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Posts Tagged ‘Martin Peretz’

An appreciation of Martin Peretz

by Mojambo ( 63 Comments › )
Filed under Anti-semitism, Bill Clinton, Israel, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Palestinians, Progressives at January 2nd, 2013 - 8:00 am

Boy do I remember the 1968 New york City Public Schools strike and the anti-Semitism and anti-White hatred that flowed from the militants in Ocean-Hill Brownsville. That anti-Semitsm made a lot (but not nearly enough) of Jews question the fact that the alleged Black-Jewish alliance appeared to be a one-way street.

by Caroline Glick

By the time I began developing a political consciousness in the early 1980s, I didn’t have any choice but to be on the right side of the political spectrum. By the early 1980s, the political Left in the US had already abandoned support for Israel.
When I grew up in what would later become Barack Obama’s neighborhood in Chicago, the black political machine in the neighborhood and the city, led by the likes of Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan was openly anti-Semitic and pro-Muslim. The white Left was also hostile. The Communists were anti-Israel. The media was anti-Israel.
As a proud Jewish girl, it was clear to me from adolescence on that I could only locate myself on the political Right.
This was not the case for people who came of age in the 1950s and early 1960s. At that time, the USSR had not yet cut off its relations with Israel. The civil rights movement was a joint Jewish-black movement.
For those of you who don’t know the history, the NAACP was founded by Jews. The plaintiff in Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, the landmark Supreme Court decision from 1954 that opened the path to school desegregation, was represented by the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund’s legal team of Jack Greenberg and Thurgood Marshall. The famous Mississippi Burning incident where three civil rights workers were lynched in 1964 involved the murder of one black civil rights worker James Earl Chaney and two Jewish civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwermer.
But starting sometime around 1965, the blacks began the process of expelling the Jews from the Civil Rights movement, as they embraced anti-Semitism and the Arab war for the destruction of Israel. In New York City, this period reached a culmination in the 1968 teachers strike. The strike was caused by the decision of a black school board in Brownsville, Brooklyn to fire many of the Jewish teachers and administrators from the local schools and replace them with black separatist teachers and administrators.
The head the teachers union Albert Shanker dated the end of Jewish-black cooperation to the strike.
While researching my book, yesterday I came across a fascinating FBI report from 1970 that was declassified under the Freedom of Information Act in 2009. Titled, “FBI Monograph: Fedayeen Impact – Middle East and United States, June 1970,” it is focused on the PLO, and Fatah’s penetration of the American political Left.
Here’s the link:
http://www.governmentattic.org/2docs/FBI_Monograph_Fedayeen-Impact_1970.pdf
[……]
As the report puts it, “Since the June 1967, war, reports emanating from various sources have suggested that the Arabs have co-opted black extremists in the United States to assist the ‘struggle’ against Israel in the Middle East and in the United States.”
The report makes specific mention of the co-optation of the Black Panther Party, (BPP), the Student National Coordinating Committee, (SNCC), Stokely Carmichael, and the Nation of Islam.
Several BPP leaders participated in anti-Israel conferences in Africa and the Middle East where they gave stridently anti-Semitic speeches calling for the destruction of Israel. In one speech in Algeria in 1969 BPP “Minister of Information” Eldridge Cleaver, “Proclaimed BPP support for the Arab position and criticized ‘US-Zionists,’ mentioning Arthur Goldberg, Henry A. Kissinger, and Judge Julius Hoffman. He also expressed BPP admiration for Yasir Arafat and al-Fatah. Cleaver and Arafat reportedly hugged and kissed each other and received a standing ovation from those at the conference.”
In an interview with the New York Times on August 15, 1967, SNCC leader Ralph Featherston launched an all-out assault against Israel and Jews.
According to the FBI report, in the interview he said that “SNCC is drawn to the Arab cause because it is working toward a ‘third world alliance of oppressed people all over the world – Africa, Asia, Latin America – and considers the Arabs have been oppressed continually by Israelis and by Europeans as well in such countries as Algeria.’ He denied that SNCC was anti-Semitic, but was interested in indicting only ‘Jewish oppressors,’ a category he applied to Israel, and ‘to those Jews in the little Jew shops in the ghettos.'”
[…….]
