The Public Is Mad at Big Business; So Why is EFCA in Trouble?

Posted on March 29, 2009 by wallwritings

by James M. Wall        alice-cropped

Things are becoming “curiouser and curiouser” in Wonderland. We have fallen into that deep hole with Alice where up is down and down is up.

“Who are YOU?” said the Caterpillar.
This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, “I–I hardly know, sir, just at present– at least I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.”

The Republican party should be hiding from pitchfork mobs angry because bankers, bonus babies, and venture capitalists have stolen 401-K retirement funds, closed factories, and shipped jobs overseas. But the Republicans are not hiding. They are gearing up to prevent Democrats from delivering a long awaited gift to American workers.

After six long years of being turned away by the Bush White House, labor unions finally have a president who is on their side. The Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) has once again been introduced in Congress.

With Obama in the White House and both the House and Senate under Democratic control,  EFCA should be rushing toward passage of what the Washington Post calls “one of the most significant revisions of federal labor law in 60 years.”

The EFCA bill is designed, according to an AFL-CIO web site to:

. . . enable working people to bargain for better benefits, wages and working conditions by restoring workers’ freedom to choose for themselves whether to join a union; remove current obstacles to employees who want collective bargaining; guarantee that workers who can choose collective bargaining are able to achieve a contract; and allow employees to form unions by signing cards authorizing union representation.

Why are Democrats in the U.S. Senate on the verge of losing EFCA, a bill that would reform what has been called “a broken union election system”?

Big Business, currently the target of so much public anger,  is fighting to block passage of EFCA. And it is winning. 

Financial giant Citigroup Inc. is a major recipient of least $50 billion in federal bailout funds. Citigroup has brazenly thrown some of its money into fighting the EFCA with the fury of a wounded giant which still won’t confess the enormity of its guilt for the current financial crisis.

Government bailout funds used to influence a congressional vote? Here is the evidence:

Citigroup hosted a private conference, led by Glenn Spencer, a senior executive at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and an ardent EFCA opponent. The call was billed as “An Update on the Employee Free Choice Act,” but its purpose was to demonize the legislation.

Sam Stein wrote on Huffington Post that Citigroup and Spencer made their case that EFCA will “inhibit flexibility,” “hamper companies from competing effectively,” and prove “cumbersome” for business.

Spencer said that “From the Chamber’s perspective, and I would say probably from the whole business communities perspective, there are really no amendments you could make to this bill that would make it acceptable.” In other words, no compromise. This is an all out labor-capital war and it is being won under a Democratic president with tax money used to bolster capital’s side.

Citigroup wore its bond rating hat to downgrade Wal-Mart’s bond rating because of fears that the Employee Free Choice Act could pass. A few weeks back Citigroup gave Wal-Mart a 9.5 rating out of 10. By lowering Wal-Mart’s rating on the day before Citigroup and the Chamber of Commerce demonized EFCA, Citigroup sent a message to members of Congress: Big Business demands the defeat of EFCA.

Citi spokesman Duncan Smith ignored this blatant mixing of bond rating and political strong arm tactics with conventional corporate spin, blandly stating that Citibank had a responsibility to advise clients on pertinent legislative matters.

“The role of Citi analysts is to make stock recommendations to investing clients, and in doing so they examine a broad range of factors that may affect a company’s market position.”

Stephen Lerner, director of the Private Equity Project for the labor union SEIU, told Sam Stein:

“Citigroup and the Chamber of Commerce have no shame. One day, Citi issues a report claiming it would hurt the stock of the Billionaire Walton family if free choice passes and workers win decent wages. Then they follow it up with a conference call where the Chamber of Commerce claims paying workers a living wage is bad for the economy.”

Is the public paying attention?  One nation wide poll found only 12% of those surveyed said they were following the EFCA issue.

What about the voters in Tuesday’s New York 20th congressional district special election to replace newly minted U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (Hillary Clinton’s replacement)? Gillibrand and Clinton are both Democrats. Democrat Scott Murphy and Republican Jim Tedisco are involved in a close race.  

The 20th is a conservative district, but in this climate of anger toward corporate greed, the public mood should favor Murphy. But voters tell Democratic workers they are mad at the Democratic party for our current financial mess. Mad enough to reject a Democrat because of the excesses of Corporate America? 

“Curiouser and curiouser”, moderate Democratic senators are not listening to what should be anti-corporate public resentment. Instead, as the EFCA vote looms, key Democratic senators are bailing out on Labor, a core Democratic constituency. 

On EFCA,  one time labor friends are looking the other way.  Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California) co-sponsored EFCA in 2007. Now she is not even sure she will vote for it. Two web sites, Firedoglake and Who Runs Gov. com report Feinstein’s tortured reasoning.  

Here is Teddy Partridge on Firedoglake:

A co-sponsor of the Employee Free Choice Act back in 2007, California Senator Dianne Feinstein is, sadly, now the lone holdout among those previous co-sponsors in the state’s Democratic delegation in Washington. Feinstein has issued a statement saying that she likely won’t support the Employee Free Choice Act in its current form.

Greg Sargent gives Feinstein’s rationale on Who Runs Gov:

Feinstein spokesperson Gil Duran confirms to me that Feinstein hasn’t signed on as a co-sponsor to the current bill yet. He sends over this statement from the Senator suggesting that she’s leaning against backing it this time, at least in its current form:

“I have thought for some time that the way to approach this issue is by trying to see if there can’t be a compromise between the business community, the agriculture community and labor. This is an extraordinarily difficult economy and feelings are very strong on both sides of the issue. I would hope there is some way to find common ground that would be agreeable to both business and labor.” . . .

Even moderate Republican Arlen Specter (R-PA), who until recently was seen as a possible pro-EFCA vote, has chosen political expedience over principle. Specter faces a strong challenge in the 2010 Republican primary from conservative former Rep. Pat Toomey. After months of Toomey attacks against EFCA, Specter announced he will not vote for EFCA.  

Among moderate Democrats, both Arkansas Democratic senators, Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor, are EFCA fence-sitters. Lincoln voted to break a Republican filibuster when the bill came up in 2007. Up for reelection in 2010 in a conservative state, Lincoln now hints she could vote against EFCA.

Arkansas may be the home of Bill and Hillary Clinton, but Bentonville, Arkansas, is the headquarters of Wal-Mart, now the world’s largest company in sales.

Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and Ben Nelson (D-Neb) are reluctant to vote against Labor. They are also hoping for a compromise. But compromise is not what Labor wants.

The Nation’s Christopher Hayes quotes AFL-CIO’s Stewart Acuff:

Are you for unions or are you against unions? If you’re against this legislation, you’re against unions. You can’t say you’re for unions if you don’t think workers should be able to form unions without fear or retribution.

Acuff sounds like a man who grew up listening to songs from Pete Seeger, the balladeer of the labor movement. Seeger, who will celebrate his 90th birthday May 3, lived through the Great Depreession. When Pete sings Which Side Are You On, he is reminding us all that there are some occasions when you take sides for justice. EFCA is one of those. If you need a reminder of Pete’s passion, click here, and sing along. 

Will the EFCA become law? Don’t count on it. Big Labor is not the powerhouse it once was. Democratic senators know they will find more campaign funds on Wall Street than they can find  in labor union halls.

Bill Greider, author of a new book, Come Home America,  talked to Bill Moyers on Moyers’ PBS Journal Friday night. Greider identified the connection between Wall Street and politicians.  

BILL MOYERS: The New York Times on Thursday had this remarkable full page graph, based upon the excellent work of the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group you’re familiar with that monitors money and politics. They said, where Wall Street trades in political currency, and if you look at this you realize that political connections may be the new currency for deal makers. Right? And it shows which of the financial elites have contributed to which elite politicians.

WILLIAM GREIDER: Oh, this is nice.

BILL MOYERS: What do ordinary citizens do about this? How do they break this grip that money has- the patrons have on the politicians?

WILLIAM GREIDER: They trust themselves. I read a wonderful book about the Civil Rights Movement and SNICC and others in the South, in Mississippi, the most treacherous, backward place you could go, bring the issue of racial equality. And they said the organizers first goal was to learn to listen to these people, that they were poor blacks in Mississippi. The second goal was to convince themselves and these poor people to act like citizens even if- even though they knew they weren’t citizens. And you think about that. That’s kind of the mystery of democracy. People get power if they believe they’re entitled to power.

The labor movement is asking for a chance to organize away from the oppressive hand of their employers. It is a simple enough request. But will EFCA pass?   Bill Greider has it right: democracy is a mysterious process. Power will go to the people but only “if they believe they are entitled to power”.  Well, they are; and now is the time for the U.S. Congress to endorse that empowerment.

Posted in Politics and Elections | 2 Comments

Israel’s “revolting” Marriage Law Faces A Court Challenge

Posted on March 25, 2009 by wallwritings

by James M. Wall

Veteran Israeli journalist Uri Avnery is constantly outraged at the conduct of the nation he loves.  

In a column in the Palestine Chronicle, Avnery writes about a case now before the Israeli Supreme Court in which a group of Jews and Arabs seek to overturn a draconian Israeli law that attacks the core of Palestinian families.  

Though security was the pretense for the passage of the law, Avnery knows the real reason for this “temporary” law was to make life untenable for Palestinians who live both inside and outside the border of Israel, a border that continually expands, also under the pretense of “security”.

Israel has no constitution. Instead, the nation is governed under what is known as “Basic Laws”. The case now before the Supreme Court insists this marriage law violates the “equal rights of all citizens” provision of those Basic Laws.

The marriage law mandates that the wife or husband of an Israeli citizen is not allowed to reside with a spouse in Israel if the non-Israeli spouse comes from the occupied Palestinian territories or from a “hostile” Arab country. The non-Israeli spouse is either forbidden to live in Israel, or if they have received a six month visa as a “visitor” to their own home, the visa must be renewed every six months, a renewal easily and often rejected.

Uri Avnery describes this law as “one of the most revolting laws ever enacted in Israel.” 

