• 
• 
  • Arts & Culture
  • City Hall
  • Environment
  • Housing & Displacement
  • Immigrant Rights
  • LGBQT
  • Poverty
  • Youth & Schools
• 
  • Features
  • News Briefs
  • Newswire
  • Headlines
• 
  • Mailing Lists
  • PhillyIMC's Wiki
  • LAVA
  • Contact us
• 
• 
• 
• 

It is interesting to see that former head of the American Jewish Committee, Henry Siegman, at this point cannot find any space in the mainstream U.S. media since he has become a critic of Israel—amusingly he can publish in the International Herald Tribune, owned by the New York Times, but not in the New York Times itself (and of course, not in the Philadelphia Inquirer). Amira Hass, Gideon Levy, and Danny Rubenstein, who are critics writing regularly for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, have also been excluded from the U.S. media (and have never appeared in the Inky).

This media policy and political one-sidedness makes resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict impossible, as for many years Israel has been using this unconditional Western support to continue to take over Palestinian land and stall on any settlement that would recognize and fix boundaries for any Palestinian state. This has been acknowledged by numerous Israeli officials as well as Middle East experts. In one dramatic case, Sharon adviser Dov Weinglass publicly stated (in October 2004) that “The disengagement plan [the removal of Israelis from Gaza] is the preservative of the sequence principle. It is the bottle of formaldehyde within which you place the president's [Bush's] formula so that it will be preserved for a very lengthy period. The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that's necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians." That is, stalling on the “political process” permits the occupation and dispossession of the Palestinians to continue—here it is openly admitted, but it is not convenient for the Inky and its comrades to report, let alone feature, this. Henry Siegman says essentially the same thing: “ there is no prospect for a viable, sovereign Palestinian state, primarily because Israel's various governments, from 1967 until today, have never had the intention of allowing such a state to come into being.” This can be said by Siegman in The Nation magazine (“Tough Love for Israel,” April 17, 2008: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080505/siegman), or in a foreign publication, but not in the Inky.

Two books have recently been published that have criticized Israel and its U.S. enforcers, and that have been too formidable to ignore: former president Jimmy Carter’s Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid, and John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. I’m not going to try to evaluate these books here, but merely note that they are by reputable and serious authors on some very important issues. Yet the Inky has reviewed neither of them, and it hasn’t provided Commentary space for Carter or Mearsheimer and Walt to expound their views.

On the other hand, the Inky published as a Commentary article Abraham Foxman’s piece “The latest scapegoating of Jews” (October 11, 2007), which attacks Carter and Mearsheimer-Walt with venom and smears in a manner familiar to those who have followed the record of this dishonest propagandist. So Carter and Mearsheimer are not permitted to state their case, and they aren’t invited to answer Foxman’s charges. Only a crude pro-Israel apologist is given the floor. This carries us beyond a mere profile in cowardice.

Also beyond mere cowardice is the Inky’s recent editorial castigating Carter for his talking with Hamas (ed., “Carter should stay home,” April 28, 2008). This short editorial sticks to the propaganda formula, and is so crude that I suspect Kevin Ferris may have written it : Hamas is a purely terrorist group that “won’t renounce terror or cease its daily rocket attacks into Israel from Gaza…rebuffed Israeli efforts to discuss the fate of an Israeli soldier...and won’t recognize Israel’s right to exist…”

The Inky of course would never acknowledge that Israel once supported Hamas as a means of weakening the secular PLO. Today Israel, the U.S. political establishment, and hence the Inky, won’t recognize that Hamas won a Western-monitored free election in 2006—which it won in good part because Israel and the United States have never allowed the secular arm of the Palestinians to bring its population any benefits, and in fact turned that faction into an enforcer of Israeli aims. And in its editorial the Inky dishonestly fails to note that Hamas has recently and more than once called for a complete cease fire, that Israel has ignored or rejected, which makes the statement that it won’t cease daily rocket attacks ignorant and/or hypocritical. Will Israel recognize Hamas’s or Palestine’s right to exist? What does “right to exist” mean? Could it mean right to be a racist state in which Jewish rights are predominant and the second class citizens and dispossessed forfeit all claims? On the discussion of the fate of an Israeli soldier, will Israel discuss the fate of 10,000 Palestinian prisoners? Could it be that Israel doesn’t want peace, but rather, as Weinglass (Siegman, etc.) suggests, wants it postponed indefinitely to help the dispossession process? Can you have peace without talking to representatives of the majority of one side? Since Annapolis the Israelis have killed 19 Palestinians for every Israeli killed, most of them civilians. Is this not wholesale, as opposed to retail, terrorism. In fact, the Inky is pro-terrorism: that is, pro-wholesale terrorism.

I note that once again the Inky fails to give Carter space to present his views. The New York Times gave him space (Carter, "Pariah Diplomacy," New York Times, April 28, 2008), and so did the International Herald Tribune (Carter, "Talking to 'terrorists'," International Herald Tribune, April 28, 2008), among others, but not the Inky. The Washington Post even gave a Hamas spokesman space to present his views, Mahmoud Al-Zahar, “No Peace Without Hamas,” http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/16/AR200804..., but again the Inky is not open to any dissent on this central topic, and in effect supports non-negotiation, and de facto continued dispossession, ethnic cleansing, and state terrorism.

