The initial attacks against Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense included a virtual mantra that the former Nebraska senator was “out of the mainstream” of thinking on the Middle East. Even in his endorsement of Hagel yesterday, Tom Friedman noted that “some of his views are not ‘mainstream.’” But that’s [...]]]> via Lobe Log

The initial attacks against Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense included a virtual mantra that the former Nebraska senator was “out of the mainstream” of thinking on the Middle East. Even in his endorsement of Hagel yesterday, Tom Friedman noted that “some of his views are not ‘mainstream.’” But that’s nonsense, particularly when it comes to the Middle East. The fact is this: Hagel’s views on the Middle East — favoring a “lighter footprint” in the region; taking a more even-handed approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; strong skepticism about any U.S. military intervention in Syria, and military intervention in general; opposition to an Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear program — very much reflect those of a significant majority of the U.S. public. We know that because poll after poll of U.S. public opinion during the last year and more shows it.

Now, as Elliott Abrams predictably points out on his blog about the results of a new Pew poll, it’s absolutely true that a significant plurality of Americans sympathize more with Israel than with the Palestinians. That is not in question and has been true for a very long time. But note in his post how he complains about public attitudes toward intervention in Syria, elements of which he and other neo-cons have been pushing for a long time. (Of course, Elliott blames Obama for the lack of public enthusiasm for intervention, just as he blames close to everything which, in his view, goes bad in the region, on Obama’s passivity or some other flaw, never recalling that his work as George W. Bush’s chief Mideast aide helped lay the groundwork for what Obama has had to deal with.) According to the poll, nearly two-thirds of respondents said they feel the U.S. has no responsibility for involving itself in Syria and 65% oppose even the arming of anti-Assad rebels. So it’s the neo-con view that Washington should get more involved in support of the rebels which, in this case, is definitely “outside the mainstream.” Similarly, take a PIPA poll from early October this year. Asked whether the U.S. should become more or less involved in the Middle East, 23% opted for the former. But a whopping 63% said the U.S. should become “less involved.” Again, the neo-con view doesn’t represent the “mainstream.” Hagel — and Obama, for that matter, seem much closer.

But back to the U.S. public’s views about Israel (and I apologize for not doing a more thorough analysis, but the circumstances in which I find myself over this vacation are such that I can’t do the kind of research and linking I’d like to). What worries the neo-cons and the Israel lobby about Hagel is that while he supports Israel, he doesn’t see it as having the same or, in some cases, similar interests and values as the United States. At times, he even sees big differences in interests between the two countries, especially in the Middle East. Neo-cons and the Israel lobby, on the other hand, are devoted to the proposition that their interests and values are one and the same. To some extent, the success of those efforts are reflected in the greater sympathy that a large plurality of Americans feel for Israel, as opposed to the Palestinians. (There are other reasons why this is so, too.)

But let’s consider just a few polling results over the past year that might shed some light on how the general public perceives the convergence of U.S. and Israeli interests. Back in February, Gallup did their annual survey of the favorability ratings of individual countries around the world. If the Israel lobby had its way, Israel would rank at the top, but that’s not the case at all. In fact, while Israel ranks relatively high, it’s quite amazing to consider which countries are higher yet. Of course, the leading Anglosphere countries top the list, with Canada at 96%, Australia at 93%, and Great Britain at 90%. One would expect Israel to come in at right around Britain’s level, but that’s not the case. Germany ranked #4 at 86%, followed by Japan at 83%; and — get this! — perfidious France, which only ten years ago almost lost its claim to fried potatoes sold in the Congressional cafeterias because of its opposition to the neocon-inspired invasion of Iraq, scored 75%. And, tied with France, was…India(!!!!), which has no serious military relationship, let alone an alliance, with the U.S. and won’t even buy our nuclear plants or fighter jets. Only then, after France and India, comes Israel, at 71%! While the view of Israel is still clearly positive, it hardly suggests that the general public, unlike the Congress and its many standing ovations for Bibi Netanyahu, accepts the Jewish state as its most loyal and steadfast ally.

Also take a look at the latest in a series of quadrennial polls conducted earlier this year and released in September by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. While the general public hopes to reduce direct U.S. involvement in the Middle East, a 50% plurality said one of the very few situations in which they would support the deployment of U.S. troops there would be as part of a peacekeeping force to help ensure an Israeli-Palestinian settlement. Asked how they would feel if Israel was attacked by its neighbors, a 50% plurality would oppose the U.S. taking any military action; 47% percent said they would favor it.

Asked about U.S. economic aid to Israel, a mere 11% said it should be increased and another 45% said it should remain the same. But 23% said it should be reduced, while 18% said it should be halted altogether. Similar figures applied to military aid (which Congress and the administration continue to increase, what with Iron Dome, etc.)

