Paul Balles

The Boston Globe called U.S. presidential candidate Ron Paul a “Republican maverick”.

The label has been attached to Paul primarily because he differs from the other Republican presidential candidates on foreign policy. Said The Globe after the presidential debate In Des Moines, Iowa on December 10th:

“While most of the Republican candidates are open to military action against Iran, Paul advocates diplomacy. While several of the candidates oppose cutting the defence budget, Paul wants to slash it. Paul was one of the only candidates in the debate to oppose extending the Patriot Act.”

For those unfamiliar with the Patriot Act, it was enacted presumably to help fight terrorism after 9/11 while sacrificing individual rights.

According to The Globe, “Dean Spiliotes, an independent political analyst from New Hampshire, said Paul’s foreign policy contradicts core Republican tenets of strong national security and defence. But it appeals to Americans who are tired of war and focused on economic issues.”

The foreign policy differences between Ron Paul and his adversaries make him an ideal candidate for those tired of America’s war hawks bankrupting the country.

During the Republican candidates’ debate, Paul didn’t believe Israel would actually strike Iran–but if it did, “we need to get out of their way,” he cautioned.

“When they want to have peace treaties, we tell them what they can do because we buy their allegiance and they sacrifice their sovereignty to us,” admonished Paul.

“They decide they want to bomb something?” asked Paul. “That’s their business, but they should suffer the consequences. Israel has 200–300 nuclear missiles and they can take care of themselves.”

For an American politician to make comments like that took courage. The one that followed would certainly upset American Israeli supporters:

 “We don’t even have a treaty with Israel. Why do we have this automatic commitment that we’re going to send our kids and send our money endlessly to Israel?”

In the debate, the other candidates were falling all over themselves, attempting to show their dedication to Israel. The leading candidate, Mitt Romney groaned:

“There’s no price which is worth an Iranian nuclear weapon. And the right course is to show that we care about Israel, that they are our friend; we’ll stick with them.”

This is the same pre-emptive war hawk rubbish that Bush and Cheney and the Zioncons fed the public as the way to combat terrorism when, in fact, they were telling Israel and its lobbies that America will eternally fight Israel’s wars.

Promised Romney, “If I’m president of the United States, my first foreign trip will be to Israel to show the world we care about that country and that region.”

The Republican candidates, except Ron Paul, all go overboard in their attempts to prove to the supporters in America that they will serve the interests of Israel at any cost.

Of course, the rest of the world doesn’t need to be shown that the U.S. cares about Israel. The only politician unwilling to sacrifice America for Israel is Ron Paul.

The American Arab Anti-discrimination Committee (ADC) recently illustrated the problem with Republicans’ unabated support for Israel:

“Among politicians, Newt Gingrich called the Palestinian people an ‘invented  people’, Eric Cantor said that Palestinian culture was ‘infused with hatred and resentment,’ and Mitt Romney said that he would consult with Benjamin Netanyahu in making U.S. policy toward Palestinians because,  apparently, Israel does not have enough say in U.S. policy toward the Middle East.”

If Ron Paul miraculously receives continuing strong support, his voting public will be tired of sacrificing America on Israel’s altar.

******

 Throughout his life as an educator, Dr. Paul J. Balles, a retired American university professor and freelance writer, has lived and worked in the Middle East for 40 years – first as an English professor (Universities of Kuwait and Bahrain), and for the past ten years as a writer, editor and editorial consultant.
He’s a weekly Op-Ed columnist for the GULF DAILY NEWS . Dr. Balles is also Editorial Consultant for Red House Marketing and a regular contributor to Bahrain This Month. He writes a weekly op-ed column for Akbar Al Khaleej (Arabic). He has also edited seven websites, including bahrainthismonth.com, womenthismonth.com

A new edict issued by General Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood organization in Egypt, Dr. Mohammad Badih in which he writes about the possibility of his movement imposing an Islamic Caliphatein accordance with the principles laid out the Mulsim Brotherhood founder(Courtesy Therearenosunglasses's Weblog)

FRANKLIN LAMB

(Tripoli) – It appears, from interviews and discussions with a wide range of Libyans including students, lawyers, judges at the Ministry of Justice, shopkeepers and casual acquaintances that the Muslim Brotherhood currently has very little popular support among this pious conservative, Sunni Muslim society. Widely expressed opinion is along these lines: “The Brotherhood is different from how Libyans view Islam,” and “They represent outsiders and interference in our country”, “Our revolution was not about replacing one autocratic regime with another.

”That said, the Muslim Brotherhood is odds-on favorite to win the June elections, in the view of many observers here in Libya.he reason the MB is in such a relatively strong position is that is has the support of Qatar, assistance from the well-established MB organizations in Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, and Turkey. The flights arriving in Tripoli from Egypt are always full and some of the passengers are MB operatives according to Professor “Dr. Ali”, a pro-Gadhafi political scientist who has so far managed to keep his teaching post.

The MB is far more organized, well-funded and is working today in the neighborhoods of Libya’s main cities recruiting members and campaign organizers, while trying to keep a low profile. They have asked members to shave their beards, talk about clean government, avoid arguments, and remind anxious Libyans that “Libya is not Afghanistan” and all we want is security, domestic peace and no foreign interference.

Nonetheless, a new edict issued by General Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood organization in Egypt, Dr. Mohammad Badih, in which he writes about the possibility of his movement imposing an Islamic Caliphate in accordance with the principles laid out by the Muslim Brotherhood founder, Imam Hassan al-Banna, created wide controversy in political circles in Libya just as it did in Egypt.

The US, UK and France are currently just watching and guessing at developments, according to the Ambassador from one southern African country. The US State Department is believed even by some National Transition Council officials, lawyers and Judges, (who I met with during two days of meetings this week at the Libyan Ministry of Justice inquiring about certain individuals in NTC and Militia custody,) to be unsure what the US policy should be because they have mixed feelings about the MB. Some US officials are reported to believe that an unstoppable Muslim Brotherhood arc or crescent is quickly jelling across the Maghreb, as it grows also in Turkey and that the MB will dominate in Syria when and if the Assad government is toppled.

The potential utility for Washington of the MB does not end there. Some in Congress and the Obama administration, as well as the Zionist lobby in and outside of Congress, hope that after all the failures of the US administration to spark a Sunni-Shia war, that the MB might just be the best and unexpected weapon in achieving this goal which has been US policy since the late 1980s.

These forces are said also to hope that after achieving a substantial share of the next government of Syria, the MB will quickly build itself up in Lebanon, and give the Sunni community strong effective leadership that has been lacking the past nearly seven years following the assassination of PM Rafiq Hariri, and take on Shia Hezbollah.

In short, NATO countries may sit on their hands regarding the coming elections, drop the current attachment to NTC officials who have only have six months left in office anyhow, and let the MB control Libya’s next government.

The MB in Libya is actually quite good on the issues that are increasingly concerning potential voters as the latter learn how to vote and participate in political parties, which have been outlawed since 1972 when Revolutionary Committees were established to make legislative and administrative decisions.

Those issues are many and include, but are not limited to the following:

– Lack of security due to the militias being viewed as increasingly aggressive with the public and fighting among themselves, as they did this week;

–growing rumors and even evidence of corruption. One example being that there is still not enough money in the Central Bank of Libya to supply local banks around the country. It’s an issue that is expected to explode here once the facts become known. During the uprising this summer, the Gadhafi government limited bank deposit withdrawals to 500 dinars per month (about $475). The new “government” has raised it to 750 dinars per month and it is not enough, given approximately 18 per cent rise in prices since this summer when the Gadhafi government enforced anti-gouging rules. Those rules are no longer being enforced and prices continue to rise.

Where suspected corruption enters the bank withdrawals problem is that according to one Central Bank official who has spent more than 15 years in the CB office that monitors the receipt of payments for Libya oil shipments, even though oil is being shipped today as well as the past few months, zero payments have been received at the CB. The reason is said to be that NATO countries are being shipped oil, (also to gas and oil rich Qatar) free of charge under a payback arrangement with NATO for its regime change services.

This issue is quickly becoming a scandal. I asked the official is he was sure of his information and he brought over the lady who keeps the records and she verified it and said Central Bank officials are outraged because the money is needed at the local banks where long lines of desperate account holders who often wait hours in lines outside banks only to be told to return another day for their monthly allocation of 750 dinars of their own money. This week, I saw ugly, sad scenes at banks in the neighborhood south of Green Square and Omar Muktar Street, as I tried in vain to find a working ATM machine. One cannot but feel bad for elderly citizens standing in the rain waiting half the day to get a meager monthly withdrawal of their funds, only to be told to return another day when, enshallah, there will be money for them. Citizens have reported that they should have taken all their money out of their bank account as soon as there were signs of trouble last February. Now it’s too late and anger is growing.

