Category Archives: Issues

Obama officials moving away from 2011 Afghan date

McClatchy reports:

The Obama administration has decided to begin publicly walking away from what it once touted as key deadlines in the war in Afghanistan in an effort to de-emphasize President Barack Obama’s pledge that he’d begin withdrawing U.S. forces in July 2011, administration and military officials have told McClatchy.

The new policy will be on display next week during a conference of NATO countries in Lisbon, Portugal, where the administration hopes to introduce a timeline that calls for the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan by 2014, the year when Afghan President Hamid Karzai once said Afghan troops could provide their own security, three senior officials told McClatchy, along with others speaking anonymously as a matter of policy.

The Pentagon also has decided not to announce specific dates for handing security responsibility for several Afghan provinces to local officials and instead intends to work out a more vague definition of transition when it meets with its NATO allies.

What a year ago had been touted as an extensive December review of the strategy now also will be less expansive and will offer no major changes in strategy, the officials told McClatchy. So far, the U.S. Central Command, the military division that oversees Afghanistan operations, hasn’t submitted any kind of withdrawal order for forces for the July deadline, two of those officials told McClatchy.

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British deny George Bush’s claims that torture helped foil terror plots

The Guardian reports:

British officials said today there was no evidence to support claims by George Bush, the former US president, that information extracted by “waterboarding” saved British lives by foiling attacks on Heathrow airport and Canary Wharf. In his memoirs, Bush said the practice – condemned by Downing Street as torture – was used in CIA interrogations of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks on the US.

He said Mohammed, below, was one of three al-Qaida suspects subjected to waterboarding. “Their interrogations helped break up plots to attack American diplomatic facilities abroad, Heathrow airport, and Canary Wharf in London, and multiple targets in the United States,” he wrote.

It is not the first time information extracted from Mohammed has been claimed as helping to prevent al-Qaida attacks on British targets. Mohammed cited attacks on Heathrow, Big Ben and Canary Wharf in a list of 31 plots he described at Guantánamo Bay after he was subjected to waterboarding 183 times following his capture in Pakistan in March 2003. The Heathrow alert in fact happened a month before his arrest, with army tanks parked around the airport, in what was widely regarded as an overreaction.

British counter-terrorism officials distanced themselves from Bush’s claims. They said Mohammed provided “extremely valuable” information which was passed on to security and intelligence agencies, but that it mainly related to al-Qaida’s structure and was not known to have been extracted through torture. Eliza Manningham-Buller,head of MI5 at the time, said earlier this year that the government protested to the US over the torture of terror suspects, but that the Americans concealed Mohammed’s waterboarding from Britain. Officials said today the US still had not officially told the British government about the conditions in which Mohammed was held.

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The fight has broken out inside the Jewish family

Philip Weiss writes:

The news from the Jewish Federations’ General Assembly in New Orleans is important. I announce landmarks every 100 yards, but this is a big one. The significance of the event is that several young Jews calling themselves proud Jews took Palestinian solidarity into the Jewish family and made trouble with an explosive disruption of rightwinger Netanyahu’s speech. These Jews were brave and surely inspired by the countless brave Palestinians who have taken far greater risks in the occupied territories. But they said, this is our place to voice our anger, an official Jewish space. We are part of the Jewish community. Deal. And the official community responded with rage and violence.

These young people are liberators. The Jewish family will never be the same; the fight has begun inside the family and begun openly at last. Now Netanyahu, whose coalition included fascistic elements, has finally been called out to his face inside the Israel lobby, by angry young Jews, as their parents’ generation swallowed his ethnic cleansing and landgrabbing.

Last year at J Street, the Palestinian solidarity types were quiet. Rabbi Eric Yoffie attacked noble Richard Goldstone in a keynote speech and some people booed but they swallowed it. The panels were all Zionist. Jonathan Chait attacked this website twice during a panel with Matt Yglesias, and I said nothing about it. Passive. I thought, what is my place here, am I a real Jew?

