CCBlogs thinking critically, living faithfully

by James M. Wall

The latest round of peace talks between Israeli and Palestine leaders begins Wednesday night with a White House dinner. President Obama will be the host, but Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu will be in control.

In addition to Obama and Netanyahu, also at the dinner and the peace summit that follows will be Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, and Jordan’s King Abdullah III. three important Arab allies in the US Middle East empire.

In preparation for the summit meeting, which will not include Hamas, the White House arranged an off the record  conference call during which White House Middle East advisor Dennis Ross (pictured below) assured American Jewish leaders, “the White House will pressure the Israelis and Palestinians to sign off on a peace agreement within a year.”

Furthermore, Ross said, Obama is prepared to “wade shoulders deep into the conflict” — starting with this week’s summit and followed by a visit to the Middle East sometime in the next year. And that’s not all:

Once the framework of a deal is worked out, further details will be added over the years after regular meetings that Obama wants between Netanyahu and Abbas. The plan is to be fully implemented within 10 years

To hammer out the deal, Israeli and Palestinian peace teams would meet in secret locations for the next year. The deal would focus on settlements, the future of Jerusalem and the borders

The Mondoweiss site found the news of the Ross briefing in the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. The article, which was in Hebrew, was translated by Didi Remez on his blog Coteret.

The Jewish newspaper Forward reported on the “off the record” call:

The Jewish leaders pressed for details: Is there a deadline? Will there be preconditions? In response, according to people on the call, they got little more than the vague back-and-forth that had characterized the announcement of the talks earlier in the day by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

How often would the lead parties to the talks, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, meet, one participant asked – and how often would the teams meet?

“Periodically,” Dennis Ross, Obama’s top Iran policy official said, referring to the leaders. “Regularly,” he said of the negotiating teams.

Dan Shapiro, the top National Security Council staffer handling Israel and its neighbors, broke in to add that the talks would be “intensive.”

Ross is back in his familiar role as Israel’s most powerful friend in the White House. He is currently Obama’s s top National Security Council Middle East strategist.

Palestinian activist and author Daoud Kuttab, writing for Huffington Post in January, 2009, when Ross was appointed as a key aide to Obama, recalls that after the failure of the Clinton-Arafat summit in 2000, in which Ross played a major role:

It was Ross who led the chorus of Israeli apologists placing all the blame for the failure of the talks on the Palestinian leader. Ironically, Ross, himself, was the person who convinced Arafat to go to Camp David after solemnly promising him that neither side will be publicly blamed if the talks fail.

Palestinian president Arafat had told Ross that the time was not ripe for a summit but Ross, in connivance with [Israeli Prime Minister] Barack, attempted to railroad a bad deal down Arafat’s throat. Arafat, who felt that the deal was very bad for Palestinians, asked his US hosts if they can get the support of Arab leaders, they were unable to.

Andrew Sullivan, in his Atlantic blog, March 28, 2010, commented on an earlier Laura Rozen Politico article:

No big surprise in Laura Rozen’s new piece that Dennis Ross, a central figure in the pro-Israel lobby, a protege of Paul Wolfwitz, the co-founder of the AIPAC-founded, Washington Institute For Near East Policy, and a fervent believer in Israel’s eternal control of all of Jerusalem (meaning a two-state solution will never happen), is the main pro-Netanyahu voice in the Obama administration

Ross was in Tel Aviv this past week ‘to resolve the settlement freeze triangle,’” an Israeli source told Politico, a reference to whether or not Israel would agree to extend a freeze on Israeli settlement building currently due to expire Sept. 26.

Ross met with Netanyahu and his Israeli negotiator Yitzhak Molcho. He did not meet with any Palestinian officials.

That second-level meeting was left to David Hale, the deputy to the Middle East peace envoy George Mitchell and the NSC’s Dan Shapiro. The State Department told Politico that Hale and Shapiro met with both Israeli and Palestinian officials to prepare for the direct talks in Washington. The State Department had no comment on Ross.

With all pretense now dropped that the US is an “honest broker” for the Palestinians and Israelis, a claim that President Clinton used to drag Arafat to the failed Camp David talks in 2000, what should we expect from the 2010 round of Washington peace talks?

That is an easy one. We may expect that the outcome of Washington 2010, will be what Bibi wants and has agreed to in advance.

We must therefore look elsewhere for any indication that Netanyahu will use his control of the talks to do any favors for Abbas.

Netanyahu has less control over his own public than he does over the White House and Israel’s supporters in the US.  And the Israeli leader may now be thinking of his legacy. Does he want to be just another Israeli power figure, or can he bring some semblance of peace to the region before he retires?

Aluf Benn posed that question in a provocative column he wrote for Ha’aretz:

The opening of the direct talks with the Palestinians again raises the question: Who is Benjamin Netanyahu?

Is he our Gorbachev, a great reformer who will end Israeli rule in the territories? A “Nixon who went to China” – a right-winger who disavowed his former approach and changed the balance of power with a brilliant diplomatic stroke?

Or is he the “old Bibi” depicted by his rivals, the illusionist who is afraid of daddy Benzion and wife Sara, the uptight leader who flinches from making decisions and passes time by dribbling the ball?

Netanyahu might choose to pay attention to that small but vocal segment of Israeli citizens who know the Occupation is wrong and dangerous to Israel’s future. These peace activists and humanitarians in Israel are largely ignored in the US Main Stream Media, but they are able to attract attention in the rest of the world with bold actions that highlight Palestinian suffering.

People like the Israeli women described by Nazareth-based journalist Jonathan Cook:

Nearly 600 Israelis have signed up for a campaign of civil disobedience, vowing to risk jail to smuggle Palestinian women and children into Israel for a brief taste of life outside the occupied West Bank

The Israelis say they have been inspired by the example of Ilana Hammerman, a writer who is threatened with prosecution after publishing an article in which she admitted breaking the law to bring three Palestinian teenagers into Israel for a day out.

Ms Hammerman said she wanted to give the young women, who had never left the West Bank, “some fun” and a chance to see the Mediterranean for the first time.

Her story has shocked many Israelis and led to a police investigation after right-wing groups called for her to be tried for security offenses

It is illegal to transport Palestinians through checkpoints into Israel without a permit, which few can obtain. If tried and found guilty, Ms Hammerman could be fined and face up to two years in jail.

But Israelis joining the campaign say they will not be put off by threats of imprisonment.

Last month, a group of 11 Israeli women joined Ms Hammerman in repeating her act of civil disobedience, driving a dozen Palestinian women and four children, including a baby, through a checkpoint into Israel.

The Israeli women say they are planning mass “smugglings” of Palestinians into Israel over the coming weeks.

These women have broken free from the historic Jewish sense of persecution which Uri Avnery describes in his most recent Gush Shalom column.

As the jolly song of the 70s goes: “The whole world is against us / That’s not so terrible, we shall overcome. / For we, too, don’t give a damn / For them. // … We have learned this song / From our forefathers / And we shall also sing it / To our sons. / And the grandchildren of our grandchildren will sing it / Here, in the Land of Israel, / And everybody who is against us / Can go to hell.”

The writer of this song, Yoram Taharlev (“pure of heart”) has succeeded in expressing a basic Jewish belief, crystallized during the centuries of persecution in Christian Europe which reached its climax in the Holocaust. Every Jewish child learns in school that when six million Jews were murdered, the entire world looked on and didn’t lift a finger to save them.

This is not quite true. Many tens of thousands of non-Jews risked their lives and the lives of their families in order to save Jews – in Poland, Denmark, France, Holland and other countries, even in Germany itself. We all know about people who were saved this way – like former Supreme Court President Aharon Barak, who as a child was smuggled out of the ghetto by a Polish farmer, and Minister Yossi Peled, who was hidden for years by a Catholic Belgian family.

These Israeli women smugglers think for themselves. They do not allow their tribal history to dictate to them those things which are “not quite true.”

These are women who are willing to risk Israeli prison sentences to show the world the moral side of their nation by introducing Palestinian women (above) and children to the beaches of Israel (at top), beaches that are close, in meters, to the West Bank, and yet so far from their Palestinian prison of  Occupation.

The Washington peace summit will not bring Netanyahu to his senses. He is only attending to make a few cosmetic compromises to burnish his image as a “peace maker”.

To force Bibi to face the reality of Israel’s future, we must rely heavily on women like the 600 Israeli smugglers.

The picture at top was taken at a Hof Dor beach on Israel’s Mediterranean coast between Haifa and Tel Aviv. I have no idea if this is a beach to which the women smugglers will take their guests. And even if I did know, I would not tell you. You can find other beaches like the one at Hof Dor on the internet. They are important to the Israeli tourist business. (The picture of the three women above is from the website “Israel:The Only Democracy in the Middle East?”.)

by James M. Wall

Wednesday Night Update Below

Amir Bar-Lev’s documentary film, The Tillman Story, has just opened in limited release in Los Angeles and New York City.

Within a few weeks, this film will be available nation wide. My advice to anyone concerned about the manner in which our Iraq and Afghanistan wars are being fought under false pretenses, and with the use of distorted facts, see The Tillman Story

The Iraq war began with a Big Lie, that Saddam Hussein was on the verge of obtaining nuclear weapons. That lie was exposed. Other lies and deceptions have followed.

Why do we let this happen?

Victory in series of  wars and the need to sell the public on achieving those victories, function under a set of what military historian and army veteran Andrew Bacevich describes in his book, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War, as the consensus by which political and military leaders maintain our nation’s never ending state of war.

The Main Stream Media is an eager ally in selling the official version of war generated by the “Washington Rules” of permanent war. The MSM does this by giving the public what it wants, specifically, war heroes, sacrificing soldiers, their families and a low-keyed treatment of casualties, ours or theirs.

Occasionally, when news from the war hits bad news bumps like Abu Gharib, “patriotic scripts” are created to justify our state of permanence, scripts with heroes and happy endings.

The Tillman Story is one of those stories.

Reviews, like this one by Stephen Holden, from the New York Times have been favorable.

What soldier, anticipating his death in combat, wouldn’t want to be remembered as a fallen hero who gave his life for his comrades? What grieving family wouldn’t accept the official account, however fraudulent, of a son or daughter’s heroism, stifle their doubts, keep their mouths shut and be content to find some comfort in the ritual honors?

That was probably the assumption of the military brass who concocted a bogus account of the combat death of Pat Tillman, a football star and a casualty of so-called friendly fire in Afghanistan in April 2004 at age 27.

The official story initially had him saving the lives of fellow soldiers during a mountain ambush by the Taliban. It was a flag-waving, “Rambo”-worthy feel-good fantasy that played well on television.

But as Amir Bar-Lev’s sorrowful, devastating documentary reveals, not every soldier or every soldier’s family is willing to be so glorified.

The documentary reveals the dark story of how the US Army followed a script that appears to have originated in the highest echelons of the Bush Administration. The script needed a war hero, and Tillman’s death looked like a God-send.

He had been a star at Arizona State, and was a safety for the Arizona Cardinals. After 911, he and his brother, with the support of his soon-to-be bride, Marie, enlisted in the army.

Tillman walked away from a $3.6 million professional football contract. He was that patriotic.  By 2002, however, according to Russell Baer, one of his army buddies, when the bombing of Baghdad began, Pat Tillman told Baer, “This war is just so f——–illegal”.

That particular profane term was used so frequently by the Tillman brothers that an older next door couple admitted, smiling, that it “was just the way the Tillman boys talked”.

Unfortunately for the creators of the script, Tillman did not die in a fire fight with the Taliban.  He was killed by friendly fire.

Undeterred by the truth, Tillman’s superiors assigned a soldier from Tillman’s unit to accompany his body for burial to Arizona. They had tried unsuccessfully to persuade Tillman’s wife and parents to let him be buried in Arlington Cemetery.

Knowing he was a high profile soldier, Tillman had signed an army document asking that, in the event of his death, he not be given any more military honors than the average enlisted man.

His wife had a copy of that document and stood firm. Her husband would be buried in Arizona, as he had requested.

At a ceremony in a public park, the soldier who accompanied Tillman’s body home, read the Army’s false version of his death from his silver star commendation.

He did so under orders from his superiors, fully away that it was a false version, which he predicted would eventually surface.

The documetary tells this story in detail, explaining  how the Army counted on the Tillman family not to press for further details of Pat’s death, and to accept his role as an American hero.

They picked the wrong family to try and sell a falsehood, most notably Pat’s mother, Mary Tillman, who spent months pouring over more than 3000 pages of the army’s heavily redacted investigation into events that transpired when Pat died.

The trailer for the film, posted above, offers snippets and comments from Tillman family members. In one climactic scene we hear the testimony of generals and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, disclaiming any responsibility for not giving the public the full story until years later.

Ironically, this film connects to an earlier “war hero” tale generated, falsely, by the US Army during the Iraq war, the staged “rescue” from an Iraqi hospital of US Army Private Jessica Lynch.

