Can Liberal Zionism Survive Israel’s New Travel Ban?

from The Nation

Israel’s new anti-BDS law is antagonizing some of the state’s most loyal supporters, rewriting a decades-old relationship.


By Mairav ZonszeinYESTERDAY 1:09 PM

Israel ramped up its fight against the global boycott movement last week, when the Knesset passed its own travel ban—a new law barring entry to any noncitizen or non–permanent resident who has publicly called for a boycott of Israel. While it has yet to be seen how the law will be implemented, the language applies broadly to any person, organization, or body that has called for a boycott of Israel in any public media or has “committed to participate in such a boycott.” Although the law appears primarily to be targeting foreign nationals who seek to enter the West Bank (which requires approval by Israeli border officials), it is likely to have the most direct effect on Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza who seek to enter Israel for a variety of personal and humanitarian reasons.

The law is essentially an extension of a 2011 anti-boycott law, which seeks to penalize Israelis who try to oppose the occupation by refusing to buy products made in the settlements or to attend cultural or academic events in the settlements. As with that law, this new one not only targets people who call for a boycott that applies to all of Israel but also to those who call for a boycott targeted solely at the settlements, which are considered illegal under international law.

By making no distinction between someone who opposes the post-1967 configuration of Israel and someone who challenges the framework of the state that was created in 1948, the Israeli government is lumping together progressive Zionists, non-Zionists, and anti-Zionists. Israel has itself been doing this for a long time internally by implementing policies that erase the Green Line and that discriminate against Palestinians regardless of whether they live in a Bedouin village inside Israel or a Palestinian village inside the West Bank, as well as by trying to limit the activities of Israeli human-rights activists. The difference with this law is that now Israel is turning this approach outward as part of its foreign policy.

How this new approach will play out politically—whether it will energize the BDS movement or scare off potential supporters—remains to be seen. But of one shift there is little doubt: The new law will necessarily redefine relations with diaspora Jews. By reconfiguring alliances based not on whether a person is Jewish but on whether a person is sufficiently “pro-Israel”—which Israel has made clear means being pro-settlement, pro-Occupation, and anti-Palestinian—Israel has indicated that it is no longer interested in the ingathering of Jews simply because they are Jewish. What matters is whether a person toes the government line, regardless of whether they are Jewish or not.

While the new law sent shock waves throughout the diaspora community, one group that has been particularly rattled are American liberals, and specifically American Jewish liberals. These are men and women who strongly oppose settlements and occupation while remaining loyal to the faded possibility of Israel as Jewish and democratic state; who have continued to promote the idea of a two-state solution with vigor even as Israel has undermined and renounced it. They are people who condemn the BDS movement, often stridently, even as some have come to advocate for a modified, settlement-based boycott. And they are people who time and again have gone to bat for Israel even as it has spat in their faces. In short, they are some of the most invested and engaged Israel supporters, true believers who grapple with it and are critical of it because they care. Now, with this law, Israel is pushing them into a corner where they must choose once and for all which side they are on: the side of universal values and human rights, or the side of Jewish nationalism, perennial military occupation, and inequality.

Already, leading American Jewish liberals have come out against the law, among them Peter Beinart, who publicly called for a boycott of settlements in 2012, and Letty Cotty Pogrebin, a veteran American Jewish leader and founder of Ms. magazine, who wrote in Haaretz, “If supporting a non-violent boycott of the settlements makes me an enemy of the Israeli state, so be it.” Meanwhile, over one hundred Jewish studies scholars, including “those who oppose the BDS movement, those who oppose BDS but support a settlement boycott, and those who support BDS,” have threatened to not visit Israel in protest, and have announced a petition opposing the law on grounds it is bad for Israel, bad for democracy, and bad for free speech. And several American Jewish organizations, including J Street and Americans for Peace Now, are sponsoring an open letter to Israeli Ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, entitled “Democracies don’t punish dissent,” which advises that “it’s time for Israel to stop using political litmus tests.”

As new law threatens to upend these old relations, it’s worth recalling an earlier moment in Israeli and American Jewish history. After Israel was established, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion quickly pushed for American Jews to fulfill the Zionist mission and move to Israel. This idea, however, generated considerable consternation in some circles, particularly among some of the Jewish American leadership, who rejected the claim that American Jews were in exile and, wary of accusations of split loyalty, instead asserted their place firmly in the United States. As tension mounted, Ben-Gurion and Jacob Blaustein, the leader of the American Jewish Congress, which was then an unabashedly non-Zionist organization, engaged in 1950 in a series of exchanges known as the Ben-Gurion-Blaustein Agreement, in which Israel made clear it did not expect Jews to move to Israel, that “They owe no political allegiance to Israel.” Nonetheless, American Jews formulated a functional consensus of support for Israel from afar, eventually building a strong political and emotional allegiance that became known as being “pro-Israel.”

In some ways, this new anti-boycott law takes us back to that landmark moment and redefines the agreement by freeing American Jews of any expectations. Israel is sending the message that it in fact does not want or need American Jewish involvement if that involvement takes the form of pitched criticism or dissent, and that the cultural or historical connection is just not that important to them. Now that there is a robust pro-Israel base in the United States comprised of Islamophobic Republicans, messianic Christian Evangelicals, and right-wing Jews who unconditionally support Israel, the government no longer feels the need to deal with critical American liberal Jews.