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Bibi, Tom Friedman, and U.S. Jews divesting from Israel

Bradley Burston writes:

Ahead of a New Orleans address to the General Assembly [GA] of the Jewish Federations of North America, sources quoted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as having said that there is fundamental support for Israel within the United States.

“We may have lost Thomas Friedman, but I don’t think we lost America,” Netanyahu was quoted as saying.

I was getting ready to leave for the airport, when my wife caught me unawares. This was the first inkling I would have of something I was to learn again and again:

Where it comes to any issue of the Mideast conflict, and where it comes to questions relating to the complex relations between the U.S. Jewish community and Israel, you can either answer in three hours, or in one sentence. This was hers:

“You know what it is – American Jews are divesting from Israel.”

This is what I was to see in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Marin County, Portland and Seattle. It’s not that they’re getting involved in significant numbers in the divestment movement. It’s that American Jews are divesting emotionally. They are quietly – but in terms of impact, dramatically – withdrawing altogether.

Not just Jews. Americans. And the younger they are, that is, the more crucial they are to Israel’s future, the more likely they are to divest.

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Police step in to protect young Jewish protesters from Jewish mob violence — in New Orleans

For more details on the protest during Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to the Jewish Federation’s General Assembly in New Orleans yesterday, see the post below.

One of the protesters has now provided her own first hand account of what happened. Although sheriffs were in attendance to provide security for the event, in the end the police needed to protect the protesters from the mob!

Rae Abileah writes:

I stood up and unfurled a pink banner that read, “The settlements betray Jewish values” and in Hebrew: “Justice, justice you shall pursue,” a verse from Deuteronomy. The crowd had grown increasingly hostile with each disruption, and I was instantly attacked from all sides. A man in the row in front of me pulled the El Al seat cover off his chair and tried to gag me with it. Another man came up from the side and grabbed me by the throat. I fell into a pile of chairs until two female sheriffs buoyed me up and hustled me out of the room. The police later confided that they were trying to protect me from the angry mob and get me out of there in one piece.

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Tribal loyalty versus the integrity of the individual

(Young Jews disrupt Netanyahu at Jewish General Assembly from stefanie fox on Vimeo.)

Human beings are animals, but the aspects of our nature that can most fittingly be called animalistic, most often express themselves collectively. They require the abandonment of a sense of self, a loss of the awareness of individual autonomy and personal integrity as individual will submerges in collective will.

When individuals from Jewish Voice of Peace disrupted Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech in New Orleans yesterday, waves of anger swept through the audience.

Jeff Shapira from San Antonio grabbed one of the protesters by the throat, but when later asked whether he had ever put a woman in a choke hold before, he responded: “Not really. No. I really did not know what was going to happen, I wanted to keep her in check. I was trying to help.”

As can be seen in the video above, a rabbi in the audience performed his own ritualistic denunciation of the protests by tearing and biting one of the protest banners as though he was slaughtering a sacrificial animal.

The collective judgement was, no doubt, that these are all appropriate ways of dealing with “self-hating” Jews — the only type of Jew who can be expected to criticize Israel.

Meanwhile, Alfred Grosser, a Jewish intellectual and Holocaust survivor who is the keynote speaker at a ceremony marking the 72nd anniversary of Kristallnacht in Frankfurt tonight, has similarly been attacked because he describes himself as pro-Palestinian.

In an interview with the Jerusalem Post, Israel’s deputy chief of mission in Germany, Emmanuel Nahshon, said that Frankfurt’s decision to invite Mr. Grosser to speak at the memorial “casts an unfortunate and unnecessary shadow on the event.” He also said that Mr. Grosser’s criticism of Israel was “illegitimate and immoral,” and suggested that his “extreme opinions are tainted by self-hatred.”

