A few days ago, I heard Professor Paul Iganski of the University of Essex and Lancaster University speak at Yale University on the subject “Playing the 'Nazi-card': Antisemitic Discourse Against Israel."
One of the more despicable strategies of Israel-haters is to try to associate Israel with Nazi Germany. It is a way of appealing to the ignorant and the bigoted, although fortunately it can only repel those who are knowledgeable and fair-minded. (On the other hand, those are generally already pro-Israel.)
Because I had just heard Professor Iganski's talk, the obnoxious subject line given the following post to the Palestinian Christians mailing list on Yahoo Groups jumped out at me. It was given the subject "Zieg Hail to the Chief of Staff. The Promised Land - Obama, Emanuel."
It was posted by "nachoua," with the email
nouche@link.net.
It consists of several screeds, which we include without additional comment, as a testiment to the unashamed hatred displayed.
By Alexander Cockburn
The first trumpet blast of change ushers in Rahm Emanuel as Obama's chief of staff and gate keeper. This is the man who arranges his schedule, staffs out the agenda, includes, excludes. It's certainly as sinister an appointment as, say, Carter's installation of arch cold-warrior Zbigniev Brzezinski as his National Security Advisor at the dawn of his "change is here" administration in 1977.
Emanuel, as Ralph Nader points out in my interview with him below, represents the worst of the Clinton years. His profile as regards Israel is explored well on this site by lawyer John Whitbeck. He's a former Israeli citizen, who volunteered to serve in Israel in 1991 and who made brisk millions in Wall Street. He is a super-Likudnik hawk, whose father was in the fascist Irgun (TERRORIST) in the late Forties, responsible for cold-blooded massacres of Palestinians. Dad's unreconstructed ethnic outlook has been memorably embodied in his recent remark to the Ma'ariv newspaper that "Obviously he [Rahm] will influence the president to be pro-Israel. Why wouldn't he be [influential]? What is he, an Arab? He's not going to clean the floors of the White House."
Working in the Clinton White House, Emanuel helped push through NAFTA, the crime bill, the balanced budget and welfare reform. He favored the war in Iraq, and when he was chairing the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2006 he made great efforts to knock out antiwar Democratic candidates. On this site in October and November, 2006, John Walsh documented both the efforts and Emanuel's role in losing the Democrats seats they would otherwise have won.
In 2006 Emanuel had just published a book with Bruce Reed called The Plan: Big Ideas for America, with one section focused on "the war on terror".
Emanuel and Reed wrote, "We need to fortify the military's 'thin green line 'around the world by adding to the U.S. Special Forces and the Marines, and by expanding the U.S. army by 100,000 more troops. .Finally we must protect our homeland and civil liberties by creating a new domestic counterterrorism force like Britain's MI5." Recall that Obama has been calling throughout his recent campaign for an addition of 92,000 to the US Army and US Marine Corps.
Emanuel and Reed had fond words for the mad-dog Peter Beinart, neocon warrior theoretician for the Democrats, roosting Marty Peretz's The New Republic, and author of The Good Fight where Beinart explained why a tough new national security policy is as essential to the future of of progressive politics as a united front against totalitarianism and communism was to the New Deal and the Great Society. Emanuel and Reed also commended Anne-Marie Slaughter's proposal for "a new division of labor in which the United Nations takes on economic and social assistance and an expanded NATO takes over the burden of collective security." In other words, let NATO shoot the natives and the UN clean the floors.
Walsh took a hard look at the 2006 Democratic primary race between Christine Cegelis and Tammy Duckworth in Illinois's 6th CD, a Republican District, which had elected the disgusting Henry Hyde from time immemorial.
In 2004 Cegelis, who was only mildly antiwar, ran as the Democrat with a grass roots campaign and polled a remarkable 44 per cent in her first run.
It was not too long before Hyde decided to retire, and the field seemed to be open for Cegelis in the November poll, in 2006.
Enter Rahm Emanuel, who promptly dug up a pro-war candidate, Tammy Duckworth. Although she had both her legs blown off in Iraq, she remained committed to "staying the course" in Iraq. Duckworth had no political experience and did not live in the 6th District. Emanuel raised a million dollars for her and brought in Joe Lieberman, Barak Obama, John Kerry, John Edwards and Hillary Clinton to support her. Despite all this help and with the Cegelis campaign virtually penniless, Duckworth barely managed to eke out a primary victory by a measly four percentage points.
