How #Snowden Outfoxed Everyone

From Robin Abcarian, at the Los Angeles Times, "How Edward Snowden managed to outfox everyone":

I hate to say this. Well, maybe I don’t.

It appears that Edward Snowden, the 30-year-old computer analyst hiding in broad daylight, has managed not only to throw a wrench into U.S. foreign policy, but to outfox the very national security apparatus whose overreach he warned against.

It’s pretty astonishing that our government can figure out a way to vacuum up our every phone call, email and text message, but can’t get its hands on Snowden, who left Hong Kong for Russia on Sunday, and may be there still, as he figures out how to make his way to what he has (inexplicably) described as a democratic nation for asylum.

Republican South Carolina Sen. Lindsay Graham put his finger on it when he told Fox News on Sunday that “The freedom trail is not exactly China-Russia-Cuba-Venezuela.” (I guess somewhere along the line, Iceland dropped off Snowden’s list.)

   In New Delhi during a three-day visit to India, Secretary of State John Kerry sarcastically called Russia and China “bastions of Internet freedom” and admonished governments that have helped or may help Snowden remain out of the grasp of American authorities.

“There would be, without any question, some effect and impact on the relationship, and consequences,” Kerry said, according to my colleague Henry Chu.  “I’d urge them to live within the law. It’s in the interest of everyone.”

Still, one has to wonder why it took the government until Sunday to revoke Snowden’s passport, as the AP reported . It may not have mattered in the long run, but why wait two weeks to take that step?

When Snowden left Hong Kong, according to a detailed New York Times story posted Monday http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/25/world/asia/snowden-departure-from-hong-kong.html?pagewanted=1&hp, he was allowed to pass through normal airport checkpoints, despite his annulled passport.

 The story also said that Snowden decided to leave Hong Kong after attorneys there advised him that he might not be able to remain free on bail while fighting extradition to the U.S. If he were incarcerated during that time, they said, he would probably not have his computer. Giving up his computer, the attorney said  would be “totally intolerable.” (Forget waterboarding. Confiscate a 30-year-old’s computer and watch him beg for mercy.)

One also wonders why the feds revealed Friday that Snowden had been indicted on three felonies, including two charges under the 1917 Espionage Act, which made it likely, in the view of some foreign policy experts, that countries antagonistic to the United States (i.e. Cuba and Venezuela) would not be inclined to respect the State Department’s notice advising governments that Snowden should not be allowed transit to or through their countries.

In any case, as this amazing story continues, in slow motion, like a global version of the famous white Bronco chase, the Obama administration has itself to blame for this mess.

Continue reading.

PREVIOUSLY: "Edward Snowden's Mysterious Flight to Cuba."

IMAGE CREDIT: Michelle Fields.

The West's Capitulation in Afghanistan

An analysis by Christoph Sydow, at Der Spiegel, "U.S.-Taliban Talks in Doha":

After 12 years of war and thousands of deaths on both sides, the US and the Taliban are finally ready to talk peace. While the West hopes to smooth its withdrawal, human rights organizations forecast the return of dark times for women and minorities.

In April 2007, Kurt Beck, then the head of Germany's Social Democratic Party (SPD), suggested that there should be a peace conference for Afghanistan that would include all of the relevant groups, including the Taliban. The idea earned him nothing but scorn. Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives vented their ire, and Rangin Spanta, Afghanistan's foreign minister at the time, went so far as to brand Beck clueless.

But now, six years later, Beck's idea is actually being implemented. On Tuesday, the Taliban held an opening celebration for its new office in Doha, the capital of Qatar. The Islamists want to host peace negotiations there with the Afghan government and the White House. Afghan President Hamid Karzai remains coy on the issue, but talks between the Taliban and the US government are supposed to kick off within the next few days.

The parties to the conflict have already been holding secret talks for some years, and representatives have also met in Germany on several occasions. But now, for the first time since the beginning of international military intervention in the Hindu Kush in 2001, the Taliban will take an official seat at the negotiation table. The extremists had refused to participate in any of the previous Afghanistan conferences, which have been held at irregular intervals.

Can There Be a 'Moderate Taliban'?

But now things have changed. The United States and its allies are planning a semi-orderly withdraw of combat troops from the troubled country. At the same time that the Taliban opened its office in Doha, Karzai announced that the Afghan army had officially taken over responsibility for security in the entire country from the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the NATO-led security mission in Afghanistan. By the end of 2014, almost 100,000 foreign soldiers are supposed to have pulled out of Afghanistan, leaving only military trainers behind.

NATO countries hope that they can at least leave behind a country that isn't steeped in chaos. In 2001, the West set lofty goals for Afghanistan, including implementing democracy, safeguarding human rights and fostering responsible governance. But the states contributing forces to ISAF gave up on achieving such goals long ago. The United States has signalled that the Taliban will be allowed to do what it wants as long as it refrains from allowing international terrorists to seek refuge in the areas it controls.

The oft-expressed distinction between "moderate" and "radical" Taliban elements straddles precisely this border. On the one side, there are the Taliban members who want to usher in a global Islamic empire with the help of al-Qaida. On the other are those who would be satisfied with ruling in Kabul.

What unites both groups is their disregard for the rights of women and minorities. Human Rights Watch is already painting a grim picture of the future of women's rights in the country, and Amnesty International is complaining about extensive violations of human rights. In its annual report, the latter said that women and girls are already being subjected to particular and repeated violence.

No, there's no "moderate" Taliban. Things are going to turn out badly.

Continue reading.

PREVIOUSLY: "Afghanistan: Obama Surrenders."

PRISM and Boundless Informant

At Atlas Shrugs:

Former Department of Justice senior lawyer J. Christian Adams says: "Prism more catastrophic than #Benghazi #AP #IRS #FastandFurious #Blackpanthers combined. Not supposed to happen in USA." "Nothing federal government has EVER done is more destructive of 4th amendment constitutional liberty than was #Prism." This is incendiary.

And more from Glenn Greenwald (who else?), at the Guardian UK, "Boundless Informant: the NSA's secret tool to track global surveillance data" (via Memeorandum):

The National Security Agency has developed a powerful tool for recording and analysing where its intelligence comes from, raising questions about its repeated assurances to Congress that it cannot keep track of all the surveillance it performs on American communications.

The Guardian has acquired top-secret documents about the NSA datamining tool, called Boundless Informant, that details and even maps by country the voluminous amount of information it collects from computer and telephone networks.

The focus of the internal NSA tool is on counting and categorizing the records of communications, known as metadata, rather than the content of an email or instant message.

The Boundless Informant documents show the agency collecting almost 3 billion pieces of intelligence from US computer networks over a 30-day period ending in March 2013. One document says it is designed to give NSA officials answers to questions like, "What type of coverage do we have on country X" in "near real-time by asking the SIGINT [signals intelligence] infrastructure."

An NSA factsheet about the program, acquired by the Guardian, says: "The tool allows users to select a country on a map and view the metadata volume and select details about the collections against that country."

Under the heading "Sample use cases", the factsheet also states the tool shows information including: "How many records (and what type) are collected against a particular country."

A snapshot of the Boundless Informant data, contained in a top secret NSA "global heat map" seen by the Guardian, shows that in March 2013 the agency collected 97bn pieces of intelligence from computer networks worldwide.


Iran was the country where the largest amount of intelligence was gathered, with more than 14bn reports in that period, followed by 13.5bn from Pakistan. Jordan, one of America's closest Arab allies, came third with 12.7bn, Egypt fourth with 7.6bn and India fifth with 6.3bn.

The heatmap gives each nation a color code based on how extensively it is subjected to NSA surveillance. The color scheme ranges from green (least subjected to surveillance) through yellow and orange to red (most surveillance).

The disclosure of the internal Boundless Informant system comes amid a struggle between the NSA and its overseers in the Senate over whether it can track the intelligence it collects on American communications. The NSA's position is that it is not technologically feasible to do so.

At a hearing of the Senate intelligence committee In March this year, Democratic senator Ron Wyden asked James Clapper, the director of national intelligence: "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?"

"No sir," replied Clapper.

Judith Emmel, an NSA spokeswoman, told the Guardian in a response to the latest disclosures: "NSA has consistently reported – including to Congress – that we do not have the ability to determine with certainty the identity or location of all communicants within a given communication. That remains the case."

Plus, from Ed Morrissey, "Guardian: PRISM “collection directly from the servers”." (At Memeorandum).

Africa's Economic Boom

An excellent piece, from Shantayanan Devarajan and Wolfgang Fengler, at Foreign Affairs, "Why the Pessimists and the Optimists Are Both Right":

Talk to experts, academics, or businesspeople about the economies of sub-Saharan Africa and you are likely to hear one of two narratives. The first is optimistic: Africa’s moment is just around the corner, or has already arrived. Reasons for hope abound. Despite the global economic crisis, the region’s GDP has grown rapidly, averaging almost five percent a year since 2000, and is expected to rise even faster in the years ahead. Many countries, not just the resource-rich ones, have participated in the boom: indeed, 20 states in sub-Saharan Africa that do not produce oil managed average GDP growth rates of four percent or higher between 1998 and 2008. Meanwhile, the region has begun attracting serious amounts of private capital; at $50 billion a year, such flows now exceed foreign aid.

