Dennis Ross, you may remember, was Bill Clinton's Middle East 'peace' envoy. Mearsheimer and Walt see him as an integral of Israel's lobby in the United States, noting that, although Ross has "occasionally criticized specific Israeli actions," he "believes that the United States should give Israel substantial diplomatic, economic, and military support even when Israel takes actions the United States opposes" and that he "has devoted a significant amount of his professional life to encouraging this sort of support." (The Israel Lobby & US Foreign Policy, 2007, p 114)
Little wonder then at the Israel first content of his near 2-page spread in Saturday's Australian. Some gems - rebutted:
"The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is essentially one of two national movements competing for the same space."
No it isn't. The 'conflict' is essentially one of an indigenous people, denied self-determination in its ancestral home by the British, then set upon, driven out, or otherwise occupied, by a European settler-colonial movement - Zionism - introduced and fostered by the British." (Give them hope & peace, 19/5/18)
"In my talk [in 2005 to a few hundred Palestinians in Gaza before the Israeli withdrawal], I said that Palestinians had never been able to control their own destiny - the Arabs determined what would be done in 1948."
What rubbish! A US-manipulated UNGA set the scene in 1947 by disregarding the right of the Palestinians to determine the fate of their country and partitioning it into a Jewish and an Arab states. This, of course, gave the Zionist forces in Palestine the pretext they needed to overrun as much of Palestine as they could, and drive out as many Palestinians as they could, without any regard whatever for the borders laid down by the UN partition plan.
"Hamas said the protests would be peaceful even as it called them Demonstrations for Return - return to Palestinian homes in Israel."
To begin with, Hamas didn't organise the protests. And there is here the incredible suggestion that merely calling for the right of the Palestinians to return to the homes and lands stolen from them by Israel in 1948, and mobilising protests in support of that right, is enough to render those protests not peaceful.
"But, of course, those being mobilised don't have homes to go back to in Israel... "
And why is that Mr Ross?
"... and Israel is not the country it was in 1948."
Well, ain't that a COMPELLING reason for the Palestinians to kept in their Gaza Ghetto box?
"Hamas's leaders [want] to stigmatise Israel before the world as a way of also weakening Israel's ability to engage in self-defense and discredit it internationally."
So let me get this straight. Gunning down defenceless Palestinian protesters (we won't even mention journalists) with sniper rifles is self defence. And it's the protesters, not Israel's own actions, who are discrediting Israel. Right...
Ross pees on us but would have us think it's raining.
Showing posts with label Dennis Ross. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dennis Ross. Show all posts
Monday, May 21, 2018
Sunday, July 16, 2017
Bill Clinton's Handshake Charade
However appalling, Trump is really only the tip of the iceberg of American ignorance and narcissism. Take our latest US visitor, for example, Clinton/Obama diplomat Dennis Ross, currently wowing them at Murdoch's Australian:
"Ross grew up in a non-religious Californian household, the son of a Catholic father and Jewish mother. At 19, inspired by the Six-Day War, he became religiously Jewish." (Long road to Israeli-Palestinian peace littered with broken deals and lost will, Brad Norington, 15/7/17)
Note that Ross was radicalised at 19. It seems that, in the US, such radicalisation, from all American boy to Zionist fanatic, is the perfect qualification and starting point for a career in US-style Middle East diplomacy. Sort of puts Jared Kushner in perspective, doesn't it?
And here's the pinnacle of that career, according to Norington:
"During an impressive career, Ross... helped facilitate the historic White House handshake between Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israel's Yitzhak Rabin."
Leaving aside discussion of the endless peace-process charade, and the preposterous, childish idea of Clinton's that this then (1993) 76-year-old colonial running sore could be solved by a cheap theatrical handshake, rather than by the hard yards of a decolonisation process and the rendering of justice to Palestine's dispossessed and occupied, let's just look at the minutiae of this supposedly "impressive" achievement, as described elsewhere by Ross himself. Here he is interviewed by Jason M. Breslow of PBS's Frontline program (6/1/16):
Were you in the Rose Garden when [President Clinton] forged the handshake between [Yasser] Arafat and Rabin?
-Yes.
Tell me about that.
-There is an interesting back story to this... So we [Ross and Secretary of State Warren Christopher] get a call from Rabin... and he says, 'Look there's been a breakthrough with the PLO'... still... he's skeptical. He wants to know what our reaction to this is going to be. Well, our reaction is, this is a historic breakthrough between Israel and the PLO, two national movements competing for the same space, and for the first time they're prepared to recognize each other."
[Note here the false framing. The reality is otherwise. These are not two, long-resident communities living in one patch, in some kind of parity, but struggling to get along. This is the old story of a foreign, usurping settler-colonial movement vs an indigenous resistance movement trying to hold on to or reclaim its ancestral homeland.]
