|
FOCUS: Today Was Just the Beginning. The Reckoning Will Come. |
 |
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
|
|
Saturday, 21 January 2017 11:54 |
|
Pierce writes: "It was the very bizarre translation of the Beatitudes that threw me off for good. In the two-hole of the Inauguration Preachers batting order, a fellow named the Reverend Dr. Samuel Rodriguez went to the familiar and iconic fifth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, but the text he read sounded like an Aramaic-English Google Translation read by Yoda."
Donald Trump. (photo: AP)
Today Was Just the Beginning. The Reckoning Will Come.
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
21 January 17
Dispatches from the inauguration of President Donald J. Trump.
 t was the very bizarre translation of the Beatitudes that threw me off for good. In the two-hole of the Inauguration Preachers batting order, a fellow named the Reverend Dr. Samuel Rodriguez went to the familiar and iconic fifth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, but the text he read sounded like an Aramaic-English Google Translation read by Yoda.
For example, here's the majesty of the King James version:
Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.
Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.
And here's the Reverend Doctor Rodriguez's version:
God blesses those who are poor and realize their need for him for the kingdom of heaven is theirs. God blesses those who mourn for they will be comforted. God blesses those who are humble for they will inherit the earth. God blesses those who hunger and thirst for justice for they will be satisfied. God blesses those who are merciful, for they will be shown mercy.
To borrow a phrase from Mark Twain, the difference between the two renditions is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. The former is poetry, the latter is prose—and clumsy prose at that. The first resounds like a prayer; the second is something you'd see on a poster in somebody's cubicle under the picture of a sunset, or a kitten hanging by its forepaws.
What was lacking from the second is what has brought the first version down through the years: majesty. And on the west front of the Capitol on Friday morning, during what we were relentlessly sold as the miracle of the Peaceful Transfer of Power—as though anyone really expected a storming of the barricades—there was no room for majesty. And while the Mormon Tabernacle Choir still has game, and the Marine Band can seriously play, majesty surrendered rather meekly to salesmanship, and branding, and the gilt-edged palaver of the midnight infomercial.
This was a sales gimmick, not an inauguration.
In theory, there's something admirably American in taking the piss out of the system's pretensions. When Jimmy Carter walked in his inauguration parade, it represented for the moment the final collapse of the imperial executive within which Richard Nixon had hidden his crimes for so long. Barack Obama's embrace of popular culture let some of the stuffing out of the office as well. But this was different.
This was somebody selling something precious and important at a reduced rate of sloganeering. A pitchman's ceremony, the inauguration of President* Donald Trump was a device for selling American democracy a hair-restoral nostrum, a cure for erectile dysfunction, and a full scholarship to his Potemkin University. This was an event in which even Scripture itself was sent through the gang down in marketing so as not to sound too "elitist" for its intended audience of marks and suckers.
The speech itself was as dark and forbidding. It was Huey Long translated by Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller. (And, as Gizmodo's Gabrielle Bluestone pointed out, a famous Batman villain.) This is to say, it was Huey Long drained of his classical references, his summons to Scripture, and whatever was left of his authentic American economic populism. In 1934, for example, Long delivered his most famous speech. In it, he said:
It is necessary to save the government of the country, but is much more necessary to save the people of America. We love this country. We love this Government. It is a religion, I say. It is a kind of religion people have read of when women, in the name of religion, would take their infant babes and throw them into the burning flame, where they would be instantly devoured by the all-consuming fire, in days gone by; and there probably are some people of the world even today, who, in the name of religion, throw their own babes to destruction; but in the name of our good government, people today are seeing their own children hungry, tired, half-naked, lifting their tear-dimmed eyes into the sad faces of their fathers and mothers, who cannot give them food and clothing they both need, and which is necessary to sustain them, and that goes on day after day, and night after night, when day gets into darkness and blackness, knowing those children would arise in the morning without being fed, and probably go to bed at night without being fed.
