Speaker Johnson visits Columbia Univ., and speaks of mob rule on campus, and of Israeli Infants Baked Alive in Ovens. That Led Me to Ask: is there any genuine debate amidst the crude propaganda?
The Speaker is the same Representative who voted against two Impeachment measures against Trump, and is digging in the tapes of Jan. 6th to prove that the riots did not happen, just casual visits...
Food line in Rafah, Gaza Strip, Dec. 21, 2023. AP Photo/Fatima Shbair
Update, Tues., April 30, 2024: I was listening to a Professor Mearsheimer debate the other day, always an informative use of time even though we have some major disagreements, especially about the war on Ukraine, but the first half of this interview is devoted to the recent Israeli-Iran exchange, and his stated view that Israel is a strategic liability for the US, which runs counter to just about 100% of the statements which come out of US political office holders and seekers mouths, like Repub. Presidential contender Nikki Haley who shocked me by stating at a CNN forum that there should be zero distance between the two countries foreign policies - we must follow Israeli’s lead no matter what, one of the most dangerous and amazingly one- sided stances I’ve ever heard in Foreign Policy. And here is a very brief news article which succinctly states the Professor’s view about our relationship with Israel:
https://www.wrmea.org/congress-u.s.-aid-to-israel/john-mearsheimer-the-israel-lobby-now-plays-smash-mouth-politics.html
And even blunter, with some inside the “situation room” details, back to 1947-1948 even, is former aide to Colin Powell, Col. Larry Wilkerson, in a brief video from two years ago, put forth by me in the spirit, once again, of leveling the informational playing field with AIPAC, which is no small order:
And here is the longer Mearsheimer Interview which prompted this Update, from April 27th, so very current. 36 and a half minutes in length.
Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
Introduction:
I was intending to write, for Earth Day, just this past Monday, April 22, (the day before Passover and a full moon) an essay along the lines of “A Walk in the Sun in Western Maryland.” The impulse was set off by my regular hike on local paths, this one on a cool, clear, early Spring Day, one of my favorite types of Northeast weather. It was a day of life bursting out in varied colors, almost equal to those of Autumn, not just in the flowers of the trees and shrubs, but also in the wet meadows. Even lowly puddles were swimming with various stages of tadpoles, the eggs hatched from frogs, toads and maybe even salamanders. Some were so small 15 or so could fit on my thumb nail, and as I gazed intently at the dark masses and spermatozoa like tales, there were also near microscopic creatures the size of a period, buzzing on the bottom: a soup of young life. In the deeper ponds, up in the meadows, I saw tadpoles with four limbs had emerged already, and last year, on a late February day with the temperature in the 30's, I heard upland chorus frogs singing, and the water was being stirred by their mating. Many of these amphibians are under greater and greater pressure throughout a good part of the US, and around the world. And right there on my “home” paths. Several days later, the shallow puddle had dried up, being in the right-hand groove of the unpaved road, and perhaps run over as well by the frequent four wheelers out for a ride, and the deeper pools further into the meadow were down 6-8 inches.
A longer account of my “Walk in the Sun” will get written, somehow, hopefully within a couple of weeks, but for now, let me share with you some of the names and dates that went through my mind as I pondered what I was seeing, and thinking about, how Western Maryland and beyond, the “advanced modern world” - or regions wishing they belonged too, treat Nature: John James Audubon (1785-1851); Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862); John Muir (1838-1914); Rosalie Edge (1877-1962); Benton MacKaye (1879-1975); Rachel Carson (1907-1964); Bob Marshall (1921-1939); Donald Worster (1941…); Elizabeth Kolbert (1961…); Naomi Klein (1970…).
It may have been Carson’s walks on the beach, and so much of her time spent peering into tidepools and describing the micro-organisms in them and the ocean’s deeper water columns that led to my scrutiny of these mundane little pools and pondings. Knowing how fragile they were, dependent on the timing of spring rainfall and human trespassing with wide treads, made them seem even more remarkable. These are the “ephemeral” waters, the vernal ponds and pools which always had problematic protection in the definitions of wetlands, and now have been killed at the federal level by the Supreme Court’s decision in Sackett vs EPA (May 25, 2023). And Ms. Kolbert paints the grim but realistic picture of a forthcoming mass extinction, heralded by the loss of so many of these amphibians.
