Obama's Israel Shuffle
The 'pro-Israel' crowd saw Obama as a potential threat. He's done his best two-step to prove them wrong.
The letter was notable not only because Obama had distinguished himself from the rest of the field (John McCain later sent a similar letter to Condoleezza Rice), but also because it was a far cry from the Obama of last March, who let slip a rare expression of compassion for Palestinians by an American politician: "Nobody's suffering more than the Palestinian people" he famously said at a small gathering in Iowa. What ensued in the 10 months between then and now is an object lesson in the intense pressure under which presidential candidates stake out ground on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the extraordinary effectiveness of the self-styled "pro-Israel" movement. This high-pressured atmosphere goes a long way to explaining why the candidate with the most liberal foreign policy views went out of his way to take a hard line on Gaza.
Obama's shuffle with the pro-Israel lobby follows in a long tradition of Democratic candidates facing a litmus test on the issue. Hillary Clinton, for her part, has enjoyed wide support among pro-Israel advocates, having made her peace with them back in 1999 after a controversy involving the lobby hurt her Senate campaign. And as Super Tuesday approaches—the day when many Jewish Democrats vote, in states like New York and California (where respectively 17 and 6 percent of primary voters identified themselves as Jewish in 2004)—Obama has aggressively moved to shore up his pro-Israel credentials, dispatching Jewish supporters to drum up support and hosting a lengthy conference call with Jewish reporters Monday. In part, the call was to counter chain e-mails, which have intensified in recent weeks, painting Obama as a "secret Muslim," but he also used a chunk of the time to make it known that he was a friend of Israel: "I want to make sure that we continue to strengthen the enduring ties between our people and pledge to give real meaning to the words 'never again,'" he said.
From the beginning, Obama has received more scrutiny on the issue of Israel than any other presidential candidate—something of a paradox given that he shares a uniformly pro-Israel record and policy platform with the major contenders from both parties. The suspicion of pro-Israel advocates for Obama was most recently captured in a January 23 Jerusalem Post op-ed in which Danny Ayalon, the former Israeli ambassador to the U.S., called the senator's candidacy cause for "some degree of concern." A memo by a top official at the American Jewish Committee, recently leaked to the Jewish Daily Forward, neatly outlined the roots of this concern: In the late 1990s Obama reportedly called for an even-handed approach to the conflict; his pastor had praised Louis Farrakhan; he has called for diplomacy with Iran; and, of course, he was once photographed breaking bread with the late Palestinian-American academic Edward Said.
There are plenty of other theories for why Obama has been so closely scrutinized on the issue Israel. "One, he is black, and in general it would be expected that black people are more sympathetic to the Palestinian people," Ziad Asali, president of the American Task Force on Palestine, a group that advocates for the creation of a Palestinian state, told me in trying to explain the scrutiny on Obama. M.J. Rosenberg of the Israel Policy Forum, a dovish advocacy group, echoes Asali: "The more right-wing segments of the Jewish community are the least likely to be comfortable with an African-American president." Two, Asali said, Obama is young and perhaps open to new interpretations of the conflict, and, "thirdly, his middle name is Hussein, so he's more suspect than a John Smith."
And no media outlet has done more to pressure Obama on the issue than the New York Sun, the de facto house organ of the pro-Israel lobby. Since its creation in 2002, the newspaper has been practicing a unique brand of gotcha journalism concerning Israel and Palestine. And Obama has consistently responded, no matter how trivial the issue. In March, after George Soros wrote an article calling for negotiations with Hamas, a Sun reporter took it upon himself to seek comments from several Democrats, including Obama. A spokeswoman issued a dissent from Soros and reiterated that the senator shared AIPAC's position on the issue. A few months later, in response to a Sun query, the campaign distanced Obama from some members of his national church who had passed resolutions critical of Israel. Then, last September a Sun reporter noticed a small barackobama.com ad on the Amazon page of The Israel Lobby, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer's book that critiques the lobby's role in U.S. policymaking. Within hours of being contacted by the Sun, the campaign issued a statement slamming the book and had the ad—although it had been completely unintentional—pulled from Amazon's site.
"[Pro-Israel advocates] have him in a position where he has to keep demonstrating his pro-Israel bona fides," says Rosenberg. "This is done every four years, pretty much in every election. Whoever is deemed to be the most liberal candidate is put on the defensive on Israel."
No one knows this better than the candidate deemed most liberal in 2004—Howard Dean. Like Obama, Dean was relatively new on the national scene and possessed liberal-leaning foreign policy views—parallels that help explain why in 2003 Dean faced an Israel problem all too similar to Obama's today. But Dean went further on Israel, at least rhetorically, than any of the candidates have this cycle, saying the U.S. should be "even-handed," that "it's not our place to take sides," and that "enormous" numbers of Israeli settlements would have to be dismantled. That talk prompted a barrage of negative press coverage and earned him a pair of scolding letters, one from Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League and another from 34 congressional Democrats. And, yet, strangely, Dean's actual position on Israel was expressly in line with President Bush and his Democratic rivals. His campaign was co-chaired by former AIPAC president Steve Grossman. Nevertheless, as Grossman later acknowledged, Dean lost support over those comments. Sound familiar?