If you take that passage and run it through the Trump Rosetta Stone program, you get:
But for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists: Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.
There was a terrifying solipsism to Trump's address, as there likely will be to his presidency. For all his protestations that he is merely the instrument of a great movement, he holds himself above that movement in the way he imagines all great leaders do. In every real sense, from his podium at the Capitol, he talked down to his audience sprawled over a good portion of the National Mall.
He talked to them about the blighted hellscape of a country that he inherited, the blighted hellscape that already existed in their own truncated imaginations. He coined their actual anxieties and displacement into one of the hoariest demagogue's tropes: America First. And despite its dingy antecedents, Trump's use of America First doesn't necessarily mean what the anti-Semites of the 1930s meant when they said it. It's more like one of those foam rubber fingers that fans wear at football games with "AMERICA" written in red across it.
For too long, a small group in our nation's Capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished—but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered—but the jobs left, and the factories closed. The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country. Their victories have not been your victories; their triumphs have not been your triumphs; and while they celebrated in our nation's capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land. That all changes—starting right here, and right now, because this moment is your moment: it belongs to you. It belongs to everyone gathered here today and everyone watching all across America. This is your day. This is your celebration. And this, the United States of America, is your country.
That is what had them buzzing on the way out of the event Friday. He really told them, did our Donald Trump. He's got balls, doesn't he? "You see 'em up there? They had to listen to him," said the guy in front of me, waiting to cross Constitution Avenue. "Yeah, there's a new sheriff in town."
As he said it, we were passing a big tree under which I had sat in January of 1981 to listen to Ronald Reagan's first inaugural address. It was a barrel of banality, too. ("Government isn't the solution. Government is the problem." Thirty-five years of political mischief have flowed from that one line.) But there was a brightness to what Reagan said, and he seemed at least to have some sense of the moment, which proves that there is a great distance between even a mediocre actor and a great con-man.
On the eve of our struggle for independence a man who might have been one of the greatest among the Founding Fathers, Dr. Joseph Warren, president of the Massachusetts Congress, said to his fellow Americans, "Our country is in danger, but not to be despaired of . . . . On you depend the fortunes of America. You are to decide the important questions upon which rests the happiness and the liberty of millions yet unborn. Act worthy of yourselves." Well, I believe we, the Americans of today, are ready to act worthy of ourselves, ready to do what must be done to ensure happiness and liberty for ourselves, our children, and our children's children. And as we renew ourselves here in our own land, we will be seen as having greater strength throughout the world. We will again be the exemplar of freedom and a beacon of hope for those who do not now have freedom.
Act worthy of me, Trump's speech said. Act worthy of what you bought from me.
In his speech, and in draining the event of his inauguration of its majesty, the president* managed to turn the west front of the Capitol into a college auditorium in Iowa, or an airplane hangar in New Hampshire, or a stage in Cleveland, Ohio. Already, this is being praised by the dim and the craven as admirable—that Trump deserves credit for declaring that he will be the same person as president as he was in the campaign. I would remind those people, and the new president*, of Henry Gondorff warning to Johnny Hooker: "You gotta keep his con even after you take his money. He can't know you took him."
There is a reckoning out there in the distant wind for everything and everybody who brought us to this day, when not even the Marine Corps Band and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir could neither elevate the inauguration of a president out of the language of mere commerce nor make of the event anything more than a banal transaction—a day on which even Jesus Christ on the Mount was warned to keep it simple, stupid.
 |
|
Why Women Are Marching on Washington |
|
|
Saturday, 21 January 2017 09:37 |
|
Steinem writes: "Two big things happened the day after the election. First, we learned that Donald Trump was the second man in recent history to win the presidency despite losing the popular vote big-time."