This story, which I will write before my mental horizons of that day drift away - was unfortunately eclipsed by my work on another promised posting: whom to support in the Maryland Democratic Senate Primary coming up on May 14: David Trone or Angela Alsobrooks (or someone else among the total of 22 or so other hopefuls in both party’s primaries, names that don’t quite reach the average voter - and so I went looking for them amidst the online electronic records). And also the many contestants in the primaries for Trone’s vacated Maryland District 6th House seat, where for my purposes of writing, the choices are narrowing down likely to just two amidst 16 democratic and 9 republican hopefuls.
It was an interesting journey to visit each candidates’ website - at least - and most had a site - as well as data at the official Maryland State Board of Elections’ online listing. As for the harder digging demanded by the issues raised in the Senate debate, and by candidate Joe Vogel over April McClain Delaney and who she keeps company with along with her donations, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and the private online data bases like Ballotpedia, Open Secrets, Follow the Money…helped clarify who gave what to whom, how much and when. The why of giving, Motives that is, of course, are a different matter.
And now, setting aside my work of the past week following my post entitled “A Most Unsatisfactory Debate,” I now turn to the vast protests over Israeli policy and actions against Hamas, in Gaza and more broadly, the treatment of Palestinians throughout the recent history of the Middle East.
I decided to write after hearing - and asking myself - “Did I hear what he just said - hear that correctly?” - what the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, Representative from Louisiana said to CNN correspondant Erin Burnett on her visit to interview him at Columbia University on Wednesday, April 24th. In his list of Hamas atrocities committed on October 7th, he included “an infant placed in an oven and cooked alive” in their 8:42 segment, which you can view for yourself here:
And upon wondering what he said in his full address, outdoors to a hostile audience, I found that he repeated the baked baby claim, plural this time, along with calls for the President of Columbia to resign, mob rule of Anti-Semites, threats that Congress would act to break up the encampments and prevent the intimidation of Jewish students, and vowing to call upon President Biden to act as well, including the threat to cut off federal funding if college Presidents don’t do more policing.
Here, judge for yourself: the PBS video is 18 minutes long.
Was this the man who just walked his Ultra Right wing’s tight rope to deliver a foreign aid package that seemed at best a long shot just ten days or so ago? I think, to give him credit for that long frustrated legislative achievement, before blasting him for his comments and interventions into campus speech issues, that the tactics he chose to get the aid to Israel, Ukraine, Taiwan, et al through the divisions in Congress - were about the only way he could have done it. I didn’t want to see, to be clear, any new money for offensive weapons given to Israel. Please note that Israel already has received advanced fighter aircraft, like the F-35 and better versions of the F-15 and F-16 than those Ukraine has not yet received (only the older versions of the F-16, with very limited range compared to the F-35 and later versions of the F-15 and F-16 are on the way). Israel operates under no restrictions (public ones at least) and Ukraine fights with more than one hand tied behind its back although it is now getting the longer range ATACMs missiles it had been begging for and been denied over more than a year. The missing advanced jets and advanced air defenses that Israel has gotten but Ukraine has been denied entirely or skimped on mightily, have cost many Ukrainian lives and billions of dollars in damage to crucial infrastructure, with far too many Ukrainian cities, like Mariupol, looking like the rubble we all see in Gaza.
After hearing of the babies in ovens spoken of as if it were accepted fact, I went to work to see how other’s have been treating the charge. Most of the references were in late October, and early November, 2023, and most seemed to rely on the perceptions of certain “first responders” at the scenes of the massacres - and massacres there were, to be sure, and lots of the most brutal forms of atrocities. But live babies in ovens?
Here is an early November account at the Jersusalem Post: https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-772181; and next is the account fromWikipedia under the heading “Misinformation in the Israeli-Hamas War”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misinformation_in_the_Israel%E2%80%93Hamas_war
“In a speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition on 28 October, Eli Beer, founder of an Israeli EMS organization, claimed that Hamas had burned a baby alive in an oven. The claim was repeated by journalist Dovid Efune, commentator John Podhoretz and others, in tweets seen over 10 million times. Israeli journalists and police found no evidence for the claim, and a representative of ZAKA, a first responder organization, said the claim was "false".[35][36][37] Other first-responders reported that the event did happen, that a baby was found in an oven of a house that had been burned down by the attackers.[38]”
Based on the allegation seeming to have faded out after these earlier attempts to present it as proven fact, one would have hoped that the Speaker of the House of the United States would be very careful in repeating such an inflamatory charge - as if the events of October 7 were not explosive enough in their most documented charges. Repeating the phrase in a very tense public setting - a speech - and in a widely seen interview ought to be seen as inflamatory and irresponsible. Flagrantly so. After all, it is harkening back directly to the Holocaust, linking “babys” and “ovens” and going further with “live” - that is precisely mob stirring rhetoric.