Trudy Rubin and Continued Closure on Iraq

I’ve pointed out before that on Iraq also the Inky refuses to allow an alternative perspective that departs from the establishment view that we must stay on to prevent greater instability. This is part of our “responsibility” to the Iraqis! The Inky “left” here is Trudy Rubin, who back in 2002 swallowed the pre-invasion propaganda lie that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and posed a serious security threat—in fact, in one of the great classics of pro-war absurdity and propaganda, Rubin had a column in which “The crime we must prevent” was Saddam’s using his weapons of mass destruction on his own people as a means of getting the fighting stopped: “In an Iraq war, will Saddam attack his own people?” (Dec. 4, 2003). Since then, Rubin has seen each U.S. alleged triumph--the declaration of “sovereignty,” the 2004 election, the death of Zarqawi, and the post-surge decline of U.S. casualties—as encouraging. Rubin fools some readers, and maybe herself, because she assails Bush for having mismanaged the war, giving the impression that she is a critic of the war policy. But she always ends up against any definite commitment to or time table for withdrawal and therefore with de facto support of continuing the occupation.

In a recent article she is very disappointed in Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for their support of a definite withdrawal of troops and because they would “not just accept cues from military commanders (like Gen.. David Petraeus).” (“After debate, still no clarity on exist strategies,” April 20, 2008). Rubin has completely failed to see that Petraeus is a front man for Bush and that in consequencee his advisories are inherently political—and interestingly this supposed “liberal” doesn’t find it troubling that a General should have so much weight in decision-making that is supposedly civilian-based and democratic.

Rubin’s view is that “Setting an exit date will encourage Iraqi factions to gear up for bigger battles as the Americans are leaving. It will prompt Iraq’s neighbors to increase arms and support for their Sunni or Shiite proxies inside the country. This in turn will undermine prospects for the ‘diplomatic surge’ we need to leave without a rout” (April 20). So we should stay and kill till we can arrange for a regional settlement.

Among the fallacies in Rubin’s plan, is first, the fact that as usual she and her fellow editors ignore public and Iraqi opinion. Solid majorities both here and in Iraq want us to get out, but Bush-Cheney and other establishment types don’t, so Rubin and company align themselves with Bush-Cheney. And they won’t allow alternative views in the paper. Second, Rubin talks of possible bigger battles with a time-table, but she has never coped with the fact that our presence has paralleled a steady increase in violence. That it will increase with our departure is pure speculation, and not too plausible. Karen deYoung writes in the Washington Post that "Iraqis of all sectarian and ethnic groups believe that the U.S. military invasion is the primary root of the violent differences among them, and see the departure of 'occupying forces' as the key to national reconciliation."

So, according to Iraqis, there is hope of national reconciliation if the invaders, responsible for the internal violence, withdraw and leave Iraq to Iraqis. This viewpoint, and the viewpoint of the U.S. majority, is alien to Trudy Rubin and is inexpressible in the Inky.

A third problem with Rubin’s analysis is that it assumes that the Bush-Cheney-Petreaus-Democrats really intend to get out of Iraq and that we may really expect a “diplomatic surge.” She seems unaware of the fact that this country has been digging deeper into Iraq; that it is still finishing up the gigantic Embassy, and continues to work to get the Maliki government to grant foreign rights to Iraqi oil (Rubin has never admitted that control of Iraq’s oil may have anything to do with the invasion-occupation). Military analyst Dan Smith finds nearly $1.9 billion allocated for 16 bases in Iraq in the National Defense Reauthorization Act that President George W. Bush signed into law in January. And that's only the tip of the bases iceberg. "Hardly had the ink dried on FY2008 legislation when the president sent Congress his proposed budget for the 2009 fiscal year," Smith writes in Base-less Strategy. "This proposes worldwide military construction spending that exceeds $21 billion, more than triple actual spending in FY2007. Even in a $550 billion budget, $21 billion is 'real money.'" It is convenient for Bush-Cheney et al to pretend that we are really exiting from Iraq, and they depend on the media and analysts like Trudy Rubin to give credence to this pretence.

Is Rubin’s substitution of a “diplomatic surge” for a real withdrawal consistent with the continued intense U.S. hostility to Iran, the multi-year refusal to negotiate with that country, and the recent buildup and threats to attack Iran? Is it consistent with the positions taken by the leading Democrats and their deference to Irael, which is eager for a U.S. confrontation with Iran?

In short, Trudy Rubin’s position is not very plausible or sensible, but it is a superb method for protecting the continued occupation of Iraq by a country that is still killing there on a large scale—something Rubin and the Inky scant with great diligence (see Pepe Escobar, “Hundreds killed by U.S. strikes in Sadr City”: http://therealnews.com/web/index.php?thisdataswitch=0&thisid=1434&thisvi... is openly threatening extending the war to Iran.

Reply

Your name: *

E-mail: *

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.

Homepage:

Subject:

Comment: *

• Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
• Lines and paragraphs break automatically.

More information about formatting options

CAPTCHA

This question is for testing whether you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.

What code is in the image?: *

Copy the characters (respecting upper/lower case) from the image.