Women protesting against Donald Trump. (photo: Getty Images)
Why Women Are Marching on Washington
By Gloria Steinem, The Boston Globe
21 January 17
 wo big things happened the day after the election. First, we learned that Donald Trump was the second man in recent history to win the presidency despite losing the popular vote big-time. Second, we probably didn’t learn that Rebecca Shook, a retired lawyer in Hawaii, posted on Facebook her idea that women should march on Washington in response to the first thing.
This week, the popularity of the second overwhelmed the first. Despite a high-level effort to attract celebrities and crowds, there will be only 200 buses transporting Trump supporters to an inauguration where even the fact that the Mormon Tabernacle Choir is singing has been protested by a petition signed by 21,000 Mormons. After a low-level and mostly online explosion of interest in a woman-led march on Washington, there will be 1,200 buses transporting people who speak, care and sing about all the issues Trump opposes, from equal rights to the environment. In support of the Women’s March on Washington, there also will be sister marches in every major city in this country and more than 50 cities around the world.
Of course, I have to admit that Trump himself helped galvanize this march. By his fact-free Tweets, narcissistic lashing out at the smallest criticism, seduction by praise, even from his country’s enemies, and appointment of a fox to head every chicken coop in Washington, he has depressed his Gallup poll ratings to a level way below that of any previous president-elect. We always knew he would be richer if he had just invested what he inherited from his father. Now we know he would be more popular if he just disappeared.
So what I want to address here is not Trump, but the surprising questions I’ve been getting about the guiding principles of the march. I am a supporter, not an organizer or decision-maker, but some observers and reporters ask me (a) why the Women’s March is including racism as well as sexism, thus making some white women feel alienated and guilty, and (b) why Planned Parenthood is one of the sponsors, though some women say they are turned off by abortion but would support equal pay and equal rights with men.
This has made me realize that we need a Twitter version of history and Feminism 101. So here goes:
Sexism and racism are intertwined and can only be uprooted together. That’s because controlling reproduction, and therefore women’s bodies, is the only way to maintain a visible difference in the long run. Yes, racism affects women differently. White women have been more likely to be sexually restricted in order to maintain racial “purity.” Black women have been more likely to be sexually exploited in order to produce cheap labor. But there is no such thing as freedom for any woman as long as racism wins. Even during slavery, when any contact between white women and black men was a crime more reliably punished than arson or murder, white Northern women and a few white Southern women joined with Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists to form a movement for universal adult suffrage. How brave was that?
But white male leaders divided this most threatening of all coalitions by giving the legal right to vote to the smallest group, black men, and then limiting it by everything from poll taxes to lynching. Racist white women then argued that “educated” white votes were needed to counter the votes of black men, but most others, like Sojourner Truth and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, tried to keep the coalition together. As Stanton warned: “There can never be true peace in this Republic until the civil and political rights of all citizens of African descent and all women are practically established.” When Gunnar Myrdal researched the first massive study of racism in America, he found that laws governing slaves had been adapted from laws governing wives, “the nearest and most natural analogy.” Writing in the 1940s, he found that, “The parallel between women and Negroes is the deepest truth of American life, for together they form the unpaid or underpaid labor on which America runs.”
Even without the big added motive of racism, patriarchy strives to dictate how many workers and how many soldiers, patriarchal religions tell us that sex is immoral unless it leads to reproduction, and made-up gender roles divide our shared humanity. Yet if women can’t decide our lives from the skin in, we can’t decide our lives from the skin out. Reproductive freedom remains the biggest indicator of whether we are poor or not, educated or not, work outside the home or not, and how long we live.
OK, that’s Twitter-length history — but it’s still going on. For instance, 53 percent of married white women voted for Trump, the most obvious sexist in presidential history, so we must ask: Is dependence on a man’s income and male approval colonizing the female spirit? Is Hillary Clinton just too painful a reminder of what women could be? Ninety-five percent of black women voted for Clinton, so we must also ask: Does the lived reality of racism plus sexism make us twice as wise? Does a need for strength create strength?