The Soviet Union openly sided with the Arabs in the Six Day War and cut off relations with Israel immediately following the war. The radical American Left, populated by the Communist Party USA and other Communist front groups and New Left groups abandoned Israel at the same time. This mass abandonment included the Progressive Labor Party; Students for a Democratic Society, (SDS); SDS-Weathermen; the Socialist Workers Party; Workers World Party; and the Communist Party – USA, (CPUSA).
Since President Obama’s political world is populated by individuals from all these groups, and since Obama launched his political career in the living room of SDS-Weathermen terror commanders Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, it is worth noting that in the SDS-Weathermen magazine “SDS Fire” December 6, 1969 issue, contained an editorial stating that “Arab peoples, above all the Palestinian people, will not and cannot accept the existence of Israel, a colonial-type creature imposed by outside forces on the area.”
A notable exception to the far Left’s abandonment of Israel and embrace of anti-Semitism was Ramparts Magazine, the New Left publication founded by David Horowitz and Peter Collier. Among other pro-Israel Ramparts articles the FBI report cites, it notes in particular one by then Harvard Professor Martin Peretz from July 1967.
In his article, Peretz took on the propaganda claims against Israel one by one and discredited them. Among other things, he said that Israel is not a colonialist state; there is no similarity whatsoever between the US war in Vietnam, which as a self-proclaimed radical he opposed, and Israel; the creation of Israel was not sponsored by imperialist powers; Nasser is not a socialist.
Peretz excoriated the Third World and Communist countries for their failure to recognize the Arab threat to Israel’s existence, calling their behavior “disgusting.”
The FBI report notes that the CPUSA’s support for the Arabs against Israel caused massive dissention in the ranks of the party, mentioning that some 75 percent of CPUSA’s members were Jewish. Jewish Communists in Chicago collected blood and plasma for Israel and donated money. Dissenters were also heard loudly in New York.
The reason I entitled this post “Martin Peretz, an appreciation,” is not for what he wrote in 1967, but because of what has happened to the Left, the Jewish Left and to Peretz in the 46 years that have passed since he wrote that article.
[…….]
But in the intervening years, fewer and fewer voices on the Left, and specifically on the Jewish Left were willing to take such positions and pit themselves against their movement. And so as the decades passed, what were the positions of the radical Left in the 1960s became increasingly the positions of the mainstream Left, until by last summer, they became the positions of the majority of delegates at the Democratic National Convention.
When I was growing up in Chicago, the local Jewish establishment’s refusal to support Israel in the 1982 Lebanon War is what made me decide to make aliyah. By the time I arrived at Columbia in 1987, and the Palestinian uprising broke out, it was hard to find Jewish leaders who were willing to stand up for Israel without stuttering.
Today the situation has become simply untenable. [……]
Yet through it all, Martin Peretz has rarely wavered. Despite his attempts to support the Palestinians, he has not allowed his desire to see the Arab conflict with Israel resolved  diminish his support for Israel. He has remained a staunch, loyal defender of Israel. When I was growing up, I relied on his New Republic for its reporting on Israel and the Middle East. Peretz was one of my intellectual heroes.
In recent years, I’ve felt more bemused by than respectful of Peretz. A colleague of mine quipped some years back that Peretz and Allan Dershowitz live in an intellectual universe populated only by Peretz and Dershowitz and they refuse to acknowledge that they are alone. That quip has probably anchored my thinking on both men ever since.
But even if my colleague’s remark was more true than false, reading the FBI report, I decided I should discard its snide diminution of Peretz. The fact is, he has been fighting this fight for nearly fifty years. As a man of the Left, he has fought the fight for Israel and Jewish rights, increasingly alone for nearly fifty years, and has done so despite what must have been enormous personal costs as his comrades all jumped ship, and in many cases, joined the cause of Israel’s enemies.
don quixote.gif
Cervantes’s Don Quixote is generally reviled as a fool for his futile battle against windmills. By the same token, Leftists who insist that their movement — which long ago parted company with the ideals it claims to represent, and serves as a warm political home for totalitarian anti-Semites — must  side with good against evil, necessarily call up the image of Don Quixote fighting the forces of nature.
But when you think about it, there is something heroic about keeping up a battle even if it is doomed to fail, simply because it is the right thing to do. So hats off to Peretz for keeping true.
Read the rest –  Martin Peretz – an appreciation