Qatar’s favorite candidate, Abdel Hakim Belhaj, head of the Tripoli Military Council and a former leader of the militant Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, (who is suing UK ministers and MI-6 for the part he claims they played in secretly sending him and his wife to Libya in March 2004 where he claims he endured seven years of torture,) has promised to fix the banking problem. Qatar is expected to play a major role as the June elections draw near.

Another issue that the MB is championing is the need to pay the salaries of the military, finding or creating jobs for militia fighters, many of whom are deeply suspicious of Belhaj just as the eastern militia continue to skirmish with those from the west.

Even women’s rights are being supported by the MB….sort of. Repairing war damage, garbage pickup, organizing traffic which has brought some crowded streets in downtown Tripoli to a near halt, (given that more than one million Libyans and others have flooded into the capital city from around the battered country with few showing signs of wanting to leave) are issues the MB is talking about while calling for sectarian dialogue.

Disarming the militias and pressuring young men to go back home, give up their arms, join the police force or a new Libyan army or get a real job are very sensitive issues that the MB does not address with much conviction. Privately the MB, as well as the NTC, admits that there will be no disarmament of militias anytime soon. A few young men I chatted with during a demonstration at Green Square yesterday actually said they miss the fighting and want to fight some more. “It was really exciting and fun most of the time and I made some great friends!” one kid from Benghazi told me. He plans to stay in Tripoli with his militia buddies.

Another development that will favor the Muslim Brotherhood in the coming Libyan elections is the draft Election law that was adopted last Monday. It eliminates many of the strongest opponents of the MB. The legislation regulates the election of a national assembly tasked to write a new constitution and form a second caretaker government. It is expected to be finalized within a month.

It bars, with loosely all-embracing language, “former members of Gadhafi’s regime” from being candidates in the election. Among the judges I spoke with at the Ministry of Justice some expressed dismay because they said that 80 per cent of the current staff at their Ministry, and most other Ministries, worked there, lawyers and judges included, under the Gadhafi regime and were patriotic Libyans. There is going to be lots of confusion concerning the scope of the new law and its application. The new election law also bans anyone who got a degree based on academic research on the Green Book — Gadhafi’s political manifesto that laid out his theory of government and society declaring Libya a “republic of the masses.” Thousands are covered by this exclusion because in order to get a good position it helped if one’s CV showed studies relating to theories of government espoused in the Green Book. The same idea as in China when it was a good idea to study Mao’s little Red Book and add that fact to one’s CV. Academics who even wrote about Gaddafi’s Green Book, which discusses politics, economics and everyday life, will also be barred from running under the law.

The draft election law has outraged women because it restricts them to only 10 per cent of the 200 election seats and the law does not indicate how many seats will go to which tribal areas. One woman angrily told me, “Ten percent is about what the Brotherhood thinks we are worth.”

The NTC officials will not offer much of an electoral impediment to the MB as it is increasingly under attack as it begins its last six months of existence. Last month, an umbrella group claiming to represent 70 per cent of militia fighters demanded that the NTC grant them 40 per cent of its seats which it failed to do and instead appointed fairly random technocrats with some exceptions. Mustapha Abdul Jalis plans on retiring in June and is still being criticized for reneging on his earlier pledge to resign following the fall of Sirte.

The coming government will likely be heavily influenced, if not controlled by Libya’s new arrival in force, the Muslim Brotherhood. The consequences for Libya and the Muslim Brotherhood’s effect on America’s withdrawal from the region is presumably being closely watched from Tehran to Washington DC and Tel Aviv

********

Franklin Lamb is doing research in Libya. He is reachable c\o fplamb@gmail.com  He is the author of The Price We Pay: A Quarter-Century of Israel’s Use of American Weapons Against Civilians in Lebanon. Dr. Lamb is Director, Americans Concerned for Middle East Peace, Wash.DC-Beirut

Republican frontrunner says Israelis have a right to their modern-day homeland but implies Palestinians do not

Newt Gingrich declares the Palestinians an ‘invented’ people.

The US Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich has declared that the Palestinians are an “invented” people who want to destroy Israel.

The Jewish Channel, a cable TV station, posted online its interview with the former US House speaker, who has risen to the top of Republican nomination candidates to challenge Democratic President Barack Obama in the November 2012 election.

Gingrich differed from official US policy that respects the Palestinians as a people deserving of their own state based on negotiations with Israel. “Remember, there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire” until the early 20th century, Gingrich said.

“I think that we’ve had an invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs and who were historically part of the Arab community. And they had a chance to go many places, and for a variety of political reasons we have sustained this war against Israel now since the 1940s, and it’s tragic,” he said.

Most historians mark the start of Palestinian Arab nationalist sentiment as 1834, when Arab residents of the Palestinian region revolted against Ottoman rule.

Modern-day Israel, founded amid the 1948 Arab-Israel war, took shape along the lines of a 1947 UN plan for ethnic partition of the then-British ruled territory of Palestine. Arabs rejected the division.

Gingrich and other Republican candidates are seeking to attract Jewish support by vowing to bolster US ties with Israel if elected.

Gingrich said the Hamas militant group, which controls the Gaza Strip, and the the governing Palestinian Authority, which controls the West Bank, represented “an enormous desire to destroy Israel”.

The US government has sought to encourage the Palestinian Authority to negotiate with Israel but regards Hamas as a terrorist group.

The Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, opposes violence against Israel as a means to secure an independent state, pinning his hopes first on negotiations and more recently on a unilateral bid for statehood via the United Nations.

Gingrich said he would be willing to consider granting clemency to Jonathan Jay Pollard, who has been serving life since 1987 for passing US secrets to Israel. Successive US presidents have refused Israel’s requests to free him.

“If we can get to a point where I’m satisfied that there’s no national security threat, and if he’s in fact served within the range of people who’ve had a similar problem, then I’d be inclined to consider clemency,” Gingrich said.

Gingrich sharply criticised the Obama administration’s approach to Middle East diplomacy, saying it was “so out of touch with reality that it would be like taking your child to the zoo and explaining that a lion was a bunny rabbit”.

Source: The Guardian

Paul Balles

“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.” –Arthur Schopenhauer

Patriotism consists not in waving the flag, but in striving that our country shall be righteous as well as strong. --James Bryce

Americans won’t like this.  Practically everyone else will: Americans simply can never admit they were wrong.

Ill-begotten wars–from Vietnam to Afghanistan have accomplished nothing but increasing enemies toward American arrogance.

Nothing could have been more misguided than the Iraq war, based on a mythical collection of WMDs. The lie, the war and the occupation cost the lives of 4,801 Americans plus 179 UK lives and the death of 1,455,590 Iraqis. The WMD’s never existed.

Instead of an admission that the Iraq debacle was wrong, the fraudsters made lame excuses in attempts to exonerate themselves.  Past Vice President Dick Cheney, the strongest defender of the Iraq misadventure continues his vain attempts to justify the unjustifiable.

“There is nothing less to our credit than our neglect of the foreigner and his children, unless it be the arrogance most of us betray when we set out to ‘Americanize’ him,” wrote American sociologist Charles Horton Cooley.

On November 28th, a NATO air attack killed at least two dozen Pakistani soldiers. Instead of admitting that they were wrong, the US military suggested that the Pakistanis shot first.

Said Fred Branfman about the incident, “Short-sighted U.S. policy is creating a national security disaster in Pakistan.” Instead of apologizing and admitting to a mistake, Branfman concludes:

“The U.S. policy of trying to win in tiny Afghanistan by extending its war-making into giant, nuclear-armed Pakistan–including drone strikes, cross-border raids, illegal U.S. ground assassination… threatens the greatest U.S. foreign policy disaster….”

American arrogance has clearly found several avenues for acrimony. More than 1,000 American military bases around the world has often been an unwelcome embodiment of American military power.

Next, not only do Americans display a belief in their superiority over other countries, their leaders’ actions reveal an arrogant pre-eminence over the masses of the American public.

In an earlier article, “Ruled by Arrogance”, I commented on an American tendency to discredit others’ opinions with forcefulness aimed at dominating those considered weaker or less important.

Texas governor and Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry faulted a mixture of arrogance and audacity in the Obama administration:

This administration in Washington…clearly believes that government is not only the answer to every need but it’s the most qualified to make essential decisions for every American in every area. That mix of arrogance and audacity that guides the Obama administration is an affront to every freedom-loving American.