We have to figure this out together, but one thing is clear: We owe a big debt of gratitude to the young and diverse women who have interrupted their lives to organize this high-tech, high energy, and contagious march. Woman-led and all-inclusive, the march is founded on the simple idea that we as human beings are linked, not ranked. Yet even as I write this, newspapers are reporting that the issue of abortion will “strain calls for unity at the Women’s March.” In fact, it isn’t abortion that strains unity, it’s religious or political forces that would deny women — or men — bodily integrity.
If you would like to join marches around the world for a silent minute of imagining equality, join 1@1 at 1 p.m. on Saturday.
After all, hope is a form of planning. If our hopes weren’t already real within us, we couldn’t even hope them.
And it’s high time.
|
|
|
US Border Officials Are Illegally Turning Away Asylum Seekers, Critics Say |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=43649"><span class="small">Joshua Partlow, The Washington Post</span></a>
|
|
Saturday, 21 January 2017 09:31 |
|
Partlow writes: "Several weeks ago, a former Guatemalan police officer walked up to U.S. private security guards at the border crossing here and asked for asylum in the United States."
A one-year-old from El Salvador clings to his mother after she turned themselves in to Border Patrol agents on December 7, 2015, near Rio Grande City, Texas. (photo: John Moore/Getty Images)
US Border Officials Are Illegally Turning Away Asylum Seekers, Critics Say
By Joshua Partlow, The Washington Post
21 January 17
 everal weeks ago, a former Guatemalan police officer walked up to U.S. private security guards at the border crossing here and asked for asylum in the United States.
“I am fleeing my country,” the policeman later recalled telling the guards, explaining that he had survived two attempts on his life. “I am being persecuted in a matter of life and death.”
The policeman said he was told he needed to see Mexican immigration authorities, who would put him on a waiting list to make his case to U.S. officials. But Mexican authorities refused to add him to the list, the policeman said, and he has been stuck in northern Mexico.
The Guatemalan is one of hundreds or perhaps thousands of foreigners who have been blocked in recent months from reaching U.S. asylum officials along the border, according to accounts from migrants and immigration lawyers and advocates.
The details of their cases vary. At the U.S. border crossing between Tijuana and San Diego, numerous asylum seekers from Central America and Mexico have been referred to Mexican authorities for an appointment with U.S. officials — but Mexican authorities often turn them down, according to migrants and immigration lawyers. In other places, migrants have been told by U.S. border agents that the daily quota for asylum cases has been reached or that a visa is required for asylum seekers, a statement that runs contrary to law, immigration advocates say.
A spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Michael Friel, said that there has been “no policy change” affecting asylum procedures, which are based on international law aimed at protecting some of the world’s most vulnerable and persecuted people. And “we don’t tolerate any kind of abuse” by U.S. border officials, he said.
But the proliferation of problems has raised alarm among advocates for migrants.
“This is happening on a daily basis,” said Kathryn Shepherd, a lawyer with the American Immigration Council, a Washington-based advocacy group, who says she has testimony from dozens of asylum seekers denied access to U.S. asylum officials at border crossings in San Diego; Nogales, Ariz.; and Texas cities including Laredo, El Paso and McAllen.
The council and five other organizations filed a complaint with the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties on Friday protesting the “systemic denial of entry to asylum seekers.” The U.S. border agency — Customs and Border Protection, or CBP — is part of the department.
The surge in complaints comes as migrant advocates fear a broad crackdown on the border, one of President-elect Donald Trump’s main campaign promises.
The United States has long adhered to international laws and conventions allowing people to seek asylum on grounds that they are being persecuted because of their race, religion, nationality, political beliefs or other factors. If a Border Patrol agent encounters a U.S.-bound migrant without legal papers and the person “expresses fear of being returned to their home country, our officers are required to process them for an interview with an asylum officer,” said Friel.
The number of asylum applicants has been soaring. Some 83,000 such requests were filed at U.S. airports, border crossings and other entry points in 2015, more than double the number in 2011, according to a November report from the Department of Homeland Security.