Obama experienced a mini-version of the Dean treatment after his statement about Palestinian suffering in March. When David Adelman, a prominent Iowa Democrat and AIPAC member, shot off a letter to Obama calling the comment "deeply troubling," a spokesman scrambled to run damage control, telling the AP that Obama believes "in the end, the Palestinian people are suffering from the Hamas-led government's refusal to renounce terrorism." Aides met personally with Adelman, who told the Des Moines Register he was "satisfied with their response."
The campaign let the quote stand for six weeks. Then, in the first debate, before a televised audience of around two million, Brian Williams asked the senator if he stood by his comment. Obama bailed. "Well, keep in mind what the remark actually, if you had the whole thing, said.… [N]obody has suffered more than the Palestinian people from the failure of the Palestinian leadership to recognize Israel..." For the candidate who is selling hope, it was a fairly cynical move.
John Edwards, who has always hewed to the AIPAC consensus on Israel, received little sustained scrutiny on the issue. Hillary Clinton, for her part, settled her debts with the Israel lobby years ago. On a Mideast trip in 1999, the First Lady hugged and kissed her Palestinian counterpart, Suha Arafat, at an event where Arafat had accused Israel of using poison gas on civilians. The incident was pumped into a media firestorm and memorialized in a commercial taken out by the Republican Jewish Coalition. Hillary went on to win her Senate seat in 2000 with an unusually slim majority of New York's Jewish vote. "The whole purpose of manufacturing that controversy when there was none was to put Hillary in a place where she would have to be hawkish on Israel," Rosenberg says." And Hillary has gone for it completely. She's been compensating for it ever since." Clinton now effectively outflanks Obama on the right with her call in September for "an undivided Jerusalem as [Israel's] capital."
It's unsurprising, then, that Hillary is clearly the favored Democrat of the pro-Israel establishment. Since 2004 when Obama first ran for Senate, he has received $93,700 of pro-Israel PAC money, while Hillary has gotten $349,073 during the same period. In the 2008 cycle, while the numbers are still quite low, Hillary has attracted five times more pro-Israel money than Obama.
All the same, the Obama campaign's loud protestations of support for Israel have been enough to placate the New York Sun's editors, who penned an editorial in early January noting "he has chosen to put himself on the record in terms that Israel's friends in America…can warmly welcome." That piece, Politico reported, was "promptly and widely" circulated by Obama's people.
Even if Obama has allowed himself to be painted into a corner on Israel, some hold out hope that his natural inclinations on the conflict are more moderate than his pronouncements. "Based on my conversations with Obama, I have a very strong belief that he shares the Tikkun perspective, which is pro-Israel and pro-Palestine both," says Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of the progressive Jewish journal Tikkun. "I'm cautious in saying I'm 100 percent sure because there was a time when Hillary Clinton said, 'Michael I'm totally with you and Tikkun on Israel/Palestine.' That was when I was supposedly her guru in 1993. Now, she went a very far distance from that later on."
Lerner's likely right to approach the issue with a degree of skepticism. This Thursday Marty Peretz, the pro-Israel New Republic editor, devoted an article to vouching for Obama, declaring he could be trusted by "friends of Israel." And if the conduct of his campaign has shown anything, it's that what Obama might believe "in his heart" and how a President Obama would approach the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are two very different matters. "Will he have the courage to stand up to the Israel lobby and push Israel toward peace?" Lerner asks. "I sincerely doubt it. I see no reason to believe that he will take on that struggle."
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My question is this: WHY do all these foreign countries, Israel included, seem so inclined toward mano-y-mano 'diplomacy', rather than exhibiting some bona-fide national unity, and standing up and fixing their own problems? Why try to graft themselves for all perpetuity into the american socio-political landscape instead of getting down to cause and effect etc?
The United States is pretty badly in debt. Part of it is the simple fact that our country has been used, misused, and abused as a venue for other countries that can't well run a budget, can't well deal with their own domestic problems, and are basically seemingly playing us for every dime they're worth. They should consider some kind of new reform legislation, the 'Go Home, And Start Dealing With Your Problems Like You Were Competent Adults' act, or something. Nothing too crass, but pointed and polite and unmistakable in meaning. I think there's a lot of crafty systematic fraud incorporated into some of the situations you read about in the news these days, and they need to let the sun shine in, there.
I wish there was a way to edit your posts on here, but you'll have to read past my typos....
I had the opportunity to visit the West Bank and Gaza over 20 years ago, and the thing that struck me about the Palestinians in Gaza was the environment they live in: open sewers in the middle of some streets, partially destroyed building that used to be housing. Much of Gaza then looked like it was the set for the urban combat scene of "Full Metal Jacket" except their were people living in the ruins. I couldn't help thinking then that the Israelis, in their very focused attempt to maintain the safety of their population, were insuring that the next generation of Palestinians would have incentive to continue the bloodshed. I know that the underlying causes of the conflict are very deep seated, but waking up to a post apocolyptic movie set every morning doesn't foster an attitude that even a grudging acceptance of Israel is possible.