Pat Tillman and his brother, Kevin Tillman (see his testimony below), were both on duty in Iraq with their US Special Forces unit, which was guarding the hospital in which the Lynch “rescue” was videotaped by an army movie unit.

(After turning down the  army’s offer to let him leave active duty and return to professional football, Pat Tillman was on his second tour in 2004 when he was killed in Afghanistan.)

The BBC broadcast on the Lynch rescue ran in Britain on Sunday 18 May, 2003.

BBC war correspondent John Kampfner directed the documentary. He describes the film on the BBC web site.

Private Jessica Lynch became an icon of the war, and the story of hercapture by the Iraqis and her rescue by US special forces became one of the great patriotic moments of the conflict. But her story is one of the most stunning pieces of news management ever conceived.

Private Lynch, a 19-year-old army clerk from Palestine, West Virginia, was captured when her company took a wrong turning just outside Nasiriya and was ambushed.

Nine of her comrades were killed and Private Lynch was taken to the local hospital, which at the time was swarming with Fedayeen. Eight days later US special forces stormed the hospital, capturing the “dramatic” events on a night vision camera.

They were said to have come under fire from inside and outside the building, but they made it to Lynch and whisked her away by helicopter Reports claimed that she had stab and bullet wounds and that she had been slapped about on her hospital bed and interrogated.

But Iraqi doctors in Nasiriya say they provided the best treatment they could for the soldier in the midst of war. She was assigned the only specialist bed in the hospital and one of only two nurses on the floor.

The facts about Pat Tillman’s death did not emerge until Mary Tillman, Pat’s father, Patrick, Sr., and other Tillman family members, diligently explored what really happened to Corporal Pat Tillman.

This is, as Time magazine critic Richard Corliss writes, “one attractive, thoughtful, ornery, heroic family”.

As Amir Bar-Lev’s documentary points out, it was a letter written by Pat’s father to the Army which described his former wife’s (they are divorced) research into the deliberate falsification of Tillman’s death.

Mary’s husband demanded a congressional investigation, a demand that was finally heard and led to a congressional hearing chaired by California Congressman Henry  Waxman.

Mary Tillman told the committee of her experience of telling military officials that she knew her son was killed by friendly fire.

She was stunned by the insensitivity of one of those officials:

In the documentary, Waxman asks the generals and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld if they could recall when they received the memorandum that warned the President about the falsification of Tillman’s death.

Each man responded that they could not recall when they learned that an army hoax was about to be exposed.

The memorandum was a P-4 document sent to President Bush from General Stanley McChrystal, then commander of Special Forces in Afghanistan, who was later appointed by President Obama to command all forces in the region.

President Obama relieved General McChrystal of his duties after the publication of a Rolling Stones article in which the general was highly critical of the president and other government leaders.

Copies of the general’s memo were sent to all the key officers in the chain of command. The memo did not become public until an anonymous source made it public.

The P-4 (“for the president”) memo warned President Bush that the Tillman death story was bogus and that the army not only lied about the death but had orchestrated a cover up to keep it from reaching the public. That testimony of Rumsfeld and the generals is reminiscent of the 1969 film, Z.

The Criterion DVD web page provides a clip and a synopsis of the plot of Z

A pulse-pounding political thriller, Greek expatriate director Costa-Gavras’s Z was one of the cinematic sensations of the late sixties, and remains among the most vital dispatches from that hallowed era of filmmaking.

This Academy Award winner—loosely based on the 1963 assassination of Greek left-wing activist Gregoris Lambrakis—stars Yves Montand as a prominent politician and doctor whose public murder amid a violent demonstration is covered up by military and government officials.

Jean-Louis Trintignant is the tenacious magistrate who’s determined not to let them get away with it.

The initial Greek government version of the death of Gregoris Lambrakis, was that it was an “accident”. In Afghanistan, 2004, the army version of Pat Tillman’s death was that he died a hero’s death in a fire fight with the Taliban

General McChrystal, author of the P-4 memorandum warning President Bush that the army’s false version of the Tillman death was about to be exposed, retired from the army in June of this year.

In August, McChrystal was named as a senior fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs.

“I am extremely excited to be teaching at Yale and I look forward to sharing my experiences and insights as a career military officer,” McChrystal said in a statement.

Wednesday Night Update

The release of the The Tillman Story has drawn new attention to the 2009 book written by veteran non-fiction author Jon Krakauer on the death of Cpl. Tillman. The book, which was published in a paperback edition in July, 2010, is entitled, Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman.

After General McChrystal’s appointment by President Obama to command US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, Jon Krakauer wrote an article for the web site, The Daily Beast, in which he expressed his surprise at the reception McChrystal received:

The general was summoned to the U.S. Senate to be grilled by the Armed Services Committee.

Although McChrystal had enthusiastic admirers on both sides of the congressional aisle and was regarded as an innovative, uncommonly effective leader, he was expected to face difficult questions about two incidents that occurred during his tenure as leader of the Joint Special Operations Command (or JSOC): the torture of detainees in 2003 at the secret facility in Iraq known as Camp Nama, and his role in the coverup of Pat Tillman’s fratricide in Afghanistan in 2004.

During the committee hearing, though, none of McChrystal’s inquisitors probed deeply into either of these issues, and on June 10 the Senate unanimously confirmed his nomination.

After he was dismissed by the president following the publication of a Rolling Stones article, in which he was highly critical of the president, McChrystal retired. He will begin teaching at Yale in September.

The New York Daily News interviewed Tillman’s mother after the announcement of the McChrystal appointment. She told the newspaper that the general’s appointment was “insulting.”

by James M. Wall

Amir Bar-Lev’s documentary film, The Tillman Story, has just opened in limited release in Los Angeles and New York City.

Within a few weeks, this film will be available nation wide. My advice to anyone concerned about the manner in which our Iraq and Afghanistan wars are being fought under false pretenses, and with the use of distorted facts, see The Tillman Story.

The Iraq war began with the Big Lie that Saddam Hussein was on the verge of obtaining nuclear weapons. That lie was exposed. Other lies and deceptions have followed. Some have been exposed; others continue to exist as an official Truth.

Why do we let this happen?

Victory in a series of  wars and the need to sell the public on achieving those victories, function under a set of what military historian and army veteran Andrew Bacevich describes in his book, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War, as the consensus by which political and military leaders maintain our nation’s never ending state of war.

The Main Stream Media is an eager ally in selling the official version of war generated by the “Washington Rules” of permanent war.

The MSM does this by giving the public what it wants, specifically, war heroes and a low-keyed treatment of casualties, ours or theirs.

Occasionally, when news from the war hits bad news bumps like Abu Ghraib, “patriotic scripts” are created to justify our state of permanent wars, scripts with stories of heroes and happy endings.

The Tillman Story is one of those stories.

Reviews have been favorable, including one from Stephen Holden, in the New York Times. Holden’s review begins:

What soldier, anticipating his death in combat, wouldn’t want to be remembered as a fallen hero who gave his life for his comrades? What grieving family wouldn’t accept the official account, however fraudulent, of a son or daughter’s heroism, stifle their doubts, keep their mouths shut and be content to find some comfort in the ritual honors?

That was probably the assumption of the military brass who concocted a bogus account of the combat death of Pat Tillman, a football star and a casualty of so-called friendly fire in Afghanistan in April 2004 at age 27. The official story initially had him saving the lives of fellow soldiers during a mountain ambush by the Taliban. It was a flag-waving, “Rambo”-worthy feel-good fantasy that played well on television.

But as Amir Bar-Lev’s sorrowful, devastating documentary, The Tillman Story, reveals, not every soldier or every soldier’s family is willing to be so glorified.

The documentary reveals the dark story of how the US Army followed a script that appears to have originated in the highest echelons of the Bush Administration. The script needed a war hero, and Tillman’s death looked like a God-send to an army in need of some good news.

Unfortunately for the creators of the script, Tillman did not die in a fire fight with the Taliban.  He was killed by friendly fire.

Tillman’s superiors assigned a soldier from Tillman’s unit to accompany his body for burial to Arizona. They had tried unsuccessfully to persuade Tillman’s wife and parents to let him be buried in Arlington Cemetery.

Knowing he was a high profile soldier, Tillman had signed a document asking that, in the event of his death, he not be given any more military honors than the average enlisted ma.

His wife had a copy of that document and stood firm. Pat would be buried in Arizona.

At a ceremony in a public park–Tillman’s family is adamantly non religious–the soldier who accompanied Tillman’s body home, read the Army’s false version of his death from his silver star commendaton.

He did so under orders from his superiors, fully away that it was a false version, which he predicted would eventually surface.

The documetary tells this story in detail, explaining  how the Army counted on the Tillman family not to press for further details of Pat’s death, and to accept his role as an American hero.

They had picked the wrong family to peddle a falsehood, most notably Pat’s mother, Mary Tillman, who spent months pouring over the army’s heavily redacted investigation into events that transpired when Pat died.

This trailer for the film, posted above, offers snippets and comments from Tillman family members and, in one climactic scene we hear the testimony of generals and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, disclaiming any responsibility for not giving the public the full story until years later.

You must see the complete film to grasp the depth of the deception which the Bush Administration’s military chain of command employed.

The Tillman Story documentary exposes one of those scripts as a set of facts twisted into fiction. Ironically, this film connects to an earlier “war hero” tale generated, falsely, by the US Army during the Iraq war, the staged “rescue” from an Iraqi hospital of US Army Private Jessica Lynch.

Pat Tillman and his brother, Kevin Tillman (see his testimony below), were both on duty with their US Special Forces unit, which was guarding the hospital in which the Lynch “rescue” was videotaped by an army movie unit.

A BBC documentary covered the rescue during their initial tour of duty in Iraq.

(After turning down the  army’s offer to let him leave the army and return to professional football, Pat Tillman was on his second tour in 2004 when he was killed in Afghanistan.)

The BBC documentary, “War Spin”, was broadcast in Britain on Sunday 18 May, [2003]. It presented an account of how US navy seals and army Special Forces delayed their “rescue” of Private Lynch until the video unit was in place.

Presented by BBC war correspondent John Kampfner, the documentary was subtitled Saving Private Jessica: Fact or fiction? because it focused initially on how the widely circulated account of the US navy seals’ rescue of Private Jessica Lynch owed more to Hollywood myth making than reality.

Lynch, a 19-year-old army supply clerk, was captured on March 23 when her 507th Maintenance Company convoy was ambushed after taking a wrong turn near the southern city of Nasiriyah.

Having discovered that Lynch had been taken to hospital in Nasiriyah, US Army Rangers and Navy Seals staged an early morning rescue operation on April 2, storming the building and whisking the badly injured private away to safety.

Within two hours, journalists at the media headquarters in Doha, Centcom, were summoned for an emergency press briefing, where the Pentagon released a five-minute video film of the rescue, captured on the military’s night vision camera.

It was the “night vision” version of the rescue that was distributed to the US public.

Prior to making War Spin, the documentary unit went to Nasiriyah to interview eyewitnesses. They found an entirely different story than the one presented to the  public in 2003.

Doctors insisted that far from being ill treated, Lynch had received the best treatment possible. Assigned to the only specialist bed in the hospital, and one of only two nurses on the floor, medical staff had even given blood to help her due to a shortage.

Dr Harith al-Houssona, who looked after Lynch throughout her ordeal, told the documentary, “I examined her, I saw she had a broken arm, a broken thigh and a dislocated ankle. Then I did another examination. There was no [sign of] shooting, no bullet inside her body, no stab wound—only RTA, road traffic accident,” he recalled.

“They want to distort the picture. I don’t know why they think there is some benefit in saying she has a bullet injury.” . . . .

US Special Forces chose to enter the hospital at the dead of night, with guns blazing. Dr Anmar Uday told the program, “We heard the noise of helicopters. We were surprised. Why do this? There was no military, there were no soldiers in the hospital.”

The Tillman and Lynch fictional twisted of facts were created to appease the public’s desire for happy endings to its war stories. Both stories were eventually exposed.

The facts about Pat Tillman’s death did not emerge until Mary Tillman, her husband and other Tillman family members, diligently uncovered what really happened to Corporal Pat Tillman.

As Amir Bar-Lev’s documentary film highlights, it was a letter written by Pat’s father to the Secretary of Defense which outlined Mary’s research into the deliberate falsification of Tillman’s death.

Her husband demanded a congressional investigation, which led to the hearing chaired by California Congressman Henry  Waxman.

Mary Tillman told the committee of her experience of trying to convince military officials that she knew her son was killed by friendly fire.

She was stunned by the insensitivity of one of those officials:

Greg Mitchel wrote in the Nation magazine’s blog, Media Fix, on July 2,

We predicted some time ago that the upcoming release of the documentary The Tillman Story will make Gen. Stanley McChrystal (among others) look bad, and that sense seems to be spreading based on comments by those who have seen the film.

The latest report comes from Newsweek:

After Tillman’s death, McChrystal, who doesn’t appear in the film, was involved in the decision to award Tillman a posthumous silver star for valor, based on the report that he had died under enemy fire.