- Now [Israeli foreign minister Shimon] Peres tells us... that there should be a meeting at the White House to sign a Declaration of Principles, but it's too much for the Israeli public to see Arafat there. It's just too much to take.
[Yes, it's simply too much for the colons to stomach their PM meeting with the leader of the people they've been slicing and dicing for the past 76 years - eeeuw! What to do?]
- So it should be Peres and Abu Mazen [Arafat adviser, Mahmoud Abbas] who would come. We actually don't question this...
[Of course you don't, you've been a card-carrying Zionist since 1967 for Christ's sake! Those sniffy colons are your volk! Notice how, even in 1993, the Israelis had their eye on Abbas as a stooge?]
- ... but when we raise it with Clinton... he simply dismisses what we've told him, and immediately leaves the impression that if Arafat wants to come, he's welcome. And he's right... because his instinct is, the only way to bind the two leaders to this is to have this colossal event where they're kind of obligated before the world... We're telling him how uneasy Rabin is, first to even be there and secondly the idea that he's going to shake hands with this guy who, in Rabin's mind, is responsible for all sorts of acts of terror that, for him, are just very hard to swallow. It's difficult for Rabin to overcome this.
[Notice the fact that Rabin's hands are covered in 76 years of Palestinian blood nowhere occurs to Ross as a possible difficulty for Arafat or the Palestinians? This is America's idea of honest brokerage.]
- Now Clinton kind of raises this in private with the two of them before they go out.
[Bill doesn't want anyone spoiling his show!]
So they both agree to kind of come, and they're hanging around the Oval Office?
- Well, you come in advance, before we go out.
OK
- To the last minute, Rabin is insisting that Arafat can't come in anything that looks like a uniform.
[And of course Ross cannot help but oblige. His Master's Voice after all:]
- We're telling Arafat, 'You can't come with a -- you don't bring a weapon.' You know, he always had a pistol. 'You don't bring a weapon to the White House.' So they come in, and the president talks to both leaders. He is already encouraging them...
[We wouldn't dare tell Rabin...]
Have they met before?
- No.
How are they with each other?
- Rabin is very uneasy. The idea of personally shaking hands with with this guy is physically difficult for him.
[With this guy...?!]
- He couldn't hide his feelings... So here is Clinton, who sees this guy give this remarkable speech on the one hand, and physically, it's hard for him to shake hands with this guy. So the iconic photograph - he literally envelops them with his arms. But he knows he has to create that image... to make peace, and how can you do that if you're not prepared to shake hands? (pbs.org)
"Ross grew up in a non-religious Californian household, the son of a Catholic father and Jewish mother. At 19, inspired by the Six-Day War, he became religiously Jewish." (Long road to Israeli-Palestinian peace littered with broken deals and lost will, Brad Norington, 15/7/17)
Note that Ross was radicalised at 19. It seems that, in the US, such radicalisation, from all American boy to Zionist fanatic, is the perfect qualification and starting point for a career in US-style Middle East diplomacy. Sort of puts Jared Kushner in perspective, doesn't it?
And here's the pinnacle of that career, according to Norington:
"During an impressive career, Ross... helped facilitate the historic White House handshake between Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israel's Yitzhak Rabin."
Leaving aside discussion of the endless peace-process charade, and the preposterous, childish idea of Clinton's that this then (1993) 76-year-old colonial running sore could be solved by a cheap theatrical handshake, rather than by the hard yards of a decolonisation process and the rendering of justice to Palestine's dispossessed and occupied, let's just look at the minutiae of this supposedly "impressive" achievement, as described elsewhere by Ross himself. Here he is interviewed by Jason M. Breslow of PBS's Frontline program (6/1/16):
Were you in the Rose Garden when [President Clinton] forged the handshake between [Yasser] Arafat and Rabin?
-Yes.
Tell me about that.
-There is an interesting back story to this... So we [Ross and Secretary of State Warren Christopher] get a call from Rabin... and he says, 'Look there's been a breakthrough with the PLO'... still... he's skeptical. He wants to know what our reaction to this is going to be. Well, our reaction is, this is a historic breakthrough between Israel and the PLO, two national movements competing for the same space, and for the first time they're prepared to recognize each other."
[Note here the false framing. The reality is otherwise. These are not two, long-resident communities living in one patch, in some kind of parity, but struggling to get along. This is the old story of a foreign, usurping settler-colonial movement vs an indigenous resistance movement trying to hold on to or reclaim its ancestral homeland.]
- Now [Israeli foreign minister Shimon] Peres tells us... that there should be a meeting at the White House to sign a Declaration of Principles, but it's too much for the Israeli public to see Arafat there. It's just too much to take.
[Yes, it's simply too much for the colons to stomach their PM meeting with the leader of the people they've been slicing and dicing for the past 76 years - eeeuw! What to do?]