That’s the same Rick Perry who arrogantly boasts about how great Texas has been with his governorship. In America, the pot (Rick Perry) is expected to call the kettle (Barack Obama) black.

Paradoxically, another American presidential candidate, Rick Santorum criticized President Obama for looking apologetic rather than being arrogant:

Watching President Obama apologize last week for America’s arrogance before a French audience that owes its freedom to the sacrifices of Americans–helped convince me that he has a deep-seated antipathy toward American values and traditions.

What American values and traditions does Santorum believe become belittled by an apology uttered by an American president? American arrogance!

Earlier, in April 2009, a number of Republicans castigated President Obama for bowing before Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah. Though the White House denied it, the video of the meeting provided enough fodder for Obama’s critics.

The arrogance of Obama’s predecessor established a standard of American presidential behaviour that those following the Bush administration should not deviate from.

America has a history of arrogance reflected in racial and gender supremacy. The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) provides an example of a superior white attitude reflected in American slavery.

In a country full of misogyny, it’s ironic that Americans now belittle countries whose men treat women as lesser creatures.

If it’s difficult to convince most Americans that they are guided by undeserved arrogance, those who know it seem undisturbed by it.

As I mentioned in an earlier article, “Look closely enough and you’ll find groups in any country who believe they are superior to all others.”

When the political elite assume they are superior to others, and when the media elite behave as if America is better than others, they flaunt a dangerously endemic model of arrogant behaviour.

The problems come when the “others” resist being disadvantaged.

********

Paul Balles is a retired American university professor and freelance writer who has lived in the Middle East for many years. He’s a weekly Op-Ed columnist for the GULF DAILY NEWS . Dr. Balles is also Editorial Consultant for Red House Marketing and a regular contributor to Bahrain This Month.

Ambassador Chas Freeman was the keynote speaker at the 2011 Arab U.S.-Policymakers Conference in Washington, DC

Remarks to the 20th Annual Arab-U.S. Policymakers Conference National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations

Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)

When John Duke Anthony asked me to kick off this two-day meeting by talking about recent events and what they might mean for US-Arab relations and U.S. policy, I was greatly honored. I was also reminded of the words of a famous expert on the Middle East who, many years ago, was asked to describe U.S. policy there. He replied, “We don’t have a policy in the Middle East; but that’s just as well because, if we did, it would be the wrong one.”

Recent events suggest that this was a major and memorable insight. The more that “change we can believe in” unfolds in the Middle East, the more things stay the same or retrogress. The more policy we have, the more perverse the results it seems to produce for our country.

Over the year since we last met here in this hall, there have been momentous events in West Asia and North Africa. Some Arab regimes have fallen to popular uprisings. Others appear to be at risk of doing so. Throughout the broad expanse of the Arab world incumbent governments of all kinds must now be much more deferential than before to the will of their people on both domestic and foreign affairs. This is good news for those who favor more accountable government, as I’m sure everyone here does – at least for foreigners. Americans concerned with the capacity of the United States to shape events in the Middle East should, however, hold the elation. Self-determination is, by definition, a rejection of subservience. This means, among other things, that Arab rulers are considerably less inclined to do America’s bidding than in the past. They are starting to do things they see as in their interests even when these things are not in ours.

This is especially the case with regard to the Israel-Palestine issue, which remains central to our relations with the region. Given our unbreakable bonds with Israel, it is not at all helpful that that country has now – as some of us feared it might – alienated those few of its neighbors with which it once enjoyed normal ties. American policies have long put sustaining Israel’s military dominance of the region ahead of encouraging it to make peace with Palestinians and other Arabs. Shielded militarily from the need to deal respectfully with its neighbors and those over whom it rules, the Zionist state has progressively segregated itself both morally and politically from the region and most of the international community, including a growing number of Jews here and elsewhere in the West.

Israel has nonetheless also demonstrated that its hold on domestic U.S. politics remains unbroken. This past year, it was able to compel our president to swear allegiance to expansive Zionism and to repudiate policies endorsed by his own and previous administrations as well as the international community. By contemptuously overriding the views and interests of the United States in this way, Israel and its American claque debased and discredited American international prestige and regional credibility. As a consequence, the world has come together in a series of ever firmer votes of no-confidence in U.S. leadership and diplomacy on the Israel-Palestine dispute. American military might remains unchallengeable, but the power of the United States to protect Israel from the political and legal consequences of its policies, statements, and actions has been gravely impaired. This is a perverse result for an Israeli government and its supporters to have engineered.

For their part, after decades of bitter frustration with a feckless, fraudulent, and ultimately fruitless American-led “peace process,” the Palestinians have concluded that they cannot count on the United States. They have ended their deference to what they (and most of the world) now see as America’s meretricious manipulation of their affairs to their occupier’s advantage. They have taken the initiative to rally regional and global support for their self-determination and independence from Israel. They hope in this way to transform the struggle for Palestinian independence into a more equal contest. Theirs will no longer be a bilateral struggle between a strong, US-backed Israel and a Palestine with no leverage. It will, they hope, become a contest between Israel and the world’s conscience.

Ironically, political reactions here to these developments promise not only to isolate the United States in international organizations but to deprive us of our residual influence with the Palestinians. The end of U.S. subsidies to the Palestinian Authority will force Israel to assume responsibility for security and other services in the Occupied Territories that it had successfully unloaded on Palestinian collaborators funded by American and other foreign taxpayers. Instead of facilitating the occupation by paying Palestinians to police it, Americans and Europeans are now likely to face demands to pay Israel directly to conduct it. Europeans, at least, are unlikely to take up this burden.

The perceived need to counter Israeli and American policies is already throwing together some strange diplomatic bedfellows. It is also marginalizing American influence on other issues of concern in West Asia and North Africa. The regional clout of non-Western powers like China, India, and Russia will surely grow concomitantly.

If this sounds grim, I apologize. I cannot promise that, as is the case on Saudi Channel One, amusing cartoons will follow the sermon. I must leave it to those who follow me to provide comic relief. I’m happy to do that. Years ago, Ronald Reagan told me: “you know, they say that hard work never killed anybody. But why take a chance?” He delegated as much as he could to experts who were smarter than he was. He set a good example I plan to follow.

This conference has been convened to weigh the implications of the trends and developments I’ve outlined. As I look at the agenda, I see that it will also consider other legacies of past and present US policies in the region, like Iran’s resentful anti-Americanism and assertive search for regional hegemony, the cancerous growth of sectarianism in the Arab world, the deepening Iraqi strategic alignment with Iran, the proliferation of vengeful anti-American radicalism, and the likely fallout from the failing US-led pacification effort in Afghanistan. In the past, denial that these are urgent problems may have sufficed to evade uncomfortable but necessary dialogue. Neither silence nor inaction is now a viable option for Americans, Arabs, Iranians, Israelis, or others with a stake in the future of the Middle East.

Three decades after Iran’s revolution, some or all of the world’s 340 million Arabs are following Persians into a repudiation of foreign tutelage. The Iranian upheaval of 1979 marked the end of any notion of Iran as the political or cultural ward of Britain, Russia, or the United States. Country by country, whether under new or existing governments, Arabs too are now asserting the right to their own self-determined national identities and policies. Arabs are not Persians; Sunni political culture is not that of Shi`ism; and the histories of the diverse parts of the Arab world differ significantly from those of Iran. It’s unlikely that any Arab country will follow Iran into uncompromisingly theocratic forms of governance that derive their legitimacy from broad confrontation with the West and its values. Still, the Arab uprisings of 2011 have made it politically impossible for rulers to put the agendas of Western patrons ahead of the views, interests, and religious traditions of their own publics.

This shift in mind set and popular expectations has huge strategic implications. It foretells Arab governments and policies that seek the authenticity that only the consent of the governed and respect for their values and views can provide. The colonial era was over elsewhere five or six decades ago. As the Arabs insist on independence under popular sovereignty, whether exercised through one ruler or many, the last vestiges of neo-colonialism are vanishing in West Asia and North Africa as well. In the new era, relations between Middle Eastern states will be determined by local judgments about what is right, proper, and to the national advantage, not what is ordained, championed, or paid for by an outside power, patron, or overlord. That has been the case for Israel. It will now be the case for Israel’s Arab neighbors as well.