The campaign to demean and delegitimize individual Jews by describing them as being afflicted by self-hatred is transparently coercive. There is perhaps a sense that the tribe cannot allow itself to rip itself apart by rejecting any of its members, but those who display what is cast as a form of tribal disloyalty must be neutered and silenced — both as a form of punishment and as a way of signalling to waverers the risks involved in stepping out of line. Rather than the threat of exile, there is the threat of being branded a lesser Jew, a self-hating Jew.

But the phrase itself — self-hating — seems to indicate more. This “self” is a particular form of Jewish identity which recognizes no such thing as a fully autonomous individual identity. A tribal consciousness, which rejects true autonomy, cannot accommodate expressions of personal conscience through dissent. The putative self which is supposedly being hated, exists inside the individual only in as much as the individual mirrors the collective

While social mechanisms such as these stretch all the way back to the origins of primate behavior, in the age of complex, diverse modern societies, they point in a darker direction: this is where fascism finds its base.

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The New Orleans protesters later described who they are and why they took their action:

They also released a declaration at Young Jewish and Proud:

A vision of collective identity, purpose and values written by and for young Jews committed to justice in Israel and Palestine. It is an invitation and call to action for both our peers and our elders, launched as a counter-protest at the 2010 Jewish Federation General Assembly in New Orleans. [Read their full declaration.]

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Britain’s Abu Ghraib

The Guardian reports:

Evidence of the alleged systematic and brutal mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners at a secret British military interrogation centre that is being described as “the UK’s Abu Ghraib” emerged yesterday during high court proceedings brought by more than 200 former inmates.

The court was told there was evidence that detainees were starved, deprived of sleep, subjected to sensory deprivation and threatened with execution at the shadowy facilities near Basra operated by the Joint Forces Interrogation Team, or JFIT.

It also received allegations that JFIT’s prisoners were beaten, forced to kneel in stressful positions for up to 30 hours at a time, and that some were subjected to electric shocks. Some of the prisoners say that they were subject to sexual humiliation by women soldiers, while others allege that they were held for days in cells as small as one metre square.

Michael Fordham QC, for the former inmates, said the question needed to be asked: “Is this Britain’s Abu Ghraib?”

The evidence of abuse is emerging weeks after defence officials admitted that British soldiers and airmen are suspected of being responsible for the murder and manslaughter of a number of Iraqi civilians, in addition to the high-profile case of Baha Mousa, the hotel receptionist tortured to death by troops in September 2003. One man is alleged to have been kicked to death aboard an RAF helicopter, while two others died after being held for questioning.

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GOP senator pushes for war to ‘neuter’ Iran

AFP reports:

The United States faces a possible war with Iran to curb its nuclear ambitions and a “period of confrontation” with China over its currency, a top US lawmaker warned Saturday.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said his fellow conservative, fresh from their historic elections romp this week, support “bold” action to deal with Iran.

If President Barack Obama “decides to be tough with Iran beyond sanctions, I think he is going to feel a lot of Republican support for the idea that we cannot let Iran develop a nuclear weapon,” he told the Halifax International Security Forum.

“The last thing America wants is another military conflict, but the last thing the world needs is a nuclear-armed Iran… Containment is off the table.”

The South Carolina Republican saw the United States going to war with the Islamic republic “not to just neutralize their nuclear program, but to sink their navy, destroy their air force and deliver a decisive blow to the Revolutionary Guard, in other words neuter that regime.”

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Somewhere in hell, Joseph Stalin is smiling

Tony Keller writes:

In the 1930s, that great legal innovator Joseph Stalin introduced the show trial. The accused would stand up in court and willingly, even eagerly, confess to the most fantastical crimes. At the first great show trial, in 1936, Grigori Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and other former senior Communist party members admitted to being members of a terrorist organization. They said they had plotted to kill Stalin and other Soviet leaders. In the following years, as Stalin’s purges picked up steam, show trials featured increasingly incredible stories, usually involving the accused admitting to being agents of Western imperialism.