- So it should be Peres and Abu Mazen [Arafat adviser, Mahmoud Abbas] who would come. We actually don't question this...
[Of course you don't, you've been a card-carrying Zionist since 1967 for Christ's sake! Those sniffy colons are your volk! Notice how, even in 1993, the Israelis had their eye on Abbas as a stooge?]
- ... but when we raise it with Clinton... he simply dismisses what we've told him, and immediately leaves the impression that if Arafat wants to come, he's welcome. And he's right... because his instinct is, the only way to bind the two leaders to this is to have this colossal event where they're kind of obligated before the world... We're telling him how uneasy Rabin is, first to even be there and secondly the idea that he's going to shake hands with this guy who, in Rabin's mind, is responsible for all sorts of acts of terror that, for him, are just very hard to swallow. It's difficult for Rabin to overcome this.
[Notice the fact that Rabin's hands are covered in 76 years of Palestinian blood nowhere occurs to Ross as a possible difficulty for Arafat or the Palestinians? This is America's idea of honest brokerage.]
- Now Clinton kind of raises this in private with the two of them before they go out.
[Bill doesn't want anyone spoiling his show!]
So they both agree to kind of come, and they're hanging around the Oval Office?
- Well, you come in advance, before we go out.
OK
- To the last minute, Rabin is insisting that Arafat can't come in anything that looks like a uniform.
[And of course Ross cannot help but oblige. His Master's Voice after all:]
- We're telling Arafat, 'You can't come with a -- you don't bring a weapon.' You know, he always had a pistol. 'You don't bring a weapon to the White House.' So they come in, and the president talks to both leaders. He is already encouraging them...
[We wouldn't dare tell Rabin...]
Have they met before?
- No.
How are they with each other?
- Rabin is very uneasy. The idea of personally shaking hands with with this guy is physically difficult for him.
[With this guy...?!]
- He couldn't hide his feelings... So here is Clinton, who sees this guy give this remarkable speech on the one hand, and physically, it's hard for him to shake hands with this guy. So the iconic photograph - he literally envelops them with his arms. But he knows he has to create that image... to make peace, and how can you do that if you're not prepared to shake hands? (pbs.org)
Saturday, July 15, 2017
Palestinians Finally Recognise Israel as Jewish State
The problem (one of them anyway) with Greg Sheridan, Australia's "most influential foreign affairs analyst" as he's trumpeted in The Australian, is that he relies on his readers (to the extent, of course, that he has any) not to look too closely at what he writes. And, of course, they don't look too closely, because reading what he writes is really all about confirming existing prejudices and reinforcing existing ignorance.
Which, I guess, explains why we had not one but two Sheridan pieces in yesterday's emission of The Australian: the first, a report, Beazley baulks at Palestine push, stamped, as always, EXCLUSIVE; the second, an op-ed, Nod to Palestine an ignorant and regressive idea. Both, of course, bewail Bob Carr's "nasty anti-Israel resolution [which] has embarrassed senior ALP leaders."
Parenthetically, you'd have to be a rusted-on Zionist fanatic to wade through either piece of poo, but what sort of extra lunacy, I wonder, would be required for one to read both, except of course for purposes of demolition? (Hell, maybe I'm the only person in the country to have soiled my boots.)
Anyway, let's start with this in the op-ed:
"Last week I had lunch with Dennis Ross, who was the Middle East co-ordinator for Bill Clinton and then a senior adviser on the Middle East for Barack Obama. It would be pretty hard to call him a neocon or a Likudnik or a supporter of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu... Ross... tells me one of the main obstacles to peace is that the Palestinian leadership has never accepted the legitimacy of a Jewish national movement, which is why it won't recognise Israel as a Jewish state."
OK, so Ross doesn't have horns quite as long as those of His Satanic Majesty, Benjamin Netanyahu. Nonetheless, the real problem is that those obdurate Palestinians won't recognise Israel as a Jewish state.
Now, if we turn from the op-ed to the 'report,' we find this from HSM:
"In an exclusive interview with The Australian earlier this year, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated his support for the two-state solution long term. 'The question is not whether the Palestinians get a state but whether that state will recognise Israel..."
Which compels us to conclude that, as much as Sheridan would like to have us believe that there is some fundamental political difference between the fast-talking US Zionist and the foaming Israeli war criminal, the truth is that the two are one and the same when it comes to demanding that the Palestinians perform the mother-of-all-grovels.
Which, in turn, had me imagining just what form that MOAG might take:
Yes, you guys were right all along, and we Palestinians were wrong. We really were, as your great patron Lord Balfour put it in his Holy Declaration, merely the "existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine," of no particular consequence therefore.
And as for those "civil and religious rights," which he graciously offered us in his Declaration, and which we scorned back then as manifestly inadequate, we should have seen that they were good enough for us.