I understand the game Obama is forced to play here. AIPAC and the other so-called "pro-Israel" groups saying that someone is not "a friend of Israel" can kill a Democratic candidate's prospects more than a pledge to raise taxes. How the "pro-Israel" lobby has been allowed to hold politicians feet to the fire of a unsustainable position is beyond my powers of imagination. One can only hope for a generational revision similar to the one beginning in Cuban communities of south Florida.
Senator Obama has been labeled an "idealist" -- as if that's a bad thing.
Perhaps he's more a "pragmatist" than we all realize.
T'would be nice if AIPAC would just stop their meddling in American politics. Since that isn't going to happen, obviously candidates have to play the game. It's unfortunate.
Bert,
You cannot know how many Israelis feel exactly that way. Many of us do not like being forced to submit to the current president's policies of the U.S.A., be he Democrat or be he Republican. We do respect and appreciate the military efforts afforded us, for without them we would no longer exist. But we know as well many Americans know, too many of the dollars end up in the politicians' pockets. Maybe someday ..we can only hope.
Unfortunately, it is a political suicide for any American politician to be even handed or neutreal when it comes to Israeli- Palestanian conflict.
Why compare the amount of "pro-Israel money" that either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama have gotten? Perhaps Obama's amounts taken in are affected by his resistance to lobbyist and PAC money, and Clinton's amount affected by her love of lobbyist money.
Obama lost any chance of getting my vote when he made those comments. I can not vote for any candidate that gives blind support for Israel and their crimes against humanity.
www.pafundi.com
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Number of Operations Iraq Freedom and Enduring Freedom casualties as confirmed by U.S. Central Command: 4404
WHY WAS OBAMA AGAINST THE WAR?
The recent report of the Obama Rezko and Nadhmi Auchi connection was mind boggling to me because of one elemental
factor: Auchi, an Iraqi billionaire with connections to Saddam Hussein and the Ba'athist regime and his wife both are political donors to Obama's campaign
I am even more perplexed today when I came across this entry by Nibras Kazimi, a visiting Scholar at the Hudson Institute in Washington DC. who writes a weekly column on the Middle East for the New York Sun, and a monthly column for the Prospect Magazine (UK) and whose
"Talisman Gate blog is widely read by Iraq experts and commentators in the United States..."
The Washington Post, July 19, 2007
"Obama's Saddam Connection?
When I first saw the names Barack Obama, Tony Rezko and Nadhmi Auchi a week ago in some random newspaper report, I was sure that some reporter would extrapolate these connections further to include the name “Saddam Hussein”. Well, I guess I expected too much from the American press, and it fell to The Times (UK) to spell out the obvious.
Back in the opposition days, the name “Nadhmi Auchi” was just another front for Saddam’s intelligence service, or so we thought. Auchi (…a Chaldean Christian; there’s a Muslim family by that name too) knew Saddam intimately enough in his youth to the point of conspiring together to pull off an assassination attempt on Soviet-leaning Iraqi strongman Col. Abdul-Karim Qasim in 1959. Auchi was considered one of Saddam’s guys, who mysteriously left his job in the Ministry of Oil to start a business in Luxembourg with school-pal Nasseer ‘Abid (…Shia from Nassiriya). Auchi’s brothers stayed behind in Iraq and fixed deals with their brother to bring oil industry spare parts, but one of them got too greedy and went too far—from the regime’s perspective—in hoarding kickbacks and was executed over corruption charges in the mid-1980s on Saddam’s personal orders. Yet, even after this, Auchi maintained a connection to Saddam, according to what we in the opposition believed at the time.
A very reliable source of mine who knows Auchi very well disputes any intelligence or money laundering roles that Auchi may have performed on behalf of Saddam, but then again, had that been true, enough people would have formed a different impression about Auchi and this stigma of him being one of Saddam’s ‘secret men’ would have faded away—but it never did. What is certain is that Auchi never turned against Saddam even after his brother was murdered, and may have stuck to the Ba’athist talking points when talking politics.
Auchi has faced all sorts of controversy and legal action in Europe, and at one point had difficulty obtaining a visa to visit the United States. I’m not fully sure, but I think that Auchi eventually did make it to Michigan and was honored at some ceremony there; I remember seeing something in the local Iraqi-American press to that effect. I could be wrong, but some reporters should be checking this out.
What if there had been an Obama-Auchi meeting that may have been arranged by Rezko? Has any reporter asked Obama about this to his face? What if either Rezko or Auchi sold Obama on how the Saddam regime sees things, and that’s why Obama took a stance against the Iraq war?
Was Obama influenced by a Saddam connection??
Are the investigative journalists of the US in HIBERNATION?
An open letter to the future President of the United States of America.
The security, tranquility, and image of a nation state’s citizens is the primary responsibility of any government and head of state and should take precedence over any foreign alliance—including the state of Israel. There has been much too much mincing of words and action on the American political and media scene on the subject of Israel--among other taboo subjects and interests groups with undue and often negative influence on American foreign policy and image, and security, including the Cuban lobby, the subject of another commentary.