McChrystal then sent a memo to several top generals and to White House personnel warning that there might be questions about Tillman’s death and cautioning speechwriters against making direct reference to what happened the day Tillman died in President Bush’s speech for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

One of the most disheartening scenes in the film is the footage from a 2007 Congressional hearing featuring recipients of McChrystal’s memo.

One by one, the military brass, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, come up with one excuse or another for why they, literally, “didn’t get the memo.” (General John Abizaid blames a faulty fax machine—a crazy notion until you realize that this is the Army.)

No one, including McChrystal, takes responsibility for the alleged cover-up; the Army continues to insist blame lies solely with Lt. General Phillip Kensinger, who was in charge of the Army Rangers and is conveniently the only general involved in the situation who is retired.

The denials of any responsibility by Rumsfeld and the generals, is shown near the end of the trailer for the documentary, shown above.

This scene evokes memories of the 1969 Greek-French co-production Z, which was directed by Costa Gravas. The Criterion DVD web page provides a clip and a synopsis of the plot of Z, beginning:

A pulse-pounding political thriller, Greek expatriate director Costa-Gavras’s Z was one of the cinematic sensations of the late sixties, and remains among the most vital dispatches from that hallowed era of filmmaking. This Academy Award winner—loosely based on the 1963 assassination of Greek left-wing activist Gregoris Lambrakis—stars Yves Montand as a prominent politician and doctor whose public murder amid a violent demonstration is covered up by military and government officials.

Jean-Louis Trintignant is the tenacious magistrate who’s determined not to let them get away with it.

The official Greek version of the death of Gregoris Lambrakis was that it was an “accident”. In Afghanistan, 2004, the official army version of Pat Tillman’s death was that he died a hero’s death in a fire fight with the Taliban.

In time, the truth, “crushed to earth”  does finally “rise again,” not from official confessions, but from dedicated individuals who fight not to lose the truth in the stifling coverup of permanent war propaganda.

by James M. Wall

The conservative anger that arose in the land last summer with the false furor over the “Kill Grandma” panels, has returned in a new form.

After smoldering for many months, this years’s conservative wild fire roared into full flame after the White House iftar dinner where President Obama spoke of the right of Muslims to build an Islamic community center in New York City, two city blocks away from the site where the World Trade Center buildings were destroyed on 911.

The political right rushed forward to throw gasoline on the wild fire, shouting “sacred space” as their ancestors might have shouted, “death to the infidels.”

Sacred space became a modern day battle cry. Leading the way was a previously unknown right wing blogger named Pamela Geller.

But what area does “sacredness” cover in the right wing political process of  sacralization? Does it cover the New York Dolls’ Gentleman’s Club, which is also located two blocks away from Ground Zero?

The  Gentleman’s Club is persumably a legitimate place of business, where, if it is like other such clubs in other cities, will most likely include scantily clad working ladies.  Should that Club be allowed to continue its bawdy business two blocks away from Ground Zero? Is the ground on which it conducts its business also “sacred space”?

The site where the World Trade Center was destroyed is, indeed, sacred. It is where 3,000 people lost their lives.

The attack on the proposed Islamic community center, however, does not come from a need to honor the dead, but from a perverted eagerness to defame the living.

On August 3, the new owners of the former Burlington Clothing factory, were granted approval, by a vote of 9 to 0, for the construction of Park51, by the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission.

That 13-foot structure, when construction is completed, is expected to include two top floors for Islamic prayer r00ms, a 500-seat auditorium, a swimming pool, a culinary school, a basketball court, and many community meeting rooms.

In addition, according to its statement of purpose, the building”will be dedicated to pluralism, service, arts and culture, education and empowerment, appreciation for our city and a deep respect for our planet.”

The plan to include worship space in the center–not a stand alone “mosque”, by the way–has driven the political right into this summer’s fury, because the right’s response is not about objecting to the presence of an Islamic community center, but rather, a political exploitation of fear and ignorance which is, at least for the moment, directed at Islam.

The 13 story Islamic community center is located in a neighborhood that already includes a Gentleman’s Club, a Catholic church, and a Protestant church, as well a a great variety of other commercial enterprises.

Those churches, familiar structures that cry out, “Christian”, and the New York Dolls Gentleman’s Club, which is selling sex to men, are pretty clear as to their respective purposes. The Islamic community center, on the other hand, is a “community center” for everyone’s participation, with prayer space included.

The Times is more interested in exploiting the conflict, which it helped generate, than it is in detailing the purpose of the center or explaining what the center will actually include:

The debate over the center [that] has become a heated political issue,[has drawn] opposition from former Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska and members of the Tea Party.

The Anti-Defamation League, an influential Jewish organization, unexpectedly entered the fray on Friday and said it opposed the project. .  .  .

On Tuesday, Rick A. Lazio, a Republican candidate for governor, appeared at the vote, in an auditorium at Pace University near City Hall, to oppose the project.

Mr. Lazio called on his Democratic rival, Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo, to investigate the finances of the group spearheading the project, the Cordoba Initiative.

Let’s have transparency,” Mr. Lazio said. “If they’re foreign governments, we ought to know about it. If they’re radical organizations, we ought to know about it.” He added, “This is not about religion. It’s about this particular mosque.”

Newt Gingrich joined the opposition with a blatant appeal to prejudice. (Even Pat Buchanan was disappointed in his fellow conservative, calling him a “political opportunist”)

Gingrich, the former Republican congressman and US House leader from Georgia, rushed to appear on a Fox television talk show to play the Holocaust card.

Politico reported the TV interview under this heated headline: Newt Gingrich compares mosque to Nazis.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich on Monday compared the mosque planned to go up blocks away from ground zero in New York to Nazis protesting next to the Holocaust museum.

In the story, writer Andy Barr quotes Gingrich:

The leaders of the cultural center are “radical Islamists” who want to prove that “they can build a mosque next to a place where 3,000 Americans were killed by Islamists.”

“That’s why they won’t accept any other offer,” he said during an interview on Fox News’s “Fox and Friends.

Gingrich then declared that if the mosque is indeed being built as a symbol, which its leaders have repeatedly denied, New York authorities have every right to prevent it from being built.

“We ought to be honest about the fact that we have a right and this happens all the time in America,” he said.

Salon.com has provided key dates in the “sacred space” outcry, starting with some surprisingly supportive conservative report for the project.

On December 8, 2009, the New York Times published a lengthy front-page look at the Cordoba project, quoting Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the lead organizer, (pictured at right) “We want to push back against the extremists.

“Two Jewish leaders and two city officials, including the mayor’s office and the mother of a man killed on 9/11 all voiced their support.

The Times story was largely ignored, except for a few of what Salon described as “third-tier right-wing blogs, including Pamela Geller’s Atlas Shrugs site.”

On December. 21, 2009 conservative media personality Laura Ingraham interviewed Daisy Khan, the wife of Abdul Rauf, the center’s lead organizer.

Ingraham, a leading conservative media personality, was guest-hosting “The O’Reilly Factor” on Fox.

In its time line story, Salon found the segment “remarkable for its cordiality”, quoting Ingraham as saying,

“I can’t find many people who really have a problem with [the Cordoba project]. At the end of the interview, Ingraham concluded, “I like what you’re trying to do.”

That was December 21, 2009.

By May 6, 2010, the conservative fire storm intensified. After the New York City community board committee approved the Islamic Community Center, the New York Post ran a story under this highly inaccurate headline, “Panel Approves WTC Mosque”.

That would be WTC, as in World Trade Center, which was destroyed on 911, a complete and deliberate false designation of the mosque projected to be built, not at the WTC site, but two city blocks away.

By now, Pamela Geller and her Atlas Shrugs blog were starting to be noticed by more than her usual right wing blog readers.

On May 6, she posted an essay on her blog which ran under this lengthy headline: Monster Mosque Pushes Ahead in Shadow of World Trade Center Islamic Death and Destruction. Ironically, In contrast to this hate language of  ”death and destruction”, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf  is a Sufi, a spiritual, peaceful branch of Islam.

America did not yet know it yet, but Pamela Geller’s Atlas Shrugs blog was setting the narrative tone of extremism for the big summer news story. Her current posting, which deals with Israel, is the most recent example of her work.

On May 6, Geller warned her readers that the “Monster Mosque” would be approved:

This is Islamic domination and expansionism. The location is no accident. Just as Al-Aqsa was built on top of the Temple in Jerusalem.

Salon’s Justin Elliott tells the Pamela Geller story, describing her role as she led the way to create a massive fear against the threat of the Islamic threat to the nation. Justin is the author of the “Ground Zero Mosque” time line in Salon, which he describes here:

To a remarkable extent, a Salon review of the origins of the story found  that the controversy was kicked up and driven by Pamela Geller, a right-wing, viciously anti-Muslim, conspiracy-mongering blogger, whose sinister portrayal of the project was embraced by Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post.

Justin’s Time Line continues:

May 7, 2010: Geller’s group, Stop Islamization of America (SIOA), launches “Campaign Offensive: Stop the 911 Mosque!” SIOA’s associate director is Robert Spencer, who makes his living writing and speaking about the evils of Islam. . . .

May 8, 2010: Geller announces SIOA’s first protest for May 29 against what she calls the “911 monster mosque” . She and Spencer and several other members of the professional anti-Islam industry will attend.

She also says that the protest will mark the dark day of “May 29, 1453, [when] the Ottoman forces led by the Sultan Mehmet II broke through the Byzantine defenses against the Muslim siege of Constantinople.”

The outrage-peddling New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser argues in a note at the end of her column a couple of days later that “there are better places to put a mosque.”

May 13, 2010: Peyser follows up with a column devoted to “Mosque Madness at Ground Zero.” This is a significant moment in the development of the “ground zero mosque” narrative: It’s the first newspaper article that frames the project as inherently wrong and suspect, in the way that Geller has been framing it for months.

Geller’s framing reaches the mainstream media through the pages of the conservative New York Post. Peyser quotes Geller at some length, promoting the anti-mosque protest of Stop Islamization of America, which Peyser describes as a “human-rights group.”

Since opinion makers on the right read the New York Post as faithfully as left wing opinion maker read the New York Times, it is no surprise that on May 13, the mosque story spreads through the conservative, and then the mainstream media “like fire through dry grass”.

Geller emerged from her blogger corner and appears on Sean Hannity’s Fox radio show. The Washington Examiner ran an outraged column about honoring the 9/11 dead. So did Investor’s Business Daily. The New York Post assigned news reporters to produce a Cordoba House story every day.

Within a month, Rudy Giuliani had called the mosque a “desecration.” Within another month, Sarah Palin had sent out her famous, “peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate” tweet.

Republican New York Congressman Peter King, Newt Gingrich and Minnesota governor and Republican presidential aspirant Tim Pawlenty raced to catch up with Palin.

Main stream political reporters and television news programs dutifully covered “both sides” of the controversy.

Justin Elliott concludes his time line with the assertion: “Geller had succeeded beyond her wildest dreams.”

And the rest of us? We have all been swept up in a right wing created “debate” that has dominated our national news coverage.

We thought the outrage against the “Ground Zero mosque” was a natural concern for “sacred space”.

Little did we realize that we had been manipulated by a right-wing blogger named Pamela Geller, the New York Post, and every politician, media outlet, and pundit who fell dutifully into line with the narrative.

Those of us who embraced the narrative enabled the right wing to have its way with us. We have met the enemy and, as Pogo says, he is us.

by James M. Wall

If I were pastor of a local church, by now I would have installed a video player and a means to project a video in a darkened sanctuary.

Then I would be ready to share unexpected gifts of grace with my congregation, like this good-to-go “sermon” which arrived this weekend in video and print form.

Click here for the link to the White House official print (and video) version of  the “sermon” President Barack Obama delivered to invited guests on August 13, during the annual White House Iftar (“breaking the fast”) evening meal.

The “sermon” runs under ten minutes. Here is part of what the President said:

Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country.That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances.

This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable.”

His entire presentation should be shown in houses of worship, in classrooms, in community centers, or in homes during the final weeks of this month of  Ramadan.

His remarks are delivered in Obama’s usual measured manner, passionate without being political, insistent without being demanding.  It is powerful in the President’s usual low-keyed manner.

Ramadan began this year on August 11. It will conclude exactly one 30-day lunar month after it began, when the new moon is sighted. That sighting ushers in a three-day feast called Eid al-Fitr, the “Celebration of the Breaking of the Fast.”

Family and community Iftar evening meals, like the one Obama hosted at the White House, are held throughout Ramadan. In some communities, especially since 911, selected Iftar meals are celebrated as ecumenical events, to which guests from many religious communities are invited.

Local and state politicians have been known to attend, especially in those communities where there are substantial Muslim voting populations.  My Republican congressional incumbent usually attends my local Iftar meal.

