From Breitbart: Donald Trump has a better shot at the presidency than Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and is just as likely to win the 2016 election as Jeb Bush, say two embarrassed political scientists.
We know they’re embarrassed by their discovery because their Washington Post article buried that news far, far into their math-heavy, thumb-sucking, 20-paragraph, Sept. 25 perambulation.
In their article, the two academics first did some tricks with numbers, multiplied some percentages, added a few assumptions — and then subtracted their interesting conclusion from the lede.
Weird — why would they subtract their conclusion?
Because they concluded that Donald Trump “has a 54 percent chance of being elected president if he is the GOP nominee… [and] he is as electable as [Jeb] Bush and [John] Kasich and more electable than [Carly] Fiorina and [Marco] Rubio.”
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I was impressed by this presentation by the two political scientists. At the end, John J. Mearsheimer says: “The United States would care about Iran acquiring nuclear weapons even if there was no state of Israel. There are two reasons for that. One, we care greatly about nuclear proliferation. Two, the Persian Gulf is an area of great strategic interest to the United States and the United States cares greatly about the balance of power in that region. There is one state we care about more than any other — Iran, because it is the one state that is capable of becoming a regional hegemon.”
“The state of Israel and parts of the [Israel] are the main driving forces behind using military force to deal with the Iranian nuclear problem… It’s the same cast of characters who are pushing to go to war against Iran who pushed the United States to go to war against Iraq. If you could take Israeli pressure and pressure from the Lobby, especially the neo-conservatives, out of the equation, there would be little talk in the United States today about using force against Iran.”
“Regarding the gentleman’s comments about negative reviews of our work in the United States, there is no question that the book has gotten nearly universal condemnation here in the United States and the response to the article that came out in March of 2006 was not much different. Steve and I wrote [in 2006] an 80 page response to all of the criticisms laid out. Anybody who reads our book would predict that we would be clobbered in the United States and that we would get good reviews outside of the United States and that’s what’s happened… Where is the most favorable review? Israel. It was written by Uri Avnery. Two of the best reviews we have gotten have been in Haaretz, the New York Times of Israel — Daniel Levy and MJ Rosenberg… We get slammed in the United States and treated differently overseas and you all know the reason — the [Israel] Lobby.”
Earlier, Stephen Walt said: “Is Israel in jeopardy? Israel has the strongest conventional army in the Middle East and it has hundreds of nuclear weapons. The famous statement of Ahmadinejad [in 2005] is often mistranslated as wiping Israel off the map. What he actually said that the Jewish state of Israel should be erased from the page of time, that the Jewish state of Israel should go out of existence in the same way that the Soviet Union went out of existence, the same way the Iranian Shah fell. He was not saying Iran would attack Israel… He was saying the [Jewish] state should go out of existence and replaced with another government there and he was not calling for the physical destruction of Israel. I’ve seen no evidence that any Iranian wants the entire Iranian society to commit suicide which is what an attack on Israel would entail, given Israel’s own nuclear deterrent and given that we are allied with Israel and have thousands of nuclear weapons of our own. I don’t think Israel’s survival is in jeopardy.”
“Many of our conflicts [with the Muslim world] are not based on irrational hatreds of the United States but on real conflicts of interest… Iran is not seeking nuclear weapons because it is has some deep religious or cultural conflict with the United States or the West. If any of us were in Iran’s position, we would thinking seriously about having a nuclear deterrent because the world’s most powerful country has declared they want regime change in that country.”
Ahmadinejad was the subject of controversy in 2005 when one of his statements, given during “The World Without Zionism” conference in Tehran, was translated to suggest Israel should be “wiped off the map,”[77] an English idiom which means to “cause a place to stop existing,”[78] or “destroy completely”.[79] The story was picked up by Western news agencies and quickly made headlines around the world.[80][citation needed] On 30 October, The New York Times published a full transcript of the speech in which Ahmadinejad was quoted:
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Our dear Imam (referring to Ayatollah Khomeini) said that the occupying regime must be wiped off the map and this was a very wise statement. We cannot compromise over the issue of Palestine. Is it possible to create a new front in the heart of an old front. This would be a defeat and whoever accepts the legitimacy of this regime has in fact, signed the defeat of the Islamic world. Our dear Imam targeted the heart of the world oppressor in his struggle, meaning the occupying regime. I have no doubt that the new wave that has started in Palestine, and we witness it in the Islamic world too, will eliminate this disgraceful stain from the Islamic world.[81]
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The Iranian presidential website stated: “the Zionist Regime of Israel faces a deadend and will under God’s grace be wiped off the map,” and “the Zionist Regime that is a usurper and illegitimate regime and a cancerous tumor should be wiped off the map.” [82]
The “wiped off the map” translation originated from the state-controlled Islamic Republic News Agency.[83] This translation’s use in the media has been criticized.[84] Arash Norouzi, artist and co-founder of The Mossadegh Project, says the statement “wiped off the map” did not exist in the original speech and that Ahmadinejad directed his comment toward the “regime occupying Jerusalem”. Norouzi’s translation of the Persian quote reads; “the Imam said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.”[85]Juan Cole, historian of the Middle East and South Asia, concurs; Ahmadinejad’s statement should be translated as, “the Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem(een rezhim-e eshghalgar-e qods, Persian: این رژیم اشغالگر قدس) must [vanish from] the page of time (bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad, Persian: باید از صفحه روزگار محو شود),” noting that there is no Persian idiom to wipe something off the map.[86] Shiraz Dossa, a professor of Political Science at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, Canada, also believes the text is a mistranslation.
Ahmadinejad was quoting the Ayatollah Khomeini in the specific speech under discussion: what he said was that “the occupation regime over Jerusalem should vanish from the page of time.” No state action is envisaged in this lament; it denotes a spiritual wish, whereas the erroneous translation – “wipe Israel off the map” – suggests a military threat. There is a huge chasm between the correct and the incorrect translations. The notion that Iran can “wipe out” U.S.-backed, nuclear-armed Israel is ludicrous.[88][89][90]
[T]ranslators in Tehran who work for the president’s office and the foreign ministry disagree with them. All official translations of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s statement, including a description of it on his website, refer to wiping Israel away. Sohrab Mahdavi, one of Iran’s most prominent translators, and Siamak Namazi, managing director of a Tehran consulting firm, who is bilingual, both say “wipe off” or “wipe away” is more accurate than “vanish” because the Persian verb is active and transitive.
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Bronner continued: “..it is hard to argue that, from Israel’s point of view, Mr. Ahmadinejad poses no threat. Still, it is true that he has never specifically threatened war against Israel. So did Iran’s president call for Israel to be ‘wiped off the map’? It certainly seems so. Did that amount to a call for war? That remains an open question.”[92] This elicited a further response from Jonathan Steele, who noted that Bronner agreed that “map” or any other place noun had not been used and criticized this Wikipedia entry (as it was on 14 June 2006) for “claiming falsely” that Ethan Bronner had “concluded that Ahmadinejad had in fact said that Israel was to be wiped off the map“.[93]
Iranian government sources denied that Ahmadinejad issued any sort of threat. On 20 February 2006, Iran’s foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki told a news conference: “How is it possible to remove a country from the map? He is talking about the regime. We do not recognize this regime legally.”[94][95][96] Ahmadinejad himself stated that Iran is not a threat to any country, including Israel.[97] At a gathering of foreign guests marking the 19th anniversary of the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 2008, Ahmadinejad said:
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“You should know that the criminal and terrorist Zionist regime which has 60 years of plundering, aggression and crimes in its file has reached the end of its work and will soon disappear off the geographical scene.”[98]
At a news conference on 14 January 2006, Ahmadinejad stated his speech had been exaggerated and misinterpreted.[99] “There is no new policy, they created a lot of hue and cry over that. It is clear what we say: Let the Palestinians participate in free elections and they will say what they want.” Speaking at a D-8 summit meeting in July 2008, he denied that his country would ever instigate military action. Instead he claimed that “the Zionist regime” in Israel would eventually collapse on its own.[100][101]
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Asked if he objected to the government of Israel or Jewish people, he said that “creating an objection against the Zionists doesn’t mean that there are objections against the Jewish”. He added that Jews lived in Iran and were represented in the country’s parliament.[100]
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Ahmadinejad said that the issue with Palestine would be over “the day that all refugees return to their homes [and] a democratic government elected by the people comes to power”,[102] and denounced attempts to normalise relations with Israel, condemning all Muslim leaders who accept the existence of Israel as “acknowledging a surrender and defeat of the Islamic world.”
In a September 2008 interview Ahmadinejad was asked: “If the Palestinian leaders agree to a two-state solution, could Iran live with an Israeli state?” He replied:
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If they [the Palestinians] want to keep the Zionists, they can stay … Whatever the people decide, we will respect it. I mean, it’s very much in correspondence with our proposal to allow Palestinian people to decide through free referendums.[103]
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Interviewer Juan Gonzalez called the reply “a tiny opening”.[103] Another observer however dubbed it an “astonishing” admission “that Iran might agree to the existence of the state of Israel,” and a “softening” of Ahmadinejad’s “long-standing, point-blank anti-Israeli stance”. Australian-born British human rights activist Peter Tatchell asked whether the statement reflected opportunism on Ahmadinejad’s part, or an openness by Iran “to options more moderate than his reported remarks about wiping the Israeli state off the map.”[104]
The speech was interpreted by some as a call for genocide. Canada‘s then Prime MinisterPaul Martin said, “this threat to Israel’s existence, this call for genocide coupled with Iran’s obvious nuclear ambitions is a matter that the world cannot ignore.”[105]
Juan Cole interprets the speech as a call for the end of Jewish rule of Israel, but not necessarily for the removal of Jewish people:
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His statements were morally outrageous and historically ignorant, but he did not actually call for mass murder (Ariel Sharon made the “occupation regime” in Gaza “vanish” last summer [sic]) or for the expulsion of the Israeli Jews to Europe.[108]
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On ‘Qods Day‘ in 2007, Iranian government IRIB News in English reported that the president ‘repeated an earlier suggestion to Europe on settlement of the Zionists in Europe or big lands such as Canada and Alaska so they would be able to own their own land.’[109]
Gawdat Bahgat, a professor of political science at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, said: “The fiery calls to destroy Israel are meant to mobilize domestic and regional constituencies. Iran has no plan to attack Israel with its [Israel’s] nuclear arsenal and powerful conventional military capabilities.[110] Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameni summed up his country’s stand on the Arab-Israeli conflict by stressing, ‘[The] Palestine issue is not Iran’s jihad.'” In fact, Bahgat says that according to most analysts a military confrontation between Iran and Israel is unlikely.[111]
Ahmadinejad gave the examples of Iran under the Shah, the Soviet Union and Saddam Hussein‘s regime in Iraq as examples of apparently invincible regimes that ceased to exist, using them to justify his belief that the United States and the State of Israel can also be defeated: “They say it is not possible to have a world without the United States and Zionism. But you know that this is a possible goal and slogan.”
President Bush attempted to sell the American public and the international community on the need for a war in Iraq, America’s most important Jewish organizations rallied as one to his defense. In statement after statement community leaders stressed the need to rid the world of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction. Some groups went even further, arguing that the removal of the Iraqi leader would represent a significant step toward bringing peace to the Middle East and winning America’s war on terrorism.
Now, however, with questions mushrooming about the basis for war and America’s occupation of Iraq, Jewish groups are staying low. Their newfound silence is both strategically misguided and morally alarming.
The question here is not whether the Jewish organizations were somehow responsible for America’s entry into the war. Conspiracy theories of a Jewish-Israeli cabal dragging America into war for Jerusalem’s benefit do not deserve serious attention. It is true that concern for Israel’s safety rightfully factored into the deliberations of the main Jewish groups. But they did not send troops into Iraq; the Bush administration did, for a host of its own reasons. Its main premise was that so long as Saddam remained in power, he would be a destabilizing force threatening the United States and its allies. The administration’s view resonated widely, even with liberal Jewish organizations that would have had no stomach for a war fought solely to cement Israel’s hold on the territories.
There’s no need to question the motivations of those who endorsed the war. Fair-minded communal leaders of many political and religious stripes ended up supporting the war. The problem arises now, one year later, when those Jewish groups that spoke out for the war refuse to wrestle with the consequences of an invasion that so far has cost the lives of more than 700 U.S. troops and hampered the fight against terrorism, while failing to turn up a single weapon of mass destruction.
Jewish community leaders need not issue any apologies for taking the administration at its word on the immediacy of Saddam’s threat. But, having done so, they should now be leading the push for an investigation into why America’s pre-war intelligence was so flawed and whether the country was misled by a White House bent on war. They should be encouraging a national debate over whether the war has hurt or helped the war against Al Qaeda. And, finally, as reports of poor planning, cronyism and prisoner abuse in Iraq mount, Jewish leaders have an obligation to call for an accounting from the administration. They took a stand a year ago. They owe it to their constituency to speak out now.
The Jewish communal leadership has a credibility on the national and world stage because of its presumed moral stature as the voice of a community of conscience. Its silence now represents a betrayal of that trust.
London Review of Books Vol. 28 No. 6, March 23, 2006
John Mearsheimer is the Wendell Harrison Professor of Political Science at University of Chicago, and the author of The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.
Stephen Walt is the Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. His most recent book is Taming American Power: The Global Response to US Primacy.
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For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread ‘democracy’ throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardised not only US security but that of much of the rest of the world. This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the US been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state? One might assume that the bond between the two countries was based on shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives, but neither explanation can account for the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the US provides.
Why has the US been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state?