I’m troubled that so few seem to have challenged that claim on line, repeated now well after the confusion and heat of that week in October and the immediate ones that followed.
Perhaps a brief visit to the Spearker’s bio at Wikipedia might prove helpful, as it would seem that not only are First Amendment Rights and their defense in his portfolio, but so is the Religious Right and one of the most conservative organizational manifestations of that movement, the Southern Baptist Convention. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Johnson_(Louisiana_politician)
Need I add that the fundamentalist religious Right in America has a special place in its thinking, religious and secular, for the fate of the State of Israel, such a special place, it seems to me, that it becomes all too easy to conflate criticism of the state of Israel with anti-Semitism, a mistake which is dominating the views in Congress and of wealthy donors to universities demanding that college presidents do more to protect Jewish students if not the state of Israel from criticism, no matter how well founded.
Background to the Middle East and Protest: Personal and Intellectual
As I hope my readers know by now, I’ve spent a lot of timing researching and writing about the Russian attack on Ukraine, which really began in 2014, not in the massed conventional invasion of February 24, 2022. But since the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023 I’ve found myself drawn deeper into the History of Israel and the many wars it has fought against Arab/Islamic/Palestinian foes since its founding in 1948.
In fact, I’ve had no choice since the Israeli-Hamas war and the broader tensions in the Middle East have essentially pushed support for Ukraine out of the news beginning in October of 2023. And the turmoil - let’s be frank - chaos - inside the Republican party and the failure of the Democrats to have a remedy until Speaker Johnson got a combined aid packaged passed this week (April 20-27th) pushed public support for Ukraine to its lowest ebb for the entire 2022-2024 span. If the brutality of Hamas on October 7 cost some 1200 Israeli deaths and still unreturned hostages they took back underground with them - over 100 - then tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers have also been killed, and thousands of civilians, and the destruction of its vital energy infrastructure continues as I write. Stepping back for a more general view, I’ve asked more than rhetorically in comments online at the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal, whether a new, unspoken valuation of human life has emerged: Israeli lives first, then Ukranians, and last and certainly least, Palestinians, especially those in Gaza.
Therefore, here I am. First things first. I was a participant in the Lafayette College Strike for Peace in Vietnam in the spring of 1970, linked to President Nixon’s expansion of the war - allegedly to end it more quickly - and then the deaths of students at Kent State by trigger happy Ohio National Guard Students which set off even more student protests nationwide. There was no mention by Speaker Johnson of Kent state and this tragic deployment of the National Guard despite its relevance to what he said at Columbia this week. And, since I was an American Studies major at Lafayette, the Speaker of the House invoked the civic “virtue” of the Founders as opposing mob rule, rightly so; what he didn’t mention was the role of mob, directed in part by members of the commercial elite of New England, and in other locations, including Annapolis, in physcially intimidating officers of the Crown, tarring and feathering some, chasing a number out of town, wrecking the homes of some as well, and essentially transferring a good part of “law and order” to anti-British mobs in the street. The Boston Massacre if you will permit me, bears at least some resemblance to “stone thowing” in the Israeli context, allowing for snowballs packed with stones. Breaking and entering and destruction of property - the Tea Party, for example - which didn’t just take place in Boston, were other examples the Speaker passed over in getting to the mob on the lawn at Columbia, which comparatively speaking to these colonial events, was pretty well behaved, the right of encampment being still disputed; and I invite readers to weigh the sincere words of David French on Sunday morning in the NY Times, which I am still weighing: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/28/opinion/protests-college-free-speech.html
I don’t recall any encampments on the Lafayette College Quad (that’s in Easton, PA, up on a hill, the proverbial College Hill, overlooking the fate of one of the oldest Northeast industrial cities on a downward spiral…with Easton being founded on the confluence of the Lehigh and Delaware Rivers) the “Quad” being the physical center of speeches, protests, frisbee contests and sunbathing along with the anti-war energy. Our strike leaders were serious academic types, not Robespierre’s, who produced newsletters, postion papers and directed our energies to the primaries in Pennsylvania, and if I remember correctly, that was my first major political campaign (before McGovern in 1972), on behalf of Jeanette Reibman…I don’t remember if that was for a state or House of Rep. seat, but anyway, she was clear in her stance, but lost. And there was intellectual and other forms of intercourse between students at the other Lehigh Valley Campuses and maybe even a broader co-ordinating committee. And I do remember marching, on the first day, down the many steps from the College Hill to the Easton Town Square where we were quite a surprise to the good citizens of sleepy Easton; no violence and no trouble in any of this. This was a bit of a reversal to one of my favorite Hawthorne short stories, required reading in several of my English courses, “My Kinsman Major Molineux,” (where it is the townspeople teaching a rural youth, young Robin, a few lessons about political life). I do remember with embarrassment, the speech by a faculty member who “lost it” emotionally by calling for, hoping for a Vietcong strike, as improbably as it was in reality, against one of our aircraft carriers which supplied some of the planes bombing North Vietnam and causing so many civilian casualties. I recall pain and regret among the students, not wild cheering in hearing this departure from the general tone of the speakers - and the mood of the anti-war protestors. Regrettably, our passions, if we still have them, can get the better of our civic roles in a Republic, including those of being teachers of the young. Also from my Lafayette days, the courses which centered the “Springtime of Nations,” the liberal revolts in 1848 all of which failed in their democratic aspirations, and led to vicious conservative pogroms against anyone who dared challenge the autocracies of the day. Classical liberalism, ever since the French Revolution of 189, has had strong reservations about political passion; Joe Biden is not one of those who has had trouble along these lines.