An indifferent American public will not know, much less care, how damaging this law is to Palestinian families. They will also not know that the law is nothing less than the latest act of “ethnic cleansing” which has been the dark underside of the effort by Israeli governments to eliminate non-Jews from the state.

Israeli scholar Ilan Pappe’s book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, is a well-documented study of this attempt by Israeli leaders to guarantee Jews a “safe haven” in their own Jewish state. A video lecture by Pappe is available on line.   

The term “ethnic cleansing” is anathema to most Israeli Jews. They resent the use of the term because it suggests a parallel to laws passed and enforced in Nazi Germany. One of those laws allowed the execution of a Jew who had “relations” with a non-Jew. These “cleansing” laws were at the center of the court case depicted in the 1961 movie Judgment at Nuremberg.

The Israeli government which passed and now enforces the law, is fully aware that the law is destructive to Palestinian families. Avnery explains:

The Arab citizens of Israel belong to Hamulas (clans) which extend beyond the borders of the state. Arabs generally marry within the Hamula. This is an ancient custom, deeply rooted in their culture, probably originating in the desire to keep the family property together. In the Bible, Isaac married his cousin, Rebecca.

The “Green Line”, which was fixed arbitrarily by the events of the 1948 war, divides families. One village found itself in Israel, the next remained outside the new state, the Hamula lives in both. The Nakba also created a large Palestinian Diaspora.

Currently, 20% of Israeli citizens are Israeli Arabs (around 1.3 million). An Israeli Arab who follows the custom of his Hamula clan will sometimes find a life partner within Israel or be drawn to a partner in the West Bank or in a refugee camp in Lebanon or Syria, where a far greater number of Palestinians now live.

During the 41 years that Israel has occupied the Palestinian territories, estimates vary, but between twenty and one hundred thousand Palestinians, male and female, who live outside the changing borders of Israel have married Israeli Arabs living in Israel. Many became Israeli citizens. The Supreme Court is now determining whether the Israeli Knesset’s “temporary” law preventing these couples from living together within Israel is a violation of Israel’s Basic Laws which are meant to provide “equal rights” to all its citizens.

 The Israeli Ministry of Justice lawyers, in arguing before the Supreme Court “let the cat out of the bag”  ( Avnery’s phrase), asserting, for the first time, in unequivocal language, that: “The State of Israel is at war with the Palestinian people, people against people, collective against collective.” Avnery is outraged at this assertion. He suggests the sentence be read several times “to appreciate its full impact.”

This is not a phrase escaping from the mouth of a campaigning politician and disappearing with his breath, but a sentence written by cautious lawyers carefully weighing every letter.

If we are at war with “the Palestinian people”, this means that every Palestinian, wherever he or she may be, is an enemy. That includes the inhabitants of the occupied territories, the refugees scattered throughout the world as well as the Arab citizens of Israel proper. A mason in Taibeh, Israel, a farmer near Nablus in the West Bank, a policeman of the Palestinian Authority in Jenin, a Hamas fighter in Gaza, a girl in a school in the Mia Mia refugee camp near Sidon, Lebanon, a naturalized American shopkeeper in New York – “collective against collective”.

Of course, the lawyers did not invent this principle. It has been accepted for a long time in daily life, and all arms of the government act accordingly. . .

The anti-Arab marriage law is part of a long series of Israeli actions. Avnery draws up the list:

The army averts its eyes when an “illegal” outpost is established in the West Bank on the land of Palestinians, and sends soldiers to protect the invaders. Israeli courts customarily impose harsher sentences on Arab defendants than on Jews guilty of the same offense. The soldiers of an army unit order T-shirts showing a pregnant Arab woman with a rifle trained on her belly and the words “1 shot, 2 kills” (as exposed in Haaretz this week).

These anonymous lawyers should perhaps be thanked for daring to formulate in a judicial document the reality that had previously been hidden in a thousand different ways.

The simple reality is that 127 years after the beginning of the first Jewish wave of immigration, 112 years after the founding of the Zionist movement, 61 years after the establishment of the State of Israel, 41 years after the beginning of the occupation, the Israeli-Palestinian war continues along all the front lines with undiminished vigor.

The inherent aim of the Zionist enterprise was and is to turn the country – at least up to the Jordan River – into a homogeneous Jewish state. Throughout the course of Zionist-Israeli history, this aim has not been forsaken for a moment. Every cell of the Israeli organism contains this genetic code and therefore acts accordingly, without the need for a specific directive.

Avnery describes this 127 year process with a compelling metaphor, the “urge of a river to reach the sea”.

A river yearning for the sea does not recognize any law, except for the law of gravity. If the terrain allows it, it will flow in a straight course, if not – it will cut a new riverbed, twist like a snake, turn right and left, go around obstacles. If necessary, it will split into rivulets. From time to time, new brooks will join it. And every minute it will strive to reach the sea.

The Palestinian people, of course, oppose this process. They refuse to budge, set up dams, try to push the stream back. True, for more than a hundred years they have been on the retreat, but they have never surrendered. They continue to resist with the same persistence as the advancing river.

One of the more polluted rivulets that emerged in the recent Gaza invasion combined rabbinical extremism with military tactics. Israel’s army is a citizen’s army that has long prided itself on being a “moral force”. But a Reuters report of a recent press conference involving soldiers who took part in the invasion brought this disturbing news:

Rabbis in the Israeli army told battlefield troops in January’s Gaza offensive they were fighting a “religious war” against gentiles, according to one army commander’s account published Friday (March 20). “Their message was very clear: we are the Jewish people, we came to this land by a miracle, God brought us back to this land and now we need to fight to expel the gentiles who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land,” he said.

The account by Ram, a pseudonym to shield the soldier’s identity, was published by the left-leaning Haaretz newspaper in the second day of revelations that have rocked the Israeli military.

A democratic nation that places its military forces in a situation where they are guided by fanatic religious authorities, is a democratic nation that will find itself dangerously isolated from the world community.

Posted in Middle East Politics | 5 Comments

Ron Holloway Finds “Political Movies” at the 2009 Berlin Festival

Posted on March 20, 2009 by wallwritings

By James M. Wall

ron-points1

Ron Holloway was one of my earliest mentors in relating film to religion.  We met during the 1960s, the peak era for art movies when European imports were arriving in the US from directors like Ingmar Bergman, Francoise Truffaut and Michelangelo Antonioni.  

Ron was instrumental in creating a Chicago-based organization for film education that became the National Center for Film Study.  He and his actress wife Dorothea continue their intense involvement with film, and their exhaustive coverage of festivals,  from their home in Berlin, Germany.  A posting he wrote for this blog on the 2008 Cannes Film Festival continues to attract readers. 

Ron has sent me his report on the 2009 Berlin Film Festival. He graciously allowed me to trim it to fit this space. 

His edited version runs below. Before reading about Berlin 2009, I strongly urge you to have a look at a profile on Ron and Dorothea, just published in Cinema Without Borders. It will take you on a journey through the world of world film festivals, a topic rarely covered in US entertainment media.

The profile begins:

Almost any veteran of the European film festival circuit knows of Ron and Dorothea Holloway, and if they don’t they should. As journalists, critics, publishers and filmmakers over the past 30-odd years, they’re Berlin’s longest-running co-production, a husband and wife team devoted to discovering and encouraging the art and appreciation of international cinema. 

Since 1979, they have written and published their small, well-respected English-language magazine on German cinema, Kino, with a razor-thin staff and a loyal group of supporters, including some impressive advertisers. It says a lot about the esteem the German establishment holds them in – not to mention the couple’s charismatic approach to sales – that Lufthansa has
reserved Kino’s back cover for decades.

That esteem was also evident at the 2008 Berlin International Film Festival, when festival chief Dieter Kosslick honored Ron and Dorothea with a special German Camera award for their career contributions to German film. For the ceremony, the festival screened their documentary on the late great Soviet Georgian director Sergei Parajonnov, maker of the magnificent Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, and who, like many filmmakers, was a good friend of the Holloways. (To continue reading this essay, click here.)

Now on to Ron Holloway and his coverage of the 2009 Berlin Film Festival:
  
Has the Berlinale created an image for itself as a “political” film festival?

Asked that question, Christoph Schlingensief, the German jury member at the 59th Berlin International Film Festival (February 5-15, 2009), responded emphatically: “A competition entry here scarcely stands a chance otherwise.”

Schlingensief, who is himself a highly motivated political filmmaker, is correct. Consider this survey of recent Golden Bear (top prize) winners.

In 2007, the Grand Prix went to Wang Quan’an’s fiction-documentary Tu ya de hun shi (Tuya’s Marriage) (China). Set in rural Mongolia, Tuya’s Marriage mirrored the plight of nomadic shepherds whose way of life is threatened by the government’s misguided plans to move them to urban shelters.

In 2008,  José Padilha’s Tropa de elite (The Elite Squad) (Brazil), won the Golden Bear.  When the Pope announced his 1997 visit to Brazil, the news triggered a drive by a Special Police Operation Battalion (BOPE) to rid the Rio slums of drug barons, regardless of the cost.   That drive inspired the creation of The Elite Squad, which was made more as a fiction-documentary than as a crime thriller. Padilha’s film depicts brutality, violence, torture, and executions as standard practice by the Brazilian police, on both sides of the law.

At this year’s 59th Berlin International Film Festival (February 5-15, 2009), the Golden Bear was awarded to Claudia Llosa’s La teta asustada (The Milk of Sorrow) (Peru/Spain/Germany). The first Peruvian film ever programmed at the Berlinale, The Milk of Sorrow deals with the traumatic scars left on the populace, particularly women, following the bloody massacres perpetrated by the still active Peruvian “Shining Path” guerrilla movement.

According to the findings of a “truth commission” established in 2001, approximately 70,000 people were murdered between 1980 and 2000, the two decades when the Maoist “Shining Path” guerrillas challenged the corrupt Fujimori government in open conflict. The commission also recorded rapes, kidnappings, and other transgressions inflicted upon women and children by both sides.

In the film’s opening scene, the violence of those decades is mirrored in a plaintive chant sung by an old woman on her deathbed. She sings of her rape as a pregnant mother and the brutal murder of her husband.

