Aid to the PA is under bi-partisan attack in Congress due to the Palestinians’ campaign to somehow upgrade their standing in the United Nations. The campaign against the Palestinians, and [...]]]>
Aid to the PA is under bi-partisan attack in Congress due to the Palestinians’ campaign to somehow upgrade their standing in the United Nations. The campaign against the Palestinians, and also against the United Nations, has already gained enough momentum that yesterday’s hearing, initially to have been held in session of the Subcommittee on the Near East and South Asia, was upgraded to a hearing of the full Foreign Affairs committee.
Leading the charge, unsurprisingly, is Committee Chair Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), who has introduced a bill threatening UN funding mainly, though not exclusively, over the issue of Israel and the Palestinians. But her predecessor as Chair, Howard Berman (D-CA) was absolutely blunt in saying: “I believe it is appropriate to point out that should the Palestinians pursue their unilateralist course, the hundreds of millions of dollars in annual assistance that we have given them in recent years, will likely be terminated.”
Four leading Democrats, Steve Israel (D-NY), Robert Brady (D-PA), Eliot Engel (D-NY) and Steven Rothman (D-NJ) have sent a bill to the Foreign Affairs Committee which would
With all this, you’d think aid to the PA was doomed, would you not?
But hold on. At the hearing, there were four witnesses, with David Makovsky of the AIPAC-created Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) being the most moderate. The other speakers were James Phillips of the Heritage Foundation, Dr. Jonathan Schanzer of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (which, along with Heritage, are neo-conservative think-tanks, with more info available here) and neocon all-star Elliott Abrams.
Makovsky was predictably dubious about cutting off aid to the Palestinians, and the entire panel was more or less united around the idea that Congress must at least keep funding PA security forces that are working with Israel to prevent attacks on Israelis.
Abrams, somewhat surprisingly, joined not only Makovsky but also the dovish “pro-Israel, pro-peace” lobbying group J Street in cautioning against cutting other aid to the PA. He said,
There’s a lot here that bears close scrutiny, as the picture Makovsky paints is pretty far removed from reality. But the important point is this wide agreement, spanning the center-left to the far right, that cutting off aid to the PA is against the interests not only of the PA but of Israel and the US as well.
This leads to an obvious question: is continuing aid to the PA in the interests of the Palestinians?
While there has been little visible Palestinian opposition to the UN campaign, or, in recent months, to the PA in general, there has also been remarkably little enthusiasm about it from any sector of the Palestinian public or civil society.
So while it’s virtually certain that, even among those opposed to the UN bid, Palestinians will collectively be furious, again, at the US for its opposition to any initiative they ever take, it’s not clear that a sizeable portion of the Palestinian public is impressed with Mahmoud Abbas campaign here.
And yet, this may produce a renewed opportunity for the PA leadership.
With unity between the PA and Hamas still nothing more than idealistic words, the future of the Palestinian national movement, and the identities of any potential interlocutors with Israel and the US, is completely in doubt. One reason is, indeed the continuing insistence of Fatah that PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad have a prominent role in a unity government. But really, that is just the public face of the real concern, which is loss of US funding.
But if arguments such as those put forward by Makovsky and Abrams win the day on Capitol Hill, the PA leadership will have new options. The US will have demonstrated a reluctance to cut Palestinian aid and, while this is not likely to extend to maintaining aid to a PA that includes Hamas, it may well allow for more boldness in Palestinian diplomacy, and further actions to try to internationalize the issue and take it out of exclusively US hands.
But taking advantage of such an opportunity will require bold and clever leadership, which the PA/PLO/Fatah have not demonstrated any hint of.
One last curiosity in all of this talk of suspending aid to the PA. That came from the inimitable Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League. He said: “I certainly understand the anger in Congress. You ignore us and then you want us to continue giving you aid?”
Foxman says this as a man who staunchly defends an Israeli government that has repeatedly thumbed its nose at the United States and embarrassed the President, despite the fact that aid to Israel, in both dollars and on the ground military coordination is greater and deeper than at any time in history.
One can only imagine the color of Abe’s face if the obvious irony was pointed out to him.
]]>Others have [...]]]>
Others have also described Ross as more skeptical [than Mitchell] about the chances of peace, based on his decades-long experience with trying to bring together the parties.
I don’t want to get all new-agey, but if you think something is difficult or impossible to do, the chances of being able to do it are greatly diminished from the get-go.