This is being no more anti-Semitic than being anti-Nazi makes one anti-German, or anti-apartheid South Africa anti- white.
Israel is, or should be to the United States, just another foreign country.
It is not. In spite of its behavior in violation of international law and human rights, its undeclared military nuclear capability, it receives special treatment from the US government (across partisan lines) which no one with political or even business ambitions on the American scene dares publicly question. It benefits from an unprecedented and disproportionate degree of economic, political, and military support and protection from the United States which gives it near impunity and fosters a degree of arrogance and sense of exception from international rules of behavior. As some have simplistically stated, it appears as an extreme case of the tail wagging the dog.
It should by now be clear--and acknowledged, had they the courage, by the US political and media community at large--that US support to the Tel Aviv regime has become one of--if not the one--greatest security and image liability to the United States and to the world Jewish community. Simply because the state of Israel by its meets the criteria of a rogue state as, ironically, defined and applied when expedient, by the United States and international community.
Israel’s foundation, prompted in reparation for the Nazi genocide, was to make the Arab Muslim world--historically relatively benevolent toward Jews--pay for the grievous crimes of Christian Europe against Jews. Whereas it would have seemed justly logical to expropriate a choice region of Germany as a Jewish homeland, the post World War II Anglo-Euro-American power block, in its customary disdain for the Arab world, found it expedient and politically convenient to stick another with its problem.
History: Facts abundantly gathered and published since 1947 by respected academics—some Jewish--and international agencies, such as the United Nations can be summarized as follows:
At the dawn of decolonization, after World War II, a European colony of expatriates survivors of Nazi persecution was established in Palestine through terrorism and ethnic cleansing of the resident population of Palestine, of which some 750,000 people were forced out by every violent means, from armed intimidation being the least, to the wholesale massacre of several communities, assassinations, and torture. Over 400 villages were rubbled so the residents would have nothing to return to. The first political use of the car bomb (well-known as a gang war weapon) was used by the Israeli Stern Gang, an organization which met the strictest definition of political terrorism. For the next sixty years, bent on realizing Hertzl’s vision expressed in 1905 of establishing a “greater Israel” by “evincing” or “easing out” the Arab populations and seizing key resources, with water at the top of the list for the region, a brutally repressive occupation was installed, supported by US assent, money, weapons, political leadership, and Judeo-Christian ideology. Israeli state terrorism set in to repress the resistance of the occupied, routinely violating a long list of international laws and conventions: Arrests, kidnapping, torture, assassination, and reprisals against the livelihood of families of resistants.
American and European silence was and remains deafening.
The French alone should find parallels with the German occupation. In both cases, the occupant has no right over the conquered territory, no right of arrest or jurisdiction over its people. Whether we like or accept it or not, Hamas will go down in Palestinian history as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, its sister Hezbollah that of the Lebanese, while the Abbas government will be remembered as a Vichy regime, collaborating with the occupant. Those Palestinians who cooperate with the occupant will be remembered and treated as were the French collaborateurs.
Negotiations resulting in lopsided fixes such as the Oslo Agreement or the latest Annapolis meetings were engineered and forced upon the Palestinians, who could not be expected to accept them. Those of us who have worked negotiations know that to succeed, there must exist a parity of motivation, i.e. each side must “feel enough pain” to want to resort to dialogue. Given the lack of military parity artificially imposed and enforced mostly by the by the United States and Britain on the Palestinian Resistance, denying it basic military means to attrite Tsaal’s military means, the Israeli regime conserved the upper hand and has had to date no real motivation to negotiate a meaningful settlement. Someone has to dare say that had the Palestinian Resistance been given the same means to take on Tsaal as the US gave the Afghan insurgents against their Soviet occupant (anti-aircraft and anti-armor portable state of the art missiles) we might have seen a very different series of outcomes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Able to attack military targets, the Resistance would not have resorted to suicide combatants against civilian targets and Israel would have been forced to either negotiate meaningfully for the long term or take extreme—and self-destructive--repressive reprisal measures against the Palestinian population. Here are some scenarios:
Outcome One: Infuriated by growing military losses, Israel could reply with near genocidal frenzy on the Palestinian population. This possibility is supported by Israel’s brutal track record toward Arabs, from the early wars of colonization of 1948-49, its extermination of Egyptian prisoners in 1967 (part of the reason for the silencing attack on the US intel ship USS Liberty), to its disproportionate response against the Southern Lebanese population in 2006.
Outcome two: Israel is brought to meaningful negotiations aimed at a two-state solution within the 1967 or 1949 borders with full Palestinian State control of its key infrastructures—water, power, sea and airports, air space, and defense.
Outcome three: Israel realizes the obvious long-term solution of willingly undertaking, with major long-term US and international support, a one-state, South Africa-type solution—multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, truly egalitarian for Jews, Arabs, and all others.
