I AM A JEW (PART XIV - The Israeli Propaganda Machine v. The Alleged Power of the Arab Lobby)

As the title shows this is the 14th part (actually the 15^th, if you count the Special Bulletin) of the series. If you haven’t read the other parts I urge you to do so. They are, after all a continuum. Easy access to the others can be obtained by clicking on the parts.

Part I, Part II, Part III, Special Bulletin, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII, Part VIII, Part IX, Part X, Part XI, Part XII and Part XIII.

In response to my post: "I AM A JEW (PART XI - The Israeli Propaganda Machine)," Albert Nekimken of Vienna, Virginia, wrote:

I suggest that you read the articles entitled: “The Arab Lobby – The American Component”, by Mitchell Bard and "The Arab Lobby: The European Component" by Steven J. Rosen as counterbalance to your current campaign against the "Israeli propaganda machine."

I urge my readers to also do so, because one should always be willing to expose oneself to a counterbalance of any viewpoint. But as for me I find myself singularly unimpressed by the presentation set forth in these articles.

Of course all depends on the definition of a “lobby." Webster’s Dictionary on line defines lobby (noun) as “a group of persons engaged in lobbying especially as representatives of a particular interest group” and lobby (verb) “to try to influence government officials to make decisions for or against something” and “to try to get something you want by talking to the people who make decisions”

I agree with that definition and by that definition the article “The Arab Lobby – The American Component” fails to support its claim.

As early as the fourth paragraph of the article the author writes:

Thus, while Louis Brandeis may have lobbied Woodrow Wilson for U.S. support for the Balfour declaration, the president's closest advisor, "Colonel" Edward House, vigorously opposed it. Harry Truman's friend Eddie Jacobson asked for the president's support for Israel but his secretary of state, George Marshall, threatened to vote against Truman if he recognized the newly established state.

Thus the author almost immediately reveals a misunderstanding, or worse a deliberate distortion, of what a lobby is and what lobbying constitutes. Let us look at the definition of a lobby, “a group of persons engaged in lobbying” and the definition of lobby (verb) is ““to try to influence government officials”.

But when we look at the paragraph quoted above we see that the author is not talking about outsiders trying to influence government officials, he is talking about government officials exercising their duties to advise the President as to what they believe is in the interests of the US. That is their duty! That is their responsibility! The fact that they believed that certain policies were in the best interests of the US, which favored one country or another, or one policy over another, does not make their behavior lobbying, or turn public officials into lobbyists. George Marshall, as Secretary of State felt strongly about what was in the best interests of the US, and expressed it in no uncertain terms.

It was Truman who was politically conscious when he said, according to the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs as well as Information Clearing House:

I'm sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism: I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.

I personally think Truman made the right decision, but to denigrate the many in the State Department who felt that in International Affairs, certain policies, which Bard disapproves of, were both in the interests of the US and fairer than the alternative, is a blatant distortion.

Allow me to quote further from the Washington Report:

 Forty-four years after these events, [Clark] Clifford, Truman's principal domestic advisor, has produced his memoir…

The article goes on to quote Clifford as follows: 

Marshall firmly opposed American recognition of the new Jewish state; I did not. Marshall's opposition was shared by almost every member of the brilliant and now legendary group of presidential advisers, later referred to as the Wise Men, who were then in the process of creating a post-war foreign policy that would endure for more than 40 years. The opposition included the respected Under Secretary of State Robert Lovett; his predecessor, Dean Acheson; the No. 3 man in the State Department, Charles Bohlen; the brilliant chief of the Policy Planning Staff George Kennan; (Navy Secretary James V.) Forrestal; and ... Dean Rusk, then the director of the Office of United Nations Affairs... 

To call these dedicated public servants lobbyists is the height of Chutzpa.

There were many reasons for their views. There were far more Arabs in the world than Jews. But at least as important they felt that the partition was imminently unfair for it: 

awarded 56 percent of Palestine to its 650,000 Jewish inhabitants, and 44 percent to its 1,300,000 Muslim and Christian Arab inhabitants.