These recollections bring back an important dynamic of the vast anti-war protests of that era, the 1965-1972 days. There was a tension in the movement between two very different views, relevant right through to today’s protests, and that was between those who openly called for a Vietcong victory, downplaying their political practices as well as those of the North Vietnamese government, and those who felt no admiration for the these practices or for that matter, the tactics of the guerillas, but rather felt the US was embarked on a losing cause and itself using tactics causing massive civilian casualties in both the North and South of Vietnam - and then in the spring of 1970, and not uncovered until much later, mass and secret bombing in adjacent countries. My own views were stated in an answer to a question from my ROTC instructor, Major Joseph MacNeil (who was on “R & R” from Westmoreland’s Intelligence Staff, teaching at a quiet Eastern elite campus) who asked the class: what the American Strategy was in our War for Independence: my reply was “to play for time, Washington never risking the entire army in one grand battle to win a particular campaign, retreating where necessary, even losing New York and Philadelphia to the British, to live to fight another day…and until the French could be persuaded to do more than send some gunpowder and muskets…until the French actually sent their own troops…and crucially, and their Navy.” It was something to keep in mind for our own era, we students of the 1960’s, because it shed a lot of light on the tactics of so many revolutionary efforts from China to Cuba, and tactics in the wars of colonial libeeration, as in Vietnam, Algeria, Africa…and Palestine going back well before the founding of the state of Israel in May of 1948. In summary, in brief: do not expect the tactics of the underdogs and the less technologically sophisticated to duplicate those of their colonial masters…it’s a brutal street fight, not a pay-for-view heavyweight boxing match with referees.
It helped, in shaping my views, to consider the advice of the democratic socialists and social democrats, especially from New York, who were old even then mostly, in the 1960’s, but had fought as young men against the communists in the labor movement and the radicals jockeying for allegiances in the coffee houses and bars of Greenwich Village. I’m thinking of the late Michael Harrington, who argued with the young SDers like Tom Hayden, warning them to make it clear they were opposing a brutal war and the way the US was waging it - not endorsing or allying with the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese practices in politics and indoctrination.
Unfortunately, the US was following the losing French model not only in IndoChina, but in Algeria, where France committed over 400,000 troops, aided by more than 100,000 Algerian recruits, came up with "a hearts and minds strategy” - village hamlet protection schemes - fortified villages - and essentially supplied all the major concepts the US would try in Vietnam.
To bring these tensions and stances right home today to what Speaker Johnson said in his speech, the anti-war movement in the US in the 1960’s was accused of “aiding and abetting” the Vietcong and the Communists writ large at the height of the Cold War by our demonstrations, to mirror exactly the trotted out fact that Hamas had just declared support for the US campus demonstrations at the time of the Speakers address. That line of tactics is, of course unavoidable in this type of intense political wrestling, no surprise to me, and nearly exact echoes familar “from the days of my youth.”
Here’s some advice to the young protestors, and I hope the staunch Israeli backers and the AIPAC powers listen as well. I wrote as some length in an earlier essay, published here on Jan. 21, 2024, entitled “World on Fire, Part III,” about the hotly contested topic of the mob in history, especially since its prominent role in the French Revolution. That includes the mobs’ at times seemingly irrational violence, which in the French Revolution included mass slaughter of opponents, suspected Royalists, but others like priests and nuns, some hacked to pieces with axes, sexual assault and the parading of genitals “liberated” from their bodies….This is the reality beyond the days of the Guillotine and Terror, and the disputes as to how many tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands died in the Vendee, in Lyons, and other sites of outright civil war…
I wrote about the debate over what causes this level of violence, between rational and irrational, and whether any forces of history, of oppression justified such behavior. The debate has never gone away, and if you want a preview of the violence since 1948 in the Middle East, if not before, I again urge a reading of Martin Evans book “Algeria: France’s Undeclared War, 1954-1962) which came out in 2012 and which is a pessimistic preview not only of US futility in Vietnam, but perhaps of the chance of any humane political forces emerging to eclipse Hamas and Hezbollah and give the people of Gaza/Palestine a chance for a peaceful homeland. And Israel as well.
