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| Volume XIII, Summer 2006, Number 2 |
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| Editor's Note |
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People demand freedom of speech in compensation for the freedom of thought they never use, said Danish philosopher Soren Kirkegaard. Irony aside, being able to say what we please is basic to the American way of life and form of government. We think our press is also free, rather than being a mouthpiece for a ruling elite. However, the mainstream media (MSM) set the parameters of respectable debate, as Noam Chomsky has put it. And, on matters of war, peace and the Middle East, those parameters are rather strict. But there has been some good news this quarter: speech in America is moving in the direction of greater freedom. Those of us who are not part of the MSM were delighted to see evidence of this April 29 on C-SPAN. The hired help at the White House Correspondents' Dinner (Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central's brazen satirist) stunned the audience by sending up the sycophantic TV bloviators who regularly flatter President Bush and his administration. (Those who missed it can watch the video and read the ecstatic e-mail responses at www.salon.com.)
Colbert touched a nerve and made many of those in the room squirm for having abdicated the responsibility to speak truth to power. The habit has fallen into disuse. Bob Woodward of The Washington Post, whom many now criticize for having become the administration's court stenographer, used to practice it a generation ago, when his bosses, Katharine Graham and Ben Bradlee, made the paper's reputation during the Watergate scandal. Analysts on the left like Chomsky and Edward Herman have explained the media-government complex in their book Manufacturing Consent (also a documentary film): the role of the press is to explain government policy to the public. Their predictions have been borne out during the last five years, as the major U.S. newspapers made it seem not only justified, but honorable, to attack and occupy Iraq. They are in the process of repeating this service in the case of Iran, although even the influential Tom Friedman of The New York Times, an early supporter of the Iraq War, has asserted that he would prefer a nuclear-armed Tehran to another similar debacle. In other words, tactical errors were the problem - not the strategy of Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld and their neocon courtiers to remake the Middle East, or at least unmake it. For Iran, more troops will be necessary: lesson learned (see our symposium on the perils of exiting Iraq and the articles by Jahangir Amuzegar and Gawdat Bahgat on Iran's potential and Israel's actual nuclear weapons).
Another taboo-shattering bombshell was lobbed over the high walls of the elite fortress recently by two professors at the top of their discipline: John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard. Conservative adherents of the "realist" school of international relations, they had been commissioned by The Atlantic Monthly to write an article on "The Israel Lobby." They took on this assignment knowing it would render them untouchable: no future administration of either party would dare offer them high positions in government. But the magazine got cold feet when they read the article, so the authors sent it to the London Review of Books, which published an abridged version (the entire paper in on the web site of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government). The (Jewish) editor of the LRB saw nothing exceptionable in the work; it fell within the parameters of respectable debate in the UK. Only in America is the subject off limits. The U.S. speech police immediately reacted in order to preempt debate when the American subscribers began receiving their copies. The Washington Post ran an unsigned article in the Sunday Outlook section (March 26) under the headline "Of Israel, Harvard and David Duke," apparently trying to make it seem that only racists would think the fearsome lobby for Israel's hard-liners has undue influence on American politicians. Defenders of the Lobby (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee [AIPAC] being the most prominent) let it be known when the article first started attracting attention on the Internet that they would wait to counter-attack until it was picked up by the MSM. For the newspapers of record, it is radioactive. But even they have not been able to ignore it.
Once a taboo has been broken, it is hard to restore the fear that kept people from breaking it. Others become empowered and speak out, shocking their friends and colleagues. Those who thought the general public agreed with them, because so few dared to speak out, know a bit more of the truth now. Tony Judt of New York University made this point about fear on the op-ed page of The New York Times (April 19) just after "The Israel Lobby" was published. There is no conspiracy on the part of supporters of Israel to control the U.S. government. Such an over-simplification is as misleading as a lie. But those who oppose the policies of the Israeli government become targets of abuse. Chomsky himself admits that Bnai Brith has dogged him for decades, monitoring his words and keeping a very thick file of quotes, arming student protesters with "data" they can wave around when he speaks on American campuses. He has been labeled a self-hating Jew, inviting another Holocaust by criticizing Israel (see my interview with Chomsky in this journal, issue 10, fall 1984).
The problem of ethnic lobbies was pointed out by a major political figure back in 1981, when Senator Charles Mathias, a three-term Republican from Maryland, wrote an article on the subject in the summer issue of Foreign Affairs. Having decided not to run for a fourth term, he could take a chance. He discussed several lobbies for foreign countries - the Irish, the Greeks and the Armenians - though the Israel lobby stood far above the others (see Lawrence Davidson on the subject, page XXX). Ian Lustick of the University of Pennsylvania has also studied the subject in depth. He made the point at a Middle East Policy Council forum back in 1998 that these lobbies, unlike those dealing with domestic interests, have no opposition keeping them honest. The field is controlled by only one side and is dominated by extremists. Most American Jews are not supporters of the right wing in Israel or its lobby in the United States, just as most Americans with roots in Ireland do not support the Irish Republican Army. But most of them are willing to remain silent and not get in way of those who dominate the game. These activists play to win and are willing to destroy the careers of politicians who will not play along. Congressman Paul Findley, Republican of Illinois, wrote a seminal work on the subject in 1985: They Dare to Speak Out (still in print and available from www.amazon.com).
Lobbies are only effective if they are in sync with the larger interests of the state, of course. President Eisenhower did not treat Israel as a special ally during the Suez crisis of 1956; the U.S. interest at the time involved undercutting the colonial power of Britain and France. That was long before June 1967, when Israel's Cold War military potential came to the attention of the Johnson administration. Now that the Soviet threat is gone, however, Israel may be seen as more of a burden than an asset - unless ideology comes into play. Perhaps that is the reason Israel's neo-con supporters want to "change" the Middle East now. They know geopolitics trumps special relationships in the long run. President Bush has indicated that in order to protect Israel the United States might have to go to war against Iran. Eventually, however, realism begins to seem the only sustainable path, ideological and arbitrary alternatives having been found impossible to sustain. The "white man's burden" became too heavy for even the richest and most committed European power to carry, and those lifted up inevitably resented being controlled. Another significant factor is coming into play: Israel's moral claims are aging off. As Tony Judt noted in Haaretz, "Soon, when an Israeli soldier kills a Palestinian child in the West Bank, it will not matter to anyone that his great-grandmother died at Treblinka." Realism is a hard taskmaster.
Anne Joyce
May 10, 2006
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