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VIDEO Debate: Rashid Khalidi VS Jonathan Tobin: Attacking Iran, AIPAC, Israel-Palestine & Obama

by on Monday, March 5, 2012 at 3:44 pm EDT in Iran, Middle East, Politics, World

Yesterday, President Barack Obama addressed the annual policy conference of the powerful pro-Israel lobby group, AIPAC.

In his speech, he attempted to walk a fine line between reassuring the group of his ‘sacrosanct’ commitment to both Israel’s security and ethnic identity as a ‘Jewish state,’ and yet tamp down on its insistence that the United States bomb Iran.

In making the case that he has been one of the most pro-Israel Presidents to date, he outlined the many ways he has bolstered the country’s security apparatus over the last three years, and then boasted about some of the more controversial diplomatic efforts he has made on Israel’s behalf:

And just as we’ve been there with our security assistance, we’ve been there through our diplomacy. When the Goldstone report unfairly singled out Israel for criticism, we challenged it. (Applause.) When Israel was isolated in the aftermath of the flotilla incident, we supported them. (Applause.) When the Durban conference was commemorated, we boycotted it, and we will always reject the notion that Zionism is racism. (Applause.) 

When one-sided resolutions are brought up at the Human Rights Council, we oppose them. When Israeli diplomats feared for their lives in Cairo, we intervened to save them. (Applause.) When there are efforts to boycott or divest from Israel, we will stand against them. (Applause.) And whenever an effort is made to de-legitimize the state of Israel, my administration has opposed them. (Applause.) So there should not be a shred of doubt by now — when the chips are down, I have Israel’s back. (Applause.)

This morning, President Obama received Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House, and it is being reported that much of their discussion was focused on Iran, and that the two continued to buck heads on the ‘red lines’ necessary for war:

Even though Obama has offered assurances of stiffened U.S. resolve against Iran before the White House meeting, the two allies are still far apart on explicit nuclear “red lines” that Tehran must not be allowed to cross, and they have yet to agree on a time frame for when military action may be necessary. 

While the two leaders hashed it out at the Oval Office, Amy Goodman moderated an excellent debate between Rashid Khalidi of Columbia University and Commentary Magazine’s Senior Online Editor, Jonathan Tobin.

Tobin’s latest article, entitled, “What’s Missing From Obama’s AIPAC Speech? Red Lines on Iran and Palestinians,” offers a right-leaning critique of Obama’s AIPAC speech, in which he accuses Obama of refusing to make the necessary move from mere rhetoric to military action:

But even more significant was the fact that despite his repeated vows to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, there was little indication that Obama is prepared to make the leap from talking about the danger to actually doing something.

Khalidi does a fine job, here, of injecting some reality into the now-all-too-familiar AIPAC-propagandized discourse on the Iranian “threat,” propagated here by Tobin.

WATCH:

Part 1 of 2:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0srgPKy41c[/youtube]

Part 2 of 2:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gbrs51AdMgo[/youtube]

Transcript

If U.S. Liberals Share Same Values As Israel, Why Do You Applaud Pat Buchanan’s Ouster From MSNBC?

by on Monday, February 20, 2012 at 12:28 pm EDT in Middle East, Politics, World

On Thursday, February 16th, MSNBC effectively dropped its go-to conservative pundit Pat Buchanan, after having suspended him four months earlier, due to the uproar caused by his latest book, Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?

The controversy stemmed from one of the book’s premises that America’s identity will cease to exist as it loses its white Christian majority. Buchanan wrote, “America is being transformed into a multiracial, multicultural, multilingual, multiethnic stew of a nation that has no successful precedent in the history of the world.”

Take a look at the names of his chapters to get an idea of just why this book has so inflamed liberal American sensibilities:

1. The Passing of a Superpower
2. The Death of Christian America
3. The Crisis of Catholicism
4. The End of White America
5. Demographic Winter
6. Equality or Freedom?
7. The Diversity Cult
8. The Triumph of Tribalism
9. “The White Party”
10. The Long Retreat
11. The Last Chance

To sell his book, Buchanan appeared on a white-nationalist radio program called The Political Cesspool, which describes itself as representing “a philosophy that is pro-White and … against political centralization.” It says, “We wish to revive the White birthrate above replacement level fertility and beyond to grow the percentage of Whites in the world relative to other races.” 

Buchanan’s attempt to peddle his white Christian-supremacy message to the American public would not stand uncontested. Liberals coalesced around the controversy, arguing that a network that claims to “lean forward” has a responsibility to shun this sort of polarizing and destructive bigotry; not to continue to empower its advocates with a mainstream media platform. 

Progressive groups CREDO Action and ColorOfChange.org quickly gathered 275,000 signatures on a petition, demanding that MSNBC President Phil Griffin and NBC News President Steve Capus fire Buchanan at once.

Last month Griffen consented that he didn’t believe Buchanan’s book “should be part of the national dialogue, much less part of the dialogue on MSNBC.” And so last Thursday, he fired Buchanan. 

