Letters to the Editor
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Honesty in Advocacy
Virtually all of the swirling war dances towards Iran are rooted in this belief, but advocates of war with Iran are too dishonest to acknowledge it openly.
Glenn,
I support your call for honesty in foreign policy debate. Attacking Iran would be a humanitarian catastrophe and anyone advocating it should clearly say so and why.
While we're on the subject of full and honest disclosure, don't you think it's time that you spell out your analysis of Israel in the Middle East and its relationship to our role there? Let's be frank: you, and the class of political bloggers you inhabit, blame Israel for the lion's share of the trouble in the region. You feel that Israel was formed in original sin -- the displacement of the Palestinians -- and its settlement policy and hawkish replies to Arab aggression create a justifiable and growing rage among Arabs and Muslims worldwide. Terrorism, border attacks and thriving Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism are the lamentable but logical consequences.
Following from this, you support the following Walt-Mearsheimer thesis: "the U.S. has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel".
I think this is why you, the people you emulate (Digby, Yglesias), and your own epigones, are so exercised about the "smearing" of Walt and Mearsheimer as anti-Semites. This isn't some soulful protest of the muzzling of their (now best-selling) voices or chagrin over the cheapening of the word "anti-Semite". Walt and Mearsheimer's calling out of The Lobby(TM) is important to you, but la femme here is the vital truth, as you see it, that The Lobby suppresses: nasty Israel's radioactivity to the US.
I don't want to debate the quality of your analysis. Doing so is tedious and off-topic. I think there's a kernel of truth to it -- the settlements are deplorable and provocative, and our silence on that issue is bewildering. It's also predicated on a retrograde and illiterate pan-Muslim nationalism, insofar as it accepts that it's rational, say, for Iranians to antagonize and attack Israel in solidarity with the Palestinians. One recalls the polyadjectival tsunami of snark you unload in response to the mirror image of these politics, for example Joe Lieberman's stupid courting of evangelical Christians on behalf of broader Zionism.
What I want, like you, is honesty in advocacy. For all of the high dudgeon on liberal blogs about the silliness of the "serious" foreign policy community, you guys rarely articulate a full foreign policy in opposition to the one in place. Now's your opportunity to start. Follow your own advice and "make [your] case expressly".
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jonsonjohnson - You are wrong about what makes Arabs and Muslim hostile to Israel
It is not the "The vilification of the West by clerics in mosques" that turns Arabs and Muslims against Israel, it is rather the fact that Israel ethnically cleansed the Palestinians from their homeland (a fact that is never mentioned in the US). If you don't believe me, I refer you to the following quote by Ben Gurion (1st prime minister of Israel):
“If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti - Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault ? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?”
- Ben Gurion (Israel's first Prime Minister) quoted by Nahum Goldmann in Le Paraddoxe Juif (The Jewish Paradox), pp121.
Why the US wants to ally itself with a country that stole the land of another nation and continues to practice apartheid against them is beyond me.
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Mr. Anonymous
You make revisionist statements concerning the situation in the Middle East. The Jews did not "steal" the land from the Arabs. Are you familiar with the number of Jews living there in the early 20th century as compared to the number of Arabs?
There was no "state" in the region. It had been administered as part of the Ottoman empire, which ceded the territory after its defeat in WWI. The Ottoman Turk administration was not benign for the Arabs, and there was no Arab entity in the area. Through a system of negotiation and concesssions, several national entities were established including Iraq, which was an amalgam of tribes and religious groups that did not have a perception of nationality.
Around the time of the Balfour declaration, plans were made to establish Trans-Jordan for the Arabs and Nish-Jordan for the Jews As there was no national state, the people in the region occupied land that they owned. The great majority of current Arabs, who claim a non-existent Palestinian nationality are descendants not of the original Arab invaders who made incursions from Saudi Arabia, but people who came to share the prosperity created by Jewish settlers. Arabs voluntarily sold land to Jews, motivated by the extraordinary profits that they received.
After the establishment of Israel, the first national state on that particular territory after the expulsion of the Ottoman Turks, and with far less land than originally mandated, the surrounding Arab states joined to attack a vulnerable fledgling Israel in an attempt to destroy it, and massacre its people. these attackers encouraged the departure of the Arabs who live there with the promise that they would share in the spoils when the Jews were eliminated. Those Arabs left of their own accord.
The number of Arabs who departed then, and in subsequent assaults by a combination of Arab states attempting to destroy Israel, abandoned their entitlement to reside in the state as they were complicit in efforts to destroy it.
As I indicated, they were largely not indigenous inhabitants of the region, but were attracted by the economic benefits anticipated by sharing in the opportunity and prosperity created by Jewish enterprise. The burgeoning populations now residing in what are erroneously described as "refugee camps," which are not camps but cities, and which do not house people who qualify as refugees except by redefinition of the term, far exceed the numbers who left Israel as they have a proclivity for families of seven or eight children, whom they could not otherwise have supported without the continuing "charity" of the UN. These populations are not the fault of or responsibility of the Israelis.
Israelis have received Jews displaced from various Islamic countries and integrated them into their nation. The Arab states have largely refused to receive and integrate the Arabs, who sought other accommodations during the wars, when they awaited the spoils they anticipated upon defeat of the Israelis.
The Palestinians, who never had a state, and never were a nation, are merely pawns used by jihadists to stir up Islamics. The Islamics are bent on subjugation of non-Islamics as directed by the Koran, and are willing to inflict any burden upon others to secure such an end.
I remind you that Islamics are engaged in conflicts worldwide and are not confined to their enmity to relations with the Jews. Just to name a few, there is the genocide that the Islamic Arabs are committing on the blacks in Darfur, ruthlessly murdering hundreds of thousands, and displacing millions, there is the situation in Thailand, the conflict in India, the strife in Indonesia with the slaughter of Christians, the internecine strife in Iraq between Sunni and Shias. And there are the slaughters of innocents in the terrorist attacks on school children murdered in Russia by the Chechens, the expulsion of Orthodox Christians from Kosovo, the attacks on countries favorable and providing havens for Muslims, such as the terrorist murders in Spain, in England, and in France.
The Islamics also have the temerity to riot and attack Westerners because of what they deem "insults" to Islam. They resort to violence and threats of death without any inhibition, such as the attacks responding to the Danish cartoons, and now a fatwah has been issued ordering the death and promising a $150,000 reward for the killing of the Swedish cartoonist now in hiding, or his editor.
Notice that I have heretofore refrained from mentioning the series of attacks on American embassies and facilities and American personnel, or the attacks directed to killing of busloads of Israeli children, as I wanted to demonstrate the verity of the incompability of Islamic thought and behavior with modern civilized societies worldwide. What you depict as a conflict due to Israeli conduct is just a reflection of the disaffection of Islam from modernity worldwide as demonstrated by its involvement in all of these conflicts. it's not a Jewish problem. It's a problem with a primitive belief system that cannot reconcile itself with coexistence with other cultures, and which has now resumed its jihad in its effort to conquer the world in the name and interests of Islam.