Arab rulers have just had it driven home to them that they cannot rely on Americans to protect them from domestic backlash to unpopular policies. They’ve also learned that they cannot look to America to constrain Israel. The strategic utility of the United States to Arab governments has been correspondingly devalued. As a result, Israel can no longer count on U.S. alliances, aid programs, or patron-client allegiances to exempt it from the consequences of its dysfunctional relationships with its neighbors.

Israelis played a major role in creating the adverse circumstances in which they now find themselves. They must now make their own peace with Turkey, sustain their own relations with Egypt and Jordan, and find their own basis for coexistence with Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, among others. They must craft their own modus vivendi and achieve their own reconciliation with Palestinians and Lebanese, whom they have heretofore treated with contemptuous cruelty and disrespect.

The spectacle of members of Congress bouncing up and down like so many obsequious yo-yos as Prime Minister Netanyahu spoke to them last May is irrefutable evidence of Israel’s hammerlock on U.S. policy. But U.S. policy no longer decides what happens politically or economically in the Middle East. This has created a new and less certain political environment in West Asia and North Africa. For the first time in decades, Israel must manage its regional and international relationships on its own. Judging from Israel’s recent handling of incidents with the UAE, Turkey, and Egypt, neither its current government nor its political elite understands the new environment or is mentally prepared to cope with it.

Israel would be in difficulty even if American prestige in the Middle East had not imploded. But it has. Our previous reputation was so strong that Americans had to work really hard to do it in. With a little help from our friends, we proved we were up to the task.

The factors that went into destroying our appeal and authority are many. They begin with the disingenuous diplomacy of the now defunct “peace process.” The major result of three decades of American mediation has been to discredit American diplomacy. In effect, the United States facilitated the ongoing seizure of territory by Israel at the expense of a just settlement of differences between Israelis and Palestinians and Palestinian self-determination.
The reputation of the United States for wisdom, truthfulness, and competence was also gravely damaged by the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The course of events in both countries convincingly demonstrated the limitations of U.S. military power. The strategic fallout continues to spread. In Iraq, the U.S. ravaged a proud Arab society. The resulting anarchy set off a widening firestorm of sectarian violence in the Arab world. It also catalyzed a major – and so far uncountered – extension of Iranian influence in the region.

Washington’s eager connivance in the maiming of Lebanon in 2006 and of Gaza just before the Obama administration took office added to the perception of the United States as indifferent, if not sadistically happy about the suffering of Arab or Muslim populations. By conservative estimate, U.S. policies and military actions in the post Cold War period have directly or indirectly caused the deaths of between 250,000 and a million Muslims and displaced at least ten million from their homes. One does not need an advanced degree to understand the origins of Muslim rage against America

America’s ideological appeal has also faded. The abuses at Kandahar, Bagram, Abu Ghraib, and Guantánamo erased the international image of America as a champion of freedom, fair play, the rule of law, and human rights. Inconsistencies in the U.S. response to the popular uprisings in various Arab countries seriously undercut the credibility of American support for democracy. So has Washington’s willingness to attempt the overthrow of freely elected governments it and Israel dislike, like the Hamas-led government elected in Palestine in 2006. There is little sympathy for Hamas in most of the Arab world, but there is now universal outrage at U.S. collusion in the ongoing Israeli effort to terrorize Palestinians in Gaza and permanently ghettoize them. The blatant hate speech against Arabs and Muslims that now pervades American political discourse further reduces the willingness of people in the region to give a sympathetic hearing to American perspectives on events.

So too, I am sorry to say, does the mounting global perception of the United States as a country that can’t get its act together. In the first few years of this century, many abroad came to see us as a military bully. More recently, they have viewed our national leadership as terminally uncivil, unable to set priorities or otherwise address urgent national and international problems, economically illiterate and fiscally incompetent, ignorant and indifferent to foreign realities, and committed to the view that threats, sanctions, and military intervention are the answer to most foreign policy problems.

Of course, we’re not a bully. We’re just a superpower with attitude. A friend of mine who works on Capitol Hill assures me that foreigners seriously “misunderestimate” our politicians. Seen up close, he says, they are without doubt the finest decision-makers that political contributions can lease. If “that government is best which governs least,” he boasts, the United States has now achieved a rare perfection. We have attained a level of political gridlock in which the people’s representatives celebrate their faith in God by leaving it to Him to solve the problems their own previous misbehavior created. We should be happy to be so thoroughly ungoverned, my friend believes. But even he, a well-traveled French intellectual, admits that, from afar, we don’t look as good as we once did.

The fact is that, even without the strategic albatross of all-out support for self-destructive Israeli policies, the United States now has less going for it than ever before to help it shape the strategic contours of a changing Middle East. Yet it is in this highly adverse context that we Americans must protect our interests. To do this, we must acknowledge the multiple failures of our policies to achieve their declared objectives.

We have not persuaded Israel to accept the recognition and reconciliation that all twenty-two Arab countries and thirty-five additional Muslim states have offered. There has been no Israeli offer of peace to the Palestinians or anyone else in the region, only demands for unconditional acceptance of Israel as a Jewish state. Yet contemporary Israel is a transplant in the region that needs mutually respectful relations with its other peoples to assure long-term survival. It is now clear beyond a reasonable doubt that we Americans do not have the will or the self-confidence to help Israel achieve this. Nor do we have the bona fides necessary to conduct the sort of shuttle diplomacy we once did. Anyone who watched the U.S. Congress clap, curtsy, and kowtow to Mr. Netanyahu understands why we now have no credibility as a mediator.

We have not been able to end the increasingly brutal Israeli occupation and siege in the West Bank and Gaza. Neither is compatible with international law, Security Council decisions, Israel’s undertakings in the Camp David accords, the spirit of the Oslo agreement, the terms of the “Roadmap,” or other relevant doctrines and decisions. We routinely deplore Israel’s policies and actions without ceasing to fund them or to prevent anyone else from halting them. No one takes what we say about Israeli or Palestinian behavior seriously anymore.

We are now trying to scuttle our own longstanding approach to the achievement of Palestinian self-determination and independence from Israel. The only answer we have to others’ objections to this is the power of the veto. But there is no reason to expect the Palestinians or the vast majority of the international community that is now aligned with them against us to restrict their challenges to the Security Council or other arenas where we can block them. They are pretty clearly ready to exclude and bypass us.

We do not know how to douse the spreading wildfire of sectarian violence in the Muslim world that we inadvertently ignited by thrusting Iraq into anarchy. We have no coherent answer to uprisings and unrest in places as disparate as Bahrain, Syria, and Yemen or to the success of rebellion in Libya. We do not know how to deal with democratic Islamists. We have not come up with a way to counter Islamist terrorists with global reach. Our current approach simply intensifies their fervor, strengthens their base among the Muslim faithful, and multiplies their supporters and copy-cats.

We have no strategy for countering Iranian inroads in the Arab world or causing Tehran to abandon its presumed nuclear ambitions. Iraq is aligned with Iran on issues from Syria and Lebanon to Bahrain. We are about to withdraw from Iraq without reaching any strategically advantageous understanding with Baghdad. We are conducting our relations with Pakistan and Afghanistan in ways that maximize the risk of protracted terrorist reprisal for our slaughter of civilians and alienation of religious and tribal elements in both. We don’t know what to do about the situations we have helped create in either or both countries.

That’s a lot of “known unknowns.” It would be easy to become depressed.

On the other hand, over the past year, like all right-thinking Americans, I have learned to be happy and love national credit rollovers. I count it a triumph that we have so far avoided a government shutdown. And I’m confident that the “Super Committee” has our fiscal situation in hand. According to my French intellectual friend on Capitol Hill, the Supers are about to produce a comprehensive nonpartisan resolution of our fiscal dilemmas. This will contract the economy while creating jobs and slash budgetary outlays while upping defense spending to produce the best of all possible worlds. I really want to believe this even if it’s clearly nuts. After all, if voodoo economics could get us into this mess, why can’t it get us out of it?

But in the absence of fiscal sorcery and some serious changes in policy, some or all of the following is very likely in our future.

Israel will be increasingly ostracized, boycotted, and prosecuted internationally for its scofflaw behavior, racist policies, and daily violence and intermittent pogroms against Palestinians. The United States will suffer correspondingly from guilt by our continuing close association with Israel. Over our objections, Turks, Egyptians, Saudis, and other Gulf Arabs will make common cause on matters relating to Palestine. The good news is that the Ayatollah Khamenei is aligned with Prime Minister Netanyahu and other yahoos in seeking to block a viable two-state solution in Palestine. Iran will therefore not make common cause with Arab countries. It doesn’t share their current and our former belief that the way to bring peace to the Middle East is through the implementation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 by recognizing the division of the Holy Land between Israel and a much smaller State of Palestine.

