Month: September 2010

Beinart recognizes Netanyahu's failure to extend the settlement freeze for what it is:

Whether or not the Obama administration can strong-arm Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas into continuing the negotiations, Netanyahu’s decision has empowered the settlers, strengthened Hamas and made it more likely that sometime in the next year or two, the occupied territories will again explode into violence. But there is one silver lining. By his actions, Netanyahu has laid bare the criteria that American Jewish organizations actually use for evaluating the behavior of an Israeli leader. To be labeled a champion of peace by the American Jewish establishment, it turns out, a prime minister of Israel only really has to do one thing: be prime minister of Israel.

Amen. Here is the truth: Israel has no legal right to build any settlements anywhere on the West Bank. Asking them merely to freeze their construction as a good will gesture to help restart negotiations for the two-state solution was the minimum a US government trying to defuse Islamism and save Israel from itself could have asked. And still Netanyahu refused and his acolytes in the US media and Congress backed him against their own government and their own president.

We should give Clinton and Mitchell a chance to keep at this. It's too important to give up at the first hurdle. I second this constructive, practical proposal from Goldblog, directed at Netanyahu:

Why not risk your governing coalition and impose and a total freeze on settlement growth outside of the greater Jerusalem area?

This way, you'll show the world, and the Palestinians — who are governed, on the West Bank, at least, by a group of true moderates, who have done a great deal for your security over the past year  — that you are serious about grappling with the challenges before you. And you'll show President Obama that you mean it when you say that it is the Iranian nutters, and not the Palestinians, who pose an existential threat to Israel. Yes, risking your coalition means you would have to induce Tsipi Livni's opposition Kadima party into the government, but now seems as good a moment as any. At the very least, you'll gain a foreign minister who isn't an international embarrassment. And you might convince at least a few settlers — those outside the security fence, especially — that it would be best for them to move back to Israel and reinvigorate Zionism.

Such a move would also help coax those of us former staunch supporters of Israel back toward some minimal level of trust in Netanyahu. Alas, I suspect there is no way that Netanyahu will do this. But we can hope, right? Israel will not have this opportunity again. And the consequences of doing nothing, as Goldblog has clearly stated, are the end of Israel in the long term as a Jewish or a decent country.

(Photo: Israeli settlers and supporters of Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing Likud party, gather in the West Bank settlement to Revava to show their support to the resumption of construction in the West Bank, on September 26, 2010 as a 10-month Israeli government ban on construction comes to an end. By Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images)

Juan Cole reacts to the Iranian president calling the 9/11 attacks an inside job:

The [UN] speech was shown on Iranian television, and he was almost certainly actually playing to the audience back home. He wanted to be on television on the world stage, poking America in the eye.

Ahmadinejad deliberately missed a chance to improve relations with the US. One of the suspects in Wednesday’s bombing in the largely Kurdish city of Mahabad is Ansar al-Islam, or radical Sunnis of the al-Qaeda type. (Kurdish separatist movements don’t typically target Kurdish civilians, as this bombing did). Iran’s president could have taken advantage of that tragedy to declare solidarity with the US in fighting radical Sunnism. He was more wedded to getting some guffaws in the workplaces of Iran.

Gary Sick sighs:

The situation has become so predictable, and so flattering to the man who comes here primarily to wallow in the publicity circus, that several journalists and organizations even issued a handbook this year about how to interview this fellow. It had no appreciable effect. Ahmadinejad loves attention, and nowhere can he get so much so fast as in New York.

Asking him tough questions is pointless. When he can’t turn the question around, when he can’t slip around it to score a point, he simply lies. Over and over and over. The website Tehran Bureau (in association with PBS Frontline) assembled a list of the most egregious recent examples

If one good thing came out of the episode, it was the first-ever interview of president Obama by an Iranian reporter.

(Image from a collection of "Four Ads Mocking Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with Photoshop")

“[Dr. Gregory B. Saathoff, a psychiatry professor at the University of Virginia], described Mr. Ghailani, a Tanzanian in his mid-30s, as generally relaxed, drinking soda and eating a Snickers bar and nachos. He said the inmate also appreciated humor, and smiled or laughed appropriately at humorous comments by a defense lawyer, Steve Zissou, who attended the sessions.

But other times, Mr. Ghailani turned somber, withdrawn, even tearful, the psychiatrist wrote. “Mr. Ghailani was most distressed, and appeared unable to speak or show any eye contact when discussing a period when …,” Dr. Saathoff wrote, but the rest of the sentence was blacked out, still classified,” – NYT today.

When will the torturers be brought to justice? When?

Muslim-baiter Paladino's chances climb. An alleged conservative, he threatened to use "eminent domain" to prevent Park51 being built within the entire area covered by dust in the wake of 9/11, while equating all American Muslims with al Qaeda.

"A Populist, whose basic conviction is that the cure for democracy is more democracy, conserves nothing – even though he may wish to do so. Populism, in effect, is what Walter Bagehot called the "ignorant democratic conservatism of the masses." ….

Populism is a revolt against the Smart Guys. I am very ready to confess that the present Smart Guys, as represented by the dominant mentality of the Academy and of what the Bergers call the Knowledge Class today, are insufficiently endowed with right reason and moral imagination. But it would not be an improvement to supplant them by persons of thoroughgoing ignorance and incompetence," – Russell Kirk, who wrote "The Conservative Mind."

God knows what he would think of the current GOP.