At the same time, poverty is declining. Since 1996, the average poverty rate in sub-Saharan African countries has fallen by about one percentage point a year, and between 2005 and 2008, the portion of Africans in the region living on less than $1.25 a day fell for the first time, from 52 percent to 48 percent. If the region’s stable countries continue growing at the average rates they have enjoyed for the last decade, most of them will reach a per capita gross national income of $1,000 by 2025, which the World Bank classifies as “middle income.” The region has also made great strides in education and health care. Between 2000 and 2008, secondary school enrollment increased by nearly 50 percent, and over the past decade, life expectancy has increased by about ten percent.

The second narrative is more pessimistic. It casts doubt on the durability of Africa’s growth and notes the depressing persistence of its economic troubles. Like the first view, this one is also justified by compelling evidence. For one thing, Africa’s recent growth has largely followed rising commodity prices, and commodities make up the overwhelming share of its exports -- never a stable prospect. Indeed, the pessimists argue that Africa is simply riding a commodities wave that is bound to crest and fall and that the region has not yet made the kind of fundamental economic changes that would protect it when the downturn arrives. The manufacturing sector in sub-Saharan Africa, for example, currently accounts for the same small share of overall GDP that it did in the 1970s. What’s more, despite the overall decline in poverty, some rapidly growing countries, such as Burkina Faso, Mozambique, and Tanzania, have barely managed to reduce their poverty rates. And although most of Africa’s civil wars have ended, political instability remains widespread: in the past year alone, Guinea-Bissau and Mali suffered coups d’état, renewed violence rocked the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, and fighting flared on the border between South Sudan and Sudan. At present, about a third of sub-Saharan African countries are in the throes of violent conflict.

More mundane problems also take a heavy toll. Much of Africa suffers from rampant corruption, and most of its infrastructure is in poor condition. Many governments struggle to provide basic services: teachers in Tanzania’s public primary schools are absent 23 percent of the time, and government-employed doctors in Senegal spend an average of only 39 minutes a day seeing patients. Such deficiencies will become only more pronounced as Africa’s population booms.

And then there’s the fact that African countries, especially those that are rich in resources, often fall prey to what the economist Daron Acemoglu and the political scientist James Robinson have termed “extractive institutions”: policies and practices that are designed to capture the wealth and resources of a society for the benefit of a small but politically powerful elite. One result is staggering inequality, the effects of which are often masked by positive growth statistics.

What should one make of all the contradictory evidence? At first glance, these two narratives seem irreconcilable. It turns out, however, that both are right, or at least reflect aspects of a more complex reality, which neither fully captures. The skeptics focus so much on the region’s commodity exports that they fail to grasp the extent to which its recent growth is a result of economic reforms (many of which were necessitated by the misguided policies of the past). The optimists, meanwhile, underestimate the degree to which the region’s remaining problems -- such as sclerotic institutions, low levels of education, and substandard health care -- reflect government failures that will be very difficult to overcome because they are deeply rooted in political conflict.

However, even if both narratives are reductive, the optimists’ view of Africa’s future is ultimately closer to the mark and more likely to be borne out by developments in the coming decades. Africa will continue to face daunting obstacles on its ongoing path to prosperity, especially when it comes to improving its human capital: the education, skills, and health of its population. But the success of recent reforms and the increased openness of its societies, fueled in part by new information and communications technologies, give Africa a good chance of enjoying sustained growth and poverty reduction in the decades to come.

Continue reading.

The authors argue that the continent is leapfrogging some stages of technological progress, going right to the cellular era --- "the so-called mobile revolution" --- bypassing a long, plodding period of telecommunications development.

Obama's Long March

From Ron Radosh, at PJ Media, "It’s the Culture, Stupid: Facing the Long Road Ahead":

If we can turn away from the elections for a moment, and the future of the Republican Party, a more fundamental problem exists. It is nothing less than the nature of the American culture. By the term “culture,” I am not referring to the social issues that usually come up when one talks about culture wars; i.e., abortion, gay rights, religion, etc. Rather, I am talking about the perception and outlook that stand beneath the way our American public define the very nature of civic life in our democratic capitalist society.

That is why I regularly borrow from the Left, as some astute observers of my previous column noted in some comments, the works of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, and particularly his theory of cultural hegemony. As I wrote in my concluding paragraph, we have to “wage a war of position on the cultural front and to do all possible to challenge the ascension of a failed intellectual liberal ideology, whether it is in the form of Progressivism, liberalism or socialism.” I’m referring to the kind of work Fred Siegel carries out in a new book he has just finished writing, and which I had the pleasure of reading in manuscript form, on the nature of American liberalism. When it is eventually published, I believe it can have the kind of impact that great works of history like Richard Hofstadter’s books had in the 1940s and ’50s.

Siegel shows that from its very inception, liberalism was a flawed ideology whose adherents substituted its would-be virtues as a way of distancing themselves from most Americans and their workaday lives; an ideology based on a view whose believers saw themselves as superior to most Americans, including those who were merchants, workers, or regular folk, who could not be counted on to comprehend the backwardness of their beliefs.

Continuing on through the post-war decades, Siegel deals with liberalism’s failure to accurately confront the issue of race; its love affair with the New Left and its moral collapse in the face of its anarchism and nihilism; the effects of McGovernism on the political collapse of the Democratic Party, and the resulting politics of “rights-based interest groups” and the new power of public sector unionism, a far different breed than that of the old labor movement of Walter Reuther and George Meany. If we want a different kind of social polity than the one we have now — based on catering to the power of competing interest groups that compose the core strength of the Democratic party — we have to address first the essential question of the kind of social order that liberalism has built.

I’m also referring to the work the intellectuals who edit National Affairs and those who edit The Claremont Review of Books — solid theoretical and analytical work on social policy, education, and law, all of which challenges the intellectual foundations of contemporary liberalism.

If you doubt that this intellectual work is necessary, you might ponder the question of why college-educated Americans are overwhelmingly liberal Democrats or among those even much further to the political Left. An answer appears in this article by Richard Vedder, which appears today in Minding the Campus. Vedder shows that the majority of professors who teach our young people in the humanities are primarily on the Left, as he writes, “62.7 percent of faculty said that they were either ‘far left’ or ‘liberal,’ while only 11.9 percent said they were ‘far right’or ‘conservative.’ The notion that universities are hot beds for left-wing politics has a solid basis in fact. Moreover, the left-right imbalance is growing — a lot. The proportion of those on the left is rising, on the right declining.” The latest research reveals that there are 5.7 professors on the left for each one on the right!

The irony is that this occurs only in the academy, since studies also show that more and more Americans define themselves as basically conservative rather than liberal. So it should come as no surprise that the suburban middle-class and university-educated Americans, having learned their liberalism and leftism at college, vote the way that they do. One study shows that 41 percent of Americans call themselves conservative while only 21 percent call themselves liberal. Thus, as Vedder says, the university faculties are truly “out of sync” with the country at large....

Another realm of mis-education is that of the popular media. This week, I have written about this in an article published in The Weekly Standard, which fortunately the editors have not put behind their firewall. It is titled “A Story Told Before: Oliver Stone’s recycled leftist history of the United States.” Stone’s TV weekly series premiers Nov.12th on the CBS-owned network Showtime, and will eventually be used by leftist professors in their own history courses on our campuses. It is, I show, nothing less than a rehash of old Communist propaganda from the 1950s offered up as both something new and as the true hidden history of our country’s past.

Imagine how many television viewers, many of whom know virtually nothing about how we got to where we are, will learn from this expertly edited documentary how and why the United States is basically an evil nation, on the wrong course, and supported the wrong side in all foreign policy crises throughout its modern history. We cannot disregard the effect this kind of miseducation has on the knowledge of our fellow citizens. Do you wonder why the polls show that most Americans think Barack Obama’s foreign policy the past four years was successful? It is because they are a generation educated from “historians” like the late Howard Zinn, political theorists like the linguist Noam Chomsky, and now from filmmaker Stone and his historian co-author, Peter Kuznick.

Finally, I have a recommendation. For your left-leaning friends and associates, I highly recommend a new e-book written by my friend, the eminent historian Martin J. Sklar. It is called Letters on Obama (from the Left):The Global Revolution and the Obama Counter-Revolution. Sklar is sui generis. He calls himself a Marxist historian and a socialist. Yet the positions he takes — which he argues are those in defense of liberty — are positions regularly associated with conservatives and Republicans. You might consider this naiveté or an oxymoron. But any serious reader should take into consideration the insights he presents and the intellectual case that he musters...

IMAGE CREDIT: The People's Cube, "October Revolution: This Time We Can Make It Work!"

