Harassing the Jews on Daily Kos: An Introduction

{Cross-Posted at the NewsRealBlog.}



Daily Kos is among the largest political blogs in the world. It has well over 200,000 registered users and, whether anyone likes it or not, has some influence within American politics.  In the 2006 midterm, for example, they raised money for 17 netroots candidates, winning eight races: Jim Webb (VA-Sen), Jon Tester (MT-Sen), Tim Walz (MN-01), Joe Sestak (PA-07), Ciro Rodriguez (TX-23), Patrick Murphy (PA-08), Jerry McNerney (CA-11), and Paul Hodes (NH-02).  

Daily Kos helped drive Joe Lieberman from the Democratic party and the mainstream media promotes Daily Kos through Keith Olbermann. It also, of course, helped give Barack Obama the Presidency - an effort that I helped in, myself.

Jews in Oz: How Did We Get Here, Dorothy?

{Cross-Posted at The NewsRealBlog.}

If people had told me a year or two ago that I would be participating on a blog associated with David Horowitz, I would have told them that they were out of their bleeding minds. I’m a liberal, for chrissake. I just spent almost the last ten years hatin’ on the Bush administration, marching against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, phone banking for MoveOn.org, donating money to the Gore campaign, the Kerry campaign, the Obama campaign. I am in favor of a woman’s right to choose, in favor of Gay rights, in favor of governmental regulation of polluting industries, and would prefer to see a more equitable distribution of wealth via the tax code. Heck, I even live in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco, the bluest neighborhood in the bluest city of a dominantly blue state.

And, yet, here I am.

The Righteous Few

Anyone who knows anything about my political views understands that I have moved from the liberal-left to a post-ideological view that seeks to emphasize humanity (or, really, humaneness) as the proper core of political expression. Up until fairly recently, I, like many, many others, tended to view politics as a manichean contest between liberals versus conservatives, the left versus the right, Democrats versus Republicans. When I looked out across the field of issues virtually all of my opinions fell on the left side of the political divide. For example, I found myself in favor of a woman's right to choose, in opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in favor of the regulation of polluting industries, in favor of universal health care, as well as in favor of GLBT rights. Taken together my stance on these issues, among others, clearly places me on the political left.

Nonetheless, I no longer consider myself as Left and have no intention of any longer supporting the "progressive" movement. There are a number of reasons for this, but the most important one has to do with the growing realization that many of my (formerly) fellow liberals seem to consider themselves as members of The Righteous Few, the Enlightened Ones, in combat with the delusional and malicious many. Most political activists seem to live in a fantasy world in which they are engaged in an imaginary battle to the death with their conservative opponents who are not merely wrong on this or that issue, but represent an almost transcendent evil that must perpetually be opposed. For people who think like this, which would include a majority of people writing at places like Daily Kos or the Huffington Post, the opposition is something less than, or other than, human and thus something to be ridiculed and hated. They do not merely disagree with the likes of Rush Limbaugh or Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck, but reduce these individuals to hideous things.

They demean. They dehumanize. And they demonize the political opposition. People like those mentioned above are spoken of as if they are the scum of the earth, war mongers, and the enemies of humanity. The truth is, of course, that people like Limbaugh, Palin, and Beck (not to mention, say, Sean Hannity or Michelle Malkin or Anne Coulter) are people with whom we disagree on core issues and who often present their cases in a manner just as vile and obnoxious as the left does in its opposition to them. In this way left and right mirror one another. Each side views the other not merely as wrong, but as inhuman and worthy of contempt.