Bureaucratic change
On a rainy morning three days before Christmas, a 34-year-old Honduran woman walked up to the Laredo border crossing with her 6-year-old daughter. The woman, who asked to be identified only by her first name, Xiomara, to protect her safety, said in an interview that she had fled an abusive husband who beat her and her children with belts and machetes. At the border, a U.S. official told her she needed a visa to cross, the Honduran recalled.
“I told him that I don’t have a visa but I want asylum and he told me no, get out of here, and go back to your country,” Xiomara said, according to a written declaration she made to her lawyer under penalty of perjury. When she tried to plead her case, a female U.S. border guard “told me they didn’t want illegals in her country and to come back if I had a visa,” Xiomara said.
Two days later, she said, she swam across the Rio Grande and was picked up by U.S. Border Patrol officers. On Jan. 3, she received a “positive” finding in her interview with an asylum officer, suggesting she has a good probability of winning her asylum case.
Diego Iniguez-Lopez, a law graduate based in Dilley, Tex., who works with detained migrants, said he started hearing about cases of rebuffed migrants after the U.S. presidential election.
Friel, the CBP spokesman, said there is “zero [evidence] to corroborate any kind of change in tone or guidance or policy” since Trump’s victory.
In Tijuana, one of the border’s busiest crossings, lawyers, migrants and human rights advocates describe a bureaucratic change that appears to have gone awry. Over the past year, at least 16,000 Haitians descended on the city, many of whom had fled to Brazil after the disastrous 2010 earthquake and then rushed north once the Brazilian recession started to bite.
With migrant shelters filled and Haitians sleeping on the street outside the port of entry, U.S. and Mexican authorities organized a new ticketing system to bring order to the chaos, according to Mexican officials. Under it, U.S. officials would refer Haitian migrants to Mexican authorities to receive a number on a waiting list, then process a limited number per day, currently about 20 to 50 people, officials said.
The problem is that U.S. border authorities have been referring not just Haitians but other Latin American asylum seekers to the Mexican authorities, according to migrants, lawyers and staff at migrant shelters. And the Mexican authorities refuse to issue numbers to those people because the system is designed to handle only Haitians, said the head of Mexico’s immigration office in Tijuana, Rodulfo Figueroa.
Some migrants eventually reach a U.S. asylum officer with the help of lawyers; others venture elsewhere along the dangerous border or return home, said migrant advocates and shelter staff.
“We’ve basically arrived at a place where applying for asylum is not available to most people,” said Ian Philabaum of the Innovation Law Lab, a nonprofit organization that works with immigration lawyers.
Philabaum visited several migrant shelters in Tijuana in early November. He met 35 people, the majority Mexicans, who were “denied or deterred the ability to request asylum,” according to a memo he wrote after his investigation.
A spokeswoman for the U.S. border agency in San Diego, Angelica De Cima, declined to provide information about the new ticketing system, beyond saying that the United States “has collaborated with the Mexican authorities to improve the processing and humanitarian assistance of those individuals with no legal status to enter the U.S. This is being done to temporarily house the individuals in a more comfortable location and out of the elements.”
‘Not going back’
In early December, more than 20 migrant shelters and immigration organizations in northern Mexico sent a letter to senior Mexican officials saying it was illegal for Mexico to act as the gatekeeper for U.S. migration authorities.
“Mexican authorities do not have the ability or training to participate in the process and, when they do so, commit serious errors and violations of migrants’ human rights,” the letter said.
A 50-year-old Guatemalan woman who said two of her sons were killed by gangs tried on two occasions in November to apply for U.S. asylum at the Tijuana-San Diego crossing. But she was told by Mexican authorities that she would have to return to southern Mexico, where she had entered the country, to obtain legal papers allowing her to transit through Mexico, according to a copy of her personal statement given to The Washington Post by a shelter where she was interviewed. She traveled east to Nogales, but U.S. officials there also referred her to Mexican authorities, who told her she did not have the right to request asylum, according to her statement.