Donna's Diner in Elyria, Ohio

I don't worry about the national polls. My biggest concern is Ohio. And while I discount PPP's Democrat-leaning surveys (the poll's a Daily Kos joint, with new numbers out today having Obama up by 5 points, unrealistically), I'm not sure if the first debate was enough to give Romney a decisive advantage there. Things look pretty good at RCP's polling average for the state, and even there the NBC/Marist poll along with PPP is skewing the average to the Democrats.  And more on these two polls at AoSHQ, "Pollsters: 1/5 of Ohio Vote Already In! Me: Bull."

In any case, more later on the polling numbers --- especially a week or so from this Tuesday and the next presidential debate. Meanwhile, here's a ground-level report from Ohio, at the New York Times, "At the Corner of Hope and Worry":

ELYRIA, Ohio

Another day begins with a sound softer than a finger-snap, in an Ohio place called Elyria. In the central square of this small city, the gushing water fountain applauds the early-morning chorus of sparrows. A car clears its throat. A door slams. And then: click.

The faint sound comes as 7:00 flashes on the clock of the Lorain National Bank building, looming over the square. The pull of a string — click — has sent life pulsing through a neon sign, announcing to all of Elyria that, once more, against the odds, Donna’s Diner is open.

Its proprietor, Donna Dove, 57, ignites the grill that she seems to have just turned off, so seamlessly do her workdays blend into one endless shift. She wears her blond hair in a ponytail and frames her hazel eyes with black-rimmed glasses that tend to get smudged with grill grease. She sees the world through the blur of her work.

A dozen years ago, Donna found a scrap of serendipity on the sidewalk: a notice that a local mom-and-pop restaurant was for sale. After cooking for her broken family as a child, after cooking for county inmates at one of her many jobs, she had come to see food as life’s binding agent, and a diner as her calling. She maxed out her credit cards, cashed in her 401(k) and opened a business to call her own.

Donna’s Diner. Donna’s.

You know this place: It is Elyria’s equivalent to that diner, that coffee shop, that McDonald’s. From the vantage point of these booths and Formica countertops, the past improves with distance, the present keeps piling on, and a promising future is practically willed by the resilient patrons.

It is where the recession and other issues of the day are lived as much as discussed. Where expectations for a certain lifestyle have been lowered and hopes for salvation through education and technology have been raised. Where the presidential nominees Barack Obama and Mitt Romney each hope that his plan for a way back will resonate with the Donna Doves, who try to get by in places like Elyria — where the American dream they talk about can sometimes seem like a tease.

Continue reading, on some of the hardship Donna and her patrons are facing, and then this:

The fresh aroma of coffee face-slaps the air. Soon the Breakfast Club regulars, that gaggle of Elyrian past and present, will be here to renew their continuing discussion of what was, is and isn’t in this city of 55,000. The presidential election sometimes serves as a conversation starter, like a curio placed between the salt and pepper shakers.

The talk will continue as yolk stains harden and refills turn tepid. Their Ohio is a swing state, after all, and their Elyria sits precariously on that swing. More Democratic than Republican, it has several global companies and the memory of many more; an embattled middle class and encroaching poverty; and the faint sense that the Next Big Thing better arrive before even its beloved park fountain, visible from the diner’s front window, gets shut off...

Kyrsten Sinema, Bisexual Israel-Hating Antiwar Radical, is Face of Today's Democrat Party

Look, while even some Democrats might take pause at the extreme left-wing candidacy of Arizona's Kyrsten Sinema, who's running for Congress from the state's Ninth Congressional District, the fact is as more and more younger activists rise up the party ranks, this is what you're going to get. Sinema is the mainstream of today's Democrat Party.

Alana Goodman reports, at Commentary, "The Reinvention of an Anti-War Activist":

You wouldn’t normally expect Washington Democrats to spend much time fretting over a congressional primary in Arizona. But the three-way Democratic race between Kyrsten Sinema, Andrei Cherny, and David Schapira is getting a surprising amount of attention from national Democrats, the pro-Israel community and the political media.

Ten years ago, Sinema was one of those radical left-wing activists who donned pink tutus at anti-war rallies and organized with anti-Israel groups. Today, the 36-year-old is running for Congress as an AIPAC-supporting moderate who would have voted in favor of the Afghanistan intervention.

The problem? Some Democrats say her evolution doesn’t add up. For one, Sinema’s been involved with anti-Israel and anti-war groups much more recently than her campaign has acknowledged. And while she recently released a strongly-worded pro-Israel position paper, her latest comments on foreign policy issues have been dodgy and confusing.

“Is she for or against killing bin Laden?” asked former AIPAC spokesman Josh Block. “Based on her record, you don’t know. You would think when you’re considering a member of Congress, you would know their positions on these issues.”

One Democratic Arizona state representative who has worked with Sinema said her views are impossible to decipher.

“When she wanted to be an activist, she was anti-war, all these kinds of things that now she says she never was,” he said. “I don’t think she actually has a foreign policy core, I think she has a political core.”

According to the Washington Free Beacon’s Adam Kredo, Sinema didn’t just dabble in radical circles; she helped organize and lead extreme anti-war groups that took anti-Israel positions on issues like the right of return and Israel’s self defense. Townhall’s Guy Benson reported that she was involved in anarchist riots that encouraged property destruction.

Sinema’s campaign disputed the claim that she was involved with anti-Israel activism, calling it a smear tactic by opponents.

Continue reading.

Look, obviously the woman wants to hide her really despicable past. She wouldn't talk to Goodman on the phone, told her to schedule an interview with her staff, and after Goodman called back she hasn't returned her messages. I guess that's getting too close to home.

It's so bad that even Philip Weiss has denounced Sinema at the anti-Israel Mondweiss, "Once she joined ‘Women in Black’ and opposed aid to Israel. And then – she ran for Congress and went to AIPAC."

Following the links, it turns out that Marc Tracy has a report on the Ninth District race at the Tablet, which has this on Sinema:

Soon after 9/11, at 25 years old, she co-founded Local to Global Justice, a local advocacy group. Its initial mission was to oppose the invasion of Afghanistan, but in 2007 it signed a petition calling for an end to U.S. aid to Israel and another in 2008 decrying Israeli “human rights violations against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and against civilians in Lebanon.” Sinema joined Women in Black, a group founded by Israelis during the First Intifada to protest human rights abuses in the territories—a history of which Sinema claimed to be unaware. (That’s pretty hard to believe, since the group was founded in 1988 and is easily located on Google.) Also in 9/11’s aftermath, she helped organize the Arizona Alliance for Peaceful Justice; its motto was, “military action is an inappropriate response to terrorism.” According to The Hill, this was her position, too. At least as late as 2010, she continued to associate with these groups, speaking, for example, at an antiwar rally several sponsored. She has since severed ties.

The post is documented with lots of links, damning links.

BONUS: Sinema is a switch hitter, according to the Advocate, "Bi Politician Announces Congressional Bid":

Arizona state senator Kyrsten Sinema has resigned from her post to pursue a U.S. House seat that has been created due to redistricting. If elected, Sinema would be the first openly bisexual member of Congress.

More at the Washington Free Beacon, "Adult Sinema."

PHOTO CREDIT: Wikimedia Commons.

Peter Beinart Backs Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Against Israel

Beinart writes at yesterday's New York Times, "To Save Israel, Boycott the Settlements":

In 2010, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel called the settlement of Ariel, which stretches deep into the West Bank, “the heart of our country.” Through its pro-settler policies, Israel is forging one political entity between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea — an entity of dubious democratic legitimacy, given that millions of West Bank Palestinians are barred from citizenship and the right to vote in the state that controls their lives.

In response, many Palestinians and their supporters have initiated a global campaign of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (B.D.S.), which calls not only for boycotting all Israeli products and ending the occupation of the West Bank but also demands the right of millions of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes — an agenda that, if fulfilled, could dismantle Israel as a Jewish state.

The Israeli government and the B.D.S. movement are promoting radically different one-state visions, but together, they are sweeping the two-state solution into history’s dustbin.

It’s time for a counteroffensive — a campaign to fortify the boundary that keeps alive the hope of a Jewish democratic state alongside a Palestinian one. And that counteroffensive must begin with language.

Jewish hawks often refer to the territory beyond the green line by the biblical names Judea and Samaria, thereby suggesting that it was, and always will be, Jewish land. Almost everyone else, including this paper, calls it the West Bank.

But both names mislead. “Judea and Samaria” implies that the most important thing about the land is its biblical lineage; “West Bank” implies that the most important thing about the land is its relationship to the Kingdom of Jordan next door. After all, it was only after Jordan conquered the territory in 1948 that it coined the term “West Bank” to distinguish it from the rest of the kingdom, which falls on the Jordan River’s east bank. Since Jordan no longer controls the land, “West Bank” is an anachronism. It says nothing meaningful about the territory today.

Instead, we should call the West Bank “nondemocratic Israel.” The phrase suggests that there are today two Israels: a flawed but genuine democracy within the green line and an ethnically-based nondemocracy beyond it. It counters efforts by Israel’s leaders to use the legitimacy of democratic Israel to legitimize the occupation and by Israel’s adversaries to use the illegitimacy of the occupation to delegitimize democratic Israel.