Anyone who knows anything about the history of the human species understands that it is precisely this willingness to hate "the other" which has caused untold human misery and war. The Nazis othered Jews and Gays and Gypsies and Socialists, considering them either racially inferior or, in this way or that, as enemies of the German people. American slave-holders, likewise, othered black people, considering them less than human and suggesting that their "blackness" was a symbol of a corrupted nature. The genocide of native peoples, whether in the Americas or Australia or elsewhere was due not merely to competition over land and resources, but because indigenous peoples were viewed as barbaric, inferior, and unworthy. Because these out-groups were looked upon as inferior, it was entirely appropriate to demean them in public discourse. To see liberals, day after day, doing precisely to their political opponents what those opponents do to them, is to see liberals indulging in behavior that goes entirely against the highest ideals of liberalism, itself. This is nothing new, of course. Liberals and progressives have been suggesting that their political opponents are less than human since at least the middle of the 19th century, if not earlier. When Marx divided the world between the hated bourgeoisie and the struggling proletariat, activists in that latter group suggested that working people had nothing whatsoever in common with the dominant political class that needed to be overcome, by violence if necessary. These rich people, these evil capitalists, these elite corporatists and their upwardly mobile middle-class, white-collar enablers and supporters represented a class of people to be hated and overthrown, not merely opposed.

The western left is currently rife with people who view the world in similar terms. It's the Righteous Few in a cosmic death grip with the despised other. This, it should be emphasized, is an essentially religious way of looking at politics. The manichean Us versus Them is at its core no different from the Medieval Catholic view that suggested that the war against the apostate and unbeliever or non-Christian... or the wars within Christianity between Protestants and Catholics... reflected on earth the battle between the Forces of Light and the Forces of Darkness as fought out in Heaven. In this way the battle against conservatism, or the Republican party, becomes a deeply self-serving interior experience of personal superiority. We are right and they are wrong. We have truth, while they have lies. We are good and they are not. We are the Forces of Light and they are the Forces of Darkness.

Needless to say, I am exaggerating a tad, but only a tad. The inclination to demonize the other side is a highly authoritarian political inclination. If the other side is something akin to evil, or if Republicans are really crypto-Fascists, than they deserve whatever they get. If someone is truly worthy of demonization and dehumanization than they are also worthy of whatever punishment can be dished out, including violence. Furthermore, if the other side truly is as horrible as many liberals suggest than to oppose them becomes a moral imperative and anyone failing to bow to this moral imperative is an ethical pygmy that must be harassed into submission. They become the dull and insidious sheeple with no understanding of what is happening around them, the stupid masses who enable a corrupt, war-like, Imperialist, regime, or system. In this way regular Americans, who are merely trying to get by in the world and build something decent for themselves and their family, are portrayed as something grotesque, as sheeple, as, in older terms, "the masses."

The Righteous Few may see themselves as holding aloft the sword of Enlightenment, but what they are really doing is little different from what all authoritarians have done, divide the world into Good People versus Bad People and then seek to destroy, or hold down, the Bad People.

I will have none of it.

What the Israelis Have Learned and What the Palestinians Have Not

When it comes to I-P we hear an awful lot about "competing narratives." Narratives in this context have little to do with history and much to do with self-serving propaganda. There is, we are to understand, an Israeli narrative and a Palestinian Arab narrative. The question is not whose narrative is true, or closest to the truth, but whose narrative will prevail in the public imagination.

At the center of these narratives is the '48 war. In the original Israeli narrative the Palestinians fled the fighting at the behest of Arab leaders who assured them that after they drove the Jews into the sea they would be free to return to their homes. In the original Palestinian narrative militaristic Jews ethnically cleansed the Palestinians from their traditional homeland resulting in the Nakba, or "catastrophe," along with the misery, oppression, and poverty of refugee status.

In the never-ending vitriolic I-P debate these two narratives, with all their various permutations and interpretations and historical implications, continue to butt heads. One thing that is often overlooked, however, is that the narratives have not remained static in the last 60 years. In the mid 1980s, Israeli historians such as Benny Morris, among others, the so-called New Historians, began to seriously question the Israeli narrative. In The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (1988), Morris took aim at the prevailing Israeli narrative and shot it full of holes.