Caution therefore to those horrified by the level and scope of Israeli destruction in Gaza, today since October 7, but also in Lebanon in 1982 (17,000 dead, 30,000 wounded); in Gaza in 2008: 1400 dead and 5,000 wounded; in Gaza again in 2014, part of the regular “mowing of the lawn” - 2000 killed and 10,000 wounded.
It makes the peace forces hoping for a ceasefire, the return of the captives and some movement towards a two-state solution despair, to see no alternative to Hamas or Hezbollah has emerged, not even a hint of opposition in Gaza, much less a slate to oppose them in an election. And then there is their stance against Israel, calling for its destruction, which only helps drive Israel to the Right, as if the Religious parties now ascendant over the secular left of the “old days” needed much help in that drift.
(Below, when I list some alternative sources, readers can get a glimpse of Professor Norman Finklestein, a Palestinian/Gaza “expert,” assert without a lot of details, in a 31 minute interview, that after it won the 2006 election in Gaza, it did have a period when it was changing its views on the right of Israel to exist and other related matters, but the Israeli gov’t was not interested in those signals and then the Professor jumps to the Israeli attack on the peaceful 2018 March of Return up against the fences ringing Gaze on the Eastern side, and the caculated shooting of civilians by the IDF.) As a matter of convenience, I’ll supply this link now: It took place in early April of this year.
I don’t see how a better alternative emerges inside Gaza or Lebanon itself; it may have to come from Gazians and Palestinian in exile yet who have maintained some ties, some organic connections to supporters on the ground zero of the destruction. Moderate Arab states - that’s the hope isn’t it with the now shaky Abraham Accords, they’re supplying the hope to colunist’s like Thomas Friedman, but we just don’t know if the “Arab street” in the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, Jordan…and yes in the Gulf State powers themselves, are going to buy into this. Here’s the outline of the hopes of US diplomacy: a Thomas Friedman column from the 26th of April, so a very current one: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/26/opinion/israel-war-rafah-riyadh.html…
The title - “Israel has a choice to make: Rafah or Riyadh” - suggests Israel can plunge further into tactics which are alienating the entire world (except the Republican Party and the Religious Right in the US, and those who have bought AIPAC’s no dissent support) by destroying Rafah in pursuit of “eliminating” what’s left of Hamas, or pursue variations of the Abraham Accord with some of the Gulf powers, where the weakest thread might be the crucial one: whether anyone in the wealthy Gulf or Israel itself, is serious about a two state solution. And here I’m sparing readers on all the more complex angles brought to bear by Iran and its alliances around the Middle East, not the least the Sunni-Shia split, and the power of the more fundamentalist forces of the old Muslim Brotherhood, updated. (For a quick refresher course try Bernard Lewis’s mini-classic, “The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror” (2003).
One of the key perspectives I took away from Evan’s book on the war in Algeria (1954-1962)is that there was point where France, under DeGaulle, seemed to have the FLN on the ropes militarily, with DeGaulle deploying all the tactics I mentioned above, and offering a three-choice referendum to the people of France and Algeria for a grand vote. But the military success was eclipsed - the key point - by the dynamics in the broader world, in the US, in the UN, and in France and England - against the old colonialism. And Israel is approaching a similar watershed: it’s the undisputed military super-power of the Middle East, but always in danger of a revolt by the repressed forces that their own military and “govenance” tactics have birthed: no alternatives ready to embrace a two state solution (a one state ethnically mixed one with equal rights for all - is impossible as I see it - summarized by the chant “From the River (Jordan) to the Sea (the Mediterranean); Israeli tactics (hiding equally abhorrent goals) having birthed only new miltants bent on revenge for the 34,000 killed and 100,000 plus wounded, thousands never found, hospitals/medical facilities, housing, schools, libraries, mosques all destroyed along with journalists and international aid workers, making me go back an read the excuses for the attack on the USS Liberty spy ship in the 1967 war. I’ll spare you those brutal details and their excuses, which were summoned up for me with the official apologies for the killing of the seven “World Central Kitchen” workers on April 1st, which added far more new fuel to the fires already burning in world protests.