The Israeli lobby, as well documented by Professors Mearsheimer and Walt (The Israel Lobby), is an unwholesome ideological mix of Christian Evangelicals, politician neoconservatives, and a minority of Jewish extremists, a lot of understandably scared and misinformed moderate Jewish Americans. As Evangelicals form 22 percent of American voters, and given the American military power behind them seen from the outside by the rest of the world, they and their cronies represent the world’s most dangerous religious fundamentalists….If the term Islamofascism is to be so liberally applied to our self-created foes of the Islamic world (read Michael Scheuer’s Imperial Hubris) it might be appropriate to coin another to describe American fundamentalists: Christo-Zio-Fascism.
Were it any other country or regime than Israel, we well might have seen, at least since the first Intifadah, an embargo followed by a Yugoslavia-type UN Chapter VII-VIII peacemaking intervention in Israel and Palestine. By the way, getting out of Iraq, period, and redeploying a US Army corps (100,000)troops as part of such a US-initiated UN resolution to Israel/Palestine, for at least one generation, supported by a Middle-East Marshall-type plan, to establish in security and prosperity for all a One-state solution (with a new flag combining Israeli and Palestinian markings?)
No more than being anti-Nazi make one anti-German, or anti-Stalinist a Russophobe, taking a stand against the Zionist state of Israel in no way equates anti-Semitism.
Born during World War II to a French Resistance family, labeled terrorists and decimated by the Occupant and the zeal of its French minions for helping Jews and other Nazi preys flee into Spain, I became an American by adoption and an American Army officer of the Vietnam generation by proud choice. I have watched and lived silently for almost three decades of service many mistakes and wrong turns in US foreign policy, starting in retrospect with Vietnam. Today, Senator Obama, since 9/11, we have come close to fascism in the United States and we and the state of Israel we support fit our very description of rogue states, hated and despised, for unfortunately good reason, by too many in this world.
I may be as distressed as my German counterpart of the old German army in 1933 must have been, watching the unthinkable take place in Germany…
Please help us regain our honor, the high moral ground, and our country. And help the Jewish community once and for all gain an inclusive home state respected not for its brutality but for its values.
YOU CAN SATISFY SOME OF THE PEOPLE, SOME OF THE TIME. BUT YOU CANNOT SATISFY ALL OF THE PEOPLE ALL OF THE TIME.
That was funny! I agree, and I could not have said it better myself!
we got struggles of our own! united states needs to stop play pappy, to all these other nations, and let them handle their own business!
Beware of media cropping, where they chop off part of quote or a picture.
Here is what Barack Obama
Barack Obama: Palestinian people suffer-but from not recognizing Israel
Q: You said recently, "No one is suffering more than the Palestinian people." Do you stand by that remark?
A: Well, keep in mind what the remark actually, if you had the whole thing, said. And what I said is nobody has suffered more than the Palestinian people from the failure of the Palestinian leadership to recognize Israel, to renounce violence, and to get serious about negotiating peace and security for the region. Israel is the linchpin of much of our efforts in the Middle East.
Source: South Carolina 2007 Democratic primary debate, on MSNBC Apr 26, 2007
Another example of media cropping
led to false reports that Obama snubbed
Hillary Clinton after the State of the union address.
He turned his head to answer a question from Senator McCaskill and the media reported, but the media cropped McCaskill and said he turned away from Clinton.
http://markhalperin.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/kennedyclintonsh260.jpg
American politics is not a line but a circle. Here is an example of left wing fascism.
Israel must be holding something over the US. Statistically, by now we should have had at least one president that stood against Iasraili influence. Remember Bush when he was first campaining for office said that he would interfere in the middle east vis-a -vis Israel? Untill he got to the whitehouse, and got "briefed". Cythia Mckiney( I hope I spelled her name right) the congress womam from georgia spoke up against mighty israel and was kicked out of congress. The people of georgia did not see anything wrong with that, neither did the rest of America. When all the states in the union are hurting for revenue, find out how much of the treasury finds its way into israel! America would forego the reconstruction of New Orleans for the construction of the apartheid wall in israel. i remember the hue and cry about the chinese influence on american politics during the Clinton administration, yet America sees nothing wrong with the idea that the top criteria for running for the highest office in the nation is to first kow-toe and reassure the state of israel of ones fidelity. Either we are all in hock to this little desert country or we are hostages and our leaders are not telling us some deep secret that is being used to blackmail this great nation by israel. Oh! I know, no need to remind me, I must be antisematic to even think like this let alone voice these sentiments.
Obama lost my vote with his blind support for Israel.
www.pafundi.com
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Number of Operations Iraq Freedom and Enduring Freedom casualties as confirmed by U.S. Central Command: 4406
Stop U.S. tax dollars to Israel. We need money spent here.
Call or write your representatives.
There's no mystery or "deep secret" behind America's obedience to Israeli interests as poster "sid" suggests. After vetting congressional candidates, as described by Mearsheimer & Walt, America's Israeli lobby (AIPAC) assures friendly-to-Israel candidates of generous campaign support and who then have no option but to vote for whatever AIPAC asks or not only lose this financial support at the next election but see it go to an opponent. Backing up AIPAC policy positions is America's mainstream media, now controlled for the most part by friends of Israel. This is documented and discussed extensively on the Liberty Forum website.