The Palestinian issue will move from meeting rooms where we are present to conference rooms where we are not – or where our objections to measures against Israel are opposed or ignored by large, unsympathetic majorities. The defunded Palestinian Authority will likely cease to function. Instead of being able to rely on continuing Palestinian collaboration on intelligence and security matters, Israel will try to deal with those parts of the Occupied Territories still inhabited by Palestinians the same way it does with Gaza. Palestinian and Arab politics will be further radicalized.

Some Palestinian factions, long quiescent, will resume operations against Israelis in Israel as well as the Occupied Territories. Others will return to terrorism against the soft targets represented by Israel’s supporters abroad. Not a few Israelis will conclude that the United States, not Israel, is the only secure domicile for the world’s Jews. Jewish emigration from Israel will accelerate. The United States will gain many desirable new citizens as a result.

The visible presence of U.S. troops on Arab soil will attract escalating local protests as well as terrorist attacks. The U.S. will step up assassinations of alleged proponents, planners, and perpetrators of such attacks. Collateral damage will mount. So will popular rage against the United States and pressure on Arab governments to deny U.S. forces access to facilities and installations in the region. Eventually, one or more Arab governments will decide that having an American military presence on its territory or facilitating transit or overflight by the U.S. armed forces is too provocative to local opinion. Other Arab governments will follow. The U.S. ability to rely on strategic lines of communication in the Gulf to link Asia to Europe and to project power around the world will take a big hit.

The Gulf Arabs, Iran, and Turkey will compete for the support of previously uncommitted external powers, like Brazil, China, India, and Russia. Gulf Arab governments will find it easy to buy arms from these countries but impossible to persuade them to replace weakening U.S. defense commitments with their own. GCC member countries will be driven toward greater self-reliance and stronger cooperation with each other. Some will ally with Turkey, Pakistan, and Egypt. Others will make their peace with Iran. Military training in the United States and the ease of cooperation and habits of coordination that it fosters will decline as U.S. budgets contract, military ties to the Gulf attenuate, and the region’s military relationships diversify.

Now that I’ve cheered you up, let me turn briefly to what might be done to avoid or mitigate developments like these. The writing may be on the wall but nothing is certain until the ink dries. Other speakers will have creative ideas about what is to be done. We need some new ideas to end our current wars and to restore our domestic security and tranquility. Before other speakers step up to this challenge, let me venture a few thoughts.

In the Holy Land, it’s about time we recalled the Hippocratic oath. This advises those with the power to intervene to “abstain from doing harm.” To put it more realistically, we should abstain from doing more harm than we already have. Foolishly encouraging Israelis to indulge in a belief that they can enjoy security through eternal reliance on American subsidies and protection and by sustaining a perpetual state of war with neighboring peoples not only does them no favor; it does Israel, the United States, and the Arabs great harm.

For a long time, we have acted as the enablers of self-injurious Israeli behavior. This has made it possible for Israel to choose land over peace, to corrupt its democracy, to deviate from the core values of its official religion as understood by Jews abroad, to empower racism and bigotry among its Jewish majority, and, most recently, to humiliate the president of the United States while extracting twenty-nine kowtows from Congress.

No one now harbors any real hope that America can either deliver peace or help Israelis, Palestinians, and those with whom they share their region to achieve it. We have shown convincingly that bilateral negotiations between grossly unequal parties cannot produce an equitable and sustainable result unless outside parties are willing to intervene to redress the imbalances in power. Yet an equitable and sustainable result is an imperative not only for Israelis and Arabs but for Americans as well. The costs of no peace are becoming too great to be sustained.

The essential objective of stated U.S. policy has always been the achievement of acceptance for Israel in its region through self-determination for the Palestinians in their own state. This is what the Arab peace initiative of 2002 offered. Americans need to get out of the way and let the international community work with the Arabs to help Israel embrace peace.

The last American with a valid claim to the status of peacemaker in the Middle East is the much-maligned Jimmy Carter. He put the squeeze on Menachem Begin to accept the peace that Anwar Sadat had bravely offered. There is no prospect that any elected or appointed American official could now act toward an Israeli leader with the determination that President Carter showed in September 1978 at Camp David. Conversely, as long as the United States fawns on Israel and uses drones and hit teams to carry out extrajudicial executions in an expanding list of Arab and Muslim countries, no president will have any credibility with Palestinians, other Arabs, or the broader Islamic community. The American-led “peace process” is over. We blew it.

The United States must now let the international community do for Binyamin Netanyahu what Jimmy Carter did for Menachem Begin – make Israel an offer of peace it will not let its prime minister refuse. This means ceasing to block the diplomatic tough love for Israel that only non-Americans can provide, and it means withdrawing U.S. funding and other support for Israeli policies and programs that harm U.S. interests or constitute obstacles to peace. The combination of international pressure and diminishing U.S. support is necessary to concentrate Israeli minds on the long-term choices before their country.

Peace has long been available if Israel would only trade sufficient land for it. The vast majority of Israelis favor swapping land for peace. A succession of right-wing Israeli governments has worked to obviate this possibility by creating adverse “facts on the ground.” It is time instead to create circumstances that will empower the Israeli majority to push their country’s recalcitrant politicians into peaceful coexistence with the other peoples of the Middle East.

Most Americans would rather forget Iraq now that we’re leaving it. But Iraq isn’t going away as an issue. Our invasion of Iraq left Iran without a credible military challenger in the region. Our withdrawal from Iraq leaves us with no strategy for countering Iranian aspirations for hegemony in the Middle East other than keeping a large part of our armed forces in the Arab countries of the Gulf. Such a presence is a stimulus to terrorism. Sustaining it is also almost certainly beyond our future fiscal capacity. Our usual response in such situations is to ask for host nation support. Given the loathing our policies in the Holy Land now inspire and the hatred our drone and other attacks are stoking, it is uncertain how Gulf Arab governments would respond to such a request. Subsidies to an American military presence are likely to be highly unpopular even where exceptional levels of citizen affluence prevail.

A better approach would be to adopt a more economic and less fatiguing strategy, like backstopping security arrangements that the GCC might contract with Turkey, Egypt, and Pakistan as well, possibly, with others, like a Syria that is no longer in the Iranian political orbit. Among other benefits, this would share the burden of guaranteeing Gulf Arab security between the United States and other countries with an interest in the security of energy supplies, regional stability, and a global oil patch undominated by a single supplier. Such countries include all the great powers of Europe and Asia. Why should those who benefit from global order not share the burden of sustaining it by supporting the GCC?

In this context, the situation in Bahrain has much broader strategic implications than many seem to realize. Bahrain is a fundamentally decent society but there are serious injustices there, as many in the Bahraini ruling family will admit. The Bahraini opposition is now infected with the revolutionary Iranian ideology of wilayat al faqih, a self-serving and self-righteous clericalism that rejects accommodation with secular authority.

The issues are complex. Negotiation is difficult for both sides. Yet, if there is no meeting of the minds, the disharmony in Bahrain, already an ulcer on GCC security, will afflict more than just Bahrainis. It will become an open wound that neither Iran nor Shi`ite Iraq will be able to resist probing.

It is hard to see how the U.S. Fifth Fleet could remain ashore in Bahrain under such circumstances. The island kingdom has become a crucial arena for the widening sectarian struggle in the Gulf as well as the contest for regional influence between Saudi Arabia and Iran. A measure of order has now been restored in Bahrain. Substantial reform must follow if domestic tranquility is to be sustained and opportunities for external mischief-making contained.

The situation in Bahrain is an example of the strategic dangers posed by injustice that is contaminated by sectarian division. In this and other contexts, I have to say, it’s hard to understand what’s in it for Saudi Arabia to continue to attempt to define itself by its Islam rather than by its character as the heartland of the Arabs. Where Saudi Arabia differs from Iran and resembles the Iranian-penetrated states and societies of Bahrain, Lebanon, and Iraq is in its “Arabness,” not its adherence to one or another school of Islam. The assertion of an Islamic rather than an Arab identity was a rational response to the challenge of secular Arab nationalism half a century ago. It makes little sense today, when the threat emanates from within the Dar al Islam and the objective must be to discourage other Arab states from aligning with a non-Arab state against the Kingdom.