The use of President Obama’s “sermon” is appropriate because his comments address a moral issue that has come to the nation’s attention during recent political and media attacks on the Islamic community center. And it does so in the name of all religious faiths. In my book, that is a “sermon”.

The center will be built on private property at a cost of $100 million. It will include a mosque and will be located a few blocks from the site of the World Trade Center towers which were destroyed on that dark day of September 11, 2001. More than 3000 persons died on that day when the towers were attacked by hijacked jetliners

The construction of the center was strongly endorsed by New York Mayor Bloomberg on August 3 during an event on New York’s Governor’s Island. Mayor Bloomberg’s remarks (video and print) are available here.

The mayor’s website reported that during his talk the mayor “spoke about the importance of religious freedom and the great tradition of tolerance and diversity that has characterized New York City since its founding. He added:

I believe this is as important a test of the separation of church and state as any we may see in our lifetime – and it is critically important that we get it right.

The day after his Iftar speech, President Obama traveled to Florida where he received strong support for his endorsement of the Islamic center, from Florida’s outgoing Governor Charlie Crist, who is currently running for a US Senate seat.

Crist told ABC news, “I think [the President] is right – I mean you know we’re a country that in my view stands for freedom of religion and respect for others.”

With a nod to the recent political exploitation of the center, Crist added this political note: “I know there are sensitivities and I understand them.”

President Obama has been strongly criticized in recent months by Progressive Left bloggers, but the Iftar talk evoked praise from one of the major progressive bloggers, Glenn Greenwald, who wrote:

This is one of the most impressive and commendable things Obama has done since being inaugurated.

Obama’s critics from the conservative right were quick to condemn the president. Politicians, especially those running in November, the usual right wing media pundits and the Main Stream Media, have been eager to spin the construction of a religious center into that which it is not.

Many of these attacks focus on the emotional charge that the Islamic center represents an invasion of “sacred space”. In doing so, they exploit the anti-Muslim bias that has continued to blame one billion Muslims for the deeds of 19 radical Muslim hijackers.

The irony of this allegation, which is bogus, is that the Islamic community center will be build on a city street surrounded by commercial stores and one “strip club” common to major urban centers.

How wide a swath would the opponents of the center want to designate as “sacred space”? All of Lower Manhattan? The entire Manhattan area?

It is for this reason that it is especially important that the presentation of President Obama’s Iftar address be shared in religious communities, emphasizing our many different religious traditions in a nation that holds in common values that include respect and love for others, tolerance and a commitment to a power that sustains us all.

Religious communities must not allow the politicians and the media who want to exploit anti-Islamic sentiment for their own purposes, to control the public stage. Our corporate main stream media, and their more conservative allies in the blogosphere, are trying to ride anti-Islam bias for their own purposes.

They do a terrible disservice to the nation’s ability to think clearly about the issue, with their hideous bleating about “sacred space”, an emotional smokescreen designed to exploit fear and prejudice.

The proposed construction has brought opposition from leading Republican politicians, including Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich. In a surprising twist, the Jewish civil rights organization, the Anti-Defamation League, which usually supports freedom of religion, has opposed the Islamic center.

There is an antidote to all this hate-generated political talk, and it should be applied in our various religious communities. The antidote includes, among other documents, the Koran and both Christian and Jewish scriptures.

And now there is a good-to-go sermon by President Barack Obama.

by James M. Wall

Ten months ago, October 21, 2009, I posted an essay on this blog, reprinted below, on Professor Tony Judt.

On Friday (August 6), Tony Judt died. The Los Angeles Times wrote:

Tony Judt, a leading historian of postwar Europe and outspoken political essayist who also wrote movingly about his struggle with Lou Gehrig’s disease, has died. He was 62.
Judt, who was a history professor at New York University, died Friday at his home in Manhattan of complications from the disease, the university announced.
In 2005, his career reached its zenith with the publication of Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, a hefty book that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Writing in the New Yorker, intellectual historian Louis Menand called Judt’s scope “virtually superhuman.”

The New York Times did not allude to Judt’s writings on Israel until late in its obituary:

His views on Israel made Mr. Judt an increasingly polarizing figure. He placed himself in the midst of a bitter debate when, in 2003, he outlined a one-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian problem in The New York Review of Books, proposing that Israel accept a future as a secular, bi-national state in which Jews and Arabs enjoyed equal status.

In 2006, a scheduled talk at the Polish Consulate in Manhattan was abruptly canceled for reasons later hotly disputed, but apparently under pressure, explicit or implicit, from the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee.

Since I came late to Professor Judt’s work, and know of him primarily through his work on the Israel/Palestine issue, the piece I wrote in October, 2009, focused on that interest.

There will, no doubt, be other stories and essays on Judt, some of which will honor him for his work on the Middle East. Others, like that of the New York Times’ obiturary, will describe Judt as “controversial” in his views on Israel, the customary coverage for disapproval.

His involvement with Israel/Palestine came late in his career, but it remains an important chapter. I am reprinting, below, my October 21, 2009, Wall Writings essay, as my contribution to that chapter.

Tony Judt Still Fights to Expose Israel’s “Inconvenient Truths”

by James M. Wall

On October 23, 2003, exactly six years ago this week, Professor Tony Judt published an essay in the New York Review of Books entitled, Israel: The Alternative.

The essay was the culmination of a journey he began as a teen-ager on an Israeli Kibbutz during the Six Day War.

Judt was born in London in 1948. His parents were secular Jews. His mother’s parents were immigrants from Russia; his Belgian-born father came from a long line of Lithuanian rabbis. By the time he reached the age of 24, Judt had earned a PhD in history from Cambridge University.

Earlier, the young scholar had followed a pattern that came naturally to a secular Jewish teenager in the 1960s.. At age 15, according to his biography in Wikipedia, he “helped promote the migration of British Jews to Israel.”

At 18, he worked for a year on Kibbutz Machanaim in Israel. During and after the 1967 Six Day War, Judt,worked as a driver and translator for the Israeli Defense Forces. When the war ended, Judt began to have doubts about the Zionist project.

“I went with this idealistic fantasy of creating a socialist, communitarian country through work,” Judt has said. He began to realize that this “idealistic fantasy” was “remarkably unconscious of the people who had been kicked out of the country and were suffering in refugee camps to make this fantasy possible.”

On September 11, 2001, Judt was a professor at New York University, where, in addition to his academic achievements, he had become known as a “combative writer and reviewer”.

In an article on Judt, the London Guardian writes, “his early opposition to the Iraq war threw him out of alignment with his usual [liberal] allies, who were still rallying around the president following the terrorist attacks.”

Judt had more to say. Seven months into the Iraq war, he wrote Israel: The Alternative. It begins:

The Middle East peace process is finished. It did not die: it was killed.

Mahmoud Abbas was undermined by the President of the Palestinian Authority and humiliated by the Prime Minister of Israel. His successor awaits a similar fate.

Israel continues to mock its American patron, building illegal settlements in cynical disregard of the “road map.”

The President of the United States of America has been reduced to a ventriloquist’s dummy, pitifully reciting the Israeli cabinet line: “It’s all Arafat’s fault.” Israelis themselves grimly await the next bomber.

Palestinian Arabs, corralled into shrinking Bantustans, subsist on EU handouts. On the corpse-strewn landscape of the Fertile Crescent, Ariel Sharon, Yasser Arafat, and a handful of terrorists can all claim victory, and they do. Have we reached the end of the road? What is to be done?

The essay was stunning in its audacity. It attacked two American sacred cows: the patriotic zeal behind the Iraq war, and Israel’s absolute right to exist as a Jewish state. Judt was saying the unsayable: The Iraq war was a tragic mistake, and the “two state solution” was dead.

This was 2003, when few Americans dared to voice either of these opinions. The essay was so removed from the conventional wisdom promoted by Main Stream Media, that it was quickly shoved into a corner reserved for eccentric professorial nonsense.

But the Israel Lobby noticed. Tony Judt immediately became a prime target for the Lobby, a man who had spoken a truth that would undermine Israel’s carefully constructed narrative designed to protect “inconvenient truths”.

Judt had written what many thought, but few dared express.

Later in his essay, Judt wrote:

The problem with Israel, in short, is not—as is sometimes suggested—that it is a European “enclave” in the Arab world; but rather that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law.

The very idea of a “Jewish state”—a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded—is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism. In one vital attribute, however, Israel is quite different from previous insecure, defensive microstates born of imperial collapse: it is a democracy.

Hence its present dilemma. Thanks to its occupation of the lands conquered in 1967, Israel today faces three unattractive choices. It can dismantle the Jewish settlements in the territories, return to the 1967 state borders within which Jews constitute a clear majority, and thus remain both a Jewish state and a democracy, albeit one with a constitutionally anomalous community of second-class Arab citizens.

Alternatively, Israel can continue to occupy “Samaria,” “Judea,” and Gaza, whose Arab population—added to that of present-day Israel—will become the demographic majority within five to eight years: in which case Israel will be either a Jewish state (with an ever-larger majority of unenfranchised non-Jews) or it will be a democracy.

But logically it cannot be both. Or else Israel can keep control of the Occupied Territories but get rid of the overwhelming majority of the Arab population: either by forcible expulsion or else by starving them of land and livelihood, leaving them no option but to go into exile.

In this way Israel could indeed remain both Jewish and at least formally democratic: but at the cost of becoming the first modern democracy to conduct full-scale ethnic cleansing as a state project, something which would condemn Israel forever to the status of an outlaw state, an international pariah.

Judt was prophetic. Six years later, the Iraq war is now generally understood to have been a tragic mistake. And with Israel’s steady “settlement” march across the Occupied Territories, the One State solution is emerging as the only viable and just alternative. (See Ali Abunimah’s One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse)

Six years later, Judt’s prophetic voice is no longer eccentric.

When Stephen Walt of Harvard and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago were targets of the Lobby, he wrote an op ed piece for the New York Times after Walt and Mearsheimer’s initial appearance on the media stage with their essay in the London Review of Books, an essay that was quickly expanded into a book, The Israel Lobby.

As they must have anticipated, the essay has run into a firestorm of vituperation and refutation. Critics have charged that their scholarship is shoddy and that their claims are, in the words of the columnist Christopher Hitchens, “slightly but unmistakably smelly.” The smell in question, of course, is that of anti-Semitism.

In a New York Times column, written in June of this year, Judt cut to the heart of the phony diplomatic game the US and Israel have been playing over “freezing” settlement growth.

He concluded his column:

President Obama faces a choice. He can play along with the Israelis, pretending to believe their promises of good intentions and the significance of the distinctions they offer him. Such a pretense would buy him time and favor with Congress.

But the Israelis would be playing him for a fool, and he would be seen as one in the Mideast and beyond. Alternatively, the president could break with two decades of American compliance, acknowledge publicly that the emperor is indeed naked, dismiss Mr. Netanyahu for the cynic he is and remind Israelis that all their settlements are hostage to American goodwill.

Judt can also be gentle. In a brief appearance in Charlie Rose’s “Green Room” in July of this year,  he spoke poignantly of his earlier years.

When Israeli author Amos Alon died on May 25 at age 82, Judt wrote:

It is for his writings on Zionism and Israel, and his lifelong engagement with the country and its dilemmas, that Amos Elon will be best remembered. In The Israelis: Founders and Sons (1971) he offered a critical history of Zionism, its practitioners, and its heirs; an account that directly confronts the shortcomings of the Zionist project and its outcome.

Today such critical accounts are common currency in debates in Israel; in those days they were rare indeed. Amos Elon’s commitment to Israel, the country where he lived and worked for most of his life, was never in question.

On Monday night, October 19, an audience of more than 2000 waited expectantly for the appearance of Tony Judt, who was to deliver the annual Remarque Lecture, at New York University’s Skirball Center.

Philip Weiss described the emotional evening:

Tony Judt rolled on to the stage at NYU last night in a wheelchair, with a breathing tube strapped to his head and a blanket over his form, and began his lecture in a surprisingly strong voice by “shooting the elephant in the room”.

A year ago he was diagnosed with a form of amyotropic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, a degenerative disease of the muscle, and it had progressed to the point that he was now paralyzed below the neck.

Some friends had urged him to make the subject of the Remarque Lecture the nature of his disease, so as to advance the health care debate, but he had concluded there was no point in show and tell.

The show was obvious: this is what the disease did to a body, left him quadriplegic “wearing facial Tupperware,” a machine breathing for him, making a rhythmic wheezing. The hope others had that he would give an uplifting lecture about what a body can do under these circumstances he must also disappoint: “I’m English, we don’t do uplifting.”

In his lecture, which lasted for 100 minutes, in spite of his physical limitations, Judt was still the articulate fighter.  Weiss’ report concludes:

I admire Judt no end. . . A man of great intellectual courage, he broke with the so-called liberals of the New Republic over Zionism, then took Walt and Mearsheimer’s side when it mattered in 2006, and joined Mearsheimer on stage at Cooper Union to explain to Shlomo Ben-Ami and Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk that just because anti-Semites agreed with something you said doesn’t mean you are wrong. . .

