Lobe on Obsession Film Finally Getting Mainstream Attention

Albeit, negative attention. The goal was to scare people into voting for McCain (which may still happen). Many of Obsession's supporters also claimed Obama was soft on terrorism, not supportive enough of Israel, etc. Obama has done everything he can to persuade the powerful and influential otherwise. These are the same people who are also looking to link Obama now with the highly respected Rashid Khalidi of Columbia University, in a negative way of course; claiming he was a PLO spokesman. Maybe he was, but so what? George Bush called Ariel Sharon, Mr. Sabra and Shatilla massacre, a man of peace.

An article on CNN is highly demonstrative of how the debate on Israel here in the U.S. is controlled. The CNN article says that Khalidi has accused Israel of "occupying" Palestinian land... why is the word occupying even qualified here? Because the United States is the Twilight Zone in relation to the rest of the world on foreign policy with Israel.

The Repubicans are trying very hard right now to make the Israel issue an American issue in light of the economic hardships many of us are facing here. It doesn't seem to be working.

Now for Mr. Lobe...

“Obsession,” the Islamophobic video that has been distributed via newspaper inserts to some 28 million households in key swing states this fall, is getting some overdue negative attention from the mainstream media at last. The Washington Post carried an article about the video Sunday that made it clear that the mass distribution was intended to influence the election in the Republicans’ favor. And Monday’s Atlantic online blog post by Jeffrey Goldberg, entitled “The Jewish Extremists Behind ‘Obsession’” was particularly notable.

He casts a remarkably negative light on Aish HaTorah, the Israeli organization whose U.S.-based officials, in Goldberg’s words, “are up to their chins in this project.” (I think IPS was the first news source to point out the connection between Aish and ‘Obsession’ in an article published back in March, 2007, although more has since come out, including a recent IPS update in September which noted other Israeli connections to the video and its distribution.)

I especially appreciated Goldberg’s identification of the Jerusalem Post’s Caroline Glick as one of his “favorite hysterics” — I posted on one of her fulminations last June — and as those behind the project as representing the “lunatic fringe.” In addition to Glick, who also heads the Middle East program at Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy, Goldberg would presumably apply that description to Daniel Pipes and Steven Emerson who played prominent roles in the video. It was Goldberg, a veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), who wrote that passionate indictment, “Israel’s ‘America Problem’” in the Washington Post’s Outlook section last May of the major national Jewish organizations, particularly the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and AIPAC, for confusing “pro-Israe”l with being pro-settler in their advocacy efforts.

Of course, the producer/distributor of “Obsession” was the still-mysterious Clarion Fund, which has just released a sequel, “The Third Jihad” about which my colleague Eli Clifton posted earlier this month. The new video, originally intended for distribution before next week’s election, according to the Post’s article, suffered production delays (hence, the distribution of “Obsession” instead).

While I haven’t yet seen it, I understand that it features commentary by Clifford May of the Likudnik Foundation for the Defense of Democracy and, more prominently, Princeton historian and neo-con icon Bernard Lewis, who, according to various accounts, helped persuade Dick Cheney, among others, that the Iraq invasion would be a very good thing for all concerned. It was also Lewis who on August 8, 2006, predicted on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would very possibly launch an attack on Israel exactly two weeks later, on August 22, to mark “the night when many Muslims commemorate the night flight of the prophet Muhammad on the winged horse Buraq, first to ‘the farthest mosque,’ usually identified with Jerusalem, and then to heaven and back. This [date],” he went on, “might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world.” Goldberg’s words about “hysterics” and “the lunatic fringe” come to mind.

Nonetheless, it was just six months later that, with Cheney in attendance, Lewis delivered the American Enterprise Institute’s (AEI) annual Irving Kristol Lecture — in which he warned that militant Islam was launching its third attempt to conquer Europe and the West through “terror and migration.” And it was presumably after that that he sat down for a long interview with the Islamophobic makers of “Obsession” and “The Third Jihad.”