Most Americans—not just Jewish ones—have over the decades supported Israel on the basis that it provided a safe haven for Jews following the centuries of anti-Semitism that culminated in the Holocaust. But in practice, Israel’s policies of dispossession and discrimination have long overshadowed its raison d’être, creating increasing dissonance with American “pro-Israel” liberals. In the face of its diminishing legitimacy, Israel has gone on the offensive by attacking the legitimacy of criticism and dissent. It has been doing so for years by attempting to quash Palestinian nonviolent resistance and, more recently, by silencing Israeli human-rights activists and organizations. Now it is turning this policy outwards against its greatest allies abroad. It has made clear that being pro-Israel has nothing to do with being Jewish, or liberal, or supporting democratic values, human rights, or critical thinking. By trying to fend off criticism of its democratic infractions, it has doubled down its anti-democratic policies, declaring war on American liberals and, specifically when it comes to the Jewish community, turning Israel’s greatest allies into its greatest nemese

How Much of the Globe’s Humanitarian Crisis Is the United States’ Fault?

from Truthdig
Posted on Mar 12, 2017

By Juan Cole / Informed Comment


The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs warned Saturday that the globe is facing the worst humanitarian crisis since the end of World War II.

2016 set post-war records in misery.

* More than 76 million persons from 31 countries needed assistance.

* More than 51 million persons were displaced (i.e. kicked out of their homes and made homeless). That is the highest number since WW II.

*There were more than 400 natural disasters in the most recent year for which there is a full count (2014)

* In these 400 disasters, 17,000 people died

* The disasters caused $82 billion in damages.

That’s in general. There were 6 “Level 3” emergencies in particular countries. Level 3 is the most severe category the UN has, implying large-scale humanitarian crises.

In 2016 the Level 3 emergencies were: Iraq, Syria, Yemen, South Sudan, Philippines, South Sudan and the Central African Republic.

What strikes me is how up to its neck the United States is in creating these crises.

Iraq’s death spiral was kicked off when George W. Bush invaded and occupied it under false pretenses. From 2003 to the present, Iraq has never had a chance to get back to normal. The US invasion led to 4 million people being displaced. Likely hundreds of thousands died.

Then the US is up to its neck in the Yemen War, wherein Washington supports the mad Saudi-led bombing raids on backward little Yemen. It helps the jet fighters refuel and the Pentagon even helps choose targets for the forces of the coalition, which is mostly led by Saudi Arabia.

The US has prolonged the Syrian Civil War by strongly backing, via the Saudis and Turkey, one side– the fundamentalist rebels. Half of the 22 million Syrians are displaced.

The US pushed for the secession of South Sudan from Sudan, but then appears, typically, to have done nothing about nation-building. Tribal feuds have riven the new country. In the old days, the Khartoum regime could at least intervene to broker a deal but now it is irrelevant and the US hasn’t substituted.

As for the Philippines, its crisis is because of unusually powerful typhoons, which are caused by the Pacific Ocean becoming warmer. The US, by putting billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, has created the possibility of climate change on steroids.

So at the very time when the Trump administration wants to turn its back on the world’s migrants, the globe’s worst crises have accelerated.

Steve Bannon’s Judeo-Christian ‘Camp of the Saints’

from mondoweiss.net
US Politics Jonathan Ofir on March 11, 2017

The Camp of the Saints, the novel Steve Bannon favors

“Everywhere, rivers of sperm, streaming over bodies, oozing between breasts, and buttocks, and thighs, and lips, and fingers.”

This is not a description of a hard-core porn-film. This is an excerpt from Jean Raspail’s 1973 French novel, “Camp of the Saints”.

The description is that of a fictional Indian ‘armada’ of 800,000 “wretched creatures” consisting of “scraggy branches, brown and black” with “fleshless Gandhi-arms”, who have come to take over France – that is white Europe – the ‘camp of the saints’.

The title is derived from St. John’s Revelation (20:9):

“And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city: and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.”

Now get this: This rabidly racist novel is Donald Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon’s model of perception.

Last week, the Huffington Post ran a piece, noting the numerous times (recorded in quote and audio) Bannon has referred to the white-supremacist cult favorite ‘Camp of the Saints’ as a model. It is noted that upon the novel’s release in the United States in 1975, the influential book review magazine Kirkus Reviews wrote:

“The publishers are presenting The Camp of the Saints as a major event, and it probably is, in much the same sense that Mein Kampf was a major event.”

Since October 2015, Bannon is on record for numerous references to the novel:

“It’s been almost a Camp of the Saints-type invasion into Central and then Western and Northern Europe” (October 2015).

“The whole thing in Europe is all about immigration. It’s a global issue today — this kind of global Camp of the Saints” (January 2016)

“It’s not a migration. It’s really an invasion. I call it the Camp of the Saints.” (January 2016)

“When we first started talking about this a year ago, we called it the Camp of the Saints. … I mean, this is Camp of the Saints, isn’t it?” (April 2016)

I can’t help doing a pun, and calling this one Bannon’s “My Camp”.

The narrative is perfect for Bannon and the Alt-Right, in that it mocks the left-wing and humanistic liberals who welcome the refugees. They too are tramped upon by the careless, selfish and cultureless savages.

The implication of the Christian-white-supremacist notion in the term ‘camp of the saints’ is not merely a demonization of the non-European and non-white ‘others’, but also a parallel aggrandization and sanctification of ‘us’ – the white, the western, the Christian… But wait, something doesn’t quite fit. Bannon’s “Judeo-Christian” narrative.

Bannon has regularly invoked a Judeo-Christian identity. An exchange between Bannon and now Attorney-General Jeff Sessions from last year, goes:

Bannon: “Do you believe the elites in this country have the backbone, have the belief in the underlying principles of the Judeo-Christian west to actually win this war?”

Sessions: “I’m worried about that….They’re eroding, regularly it seems to me, classical American values that are so critical to our success”.

Bannon gave a speech in 2014 at the Vatican. He said:

“If you look back at the long history of the Judeo-Christian west struggle against Islam, I believe that our forefathers kept their stance, and I think they did the right thing. [….] They were able to stave this off, and they were able to defeat it, and they were able to bequeath to us a church and a civilization that really is the flower of mankind”.

That should scare people, really it should – the notion of a fundamentalist ‘Judeo-Christian’ holy-war by the west, as a bulwark against a supposedly barbaric, uncivilized Islam.