What made men confess to things that were unlikely, sometimes impossible and usually unsupported by other evidence? Torture. Sleep deprivation, beatings, and threats against their wives and children. To stop the pain, you had to confess to whatever it was that the interrogators wanted to hear. And then you had to get up in court and willingly confess to it all over again.

The trial of Omar Khadr has been called a travesty of justice, a violation of the rule of law, a kangaroo court and lots of other things beside. But what it really was, was a show trial.

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Obama’s problem simply defined: it was the banks

James K Galbraith writes:

Bruce Bartlett says it was a failure to focus. Paul Krugman says it was a failure of nerve. Nancy Pelosi says it was the economy’s failure. Barack Obama says it was his own failure — to explain that he was, in fact, focused on the economy.

As Krugman rightly stipulates, Monday-morning quarterbacks should say exactly what different play they would have called. Paul’s answer is that the stimulus package should have been bigger. No disagreement: I was one voice calling for a much larger program back when. Yet this answer is not sufficient.

The original sin of Obama’s presidency was to assign economic policy to a closed circle of bank-friendly economists and Bush carryovers. Larry Summers. Timothy Geithner. Ben Bernanke. These men had no personal commitment to the goal of an early recovery, no stake in the Democratic Party, no interest in the larger success of Barack Obama. Their primary goal, instead, was and remains to protect their own past decisions and their own professional futures.

Up to a point, one can defend the decisions taken in September-October 2008 under the stress of a rapidly collapsing financial system. The Bush administration was, by that time, nearly defunct. Panic was in the air, as was political blackmail — with the threat that the October through January months might be irreparably brutal. Stopgaps were needed, they were concocted, and they held the line.

But one cannot defend the actions of Team Obama on taking office. Law, policy and politics all pointed in one direction: turn the systemically dangerous banks over to Sheila Bair and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Insure the depositors, replace the management, fire the lobbyists, audit the books, prosecute the frauds, and restructure and downsize the institutions. The financial system would have been cleaned up. And the big bankers would have been beaten as a political force.

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Is Islamic finance the new challenge to Wall Street?

Andrew Sheng writes:

In the 1990s, Islamic finance was a fledgling fringe industry. But today, its size has grown from roughly US$150 billion to about US$1 trillion in size. This is of course still small relative to some of the largest global fund managers and universal banks, who manage more than US$1 trillion each. But the double-digit growth and potential size of the market cannot be ignored. Some pundits think that the market size will reach US$2 trillion within the next five years.

There are roughly 1.3 billion Muslims in the world, with 138 million in India and roughly 30 million in China. These are growing markets in terms of income and wealth. As the Muslim community seeks to invest in interest-free banking, Islamic funds have been growing in leaps and bounds. Today, there are roughly US$800 billion in Islamic banking funds, US$100 billion in the sukuk (or Islamic bond) market and another US$100 billion in takaful (Islamic insurance) and fund management business. Hong Kong, of course, introduced the Hang Seng Shariah Compliant China Index Fund in 2008 to attract Muslim investors.

As oil prices continue to remain at high levels, the Middle East oil-producers will continue to generate surpluses that must be parked somewhere. With the Western markets and economies under pressure, some of that money has moved Eastwards.

Will Islamic finance be a serious challenge to traditional Wall Street finance? That is a question that deserves a good answer.

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The Tea Party is tapping into legitimate grievances

Noam Chomsky writes:

The U.S. midterm elections register a level of anger, fear and disillusionment in the country like nothing I can recall in my lifetime. Since the Democrats are in power, they bear the brunt of the revulsion over our current socioeconomic and political situation.

More than half the “mainstream Americans” in a Rasmussen poll last month said they view the Tea Party movement favorably—a reflection of the spirit of disenchantment.

The grievances are legitimate. For more than 30 years, real incomes for the majority of the population have stagnated or declined while work hours and insecurity have increased, along with debt. Wealth has accumulated, but in very few pockets, leading to unprecedented inequality.