Incidentally, for a penetrating analysis of “Obsession”, read a review by David Shasha featured on Richard Silverstein’s blog at the Tikun Olam site.

Chomsky on Voting for the Lesser of the Two Evils

The GOP has become the Know Nothing Party

Fittingly, Republicans are going back to their roots. Many non-whites in America must feel semi-awkward when at a GOP rally for McCain. As the rhetoric from the uglies of the GOP gets uglier, Obama's lead increases. The race issue (and now the religion issue) is alive and well today.

Powell's Words a Lesson for McCain

by Sally Quinn

It is my belief that John McCain disqualified himself from being an effective leader of this country about a year ago when he was asked if he would vote for a Muslim candidate for president.

McCain's reply: "I just have to say in all candor that since this nation was founded primarily on Christian principles, personally, I prefer someone who has a grounding in my faith." McCain recanted a few days later, saying "I would vote for a Muslim if he or she was the candidate best able to lead the country and defend our political values."

It was good that he backed off the comment, but we need more from a man who wants to be president of the United States and leader of the free world. What we need to hear John McCain say is what we heard Colin Powell say Sunday on Meet the Press: "Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country?' The answer is 'No. That's not America."

It shouldn't be. There are 1.3 billion Muslims in the world. Most of them are our friends and some our allies. Only a tiny minority wish us ill. Our next President faces enormous problems throughout the world. How can we have a leader who would alienate the very people he must deal with to solve those problems?

Think of the Muslims in Northern Africa, the Gulf states, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Turkey, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, the Caucuses, Indonesia. What are they to think about a President who not only puts them down but allows and condones a distinctly anti-Muslim tone to infiltrate his campaign?

But he has.

McCain rarely lets an opportunity go by without referring to "radical Islamic terrorism" as our greatest threat. McCain referred to megachurch pastor Rod Parsley, who calls Islam a 'false' religion that should be destroyed, as his "spiritual adviser". He rejected Parsley's support only after the pastor's views became widely known.

McCain has been silent when his opponent is introduced at rallies as Barack "Hussein" Obama, a not so subtle attempt to promote the lie that Obama is Muslim. At a recent McCain rally a woman said she didn't trust Obama because he was an "Arab." "No," McCain demurred. "He's not. He's a decent family man."

What? You can't be both?

McCain's rhetoric has influenced others in his party. Two weeks ago, Virginia Republican Party Chairman Jeffrey M. Frederick compared Obama with Osama Bin Ladin. "Both have friends that bombed the Pentagon," said Frederick. "That is scary." Frederick later said he was joking. McCain rebuked the comments.

At a recent meal with Muslim American friends I encountered despair and outrage. Some were Republicans who said they could not vote for McCain. They felt disenfranchised by him. One said his Democratic friends were afraid to openly campaign or support Obama for fear of hurting him. Obama, they say, is in an untenable position. He is a Christian and yet denying being a Muslim implies that there is something wrong with being a Muslim.

One of my Muslim friends said, "I have two young children. I don't want them to grow up in a country where Muslims are looked upon with suspicion.

Fifty percent of Americans either view Muslims as terrorists or with suspicion. Colin Powell addressed those suspicions admirably Sunday. Powell said he was troubled that some Republicans had been spreading rumors that Obama is a Muslim.

"Well, the correct answer is that he is not a Muslim, he's a Christian," Powell said. "He's always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer's no., that's not America. Is there something wrong with some seven year old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be President? Yet I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, 'He's a Muslim and he might be associated with terrorists.' This is not the way we should be doing it in America."

How many Americans understand that there are pluralists and extremists in every religion? How many know that Muslims revere Jesus as a great prophet and when they say his name they say "Peace be upon him"? How many Americans know that in the Koran it says, "God made us different nations and tribes that we may come to know one another"?

John McCain could tell them if he really wanted to. If he doesn't, what are the 1.3 billion Muslims in the world going to think of a country which could elect a man who seems so disrespectful of their religion?