Having made that rhetorical distinction, American Jews should seek every opportunity to reinforce it. We should lobby to exclude settler-produced goods from America’s free-trade deal with Israel. We should push to end Internal Revenue Service policies that allow Americans to make tax-deductible gifts to settler charities. Every time an American newspaper calls Israel a democracy, we should urge it to include the caveat: only within the green line.

But a settlement boycott is not enough. It must be paired with an equally vigorous embrace of democratic Israel. We should spend money we’re not spending on settler goods on those produced within the green line. We should oppose efforts to divest from all Israeli companies with the same intensity with which we support efforts to divest from companies in the settlements: call it Zionist B.D.S.

Supporters of the current B.D.S. movement will argue that the distinction between democratic and nondemocratic Israel is artificial. After all, many companies profit from the occupation without being based on occupied land. Why shouldn’t we boycott them, too? The answer is that boycotting anything inside the green line invites ambiguity about the boycott’s ultimate goal — whether it seeks to end Israel’s occupation or Israel’s existence.

For their part, American Jewish organizations might argue that it is unfair to punish Israeli settlements when there are worse human rights offenses in the world and when Palestinians still commit gruesome terrorist acts. But settlements need not constitute the world’s worst human rights abuse in order to be worth boycotting. After all, numerous American cities and organizations boycotted Arizona after it passed a draconian immigration law in 2010.

The relevant question is not “Are there worse offenders?” but rather, “Is there systematic oppression that a boycott might help relieve?” That Israel systematically oppresses West Bank Palestinians has been acknowledged even by the former Israeli prime ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert, who have warned that Israel’s continued rule there could eventually lead to a South African-style apartheid system.

Boycotts could help to change that. Already, prominent Israeli writers like David Grossman, Amos Oz and A. B. Yehoshua have refused to visit the settlement of Ariel. We should support their efforts because persuading companies and people to begin leaving nondemocratic Israel, instead of continuing to flock there, is crucial to keeping the possibility of a two-state solution alive.

I think the phrase "useful idiot" was invented for people like Beinart.

I remember a few years ago Beinart emerged on the scene with some writings on foreign policy (although I can't recall the titles of his books, which should tell you something). And now apparently he's a professor at the City University of New York. I wouldn't recommend him to my students. Beinart's giving aid and comfort to Israel's enemies. Recall that I'm reading Professor Michael Curtis' new book, Should Israel Exist?: A Sovereign Nation Under Attack by the International Community. Let me refer readers to Chapter 9, "The Mufti of Jerusalem and the Nazis." The Mufti was Haj Amin al-Husseini, an Arab nationalist who worked with Adolf Hiter and top leaders of the Nazi regime to develop Germany's policy on the Middle East and the Jews. One key policy proposed was a Jewish boycott. In the 1930s, the Mufti was the lead organizer of Palestinian Arab campaigns of assassination and terrorism against British forces and the Jews in the area of Palestine. After World War II, Husseini was the head of the Arab High Committee in Palestine that imposed an economic boycott on Jewish companies, industry, and trade throughout Palestine. According to Curtis, "The Arab League in 1948 formerly organized a boycott, which had begun more informally three years earlier and had preceded the establishment of Israel, not only of Israeli companies and products, but also of those from other countries maintaining economic relations with or who were perceived to be supporting Israel." Curtis notes that elements of the "boycott is still in existence" today and it costs Israel "considerable amounts of finance in terms of lost markets and economic problems" (p. 149). (The boycott was the economic arm of the Arab state strategy that came to a head in the Arab's war of aggression against the new state of Israel in 1948 --- and it's thus in fact a central cause of the current conflict in the Middle East today.)

Folks should get a hold of Curtis's book --- it's a must-read history, vital for the intellectual and political defense of Israel. And you can see why: The idiot Beinart is attempting to make distinctions between this and that side of the Green Line where none exist. The West Bank territories do not belong to Arab states or the so-called Palestinians. These are not "occupied territories." The lands were delineated and internationally accepted by the 1948 partition plan: "there was never an international border on the Green Line..." Beinart is involved in helping to propagate a lie that works to further the delegitimation program of the global left's Israel extermination industry. He should be ashamed of himself.

In any case, Beinart has a new book out, The Crisis of Zionism. I haven't read it but Sol Stern has a review at Commentary, "Beinart the Unwise."

I'll have more later.

In the meantime, keep pushing back against the assholes. This is getting ridiculous.

How Moderate Republicans Became Extinct

It's really amazing listening to this interview with Reihan Salam at the clip below. Salam is the co-author of Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream. Written with Ross Douthat, the book came out around the time of the 2008 campaign. The first half of the book is a tour de force on the changes in the Republican Party and general party realignment since the 1960s. The thesis is that the GOP can't hold onto the "Sam's Club" constituency --- which is basically the old working class Reagan Democrat types who have frequently shifted over to the GOP column since the cultural tumult of the 1960s. It's a fickle demographic, and the problem diagnosed in Grand New Party returns in Salam's new piece at Foreign Affairs, "The Missing Middle in American Politics." It's all fascinating from an academic perspective, and realistic in terms of our two-party system, but the notion of the "moderate Republican" is quaint. In seven minutes Salam mentions the tea party not once. So while all the talk of the old-style GOP moderates makes for some good establishment-style nostalgia, I think in the age of Obama it's not too risky to widen the perspective a bit. The economy will continue to be a huge issue through November, so those "swing voters" allegedly repulsed by the "fanatical" GOP candidates are hardly cemented into the Democrat column as if it were October 2008. More on that later. Meanwhile, here's this from Salam's essay:

The dominant ideology and style of today’s Republican Party would have been utterly alien to [Mitt] Romney’s father. In Rule and Ruin, the historian Geoffrey Kabaservice’s vivid account of the pitched ideological battles that shaped the postwar Republican Party, George Romney is cast as the last hope of a moderate Republicanism that has all but vanished. Born into poverty in a Mormon colony in northern Mexico, Romney rose to become the chief executive of the American Motors Corporation. There, he succeeded in taking on the Big Three car companies, scoffing at their “gas-guzzling dinosaurs” and offering sleek, fuel-efficient compacts that anticipated the later triumphs of the Japanese automobile industry. Like many self-made business executives of the time, Romney felt a deep sense of moral obligation, which flowed in part from his devout religious faith. As poor African Americans from the Deep South settled in and around Detroit, Romney made it his mission to better their condition. Shortly after his election as governor in 1962, Romney pressed for a massive increase in spending on public education and on generous social welfare benefits for the poor and unemployed. During Romney’s first term alone, Michigan’s state government nearly doubled its spending, from $684 million in 1964 to $1.3 billion in 1968. To finance the increase, Romney fought for and won a new state income tax, which would become a thorn in the side of future Michigan Republicans.

What separated Romney from liberal Democrats who were similarly eager to expand government was his conviction that he was doing God’s work on earth. Today, it is entirely common for Republican presidential candidates to describe the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as divinely inspired documents, as Romney did. But in the mid-1960s, as Kabaservice observes, such religiosity was unusual, at least for a moderate Republican. Kabaservice briefly speculates that Romney’s brand of moralistic progressivism might have resonated with many Christian voters who instead embraced a harder-edged form of conservatism infused with evangelical fervor. But Romney’s political program was badly undermined by the 1967 Detroit riots, which discredited the notion, fairly or not, that large-scale social spending was the most effective route to social uplift, at least among conservatives.

Disagreements on race and the Vietnam War fueled the split in the late 1960s between the radical New Left and the liberal Democratic establishment. But the upheaval of the late 1960s also divided the Republicans. Conservatives of that era saw themselves as defending the United States’ founding ideals against communism abroad and radicalism at home. Moderates, in contrast, sought to modernize the GOP: to keep up with the baby boomers’ shifting sensibilities on social issues and to share in their embrace of a more diverse and dynamic society. Some even praised what they saw, perhaps naively, as the freedom-loving spirit of the antiwar movement.

Yet as Kabaservice relates, the moderates never coalesced into a movement with a coherent program and ideology, despite Dwight Eisenhower’s earlier attempts to build a modern party that embraced the New Deal and a vision of responsible American global leadership. This failure left moderate Republicans in an awkward position. Those who shared the Democratic faith in activist government, tempered by a desire for decentralization and fiscal rigor, found themselves gravitating to the left. Those who shared conservative skepticism of big government, tempered by a recognition that Social Security and Medicare were here to stay, found themselves gravitating to the right. There was no glue to hold the two sides together.

Ultimately, Kabaservice argues, it was this lack of coherence that doomed the centrists within the Republican Party. The absence of a rigid ideology freed them to embrace creative solutions to emerging social problems, which proved useful when they were in power. But precisely because they were so allergic to ideology, the moderates were disinclined to rally the troops or to wage scorched-earth campaigns against their political enemies. Even when they had the advantage of numbers, as they did after Goldwater’s 1964 defeat, they routinely failed to coordinate their efforts, never managing to build the kind of grass-roots fundraising network that fueled the rise of the political right.