To win the House, the Dems had to win 15 seats from the Republicans. Walsh identified 22 candidates hand picked by Emanuel to run in open districts or districts with Republican incumbents. Of these, nine adopted a US "must win" in Iraq position and only one of Rahm's candidates was for prompt withdrawal from Iraq.
Then, after the election, Walsh assessed Rahm's supposed brilliance in winning back the House. "Looking at all 22 candidates hand-picked by Rahm, " Walsh wrote, "we find that 13 were defeated [including Duckworth], and only 8 won! And remember that this was the year of the Democratic tsunami and that Rahm's favorites were handsomely financed by the DCCC. The Dems have picked up 28 seats so far, maybe more. So out of that 28, Rahm's choices accounted for 8! Since the Dems only needed 15 seats to win the House, Rahm's efforts were completely unnecessary. Had the campaign rested on Rahm's choices, there would have been only 8 or 9 new seats, and the Dems would have lost. In fact, Rahm's efforts were probably counterproductive for the Dems since the great majority of voters were antiwar and they were voting primarily on the issue of the war (60 per cent according to CNN). But Rahm's candidates were not antiwar.
Talking to Nader about the Campaign, on November 5.
AC: In 2000,you drew nearly 10,000 people to a speech in Portland, Oregon.
This year you got barely 2,000 in in the whole of Multnomah County where Portland lies, perhaps the most progressive county in the nation. Is this a sign of the withering of the progressive ggleft or the dead end of independent political campaigns?
Nader: It's a sign of the swoon in the voting booth by people who told pollsters that they were going to vote for me at a level of 4 to 7 million; that is, 6 per cent nationally in the summer and 3 per cent the day before the election, according to CNN. In Washington DC district Obama got 94 per cent. I said to people, how many years have you known me? And they answered, it's a historic occasion. I wanted to be part of history. The real issue in this campaign is the voters. These are people who knew all about Obama's flipflops, his support for offshore drilling, for FISA, his role as the number one corporate cadidate.
When you in prison and you're told you can't get out and to chose between TB and cancer you'll chose. It's beyond politics, it's psychology. This is what happens when we're trapped in the winner take all closed system, watching tv.
The pattern is: Progressive politics for three years, and in the fourth year it renews itself with heavy doses of regressive politics and charges forward again.
I thought we'd get two to three millon votes. We had a huge internet presence.
AC: How many votes did you get? This year and in the last two campaigns?
Probably 700,000. In 2000 it was 2.8 million. In 2004, 450,000. But those figures don't tell the story. In New York this time for example it was almost impossible to find me on the ballot.
AC What about you calling him an Uncle Tom on Fox?
Nader: On Fox I said that as the first African American president we wish him well. The question is, will he be Uncle Sam for the people or Uncle Tom for the giant corporations which are driving America into the ground. Fox cut it off after "corporations".
He is less vulnerable to criticism and harder to criticize because of his race. When I said he was talking White Man's talk, the PC people got really upset.
It doesn't matter that he sides with destruction of the Palestinians, and sides with the embargo. It doesn't matter that he turns his back on 100 million people and won't even campaign in minority areas. It doesn't matter than he wants a bigger military budget, and an imperial foreign policy supporting various adventures of the Bush administration. It doesn't matter that he's for the death penalty ,which is targeted at minorities. But if you say one thing that isn't PC, you get their attention. I tell college audiences, a gender, racial or ethnic slur gets you upset, reality doesn't get you upset.
Can Obama speak truth to the white power structure? There's every indication he doesn't want to. For example, in February he stiffed the State of the Black Union annual meeting in New Orleans. He's a very accommodating personality.
AC: Ralph, Why do you think Ron Paul was able to excite younger voters and you weren't?
Nader: Ron Paul? There's the novelty aspect. It was his first try. He hasn't been losing. He gets the hard core people focused on the gold standard, and abolishing the federal reserve. The "Get government off our back", rock-ribbed Goldwater people. He says the things mainstream Republicans can't.
AC: Are the Republicans down for the count for a while?
Nader: Any time there's a terrorist attack they're back in business.
Enough people will soon forget what Bush and Co actually did. At the moment conservatives have been subjected to Obama's shock and awe, but they still have all these social issues. As a candidate Obama dodged the Gay Marriage Ban ballot, but they'll throw the social issues at him. The Republican inventory is intact: "tax and spend", "over regulation", plus all these social issues.
AC Does Palin have a future?
Nader: No.
