Regular antiwar.com contributor Tom Engelhardt NAILS it – – – on Democracy Now! too.
Tom Engelhardt on “The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s” Here: http://www.democracynow.org/2010/6/18/afghan
Category: Middle East
Queer as Folk
Andrew Sullivan scolds the organizers of a gay pride parade in Madrid for withdrawing their invitation to an Israeli float:
Barring an Israeli float in Madrid’s gay pride parade seems perverse, exclusive and pernicious. They think they could have a pride parade in Gaza?
No, I’m pretty sure they don’t think that. I think it’s entirely possible that gay Spaniards are, you know, Spaniards – and as such are a little peeved at the Israeli government for assaulting civilian ships that carried some of their countrymen. Had Sullivan bothered to read more than one report on this story, and from somewhere other than Ynet, he might have learned that this wasn’t just a float with some random Israelis on it (though even Ynet noted that the Israeli delegation included representatives of Avigdor Lieberman‘s Foreign Ministry). This took five seconds to find on Google:
The float was sponsored by the municipality of Tel Aviv but Spain’s Federation of Lesbians, Gays, Transsexuals and Bisexuals withdrew the welcome mat after learning that the mayor of the Israeli city has not condemned last week’s naval raid, which killed nine pro-Palestinian activists.
“After this attack and taking into account that there has been no condemnation on the part of the mayor of Tel Avi we decided not to allow the float to participate,” the federation’s president, Antonio Poveda, told AFP.
“We see nothing wrong with Israeli organisations which are clearly in defence of human rights, taking part privately in gay pride,” he added.
So maybe they’re not fans of Hamas so much as people of principle.
Love, Exciting and New, Come Aboard, We’re Expecting You
Our quote of the day comes from wounded idealist Benjamin Netanyahu:
That was not a love boat. That was a boat of hatred. It was not a peaceful flotilla. The soldiers who boarded the ships were attacked by clubs, batons and knives.
And if you can bear to look, here’s a link to the Israel Defense Force spokesperson’s blog, with chilling photos of the hardware-store holocaust the activists had in mind.
Can We Hear the Recording Please?
In his zeal to defend Israel, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies’ (FDD) Cliff May cites a colleague’s contentions that the activists taking part in the “Freedom Flotilla†were obviously Islamic radicals bent on massacring Jews. From his weekly round-up of the very best in Likudnik commentary:
FDD’s Ben Weinthal notes:
According to media reports, activists invoked on their way to Gaza the Islamic battle cry, “Jews, remember Khyabar [sic], the army of Mohammed is returning.†The reference is to a Muslim massacre and expulsion of Jews in seventh-century Arabia.
The reader is then encouraged to “Read more†with a link that goes to a May 30 Jerusalem Post article which quotes Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon and the Foreign Ministry as the basis for this assertion:
Also Sunday, Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon criticized the effort, saying anti-Semitic chants voiced by the activists on board earlier in the day showed the ‘real motivation’ for the campaign, which he termed an ‘armada of hate.’
According to a Foreign Ministry press release, participants on the flotilla were recorded shouting ‘Khaybar Khaybar ya yahud, Jaish Muhammad saya’ud,’ which means ‘Jews, remember Khyabar [sic], the army of Mohammed is returning.’ This cry relates to an event in the seventh century when Muslims massacred and expelled Jews from the town of Khaybar, in modern-day Saudi Arabia.
‘Israel condemns the anti-Semitic chants that were publicized this morning,’ Ayalon said. ‘This amply demonstrates that many are not against a particular policy of the Israeli government, but have very real and dangerous hatred for Jews and the Jewish State.’
So, from FDD, we get “media reports†that are based entirely on assertions by a government ministry without the slightest effort to confirm those assertions from any independent source. This, of course, begs many questions, such as of the source of the recording, how it was obtained by the Foreign Ministry, and how many of the flotilla’s participants allegedly took part in the chants, if indeed that’s what took place.
As a former reporter for the New York Times, May should be a bit more conscientious about what he and his colleagues assert as fact. Especially when Khaybar is spelled “Khyabar,†twice.