The power of small groups such as AIPAC and the Cuban community in Florida to greatly influence national elections is the result of the greatly flawed electoral college system. Since most states have a winner take all system, a small homogeneous group in key electoral states such as Florida with a large number of electoral votes, must be catered to in order to have the greatest chance to win that state. This gives these groups an inordinate amount of power, greater than they should have based on their percentage of population of the nation as a whole. That is why we refuse to trade with Cuba, a tiny totalitarian Communist nation, while we have a huge trade deficit with China, a huge totalitarian Communist nation. The same goes with AIPAC and how we are forced to march lockstep with their agenda. We need to thus change this corrupt and outdated system to ensure that no small group is able to hold their interests above the interests of the entire nation. Since the electoral college is established in the Constitution and thus would need an amendment to change, I would urge people to check out the National Popular Vote movement at http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/index.php
which seeks to bring about the same result through legislative action.
It's just disgusting and sickening that AIPAC has the influence it does. And people have the audacity to say the "Israel Lobby" is a book based on flawed academics? The evidence is blatantly clear, as the above article displays without a doubt.
Why in all of these years did the Palestinians living in and around the camps, Israel, and in Jordan pick p their garbage and build some decent roads and some schools and hsspitals? the PLO area looked like garbage dums and peop,le just threw their trash in the street. Instead of using thie oney and energy making wars andccomplaining they cold have cleaned up their act and become more worthyof people's aid. I did't eel sorry for them when I was there. Even when the war was on in l948, they Jews cleaned their streets. I am old enough to remember this stuff.
So it looks like the Palestinian people will continue to get a raw deal from the United States no matter who the next president is.
To Mr. Frank - Thank you for your very inspiring grasp of the ME situation. I support whoheartedly your suggestion of redeploying US soldiers to Isreal/Palestine borders to broker a peace settlement once and for all. A lot of objections would have to be overcome on both sides but that's what real friends are for: uphold one's friend worthiness but also withstand any shortcomings. Merci beaucoup.
It is ironic that some like Jack Frank concede the right of a nation to the defense of its civilian populace, yet deny this right to the Israelis. Perhaps if the Palestinians stopped their wars against Israel and negotiated with them for a realistic two-state solution, providing each population with a viable state of its own, the international isolation of Hamas and the continuing pattern of "strike and counter-strike" would cease. However, the Palestinians are locked into a failed strategy of war to eradicate Israel, which has failed to produce their independence for the past 60 years. They seem to think that persistence of that failed policy will succeed, rather than something different. For example, From 1949 to1972, the U.S. pursued a policy of non-recognition of the Peoples Republic of China, yet in a dramatic departure from that isolationist policy, Richard Nixon set into motion events leading to a major internal transformation of that nation. What the Palestinians need and sorely lack, is a Nixon of their own, who like Anwar Sadat and King Hussein of Jordan, will take that dramatic leap of faith in the interest of peace! While the Palestinians, particularly Hamas continue to devote their limited resources to war, the sewage continues to flow through the streets of Gaza City, while the Israelis, even in the midst of war are able to divert resources to infrastructure, agriculture, industrialization and education, from national defense! That is in part due to greater resource availability, but more importantly a policy of using resources constructively! Barack Obama correctly pointed out the suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza, but also correctly pointed out that " , , , nobody has suffered more than the Palestinian people from the failure of the Palestinian leadership to recognize Israel." There is also an appropriate adage of the black community which he could also cite on the status of the Palestinians: "If you always do what you have always done, you will always get what you always got!"
Why is it so difficult to simply take the position that being a friend of Israel does not require embracing the point of view of the Israeli right wing? The opinion of the Israeli right wing does not represent the opinion of a majority of Israeli citizens. If this statement is incorrect, the burden of proving it incorrect should fall to the Israeli right wing. Israel is not a closed society. Barack Obama should not fear that Israeli hawks own Israeli public opinion. I doubt that the Israeli right wing positions even dominate American Jewish opinion.
I am also a leftist supporter of Israel. That does not mean that I agree with everything the Israeli government ever did. However, it should be noted for the record that the eight most likely candidates for 2008 President are all strong supporters of Israel. (Obama, Clinton, Edwards, Richardson among the D's and McCain, Guliani, Romney and Huckabee for the R's). To chalk this all up as the result of "pressure" from the USA Israel lobby is beyond ridiculous. Its because many Americans realize that (for the most part), Israel has been left with no other viable choice but to fight back, against 90+ years of violence against their citizens. The fact that Israeli counter-terrorism has been vastly more effective and therefore deadly) then the underlying Arab terrorism, does NOT reverse the roles.
Something must be done to further the peace process. Stagnation produces anxiety and worsens conditions on the ground. No matter how one characterizes a candidates views the reality of suffering masses of Palestinian children living in squalid camps must be addressed as a humanitarian crisis.
Of course. Its a 60 year old humanitarian crisis. A number of years ago, the Director of the UNHCR (Rudd Lubbers) personally informed me that his office was politically blocked from re-settling Palestinian-Arabs into habitable (permanent) quarters. Not by Israel mind-you, but by those Arab and Muslim nations--who were insistent that the nationless Arabs remain "refugees", until they would be shipped exclusively into Israel.