Continue reading.

Inequality: An Unavoidable Byproduct of Capitalism?

A CNN segment with Ali Velshi.

Mostly of interest here are the comments by Harold Meyerson, who is introduced as a columnist at the Washington Post, but who is in fact a hard-line leftist and Vice-Chair of the Democratic Socialists of America (via Discover the Networks).

And from the DSA website, "Where We Stand: The Political Perspective of the Democratic Socialists of America":

Socialists have historically supported public ownership and control of the major economic institutions of society -- the large corporations -- in order to eliminate the injustice and inequality of a class-based society, and have depended on the the organization of a working class party to gain state power to achieve such ends. In the United States, socialists joined with others on the Left to build a broad-based, anti-corporate coalition, with the unions at the center, to address the needs of the majority by opposing the excesses of private enterprise. Many socialists have seen the Democratic Party, since at least the New Deal, as the key political arena in which to consolidate this coalition, because the Democratic Party held the allegiance of our natural allies. Through control of the government by the Democratic Party coalition, led by anti-corporate forces, a progressive program regulating the corporations, redistributing income, fostering economic growth and expanding social programs could be realized.

With the end of the post-World War II economic boom and the rise of global economic competitors in East Asia and Europe in the 1970s came the demise of the brief majoritarian moment of this progressive coalition that promised--but did not deliver--economic and social justice for all. A vicious corporate assault on the trade union movement and a right-wing racist,populist appeal to downwardly mobile, disgruntled white blue-collar workers contributed to the disintegration of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party in the 1970s and 1980s.

Today, the mildly redistributive welfare state liberalism of the 1960s, which accepted the corporate dominance of economic decision-making, can no longer be the programmatic basis for a majoritarian progressive politics. New Deal and Great Society liberalism depended upon redistribution at the margins of an ever-expanding economic pie. But today corporations no longer aspire to expand production and consumption by raising global living standards; rather, global capital engages in a race to increase profits by "downsizing" and lowering wages.

With the collapse of the political economy of corporate liberalism came the atrophy of the very institutions upon which the progressive politics of the New Deal and Great Society had been constructed. No longer do the social bases for a majoritarian democratic politics -- strong trade unions, social movements and urban, Democratic political machines -- simply await mobilization by a proper electoral appeal. Rather, a next left must be built from the grassroots up.

Given the globalization of economic power, such grassroots movements will increasingly focus upon building a countervailing power to that of the transnational corporations. A number of positive signs of this democratic and grassroots realignment have emerged. New labor leadership has pledged to organize a workforce increasingly constituted by women, people of color, and immigrant workers. Inner-city grassroots community organizations are placing reinvestment, job creation, and economic democracy at the heart of their organizing. The women's movement increasingly argues that only by restructuring work and child care can true gender equality be realized. And the fight for national health care -- a modest reform long provided by all other industrial democracies -- united a broad coalition of activists and constituencies.

But such movements cannot be solely national in scope. Rather, today's social movements must be as global as the corporate power they confront; they must cooperate across national boundaries and promote interstate democratic regulation of transnational capital.

If socialism cannot be achieved primarily from above, through a democratic government that owns, control and regulates the major corporations, then it must emerge from below, through a democratic transformation of the institutions of civil society, particularly those in the economic sphere -- in other words, a program for economic democracy.

As inequalities of wealth and income increase and the wages and living standards of most are either stagnant or falling, social needs expand. Only a revitalized public sector can universally and democratically meet those needs.

In other words, a socialist revolution.

Freakin' Harold Meyerson, damned Marxist asshole.

The Crisis of Governability in the Industrial Democracies

From Charles Kupchan, at Foreign Affairs, "The Democratic Malaise: Globalization and the Threat to the West":

Globalization has expanded aggregate wealth and enabled developing countries to achieve unprecedented prosperity. The proliferation of investment, trade, and communication networks has deepened interdependence and its potentially pacifying effects and has helped pry open nondemocratic states and foster popular uprisings. But at the same time, globalization and the digital economy on which it depends are the main source of the West’s current crisis of governability. Deindustrialization and outsourcing, global trade and fiscal imbalances, excess capital and credit and asset bubbles -- these consequences of globalization are imposing hardships and insecurity not experienced for generations. The distress stemming from the economic crisis that began in 2008 is particularly acute, but the underlying problems began much earlier. For the better part of two decades, middle-class wages in the world’s leading democracies have been stagnant, and economic inequality has been rising sharply as globalization has handsomely rewarded its winners but left its many losers behind.

These trends are not temporary byproducts of the business cycle, nor are they due primarily to insufficient regulation of the financial sector, tax cuts amid expensive wars, or other errant policies. Stagnant wages and rising inequality are, as the economic analysts Daniel Alpert, Robert Hockett, and Nouriel Roubini recently argued in their study “The Way Forward,” a consequence of the integration of billions of low-wage workers into the global economy and increases in productivity stemming from the application of information technology to the manufacturing sector. These developments have pushed global capacity far higher than demand, exacting a heavy toll on workers in the high-wage economies of the industrialized West. The resulting dislocation and disaffection among Western electorates have been magnified by globalization’s intensification of transnational threats, such as international crime, terrorism, unwanted immigration, and environmental degradation. Adding to this nasty mix is the information revolution; the Internet and the profusion of mass media appear to be fueling ideological polarization more than they are cultivating deliberative debate.

Voters confronted with economic duress, social dislocation, and political division look to their elected representatives for help. But just as globalization is stimulating this pressing demand for responsive governance, it is also ensuring that its provision is in desperately short supply. For three main reasons, governments in the industrialized West have entered a period of pronounced ineffectiveness.

First, globalization has made many of the traditional policy tools used by liberal democracies much blunter instruments. Washington has regularly turned to fiscal and monetary policy to modulate economic performance. But in the midst of global competition and unprecedented debt, the U.S. economy seems all but immune to injections of stimulus spending or the Federal Reserve’s latest moves on interest rates. The scope and speed of commercial and financial flows mean that decisions and developments elsewhere -- Beijing’s intransigence on the value of the yuan, Europe’s sluggish response to its financial crisis, the actions of investors and ratings agencies, an increase in the quality of Hyundai’s latest models -- outweigh decisions taken in Washington. Europe’s democracies long relied on monetary policy to adjust to fluctuations in national economic performance. But they gave up that option when they joined the eurozone. Japan over the last two decades has tried one stimulus strategy after another, but to no avail. In a globalized world, democracies simply have less control over outcomes than they used to.

I like Kupchan, but he errs badly here:

In the United States, partisan confron­t­ation is paralyzing the political system. The underlying cause is the poor state of the U.S. economy. Since 2008, many Americans have lost their houses, jobs, and retirement savings. And these setbacks come on the heels of back-to-back decades of stagnation in middle-class wages. Over the past ten years, the average household income in the United States has fallen by over ten percent. In the meantime, income inequality has been steadily rising, making the United States the most unequal country in the industrialized world. The primary source of the declining fortunes of the American worker is global competition; jobs have been heading overseas. In addition, many of the most competitive companies in the digital economy do not have long coattails. Facebook’s estimated value is around $70 billion, and it employs roughly 2,000 workers; compare this with General Motors, which is valued at $35 billion and has 77,000 employees in the United States and 208,000 worldwide. The wealth of the United States’ cutting-edge companies is not trickling down to the middle class.

These harsh economic realities are helping revive ideological and partisan cleavages long muted by the nation’s rising economic fortunes. During the decades after World War II, a broadly shared prosperity pulled Democrats and Republicans toward the political center. But today, Capitol Hill is largely devoid of both centrists and bipartisanship; Democrats campaign for more stimulus, relief for the unemployed, and taxes on the rich, whereas Republicans clamor for radical cuts in the size and cost of government. Expediting the hollowing out of the center are partisan redistricting, a media environment that provokes more than it informs, and a broken campaign finance system that has been captured by special interests.

The resulting polarization is tying the country in knots. President Barack Obama realized as much, which is why he entered office promising to be a “postpartisan” president. But the failure of Obama’s best efforts to revive the economy and restore bipartisan cooperation has exposed the systemic nature of the nation’s economic and political dysfunction. His $787 billion stimulus package, passed without the support of a single House Republican, was unable to resuscitate an economy plagued by debt, a deficit of middle-class jobs, and the global slowdown. Since the Republicans gained control of the House in 2010, partisan confrontation has stood in the way of progress on nearly every issue. Bills to promote economic growth either fail to pass or are so watered down that they have little impact. Immigration reform and legislation to curb global warming are not even on the table.

Ineffective governance, combined with daily doses of partisan bile, has pushed public approval of Congress to historic lows. Spreading frustration has spawned the Occupy Wall Street movement -- the first sustained bout of public protests since the Vietnam War. The electorate’s discontent only deepens the challenges of governance, as vulnerable politicians cater to the narrow interests of the party base and the nation’s political system loses what little wind it has in its sails.