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Caliphate on the range? The shariah precedent in American courts

Asma Uddin writes:

Judging by how Oklahoma voted in the recent election, one might conclude that despite its tiny Muslim population, Oklahoma was on the verge of becoming an Islamic caliphate in Middle America. The reality is of course far different. Oklahoma State Question 755, which passed, asked voters whether state courts should be forbidden “from considering or using Sharia Law.” Similar legislation is being considered in Tennessee, and Louisiana recently became the first state to pass several bills banning international law from its courts. Although the Louisiana bills didn’t mention shariah explicitly, they were apparently motivated at least in part by a similar distaste for Muslims and their religious law, and a desire to “protect” constitutional law. These constitutional law protectors appear, however, to be a little fuzzy on what constitutional law actually means, how it allows for various forms of religious arbitration and what the state can and cannot do to regulate religious freedoms.

In the discussion and debate surrounding Question 755, supporters in search of an example where the bogeyman shariah was permitted inside American courtrooms kept pointing to a New Jersey case where the court denied a restraining order to a woman who was sexually assaulted by her then-husband. The judge ruled that the husband did not have a “criminal desire to or intent to sexually assault” her as the husband was merely under the impression that he was exercising his prerogative as a husband under Islamic law. What’s rarely reported, however, is that the decision was promptly overturned on appeal because the application of shariah, or the “cultural defense,” conflicted with civil law.

This example is noteworthy not just because the decision was overturned because it got the law wrong, or that it is the only one of its kind, but because it is an atypical example of how shariah has made an appearance in American courtrooms. The typical cases are far from frightening. For example, arbitration under shariah law is permitted in the U.S., just like arbitration according to Christian principles or Jewish religious tradition is permitted, or according to any other set of rules two contracting parties may agree to. Indeed, prominent Christian groups like PromiseKeepers have long required Christian arbitration clauses in their contracts with vendors.

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YouTube bows to political pressure and removes Awlaki videos

On Wednesday, The Guardian reported:

Hundreds of videos inciting violence, including some linked to the suspected al-Qaida mastermind of the cargo plane bomb plot, were removed from YouTube today.

The videos were highlighted after the conviction of Roshonara Choudhry for attempting to kill the former [British] government minister Stephen Timms. She was radicalised watching internet sermons by Anwar al-Awlaki, an Islamist cleric now in Yemen who the US suspects masterminded several terrorist plots.

In a private speech in the US last week, the security minister, Lady Neville-Jones, called on the White House to “take down this hateful material” in cases where servers were located within its jurisdiction.

“When you have incitement to murder, when you have people actively calling for the killing of their fellow citizens and when you have the means to stop that person doing so, then I believe we should act,” she said. “Those websites would categorically not be allowed in the UK. They incite cold-blooded murder and as such are surely contrary to the public good.”

Will YouTube also now be looking at videos conveying messages of hate from people like Michael Savage?

When Byron Williams went on a shooting spree in California this summer, his desire to “start a revolution” was inspired in part, it was reported, by Savage’s talk radio rants. Speaking about the ACLU, Savage had warned: “They will kill us all if they’re not stopped.” Williams aimed to do just that by killing the ACLU’s leaders.

In 2006, Savage called for the killing of 100 million Muslims:

There are too many RDDBs [red-diaper doper babies, Savage’s term for people supposedly raised by Marxist parents] in high places and in the media and in the courts for us to stand up to this fanatical enemy. And so unless the RDDB is reined in somehow or taken out of power, we’re going to die as a nation. I swear to God that’s what people are saying to me. And these are intelligent people, wealthy people. They are very depressed by the weakness that America is showing to these psychotics in the Muslim world. They say, “Oh, there’s a billion of them.” I said, “So, kill 100 million of them, then there’ll be 900 million of them.” I mean, would you rather die — would you rather us die than them? I mean, what is it going to take for you people to wake up? Would you rather we disappear or we die? Or would you rather they disappear and they die? Because you’re going to have to make that choice sooner rather than later.