But wait, where have we heard this before?

“For Europe, we would form part of a bulwark against Asia there [Palestine], we would serve as the advance post of civilization against barbarism.” – Theodore Herzl, Der Judenstaat.

Bannon’s racism is hardly worth discussing. But what about anti-Semitism? Could he be anti-Semitic even if he says ‘Judeo-Christian’? Ostensibly, the ‘Judeo-Christian’ narrative cancels that option out – I mean, Jews are in the ‘camp of saints’, right?

As Shane Burley noted in a coverage of the Alt-Right, when Richard Spencer was asked about the very essence of the Alt-Right, he answered it first with one word: Inequality. He then elaborated that the Alt Right was built on the truth that “all men were created unequal.”

Essentially then, for the Christian white supremacists, in the more liberal case, Jews could well be described as ‘separate but equal’.

Three months ago, when Spencer was challenged by Texas Hillel Rabbi Matt Rosenberg, the rabbi said:

“My tradition teaches a message of radical inclusion and love. Will you sit down and learn Torah with me, and learn love?”

Spencer left Rosenberg speechless when he answered him:

“Do you really want radical inclusion into the State of Israel? And by that I mean radical inclusion. Maybe all of the Middle East could go move in to Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. Would you really want that?”, Spencer said.

It was as if Spencer had stuck a knife straight into Rabbi Rosenberg’s Jewish-Zionist heart, and Rosenberg kept losing that debate, because he really couldn’t reconcile those values of ‘radical inclusion and love’ with his other pet – Zionism.

Spencer makes no secret of his appreciation for Jews, when they are exclusivist. “Jews exist precisely because you did not assimilate,” Spencer went on. “That is why Jews are a coherent people with a history and a culture and a future. It’s because you had a sense of yourselves. I respect that about you. I want my people to have that same sense of themselves.” This is why Spencer calls his white-supremacy a kind of “white-Zionism”.

Usage of Jews in order to rebuff allegations of anti-Semitism can reach an appalling degree, as when President Trump last month (February 15th) dodged a question regarding a wave of anti-Semitic incidents, by using his family as human shields. He was asked:

“Mr. President, since your election campaign and even after your victory, we’ve seen a sharp rise in anti-Semitic — anti- Semitic incidents across the United States. And I wonder, what do you say to those among the Jewish community in the states and in Israel and maybe around the world who believe and feel that your administration is playing with xenophobia and maybe racist tones?”

After dodging the question with a long boast of his electoral victory, Trump turned to dodge it using his family: his Jewish son-in-law (and advisor) Jared Kushner, as well as his ‘beautiful [Jewish] grandchildren’.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even backed him in that. He simply injected more schmaltz to aid Trump:

“If I can respond to something that I know from personal experience, I’ve known President Trump for many years, and to allude to him or to his people, his team, some of whom I’ve known for many years too — can I reveal, Jared, how long we’ve known you? … There is no greater supporter of the Jewish people and the Jewish state than President Donald Trump. I think we should put that to rest.”

But Trump had never addressed the central question: the wave of anti-Semitic incidents. A day later (February 16th), a Jewish-Orthodox reporter made a sincere effort to clarify that this was NOT just personal to Trump:

“So, first of all, my name is Jake Turx. I haven’t seen anybody in my community accuse either yourself or anyone on your staff of being anti-Semitic. We understand that you have Jewish grandchildren — you are their zayde [granfather in Yiddish]. However, what we are concerned about and what we haven’t being heard addressed is how the government is planning to take care of it. There are reports that 48 bomb threats have been made against Jewish centers across the country in the last couple of weeks. There are people committing anti-Semitic acts or threatening to—”

But to no avail. Trump dodged it again, this time by attacking Turx for being a ‘liar’ (because the question wasn’t as ‘straight and simple’ as it was supposed to be, according to Trump), as well as attacking the ‘press’ as a whole.

“He said he was going to ask a easy question — okay sit down, I understand the rest of your question. So here’s the story folks, number one, I am the least anti-Semitic person that you have seen in your entire life. Number two, racism. The least racist person. We did relatively well — quiet, quiet, quiet — see he lied about what was going to be a very straight simple question. I hate the charge. I find it repulsive, I hate even the question because people that know me and you heard the Prime Minister, you heard Netanyahu yesterday. Did you hear him, Bibi, he said I’ve known Donald Trump for a long time and said forget it so you should take that instead of getting up and asking a very insulting question like that. Just shows you about the press but that’s the way the press is.”

Thus, again, Trump uses ‘Bibi’s’ endorsement of him. If ‘Bibi’ said ‘forget it’, then everyone should forget it.

Former Anti-Defamation League chair Abraham Foxman is also running the same line about the anti-semitic incidents, as noted by The Forward last week:

“I’m telling them: ‘Cool it, cool it. But it’s very tough. People are very emotional.”

The Forward further notes that

“even though Foxman believes Trump empowered haters with his appeals to far right wing white nationalists, he does not think the president himself is a bigot. “He legitimized it, but he did not create it,” Foxman said. “Trump is not an anti-Semite.”

Oh boy. Read that sentence again: “He legitimized it, but he did not create it”. Neither did Foxman create Trump – but he just legitimized his empowering of far right wing nationalist haters.

Larry Solov, the Israeli-Jewish co-founder of Breitbart News, says in his own article that

“a lot of people don’t realize this but Breitbart News Network really got its start in Jerusalem”… “One night in Jerusalem, when we were getting ready for dinner, Andrew [Breitbart, ed.] turned to me and asked if I would de-partner from the 800-person law firm where I was practicing and become business partners with him. He said he needed my help to create a media company. He needed my help to “change the world.”

The cover photo for the article portrays what appears to be the founding group, with Netanyahu at the front.