Most important — and this goes to the latest Pew stats cited by Abrams — the Council asked about what side, if any, the U.S. should take in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. While 30% said Washington should take Israel’s side — despite their lip-service to a two-state solution, the vast majority of members of Congress clearly fall into that category with its various AIPAC-drafted resolutions, statements, and letters — and only three percent said it should side with the Palestinians, while a strong 65% majority said it should take neither side. This is consistent with virtually all polling done on this question, which, it bears repeating, is far more relevant than the question of which side you sympathize with most. The fact is, around two-thirds of the U.S. public believes Washington should act as an honest broker between the two sides, which, as I understand it, is what Hagel has long argued. Again, on this, it’s the neo-cons and the Israel lobby that lies outside the mainstream.

Finally, the Chicago Council asked respondents to say what they would prefer the U.S. do if Israel attacks Iran’s nuclear facilities, and Iran retaliated against Israel. The question was, should the U.S. “bring its military on the side of Israel against Iran?” Thirty-eight percent of respondents said yes, but a 56% majority said no. (Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Dempsey, of course, also suggested his answer would be no.) Of course, this is not the reigning view in Congress, at least at the moment.

As I noted, this is a pretty cursory glance at some polls about how the general public sees the identity or difference in interests between the U.S. and Israel. But I’m confident that if you troll among many polls, these results would be pretty representative. Like Hagel, the general public has expressed support in various surveys for a two-state solution along the Clinton parameters, but I don’t think most neocons support that, and the Israel lobby takes its cues from Bibi whose sincerity on the issue is subject to considerable doubt, particularly in light of the most recent settlement announcements and activity. Again, it’s the neocons who appear outside the mainstream, certainly not Hagel. The disconnect here is found in Congress where the lobby exercises the most influence. Indeed, the measure of the influence — and/or intimidation — exerted by the lobby can be seen precisely in that disconnect between Congress (and the Beltway Bubble) and the general public.

Photo: Junko Kimura/Getty Images

Faced with a rise in anti-Muslim sentiment and a well-funded campaign to promote Islamophobia, a coalition of faith and religious freedom groups Thursday said it will circulate a new pamphlet on frequently asked questions (FAQs) about Islam and U.S. Muslims to elected officials across the United States.

The initiative, which coincides [...]]]> via IPS News

Faced with a rise in anti-Muslim sentiment and a well-funded campaign to promote Islamophobia, a coalition of faith and religious freedom groups Thursday said it will circulate a new pamphlet on frequently asked questions (FAQs) about Islam and U.S. Muslims to elected officials across the United States.

The initiative, which coincides with the appearance in subway stations in New York City and Washington of pro-Israel ads equating the Jewish state with “civilised man” and “Jihad” with “savages”, is designed to rebut the notion that Muslims pose a threat to U.S. values and way of life.

“Nothing gives weight to bigotry more than ignorance,” said Rev. Welton Gaddy, a Baptist minister who is president of the Interfaith Alliance, a grassroots organisation of leaders representing 75 faith traditions. “The FAQ enables people to be spared of an agenda-driven fear and to be done with a negative movement born of misinformation…”

Gaddy was joined by Charles Haynes, director of the Religious Freedom Project of the Freedom Forum’s First Amendment Center which co-sponsored the new 13-page pamphlet, entitled “What is the Truth About American Muslims?”

“In my view,” Haynes said in reference to the so-called “Stop Islamisation of America” (SIOA) movement that, among other things, has sponsored the subway ads, “this campaign to spread hate and fear is the most significant threat to religious freedom in America today.”

“Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the anti-Muslim narrative has migrated from the right-wing fringe into the mainstream political arena – and is now parroted by a growing number of political and religious leaders,” he said.

Indeed, public opinion polls have shown a gradual rise in Islamophobia here over the past 11 years, most recently in the wake of last month’s anti-U.S. demonstrations across the Islamic world that were triggered by a vulgar internet video mocking the Muslim Prophet Muhammad. The video, supposedly a trailer for a longer movie, was reportedly produced by a California-based, Egyptian-born Copt, although the source of its funding remains unclear.

While a majority (53 percent) of U.S. respondents say they believe that it is possible to find “common ground” between Muslims and the West, that majority has shrunk since 9/11, according to a poll released earlier this week by the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA). Only one year ago, it stood at 59 percent, and in November 2001 – just two months after 9/11 – it was 68 percent.

Conversely, the minority that agreed with the notion that “Islamic religious and social traditions are intolerant and fundamentally incompatible with Western culture” rose from 26 percent in 2001, to 37 percent last year, and 42 percent when the latest PIPA poll was conducted two weeks ago.