Chomksy on the Economic Crisis

After the Breakdown of Bretton Woods

Exposing the Un-Democratic Face of Capitalism

by Noam Chomsky

The simultaneous unfolding of the US presidential campaign and unraveling of the financial markets presents one of those occasions where the political and economic systems starkly reveal their nature.

Passion about the campaign may not be universally shared but almost everybody can feel the anxiety from the foreclosure of a million homes, and concerns about jobs, savings and healthcare at risk.

The initial Bush proposals to deal with the crisis so reeked of totalitarianism that they were quickly modified. Under intense lobbyist pressure, they were reshaped as "a clear win for the largest institutions in the system . . . a way of dumping assets without having to fail or close", as described by James Rickards, who negotiated the federal bailout for the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management in 1998, reminding us that we are treading familiar turf.

The immediate origins of the current meltdown lie in the collapse of the housing bubble supervised by Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, which sustained the struggling economy through the Bush years by debt-based consumer spending along with borrowing from abroad. But the roots are deeper. In part they lie in the triumph of financial liberalisation in the past 30 years - that is, freeing the markets as much as possible from government regulation.

These steps predictably increased the frequency and depth of severe reversals, which now threaten to bring about the worst crisis since the Great Depression.

Also predictably, the narrow sectors that reaped enormous profits from liberalisation are calling for massive state intervention to rescue collapsing financial institutions.

Such interventionism is a regular feature of state capitalism, though the scale today is unusual. A study by international economists Winfried Ruigrok and Rob van Tulder 15 years ago found that at least 20 companies in the Fortune 100 would not have survived if they had not been saved by their respective governments, and that many of the rest gained substantially by demanding that governments "socialise their losses," as in today's taxpayer-financed bailout. Such government intervention "has been the rule rather than the exception over the past two centuries", they conclude.

In a functioning democratic society, a political campaign would address such fundamental issues, looking into root causes and cures, and proposing the means by which people suffering the consequences can take effective control.

The financial market "underprices risk" and is "systematically inefficient", as economists John Eatwell and Lance Taylor wrote a decade ago, warning of the extreme dangers of financial liberalisation and reviewing the substantial costs already incurred - and proposing solutions, which have been ignored. One factor is failure to calculate the costs to those who do not participate in transactions. These "externalities" can be huge. Ignoring systemic risk leads to more risk-taking than would take place in an efficient economy, even by the narrowest measures.

The task of financial institutions is to take risks and, if well-managed, to ensure that potential losses to themselves will be covered. The emphasis is on "to themselves". Under state capitalist rules, it is not their business to consider the cost to others - the "externalities" of decent survival - if their practices lead to financial crisis, as they regularly do.

Financial liberalisation has effects well beyond the economy. It has long been understood that it is a powerful weapon against democracy. Free capital movement creates what some have called a "virtual parliament" of investors and lenders, who closely monitor government programmes and "vote" against them if they are considered irrational: for the benefit of people, rather than concentrated private power.

Investors and lenders can "vote" by capital flight, attacks on currencies and other devices offered by financial liberalisation. That is one reason why the Bretton Woods system established by the United States and Britain after the second World War instituted capital controls and regulated currencies.*

The Great Depression and the war had aroused powerful radical democratic currents, ranging from the anti-fascist resistance to working class organisation. These pressures made it necessary to permit social democratic policies. The Bretton Woods system was designed in part to create a space for government action responding to public will - for some measure of democracy.

John Maynard Keynes, the British negotiator, considered the most important achievement of Bretton Woods to be the establishment of the right of governments to restrict capital movement.

In dramatic contrast, in the neoliberal phase after the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s, the US treasury now regards free capital mobility as a "fundamental right", unlike such alleged "rights" as those guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: health, education, decent employment, security and other rights that the Reagan and Bush administrations have dismissed as "letters to Santa Claus", "preposterous", mere "myths".

In earlier years, the public had not been much of a problem. The reasons are reviewed by Barry Eichengreen in his standard scholarly history of the international monetary system. He explains that in the 19th century, governments had not yet been "politicised by universal male suffrage and the rise of trade unionism and parliamentary labour parties". Therefore, the severe costs imposed by the virtual parliament could be transferred to the general population.

