supertankers that ply Hormuz every day — in addition to Iran, they are Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

In his daily note to clients today, Connecticut-based oil analyst Peter Beutel steps away from the machismo of other traders, and notes the stakes should Iran make good on its threat: “Under any scenario, [it] would be a game-changer. It could keep millions of barrels a day from moving out of the Petroleum Gulf — perhaps as much as 19 million barrels per day — and would instantly draw all consuming nations into opposition with Tehran. The U.S. and its Arab allies would be compelled to open [the strait] by military force.”

I remarked last week on the poor record of sanctions in terms of achieving foreign policy objectives. But it is hung up because, notwithstanding the lobby that earns a living by urging war with this or that country, there is very little upside, and much in the way of downside, in any military solution. So if you wish to forestall a nuclear-armed Iran, and war is too risky, sanctions are about all there is.

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U.S. and Israel consider ‘red lines’ triggering war on Iran?

“Israel and the U.S. are discussing ‘red lines’ in Iran’s nuclear program, that if crossed would justify a preemptive strike on its nuclear facilities,” reports Haaretz citing an article in the Daily Beast. But no one in the Obama administration is spelling out what those red lines would be. It sounds less like preparation to issue concrete threats to Iran and more like the latest display of a threatening posture — which is not to say there’s no reason for concern, but simply that the headlines with ‘red lines’ and ‘triggers’ may overstate what’s happening.

Eli Lake reports: Until recently, current and former Obama administration officials would barely broach the topic in public, only hinting vaguely that all options are on the table to stop Iran’s program. Part of the reason for this was that Obama came into office committed to pursuing negotiations with Iran. When the diplomatic approach petered out, the White House began building international and economic pressure on Iran, often in close coordination with Israel.

All the while, secret sabotage initiatives like a computer worm known as Stuxnet that infected the Siemens-made logic boards at the Natanz centrifuge facility in Iran, continued apace. New U.S. estimates say that Stuxnet delayed Iran’s nuclear enrichment work by at most a year, despite earlier estimates that suggested the damage was more extensive.

Last week in a CBS interview, Panetta said Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon is a “red line.” White House advisers have more recently broached the subject more specifically in private conversations with outside experts on the subject.

Patrick Clawson, the director of research for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy said, “If Iran were found to be sneaking out or breaking out then the president’s advisers are firmly persuaded he would authorize the use of military force to stop it.” But Clawson added, “The response they frequently get from the foreign policy experts is considerable skepticism that this is correct, not that these people are lying to us, but rather when the occasion comes we just don’t know how the president will react.”

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The big lie

Michael Thomas writes: Imagine a vast field on which a terrible battle has recently been fought, the bare ground cratered by fusillade after fusillade of heavy artillery, trees reduced to blackened stumps, wisps of toxic gas hanging in the gray, and corpses everywhere.

A terrible scene, made worse by the sound of distant laughter, because somehow, on the heights commanding the dead zone, the officers’ club has made it through intact. From its balconies flutter bunting, and across the blasted landscape there comes a chorus of hearty male voices in counterpoint to the wheedling of cadres of wheel-greasers, the click of betting chips, the orotund declamations of a visiting congressional delegation: in sum, the celebratory hullabaloo of a class of people that has sent entire nations off to perish but whose only concern right now is whether the ’11 is ready to drink and who’ll see to tipping the servants. The notion that there might be someone or some force out there getting ready to slouch toward the buttonwood tree to exact retribution scarcely ruffles the celebrants’ joy.

Ah, Wall Street. As it was in the beginning, is now, and hopes to God it ever will be, world without end. Amen.

Or so it seems to me. It was in May 1961 that a series of circumstances took me from the hushed precincts of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I was working as a curatorial assistant in the European Paintings Department, to Lehman Brothers, to begin what for the next 30 years would be an involvement—I hesitate to call it “a career”—in investment banking. I would promote and execute deals, sit on boards, kiss ass, and lie through my teeth: the whole megillah. In consequence of which, I would wear Savile Row and carry a Hermès briefcase. I had Mme. Claude’s home number in Paris and I frequented the best clubs in a half-dozen cities. But I had a problem: I was unable to develop the anticommunitarian moral opacity that is the key to real success on Wall Street.

I had my doubts from the beginning. A few months after I started to work downtown, I ran into an old friend from college and before, a man later to become one of New York’s most esteemed writers and editors.