In another poll conducted by the Pew Research Center last year which asked respondents “how much support for extremism is there among Muslim Americans”, 40 percent said there was either a “great deal” or a “fair amount”, while only a narrow plurality (45 percent) disagreed.

In addition to the violent images of conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere in the Islamic world that have been beamed onto U.S. television screens and home computers since 9/11, popular beliefs that Muslims are inherently more hostile and dangerous have been propagated by a small network of funders, bloggers, pundits and groups documented in a 2011 report, entitled “Fear, Inc.,” by the Center for American Progress (CAP).

It identified seven foundations – most of them associated with the far-right in the U.S., as well as several Jewish family foundations that have supported right-wing and settler groups in Israel – that provided more than 42 million dollars between 2001 and 2009 to key individuals and organisations who have spread an Islamophobic message through, among other means, videos, newspaper op-eds, radio and television talk shows, paid ads, and local demonstrations against mosques.

Among the most prominent recipients have been the Center for Security Policy, the Middle East Forum, the Investigative Project on Terrorism, the Society of Americans for National Existence, as well as SIOA, the group, which, along with the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), is sponsoring the current subway ad campaign.

“Together, this core group of deeply intertwined individuals and organizations manufacture and exaggerate threats of ‘creeping Sharia’, Islamic domination of the West, and purported obligatory calls to violence against all non-Muslims by the Quran,” according to the CAP report.

It noted that their message was also echoed by leaders of the Christian Right and some Republican politicians, including several who ran for president this year, such as former speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich.

Leaders of many mainstream Jewish and Christian denominations have denounced specific aspects of the network’s initiatives, such as its efforts to derail the construction of a Muslim community center near the so-called “Ground Zero” site where Manhattan’s Twin Towers were destroyed on 9/11; distribute Islamophobic videos, such as ‘Obsession’; and to lobby state legislatures to ban the application of “Sharia”, or Islamic law, in their jurisdictions.

The new pamphlet, however, marks the first effort by faith groups and religious freedom advocates to directly rebut common misconceptions and claims made against Muslims and their theology by, among other things, explaining the meaning of “jihad”, and the sources, practice, and aims of Sharia.

“In a time when misinformation about and misunderstandings of Islam and of the American Muslim community are widespread, our goal is to provide the public with accurate answers to understandable questions,” said Gaddy, who noted that the authors consulted closely with well-recognised Muslim scholars in drafting the document.

Twenty-one religious and secular organisations, including the Disciples of Christ, the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good, the Presbyterian Church, the United Church of Christ, the United Methodist Church, and Rabbis for Human Rights-North America endorsed the pamphlet, as did several major Muslim and Sikh organisations.

Six people were killed at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin last summer by an individual who had mistakenly believed he was attacking Muslims.

Haynes stressed that the response to the Islamophobia campaign was late. “We have left the field to the people who demonised Muslims, and they have won the day,” he said. “We’re playing catch-up on this nonsense.”

In bold black-and-white lettering, the subway ad that first appeared in New York last month and then in Washington this week states: “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.”

A coalition of 157 local religious groups have formally objected to the transit authority over the ad, and demanded that it issue disclaimers alongside the ads as the San Francisco transit authority did when the same groups took out ads on buses this summer.

A number of religious groups, including Sojourners, an evangelical group, Rabbis for Human Rights, and the United Methodist Church are running counter-ads in New York and Washington.

When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the U.N. General Assembly last month that Iran’s nuclear programme was unlikely to breach his “red line” for presumed military action until next spring or summer, many observers here looked forward to some relief from the nearly incessant drumbeat for war by U.S. [...]]]> via IPS News

When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the U.N. General Assembly last month that Iran’s nuclear programme was unlikely to breach his “red line” for presumed military action until next spring or summer, many observers here looked forward to some relief from the nearly incessant drumbeat for war by U.S. neo-conservatives and other hawks.

But even as the Barack Obama administration and its Western European allies prepare a new round of sanctions to add to what already is perhaps the harshest sanctions regime imposed against a U.N. member state, the war drums keep beating.

Earlier this week, Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham said he is working on a new Congressional resolution he hopes to pass in any lame-duck session after the Nov. 6 elections that would promise Israel U.S. support, including military assistance, if it attacks Iran.

And after the new Congress convenes in January, he suggested he would push yet another resolution that would give the president – whether the incumbent, Obama, or his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney – broad authority to take military action if sanctions don’t curb Iran’s nuclear programme.

“The 30,000-foot view of Iran is very bipartisan,” he told the Capitol Hill newspaper, ‘Roll Call’.

“This regime is crazy, they’re up to no good, they are a cancer spreading in the Mideast. …Almost all of the Democrats and Republicans buy into the idea that we can’t give them a nuclear capability,” he said.