But with the radicalisation of the general public during the Great Depression and the anti-fascist war, that luxury was no longer available to private power and wealth. Hence in the Bretton Woods system, "limits on capital mobility substituted for limits on democracy as a source of insulation from market pressures".

The obvious corollary is that after the dismantling of the postwar system, democracy is restricted. It has therefore become necessary to control and marginalise the public in some fashion, processes particularly evident in the more business-run societies like the United States. The management of electoral extravaganzas by the public relations industry is one illustration.

"Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business," concluded America's leading 20th century social philosopher John Dewey, and will remain so as long as power resides in "business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by command of the press, press agents and other means of publicity and propaganda".

The United States effectively has a one-party system, the business party, with two factions, Republicans and Democrats. There are differences between them. In his study Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, Larry Bartels shows that during the past six decades "real incomes of middle-class families have grown twice as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans, while the real incomes of working-poor families have grown six times as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans".

Differences can be detected in the current election as well. Voters should consider them, but without illusions about the political parties, and with the recognition that consistently over the centuries, progressive legislation and social welfare have been won by popular struggles, not gifts from above.

Those struggles follow a cycle of success and setback. They must be waged every day, not just once every four years, always with the goal of creating a genuinely responsive democratic society, from the voting booth to the workplace.

Note

* The Bretton Woods system of global financial management was created by 730 delegates from all 44 Allied second World War nations who attended a UN-hosted Monetary and Financial Conference at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods in New Hampshire in 1944.

Bretton Woods, which collapsed in 1971, was the system of rules, institutions, and procedures that regulated the international monetary system, under which were set up the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) (now one of five institutions in the World Bank Group) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which came into effect in 1945.

The chief feature of Bretton Woods was an obligation for each country to adopt a monetary policy that maintained the exchange rate of its currency within a fixed value.

The system collapsed when the US suspended convertibility from dollars to gold. This created the unique situation whereby the US dollar became the "reserve currency" for the other countries within Bretton Woods.

This column originally appeared in the Irish Times.

FAIR goes after noted anti-Muslim pundits

http://www.smearcasting.com/index.html

That's the new web site by the folks at Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting. They have four nice, short articles on some of the recent anti-Muslim campaigns waged by people like Pipes (going after the Arabic-speaking school in NYC) and Malkin (the Dunkin Donuts-Rachel Ray-keffiyyah protest).

It's good to see fellow Americans standing up, speaking out against people whose jobs are to demonize Islam and Muslims.

Olmert a Radical Islamist

Ehud Olmert came to his senses in an interview with an Israeli newspaper stating that Israel must agree to peace with the Palestinians and return their land, reported by Uri Avnery at CounterPunch. Of course this only means that he's a dhimmi, a self-hating Jew and an undercover Islamist operating at the highest levels of Israeli government. This is even worse for the radical right than the former Mossad chief saying that Hamas is "not solely a terrorist group." Send more of those DVDs out!!!


Olmert's Final Divorce From "All of Eretz Israel"
by Uri Avnery

In colloquial Israeli Hebrew, when someone discovers something that everybody else already knows, we say: "Good morning, Elijahu!"

Why Elijahu? I don't know. Now one could say: "Good morning, Ehud!"

That's what I said to myself when I read the sensational interview that Ehud Olmert gave this week, on the eve of the Jewish New Year, to the newspaper "Yediot Aharonot".

AT THE end of his political career, after resigning from the prime ministership, while waiting for Tzipi Livni to set up a new government, he said some astounding things - not astounding in themselves, but certainly when they come from his mouth.

For those who missed it, here is what he said:

* "We must reach an agreement with the Palestinians, the essence of which is that we shall actually withdraw from almost all the territories, if not from all the territories. We shall keep in our hands a percentage of these territories, but we shall be compelled to give the Palestinians a similar percentage, because without that there will be no peace.