In 2008, after the Mumbai attacks, Savage advocated genocide, referring to the tribal areas of Western Pakistan, saying: “[T]here’s no question that entire region needs to be annihilated and stripped off the earth.”

From Michael Savage, to Pastors John Hagee, Rod Parsley and Terry Jones, America has no shortage of hate-mongers whose words are capable of inciting violence. Should YouTube and other publishers and media outlets be policing their operations so that none of these men can find an easily available platform from which to vent their anger?

Not if we want to protect the First Amendment.

In 1969 in Brandenburg v. Ohio, the Supreme Court ruled that “the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.” The ruling went on to cite Noto v United States (1961) which said: “the mere abstract teaching … of the moral propriety or even moral necessity for a resort to force and violence, is not the same as preparing a group for violent action and steeling it to such action.”

On this basis, it seems pretty clear that lectures by Anwar al-Awlaki, available on YouTube, and Michael Savage’s talk-radio rants, are both examples of free speech protected by the First Amendment.

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Bill Clinton’s prayer for peace

Bill Clinton referring to Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996: 'Who the fuck does he think he is? Who's the fucking superpower here?'

Less than two weeks ago, while observers gathered around the fetid corpse of the Middle East peace process, once again looking to see whether it might miraculously spring back to life, Laura Rozen reported:

[T]he New America Foundation’s Steve Clemons said he is convinced that the man who can help Obama bring peace to the Middle East is former President Bill Clinton. That is the spouse of Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

“Bill Clinton is the only guy I can think of who is trusted and liked by all sides,” Clemons told Politico. “He is the only guy I know who successfully wrestled and pushed Netanyahu to do what he wants to do. And Clinton has spectacular popularity in Israel and Obama doesn’t.”

The former president “has granular understanding of every deal and piece of the deal – behind the scenes stuff that has been distorted and reframed,” Clemons continued. “No one has a better grasp, … sees the opportunity and has the global stature to both cajole, seduce and embarrass” the parties towards an agreement.

And under that scenario, which Clemons concedes is a float though one influenced by some kibitzing on the peace process with Bill Clinton at an event last week, how would Obama control the force that is Bill Clinton?

“Why would you want to control him,” Clemons responded. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict “has become a global fault line in the eyes of the world, and a manifestation of America’s weakness today. It has far greater significance” strategically “than northern Ireland. My bet is this is one of several defining issues” for the U.S. and the Obama administration, Clemons continued.

And how would Hillary Clinton not lose her authority as Secretary of State if her husband played such a role?

“Hillary Clinton should embrace and support what he does, giving him the latitude to be a creative player,” Clemons responded. “He can outmaneuver” the obstacles to an agreement and “all their corks will rise.”

Lo and behold the force that is Bill Clinton has appeared like a comet soaring over the horizon, shining light when all seemed consumed by darkness. Or maybe not.

In his remembrance of Yitzhak Rabin who was assassinated 15 years ago, Clinton’s main message seems to be that Rabin could have delivered on the implementation of the two-state solution — but he got shot, and the rest is history.

In Clinton’s view, all the necessary pieces for a resolution to the conflict are now lined up — everyone just needs to get on with the work at hand.

Let us pray on this anniversary that [Rabin’s] service and sacrifice will be redeemed in the Holy Land and that all of us, wherever we live, whatever our capacity, will do our part to build a world where cooperation triumphs over conflict. Rabin’s spirit continues to light the path, but we must all decide to take it.

Those are not the words of an unstoppable force. “We must all decide” is really just a positive construction on the assertion that has been repeated so many times before: “We can’t want peace more than the parties themselves.”

If Clinton is laying groundwork here it is not for his own entry into the fray; it is instead the path along which Obama can gracefully bow out by saying, I did what I could but the time was not right.