There was real grief in seeing a great man so reduced by an illness that he has approached with a stiff upper lip. . . . A huge community of leftleaning New Yorkers turned out because Judt has been so important, and this public act was one of leadership.

As he has done on other occasions, he pulled aside the curtains and the wings to show that the little world we are used to accepting is not necessarily the world of history. It is the world of recent “opinion.” . . .

It was in the end a thrilling spiritual message, forged by Judt’s own misery, and a challenge to our creativity, to break the chains of established opinion and tell a different story about history.

The picture above of Professor Judt is by John R. Rifkin.

by James M. Wall

This is a story about a New York Times columnist who dissembled, a movie about a man named Truman who escapes from a made-up reality, and Israeli Arab  villagers who stood by helplessly as the Israeli army destroyed their village.

The New York Times’ column (August 2) strains credulity. Some of my best liberal friends were taken in by the earnest, helpful tone of the column written by Efraim Karsh.

Unless you are well versed in the history and politics of the Middle East, circa 1948 to the present, you too, might read Karsh’s column as a serious effort to be helpful to the Palestinian people.

Blogger and retired professor Jerome Slater was not beguiled by Karsh. He writes:

*Karsh concludes that it’s a good thing for the Palestinians that the Arabs have now “apparently become so apathetic about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict,”  their previous “self-serving interventionism has denied Palestinians the right to determine their own fate”

Efraim Karsh is an Israeli-born professor of Middle East and Mediterranean studies at King’s College London and the author, most recently, of Palestine Betrayed, a book praised by a certain segment of the American media/academic community.

Writing for the National Review, Daniel Pipes described Palestine Betrayed as:

“[A] tour de force. . . . With his customary in-depth archival research. . .clear presentation, and meticulous historical sensibility, Karsh argues. . . that Palestinians decided their own destiny and bear near-total responsibility for becoming refugees.”

Sol Schindler wrote in the Washington Times that Palestine Betrayed is:

“A thoroughly researched, sound historical account of the struggles that ensued between the Jewish and Arab communities when the British decided to leave Palestine.”

For the past week I have been reading and writing about, Andrew J. Bacevich’s book, Washington Rules, a clarion call which alerts the American and Israeli publics to the reality that we are all living in a reality show created and sustained by Washington Rules.

Bacevich makes a convincing case that our American power matrix operates within an interlocking control mechanism which demands decision-making consistency from all who seek the comfort and security of believing in the Rules.

This matrix controls our understanding of reality in a manner disturbingly like the enclosed community created by film director Peter Weir in his brilliant 1998 fantasy movie, The Truman Show. In that film, insurance salesman/adjuster Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) has lived his entire life within a totally fabricated television reality show.

Karsh and the New York Times know that under the Washington Rules, the American public receives its information on the politics of the Middle East from the keepers of the Washington Rules.

Experience teaches us that this is how the Zionist narrative will continue to be viewed. There are signs, however, that this could be changing.

At a crucial turning point in The Truman Show, Christof, the director within the film, realizes that Truman, is starting to doubt what he is experiencing. Christof  is forced to tell Truman the truth. In doing so, he argues that it is a better truth than the one Truman would find if he escapes from the world Christof has created for him.

The Zionist narrative, with its elements of horrific reality, has been stretched so thinly by the current right wing Israeli government that its credibility has begun  to crumble. In time, even the casual observer may begin to doubt.

Karsh and the Times are doing their part to protect the narrative, presenting Israeli leaders as well-intentioned Zionists who really can be trusted to do what is best for all.

Karsh does not help his cause by misusing a survey conducted by the Al Arabiya television network to argue that the “Arabs have indeed abandoned the Palestinians”.

The sooner the Palestinians recognize that their cause is theirs alone, the sooner they are likely to make peace with the existence of the State of Israel and to understand the need for a negotiated settlement.

Start with a false premise, you reach a false conclusion. The Al Arabiya survey did not mention Palestine nor Palestinians. Rather it asked respondents about their level of interest in the “Middle East peace process”, a vague question to which 71 percent responded they had no interest.

Hardly surprising, writes James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, because few people in the Arab states or Palestine believe in a “peace process” which Israel has no intention of ever taking seriously since Israel’s goal is not peace but total control. Zogby writes:

Given the lack of results and the repeated disappointments and frustrations experienced during just the last two decades of the so-called “Middle East peace process,” this lack of interest displayed by respondents in the al Arabiya website question is hardly surprising.

But to go from this result to Qallab’s alarming conclusion or Karsh’s broader argument is both unwarranted and dangerously wrong.

The American public which lives under the Washington Rules, continues to close its collective minds to the harshness of what has happened to the Palestinian population since the start of the Nakba in 1947-48, an event which Karsh in an earlier book, denied ever happened.

The power centers that enforce and sustain the Washington Rules work diligently across partisan political, media, and financial lines to keep the masses living within a reality show, never fully informed and always just out of sight of the brutalities of Israel’s ever-expanding military control.

Karsh does not argue, he simply tells the Palestinians the Arab states have abandoned them. The “poll results-leave them with no choice but to make peace with the existence of the State of Israel and negotiate a settlement with the current Zionist government.”

He asks Palestinians to reach a negotiated settlement with an Israel  he denies was created through an ethnic cleaning of Palestinian families that continues unabated to this day as the picture above and this video demonstrate.

Should the Palestinians negotiate in good faith with a government that has just bused in high school students to take part in the most recent ethnic cleansing of its own Israeli residents of the Bedouin village of Al-Araqeeb, ancestral land that has belonged to these Bedouin families since the Days of the Ottoman Empire?

Max Blumenthal reported on the eradication of the village:

On July 26, Israeli police demolished 45 buildings in the unrecognized Bedouin village of al-Arakib, razing the entire village to the ground to make way for a Jewish National Fund forest.
The destruction was part of a larger project to force the Bedouin community of the Negev away from their ancestral lands and into seven Indian reservation-style communities the Israeli government has constructed for them. The land will then be open for Jewish settlers, including young couples in the army and those who may someday be evacuated from the West Bank after a peace treaty is signed.
For now, the Israeli government intends to uproot as many villages as possible and erase them from the map by establishing “facts on the ground” in the form of JNF forests.

Witnesses told CNN that the Israeli forces arrived at the village accompanied by busloads of civilians who cheered as the dwellings were demolished. They said armed police deployed with tear gas, water cannon, two helicopters and bulldozers. . .

Do Efraim Karsh, the New York Times and the keepers of the Washington Rules really expect us to believe the Palestinian people can trust this current Israeli government?

Apparently they do, which just may be a hopeful sign because the world of unreality they have created is showing signs that its days-or years-are numbered.

“Cue the sun”.

The picture is an Active Stills photo of a Bedouin family being evicted from their home in Al-Arakib. The still photo and the video at top are from maxblumenthal.com.

by James M. Wall

Andrew J. Bacevich’s latest book, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War, arrives in stores this week.

In what should serve as an introduction to his book, Bacevich‘s recent essay on TomDispatch.com is entitled: “The End of (Military) History?: The United States, Israel and the Failure of the Western Way of War”.

A career army officer who is now a professor of international relations at Boston University, Bacevich has, since 2005, produced four books that cover both US foreign policy and the role the military plays in that policy.

His earlier books are The Limits of Power (2008) The Long War (2007) and The New American Militarism (2005).

Bacevich is a 1969 West Point graduate. He served in the United States Army during the Vietnam War, in 1970 to 1971.  He held posts in Germany, including the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, the United States, and the Persian Gulf before he retired with the rank of Colonel in the early 1990s.

He holds a doctorate in American Diplomatic History from Princeton University, and taught at West Point and Johns Hopkins University prior to joining the faculty at Boston University in 1998.

On May 13, 2007, Bacevich’s son, Andrew J. Bacevich, Jr., was killed in action in Iraq by an improvised explosive device south of Samarra in Salah ad Din Governate.

Bacevich’s essay, and his new book, are warnings to Americans, and to Israelis, that we are racing down our mutual “path to permanent war”.

This summer, Israel is acting very much like a preprogrammed Manchurian Candidate, in its determination to stay on the path toward war with Iran.

In John Frankenheimer’s 1962 film, a former Korean War POW is brainwashed by Communists into becoming a political assassin.
Only this time it is not just one soldier who has been brainwashed, but the nation of Israel which is being pushed by a radical Zionist government toward an attack on the ancient land, people and culture of Persia.

Two earlier World Wars between the “great” Western powers, which Bacevich describes as “armed conflict in the industrial age [which] reached new heights of lethality and destructiveness,”  inflicted “staggering material, psychological and moral damage.”

Wars can no longer be won. European nations know this, which accounts, in part, for their reluctant and minimum involvement in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Only two democracies failed to grasp the reality that war is never a solution–the US and Israel, both of  which continue down their mutual path “to permanent war”.

The US and Israel pretend to pursue lofty and peaceful goals, but in the lexicon of American and Israeli politics, peace is a codeword for forcing an enemy to accept a condition of  ”permanent inferiority”.

In their own special way, the US and Israel cry peace, when, as Bacevich writes, it is obvious that in both countries, the civilian and military elites “prepare obsessively for war.”

The Jewish settler movement, with government support, created “facts on the ground” with waves of Jewish settlements under the pretense that permanent settlements would enhance Israel’s security. Instead, as Bacevich points out, the settlers “succeeded chiefly in shackling Israel to a rapidly growing and resentful Palestinian population that it could neither pacify nor assimilate.
The “shock and awe” invasion by US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, followed by what is obviously a permanent occupation of both countries are part of that permanent war, guaranteeing hostility and resistance to the presence of foreign troops.
Our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bacevich writes in a Washington Post column, has proven to be enormously destructive to our all-volunteer army. To be an American soldier today is to serve a people who find nothing amiss in the prospect of armed conflict without end. Once begun, wars continue, persisting regardless of whether they receive public support.
President Obama’s insistence to the contrary notwithstanding, this nation is not even remotely “at” war. In explaining his decision to change commanders without changing course in Afghanistan, the president offered this rhetorical flourish: “Americans don’t flinch in the face of difficult truths.”
In fact, when it comes to war, the American people avert their eyes from difficult truths. Largely unaffected by events in Afghanistan and Iraq and preoccupied with problems much closer to home, they have demonstrated a fine ability to tune out war. Soldiers (and their families) are left holding the bag. In his TomDispatch essay, Bacevich writes: If any overarching conclusion emerges from the Afghan and Iraq Wars (and from their Israeli equivalents), it is this: victory is a chimera.  Counting on today’s enemy to yield in the face of superior force makes about as much sense as buying lottery tickets to pay the mortgage: you better be really lucky. As Bacevich traces recent military history, he finds: By 2007, the  American officer corps itself gave up on victory, although without giving up on war. First in Iraq, then in Afghanistan, priorities shifted. High-ranking generals shelved their expectations of winning–at least as a Rabin or Schwarzkopf would have understood that term.  They sought instead not to lose.
In Washington, as in US military command posts, the avoidance of outright defeat emerged as the new gold standard of success. As a consequence, US troops today sally forth from their base camps not to defeat the enemy, but to “protect the people”, consistent with the latest doctrinal fashion.
Meanwhile, tea-sipping US commanders cut deals with warlords and tribal chieftains in hopes of persuading guerrillas to lay down their arms. . . For the conflicts in which the United States finds itself enmeshed, “military solutions” do not exist.

As [General David] Petraeus himself has emphasized, we cannot “kill our way out of” the fix we’re in.

In this way, he also pronounced a eulogy on the Western conception of warfare of the last two centuries.

What, exactly is the “credo” by which American foreign policy is driven?

Bacevich:

In the simplest terms, the American credo summons the United States–and the United States alone–to lead, save, liberate and ultimately transform the world.

In a celebrated manifesto issued at the dawn of what he termed ‘the American Century’, Henry R. Luce made the case for this spacious conception of global leadership. Writing in Life magazine in early 1941, the influential publisher exhorted his fellow citizens to ‘accept wholeheartedly our duty to exert on the world the full impact of our influence for which purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.’

Luce’s concept of an American Century, “an age of unquestioned American global primacy, resonated, especially in Washington. It quickly found a permanent place in the lexicon of national politics.

Even today, whenever public figures allude to America’s responsibility to lead, they signal their fidelity to this creed. Along with respectful allusions to God and “the troops,” adherence to Luce’s credo has become a de facto prerequisite for high office. Question its claims and your prospects of being heard in the hubbub of national politics become nil.

The credo emphasizes “activism over example, hard power over soft, and coercion (often styled ‘negotiating from a postion of strength’) over persuasion.”

Above all, the exercise of global leadership as prescribed by the credo, obliges the United States to maintain military capabilities staggeringly in excess of those required for self-defense. After World War II, “an affinity for military might, emerged as central to the American identity”.