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Posted in Anti-semitism, Bill Clinton, Israel, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Palestinians, Progressives | 63 Comments »

When President Obama talks about Islam

by Mojambo ( 30 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Middle East, Palestinians, Political Correctness, Syria, Turkey at August 27th, 2012 - 8:30 am

It is too bad that Obama views the Middle East through his late father’s third world focus. He has fallen (as have many of his predecessors) into the narrative that “Palestine” is the key to peace when in reality the Arab world’s refusal to accept Israel as a non-Arab, non-Islamic state  is the crux of the problem.  Obama’s  belief in Turkey as a mediator in the Middle East (despite the daily evidence of Recip Tayyip Erdogan’s anti-Semitism) is naivety at its worst (also Obama’s dropping of the Armenian genocide recognition is rather insulting and hypocritical) and shows the complete lack of professionalism in the Hillary Clinton State Department.

hat tip – Powerline

by Martin Peretz

Barack Obama’s initial six months in the presidency were rich in symbolics. No one could have misunderstood his intention when he anointed Al-Arabiya, Dubai-based and Saudi-owned, to be the first of the world’s television networks to interview him from the White House. Not surprisingly, the reporter began by asking what Obama meant when he promised “aggressive peacemaking between the Palestinians and the Israelis.” The president responded lamely by alluding to George Mitchell, his already-designated special envoy to the problem, as “somebody of enormous stature. He is one of the few people who have international experience brokering peace deals.” As if the nasty Irish quarrel was at all comparable to the historical and meta-historical warfare between Zion and Araby. Then, two more fawning asides about Mitchell, thought of as the deus ex machina for the president’s predicament, and one allusion to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia for having “great courage,” a prelude to Obama’s undignified curtsy in Riyadh.

When Obama speaks about Islam it is mostly blah, blah:

Did not Obama realize, did not his advisers tell him, that the very day he was addressing the Islamic orbit was the 30th anniversary of the shah’s abdication? The Ayatollah Khomeini wrote the acrid script for American-Islamic relations from 1979 onwards, exacerbating the ongoing conflict in Lebanon (where 17 American diplomats and then 241 US Marines were murdered in two separate incidents, and 56 French soldiers besides), sharpening the hostility of Syria toward the West, eroding the progressive reforms — yes, the shah’s progressive reforms — in Iran itself. And how about Obama’s careless reference to peace two decades back? The Gulf War, for one, which really was the beginning of the conflict against Saddam Hussein that has not yet ended, and, since it was always a sectarian conflict, will not likely end soon. The Afghan fratricide is an antique phenomenon, reinvigorated by Obama himself as the “yes, we can” war, but now being left to fester, ancient hatreds on ancient turf, and spread to the paradigmatic non-nation-state of Pakistan.

[…….]

Actually, no one expected Obama to call attention to the Turkish genocide against the Armenians on his visit to Turkey that April. Unlike the Germans, who are hewn to a philosophical tradition of guilt and remorse and have put themselves and their youth through an unforgiving struggle of conscience, Islam does not traffic in matters of collective guilt and remorse. These are not categories of the faith, and Obama did not nothing to disturb the self-satisfied temper of the faithful. Having anointed Recep Tayyip Erdogan his favorite Muslim, he brought comfort, if not exactly good cheer, to Ankara. The most brazen instance, given the fact that America is not a member of the European Union and that the Europeans do not trust him, was the president’s endorsement of Turkey’s admission to the common market. If anything, Obama’s advice left the continent very much peeved. Where does he come off telling us who is family?

He also had an assignment for Turkey in resolving the historic struggle between Israel and the neighborhood within which it lives. “Like the United States,” Obama declared in a sloppy, all-too-facile analogy, “Turkey has been a friend and partner in Israel’s quest for security.” Now, the fact is that the editor of this very page was perhaps the first American journalist to chronicle the Erdoganian view of the world and his weird affinities for weirder allies. Already in 2006, he had noticed the prime minister’s weakness for the body parts blood libel implicating both Israel and our country. Apparently, neither the president nor his scriptwriters were aware of the cranky Ottomanist elements in Erdogan’s Middle East strategy. Anyway, Ankara has never let go of the Mavi Marmara pretension that you can break a legal international blockade against a rogue not-at-all statelet without cost or intervention. What was Netanyahu to do? Let the Turkish “humanitarians” run the blockade and invite anyone and everyone to follow suit?