While Graham, who succeeded last month in pushing through the Senate – by a 90-1 margin – a resolution ruling out “containment” as an option for dealing with a nuclear weapons-capable Iran, disclosed his new plans, the CEO of the influential foreignpolicy.com website published an article in which he claimed that the U.S. and Israel were actively considering a joint “surgical strike” against Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities.

Citing an unnamed source “close to the discussions”, David Rothkopf, a well-connected former national security official under President Bill Clinton, claimed that such a strike “might take only ‘a couple of hours’ in the best case and only would involve a ‘day or two’ overall,” using primarily bombers and drones.

Such an attack, according to “advocates for this approach” cited by Rothkopf, could set back Iran’s nuclear programme “many years, and doing so “without civilian casualties”.

In an echo of the extravagant claims by neo-conservatives that preceded the attack on Iraq, one “advocate” told Rothkopf such an attack would have “transformative outcome: saving Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, reanimating the peace process, securing the Gulf, sending an unequivocal message to Russia and China, and assuring American ascendancy in the region for a decade to come.”

Rothkopf’s article spurred a flurry of speculation about his source – at least one keen observer pointed to Israeli Amb. Michael Oren, a long-time personal friend who has kept up his own drumbeat against Iran on the op-ed pages of U.S. newspapers.

It also caused consternation among most informed analysts, if only because of the Obama administration’s not-so-thinly-veiled opposition to any military strike in the short- to medium term and the Pentagon’s preference, if it were ordered to attack, for a broad offensive likely to stretch over many weeks.

“The idea that the American military would agree to any quick single strike seems fantastical to me,” said Jon Wolfsthal, a non-proliferation expert who served in the Obama White House until earlier this year. “Should we decide to go, I believe U.S. military planners will – rightly – want to go big and start with air defence and communication suppression. This means many hundreds of strikes and a lot of casualties.”

Meanwhile, the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC), a think tank that has issued a succession of hawkish reports by a special task force on Iran since 2008, released a new study here Thursday on the potential economic costs – as measured by the likely increases in the price of oil – of a “nuclear Iran”.

The 47-page report, “”, appeared intended to counter warnings by other experts that an Israeli or U.S. attack on Iran would send oil prices skyward – as high as three times the current price depending on the actual disruption in oil traffic – with disastrous effects on the global economy.

“In the public debate during the last year, a recurring concern has been the economic risks posed by the available means for preventing a nuclear Iran, whether tough sanctions or military action,” it began. “Such risks are a legitimate concern.”

“…Inaction, too, exposes the United States to economic risks,” the task force, which includes a number of neo-conservative former officials of the George W. Bush administration, noted.

The report provides a variety of possible scenarios and estimates the probabilities of each. It stressed that a “nuclear Iran” – which went undefined in the report but which one task force staffer described as the point at which Tehran’s neighbours, notably Saudi Arabia and Israel, were persuaded that it either had a weapon or its acquisition was imminent – would “significantly alter the geopolitical and strategic landscape of the Middle East, raising the likelihood of instability, terrorism, or conflict that could interrupt the region’s oil exports”.

“It’s hard to imagine Iran with a nuclear umbrella as behaving more responsibly than they do today,” said Amb. Dennis Ross, a task force member who served as President Barack Obama’s top Iran adviser until late last year.

And while Washington would probably try to persuade Saudi Arabia not to go nuclear itself, that would prove unavailing, according to Ross, who quoted King Abdullah as telling him, “If they (the Iranians) get it, we get it.”

“Our analysis indicates that the expectation of instability and conflict that a nuclear Iran could generate in global energy markets could roughly increase the price of oil by between 10 and 25 percent,” according to the report.

If actual hostilities broke out between a nuclear Iran and Saudi Arabia or Israel, the price could far higher, particularly in the event of a nuclear exchange, the report found. It rated the chances of an Iran-Israel and an Iran-Saudi nuclear exchange at 20 percent and 15 percent, respectively, within three years of the perception that Iran had become a nuclear state.

Whether these latest efforts by hawks to maintain the momentum toward confrontation with Iran will succeed remains to be seen.

While both presidential candidates have stressed that they are determined to prevent Iran from attaining nuclear status, the emphasis for now should be placed on sanctions and that a military attack should only be considered as a last resort.

At the same time, a war-weary U.S. public shows little enthusiasm for the kind of resolution sought by Graham in support of an Israeli attack on Iran.

In a survey of more than 700 respondents concluded by the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA), a week ago, 29 percent said Washington should discourage Israel from taking such action, while 53 percent said the U.S. should stay neutral. Only 12 percent said the U.S. should encourage Israel to strike.