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Obama is through with Middle East peacemaking — at least for now

Larry Derfner writes:

Whatever the Obama administration may say, it is through with Middle East peacemaking, at least for this term. It has zero leverage over Israel’s right-wing government because the roaring Republicans love this government and especially its prime minister. The Republicans love the settlements, love Israeli rule over the West Bank, love the blockade of Gaza and, no less important, hate Palestinians and the rest of the Muslim world.

These are the political forces that have Obama in check. Well before the Tea Party surfaced, the GOP had lurched to the right on Israel/Palestine, lining up squarely with Likud and the Council of Jewish Communities in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip, and now these people are in the catbird’s seat in Washington.

If you were a Palestinian, would you trust that the US could even soften the Netanyahu government in negotiations now, much less “deliver” it? No, you wouldn’t, and neither would I, so I don’t see why the Palestinians should be expected to go on playing with Israel when America is the dealer. If the game wasn’t rigged against them before, it obviously is after Tuesday.

And since Israel isn’t going to budge and America can’t force it to, that means the ball is in the Palestinians’ court.

What are they going to do, now that Pax Americana is not an option for them, not for at least two years and maybe a lot longer? Hopefully, they’re not going to return to violence. Hopefully, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad will not resign, nor be overthrown by Hamas in the West Bank like they were in the Gaza Strip.

The best-case scenario is that the PA will make good on its threat to seek UN recognition for statehood, knowing that even if the US vetoes such a resolution, it would be a show of strength. It would create a sense of urgency. Challenging the occupation in the UN might shake the moderate West into acting as a counterweight to Tea Party America in the conflict.

Hopefully, the PA will also keep pressing its claim on Arab east Jerusalem nonviolently, as Fayyad sought to do this week, with some success. And hopefully, the moderate West will show its support, as British Foreign Secretary William Hague did yesterday by meeting Palestinian activists on the city’s Arab side.

Ynet reports:

British Foreign Minister William Hague on Wednesday met with the Palestinian prime minister and Israeli foreign minister, but his visit with Palestinian activists made the most headlines.

Hague met with three senior Palestinian activists spearheading the popular struggle against Jewish settlements and the West Bank security fence, and expressed his support in their non-violent struggle.

“Hague told us that he supports the non-violent popular struggle, similarly to the official statement made by the European Union,” Mahmud Zuhari, one of the activists, told Ynet.

The meeting was held in the West Bank town of Bitunia, just south of Ramallah, in an area overlooking the security fence and Ofer Prison, where many activists are jailed.

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Tea Party going to Israel

Ynet reports:

First they took Washington, now they’ll take Jerusalem? With victory in the congressional elections less than a day old, Florida Senator Marco Rubio (Rep.) who considers himself a ‘Tea Party’ member, is set to arrive in Israel on Sunday. Rubio’s visit so soon after the election win is a move that strengthens assessments that the congress in its current form will continue where it left off – at least where Israel is concerned.

The pro-Israeli AIPAC lobby applauded the election results, congratulated the winners and said: “It is abundantly clear that the 112th Congress will continue America’s long tradition of staunch support for a strong, safe and secure Israel and an abiding friendship between the United States and our most reliable ally in the Middle East.”

AIPAC expressed satisfaction over the fact that most pro-Israel senators were reelected and sent messages of congratulations to senators and congress members from both parties.

In a speech delivered to the Republican Jewish Coalition in June, soon after the Mavi Marmara flotilla massacre, Rubio said:

If Israel’s right to self-defense is undermined by efforts to lift its legal and necessary blockade of Gaza, which serves to stop Hamas from arming itself with deadly weapons, there will be lasting consequences, not just for Israel but also for the United States and ultimately for the world.

Israel’s enemies are — or will soon be — America’s enemies as well. They are emboldened any time they sense any sort of daylight between the United States and Israel. And now more than any other time, it is important that America has a firm and clear relationship with Israel.

In late August, Rubio said on Fox News (as he has said repeatedly) that Israel is America’s “best friend in the world.”

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