And of course, when your saintly Chaim Weizmann indicated, soon after, that he wanted a Palestine as Jewish "as England is English and France is French," we should have embraced the idea without so much as a raised eyebrow, nay, happily, joyously strewing flowers in your path as you disembarked in your thronging thousands at Jaffa on ships coming from Poland or Russia.
Yes, we should have seen the superior, God-like wisdom in the good Lord's decree that "Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land," as he once so eloquently put it.
So, here it is, for what it's worth, our belated recognition that yes, Israel is a Jewish state.
So sorry to have troubled you all these years, we'll get out of your way now...
Which, I guess, explains why we had not one but two Sheridan pieces in yesterday's emission of The Australian: the first, a report, Beazley baulks at Palestine push, stamped, as always, EXCLUSIVE; the second, an op-ed, Nod to Palestine an ignorant and regressive idea. Both, of course, bewail Bob Carr's "nasty anti-Israel resolution [which] has embarrassed senior ALP leaders."
Parenthetically, you'd have to be a rusted-on Zionist fanatic to wade through either piece of poo, but what sort of extra lunacy, I wonder, would be required for one to read both, except of course for purposes of demolition? (Hell, maybe I'm the only person in the country to have soiled my boots.)
Anyway, let's start with this in the op-ed:
"Last week I had lunch with Dennis Ross, who was the Middle East co-ordinator for Bill Clinton and then a senior adviser on the Middle East for Barack Obama. It would be pretty hard to call him a neocon or a Likudnik or a supporter of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu... Ross... tells me one of the main obstacles to peace is that the Palestinian leadership has never accepted the legitimacy of a Jewish national movement, which is why it won't recognise Israel as a Jewish state."
OK, so Ross doesn't have horns quite as long as those of His Satanic Majesty, Benjamin Netanyahu. Nonetheless, the real problem is that those obdurate Palestinians won't recognise Israel as a Jewish state.
Now, if we turn from the op-ed to the 'report,' we find this from HSM:
"In an exclusive interview with The Australian earlier this year, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated his support for the two-state solution long term. 'The question is not whether the Palestinians get a state but whether that state will recognise Israel..."
Which compels us to conclude that, as much as Sheridan would like to have us believe that there is some fundamental political difference between the fast-talking US Zionist and the foaming Israeli war criminal, the truth is that the two are one and the same when it comes to demanding that the Palestinians perform the mother-of-all-grovels.
Which, in turn, had me imagining just what form that MOAG might take:
Yes, you guys were right all along, and we Palestinians were wrong. We really were, as your great patron Lord Balfour put it in his Holy Declaration, merely the "existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine," of no particular consequence therefore.
And as for those "civil and religious rights," which he graciously offered us in his Declaration, and which we scorned back then as manifestly inadequate, we should have seen that they were good enough for us.
And of course, when your saintly Chaim Weizmann indicated, soon after, that he wanted a Palestine as Jewish "as England is English and France is French," we should have embraced the idea without so much as a raised eyebrow, nay, happily, joyously strewing flowers in your path as you disembarked in your thronging thousands at Jaffa on ships coming from Poland or Russia.
Yes, we should have seen the superior, God-like wisdom in the good Lord's decree that "Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land," as he once so eloquently put it.
So, here it is, for what it's worth, our belated recognition that yes, Israel is a Jewish state.
So sorry to have troubled you all these years, we'll get out of your way now...
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Follow the Thread...
.... from this...
"Even though the Great Recession technically ended in 2009, incomes fell, poverty rose and the number of Americans without health insurance jumped again in 2010, the federal government announced Tuesday. The nation's poverty rate increased to 15.1% in 2010, up from 14.3% in 2009 and the highest level since 1993, according to the US Census Bureau's annual Income, Poverty & Health Insurance Coverage report for 2010. An additional 2.6 million landed in poverty lat year, bringing the total to 46.2 million - the highest number since the government started tracking poverty in the 1950s." (US poverty rate climbed to 15.1% last year, total number hit all-time record, Janell Ross, huffingtonpost.com, 13/9/11)
... to this...