Religious ideology is Iran’s battleground of choice. One should never allow one’s adversary to pick the field of battle. Only Saudis can decide who they are, but, in terms of Saudi prospects for victory in the struggle for the soul of the Arab world, Arab identity and tradition would seem to be a more promising choice of terrain on which to make a stand than religion. There is nothing Arab about the concept of rule by mullahs embodied in the recent theological innovation of wilayat al faqih. It is not a doctrine that Arab Shi`ites should find appealing, any more than Arab Sunnis do. The need to ensure that Shi`ite Arabs do not embrace it is an argument for expanded religious dialogue and tolerance.

Iran’s hegemonic ambitions are a serious problem for its neighbors. There is no magic bullet to put an end to this problem. Military action is more likely to create new problems than to solve this one. Dealing with Iran requires a comprehensive strategy and engagement linked to a long-term effort by the GCC that is backed by the United States and others. No such strategy or effort is in place. The current cascade of sanctions, threats of air attack, and covert actions against nuclear facilities does not add up to a strategy. The sanctions impoverish ordinary Iranians and rally them against foreign enemies. The threats emphasize to them how much safer they would be if only they had a nuclear deterrent. The cyber attacks and other covert actions against Iran retard its nuclear program but do not address its motivations for the program or halt it.

There is no unity of purpose among those concerned about the various dimensions of Iranian behavior. The GCC does not have anything useful to say to Iran about its nuclear programs. Those in the region, like Turkey, who have tried to speak to Iran on this issue have been undercut rather than supported by the West. Iran’s roles in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Afghanistan, and elsewhere are unaddressed by American diplomacy, which is entirely focused on eliminating the presumed Iranian threat to Israel’s regional nuclear monopoly. It is clearly time for all concerned about the diverse challenges Iran presents to confer, to deconflict their disparate policy priorities, and to cooperate.

Osama Bin Laden was finally apprehended through classic intelligence and law enforcement work. He was killed by Navy Seals but it is hard to argue that a military hit team was essential to arrest or execute him. America seems wedded to a militarized approach to combating terrorism despite the fact that this is widening our struggle to an expanding list of Muslim countries – not narrowing it – while deepening existing Muslim animosity toward the United States. We need to rethink our approach. Decimating leadership structures can demoralize and disorient armies. But we are not dealing with armies. We are dealing with an enraged global community and an ideology that tells individuals within it what targets are legitimate objects of retribution and reprisal and that motivates them to act on their own or to seek others of like mind to join them in acts of terrorism.

Unless the causes of Muslim indignation are mitigated and the deviant ideology of those who exploit it is refuted, anti-American terrorism will continue to flourish. The apprehension and execution of Osama Bin Laden or other prominent terrorists punishes their crimes against us but we should be under no illusion that it shakes either the motivation or the rationale of those they inspire. To accomplish that, we need the help of Muslim allies. We Americans are good at killing our enemies. We are unqualified to refute Islamic heresies and unsuited to persuading those who have embraced these heresies to step aside from the path to terror. We need Muslim help to accomplish both.

I am tempted to turn to Afghanistan and Pakistan, where many believe it’s all over but the excuses for the retreat, but, fortunately, my time has expired.

I want to close by affirming my faith in the adaptability and resilience of the United States. With all the problems we have made for ourselves and our friends in the Middle East, we have just about run out of alternatives to doing the right things. Now we may get around to actually doing them, insha’Allah. Bukra. Mumkin.

 
Source: Middle East Policy council

Ahram Online Friday 30 Sep 2011

Sean Penn in Tahrir square, Cairo's iconic landmark

US film star and Oscar winner Sean Penn has joined today’s demonstration in Tahrir Square, staged to protest recent unpopular moves by Egypt’s ruling military council.

“The world is inspired by the call for freedom by the courageous revolution of Egypt,” Penn, waving an Egyptian flag, told Ahram Online from the square. “There are still struggles forward, there are constitutional issues, there [needs to be] a transition of power from the military to the people.”

Penn arrived in the square shortly after noon with Egyptian actor Khaled El-Nabawy. The two actors toured the iconic landmark before heading to the nearby Egyptian Museum.

The American actor added that he had joined today’s protest in order to show “solidarity with our brave Egyptian brothers; we are here to support their freedom.”

El-Nabawy said he had personally invited Penn to Egypt in hopes of reenergizing the country’s flagging tourism industry, which has struggled to bounce back following the recent revolution. El-Nabawy said that such visits by high-profile personalities would show that Egypt remained a “safe and beautiful country.”

Penn, a two-time Academy Award winner for his roles in ‘Mystic River’ and ‘Milk,’ is also an outspoken critic of US policy in the Middle East.

Source: Pyramidion

****************

Dr. Ashraf Ezzat works as a Medical Doctor. Apart from the medical experience, he’s always been engaged in writing activities. He writes articles about ancient Egyptian history, Ancient Near Eastern history, comparative religion and politics especially the Arab- Israeli conflict. Founder and board member of the bibliotheca Alexandrina friends society. Some of His articles have been published in Egyptian magazines and online publications

Are They Americans? Definitely!

EDITORS NOTE:  Eighty-one congressmen, about 20 percent of the US House of Representatives, will visit Israel for week-long trips sponsored by American Israel Education Foundation in next three weeks during Congress’s summer recess. The first group of 26 Democrats are scheduled to arrive as early as Monday.

55 Republican, 26 Democratic congressmen about 20% of US House of Representatives to visit Israel by summers end. The Democratic delegation will be followed by two Republican ones, bringing a total of 55 Republicans.

You might note that they are freshmen Congressmen going  to Israel as guests of some Israeli educational organization affiliated with (AIPAC) American Israel Public Affairs Committee, obviously to be properly educated in American policy and political reality!

The votes may be in their constituency back in Hometown, USA, but the money which they will need to buy them and to feather their retirement programs will all come from Israel.

Why are we reading about this in the Jerusalem Post and not the NYTimes or the Wall Street Journal?

*******************

81 Congressmen to Visit Israel in Coming Weeks

by HERB KEINON

(08/08/2011) – 55 Republican, 26 Democratic congressmen to arrive for week-long trips sponsored by American  Israel Education Foundation.

Eighty-one congressmen, or about 20 percent of the US House of Representatives, will visit Israel over the next three weeks during Congress’s summer recess, with the first group of 26 Democrats scheduled to arrive on Monday.

The Democratic delegation will be followed by two Republican ones, bringing a total of 55 Republicans.

Most of the representatives are freshmen congressmen, with 47 – or fully half of the freshmen Republicans voted into office in 2010 – making the trip.

For many of them, this will be their first trip to Israel.

The week-long trips are sponsored by the American Israel Education Foundation, a charitable organization affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which brings large delegations of congressmen here every other August.

House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Maryland) will head the Democratic delegation, and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Virginia) will lead one of the Republican groups.

Hoyer, in a statement, said he looked forward to “returning to Israel to continue learning firsthand about the evolving security situation in the Middle East, the deep challenges facing Israel, and the role the US can play in the region during this time of uncertainty.

I’m pleased members of Congress have this opportunity to study American interests in the Middle East and gain a deeper understanding of the issues involved in increasing stability in the region.”

The delegation will visit both Israel and the West Bank, and is scheduled to meet with President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem, and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah.

Among those on the delegation arriving Monday are Illinois Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr., Ohio’s Betty Sutton, and Pennsylvania’s Mark Critz.

In a related development, The Israel Project will be bringing a group of 18 Washington-based ambassadors from Asia, Europe, Africa and Latin America to Israel on Monday for a weeklong tour and high-level meetings. Like the congressmen, they will also go to Ramallah, for a meeting with PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad.

Among the countries represented on the trip are Albania, Barbados, Belize, Burkina Faso, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Macedonia, St. Lucia and Uganda.

Some of these countries have been mentioned by officials in Jerusalem as likely candidates to either vote against, or at least abstain, when the vote on Palestinian statehood comes before the UN in September.

Jerusalem Post

 ***************

Herb Keinon, the diplomatic correspondent at The Jerusalem Post, moved to Israel from Denver some 30 years ago. He has been at the Post since 1985, and has covered a wide range of beats since them. He took over the diplomatic beat in August 2000.

Keinon has a BA in political science from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and an MA in Journalism from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. He is the author of one book: Lone Soldiers: Israel’s Defenders from Around the World.

Keinon lives in Ma’ale Adumim, and is married with four children.

by Nadia Hijab

It was never about aid.

Freedom Flotilla II is, like its assaulted predecessor of a year ago, a political act. The passengers came together in shared determination to challenge Israel’s five-year siege of Gaza and to exercise their right to travel through international waters to Palestinian shores and, by so doing, support the Palestinian right to freedom.