As the film’s title, The Milk of Sorrow, hints, Claudia Llosa maintains that an undefined illness was passed on from a mother’s breast to her offspring due to this prior rape and abuse under guerrilla terrorists. The director is the niece of renown Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, who is best known for The War of the End of the World (1981), an historical novel questioning the idealization of violence.

The Milk of Sorrow stars Magaly Solier, whose stoically detached performance commands respect by her presence alone. Further, the film picks up where Claudia Llosa’s previous Madeinusa (2005) left off. That film was an internationally awarded debut feature depicting a distorted Catholic religiosity in the Peruvian Andes. The lead role in Madeinusa was also played by Magaly Solier.

In The Milk of Sorrow Solier plays a vulnerable young Incan woman, whose inordinate fear of rape prompts her to place a potato in her vagina as a “shield” against unwanted intrusion on her body and soul. That scene alone prompted a lively give-and-take at the press conference. There, Llosa and Solier confirmed that the “potato shield” was a common practice among Incan women of the Andes.

Coined by an observant critic at Berlinale, “festival incest” has become a fashionable practice at major European film festivals. Take Claudia Llosa’s The Milk of Sorrow as an example. The film was one of a handful in competition in Berlin, thanks the festival-sponsored World Cinema Fund (WCF).

Founded in 2004, the WCF is a joint funding project supported by the Berlinale and the German Federal Cultural Foundation in cooperation with the Goethe Institute. Its aim is to support filmmakers in developing countries and regions which lack a constructive film industry.

The project focuses on feature films and feature-length documentaries with a strong cultural identity. Working with an annual budget of 500,000 Euros, the WCF has helped in the co-financing of quality productions by creative filmmakers from the Near East, Africa, Latin America, Central and Southeast Asia, and the Caucasus.

Of the 25 productions earmarked for WCF support over the past five years, nearly all have merited top awards at key international film festivals: Berlin, Cannes, Venice, Rotterdam, San Sebastian, Locarno, Pusan, Almaty, and Sundance. Indeed, the WCF record of awarded prizes at the Berlinale is impressive, to say the least:

Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now (Netherlands/Germany/France), the Blue Angel Prize for Best European Film at the 2005 Berlinale. Rodrigo Moreno’s El Custodio (The Shadow) (Argentina/Germany), the Alfred Bauer Prize at the 2006 Berlinale. Ariel Rotter’s El Otro (The Other) (Argentine/France/Germany), the Silver Bear, Grand Jury Prize, plus a second Silver Bear for Best Actor (Julio Chavez), at the 2007 Berlinale.

This year, WCF productions were the major award winners at the Berlinale. Besides the Golden Bear awarded to Claudia Llosa’s The Milk of Sorrow, another Latin American entry, Adrien Biniez’s Gigante (Uruguay/Argentina/Germany/Netherlands) was handed numerous prizes by international juries: Silver Bear – Grand Jury Prize, Alfred Bauer Prize for Particular Innovation, and Best First Feature Award. Not bad – four of the Berlinale’s top prizes were awarded to the festival’s own WCF films.

Based on the results, “festival incest” is a festival funding formula that works like a charm. In fact, it has become a tradition. How did festival incest begin in the first place? Most critics credit the Cannes festival as the initiator, thanks to its visionary programming and adept scouting teams. A decade ago, when a trade publication statistically noted that practically every film in the festival sidebars had received some kind of French funding, Gallic coin was dubbed a fast track to Cannes participation.

I was once asked which festival director first launched a visible beneficial festival policy of production funding. My response: Hubert Bals – the late Dutch founder-director of the Rotterdam International Film Festival, who honed cross-cultural film funding to a fine art. Twenty years ago, Hubert Bals put the Rotterdam film festival on firm ground by establishing a fund – subsequently named the Hubert Bals Fund (HBF) in his honor – to support filmmakers from developing countries.

Altogether, 270,000 tickets were sold for Berlinale attractions – 30,000 more than in 2008. Add free passes for press and guests, and the collective festival attendance is said to have approached the 300,000 mark. Even festival director Dieter Kosslick expressed surprise when the Friedrichstadtpalast, a 1800-seat entertainment palace in downtown Berlin converted overnight into a venue for the film festival, drew packed attendance almost every single night.

This year’s Berlinale Specials section served as a popular platform to highlight the cream of current German film production. When one notes that the German film productions in 2008 had recorded a high of 33.9 million admissions – or a 26.6% box office share (the highest mark since 1991) – Dieter Kosslick need not be clairvoyant to play this trump card as a major festival attraction.

Altogether, he booked 50 German films for the 2009 Berlinale, offering slots in the sidebar “German Cinema” section for both commercial hits (Uli Edel’s The Baader Meinhof Complex and festival award winners (Andreas Dresen’s Cloud 9). Besides the strong audience turnout for Effi Briest and Hilde, other new German productions programmed as Berlinale Specials also proved worthy seat fillers.

Asked if he regretted losing any aspired entry for the competition, Dieter Kosslick named Gus Van Sant’s Milk (USA). In fact, his ire was raised when he discovered that Milk had been screened outside the production country within days after its Beverly Hills premiere on October 31, 2008. According to FIAPF rules, the International Federation of Film Producers Associations could scratch Milk from Berlinale Bear consideration on the grounds of international “over-exposure.”

Well aware of the dilemma, Dieter Kosslick is reported to have pulled out all the stops to get producers Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen to premiere Milk at the Berlinale instead. To no avail. Instead, Gus Van Sant’s Milk was programmed in the Panorama, outside of the main competition, together with Robert Epstein’s vintage documentary The Times of Harvey Milk (USA, 1984), as a double-bill “celebration presentation” of a high-water-mark in Berlinale history that happened 15 years ago, when The Times of Harvey Milk was first screened.

Had Kosslick succeeded in securing Milk to play in competition, it is quite likely that Milk would have been amply rewarded with festival kudos by a friendly jury headed by British actress Tilda Swinton.

Which raises an important question regarding the future of Hollywood-produced films at the Berlinale. Box-office hits released in the U.S. towards the end of the year travel rapidly around the globe as attractive holiday fare, to say nothing of instant DVD consumption, pirated or otherwise. Does a prime Hollywood production need Berlinale exposure? For that matter, the question must be raised: Do A-festivals, in general, still count as choice launching pads for international release.

And should the arcane FIAPF rules be changed to accommodate the coming era of internet downloading, digital projection, and satellite distribution. Despite the ability of these rules to prevent the appearance of major Hollywood productions, the major A-festivals – Cannes, Berlin, Venice – are still valuable as venues for discovering directorial talent, exploring timely thematic material, and signaling new and technical trends on the horizon.

One important example at this year’s Berlinale was Oren Moverman’s The Messenger (USA). Awarded a Silver Bear for Best Screenplay (Oren Moverman, Alessandro Camon), The Messenger was by far the most important film seen at the Berlinale, if not the best. The story of two Iraq War army veterans assigned to bring the bad news of husbands and sons killed in action to the relatives of the dead, the pair (Woody Harrelson, Ben Foster) are ill suited to each other’s company in temperament and military code.

Their arduous mission as messengers of bad news comes across as a labyrinthine odyssey into the self, along the lines of American cult director Hal Ashby’s similar The Last Detail (USA, 1973) and Coming Home (USA, 1978). Despite some bumps in the narrative line, The Messenger is nonetheless a thought-provoking feature debut that deserves extensive festival programming and arthouse distribution.

Another Berlinale discovery was Adrian Biniez’s Gigante (Uruguay/Argentina/Germany/Netherlands), a feature debut supported by the aforementioned World Cinema Fund and the Hubert Bals Fund. Set in suburban Montevideo, Gigante is the story of a shy, middle-aged giant who works the night shift as a security guard in a supermarket. Although his job is keeping an eye on employees at the supermarket, he takes a heartthrob interest in a younger cleaning woman and follows her home and to the movies in his off-hours.

Soon the lumbering giant is living two lives, his own and the woman’s. The day of awakening comes when workers at the supermarket are laid off, including the cleaning woman. A minimalist film composed mostly of looks and gestures, thus stripped to the bone of superfluous dialogue, Gigante introduces a talented Uruguayan writer-director who also scored the music for the film.

A leading Auteur in the German New Wave, Hans-Christian Schmid is the moralist of the movement. Born in Altötting, a Bavarian pilgrimage locale, Hans-Christian Schmid capped his studies at the Munich Film Academy with the documentary Die Mechanik des Wunders (The Mechanism of Miracles) (1992), depicting how belief and enterprise go hand-in-hand in his home town.

Years later, he returned to this strict religious milieu to make Requiem (2006), the story of a young epileptic whose penchant for hearing voices is misinterpreted as possession by the devil. Based on an actual incident that occurred in an isolated Catholic community at the beginning of the 1970s, Sandra Hüller’s performance as the suffering girl merited her a Silver Bear for Best Actress at the 2006 Berlinale. Even more impressive as a statement on social conditions in eastern Germany at the Polish border after the fall of the Berlin wall, Hans-Christian Schmid’s Lichter (Distant Lights) (2003) sketched the fates of five “losers” in an interlocking narrative that never loses sight of the tragicomic no matter how bitter it is for the protagonists to face the truth.

Distant Lights was awarded the International Critics (FIPRESCI) Prize at the 2003 Berlin. “I feel a great sympathy for people who fight so hard for their happiness,” Schmid said in an interview. Perhaps this is the reason why he returned to the border with his Polish cameraman Bogumil Godfrejow to shoot the documentary Die wundersame Welt der Waschkraft (The Wondrous World of Laundry).

Programmed at the Berlinale in the International Forum of New Cinema, The Wondrous World of Laundry chronicles the daily chores of Polish laundry women as they labor in shifts to wash, clean, and press the linen transported daily in trucks from Berlin luxury hotels. With the focus primarily on the needs of the women to assure a steady income in the household, albeit with sacrifices on the family, we know from the start where the director’s sympathies lie.