Instead, the thrust of US policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic politics, and especially the activities of the ‘Israel Lobby’. Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of the other country – in this case, Israel – are essentially identical.
Since the October War in 1973, Washington has provided Israel with a level of support dwarfing that given to any other state. It has been the largest annual recipient of direct economic and military assistance since 1976, and is the largest recipient in total since World War Two, to the tune of well over $140 billion (in 2004 dollars). Israel receives about $3 billion in direct assistance each year, roughly one-fifth of the foreign aid budget, and worth about $500 a year for every Israeli. This largesse is especially striking since Israel is now a wealthy industrial state with a per capita income roughly equal to that of South Korea or Spain.
Other recipients get their money in quarterly installments, but Israel receives its entire appropriation at the beginning of each fiscal year and can thus earn interest on it. Most recipients of aid given for military purposes are required to spend all of it in the US, but Israel is allowed to use roughly 25 per cent of its allocation to subsidise its own defence industry. It is the only recipient that does not have to account for how the aid is spent, which makes it virtually impossible to prevent the money from being used for purposes the US opposes, such as building settlements on the West Bank. Moreover, the US has provided Israel with nearly $3 billion to develop weapons systems, and given it access to such top-drawer weaponry as Blackhawk helicopters and F-16 jets. Finally, the US gives Israel access to intelligence it denies to its Nato allies and has turned a blind eye to Israel’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.
Washington also provides Israel with consistent diplomatic support. Since 1982, the US has vetoed 32 Security Council resolutions critical of Israel, more than the total number of vetoes cast by all the other Security Council members. It blocks the efforts of Arab states to put Israel’s nuclear arsenal on the IAEA’s agenda. The US comes to the rescue in wartime and takes Israel’s side when negotiating peace. The Nixon administration protected it from the threat of Soviet intervention and resupplied it during the October War. Washington was deeply involved in the negotiations that ended that war, as well as in the lengthy ‘step-by-step’ process that followed, just as it played a key role in the negotiations that preceded and followed the 1993 Oslo Accords. In each case there was occasional friction between US and Israeli officials, but the US consistently supported the Israeli position. One American participant at Camp David in 2000 later said: ‘Far too often, we functioned . . . as Israel’s lawyer.’ Finally, the Bush administration’s ambition to transform the Middle East is at least partly aimed at improving Israel’s strategic situation.
This extraordinary generosity might be understandable if Israel were a vital strategic asset or if there were a compelling moral case for US backing.
This extraordinary generosity might be understandable if Israel were a vital strategic asset or if there were a compelling moral case for US backing. But neither explanation is convincing. One might argue that Israel was an asset during the Cold War. By serving as America’s proxy after 1967, it helped contain Soviet expansion in the region and inflicted humiliating defeats on Soviet clients like Egypt and Syria. It occasionally helped protect other US allies (like King Hussein of Jordan) and its military prowess forced Moscow to spend more on backing its own client states. It also provided useful intelligence about Soviet capabilities.
Backing Israel was not cheap, however, and it complicated America’s relations with the Arab world. For example, the decision to give $2.2 billion in emergency military aid during the October War triggered an Opec oil embargo that inflicted considerable damage on Western economies. For all that, Israel’s armed forces were not in a position to protect US interests in the region. The US could not, for example, rely on Israel when the Iranian Revolution in 1979 raised concerns about the security of oil supplies, and had to create its own Rapid Deployment Force instead.
The first Gulf War revealed the extent to which Israel was becoming a strategic burden.
The first Gulf War revealed the extent to which Israel was becoming a strategic burden. The US could not use Israeli bases without rupturing the anti-Iraq coalition, and had to divert resources (e.g. Patriot missile batteries) to prevent Tel Aviv doing anything that might harm the alliance against Saddam Hussein. History repeated itself in 2003: although Israel was eager for the US to attack Iraq, Bush could not ask it to help without triggering Arab opposition. So Israel stayed on the sidelines once again.
Beginning in the 1990s, and even more after 9/11, US support has been justified by the claim that both states are threatened by terrorist groups originating in the Arab and Muslim world, and by ‘rogue states’ that back these groups and seek weapons of mass destruction. This is taken to mean not only that Washington should give Israel a free hand in dealing with the Palestinians and not press it to make concessions until all Palestinian terrorists are imprisoned or dead, but that the US should go after countries like Iran and Syria. Israel is thus seen as a crucial ally in the war on terror, because its enemies are America’s enemies. In fact, Israel is a liability in the war on terror and the broader effort to deal with rogue states.
‘Terrorism’ is not a single adversary, but a tactic employed by a wide array of political groups. The terrorist organisations that threaten Israel do not threaten the United States, except when it intervenes against them (as in Lebanon in 1982). Moreover, Palestinian terrorism is not random violence directed against Israel or ‘the West’; it is largely a response to Israel’s prolonged campaign to colonise the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The US has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around.
More important, saying that Israel and the US are united by a shared terrorist threat has the causal relationship backwards: the US has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around. Support for Israel is not the only source of anti-American terrorism, but it is an important one, and it makes winning the war on terror more difficult. There is no question that many al-Qaida leaders, including Osama bin Laden, are motivated by Israel’s presence in Jerusalem and the plight of the Palestinians. Unconditional support for Israel makes it easier for extremists to rally popular support and to attract recruits.
As for so-called rogue states in the Middle East, they are not a dire threat to vital US interests, except inasmuch as they are a threat to Israel. Even if these states acquire nuclear weapons – which is obviously undesirable – neither America nor Israel could be blackmailed, because the blackmailer could not carry out the threat without suffering overwhelming retaliation. The danger of a nuclear handover to terrorists is equally remote, because a rogue state could not be sure the transfer would go undetected or that it would not be blamed and punished afterwards. The relationship with Israel actually makes it harder for the US to deal with these states. Israel’s nuclear arsenal is one reason some of its neighbours want nuclear weapons, and threatening them with regime change merely increases that desire.
A final reason to question Israel’s strategic value is that it does not behave like a loyal ally. Israeli officials frequently ignore US requests and renege on promises (including pledges to stop building settlements and to refrain from ‘targeted assassinations’ of Palestinian leaders). Israel has provided sensitive military technology to potential rivals like China, in what the State Department inspector-general called ‘a systematic and growing pattern of unauthorised transfers’. According to the General Accounting Office, Israel also ‘conducts the most aggressive espionage operations against the US of any ally’. In addition to the case of Jonathan Pollard, who gave Israel large quantities of classified material in the early 1980s (which it reportedly passed on to the Soviet Union in return for more exit visas for Soviet Jews), a new controversy erupted in 2004 when it was revealed that a key Pentagon official called Larry Franklin had passed classified information to an Israeli diplomat. Israel is hardly the only country that spies on the US, but its willingness to spy on its principal patron casts further doubt on its strategic value.
Israel’s strategic value isn’t the only issue. Its backers also argue that it deserves unqualified support because it is weak and surrounded by enemies; it is a democracy; the Jewish people have suffered from past crimes and therefore deserve special treatment; and Israel’s conduct has been morally superior to that of its adversaries. On close inspection, none of these arguments is persuasive. There is a strong moral case for supporting Israel’s existence, but that is not in jeopardy. Viewed objectively, its past and present conduct offers no moral basis for privileging it over the Palestinians.
Israel is often portrayed as David confronted by Goliath, but the converse is closer to the truth. Contrary to popular belief, the Zionists had larger, better equipped and better led forces during the 1947-49 War of Independence, and the Israel Defence Forces won quick and easy victories against Egypt in 1956 and against Egypt, Jordan and Syria in 1967 – all of this before large-scale US aid began flowing. Today, Israel is the strongest military power in the Middle East. Its conventional forces are far superior to those of its neighbours and it is the only state in the region with nuclear weapons. Egypt and Jordan have signed peace treaties with it, and Saudi Arabia has offered to do so. Syria has lost its Soviet patron, Iraq has been devastated by three disastrous wars and Iran is hundreds of miles away. The Palestinians barely have an effective police force, let alone an army that could pose a threat to Israel. According to a 2005 assessment by Tel Aviv University’s Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies, ‘the strategic balance decidedly favours Israel, which has continued to widen the qualitative gap between its own military capability and deterrence powers and those of its neighbours.’ If backing the underdog were a compelling motive, the United States would be supporting Israel’s opponents.
That Israel is a fellow democracy surrounded by hostile dictatorships cannot account for the current level of aid: there are many democracies around the world, but none receives the same lavish support. The US has overthrown democratic governments in the past and supported dictators when this was thought to advance its interests – it has good relations with a number of dictatorships today.
Unlike the US, where people are supposed to enjoy equal rights irrespective of race, religion or ethnicity, Israel was explicitly founded as a Jewish state and citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship.
Some aspects of Israeli democracy are at odds with core American values. Unlike the US, where people are supposed to enjoy equal rights irrespective of race, religion or ethnicity, Israel was explicitly founded as a Jewish state and citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship. Given this, it is not surprising that its 1.3 million Arabs are treated as second-class citizens, or that a recent Israeli government commission found that Israel behaves in a ‘neglectful and discriminatory’ manner towards them. Its democratic status is also undermined by its refusal to grant the Palestinians a viable state of their own or full political rights.
A third justification is the history of Jewish suffering in the Christian West, especially during the Holocaust. Because Jews were persecuted for centuries and could feel safe only in a Jewish homeland, many people now believe that Israel deserves special treatment from the United States. The country’s creation was undoubtedly an appropriate response to the long record of crimes against Jews, but it also brought about fresh crimes against a largely innocent third party: the Palestinians.
This was well understood by Israel’s early leaders. David Ben-Gurion told Nahum Goldmann, the president of the World Jewish Congress:
If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country . . . We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?
Since then, Israeli leaders have repeatedly sought to deny the Palestinians’ national ambitions. When she was prime minister, Golda Meir famously remarked that ‘there is no such thing as a Palestinian.’ Pressure from extremist violence and Palestinian population growth has forced subsequent Israeli leaders to disengage from the Gaza Strip and consider other territorial compromises, but not even Yitzhak Rabin was willing to offer the Palestinians a viable state. Ehud Barak’s purportedly generous offer at Camp David would have given them only a disarmed set of Bantustans under de facto Israeli control. The tragic history of the Jewish people does not obligate the US to help Israel today no matter what it does.
Israel’s backers also portray it as a country that has sought peace at every turn and shown great restraint even when provoked. The Arabs, by contrast, are said to have acted with great wickedness. Yet on the ground, Israel’s record is not distinguishable from that of its opponents. Ben-Gurion acknowledged that the early Zionists were far from benevolent towards the Palestinian Arabs, who resisted their encroachments – which is hardly surprising, given that the Zionists were trying to create their own state on Arab land. In the same way, the creation of Israel in 1947-48 involved acts of ethnic cleansing, including executions, massacres and rapes by Jews, and Israel’s subsequent conduct has often been brutal, belying any claim to moral superiority. Between 1949 and 1956, for example, Israeli security forces killed between 2700 and 5000 Arab infiltrators, the overwhelming majority of them unarmed. The IDF murdered hundreds of Egyptian prisoners of war in both the 1956 and 1967 wars, while in 1967, it expelled between 100,000 and 260,000 Palestinians from the newly conquered West Bank, and drove 80,000 Syrians from the Golan Heights.
During the first intifada, the IDF distributed truncheons to its troops and encouraged them to break the bones of Palestinian protesters.
During the first intifada, the IDF distributed truncheons to its troops and encouraged them to break the bones of Palestinian protesters. The Swedish branch of Save the Children estimated that ‘23,600 to 29,900 children required medical treatment for their beating injuries in the first two years of the intifada.’ Nearly a third of them were aged ten or under. The response to the second intifada has been even more violent, leading Ha’aretz to declare that ‘the IDF . . . is turning into a killing machine whose efficiency is awe-inspiring, yet shocking.’ The IDF fired one million bullets in the first days of the uprising. Since then, for every Israeli lost, Israel has killed 3.4 Palestinians, the majority of whom have been innocent bystanders; the ratio of Palestinian to Israeli children killed is even higher (5.7:1). It is also worth bearing in mind that the Zionists relied on terrorist bombs to drive the British from Palestine, and that Yitzhak Shamir, once a terrorist and later prime minister, declared that ‘neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat.’
The Palestinian resort to terrorism is wrong but it isn’t surprising. The Palestinians believe they have no other way to force Israeli concessions. As Ehud Barak once admitted, had he been born a Palestinian, he ‘would have joined a terrorist organisation’.
So if neither strategic nor moral arguments can account for America’s support for Israel, how are we to explain it?
So if neither strategic nor moral arguments can account for America’s support for Israel, how are we to explain it? The explanation is the unmatched power of the Israel Lobby.
The explanation is the unmatched power of the Israel Lobby. We use ‘the Lobby’ as shorthand for the loose coalition of individuals and organisations who actively work to steer US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction. This is not meant to suggest that ‘the Lobby’ is a unified movement with a central leadership, or that individuals within it do not disagree on certain issues. Not all Jewish Americans are part of the Lobby, because Israel is not a salient issue for many of them. In a 2004 survey, for example, roughly 36 per cent of American Jews said they were either ‘not very’ or ‘not at all’ emotionally attached to Israel.
Not all Jewish Americans are part of the Lobby.
Jewish Americans also differ on specific Israeli policies. Many of the key organisations in the Lobby, such as the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organisations, are run by hardliners who generally support the Likud Party’s expansionist policies, including its hostility to the Oslo peace process. The bulk of US Jewry, meanwhile, is more inclined to make concessions to the Palestinians, and a few groups – such as Jewish Voice for Peace – strongly advocate such steps. Despite these differences, moderates and hardliners both favour giving steadfast support to Israel.