Many have misrepresented this political act as being about aid. If Palestinians had a dollar for every time the State Department bleated, “there are established channels for aid to Gaza,” they would never need another donated dime. Instead, because of U.S. policy the highly educated and enterprising Palestinians have been stripped of their dignity and forced to live on international charity.

Israel has never made any secret of its intentions for Gaza. Dov Weisglass, key advisor to former Israeli prime ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert, reportedly explained in the wake of Hamas’ electoral victory in 2006, “the idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet but not to make them die of hunger.” This was later revealed to be Israeli strategy according to official documents.

In fact, Israel’s sealing of Gaza from the outside world began before Hamas was elected. It began as far back as 1988 — almost before Hamas existed — when Israel imposed a “permit system” in Gaza. Israel introduced closures in 1991 and institutionalized them in 1993, the heyday of the Oslo so-called peace process. Israel sealed Gaza off by an electronic wall in 1994, and continued to punish it with invasions, home demolitions, air raids, “targeted assassinations,” and other acts illegal under international law.

Israel often complains that it is singled out for criticism when there are other worse human rights violators. Why not set a flotilla against China or Russia? Because Israel is the only country claiming to be a Western-style democracy whose gross human rights violations are supported economically and politically by major world powers. Take, most recently, the sickening parroting by the Quartet – the U.S., Russia, the European Union and the United Nations — of the U.S. line in a July 2 statement calling on “all those wishing to deliver goods to the people of Gaza to do so through established channels.”

To repeat, the Flotilla is not about delivering “goods” to transform Israel’s siege into a kinder, gentler blockade. Rather, it is to deliver this question: By what right does Israel besiege Gaza? And this answer: None, under international law. The Palestinians of Gaza have the right to freedom of movement, education, and development, like all other human beings on this planet. Collective punishment is against the law.

The passengers and organizers of the US Boat to Gaza in Freedom Flotilla II have powerfully compared this quest for justice to that of the American civil rights movement. Alice Walker traces her activism for Palestinian rights to the Jewish activists who faced death to support Black people in the American South. Hannah Schwarzschild movingly evokes her father’s Freedom Ride to the segregated South.

Now Israel and the U.S. have got the Greek government to do their dirty work for them by blocking the Flotilla’s ships before they sail. Yet even some Israeli analysts on the political right say “Israel lost the Flotilla war” by magnifying its symbolism.

Beyond drawing the world’s attention to the obscenity that is the siege of Gaza, the Flotilla has shown the peoples of the Arab world, engaged in their own quest for dignity and rights, that there are two kinds of Americans and two kinds of Jews. Not just those in power in the U.S. and Israel who are widely seen to subvert human rights throughout the region, but also those determined to uphold human rights. By so doing, the Flotilla has contributed to an eventual era of mutual respect between Arabs, Americans, and Jews.

Meanwhile, hundreds of activists intend to travel by air to Israel to express solidarity with Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Here, Israel maintains an equally draconian but less visible siege that enables it to colonize Palestinian land and water resources. The activists fly in on July 8, the seventh anniversary of the International Court of Justice advisory opinion reaffirming the illegality of Israel’s actions, and the sixth anniversary of the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions of Israel until it upholds international law. Will Israel also block them?

Even as Israel tightens its control over Palestinian lives it faces a growing global movement armed only with the tools of non-violent civil resistance and a powerful story of justice. Soon, as two former premiers acknowledge, Israel will be universally seen as the ugly face of apartheid in the 21st Century. And the world has ways to deal with apartheid states and their enablers.

********************

Nadia Hijab

Nadia Hijab is Senior Fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies and director of Al-Shabaka, The Palestinian Policy Network, and a writer, public speaker and media commentator.

A powerful and important Press Conference with some extremely impressive speakers.  They are all Truth Sayers in the Land of Deceit!

By Debbie Menon / Intifada Palestine

(FinalCall.com) – Minister Farrakhan exposed the U.S. and NATO’s criminal War Libya and Africa during a June 15, 2011 Press Conference at the UN Plaza Hotel. Also presenting were former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, Human Rights Activist Viola Plummer and International Activist Cynthia McKinney.

What a beautiful experience, watching and listening to these wise men and women. I’ve realized “America” is full of good people like them. Unfortunately, they do not get the exposure, attention or the respect they deserve, and therefore their influence is far lesser than they deserve.

Former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney

There are probably good reasons why more of them are not into politics.

They are all Truth Sayers in the Land of Deceit!   And, this makes them third rail!  It also puts them in some grand and impressive company, right up there among people like The Kennedy brothers (assassinated) Paul Wellstone (Aircraft accident), Martin Luther King, (Assassinated), Elijah Muhammad (Predecessor and Spiritual guide of Farrakhan, also assassinated), and a great many other living martyrs who although still walking have been assassinated professionally and characteristically, like America’s top journalist Ms Helen Thomas, Prof. Norman Finkelstein, Prof. Bill Robinson, Joel Kovel and a great many, many, others with whom many of you may be familiar.

Will future men be permitted to grow to the stature which will be required to replace these gentlemen and women?  As Dr. Farrakhan says, “I think not!”  I fear not!

All of this “hatred” towards them is simply a measure of how successful the Zionist spinmeisters are with their “hate” spiels in North America.

I ask you all to listen to the full Farrakhan speech and challenge anyone who tries to dismiss or discredit him because he is “hated,” unpopular, or attempts character assassination, to respond to and prove or show where any one of his many charges, and arguments are false or inaccurate, incorrect, excessive or exaggerating!

Yes, he comes on bombastic, proud, arrogant, perhaps smug, and officious. With his facts and numbers in order as he has them, he has a right to do so. His is the classical Catbird Seat at this conference… and he damned well knows it!

How about his comparison of US with other nation’s Human Rights?  Economies?  Quality of life?

Listen carefully to this man before you trash him just as the spinners of those false webs of intrigues want you to do.

Cynthia McKinney is a politician. But, she has not surrendered or trashed the moral and probably Christian up bringing of her mother or her youth, and still operates from the basis of moral Justice, and what is right. Hillary Clinton and most other politicians do not. Her mother taught her well the unwisdom of accepting gifts from her masters in the big house up on the hill.

She is a little lady, much bigger in the inside than she appears from the outside. She is full of guts, and the willing to risk them in doing what is right. But, she also knows and plays the cards of politics to the hilt.

She is one hellova good Capital Hill poker player, which is one of the things those Big fat-bellies on the hill cannot stand… a little girl from the backwoods coming in, upstaging them at their own game, and sweeping the tables clean.

I think she is enjoying herself, I hope so. She is doing all that Obama promised and failed to do with his color.

I am romantic enough to wish she were President. I am realist enough to realize that she doesn’t stand a chance. If she so much as declared as a candidate, she would not last even as long as Clown Trump lasted.

In her current capacity as an activist, she is a problem and a pest, but she is not a threat. But, they realize that she is a potential threat, and if she reaches for more, then they will treat her as a threat, and she will encounter deadly bad times.

Yes, this is third rail and we will draw a lot of heat disseminating this information. A lot of it will be from ignorant people all of whom believe the “hate” screens which have been erected around these good men and women.  But, a greater majority of it will come from concerted and organized attacks from Zionists and Sayanims who will rise up in arms en mass against them and anyone who dares to touch or stand beside them, Louis Farrakhan, Cynthia McKinney, Viola Plummer and Ramsey Clark.

And who is the quiet little guy on the left side of the screen who did not speak, but sat there, attentively, all the while? His name is Brian Becker. He does good work, check him out: http://www.answercoalition.org/sf/.

Related Post

RAY MCGOVERN : Please Don’t Trust Fox News, There Was NO Heckler

Related Video

A VIDEO TRIBUTE TO GLOBAL REVOLUTIONARIES –2011

________________________

Debbie Menon is a freelance writer based in Dubai. Her articles have been featured in several print and online publications. She can be reached at: debbiemenon@gmail.com, http://mycatbirdseat.com/
http://www.facebook.com/mycatbirdseat
http://twitter.com/mycatbirdseat/

by Dr. Lawrence Davidson / Intifada Palestine

Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal i

Part I – Saudi Power

The Saudis do not like President Barak Obama and his administration. The reason is straightforward. They do not like the what the administration says to them. They say things that Riyadh does not want to hear and, in their ears, sound downright dangerous. For instance, the Obama administration has advised the Saudis, and the rest of the rulers in the Arab world, to get out ahead of the region’s growing protest movements and make democratic reforms. The Saudis have no tradition of democracy beyond the tribal advisory council. Before they were kings and princes, they were desert sheiks. Obama’s advice sounds like an erstwhile ally telling them to surrender. In the Bedouin tradition strong leaders do not surrender without a struggle.