Looking back over the last sixty years of US military policy and practice and a continuity emerges. Bacevich calls these consistent elements:

“the sacred trinity: an abiding conviction that the minimum essentials of international peace and order require the United States to maintain a global military presence, to configure its forces for global power projection, and to counter existing or anticipated thrusts by relying on a policy of global interventionism. (p. 14)

The relationship between the “credo” and the “sacred trinity” which outlines how the United States is to maintain its global expansion and international control is important. “The trinity lends plausibility to the credo’s vast claims.”

Whichever political party holds power in Washington, the credo and the trinity will always provide the basis for an enduring consensus that guarantees a consistency to US policy.

Bacevich insists “from the era of Harry Truman to the age of Barack Obama, that consensus has remained intact. It defines the rules to which Washington adheres; it determines the precepts by which Washington rules.”

In this sense, Washington is “less a geographic expression than a set of interlocking institutions headed by people who, acting officially or unofficially, are able to put a thumb on the helm of state.”

Those institutions always include the branches of the federal government, the principal components of the “national security state”, the departments of Defense, State, and more recently, Homeland Security, along with the agencies that comprise the intelligence and federal law enforcement communities.

When Senator Joe Lieberman demanded the chairmanship of Homeland Security Senate Committee; when the Israel Lobby went nuts over the thought of Charles Freeman as chair of the National Intelligence Council; and when Dennis C. Blair, who initially appointed Freeman, lasted only a year as Director of National Intelligence, the keepers of the “Washington Rules” knew what was going on.

The consensus had to be protected. The “credo” had to be secure and the US-Israel team had to be free to carry out the dictates of the “sacred trinity”, global military presence; global power projection and global interventionism. That is why Bacevich calls them sacred; they must be honored.

Did President Obama, who promised us change, know what was going on? He does now.

What other entities are involved in maintaining and protecting the “credo”? Here are a few listed by Bacevich: “select think tanks and interest groups, lawyers, lobbyists, fixers, former government officials and retired military officers who still enjoy ‘access’.”

Beyond the Beltway [outside Washington] the protectors of the “Washington Rules” Bacevich’s list includes “big banks, and other financial institutions, defense contractors and major corporations, television networks and elite publications like the New York Times, even quasi-academic entities like the Council of Foreign Relations and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.”

You want to enter and remain in the world that runs this nation? Know the “rules” and keep them inviolate.

Bacevich gives the reader five reasons why he wrote Washington Rules:

first to trace the origins and evolution of the Washington Rules–both the credo that inspires consensus and the trinity in which it finds expression;

second, to subject the resulting consensus to critical inspection, showing who wins and who loses and also who foots the bill;

third, to explain how the Washington rules are perpetuated, with certain views privileged while others are disreputable;

fourth, to demonstrate that the rules themselves have lost whatever utility they may once have possessed, with their implications increasingly pernicious and their costs increasingly unaffordable;

and finally, to argue for readmitting “disreputable (or ‘radical’ ) views to our national security debate, in effect legitimating alternatives to the status quo.”

It is a heavy order Bacevich has served up for us. As I read and reread his five points, I find myself no longer depressed over the state of our nation but immensely encouraged to keep moving forward. There is too much at stake to give up now.

It is time to change the system from within. Is President Obama the Change Agent we had hoped he would be? Still too soon to tell.

There are occasional signs the President knows he is trapped inside the binding chains of the Washington Rules. He needs our help if he is to break the chains which are leading us further along the “path to permanent war”.

The picture above: A US Marine patrol moves through a sand storm in March, 2009, in Qalanderabed in souhwest Afghanistan. ( by John Moore/Getty Images). Image from Boston.com.

by James M. Wall

Richard Goldstone, Chas Freeman, Shirley Sherrod.

If you figure ‘Shirley” as a nickname for a first baseman, “Freeman to Goldstone to Sherrod” could be a modern day version of the celebrated double play Chicago Cubs’ combination of  “Tinkers to Evers to Chance”.

It could even be a prestigious law firm on LaSalle Street in Obama’s hometown of Chicago. It is neither.

It is, rather, a series of events that has produced an 18-month nightmare for Barack Obama.

“Freeman to Goldstone to Sherrod”, is a Washington disaster, an accumulation of three major presidential stumbles, each of which could easily have been avoided. What they have in common is poor staff work and a president overly sensitive to political calculations.

The main stream media (MSM) played a major role in helping to enable these stumbles. It did so by going for the quick and shallow headline and analysis that now permeates the 24-7 news cycle.

Two of these major stumbles involve Israel, which means the MSM did nothing to probe beneath the prevailing conventional wisdom that would have cut through pro-Israel bias and asked harder questions as to what really was happening in these two stumbles.

The Israeli media did a far better job of reporting on the Freeman and Goldstone stumbles than did any MSM outlet in the US. It was not because of ignorance that the US  media failed to cover Freeman and Goldstone.

The internet brings the Israeli and Arab media into every newsroom of every media outlet in the US. The story was there, but the media is a part of the alliance of the pro-Israel MSM media and American politics that  protect the White House from having to face the unpopular truth about Israel.  That is why it is called “enabling”.

The Sherrod stumble, however, involves race, which the MSM jumped on with vigor, once its initial part in pushing a false story was exposed by some simple research.

This stumble is the third in the “Freeman to Goldstone to Sherrod” series, but since it is the most recent stumble, it is better known than the other two.

Because the MSM has a shared belief in matters racial, the MSM quickly filled in details of the Sherrod affair and brought the distortions to the public’s attention.

The MSM reversal also brought an immediate apology from President Obama and his personal request that Sherrod “stay in” government service. The call, however, did not come until it became obvious that she had been grossly maligned.

This third White House stumble should have been an easy call for an African American president. Instead, for reasons as yet unclear, President Obama did nothing to prevent  the initial White House attack on Sherrod.

There is a common thread that connects these three Obama stumbles, “Freeman to Goldstone to Sherrod”: Atrociously bad staff advice driven by cold calculating politics, and the failure of President Obama to overrule bad advice and declare, firmly: We will do the right thing.

The right thing in the matter of Shirley Sherrod was to forget about the 24-7 news cycle and not worry that  Glenn Beck will run with the story while the White House pauses to check it out. Later, much too late, check it out is exactly what the White House finally did.

This story began on Monday, July 19. Sherrod was driving her car from Columbus, Georgia to Athens, Georgia, when she received a message that the White House wanted her to resign her position as the Georgia director of the US Department of Agriculture office of Rural Development.

The call came from the USDA’s deputy undersecretary Cheryl Cook. Sherrod told the Associated Press:

“They called me twice. The last time they asked me to pull over on the side of the road and submit my resignation on my Blackberry, and that’s what I did.”

The New York Daily News had a detailed story on Sherrod’s firing:

The controversy began after several media organizations posted a 38-second video clip of Sherrod speaking to a local Georgia chapter of the NAACP. She tells the group that she did not give a white farmer “the full force of what I could do” after he asked for assistance.   The video surfaced days after the NAACP quarreled with Tea Party members over allegations of racism.
Sherrod said her statements were taken out of context. ”My point in telling that story is that working with him helped me to see that it wasn’t a black and white issue,” she said. Sherrod added that the episode took place in 1986 before she worked for the Agriculture Department. Sherrod said that she eventually became friends with the farmer and worked with him for two years to help him avoid foreclosure. How could the first African American president allow this to happen?

Maureen Dowd’s New York Times column offers a simple explanation of how the Sherrod stumble could have been avoided.

The Obama White House is too white. It has Barack Obama, raised in the Hawaiian hood and Indonesia, and Valerie Jarrett, who spent her early years in Iran.

But unlike Bill Clinton, who never needed help fathoming Southern black culture, Obama lacks advisers who are descended from the central African-American experience, ones who understand “the slave thing,” as a top black Democrat dryly puts it.

Dowd has a simple solution.  It is time to rethink the make up of the White House staff:

The first black president should expand beyond his campaign security blanket, the smug cordon of overprotective white guys surrounding him. . . . Otherwise, this administration will keep tripping over race rather than inspiring on race.

The West Wing white guys who pushed to ditch Shirley Sherrod before Glenn Beck could pounce not only didn’t bother to Google, they weren’t familiar enough with civil rights history to recognize the name Sherrod. And they didn’t return the calls and e-mail of prominent blacks who tried to alert them that something was wrong.

Charles Sherrod, Shirley’s husband, was a Freedom Rider who, along with the civil rights hero John Lewis, was a key member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee of the ‘60s.

As Lewis, the longtime Georgia congressman, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, he knew immediately that something was amiss with the distorted video clip of Sherrod talking to the NAACP.

“I’ve known these two individuals — the husband for more than 50 years and the wife for at least 35, 40 — and there’s not a racist hair on their heads or anyplace else on their bodies,” Lewis said.

We may not have a “nation of cowards” on race, as Attorney General Eric Holder contended, but we may have a West Wing of cowards on race

The firing of Chas Freeman was the first White House stumble in President Obama’s 18 month nightmare. It is also one that President Obama has refused to acknowledge.  One reason: His White House “white guys” are as fixed on the Israeli side of  the Israel-Palestine issue as they are trapped in their whiteness in advising the President on racial matters.

Besides, the MSM makes no effort to understand the Palestinian side of the issue; hence no pressure from the media.

The first of his series of blunders began when, in late February, 2009, Obama appointed the veteran diplomat Chas Freeman  to serve as Chairman of the National Intelligence Council (NIC).

Ambassador Freeman came highly recommended, but he was also on record as having committed the Number One Washington Sin in all matters Israeli. He had uttered public criticism of actions by the Jewish state.

His appointment evoked an all-out smear attack which has become common place in US right wing media.  It was McCarthyism at its worst.

Freeman’s post was too far down the food chain to require Senate approval, but the right wing noise machine put together attacks from politicians and pundits to force the president to withdraw Freeman’s name on March 11, 2009.

Much credit for the success of the Freeman smear campaign goes to a well known Senate PEP (Progressive Except on Palestine), New York’s Charles Schumer. Schumer called his White House friend Rahm Emanuel, with clear instructions: The Freeman appointment must not stand.

On his blog, Informed Comment, Juan Cole has a detailed analysis of how Freeman was named and then dropped. It is must reading.

The second major stumble in the “Freeman to Goldstone to Sherrod” series quickly followed the Freeman Affair. It was the mishandling of the Goldstone Report by the White House, a huge mistake since it was clear that the evidence discovered by Goldstone would eventually be shown to be valid.

Obama has refused to acknowledge that he was wrong to reject the Goldstone Report, which was researched and written by a committee headed by Judge Goldstone.

The Goldstone committee was asked by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to investigate possible war crimes and crimes against humanity during Israel’s December 2008-January 2009  blitz against Gaza which claimed nearly 1400 Palestinian lives.

This invasion of Gaza took place during the final days of the George W. Bush presidency, ending on the eve of President Obama’s inauguration.

The delivery of Judge Goldstone’s report to the UN and then to Israel was initially rejected by Israel, which announced that it would conduct its own investigation

In the face of world-wide support for the UN Goldstone Report, President Obama worked to squash the Goldstone Report, sending it off to bureaucratic oblivion rather than have Israel suffer further exposure for its conduct in the January 2008-2009 invasion.

Writing in the South African publication, Business Day, Allister Sparks reports that the Israeli military’s own investigation has been completed, with results that vindicate much of the Goldstone Report.

After carrying out its own investigation into last year’s Gaza War, the Israeli military has finally confirmed several of the most serious incidents committed by its troops in that 22-day assault, which a United Nations commission of inquiry, headed by our own Judge Richard Goldstone, reported on last September.

In a low-key report released two weeks ago that seems to have escaped the attention of the entire South African media, perhaps because of its preoccupation with the Fifa World Cup at the time, the military has confirmed that three of the most serious findings of Goldstone’s egregiously vilified report were true.

It has confirmed the fatal shooting by a marksman of an unarmed man (the Goldstone Commission said a man and a woman were killed) walking with a group of Palestinians waving a white “surrender” flag; the shelling of a mosque during a prayer service, causing casualties among the worshippers; and the ordering of a criminal investigation into a fatal air strike on a house where about 100 members of an extended Palestinian family, the Samounis, were sheltering on the advice of the Israeli Defence Force.

The Samouni case caused particular outrage worldwide because Israeli forces prevented Palestinian paramedics from entering the house for days after the strike.

When Red Cross workers eventually got into the house, they found four emaciated Samouni children, who had been trapped there for days with their mothers’ corpses. In all, 30 Samounis died.

So far, no American MSM has referred to this story by Sparks, nor published any detailed information on the IDF’s own findings on the conduct of its troops. My source is Helen Cobban’s blog, Just World News. She writes:

The great, strongly anti-Apartheid South African journalist Allister Sparks has penned a powerful rebuke of his country’s Chief Rabbi, Warren Goldstein, over the latter’s strongly expressed criticism of Constitutional Court member Richard Goldstone, and Goldstone’s role in heading the UN’s fact-finding mission for Gaza.