"Israel's defence ministry said on Sunday that the United States has agreed to provide it with an additional $235 million to finance its rocket defence system... The additional funds come on top of the $3 billion dollars of annual military aid given by the US to Israel." (US 'to give Israel extra aid for rocket system', AFP, news.yahoo.com, 25/12/11)
... and, finally, this:
"Within the US, Obama has laid the groundwork for a new and bigger war in the Middle East by relocating troops from Iraq and Afghanistan and concentrating them facing Iran. To undermine Iran, Washington is expanding clandestine military and civilian operations against Iranian allies in Syria, Pakistan, Venezuela and China. The key to the US and Israeli bellicose strategy toward Iran is a series of wars in neighboring states, world-wide economic sanctions, cyber-attacks aimed at disabling vital industries and clandestine terrorist assassinations of scientists and military officials. The entire push, planning and execution of the US policies leading up to a war with Iran can be empirically attributed to the Zionist power configuration (ZPC) occupying strategic positions in government, mass media and 'civil society'. A systematic analysis of policymakers designing and implementing economic sanctions policy in Congress finds prominent roles for mega-Zionists like Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Howard Berman; in the White House, Dennis Ross, and Jeffrey Feltman in State; Stuart Levy and his replacement David Cohen in Treasury. The White House is totally beholden to Zionist fund raisers and takes its cue from the '52' Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations. The Israeli-Zionist strategy is to encircle Iran, weaken it economically and attack its military. The Iraq invasion was the US's first war for Israel; the Libyan war the second; the current proxy war against Syria is the third. These wars have destroyed Israel's adversaries or are in the process of doing so. During 2011, economic sanctions, which were designed to create domestic discontent in Iran were the principle weapon of choice. The global sanctions campaign engaged the entire energies of the major Jewish-Zionist lobbies. They also faced no opposition in the mass media, Congress or the White House. The ZPC faced virtually no criticism from any of the progressive, leftist and socialist journals, movements or grouplets - with a few notable exceptions. The past year's relocation of troops from Iraq to the borders of Iran, the sanctions and the rising Big Push from Israel's fifth column in the US means War in the Middle East. This likely means a 'surprise' aerial and maritime missile attack by US forces. This will be based on a concocted pretext of an 'imminent nuclear attack' cooked up by Mossad and transmitted by the ZPC to the Congress and White House for consumption and transmission to the world. It will be a destructive, bloody, prolonged war for Israel. The US will bear the direct military cost by itself but the rest of the world will pay a dear economic price. The Zionist-promoted US war will convert the recession of early 2012 into a major depression by the end of the year and probably provoke mass upheavals." (A doomsday view of 2012, James Petras, petras.lehaine.org, 24/12/11)
"Even though the Great Recession technically ended in 2009, incomes fell, poverty rose and the number of Americans without health insurance jumped again in 2010, the federal government announced Tuesday. The nation's poverty rate increased to 15.1% in 2010, up from 14.3% in 2009 and the highest level since 1993, according to the US Census Bureau's annual Income, Poverty & Health Insurance Coverage report for 2010. An additional 2.6 million landed in poverty lat year, bringing the total to 46.2 million - the highest number since the government started tracking poverty in the 1950s." (US poverty rate climbed to 15.1% last year, total number hit all-time record, Janell Ross, huffingtonpost.com, 13/9/11)
... to this...
"Israel's defence ministry said on Sunday that the United States has agreed to provide it with an additional $235 million to finance its rocket defence system... The additional funds come on top of the $3 billion dollars of annual military aid given by the US to Israel." (US 'to give Israel extra aid for rocket system', AFP, news.yahoo.com, 25/12/11)
... and, finally, this:
"Within the US, Obama has laid the groundwork for a new and bigger war in the Middle East by relocating troops from Iraq and Afghanistan and concentrating them facing Iran. To undermine Iran, Washington is expanding clandestine military and civilian operations against Iranian allies in Syria, Pakistan, Venezuela and China. The key to the US and Israeli bellicose strategy toward Iran is a series of wars in neighboring states, world-wide economic sanctions, cyber-attacks aimed at disabling vital industries and clandestine terrorist assassinations of scientists and military officials. The entire push, planning and execution of the US policies leading up to a war with Iran can be empirically attributed to the Zionist power configuration (ZPC) occupying strategic positions in government, mass media and 'civil society'. A systematic analysis of policymakers designing and implementing economic sanctions policy in Congress finds prominent roles for mega-Zionists like Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Howard Berman; in the White House, Dennis Ross, and Jeffrey Feltman in State; Stuart Levy and his replacement David Cohen in Treasury. The White House is totally beholden to Zionist fund raisers and takes its cue from the '52' Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations. The Israeli-Zionist strategy is to encircle Iran, weaken it economically and attack its military. The Iraq invasion was the US's first war for Israel; the Libyan war the second; the current proxy war against Syria is the third. These wars have destroyed Israel's adversaries or are in the process of doing so. During 2011, economic sanctions, which were designed to create domestic discontent in Iran were the principle weapon of choice. The global sanctions campaign engaged the entire energies of the major Jewish-Zionist lobbies. They also faced no opposition in the mass media, Congress or the White House. The ZPC faced virtually no criticism from any of the progressive, leftist and socialist journals, movements or grouplets - with a few notable exceptions. The past year's relocation of troops from Iraq to the borders of Iran, the sanctions and the rising Big Push from Israel's fifth column in the US means War in the Middle East. This likely means a 'surprise' aerial and maritime missile attack by US forces. This will be based on a concocted pretext of an 'imminent nuclear attack' cooked up by Mossad and transmitted by the ZPC to the Congress and White House for consumption and transmission to the world. It will be a destructive, bloody, prolonged war for Israel. The US will bear the direct military cost by itself but the rest of the world will pay a dear economic price. The Zionist-promoted US war will convert the recession of early 2012 into a major depression by the end of the year and probably provoke mass upheavals." (A doomsday view of 2012, James Petras, petras.lehaine.org, 24/12/11)