Cinematographer Bogumil Godfrejow also collaborated on Hans-Christian Schmid’s Sturm (Storm), one of the two German competition entries at the Berlinale. Set in Den Haag, where the International Criminal Tribunal holds court, Storm depicts the moral dilemmas placed on the conscience of a woman prosecutor, Hannah Maynard (Kerry Fox), assigned to investigate the guilt of a former Yugoslav commander accused of the rape and murder of Bosnian women and civilians. Since the alleged crimes took place in a small town of today’s Srpska Republic, a stronghold of Serb nationalists, Hannah is required to find a reliable eyewitness to confront the indicted commander in court.

In the end, she succeeds – but at a cost. She finds herself compromised by her own lawyer husband, whose client is the European Union. And, of course, his overriding interest in this legal thriller is to move beyond the case to open the door for Serbia’s eventual entry into the EU. Shot in English, Storm is one of those cross-European productions that requires at least a history lesson to unravel the relevant details behind the travesties of the Bosnian War (1992-95), particularly the charge of genocide that happened more than a decade ago within the time scale of this film.

In this respect, Goran Duric, the name of the accused commander in the film, might easily be construed as General Ratko Mladic, who has yet to be turned over to the Tribunal by Serb authorities. Storm, for all its dramatic immediacy, comes to life only when the key witness, a rape victim placed by Romanian actress Annamaria Marinca, arrives in Den Haag to tell her story. The case may be lost, but humanity triumphs.

 

Posted in -Movies and politics, -Movies and Religion, Movies | 1 Comment

Jimmy Carter’s New Book Is Must Reading for Freeman’s Successor

Posted on March 16, 2009 by wallwritings

by James M. Wall                   carter

While keeping up with L’Affaire Freeman, which has been consuming this blog of late, I have been rereading Jimmy Carter’s We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land: A Plan That Will Work.  

I started this post on Carter’s book the morning that Ann Hafften sent me her latest blog posting from “A Texas Lutheran’s Voice for Middle East Peace”. 

I have a double motive for linking to Ann Hafften’s blog. First, her sources are well chosen. Second, I need to point out that progressive peace and justice bloggers like Ann Hafften were following Charles Freeman’s rise and fall as the potential NIC chair. The arrival of Carter’s book was timely, a break in the dark clouds of the Israel Lobby’s grip on our political life. 

These bloggers cheered the Freeman appointment, and then when their hopes were dashed, they expressed their disapproval over the Obama team’s failure to defend a well qualified appointee. A word of warning to Obama: You have friends in the religious peace and justice community; keep that in mind the next time you let a Freeman-type appointment hang in the wind. 

Ann Hafften is one of the more experienced members of this blogging community. She brings media experience and a personal passion to the task.

For most of her pre-blogging career, Ann worked as a communication specialist for agencies of the Lutheran church. After several trips to Palestine and Israel she had her own Damascus Road experience when she realized she had been duped by the US media’s one-sided coverage of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian people. 

Ann directed the news service of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) for six years. Her first trip to the Middle East was as a pilgrim in 1977. For several years  she returned to Israel as a kibbutz volunteer. In 1989, she traveled with a Fellowship of Reconciliation delegation. Following that trip she became an ardent advocate for the Palestinian cause.

After four years as the ELCA’s coordinator for Middle East networking, Ann moved to Weatherford, Texas, where she writes her blog and serves as US Coordinator for the World Council of Churches’ Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel.

Ann Hafften brings to life Moshe Dyan’s prediction.  It was Dyan who was supposed to have said that Israel had more to fear from Palestinian tour guides than it did from Palestinian fighter pilots. To his credit, Dyan also once said: “If you want to make peace, you don’t talk to your friends, you talk to your enemies.”  Carter liked that quote. 

It was out of this background that Ann Hafften embraced the writings and career of Jimmy Carter. In her blog she points first to a review by Alkva Eldar, in Ha’aretz:

Likudniks don’t scare former United States president Jimmy Carter. On the contrary: The electoral turnaround of 1977 that brought them to power for the first time enabled Carter to be inscribed in the history books as the leader who facilitated the first peace agreement between Israelis and Arabs. In his new book, We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land, Carter relates that neither he nor America’s Jewish community knew what to expect from prime minister Menachem Begin, a former underground fighter who had acquired a bad name for himself as a war-mongering fanatic. Egyptian president Anwar Sadat reported to Carter that he had asked Eastern European leaders who knew the new prime minister whether Begin was an honest man and a strong person. According to him, the answers were in the affirmative.

“In a telephone interview before this week’s election, I asked Carter what he thinks of Likud chairman Benjamin Netanyahu. From his office at the Carter Center in Atlanta, the 39th U.S. president answered calmly that Netanyahu is a practical politician, and that if a proposed peace agreement wins broad support among the Israeli public, the Likud leader would not turn his back on it, and would be `constructive.’

NPR began its piece with an appreciative word on Carter’s work in shaping the historic peace agreement between Israel and Egypt:

Nearly 30 years ago, Israel and Egypt signed a peace treaty that holds to this day. Much of the credit for that treaty goes to former President Jimmy Carter.

In the decades since, Carter has pursued a much more elusive goal: a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians. And he says there have been three recent developments that could help achieve it. The first development was the election of Barack Obama as president, he tells NPR’s Renee Montagne. For the Middle East, Carter said, that should mean `a balanced and aggressive commitment to bring peace. That’s quite a change.’

The former president also cited progress in his meetings with members of the Palestinian parties, Hamas and Fatah, in April and December of 2008. For the first time, the Hamas leaders pledged that they would accept any peace agreement negotiated between the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas and Israel,’ Carter said — as long as Palestinians approve the agreement in a referendum.

“And the recent violence between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, which Carter called an `evolving tragedy,’ adds what he said is `another element of urgency to bringing peace to Israel.’

Finally, Ann found this segment from religious blogger Eileen Fleming:

With `the fierce urgency of now’ Jimmy Carter writes of reasons why recent `public opinion polls in the Arab world revealed that the United States was seen as a greater threat than Iran, and a successful peace effort in Palestine could be the most important factor in improving its citizens’ opinion of America. Due to their lack of political and military power, the Palestinians have been dependent on the international community to survive; and they have commitments from the UN, the International Quartet and the Arab League who have all dreamt a dream of a sovereign peaceful Palestinian state beside a secure Israel. . . .

“Palestinian negotiator, Ahmed Qurei predicted, `If Israel continues to reject our propositions regarding the borders [of a future Palestinian state], we might demand Israeli citizenship.”A Fatah leader quipped, `Where will a Palestinian state rise up? The Israeli nation is inside us already.’

As a long time observer, admirer, and friend of Carter’s, I am always amazed at his ability to maintain his tranquil demeanor in moving among the leaders he meets and revisits, on his trips to the Middle East. He talks to all sides, fully aware that he will return home to face what he knows will be vitriolic, ill-informed and hostile critics. The Lobby targeted him for his “apartheid” book, as they called it. But nothing slows him down.

Carter wrote this latest book to suggest to the Obama administration some directions toward a peaceful and just solution to the quagmire. A peace-seeker, he is also a realistic politician which is why his guidance is valuable to the new president. Carter continues to believe that a Two State solution is the more realistic option available.  

On this point he has opposition in the pro-Palestinian community, where the apartheid situation in the Occupied Territories has forced a final agreement ever closer to a One State solution.  Why does Carter still support Two States? Simple, he talks with Israeli citizens and officials and he knows how fearful they are of losing their cherished “Jewish state” existence. 

His long involvement with the region is evident in the little asides he includes in his book, as when he notes that he has known Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad “since he was a university student”.  Not many current political leaders have that sort of familiarity with leaders of the region. The last visit I had with Yasir Arafat, he greeted me warmly because I was “a friend of Jimmy Carter’s.” 

Carter understands the finer points of diplomatic negotiations. He writes about Israel’s “three demands” that Hamas “must” agree to before any further discussions may be held. The three Absolute demands have become Israel’s mantra, dutifully promulgated by US media: Hamas must “recognize Israel”, accept all previously negotiated agreements, and forego violence.

The US media rarely gives equal time to the Palestinian response that Carter heard from Hamas leaders; he includes the responses in his book (p. 141-142):

The Hamas response [to the three demands] is that (a) it will acknowledge Israel’s right to live in peace within its 1967 borders, but diplomatic recognition can be mutual only between Israel and a sovereign Palestinian state; (b) previous agreements are not acceptable that are based on Israel’s continuing occupation of Palestine (as was Oslo); and (c) it will agree to a long-term cease-fire (as much as fifty years) between Israel and an adjacent Palestinian state but not officially renounce its right to resist until Israel is no longer occupying Palestine. 

Carter is a veteran at hearing both sides; in contrast, the US media assumes there is no reasonable counter proposal from Hamas because no one has heard from Hamas.  Except, of course, Jimmy Carter, who does talk to Hamas’ leaders, both those based in Gaza and in Damascus. 

Reading Carter’s book is like reading a carefully developed intelligence report from an experienced official who has talked to both sides and understands, at a deep level, what they are saying. Whoever is named to replace Charles Freeman as President Obama’s NIC chair, should study this book. Then he or she should talk to Carter to prepare for the intelligence gathering task ahead.

(For a televised interview Fareed Zakaria conducted with Charles Freeman, click here.  The interview was posted by Andrew Sullivan on his Atlantic blog)

Posted in Media, Middle East | Leave a comment

David Broder: Obama Suffers an Embarrassing Defeat

Posted on March 13, 2009 by wallwritings

by James M. Wall

There are few journalists working today I admire as much as I admire David Broder. We go way back. As far back as the George McGovern campaign of 1972.

This is a man I trust and what is more important, he is trusted by the Washington political and media community. His column appears regularly in the Washington Post. It is also syndicated to the more fortunate news outlets in the country.

His column this week on Charles Freeman was so on target, so personal and so insightful that it is command reading for everyone who has shown interest in the rise and fall of Charles Freeman. 

He begins in his usual pithy style with the following words, and he concludes with a zinger on how the White House has handled this matter:

The Obama administration has just suffered an embarrassing defeat at the hands of the lobbyists the president vowed to keep in their place, and their friends on Capitol Hill. The country has lost an able public servant in an area where President Obama has few personal credentials of his own — the handling of national intelligence.