Sparks starts by noting that three of the major IDF war crimes reported by the Goldstone Commission in Gaza were in fact recently confirmed to have been such by a military investigation undertaken by the IDF high command itself.

He comments, “the real importance of this military investigation is that it vindicates the Goldstone commission,” adding:

For Judge Richard Goldstone, particularly, this is a personal vindication, for he was excoriated by leading members of the local Jewish community for chairing the commission. He was told his commission’s findings were lies; that he was naive and gullible for accepting the version of events given by terrorists; and that, since he is a Jew, he was a traitor to his people.

His critics were [supported] by Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein, who chastised Goldstone for “doing great damage to the state of Israel”. He should have recused himself instead, Goldstein said, and taken no part in the investigating mission.

Sparks concludes his article by issuing this final reproach to South Africa’s Chief Rabbi, Warren Goldstein:

We secularists need to know what a religious leader in our community means when he seeks to impose such an ethical dictum on a prominent member of his faith [Judge Richard Goldstone] — someone who was a founding father of our Constitutional Court and an interpreter of our infinitely important national constitution in this new democracy.

by James M. Wall

(See Updated Comment from PCUSA Commissioner Pete Bloss at end of Comments.)

Who “won” the Minneapolis Presbyterian Church (USA) General Assembly?

To answer that question, we first need to ask, who did not win?

The religious arm of the Israel Lobby did not win, in spite of what you may have read in Newsweek, in the Los Angeles Times and in the  American Jewish media.

When a “What’s Good for Israel” spin is set in rapid motion, you know you are witnessing the work of an operation that left Minneapolis surprised and disappointed at the outcome.

Something had to be done, and quickly, before the public–and the folks back in Tel Aviv–heard that the Protestant/Israeli Iron Wall had been breached.

Something, indeed, had to be done, and that something was to launch a ”save the Jewish-Christian dialogue” media blitz. The blitz included a second Newsweek appearance this month in a column by Katharine R. Henderson,  president of Auburn Theological Seminary.

With respected Protestant leaders like Henderson as allies, the state of Israel tried to do exactly what the US private healthcare industry did when it kept a public option out of President Obama’s health care bill: Control the process in their favor.

In a fancy bit of footwork, health care lobbyist Liz Fowler rotated between a job as a public policy adviser to WellPoint Inc, the nation’s largest publicly traded health benefits company, and a position as a top advisor to Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont), who receives massive campaign funds from the insurance industry.

Bill Moyers reported on his television program how Fowler killed the public option in the bill. Fowler, by the way, has a new job. President Obama asked her to implement the health care bill for the administration. This news appeared July 14, in the Billings Gazette. The national media ignored the story.  The revolving door between lobbyists and government appointments is no longer important in Washington.

That is how the Lobby system works. A lobby recruits allies, develops plans, cultivates decision makers, and pays to control the final outcome of legislation affecting its client. With Liz Fowler in control, the private health care industry got the health care bill the health care industry wanted.

It works the same way with the Israel Lobby. Experienced in such matters, the Lobby knew what it had to do when confronted by all those “bleeding heart” Progressives in the Presbyterian Church (USA), which for years has been the lobby’s greatest nightmare, a denomination that will not stay on the reservation.

The Lobby has had a much easier time of it with Episcopalians and Lutherans, historic state churches accustomed to following a national consensus.

But oh, those Presbyterians. It was time for the Lobby to call on friendships inside the denomination, cultivated over many years with a single goal in mind: Protect, by any means possible, the “fragile” relationships between Christians and Jews.

Here is how it works:

Give a rabbi and a neighboring Presbyterian pastor free passage to the Holy Land. Provide their church and synagogue members with low rates in Israel’s finer hotels. Travelers walk where Jesus walked.

By the time Holy Land travelers prepare to return home, religiously aglow, the entire delegation will be singing “kum ba yah” around the closing banquet table.

Some of those Presbyterian travelers might end up as voting commissioners when the General Assembly of the PCUSA meets to discuss a “controversial” report on the Israel-Palestine situation.

I do not know the background of one PCUSA commissioner who came to Minneapolis to vote on that  ”controversial” report in Minneapolis in early July. I have no idea why he thinks the way he thinks. (For

But I do know his story, because he told it to Josh Nathan-Kazis, who wrote about this particular commissioner for the on line edition of the national Jewish publication, Forward.

This commissioner sure sounds like he has sung a few choruses of “kum ba yah” with his Jewish neighbors, as is his right, and indeed duty, as a member of the Jewish-Christian dialogue caucus in the PCUSA.

The blogger’s headline, Presbyterians Tone Down Report On Israel After Jewish Lobbying, could serve as a text for our discussion here on how lobbying works when it involves Presbyterians and Jewish lobbyists.

Here is how the Forward blogger tells the story:

Ask Pete Bloss why he worked against resolutions critical of Israel at the general assembly of the largest Presbyterian group in the United States, and the Gulfport, Miss., resident speaks more about Hurricane Katrina than about Israeli policy.
“The richness and diversity of points of view in the Jewish community really became clear to us when Jewish college groups started arriving,” he said, recalling the Jews who worked with his church on reconstruction projects after the 2005 disaster. “
We koshered our kitchen for several weeks.… We had rabbis teaching the Old Testament in our Sunday school classes. It was just wonderful to share things.”
An elder in his local Presbyterian church, and a practicing attorney, Bloss said that hosting the influx of Jews who came to help “probably energized us, and people like me, to say that when incredibly unbalanced things were taking place with the general assembly, that we wanted to try to be a part of bringing that back into balance.”

Commissioner  Pete Bloss went to Minneapolis to cast votes on matters related to a resolution presented by a General Assembly Committee.  He believes he witnessed “incredibly unbalanced things” taking place at the GA.  He was determined to play a part in “bringing that back into balance”.

(See Comment below from Commissioner Pete Bloss, written in response to this posting.)

There, in a nutshell, was the battle of Minneapolis, the 219th General Assembly of the PCUSA, as witnessed by one of the soldiers involved, an attorney from Mississippi.

The “incredibly unbalanced things” Commissioner Bloss was determined to bring back into balance included the PCUSA’s acceptance of the overture, Toward Peace and Reconciliation in Mideast (supporting the Goldstone Report).

The Goldstone overture was supported in committee, 38-9, with 5 abstentions. It was accepted by the full plenary. The overture may be read on line.

The MESC report endorsed an overture which calls on the US government to end all military funding to Israel until Israel agrees to stop settlement construction. It passed in the committee 47 to 1 vote, with 3 abstentions.

The military aid overture was also  approved by the General Assembly plenary.

On July 16, six days after the GA ended,, the Palestinian organization Miftah reported that US Assistant Secretary of State Andrew Shapiro announced that the US would give Israel “the largest security package ever, $2.775 billion to “help advance the peace process with the Palestinians”.

The GA received the “controversial” Kairos theological statement which had been written by leaders of the Christian churches in Palestine and sent to American churches.

What makes it “controversial” is that it reflects the influence of liberation theology (read a concise history of of Liberation Theology, here), which reached international theological acceptance through:

Lectures given by Gustavo Gutiérrez in Montreal in 1967, and at Chimbote in Peru on the poverty of the Third World and the challenge it posed to the development of a pastoral strategy of liberation were a further powerful impetus toward a theology of liberation.

Its outlines were first put forward at the theological congress at Cartigny, Switzerland, in 1969: “Toward a Theology of Liberation.”

The importance of the Kairos document to the Palestinians was summed up by one GA Commissioner who said, “Kairos is for Palestinians what the Letter from a Birmingham Jail is for African-Americans.”

So it was that the supporters of the Middle East Study Committee report, which was eventually adopted by the General Assembly, with modifications, retained  the Kairos document intact, including its reliance on liberation theology.

BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) also remains in the MESC report, accepted by the GA. Its presence in the GA-accepted document remains as an anathema to the Jewish-Christian Dialogue supporters among GA commissioners.

The MESC Report did not ask the plenary to divest its funds from Caterpillar. However, the permanent GA committee on investments had agreed to “denounce” Caterpillar for refusing to respond to PCUSA objections to CAT’s sale of bulldozers to Israel.

On July 13, three days after the close of the GA, Miftah reported that “Israeli occupation authorities demolished six houses in the eastern sector of the city in Essawiyeh and Beit Hanania. One of the homes, located in Beit Hanania, was inhabited at the time it was demolished.”

The Kairos document emphasis on liberation theology remains in the GA’s final report. It is available for study and application in individual congregations.

Coinciding with the news of the US “security” $2.775 billion gift to Israel, and the destruction of the home in Beit Hanania with the family still inside, a second column on the GA appeared in Newsweek, co-authored by Auburn Theological Seminary President Katherine Henderson.

Her first column on the GA was co-authored with Gus Niebuhr; this second one was written with Henderson’s Auburn colleague, J.C. Austin.

Henderson moonlights as a regular contributor for Newsweek. This second column gets right down to some 1960s civil rights history that Newsweek readers would remember, even those largely unfamiliar with Presbyterians.

The Henderson-Austin column begins with the familiar trope, “what does Athens have to do with Jerusalem”.

What does the Presbyterian Church (USA) have to do with the Middle East anyway? For us, the conflict is personal. We have a long history of friendship and collaboration with the Jewish community. We stood side-by-side in the Civil Rights struggle, forging a deep bond in the crucible of jail cells.

To this day, we work together on issues like poverty and immigration, convinced we share similar values for “repairing the world” and that we can be more effective together.

The problem with evoking the civil rights era is that the issues before the General Assembly this summer were not about past struggles for civil rights in the US. At Minneapolis the issue was the violations of human rights of Christians, Jews AND Muslims, today, at this very moment in Israel/Palestine.

Henderson-Austin did finally get to the Palestinians, but only to some of them.

And Presbyterians have a long history with Palestinians, too, especially the Christian community. Palestinian Christians come to the United States to study in our seminaries and work with our churches.

When we take our pilgrimages to the Holy Land, we go to Jerusalem and Bethlehem and the Galilee not simply to see the sights and buildings testifying to the history of Christianity, but the “living stones” of our faith in the region, the Palestinian people who have kept the faith alive since Jesus walked those lands and to whom we are bound in shared belief and ministry and spirit.

That is embarrassing. “Especially the Christian community”? Don’t they hear what they are writing? They embrace only certain Palestinians?

Did Henderson’s fellow Holy Land travelers ever once ask their Israeli guides to take them to Gaza to visit the Muslim mosque built over the traditional site of Samson’s suicidal show of strength? (Judges 16:1)

Muslims are God’s children. They are not “others”, but part of our common humanity. In God there is no “us” and no “others”. “Us and them” is a western colonial concept which is both immoral and evil.

So who, exactly, won at Minneapolis?

Bottom line is that the Presbyterian Church (USA) General Assembly made enormous progress in its 219th assembly by linking military aid to Israeli settlements, denouncing Caterpillar, approving a Kairos document written by Palestinian Christian leaders, and, by demanding that the Jewish-Christian Dialogue study paper, which was expected to receive an easy endorsement, be rejected and sent back for further development.

Is that a “win”? You decide.

This much we do know, for sure, when the next set of General Assembly commissioners see the Jewish-Christian Dialogue study paper, they expect to see a document written with “more people at the table”, including Palestinian Christians.

And who knows, maybe the new table will include Muslim representatives, fellow religionists who lived peacefully with their Jewish and Christian neighbors in Palestine until the Zionist enterprise entered the modern political picture.

The picture at the top is an AFP/Gettty image of children in Gaza. It appeared on the Middle East Channel, a Foreign Policy blog.

by James M. Wall

When commissioners to the 219th Presbyterian Church (USA) General Assembly left Minneapolis, they departed from a GA that achieved amazing, surprising, and unexpected results.

Reports on the Assembly in the secular media were formulaic, shaped by the American Jewish-Christian dialogue paradigm, which has been carefully built and sustained over many decades by the Israeli Hasbara (hebrew for “propaganda” or, more politely, “explanation”.)

The New York Times reported on the GA actions with a short summary that was one-third about the GA actions, and two-thirds about Jewish response to those actions.

Nothing, of course, about any Muslim reactions, of which more later.

The Los Angeles Times had its usual “middle ground” lead, written by Mitchell Landsberg. Notice that his focus is not on the Presbyterians, but on the fact that the report included criticism of Israel.

In sports writing culture, this is known as reporting from the perspective of the home team.

A week ago, the Presbyterian Church USA seemed headed for a bruising, polarizing battle over a report on the Middle East that sharply criticized Israel.

On Friday, meeting in Minneapolis, the church’s General Assembly overwhelmingly passed a resolution that seemed to placate nearly everyone on both sides of the issue — a “miracle,” some said, that offered hope to those who see the Mideast as hopelessly deadlocked.

Sorry, Mitch, but you missed the final inning rally by the visiting team.

The big story out of Minneapolis is that this is no longer your Daddy’s Presbyterian Church.