After his ouster, Buchanan was invited to appear on right-winger Sean Hannity’s TV program (on Fox News) to defend himself. Attempting to rationalize his beliefs, Buchanan said:

“The year 2042, people had talked about where the European majority in the country, the white majority, would be a minority. Now, there was a cover story in The Atlantic titled ‘The End of White America,’ and this fella who was a professor celebrated it. Bill Clinton went out to Portland State and said by 2050, there’s going to be no racial majority in the country, and everybody applauded.

“So I took up that issue and I said, ‘Wait a minute. This… it’s not known for sure that this is going to be beneficial because I don’t know a country in this day and age where there’s no ethnic majority that is not in danger of coming apart. And my question is, why can everybody else celebrate this and say it’s wonderful, and I can’t even write about it without being blacklisted?”

The Left’s reaction to Buchanan’s beliefs just exemplify how prominent the virtues of inclusiveness and equality are to liberal values. Any Buchanan-like ideology predicated on the belief that demographic shifts (in race, religion, or ethnicity) represents a ‘threat’ to the country, is considered so bigoted, so immoral, so un-American, that all responsible gatekeepers must denounced it, and expunged it from mainstream American discourse.

So why wasn’t there a similar display of outrage by these ‘principled’ liberals, including groups CREDO Action and ColorOfChange.org, when nearly every Democratic member of the U.S. House and Senate gave 29 exuberant standing ovations during Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech last year to a joint session of Congress? This adoration trumped the reception they displayed for our own Democratic U.S. President, who received 25 standing ovations at his State of the Union Address, earlier that year.

And Netanyahu’s and Buchanan’s bigoted views are virtually indistinguishable from one another’s. They each regularly cite potential demographic shifts away from their own religious/ethnic majorities as existential threats to their respective countries.

In fact, Netanyahu likens anything short of a lopsided Jewish-majority in Israel as the literal destruction of Israel. He considers Arab-Israelis to be an existential threat to Israel, in much the same way that Buchanan sees Mexican Americans, African Americans, and other minorities as existential threats to America.

As an example, while speaking at the Herzliya Conference on security, Netanyahu said:

“If there is a demographic problem, and there is, it is with the Israeli Arabs who will remain Israeli citizens,” he said. The Declaration of Independence said Israel should be a Jewish and democratic state, but to ensure the Jewish character was not engulfed by demography, it was necessary to ensure a Jewish majority, he said.

If Israel’s Arabs become well integrated and reach 35-40 percent of the population, there will no longer be a Jewish state but a bi-national one, he said. If Arabs remain at 20 percent but relations are tense and violent, this will also harm the state’s democratic fabric. “Therefore a policy is needed that will balance the two.”

[…]

Netanyahu said that the “separation fence” would … help to prevent a “demographic spillover” of Palestinians from the territories.

And yet this obscenely bigoted policy statement — built upon the same rationale used throughout history to incite ethnic cleansing and genocide — does not cause a stir in American liberal circles. In fact, liberal leaders line up enthusiastically to shake Netanyahu’s hand, to pledge their allegiance to Israel, and to repeat (almost mechanically) that Israel and the United States share common values, and that our countries’ interests are identical. 

Our Democratic President, our Democratic Congresspeople, and some of our most popular ‘liberal’ political journalists and pundits either refuse to acknowledge or discuss Netanyahu’s bigoted beliefs and policies, or more often than not, subordinate their own progressive values on equality to his bigoted ones.

Take, for instance, President Obama speaking to the Union for Reform Judaism’s biennial conference:

“We stand with Israel as a Jewish democratic state because we know Israel was born of values that we share. America’s commitment and my commitment to Israel and Israel’s security is unshakable.”

“Israel was born of values that we share” might be true, if you are Pat Buchanan. Think about it, Buchanan’s cardinal sin, which got him tarred/feathered, and ultimately fired, was for insinuating that the U.S. should remain a state with a white Christian majority.

Obama’s commitment above, to Israel as a ‘Jewish’ state, could lead one to reasonably conclude that our President and Buchanan share identical anti-progressive values when it comes to racial, religious, and ethnic equality.

And Netanyahu is far more dangerous than political pundit Pat Buchanan ever was, or ever could be. Buchanan merely whines aloud, or on paper, about losing his idealistic ‘white Christian’ America. Netanyahu actually implements this line of bigotry as Israeli policy, and then states unapologetically that Israel’s very existence depends upon it. 

And this bigotry didn’t just begin with Netanyahu. As he stated in his speech above, it goes back to the founding of Israel. It is the central tenet of Zionism, as a political ideology. The country was founded on this very goal of creating and then solidifying a Jewish majority in a country that was predominately inhabited by Arab non-Jews. 

We see this Buchanan brand of bigotry implemented on the ground today in East Jerusalem and in the West Bank, as Palestinian homes continue to be demolished — entire families made homeless, for having had the audacity of being born as non-Jews. Their lands and their homes wiped clean from the map, and quickly supplanted by Jewish-only settlements, interconnected by Jewish-only roads.

This is ethnic cleansing. 

And any so called ‘liberal’ who subscribes to, defends, or even acquiesces to an ideology that incites or rationalizes ethnic cleansing, has absolutely no ground to stand on when it comes to criticizing Pat Buchanan for merely writing similar extremist opinions down on paper.