The fact is that Obama is afflicted with a certain Turkomania, and it persuaded him that the US could trust Erdogan’s lead in Syria, way past the time he had shown that he was not inclined to do so. Erdogan suffers from Kurdophobia, which stays his hand in Syria, however much his early but sudden antagonism to the Assad regime in the civil war may have suggested otherwise. Indeed, as soon as Turkey let pass the shooting down of its bomber by Damascus, it no longer had credibility as a big player in the conflict. But Obama had trusted Erdogan to lead, and, predictably, he did not.

[…….]

The third of the president’s Middle East extravaganzas at the beginning of his tenure was the speech in Cairo. One doubts that Obama would be embarrassed by his text. After all, he does not make mistakes! But maybe, if we had a secretary of state like Dean Acheson or George Shultz instead of Hillary Clinton, he could be made to be mortified by its strange medley of geeky innocence and high moral cynicism. (Have you noticed on the State Department website feature, “Travels With The Secretary?” 102 countries, 352 travel days, 843,450 miles. This is not a formula for analytic depth.) Our chief executive clearly has no patience for depth, which may be why he and the mistress of our diplomatic corps get along so well. Even a cursory rereading of his June 2009 text would expose how deeply he does not understand the region and its doctrines, its peoples and their excuses. Virtually nothing — no fact, no insight — has survived from the president’s self-confident Al Aqsa prayer meeting only 38 months ago.

Of course, what Obama considered the most serious unsolved foreign challenge to the United States was the question of Palestine, or, to be more precise, the question of the Arabs of Palestine, now referred to as the Palestinians. The world has given them — through the United Nations with its various redundant organs (what do they all do?), the support of the sloppy moralists (like Norway, Sweden, unworthy South Africa) and the up-for-purchase so-called non-aligned — the phony backing that they see as near unanimous support. The fact is, the Palestinians are further away from having their Palestine than at anytime since 1967. Or maybe 1947. The General Assembly may in its next session sanction an Arab government called Palestine, as it did 65 years ago, when the British ran away from their Mandate while the Jews picked up half of it and turned an established society into a nation-state. What kept Arab Palestine from becoming Palestine at that time were Egypt and Jordan, and the fact that Palestinian society was a primitive and fractured collection of clans and tribes as far from nationhood as other countries which the British abandoned in the post-war period.

In any case, who really cares what the General Assembly does or, for that matter, what the Security Council does or does not do? Kofi Annan is the prototype for the UN: cocksure but irrelevant, really altogether beside the point. Nothing the UN does will affect the lives of the Palestinians. What keeps Palestine from becoming Palestine now is that most — indeed almost all — of the Palestinians do not recognize the Jewish state and its history. Which is really why they won’t negotiate. Which is also why they return again and again to the empty geographical formula of the armistice lines of 1949.

[…….]

It is a pity that Obama took his foreign policy imperative from Rashid Khalidi in fixing on the issue of Palestine as uniquely his own. The issue that is most important is Iran and nuclear weapons, and this has also fundamentally affected the Palestine question. If Iran secures the bomb, so will Saudi Arabia, Turkey, even Egypt. For three and a half years Obama deceived himself into thinking that somehow he had, he could, he would, with suasion and goodwill, talk the Persians into giving up the ultimate weapon. Then he did “sanctions,” ever so slowly and piecemeal. Did the president not grasp the urgency of time? The further Iran went in securing the atom for itself, the more difficult it would be for it to give it up. That is where we are now: Iran on the cusp of possession, the Arabs in agitated nowhere, the Palestinians fooling themselves that statehood is only a step or two away. And Israel? A free and pleasant place to visit and to live, with many grounds, both old and new, to worry.