If there was any lobbying at the time (or since) it was by the “Jewish” lobby. Quoting again from the Washington Report:

"Lovett began by criticizing what he termed signs of growing 'assertiveness' by the Jewish Agency ... Marshall interrupted Lovett. He was strongly opposed to the behavior of the Jewish Agency, he said.

And where does the article go from trying to label public servants and even the Secretary of State lobbyists, It argues that American foreign policy has unwisely catered to the Saudis. This may or may not be sound policy, but it is difficult to see what it has to do with an Arab lobby.

The author writes:

Arab states have benefited in the United States from the support of oil companies, defense contractors, and, perhaps most of all, from Arabists within the State Department.

Oil companies and defense contractors pursue their own interests – if that interest happens to coincide with those of certain countries, that does not make them a lobby for them. As for so-called Arabists in the State Department, they are doing their job, and work for what they believe to be in the best interest of their country, the USA. They are public officials, not lobbyists.

The rest of the article is essentially a polemic criticizing American foreign policy in the Middle East, but this has little if anything to do with proving the existence of an Arab lobby in the United States.

But the author, possibly inadvertently, shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is no Arab lobby in the US, and in fact why it is impossible for one to exist, when he writes:

… limiting …their influence are the divisions among Arabs and Muslims, which carry over to their expatriates and their descendants in the United States. According to the 2000 U.S. census, 1.2 million Americans were of Arab descent. Unlike the Israel lobby, which can stand up for the strengthening of America's relationship with a single nation, it is difficult, if not impossible for Arab Americans to represent all Arabs because Americans of Arab descent come from no fewer than twenty-one countries with conflicting interests and which are often feuding among themselves. As Jawad George, the executive secretary of the Palestine Congress of North America said, "The same things that divide the Arab world divide the Arab-American world.”

The author goes on to undermine his own argument by admitting that:

Over the last two decades, …(they) have had no discernible impact on policy.

Now when we come to Rosen’s article, we find that he defeats his argument about an effective Arab lobby in relation to US policy toward Israel at the outset, for he writes about: “A Petrodollar Lobby” but then says:

Yet it is difficult to see significant evidence of the impact of the petrodollar lobby in the Arab-Israeli sphere or any major effort on their part to interfere in the bilateral relationship between the United States and Israel.

Having found no effective Arab lobby anywhere, he like Bard, tries to turn government officials into lobbyists, in this case European ones.

The strongest external force pressuring the U.S. government to distance itself from Israel is not the Arab-American organizations, the Arab embassies, the oil companies, or the petrodollar lobby. Rather, it is the Europeans, especially the British, French, and Germans, that are the most influential Arab lobby to the U.S. government.

But governments are not lobbyists. Governmental officials argue for the policies they believe are in the best interests of their countries. By no stretch of the imagination will the argument that public servants are lobbyists stand up to any kind of objective scrutiny.

I welcome comments, but will not publish any, unless they have a unique relevance to the segment under discussion, until this series is complete.

The Fiscal Cliff

In my last post entitled "We Interrupt this Debate for Some Timely Comments.” I commended to the reader an article entitled “President Obama: The Democrats' Ronald Reagan” but introduced my subject with: “As the impending fiscal cliff moves ever closer, some timely observations appear to be in order and they will follow soon.” and that will be the main subject of this commentary.

In the meantime, however, the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut cannot be ignored or as Ernst Hauser of the Bronx and Manhattan, NY said:

Yesterday’s events have interrupted the interruption - since the Supreme Court has chosen to break the SECOND AMENDMENT into 2 pieces, separating the "well regulated militia" and the "right to bear arms" the time has come to REPEAL it and replace it with a clearer worded one, that neither the CJ nor Scalia could twist. In the meantime Congress could repass the Brady bill, without an expiration date or time.

So much has been said on this subject that I have not much to add, except to observe that the tragedy in Newport, Connecticut is dwarfed by the carnage that goes on every day throughout the US without much publicity. The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence reports that more than 30,000 people are killed by guns in this nation each year. Yet this daily tragedy, neither commands the attention of the media, nor the attention of the nation.

Is this because multiple deaths occurring at the same time and place make for better headlines than smaller numbers occurring simultaneously, but in different places?

Or is it because such a large percentage of the victims of gun violence are black?

The first possibility is bad. The second is outrageous. 