So why does this Ross guy keep getting jobs that he doesn’t think are possible? I picked up Ross’ book off of my shelf here in D.C., and it amazed me how many times he says you cannot make any kind of deal with the Iranians. Then, Obama put him in charge of making a deal with the Iranians. Ross, we now learn, doubts that a peace deal can be reached in Israel-Palestine, and Obama gives him a job making peace in Israel-Palestine.
On the Middle Eastern conflict, Ross’s credentials for the job are impeccable. After all, he’s been involved in decades — decades! — of failed peace processes. Ross has worked at the Washington Institute (WINEP), an AIPAC-formed think tank, and also chaired the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI), an Israeli organization dedicated to “ensur(ing) the thriving of the Jewish People and the Jewish civilization.” (The organization seems to oppose intermarriage with racist-sounding statements like “cultural collectivity cannot survive in the long term without primary biological foundations of family and children.”)
Ross was thought responsible for crafting Obama’s presidential campaign AIPAC speech — yes, the one with the line about an “undivided” Jerusalem that would spike a peace deal if implemented. Ross later reiterated the notion of an undivided Jerusalem as a “fact” in an interview with the Jerusalem Post.
Ross was recently in the news following a secret but not-so-secret visit to the Middle East, which was fleshed out on Politico by Laura Rozen. Rozen was the reporter who carried a rather shocking anonymous allegation about Ross:
“[Ross] seems to be far more sensitive to [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s coalition politics than to U.S. interests,” one U.S. official told POLITICO Saturday. “And he doesn’t seem to understand that this has become bigger than Jerusalem but is rather about the credibility of this administration.”
In an update, Rozen carried NSC CoS Denis McDonough’s defense of Ross:
“The assertion is as false as it is offensive,” McDonough said Sunday by e-mail. ”Whoever said it has no idea what they are talking about. Dennis Ross’s many decades of service speak volumes about his commitment to this country and to our vital interests, and he is a critical part of the president’s team.”
But the new Forward article, as MJ Rosenberg points out, backs up the notion that Ross was extremely concerned with “advocat[ing]” for Israel. The source is none other than Israel-advocate extraordinaire Abe Foxman (who doesn’t negotiate on behalf of the U.S. government):
“Dennis is the closest thing you’ll find to a melitz yosher, as far as Israel is concerned,” said the Anti-Defamation League’s national director, Abraham Foxman, who used the ancient Hebrew term for ‘advocate.’”
Do you get the feeling that Ross advocated for Iran? Or, as the Forward article put it (with my strikethrough), has “strong ties to Israel” Iran? Guttman writes that Ross is considered to have a “reputation of being pro-Israeli.” As for Iran? Not quite: Ross’s Iran experience seems to boil down to heading United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), a group that pushes for harsher, broad-based sanctions against Iran (despite a stated goal to not hurt ordinary Iranians) and that has criticized Obama’s policy of engagement. Ross left the gig, as with JPPI, when he took the job with the administration.
The group also launched an error-filled fear-mongering video (while Ross was still there; he appears in the video) and a campaign to get New York hotels to refuse to host Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad when he comes to town each year for the U.N. General Assembly, which hardly lays the groundwork for good diplomacy.
Oh, and about the Iran engagement designed by Ross: The administration’s approach has been questioned by several leading Iran experts. “It is unlikely that the resources and dedication needed for success was given to a policy that the administration expected to fail,” National Iranian American Council (NIAC) president Trita Parsi observed. In December, Ross publicly defended the administration against charges that engagement was less than sincere from the U.S. side. But it is Ross himself who has apparently long held a pessimistic outlook on engagement.
Ross’s 2007 book, “Statecraft: And How to Restore America’s Standing in the World“, is fascinating in light of where Ross has come from, and where he’s taken Iran policy. I was struck at a five-page section of the first chapter called “Neoconservatism vs. Neoliberalism,” in which Ross writes, “[Neoconservatism's] current standard-bearers — such as Richard Perle, David Frum, William Kristol, and Robert Kagan — are serious thinkers with a clear worldview,” (with my links).
Later, in several long sections about the run-up to George W. Bush’s Iraq war, Ross notes that Paul Wolfowitz was highly focused on Iraq before and after 9/11. He also mentions “political difficulties” in the push for war: “Once [Bush] realized there might be a domestic problem in acting against Iraq, his administration focused a great deal of energy and effort on mobilizing domestic support for military action.”