WATCH: Max Blumenthal Discusses Israel And The American Elections

by on Friday, February 3, 2012 at 2:02 pm EDT in Election 2012, Middle East, Politics, World

Max Blumenthal discusses the significant roles several key right-wing, pro-Israel political donors have played, and continue to play, in American elections:

On Haim Saban:

He got rich with this show Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, and now he has established an entire, you know, wing within the establishment, the major establishment think tank in Washington, Brookings Institute.

He funded the construction of the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters.

He was the largest individual donor to President Bill Clinton and came forward to support Clinton’s campaign during the impeachment crisis. He was the largest individual donor, I think, to President Barack Obama’s campaign. And Haim Saban says he’s also a donor to the Israeli army. Every year he gives millions of dollars to the Friends of the IDF. And Saban has said, I’m a single issue guy; my issue is Israel. He is funding the Democratic Party to make sure that the Democratic Party remains in the pro-Israel camp. 

On Sheldon Adelson:

He’s sort of just like the Jewish Donald Trump. He got into Israel after he broke up with his first wife. He had a divorce, and he decided that he wanted to meet Israeli women. And he’s sort of a hovercraft elite who can go around the world and pretty much get whatever he wants. So he went to Israel and met a woman who is extremely right-wing, became his wife, and she’s pumping money into Gingrich’s campaign. And now Adelson has said, according to Gingrich, that his life’s mission is supporting Israel. And he’s one of the key donors to the Republican Party, as well as to the Israel lobby.

WATCH:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBLkuI6QxSw[/youtube]

Transcript

Mossad Frames The C.I.A. For Terrorist Attacks In Iran, As Israel Drags The U.S. Into War

by on Saturday, January 14, 2012 at 3:06 pm EDT in Iran, Middle East, World

Despite what has been described as a full-court press by the Obama Administration to convince Israel not to attack Iran, the Wall Street Journal reports that the U.S. is now in fact preparing for such an attack. The Administration fears a range of possible Iranian reprisals directed at American targets, including “assaults by pro-Iranian Shiite militias in Iraq against the […]

WATCH: Press Corps Hammers U.S. State Dept Spokesperson On U.S. Impotence In Middle East

by on Thursday, November 3, 2011 at 12:00 pm EDT in Middle East, Politics, World

This U.S. State Department press briefing exemplifies how the United States’ foreign policy in the Middle East is both nonsensical and indefensible. State Dept. Spokesperson Victoria Nuland (the wife of Neocon Robert Kagan) could not give a sound and plausible answer to a single question she fielded. The press corp questions continued to come back to one […]

How The U.S. Has Undermined Its Own Vital Interests To Appease Israel At The UN

by on Tuesday, November 1, 2011 at 12:13 pm EDT in Middle East, World

Yesterday, the Palestinians’ bid for full membership at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was approved by a vote of 107-14, with 52 abstentions. This move will help to prevent the Palestinians’ cultural-heritage sites and artifacts from being plundered, as Israel continues its efforts to Judaize the occupied territory.  But what might […]

WATCH: Jeff Halper On Israel Arming Its Settlers In Anticipation Of Palestine Vote

by on Tuesday, August 30, 2011 at 4:42 pm EDT in Middle East, World

Ha’aretz reports that Israel is now arming its Jewish settlers in the West Bank with riot gear in preparation for Palestinian ‘mass disorder’, which they say will result from a vote in favor of Palestinian Statehood at the UN General Assembly this September.  Palestinian leaders have maintained that any and all September protests will be peaceful, but Israeli […]

WATCH: Max Blumenthal Discusses Role Of US Media In Normalizing Israel’s Occupation

by on Tuesday, August 30, 2011 at 12:41 pm EDT in Middle East, World

Sternchen Productions recently recorded a must-watch series of interviews with Max Blumenthal, where he discusses a wide gamut of Israel/Palestine-related topics.  In the video entitled “The role of the media in the Israel/Palestine conflict” (the video follows) Blumenthal describes instances of the US media insidiously crafting pro-Israel narratives to overshadow if not to flat-out whitewash Israel’s brutal policies: […]

Reporters’ Questions On Gaza-Bound Flotilla Stump US State Dept Spokesperson

by on Saturday, June 25, 2011 at 4:38 pm EDT in Middle East, World

Friday’s daily press briefing at the US State Department (see video below) pretty much exemplifies the Obama Administration’s inability to articulate a logical justification for their support of Israel’s illegal Gaza blockade, or for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s recent hat-tip to Israeli threats against thirty-six US citizens who plan to set sail on a Gaza-bound […]

What The Osama Bin Laden Video Reveals As Impetus For Terrorism: Israel

by on Tuesday, May 10, 2011 at 1:03 pm EDT in Afghanistan, Middle East, Pakistan, Politics, World

Fox & Friends recently spoke with former Head of CIA’s Bin Laden Unit, Michael Scheuer, about the Bin Laden videos obtained during the Navy Seal raid at the al-Qaeda leader’s compound. One of the program’s hosts, after describing how Bin Laden seemed obsessed with his own self image, asked Scheuer if this is why the Obama […]