The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention of the Department of Justice reports: “Young African-American males have the most elevated homicide victimization rate of any race or gender group. Homicides involving firearms have been the leading cause of death for African-American males ages 15 to 19 since 1969.”

Whatever the reason, the lack of attention to this ongoing carnage by the media is a disgrace.

Now to the Fiscal Cliff!

I find myself disturbed here not only by the distortions on the Right, but by the blasé attitude toward the Cliff on the part of the Left. Thus I have started to get e-mails from an organization styling itself as AmericasDemocrats.org, which refers to that looming calamity as “the so-called fiscal cliff -- and why going over it might not be so bad.” Some suggest that it would take a long time for its effects to be felt. And the rest of the Left blogosphere, while not going quite this far, proclaims the slogan: “No Deal is better than a Bad deal.” While I have no difficulty agreeing with this in principle, I find that these self-styled “Liberals” define a “Bad Deal” as anything that makes the slightest change in the Entitlement programs.

Yes, it might be necessary for the President to allow the country to go over the Cliff rather than to give in to the constant blackmail by those who have decided that they can get their way by taking the Nation hostage, but the failure on the part of the Left to recognize the seriousness of this step, or to downplay it, is deeply disturbing, to say the least.

Let us understand what it means!

I quote from pages one and two of a 10 page paper released by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the highly respected non-partisan arm of Congress, entitled: “Economic Effects of Reducing the Fiscal Restraint That Is Scheduled to Occur in 2013.” 

“Under current law, the federal budget deficit will fall dramatically between 2012 and 2013 owing to scheduled increases in taxes and, to a lesser extent, scheduled reductions in spending—a development that some observers have referred to as a ‘fiscal cliff.’ … The resulting weakening of the economy will lower taxable incomes and raise unemployment…” (Emphasis added) 

“If measured for calendar years 2012 and 2013, the amount of fiscal restraint is even larger. Most of the policy changes that reduce the deficit are scheduled to take effect at the beginning of calendar year 2013, so budget figures for fiscal year 2013—which begins in October 2012—reflect only about three-quarters of the effects of those policies on an annual basis. 

“CBO expects—with the economy projected to contract at an annual rate of 1.3 percent in the first half of the year and expand at an annual rate of 2.3 percent in the second half. Given the pattern of past recessions as identified by the National Bureau of Economic Research, such a contraction in output in the first half of 2013 would probably be judged to be a recession.“ (Emphasis added)

Furthermore, Christine Lagarde has urged US leaders to reach a deal to avoid the "fiscal cliff,” warning that the uncertainty was damaging the global economy. The head of the International Monetary Fund told the BBC's Katty Kay that the US had a duty "to try to remove uncertainty and doubt as quickly as possible.” 

Even as early as December 12, 2012 Reuters reported that Dupont was already curtailing spending due to the imminence of the fiscal cliff. 

Furthermore, failure to reach agreement and falling over the cliff means that unemployment insurance checks stop being paid as of Dec. 29 resulting in “about 2.1 million Americans loos(ing) their extended jobless benefits … (and) An additional 930,000 people will run out of unemployment insurance in early 2013. 

Anyone reading this analysis can see the consequences are real and they are serious. Going over the cliff cannot be approached lightly, and from a political standpoint, if it must be endured, it must be clear to the American people that there was no real choice.

This is the President’s dilemma. He cannot stonewall, as the Left would have him do! He cannot cave to their laments, “No changes to Social Security, to Medicare, to Medicaid.” He must be, and he must appear to be, reasonable. It must be crystal clear that if this calamity were to happen that it was Republican intransigence that was to blame.

The Left keeps screaming: “We need more jobs” and it ignores that falling off the cliff will increase unemployment and increase the hardship of the unemployed.

Furthermore these strident voices ignore that more is at stake than entitlements.

Eduardo Porter writing in the New York Times of December 19, 2012, points out that “loath to raise taxes on the middle class yet unwilling to cut deeply into the budgets for Social Security or Medicare, the president and his advisers proposed cutting the discretionary part of the budget devoted to everything except defense and other security agencies to 1.7 percent of economic output by 2022, down from 3.1 percent last year” but there is not a word about such cuts from the Left. For the Left it appears that nothing matters other than entitlements.