“So,” he asked, “how do you like what you’re doing now?”

“I like it quite a lot,” I said. And this was true: these were new frontiers for me, the pace was lively, the money was good enough ($6,500 a year), and there was so much to learn. But there was one aspect of Wall Street that I found morally confusing if not distasteful: “There’s one thing that bothers me, though. It’s this: on the one hand the New York Stock Exchange has sent its president, the estimable G. Keith Funston, out into the countryside, supported by an expensive, extensive advertising campaign, to exhort the proletariat to Own your share of America! As if buying 50 shares of IBM or GM in 1961 is as much of a civic duty as buying a $100 war bond in 1943.”

I then added, “But here’s the thing. At the same time as Funston’s out there doing his thing, if you ask any veteran Wall Street pro how the Street works, the first thing he’ll tell you is: The public is always wrong. Always.” I paused to let that sink in, then confessed, “I have to tell you, I have trouble squaring that circle.” [Continue reading…]

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Obama’s freedom to kill anyone anywhere

Glenn Greenwald writes: [A] new Washington Post article which contains three short passages that I really want to highlight because they so vividly capture the essence of so much. The article, by Greg Miller, is being promoted by the Post this way: “In 3 years, the Obama administration has built a vast drone/killing operation”; it describes the complete secrecy behind which this is all being carried out and notes: “no president has ever relied so extensively on the secret killing of individuals to advance the nation’s security goals.” Here is the first beautifully revealing passage:

Senior Democrats barely blink at the idea that a president from their party has assembled such a highly efficient machine for the targeted killing of suspected terrorists. It is a measure of the extent to which the drone campaign has become an awkward open secret in Washington that even those inclined to express misgivings can only allude to a program that, officially, they are not allowed to discuss.

In sum: the President can kill whomever he wants anywhere in the world (including U.S. citizens) without a shred of check or oversight, and has massively escalated these killings since taking office (at the time of Obama’s inauguration, the U.S. used drone attacks in only one country (Pakistan); under Obama, these attacks have occurred in at least six Muslim countries). Because it’s a Democrat (rather than big, bad George W. Bush) doing this, virtually no members of that Party utter a peep of objection (a few are willing to express only the most tepid, abstract “concerns” about the possibility of future abuse). And even though these systematic, covert killings are widely known and discussed in newspapers all over the world — particularly in the places where they continue to extinguish the lives of innocent people by the dozens, including children — Obama designates even the existence of the program a secret, which means our democratic representatives and all of official Washington are barred by the force of law from commenting on it or even acknowledging that a CIA drone program exists (a prohibition enforced by an administration that has prosecuted leaks it dislikes more harshly than any other prior administration).

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Vote Obama — if you want a centrist Republican for president

Glenn Greenwald writes: American presidential elections are increasingly indistinguishable from the reality TV competitions drowning the nation’s airwaves. Both are vapid, personality-driven and painfully protracted affairs, with the winners crowned by virtue of their ability to appear slightly more tolerable than the cast of annoying rejects whom the public eliminates one by one. When, earlier this year, America’s tawdriest (and one of its most-watched) reality TV show hosts, Donald Trump, inserted himself into the campaign circus as a threatened contestant, he fitted right in, immediately catapulting to the top of audience polls before announcing he would not join the show.

The Republican presidential primaries – shortly to determine who will be the finalist to face off, and likely lose, against Barack Obama next November – has been a particularly base spectacle. That the contest has devolved into an embarrassing clown show has many causes, beginning with the fact that GOP voters loathe Mitt Romney, their belief-free, anointed-by-Wall-Street frontrunner who clearly has the best chance of defeating the president.

In a desperate attempt to find someone less slithery and soulless (not to mention less Mormon), party members have lurched manically from one ludicrous candidate to the next, only to watch in horror as each wilted the moment they were subjected to scrutiny. Incessant pleas to the party’s ostensibly more respectable conservatives to enter the race have been repeatedly rebuffed. Now, only Romney remains viable. Republican voters are thus slowly resigning themselves to marching behind a vacant, supremely malleable technocrat whom they plainly detest.

In fairness to the much-maligned GOP field, they face a formidable hurdle: how to credibly attack Obama when he has adopted so many of their party’s defining beliefs.