But Ross never acknowledges that some of his neoconservative “serious thinkers” — such as Kristol and his Weekly Standard magazine — were involved in the concerted campaign to mislead Americans in an effort to push the war… just as the same figures are pushing for an attack on Iran. Frum, who does seem capable of serious thinking, was the author of the “axis of evil” phrasing of Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address. The moniker included both Iraq and Iran, despite the fact that the latter was, until the speech, considered a potential ally in the fight against Al Qaeda. (Marsha Cohen chronicled an Israeli effort to squash the alliance, culminating in Frum’s contribution to the Bush speech.)
Ross never mentions that neocon Douglas Feith, a political appointee in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans (OSP), was responsible for cherry-picking intelligence about Iraq within the administration, and whose office was feeding cooked information to the public via Scooter Libby in Vice President Dick Cheney‘s office. Through Libby, the distorted information made its way into the hands of the Standard and sympathetic journalists like ideologue Judith Miller at the New York Times. In August of 2003, Jim Lobe wrote (with my links):
[K]ey personnel who worked in both NESA [the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia bureau] and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003. …
Other appointees who worked with… both offices included Michael Rubin, a Middle East specialist previously with the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI); David Schenker, previously with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP); Michael Makovsky; an expert on neo-con icon Winston Churchill and the younger brother of David Makovsky, a senior WINEP fellow and former executive editor of pro-Likud ‘Jerusalem Post’; and Chris Lehman, the brother of the John Lehman, a prominent neo-conservative who served as secretary of the navy under Ronald Reagan, according to Kwiatkowski.
Ross has personal experience with many OSP veterans, working with them at WINEP and signing hawkish reports on Iran authored by them.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, Ross was a member of a task force that delivered a hawkish report apparently co-authored by two veterans of OSP, Rubin and Michael Makovsky. (Ross reportedly recused himself as the presidential campaign came into full swing.) Lobe, noting Ross’s curious involvement, called the report a “roadmap to war with Iran,” and added, a year later, that the group that put out the report was accelerating the plan, calling for a military build-up and a naval blockade against Iran.
After taking his position within the Obama administration, Ross released a book, co-authored with David Makovsky, that was skeptical of the notion that engagement could work. Nathan Guttman, in a review of the book for the Forward, wrote:
The success of diplomatic engagement, according to Ross, is not guaranteed and could be unlikely. Still, he and Makovsky believe that negotiations will serve a purpose even if results are not satisfying. “By not trying, the U.S. and its refusal to talk become the issue,” said Makovsky in a June 1 interview with the Forward. “What we are saying is that if the U.S. chooses engagement, even if it fails, every other option will be more legitimate.”
The attitude of Ross and Makovsky seems closer to that of the Israeli government then to that of the Obama administration.
OSP, Feith, the Makovsky brothers, and Rubin are not listed in the index of “Statecraft,” nor have they appeared in the many sections that I’ve read in full.
In his book, Ross does have many revealing passages about concepts that have been worked into the Obama administration’s Iran policy. One such ploy, which has not been acknowledged or revealed publicly, is using Israel as the crazy ‘bad cop’ — a potentially dangerous game. Ross also writes that international pressure (through sanctions) must be made in order to cause Iran “pain.” Only then, thinks Ross, can concessions such as “economic, technological and security benefits” from the U.S. be offered:
Orchestrating this combination of sticks and carrots requires at this point some obviously adverse consequences for the Iranians first.
This view does not comport with the Obama plan for a simultaneous dual-track policy toward Iran — which holds that engagement and pressure should occur simultaneously — and serves to bolster critics who say that engagement has not been serious because meaningful concessions have not been offered. But it does hint at another tactic that Ross references at least twice in the book: the difference between “style” and “substance.” With regard to Iran, he presents this dichotomy in relation to public professions about the “military option” — a euphemism for launching a war. But publicly suppressing rhetoric is only used as a way to build international support for pressure — not also, as one might expect, a way to assuage the security fears of Iran.
But those aren’t the only ideas from the 2007 book that seem to have made their way into U.S. policy toward Iran. In “Statecraft,” Ross endorses the use of “more overt and inherently deniable alternatives to the use of force” for slowing Iran’s nuclear progress. In particular, he mentions the “fragility of centrifuges,” which is exactly what is being targeted by the Stuxnet virus, a powerful computer worm thought to be created by a state, likely Israel, and perhaps with help from the U.S., according to the latest revelations.
