Organizing for America | Mark Levin's Blog: Racism, Barack, how we are seen, and our Israel Policy

Racism, Barack, how we are seen, and our Israel Policy

By Mark Levin - Apr 10th, 2008 at 7:02 am EDT

Also listed in: The IR (International Relations) Forum

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Tags: fairness, Foreign policy, ISRAEL, media, racism, Terrorism

Dear fellow Obamaphiles,

I know these issues are controversial, but they are IR-related with political relevance to Obama's candidacy and hopefully, eventual presidency. So we should not run away from them.

In recent posts I've seen an uncomfortable reaction to Tony Wicher's attempts to raise the Mideast issue with an angle that's at variance with Obama's position. If we were all in lockstep with Obama, there would be no reason to debate and ponder anything in the IR forum. Some of what I will say may seem a little too crude for a high-minded IR debate, but I think we should deal with the ground realities of how we are percieved abroad. Not understanding them will lead to more failures - whether that is Bush at the helm or Obama.

A quick aside on Wright - 527s are going to pummel him in the Fall on patriotism with swiftboat style ads - and they will get a huge boost in the media through repeat plays. We better come up with the worst possibilities now by styling those ads ourselves, and coming up with parodies and mock what they might try to do. And for God's sake, he has to stop saying "this country" and say "my country" or "our country." He looks too tepidly passionate about America right now to get the white guys we need! He can't disrespect the white guys with flags on their porches - and needs a way to recover from the flag lapel pin perception. Otherwise this stuff will fester under the radar. Unfortunately, he needs to give a patriotism speech much more than he needed to give a racism speech. In an era of digital globalization when the rise of wages in the Asian middle class is coming at the expense of wages of the US middle class, the white male in that socioeconomic stratum has few things to cling on other than God and country - and maybe a war hero, even if electing that man is not in his economic self-interest.

Even though Obama has backpedaled furiously and largely successfully from his "Nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people" and Ed Said days, he himself has said that embracing a pro-Likud position (which he kind of has) is not equivalent to being a friend of Israel. That aligns him with the majority of left-leaning Jewish voters in the US (as opposed to Jewish leadership) and Jewish voters in Israel (people in Israel are far more attuned to the reality, and more willing to make land sacrifices than the US diaspora is).

There are racial, moral and foreign policy implications for our language and actions. The epithet "antisemitic" is so easily thrown around, especially at critics of a non-Likudnik stance, you'd think it was candy at Halloween. And somehow, in our culture, it has come to be seen as a worse sin than racism. I hold our media responsible - not just Congress, AIPAC or ADL. How did that happen? Both racism and antisemitism are equally abhorrent, and we should stop elevating antisemitism to a higher sin. We would do that if we called racism against Jews "racist", instead of using a special moniker. Our tolerance for comedians to insinuate that Muslims/Arabs have a propensity towards violence is higher than what it should be, and hence, I'd argue racist. Since we play along, we are not different than those comics. You don't see non-Jewish comedians making fun of Jews, or too many white comedians making fun of blacks. But let's look at the premise. If one was to go by objective data - groups, states and individuals from Judaeochristian majority-nations have taken actions employing violent force resulting in more deaths worldwide than those coming from Islam-linked groups, states and individuals. Just tally them up and look at the last 5, 10, or 50 years. Yet, we never consider Christianity to be a "violent religion" even though our cultural moorings and policy orientations spring from our religious heritage. That characterization somehow doesn't sit well with us. But Islam has almost a pop-cultural linkage to terrorism & violence - thanks to its portrayals in the US entertainment industry which has a global footprint. Islam and radicalism/violence - well that just makes more sense to us somehow than calling Christianity or Judaism violent, right?

One pro-Palestinian group, http://ifamericaknew.org/ tries to get beyond the anti-Arab/Muslim spin of CAMERA or MEMRI (both of which rely on selective, qualitative and not quantitative methods) by focusing on quantifying provable facts vs. news coverage, and focusing on comparing bodycounts of children who cannot be painted by the "military/militant/terrorist" brush that easily. When the White House or State Dept issues statements about the Middle East, it always "condemns" the death of Israeli civilians/children, and expresses, at most "regret" when Palestinian civilians/children die as a result of Israeli force - and always makes a point of explaining the Israeli action was a reaction to something the Pals did. This doesn't pass the sniff test of fairness, for people in other nations or our people who feed on a less sterile version of news than most of us are. I don't blame us Americans and even those who are uninformed. Most people just don't have time to source their facts from multiple opposing sources to triangulate the truth - they rely on our media, and our mainstream journalists (with a few exceptions) fail to present a nuanced, even-handed view - that this is a clash of two equally valid worldviews, a clash of two rights, instead as a clash between right vs wrong. Why? Probably laziness and unwillingness to take any risk of being percieved as antisemitic in an industry that has sizable Jewish numbers in the editorial ranks. While one may not be black-balled to the extent such views kills political futures in Congress, it probably does exist. There is probably no conscious bias either among the Jewish journalists, but if I was one of them, I would also subconsciously downplay stories or facts that put a country I identify with in a bad light. An Indian friend of mine told me how a similar situation exists in the UAE. Most of the journalists and editors are from the Indian minority, and hence portrayals of the Kashmir issue there inevitably skew towards the Indian rather than the Pakistani position, much to the chagrin of Pakistanis and Muslims in the UAE who have not necessarily grown up with that one portrayal.