Charles Freeman, the man who was slated to be chairman of the National Intelligence Council, the high-level interagency group that prepares evaluations for the president and other senior officials, suddenly withdrew his name Tuesday night.

I know it was a sudden decision because I had breakfast with him that morning. He said then that he thought he could ride out the storm caused by his outspoken comments on policy toward China and the Middle East — and the enmity that he had incurred from lobbies supporting Israel and human rights in Tibet.

“I think their goal is not to stop me but to keep others from speaking out, and to assure that AIPAC [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee] is part of the vetting process for future nominees,” he told me.

But after another visit to members of Congress, Freeman was gone. For David’s entire column, and to read the zinger, click here.

Posted in Media | 2 Comments

The Times Wakes Up While Schumer Says He Helped the White House Do the Right Thing

Posted on March 12, 2009 by wallwritings

by James M. Wall

The New York Times finally woke up to the Charles Freeman affair and  wrote about Freeman’s withdrawal in its news pages this morning. 

The Times called AIPAC for a statement and allowed a spokesman to deny involvement while treating the withdrawal as a “new” story, even though the assault on Freeman has been waged for weeks in the blogosphere. (The Times’ promotion of the Iraq war creeps sadly back to mind).

Greg Sargent explains in Who Runs Gov.com:

 The Times didn’t seem that interested in figuring out why Freeman was ousted. The paper quotes Freeman blaming the “Israel Lobby,” and then places one call to AIPAC, whose spokesperson says that the group never took a formal position on Freeman. The paper lets the matter rest there.

Now that the Times has finally put words on paper in its news section, the rest of the MSM’s news pages will follow the Media Godfather’s lead and gingerly touch upon the topic with its usual lack of insight or perspective.

Of course, the Washington Post, AIPAC’s DC house organ, produced an editorial that sounded strangely like something an AIPAC intern might write, evoking the magic smear, “grotesque libel” in its attack. The Post helpfully links to what it calls Freeman’s “screed”.  Click on “screed”  below, and see for yourself if it is a screed, or an indictment of any group or individual who places the interests of a foreign nation ahead of our own.

Mr. Freeman issued a two-page screed on Tuesday in which he described himself as the victim of a shadowy and sinister “Lobby” whose “tactics plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency” and which is “intent on enforcing adherence to the policies of a foreign government.” Yes, Mr. Freeman was referring to Americans who support Israel — and his statement was a grotesque libel.

Freeman does not write “shadowy and sinister” in his statement, as the editorial states.  The Post editorialist needs to remember Journalism 101: Thou Shalt Not Paraphrase Falsely Against Thy Neighbor. Freeman’s full statement deserves a careful reading; his language is blunt and angry. But he speaks the truth, to which anyone who has ever been attacked by the Lobby, will attest:

. . . The libels on me and their easily traceable email trails show conclusively that there is a powerful  lobby determined to prevent any view other than its own from being aired, still less to factor in American understanding of trends and events in the Middle East.  The tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication of falsehoods, and an utter disregard for the truth. 

The aim of this Lobby is control of the policy process through the exercise of a veto over the appointment of people who dispute the wisdom of its views, the substitution of political correctness for analysis, and the exclusion of any and all options for decision by Americans and our government other than those that it favors. . . 

Fortunately, the blogosphere has been all over this story. I wrote about it, in order,  here and here and here and here.  My postings point to links of other bloggers who have been relentless in demanding that the Israel Lobby give President Obama the right to nominate Freeman as chairman of the National Intelligence Council.

This is the Council which, in the Bush days, was deeply involved in cooking the intelligence books in favor of attacking Iraq. 

Under Clinton or Bush the appointment of Freeman would not have even been considered. So score this nomination as a home rum for President Obama.

Then the Lobby came roaring out of its darkness to blast a man of integrity who has been willing to speak the truth about Israel. After a few days and a private chat between Chuck Schumer and Rahm Emanuel,  Obama caved. Freeman withdrew.

Greg Sargent wrote that Schumer touted himself as a giant killer in a statement his office sent to the media, quoting Schumer:

“Charles Freeman was the wrong guy for this position. His statements against Israel were way over the top and severely out of step with the administration. I repeatedly urged the White House to reject him, and I am glad they did the right thing.”

So sorry, baseball fans, this was not a home run; a replay showed the ball veered foul.  

There still could be a hopeful outcome to this series of events. L’affaire Freeman could be a turning point in the long effort to break the iron control the Israel Lobby has maintained over American foreign policy.

Larry Rosen’s comment that lobbying should remain in the dark because it dies in the sunlight, is so on target in this situation. It is ironic that it is Rosen, the former AIPAC lobbyist, who has led the battle to oust Freeman from his appointment as chairman of the NIC. He should have read his old memos.

Rosen no longer works for AIPAC, officially. He lost his position there following his federal indictment on August 4, 2005 for alleged violations of the Espionage Act in the conduct of AIPAC’s work. He was scheduled to go on trial in the U.S. Courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia, in April, 2008. The case has since been postponed to a future date. 

The Times story treated L’affaire Freeman as a catfight between ideological extreminsts when, in fact, it was an uprising against the Lobby’s control over the US Congress, the media and American public opinion.

And, I must add, though only religious people notice, the Lobby’s control over American churches is almost as total as is its control over the Congress. This too, inshallah, may be changing. The interfaith and anti-semitism trump cards just may have been played once too often against those God-fearing folk Martin Luther King, Jr. like to describe as “people of good will”. 

Where is the evidence that the tide against the Lobby’s control over American foreign policy is starting to shift? Start with columns like the stunningly powerful piece by Roger Cohen that ran in the New York Times on the same day that Ambassador Freeman withdrew from the NIC chairmanship. See the stories that have begun to creep into US media, print and visual, out of Gaza. The suffering there was finally just too much to cover up with the “Israel must defend itself” smoke screen. 

And when members of Congress travel to Palestine and Israel and come back to deplore the suffering in Gaza, the media had to notice. Certainly they had to notice a former presidential candidate like Senator John Kerry and courageous members of congress like Brian Baird (D-Washington) and Keith Ellison  (D-Mi), who must face voters every two, not six, years.  (Links to these three provide a comprehensive coverage of their journeys; check them out by clicking on their names.)

You want more evidence? How about money? The American public is beginning to notice how the government spends tax dollars, now, more than ever.  The money the US taxpayers send to Israel tops all other foreign assistance gifts.  This is not money to feed the hungry and cure the sick; it is money that buys arms and builds settlements on stolen land.

The Lobby, which knows how to use its money to persuade members of Congress to do its bidding, appears to have forgotten that this is not a good time to upset the American taxpayer. The Lobby’s once rigid discipline is slipping; was Freeman really that important to them?  Apparently so.

Concern for money was the same back in those earlier economic bad times, the 1930s, described in the movie, O Brother, Where Art Thou, when Washington Hogwallop explained to his cousin Pete why Hogwallop had to turn Pete over to the sheriff. It was for the reward:

“Sorry, Pete, I know we’re kin, but they got this depression on. I got to do for me and mine.”

We sure do have this depression thing going on. Money unwisely spent does not go over well with American tax payers facing unemployment and foreclosures. 

This time the Israel Lobby came out of the shadows and forgot that the bloggers were watching, even as the MSM looked the other way.  

I was so impressed with the New York Times timid entry into L’Affaire Freeman that I sent them a comment, which was immediately added to what at the time were over 275 comments. overwhelmingly anti-Lobby and pro-Freeman.

For a brief shining moment, my comment was actually among those posted. But then, alas, I looked again and after the number of comments had exceeded 325, the Times cut them back to only five, “editors’ selection” comments.  Too much pro-Freeman was too much for the Times.

Here, for your reading pleasure, and for the record, is the comment I offered the Times, now sadly confined to the “others” category:

I have been writing on my blog wallwritings.wordpress.com that the Main Stream Media, which is led by the Times, would ignore this Freeman controversy until the Israel Lobby did its dirty work and forced his withdrawal. And then You would report it. Which you have done, typically treating a main culprit, Chuck Schumer, with kid gloves. But blessings on you for printing so many comments. I have gotten through more than 50 of them and they “get it”, they understand that the Israel Lobby is highly dangerous to our American well being.

The Lobby is toxic to our American domestic politics; it is dangerous to the well being of the Jewish people in Israel by pushing war not peace there, and it most certainly damaging to the well being of the occupied Palestinian people. The Times deserves credit for printing these comments. Thank you for what you did with these comments and welcome to the public discussion.

Feel free to send your comments to this posting, below.  More importantly, send your comment to the New York Times. They just might select it for the “editors’ selection”.

Posted in Media, Middle East, Religious Faith | 5 Comments

Good: Cohen Calls Hamas a “political phenomenon” in the Palestinian National Fabric; Bad: Freeman Withdraws

Posted on March 10, 2009 by wallwritings

By James M. Wall

Back in the Israel Lobby’s halcyon days, could you imagine a New York Times leading columnist writing the following paragraphs? And keeping his job?

Like Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah has long been treated by the United States as a proscribed terrorist group. This narrow view has ignored the fact that both organizations are now entrenched political and social movements without whose involvement regional peace is impossible.

Britain aligned itself with the U.S. position on Hezbollah, but has now seen its error. Bill Marston, a Foreign Office spokesman, told Al Jazeera: “Hezbollah is a political phenomenon and part and parcel of the national fabric in Lebanon. We have to admit this.”

Hallelujah.

But that is what Roger Cohen wrote in a column entitled, “Middle East Reality Check”.  Hallelujah, indeed. But wait, there is more:

Precisely the same thing could be said of Hamas in Gaza. It is a political phenomenon, part of the national fabric there.

One difference is that Hezbollah is in the Lebanese national unity government, whereas Hamas won the free and fair January 2006 elections to the Legislative Council of the Palestinian Authority, only to discover Middle Eastern democracy is only democracy if it produces the right result.