The senior editor of Breitbart is Joel Pollak, an Orthodox Jew. Appearing a couple of weeks ago on the ABC program The View, Pollak was asked by Joy Behar to explain “the rise of anti-Semitism,”

Pollak framed the issue as an exclusively left-wing matter (which would conveniently conflate it with Palestinian solidarity and popular protests against Israel), saying:

“I’m really glad the media finally woke up to this phenomena. It started quite a long time ago, long before Donald Trump ran for president, particularly in California where I live, on college campuses, there’s been a rising tide of anti-Semitism linked to far left-wing criticism of Israel. It’s very tough to be a Jewish student on some of these campuses nowadays.”

Pollak did the same Jewish-human-shielding trick here:

“And I think that I feel very proud that Donald Trump not only is one of the most pro-Israel presidents that we’ve ever had, but his daughter Ivanka tonight will light the Sabbath candles just like my wife will, and bring in the Sabbath. To me, that is something extraordinary in America history”, he said.

Behar didn’t give up:

“But you know that phrase, one of my best friends is Jewish, it’s meaningless really. You can still be an anti-Semite and have Jewish relatives.”

Pollack, recovering from Behar’s near-knock-out, still tries to save his soul:

“I agree with you. When people say my friends are Jewish, it doesn’t cut it”.

Behar: “Or I have a black friend”.

Pollak: “But when your in-laws are Jewish, you have a little more credibility.”

Now isn’t that interesting? The ‘some of my best friends are Jewish’ thing doesn’t really cut it – but to be married in with Jews – that’s something. That gives credibility.

I think there’s something very central to be understood here:

The old-fashioned anti-Semitism from before Israel’s existence, has historically had a predominantly Christian-white constituency, which applied hate of Jews as a general religious-ethnic target. With the rise of Zionism, and particularly with the establishment of Israel, Zionists have found common cause with anti-Semites (even with Nazis), in the notion of an exclusivist nation-state (which would dovetail with anti-Semitic wishes to concentrate the Jews elsewhere as well as act against the notion of assimilation). With the growth of Israel’s military capacity, and particularly so from 1967, the Jewish State also proved as a military power asset (nuclear no less), serving as that “advance post of civilization against barbarism” as Herzl had envisioned. So the new white-supremacists have found a model that happened to be created by a certain stream of Jews – the ‘strong Jews’ of Zionism. And the advantage that this alliance creates is far more substantial in realpolitik terms for those power-seeking white-supremacists, than the redundant old anti-Semitism. Because the ‘new Jews’ (if to make analogy to 1930’s Europe) are now predominantly the Muslims.

We therefore need to make this shift in our notions. Many Jews are colluding with the most vile racists today, because although the ‘back yard’ of these racists is full of people who are more unabashed about hating Jews, the more savvy leaders manage to keep their front lawn ‘Jew friendly’, and this brings advantages to both sides. The ‘collateral’ of actual anti-Semitism, is carefully downplayed by Jews who see Zionism as a key element in their identity and ideology.

In the glorification of white supremacy and the ‘Judeo-Christian camp’, the Jews get to enjoy a ‘sainthood’ endowed upon them by Saint Bannon – they get to be in the ‘camp of the saints’, against those black and brown savages, whose resemblance of Gandhi is apparently beyond appalling, not only in the physical sense, but also in the ideological sense. Thus, the case is insidiously made, that left-wing ‘tolerance’ and ‘multi-culturalism’ is merely a naiveté, opening a gate to the destruction of the ‘camp’. The alignment of the administration of Trump and Bannon with Jews who seek Jewish exclusivity at the expense of Palestinians is thus no accident. Trump’s pick for ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, is a major fundraiser for the Jewish settlement of Beit El, which is built entirely on stolen Palestinian private property. Friedman is on record for considering the liberal Jewish-American J Street (which generally hold liberal-Zionist positions) as “far worse than kapos” (‘Kapos’ meaning prisoners of Nazis who were assigned as guards over other prisoners – the term is used colloquially to refer to Jews who have no loyalty to ‘their own’).

Trump’s Jewish son-in-law and White House Advisor Jared Kushner sits on the board of directors for the family Kushner Foundation, which for years has been funding rabidly violent settlements and radical religious settlement institutions, such as the radical Od Yosef Chai yeshiva in Yitzhar. This particular yeshiva was banned from funding in 2011 by the Israeli Government, as it has served as a base for launching violent attacks against nearby Palestinians villages and Israeli security forces, as well. The Yeshiva published the book Torat Hamelech in 2009, advocating that babies and children of Israel’s enemies may be killed since “it is clear that they will grow to harm us.”The Yitzhar rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur further opined in the book, that the prohibition ‘Thou Shalt Not Murder’ applies only “to a Jew who kills a Jew,”, and that non-Jews are “uncompassionate by nature” and attacks on them “curb their evil inclination”.

These are the Jews who serve as part of the administration, of which Steve Bannon is Chief Strategist. The ‘shared values’ here are not to be missed. They are all about a walling out of the “barbarians from the east”, who have come to defile the Camp of the Saints. It is not clear how long Jews will retain their noble status as ‘separate but equal’ under this ideological arrangement, but it would appear that as long as they can offer the ‘Christian Whites’ that “advance post of civilization against barbarism”, then all will be well for them – at least that’s what some seem to believe. Meanwhile, the other ‘saints’ can go a bit wild back in the ‘camp’. But let’s not make a fuss. “Cool it, Cool it”, says Abe Foxman.

- See more at: http://mondoweiss.net/2017/03/bannons-christian-saints/#sthash.PuQLUEIh.dpuf

Get Used to It, America: Brown People Are Here to Stay

from Truthdig
Posted on Mar 9, 2017

By Sonali Kolhatkar

Chief strategist Steve Bannon, right, looms large in Donald Trump’s White House. (Evan Vucci / AP)

There might be a new favorite novel among American conservatives these days. No, it’s not Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” which extolled the virtues of selfishness as a justification for free-market capitalism and once held pride of place on right-wing bookshelves. Rand’s book may well be displaced by one often referred to by White House chief strategist Steve Bannon: “The Camp of the Saints” written in 1973 by French writer Jean Raspail.