Joanna Williams, director of education and advocacy with the Nogales-based Kino Border Initiative, which helps migrants recently deported from the United States, said U.S. Border Patrol officials in recent months have periodically rejected asylum seekers, claiming they do not have the capacity to process them.
The Guatemalan policeman, who asked to be identified only by his first name, Wilson, because of fear for his safety, said he has been blocked at least four times in Tijuana from speaking with U.S. border officials. On one trip, which was videotaped, the private U.S. security guard told him he needed to go to Mexican immigration authorities. But they told him he could not be put on the waiting list to approach U.S. officials, he said.
In the past two years, he said, he has suffered two assaults — he was shot at, and hit by a truck while on his motorcycle with his 10-year-old nephew. He suffered a broken skull and his nephew was killed in the truck assault, he said. Wilson attributed both attacks to a person in the government who he said has threatened him. He declined to name the person or provide details of the threats.
“This is too much for me,” he said. “But I’m not going back to Guatemala for any reason.”
|
|
Obama's Condemnation of Israeli Occupation Doesn't Match His Last 8 Years in Office |
|
|
Saturday, 21 January 2017 09:29 |
|
Excerpt: "During Wednesday's press conference, President Obama warned that the expansion of Israeli settlements was making a two-state solution impossible. 'I don't see how this issue gets resolved in a way that maintains Israel as both Jewish and a democracy,' Obama said."
Israeli soldiers search Palestinians during clashes in the West Bank city of Hebron, September 19, 2016. (photo: Reuters)
Obama's Condemnation of Israeli Occupation Doesn't Match His Last 8 Years in Office
By Rashid Khalidi and Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!
21 January 17
 uring Wednesday’s press conference, President Obama warned that the expansion of Israeli settlements was making a two-state solution impossible. "I don’t see how this issue gets resolved in a way that maintains Israel as both Jewish and a democracy," Obama said, "because if you do not have two states, then, in some form or fashion, you are extending an occupation. Functionally, you end up having one state in which millions of people are disenfranchised and operate as second-class occupant—or residents. You can’t even call them 'citizens' necessarily." We get response from Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said professor of Arab studies at Columbia University. He’s the author of several books; his most recent is titled "Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East."
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, there was an interesting sort of geography to and diversity to the questions that President Obama answered, all clearly laid out in advance—eight reporters—five women, three men—a gay publication, urban radio. And also he took a question from Janet Rodríguez, White House correspondent for Univision, and Nadia Bilbassy-Charters, senior diplomatic correspondent for Al Arabiya News Channel. She asked President Obama about the Middle East and about particularly the Israeli occupation; President Obama, in his answer, warning that the expansion of Israeli settlements was making a two-state solution impossible.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: I’ve said this directly to Prime Minister Netanyahu. I’ve said it inside of Israel. I’ve said it to Palestinians, as well. I don’t see how this issue gets resolved in a way that maintains Israel as both Jewish and a democracy, because if you do not have two states, then, in some form or fashion, you are extending an occupation. Functionally, you end up having one state in which millions of people are disenfranchised and operate as second-class occupant—or residents. You can’t even call them "citizens" necessarily. And so—so the goal of the resolution was to simply say that the settlements, the growth of the settlements, are creating a reality on the ground that increasingly will make a two-state solution impossible. And we’ve believed, consistent with the positions that have been taken with previous U.S. administrations for decades now, that it was important for us to send a signal, a wake-up call, that this moment may be passing. And Israeli voters and Palestinians need to understand that this moment may be passing. And hopefully, that then creates a debate inside both Israeli and Palestinian communities that won’t result immediately in peace, but at least will lead to a more sober assessment of what the alternatives are.
AMY GOODMAN: That was President Obama yesterday, again, in the last 48 hours of his presidency. Rashid Khalidi also with us now, Edward Said professor of Arab studies at Columbia University. Your response to what he said and what he has done over this past eight years?