Levelling out the Debate and the Propaganda
I thought the best thing I could do to bring alternative perspectives to bear, to level out the playing field which in Maryland and beyond, is so heavily tilted towards the AIPAC bonding with Israel with both parties (check with Donna Edwards over her losing race against Senator Van Hollen on that score) is to provide links to what I think are alternative views, soberly presented. They’re not one- to- one with my own views, which are evolving, but worth hearing from people who are far more Middle East scholars than I am…
Let me preface these views with a politcal statement of what I think is fact: the US is never going to let Israel be “overrun,” and right now, no Middle East force, governmental or “street based” is capable of doing that, as Iran’s failed 300 “aerial vehicle” attack in April, a retaliatory effort for Israel’s blasting a diplomatic compound in Syria, shows. But Israel can push itself to the brink of deeper long term trouble, political isolation, and drag the US along with it, by continuing the barbarism it has displayed in its revenge on Hamas, taken out on all of Gaza and Palestianians, shocking the world with its WWII analogies to allied mass bombing of civilians….At minimum, Israel is supplying all the historical and ideological fuel needed by generations of future terrorists and Palestinian “liberators,” whom I hope do a better job of liberation and material achievement for their people than their ideological predessors brought to the fate of Algeria, and other African nations, which are free of France but still barely in the modern world.
Let’s start with the broadest overview of the efforts of Israel and AIPAC to control the debate, aided by the work of Frank Luntz, the Republican media guru, way back when…I hope you find this 45 minute “brief” version of “The Occupation of the American Mind” (2016) as riveting as I did. And now for a little historical brief to go along with it. How did I entirely miss the controversy set off in 2019 when the city of Takoma Park proposed airing it in a public forum, and did so, despite the protests of state Senator Ben Kramer, major political player Peter Franchot, and 8 of 10 Montgomery County Council members, the Council composition being a good bell weather of Maryland Democratic politics, if not of Republican.
Next is a talk and Q & A which Chris Hedges organized at Princeton University before the current tents were going up, featuring Professor Norman Finkelstein, who is a very interesting and controversial figure. He speaks very slowly, the better, he says, to chose his words carefully, which is understandable since he wades into the deepest and most turbulent ideological waters covering Israel and the Palestinians. He is regarded as an expert on Gaza and the Palestinian struggle, has been denied tenure at several universities, and is known as a tenacious debater, frequently throwing quotes for his debate adversaries own books back at them, and “famous” for his court room tussles and debating matches with legal scholar Alan Dershowitz, who is himself quite ready for intellectual battle.
And now once again, Professor Finkelstein in a very interesting interview with Marc Lamont Hill at Al Jazeera network on YouTube, with the prominent note that Al Jazeera, is funded “in whole or part by the Qatari government.” Israel is in the process of banning foreign news broadcasts, but it is not clear if it will take action against Al Jazeera specifically, and there have been substantial international protests about that happening. Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to do just that right after the law passed, says a CNN segment dated April 2.
My take on this video is that the reporter doing the interview here is tough on Finkelstein, with hard questions and only a grudging acknowledgement of Finkelstein’s major points, not necessarily agreeing with them. Far tougher than the Maryland/DC journaist panel featured on the Trone-Alsobrooks debate I’ve written about.
Update, April 29th: here is a pretty detailed bio and career disputes on Marc Lamont Hill, who as they might say on the street, “has been around the block.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Lamont_Hill
Now here’s the tough moral question that Finkelstein raises in this interview, and in others I’ve seen: his evolving stance on the tactics of Hamas in their October 7th sortie into Israel. In the Princeton interview with Hedges, he hesitates condemning them morally, although he clearly recoils at their brutality (much in the way Yanis Varoufakis’ comments have done - YV refused to condemn them and he has since been banned from German airwaves, a remarkable development, foreshadowing the fate of the American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison after his writings on the Nat Turner revolt in 1831.)
How does Finkelstein remove himself morally from an outright condemnation of Hamas and their actions on the 7th of October? In this interview on Al Jeezera, he veers into very familiar American territory, our racial history, and into terrain I’m quite familar with. He starts with that 1831 slave revolt in Virginia led by Nat Turner, a religious zealot who instructed his followers to kill all the whites they came across in their nightime raid on plantations. The murders were brutal with hand held axes and other primitive weapons, and included young children. When finally caught, the white reaction killed him and his followers, and many other blacks who randomly ran across the mood of vicious reaction. It led to tough slave codes, limitations on travel and so forth. It was a failure that did not lead to a widespread slave revolt.