Kupchan relies less on his globalization variable in the American case than he does on rising inequality and partisanship. And you'd have to code "protests" by leftward or rightward orientation for Occupy Wall Street to be "the first sustained bout of public protests since the Vietnam War." Actually, by that logic it was the tea parties that were the first sustained protests since Vietnam, but if you code "public protests" only as left-wing, one can forget about the tea parties --- a protest movement that dominated all of 2009 and is widely considered to have formed the grassroots constituency driving the GOP to the House majority in the 2010 elections.

Beyond that, I agree there's a crisis of governability in the industrial democracies. I just don't think Kupchan's focusing on the most important causes. The unsustainability of the European social welfare state model is probably a more important factor in the political turmoil in Europe in 2011. Globalization is important as well, no doubt, but the EU nations can only blame themselves for digging the kinds of debt holes in which they found themselves unable to climb out. Kupchan just barely touches on this, and he blames the economic crisis more so than the ultimately flawed social welfare commitments. Governments like Greece and Italy fell not just from economic and social crisis but because leaders lacked independence from EU institutions, which have enforced continued commitments to a continental bargain whose fundamental failures are finally being revealed.

And for the wider systemic challenge facing the Western democracies, Kupchan suggests more statism and accommodation to globalization --- the same variable he posits as the number one factor causing the decline of industrial competitiveness and economic dynamism. In other words, Kupchan's recycling failed theories of a sort of globalist Keynesian bargain: "state-led investment" in the domestic economies and "progressive populism" in the political systems of these states. It sounds fancy. But that's the kind of thing that got these nations into trouble in the first place.

Hate-Blogger Walter James Casper III and Progressive Evil: Denial of Israel-Hatred Enables Exterminationist Anti-Semitism

Okay, here's a year-end review on my deranged stalker, racist hate-blogger Walter James Casper III --- with a special focus on Repsac3's endorsement of elminationist Jew-hatred and anti-Israel demonization. I've been spotlighting Casper's support for Occupy Wall Street as a window to pure evil and diabolical opposition to truth and justice in the world. Casper is the epitome of hate-addled progressive ideology, where up is down and wrong is right. And I know the coverage on this has been a bit much, and I apologize, but it's important to expose the program of someone who has made it his life's goal to destroy his ideological opponents. And it's especially important to expose the deception, for racist Walter James Casper is most dangerous in his campaign of lies and subversion.

Racist Walter James Casper III has written a series of whiny butthurt posts weaselly attempting to deny his endorsement of the hate. Recall, of course, the fact that Walter James Casper endorsed Occupy Wall Street in a Twitter exhortation, "Occupy wherever you are."

Yet as we all know, the evidence of Occupy Wall Street's hatred of Israel and the Jews is everywhere. Jonathan Neumann wrote a devastating indictment at Commentary, which left racist Walter James Casper in a fit of apoplexy and rage. See: "Occupy Wall Street and the Jews."

Readers can Google Casper's Jew-hating stalker blog at "American Nihilist." In response to being pinned down like an Nazi camp guard, Walter James Casper writes:

According to ... Donald Douglas, it's irrelevant that one has never spoken ill of Jewish people. All it takes to be a Jew-hating anti-Semite is to endorse a movement at which a few individuals -- either members of the general public, or in a few cases, longer term activists -- have said some pretty horrible things about Jews. Your own words and actions are not what matter; if one member of your group says or does something shameful, every member of your group is responsible for those shameful words or deeds.

I have to shake my head at this, for the denial here is by definition a clinical condition. But to reiterate, Walter James Casper is lying. To keep up a wicked facade holding that Occupy is some wonderful movement full of hope and beauty, racist Walter James Casper must spew lies about how it's just a "few individuals" who are fomenting hate. But truth is difficult to face when your whole ideological program is based on hatred, demonization, intimidation, and harassment. Towards the conclusion of his Commentary essay, after laying out example after example of vile Jew hatred within the Occupy program, Jonathan Neumann writes:

These do not begin to exhaust the extent or foulness of the sentiments toward Jews and Israel that emanated from the Occupy protests—sentiments so extreme as to compel even Michael Lerner, editor of the left-wing magazine Tikkun, to share his ‘‘distress at the hatred toward Israel and/or toward Jews’’ on display in Oakland.

Racist Walter James Casper cannot argue away the facts, so he denies them. This tendency is in fact a clinical pathology, as Dr. Pat Santy has indicated:

Denial can make otherwise intelligent individuals/groups/nations behave in a stupid or clueless manner, because they are too threatened by the Truth and are unable to process what is perfectly apparent to everyone. People who live in this Wonderful World go through their daily lives secure in the knowledge that their self-image is protected against any information, feelings, or awareness that might make them have to change their view of the world. Nothing--and I mean NOTHING--not facts, not observable behavior; not the use of reason or logic; or their own senses will make an individual in denial reevaluate that world view. All events will simply be reinterpreted to fit into the belief system of that world -- no matter how ridiculous, how distorted, or how psychotic that reinterpretation appears to others. Consistency, common sense, reality, and objective truth are unimportant and are easily discarded--as long as the world view remains intact.

It is, of course, "perfectly apparent to everyone" that Occupy Wall Street pushes a program predicated on hatred of Jews. And so for the epic hate merchant Walter James Caspser, he must distort reality to shoehorn into a deranged and hateful ideological belief system, progressivism.

Last night I posted on the comment boards from the Occupy Wall Street homepage: "Occupy Wall Street: 'F**k Israel'." As is often the case, the administrators post a disclaimer that such views are "not official" --- and one can see why. When your core constituency exhibits a fanatical hatred of Israel you'd want to post as many disclaimers as possible. But those who were on hand in Zuccotti documented the hate for all to see, and to deny this hate is to evince a clinical refusal to denounce evil. Here's Urban Infidel, who covered Occupy Wall Street on the ground in New York City:

I went back to Zucotti Square yesterday because David Crosby and Graham Nash were going to perform and since I had the afternoon free I figured I'd head down to check out the absurd scenery. I missed the show but found something else: the Left's total hatred of Israel and probably Jews. Now, it's never been a secret but to see it openly and unchecked on full display was disturbing.

And it should be disturbing. That kind of rampant hatred is unnatural. But Walter James Casper is down with it. He endorsed it and when called out he's twisted himself into pretzels of lies and distortions to avoid his responsibility.

Photo-journalist El Marco traveled to New York in November and published an epic report. Included is coverage of the progressive Jew hatred documented by Urban Infidel and so many others. Here's El Marco's description of what's going on at the picture below:

A gay, Jewish civil servant, on left, reacts in horror to the comments of this sign-carrying radical Israel-hating non-Jewish Jew. The man with the sign supports Hamas and other Jewicidal groups, and I also photographed him surrounded by muslim men and women who were delighted by his anti-Israel exhortations.

I can already hear racist Repsac's desperate bleats of denial. But the truth hurts. And we fight the left's lies because they facilitate extreminationism.

To continue, here's the statement from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, "The “Occupy Movement” Must Repudiate the Anti-Semites in Their Ranks":

With a big and sustained boost from the Media, the Occupy Wall Street Movement has gone global. Beyond Los Angeles’ sustained presence outside of City Hall, the anger and angst is being heard in over a hundred cities, with protesters as far away as Italy and Japan adding their disaffected voices.

Unfortunately, the hateful fringe of the Movement is now also coast-to-coast, though you might not know it from the mainstream media. Today’s hate propaganda from the New York protests has gone viral. This includes placards identifying “Wall Street Jews” as “Hitler’s Bankers,” and angry shouts of “Kill/Screw Google Jews.” According to anecdotal evidence, the conspiracy banter that the 9/11 attacks were a U.S. government and/or Israeli plot is also popular among some protestors....

For almost 200 years, blaming the world’s economic woes on the Rothschilds or Wall Street or Jewish bankers has been “the socialism of fools”—and mother’s milk of every demagogue from Hitler to Henry Ford to the Internet bloggers who still insist that Goldman Sachs’s secret Zionist high-command cunningly engineered the 2008 global financial collapse. Of course, toxic hate is not the motivator of most protestors, many of whom are suffering from orsincerely concerned about real economic hardship. Yet history shows the danger of lunatic fringe ideas spreading from the periphery to the center of a tumultuous movement. And it’s not just anti-Semitism. Americans on all sides of the economic/political divide should be concerned about a New York Magazine poll showing that 34 percent of protestors already consider the U.S. government as bad as Al Qaeda.

The Tea Party, when it emerged in 2009, also attracted its own extremist fringe, as a hyper-vigilant national media was correct to quickly expose. Some of the Tea Party fringe equated Obama with Hitler and claimed that the first African American president was a Manchurian candidate with a phony birth certificate. Yet the Tea Party Movement eventually produced grassroots leaders who denounced such nonsense and repeatedly disavowed racism and racists. Though not everyone was convinced by the Tea Party’s disavowals of prejudice, millions of decent Americans who weren’t bigots voted in the 2010 elections to support the complaints and goals of the movement.