But there is much at stake here!! Possibly more than even entitlements. To quote from the article: “It pays subsidies for higher education and housing assistance for the poor. It finances the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration. It pays for the Federal Emergency Management Agency and training programs for unemployed workers.” But even Porter leaves out much of what is in that part of the budget. How about National Parks? How about the budget for the SEC and our other regulatory agencies? How about the budget of the IRS, where for every cut in its enforcement budget, we lose a multiple in tax revenues. I could go on and on. What about spending on infrastructure? See here. But I don’t hear any concern from the Left.

I know that we live in an age of slogans, and the pretense of simple solutions, in an age of short columns and short attention spans, but unless we focus on what is truly at stake and how difficult the choices are, we undermine the very things we value. Entitlements are very important, but they are not the be all and the end all.

And then comes the final straw from this new messenger from the Left. This AmericasDemocrats.org gives the impression that it is connected to the Democratic Party. Not only is this not true, but it gives us this bit of revisionist history. It tells us:

Did you know that Democratic “bosses” made FDR accept Harry Truman as vice president?

Did you know that Truman was “very anti-Semitic and racist”?

Did you know that Japan did not surrender primarily because of the atom bomb?

The first is not true. No one could make Roosevelt do anything he did not want to do and he demonstrated this four years before when he wanted Henry Wallace on his ticket, by being prepared to threaten not to run if Wallace was not his running mate.

As for the second, it was Truman who signed an executive order integrating the military at a time when most still thought of African-Americans as inferior, and it was Truman who against the strong opposition of his Secretary of State, George Marshall, recognized the State of Israel.

The website sets forth a view of the Cold War that can only be described as being out of playbook of the then communist party, blaming the cold war on Truman and American Imperialism. For more on Wallace, see here and particularly the sections on “The 1948 Presidential election” and “Later career”.

Next time I will return to the discussions with my readers, which I left off on December 4, 2012 with The President’s Re-election (More Discussion III)

How Secure is the Victory For Democrats?

In my last two postings I address first the question of bipartisanship and explained it is unlikely that there will be much bipartisanship, if any. In the following commentary I queried whether the new so-called conservative members are likely to push the Democratic Party to the Right and concluded with a resounding NO.

Now I address just how secure the victory for the Democrats is. A look at history is instructive in how much a great victory carries over to the next election.

For this purpose I go back to the historic election of 1946. The President was Harry Truman and at that time, hardly more than three weeks before the midterm elections his approval rating dropped to 32 percent. As the reader will quickly surmise, there is a parallel here to the unpopularity of President Bush prior to the just concluded midterm elections. I should add that there was another similarity to the election now. The Democrats then had a lock on the Southern vote, just as Republicans have now.

The results of the elections of 1946 were that in the House Republicans picked up 54 seats. The GOP wound up with a 59-member dominance over the Democrats. When the new Congress convened in January, Republicans occupied 75 percent of the seats outside the South. That is a far greater victory than Democrats achieved in this election

Just as in this election, it was doubtful that Democrats could win the Senate with only one third of the Senate up for election, but Republicans picked up 13 seats to take control of the chamber, 51 to 45. Compare this to the five seats that Democrats picked up in the Senate and the approximately thirty seats they picked up in the House.

In addition the unpopular Republican President Bush will not encumber the Republican ticket in the next election. Two years after that disastrous election for the Democrats, the very same Democratic incumbent President, Harry Truman, would lead the ticket.

But a lot can happen in two years. In fact a lot can happen in one campaign. . When 1948 came Truman campaigned vigorously against the "do-nothing, good-for-nothing 80th Congress," while largely ignoring the Republican nominee, Governor Dewey. In November 1948, to the astonishment of almost everyone (Who can forget the headline, “DEWEY WINS”) and to the consternation of Republicans, Truman won reelection and Democrats recaptured Congress. They picked up nine seats in the Senate and so many seats in the House that they not only recouped their 1946 losses, but also erased all gains made by the GOP in three previous elections. Of the 50 Republican newcomers in the House in 1946 who ran for reelection, 35 went down to defeat.

Can history repeat itself in reverse? I fear that it can.