Read the rest – What Obama talks about when talks about Islam

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Posted in Barack Obama, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Middle East, Palestinians, Political Correctness, Syria, Turkey | 30 Comments »

Martin Peretz and a case of buyers remorse

by Mojambo ( 81 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Election 2008, Elections 2012, History, Political Correctness, Progressives at August 8th, 2012 - 2:00 pm

Martin Peretz, the former editor of The New Republic is emblematic of so many people who chose to see Barack Obama for what they wanted him to be rather then for what he really is.  Peretz was always a classic liberal in the Harry Truman/Hubert Humphrey/Henry “Scoop” Jackson mold which despised totalitarianism and controlled up until 1968 – 1972 the Democratic foreign policy establishment.  However with the rise of McGovernism,  people such as  Peretz and Jackson became increasingly marginalized.

by Sohrab Ahmari

New York

‘I bought the New Republic to take back the Democratic Party from the McGovernites,” the legendary editor and publisher Martin Peretz says. Now, he fears, George McGovern’s ideas may be back in vogue within the party.

The 1972 election and the domestic drama surrounding the Vietnam War caused a major schism between Democrats. On one side were supporters of Mr. McGovern, the U.S. senator and presidential candidate who preached engagement and accommodation with communism. On the other were those who thought the rise of the McGovernites spelled disaster for Democrats and the nation, and who were determined to return the party to a responsible center on foreign policy.

Mr. Peretz, then a Harvard University lecturer and a veteran of the antiwar movement, was in the latter camp. Two years after Richard Nixon thumped Mr. McGovern in the election, he purchased the New Republic, the flagship liberal magazine founded in 1914. Under Mr. Peretz’s ownership the magazine promoted a set of foreign-policy ideas that gradually reconquered the Democratic mainstream. Chief among these were a willingness to deploy military power to advance national interests and values, plus an abiding commitment to Israel as a mirror of American ideals in an unfree Middle East.

Since selling the New Republic to Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes in 2011, however, Mr. Peretz, now 73, has emerged as a vociferous critic of Barack Obama and much of the Democratic foreign-policy establishment. His break with the president he campaigned for in 2008 has been sharp and painful. The Obama administration’s worldview, he now thinks, represents a radical departure from the “healthily hard-ass” foreign policy he has long championed on the left. Mr. Peretz is especially disturbed by Mr. Obama’s failure to support Israel at a time when the Jewish state faces an unprecedented combination of threats.

Born into a devotedly Zionist household in New York City, Mr. Peretz attended Public School 28 in the Bronx, “largely a Jewish school with Irish teachers.” At a Christmas pageant in second grade he was cast as the star of Bethlehem. (“It did not harm my Jewishness one bit.”) At the front of the classroom that day there were an American flag and a large banner adorned with the United Nations logo. “The world’s last, best hope,” read the words above the logo.

[…….]

The leap from that childhood faith to leftist activism in 1960s Boston—he graduated from Brandeis in 1959 and went on to earn a Ph.D. in government at Harvard—was a logical one. Mr. Peretz would grow a big beard (a friend called his look “rabbinical Ho Chi Minh”) and join the marches against the war in Vietnam. But unlike many others in the antiwar crowd, Mr. Peretz always remained skeptical of the Viet Cong.

An epiphany came in the fall of 1968, when he and Sam Brown, a prominent fellow activist, were granted an audience with Viet Cong emissaries in Paris. At the end of the four-hour meeting, the Viet Cong presented the Americans with ashtrays they claimed were made from the wreckage of a U.S. plane that had been shot down. Mr. Peretz, who found these souvenirs revolting, refused to accept his. “This is a morally compromising gift,” he told his hosts, and left.

When the 1972 presidential election came around, Mr. Peretz cast his ballot for Nixon. “I could not stand the politics of George McGovern,” he says. He doesn’t regret the vote: “In retrospect I realized that McGovern would not have interceded for Israel in the Yom Kippur War.”

The lesson of that 1973 war—when four Arab armies backed by the Soviet Union launched a surprise attack on the Jewish state—was searing. The Arabs were once again on an expedition to annihilate Israel, and the U.N. was nowhere to be found.

[…….]

