Antiwar.com Blog

From The Jewish Week:

President George W. Bush will do better among Jewish voters in November than he did in 2000, even though Jews are much less supportive of his Iraq and anti-terror policies than other Americans.

And former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who hopes to be his Democratic opponent, will do better than some Jewish leaders predict.

The statistical portrait came in the yearly American Jewish Committee survey of Jewish public opinion, released this week at the start of what could be a watershed year in Jewish politics.

The 2003 survey also offered a slap at Christian conservatives, who are still seen as major propagators of anti-Semitism, and it pointed to continued Jewish resistance to government funding of religious schools.

There were hints of change, but also of a streak of political stubbornness in the Jewish community: For all the talk of a Jewish shift to the right, the community remains heavily Democratic, strongly liberal and deeply distrustful of some of the most conservative forces in American society.

David Harris, the AJCommittee executive director, said the most surprising statistic was the weak Jewish support for Bush’s war on terrorism in general and the U.S. effort in Iraq in particular.

Asked about Bush’s handling of the U.S. campaign against terrorism, 54 percent of respondents said they disapproved and 41 percent approved. The same proportion said they disapproved of the war with Iraq.

So a large majority of American Jews do not support Bush foreign policy, just as many of the Iraq war’s most vocal critics have been Jewish. The poll’s respondents also have some interesting thoughts on the sources of real anti-Semitism:

The poll also represented very bad news for a new ally of the pro-Israel community. In recent years Christian conservatives have become outspoken supporters of the current Israeli government, and many have railed against the rise of anti-Semitism around the world.

But in the AJCommittee poll, 20 percent of the Jewish respondents said that “most” members of the “religious right” are anti-Semitic, and another 21 percent selected “many.”

That puts religious conservatives second only to Muslims and far behind African Americans in being regarded as sources of anti-Semitism in this country.

Read the whole thing.

I suspect the “religious conservatives” referenced here are primarily the Protestant fundamentalist, pro-Sharon, pro-Armageddon types who make up Dubya’s core constituency.

[Side note: Please excuse the confusing all-italics script that begins a few posts down. There seems to be some sort of technical problem at the moment.]

USA Today’s star foreign correspondent, Jack Kelley, landed in hot water over fabricating a story about a journal purporting to “prove” Serbs were “ethnically cleansing” Kosovo. After an internal investigation, Kelley resigned from the paper. Case closed? Hardly. The investigation, and the media coverage thereof, are doing their best to whitewash Kelley’s fabrication, even as they feed him to the sharks. Continue reading “Jack and the phantom journal”

Monday’s column has generated a lot of reader response. It has also gotten plugged by the Christian Science Monitor, FAIR, and Jim Henley.

While enjoying my breakfast coffee this morning, my day was further brightened upon reading an entry by Lew Rockwell at his blog referencing the following New York Times book review by Michiko Kakutani of David Frum and Richard Perle’s new warmongering little classic. Bravo, Ms. Kakutani, for telling it like it is, even at the risk of being thought “unpatriotic.”

The title of this new book by David Frum and Richard Perle, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, says it all. It captures the authors’ absolutist, Manichaean language and worldview; their cocky know-it-all tone; their swaggering insinuation that they know “how to win the war on terror” and that readers, the Bush administration and the rest of the world had better listen to them…

Making its points with all the subtlety of a pit bull on steroids, An End to Evil is smug, shrill and deliberately provocative. Which might not be so surprising given the authors’ track records. Mr. Frum, a former White House speechwriter who helped coin the “axis of evil” phrase that President George W. Bush used in his 2002 State of the Union address, adopted a similarly bellicose manner in his 2003 book The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush. Mr. Perle, a hawkish member of the Defense Policy Board and an assistant secretary of defense during the Reagan administration, acquired the Washington nicknames Prince of Darkness and Darth Vader in the 1980’s for his combative, take-no-prisoners pronouncements…

Throughout An End to Evil they purvey a worldview of us-versus-them, all-or-nothing, either-or, and this outlook results in a refusal to countenance the possibility that people who do not share the authors’ views about the war in Iraq or their faith in a pre-emptive, unilateralist foreign policy might have legitimate reasons for doing so. Instead, Mr. Frum and Mr. Perle accuse those who differ with their foreign-policy beliefs of failing to support the war against terrorism: of being cowardly, delusional or defeatist…Read full review

While all Iraqis are suffering as a result of this totally unnecessary war, Iraqis of Palestinian descent are perhaps worse off than most of their countrymen. Jo Wilding gives a brief first-hand account of what their lives are like now:

She lives in a tent with UNHCR stamped on the roof in the grounds of the old Haifa Palestinian Sports Club, among twelve thousand homeless families. “I was born in Iraq and brought up here, married here and had my children here, but my father was Palestinian so I am Palestinian. I have no nationality, no identification, no right to own property.”

After the war the landlord came to the house and threatened to douse it in petrol and burn it if they didn’t leave. Her four sons live there with her but her two daughters have been squeezed into a relative’s house. “There are so many young men here. I am too afraid for them here. But they had to stop going to school because of the situation. It is not safe.”

For a time they were supported by the UN and aid agencies, she said, but there has been no constant assistance for some months now. Half of the aid is taken anyway by the people inside. She and her friend gestured towards the buildings and offices of the club. “They sell it outside the camp. But Dr Qusay owns the club and if he did not let us live here we would be on the streets.”
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Victoria Schofield, a specialist on South Asia, is the author of “Afghan Frontier: Feuding and Fighting in Central Asia.” In this commentary for the Daily Star (Lebanon), she discusses the tense and dangerous border area between Afghanistan and Pakistan and how it has been affected by the continued fighting there.

That the Pakistani Army’s raid last week into South Waziristan met with local resistance should not have come as a surprise. Ever since Pakistan became an independent country, the mountainous region bordering Afghanistan known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas has been a law unto itself. Occupied by numerous different tribes, or khels, the inhabitants of this region have never officially been incorporated into the constitutional framework of Pakistan. And although Pakistan controls the main roads to the Afghan frontier, most famously the Khyber Pass which leads to Torkham on the border and onward to Jalalabad and Kabul, the areas lying in between are neither governed by Pakistan, nor do they come under its legal jurisdiction.

This anomalous relationship arises from the days of the British occupation of the northwest frontier in the early 20th century. Whereas British troops were able to establish control over “settled areas” in the plains, they found that the cost was too high to exert their authority over the mountainous tribal regions…

The Pakistani government may well be justified in launching offensives into tribal territory in pursuit of terrorists. But its actions also have the potential of alienating those who, though not involved in terrorist acts, are developing a new resentment against the federal authorities. After the raid, Afridi stated that the government had “sold the freedom of tribal people” to the American Federal Bureau of Investigation, and he pointed out that the government was forcing tribesmen to rebel.

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