Some critics of this website complain that the level of attention given to neoconservatives is too great, but they should consider this: Look at Dennis Ross. He works extensively with this clique, and no doubt has the occasional drink or meeting with them. And, most importantly, he writes approvingly about neoconservatives, noting that their viewpoint affects political considerations of “any political leader.” Because of these neocon “considerations,” he writes, this is how we should view the Islamic Republic: “With Iran, there is a profound mistrust of the mullahs, and of their perceived deceit, their support for terror, and their enduring hostility to America and its friends in the Middle East. … No one will be keen to be portrayed as soft on the Iranian mullahs.”
This from the man that formulated a policy that has offered “adverse consequences” but so far no “carrots.” Ross’s predictions are a self-fulfilling prophecy — and since he gets the big appointments, he gets to fulfill them. Taking reviews of his book with Makovsky, the Bipartisan Policy Committee report, and “Statecraft” as a whole, I’m not at all surprised that little progress has been made with Iran.
But, at least, that was his first try. He’s a three-time-loser on Israeli-Palestinian peace-making. With Iran, I had to put the pieces together, whereas with the Israeli-Palestinian issue, his record is right there for all to see. Putting Ross in charge of peace-making between the two seems to perfectly fit Einstein’s definition of insanity.
]]>It was Eli who first noticed Thomas Joscelyn’s piece on the Weekly Standard website Dec 27 in which he mocked Obama’s claim that Guantanamo was “probably the number one recruitment tool that is used by these jihadist organizations.”
In his post, entitled “Gitmo is Not Al Qaeda’s ‘Number One Recruitment Tool,’ Joscelyn, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), performed a quantitative analysis of key words that appeared in the “translations of 34 messages and interviews dlievered by top al Qaeda leaders operating in Pakistan and Afghanistan, including Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri, since January 2009.” Guantanamo, he found, was “mentioned in only 3 of the 34 messages. The other 31 messages contain no reference to Guantanamo.” Within those three messages, Guantanamo was mentioned a mere seven times, according to Joscelyn’s findings.
To show just how ignorant or misleading Obama was, Joscelyn naturally went on to compare that paltry total with the number of other key words used during the period:
“By way of comparison, all of the following keywords are mentioned far more frequently: Israel/Israeli/Israelis (98 mentions), Jew/Jews (129), Zionist(s) (94), Palestine/Palestinian (200), Gaza (131), and Crusader(s) (322). (Note: Zionist is often paired with Crusader in al Qaeda’s rhetoric.)
“Naturally, al Qaeda’s leaders also focus on the wars in Afghanistan (333 mentions) and Iraq (157). Pakistan (331), which is home to the jihadist hydra, is featured prominently, too. Al Qaeda has designs on each of these three nations and implores willing recruits to fight America and her allies there. Keywords related to other jihadist hotspots also feature more prominently than Gitmo, including Somalia (67 mentions), Yemen (18) and Chechnya (15).”
So compelling were Joscelyn’s little survey and conclusions that Karl Rove gleefully devoted his weekly column in the Wall Street Journal to it — “Gitmo Is Not A Recruiting Tool for Terrorists” on Dec 29. [It was published in the Dec 30 print edition.] Here’s his triumphant conclusion about Joscelyn’s findings:
[T]he president is wrong to assign such importance to Gitmo and, by implication, to suggest it would be a major setback to al Qaeda were he to close it, as he promised but failed to do by the end of his first year in office. Shuttering the facility would not take the wind out of terrorism, in part because it is not, and never has been, its ‘No. 1 recruitment tool.’
So, assuming that Joscelyn’s hypothesis and Rove’s assertion make sense — that there must be some correlation between key words used by al Qaeda leaders (in Afghanistan and Pakistan) in their public pronouncements and what they believe are the issues that are most likely to rally their intended audience behind them (and assuming that Joscelyn’s methodology for data collection and keyword analysis was sound), what can we conclude?
It seems we can safely say that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is seen by al Qaeda leaders as their “number one recruitment tool.” Indeed, taken together, “Israel/Israelis,” “Jew/Jews,” “Zionist(s),” “Palestine/Palestinian,” and “Gaza” account were mentioned an astonishing 652 times in 34 messages: that’s virtually twice as many times as “Afghanistan” or “Pakistan” which, given their geographic proximity to the al Qaeda leaders who are sending these messages, is quite remarkable.