RASHID KHALIDI: Well, he did what he’s been doing for eight years: He sent a signal. The most powerful country on Earth, the sole serious supporter of Israel, without whose support Israel couldn’t do anything, has now, yet again, for administration after administration, sent a signal that what Israeli governments have been doing for decades is going to lead to a one-state solution, in which Palestinians, as he said, are disenfranchised, are not even citizens and so on and so forth. So we have the diagnostician-in-chief telling us about this problem, which he and previous presidents have absolutely—done absolutely nothing to solve. The United States can, could, should act to stop this ongoing annexation, colonization and so forth, which has led to disenfranchisement. I mean, his analysis is impeccable, but his actions—as Professor Glaude said, his actions are just not in keeping with his words, and have not been over eight years in keeping with his words.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you think needs to happen? What opportunity did he miss? So much has happened in the last few weeks, with Secretary of State John Kerry’s speech. You wrote a piece in The New York Times, as well as in The Guardian, saying, "too little, too late."
RASHID KHALIDI: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: And now [President-elect Trump] appointing, if he’s approved, the ambassador to Israel, who is very much for, among other things, moving the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which Nikki Haley just said—
RASHID KHALIDI: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: —who would be the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, she also endorses in her confirmation hearing yesterday.
RASHID KHALIDI: Well, the president-elect’s team includes people like his son-in-law, his nominee for ambassador to Israel and others, who are not just in favor of incendiary acts like moving the embassy, but are themselves major financial or political supporters of the Israeli settler movement. So we’re not just talking about people who are rhetorically in favor of this or that extremist position.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk specifically—you’re talking about Jared Kushner, who will be a top adviser—
RASHID KHALIDI: Jared Kushner.
AMY GOODMAN: —his son-in-law. David Friedman.
RASHID KHALIDI: David Friedman, the ambassador designate, and Jared Kushner are both, according to all the reports, major financial backers of the settlement movement. So, what we have in American and Israeli politics with the arrival of Trump is the completion of a convergence between the extreme right-wing settler, colonial regime that we have in Israel and a segment of the American ruling class, if you want. I mean, Jared Kushner is a major real estate entrepreneur, and he’s used many, many, many of his family’s millions to support not just charitable causes in Israel, but the settler movement, among many other extreme causes.
And so, what we’re seeing on the policy level, what we’re seeing on the media level, what we’re seeing in terms of people who are making political contributions to both the right-wing parties in Israel and American political parties is sort of a convergence of the two systems, but at a time when we’re going to have the most extreme—we have had the most extreme right-wing government in Israel’s history, and when we’re going to have a president who is in favor of things that are sometimes to the right even of that right-wing Israeli government, in terms of what his designees for various positions have said.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you feel President Obama paved the way for this?
RASHID KHALIDI: I think every American president who has stood by idly and just uttered words, like the president has done in his press conference and like the secretary of state did in his speech, and did nothing to actually stop this trend, that he so accurately described, are—they’re all responsible. He is certainly responsible. Had Security Council Resolution 2334 been passed in the first year of this president’s eight years, who knows what might have happened?
AMY GOODMAN: And explain what that resolution is—
RASHID KHALIDI: Well—
AMY GOODMAN: —that caused so much furor, at least on the part of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.
RASHID KHALIDI: That resolution said that everything Israel has done in the Occupied Territories, in Jerusalem and the rest of them, is illegal. It has said that moving its population into occupied territories is a violation of the Geneva Convention, i.e. moving a half a million or 600,000 Israelis into territory occupied is illegal, that the acquisition of territory by force is illegal. And it went on to lay down various other parameters for a solution, including a two-state solution, and the '67 borders as the basis of that. Now, none of this is new. The United Nations has said this again and again and again. This is a reiteration of Security Council Resolution 242 of November 1967. It's also a reiteration of positions that have been taken by every single American administration from President Johnson’s to George W. Bush’s, and this one, as well.