The Saudis have shown their frustration with Washington in a number of dramatic ways. One was their coming to the rescue of the Bahraini monarchy (more sheikhs now calling themselves kings) and supporting the outright fascist reaction that regime has been practicing on its majority Shi’ite citizens. The Saudi’s are Wahhabi Sunnis, the most conservative of Muslims, and they do not care what happens to the Shi’ites. They view them as heretics and suspect that the ones in Bahrain are acting as the pawns of Iran (who they fear as a rising Shi’ite regional power). So the Bahraini terror seems a good and necessary thing in Riyadh. This writer finds the Saudi attitude in relation to Bahrain despicable.

The second way the Saudis have shown their frustration is by pointing a finger at U.S. hypocrisy. This was done in a sharp, no-nonsense op-ed by Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal in the Washington Post of 10 June 2011. Turki has strong credentials. He has been the Saudi ambassador to both the U.S. and the U.K. He has been his country’s chief of intelligence. And while he presently holds no government office (which is probably why he was the one who authored this op-ed) his sentiments undoubtedly reflect those of the Saudi government. So what did the prince say?

1. Referring to President Obama’s speech on events in the Middle East, Turki noted that “President Obama…admonished Arab governments to embrace democracy” while he “conspicuously failed to demand the same rights to self-determination for Palestinians–despite the occupation of their territory by the region’s strongest military power.”

2. Turki found equally depressing “the sight of Congress applauding the denial of basic human rights to the Palestinian people” when recently addressed by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

3. Taken together, the denial of such rights to the Palestinians, while calling for them for the rest of the Arab world was, in the Saudi view, a clear indicator that “any peace plans co-authored by the United States and Israel would be untenable and that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will remain intractable as long as U.S. policy is unduly beholden to Israel.”

4. Thus, “in the absence of productive negotiations, the time has come for Palestinians to bypass the United States and Israel and to seek direct international endorsement of statehood at the United Nations. They will be fully supported in doing so by Saudi Arabia.

If the Saudis have it all wrong in Bahrain, they have it all right on Palestine. But the message does not stop here. Turki proceeds to throw down the gauntlet, so to speak.

5. “American leaders have long called Israel an ‘indispensable’ ally. They will soon learn that there are other players in the region…who are as, if not more, ‘indispensable.’ The game of favoritism toward Israel has not proven wise for Washington, and soon it will be shown to be an even greater folly….There will be disastrous consequences for U.S.-Saudi relations if the United States vetoes U.N. recognition of a Palestinian state.”

It should be noted that there is no legal basis for such a veto in the UN General Assembly, but the Obama administration could make things very difficult simply by twisting arms so as to get nations dependent on Washington to vote no on Palestinian recognition. That, by the way, is what the Truman administration did in 1948 in order to get the necessary yes votes for Israel’s recognition as a state (the vote was a close thing). It would be sadly ironic if the Obama administration tried the same tactic to defeat the Palestinian effort.

6. Turki concludes, “We Arabs used to say no to peace, and we got our comeuppance in 1967. In 2002 King Abdullah offered what has become the Arab Peace Initiative….it calls for an end to the conflict based on land for peace….Now, it is the Israelis who are saying no. I’d hate to be around when they face their comeuppance.”

It would be dangerous to consider this a bluff. Turki is quite right when he says that there are others in the Middle East region who are more indispensable to the United States and the West in general than Israel. For instance, any and all of the oil producers of the area. To demonstrate this the Saudis do not have to repeat the oil embargo of 1973. All they have to do is cut back on production a little bit at a time and pressure the other Arab producers to do so as well. If they do that President Obama will be campaigning in 2012 with gasoline at above $5 a gallon. Nor will the price come down just because he loses to Mitt Romney or some other candidate in an elephant costume. It is unlikely to come down until the Palestinians have a just peace.

Part II – Israeli Power

Against this reference to very real Saudi power we have Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s latest bit of legerdemain. In a Rome press conference the Prime Minister, backed up by the smiling approval of his Italian counterpart, Silvio Berlusconi, told the world that “the problem is not the settlements; the root of the conflict is the fact that the Palestinians refuse to recognize the existence of the Jewish state.” Later on Netanyahu elaborated, “This is an insoluble conflict because it is not about territory….Until the Palestinians agree to accept Israel – not just as a country, but as a Jewish state – it will be impossible to move forward.”

All Israeli leaders seem to have possessed this power to create illusions. Here Netanyahu manifests this by moving the peace process goalpost simply by the spoken word. This magic act seems to be underpinned by the spectators complete lack of historical memory and perspective. So, Netanyahu is able to say historically incorrect things and get away with it. Here is what he left out:

1. In 1993 the Palestine Liberation Organization, then led by Yasir Arafat, formally recognized the state of Israel . At the time it was clearly understood what the “state of Israel” meant. No one was trying to play fast and loose by leaving out a descriptive term like “Jewish.” Arafat himself later told the Guardian newspaper that it was “clear and obvious” both that Israel was and will be Jewish and the refugee problem has to be solved in a way that maintained that Jewish character.

2. Then there is the information revealed by the leaked Palestine Papers (January 2011). What they showed was that Mahmoud Abbas (aka Abu Mazen) and his follows had offered the Israelis just about every thing they wanted. As I noted at that time, Abbas and his colleagues “were willing to accept the Bantustans, to give up almost all of Jerusalem, to turn their backs on 99% of the Palestinian refugees, to look the other way as the people of Gaza were slaughtered and to even serve as an ally of the Israeli occupation forces on the West Bank. By the time they were done there was nothing left that was worth fighting for. As the PNA’s chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat told U.S. Middle East envoy George Mitchell, they had done everything but “convert to Zionism.” And yet, the Israelis scorned the Palestinian compromises.”

Now, one can say that Netanyahu is so narrow minded and under-informed that he does not remember 1993 or Arafat’s subsequent clarification to the Guardian. But he must remember the capitulation described in the Palestine Papers. After all, it happened partly on his own watch. So, what is it with him and his “Jewish state”demand? The only logical conclusion is that Prime Minister Netanyahu is a “confidence artist” and he thinks of the rest of us, particularly the U.S. Congress, as his “marks.” Behind this illusion is the reality: the Israeli leadership is not interested in peace. Indeed, peace is to be avoided because it would necessarily stop their absorption of Palestinian land. This is really why it is “impossible to move forward.”

Part III – And The Winner Would Be….

What happens if the Saudis decide that the time really has come to exercise their immense economic power for the sake of the Palestinians? Can the power of the Israeli con artists successfully compete? Well here are some things to consider:

1. Zionist power outside of Palestine is confined to a small number of locales. That does not mean it is not real, but it does mean that its basis is shallow. For instance, its twin pillars are holocaust guilt and lobby influence. The latter, at least in the U.S., comes in the form of political payoffs. The Zionists also have media leverage but that influence is not as ubiquitous as it use to be. It is unclear just how long it would hold up in the face of serious economic counterweights.

2. Saudi Arabia’s power, on the other hand, is truly international and represents well founded, mass economic power. If the price of energy starts going higher and higher because the Saudis and other Arab oil producers cut back on production, the Zionists can’t do a thing about it. And what is Washington and the Europeans going to do? Invade Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, et. al.? That sort of thing happens in suspense novels and will only be advocated by fringe extremists of the John Bolton type. It is not likely to happen in the real world.

No. In this kind of confrontation the Zionists can not win. They are just not as indispensable as affordable energy. It is interesting that not much is being said about this in the U.S. media. Maybe the Zionists and their friends think that if they ignore the Saudis, they will just go away. Maybe they are praying for fusion power before September. Maybe they think it is all bluff.
Personally, I think it might just be Saudi Arabia’s moment. That it is Saudi power that can force a just peace on Washington and Tel Aviv. Let us hope so. For Palestine I’m ready to pay per gallon whatever it costs.

ldavidson@wcupa.edu
www.tothepointanalyses.com
www.twitter.com/pointanalyses
http://www.twitter.com/point

Lawrence Davidson
Department of History
West Chester University
West Chester, Pa 19383
USA

___________________________

DR. LAWRENCE DAVIDSON is professor of Middle East history at West Chester University in West Chester, PA, and the author of America’s Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood (University of Florida Press, 2001), Islamic Fundamentalism (Greenwood Press, 2003), and Foreign Policy, Inc.: Privatizing American National Interest (University of Kentuck Press, 2009).