The United States should follow the British example. It should initiate diplomatic contacts with the political wing of Hezbollah. The Obama administration should also look carefully at how to reach moderate Hamas elements and engineer a Hamas-Fatah reconciliation.

And there is much, much more in Cohen’s remarkable column. As he discusses the Hamas situation and the need for a diplomatic outreach from the US to Hamas, Cohen offers some harsh facts and a personal testimony:

Speaking of violence, it’s worth recalling what Israel did in Gaza in response to sporadic Hamas rockets. It killed upward of 1,300 people, many of them women and children; caused damage estimated at $1.9 billion; and destroyed thousands of Gaza homes. It continues a radicalizing blockade on 1.5 million people squeezed into a narrow strip of land.

At this vast human, material and moral price, Israel achieved almost nothing beyond damage to its image throughout the world. Israel has the right to hit back when attacked, but any response should be proportional and governed by sober political calculation. The Gaza war was a travesty; I have never previously felt so shamed by Israel’s actions. . . .

Israel Lobby discipline has broken down. As a current example, this much piling on to Charles Freeman’s NIC appointment would never have been tolerated in the Lobby’s halcyon days. Senator Charles Schumer (NY-D) forgot that no conversation goes unnoticed in the days of the internet.

Schumer’s friendly chat with Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel would once have been just a private exchange between old friends. No more; their discussion was revealed by blogger Greg Sargent in a conversation I cited in an earlier piece here on Freeman. 

The internet is filled with critics of Israel who do not quake in fear that they will be sent immediately by the Lobby into the outer darkness of journalist unemployment. There are also columnists like Roger Cohen who lack the same fear. 

Senator Schumer apparently does not realize that Israel’s conduct is now being noted, openly, by New York Times columnists. Of course, little of Cohen’s candor has reached the Times news columns, where the Freeman struggle has yet to attract any significant notice. Nor has the fight over Freeman entered the purified pro-Israeli air of columnists like Tom Freidman and David Brooks. 

But in time, it will, especially now that a tough minded diplomat like Freeman has been forced to withdraw his name from consideration as the NIC chairman. The Lobby won this one but at what a cost.  The Lobby was responsible for driving Freeman from the field through the pressure of leading Democrats like Schumer, and then, in what may have been the final blow from the obsequious Joe Liberman. 

Politico reported late Tuesday afternoon that Freeman had requested his selection to be Chairman of the National Intelligence Council not proceed.” Blair’s office said in a statement, “Director Blair accepted Ambassador Freeman’s decision with regret.”  

Charles W. Freeman Jr., the former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, had been praised by allies and by the director of national intelligence, Dennis Blair, as a brilliant, iconoclastic analyst. Critics said he was too hard on Israel and too soft on China, and blasted him for taking funding from Saudi royals. . . 

. . . The withdrawal came after Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) grilled Blair at a Senate Armed Service Committee hearing Tuesday. Lieberman cited his “concern” about “statements that [Freeman] has made that appear either to be inclined to lean against Israel or too much in favor of China.”  

It is important to remember that this is the same Joe Lieberman who traveled recently to Israel to embrace Israel’s racist political leader Avigdor Lieberman as someone the US could  work with as Israel’s foreign minister, a position the Israeli Liberman covets. Joe Liberman loves the Israeli Liberman but has no use for the American Charles Freeman. Is Joe a true patriot, or does he have other loyalties that drive him?  Just asking. 

Senators like Schumer and Lieberman were once expected to remain in the shadows while doing their dirty work on Israel’s behalf. But the times, “they are a changin”, as Max Blumenthal, a blogger for the Daily Beast, notes in citing a 19-year-old internal AIPAC memo, written by Larry Rosen, then AIPAC’s director of foreign policy issues. 

In a recent posting, Blumenthal points to a June 13, 1999 Washington Post article, ” The Lobbyists From AIPAC, Girding for Battle in the New World” , written by Lloyd Grove:

. . . many U.S. Jews are uncomfortable with such talk, and see the specter of antisemitism behind every public reference to the “Jewish lobby,” as AIPAC is frequently called by its opponents. Rep. Tim Valentine (D-N.C.), whose House amendment to cut the $ 650 million in extra aid for Israel received a mere 24 votes, blamed the Jewish community for its lopsided defeat.

“I do plan to find an opportunity to talk to my Jewish friends,” the congressman vowed, “and say, ‘Do you realize the impression that this thing makes, when you come down with full force, all the strength that you have, for a few bucks? My God, what does that say?’ ” Asked what it said, Valentine responded, “I don’t know. You know what I mean.”

Groves concludes with a reminder of the code of conduct then expected from AIPAC (remember, this was in 1991):

Understandably, perhaps, AIPAC prefers to operate outside the spotlight. “A lobby is like a night flower,” AIPAC’s director of foreign policy issues, Steven Rosen, once wrote in an internal memo. “It thrives in the dark and dies in the sun.”

What went wrong in the assault on Ambassador Freeman was the lack of discipline among AIPAC operatives. Blumenthal concludes that “while AIPAC has attempted to avoid the appearance of being involved in any way in the attacks on Freeman, Rosen has taken a leading role. In assuming such a prominent part, he has violated his own rule.”

Larry Rosen will have to live with the fact that he was the catalyst who brought abut the Lobby’s “overreach moment”, that moment in 2009 when the public, and increasingly, the media, began to wake up to the fact that the Lobby is not the Sheriff of US policy in the Middle East. This is  how change happens: first, the Brits, then the American public, followed, ever so slowly, by the media, and then, God Willing, the US Congress.  The Lobby won this one, but the internet struggle revealed an audacity in the Lobby which it once managed to keep under wraps.

Here is how Andrew Sullivan described Rosen’s role in this fiasco:

The story was broken by Laura Rozen and her report on February 19 at 10.36 am is very dry and factual. In fact, it doesn’t seem to presage any controversy. Then came the three fire alarm from Steve Rosen, who has since been a clearing house for any and all attacks. Rosen is very candid about the reasons for his believing this appointment is “alarming”:

This is a profoundly disturbing appointment, if the report is correct. Freeman is a strident critic of Israel, and a textbook case of the old-line Arabism that afflicted American diplomacy at the time the state of Israel was born. His views of the region are what you would expect in the Saudi foreign ministry, with which he maintains an extremely close relationship, not the top CIA position for analytic products going to the President of the United States.

Rosen followed up with a second post a day later focusing entirely on the Israel question – and arguing simply that someone with Freeman’s views must be barred from a high-level job in the US government. Ben Smith wrote a piece the next day, “A Test For The Israeli Lobby”, in which the entire controversy was about Israel:

A well-placed pro-Israel source says there’s “no amount of good will” that would soften reaction to that appointment because “they might as well have appointed Bandar.” 

Will the US intelligence community continue the Bush doctrine of shaping foreign intelligence in a direction to please Israel? Was the tragic mistake of Iraq not enough? L’affaire Freeman was a victory for the Israel Lobby. It is a costly defeat for the well being of the American people.

Update on Freeman’s withdrawal:

Ambassador Freedom issued a lengthy personal statement after his withdrawal as NIC chairman. His entire statement is an eloquent call for the public to address the overreaching of the Israel Lobby. To read the statement in full, click here. Here is an excerpt:

The libels on me and their easily traceable email trails show conclusively that there is a powerful  lobby determined to prevent any view other than its own from being aired, still less to factor in American understanding of trends and events in the Middle East.  The tactics of the Israel Lobbyplumb the depths of dishonor and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication of falsehoods, and an utter disregard for the truth.  The aim of this Lobby is control of the policy process through the exercise of a veto over the appointment of people who dispute the wisdom of its views, the substitution ofpolitical correctness for analysis, and the exclusion of any and all options for decision by Americans and our government other than those that it favors.

There is a special irony in having been accused of improper regard for the opinions of foreign governments and societies by a group so clearly intent on enforcing adherence to the policies of a foreign government – in this case, the government of Israel.  I believe that the inability of the American public to discuss, or the government to consider, any option for US policies in the Middle East opposed by the ruling faction in Israeli politics has allowed that faction to adopt and sustain policies that ultimately threaten the existence of the state of Israel.  It is not permitted for anyone in the United States to say so.  This is not just a tragedy for Israelis and their neighbors in the Middle East; it is doing widening damage to the national security of the United States.

The outrageous agitation that followed the leak of my pending appointment will be seen by many to raise serious questions about whether the Obama administration will be able to make its own decisions about the Middle East and related issues.  I regret that my willingness to serve the new administration has ended by casting doubt on its ability to consider, let alone decide what policies might best serve the interests of the United States rather than those of a Lobby intent on enforcing the will and interests of a foreign government. 

How does the withdrawal of Freeman from the NIC appointment reflect upon President Obama’s ability to stand up to Israel, which, the last time we checked, is still a foreign government? Will this rejection of Freeman strengthen Obama’s resistance to the Lobby? Or is Atlantic blogger Andrew Sullivan correct in believing that Obama will make no effort to confront the Lobby again?  We soon will find out.

Posted in Middle East Politics | 2 Comments

Yes Virginia, There is an Israel Lobby and It is Still Fighting Charles Freeman

Posted on March 6, 2009 by wallwritings

by James M. Wall

Yes, Virginia, there is an Israel Lobby, and it is still fighting to block Charles Freeman’s recent appointment.

We thought the matter was settled when the word came down that Charles Freeman would be named chairman of the National Intelligence Council. This decision evoked great rejoicing among those of us who are counting on President Obama to tell the Israel Lobby, no single lobby will control what happens in the Obama Oval Office.

It is important to remember, Virginia, that the Israel Lobby has a role to play along with all the other special interest pleading groups in Washington. But, Virginia, you and all your other little friends, should never forget that a lobby’s role is to plead a case, not to control government policy.

The internet back-and-forth over Freeman’s appointment has yet to surface in the MSM. But in the blogosphere, it has raged and continues to rage, since rumors surfaced that Freeman was under consideration for the NIC position.

I wrote about Freeman in four separate postings (here and here and here and here, should you wish to revisit the recent past).  