Raspail paints a vivid and terrifying picture of white Europeans being overrun by hordes of savage, brown-skinned Indian migrants. In his paranoid and overtly racist novel, liberal sentiments about tolerance and diversity pave the way for territorial takeover. The book, which succumbs to every imaginable ugly stereotype of Indians, has seen a recent resurgence in sales and is favored by white supremacists and an increasing number of conservatives.

Bannon, Donald Trump’s most trusted adviser, seems to fear that Raspail’s xenophobic dystopian vision offers an appropriate warning for the contemporary world. The Huffington Post cites numerous references Bannon has made to the novel over the past few years, most often with respect to Europe’s refugee crisis. For example, in 2015 he said, during an interview with then-Sen. Jeff Sessions, “It’s been almost a ‘Camp of the Saints’-type invasion into Central and then Western and Northern Europe.”

It is hardly a leap to draw links between Bannon’s references to the horrifically racist “Camp of the Saints” and his authorship of Trump’s “Muslim ban.” Bannon clearly fears nonwhite immigrants taking over the spaces inhabited by white Americans. He has said as much, stating in an inaccurate rant that there are too many Asian CEOs in Silicon Valley. Recent attacks on South Asians in the U.S. suggest that this fear is being acted upon by angry, resentful whites.

Bannon’s paranoia is reminiscent of the dark era of American McCarthyism, when fear of communists infiltrating every aspect of American government and society led to witch hunts, baseless accusations and ruined lives. Sen. Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, who led the aggressive attacks, has been rightly judged by history to be a villain. But Bannon appears to think McCarthy should have been vindicated. In 2013, during an interview with a conservative author Diane West, Bannon said, “The place was infested with either traitors that were on the direct payroll of Soviet military intelligence or fellow-travelers who were kind of compliant in helping these guys get along. I mean, there’s absolutely no question of it.” Referring to McCarthy being seen as a villain today, Bannon asked, “How has pop culture so changed it that white is black and black is white?”

It is highly ironic that in a series of bizarre and baseless rants on Twitter on Saturday, Trump invoked the idea of McCarthyism in claiming President Obama wiretapped his phones. But it is a habit of this administration to depict the opposite of truth as reality.

Bannon’s fear of immigrants taking over the U.S. is reflected in the politics of racial resentment that drove Trump’s election. Whiteness as the default identity of the nation is threatened by demographic shifts toward a browner country, and the backlash has taken the form of President Trump.

But even if Trump succeeds in restricting people from some Muslim-majority nations from entering the U.S., and even if he tries to round up and deport as many undocumented immigrants as possible, it is too late to stop the demographic manifestation of whiteness from shrinking in the U.S. The year 2011 was the first time more nonwhite babies were born in the U.S. compared with white babies, and 2050 is projected to be the year when the nation as a whole will become a “majority minority” state.

This inevitable trend frightens many white Americans. A 2014 psychology study showed as much, reporting that white respondents reacted negatively to ideas of diversity and multiculturalism when presented with graphics of this trend. One reviewer concluded that the study proved that “when white people sense their special status is threatened, it changes how they view politics and the world.” He added, quite presciently, “Certainly worth keeping an eye on as American politics adapt to a changing demographic landscape.”

We may imagine that young whites are more progressive than their elders. It is an often-expressed sentiment that racism in the U.S. will simply die out along with older, white Americans. A look at those who voted for Trump in last November’s election reveals otherwise. Forty-eight percent of white Americans ages 18-29 voted for Trump, compared with 43 percent who voted for Hillary Clinton. Studies confirm that youthfulness among whites does not tame racist sentiments. Bannon, Trump and their ilk are desperately trying to save the sinking ship of white supremacy and are counting on white Americans, young and old, to back them.

What they may not have realized is how dependent the U.S. economy is on immigrant labor. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 26 million foreign-born workers contribute to the U.S. economy, which amounts to close to 17 percent of the entire workforce. Nearly half of those workers are listed as “Hispanic,” and about a quarter are Asian. The agency also found that “[f]oreign-born workers were more likely than native-born workers to be employed in service occupations; natural resources, construction, and maintenance occupations; and production, transportation, and material moving occupations.” While foreign-born workers earned, on average, significantly less than their U.S. citizen counterparts, that wage gap closed for workers with higher levels of education.

Foreign-born doctors in particular fill a serious need in the U.S., especially in poor communities. The newly launched Immigrant Doctors Project points out that 7,000 doctors in the U.S. hail from the countries targeted by Trump’s ban. “Cardiology and neurology are two of the three specialties with the highest share of doctors from the six targeted countries,” according to the group’s website. Unless Trump has a plan to promote medical education among native-born Americans, it is unclear who will fill this crucial need if the president has his way.

In taking their highly unethical and unconstitutional actions to preserve whiteness, Trump’s team has unleashed cruelty on the very people it accuses of plotting and enacting violence. But those targeted people won’t back down. In thinking about the petty, jealousy-driven, paranoid rage we face from the Trump administration and its supporters, I am heartened by the sentiment of Elisa Chavez’s powerful poem, “Revenge,” published in the Seattle Review of Books in January. The entire poem is worth reading (out loud if possible), but the lines that stand out most to me are:

We’re the effigies that haunt America’s nights harder
the longer they spend burning us,
we are scaring the shit out of people by spreading,
by refusing to die: what are we but a fire?

If Bannon is worried about a “ ‘Camp of the Saints’-type invasion” of the U.S. by the brown masses, we can only remind him, as Chavez’s poem does (“… you didn’t stop the future from coming. / You just delayed our coronation.”), that he’s too late. We are here, we are not going anywhere, and he’d better get used to it.