Morris, and the historians that followed him, discovered that the Palestinian refugees did not merely flee the fighting at the behest of Arab leadership, but were often driven from their homes by Jewish military forces, precisely as the Arabs had always claimed. And while some scholars tend to focus more on the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and others focus more on the Palestinian violence that preceded that ethnic cleansing, the Israeli "narrative" has moderated. Most historians of Israel and the I-P conflict now understand that some Palestinians left at the behest of the leadership, some were pushed out by Israeli troops because they were fighting Israeli troops, and some simply fled out of a rational fear of war... an option that the Jews did not have.

It is not only Israeli scholars who have moderated their views, but the Israeli public, as well. If the 1948 war represents one vital crux of the matter, the 6 Day War and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza represents another vital crux. Between 1967 and the First Intifada of the late 1980s, the majority of Israelis considered the idea of a two-state solution to be nothing less than a dagger at the heart of the Jewish state. In 1948, Arab governments, with the full backing of their people, sought to destroy the Jewish state and failed. In 1967, Arab governments again sought to destroy the Jewish state and failed. And in 1973, Arab governments yet again sought to destroy the Jewish state and yet again failed. Israelis were, and for good reason, convinced that a Palestinian state cozied up right next to a Jewish state would be nothing less than a terrorist country intent on violence toward Israel. For this reason the Israeli right-wing encouraged Jewish settlement in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria, as they would say) as a buffer between themselves and a hostile Palestinian population.

The intifada of the late 80s, however, represented a major wake-up call for the Israeli public. It was the violence and the suicide bombings and the chaos of those years that taught most Israelis that the occupation was untenable, unsustainable, and counterproductive. Thus by the 1990s the Israeli consensus became pro-two-state solution. Even hard-line right-wing Likudniks like Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon eventually came around to the idea. The center of Israeli thinking on the subject had shifted in a significant way and the public came to favor Palestinian autonomy in a Palestinian state.

Thus in at least two major ways the Israeli narrative has shifted and moderated itself. The myth of complete Israeli innocence in '48 was busted and the acceptance of a two-state solution became the consensus. Likewise the Palestinian narrative has also shifted. If the Palestinians believed that the militarist Jews unjustly drove them from their homes in '48, they are now even more convinced of the rightness and truthfulness of this simplistic view. If the Palestinians saw themselves as mere victims of the struggle, they are now even more convinced of their own innocence and the righteousness of their cause. In short, while the Israelis have moderated their views, the Palestinians have, year after year, decade after decade, bolstered their original narrative.

The Palestinians still refuse to accept any responsibility for the events of 1948. Missing from their narrative is the historical fact that they launched a civil war against the Jews of the Yishuv in November of 1947, directly after UN Resolution 181, the partition resolution. Directly after the Holocaust the Arabs of the mandate, who had allied themselves with Hitler and the Nazis, sought to slaughter the Jewish population in the traditional homeland of the Jewish people. Furthermore, if the Israelis came to accept the idea of a two-state solution, with a state of Palestine living in peace next to a Jewish state, the Palestinian leadership has never accepted the idea and apparently still has not.

Hamas, of course, remains a genocidal theocratic organization devoted to the violent overthrow of the Israeli government and the replacement of the Jewish state with an Islamist state grounded in Sharia law. Fatah, for its part, has refused offer after offer for a Palestinian state next to Israel. Just as the Arabs refused partition in 1937 under the British Peel Commission and just as they refused a Palestinian state next to Israel with UN 181 in 1947, so Arafat refused a Palestinian state comprised of 100 percent of Gaza, well over 90 percent of the West Bank in a contiguous area, with the Arab sections of eastern Jerusalem for a Palestinian capital in 2000. As recently as 2008, Mahmoud Abbas turned down Ehud Olmert's offer for state claiming that the offer was not good enough, despite the fact that it was an even better deal than what Ehud Barak offered Arafat when Bill Clinton sought to end the conflict.

The bottom line is that the Israelis have shifted their thinking over the years and have been willing to make painful concessions for the purpose of peace while the Palestinians have remained entirely intransigent and continue to refuse a state of their own. The only way the occupation can possibly end is with Palestinian acceptance of Palestinian statehood next to Israel. Until they are ready for that, and until they give up the dream of destroying the Jewish state, than they will continue to live in poverty and under occupation.