Monday, May 23, 2011
Obamanation
In America, where brown is now the new black, and Arab/Muslim the new Jew, Iranian-born American academic and author Hamid Dabashi guides us through the brave new world of Obamanation:
"For 8 long and murderous years (2000-08), the world was at the mercy of George W Bush. He ruled the United States - and, with it, the world - with utter disregard for the most basic principles of human decency. He ended his term leaving a desperate and desolate world covered with human corpses and spotted with the bodies of tortured men, murdered mothers, raped women, orphaned children, ruined buildings, burned farms and burning factories, firms, and oilfields, from Afghanistan to Iraq to Palestine to Lebanon to the streets of New Orleans. There has been much talk in the United States about prosecuting Bush and his subordinates for war crimes. But no tribunal could ever issue a verdict harsh enough to equal the pain and suffering that this man caused among the poor and disenfranchised. Aided by his European and Israeli allies, and actively or passively endorsed by corrupt and incompetent Arab and Muslim heads of state, George W Bush looks like a nightmare from which the world has finally woken up; after a clean, cold shower it may once again remember humanity, decency and morality. Bush's last act before getting lost in historical ignominy was endorsing the Israelis' massacre of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza.
"After 8 catastrophic years, Americans from all walks of life, disgusted with what this man had done to the world in their name, came together on November 4, 2008, in a momentous occasion of collective redemption and catharsis, and chose Barack Hussein Obama as the first African-American to hold the highest office in the land. More profoundly, this was the expression of their highest aspirations and their hope to return to the fold of humanity and to stop embodying the principle source of menace and mayhem around the globe. But it did not take more than a mere couple of days for the euphoria of Obama's victory to begin giving way to an icy cold fear and wonder. From the windy winter cold of Chicago he announced his selection of Illinois Congressman Rahm Israel Emanuel as his chief of staff - effectively the gatekeeper of his White House. Congressman Emanuel comes from a strongly pro-Israeli family. He served in the Israeli army for a short time; his father Benjamin Emanuel, served for a much longer period with the notorious Irgun, the Zionist terrorist organization chiefly responsible for scores of murderous acts, among them the ethnic cleansing of Palestine when Israel was being superimposed on the world map in the 1940s. Throughout his presidential campaign, Obama had remained a suspicious figure to pro-Israeli voters, and no matter how hard he tried to convince them that he held the American relationship with Israel 'sacrosanct', as he put it on a number of occasions, he was not completely successful. In his infamously obsequious speech in front of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) soon after he declared victory in June 2008 in his pursuit of the Democratic presidential nomination, he spent a great deal of time refuting the allegations with which he had been charged - chief among them that he was a Muslim. The appointment of a pro-Israeli chief of staff went a long way toward reassuring pro-Israeli lobbies and voters, and the ground opened up like an abyss under the feet of those who had hoped for something different.
"The disappointment that a wide spectrum of Obama supporters now faced was neither limited to this single appointment nor confined to what their candidate would do toward reconciling the idealism of his youthful community activism (over which the memory of Malcolm X shone brightly) with the pragmatism of his adult presidency vis-a-vis the predicament of Palestinians and the warmongering of the Jewish apartheid state. Every appointment that he made in public in November and December 2008 called for a reassessment of his campaign promises. When he finally announced New York's junior senator, Hillary Rodham Clinton (who stands to the right of the Likud Party when it comes to Israel), as his choice for Secretary of State, and the news spread that Dennis Ross (a key AIPAC operative) would be his choice to head Middle East Affairs, the disappointment deepened. When Israel commenced the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza late in December 2008, President-elect Obama seemed thoroughly preoccupied with the mounting economic problems that his administration was inheriting; he remained silent on the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians, calling on the mantra 'We have only one president at a time'. While many were dismayed, I for one was relieved that at least he did not repeat the nauseating Bush administration line that Hamas was responsible for the carnage the Israeli army was visiting upon Gaza. As we say in Persian: Ma ra beh kheyr-e to ommid nist, shar marasan. We have no hope in your doing any good; prithee do us no evil.
"It did not help matters when Rahm Emanuel's father, Benjamin Emanuel, gave an interview to the Israeli newspaper Ma'riv in which he predicted that 'obviously' his son 'will influence the president to be pro-Israel. Why wouldn't he be? What is he, an Arab? He's not going to clean the floors of the White House'. The crudely racist remark delighted Zionists from Tel Aviv to New York and created havoc among the Arab and Muslim communities in the US, forcing the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) - hardly known for its daring imagination or principled postion on anything - to write a letter to Rahm Emanuel demanding that he repudiate his father's comment and send a copy to the president-elect. According to reports, the younger Emanuel called Mary Rose Oakar, the ADC president, to dissociate himself from his father's remark and apologize.