But let’s be more conservative. As Joscelyn noted, “Zionist” was often paired with Crusader in al Qaeda’s rhetoric” and thus may not have anything directly to do with the Israel-Palestinian conflict per se. Similarly, “Jew/Jewish” is not necessarily relevant, either, so let’s delete those two keywords from the data set as well. Nonetheless, even if we confine our count to “Israel/Israelis,” “Palestine/Palestinian,” and “Gaza” — all of which are more likely to refer to the Israel-Palestinian conflict — we come up with 429 mentions, or some 25 percent more than runner-up “Afghanistan”!
Of course, this linkage between Islamist extremism and the Israel-Palestinian conflict is something that real scholars — and the military brass, most famously last March in testimony by Gen. David Petraeus when he was still CENTCOM chief — have long maintained. But it also a linkage that neo-conservatives, in particular, have repeatedly and strenuously denied. Take what Abe Foxman wrote in the Jerusalem Post shortly after Petraeus’ remark last spring as just one of a legion of examples: “The notion that al-Qaida’s hatred of America ….or the ongoing threat of extremist terrorist groups in the region is based on Israel’s announcement of building apartments [in East Jerusalem] is absurd on its face and smacks of scapegoating.”
But let’s go back to the logic behind Rove’s argument that if Gitmo were “the No. 1 recruitment toll” for al Qaeda, “then Al Qaeda leaders would emphasize it in their manifestos, statements and Internet postings, mentioning it early, frequently and at length.” Well, if that doesn’t apply to Gitmo, it seems to apply in spades to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, suggesting — again, using Rove’s logic — that resolving the conflict could “take the wind out of terrorism…”
Of course, Rove doesn’t go down the road, even if his logic points in that direction. Instead, he reverts to a tired neo-conservative mantra: “It is the combination of a fierce, unquenchable hatred for the U.S. and a profound sense of grievance against the modern world that helps Islamists to draw recruits,” he insists. Of course, the notion that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict may contribute importantly to that sense of grievance doesn’t occur to him, despite all of the evidence he recites from Jocelyn’s little study.
]]>In regards to Iran, toward the start of the discussion Sheen brought up the non-violent strategy of targeted boycotts to oppose, among other things, Israel’s occupation of Palestinian Territory. Foxman, exposing his hypocrisies, replies (with my emphasis):
I’m opposed to boycotts, period. I think boycotts hurt the wrong people, do not achieve their aims. They’re counterproductive. I’m not aware of any boycott — except for the boycott against South Africa — that has worked. And even there, it hurt innocent people…
So I’m opposed to boycotts, and I’m certainly opposed to boycotts whether against the whole state of Israel or segments of the state of Israel. We basically have a policy of being opposed to boycotts.
[Question from Sheen about whether Foxman's opposition is moral deficiencies or tactical inefficacy of the strategy.]
Well, the moral reason is boycotts basically hurt the wrong people, and there are innocent victims of the boycotts. There’s the same question about sanctions, whether sanctions work. … On a principled stance, we are opposed to boycotts.
Watch the video, starting from 16:40:
While Foxman says he doesn’t support visiting the morally reprehensible collective punishment of boycotts on Israelis, he has no qualms about using them to attack ordinary Iranians in an effort to force the country’s leadership to change its mind. This is exactly what Foxman did when the ADL whole-heartedly backed various sanctions packages — which he admits are plagued by the same moral quandaries as boycotts — against the Islamic Republic.
Here’s an ADL statement, co-issued by Foxman on June 9, welcoming UN sanctions against Iran (my bold again):
The world can live without Iranian oil exports, but the regime can’t. Empty oil tankers bypassing Iran on their way to fill up at Saudi, Kuwaiti and Emirati ports will concentrate the minds of Iran’s leaders unlike any action we can take short of war.
Foxman again, on June 17, celebrating EU sanctions against Iran that targeted that nation’s oil and natural gas sectors as well as finance and trade. His statement — a de facto endorsement of collective punishment of Iranians in order affect change in the Iran’s leadership — was issued despite the well-known fact that the leadership is notoriously obstinate:
While the impact on Iran’s finances will be in the future, these sanctions should impact the regime’s decision-making today.
The leadership of the Iranian opposition is unequivocally opposed to broad-based U.S. sanctions against Iran — both Mehdi Karroubi and Mir Hossein Mousavi have said as much, as have some exiles close to the Green movement like Hooman Majd. Even New York Times columnist Roger Cohen, whose writing shows that he is certainly no fan of the Islamic Republic’s leadership, is opposed to sanctions.
