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writing for godot

The Chuck Hagel Hearing: “Are you lying?” “No.”

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Written by Paul Larudee   
Sunday, 03 February 2013 14:18

It was a classic exchange that will become an icon in the annals of the U.S. Senate and beyond. Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the most loyal friends of Israel in that august body, was questioning his former colleague and now nominee for Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, during the latter’s confirmation hearings.

Referencing a statement that Hagel had made years earlier to the effect that “the Jewish Lobby intimidated Congress”, Graham asked, “Name one person who's intimidated by the Israel lobby in the United States Senate.”

An intimidating request, to be sure, from a Senate spokesperson for the Lobby, when your confirmation is at stake. If you give up a name, you might kill that person’s career or reputation and your own, as well. If you say “Charles Percy”, it’s not necessarily true, because Percy was hounded out of the Senate for not being sufficiently intimidated. You could quote from Paul Findley’s book They Dare to Speak Out, but his examples are also of those who paid dearly for refusing to be intimidated.

You could choose to name yourself, or point out that the request itself is intimidating, but then you have the same problem or are begging the question. What to do?

In the end, after a pause that ended before it became too pregnant, Hagel replied, “I don’t know,” thus confirming his own submission to the Lobby’s intimidation, but in such a way as to be embarrassingly obvious to all in attendance. Those who chose to interpret it as the ultimate loss of the last shred of Hagel’s self-respect suppressed a moan of sympathetic pain for him. Those who found it a brilliant ploy that exposed and ridiculed the tactic must have suppressed a peal of laughter capable of bringing down the house. I wish it had been me.

In the end, it was the perfect response. The bully with the brass knuckles could not fault it, but it made clear that Palestinians are not the only ones occupied by Israel.

Thank you, Chuck.

Paul Larudee is a writer and humn rights advocate in Northern California.

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