The 1973 threat passed but the region and the world today appear equally chaotic and perilous to Mr. Peretz. “In our age the question of what a nation-state is has come into sharp relief,” he explains. “The international order—the international disorder!—is made up mostly of non-nation-states.” The nation-states, he claims, are clustered in and around Europe, East Asia, North America and South America. They also include Israel, Australia and New Zealand. “It’s not an accident that these are the most peaceful of the nations,” Mr. Peretz observes.

Most Arab and Muslim states, by contrast, are inherently unstable. To Mr. Peretz, the notion that Arab cultures are beset with endemic pathologies is noncontroversial, almost a banal point. “[Mitt] Romney was said to have made a tremendous faux pas when he said that the difference between the Palestinians and the Israelis is a matter of culture,” alluding to historian David Landes’s book, “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations.”

[………]
That Mr. Romney should have to go on the defensive over his remarks, Mr. Peretz thinks, has to do with the fact that “the magazines and the websites that are popular among the liberal, semi-intelligent, semi-intellectual readership of America have their own ideological blinders.”

Mr. Peretz has little patience for such pieties. And he holds few hopes that the recent Arab uprisings will make the region more liberal or peaceful.

Take Egypt. “I have no nostalgia for the [Egyptian] military,” he notes. “But I have no great anticipations in the [Mohammed] Morsi government either, largely because, it seems to me, the Muslim Brotherhood’s program in its essentials will not alter the social rules of Arab societies. That is, if you expect that in 20 years someone will be able to say that what Romney said is not true, you will be bitterly disappointed.”

[……..]

Mr. Peretz says he laughs when he hears that U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon or recently resigned Syria envoy Kofi Annan “are distressed by the fact that they can’t get an agreement in the Security Council, except on things that don’t work.”

Mr. Obama’s faith in the power of international deliberation to move tyrannical regimes, Mr. Peretz argues, is equally deluded. “The Obama administration came into office pledging to revivify—revivify from what?—the moral and political standing of the United Nations,” he wrote in a February item for the New Republic. “This, too, is one of the great self-deceptions of the president and his crowd, in this particular case Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton, who thought that somehow the president’s tranquilizing words and theirs would bring honesty and reason to Russia, to China, to African tyrants and, their biggest bet, to the intersecting orbits of Arab states and Islamofascist mullahs.”

Then there’s the Obama administration’s sustained badgering of Israel as its neighborhood grows ever more unstable.

[…….]

“There are no instruments to guarantee the borders of Israel or to guarantee that terror with increasingly lethal weapons would not be unleashed against Israel. One of the reasons is that there is no one to guarantee that peace. It is un-guaranteeable.” Nor can outsiders, Mr. Peretz thinks, uphold a negotiated settlement: “NATO is nothing, really—if only the Russians knew how little NATO is! And I as a Zionist don’t want American troops to die for Israel.” No, Mr. Peretz says, “Jews should defend themselves, and there is no indication that they can’t.”

Perhaps the circumstances wouldn’t be so dire if the Obama administration were less “schizophrenic” in its approach to Israel. The arms transfers to Israel in recent years have been significant and admirable, Mr. Peretz says, yet Mr. Obama is plainly cool toward Israel’s leadership and ignorant of its history.

[…….]

Such rapprochement, moreover, is foreclosed by Mr. Obama’s indifference to the basic Zionist ideal, which was on full display in his 2009 Cairo speech to the Muslim world. There Mr. Obama cited the Holocaust—not millennia of Jewish ties to the land—as the basis for Israel’s legitimacy. “It took him three-and-a-half years to get to the point where he could recite some version of Zionist narrative,” Mr. Peretz sighs. “My father first went to Palestine in 1912″—that is, three decades before the destruction of European Jewry and the establishment of Israel.

All this stands in jarring contrast to the Democratic Party’s foreign-policy traditions, Mr. Peretz argues. “You know, I disagreed with Bill Clinton on some things and I didn’t disagree with him on others,” Mr. Peretz recalls. But Mr. Clinton’s administration “was in the deep tradition of the Roosevelt-Truman idea.” He concludes: “In any case, I think the Democratic Party was restored to a center role. Yes, it took a lot for the Clinton administration to rescue Bosnia. And it took a lot for the Democrats to admit to a mistake in Somalia.” But they eventually did both.