Do you hear, little Jonesettes?
Riddle-me-that Bruce Wayne . . .
How does the world body (U.N.) get away with this injustice, completely unnoticed?
The average American remains functionally clueless--as to what is actually occurring in the M.E.
This goes (at least) double for many within the radical "left", who in addition to (typically) being factually dysfunctional on the subject, likes it that way--as long as they have a hero to exalt and correspondingly, an enemy to scorn.
Who is this destroyer of all that is good and just?
GOLDSTEIN!
Who is this usurper of human rights??
GOLDSTEIN!!
Who is the eternal enemy of the state???
GOLDSTEIN!!! . . . . . . . . . . (NOT!)
The fact that (now) the THIRD generation of Palestinian-Arabs have been born on (for example) Lebanese soil, yet remain totally nationless, as animals, without human rights and lacking even the right to work full-time jobs, is of no consequence to the average champion of the "Arab Cause".
'Pathetic' is hardly a serious enough description.
I find it a bit strange that Mother Jones references a wikipedia article as their source for Obama's "uniformly pro-Israel record."
Obama is not "uniformly pro-Israel" and Mother Jones should have higher standards.
this just another prove the American political system is so corrupted and beyond reform,money,power and self interest have been the core values of the American political system,It's time for American intifada....
No mystery or deep secret eh Paul? Tell me this, why and how does this AIPAC group have such awesome access and influence with our ellected officials bar none? Why does your congressperson and senater pay more heed to this group tha to YOU America? Who are the members of this group and why have they walled off washington for everyone else? Why do the other lobby groups find it imppossible to match the access and/or influence that we all seem to think this AIPAC takes for granted? I think that AIPAC is a smoke screen. Something to conveniently point to whenever serious questions are asked about israeli influence on American politics and policy. Ask your elected (read bought & paid for) officials some of these questions next time you get past AIPAC and talk to them.
Why does he belong to church which honors FARRAKHANT and whose pastor is anti Israel and undoubtly preaches this rhetoric from the pulpit?
The letter by Obama has nothing to do with the so called "Israel Lobby".
It is plain common sense.
Sderot is a a working class community in the Western Negev. It has a large Moroccan and Ethiopian immigrant population.
These people have been under daily rocket attack since Israel withdrew its forces and left its settlements in Gaza.
There is no nation on Earth that would tolerate the daily bombing of one of its cities. If anything, the Israeli government can be accused of racism by not doing more than a mere blockade of Gaza in defense of its working class, immigrant and black population.
Mr. Obama by sending his letter is no more than the voice of reason, while so many others rushed to enable Palestinian victim mentality.
So called left wing and liberal groups should be championing the rights of the people of Sderot. Instead they are championing the rights of theocratic governments (like Hamas) whom openly call for genocide against the Jews (please read article 6 of the Hamas charter), deny the rights of women, free speech, and dissent.
Stan
Sid:
Karl Marx became a Russian Orthodox Christian because his father, a lawyer was given the choice (by the Czar's regime): Either convert or loose his license to practice law.
Karl was taught to hate Jews because doing so was in agreement with "the powers that be". After the revolution, the commies kept the Czar's resentment of Jews and the standard party line became:
"The Jews are planning a takeover of the Russian government". Slightly later, this same reasoning was used to rationalize why Russia was officially against the establishment of a 'Jewish National Homeland' in Palestine, even though most Arab leaders (of that time) had no problems with the same concept.
The Arabs and the Jews were in the same boat, as subjects of the Turks. The USSR however, publicly denounced such a plan due to their belief that Jews would merely use Jerusalem as a staging-ground for world domination and conquest.
The new radical left has not evolved very far from the old radical left.
Your comments are a perfect example. If an abnormal percentage of Jews are doctors, lawyers, engineers and politicians, its because we are "N" type (high achievers). If non-Jews tend to listen to our advise, its because they respect our intuition.
Your explanation (to be polite) is political garbage.
If Obama is elected, He will pull us out of Isreal and cause a Global catastrophe. Starting Iran invading Isreal, the a nule battle and we will all get sucked in. He promises change, and changed it will be!!!
You damn right it will be change, like this country has never seen before. He is a threat to this nations...
Are some of you entirely blind? Israel's occupation of Gaza and the West Bank is illegal under international law. You might want to take note of the fact that far more Palestinian civilians (including kids) have been killed by Israel than vice versa in the past two years. Bulldozing an entire Palestinian village as not a proportionate retaliation for a homemade rocket attack. It is a deliberate attempt to destroy an entire population. The US/Israel blockade of Gaza - which is denying basic supplies to its occupants, such as food, water and electricity - is a crime against humanity. Punishing an entire people for the actions of a few is monstrous. Requiring Hamas to acknowledge Israel's right to exist, without requiring Israel to reciprocate is grossly hypocritical.
This is NOT an endorsement of terror; I oppose all forms of violence, which means that I oppose acts of violence against Palestinians as well as those against Israel.
Some of the comments on this article reflect a lack of compassion that is just frightening.