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Book examines America’s turn from science, warns of danger for democracy

McClatchy reports: Americans have trouble dealing with science, and one place that’s especially obvious is in presidential campaigns, says Shawn Lawrence Otto, who tried, with limited success, to get the candidates to debate scientific questions in the 2008 presidential election. Otto is the author of a new book, “Fool me twice: Fighting the assault on science in America,” which opens with a quote from Thomas Jefferson: “Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government.” And if the people and their leaders aren’t well informed and don’t use scientific information to solve modern problems, Otto suggests, the United States could soon skid into decline. “Without the mooring provided by the well-informed opinion of the people, governments may become paralyzed or, worse, corrupted by powerful interests seeking to oppress and enslave,” he writes. Today, he adds, Congress seems paralyzed and “ideology and rhetoric increasingly guide policy discussion, often bearing little relationship to factual reality.” In 2008, Otto and a group of other writers tried to organize a presidential debate on science issues. Neither Barack Obama nor John McCain was interested. In the end, the two candidates agreed to respond to 14 questions in writing, and Otto’s group posted them on its ScienceDebate.org website. Otto said the group plans to try for another science debate in 2012. Reporters play a role in whether science is discussed in campaigns. A League of Conservation Voters analysis in early 2008 found that prime-time TV journalists asked 2,975 questions in 171 interviews. Only six questions were about climate change, “and the same could be said of any one of several major policy topoics surrounding science,” Otto writes in the book.

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Careful what you wish for: an unstable world as U.S. declines

Tony Karon writes: Alarmed by the unchecked global dominance of Washington in the late 1990s, France’s then-foreign minister Hubert Vedrine described the US as a “hyperpower” whose influence needed to be checked for the greater good. This would be achieved, he suggested, by the construction of a “multipolar” world order, in which US influence would be balanced by the emergence of a number of different power centres.

As 2011 draws to a close, there can be no doubt that “multipolarity” is upon us, and then some: Washington has found its abilities limited to influence the dramatic political events unfolding across the wider Middle East and beyond. The US in 2012 faces a wave of crises that could have profound consequences for America’s well-being, yet with dramatically weakened levers of influence to shape the outcomes to those crises.

Today, decisions made in Ankara, Beijing, Paris, Berlin, Tehran, Riyadh and even Doha are having an effect on international affairs that might have been unthinkable just a few years ago. A quick glance at a few of the crises currently on the boil suggests the “multipolar” world may be a more unpredictable place than Mr Vedrine imagined.

President Barack Obama pulled the last US troops out of Iraq saying that it could become a “model for the entire region”, but the bloodbath visited on Baghdad by car bombers in the final weeks of 2011 was a grim reminder that Iraq may still be headed down the abyss of sectarian bloodshed. The attacks come against a backdrop of sharply rising sectarian tensions as the Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki appears to be systematically removing leading Sunnis from the political scene, raising fears of a renewed insurgency.

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Iran threatens to close Strait of Hormuz if West imposes oil sanctions

The New York Times reports: Iran issued a blunt warning on Tuesday that it would block the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most important oil transit point, if Western powers attempt to impose an embargo on Iranian petroleum exports in their campaign to isolate the country over its suspect nuclear energy program.

The warning, issued by Vice President Mohammad Reza Rahimi, came as Iran’s naval forces were in the midst of a 10-day war games exercise in a vast area of the Arabian Sea and Gulf of Oman. The Strait of Hormuz, a narrow passage that connects the Gulf of Oman to the Persian Gulf, is the route for one third of the world’s oil-tanker traffic.

“If Iran oil is banned not a single drop of oil will pass through Hormuz Strait,” Mr. Rahimi was quoted as saying by the official Islamic Republic News Agency at a conference in Tehran.

“We are not interested in any hostility,” he was quoted as saying. “Our motto is friendship and brotherhood, but Westerners are not willing to abandon their plots.”

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One family in Gaza

Jen Marlowe writes: Just months after the Israeli assault that killed 1,390 Palestinians, I visited Gaza. Among dozens of painful stories I heard, one family stood out. I spent several days with Kamal and Wafaa Awajah, playing with their children, sleeping in the tent they were living in, and filming their story.

Wafaa described the execution of their son, Ibrahim. As she spoke, her children played on the rubble of their destroyed home. Kamal talked about struggling to help his kids heal from trauma.