Can Democrats avoid this? I believe that they can but the point is that nothing can be taken for granted. Democrats must be prudent. Whether they achieve anything or not they must not be seen as “a do nothing Congress.” Investigations will be useful, but for the most part they will only make the outgoing Administration, which is not running for reelection look even worse than they do now. But if there is one thing we can count on, Republicans will be running away from this Administration; they are already doing so. So it will be difficult to run against the record of this Administration. It will have to be based on the record of this Congress, and if they accomplish nothing, they will have to show that they did their best and that Republican obstructionism is to blame. They will have one advantage by being in the majority. They will control the agenda.

Well then what are Democrats to do? As important as the Iraq war was in this last election one other issue may very well have been more important; and that is the issue of corruption. Democrats cannot; must not shilly-shally around on this issue. The possibility that Nancy Pelosi, the new Democratic Speaker, might have picked Alcee Hastings, a man who had once been impeached and removed for taking a bribe while a federal judge would have been a disastrous beginning.

Now Pelosi faces a new dilemma. Representative William Jefferson, Dem. of New Orleans has been reelected to his seat. He was the Democrat who hid $90,000 in his freezer. He has argued that it has been about a year since the money was found and no indictment has been handed down, proving he is innocent. All it proves that the evidence to support an indictment has not been found, but that hardly puts him above suspicion, and Democrats must show that they stand for Congressman being above suspicion. This is a hard one politically. Jefferson was just reelected by his constituents-he is black and probably will have the support of much of the black caucus in Congress, but the Democrats must show that to serve in a Congress they control, one must be above suspicion. The House has the power under the Constitution to refuse to seat members who they do not consider qualified. Democrats must refuse to seat Jefferson. The fall out within the Party will be much less, than the fallout among the American people if they seat him.

The other scandal that Democrats must address is earmarks. That is not to say that all projects that are covered by earmarks are necessarily bad, but members of Congress should approve no expenditure without full committee approval, a full vetting by the Congress and a vote on the merits. Simply, revealing who inserted the earmark is not reform. Pork will always be around, but it should never be within the control of any one member, or be inserted in the dead of night, or out of the public view, and certainly not out of the view of all the members of the Congress.

That will be a good start but Democrats need to do much more.

Why This Is So! (continued III)

I concluded my last installment with, “Next time, how Reagan takes the Republican Party and the country to the right and makes this respectable, as Democrats have no answer and as the Union movement crumbles.

When the country elected Reagan I think few realized what a radical departure this constituted for the country. During all the years of Democratic ascendancy the Republican Party for the most part did not take serious issue with the direction the Democrats were taking the country. To be sure, there were many of wealth who looked upon both Roosevelts as traitors to their class and dreamed of undoing all that they stood for and all they had accomplished. But the Republican Party knew that such a position would be political suicide and so basically ran on platforms that only opposed Democratic reforms on the periphery. They argued that they wanted to do the same thing only they could do it better. They opposed some measures because ”they went too far”; they opposed others on the basis of defending states rights, they opposed others on the basis that they were too expensive and therefore fiscally irresponsible, but they never opposed the basic concept of the welfare state and that the government had a responsibility to provide a safety net, to protect the environment and to treat working people as something other than a component of industry to be treated no different than a widget. 

In other words they ran as Democrats light or as some dubbed it, “The Me Too Party. They did make some viscous attacks on Democrats, which in the short run did little damage but in the long took its toll. Beginning as early as 1947 they began a campaign to weaken the Labor movement when they passed the Taft-Hartley Act over Truman’s veto. They attacked Democrats as being, “soft on communism” and Joe McCarthy as the leader of the red baiting Republicans dubbed the Democratic Party as the Democrat Party, a label that has stuck to this day. They accused Democrats of having lost China to communism and being anti-defense.

At the same time they recognized that they had no intellectual base and while attacking intellectuals as eggheads, they systematically formed think tanks so that today right-wing think tanks outnumber liberal ones by a significant multiple. 

They vowed that newscasts would be more too their liking or they would buy them and in time all three major networks were bought by large corporations and they formed their own network and cable news channel, i.e. Fox. They took over radio as their propaganda organ.