But had that been laid down as a marker, a slap in the face of the Netanyahu government, in 2009, when the president came into office, instead of mollycoddling them, instead of continuing to fund settlements—we fund settlements by giving American so-called charities 501(c)(3) status. The president could have reversed that on the first day he was in office, saying, "You cannot send money, tax-free money—you cannot reduce your taxes to support illegal occupation and colonization." He didn’t do that. The Justice Department, the Treasury could have done that. So, we have financed by—we taxpayers, who are actually paying our taxes, have enabled people who are not paying our taxes, by making so-called charitable deductions, support the settlement movement. Jared Kushner is one of them. [David] Friedman is one of them. There are many, many others.
AMY GOODMAN: So, what do you think is possible now?
RASHID KHALIDI: With Trump as president? Well, I think that this is a—this should be a wake-up call for people in the United States who had some kind of idea of Israel as the light unto the nations, to wake up and realize that the United States has helped to create a situation in which Israeli Jews rule over disenfranchised Arabs, that this is not a light unto the nations. This is not really a democracy, if you have helots. He called them "not citizens." Well, you can call them what you want. He said they’re disenfranchised. It’s actually worse than that. Go to the Occupied Territories. Go to Arab communities inside Israel. Look at what happened to a member of Knesset yesterday, shot in the face by Israeli border police, because he protested the demolition of a village in the south of Israel. You’re talking about people who, in some cases, nominally have rights—Palestinian citizens of the state of Israel—or in the Occupied Territories having really no rights, and both of whom live under an unjust and discriminatory regime. We have fostered that. We have helped to finance and fund that, all the while our political leaders talk about how wonderful Israel is, how its values and our values—well, these are Jim Crow values. The president talked about Jim Crow. What Israel is enforcing are worse than Jim Crow values. And I think we have to start talking and thinking in those terms and setting ourselves apart or understanding how to set ourselves apart from those kinds of practices that are discriminatory or racist.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you think—what do you think it was that led President Obama to have the ambassador for—to have the United States abstain from this, at the very end of his two terms?
RASHID KHALIDI: I mean, I can’t speculate what was going on in his mind, why at the very end. It’s a really good question. I would love to have seen this eight years ago. Maybe it was his chance to get back at the slights and insults that he’s been receiving from Prime Minister Netanyahu over the past eight years, coming to Congress and attacking American—
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, Netanyahu, famously, to say the least, disrespects him.
RASHID KHALIDI: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: And yet President Obama has been more solicitous of Israel than all the previous presidents—
RASHID KHALIDI: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: —from the Bushes on to Clinton, all involved with resolutions that were critical of Israel, but President Obama did not allow that to happen until now.
RASHID KHALIDI: Exactly. This is the first such resolution that has passed under Obama. Every—as you’ve just said, every previous American president has allowed or has sponsored resolutions that are just as harsh as this or involved elements of this resolution. So, maybe he was—you know, what he seems to be doing in his last few days, few weeks, few months, is to doing—is to do some of the things that maybe he wanted to do but felt he couldn’t do. And it’s really a terrible shame. I mean, this is a—this is a man who came into office, supposedly, with fresh ideas about how to deal with the Middle East. He appointed Senator Mitchell, who ultimately was undermined by people he himself had appointed, and was not able to do what he wanted to do. And from that point on, I think it really was downhill for this president, as far as the Middle East is concerned. His legacy is not a good one, as far as Arab-Israeli issues, as far as the Palestinians are concerned. Palestinians will not—and Arabs and, I would argue, Israelis should not remember this man’s legacy with any fondness.
AMY GOODMAN: Rashid Khalidi, professor of Arab studies at Columbia University, and Eddie Glaude, head of African American Studies at Princeton University, we thank you both for this conversation. This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we look at some of the Senate confirmation hearings. To say the least, heated. Stay with us.
|
|