Foxman is always accusing critics of Israel of singling out the Jewish state. In this case, it turns out Foxman is the Israeli exceptionalist, period.
]]>Klein and Chesnoff write:
The current Jewish problem with Obama can be traced back to his first full day on the job. On January 21, 2009, he summoned his national security team to the Oval Office and laid out a tough new policy toward Israel. According to our sources, Obama said that in order to make good on his campaign promise to extricate 200,000 American troops from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. had to create a grand coalition of “moderate” Muslim states and Israel to isolate Iran, which has made no secret of its ambition to become the nuclear hegemon in the Middle East.
The only way to accomplish that goal, the president stated, was to eliminate the poisonous effect of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which provides Iran with an excuse to stir up trouble. Thus it was “a vital national interest of the United States” to stop Israel from building settlements in the occupied West Bank and housing in East Jerusalem, and force the Jewish state to resolve the Palestinian problem.
According to the article, Foxman tried to convince Obama that if the United Staes wants Israel to take risks for peace then “the best way is to make Israel feel that its staunch friend America is behind it.”
“You are absolutely wrong,” the president replied. “For the past eight years [under the Bush administration], Israel had a friend in the United States and it didn’t make peace.”
Obama’s response is the best possible argument against those who reject the concept of linkage, such as Foxman, or endorse a reverse linkage argument, such as the neoconservatives, who argue that pressuring Israel to make peace is best postponed until the U.S. has eradicated all of Israel’s enemies from the Middle East.
Having followed the reverse linkage line of reasoning in invading Iraq — as well as observing that the 2006 Lebanon War, the 2007 Hamas takeover of Gaza and the winter 2008-2009 Gaza War all occurred after Saddam Hussein had been removed from power — it seems clear Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol‘s promise that the road to peace “runs through Baghdad” was a dead-end.
Foxman continues his critique:
“I came away from the meeting convinced that Obama has introduced a new and dangerous strategy and that it’s revealing itself in steps,” Foxman told Edward Klein. “Unlike other administrations, this one is applying linkage in the Middle East. It’s saying that if you resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the messiah will come and the lions will lie down with the lambs. All the president’s advisers on the Middle East, starting with George Mitchell, believe in linkage, and they’re telling the president you have to prove to the Arab Muslim world that you are different than previous presidents and you can separate yourself from Israel, distance yourself from the settlements issue. After all, settlements are something that American Jews don’t like anyway, so it’s a win-win proposition.”
Foxman doesn’t even bother to seriously challenge the validity of linkage. (No one has suggested that “the messiah will come and the lions will lie down with the lambs,” either metaphorically or literally.) Instead, he and those others who oppose the White House’s position on settlements prefer to embellish the claims of linkage supporters, while refusing to engage in a real discussion about the failure of Israeli leadership to make concessions necessary for peace.
While many progressive American Jews are frustrated with the administration’s inability to convince Netanyahu to stop settlement construction, Klein and Chesnoff’s piece offers some of the strongest indications yet that the Obama administration is firmly grounded in the linkage strategy and has soundly rejected the reverse linkage argument.
]]>Whatever you may think of the proposed mosque and community center, lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question –should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion? That may happen in other countries, but we should never allow it to happen here.
This appears to be a none-too-subtle rebuke of Newt Gingrich’s bizarre-to-say-the-least claim that there “should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia.” Similarly, I can’t help but wonder whether Bloomberg’s professed hope that the mosque will “help repudiate the false and repugnant idea that the attacks of 9/11 were in any way consistent with Islam” (my emphasis) was an allusion to the aforementioned former half-term Alaska governor’s well-known adventures with the English language.
In any case, taken together with today’s ruling by the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission clearing the way for construction, Bloomberg’s statement should help put this phony controversy to rest. More than a few public figures have made themselves look awfully foolish in the process, however — Palin and Gingrich, to be sure, but probably no one more than Anti-Defamation League head Abe Foxman.
Full statement below the jump:
The following are Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s remarks as delivered on Governors Island:
“We have come here to Governors Island to stand where the earliest settlers first set foot in New Amsterdam, and where the seeds of religious tolerance were first planted. We’ve come here to see the inspiring symbol of liberty that, more than 250 years later, would greet millions of immigrants in the harbor, and we come here to state as strongly as ever – this is the freest City in the world. That’s what makes New York special and different and strong.