Opinion I Would Be Happy to Live on an Israeli Yasser Arafat St.

Every nation’s heroes are stained with blood. Some of the heroes for whom Israeli streets are named have a lot more blood on their hands than Yasser Arafat did.


from Haaretz Gideon Levy Mar 09, 2017 2:43 AM

Yasser Arafat with Palestinian security forces in Gaza in 1995. AP
Arab town in Israel removes 'Arafat' street signs under government order
The Arab lawmaker vying to be prime minister of a utopian Israeli-Palestinian state
Ten tourist hot spots in the West Bank (where the only thing missing is actual tourists)
I would be happy to live on Yasser Arafat Street in Ramat Aviv. It would be inspiring to live on a street named for a Nobel Peace Prize winner; it would instill hope to live on a street named for a former enemy and the founding father of the neighboring nation, members of which lived in the village on whose ruins the neighborhood was built and who himself tried to make peace with Israel.

The gesture of a street named for the destroyed village, Sheikh Munis, would also be a high honor for the neighborhood and the country. If Israel only had a little more confidence in the justice of its path, the idea wouldn’t be so far-fetched.
But I live on a street that bears the name of an Anglo-Jewish statesman, the viceroy of India, Rufus Daniel Isaacs, the Marquess of Reading. I doubt that there’s a single person living on the street who knows who he was or why a main street is named for him.

Our streets are generally named for Zionist activists and rabbis, which is certainly acceptable. Less acceptable is to use such names for streets where Arabs live. Dov of Mezeritch, Besht (Baal Shem Tov), Zalman Meisel, Shivtei Yisrael and Avodat Yisrael are streets in Arab Jaffa. In some mixed cities the provocation is even more brazen. The main street in Ramle of course bears the name of Binyamin Ze’ev Herzl, while Hapalmach, Ha’etzel, Beitar and Yitzhak Sadeh are streets where at least some of the residents are Arabs. In Lod the situation is similar; Tzahal Boulevard near the Al Omari mosque, and Eliyahu Golomb, Exodus and Aliya Bet streets near the market and Khan el-Hilu.

There are almost no Arab street names and certainly no sensitivity. The entrance bridge to Nazareth is named for IDF Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan, one of the greatest Arab-haters, who compared them to drugged cockroaches. Since the bridge was built, his legacy echoes for every Nazareth driver who crosses it. That’s how an Israeli minority is treated.

But that’s not enough. The Arab town of Jatt decided a few months ago to name a street after the father of its nation. The existence of an Arafat Street in the State of Israel came to the authorities’ attention belatedly, but it’s never too late to cause a scandal and oppress a minority. The prime minister said he would not agree for the country to have “streets named after the enemies of Israel.” The interior minister was told to act, the local council chairman capitulated and the name of the street was removed. There is no Arafat, his name has been erased. Maybe the street will instead be named after Elor Azaria. That would be amusing if the effort to delete, overwrite and choke off any national sentiment wasn’t so shocking. Only Jews may be remembered.
read more: http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.776040?utm_source=smartfocus&utm_medium=email&utm_content=opinion/.premium-1.776040&utm_campaign=Gideon+Levy&utm_term=20170309-02:43&writerAlerts=true

A Palestinian state has always been a fiction for Zionists

from mondoweiss
Jonathan Ofir on March 5, 2017

From the Israeli leadership perspective, a Palestinian state in any true capacity has always been a ‘Never-Never Land’ that should remain in the realms of fiction. When Israel and the Palestinians embarked upon the famous ‘peace process’ in Madrid in 1991, Prime Minister Itzhak Shamir coined the ‘teaspoon policy’: endless negotiating sessions at which countless teaspoons amounting to mountains of sugar would be stirred into oceans of tea and coffee, but no agreement would ever be reached. For Israel, with or without a ‘peace process’, this continues to be policy: the more it draws out the time, the more opportunity it gets to annex, the more it shrinks Palestinian enclaves into Bantustans and open air prisons.

Israel has no intention of realizing a real Palestinian state, and it never had.

Let me review the history. Israel took over four-fifths of historical Palestine in 1948 and ethnically cleansed five-sixths of the Palestinian population therein, and then 19 years later it ‘completed the job’ territorially, ethnically cleansing another roughly 250,000 Palestinians as well as over 100,000 Syrians. So in 1967, Israel was left with a ‘greater Israel’ territorially – yet it had now further taken under its control roughly the same number of Palestinians it had expelled in 1948.

Thus the ‘Palestinian demographic problem’ was not solved.

The preferred option for Israelis was to forget Palestine altogether. Prime Minister Golda Meir said that Palestinians didn’t exist, and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan said that “there is no more Palestine – finished.” But that was wishful thinking on behalf of the Zionists. Palestinians were not completely ‘finished off’, and even if Israel wanted to provide itself the genocidal prospect of erasing them conceptually, it had to continue its campaigns to make them shrink demographically.

So this time, 1967, Israel would be cautious not to annex the conquered territory, as it would entail a large Palestinian population. While saving the option for slow-motion ethnic cleansing, Israel had to make sure that the ‘limbo’ territory under the status of ‘belligerent occupation’ would not be claimed by anyone, to challenge Israel’s effective sovereignty. In the 1948 paradigm, the ‘existential threat’ to the Jewish State was related to the demographic issue of the refugees, and denial of their return was essential to avert this ‘threat’. In 1967 nonetheless, the ‘existential threat’ tripled: not just the refugees, but the new ‘demographic problem’, as well as the need to avoid future ‘foreign’ claim to the territory.

Israel sought to solve the territorial issue by settlement – creating ‘facts on the ground’. Such ‘facts’ also facilitate the eviction of the population, on claims of ‘security’ (although nowadays outright theft of Palestinian land via Israeli law does not seem to require the ‘security’ alibi at all).