What compelled me to tell the Awajah family’s story? I was moved not only by their tragedy but by the love for their children in Wafaa and Kamal’s every word.

Palestinians in Gaza are depicted either as violent terrorists or as helpless victims. The Awajah family challenges both portrayals. Through one family’s story, the larger tragedy of Gaza is exposed, and the courage and resilience of its people shines through.

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Occupations in winter

Justin Elliot reports: Local occupations around the country are linking up through frequent, massive conference calls, tightening what is now an extremely loose national network that operates under the Occupy banner into a more focused force.

The effort, now known as InterOccupy, started out of Occupy Wall Street in New York in mid-October. It has since grown into an elaborate website with multiple weekly phone calls during which occupiers trade ideas, coordinate multistate actions, and plan for the future. Participants at about 150 occupations around the country (and a few internationally) have now participated in the calls, organizers tell me.

“The [weekly] national calls have brought people together, including people who are otherwise isolated in their own occupations,” says Nate Kleinman, an Occupy Philly participant and InterOccupy organizer. “There’s usually a strong particular culture at individual occupations. It’s immensely valuable to have a place once a week where people come together from across the country and share ideas and their hopes for what the movement can accomplish.”

Sometimes that has meant planning specific coordinated actions.

On Dec. 12, Occupy protesters on the West Coast held a day to “shut down Wall Street on the waterfront,” resulting in the partial closure of several ports. In the two weeks before the protests, there were six InterOccupy conference calls in which representatives from 25 occupations planned the day of action, according to Joan Donovan, an InterOccupy organizer and Occupy Los Angeles participant. Those calls covered everything from coordination of the timing of protests up and down the coast to lessons learned from Oakland organizers from a previous port demonstration to strategies to minimize arrests, she said.

I listened in on a recent general call and came away with two impressions: Despite the reduction in media coverage of the Occupy movement after the initial burst of interest and the evictions of physical occupations, there is an efflorescence of activism happening around the country that didn’t exist just a few months ago. And occupiers are planning and organizing in many directions at once.

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Gender apartheid and Israel’s next war

CNN‘s Belief Blog reports: Eight-year-old Naama Margolis is afraid to walk to school.

She’s afraid, her mother says, because life has become a nightmare for anyone who doesn’t follow the edicts of the ultra-Orthodox Jews who have flocked in recent years to their city of 80,000 just outside of Jerusalem.

“They threaten everyone in town over everything they don’t like,” Hadassah Margolis told CNN on Monday. “We have suffered swearing, they have had eggs, tomatoes, stink bombs and rocks thrown at us. They do this to anyone who doesn’t think, look or act as they do.”

“I’m afraid when one of them passes by me,” she earlier told Israel’s Channel 2 “I don’t know if he will spit on me or will curse me ‘whore’, ‘slut’, “bastards” ‘go away from here’ – exactly in those words.”

The Margolis family, whose story was detailed Friday in a nationwide television broadcast, is the latest in a series of high-profile examples of what critics say are attempts by groups within Israel’s ultra-Orthodox community to impose its religious beliefs on the public and excise women from the public sphere.

Last week, for instance, a young Israeli woman made headlines when she detailed her experience refusing a ultra-Orthodox man’s demands that she sit in the back of a bus. Several well-publicized rallies have also voiced opposition to various forms of gender segregation favored by the ultra-Orthodox.

In addition to demanding more modesty and trying to segregate bus passengers, ultra-Orthodox Jews have posted unofficial signs in some neighborhoods commanding men and women to walk on different sides of the street.

In the Jerusalem Post, Ruth Eglash writes: Whereas in the past most of Israeli society and the authorities simply tolerated haredi demonstrations and even saw the harassment of women as just part of the “ultra-Orthodox experience,” today ever more people are becoming frustrated with such religious zealotry, which been continuing unchecked for years.

Israeli society – backed by politicians both male and female, on the left and on the right, and even religious and secular – are pretty much in agreement that this extremism and any sort of discrimination against women is wrong and must be stopped.

Last week, at a Tel Aviv conference, female lawmakers and leaders emphasized their determination to halt any more attacks against women’s place in society. This week, women’s rights activists are preparing a mass protest on Wednesday, having already vowed to battle this phenomenon head-on.

Even Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu voiced his determination to put an end to this dangerous trend, stating in his cabinet meeting Sunday, “Israel is a democratic, Western, liberal state. The public sphere is open and safe for everyone – men and women alike. There is no place for harassment or discrimination.”