Your comment was a powerful comment based on excellent analysis and a pool of information.I wish all Americans were as well informed as you.
Obama represents a "revolt" of us americans.. who are just sick and tired of the "other guys". We've heard all their stuff.. trust in them.. given them our support. Now.. we have a dollar that won't even take you to Canada, and a new version of Viet Nam where jungle has been traded for sand.
Obama cannot possibly be worse.
The mystry is not what you think. If Isreal has no backing from the United States, and there were no arms.. there would be an instant holocaust. If Iran, Syria and the other Hammas supporters has no arms- there would be instant peace. You figure it out.. there is no mystry. The hold Isreal has on the United States is it's democracy- something the other guys in the regions have not yet mastered.
As long as the Palastinian people support the lobbing of Katusha rockets into Isreal, as long as they support violence, their people will suffer.. everyone will suffer.
What Obama said.. was correct.. no one has suffered more...
Isreal is our only true ally in the area.. think carefully about who you want as your friends..
They will continue to get a raw deal as long as they support terrorists and violence.
One wishes that the thugs running the show in Palestine would do something at least as constructive as the many things Israelis have done for the Palestinians: Hospital care, education etc. Good grief, the Israelis provided electricity (free of charge) to the Palestinians (Hamas did not re-instate the electrical power when Pal. was appeased w/Gaza land) Yasar Arafat, Hamas et al have not been able to come close to the care the Israelis provided for the welfare of the Palestinian people (and incidentally, the only support Arabs have given is through $$ for weapons - and Saddam Hussein's incentive program for suicide bombers: give the 'martyr's' families an upgraded apartment. ) The Islamic world uses Palestine as a public display of their never-ending grievance towards the accomplishments of israel and the West and as a diversion from their own lack of social ability/success.
The Pals don't take care of their communities through the organization of public services?! That would be because Israel collects the taxes and then keeps the taxes, spending Pal tax millions instead on expanding illegal settlements on Pal land. Israel gives free education and health care to Pals? Rubbish. Follow the money - taxes collected, and taxes not spent on education and health care. Studies show conclusively the lagging of education and health care of Pals; of particular note, in Israeli Arab communities. Jesus wept, the comment post that spurs this reply declares that the Pals ought to have been appeased with the give-back of Gaza land, a grandiose sacrifice of giving back something that didn't belong to you in the first place, lock them down and starve them like dogs. On electricity for Gaza? Israel bombed the main electrical plant in Gaza. Now you call what electricity is allowed into Gaza charity? There isn't enough electricity to run water treatment or sewage plants. That's called biological warfare, just the same biological warfare that the U.S. perpetrated in Iraq leading to the deaths of five hundred thousand children there. Charity? Israel prevents Gaza from importing adequate food to feed the population. Truck convoys languish at the roadside prevented from entering. A mere 41% of Gaza's food requirements are permitted to enter, since last June. Sometimes its the small story that helps to drive the big one home. In what ways are hearing aid batteries for Gaza Pal children who need to hear to be able to learn a threat to the state of Israel? Or how about medicine for the sick? Or food to feed the hungry? All are prevented from entering Gaza. The racists on this thread horrify. They have functioning brains. They choose evil over good - Good Germans of another era.
publisher, The McLoughlin Post
mcloughlin post dot com
Nobody in the US can get elected without genuflecting in front of AIPAC and those parties who support them...Obama is very smart and he is forced to pay lip service.
One day, maybe in 5 years, maybe in 50 the American public will realize what the Jews have done to the American dream.
I don't think there has ever been a situation in history that is viewed with more biased then the Israel/Palestine conflict.
It's a shame, people don't view others as human beings but as a label. They forget the hostility kids live under and that they have no human rights.
The amount of deaths do not lie and they show who has suffered more in this conflict. Those are people not statistics.
Israel continues to push people out of their homes without right and soon they will be like the Jewish people once were.. without a home.
It's like westward expansion all over again. Native Americans where once viewed as the terrorist of America and were nearly exterminated. Hopefully something changes because when we look back at the history and say what have we done? It will have been too late. Just like with the Natives here in North America.
Before making racist, inaccurate claims about Palestinians 'supporting terror', and so forth, I suggest that some of you check out the B'Tselem website: http://www.btselem.org/index.asp
B'Tselem is an Israeli human rights organisation that focuses on human rights abuses in the Occupied Territories. It's absolutely despicable that there are people condoning occupation and genocide. There seems to be this absolutely insane, racist perception amongst a disturbing number of people that Palestinian lives are worth less than Israeli lives, and that wholesale (state) terror is more acceptable than retail (non-state) terror, despite the fact that the former is much larger in scale and causes far, far greater destruction than the latter.
I've been in tears - literally - over what's happening in Gaza at the moment, and it's just so upsetting that there are so many people who seem to think that death and destruction is just fine, as long as it's Palestinians who are dying.
I'm sure looking the other way and dismissing an entire group as 'terrorists' who 'deserve what they get' is a great conscience appeaser, but if you choose to subscribe to this view, then you are, in effect, condoning genocide, and that is just horrifying.