"Under ordinary circumstances this apology would have been the end of the matter. But these are not ordinary times. The unabated and in fact growing racism toward Muslims in general and Arabs in particular in North America (and Western Europe) requires far more serious attention - for it is the newest gestation of classical Christian anti-Semitism and white supremacist racism, now coming together in their fullest unfolding. For what seems to have happened since the events of 9/11, but particularly during the presidential election of 2008, is the semiotic transmutation of 'blacks' and 'Jews' into 'Arabs' and 'Muslims', respectively, in the evolving lexicon of American racism - and for this reason Benjamin Emanuel's remark deserves closer attention, as does the entire presidential election in 2008, during which, on countless occasions, this recodification of American racism was fully on display, particularly when it came to the figure and phenomenon of Barack Hussein Obama himself.
"What does it mean, exactly, to say: 'He's not going to clean the floors of the White House' - of all things? What does it signify? Who has stereotypically, and in a racist cliche, cleaned the floors of the White House? Certainly not Arabs - though perhaps in Israel, where cheap Palestinian labor is systematically abused, Israelis are used to seeing Arabs clean their floors. In Washington DC and the rest of the United States, and certainly in the White House, a whole history of African slavery has determined who, as a matter of racist cliche, cleans the floors. In the racist mind of the aging Benjamin Emanuel - who does not know the language of concealing one's bigotry and speaks like the Irgun terrorist that he was - he simply switches the African for the Arab and lets go of 'the values upon which he has raised his family'. What the senior Emanuel uttered is not all that odd for an Israeli racist. The domain of anti-Arab bigotry in Israel, from which Benjamin Emanuel draws freely, is not limited to Irgun terrorists. 'Mohammed's a pig', and 'Death to Arabs' are the staples of Israeli racism regularly sprayed on mosques and spewed at the residents of occupied Palestine, as is the hurling of severed pigs' heads into Muslim houses of worship. What is embedded in the senior Emanuel's remark is the regenerative transfusion of two differently coded modes of racism: Ashkenazi Israeli racism toward Arabs (and, for that matter, Sephardic Jews) and white American racism toward blacks. In a simple act of cross-codification, the two modes of racism come together and announce not just a mere Israelification of American political culture but also the transformation of racist registers of Blacks into Arabs (or 'sand niggers' as they have been popularly dubbed)." (Brown Skin, White Masks, 2011, pp 112-115)
"For 8 long and murderous years (2000-08), the world was at the mercy of George W Bush. He ruled the United States - and, with it, the world - with utter disregard for the most basic principles of human decency. He ended his term leaving a desperate and desolate world covered with human corpses and spotted with the bodies of tortured men, murdered mothers, raped women, orphaned children, ruined buildings, burned farms and burning factories, firms, and oilfields, from Afghanistan to Iraq to Palestine to Lebanon to the streets of New Orleans. There has been much talk in the United States about prosecuting Bush and his subordinates for war crimes. But no tribunal could ever issue a verdict harsh enough to equal the pain and suffering that this man caused among the poor and disenfranchised. Aided by his European and Israeli allies, and actively or passively endorsed by corrupt and incompetent Arab and Muslim heads of state, George W Bush looks like a nightmare from which the world has finally woken up; after a clean, cold shower it may once again remember humanity, decency and morality. Bush's last act before getting lost in historical ignominy was endorsing the Israelis' massacre of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza.
"After 8 catastrophic years, Americans from all walks of life, disgusted with what this man had done to the world in their name, came together on November 4, 2008, in a momentous occasion of collective redemption and catharsis, and chose Barack Hussein Obama as the first African-American to hold the highest office in the land. More profoundly, this was the expression of their highest aspirations and their hope to return to the fold of humanity and to stop embodying the principle source of menace and mayhem around the globe. But it did not take more than a mere couple of days for the euphoria of Obama's victory to begin giving way to an icy cold fear and wonder. From the windy winter cold of Chicago he announced his selection of Illinois Congressman Rahm Israel Emanuel as his chief of staff - effectively the gatekeeper of his White House. Congressman Emanuel comes from a strongly pro-Israeli family. He served in the Israeli army for a short time; his father Benjamin Emanuel, served for a much longer period with the notorious Irgun, the Zionist terrorist organization chiefly responsible for scores of murderous acts, among them the ethnic cleansing of Palestine when Israel was being superimposed on the world map in the 1940s. Throughout his presidential campaign, Obama had remained a suspicious figure to pro-Israeli voters, and no matter how hard he tried to convince them that he held the American relationship with Israel 'sacrosanct', as he put it on a number of occasions, he was not completely successful. In his infamously obsequious speech in front of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) soon after he declared victory in June 2008 in his pursuit of the Democratic presidential nomination, he spent a great deal of time refuting the allegations with which he had been charged - chief among them that he was a Muslim. The appointment of a pro-Israeli chief of staff went a long way toward reassuring pro-Israeli lobbies and voters, and the ground opened up like an abyss under the feet of those who had hoped for something different.