It's no longer up to Israel because the Israelis have long ago accepted the principle of two states.

Only when the Palestinians also accept the principle of two states for two peoples, only when they moderate their own narrative, can there be a resolution. Until they do their misery will continue even as the Jewish state thrives.

Israel 1242 - Tibet 18

Daily Kos is the largest political blog in the world and represents the grassroots / netroots of the Democratic party and the progressive movement. These people claim to be interested in human rights, but they are not. Not really. If Daily Kos, as a group, honestly cared about human rights than they would care about the human rights of all peoples. But they do not. Do they care about human rights in Darfur where in recent years over 300,000 people have died and millions more displaced? Not so much. Do they care about the over 5 MILLION dead in the Congo? So, sorry. Not really.

How about Tibet? Surely these self-righteous activists, so committed to peace and universal principles of human rights would care about Tibet. It's Tibet, for chrissake. China is occupying Tibet and denying the Tibetans basic human rights. Surely left-liberal American activists of the kind that write on Daily Kos would care about them. Well, again, not so much really.

A basic tag search of the Daily Kos blog reveals that between Feb 21, 2009 and today there were a grand total of 18 essays on the topic of Tibet. That is a total of 18 essays over the period of about 13 months on a left political blog with over 200,000 registered users. During that exact same period of time, however, there were 1242 diaries on the subject of Israel.

Tag search Israel.

Tag search Tibet.

Whatever else we might make of such numbers it clearly reveals that the denizens of Kos-Land take an exceedingly selective view on the subject of human rights. They care about some people and hardly at all about others.

In truth, these people do not really care about human rights at all for if they did they would care about the human rights of people who do not happen to live in Ramallah or Gaza City. If they honestly cared about human rights they would care about the Tibetans. They would care about Darfur. They would care about Congo and Chechnya.

They don't.

1242 to 18.

The blatant hypocrisy is astounding.

Time for Israel to Take Matters into its Own Hands

(Cross-posted at My Left Wing.)

There are only two possible ways to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict, a negotiated settlement or a unilateral disengagement. Now that Barack Obama has thrown a monkey wrench into any possible negotiated settlement, Israel must go it alone.

Just why Obama has thrown a monkey wrench into the possibility of a negotiated settlement is open to question. That he has done so is not. When Obama demanded "total settlement freeze" as a precondition for negotiations, a requirement that Netanyahu either could not, or would not, meet, it meant that Mahmoud Abbas could require nothing less. The President of the Palestinian Authority, of course, is in no position to be viewed as softer on Israel than the American President. Thus the PA refuses negotiations, even "proximity talks."

Last year, early in Netanyahu's second term, he agreed to a two-state solution, called for negotiations without preconditions, and later agreed to a ten month moratorium on Israeli housing construction in the West Bank. This last being a concession that no other previous Israeli Prime Minister has ever made and that no other PA President has ever demanded as a precondition for talks.

Despite this important concession, the American President is not satisfied. While demanding exactly nothing from the PA, the US administration is allegedly "insulted" at the recent announcement by a functionary in the Israeli Ministry of the Interior that Israel will, some years from now, build housing for Jewish people in a Jewish neighborhood in the northeastern section of the ancient capital of the Jewish state. This terrible affront was "condemned" by US Vice President Joe Biden during his recent visit to Israel and resulted in a series of American gestures toward Israeli leadership that could only have been designed to distance the US from Israel and to thereby undermine any Israeli confidence in the US as a fair interlocutor.

In defiance of anything resembling reasonable diplomatic standards toward a friend and ally, Hillary Clinton gave Netanyahu a 45 minute dressing down for the Israeli crime of building in the Israeli capital, Joe Biden arrived an hour and a half late to dinner with Netanyahu in Israel, and in Washington Barack Obama received Netanyahu to the White House with all the enthusiasm one might usually reserve for the likes of Idi Amin.