Not surprisingly, American Jewish leaders often consult Israeli officials, to make sure that their actions advance Israeli goals. As one activist from a major Jewish organisation wrote, ‘it is routine for us to say: “This is our policy on a certain issue, but we must check what the Israelis think.” We as a community do it all the time.’ There is a strong prejudice against criticising Israeli policy, and putting pressure on Israel is considered out of order. Edgar Bronfman Sr, the president of the World Jewish Congress, was accused of ‘perfidy’ when he wrote a letter to President Bush in mid-2003 urging him to persuade Israel to curb construction of its controversial ‘security fence’. His critics said that ‘it would be obscene at any time for the president of the World Jewish Congress to lobby the president of the United States to resist policies being promoted by the government of Israel.’
Similarly, when the president of the Israel Policy Forum, Seymour Reich, advised Condoleezza Rice in November 2005 to ask Israel to reopen a critical border crossing in the Gaza Strip, his action was denounced as ‘irresponsible’: ‘There is,’ his critics said, ‘absolutely no room in the Jewish mainstream for actively canvassing against the security-related policies . . . of Israel.’ Recoiling from these attacks, Reich announced that ‘the word “pressure” is not in my vocabulary when it comes to Israel.’
In 1997, Fortune magazine asked members of Congress and their staffs to list the most powerful lobbies in Washington. AIPAC was ranked second.
Jewish Americans have set up an impressive array of organisations to influence American foreign policy, of which AIPAC is the most powerful and best known. In 1997, Fortune magazine asked members of Congress and their staffs to list the most powerful lobbies in Washington. AIPAC was ranked second behind the American Association of Retired People, but ahead of the AFL-CIO and the National Rifle Association. A National Journal study in March 2005 reached a similar conclusion, placing AIPAC in second place (tied with AARP) in the Washington ‘muscle rankings’.
The Lobby also includes prominent Christian evangelicals like Gary Bauer, Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson, as well as Dick Armey and Tom DeLay, former majority leaders in the House of Representatives, all of whom believe Israel’s rebirth is the fulfilment of biblical prophecy and support its expansionist agenda; to do otherwise, they believe, would be contrary to God’s will. Neo-conservative gentiles such as John Bolton; Robert Bartley, the former Wall Street Journal editor; William Bennett, the former secretary of education; Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former UN ambassador; and the influential columnist George Will are also steadfast supporters.
The US form of government offers activists many ways of influencing the policy process. Interest groups can lobby elected representatives and members of the executive branch, make campaign contributions, vote in elections, try to mould public opinion etc. They enjoy a disproportionate amount of influence when they are committed to an issue to which the bulk of the population is indifferent. Policymakers will tend to accommodate those who care about the issue, even if their numbers are small, confident that the rest of the population will not penalise them for doing so.
The Israel Lobby is no different from the farm lobby, steel or textile workers’ unions, or other ethnic lobbies.
In its basic operations, the Israel Lobby is no different from the farm lobby, steel or textile workers’ unions, or other ethnic lobbies. There is nothing improper about American Jews and their Christian allies attempting to sway US policy: the Lobby’s activities are not a conspiracy of the sort depicted in tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For the most part, the individuals and groups that comprise it are only doing what other special interest groups do, but doing it very much better. By contrast, pro-Arab interest groups, in so far as they exist at all, are weak, which makes the Israel Lobby’s task even easier.
The Lobby pursues two broad strategies. First, it wields its significant influence in Washington, pressuring both Congress and the executive branch. Whatever an individual lawmaker or policymaker’s own views may be, the Lobby tries to make supporting Israel the ‘smart’ choice. Second, it strives to ensure that public discourse portrays Israel in a positive light, by repeating myths about its founding and by promoting its point of view in policy debates. The goal is to prevent critical comments from getting a fair hearing in the political arena. Controlling the debate is essential to guaranteeing US support, because a candid discussion of US-Israeli relations might lead Americans to favour a different policy.
A key pillar of the Lobby’s effectiveness is its influence in Congress, where Israel is virtually immune from criticism. This in itself is remarkable, because Congress rarely shies away from contentious issues. Where Israel is concerned, however, potential critics fall silent. One reason is that some key members are Christian Zionists like Dick Armey, who said in September 2002: ‘My No. 1 priority in foreign policy is to protect Israel.’ One might think that the No. 1 priority for any congressman would be to protect America. There are also Jewish senators and congressmen who work to ensure that US foreign policy supports Israel’s interests.
Another source of the Lobby’s power is its use of pro-Israel congressional staffers. As Morris Amitay, a former head of AIPAC, once admitted, ‘there are a lot of guys at the working level up here’ – on Capitol Hill – ‘who happen to be Jewish, who are willing . . . to look at certain issues in terms of their Jewishness . . . These are all guys who are in a position to make the decision in these areas for those senators . . . You can get an awful lot done just at the staff level.’
AIPAC itself, however, forms the core of the Lobby’s influence in Congress. Its success is due to its ability to reward legislators and congressional candidates who support its agenda, and to punish those who challenge it. Money is critical to US elections (as the scandal over the lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s shady dealings reminds us), and AIPAC makes sure that its friends get strong financial support from the many pro-Israel political action committees. Anyone who is seen as hostile to Israel can be sure that AIPAC will direct campaign contributions to his or her political opponents. AIPAC also organises letter-writing campaigns and encourages newspaper editors to endorse pro-Israel candidates.
There is no doubt about the efficacy of these tactics. Here is one example: in the 1984 elections, AIPAC helped defeat Senator Charles Percy from Illinois, who, according to a prominent Lobby figure, had ‘displayed insensitivity and even hostility to our concerns’. Thomas Dine, the head of AIPAC at the time, explained what happened: ‘All the Jews in America, from coast to coast, gathered to oust Percy. And the American politicians – those who hold public positions now, and those who aspire – got the message.’
AIPAC’s influence on Capitol Hill goes even further. According to Douglas Bloomfield, a former AIPAC staff member, ‘it is common for members of Congress and their staffs to turn to AIPAC first when they need information, before calling the Library of Congress, the Congressional Research Service, committee staff or administration experts.’ More important, he notes that AIPAC is ‘often called on to draft speeches, work on legislation, advise on tactics, perform research, collect co-sponsors and marshal votes’.
AIPAC, a de facto agent for a foreign government, has a stranglehold on Congress.
The bottom line is that AIPAC, a de facto agent for a foreign government, has a stranglehold on Congress, with the result that US policy towards Israel is not debated there, even though that policy has important consequences for the entire world. In other words, one of the three main branches of the government is firmly committed to supporting Israel. As one former Democratic senator, Ernest Hollings, noted on leaving office, ‘you can’t have an Israeli policy other than what AIPAC gives you around here.’ Or as Ariel Sharon once told an American audience, ‘when people ask me how they can help Israel, I tell them: “Help AIPAC.”’
Thanks in part to the influence Jewish voters have on presidential elections, the Lobby also has significant leverage over the executive branch. Although they make up fewer than 3 per cent of the population, they make large campaign donations to candidates from both parties. The Washington Post once estimated that Democratic presidential candidates ‘depend on Jewish supporters to supply as much as 60 per cent of the money’. And because Jewish voters have high turn-out rates and are concentrated in key states like California, Florida, Illinois, New York and Pennsylvania, presidential candidates go to great lengths not to antagonise them.
Key organisations in the Lobby make it their business to ensure that critics of Israel do not get important foreign policy jobs. Jimmy Carter wanted to make George Ball his first secretary of state, but knew that Ball was seen as critical of Israel and that the Lobby would oppose the appointment. In this way any aspiring policymaker is encouraged to become an overt supporter of Israel, which is why public critics of Israeli policy have become an endangered species in the foreign policy establishment.
When Howard Dean called for the United States to take a more ‘even-handed role’ in the Arab-Israeli conflict, Senator Joseph Lieberman accused him of selling Israel down the river and said his statement was ‘irresponsible’. Virtually all the top Democrats in the House signed a letter criticising Dean’s remarks, and the Chicago Jewish Star reported that ‘anonymous attackers . . . are clogging the email inboxes of Jewish leaders around the country, warning – without much evidence – that Dean would somehow be bad for Israel.’
This worry was absurd; Dean is in fact quite hawkish on Israel: his campaign co-chair was a former AIPAC president, and Dean said his own views on the Middle East more closely reflected those of AIPAC than those of the more moderate Americans for Peace Now. He had merely suggested that to ‘bring the sides together’, Washington should act as an honest broker. This is hardly a radical idea, but the Lobby doesn’t tolerate even-handedness.
The Lobby doesn’t tolerate even-handedness.
During the Clinton administration, Middle Eastern policy was largely shaped by officials with close ties to Israel or to prominent pro-Israel organisations; among them, Martin Indyk, the former deputy director of research at AIPAC and co-founder of the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP); Dennis Ross, who joined WINEP after leaving government in 2001; and Aaron Miller, who has lived in Israel and often visits the country. These men were among Clinton’s closest advisers at the Camp David summit in July 2000. Although all three supported the Oslo peace process and favoured the creation of a Palestinian state, they did so only within the limits of what would be acceptable to Israel. The American delegation took its cues from Ehud Barak, co-ordinated its negotiating positions with Israel in advance, and did not offer independent proposals. Not surprisingly, Palestinian negotiators complained that they were ‘negotiating with two Israeli teams – one displaying an Israeli flag, and one an American flag’.
The situation is even more pronounced in the Bush administration, whose ranks have included such fervent advocates of the Israeli cause as Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, I. Lewis (‘Scooter’) Libby, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and David Wurmser. As we shall see, these officials have consistently pushed for policies favoured by Israel and backed by organisations in the Lobby.
The Lobby doesn’t want an open debate, of course, because that might lead Americans to question the level of support they provide. Accordingly, pro-Israel organisations work hard to influence the institutions that do most to shape popular opinion.
The Lobby doesn’t want an open debate, of course, because that might lead Americans to question the level of support they provide.
The Lobby’s perspective prevails in the mainstream media: the debate among Middle East pundits, the journalist Eric Alterman writes, is ‘dominated by people who cannot imagine criticising Israel’. He lists 61 ‘columnists and commentators who can be counted on to support Israel reflexively and without qualification’. Conversely, he found just five pundits who consistently criticise Israeli actions or endorse Arab positions. Newspapers occasionally publish guest op-eds challenging Israeli policy, but the balance of opinion clearly favours the other side. It is hard to imagine any mainstream media outlet in the United States publishing a piece like this one.
‘Shamir, Sharon, Bibi – whatever those guys want is pretty much fine by me,’ Robert Bartley once remarked. Not surprisingly, his newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, along with other prominent papers like the Chicago Sun-Times and the Washington Times, regularly runs editorials that strongly support Israel. Magazines like Commentary, the New Republic and the Weekly Standard defend Israel at every turn.
Editorial bias is also found in papers like the New York Times, which occasionally criticises Israeli policies and sometimes concedes that the Palestinians have legitimate grievances, but is not even-handed. In his memoirs the paper’s former executive editor Max Frankel acknowledges the impact his own attitude had on his editorial decisions: ‘I was much more deeply devoted to Israel than I dared to assert . . . Fortified by my knowledge of Israel and my friendships there, I myself wrote most of our Middle East commentaries. As more Arab than Jewish readers recognised, I wrote them from a pro-Israel perspective.’
News reports are more even-handed, in part because reporters strive to be objective, but also because it is difficult to cover events in the Occupied Territories without acknowledging Israel’s actions on the ground. To discourage unfavourable reporting, the Lobby organises letter-writing campaigns, demonstrations and boycotts of news outlets whose content it considers anti-Israel. One CNN executive has said that he sometimes gets 6000 email messages in a single day complaining about a story. In May 2003, the pro-Israel Committee for Accurate Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) organised demonstrations outside National Public Radio stations in 33 cities; it also tried to persuade contributors to withhold support from NPR until its Middle East coverage becomes more sympathetic to Israel. Boston’s NPR station, WBUR, reportedly lost more than $1 million in contributions as a result of these efforts. Further pressure on NPR has come from Israel’s friends in Congress, who have asked for an internal audit of its Middle East coverage as well as more oversight.
The Israeli side also dominates the think tanks which play an important role in shaping public debate as well as actual policy. The Lobby created its own think tank in 1985, when Martin Indyk helped to found WINEP. Although WINEP plays down its links to Israel, claiming instead to provide a ‘balanced and realistic’ perspective on Middle East issues, it is funded and run by individuals deeply committed to advancing Israel’s agenda.
The Lobby’s influence extends well beyond WINEP, however. Over the past 25 years, pro-Israel forces have established a commanding presence at the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, the Center for Security Policy, the Foreign Policy Research Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Hudson Institute, the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). These think tanks employ few, if any, critics of US support for Israel.
Take the Brookings Institution. For many years, its senior expert on the Middle East was William Quandt, a former NSC official with a well-deserved reputation for even-handedness. Today, Brookings’s coverage is conducted through the Saban Center for Middle East Studies, which is financed by Haim Saban, an Israeli-American businessman and ardent Zionist. The centre’s director is the ubiquitous Martin Indyk. What was once a non-partisan policy institute is now part of the pro-Israel chorus.
Where the Lobby has had the most difficulty is in stifling debate on university campuses. In the 1990s, when the Oslo peace process was underway, there was only mild criticism of Israel, but it grew stronger with Oslo’s collapse and Sharon’s access to power, becoming quite vociferous when the IDF reoccupied the West Bank in spring 2002 and employed massive force to subdue the second intifada.