To my surprise, my postings on this topic drew the largest number of responses of any Wall Writings posting since the late Andrew Weaver blasted SMU for capitulating to the George W. Bush library project. Much of it was supportive, at least as measured by the websites and blogs that referred the postings to their readers. The opposition, which was heavy, was a mixture of ugly racism and sophisticated diversion tactics from academics and slick pundits.

Richard Silverstein demonstrates just how diversionary rhetoric works:

[Freeman’s] critics veil their criticism in an attack on Freeman’s close ties to Chinese and Saudi business and government interests, but make no mistake–Freeman’s sin is his outspokenness on Israel and his sympathies for Palestinian suffering.

There were no diversions in a White Supremacy website which had referred its readers to my blog. That site bashes Freeman for being anti-Israel. That is an interesting shift, since in earlier years, White Supremacists were equal opportunity haters of both African Americans and Jews. Maybe they still hate American Jews but love the state of Israel? Armageddon anyone?

Stephen M. Walt, Professor of International Relations at Harvard University, knows the Israel Lobby quite well. He is the co-author, along with John J. Mearsheimer of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.  He identifies the cast of characters in the “get Freeman” drama:

. . . As soon as the appointment was announced, a bevy of allegedly “pro-Israel” pundits leapt to attack it, in what The Nation’s Robert Dreyfuss called a “thunderous, coordinated assault.”  Freeman’s critics were the usual suspects: Jonathan Chait of the New Republic, Michael Goldfarb at the Weekly Standard, Jeffrey Goldberg of theAtlantic, Gabriel Schoenfeld (writing on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal), Jonah Goldberg of  National Review, Marty Peretz on his New Republic blog, and former AIPAC official Steve Rosen (yes, the same guy who is now on trial for passing classified U.S. government information to Israel). . . .

Among Freeman’s “past crimes”, according to his opponents, was that he served as an able and respected US ambassador to Saudi Arabia where he developed a good relationship with the ruling family.  Along with many other non-profit American foundations, a foundation on whose board he sits has received donations from the Saudi government.  Good for the Saudis for plowing back oil profits into good causes in the country which buys so much Saudi oil.

Freeman, in other words, has been friendly with the leadership in Saudi Arabia. Friendly to leaders of another country? The mind boggles. Friendship is a valuable diplomatic tool. Absolute loyalty to another nation is something different. It is absolute loyalty to another nation that is practiced extensively by Israel Lobby operatives, specifically, Washington insiders, public officials, pundits and funding sources.

The American public is not dumb; we know the difference between friendship and absolute blind loyalty to another country, no questions asked. Friends do not let friends drive when drunk; blind loyalists give them the keys. 

Have these people read George Washington’s farewell address in which he said, ” “It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world…”  In his book on that address, Henry Cabot Lodge wrote “…no man ever left a nobler political testament.”

Freeman is a recognized authority on both Middle Eastern and Chinese affairs. His honesty and integrity are clearly superior to the practitioners of apophasis and venom who are determined to derail his appointment to the NIC through intimidation and political muscle.

At the moment that muscle is centered in the powerful office occupied by New York Democratic Senator Charles Schumer. Two other former members of Congress, another senator from New York named Clinton and a chief of Staff named Emanuel from Illinois, are out of the Lobby’s immediate reach now that President Obama has brought them into the official orbit of the executive branch.

And, to think, we worried about those two joining the Obama team. This Obama fellow appears to understand how government and politics work. 

But Chuck Schumer is still in the Senate and making noises. Greg Sargent wrote on his blog, Who Runs Gov, that Schumer placed a private call to his old buddy, Rahm Emanuel, to say that “he is concerned about Freeman”. This was not news to Emanuel. Since Schumer and Emanuel are notorious media leakers, that was a “private” conversation conducted specifically to be made public. 

Notice the gingerly manner in which the “private” conversation is treated in this blog. The message is clear: MSM, when you get around to covering this, take note, Schumer means business. Right now he is being Mr. Nice Guy, but this is only Round One.

Senator Charles Schumer has privately expressed concerns directly to White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel about Chas Freeman, the Obama administration’s pick to head the group that prepares some of the intel community’s most politically sensitive assessments, a person familiar with their conversation tells me.

Obama’s choice of Freeman as head of National Intelligence Council — which has aroused opposition because of his strong criticism of Israel and other things — signaled that the President isn’t afraid to buck the pro-Israel lobby and the neocon critics who aggressively opposed the Freeman pick.

But Schumer’s concerns could create serious problems for Freeman, since Schumer is a Democrat and a high-profile voice on Israel, and could give cover for other Democrats to come out and vocally raise questions about the appointment. The source familiar with Schumer’s conversation with Rahm tells me the New York Senator was concerned about Freeman’s positions on Israel.

Schumer is not just the highest profile voice on Israel.  He is the leader of the AIPAC pack whose tactics are described by Richard Silverstein,in his blog, Tikum Olam:

This coordinated attack fits Aipac’s modus operandi to a tee.  First, you will probably not hear the group’s name directly associated with the assault.  The phone calls go from Aipac headquarters to their mostly Republican minions on the Hill.  But it’s entirely possible that unlike the Manchurian Candidate, Aipac doesn’t even need to activate their operatives.  They’ve been so indoctrinated that the Congress members know what is expected of them and they start the campaign themselves.

In a posting, “Intel Council Draws Ire of Israel Lobby”, on the Anti-War.com website, Lobe and Daniel Luban wrote:

The campaign gained a much higher profile this week when the ranking Republican and former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Peter Hoekstra, called on the administration to withdraw Freeman’s appointment in an interview with the Wall Street Journal whose neoconservative editorial page had already denounced the appointment, and a New York Democrat, Rep. Stephen Israel, urged an investigation of his ties to Saudi Arabia.

Ten other members of Congress made the same demand in a letter they sent to the DNI’s inspector-general Tuesday:

Four of the signatories – Republican Rep. Mark Kirk and Democratic Rep. Shelley Berkley, as well as the top two Republicans in the House of Representatives, Minority Leader John Boehner and Minority Whip Eric Cantor – were among the five top recipients in the House of campaign contributions from pro-Israel political action committees (PACs) closely tied to AIPAC during the 2007-8 election cycle, according to figures compiled by the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. Kirk himself has been the House’s top recipient of Israel-related PAC money over the past decade, according to the Report.

Largely outside MSM range, the attacks on Freeman have come from the usual suspects in pro-Israel circles. They include writers and publications the casual reader might not recognize as being loyalists in the AIPAC army. All are following the AIPAC script: Shift the attention to Saudi Arabia, and away from Israel. 

M.J. Rosenberg writes in his blog that these attacks on Freeman are getting creepy:

The effort to force President Obama to withdraw the nomination of Chas Freeman as chairman of the National Intelligence Council is getting very very creepy. . . .Here is the scary part.  I’m a pro-Israel Jew, who has visited Israel 50 times in 40 years. But I am, like 99.9% of American Jews, first an American.The idea that the anti-Freeman crowd is running all over town demanding that anyone not close to Israel be banned from working in an American intelligence agency leaves me nauseated.

How did we reach this creepy moment? Stephen M. Walt traces the narrative:

 What unites this narrow band of critics is only one thing: Freeman has dared to utter some rather mild public criticisms of Israeli policy. That’s the litmus test that Chait, Goldberg, Goldfarb, Peretz, Schoenfeld et al want to apply to all public servants: thou shalt not criticize Israeli policy nor question America’s “special relationship” with Israel. Never mind that this policy of unconditional support has been bad for the United States and unintentionally harmful to Israel as well. If these pundits and lobbyists had their way, anyone who pointed that fact out would be automatically disqualified from public service.
 
There are three reasons why the response to Freeman has been so vociferous. First, these critics undoubtedly hoped they could raise a sufficient stink that Obama and his director of national intelligence, Dennis Blair, might reconsider the appointment. Or perhaps Freeman might even decide to withdraw his name, because he couldn’t take the heat. Second, even if it was too late to stop Freeman from getting the job, they want to make Obama pay a price for his choice, so that he will think twice about appointing anyone else who might be willing to criticize Israeli policy or the special relationship. 
 
Third, and perhaps most important, attacking Freeman is intended to deter other people in the foreign policy community from speaking out on these matters. Freeman might be too smart, too senior, and too well-qualified to stop, but there are plenty of younger people eager to rise in the foreign policy establishment and they need to be reminded that their careers could be jeopardized be if they followed in Freeman’s footsteps and said what they thought. Raising a stink about Freeman reminds others that it pays to back Israel to the hilt, or at least remain silent, even when it is pursuing policies — like building settlements on the West Bank — that are not in America’s national interest.  

This last ditch effort to derail Freeman, as Walt notes, lays down a marker. Even if Freeman makes it to the NIC, the Washington political community has been warned by the Lobby .  Which is why this should be the moment when Obama says to the Lobby:

Thank you for your service as a lobby; you and other lobbies in this nation perform a useful civic role. But you must remember that my task is to promote American interests and values in the Middle East, not just the interests of one country among many. Now I want you to back off, or run the risk of reducing your role in American life to that of the Know Nothings of American history .

Posted in Middle East Politics, Politics and Elections | 13 Comments

The Palestinian Democracy That Might Have Been After the 2006 Election

Posted on March 5, 2009 by wallwritings
election-results-062
By James M. Wall

The map above shows the final results of the 2006 Palestinian legislative district elections. It was distributed by the Central Elections Commission of Palestine and published on the BBC website. One half of the legislators in the 2006 election were chosen in districts (66 seats); the other half were chosen in a “countrywide” vote (66 seats).

As this map indicates, Hamas won an overwhelming majority of the legislative seats chosen by districts in both the West Bank and Gaza. The border drawn on this map follows the internationally recognized 1967 border.  Note carefully how many green Hamas legislative seats on this map are in the West Bank. The 2006 legislative election was a major electoral triumph for Hamas throughout the entire country, not just in Gaza, as post-election propaganda would have us believe.

American media did not cover this election as a Palestinian election. They covered its implications for Israel while viewing it entirely through Israeli lens. This was an election I viewed up close, talking with voters and officials. I am certain it was the sort of election US political writers would have loved to cover.