The Professor says that the great American Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, did not condemn the uprising, but rather the oppressive evils which fueled it. That’s close to the reality, but I’ll let you judge for yourself by visiting with the late author Henry Mayer’s (1941-2000) whose magesterial biography of Garrison, “All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery,” (1998) I consider one of the greatest American biographies, and a personal inspiration to me, having visited Garrison’s birthplace in 1805 in Newburyport, MA while on a vacation in New England in 2001.
Garrison had just brought out his newsletter, The Liberator on Jan. 1, 1831, when the firestorm of the Turner’s summer slave revolt broke, so he was just getting started in his publishing career, and that publication would itself become as famous as it editor, running all the way until Dec. of 1865, perhaps the longest running journal of its type in American history.
Let’s see what Mayer says about Garrison’s reaction - to measure how close Finklestein comes to the facts:
“As a pacifist who sought ‘to accomplish the great work of national redemption through the agency of moral power,’ Garrison would not condone the calamitous massacre, but neither would he ignore its underlying causes. ‘In his fury against the revolters,’ the editor asked, ‘who will remember their wrongs?’…Garrison had moral reservations about the violent legacy most Americans accepted. ‘I deny the right of any people to fight for liberty, and so far am a Quaker in principle,’ Garrison told a friend privately. ‘I do not justify the slaves in their rebellion; yet I do not condemn them, and applaud similar conduct in white men.’ Few editorial writers beyond his immediate circle endorsed Garrison’s view of the insurrection as an apocalyptic warning or shared his willingness to sympathize with the oppressed despite their turn to measures he deplored…most commenttors took the violent affair as a sign of a residual black barbarism that made emancipation a practical impossibility.” (All on Fire, pps 120-121.)
Well then, close enough Professor. Finkelstein goes on to raise the issue of John Brown’s raid, the work of another religious fanatic, in 1859, and Garrison kept his distance from Brown, even before the Harpers Ferry Raid, remembering his direct participation in slaughtering slave advocates in Bloody Kansas, in a brutal act of revenge. And yet the Civil War itself would carry national policy into all the terrible instruments of warfare at mid-century, so that the great Abolitionist had to watch and struggle to see his ends, the abolition of slavery, accomplished by means which he deplored. Such is the cruelty of history to even the most ethical of its makers - and commentators.
But there was more fallout to Garrison’s brave stance over Nat Turner’s violent rebellion, and it is very instructive for our matters at hand today. All the mainstream politicians, North and South, called for Garrison’s head, there were plots to kidnap him, prevent him from publishing, confiscate his papers and arrest anyone carrying them to the South. And their was worse even. Mayer writes that
From Alexandria, Virginia, Nelly Custis Lewis, granddaughter of Martha Washington, told Otis (the Mayor of Boston, who others approached about silencing Garrison) that Garrison merited the death penalty for making ‘innocent’ Southerners feel as if they were sitting on a ‘smothered volcano.’ (Ibid, p. 123.)
I trust readers can translate Garrison’s views on a very controversial issue into present day calls in Congress for investigations, suppression of various “incendiary” forms of speech, which may or may not be anti-Semetic (your know how broad that charge has become) and Israel’s own attempt to muzzle journalist to prevent direct independent reporting, unsupervised by the IDF, in Gaza, the many journalists who never left and have been killed there, and the already mentioned attempt to suppress Al Jeezera in Israel. It will get worse, probably much worse, before this mood gets better.
Let me offer a rather different historical view of the whole matter of the founding of the State of Israel, and the colonial period which preceded it, starting with the Balfour Declaration from Britain in 1917. This will be sure to upset Senator Schumer’s historical accounting in his moving Senate speech calling on Prime Minister Netanyahu to resign, which we have written about, especially the Senator’s discomfort with critics description of Israeli dynamics towards the Palestinians as typical of “settler, colonial” patterns. Well, here is another Professor, Rashid Khalidi, a Middle East specialist who teaches at, of all places, Columbia University in New York.
I apologize for his interviewer’s shortcomings, which are obvious, and Khalidi’s rolling with them speaks to his good restraint and tolerance. Nonetheless, the chronological periods the professor uses to illuminate the history, and his whole framework of British and then American imperial tendencies coloring the whole process, speaks of my theme in this essay to present what the AIPAC devotees never will to the American public: a learned, careful dissenting viewpoint of the whole history of the Mandate and Protectorate from the late British Empire and the founding of Israel in May of 1948. With American and Russian support. And memorable from what I’ve so far watched is that the Balfour Declaration didn’t even consider the native inhabitants to have rights equal to those being bestowed upon Jewish Zionists emigrating from Europe…no national state for the Palestinians, which is one of the cries, for just such a state welling up around the world from the protestors. Here’s the interview, 1hour and 13 minutes, two weeks ago.