AIPAC more than tripled its spending on programmes to monitor university activities and to train young advocates, in order to ‘vastly expand the number of students involved on campus . . . in the national pro-Israel effort’.
The Lobby moved immediately to ‘take back the campuses’. New groups sprang up, like the Caravan for Democracy, which brought Israeli speakers to US colleges. Established groups like the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and Hillel joined in, and a new group, the Israel on Campus Coalition, was formed to co-ordinate the many bodies that now sought to put Israel’s case. Finally, AIPAC more than tripled its spending on programmes to monitor university activities and to train young advocates, in order to ‘vastly expand the number of students involved on campus . . . in the national pro-Israel effort’.
The Lobby also monitors what professors write and teach. In September 2002, Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes, two passionately pro-Israel neo-conservatives, established a website (Campus Watch) that posted dossiers on suspect academics and encouraged students to report remarks or behaviour that might be considered hostile to Israel. This transparent attempt to blacklist and intimidate scholars provoked a harsh reaction and Pipes and Kramer later removed the dossiers, but the website still invites students to report ‘anti-Israel’ activity.
Groups within the Lobby put pressure on particular academics and universities. Columbia has been a frequent target, no doubt because of the presence of the late Edward Said on its faculty. ‘One can be sure that any public statement in support of the Palestinian people by the pre-eminent literary critic Edward Said will elicit hundreds of emails, letters and journalistic accounts that call on us to denounce Said and to either sanction or fire him,’ Jonathan Cole, its former provost, reported. When Columbia recruited the historian Rashid Khalidi from Chicago, the same thing happened. It was a problem Princeton also faced a few years later when it considered wooing Khalidi away from Columbia.
A classic illustration of the effort to police academia occurred towards the end of 2004, when the David Project produced a film alleging that faculty members of Columbia’s Middle East Studies programme were anti-semitic and were intimidating Jewish students who stood up for Israel. Columbia was hauled over the coals, but a faculty committee which was assigned to investigate the charges found no evidence of anti-semitism and the only incident possibly worth noting was that one professor had ‘responded heatedly’ to a student’s question. The committee also discovered that the academics in question had themselves been the target of an overt campaign of intimidation.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of all this is the efforts Jewish groups have made to push Congress into establishing mechanisms to monitor what professors say. If they manage to get this passed, universities judged to have an anti-Israel bias would be denied federal funding. Their efforts have not yet succeeded, but they are an indication of the importance placed on controlling debate.
A number of Jewish philanthropists have recently established Israel Studies programmes (in addition to the roughly 130 Jewish Studies programmes already in existence) so as to increase the number of Israel-friendly scholars on campus. In May 2003, NYU announced the establishment of the Taub Center for Israel Studies; similar programmes have been set up at Berkeley, Brandeis and Emory. Academic administrators emphasise their pedagogical value, but the truth is that they are intended in large part to promote Israel’s image. Fred Laffer, the head of the Taub Foundation, makes it clear that his foundation funded the NYU centre to help counter the ‘Arabic [sic] point of view’ that he thinks is prevalent in NYU’s Middle East programmes.
Anyone who merely claims that there is an Israel Lobby runs the risk of being charged with anti-semitism.
No discussion of the Lobby would be complete without an examination of one of its most powerful weapons: the charge of anti-semitism. Anyone who criticises Israel’s actions or argues that pro-Israel groups have significant influence over US Middle Eastern policy – an influence AIPAC celebrates – stands a good chance of being labelled an anti-semite. Indeed, anyone who merely claims that there is an Israel Lobby runs the risk of being charged with anti-semitism, even though the Israeli media refer to America’s ‘Jewish Lobby’. In other words, the Lobby first boasts of its influence and then attacks anyone who calls attention to it. It’s a very effective tactic: anti-semitism is something no one wants to be accused of.
Europeans have been more willing than Americans to criticise Israeli policy, which some people attribute to a resurgence of anti-semitism in Europe. We are ‘getting to a point’, the US ambassador to the EU said in early 2004, ‘where it is as bad as it was in the 1930s’. Measuring anti-semitism is a complicated matter, but the weight of evidence points in the opposite direction. In the spring of 2004, when accusations of European anti-semitism filled the air in America, separate surveys of European public opinion conducted by the US-based Anti-Defamation League and the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that it was in fact declining. In the 1930s, by contrast, anti-semitism was not only widespread among Europeans of all classes but considered quite acceptable.
The Lobby and its friends often portray France as the most anti-semitic country in Europe. But in 2003, the head of the French Jewish community said that ‘France is not more anti-semitic than America.’ According to a recent article in Ha’aretz, the French police have reported that anti-semitic incidents declined by almost 50 per cent in 2005; and this even though France has the largest Muslim population of any European country. Finally, when a French Jew was murdered in Paris last month by a Muslim gang, tens of thousands of demonstrators poured into the streets to condemn anti-semitism. Jacques Chirac and Dominique de Villepin both attended the victim’s memorial service to show their solidarity.
No one would deny that there is anti-semitism among European Muslims, some of it provoked by Israel’s conduct towards the Palestinians and some of it straightforwardly racist. But this is a separate matter with little bearing on whether or not Europe today is like Europe in the 1930s. Nor would anyone deny that there are still some virulent autochthonous anti-semites in Europe (as there are in the United States) but their numbers are small and their views are rejected by the vast majority of Europeans.
Israel’s advocates, when pressed to go beyond mere assertion, claim that there is a ‘new anti-semitism’, which they equate with criticism of Israel. In other words, criticise Israeli policy and you are by definition an anti-semite. When the synod of the Church of England recently voted to divest from Caterpillar Inc on the grounds that it manufactures the bulldozers used by the Israelis to demolish Palestinian homes, the Chief Rabbi complained that this would ‘have the most adverse repercussions on . . . Jewish-Christian relations in Britain’, while Rabbi Tony Bayfield, the head of the Reform movement, said: ‘There is a clear problem of anti-Zionist – verging on anti-semitic – attitudes emerging in the grass-roots, and even in the middle ranks of the Church.’ But the Church was guilty merely of protesting against Israeli government policy.
Critics are also accused of holding Israel to an unfair standard or questioning its right to exist. But these are bogus charges too. Western critics of Israel hardly ever question its right to exist: they question its behaviour towards the Palestinians, as do Israelis themselves. Nor is Israel being judged unfairly. Israeli treatment of the Palestinians elicits criticism because it is contrary to widely accepted notions of human rights, to international law and to the principle of national self-determination. And it is hardly the only state that has faced sharp criticism on these grounds.
In the autumn of 2001, and especially in the spring of 2002, the Bush administration tried to reduce anti-American sentiment in the Arab world and undermine support for terrorist groups like al-Qaida by halting Israel’s expansionist policies in the Occupied Territories and advocating the creation of a Palestinian state. Bush had very significant means of persuasion at his disposal. He could have threatened to reduce economic and diplomatic support for Israel, and the American people would almost certainly have supported him. A May 2003 poll reported that more than 60 per cent of Americans were willing to withhold aid if Israel resisted US pressure to settle the conflict, and that number rose to 70 per cent among the ‘politically active’. Indeed, 73 per cent said that the United States should not favour either side.
Yet the administration failed to change Israeli policy, and Washington ended up backing it. Over time, the administration also adopted Israel’s own justifications of its position, so that US rhetoric began to mimic Israeli rhetoric. By February 2003, a Washington Post headline summarised the situation: ‘Bush and Sharon Nearly Identical on Mideast Policy.’ The main reason for this switch was the Lobby.
The story begins in late September 2001, when Bush began urging Sharon to show restraint in the Occupied Territories. He also pressed him to allow Israel’s foreign minister, Shimon Peres, to meet with Yasser Arafat, even though he (Bush) was highly critical of Arafat’s leadership. Bush even said publicly that he supported the creation of a Palestinian state. Alarmed, Sharon accused him of trying ‘to appease the Arabs at our expense’, warning that Israel ‘will not be Czechoslovakia’.
Bush was reportedly furious at being compared to Chamberlain, and the White House press secretary called Sharon’s remarks ‘unacceptable’. Sharon offered a pro forma apology, but quickly joined forces with the Lobby to persuade the administration and the American people that the United States and Israel faced a common threat from terrorism. Israeli officials and Lobby representatives insisted that there was no real difference between Arafat and Osama bin Laden: the United States and Israel, they said, should isolate the Palestinians’ elected leader and have nothing to do with him.
The Lobby also went to work in Congress. On 16 November, 89 senators sent Bush a letter praising him for refusing to meet with Arafat, but also demanding that the US not restrain Israel from retaliating against the Palestinians; the administration, they wrote, must state publicly that it stood behind Israel. According to the New York Times, the letter ‘stemmed’ from a meeting two weeks before between ‘leaders of the American Jewish community and key senators’, adding that AIPAC was ‘particularly active in providing advice on the letter’.
By late November, relations between Tel Aviv and Washington had improved considerably. This was thanks in part to the Lobby’s efforts, but also to America’s initial victory in Afghanistan, which reduced the perceived need for Arab support in dealing with al-Qaida. Sharon visited the White House in early December and had a friendly meeting with Bush.
In April 2002 trouble erupted again, after the IDF launched Operation Defensive Shield and resumed control of virtually all the major Palestinian areas on the West Bank. Bush knew that Israel’s actions would damage America’s image in the Islamic world and undermine the war on terrorism, so he demanded that Sharon ‘halt the incursions and begin withdrawal’. He underscored this message two days later, saying he wanted Israel to ‘withdraw without delay’. On 7 April, Condoleezza Rice, then Bush’s national security adviser, told reporters: ‘“Without delay” means without delay. It means now.’ That same day Colin Powell set out for the Middle East to persuade all sides to stop fighting and start negotiating.
Israel and the Lobby swung into action. Pro-Israel officials in the vice-president’s office and the Pentagon, as well as neo-conservative pundits like Robert Kagan and William Kristol, put the heat on Powell. They even accused him of having ‘virtually obliterated the distinction between terrorists and those fighting terrorists’. Bush himself was being pressed by Jewish leaders and Christian evangelicals. Tom DeLay and Dick Armey were especially outspoken about the need to support Israel, and DeLay and the Senate minority leader, Trent Lott, visited the White House and warned Bush to back off.
The first sign that Bush was caving in came on 11 April – a week after he told Sharon to withdraw his forces – when the White House press secretary said that the president believed Sharon was ‘a man of peace’. Bush repeated this statement publicly on Powell’s return from his abortive mission, and told reporters that Sharon had responded satisfactorily to his call for a full and immediate withdrawal. Sharon had done no such thing, but Bush was no longer willing to make an issue of it.
Meanwhile, Congress was also moving to back Sharon. On 2 May, it overrode the administration’s objections and passed two resolutions reaffirming support for Israel. (The Senate vote was 94 to 2; the House of Representatives version passed 352 to 21.) Both resolutions held that the United States ‘stands in solidarity with Israel’ and that the two countries were, to quote the House resolution, ‘now engaged in a common struggle against terrorism’. The House version also condemned ‘the ongoing support and co-ordination of terror by Yasser Arafat’, who was portrayed as a central part of the terrorism problem. Both resolutions were drawn up with the help of the Lobby. A few days later, a bipartisan congressional delegation on a fact-finding mission to Israel stated that Sharon should resist US pressure to negotiate with Arafat. On 9 May, a House appropriations subcommittee met to consider giving Israel an extra $200 million to fight terrorism. Powell opposed the package, but the Lobby backed it and Powell lost.
Sharon and the Lobby took on the president of the United States and triumphed.
In short, Sharon and the Lobby took on the president of the United States and triumphed. Hemi Shalev, a journalist on the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv, reported that Sharon’s aides ‘could not hide their satisfaction in view of Powell’s failure. Sharon saw the whites of President Bush’s eyes, they bragged, and the president blinked first.’ But it was Israel’s champions in the United States, not Sharon or Israel, that played the key role in defeating Bush.
The situation has changed little since then. The Bush administration refused ever again to have dealings with Arafat. After his death, it embraced the new Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, but has done little to help him. Sharon continued to develop his plan to impose a unilateral settlement on the Palestinians, based on ‘disengagement’ from Gaza coupled with continued expansion on the West Bank. By refusing to negotiate with Abbas and making it impossible for him to deliver tangible benefits to the Palestinian people, Sharon’s strategy contributed directly to Hamas’s electoral victory. With Hamas in power, however, Israel has another excuse not to negotiate. The US administration has supported Sharon’s actions (and those of his successor, Ehud Olmert). Bush has even endorsed unilateral Israeli annexations in the Occupied Territories, reversing the stated policy of every president since Lyndon Johnson.
US officials have offered mild criticisms of a few Israeli actions, but have done little to help create a viable Palestinian state. Sharon has Bush ‘wrapped around his little finger’, the former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft said in October 2004. If Bush tries to distance the US from Israel, or even criticises Israeli actions in the Occupied Territories, he is certain to face the wrath of the Lobby and its supporters in Congress. Democratic presidential candidates understand that these are facts of life, which is the reason John Kerry went to great lengths to display unalloyed support for Israel in 2004, and why Hillary Clinton is doing the same thing today.
Maintaining US support for Israel’s policies against the Palestinians is essential as far as the Lobby is concerned, but its ambitions do not stop there. It also wants America to help Israel remain the dominant regional power. The Israeli government and pro-Israel groups in the United States have worked together to shape the administration’s policy towards Iraq, Syria and Iran, as well as its grand scheme for reordering the Middle East.
Pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was critical. Some Americans believe that this was a war for oil, but there is hardly any direct evidence to support this claim. Instead, the war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure. According to Philip Zelikow, a former member of the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, and now a counsellor to Condoleezza Rice, the ‘real threat’ from Iraq was not a threat to the United States. The ‘unstated threat’ was the ‘threat against Israel’, Zelikow told an audience at the University of Virginia in September 2002. ‘The American government,’ he added, ‘doesn’t want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.’
‘Israel is urging US officials not to delay a military strike against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.’- Washington Post
On 16 August 2002, 11 days before Dick Cheney kicked off the campaign for war with a hardline speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Washington Post reported that ‘Israel is urging US officials not to delay a military strike against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.’ By this point, according to Sharon, strategic co-ordination between Israel and the US had reached ‘unprecedented dimensions’, and Israeli intelligence officials had given Washington a variety of alarming reports about Iraq’s WMD programmes. As one retired Israeli general later put it, ‘Israeli intelligence was a full partner to the picture presented by American and British intelligence regarding Iraq’s non-conventional capabilities.’
Israeli leaders were deeply distressed when Bush decided to seek Security Council authorisation for war, and even more worried when Saddam agreed to let UN inspectors back in. ‘The campaign against Saddam Hussein is a must,’ Shimon Peres told reporters in September 2002. ‘Inspections and inspectors are good for decent people, but dishonest people can overcome easily inspections and inspectors.’
At the same time, Ehud Barak wrote a New York Times op-ed warning that ‘the greatest risk now lies in inaction.’ His predecessor as prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, published a similar piece in the Wall Street Journal, entitled: ‘The Case for Toppling Saddam’. ‘Today nothing less than dismantling his regime will do,’ he declared. ‘I believe I speak for the overwhelming majority of Israelis in supporting a pre-emptive strike against Saddam’s regime.’ Or as Ha’aretz reported in February 2003, ‘the military and political leadership yearns for war in Iraq.’
As Netanyahu suggested, however, the desire for war was not confined to Israel’s leaders. Apart from Kuwait, which Saddam invaded in 1990, Israel was the only country in the world where both politicians and public favoured war. As the journalist Gideon Levy observed at the time, ‘Israel is the only country in the West whose leaders support the war unreservedly and where no alternative opinion is voiced.’ In fact, Israelis were so gung-ho that their allies in America told them to damp down their rhetoric, or it would look as if the war would be fought on Israel’s behalf.
Within the US, the main driving force behind the war was a small band of neo-conservatives, many with ties to Likud. But leaders of the Lobby’s major organisations lent their voices to the campaign. ‘As President Bush attempted to sell the . . . war in Iraq,’ the Forward reported, ‘America’s most important Jewish organisations rallied as one to his defence. In statement after statement community leaders stressed the need to rid the world of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction.’ The editorial goes on to say that ‘concern for Israel’s safety rightfully factored into the deliberations of the main Jewish groups.’
Although neo-conservatives and other Lobby leaders were eager to invade Iraq, the broader American Jewish community was not.
Although neo-conservatives and other Lobby leaders were eager to invade Iraq, the broader American Jewish community was not. Just after the war started, Samuel Freedman reported that ‘a compilation of nationwide opinion polls by the Pew Research Center shows that Jews are less supportive of the Iraq war than the population at large, 52 per cent to 62 per cent.’ Clearly, it would be wrong to blame the war in Iraq on ‘Jewish influence’. Rather, it was due in large part to the Lobby’s influence, especially that of the neo-conservatives within it.
The neo-conservatives had been determined to topple Saddam even before Bush became president. They caused a stir early in 1998 by publishing two open letters to Clinton, calling for Saddam’s removal from power. The signatories, many of whom had close ties to pro-Israel groups like JINSA or WINEP, and who included Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, William Kristol, Bernard Lewis, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, had little trouble persuading the Clinton administration to adopt the general goal of ousting Saddam. But they were unable to sell a war to achieve that objective. They were no more able to generate enthusiasm for invading Iraq in the early months of the Bush administration. They needed help to achieve their aim. That help arrived with 9/11. Specifically, the events of that day led Bush and Cheney to reverse course and become strong proponents of a preventive war.
At a key meeting with Bush at Camp David on 15 September, Wolfowitz advocated attacking Iraq before Afghanistan, even though there was no evidence that Saddam was involved in the attacks on the US and bin Laden was known to be in Afghanistan. Bush rejected his advice and chose to go after Afghanistan instead, but war with Iraq was now regarded as a serious possibility and on 21 November the president charged military planners with developing concrete plans for an invasion.
Other neo-conservatives were meanwhile at work in the corridors of power. We don’t have the full story yet, but scholars like Bernard Lewis of Princeton and Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins reportedly played important roles in persuading Cheney that war was the best option, though neo-conservatives on his staff – Eric Edelman, John Hannah and Scooter Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff and one of the most powerful individuals in the administration – also played their part. By early 2002 Cheney had persuaded Bush; and with Bush and Cheney on board, war was inevitable.
Outside the administration, neo-conservative pundits lost no time in making the case that invading Iraq was essential to winning the war on terrorism. Their efforts were designed partly to keep up the pressure on Bush, and partly to overcome opposition to the war inside and outside the government. On 20 September, a group of prominent neo-conservatives and their allies published another open letter: ‘Even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack,’ it read, ‘any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.’ The letter also reminded Bush that ‘Israel has been and remains America’s staunchest ally against international terrorism.’ In the 1 October issue of the Weekly Standard, Robert Kagan and William Kristol called for regime change in Iraq as soon as the Taliban was defeated. That same day, Charles Krauthammer argued in the Washington Post that after the US was done with Afghanistan, Syria should be next, followed by Iran and Iraq: ‘The war on terrorism will conclude in Baghdad,’ when we finish off ‘the most dangerous terrorist regime in the world’.
This was the beginning of an unrelenting public relations campaign to win support for an invasion of Iraq, a crucial part of which was the manipulation of intelligence in such a way as to make it seem as if Saddam posed an imminent threat. For example, Libby pressured CIA analysts to find evidence supporting the case for war and helped prepare Colin Powell’s now discredited briefing to the UN Security Council. Within the Pentagon, the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group was charged with finding links between al-Qaida and Iraq that the intelligence community had supposedly missed. Its two key members were David Wurmser, a hard-core neo-conservative, and Michael Maloof, a Lebanese-American with close ties to Perle. Another Pentagon group, the so-called Office of Special Plans, was given the task of uncovering evidence that could be used to sell the war. It was headed by Abram Shulsky, a neo-conservative with long-standing ties to Wolfowitz, and its ranks included recruits from pro-Israel think tanks. Both these organisations were created after 9/11 and reported directly to Douglas Feith.
Ha’aretz columnist Akiva Eldar warned that Feith and Perle ‘are walking a fine line between their loyalty to American governments . . . and Israeli interests’.
Like virtually all the neo-conservatives, Feith is deeply committed to Israel; he also has long-term ties to Likud. He wrote articles in the 1990s supporting the settlements and arguing that Israel should retain the Occupied Territories. More important, along with Perle and Wurmser, he wrote the famous ‘Clean Break’ report in June 1996 for Netanyahu, who had just become prime minister. Among other things, it recommended that Netanyahu ‘focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq – an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right’. It also called for Israel to take steps to reorder the entire Middle East. Netanyahu did not follow their advice, but Feith, Perle and Wurmser were soon urging the Bush administration to pursue those same goals. The Ha’aretz columnist Akiva Eldar warned that Feith and Perle ‘are walking a fine line between their loyalty to American governments . . . and Israeli interests’.
Wolfowitz is equally committed to Israel. The Forward once described him as ‘the most hawkishly pro-Israel voice in the administration’, and selected him in 2002 as first among 50 notables who ‘have consciously pursued Jewish activism’. At about the same time, JINSA gave Wolfowitz its Henry M. Jackson Distinguished Service Award for promoting a strong partnership between Israel and the United States; and the Jerusalem Post, describing him as ‘devoutly pro-Israel’, named him ‘Man of the Year’ in 2003.
Robert Weisberg writes: For over a half century government has spent billions to eliminate the race-related academic achievement gap and all to no avail. Paralleling this educational failure has been a similar frustration to reverse the pathologies plaguing the black underclass, e.g., crime, welfare dependency, drug addiction, chaotic family life, gang violence and chronic unemployment, among others. Yes, some policies such as stop and frisk may help, but nothing appears to be a long-term, politically viable cure for this Hobbesian world. Sad to say, both conditions—education and pathology—appear intractable.
Let me suggest a radically different way of solving both problems: replace the current high test score idée fixe with education as civilizing. That is, transforming under-class black youngsters into dutiful scholars is unreachable but we may be able to civilize them just as millions of Europeans were “domesticated” between the 11th and 20th century (see Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, Chapter 3). Hardly a snap but certainly more feasible than boosting the test scores of blacks. Of the utmost importance, the formulae exist and can be readily applied; no need to unleash thousands of policy wonks to invent yet more expensive doomed panaceas. And, replacing the test score crusade with a civilizing mission will, in all likelihood, simultaneously improve academic performance.
Now, as per Pinker, who himself heavily relied on Norbert Elias (1897-1990) and his Civilizing Process, let’s begin with some items on the civilization menu.
First, the civil society requires people controlling their emotions, especially violent urges. As Pinker depicts the transformation, reacting to insults with immediate violence (defending one’s honor) slowly gave way to dueling that permitted multiple “honorable” escape routes which, in turn, transitioned to relying on litigation (“see you in court”). Simultaneously, the culture shifted so defending one’s reputation by drawing a sword for some trivial offense vanished thanks to the aggrieved party learning to hold his tongue, count to ten or develop a thick skin. Pinker also tells how ridicule eventually undermined the violence-soaked code that demanded a gentleman risk his life over trifling slights. Today’s civilized people see virtue in what was once spinelessness.
Second, civilization requires across-the-board delayed gratification, self-discipline and moderation. One does not eat a lunch snack at breakfast or crave the latest iPhone. Refined people now wait until all the others are served before eating. Think habits such as finishing school work before heading off to play or forgoing sex until adulthood. Most of all learn to resist crime as an alternative to employment and saving money.
Third, civilized people learn to obey authority regardless of contrary urges. When the teacher tells you to sit still and be quiet, you sit still and stop talking. As an adult one heeds police orders regardless of opinions regarding the police officer or policing more generally. In other words, civilization is impossible if “everybody does their own thing” or people can autonomously decide their own rules. Respect for the rule of law is what separates civilization from savagery.
The good news, as Pinker documents, is that history overflows with recipes to refine the unruly. Surely, even in the absence of stable families, teachers can impart these requirements if permitted to employ the traditional classroom discipline—stigma, humiliation, shame and even corporal punishment. Youngsters can certainly be taught the etiquette facilitating peaceful society—saying “excuse me” if inadvertently bumping into a classmate. Even students with room temperature IQ’s can be socialized though, to be sure, this quest may take years of punishment before avoiding fights over petty insults becomes second nature.
Moreover, it would cost almost nothing to begin teaching even kindergarten students habit such as punctuality, always being prepared and respective language—its “Mr. Smith,” not “hey teach.” Teachers could demand that youngsters tidy up after themselves so no milk and cookies until everything is neatly put away and the proper place. When I attended grade school no student could enter the building until everyone was perfectly lined up outside and absolutely silent. What about assigning books where the kindly hero outsmarts his boorish, brutal rival? Pinker tells of the many etiquette books of the Middle Ages that carefully spelled out behavior for a proper gentleman, and these can be adapted for today’s youngsters. While there might be rough and tumble sports but woe to any kid who turns a friendly dodge ball game into an exercise of taunting rivals that will almost guarantee violence. Punishment would be especially heavy if the miscreant continued this out of place behavior post game—who needs sports insults escalating into vendettas? The Battle of Waterloo may have been won on the playing fields of Eton, but if inner-city civilization is to be restored, the task must begin in thousands of violence prone schools and playgrounds.
Japanese educators have long understood the link between inculcating good behavior and academic achievement (it is called “learning to learn”). One practice requires youngsters to sit still and stare at a dot on the blackboard. Each student keeps a personal record of how long they are able to perform this patience-building task and those who excel are recognized for their accomplishment. In some classrooms the heat is turned down to 55 degrees and students wear shorts so as to learn how to work despite discomfort. Obviously there are countless other tactics, all practical, proven successful and many virtually cost-free but these examples should suffice.
Now, what is the prognosis for this civilizing mission? Alas, our advice is doomed and will surely be denounced. Clearly the basic premise underlying everything here is that young blacks (like all children) require domestication, but all the yammering will not sway critics who insist that imparting self-control, good manners, and obedience to authority is some pernicious scheme to make blacks “white.” I can already hear “are you suggesting that black youngsters are savages?” This opposition might be called Rousseauian educational philosophy with a racial twist—these youngsters naturally thirst for learning but are frustrated by rotten teachers, under-funded schools and all the rest.
But, at the same time, those who see “civilizing” as thinly disguised cultural imperialism do have a valid point, and one that must be addressed. After all, what moral justification exists for trying to turn a violence prone black dominated grade-school into one that resembles a school where classrooms are filled with quiet education-obsessed Asians? Recall the outrange from some black intellectuals when Bill Cosby suggested that young African Americans embrace more middle class “white” values. Our argument is easily reversed: perhaps these passive, dutiful Asians should lighten up a little and be more spontaneous (or, to use the PC euphemism for chaotic schools, be more “vibrant”).
The modern education establishment will also assert that learning should be fun (think Sesame Street, computer games, hands-on projects) and loathes traditional “authoritarian” practices (mastering the multiplication table is condemned as “drill and kill”). Progressive experts might admit that discipline-heavy Catholic schools graduate well-behaved youngsters who also performed well academically (including inner-city black kids), but returning to this pedagogical model is now unthinkable even if the despotic nuns of yesteryear could be lured out of retirement.
