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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
The crisis in Israel, its impact on the American presidential race and how (and why) Gore lost the final debate.
Oct 25, 2000 | With the center of gravity in the presidential campaign having shifted abroad due to rising tensions and open conflict in the Middle East, the United States is in a very dangerous position. The lax military oversight and poor strategic planning shown by the vulnerability of the Aegis destroyer, the USS Cole, to a small boat in the harbor at Aden, Yemen, significantly increased the probability that President Bill Clinton, already fretting about Al Gore's sluggish showing, would order military action somewhere in the world before Election Day. We can only hope that, should it occur, it will be a measured and rationally directed strike and not another example of this administration's abuse of the military for domestic political advantage.
The sudden Mideast crisis has also destabilized the campaign season by resurrecting the long-vexed question of how much of a role Jewish Americans have or have not played in influencing U.S. support of Israel. At the Million Family March organized by the Nation of Islam in Washington last week, a Syrian Muslim jurist blamed what he called (according to the Washington Post) the "Zionist-controlled media" in the U.S. for partisan treatment of the Palestinian cause. While most observers would categorically reject that inflammatory formulation, it must be said that the new medium of the Web has allowed Americans to sample and monitor the far more balanced reportage of Mideast issues in the British, European and Canadian press.
"Conversion to Islam is rising among African-Americans," stated the headline of a report by Monica Rhor in the Oct. 14 Philadelphia Inquirer. Over the past 40 years, this trend has fostered pro-Arab and occasionally anti-Semitic sentiments among a community that the Democratic Party has come to take for granted as part of its base. Gore's selection of Sen. Joseph Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew, for his running mate was enormously popular among white middle-class professionals and academics of the Northeast but appears to have exacerbated tensions among working-class urban blacks, whose turnout on Election Day is crucial for Gore as well as for Hillary Clinton in the New York Senate race. Unease about the Lieberman nomination was inevitable given that the Gore campaign left blacks off the shortlist of finalists it floated the week before the announcement.
The power of the pro-Israel lobby -- which certainly does not include all American Jews, who on the academic left are often Palestinian sympathizers -- is demonstrated by Hillary's embarrassing behavior since she began actively campaigning for the Senate. This longtime supporter of Palestinian statehood who was once on huggy-kissy terms with Suha Arafat has been frantically backpedaling and re-tailoring her words and views to win the support of Jewish voters, who represent between 10 and 12 percent of New York state voters. That there were very few blacks (aside from Hollywood stars) on the official list of 404 "friends" who were invited for discreet White House sleepovers from July 1999 to last August says everything about where the Clintons think the real power lies.
Many Americans, myself included, have wondered for years why our safety and security are compromised by an inflexible foreign policy that has set the entire Muslim world against us. From the 1988 destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, to the 1993 bombing of New York's World Trade Center, the American mainstream media has been in denial, blaming those heinous acts of terrorism on small cadres of madmen funded by outlaw regimes -- as if the attacks were unrelated to decisions made in Washington. The U.S. is rightly seen by Arabs as the principal guarantor of Israel's military might, which Americans have underwritten with billions of tax dollars for which there are pressing domestic needs. The media rarely allow Arab views to be heard unfiltered and unframed, and too often, Arabs are portrayed as irrational or medieval, clamoring cartoon figures of no interest until they begin to adopt Western ways.
But pictures tell a thousand stories, breaking through press censorship. The horrors and irreconcilable passions of the Mideast were recently dramatized by the death of a 12-year-old Palestinian boy, caught in a crossfire as he huddled with his father in a stony street. Then the massacre and barbaric mutilation of two Israeli reservists by laughing, taunting vigilantes at a police station in Ramallah stunned the world. The mob's frenzy and its use of metal poles and even a window screen to savage the corpses recall the bloody denouement of Tennessee Williams' "Suddenly Last Summer," where a pack of Spanish beggar boys hack a rich aesthete to pieces with shards of rusty cans and metal scrap from the dump. It's the rage sparked by abject powerlessness, the revenge of the exploited and dispossessed that ultimately dehumanizes both sides.