The Occupy Wall Streeters and LA’s City Hall crowd have won accolades for marrying new social network technology to bohemian garb. Its pungent invocation of 1960s hippiedom—”God Forbid We Have Sex ‘N Smoke Pot. They Want Us to Grab Guns ‘N Go to War!”—also strikes a nostalgic chord among some grey-haired pinstripers. But street theater is no substitute for the serious work of building a mass movement that can really change society for the good. America’s “Occupy Crowd” crowd likes to compare itself to Tahrir Square and the Arab Spring Movement that toppled a geriatric dictator. Alas, that Movement has largely collapsed—as Egypt slides toward political chaos or Islamic dictatorship—in part because young Egyptian protesters never learned how to move beyond demonstrating and tweeting to become a constructive social force.

If the Occupy Wall Streeters really want their movement to achieve mainstream credibility and clout, they should begin by policing their own ranks. Organizing the public sanitation in their own encampments is a start, but social and political civility must also prevail. The Occupy Movement’s leaders in LA as well as New York need to disown the purveyors of hate within their ranks. They must pull the plug on the bigots amongst them who view the slogan of fighting the detested “1 percent of fat cats” as their opportunity to mainstream the hatred of Jews.

Unfortunately, it's doubtful we'll ever see "policing the ranks." We won't see Occupy "pull the plug on the bigots" because the bigots are running the show. Yid With Lid wrote a magisterial essay in October, "The Anti-Semitic/Anti-Israel Origins of Occupy Wall Street Are Ignored by the Media." Take a few minutes to read the whole thing. It's a crushing investigation of the essential organizing hatred of Occupy Wall Street, and the essay concludes:

Over the past month there have been many comparisons between the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street Movement. Here is one comparison that the Mainstream Media will not make. The MSM worked very hard to brand the Tea Party Movement as Racist, but it wasn't. They are working just as hard to ignore the blatant Antisemitism and libelous demonization of Israel coming out of the Occupy Wall Street protests, and they are.

It is not just a few nuts within the Occupy Wall Street Movement who are bashing Israel and Jews, it is the leadership and founders, yet our President and the rest of the Democratic Party are practically tripping over their underwear in a rush to embrace these haters.

Yes, they are tipping over backward not only to "embrace these haters," but to deny that the hate is central to the movement. Ben Shapiro also wrote on this. See "The Anti-Semites of Occupy Wall Street." Like the Wiesenthal Center, Shapiro acknowledges the fringe elements, but indicates how anti-Jewish hatred is the animating ideological orientation of the global left:

Europe is a leftist continent – of that there can be little doubt.  Yet anti-Semitism runs rampant through it.  Socialist Spain leads the way in anti-Semitic polling, but countries like France and Austria aren’t far behind.  Britain’s anti-Israel policy is cover for anti-Semitism; Germany’s post-World War II history of stamping out anti-Semitism is beginning to fade into the past.  Crimes against Jews are up across Europe.

In the United States, the left is just as anti-Semitic, if less violent.  Their anti-Zionist rhetoric is certainly a cover for anti-Semitism, since Zionism stands merely for the principle that Jews deserve a state.  The left has no problem with anyone else having a state – Palestinian, Kurd, Tibetan.  When it comes to the Jews, however, they find it respectable to reject out of hand their right to a self-governing homeland.  Opposing specific policies of the Israeli government is not anti-Semitic.  Opposing Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state is.

The focus on Zionism at the OWS rallies is odd, to say the least.  Why should a foreign state located some 5700 miles from New York have any part in the discussion about America’s economy?  The answer is simple at root: the hard left still buys into the discredited notions of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, in which Jews supposedly plotted the takeover of the world economy.  Zionism, in this twisted vision, is the wellspring of that control – Jerusalem is supposedly the capital of the Jew/banker conspiracy.  That sick notion pervades the rhetoric of the OWS rallies.  Says one OWS rallier in Los Angeles, “I think the Zionist Jews who are running these big banks and our Federal Reserve … need to be run out of this country.”  Says another in Chicago, “Israel is beginning to be seen as the criminal pariah state that it is.”

This nasty thought pattern unites both the nationalist and the internationalist hard left.  The nationalist hard left – i.e. neo-Nazis and white supremacist groups, as well as many nationalist groups in Europe – see Israel as a façade for a globalist Jewish regime seeking to bring “blood-sucking” capitalism to prominence.  The internationalist hard left – i.e. OWS and its ilk – see Israel as the last vestige of discredited nationalism, and Wall Street as its colonialist branch in the United States.

If OWS wants to be taken seriously as a movement, its members need to root out the anti-Semitism from their midst.  Then again, that rooting out process may not be possible because of how close the cancer of anti-Semitism is to the heart of the movement.  If that is the case, every responsible politician has the responsibility to disassociate from OWS.  Somehow, in the case of the Obama administration, that seems unlikely, no matter how outrageous the Jew-hatred gets at OWS.

I have highlighted in bold italics that key line just above. Anti-Semitism is at the "heart of the movement."

Occupy Wall Street has pledged for 2012 an "American Spring" to bring about a revolution in the United States. It goes without saying that the "cancer of anti-Semitism" that is at "the heart of the movement" will be everywhere in evidence as the next round of protests kick off.

So, I'll close with a link to Phyllis Chesler, "An Open Letter to the 'Good Liberal' Who Ignored Occupy Wall Street's Jew Hatred." Chesler is discussing how global Jew-hatred consitutues a threat to Western civilization. And she places Occupy Wall Street smack dab, front and center, at the forefront of that program of exterminationism.

And how will Walter James Casper respond?

He'll attack Phyllis Chesler as a "bigot". He'll attack her for making "generalizations" that amount to "bigotry.' Walter James Casper will attack Ben Shapiro as a "bigot" for pointing out that Jew-hatred is the heart of Occupy Wall Street. Walter James Casper will attack Rabbi Abraham Cooper and Dr. Harold Brackman of the Simon Wiesenthal Center as "bigots" for calling out Occupy Wall Street for its toxic anti-Jewish propaganda and hatred. Walter James Casper will attack Yid With Lid as a "bigot" for exposing the top leadership of Occupy Wall Street as a raving band of Jew-hating extremists. Walter James Casper will demonize El Marco and the Urban Infidel as "bigots" for their first hand reporting on the hate at Zuccotti Park. Walter James Casper will attack Dr. Pat Santy as a "bigoted" hack for highlighting the progressive pathology of hate-based ideological denialism. And Walter James Casper will attack Jonathan Neumann of Commentary as a "bigot" for writing an essay document a nationwide movement based on eliminationist anti-Semitism.

That's right.

Walter James Casper has written an entire post attacking people for highlighting the hate. Racist Repsac3 claims, for example, "As I've said before, these kind of sweeping generalizations about whole groups of people are what lead to stereotypes and bigotry." And he continues, "When one decides to believe -- and worse propagate ... the idea that seeing a statistically small number of _______ people acting a certain way means that MOST or ALL _______ people act that way, that's bigotry."

So, all of us speaking out against the hate are "bigots" It's not the Occupiers calling for the end of Israel who are "bigots." It's the people of good will, my friends and allies cited here at the post, who are the "bigots." So, see what I mean about up is down and wrong is right? Behold true evil. It's just plain evil. And I know, to repeat, it's astonishing that one can deny the hatred that's at base of an entire movement, and it's even more astonishing to attack people as "bigots" for bringing the truth to the light of day.

But I guess you have to see it to believe it. Folks can Google Walter James Casper's hate blog "American Nihilist." I'm not linking. I long ago stopped linking that vile hate dump and attack portal.

Again, my apologies for my extra attention on these matters. But it's warranted. Walter James Casper's blog is a key repository of progressive hate and it's a documented launchpad against good and decency in the world. I will continue to highlight the deeds of the criminal stalking hate-blogger Walter James Casper III. It needs to be done. And it will be done, for the good of decency and right.

Anarchy in the U.S.A.

From Matthew Continetti, at the Weekly Standard, "The Roots of American Disorder":

Ever since September, when activists heeded Adbusters editor Kalle Lasn’s call to Occupy Wall Street, it’s become a rite of passage for reporters, bloggers, and video trackers to go to the occupiers’ tent cities and comment on what they see. Last week, the day after New York mayor Michael Bloomberg ordered the NYPD to dismantle the tent city in Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, the New York Times carried no fewer than half a dozen articles on the subject. Never in living memory has such a small political movement received such disproportionate attention from the press. Never in living memory has a movement been so widely scrutinized and yet so deeply misunderstood.

If income equality is the new political religion, occupied Zuccotti Park was its Mecca. Liberal journalists traveled there and spewed forth torrents of ink on the value of protest, the creativity and spontaneity of the occupiers, the urgency of redistribution, and the gospel of social justice. Occupy Wall Street was compared to the Arab Spring, the Tea Party, and the civil rights movement. Yet, as many a liberal journalist left the park, they lamented the fact that Occupy Wall Street wasn’t more tightly organized. They worried that the demonstration would dissipate without a proper list of demands or a specific policy agenda. They suspected that the thefts, sexual assaults, vandalism, and filth in the camps would limit the occupiers’ appeal.