But until Goldwater came along they didn’t represent a true alternative to the Democratic Party initiatives. Goldwater brought the party sharply to the right but in doing so he gave the Party an identity and a passion that it never had before. Goldwater was defeated in a landslide, but he gave the party passion and purpose, which Reagan inherited and exploited. This was not true of the McGovern candidacy, which only served to strengthen stereotypes of Democrats as being, in the words of Spiro Agnew, “effete.” 

At the same time the Union movement, which at one time had the almost universal support of the American people, was losing its image as the bulwark of all working people. At the height of the Union movement few people would cross a picket line. Unfortunately, the image of unions over the years, fairly or not, became of groups that supported featherbedding and had contempt for the public. This was exemplified by the by the strike waged by the Transport Workers Union in 1966, who went out on strike days before the new Mayor, John Lindsay, was sworn in and tied up public transportation for 12 days. Today unions are associated more with wealthy sports figures than with ordinary laboring people and union membership which reached its peak at about 35% of the total work force in 1945, declined to about 15% by 1995 and has held steady at that level for the past ten years. While the reasons for this decline are varied its effect on the Democratic Party and the progressive movement has been negative.

At least as important it appears that after Humphrey’s defeat by Nixon in 1969 The Democratic Party showed itself as a party that no longer had a real agenda. Whatever significant progress which was made thereafter was done by the Supreme Court (e.g. See Roe vs. Wade 1973) and the Democratic Party essentially became a conservative party fighting to keep the status quo, as a backlash against many of the achievements of the Great Society gathered steam.

Next: What Reagan did and what the Democratic Party should have done.

Why This Is So!

In my last column, entitled, “Things are worse than they seem,” I set forth my rather pessimistic views as to the state of the Democratic Party, (not Democrat Party) (more on this in a later essay) and the state of the progressive movement in general. I did not mention in that article two other disturbing factors which bear mention, namely that the percentage of the Latino and over 65 vote for Kerry, both declined from the percentages of the previous four years. I concluded my article with the promise that in my next analysis I will discuss why I think this is so and in a third installment I will discuss what I believe must be done to reverse the trend.

So here is why I think this is so! I believe that the seeds for demise of the Democratic Party and the progressive movement, which has its roots in the administration of Theodore Roosevelt early in the twentieth century, were sown during the Administration of Lyndon Johnson and in the Civil Rights movement. Until then the Democratic Party held its dominance based on a coalition of what used to be the Confederacy whose representatives, for the most part, were segregationists and anti-union factions, and the industrial states centered on the East and West coasts and around the Great Lakes. Franklin Roosevelt, held this coalition together by never touching what he saw as the third rail of politics, namely the plight of African-American’s in the South. 

Truman endangered this coalition to some extent, when he desegregated the military, but the South, which associated the Republican Party, with Lincoln and emancipation, could not bring itself to even consider any association with this old enemy. Johnson, who but for Vietnam, might have gone down in history as the greatest of twentieth century Presidents, totally shattered this image by pushing through a recalcitrant Congress the greatest change in racial relations since the Emancipation Proclamation. What Johnson did may in fact have done more to free the Black man than Lincoln because Lincoln legacy left the Black man in something equivalent to slavery, known as “share cropping.” 

While the South was not immediately lost to the Democrats (voting habits die hard) the South gradually fell away from the Democratic party and when Nixon took advantage of this with his “Southern strategy” the die was cast, particularly when it became apparent that the party of Lincoln was now embracing the most rabid of the segregationists and welcoming them into its bosom. Strum Thurmond, who ran for President on the Dixiecrat ticket was only the most egregious of these. Not only was the South lost, but since then not a single Democratic candidate for president ever received a majority of the White, or more accurately, the Caucasian vote. 

Johnson did more than this. He enacted the programs of the Great Society, which with their great appeal to the poor and most of the middle class had the potential to overcome the loss of the segregationist vote. Johnson led a revolution, which in its scope dwarfed the achievements of the New Deal. Under his leadership, Congress enacted Medicare, Medicaid, Public Housing, and Aid to Dependent Children, to mention only the most important of his “War on Poverty.” Unfortunately, The Vietnam war not only tarnished his and the Democratic parties legacy but forced an underfunding of many of his programs, thus making many of them ineffective.