person:stephen walt

Hagel Hearing: The War Party’s Waterloo by Justin Raimondo
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2013/01/31/hagel-hearing-the-war-partys-waterloo

We have to be thankful to Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of our more theatrical solons, for dramatizing the way in which the Israel lobby intimidates members of Congress: by asking Chuck Hagel if he could name a single Senator who was so intimidated he merely underscored how thoroughly each and every one of them is cowed. The whole spectacle of this public interrogation, with its tiresomely repetitive demands for pledges of undying loyalty to Israel, brought home the truth of Hagel’s remark.

Of course Hagel couldn’t say that, but the ugly reality resonated in the immense silence that followed this exchange. Interestingly, Hagel didn’t back down: He said “I don’t know.” As to what motivates any particular member of Congress on any specific “dumb thing” they do – well, he couldn’t know, could he? But of course, everybody knows about the Israel lobby: and if its power and vindictiveness were ever in danger of being forgotten, then surely the battle over Hagel’s confirmation has reminded us.

To anyone who lives outside the Washington bubble, there was something profoundly weird about the ritualistic invocations of undying loyalty to Israel, a country mentioned 135 times in the course of the hearing: Afghanistan only merited 27, while al Qaeda got 2 and Mali one. One would have thought Hagel had been nominated for Israeli Defense Minister instead of the top civilian in the Pentagon. As he faced the pro-Israel “inquisitors” – as Sen. Angus King put it – the educational value of this political drama was worth far more than all the books and articles one could possibly read.

Why Chuck Hagel Is Irrelevant
http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/9233/why-chuck-hagel-is-irrelevant

The latest non-scandal scandalizing the American commentariat is whether Barack Obama will be able to nominate former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel as his new Secretary of Defense. The narrative is that the Zionist lobby is eager to scuttle Hagel’s nomination because he has uttered one too many words “critical” of Israel, and displayed too many sentiments suspected of being contrary to the agenda of the lobby: namely, destroying Iran.

The narrative is true enough.

That the lobby does not want Hagel is clear, and his nomination would be a defeat for the lobby’s right wing.

Still, it is barely a scandal, except in the sense that it is scandalous how narrow the parameters of debate are in this country such that leftists think that an aggressive nationalist like Hagel merits their defense.

Chomsky : Réflexions sur les engagements d’une vie – le sionisme, la question palestinienne et l’empire états-unien par Noam CHOMSKY
►http://www.legrandsoir.info/chomsky-reflexions-sur-les-engagements-d-une-vie-le-sionisme-la-questi

Noam Chomsky : Oui. Mais ils enfoncent une porte ouverte, parce qu’il existe des raisons qui font que les États-uniens sont favorables à Israël. Souvenez-vous que cette relation est très ancienne, elle est même antérieure au sionisme. Instinctivement il existe une identification unique en son genre, la comparaison avec les Indiens américains, vous savez les barbares, les peaux-rouges qui veulent empêcher le progrès et le développement, qui attaquent les blancs innocents : c’est le conflit israélo-palestinien. En fait cela se trouve y compris dans la Déclaration d’Indépendance rédigée par Thomas Jefferson, le plus libertarien des pères fondateurs.

L’une des attaques à l’encontre de George III c’est qu’il a lancé contre nous les Indiens, sauvages et cruels, qui font la guerre en pratiquant la torture et l’assassinat, etc. Cela pourrait très bien être de la propagande sioniste. C’est très enraciné dans la culture états-unienne, dans l’histoire. En fait le pays a été fondé par des extrémistes religieux qui brandissaient le Livre saint et qui se voyaient comme les enfants d’Israël retournant à la Terre promise. Ainsi le sionisme a naturellement trouvé ici un environnement favorable.

Passionnante interview de Noam Chomsky avec Mouin Rabbani : Reflections on a Lifetime of Engagement with Zionism, the Palestine Question, and American Empire. Chomsky revient assez longuement sur ses propres engagements dans une famille hébraïsante, puis en kibboutz…
►http://www.palestine-studies.org/journals.aspx?id=11394&jid=1&href=fulltext

I was an organizer of what were then called Zionist youth groups, which I suppose would now be called anti-Zionist, because they were mostly opposed to a Jewish state. My own commitments early on, from when I was a teenager, would be socialist binationalism.