“We’re now in a new era,” Mr. Peretz warns. “I think that Obama is a child, or maybe let’s say a grandchild, of the New Left, with casual moral judgments made about very intricate ethical alternatives.” Later he thunders: “Leading by following—it’s really a sick phrase.”

Read the rest – Martin Peretz; From Truman to McGovern to Obama

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Posted in Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Election 2008, Elections 2012, History, Political Correctness, Progressives | 81 Comments »

Obama’s foolish Middle East counselors

by Mojambo ( 308 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Egypt, Hamas, Islamic Supremacism, Israel, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Palestinians, Progressives, Syria at May 19th, 2011 - 11:30 am

According to Martin Peretz,  Obama is influenced by Fareed Zakaria and Tom Friedman. Friedman is an apologist and admirer of Communist China and Zakaria thinks that the American era is over and is glad of it.  Peretz compares  Friedman’s wish that America were more like China to Charles Lindbergh’s wish that America could be more like Nazi Germany. Too bad that Obama does not take advice form the brilliant Fouad Ajami who writes op ed columns for The Wall Street Journal and other publication, who actually knows his stuff.

by Martin Peretz

Wowy, zowy, Obama is doing his own thinking on the Middle East and here’s the even worse news: He’s taking advice from Tom Friedman and Fareed Zakaria.

These pathetic tidings about the inner Barack Obama, who puts his very own twist on all things, particularly Arab and Muslim matters, and the other Barack Obama, who needs counsel from two political therapists, famous and even clever but not especially deep, come from the subtle and highly reliable journalist Mark Landler in The New York Times. These tidbits are not contradictory. Zakaria’s diagnosis, at least for the last few years, is that America is over, just plumb over. Or, to use the ill-omened word from his The Post-American World, “enfeebled,” which implies continuous decline. Enfeebled nations do not, after all, usually rise again. Zakaria was, however, more than a bit mortified by being called a presidential adviser, although it was he who labeled himself. He posted a statement on Saturday saying, well, that he didn’t really advise but spoke to Obama several times in face-to-face meeting about the Arab Spring (which, by the way, in my view is fast becoming Arab winter, like the east coast winter last season.) Anyway, if he is trying to establish a difference, it’s not a distinction.

But why should I paraphrase? Read it all here:

The characterization that I have been “advising” President Obama is inaccurate. Over the last few months I’ve had a couple of conversations with the president, off-the-record. At no point did President Obama ask me for advice on a specific policy or speech or proposal, nor did I volunteer it. I know that he has had similar meetings with other columnists.

[……]

What’s strange about his putative advice is that Obama didn’t need it. He and Zakaria are in fundamental agreement. America is weak. America is poor. America is politically sundered. The only real difference between them is that the president believes that America is historically and morally compromised. But rising upper class minority Muslim from Bombay, rising American from Yale and Harvard (and now a member of the Yale Corporation, from which perch he counseled the president of the university and the university press not to permit images of the Prophet to appear in a book it was publishing, The Cartoons That Shook the World by Danish scholar Jytte Klausen), Zakaria was once a supporter of the great imperium. So I don’t know whether he thinks it is a matter of ethics. It’s more a matter of “can do” or “cannot do.” He thinks it cannot.

[……….]

He has numbed the nation’s idealistic impulses by playing it oh, so cool—not agitated by evil or especially perturbed by calamity. I wonder, in fact, how he maintained his energy and perseverance as a “community organizer,” since the vocation itself doesn’t have real gauges of success. Or maybe that was its secret. If there’s no recognized measure of achievement or, for that matter, of failure, you go on doing what you’re doing “till the cows come home.” Or until you get a real job. Obama appears to be allergic to passion, although he can get a bit nasty when some foreign leader doesn’t quite accept a simple remedy—his simple remedy—to an intricate strategic dilemma. Take the president’s irritable manner with Israel and its prime minister. Yup, Zionism is something he just doesn’t get. And also doesn’t like. (Did the Obamas’ Passover show seder include the crowning prayer, “Next Year in Jerusalem,” which even the Daily Kos said “ends every seder around the world”? I doubt it. But he did include a lame and certainly premature allusion to “modern stories of social transformation and liberation unfolding in the Middle East and North Africa.” From his mouth to God’s ears. Still, is this really the Passover of the Arabs? I am sure it is not.)