On to how we kill. We have a healthy tolerance for "collateral damage" as long as the shrapnel killing and maiming comes from a high-tech bomb released by a "courageous" pilot from up on high, and not from some virgins-on-the-brain suicide bomber who is let's say acting on some considerable risk to himself. Why? We take moral stances on the method of killing, while conveniently ignoring the balance of bodycounts, pain and suffering those actions cause. We say that the collateral damage (in effect, collateral killings/murder) of our actions to civilians was "unintended" as opposed to a suicide bomber's explicit civilian targeting - and that our action took 10 innocent lives is far more moral than the 10 innocents the suicide bomber or IED-maker killed. Why? Did the pain we cause any less? No. When we greenlight an action and consider the collateral damage acceptable, we are essentially saying I am willing for 10 innocent people to die in the hope that I'll get my bad guy - when you make the lives of others expendable, it is not different than murder. We mask our terrorism/violence behind the sophisticated veneer of civilization - a higher threshold for collateral damage. It's because they are not "one of us." They do not speak our language, look like a first world people, or embrace things we like. They celebrate death while we celebrate life. Let's forget that New Hampshire's license plates and motto say "Live Free or Die." We and the kamikaze Japanese warriors are somehow nobler than suicide attackers of the USS Cole - that to us is "terrorism".

3,000 Americans are murdered, and a stunning array of resources are mobilized around the world in response, and maybe $3 trillion will be spent, and a million more lives lost (extrapolating the Lancet study that estimated 650K dead in Iraq by end of 2006) in an orgy of misdirected reaction to fear. 5 million black Africans die in the Congo because of a war - and the world has probably spent less than $50 million to respond to it. Why? Then there was the Rwanda genocide. Do the math on how our world system (of which we are a vocal, influential presence) values people's lives around the world. It is downright embarrassing and immoral. They are not stupid - when we devalue their lives through our acts of commission or omission - they take note of it. People can smell unfairness, and there is blowback. We should have never been so uninformed by the media about our heavy footprint around the world so that in the aftermath of 9/11 we were asking "why do they hate us?" - (1) we should have known already - if the media allowed the "dignity deficits" due to our policies to be shown to us at 6:30pm, we would have not been that lax about keeping our troops in places or support efforts whether the Israeli military or the Saudi dictators that insult those populations (2) we should have been smarter than to swallow the amazingly childish "they hate us because they hate our freedoms" and "we need to fight them there so they don't come here" lines that should have insulted our intelligence. It makes no sense! Even Osama himself wants freedom and dignity for "his" people to live their own lives and be left alone. I think Obama gets it - which is why he believes, like Samantha Power, in the primacy of "human dignity" promotion globally as an effective foreign policy and counterterrorism tool.

His Israel policy will have to evolve if he is to make any headway on the Mideast issue after he becomes President. Our 1-sided approach has not resulted in a stable peace and rapproachment. Maybe it is time to try a fairer approach. I find his current stance at odds with the rest of his liberal philosophy, which should be about the empowerment of the little guy, the one in a more precarious socioeconomic/security condition. I understand that his current stance was necessary to even have a chance of getting elected - given that nearly half the funds traditionally raised by Democrats has been from the Jewish community, and the remarkable influence by pro-Israeli groups on our politicians. We should always become suspicious when Democrats and Republicans show almost zero deviations in their policy on this (which is at odds with what most other countries think) while they differ on almost all other policy issues - foreign and domestic! I am amazed at the flak he has taken about his pro-Jewish credentials despite toeing the AIPAC line on Israel. Instead of asking if he is "black enough", the debate has been about if he is "Jewish enough"! It has been amusing. I think those who are paranoid about preserving the US embrace of Israel, especially the older generation (having been to Auschwitz and Birkenau, I don't blame them -they are too close to the Holocaust years) - they detect a lack of political orthodoxy or fear in him that makes them, I think and hope with good reason, suspicious. For them he doesn't show enough passion in his Israel stance - they are - "just words."

I personally believe that a one state solution, which is secular, should be the goal. Aliyah should be based on actual persecution and asylum seeking rather than some religion-based right. How is an apartheid system that has one immigration law for people of one religion, and another immigration law for those of another religion consistent with a modern, moral state?

It may not be politically tenable now. The chorus is for a two-state solution. But even if a two state split does happen - I believe the one state is a more natural and stable configuration that reflects how the region used to be - a mixed one that Jews and Arabs can call home. I believe that will happen in 100-200 years. There will be a reunification. By that time the Holocaust 's resonance will recede given no living survivors and the existential threat to Jews will become an interesting historical footnote. Racial differences and demonizations between groups will recede. Borders will matter less, nation states will be as quaint as kingdoms and feudal fiefdoms. It would be psychologically satisfying for religious Jews who will like that they can live freely in Judaea and Samaria (West Bank) again. Reparations may be paid to descendants of those Jews and Arabs who were made refugees. There would be museums instead of walls and checkpoints. Globalization and the Internet makes this inevitable.

Once a friend of Shimon Peres told me that Shimon wishes we could only teach science to kids - and burn the history books of Israelis and Palestinians so that a new generation would not grow up with such divergent worldviews. Well 150 years of globalization and intermarriages should do the trick - lower the racial prejudices in all of us. The biggest enemy of a right-winger is time, and the natural arc of human progress. Change happens.

Obama happens.

Sorry for the rambling! Hope there is something of sense in there you can embrace or debate. Comments, criticisms and counterarguments would be very welcome.

Regards,

Mark

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