And let’s not forget today’s cult of self-esteem that dictates that black youngsters in particular should never be made to feel unworthy so who needs unremitting censure and punishment? Imagine parental reaction when told that their little angel was humiliated by the teacher by being forced to write 100 times on the blackboard, “I will not talk in class unless called upon” and similar old-fashioned commonplace civilizing practices? Why risk a Department of Justice investigation into such cruelty?
Nor will any education-minded foundation let alone the US Department of Education willingly associate itself with something so “old-fashioned” as restoring disciplinary power to teachers or forcing youngster to practice self-restraint. Today’s education reform industry is all about innovation, cutting edge technology and painless gimmicks. Will Bill Gates give millions to school to buy rulers so teachers can whack the knuckles of miscreants?
Now, for the really big obstacles to applying Pinker’s lessons: there is no money in it. Today’s reformers flourish only to the extent that their nostrums attract powerful, well-funded constituencies. It is no accident, for example, that so many doomed-to-fail nostrums call for more teachers, learning specialists or therapists—powerful teachers’ unions love it. Meanwhile, free market conservatives are easy marks for anything that contains the word “choice.” Actually, I cannot think of a single potential constituency for the school’s civilizing mission.
Worse, as contemporary schools compete harder to attract students, efforts to civilize youngsters will decimate enrollments so better to entertain than punish little barbarians. Conceivably, the millennial long progression outlined in The Better Angels has ceased, at least for portions of society (Pinker suggests that this task is more arduous when targeting the bottom). If some folk can tolerate surviving in a Detroit that resembles 14th century Europe in its anarchy, why bother? Provided that the savagery is self-inflicted and peacekeeping handouts are affordable, the Hobbesian existence is now just “an alternative lifestyle.”
Posted inEducation|Comments Off on Using Education To Develop Civilization
From Breitbart: Pope Francis is urging America to throw open her borders to thousands of impoverished migrants, in part to atone for the “sins” of the colonial era.
“We must not repeat the sins and the errors of the past. We must resolve now to live as nobly and as justly as possible,” he declared before a joint session of Congress. “Thousands of persons are led to travel north in search of a better life for themselves and for their loved ones, in search of greater opportunities…We must not be taken aback by their numbers.”
The call was not entirely unexpected.
“America Atone,” read The Drudge Report’s banner story upon the Pope’s arrival to the White House a day before his historic Congressional address.
The headline linked to a Bloomberg piece entitled, “Obama to Bask In Pope’s Aura, But Francis Wants Economic Justice.” The article predicted the Pope would aim to “exploit” his “moral authority” to “pressure his host” nation on issues including mass immigration and wealth redistribution.
Indeed, as the Pope addressed the nation today it is clear that the immigration issue has hit a boiling point. Headlines blare:
The last three headlines, however, are ripped not from today’s papers, but from the pages of a controversial 1973 French novel by Jean Raspail, which manysay has predicted with shocking accuracy the events unfolding today.
The novel, which has been translated into English, is entitled Camp of the Saints, and posits that the liberalism of the West would cause Western nations to throw open their doors to so many migrants that it would spell the doom of liberal society itself. Raspail’s thesis, quite simply, is that liberalism is inadequate to defend liberalism.
All around the world, events seem to be lining up with the predictions of the book. The novel features a new pope, born in Latin American, who is “in tune with the times, congenial to the press” who preaches “universal love” and calls on the Western world to open its borders to the world’s migrants. Now, as in the novel, prominent political officials are urging on ever larger waves; secular and religious leaders hold hands to pressure blue collar citizens to drop their resistance; media elites and celebrities zealously cheer the opportunity that the migrants provide to atone for the alleged sins of the West— for the chance to rebalance the wealth and power of the world by allowing poor migrants from failed states to rush in to claim its treasures.
Raspail argues that the inability of the Western conscience to erect walls, to “put her foot down,” to turn people away, will lead to the undoing of Western civilization itself.
As the world’s eyes turn to the U.S. arrival of the pope, many conservatives are arguing that Jean Raspail’s book has perhaps come to life.
Will the West endure, or disappear by the century’s end as another lost civilization? Mass immigration, if it continues, will be more decisive in deciding the fate of the West than Islamist terrorism… Does Europe have the toughness to seal its borders and send back the intruders? Or is Europe so morally paralyzed it has become what Jean Raspail mocked in “The Camp of the Saints”?
The Hudson Institute’s John Fonte told Breitbart News:
It is not surprising that the confused response by European elites to today’s mass migration from the developing world has triggered new interest in Jean Raspail’s 1973 dystopian novel “Camp of the Saints,” in which feckless Western leaders are unable to respond to a fictitious mass migration from what was then called the “Third World.”
The novel begins with the Belgian government’s announcement that it is ending its Indian child adoption policy, originally instituted to aid overpopulated India. The program had to be shut down due to an influx of applicants: “babes by the hundreds of hundreds, all ripe for adoption, [their mothers] pushing up to the brink [of the Belgian Consulate gate], to take the giant leap to [Western] paradise.”
Shortly after the program is terminated, millions of impoverished men, women and children board a fleet headed to the West.
The majority of the novel takes place around Easter as the French government decides how to respond to the “unprecedented incursion”: whether to throw open its borders and receive the fleet, or defend their nation from the coming invaders. France’s response stands to dictate that of the rest of the Western World:
“With France the Enlightened glad to grovel on her knees, no government now will dare sign its name to the genocidal deed” of fighting off the helpless horde.
Throughout the book, Raspail is constantly grasping for an “explanation” as to what sparked the Third World incursion, and what has caused the West to thrown down her arms and thrown open her doors.
Raspail suggests that overly-generous immigration policies are, in part, to blame. This is not dissimilar to Republicans’ recent push for amnesty, which government data shows played a substantial role in encouraging the 2014 border surge of alien youths.
“Once we had opened the door and shown how weak we are, others would come. Then more, and more. In fact, it’s already beginning,” Raspail wrote.
Posted inImmigration|Comments Off on ‘CAMP OF THE SAINTS’ SEEN MIRRORED IN POPE’S MESSAGE
You sure made a splash yesterday when, as the senior rabbi of Adas Israel (the largest Conservative synagogue in Washington DC) you announced that you are divorcing your wife and coming out as gay.
In a letter to your congregation, you asked for its “continued trust in me to guide you as your spiritual leader as I truly am.”
Such assertions are common by LGBT people – that being gay is “who they are.” But it’s an unfortunate and very narrow construction of someone’s identity. Rabbi Steinlauf, “who you truly are” indeed involves your libido, sexual orientation, and desired family format.
But you are also your faith, your marriage (your wife is also a rabbi), your parenthood (you have three children), your politics (you’re a Zionist and a proponent of social justice), your community, your status as a role model, your profession (calling?), and your job. To decide that one important but ultimately secondary aspect of your identity is your very essence – to which everyone in your family, congregation, and community must adapt – is awfully selfish.
Worse, Rabbi, is your attempt to justify your decision with reference to our sacred texts. Your letter cites the great Talmudic personality Abaye saying a scholar whose inside does not match his outside is an abomination. Does anyone seriously believe that our sages of blessed memory would think a rabbi who opts to stay closeted is MORE abominable than one who leaves his wife to pursue intimate relationships with other men?
Please.
Steps like yours no doubt feel like the right thing to do for gay men in loveless marriages. But you’re not just any gay man. You’re one of the most important Jewish leaders in your city. Part of your job is to help model a loving Jewish family.
Leave aside homosexuality. What does your announcement say to the many men in your synagogue who are more sexually attracted to younger women than to their wives? I doubt you’d approve of a congregant breaking up his family to chase after his 28-year-old secretary.
Oh, but you say being attracted to men is “who you are.” Well, for a lot of heterosexual males, being attracted to younger women is “who they are” too, but we don’t give them dispensation to seek – casualties be damned – self-actualization.
Posted inHomosexuality, Rabbis|Comments Off on Open Letter To Out Of The Closet Rabbi
Troubled Conservative gay rabbi (who came out when he had three teenage kids and a wife) writes in the Washington Post:
Jews in America struggled for decades to become white. Now we must give up whiteness to fight racism.
Let’s teach our children that we are, in fact, not white, but simply Jewish.
Heartiste: Giving up the burden of white privilege to “fight racism”, aka to “freely shit in the faces of flyover White goyim in perpetuity and pull the Eskimo card whenever there’s a faint whiff of wholly justified blowback against our machinations”. How magnanimous!
(If you wonder why I used the “our” possessive pronoun above, do note that the chosen-not-frozen author staked his dialectical ground using the royal “we”.)
Of course, this “white privilege” he wants to give up is actually the albatross of “white defenselessness” he doesn’t want hanging around his neck now that it’s open season on Whites in America. It’s easier to subvert the once-dominant-but-now-a-fag69 White culture when you can simultaneously evade collateral damage and also receive protection from return fire by claiming anti-White fringe coalition membership.
Comments at the Chateau:
* It‘s always been part of their plan. Obfuscate the surname, blend in your host’s territory when it suits. Once ingrained, and having secured the important strategic bridgeheads in media and holowood, stand apart from the new world ordure you’ve created, while pointing at the brain-dead blanks and shrieking, “they did it!”
Sad but true, actually. The damage was done a long time ago, as whole generations of nominally white people forgot their heritage and sold their birthright for a mess of pottage.
* They wanted to be white just long enough to amass vast wealth and power, and a tax subsidised homeland. Now that they have it made, they want to morph into something else.
Maybe they should give up the burden of their vast wealth first. That is the greatest of all privilege.
* Right in the first paragraph that eskimo says something 100% false,
“…how, in light of Ferguson, Charleston and seemingly endless incidents of injustice against black people in our society, she felt a need to grapple with the racism that is so pervasive in this country and how it affects her identity…”
Wasn’t it in Ferguson that black giant Michael Brown tried to grab the gun from a police officer and that was minutes after that gentle giant had roughed up a store owner and this was captured on video?
What was the racial injustice against Michael Brown?
Had he managed to grab the gun he would have shot the police officer.
There is no endless incidents of injustice against blacks, there is an endless number of crimes committed by blacks ( most of their victims are other blacks ) and an endless number of blacks who resist arrest or attack police officers.
There is an endless number of journalists who distort facts to brainwash people into believing blacks are victims of some racial injustice ( they even doctored the 911 tape of Zimmerman calling for help to make him sound racist )
There is no endless injustices against blacks.
I stopped reading after the first paragraph, the whole article is based on something 100% false.
COMMENTS TO WASHINGTON POST:
* I am getting so tired of this racism crap and so are very many white people I know. The reason why antisemitism has ebbed in this country is because we live in one of the most racially and religiously tolerant countries in the world, possibly the most. Go to a kosher deli in Paris and see how that works. It’s not because you are perceived as white!! Enough with the self-flagellation and call it what it is. The rest of the world, particularly the Muslim world, hates you and is willing to die to kill you. The United States welcomes you and your successful fellow Jews with open arms.
* Stop cutting up infant boys’ genitals and sucking on them. Once you have made that huge leap towards sanity maybe nonsense like this article won’t occur to you.
* Behold America, the Jew shows his parasitic nature. But the Jews can’t hide from their past and current crimes. Funny isn’t it how Donald Sterling was white to the world when the press was brutally chastising his racism, but as many of us know, Donald Tokowitz aka Donald Sterling was a racist Jew. The Jews have long used minorities to get laws passed that they could use all the while not caring one bit about the black man. From slavery to the civil rights Jews have had their own agenda; control. Don’t fall for the BS this Jew is writing. The Synagogue of Satan is their holy place.
* “We can be the ones who change business practices, housing codes, policing, correctional facilities, social policies, unequal schools”
Hang on a minute. I thought that the idea that Jews control everything was one of those “anti-Semitic” canards. And yet here it’s admitted as plain as day!
* Most American Jews came from Europe, especially Germany, making them white.
There is nothing shameful about being white, so get over it.
* Quite a long article, even for a rabbi. Let me see if I got the gist.
So we Jews were associating with “the Whites”, and we got it all wrong.
We should oppose “the Whites” (who are racists and oppressors) and instead side up with “the Blacks”, who are victims and generally good guys.
We should do that because we are, after all, “the Jews”, and “the Jews” , too, must behave in a prescribed ( by the rabbi, I suppose) pattern.
And this is the way to fight racist attitudes and to ensure everyone in US is not judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
Oy, what is wrong here?
* Let’s assume Rabbi Steinlauf knew that a good portion of his congregation, like most of the commenters here, would be offended by his offering up campus SJW drivel on Rosh Hashanah. Why give this sermon then (and probably many others like it)? Why not even acknowledge “white privilege” is a highly contentious idea even amongst liberal Jews, and that there’s room for nuanced, thoughtful disagreement. I think Rabbi Steinlauf’s likely purpose is to drive non-left liberals and moderates out of Adas Israel’s congregation. In turn, this gives him the temple membership that will support his taking Adas Israel much further to the cultural left than it is now. That said, I have no familiarity with Adas Israel itself and would very much like to hear from members of that synagogue.
* My extended family (18 first cousins who have all had many children) are all orthodox jews from eastern europe (I’m the atheistic black sheep), and no matter what the rabbi says, we’re all white, have always been white, and will continue to make white babies.
The drivel in this article is the reason I stopped attending synagogue.
The rabbi, like most leaders of religious congregations, is a sanctimonious, bombastic moron, utterly enamored of every word that comes out out of his mouth, his common sense having left him as the compliments form the older female parishioners piled up about just how wonderful he was.