* "… including Jerusalem. With special solutions, that I can visualize, for the Temple Mount and the historical holy places … Anyone who wants to keep all the territory of the city will have to put 270 thousand Arabs behind fences within sovereign Israel. That won't work."

* "I was the first who wanted to impose Israeli sovereignty on all the city. I admit … I was not ready to look into all the depths of reality."

* "Concerning Syria, what we need first of all is a decision. I wonder if there is one single serious person in Israel who believes it is possible to make peace with Syria without giving up the Golan Heights in the end."

* "The aim is to try and fix for the first time a precise border between us and the Palestinians, a border that all the world [will recognize]."

* "Let's assume that in the next year or two a regional war will break out and we shall have a military confrontation with Syria. I have no doubt that we shall smite them hip and thigh [an allusion to Judges 15:8] … [But] what will happen when we win? … Why go to war with the Syrians in order to achieve what we can get anyway without paying such a high price?"

* "What was the greatness of Menachem Begin? [He] sent Dayan to meet with Tohami [Sadat's emissary] in Morocco, before he even met Sadat … and Dayan told Tohami, on behalf of Begin, that we were prepared to withdraw from all of Sinai."

* "Arik Sharon, Bibi Netanyahu, Ehud Barak and Rabin, his memory be blessed …each one of them took a step that led us in the right direction, but at some point in time, at some crossroads, when a decision was needed, the decision did not come."

* "A few days ago I sat in a discussion with the key people in the decision-making process. At the end [I told them]: listening to you, I understand why we have not made peace with the Palestinians and the Syrians during the last 40 years."

* " We can perhaps take a historic step in our relations with the Palestinians, and a historic step in our relations with the Syrians. In both cases the decision we must make is the decision we have refused to face with open eyes for 40 years."

* " When you sit on this chair you must ask yourself: where do you direct the effort? To make peace or just to be stronger and stronger and stronger in order to win the war … Our power is great enough to face any danger. Now we must try and see how to use this infrastructure of power in order to make peace and not to win wars."

* "Iran is a very great power … The assumption that America and Russia and China and Britain and Germany do not know how to handle the Iranians, and we Israelis know and we shall do so, is an example of the loss of all sense of proportion."

* "I read the statements of our ex-generals and I say: how can it be that they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing?"

My first reaction, as I said, was: Good morning, Ehud.

I am reminded of my late friend, the poet who went by the name of Yebi. Some 32 years ago, after dozens of Arab Israeli citizens were killed demonstrating against the expropriation of their lands, he came to me in utter turmoil and exclaimed: we must do something. So we decided to lay wreaths on the graves of the killed. There were three of us: Yebi, I and the painter Dan Kedar, who died last week. The gesture aroused a storm of hatred against us, the like of which I have not experienced before or since.

Since then, whenever someone in Israel said something in favor of peace, Yebi would burst out: "Where was he when we laid the wreaths?"

That is a natural question, but really quite irrelevant. Olmert, who fought all his life against our views, is apparently adopting them now. That is the main thing. Not "Good morning, Ehud" but "Welcome, Ehud".

True, we said this 40 years ago. But we were not an incumbent Prime Minister.

True, too, that these things were said and spelled out in detail by many good people, like those who wrote the Gush Shalom Draft Peace Treaty, the Nusseibeh-Ayalon document or the Geneva initiative. But none of them was an incumbent Prime Minister.

And that is the main thing.

IT SHOULD not be forgotten: In the period in which these ideas were crystallizing in Olmert's mind, he was allowing the settlements to expand, especially in East Jerusalem.

That gives rise to an unavoidable question: Does he really mean what he says? Isn't he cheating, as is his wont? Isn't this some sort of manipulation, as usual?

This time I tend to believe him. One can say: the words sound truthful. Not only the words themselves are important, but also the music. The whole thing sounds like the political testament of a person who is resigned to the end of his political career. It has a philosophical ring - the confession of a person who has spent two and a half years in the highest decision-making office in the land, has absorbed the lessons and drawn conclusions.