“Our doors are open to everyone – everyone with a dream and a willingness to work hard and play by the rules. New York City was built by immigrants, and it is sustained by immigrants – by people from more than a hundred different countries speaking more than two hundred different languages and professing every faith. And whether your parents were born here, or you came yesterday, you are a New Yorker.
“We may not always agree with every one of our neighbors. That’s life and it’s part of living in such a diverse and dense city. But we also recognize that part of being a New Yorker is living with your neighbors in mutual respect and tolerance. It was exactly that spirit of openness and acceptance that was attacked on 9/11.
“On that day, 3,000 people were killed because some murderous fanatics didn’t want us to enjoy the freedom to profess our own faiths, to speak our own minds, to follow our own dreams and to live our own lives.
“Of all our precious freedoms, the most important may be the freedom to worship as we wish. And it is a freedom that, even here in a City that is rooted in Dutch tolerance, was hard-won over many years. In the mid-1650s, the small Jewish community living in Lower Manhattan petitioned Dutch Governor Peter Stuyvesant for the right to build a synagogue – and they were turned down.
“In 1657, when Stuyvesant also prohibited Quakers from holding meetings, a group of non-Quakers in Queens signed the Flushing Remonstrance, a petition in defense of the right of Quakers and others to freely practice their religion. It was perhaps the first formal, political petition for religious freedom in the American colonies – and the organizer was thrown in jail and then banished from New Amsterdam.
“In the 1700s, even as religious freedom took hold in America, Catholics in New York were effectively prohibited from practicing their religion – and priests could be arrested. Largely as a result, the first Catholic parish in New York City was not established until the 1780’s – St. Peter’s on Barclay Street, which still stands just one block north of the World Trade Center site and one block south of the proposed mosque and community center.
“This morning, the City’s Landmark Preservation Commission unanimously voted not to extend landmark status to the building on Park Place where the mosque and community center are planned. The decision was based solely on the fact that there was little architectural significance to the building. But with or without landmark designation, there is nothing in the law that would prevent the owners from opening a mosque within the existing building. The simple fact is this building is private property, and the owners have a right to use the building as a house of worship.
“The government has no right whatsoever to deny that right – and if it were tried, the courts would almost certainly strike it down as a violation of the U.S. Constitution. Whatever you may think of the proposed mosque and community center, lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question – should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion? That may happen in other countries, but we should never allow it to happen here. This nation was founded on the principle that the government must never choose between religions, or favor one over another.
“The World Trade Center Site will forever hold a special place in our City, in our hearts. But we would be untrue to the best part of ourselves – and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans – if we said ‘no’ to a mosque in Lower Manhattan.
“Let us not forget that Muslims were among those murdered on 9/11 and that our Muslim neighbors grieved with us as New Yorkers and as Americans. We would betray our values – and play into our enemies’ hands – if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else. In fact, to cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists – and we should not stand for that.
“For that reason, I believe that this is an important test of the separation of church and state as we may see in our lifetime – as important a test – and it is critically important that we get it right.
“On September 11, 2001, thousands of first responders heroically rushed to the scene and saved tens of thousands of lives. More than 400 of those first responders did not make it out alive. In rushing into those burning buildings, not one of them asked ‘What God do you pray to?’ ‘What beliefs do you hold?’
“The attack was an act of war – and our first responders defended not only our City but also our country and our Constitution. We do not honor their lives by denying the very Constitutional rights they died protecting. We honor their lives by defending those rights – and the freedoms that the terrorists attacked.
“Of course, it is fair to ask the organizers of the mosque to show some special sensitivity to the situation – and in fact, their plan envisions reaching beyond their walls and building an interfaith community. By doing so, it is my hope that the mosque will help to bring our City even closer together and help repudiate the false and repugnant idea that the attacks of 9/11 were in any way consistent with Islam. Muslims are as much a part of our City and our country as the people of any faith and they are as welcome to worship in Lower Manhattan as any other group. In fact, they have been worshipping at the site for the better part of a year, as is their right.
“The local community board in Lower Manhattan voted overwhelming to support the proposal and if it moves forward, I expect the community center and mosque will add to the life and vitality of the neighborhood and the entire City.
“Political controversies come and go, but our values and our traditions endure – and there is no neighborhood in this City that is off limits to God’s love and mercy, as the religious leaders here with us today can attest.”
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