Their god is the reason people attend your synagogue, rabbi, not your glowing presence. If you dropped off the face of the earth tomorrow, attendance wouldn’t suffer one iota.
Your self-serving effort to once again separate us from mainstream society is misguided, to be kind.
* Tell us, Rabbi:
Did Jews drink from colored water foundations in the South?
Was the Secretary of State for the Confederacy Jewish?
Did Jews fight for the Confederacy?
Did Jews own slaves?
Did Jews own cotton brokerage houses in the South during the Civil War?
What is the history of Lehman Brothers?
* Perhaps he is seeking absolution of the guilt of white “privilege”? Somehow I don’t think the members of other races are going to allow them off that easily. But what is curious is that part of the reason he claims that Jews are not white is because of anti-Semitism. But that is specious. There are numerous ethnic animosities between whites. There are anti-Irish, anti-Scot, anti-English, anti-French, anti-German, anti-Pole, anti-Slav, anti-Italian, anti-Spanish, etc. Every white ethnic group has negative (and positive) stereotypes associated with it and has been on the receiving end of abuse by other whites. The same divisions exists within all racial groupings of ethnicities I would suspect.
* Note that this rabbi’s indiscriminate attack on Whites would be unacceptable and “racist” if directed at ANY other ethnic group. Unfortunately, it has been clear for some time that a vocal segment of Jews, such as a Tim Wise and Noel Ignatiev, are rabidly, virulently anti-White. The very concept of “whiteness” and I suspect “White Privilege” are constructs of Jewish intellectuals. So, Rabbi, please leave the White race, as it’s already clear that you hate us.
* The Black Lives Matter rabble is an obnoxious anti-white hate group that advocates the killing of police officers and encourages attacks on police officers primarily white police officers so your selection of that group as a group to model yourself after is ironic if not just plain dumb. Also you do realize at least I hope you realize and I don’t mean to stereotype groups but there is a pervasive and virulent anti-Semitism that runs in the black community. And while it is your right to shoulder as much white guilt as you feel necessary or to shun your racial identity in order to make yourself feel better or more magnanimous toward different groups you should be aware of the feelings that others groups might have toward you based not on your race but rather on your ——————- religion. Think about it.
* I have to say I’m astonished at how this author missed the salient point of his facts. Assimilation works! For God’s sake shout it from the rooftops! Work hard, learn English, out American the Americans. Raise kids who have to be told they’re different, because they feel nothing but their American identity. And shame on you author, for further propagating the lie of Ferguson. That shooting was found to be totally beyond reproach by the justice department, led by Eric Holder himself. Liar! Shame on you for stoking racial hatred! You cant stand that being Jewish does not make you a victim, you are feeling excluded from the great American pity party. White man! I call you out as the most hated creature on earth! White Man! Suffer your whiteness and your lack of victimhood. Tee hee!
* A rather odd commentary, especially coming from a religious leader. All whiteness is privilege? Maybe he could drive his BMW out to Appalachia some time and check out the pockets of illiteracy and disease about three or four hours’ drive from his nice neighborhood in the D.C. area in West Virginia, western Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Ohio.
* What a bunch of ridiculous nonsense. He seems to be saying that Jews are supposed to join every bandwagon that certain members of the black community parade. Jews who supported the demonstrators in Ferguson were supporting a lie, not justice. Jews who lock in march step behind false claims of discrimination based on “disparate outcome” are not helping the black community, but only increasing its inability to rise out of the welfare quagmire it finds itself in.
* If the majority of blacks had assimilated, worked and STUDIED like the majority of Jews in the US, there would not be as much of the racism they claim. My wife and mother-in-law were emotionally burned out as teachers because they tried over and over to help black kids in poor neighborhoods to advance their lives with scholarship, only to have their efforts rejected because the kids’ “friends” told them to “stop actin’ white.” Some racism is earned.
* I applaud Rabbi Steinlauf’s comments. However, I find the way that Israel treats African refugees and even worse, Ethiopian Jewish Israeli citizens to be completely at odds with the supposed Jewish tradition “…that motivates us to remember the stranger, for we were strangers in Egypt; that calls on us to lift up the cause of all those who are oppressed.” What to do if the Jewish state is in fact itself the oppressor and where is the condemnation of it?
* You know what’s unique about the American Jewish experience? No other people, ever, has had a host country build its entire foreign policy around keeping a special homeland for them that they, and only they, can have an open door “right of return” to if they wish.
What other people have ever had another country spend billions to to keep a separate country for themselves? If this isn’t “privilege”, I don’t know what is.
The first way one could check their privilege is to agitate for a cutting of such purse strings. The other is to stop arguing for a perpetual opt-out clause that exempts them from responsibility for, well, anything.
* The other thing that is problematic about this article is that it completely ignores the reality that Jews are oppressors in this world, too, both in the United States (as White people) and in the Middle East (as Jewish people and US allies). The situation in Palestine/Israel right now is structurally racist, and those who focus solely on how Jewish people have been oppressed in history should know better. We know that isn’t cool, cuz we’ve been there. So how about we stop doing this to other people now?
* Let’s teach ALL OUR CHILDREN that they are simply AMERICANS. All other identities are secondary. When we abandon E Pluribus Unum we will be lost as a nation, and multicultural idiocy and fractionating identity politics are weakening our foundations. We must make a larger sense of national belonging primary. The rabbi also has it profoundly wrong: immigrant Jews like my father NEVER struggled to white: he ONLY wanted to be an American.
* So Jews were originally people of color, fought hard to become white, and now should renounce their whiteness to fight racism? Do you know how crazy you sound?
* What would happen if African Americans, 13% of the population, didn’t commit over 50% of US homicides? What if almost everybody I’ve known or read about whose been raped, robbed, carjacked, killed or beaten up on a bike trail had been done so by a Jew instead of an African American? What if African Americans had family structures as strong as Jews and worked as hard in school? (I worked in DCPS for 7 years. I’ve seen it.)
It’s not perfect, but there is no more slavery. There is no more Jim Crow. Companies and universities have diversity training and compete hard for all willing and able black applicants. The best boss I ever had was a black guy. Most of my colleagues and clients are African American. They are my bosses and mentors.
But it seems there is a critical mass of African American culture that doesn’t participate in what it takes to be successful. And it stains all, especially in the eyes of white people who don’t have everyday experiences with African Americans. Whether these behaviors of success are good or bad…they are what they are, and you can do it or not. But it’s your move now.
What if I was willing to stipulate that every problem every African American has ever had was because of something white people had done? That doesn’t mean we can fix it, even with the best of intentions. Something has to change on the other side. Aside from trying to treat people fairly and constantly acknowledging my white privilege, what am I supposed to do? White liberals like myself are not going to get very excited for very long about micro-aggressions and how many African Americans are nominated for Emmys. If you lose us, you lose.
* When a Jewish person writes an article that is hateful and bigoted against an entire ethnicity of people, and is called out on it, then his critics are being hateful. I forgot that criticism of political action and speech was protected by de facto hate laws.
* I think the good Rabbi has identified one of the problems of being Jewish. If a religious group spreads out throughout neighboring countries but is exclusionary, insular and closed, never really becoming a part of the countries they inhabit, then they are always the ‘other.’ It drives me crazy when someone says that they are Irish and Jewish. Jewish is not a nationality but is a way to set a small group (tribe?) apart from others. Perhaps it is good that Jews have a homeland (even if stolen from the previous inhabitants) because now there is somewhere where they are not outsiders. This is a sad reality where the need to be different creates responses that can be unpleasant. I am Scottish, English and Atheist. My poor Atheist tribe wanders the planet, searching for a safe place where Atheists can rule and others are second class citizens. Strange.
* Their chutzpah is so astonishing that I don’t even know what to say except let’s judge them by their actions and not their words. In order to move to Israel and get Israeli citizenship, you pretty much need to be Jewish (have at least one grandparent that is Jewish) so let’s work for similar immigration laws in America. E.g., you need at last one grandparent that is North-West European in order to get American citizenship. Let’s deal with illegal migrants the exact same way that Israel does – by building a fence to keep them out and detain the ones that got through in a huge detention center. One Israeli newspaper even reported that they force their Ethiopian Jews to get Depo Provera shots to jeep their birth rate down. We can apply that same method to the – here.
* Perhaps Jews like Rabbi Steinlauf, eager to abandon their “whiteness”, should go further and extend their embrace of migrants and open borders to include Israel, a land that has built powerful walls along its border with Egypt to keep out the many desperate Africans who have tracked so far in search of a better life. And perhaps too, Jews like Rabbi Steinlauf should give up their advocacy of Israel as a “Jewish” State. Israel has no more (or less) of a moral right to be majority “Jewish” than Europe has to be majority “White” or “Christian.” But don’t hold your breath.
* This seems like the worst type of bandwagon politics, in order to avoid taking criticism for privilege and racism at a convenient time.
It’s also viciously racist against people of indigenous European decent, many of whom were stripped of their ethnicity because of anti-ethnic bigotry, and are simply left with being “White”. Millions of these people are destitute.
Also, why just single out Whiteness? Let’s look at wherever bigotry and differences exist. Why aren’t more Blacks given the education and opportunity to become Jewish and benefit from that culture? There are very few Black converts and no Black Jewish congregations in the USA, especially amongst the Orthodox. After all, we have an income inequality problem in this country and the statistics put Jewish income above Whites. It seems like lack of conversion opportunity is having a disparate impact on Blacks. Let the Jewish faith benefit them. Also, what about Jewish privilege in Israel and the legacy of oppression and racism there? The author is casting stones while living in a glass house.
Insofar as being multiracial is concerned, the majority of the Jewish population is closely genetically related. They have a Tay Sachs problem for a reason. No White religions have problems with diseases caused by genetic inbreeding. Few other religions can say that they have racial elements to them, and almost no religions followed by White people with any significant membership. Ethiopian Jews, the largest group of Black Jews, do not follow the Talmud and are discriminated against in Israel. They aren’t well included in the group. There is almost no intermarriage. They hardly exist in the U.S.A.
It seems hateful, opportunistic, and hypocritical to write this article. What difference does it make if ethnicity is based in religion or skin color if both groups are intractably exclusive due to difficulty of group entry? The religion becomes a default racial group anyway.
* How times have changed. My father instilled in his children a love of being Jewish and a love of the United States and, yes, a love white American cultural. (Granted, he was only half Jewish and married a non-Jew.) He studied history and understood quite well how differently Jews were treated in the U.S. compared to almost any other country that we have lived.
You article stinks of contempt for a group that did more for Jews than any group in history. If you think that the rising non-white groups in this country will be so accepting, you are insane.
When my fellow Jews start moving out of white areas to live in majority black and Hispanic neighborhoods, send their kids to majority black and Hispanic schools, look for black and Hispanic doctors and dentists and CPAs instead of a nice Jewish boy (or that smart goy) and truly feel happy when their daughters marry a black or Hispanic, then you can stop identifying as a white Jew and consider yourself just a Jew.
Until then, quit crying about how you have to endure the stigma of “white privilege.” First off, you are white from a genetic standpoint. Second, on a per capita basis (and sometimes on an absolute basis), we have more power and influence in any number of aspects of society than gentiles, so if there’s white privilege, we’ve got it whether we want it or not.
And for the love of God, can my fellow Jews stop bringing up the country club thing. You do realize that almost all of the times that Jews were banned from country clubs, it was be other Jews! It was German Jews keeping out East European Jews.
Posted inJews, Whites|Comments Off on Giving Up The Burden Of White Privilege
* Elements of Turbulence in the life of David Brooks after a cursory Google:
#1 – His son left the USA and is in the IDF
#2 – Brooks is divorced from his Christian wife who converted to Judaism
#3 – Or maybe not
#4 – Brooks is in the process of converting to Catholicism
#5 – Or maybe not
Mid Life Crises — Ain’t it Wonderful?
* “The Republican Party is led by people who are profoundly uncomfortable with the changing (and inevitable) demographic nature of our nation.”
Note the choice of words there. This is intellectual dishonesty and media manipulation.
Demographic change is not “inevitable.” It’s not like a hurricane or winter storm that no one can stop. The rulers of this country can, in fact, control who enters it. They choose not to.
The fact that Brooks and the Times choose to purposely cloud this issue with Newspeak should set off alarm bells. Anytime the elites claim something under their control is “inevitable” it means there is a reason they’re allowing it to happen but not telling us.
* Brooks ignores the disastrous effects of immigration on African-Americans. David Frum wrote:
Despite three years of supposed economic recovery, black children were as likely to be poor in 2013 as in 2010 — and more likely than at any time since the early 1990s. Almost four out of 10 black children are now growing up in poverty, as against one in nine white children. More than 25 percent of the black poor now live in areas of concentrated poverty, triple the rate for poor white people.
“The uniquely harsh African American economic experience since 2007 has divided black opinion further from that of other elements of the Obama coalition. Only 29 percent of Latinos under age 30 think illegal immigrants take jobs from Americans — but 48 percent of African Americans under 30 think so. No wonder.
“African Americans have been very much bypassed in the recovery, as employers substituted immigrant for native-born labor. As of mid-2015 all of the net new job growth from the previous employment peak in 2007 has gone to foreign-born workers. The black unemployment rate — although declining — in summer 2015 still hovered well above the rate in December 2007. Among younger black people, 16-24, the unemployment rate is a Greek-like 20 percent. Nearly half of black youth aren’t in the workforce at all.