The conservative reaction has been similar. A great many conservatives stress the conditions among the tents. They crow that Americans will never fall in line behind a bunch of scraggly hippies. They dismiss the movement as a fringe collection of left tendencies, along with assorted homeless, mental cases, and petty criminals. They argue that the Democrats made a huge mistake embracing Occupy Wall Street as an expression of economic and social frustration.

A smaller group of conservatives, however, believes the occupiers are onto something. The banks do have too much power. Wages have been stagnant. The problem, these conservatives say, is that Occupy Wall Street doesn’t really know what to do about any of the problems it laments. So this smaller group of conservatives, along with the majority of liberals, is more than happy to supply the occupiers with an economic agenda.

But they might as well be talking to rocks. Both left and right have made the error of thinking that the forces behind Occupy Wall Street are interested in democratic politics and problem solving. The left mistakenly believes that the tendency of these protests to end in violence, dissolute behavior, and the melting away of the activists is an aberration, while the right mistakenly brushes off the whole thing as a combination of Boomer nostalgia for the New Left and Millennial grousing at the lousy job market. The truth is that the violence is not an aberration and Occupy Wall Street should not be laughed away. What we are seeing here is the latest iteration of an old political program that has been given new strength by the failures of the global economy and the power of postmodern technology.

To be sure, there are plenty of people flocking to the tents who are everyday Democrats and independents concerned about joblessness and the gap between rich and poor. The unions backing the occupiers fall into this group. But the concerns of labor intersect only tangentially with those of Occupy Wall Street’s theorists and prime movers. The occupiers have a lot more in common with the now-decades-old antiglobalization movement. They are linked much more closely to the “hacktivist” agents of chaos at WikiLeaks and Anonymous.

When the police officers and sanitation workers reclaimed Zuccotti Park, Occupy Wall Street’s supporters cried, “You can’t evict an idea whose time has come.” Whether the sympathizers or the critics really understand the idea and the method of the movement is a good question. The idea is utopian socialism. The method is revolutionary anarchism.

Keep reading.

I've been arguing basically the same thing for weeks. For example, Continetti echoes what I wrote at the time of the Oakland rioting a few weeks back:

When you see occupiers clash with the NYPD on the Brooklyn Bridge, or masked teenagers destroying shop windows and lighting fires in downtown Oakland, you are seeing anarchism in action. Apologists for Occupy Wall Street may say that these “black bloc” tactics are deployed solely by fringe elements. But the apologists miss the point. The young men in black wearing keffiyehs and causing mayhem are simply following the logic of revolutionary anarchism to its violent conclusion. The fringe isn’t the exception, it’s the rule.

PREVIOUSLY: "Hypocritical Occupy Oakland Supporters Denounce Anarchy and Violence of Occupy Oakland Protesters," and "On the Origins of the Occupy Movement."

What We Got Right in the War on Terror

I was hoping to do some big analysis of Abe Greenwald's masterful essay, at Commentary, but never got around to it. This is simply the best piece I've read on the war on terror:

Over the course of the 10 years, American authorities foiled more than two dozen al-Qaeda plots. Those averted tragedies were not foremost on the minds of revelers who gathered to celebrate Bin Laden’s demise on May 1 at Ground Zero, Times Square, and in front of the White House. But if a mere few of the plots had materialized, those spaces might not even have been open to public assembly.

Not only have U.S. authorities managed to keep America safe from al-Qaeda for a decade; by the time he was killed, Osama bin Laden was barely a leader. Among the items recovered at his compound in Abbottabad were some recent writings, in which the former icon lamented al-Qaeda’s dramatically sinking stock and pondered organizational rebranding as a possible antidote.

His growing insignificance as a global player was not the product of chance. The marginalization of the world’s principal jihadist was the result of audacious American policy—indeed, the most controversial and hotly debated policy undertaken in the wake of 9/11. In the words of Reuel Marc Gerecht writing in the Wall Street Journal, “the war in Iraq was Bin Laden’s great moral undoing.” In his desperate attempt to drive American fighting forces out of Mesopotamia, Bin Laden sanctioned a bloody civil war in Iraq in 2005 and 2006. The carnage failed to repel the United States, but in the end, the countrywide slaughter of Muslims proved too much to bear for al-Qaeda’s own one-time and would-be supporters. The “Sunni awakening” that helped transform Iraq was an awakening out of al-Qaeda jihadism, and the blow it delivered to Bin Laden’s ambitions was stunning.

After the turnaround in Iraq, the landscape of the Muslim world suffered even greater changes—with ordinary Muslims rising to revolt against Persian and Arab tyranny, not against American hegemony. As Fouad Ajami has written: “The Arab Spring has simply overwhelmed the world of the jihadists. In Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, and Syria, younger people—hurled into politics by the economic and political failures all around them—are attempting to create a new political framework, to see if a way could be found out of the wreckage that the authoritarian states have bequeathed them.”

It was the Freedom Agenda of the George W. Bush administration—delineated and formulated as a conscious alternative to jihadism—that showed the way. Indeed, the costly American nation-building in Iraq has now led to the creation of the world’s first and only functioning democratic Arab state. One popular indictment of Bush maintains that he settled on the Freedom Agenda as justification for war after U.S. forces and inspectors found no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The record shows otherwise. “A free Iraq can be a source of hope for all the Middle East,” he said before the invasion, in February 2003. “Iraq can be an example of progress and prosperity in a region that needs both.”

And something of the kind has come to pass. “One despot fell in 2003,” Ajami has said. “We decapitated him. Two despots, in Tunisia and Egypt, fell, and there is absolutely a direct connection between what happened in Iraq in 2003 and what’s happening today throughout the rest of the Arab world.”

Thus, there are three intertwined achievements that have proved to be the dispositive features of American success in the war on terror: formulating the Freedom Agenda in the Middle East, reversing the course of the war in Iraq, and establishing a national-security apparatus to foil multiple terrorist attacks. It is no coincidence that they are also the most controversial foreign policies America has implemented since the Vietnam War.

September 11 was a hinge moment in American history. The attacks plunged the nation into a full-scale war against non-state entities. Any adequate American response had to break with previous approaches in previous conflicts. War could not be waged on parties inside states in the same way it had been waged on states themselves. Prisoners captured on a battlefield in a country not their own and with no interest in following the rules of conventional war could not be handled as they had been. Getting the edge on Islamist terror would mean fundamentally rethinking our approach to both the blunting of deadly threats and the shuttering of the political hothouses of the Middle East in which such threats thrive.

The adoption of these unprecedented and uncompromising means of war inspired animated debate in the United States. In fighting the war on terror, we have been told, America has become—depending on the accuser—either too dismissive or too enamored of democracy. Some on the left think our national-security apparatus undermines our defining ideals. On the right, outraged voices condemn our naive enthusiasm for helping to secure liberty for Muslims abroad, calling it a form of multicultural self-sabotage. After civil war seized post-invasion Iraq, critics from across the ideological spectrum denounced our misguided effort. The fits and starts and frustrations of the war decade have this one thing in common: we have done battle in an age when spectacular setbacks appear to provide irrefutable evidence of our own baseness and incompetence—a few years before drab good news arrives to refute both expert opinion and common knowledge.

The arguments that we have prosecuted the war on terror immorally and ineffectually are important, and deserve the respectful hearing they have received, even if many of those arguing these points have resorted to launching the most abject slanders and accusations toward those who believe the war on terror is just and has been fought honorably. To be sure, not everything the United States has done in the war on terror has been correct. Far from it. As Winston Churchill said, “War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.” In the fight against Islamist terrorism, American blunders have come in all shapes and sizes, and in truth there are few small wartime miscalculations. This is especially so in an age of instant global headlines.

We continue to suffer for our biggest mistakes. Concerning the failure to catch Bin Laden and make serious efforts to nation-build early in the Afghanistan war, inaccurate intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s weapons, and the Pentagon’s ill-preparedness for the Iraqi insurgency, there can be no absolution. These errors have cost the country tragic sums in money, credibility, and life. They also set our efforts back precious years.

But these blunders, great as they are, have not undone America’s outstanding accomplishments. Ten years ago, the most delusional optimist among us would not have predicted the irrelevancy of Osama bin Laden or a decade without another al-Qaeda attack, let alone a democratic Iraq and a transformative explosion of antiauthoritarianism in the Middle East.

Nor do American achievements in this war mean we are in a position to quit the fight. The notion that America achieved closure with Bin Laden’s killing suggests to some, perhaps even the occupant of the White House, that the war on terror has had its decade and the United States can now move on. “America, it is time to focus on nation-building here at home,” said Barack Obama this summer as he announced a sizable drawdown of troops in Afghanistan for the fall of 2012. The suggestion that our work is done has traction only because resolute American action at home and abroad have provided a sense of security so pervasive it now goes unquestioned.

The United States has fallen prey to false comfort in the past. So before we submit to the siren song of closure, we would do well to recall that that is exactly where this war began—and our retaining some genuine measure of security has been the result of thinking and acting more boldly than we have in generations.

Now go read the whole thing.