"The disappointment that a wide spectrum of Obama supporters now faced was neither limited to this single appointment nor confined to what their candidate would do toward reconciling the idealism of his youthful community activism (over which the memory of Malcolm X shone brightly) with the pragmatism of his adult presidency vis-a-vis the predicament of Palestinians and the warmongering of the Jewish apartheid state. Every appointment that he made in public in November and December 2008 called for a reassessment of his campaign promises. When he finally announced New York's junior senator, Hillary Rodham Clinton (who stands to the right of the Likud Party when it comes to Israel), as his choice for Secretary of State, and the news spread that Dennis Ross (a key AIPAC operative) would be his choice to head Middle East Affairs, the disappointment deepened. When Israel commenced the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza late in December 2008, President-elect Obama seemed thoroughly preoccupied with the mounting economic problems that his administration was inheriting; he remained silent on the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians, calling on the mantra 'We have only one president at a time'. While many were dismayed, I for one was relieved that at least he did not repeat the nauseating Bush administration line that Hamas was responsible for the carnage the Israeli army was visiting upon Gaza. As we say in Persian: Ma ra beh kheyr-e to ommid nist, shar marasan. We have no hope in your doing any good; prithee do us no evil.
"It did not help matters when Rahm Emanuel's father, Benjamin Emanuel, gave an interview to the Israeli newspaper Ma'riv in which he predicted that 'obviously' his son 'will influence the president to be pro-Israel. Why wouldn't he be? What is he, an Arab? He's not going to clean the floors of the White House'. The crudely racist remark delighted Zionists from Tel Aviv to New York and created havoc among the Arab and Muslim communities in the US, forcing the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) - hardly known for its daring imagination or principled postion on anything - to write a letter to Rahm Emanuel demanding that he repudiate his father's comment and send a copy to the president-elect. According to reports, the younger Emanuel called Mary Rose Oakar, the ADC president, to dissociate himself from his father's remark and apologize.
"Under ordinary circumstances this apology would have been the end of the matter. But these are not ordinary times. The unabated and in fact growing racism toward Muslims in general and Arabs in particular in North America (and Western Europe) requires far more serious attention - for it is the newest gestation of classical Christian anti-Semitism and white supremacist racism, now coming together in their fullest unfolding. For what seems to have happened since the events of 9/11, but particularly during the presidential election of 2008, is the semiotic transmutation of 'blacks' and 'Jews' into 'Arabs' and 'Muslims', respectively, in the evolving lexicon of American racism - and for this reason Benjamin Emanuel's remark deserves closer attention, as does the entire presidential election in 2008, during which, on countless occasions, this recodification of American racism was fully on display, particularly when it came to the figure and phenomenon of Barack Hussein Obama himself.
"What does it mean, exactly, to say: 'He's not going to clean the floors of the White House' - of all things? What does it signify? Who has stereotypically, and in a racist cliche, cleaned the floors of the White House? Certainly not Arabs - though perhaps in Israel, where cheap Palestinian labor is systematically abused, Israelis are used to seeing Arabs clean their floors. In Washington DC and the rest of the United States, and certainly in the White House, a whole history of African slavery has determined who, as a matter of racist cliche, cleans the floors. In the racist mind of the aging Benjamin Emanuel - who does not know the language of concealing one's bigotry and speaks like the Irgun terrorist that he was - he simply switches the African for the Arab and lets go of 'the values upon which he has raised his family'. What the senior Emanuel uttered is not all that odd for an Israeli racist. The domain of anti-Arab bigotry in Israel, from which Benjamin Emanuel draws freely, is not limited to Irgun terrorists. 'Mohammed's a pig', and 'Death to Arabs' are the staples of Israeli racism regularly sprayed on mosques and spewed at the residents of occupied Palestine, as is the hurling of severed pigs' heads into Muslim houses of worship. What is embedded in the senior Emanuel's remark is the regenerative transfusion of two differently coded modes of racism: Ashkenazi Israeli racism toward Arabs (and, for that matter, Sephardic Jews) and white American racism toward blacks. In a simple act of cross-codification, the two modes of racism come together and announce not just a mere Israelification of American political culture but also the transformation of racist registers of Blacks into Arabs (or 'sand niggers' as they have been popularly dubbed)." (Brown Skin, White Masks, 2011, pp 112-115)
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