One can ask: Why do such people reach their conclusions only on finishing their term of office, when they can no longer do much about the wise things they are proposing? Why did Bill Clinton come to formulate his proposals for Israeli-Palestinian peace during his last days in office, after wasting eight years on irresponsible games in this arena? And why, for that matter, did Lyndon Johnson admit that the Vietnam War has been a terrible mistake right from the beginning only after he himself had brought about the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans and millions of Vietnamese?

The superficial answer lies in the character of political life. A Prime Minister rushes from problem to problem, from crisis to crisis. He is exposed to temptations and pressures from the outside and stress from the inside, coalition squabbling and inner-party intrigues. He has neither the time nor the detachment to draw conclusions.

The two and a half years of Olmert's term were full of crises, from the Second Lebanon War, for which he was responsible, to the corruption investigations which dogged him throughout. Only now has he got the time, and perhaps the philosophical composure, to draw conclusions.

That is the importance of this interview: the speaker is a person who stood for two and a half years at the center of national and international decision making, a person who was exposed to the pressures and the calculations, who had personal contact with the leaders of the world and of the Palestinians. A normal person, not brilliant, not a profound thinker by any means, a man of political practice, who "saw things from there that cannot be seen from here".

He has delivered a kind of State of the Nation report to the public, a summary of the reality of Israel after 60 years of the state and 120 years of the Zionist enterprise.

ONE CAN point out the huge gaps in this summary. There is no criticism of Zionist policy over five generations - but that is something that one cannot really expect from him. There is no empathy with the feelings, the aspirations and the traumas of the Palestinian people. There is no mention of the refugee problem (it is known that he is ready to take back just a few thousand in the framework of "family reunion"). There is no admission of guilt for the disastrous enlargement of the settlements. And the list is long.

The primitive basis of his world view has not changed. That is made clear by the following amazing statement: "Every grain of the area from the Jordan to the sea that we will give up will burn our hearts … When we dig in these areas, what do we find? Speeches by Arafat's grandfather, or Arafat's great great great grandfather? We find there the historical memories of the people of Israel!"

That is utter nonsense. It is totally unsupported by historical and archeological research. The man is just repeating things he picked up in his early youth, he is simply expressing his gut feelings. Anyone sticking to this ideology will find it hard to dismantle settlements and make peace.

All the same, what is in this testament?

It is an unequivocal and final divorce from "All of Eretz Israel" from a person who grew up in a home over which hovered the Irgun emblem: the map of Eretz Israel on both sides of the Jordan. For him, the Irgun slogan "Only Thus" has turned into "Anything But Thus".

It gives unequivocal support to the partition of the country. This time, his adherence to the principle of "Two States for Two Peoples" appears much more genuine, not lip service or sleight of hand. His demand for "fixing the final borders of the State of Israel" represents a revolution in Zionist thought.

Olmert has already said in the past that the State of Israel is "finished" if it does not agree to partition, because of the "demographic danger". This time he does not invoke that demon. Now he speaks as an Israeli who is thinking about the future of Israel as a progressive, constructive, peaceful state.

All this is put forward not as a vision for the remote future, but as a plan for the present. He demands that a decision be taken now. It almost sounds like: Let me continue for another few months, and I shall do it. The unstated assumption is that the Palestinians are ready for this historic turning point.

And he has fixed an Israeli position from which there can be no going back in any future negotiations.

This is the testament of the Prime Minister, and it is obviously intended for the next Prime Minister.

We don't know whether Tzipi Livni is ready to implement such a plan, or what she thinks about this testament. True, she has lately voiced rather similar ideas, but she is now entering the cauldron of the Prime Minister's office. One cannot know what she will do.

I wish her one thing above all: that at the end of her days as Prime Minister she will not have to sit down and give an interview, in which she, too, will apologize for missing the historic opportunity for making peace.

Uri Avnery is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom. He is a contributor to CounterPunch's book The Politics of Anti-Semitism.