AC: How about the liberals and the left now?
Nader: The real crisis is the self-destruction of the liberal progressive community. It's got nowhere to go, other than to renew its three out of four year cycle of criticism of the Democrats. They've nowhere to go because they've made no demands. He's been a candid right-center Democrat and they've given him a free ride. No demands. From Labor? No demands. He gave them a sop on the card check. He campaigned for two years, promised blacks nothing, Latinos nothing, women's groups nothing, labor nothing. Contrast the lack of demands on the liberal progressive side to what the Limbaugh crowd exacted from McCain.
AC: You think Michael Moore could have made some demands in return for his support?
Nader: Moore knows were his bread is buttered. He's seen what the Hollywood set and the others did to me.
AC: How do you see the next phase playing out?
Nader: Obama faces three crises: wars overseas, economic collapse and the deficit. They can't use fiscal policy very much, so he's going to be strapped by things like Medicare.
He's got along on general rhetoric, but now each decision will shake some section of the liberal constituency.
They need to launch a comprehensive program dealing with poverty, low income housing, corruption and extortion in the ghettoes, and doubling the minimum wage to compensate for inflation.
They need to address the right of labor to form trade unions without coming up against the steel wall of Taft Hartley.
Health insurance? He'll extend tax supports which will give the insurance companies more business. He should deal with drug prices, but that's a battle he won't undertake.
How's he going to deal with the auto companies which are in deep trouble?
Take the proposed GM-Chrysler merger which makes no sense and will mean lay-offs for 90,000 workers. If people don't want the cars then the sacrifices and subsidies are to no avail.
The only way this guy can ever get his head above water is if he is courageous. What he's basically doing so far is giving the Clinton crowd a second chance. Rahm Emanuel? He's the worst of Clinton. Spokesman for Wall Street, Israel, globalization.
Second: demilitarize foreign policy, establishing the international stability that flows from our becoming a respectful but energetic humanitarian superpower, confronting world issues like drinking water and infectious diseases.
He has to reverse course on Afghanistan. As Ashraf Ghani former finance minister for Karzai has said, the approach to Afghanistan should be the need for justice, the fundamental basis of all public order.
Third, he's got to develop economic policy for the greatest good for the greatest number. Public works not bailout. Put money where it matters.
He's got to say to the rich and powerful, you have to give up your greed.
It should be a two-track presidency, dealing with issues day to day, and strengthening the fiber of democratic society. That's partly a matter of shareholder authority, worker-owned pension funds, which is a third of Wall Street. If every such fund was given the authority to control what they own, it wd be over. Look at all institutional shareholderd in Fannies.
Their holdings are worth one per cent of what they were and these were the second safest investments after Treasuries! Believe in first principles:
What you own, you control. If you screw up you're free to sink -- the first and second principles of capitalism.
I'm going to write Obama a letter in the next month saying, what you have to do is a pre-State of the union where you lay out exactly where the Bush Administration has left America, in category after category, so you will not be hung with it. In the pre-state of the union, Obama should say, This is the mess I've inherited.
Second, Obama has to cut the sequence of war crimes and high crimes and misdeameanours. If not, he'll become a war criminal himself within a month. Shut down Guantanamo with strict directives, no torture. If he continue his policies, then he'll become a war criminal. If you going to restore the rule of law, you have got to draw the line between what you're going to do and what you refuse to inherit. Then it's a real fresh start.
Obama's a guy who's got away with a ten minute speech for two years. He won too easily. He didn't have to respond to the liberal constituencies.
He's really had it very easy, because he had an easy act to challenge and an easy act to follow ,
AC: How do you feel about your run?
Nader: I'm happy I ran, because the alternative is total surrender. I carried the banner to 50 states. I surprised myself. Look at the abolitionist Liberty Party in the mid-19th century. It didn't get a tenth of one per cent. Did you think those people wasted their vote? We were quite successful this time in beating back ballot access barriers , in Arizona and Ohio. It's like the early stages of fighting Jim Crow laws.
AC: The history of third parties over the past thirty years is not very encouraging.
Nader: We're advancing majoritarian programs and the majority voters are trapped into the two party choice This is what happens. Obama sank public funding. Not only did he betray the principle and therefore shattered his credibility. In so outdoing he way outraised McCain. I read the trade literature. Not one of these industries -- banking, insurance, automotive, oil, agribusiness, international trade - is worried. They're all totally calm. The corporate state moves on.