“You know what youth unemployment is in the United States of America today? If you’re a white high school graduate, it’s 33 percent, Hispanic 36 percent, African American 51 percent. You think we should open the borders and bring in a lot of low-wage workers, or do you think maybe we should try to get jobs for those kids?”
The employment rate of black men, and particularly of low-skilled black men, fell precipitously between 1960 and 2000. At the same time, their incarceration rate rose. This paper examines the relation between immigration and these trends in employment and incarceration. Using data from the 1960–2000 US censuses, we find that a 10% immigration-induced increase in the supply of workers in a particular skill group reduced the black wage of that group by 2.5%, lowered the employment rate by 5.9 percentage points, and increased the incarceration rate by 1.3 percentage points.
….
And while Brooks correctly points out that legal immigrants have a lower incarceration rate than the general population, he conveniently ignores the fact that ILLEGAL immigrants are locked up at a far higher rate, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission:
According to FY 2014 USSC data, of 74,911 sentencing cases, citizens accounted for 43,479 (or 58.0 percent), illegal immigrants accounted for 27,505 (or 36.7 percent), legal immigrants made up 3,017 (or 4.0 percent), and the remainder (about 1 percent) were cases in which the offender was either extradited or had an unknown status.
Broken down by some of the primary offenses, illegal immigrants represented 16.8 percent of drug trafficking cases, 20.0 percent of kidnapping/hostage taking, 74.1 percent of drug possession, 12.3 percent of money laundering, and 12.0 percent of murder convictions.
* “The vitriol toward immigrants, Muslims, and all people other than White America coming from the candidates should frighten all Americans.”
This is just pious leftoid nonsense.
There is vitriol directed towards Latin immigrants because large numbers of them are here illegally, and feel that they are entitled to be here. There are some people who dislike Latins as such but most people are fine with Latins, as long as they speak English. (A bi-lingual and bi-cultural America would be as much a disaster for the US as for any European precedents.)
Hostility towards Muslims is two part: (a) Because they engage in cultural practices that are incompatible with life in the West (honor killings, FGM), and (b) because in virtually every culture they go into, they demonstrate a refusal to assimilate, thus creating alien ghettoes, and second, when they aren’t not assimilating they are terrorizing the dominant culture (a la Charlie Hebdo) for refusing to police itself in accordance with their religious laws.
* If US is indeed all about ‘diversity’ and ‘multi-culti’ stuff, then there is no single Americanism. So, it is wrong for Brooks to talk as if he represents the only American Dream.
It may well be that the Jewish-American Dream is to increase diversity to play divide-and-rule among goyim.
But white-American Dream is to maintain some degree of white dominance because, from its very beginning, America began as an extension of European civilization.
As for Palestinian-Americans, their dream could be the hope that US stop supporting the Israeli oppression of Palestinians. Palestinian-American Dream differs from Jewish-American Dream.
From now on, there is no more American Dream. There is only the
Hyphenated-American Dream, and Brooks should know that it’s wrong and arrogant for him to claim that the dream of his ethnic group is THE American Dream. No, it is merely one among many that differ and are in conflict.
* David Brooks (not a social conservative) is busy telling social conservatives what they should believe – just like David Brooks the Jewish, Israeli nationalist is busy telling non-Jewish Americans they should not be nationalists.
* Following the Obergefell ruling, Brooks urged social conservatives to abandon the culture war to focus on serving the vibrantly diverse populations:
“The defining face of social conservatism could be this: Those are the people who go into underprivileged areas and form organizations to help nurture stable families. Those are the people who build community institutions in places where they are sparse. Those are the people who can help us think about how economic joblessness and spiritual poverty reinforce each other.”
If you’re wondering why that isn’t the defining face of neoconservatism, it’s because neoconservatives are busy doing important things.
* Brooks values American nationalism for one reason and one reason alone: it convinces gullible young Americans to enlist in the military and die fighting the enemies of Israel.
* People forget how the US and the West, in general, are indirectly subsidizing the living standards of low GDP countries or of low income people by having simply existed and developing things on their own – medicine, tech etc.
The more ambitious nations, like Japan, S. Korea and China, industrialized rapidly by simply adopting and adapting the technology, modes of organization and knowledge that the West had already run through numerous iterations, absorbing the costs of the initial research, the initial failures and the repeated upgrades. They also find export markets ready made, as well as abundant willing capital if they can ensure low wages or other favorable terms. Of course, there’s nothing simple about it, as HBDers, culturalists and institutionalists know, the world being strewn with failures to catch up or to even take off.
Cuba has its life expectancy partially because it can tap into capitalist advances in dentistry, pharmacology, surgery etc without paying the usual costs or having to absorb some of the sunk costs of R&D.
The best example I can think of are the Amish and other low-tech, low GDP groups that people like to praise for their wholesome simplicity and other qualities. By living in the US, or in the proximity of nations beholden to Mammon:
– They get to live in a place where their security is subsidized by an advanced power, protecting them from invading armies, rape, plunder etc.
– Their property rights are secure.
– If they deign to make their own horseshoes or other implements, the steel they can buy is of much higher quality and lower cost in real terms than 150 years ago.
– If they make overpriced handmade furniture or bric-a-brac, then they are bought because their customers enjoy disposable incomes and their creations are given value by the contrast with the cheap, mass produced stuff that every pleb has.
– Their economic activities invariably rely on continental transport systems or information systems underlying banking, weather forecasts etc.
– Their crops might be specially developed, if not GMO. Let’s remember who started the Green Revolution in Africa that primed the population growth since the 1960s.
– They have access to insurance, medical services, emergency services etc.
– I read an article about an Amish community tolerating a high tech gene sequencing center among them to study and find solutions to the problems posed by inbreeding.
All of those benefits might be reduced by the rich countries de-developing themselves, or they may stagnate. Stagnation might not sound that bad for GDP-fatigued people, but it’s hard philosophically to consciously put a lid on innovation or development (do you do it before or after the Salk vaccine, or some theoretical cure for cancers? What about space?). That saying about tipping over the ladder behind you is also applicable. I kind of want to develop in my own land properly and, for most small nations, that involves piggybacking on foreign markets, tech and capital. If that stagnates, can I edge out the other dude? If I can’t, then what’s left for the economically ambitious if not to change their country of residence and skip 20 years of development that are not going to happen and get the best buck for your bang straight away? We know where that leads. The high-IQ prevalence or the advanced PISA score proportions may differ, but I hardly doubt my Romanian trucker or hair dresser is in some personal way the lesser of an American one, yet the income differences are staggering. This can be put down to the value of the cargo, the profitability of the market, the better infrastructure, the lower equipment wear and tear, the lower transport times on good infrastructure, the amortization of prior costs, the lower capital costs of the firm etc etc but not on IQ or some specialized knowledge of the driver.
Meanwhile, the Africans are sitting on some major resources (that haven’t even been exhausted at the surface the way Europe’s have been) and a huge continent that’s just a killer jungle or a dustbowl to them.
* As is typical of the dewey-eyed* Emma Lazarus genre, the only quantification Brooks bothers to supply in this column comes from an opinion survey (that fraction posing as an arrest statistic at the end is laughable, as everyone here recognizes).
But numbers are of the essence when it comes to immigration, and the question, “How many?” is the proper (and effective) reply to anyone who spouts the tired “nation of immigrants” line as an excuse from argumentation.
“So why don’t we let in a billion immigrants?” is the question to ask Brooks. No “sane” person would agree to that (although people with academic credentials have proposed it), but having established that there might be an upper limit, the discussion turns to “What’s the right number?” and its corollaries, “How do we choose?”, “Whom do we admit?”, and “How do we make sure?”
Maybe it won’t amount to anything in practice, but I feel that the doorway to discussing these questions publicly has been decisively opened. I take Brooks’ column as evidence of the panic that’s set in on open borders side.
* The desire of old stock Americans to minimize immigration of ethnically different individuals reflects the deep instincts, probably going back to Paleolithic days that were discovered by Harvard’s Robert Putnam: diversity creates anomie and the loss of social capital.
Who would want to create such a situation in their own society? One might imagine that enemies of that society might want to create it.
It was America’s high level of social capital that enabled to create a great industrial system and to win two world wars. It was a similar high level of social capital that enabled England to initiate the Industrial Revolution and to create the greatest empire the world is ever seen.
* Your interpretation of the founding of the United States is revisionist hogwash. It was part of the 3rd wave of propaganda from the people who brought you the idea of “civil rights”. Originally, civil rights and equality under the law was sold to a Christian America under the guise of fairness and meritocratic ideals, very Christian indeed. Once majority America capitulated to that first violation of A)freedom of association and B) self interest, the assaults just kept coming. We were ordered to condemn our history, then our own families and grandparents, then our Christian Faith, and finally we have been asked to condemn ourselves. We won’t do it. You say our whiteness is part of a mark against us for supposed injuries of generations past.
Do African-Americans have to apologize for their ancestors’ cannibalism or part in the slave trade (selling)? No. Do Jews have to apologize for their ancestors part in the slave trade (middle men)? No. Do whites have to apologize? Yes, and we have. But there is no forgiveness given. Those original ideas of supposed belief in meritocracy have been shown to be a lie simply to gain power.
The media, the universities, and yes, the Obama Justice Department have been waging a war to frame whites as evil-doers in hundreds of situations. The idea of “white privilege” as some sort of call to action is communism at best, blood libel and genocide at worst. Your type has smeared us as a race, and we are finally ready to give back in kind.
We are done apologizing for things we didn’t do. We are ready to demand apologies from blacks for their asymmetrical warfare waged as violent crimes against us- and poverty is no excuse particularly not for rapes or homicides. We are ready to demand apologies from Jewish-owned media for their part in smearing us over the last fifty years. We are ready to demand apologies from illegal invaders who have trespassed on sovereign ground and forged their way into unearned benefits. And we are ready to tell leftists of all stripes to sit the hell down; their reign of terror is over. This includes the type of leftists that run NRO and the Weekly Standard. We are no longer fooled. We don’t care one bit about the childish names they will call us, anymore.
This is a rightwing movement that is growing exponentially. The comments sections of every online newspaper have become extremely rightwing, so much so that they are removing them in a hasty panic. Every day a new right wing website pops up. Every year the Amren and NPI conferences get bigger and younger. We are winning the war of ideas and we are winning the youth. Our movement is even more advanced in Europe. If you are frightened as a leftist, you should be.
If Trump can be our strong man, so be it. If not, there will be another to come along. Our movement will not die.
JJ Goldberg writes: The recently retired chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, Lieutenant General Benny Gantz, gave an important talk this morning at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, summing up the current state of Israeli security. You can watch the whole thing (it’s in English) here.
I’ll have a fuller analysis of what’s new and what’s not new in his talk after the weekend. For now, though, I’ve transcribed his comments about the Iran nuclear agreement. As you read it, you’ll note that there’s a not-too-subtle dissent from — perhaps even a rebuke of — the approach that Prime Minister Netanyahu and his allies have taken both toward interpreting the Iranian issue and toward managing relations with the American government.
I’ll leave out the speed with which the dreaded threat of Iranian weaponry has disappeared from Israel’s political agenda and been replaced by the supposedly equally deadly threat of teenagers throwing stones. Gotta love it.
Anyhow, here’s Benny Gantz:
I do agree that a better deal could have been reached. I do see the challenge that the theoretical enrichment rights that the Iran might have gained and this is indeed a challenge. But I also see the half-full part of the glass here. I see the achievement of keeping away the Iranians for 10 to 15 years into the future and postponing their capabilities of having a nuclear capability and with the right price.Usually they have said that war is an extension of the political activities. In our world you have political activities and if they do not succeed then you use war. Well, they have had political activities and they have saved a war,which I think is not bad in and of itself.Now, I am not naïve. I understand who we are dealing with. I understand why the Iranians want to possess nuclear capabilities. I understand that we must look into the future and I think this is what we need to suggest.And I would look at the deal as it is. It’s a done deal. Let’s look forward. And in looking forward, I would definitely promote, most importantly, the intel capabilities and the intel cooperation between the entire organizations of the country to make sure to expand, as much as we can, the known areas versus the unknown areas. And if they stay unknown then we know that they are unknown, and you all know this sentence — I cannot repeat it, right?But we must extend our intel capabilities. We must continue to build defensive and offensive capabilities that will be used as deterrents, or as an operational means when and if needed in future times.We must strengthen the others around and do everything in our capacity to prevent the need of a nuclear race. Currently I don’t see the need for one — from our perspective, I don’t know what the others might think — because if you can ensure that Iran doesn’t get it, so why would the Saudis have it? Et cetera, et cetera.And last but not least I would even dare to say that there is a need to reach out to the Iranian people themselves, which have a very large base of westernized aspect. They want to live their lives. They see the Internet just the way you and me see it. And let’s turn it into a kind of a honey-trap if you wish for future times.Now, from what I know, and I think I know, and from what I assess, and I think I have a basis to assess it, I am not worried about Israel’s security situation. We are the strongest country in the world [? Sic]. We know how to take care of ourselves. And this issue is a worldwide issue that inflects the Bab el-Mandeb and all those sea trails. It affects the region. And then it has to do with us. Not the other way around. It’s not an Israeli issue and then a regional issue and then a world challenge. It’s the other way around. It’s a world challenge. Let the world deal with it. It’s a regional challenge. Let’s see how the region deals with it. And we will stay strong as we are.So I refuse to get hysterical on this. And I think we need to look into the future. And I understand that the United States of America has suggested it. And I am sure that the state of Israel will be there. And we should continue to promote our capabilities to face a negative development if it arises down the future.
Posted inIran, Israel|Comments Off on Hey, What Ever Happened to the ‘Existential Threat’ of Iran?
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