Puis, classiquement, l’évolution de l’engagement politique et intellectuel, aux États-Unis et en Europe, en faveur d’Israël à partir de 1967 :

1967 changed everything here; it was almost instantaneous. Suddenly the intellectual community has a passion for Israel, it was a love affair. Support for Israeli actions became reflexive: as I mentioned earlier, people like Irving Howe and Norman Podhoretz, who had been indifferent to Zionism, became almost fanatic Zionists after1967. This is partly because now the U.S.-Israeli alliance was firmly in place, making it possible to support the U.S. government and look humanitarian at the same time. You could support violence and terror and be noble and humanitarian, defending the Jews from anti-Semitism and genocide, and so on. This is an irresistible combination for liberal intellectuals. You can see the same phenomenon elsewhere, like in Bosnia.

But actually, the love affair wasn’t new. It had existed in American society before. If you go back and read the press of the 1920s, 1930s, you have a similar picture. I didn’t know this at the time, but this country had already been steeped in Zionism, this whole conception of biblical promises being realized. It’s not just Christian evangelicals; a large segment of the population was immersed in the Bible; Woodrow Wilson read the Bible every day; for Truman it was real. Lawrence Davison has written a good history of the early period with plenty of press quotes. Harold Ickes, one of Roosevelt’s main advisors, described the Jewish return to Palestine, to use his exact words, as “the most remarkable, historical event in history.” I mean, this is a very deep current of British and American thought. It’s a mistake to dismiss it.

There’s also the crusader element. When General Allenby conquered Jerusalem in 1917, he was compared with Richard the Lion-hearted, depicted as having achieved what the crusaders had tried to do and failed: drive the infidels out of the holy land. His obituary repeated the same thing twenty years later. It’s kind of like how China talks about its century of humiliation. For the West, there was 1,300 years of humiliation when the pagans took our Holy Land. Now it’s back in our hands, back in the civilized world, and the Jews are returning. And they are modern and European and developing, and the Palestinians were supposed to be gaining enormously from these progressive elements in their midst. It just captured the American mind.

FAIR Blog » Blog Archive » The Nonconspiratorial Worldview of Michael Gordon
http://www.fair.org/blog/2011/10/28/the-nonconspiratorial-worldview-of-michael-gordon

Not surprisingly, Hussein comes off as paranoid, incompetent and so on.  Gordon begins the story noting that Hussein was troubled by the Iran/Contra story, interpreting the U.S. deal with his Iranian enemies as some sort of “conspiracy against Iraq.”

Gordon calmly explains, free of a conspiratorial mind-set, that Iran/Contra was just an operation “to open a private channel to the new leadership in Tehran and to generate secret profits that could be sent to Nicaraguan rebels.” You know, the way any superpower funnels support to a terrorist group. No big deal.

Etats-Unis, le lobby pro-israélien : voyage autour d’un tabou | Grégory Salomonovitch (Là-bas si j’y suis)
http://www.la-bas.org/article.php3?id_article=2275

Je suis en train d’imprimer l’étude que vient de publier le Center for American Progress : Fear, Inc. The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America :
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/08/pdf/islamophobia.pdf

J’ai bien l’impression que c’est un document très important. J’en reparle quand je l’aurai lu (et que j’aurai le temps).

Alan Dershowitz : Norway to Jews—You’re Not Welcome Here - Anti-Semitism doesn’t even mask itself as anti-Zionism. - WSJ.com
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704474804576222561887244764.html

It was then that I realized why all this happened. At all of the Norwegian universities, there have been efforts to enact academic and cultural boycotts of Jewish Israeli academics. This boycott is directed against Israel’s “occupation” of Palestinian land—but the occupation that the boycott supporters have in mind is not of the West Bank but rather of Israel itself. Here is the first line of their petition: “Since 1948 the state of Israel has occupied Palestinian land . . .”

The administrations of the universities have refused to go along with this form of collective punishment of all Israeli academics, so the formal demand for a boycott failed. But in practice it exists. Jewish pro-Israel speakers are subject to a de facto boycott.