My final offering to deepen and broaden the public debate is a link to Chris Hedges Substack posting from March 30, this year, entitled “A Genocide Foretold.” I hope Mr. Hedges does not mind me quoting his first three paragraphs. I may have softer, less harsh judgements, but events have moved me closer, to not further from his views on what Israel is really up to. It echoes Professor Finkelsteins range of Israel’s choices and politics from the previous presentation.
Let me say this about Chris Hedges writing: he is as disturbing to the American establishment today as William Lloyd Garrison was to the one of the Ante-bellum days, 1831-1861. Unlike a certain President we know, his words ring with the certainty and power of an Abolitionist blacksmith. At times they’re too unqualified for me, but still, I can’t pay any writer or thinker in the matters of the Middle East a higher compliment than a comparison to WLG; no one has stuck their necks out earlier and been proven much more right than wrong than Hedges. I’ll leave it at that: here they are, including the subheading beneath the title, and the link to the full posting:
“The genocide in Gaza is the final stage of a process begun by Israel decades ago. Anyone who did not see this coming blinded themselves to the character and ultimate goals of the apartheid state.
There are no surprises in Gaza. Every horrifying act of Israel’s genocide has been telegraphed in advance. It has been for decades. The dispossession of Palestinians of their land is the beating heart of Israel’s settler colonial project. This dispossession has had dramatic historical moments — 1948 and 1967 — when huge parts of historic Palestine were seized and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were ethnically cleansed. Dispossession has also occurred in increments — the slow-motion theft of land and steady ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
The incursion on Oct. 7 into Israel by Hamas and other resistance groups, which left 1,154 Israelis, tourists and migrant workers dead and saw about 240 people taken hostage, gave Israel the pretext for what it has long craved — the total erasure of Palestinians.
Israel has razed 77 percent of healthcare facilities in Gaza, 68 percent of telecommunication infrastructure, nearly all municipal and governmental buildings, commercial, industrial and agricultural centers, almost half of all roads, over 60 percent of Gaza’s 439,000 homes, 68 percent of residential buildings — the bombing of the Al-Taj tower in Gaza City on Oct. 25, killed 101 people, including 44 children and 37 women, and injured hundreds — and obliterated refugee camps. The attack on the Jabalia refugee camp on Oct. 25 killed at least 126 civilians, including 69 children, and injured 280. Israel has damaged or destroyed Gaza’s universities, all of which are now closed, and 60 percent of other educational facilities, including 13 libraries. It has also destroyed at least 195 heritage sites, including 208 mosques, churches, and Gaza’s Central Archives that held 150 years of historical records and documents.”
Enough for now, this essay, posting has grown far longer than I intended. I hope it begins to change minds, broaden the debate, and eventually help bring a cease fire, the hostages back to their homes and families, and some first steps to putting a statehood for Palestinian back on the radar screens of those who wanted them to disappear in those “Abraham Accords.”
Best to all my readers,
William R. Neil
Frostburg, MD
Bill - Don't rely on Mayer's interpretation of Garrison - read the original essay in The Liberator. Mayer has it wrong, Finkelstein has it right.
On all the Israeli Hasbara (lies), read Max Blumenthal, Aaron Mate and reporters at The Grayzone - they debunked the babies and rape atrocity propaganda months ago.
Professors Jeffrey Sachs and Mearsheimer need to be added to your readings in Ukraine.
The current war didn't start in 2014 with the US funded, organized, and instigated coup that removed the Russian leaning elected government (all legitimate Ukrainian democratic elements of the Maidan having been hijacked by NeoNazi groups). It began in Bucharest in 2008, with the pledge to incorporate Ukraine in NATO:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine–NATO_relations#:~:text=Bucharest%20summit%3A%202008–2009,-Main%20article%3A%202008&text=At%20the%20NATO%20summit%20in,Ukraine%20would%20eventually%20become%20members.
You could say it began long before then, when the Clinton Administration made the commitment to expand NATO eastward, including Ukraine.
Bill - amazing coincidence: yesterday I watched the excellent PBS documentary on Kent State:
"The Day The Sixties Died"
https://whyy.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/35840006-71b6-4d45-a728-e7d6a924453b/the-day-the-60s-died/