Michael Rubin: The Moral Contortionist
Michael Rubin has posted yet another rant on National Review’s “The Corner.” This time he goes after the petty Europeans and “chattering class†for their quaint beliefs in proportionality.
As Daniel Luban and Jim Lobe have pointed out, Michael Rubin has been banging out post after post about the Israeli attack on civilian ships in international water.
Rubin has tried to make lemonade from the lemons that the IDF handed him on Monday by claiming that now, more than ever, the U.S. should unconditionally support Israel and that a failure to offer such support could result in Israel unilaterally attacking Iran.
So, according to Rubin, the U.S. relationship with Israel boils down to our responsibility to enable a self-destructive friend while permitting that friend to dictate our foreign policy through blackmail.
In his post last night, Rubin attacks the liberal European notion of proportionality and charges that the European response to the Israeli attack on the “Free Gaza†flotilla is naive and ignores the importance of disproportionality in protecting freedom and security.
Rubin writes:
A Question of Proportionality [Michael Rubin]
A lot of the criticism surrounding Israel’s actions against the Free Gaza flotilla center on proportionality. Did Israel apply disproportionate force? The same charges form the basis of the criticism leveled by the Goldstone Report and, indeed, also were leveled against Israel following the 2006 Hezbollah War and, before that, Operation Defensive Shield in 2002.
But why should any democratic government empowered to defend its citizenry accept Europe’s idea of proportion? When attacked, why should not a stronger nation or its representatives try to both protects its own personnel at all costs and, in the wider scheme of things, defeat its adversaries?
Likewise, when terrorists seek to strike at the United States, why should we find ourselves constrained by an artificial notion of proportionality when responding to those terrorists or their state sponsors?
Ultimately, it may be time to recognize that, in the face of growing threats to Western liberalism, strength and disproportionality matter more to security and the protection of democracy than the approval of the chattering class of Europe or the U.N. secretary general, a man whose conciliatory policies as foreign minister of South Korea proved to be a strategic disaster.
One final note on proportionality: Fifteen “peace†activists dead is a tragedy, but they represent only one one-thousandth of the death toll of a French heatwave.
Rubin clearly stated his loyalties to Israel in an earlier post on Monday. Still, it’s worth asking what Israel would have to do to earn a condemnation from him. The moral and logical contortions exhibited in Rubin’s posts on Monday would suggest that he will go to any length to defend Israel’s attack on civilian ships in international waters.
Rubin argues that notions of proportionality are a threat to Western liberalism. A more reasoned analysis might suggest that uncompromising support of an ally’s flagrant disregard of international law and reckless behaviors which needlessly result in civilian deaths is morally indefensible, bad politics and, to put it in the words that Rubin would use, a threat to Western liberalism.
The Everybody’s-Doing-It Dodge
On his Twitter feed, Glenn Greenwald commends Rep. Barney Frank for these recent comments:
In an interview with the Boston Herald, Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) said that that “‘as a Jew,’ Israeli treatment of Arabs around some of the West Bank settlements ‘makes me ashamed that there would be Jews that would engage in that kind of victimization of a minority.'”
I, too, thank Rep. Frank for his candor and his willingness to rise above tribalism. (Though I also agree with Jeremy that individuals have no reason to apologize for or feel ashamed of acts they oppose simply because those acts are committed under the auspices of a collective, whether legal, religious, or ethnic, that they “belong” to. As an official of the U.S. government, Rep. Frank has plenty to feel ashamed about; as a Jew, nothing.) Sadly, though, Frank turned right around the next moment with this:
In defense of Israel, Frank added there are people “howling for Israel to pay a price [for the Gaza aid ship attack] that don’t seem disturbed that North Koreans killed 46 South Koreans by torpedoing a South Korean boat. I think we have a right to ask for some consistency.”
Now lest it be said that my vicious, throbbing anti-Semitism has blinded me to the greater sins of Kim Jong-Il (and it will be said anyway), let me go on record as condemning the attack by a government that my tax dollars do not subsidize on a military vessel during what is technically still an ongoing war. Yes, Rep. Frank, it does appear to me that one of the two attacks is worse than the other, but I’ll let you guess which one.