Netanyahu said that he has already called on the Israel Police to take full action “to arrest and stop those who spit, harass or raise a hand.”

The problem, however, is that it may be too late for the government to reign in these religious fanatics who seem prepared to defend their extreme beliefs at all costs, even if it means jeopardizing the Jewish state’s precarious religious-secular status quo and even starting some form of civil war.

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Disentangling criticism of Israel from anti-Semitism

Pragmatic Middle East writes: If you’ve only read Caroline Glick in the Jerusalem Post and Eli Lake in the Weekly Standard over the past couple of weeks, you’d have to conclude that there was one thing that New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, Time magazine columnist Joe Klein, US Ambassador to Belgium Howard Gutman, Secretary of Defense Panetta, Secretary of State Clinton and President Obama had in common: they’re all anti-Semites!

Never mind the fact that some of the members of this esteemed club are Jewish. But all of them made the mistake of criticizing the policies of the state of Israel or highlighting the very real power that the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has on American foreign policy.

It’s high time to disentangle anti-Semitism from criticism of Israeli government policy or AIPAC.

Gutman made the mistake of saying that some manifestations of anti-Semitism are “born of and reflecting the tension between Israel, the Palestinian Territories and neighboring Arab states in the Middle East over the continuing Israeli-Palestinian problem.” His statement was largely vilified and misrepresented in Israeli media and on the US GOP primary trail.

Popular Israeli columnist Glick, in an article in the Jerusalem Post, says that Gutman “effectively denied the existence of anti-Semitism in Europe” and that he, Obama, Clinton and Panetta all engage in “classical anti-Semitic behavior.” Never mind that the Obama Administration backed Israel at the United Nation and has given billions of dollars in unconditional annual aid to the Israeli military. Glick concludes by saying that the United States under Obama is an ally of Israel no more, yet the Israeli Defense Forces don’t seem to be in a hurry to return the money.

Friedman was harangued for the following quote in his December 13th column, “Newt, Mitt, Bibi and Vladimir”:

“I sure hope that Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.”

Never mind that Friedman is Jewish, an unabashed supporter of the Jewish state and a donor to pro-Israel causes. As MJ Rosenberg said in subsequent article, “If Tom Friedman is an anti-Semite, there is no such thing; the charge has simply lost its meaning.”

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The Israeli occupation the world forgot: the Golan Heights

Mya Guarnieri writes: Earlier this month, The Atlantic published “2011: The Year in Photos.” It included a picture of Palestinian protesters climbing the fence that separates, according to The Atlantic, the “Israel-Syria border… near Majdal Shams.” The caption explained that Majdal Shams is located in “northern Israel.”

Imagine the fury if mainstream media outlets referred to the occupied West Bank as “Judea and Samaria.” That would be equivalent to calling the Golan Heights, which also lies beyond the Green Line, “northern Israel.” Calling the Golan “northern Israel” tacitly legitimizes the 1981 Israeli annexation, which has been rejected by the United Nations on numerous occasions in numerous resolutions and goes unrecognized by the international community.

It is this kind of blind repetition of the Israeli government line that has caused both Israeli citizens and the world to forget that the Golan Heights is occupied territory, not unlike East Jerusalem. Those who live in both East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights are not citizens of the state but residents who pay taxes to the Israeli government and receive next to nothing in return. The residents of the Golan run their own hospitals. They build their own schools. And, as is the case in East Jerusalem and Area C in the West Bank, they usually build without permits as Israel will not allow for natural population growth.

As is the case in the West Bank, Arab residents of the occupied Golan Heights have faced restricted access to their lands, land confiscation, and tight water restrictions that impede their farming. According to the NGO Jawlan- Golan for the Development of the Arab villages, the area’s Israeli settlers use as much as17 times more water per capita than the indigenous inhabitants of the Golan.

As is the case with Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Palestinian citizens of Israel, Israeli expulsions and expansion has split Golan families into two. In 1967, 130,000 Arab inhabitants were expelled from the Golan Heights, leaving only 6000 residents behind. As a number of Majdal Shams residents told me, every house in the Golan is divided. Everyone has family in Syria, loved ones they see through binoculars at Shouting Hill, cousins they talk to through bullhorns, brothers they have never met.

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