The Palestinian PLO position before the mid-1970’s was comfortable for Israel, in that it sought a liberation of the whole of historical Palestine, and Israel could claim it was an untenable zero-sum claim, which it would fight as a wholesale existential threat. But in mid-1970’s, the PLO was making steps which very seriously approximated the international consensus on Israeli withdrawal to June 4, 1967 lines, proposing a Palestinian state within the remaining 22% of historical Palestine.

Israel thus stepped up its belligerence to avert this Palestinian ‘peace offensive’ as Israeli strategic analyst Avner Yaniv called it (see 1981-2 Fez plan). The averting of this ‘peace offensive’ meant of course Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, in an attempt to destroy the PLO’s political power (the PLO leadership was exiled in Lebanon). From the next exile in Tunisia, PLO leader Yasser Arafat came to Geneva in 1988 for a special UN gathering, due to the USA’s refusal to grant him an entry visa. There he spoke and said that

“The PLO will seek a comprehensive settlement among the parties concerned in the Arab-Israeli conflict, including the State of Palestine, Israel, and other neighbors, within the framework of the international conference for peace in the Middle East on the basis of resolutions 242 and 338 and so as to guarantee equality and the balance of interests, especially our people’s rights, in freedom, national independence, and respect the right to exist in peace and security for all.”

No one was expecting Israel to agree to this without pressure, as it would destroy its plans for the takeover of entire historical Palestine. The 1st Intifada was already on its way, a predominantly unarmed civil uprising– met with bone-breaking policy by Defense minister Yitzhak Rabin. But the popular resistance was not quashed, and continued into the 1990’s.

Israel was beginning to appear as the rejectionist, and so a semblance of willingness to ‘negotiate’ had to be provided.

Thus Israel and the Palestinians embarked upon the famous ‘peace process’ which started in Madrid in 1991, hence Shamir’s mentioned ‘teaspoon policy’. Although many around the world thought that the Oslo accords (1993 and 1995) meant a Palestinian state, even Rabin, just before his assassination in 1995, assured the Knesset that it would be “less than a state”. The ‘temporary’ Oslo division of the West Bank, appropriating Israel more than 60% full control of the West Bank, became permanent, and a means to assure that whatever Palestinians would eventually get, their lands would effectively be a set of Bantustans, with Israel controlling them from all sides.

While portraying the ‘conflict’ as the competing claims to the land of two sides, Israel maintains the powerful position in all aspects, demanding that Palestinians remain surrounded and disempowered even after an ‘agreement’ is reached.

The illusion of the Palestinian Never-Never Land is maintained not only by denial of Palestinian statehood, but also by the denial of the colonialist paradigm that governs the Zionist venture, hence the Jewish State. Denial of this paradigm aids in the creation of the illusion of the ‘two more-or-less-equal parties’, and suggests that this is a mere territorial dispute that can be likened to Israel vis-á-vis Egypt, over the Sinai. But this is not a dispute between two states. It is a matter of colonialist control by a one state, over a disempowered native population.

The Palestinian state does not arrive, because Israel doesn’t intend, and never has intended, for the Palestinian dream to come true, as pragmatically tailored as it has become. Palestine is anathema to Zionism, and this is why Israel will not recognize Palestine. It will pay lip service to political correctness and go as far as saying ‘Palestinian authority’ and ‘Palestinians’ as long as they are committed to Bantustans – but it will not go beyond that.

So the left Zionist Union leader Herzog provides us with a 10-point plan, which entails a 10-year ‘waiting period’ for that dreamed-of Palestinian state– only after which ‘negotiations’ may begin. He ends his presentation saying:

“This is how we’ll save the settlement blocs and keep them under Israel’s sovereignty. It will be Zionism’s real victory. A new reality of security and mutual trust will ultimately forge a peace process and prevent disaster.”

Journalist Gideon Levy suggests an 11th point, to perfect the plan:

“The parties should announce a 10-year period during which Isaac Herzog will remain in a cage. During this time, they will move toward realizing the two-state vision. At the same time, the economic development of the cage will be accelerated dramatically, among other things through regional and international assistance. Pieces of bread will be thrown into Herzog’s cage from time to time, and over the years the addition of various spreads will be considered. The parties will work to renovate the cage, including building a seesaw (subject to strict security arrangements). If his behavior conforms to expectations, Herzog will be entitled to declare his cage a state with temporary borders. At the end of the 10-year period (if Herzog is still alive), and on condition that he has behaved properly, the jailors will begin direct negotiations with the cage’s occupant, backed by the countries of the region and the international community, with no preconditions, as equals, seriously and resolutely, while moving toward a full and final peace agreement.”

The liberal Zionists seem to love these sorts of dreams more, whilst the rightists irritate them by being more unabashed about annexation and injuring Israel’s global image. Theodor Herzl’s “if you will it, it is no dream” (the famous claim ending his 1902 novel Altneuland), means that Palestine and a Palestinian state must remain in the realms of fiction. Palestine must remain a fairy-tale, whilst Jews return to the promised land.

Who cares if it’s a legend. What matters is only if we, the Jews, wish it to be true. As to Palestinian wishes – their wishes are consigned to Never-Never Land.

- See more at: http://mondoweiss.net/2017/03/palestinian-fiction-zionists/?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=0923a55573-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b86bace129-0923a55573-309260894&mc_cid=0923a55573&mc_eid=b1e0e2d3d7#sthash.ygwKnhWd.dpuf

Donald Trump’s Greatest Allies Are the Liberal Elites

from Truthdig
Posted on Mar 5, 2017

By Chris Hedges




The liberal elites, who bear significant responsibility for the death of our democracy, now hold themselves up as the saviors of the republic. They have embarked, despite their own corruption and their complicity in neoliberalism and the crimes of empire, on a self-righteous moral crusade to topple Donald Trump. It is quite a show. They attack Trump’s “lies,” denounce executive orders such as his travel ban as un-American and blame Trump’s election on Russia or FBI Director James Comey rather than the failed neoliberal policies they themselves advanced.