Corporate power has unique characteristics. It is perfectly willing and able to corrupt, regardless of sexual or ethnic preference. It offers equal opportunities to be corrupted or coopted . That's why it's very difficult for the civil community, which is affected by principles, nuances, honest disagreements, to confront the monistically commercial corporations. No one says 'the big debate inside Exxon is whether to go more for oil or solar. That's why every religion in the world, in their scriptures, issues a warning not to give too much power to the merchant class. The commercial instinct is relentless, consistent, limitless in achieving its goal. It will run rough-shod to destroy, co-opt or dilute civic and spiritual values that stand in its way.
At no time has Obama said he wanted dialogue with Iran but in fact always stated that America needed to go to war with Iran in order to stop her Nuclear Technology!!Obama wnats troops taken OUT of Iraq to be diverted to fight Iran and to increase troop numbers in Afghanistan which the ZIONIST USA does not wish to relinquish its military conquest and butchering of Afghanis, epspecially as we have seen time and time again, targetting Weddings attended by innocent civilians!! and on the VERY DAY of US Elections, ISRAEL sends her COCKY ARROGANT MESSAGE to OBAMA by BOMBING AND ASSASSINATING GAZANS!!
JERUSALEM ????? Israel said Thursday US President-elect Barack Obama's stated readiness to talk to Iran could be seen in the Middle East as a sign of weakness in efforts to persuade Tehran to curb its nuclear program.
"We live in a neighborhood in which sometimes dialogue ????? in a situation where you have brought sanctions, and you then shift to dialogue ????? is liable to be interpreted as weakness," Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said, asked on Israel Radio about policy change toward Tehran in an Obama administration.
Her remarks sounded the first note of dissonance with Obama by a senior member of the Israeli government since the Democrat's sweeping victory over Republican candidate John McCain in the US presidential election Tuesday.
Asked if she supported any US dialogue with Iran, Livni replied:
"The answer is no."
Livni, leading the centrist Kadima party into Israel's February 10 parliamentary election, also said "the bottom line" was that the United States, under Obama, "is also not willing to accept a nuclear Iran."
Israel retains only nuclear arsenal in Middle East
Obama has said he would harden sanctions on Iran but has also held out the possibility of direct talks with US adversaries to resolve problems, including the dispute over Tehran's nuclear ambitions.
The West believes Iran's nuclear enrichment program is aimed at building atomic weapons, an allegation the Islamic Republic denies.
Israel, believed to have the Middle East's only atomic arsenal, has said Iran's nuclear program is a threat to its existence and that it was keeping all options on the table to stop it.
By JOHN V. WHITBECK
November 07, 2008 "Counterpunch" -- -- In the first major appointment of his administration, President-elect Barack Obama has named as his chief of staff Congressman Rahm Emanuel, an Israeli citizen and Israeli army veteran whose father, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, was a member of Menachem Begin's Irgun forces during the Nakba and named his son after "a Lehi combatant who was killed" -- i.e., a member of Yitzhak Shamir's terrorist Stern Gang, responsible for, in addition to other atrocities against Palestinians, the more famous bombing of the King David Hotel and assassination of the UN peace envoy Count Folke Bernadotte.
In rapid response to this news, the editorial in the next day's Arab News (Jeddah) was entitled "Don't pin much hope on Obama -- Emanuel is his chief of staff and that sends a message". This editorial referred to the Irgun as a "terror organization" (a judgment call) and concluded: "Far from challenging Israel, the new team may turn out to be as pro-Israel as the one it is replacing."
That was always likely. Obama repeatedly pledged unconditional allegiance to Israel during his campaign, most memorably in an address to the AIPAC national convention which Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery characterized as "a speech that broke all records for obsequiousness and fawning", and America's electing a black president has always been more easily imagined than any American president's declaring his country's independence from Israeli domination.
Still, one of the greatest advantages for the United States in electing Barack Hussein Obama was the prospect that the world's billion-plus Muslims, who now view the United States with almost universal loathing and hatred, would be dazzled by the new president's eloquence, life story, skin color and middle name, would think again with open minds and would give America a chance to redeem itself in their eyes and hearts -- not incidently, drastically shortening the long lines of aspiring jihadis eager to sacrifice their lives while striking a blow against the evil empire.
The profound loathing and hatred of the Muslim world toward the United States, which has always had its roots for America's unconditional support for the injustices inflicted and still being inflicted on the Palestinians, can fairly be considered the core of the primary foreign policy and "national security" problems confronting the United States in recent years.