Andrew Sprung fights back against the popular gloom of the left and the nihilism of the right, with a helpful corrective to our current short-termism and cable-news attention span:

At this beleaguered moment I believe that Obama is inevitably being judged on the wrong time scale. The economy is not growing fast enough, and that’s killing him.  But as to the larger, slower battleships he’s trying to turn: the record (sticking for now to the domestic front) is mixed but impressive. He has laid foundations for universal healthcare and healthcare cost control (i.e., meaningful entitlement reform); educational improvement; and a reversal or at least slowing of the 30-year rise in income inequality (via healthcare reform, student loan reform, middle class tax cuts and tax hikes for the wealthy, the latter a work in progress). The stimulus also seeded a host of investments in infrastructure and alternative energy (as well as education) that will also take a long time to assess. With a little bit of economic luck, he will be the transformative president that he aims to be.

I think there is an enormous amount of truth to this, just as the presidency of George H.W. Bush was vastly under-estimated at the time, only to be fully appreciated later. It’s time for the sane center and the left to rally behind this president, especially given the domestic and foreign policy recklessness of the alternative.

(Photo: Saul Loeb/Getty.)

Gordon Adams lambastes Danielle Pletka and Thomas Donnelly of the AEI for twisting facts to defend military spending.

One thing that's truly amazing about Stephen Colbert is his maintenance of his fantastic character in almost every public setting. Which is what makes the moment above so arresting, and, to me, moving. He breaks character for a moment, and reveals the authentic Catholic beneath:

"I like talking about people who don’t have any power, and it seems like one of the least powerful people in the United States are migrant workers who come in and do our work, but don’t have any rights as a result. And yet, we still ask them to come here, and at the same time, ask them to leave. And that’s an interesting contradiction to me, and um… You know, “whatsoever you did for the least of my brothers,” and these seemed like the least of my brothers, right now. A lot of people are “least brothers” right now, with the economy so hard, and I don’t want to take anyone’s hardship away from them or diminish it or anything like that. But migrant workers suffer, and have no rights."

For me, this is an inspiring piece of Catholic testimony, informed by the words of Jesus and what Christianity – not Christianism – should stand for. Above all else, caritas. An agnostic reader writes:

This remark has struck me as the most sincere religious remark that I have heard in a long time.

And it can only come from someone who has read the bible, thought about its teachings, and decided to act on Jesus' call for compassion for the poor and outcasts. I am not religious. As a scientist, I have concluded that I can not say anything sensible about god's existence. I try to be a good human being though, have read the new testament and concluded that there a whole bunch of good learnings (don't do onto others etc), combined with a bunch of abject bullshit. But what Colbert said touched me deeply. Here's a man that stands up to most in his profession, a lot of the press, puts himself in a very vulnerable position and does what he reads in the bible: Stand up for the poor and powerless. It gives me a glimmer of hope for religion.

It reminds me that although religious leaders are corrupt insane bastards, individuals can get great inspiration and guidance for their actions. Colbert has now done more for illegal immigrants than any politician (except perhaps that lady that got him invited).

And on top of that, Colbert has been able to mock the Congressional insanity in its own House. He has proposed an insane solution to the problem (to stop eating fruits and vegetables) as well as a common sense solution (we could offer more visas to the immigrants) to the problem. He has been able to ask them directly: "Why isn´t the government doing anything?" He has been able to point out (almost beg) what they should be doing (both sides will work together on this issue in the best interest of America, as you always do.), and yet embarrassingly enough, his comment was greeted with laughter.

These are all things that the press should be doing, but forget because they're too busy getting and maintaining "access" and writing bad books to enrich themselves. Remember, Colbert is the host of the only program that was hosted an entire week from Iraq. Not a single news program, or any other program has done so.

As a non-religious person, I must objectively conclude that Stephen Colbert is the greatest American catholic of the moment.

Exum calls out an alleged double standard:

Here is Andrew Sullivan warning, today, of the menace David Petraeus poses to healthy civil-military relations. But when a bunch of retired flag officers get politically involved and start lobbying the administration on the "right" side of an issue that Andrew Sullivan cares about, they are to be applauded. And when generals complained about Don Rumsfeld, they too were to be lauded for speaking out.

I'm not trying to pick on Andrew Sullivan here, but the uneven way he approaches civil-military relations — alternately praising or chiding flag officers for getting politically involved depending on the issue and the political preferences of the writer — seems representative of most punditry I read on this on both the right and the left. Again, I respect folks like Andrew Bacevich or Richard Kohn for being more ecumenical (if uncompromising) in their treatment of the issue. Read Kohn's biting essay on the subject here.

Does Andrew not recognize the difference between retired generals speaking out and active ones politicking and manipulating the press to get the wars they want? Please. It's such an obvious distinction it's amazing someone as smart as Exum cannot see it. There's no double standard here whatever.

“My biggest struggle is to rehumanize the Palestinians. There’s a whole machinery of brainwashing in Israel which really accompanies each of us from early childhood, and I’m a product of this machinery as much as anyone else. [We are taught] a few narratives that it’s very hard to break. That we Israelis are the ultimate and only victims. That the Palestinians are born to kill, and their hatred is irrational. That the Palestinians are not human beings like us? So you get a society without any moral doubts, without any questions marks, with hardly public debate. To raise your voice against all this is very hard …

I am amazed again and again at how little Israelis know of what’s going on fifteen minutes away from their homes. The brainwashing machinery is so efficient that trying [to undo it is] almost like trying to turn an omelette back to an egg. It makes people so full of ignorance and cruelty. [During Operation Cast Lead] a dog – an Israeli dog – was killed by a Qassam rocket and it was on the front page of the most popular newspaper in Israel. On the very same day, there were tens of Palestinians killed, they were on page 16, in two lines.” – Gideon Levy, in a riveting profile by Johann Hari.