Toujours subtile, Alan. C’était en mars dernier. Maintenant que cette bande d’antisémites réunis sur l’île d’Utoeya a été massacrée par un fanatique pro-israélien, tu te sens mieux, Alan ?

Il y a quelques jours, le Washington Post a présenté, au monde émerveillé, le nouveau leader de l’opposition syrienne, Ammar Abdulhamid :

Syrian rebels don’t want U.S. aid, at least for now - Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/mar/27/syrian-rebels-dont-want-us-aid-at-least-for-now

Ammar Abdulhamid, who has emerged as an unofficial spokesman in the West for the activists organizing the Syrian protests...

Angry Arab n’a pas tardé à faire remarquer à quel point cette prétention était ridicule :
http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2011/03/this-is-hilarious-when-western.html

This is hilarious: when Western countries select leaders for the region
They decided that a Syrian living in Washington, DC is the leader of the protests.  I wonder how many Syrians actually know who he is. (thanks Ahmet)

Joshua Landis (Syria Comment), dans un article apparemment neutre, rappelle des infos bien gênantes :
http://www.joshualandis.com/blog/?p=8864

Déjà présenté par le WaPo en juillet 2004, l’homme a trouvé l’équation idéale (ancien super-musulman donc légitime, mais plus musulman du tout donc rassurant pour le lecteur du WaPo) :

Ammar Abdulhamid is no Islamist. He did flirt with Islam and the notion of going to Afghanistan during a difficult period of introspection after dropping out of University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, but pulled away from the lures of fundamentalism. “It gave my life structure, but it enslaved the hell out of me,” he told the Washington Post’s Nora Boustany. Eventually he abandoned Islam for atheism and ultimately became an “agnostic.”

Notez bien : il pense aller en Afghanistan en... 1988. Contre les russes, donc. Pas contre les américains. (Ouf.)

Mais, dès 2005, il rejoint le Saban Center, think tank fondé par Haim Saban, dirigé par Martin Indyk, et décrit par John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt comme un élément du lobby pro-israélien.

He was appointed a visiting fellow at the Saban Center of the Brookings Institute in Washington DC, shortly after he had established the Tharwa Project [...] in June 2004.

À l’instar d’une Joumana Haddad, c’est un auteur écrivant sur un passionnant sujet à la con, mais totalement dans l’air du temps (ce qui en fait, je suppose, le Carrie Bradshaw de Damas) :

He is the author of a prize winning novel, Menstruation: A Novel, that depicts how the culture of Islam in Syria is sexually and morally repressive.

En novembre 2005, le gars soutient le rapport Mehlis avec ferveur dans le quotidien libanais Daily Star (il se présente comme « Visiting Fellow » pour le Saban Center for Middle East Policy). Aujourd’hui, plus personne ne se réfère au rapport Mehlis, sauf pour le désavouer.
http://www.mafhoum.com/press9/256P5.htm

In making up his mind on the next steps, Assad needs to consider that the Mehlis report was only a preliminary document prepared for the sake of getting an extension of the UN probe and securing Syrian cooperation. Mehlis did not put everything he had in the report and did not divulge all the pieces of evidence. This includes more taped conversations with Syrian officials, both alive and recently dead, as well as testimony by more credible witnesses whose identity still needs to be protected.

En 2005, il rejoint le Front de salut national en Syrie d’Abdel Halim Khaddam et Ali Sadreddine Bayanouni.

Following the 2005 defection of Syria’s long time Vice President Abdul Halim Khaddam, who founded the National Salvation Front in cooperation with the long-time leader of Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood, Bayanuni, Ammar decided to join opposition politics directly. Abdulhamid worked to gain the NSF a place in Washington and recognition from the Bush administration. It was successful in opening an office in Washington DC, largely thanks to Ammar’s connections and support, despite considerable reluctance on the part of US lawmakers to support any organization associated to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Selon Landis, il quitte cet attelage trop ouvertement associé à l’administration Bush (en 2007 ?) :

Ammar quite the National Salvation Front in 2007 shortly before it was dissolved at the time the Obama administration took office.

Avec un curriculum pareil, il semble impossible de ne pas être proclamé représentant d’un truc arabe quelconque par le Washington Post.