Why would Obama, a man of unquested brilliance, have chosen to send such a contemptuous message to the Muslim world with his first major appointment?
Why would he wish to disabuse the Muslim world of its hopes (however modest) and slap it across the face at the ealiest opportunity?
A further contemptuous message is widely rumored to be forthcoming -- the naming as "Special Envoy for Middle East Peace" of Dennis Ross, the notorious Israel-Firster who, throughout the 12 years of the Bush the First and Clinton administrations, ensured that American policy toward the Palestinians did not deviate one millimeter from Israeli policy and that no progress toward peace could be made and who has since headed the AIPAC spin-off "think tank", the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Neverthess, since it is almost always constructive to seek a silver lining in the darkest clouds, a silver lining can be found and cited. For decades, the Palestinian leadership has been "waiting for Godot" -- waiting for the U.S. Government to finally do the right thing (if only in its own obvious self-interest) and to force Israel to comply with international law and UN Resolutions and permit them to have a decent mini-state on a tiny portion of the land that once was theirs.
This was never a realistic hope. It has not happened, and it will never happen. So it may well be salutary not to waste eight more days (let alone eight more years) playing along and playing the fool while more Palestinian lands are confiscated and more Jewish colonies and Jews-only bypass roads are built on them, clinging to the delusion that the charming Mr. Obama, admirable though he may be in so many other respects, will eventually (if only in a second term, when he no longer has to worry about reelection) see the light and do the right thing. It is long overdue for the Palestinians themselves to seize the initiative, to reset the agenda and to declare a new "only game in town".
Furthermore, in February, Israel will elect a new Knesset. Bibi Netanyahu, who, most polls and coalition-building calculations suggest, is most likely to emerge as the next prime minister, has one (if only one) great virtue.
He is absolutely honest in not professing any desire (however insincere) to see the creation of any Palestinian "state" (whether decent or less-than-a-Bantustan in nature) or to engage in any talks (even never-ending and fraudulent ones) ostensibly about that possibility. His return to power would definitively slam the door on the illusion of a "two-state solution" somewhere over an ever-receding horizon.
This would constitute a blessing and a liberation for Palestinian minds and Palestinian aspirations. Their leadership(s) could then return, after a long, costly and painful diversion, to fundamental principles, to pursuing the goal of a democratic, nonracist and nonsectarian state in all of Israel/Palestine with equal rights for all who live there.
This just goal could and should be pursued by strictly nonviolent means. If the goal is to convince a determined and powerful settler-colonial movement which wishes to seize your land, settle it and keep it (eventually cleansing it of you and your fellow natives) that it should cease, desist and leave, nonviolent forms of resistance are suicidal. If, however, the goal were to be to obtain the full rights of citizenship in a democratic, nonracist state (as was the case in the American civil rights movement and the South African anti-apartheid movement), then nonviolence would be the only viable approach. Violence would be totally inappropriate and counterproductive. The morally impeccable approach would also be the tactically effective approach. The high road would be the only road.
No American president -- least of all Barack Obama -- could easily support racism and apartheid and oppose democracy and equal rights, particularly if democracy and equal rights were being pursued by nonviolent means. No one anywhere could easily do so. The writing would be on the wall, and the clock would be running out on the tired game of using a perpetual "peace process" as an excuse to delay decisions (while building more "facts on the ground") forever.
Democracy and equal rights would not come quickly or easily. Forty years passed between when, on the night before his assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King cried out that he had been to the mountain top and had seen the promised land and when Barack Obama was elected as president of the United States. (The Bible suggests a similar waiting period in the wilderness for Moses.) Forty-six years passed between the installation of a formal apartheid regime in South Africa and the election of Nelson Mandela as president of a fully democratic and nonracist "rainbow nation".
While it may be be hoped that the transformation would be significantly quicker in Israel/Palestine, it is clear that many who already qualify as "senior citizens" will not live to see the promised land. However, if the promised land of a democratic state with equal rights for all is correctly and clearly perceived and persistently and peacefully pursued, there is ample reason for confidence that Israel/Palestine will one day experience the tearful exaltation of a "Mandela Moment" or an "Obama Moment", restoring hope in the moral potential both of a nation and of mankind, and that the Jews, Muslims and Christians who live there will finally reach their promised land.
John V. Whitbeck, an international lawyer who has advised the Palestinian negotiating team in negotiations with Israel, is author of "The World According to Whitbeck".