In contrast to Zakaria, Friedman is not embarrassed by being seen as the president’s counselor. His column is the closest thing there is to an up-front advice column, like Ann Landers and now her daughter, my old flame of half a century ago, Margo Howard. Tom even writes open letters to those he wants to exhort, advise, dissuade. It’s an old journalistic trick, the oldest trick in the book, really. When you are desperate for a hook you use this one. I should admit that I nurse a certain envy towards him and doubtless it is because of his sway over millions. We are friends but only because he is tolerant. In any case, my first tangle with him was after he published From Beirut to Jerusalem, which I reviewed hostilely in these pages. Anyway, Tom’s lens for seeing contemporary America is through contemporary China. He wishes America were China, almost the way some native fascists like Charles Lindbergh wanted America to be like Germany and the way ignorant but “idealistic” oodles of American intellectuals and radical Jewish immigrants wanted the country to be like Soviet Russia. The Chinese can do everything. America can do nothing. Except push the peace process.

[……….]

I wonder what Obama can really learn from Zakaria and Friedman, neither of whom know Arabic, neither of whom know the sources (arcane or simply erudite), both of whom jump from one fashionable topic to another. Today, it’s energy. No, that was yesterday. Wouldn’t the president have been better off and the country better off, too, if he had sat down with, say, Fouad Ajami, who doesn’t agree with him but has the learning to explain why. Maybe Obama should also sit down with Paul Berman, who has explored the ties between radical Arab politics and radical Muslim theology, a generally forbidden topic, especially in this White House. (Berman has done much of his essay writing in this magazine.) Or is it the president’s habit to talk only with people who agree with him?

In one of his almost weekly columns, Ajami has pinioned the administration’s “look away” attitude towards the Assad tyranny between both strategic and moral imperatives. Ajami quotes an exchange between The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg and Hillary Clinton. Goldberg asks: “Would you be sad if his [Bashar Assad’s] regime were to disappear?” Hillary: “It depends on what replaces it.” Sequestered in this breezy answer is the Obama entourage’s firm belief in Assad’s moderation and reform commitments. Even now, after the massacre of nearly 1,000 Syrians, some—to be sure—nasty pietistic Muslim Brothers. (I hope you don’t attribute sexism to me if I remind readers that another secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, was convinced of Papa Assad’s reforming instincts. Poor morally compromised lady: She was the one who, with Susan Rice, then her assistant secretary for African affairs and now our ambassador to the U.N., also labored hard and succeeded in keeping America from intervening in the Rwanda genocide.)

[…….]

Of course, it is not exactly the president’s lack of knowledge about the Arabs (and the Jews, for that matter) that has left his Middle East policy in shambles. It is the continuous Arab sandstorm of sanctimony and duplicity which has blinded him to the precise underlying realities the sandstorm was meant to conceal. He is a victim of their deceit and his own credulity. But it is even more than that: He believes in his own powers to discern and to persuade as a function of that discernment. Now that virtually every society in the region has upended Obama’s benign take of their reality, it remains to be seen whether he himself can adjust his inner lens to accommodate the brute bedrock.

[……..]

Syria is where the new paradigms of Arab history will be made. The brutality of the Assad dictatorship is legendary, and it has gone over 40 years from father to son. No one is willing to predict whether the family will survive or be taken out. If it survives, it will be more dictatorial than anyone imagined possible. If it is overthrown, it will be replaced by a regime equally cruel but more pious, much more pious. It is not easy for outsiders to decide what they want.

But Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have already more than indicated that they prefer the continued dominion of Bashar Assad. You have to be pretty cold-blooded to make a choice like that. There are other consequences to this decision. Syrian dominion over Lebanon will continue. The Syrian alliance with Iran will continue. Syrian influence over Turkey will continue, perhaps intensify. Syrian intrusion in Iraq will continue. Syria might even get its chance to be on the U.N. Human Rights Council. Hey, and here’s a good thing: The Golan will remain a part of Israel.

Read the rest Tel Aviv Journal:  President Obama’s  Wrongheaded Middle East Counselors

 

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