Of course, there were compromises by GA commissioners–this is, after all, a democratic body–but “placating nearly everyone”? Not even close.

Here, in summary, are key decisions reached by the 129th General Assembly during the week of July 3-10, 2010:

Approved a comprehensive report on the Middle East – its first since 1997–which calls for the following actions.

Called for an immediate cessation of all violence, whether perpetrated by Israelis or Palestinians;

Reaffirmed Israel’s right to exist as a sovereign nation within secure and internationally recognized borders

The end of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories;

An immediate freeze on the establishment and expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and on the Israeli acquisition of Palestinian land and buildings in East Jerusalem.

The General Assembly got down to the hard stuff when it “approved” the report of the Mission Responsibility Through its Investment (MRTI) committee, an ongoing unit of governance that identifies corporations and businesses deemed worthy or unworthy for the approved investment list.

The MRTI has compiled its list on instructions from General Assemblies in 2004, 2006 and 2008.

The committee reached a compromise in its report by acknowledging “that Caterpillar has in many ways provided positive leadership to its community, its state, and the nation.

It has donated considerable resources and equipment in support of local development and disaster relief at home and overseas.

It has significantly improved workplace safety, acted aggressively to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and pursued environmental conservation within its production processes.

That was the carrot.

MRTI followed with a stick by “asking the GA to strongly denounce Caterpillar’s continued profit‐making from non‐peaceful uses of a number of its products on the basis of Christian principles and as a matter of social witness.

The MRTI also “calls upon Caterpillar to carefully review its involvement in obstacles to a just and lasting peace in Israel‐Palestine, and to take affirmative steps to end its complicity in the violation of human rights.

This carrot and stick compromise was reached by the GA to avoid the dreaded step of “divesting” from Caterpillar.

It is pretty clear that BDS has its avid backers within the church, but they are still in the minority. For that reason, compromise was inevitable.

Denouncing, however, keeps CAT on the hot seat, provoking one commissioner to comment to a small group that since CAT would not go bankrupt if it lost Presbyterian investments (hardly), why not just go ahead and divest and leave the Peoria, Illinois-based company alone.

The answer, I suspect, lies in the reluctance among Americans to use economic tools against an “ally”–as opposed to, say, Iran, North Korea, or Cuba, you know, our “enemies”.

The Jewish-Christian dialogue paradigm is too deeply rooted, so far, to overcome resistance to the use of BDS as a tool to confront an “ally” on a justice issue.

Resistance to BDS is not strong in, for example, Great Britain, where the Methodist Church just approved a boycott of settlement products, of which there are many in the UK, especially produce.

In  France, a major labor union just agreed not to work on Israeli projects.

These are clear signs that the old ark is a moving.

Because BDS is gaining such worldwide acceptance, the Hasbara has increased its campaign against those US churches which threatens to break ranks.  It has not been totally successful.  The Northern Illinois United Methodist Conference, for example, recently voted to divest from Caterpillar.

The pressure on the Presbyterians was felt at the GA during consideration of Kairos, a Palestinian  theological  document approved for study by the GA.

Through some parliamentary moves that would have made Nancy Pelosi proud, the GA agreed to approve the Kairos document, and send it to local churches for study.  At the same time, the GA did not approve a section of the Kairos document that advocates BDS.

GA approval, however, sends Kairos to local churches, where the full document, including the BDS section, will be available for study.  Will every church look carefully at BDS? Some will, some won’t.

It is important to note that the Kairos document was developed by leaders of the Palestinian Christian church bodies. It is a theologically-based request for justice and peace in Palestine.

One letter to commissioners sent by a coalition of US Jewish organizations, was harshly critical of the Kairos document on theological grounds.  The coalition dismissed Kairos as a statement written “by a few Palestinian Christians”.

A principal author of Kairos is Mitri Raheb  (right), a Palestinian Christian, who is the pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem. He is founder and president of the Diyar Consortium, a group of Lutheran-based, ecumenically-oriented institutions serving the Bethlehem area.

Raheb was in Minneapolis to speak to commissioners. He earned his advance degrees in theology in Germany, first at Hermannsburg Mission Seminary (1984) and then at Philipps University in Marburg, Germany (1988).

Which bring us to what is for me, the “really big story” (think Ed Sullivan) in Minneapolis:

I am talking here about the GA’s overwhelming vote to demand a revision of a Jewish-Christian dialogue study paper because it lacked sufficient Palestinian Christian input.

I interviewed one commissioner who agreed with me that this story is significant, but she figures it is too “in house” to be important to anyone outside the denomination.

I think she is wrong.  What happened to the Jewish-Christian dialogue study paper is nothing less than an ecclesiastical tectonic shift in the history of the Presbyterian Church (USA).

It all started two months before the GA met. An unexpected overture arrived in “Louisville”, the Presbyterian Vatican located far from either the east or west coasts.

The surprise overture was from the San Francisco Presbytery. It proposed that two study papers be revised before approval for use in local congregations.

One was the usual Jewish-Christian dialogue paper; the other was just starting its development, a Muslim-Christian study paper.

The overture from San Francisco just made the filing deadline, but it was in time for Louisville staff to have to open up consideration on both papers.  And that meant the list of authors would have to be made public for discussion in committee.

Alert members of the Israel/Palestine Mission Network (IPMN) realized that the Jewish-Christian dialogue paper’s authors were less than representative of the entire denomination.  Only a few Palestinian Christians were included, none now resident in Palestine itself.

Process–a favorite Presbyterian term–kicked in. By the time the GA received the San Francisco overture, it had been divided into two parts.

The Jewish-Christian dialogue paper was rejected and sent back for further work over the next two years. The Plenary delegates agreed that the paper needed further work “around a larger table”, one that gave more representation to Palestinian Christians.

The Muslim-Christian dialogue paper is still a “work in progress.” By a vote of 548 affirmative; 129 negative, and 4 abstentions, the paper was affirmed and sent out to the churches. Changes and vote totals are here.

This paper will take its place alongside older, well worn Jewish-Christian Dialogue study documents.

Two years from now a revised Jewish-Christian document could be available, reflecting a more Middle Eastern perspective.

That is when the ecclesiastical tectonic shift rumbled through the horse farms of Kentucky. The 219th General Assembly overwhelmingly chose to reach out to its Muslim co-religionists, in defiance of a still prevalent bias against Islam in American culture.

This shift shakes up the Jewish-Christian dialogue paradigm which has controlled American Protestant understanding of the Middle East since the 1947 creation of the modern state of Israel.

The paradigm was, from the beginning, designed as a neat “Us Christians and Us Jews” fighting for survival against those “Others”, outsiders, Muslim Arabs, who not too long ago were called, by Westerners, Mohammadens, (Saracens in Medieval days).

Few Americans knew, until recently, that there is a rich history of Muslim-Christian interaction dating back to the start of Islam in the deserts of Arabia.

The Presbyterians knew, which is why at the 219th General Assembly, they sent to their churches a plan to study that rich history which will enable them to start interacting with their Muslim neighbors on a more positive footing.

It will be that dialogue which will break down walls in American life, walls already under attack from creative funny man and philosopher, Jon Stewart, who skillfully turns bigots against themselves in a recent Comedy Central segment.

Click here to hear from Stewart.

The photo above of a GA commissioner standing in prayer was taken by AP’s Jim Mone. It was printed in the LA Times.

by James M. Wall

Barack Obama swept into the White House, thanks, in part, to his political and oratorial skills.

He should have learned during his campaign for the US Senate that what he says about race relations at a Southern Illinois county fair will be reported in the African American wards in Chicago.

So what happened to those skills when he hosted Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu at the White House this week?

One day after what he described as an “excellent” White House meeting with Netanyahu, President Obama turned his back on the rest of the world, and focused tightly on confronting “the anxiety some Israelis feel toward him.”

The President was determined to reassure  the Israeli public. But did he pause, even for a moment, to consider how his answers would sound to that part of the Israeli public that desperately wants him to stand up to Bibi?

Did he think how demeaning his answers were to Americans who want their president to be their president, and not pander to the prime minister of a foreign nation?

Did he stop to think that his answers would be harmful and offensive to the Arab/Muslim world?  Worse yet, did he care?

Obama was interviewed by Israel’s Channel 2 network reporter Yonit Levy one day after his meeting with Netanyahu.

The story of the interview appeared in the Jerusalem newspaper, Ha’aretz.

Obama responded to Levi’s question by saying that some of the anxiety may stem from the fact  that his “middle name is Hussein, and that creates suspicion.”

“Creates suspicion?” Please, Mr. President, the name Hussein is one you have previously said you carry proudly. What purpose is there in linking “Hussein” to “suspicion”.  That is Fox News talk and we know what you think of Fox News.

The name Hussein “creates suspicion” only to small minded people who hate and fear Muslims. It is beneath Barack Obama to fall into that Fox News bigoted mindset by pandering to an Israeli television audience, most of whom know pandering when they see it.

Unfortunately, the President was just warming up. He went on to brag about the fact that two of his top staff members are Jewish:

Ironically, I’ve got a Chief of Staff named Rahm Israel Emmanuel. My top political advisor is somebody who is a descendent of Holocaust survivors.

The advisor, whom he does not name, is, of course, David Alexrod.

And I am reasonably certain that Alexrod would not have approved of the President Obama’s final comment on this topic:

My closeness to the Jewish American community was probably what propelled me to the US Senate.

That closeness did have a lot to do with the start of your national career, Mr. President, but it is not something you brag about when you claim to be working for a “peace agreement” between Israel and the Palestinians.

Barack Obama has been in this political business long enough to know that what is said on Israeli television, does not stay on Israeli television.  You are not in Vegas anymore, Mr. President.

Bragging about key advisors being Jewish and commenting like a political reporter about the start of your political career would not have impressed Israelis from the hard right political wing of Israeli politics.

Nor were they impressed by the President of the United States pandering to the Israeli prime minister who has yet to give the President even the slightest concession in negotiations with the Palestinian leadership.

Netanyahu made that clear even before he left on his triumphant return to Israel. Reuters reported:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signaled on Thursday he would not extend beyond September a 10-month moratorium on new housing starts in settlements in the West Bank.

“I think we’ve done enough. Let’s get on with the talks,” he said, when asked in an appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York whether he would extend the limited freeze he put in place to coax the Palestinians into peace negotiations.

Bibi Netanyahu does not have the slightest intention of making concessions to the Palestinians. Why should he? He has the US Congress in his back pocket. The American public remains under the sway of a decades-old Hasbara campaign that has created a false narrative that Israel is our only friend in the Middle East.

That narrative has been around a long time and its grip on American consciousness is appalling. It is a narrative that should be very much in President Obama’s mind as he confronts Netanyahu’s hard line stance.

Geoffrey Wawro explains how Israel’s power over the US has grown dramatically in his book, Quicksand: America’s Pursuit of Power in the Middle East:

Already in 1948, the Truman administration regretted the arrogance and brutality of Jewish ethnic cleansing in the Arab parts of Palestine but did nothing about it because of Cold War rivalry and fear of what Truman called the “pressure boys” of the Israeli lobby.

Each subsequent administration cried foul–”Henry, they can’t do that to us again,” Nixon wailed to Kissinger in 1973–but failed to crack down on Israeli foul play because of the same worries that creased Truman’s brow. (page 606)

The American media has, of course, long been under the control of Israel’s Hasbara (Hebrew for propaganda or explanation), but of late there have been signs that change may be on the way.

How else to explain a surprising column written by the Washington Post‘s Dana Milbank, under the heading, Netanyahu hears no discouraging words from Obama.

A blue-and-white Israeli flag hung from Blair House. Across Pennsylvania Avenue, the Stars and Stripes was in its usual place atop the White House. But to capture the real significance of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s visit with President Obama, White House officials might have instead flown the white flag of surrender.

That is what we might refer to as an “ouch” opening paragraph. Read on, there is more:

Four months ago, the Obama administration made a politically perilous decision to condemn Israel over a controversial new settlement. The Israel lobby reared up, Netanyahu denounced the administration’s actions, Republican leaders sided with Netanyahu, and Democrats ran for cover.

So on Tuesday, Obama, routed and humiliated by his Israeli counterpart, invited Netanyahu back to the White House for what might be called the Oil of Olay Summit: It was all about saving face.

The president, beaming in the Oval Office with a dour Netanyahu at his side, gushed about the “extraordinary friendship between our two countries.” He performed the Full Monty of pro-Israel pandering: “The bond between the United States and Israel is unbreakable” . . .

For that small number of readers for whom “the Full Monty” might not be a familiar movie and play title which has given rise to a term now widely used, suffice it to say that not only does Milbank’s column evoke the image of surrender,  he also manages to slip in a term that five years ago would never have made it past the Post’s Hasbara copy desk.

That my friends, is progress toward peace, real peace, not the peace going nowhere around a negotiating table,  but progress toward peace that has begun to shatter the Hasbara grip on American politics.

The picture above is a Wilson/Getty image, used in the Washington Post.