I could imagine David Broder walking the streets of Ramallah for the Washington Post to interview voters. I suspect he would have sniffed out the declining power of Fatah and the surge of Hamas. Unlike the foreign policy reporters who take their leads from their Israeli minders, he would have discovered immediately that the most recent city council election in Bethlehem, an historic Christian city, elected Hamas members. This 2006 election was an upset in the making. Political reporters dearly love upsets. Too bad none of them were there to see it happen.

British media understood the election results. The American media wrote their stories from West Jerusalem, ever mindful of their editors back home who see all things in the region through Israeli lens.

The result: When the demonization of the winning party started, there was no one there to say, “wait a minute, didn’t these guys win a democratically run election?”

The Jerusalem-based American media corp continues to dutifully stipulate, as their editors insist that they do, that there will be no peace until Hamas, Fatah and anyone else in the region “recognizes Israel’s right to exist”.  They dare not touch the obvious question: How can Israel make that rhetorical demand when it refused  to recognize the right of the Palestinians to have Hamas recognized as the political party that won that 2006 election?

And then there is that constant demand from Israeli that Hamas denounce the use of “terror”? Roger Cohen, the courageous New York Times columnist, recently wrote an appreciative piece on Jews living peacefully in Iran. He was excoriated by letter-writers who denounced him for not describing Iran as a terror state.  He responded to that criticism with a column that contained these insights:

. . . .[T]he equating of Iran with terror today is simplistic. Hamas and Hezbollah have evolved into broad political movements widely seen as resisting an Israel over-ready to use crushing force. It is essential to think again about them, just as it is essential to toss out Iran caricatures. I return to this subject because behind the Jewish issue in Iran lies a critical one — the U.S. propensity to fixate on and demonize a country through a one-dimensional lens, with a sometimes disastrous chain of results.

It’s worth recalling that hateful, ultranationalist rhetoric is no Iranian preserve. Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s race-baiting anti-Arab firebrand, may find a place in a government led by Benjamin Netanyahu. . . .

After Hamas won the 2006 election, Israel, which claims to be the only democracy in the Middle East,  promptly put 45 duly elected Hamas legislators into Israeli jails, where they remain until this day.  As a consequence, Fatah and Hamas resumed their internal battles in street skirmishes, a battle promoted on behalf of Fatah under US prodding and training.

But who noticed?  Now, following the recent and excessive destruction in Gaza, the new American president sent his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, to the Egyptian resort of Sharm al-Sheikh to meet with negotiators which included Fatah. Not represented was the duly elected Hamas government. Clinton arrived with an offer of $900 million designed to pick up the debris left by Israel’s 22 day long recent invasion and daily bombardments.

This need not have happened had democracy been permitted to function after the election of January, 2006.

I was at a polling place in Bethlehem on that bright, sunny January election day.  Literature was being handed out, mostly by women, the walls around the election site were covered with candidate posters. It was a day filled with hope and promise.

Some of us walked around the area in front of the building where a long line of voters waited patiently. There were even two young people with clipboards taking an exit poll as voters left the municipal building.

The previous day I had attended the final pre-election meeting of the Palestine Election Commission in Ramallah. The Commission had invited President Jimmy Carter and members of his team of international monitors for a final briefing. I had been asked to sit in on the meeting by an old friend who chaired the Commission, Dr. Hanna Nasir, retired president of Biet Ziet University.

At the pre-election meeting in Ramallah, one of the monitors, from Sweden, as I recall, asked if the Hamas political party had been involved in planning the election. Dr. Nasir had a slight smile on his face when he responded:

“All the political parties have been meeting with this commission to prepare for this election; none of them are here today to greet you because they are out campaigning.  But you asked about Hamas?  As a matter of fact, Jim Wall, over there, is sitting in the Hamas seat”.

The group chuckled. The Hamas question was especially pertinent because Hamas had boycotted the previous election in which the Fatah party took control of the Palestinian legislature. In a separate election, Fatah leader Yasir Arafat had been elected president.

Since those elections, Fatah had lost favor with voters, thanks to the slowness of the peace process and rampart Fatah corruption This time Hamas was participating in this democratic process with considerable enthusiasm, as we discovered the next day at the Bethlehem polling site. The green banners of Hamas were very much in evidence and most of the literature I received came from Hamas.

President Carter and his monitoring group spread out through Gaza and the West Bank to monitor first the voting, and then the vote counting. One friend of mine from the US was assigned to Jenin.  He found the same enthusiasm we had encountered in Bethlehem.  By the end of election day, 74.6% of an estimated 1.3 million Palestinian voters had gone to the polls.

In the districts, Hamas won by a landslide, 45 to 17, a majority Nancy Pelosi could only dream about. Party winners by districts are shown on the map above: Hamas (45 seats) in blue on the map; Fatah (17 seats) in yellow; independents (4 seats) in red.

Another 66 legislators were chosen on a national ballot. Those results were closer: Hamas, 29 seats; Fatah, 28 seats; PFLP, 3 seats; Badeel, 2 seats; Independent Palestine, 2 seats; Third Way, 2 seats. Combining the totals won in district and national balloting, Hamas won 74 seats to 45 for Fatah.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was exercising on her stationary bike when an aide brought her the news.

After a democratic election, she was told, Hamas was now the ruling party in the Palestinian legislature. That she was shocked at the news is what is shocking. Any low level foreign service officer could have told her well in advance that Hamas would win.  Democracy was working and the voters were speaking, only not the way Rice and Israel wanted it to work.

Three years later the Palestinian democracy that might have been is once again reduced to absolute poverty. The small section known as Gaza lives with its borders sealed, its families existing in tents, its children starving and its medical facilities destroyed. And a new US Secretary of State has the audacity to come to the region bearing a gift of $900 million and repeating the same tired diplomat formula that had failed during the Bush presidency.

Hasan Abu Nimah and Ali Abunimah wrote in The Electronic Intifada:

It is ludicrous to demand that the stateless Palestinian people unconditionally recognize the legitimacy of the entity that dispossessed them and occupies them, that itself has no declared borders and that continues to violently expand its territory at their expense. If Palestinians are ever to recognize Israel in any form, that can only be an outcome of negotiations in which Palestinian rights are fully recognized, not a precondition for them.

The gift of $900 million arrives not as an expression of hope, but as further example of heartlessness toward the Gazan people. A London Guardian editorial writer is realistic about this $900 million gift:

Pledging aid for Gaza is the easy bit. Getting it delivered to Gazans living in tents after Israel’s three-week bombardment is another matter. The $3bn that donors promised in Sharm el-Sheikh yesterday [March 2] will have to penetrate a labyrinth of barriers and conditions, the complexity of which King Minos of Crete would have been proud. The money will be given to the Palestinian Authority, not Hamas, even though the PA’s writ does not run in Gaza. The aid will pass through crossings currently closed by Israel. It will be distributed in such a manner as to avoid ending up in the hands of its governors. But how? This is like trying to spoon a thin gruel into a dying man, without letting it touch any part of his throat.

President Obama’s Secretary of State did not bring hope to the Palestinian people.  She brought only a thin gruel of the failed Bush-Rice policies. This is not the change we had hoped for.

Posted in Middle East Politics | Leave a comment

Carter, Walt and Mearsheimer, This One’s for You; Freeman Named National Intelligence Council Chairman

Posted on February 26, 2009 by wallwritings

by James M. Wall

It is official: Ambassador Charles Freeman has been appointed chairman of the National Intelligence Council. The announcement came Thursday afternoon from the Director of National Intelligence, Dennis C. Blair. 

From the Office of the Director of National Intelligence:

Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair has selected Charles W. Freeman, Jr. to be Chairman of the National Intelligence Council (NIC). As Chairman, Ambassador Freeman will be responsible for overseeing the production of National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) and other Intelligence Community (IC) analytic products.

‘Ambassador Freeman is a distinguished public servant who brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise in defense, diplomacy and intelligence that are absolutely critical to understanding today’s threats and how to address them,’ Director Blair said. ‘The country is fortunate that Ambassador Freeman has agreed to return to public service and contribute his remarkable skills toward further strengthening the Intelligence Community’s analytical process.’ 

As a former United States negotiator, Freeman has worked with more than 100 foreign governments in East and South Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and both Western and Eastern Europe. He has served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, U.S. Ambassador to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Deputy Chief of Mission and Chargé d’Affaires in Bangkok and Beijing, Director of Chinese Affairs at U.S. State Department, and Distinguished Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace and the Institute of National Security Studies. Freeman received his J.D. from the Harvard School of Law. Ambassador Freeman will report to DNI Blair and the Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis, Dr. Peter Lavoy.

The first report I received on the appointment came from Robert Dreyfuss’ blog for Nation magazine. Dreyfuss reproduced the announcement and then concludes:

The campaign against Freeman was both ignorant and unrelenting.

The Weekly Standard, which had quacked about the appointment finally surrended to it, aghast, but called it “a disgrace,” in a moronic article entitled “It’s Official: Saudi Puppet to Head NIC.”

It’s nice to win one, now and then.

As my earlier postings will indicate, here and here and here, the MSM has not covered this battle. Why should they? The Lobby always wins.

The story was reported by bloggers like Robert Dreyfuss and Philip Weiss’ Mondoweiss, as a heated internal Jewish battle over the appointment, which it largely was. 

The strongly anti-Freeman Israel Lobby was aligned against pro-Freeman Jewish progressives. Now it will be interesting to see how the MSM outlets report what is clearly a major defeat for the Israel Lobby.  

The JTA, a conservative “Global News Service for the Jewish People” described Freeman as a “controversial former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia”. The conservative Washington Times, reported the opening paragraph of the official news release. It then devoted the rest of its story to rehashing distorted charges against Freeman for being “anti-Israel”.  

Dreyfuss is right; it is good to win one from time to time. And lest we forget, this appointment, which was vigorously resisted by the Israel Lobby, was made under the presidency of Barack Obama.

Jimmy Carter, Steven Walt and John Mearsheimer, this one’s for you.

Posted in Media, Middle East Politics | 3 Comments