Israel therefore faces Palestinian leadership in the Gaza that calls for the slaughter of Jews and a Muslim theocracy from "the river to the sea," a Palestinian leadership in the West Bank that still refuses to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and that refuses any negotiations until all its demands are met, and an American President that has proven himself openly hostile to the Israeli Prime Minister, if not Israel itself.

For these reasons Israel must forget about negotiations and take unilateral measures to end the occupation of the West Bank. The Palestinians have, after all, never favored a state of Palestine alongside Israel and are showing no signs that they favor such a state currently. In 1937, after the Arabs of Palestine took to rioting and murder during the Arab Revolt of the late 1930s, the British offered to divide Palestine into an Arab state and a Jewish state. The Jews reluctantly accepted, the Arabs did not. In 1947, the UN offered a similar deal to the Arabs and the Jews in Resolution 181, the partition resolution. Again the Jews accepted it and again the Arabs did not, instead preferring to launch first a civil war in Palestine between November 1947 and May 1948 and then a wider war featuring the surrounding Arab states versus the Jews, who were forced to field women and Holocaust survivors in their efforts to fend off the attack.

One would have hoped that during the ensuing years that Palestinian statelessness and refugee status might have inclined them to change their mind and accept a state. This, unfortunately, has proven not to be the case. After the 6 Day War, in 1967, Israel offered to return the West Bank to Jordan and the Gaza to Egypt, in accordance with UN Resolution 242, but was met with the famous "3 Noes" of the Arab League, including its Palestinian contingent, in the Khartoum Resolution:

"No negotiations. No recognition. No peace."

It is interesting to note, furthermore, that in the 19 years between 1948 and 1967, when Egypt occupied Gaza and Jordan occupied the West Bank, that no Palestinian leadership ever called for the creation of a Palestinian state in those lands. In fact, prior to 1967, the great majority of Palestinian Arabs did not even consider themselves "Palestinian," thereby indicating a lack of Palestinian nationalism to begin with.

Nonetheless, between 1967 and 2000, Palestinian nationalism did develop and Palestinian identity firmly established itself. Between 1993 and 2000, the Israelis engaged PLO chief Yassir Arafat in the Oslo Peace Process which culminated in Ehud Barack's offers to Arafat in 2000 and 2001. Israel offered Arafat 100 percent of the Gaza, over 90 percent of the West Bank in a contiguous area, and Arab sections of eastern Jerusalem as a capital. Instead of accepting the offer, Arafat refused to make a counter offer and launched the Second Intifada resulting in the deaths of thousands of Israelis and Palestinians. Between 2000 and 2003, the death toll represents the equivalent of an Israeli "9/11" every two weeks, week in and week out, year after year.

Finally, in 2008, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered Abbas a similar deal which was likewise refused. Some critics of Israel like to suggest that these final two offers were refused by the Palestinian leadership because they were not good enough. They claim, echoing the now deceased Arafat, that the West Bank would have been divided into three "Bantustans" in a non-contiguous area. If this is the case than both US President, Bill Clinton, and the chief US negotiator, Dennis Ross, are lying and Arafat was telling the truth. In any case, it should be noted that the partition plan that Israel accepted in 1948 really was comprised of three "Bantustans" without Jerusalem as the capital, as can be seen from the map below where the orange represents the proposed Jewish state.

.

Thus, currently, the US government is pressuring Israel to accept what Israel has already accepted, while applying no pressure on the Palestinians to accept what they have never accepted, a Palestinian state in peace next to the Jewish state. That being the case, it is time for Israel to take the Palestinian "no" for an answer.

Since the Palestinians refuse to negotiate, and because the US president has proven himself a hostile and untrustworthy interlocutor, Israel must go it alone. Israel should simply declare its final borders, and pull the IDF behind those borders, as it relocates any West Bank Jews who would prefer to live in Israel, rather than in a newly created state of Palestine. Of course, this would mean that the Palestinians would not likely get any part of Jerusalem for their capital, but there's no reason why Ramallah could not serve as the capital of a Palestinian state.

At a certain point one must understand that "No" means "No."

We have arrived at that point.