Where was this moral outrage when our privacy was taken from us by the security and surveillance state, the criminals on Wall Street were bailed out, we were stripped of our civil liberties and 2.3 million men and women were packed into our prisons, most of them poor people of color? Why did they not thunder with indignation as money replaced the vote and elected officials and corporate lobbyists instituted our system of legalized bribery? Where were the impassioned critiques of the absurd idea of allowing a nation to be governed by the dictates of corporations, banks and hedge fund managers? Why did they cater to the foibles and utterings of fellow elites, all the while blacklisting critics of the corporate state and ignoring the misery of the poor and the working class? Where was their moral righteousness when the United States committed war crimes in the Middle East and our militarized police carried out murderous rampages? What the liberal elites do now is not moral. It is self-exaltation disguised as piety. It is part of the carnival act.

The liberal class, ranging from Hollywood and the Democratic leadership to The New York Times and CNN, refuses to acknowledge that it sold the Democratic Party to corporate bidders; collaborated in the evisceration of our civil liberties; helped destroy programs such as welfare, orchestrate the job-killing North American Free Trade Agreement and Trans-Pacific Partnership deal, wage endless war, debase our public institutions including the press and build the world’s largest prison system.

“The truth is hard to find. The truth is hard to know. The truth is more important than ever,” reads a television ad for The New York Times. What the paper fails to add is that the hardest place to find the truth about the forces affecting the life of the average American and the truth about empire is in The New York Times itself. News organizations, from the Times to the tawdry forms of entertainment masquerading as news on television, have rendered most people and their concerns invisible. Liberal institutions, especially the press, function, as the journalist and author Matt Taibbi says, as “the guardians” of the neoliberal and imperial orthodoxy.

It is the job of the guardians of orthodoxy to plaster over the brutal reality and cruelty of neoliberalism and empire with a patina of civility or entertainment. They pay homage to a nonexistent democracy and nonexistent American virtues. The elites, who live in enclaves of privilege in cities such as New York, Washington and San Francisco, scold an enraged population. They tell those they dismiss as inferiors to calm down, be reasonable and patient and trust in the goodness of the old ruling class and the American system. African-Americans have heard this kind of cant preached by the white ruling class for a couple of centuries.

Because the system works for the elites, and because the elites interact only with other elites, they are mystified about the revolt rising up from the decayed cities they fly over in the middle of the country. They think they can stuff this inexplicable rage back in the box. They continue to offer up absurd solutions to deindustrialization and despair, such as Thomas Friedman’s endorsement of “a culture of entrepreneurship” and “an ethic of pluralism.” These kinds of bromides are advertising jingles. They bear no more connection to reality than Trump promising to make America great again.

I walked into the Harvard Club in New York City after midnight on election night. The well-heeled New York elites stood, their mouths agape, looking up at the television screens in the oak-paneled bar while wearing their Clinton campaign straw hats. They could not speak. They were in shock. The system they funded to prevent anyone from outside their circle, Republican or Democrat, from achieving the presidency had inexplicably collapsed.

Taibbi, when I interviewed him in New York, said political power in our corporate state is controlled by “a tripartite system.” “You have to have the assent of the press, the donor class, and one of the two [major] political parties to get in,” said Taibbi, author of “Insane Clown President: Dispatches From the 2016 Circus.” “It’s an exclusive club. It’s like a membership system. They all have to agree and confer their blessing on the candidate. Trump somehow managed to get past all three of those obstacles. And he did it essentially by putting all of them on trial. He put the press on trial and villainized them with the public. I think it was a brilliant masterstroke that nobody saw coming. But it wouldn’t have been possible if their unpopularity hadn’t been building for years and years and years.”

“It’s a kind of Stockholm syndrome,” he said of the press. “The reporters, candidates, and candidates’ aides are all thrown together. They’re stuck in the same environment with each other day after day, month after month. After a while, they start to unconsciously adopt each other’s values. Then they start to live in the same neighborhoods. They go to the same parties. Then it becomes a year-after-year kind of thing. Then after that, they’re the same people. It’s a total perversion of what’s supposed to happen. We’re [the press] supposed to be on the outside, not identifying with these people. But now, it’s a club. Journalists enjoy the experience of being close to power.

At first the press, especially the television press, could not get enough of Trump. He received 23 times the coverage of Sen. Bernie Sanders, who spoke about things that do not make for great television—inequality and corporate corruption. Trump brought in the advertising dollars. 2016 was CNN’s most profitable year. Then, alarmed at Trump’s ascendancy, the press set out to destroy him. The press applied its Darth Vader Force choke. It did not work. They tried it again and again. The Force had deserted them.

“When a candidate makes a mistake and steps in it—[2004 presidential hopeful] Howard Dean is the classic example, the scream—then they [TV news shows] replay it every hour, 100 times a day,” Taibbi said. “The critical part is that Dean was already in violation leading up to that moment. He was not the right person because he was anti-war. He got his donations from the wrong people. He makes the mistake. The press pig-piles on the person just instinctively. All this negative attention. The candidate freaks out and apologizes. He disappears for a while. He tries to soldier on. The next thing you know, there’s a Page 16 story: Candidate exits the race. It’s a script. But it didn’t work with Trump.”

The press, like the Democratic Party, is an appendage of the consumer society. These institutions are not about politics or news. They are about imparting an experience. They create political personalities, marketed as celebrities, to make us feel good about candidates. These manufactured emotions, the product of the dark arts of the public relations industry, determine how we vote. Issues and policies are irrelevant. It is marketing and entertainment. Trump is a skillful marketer of his fictitious self.

“When you work in that environment long enough you unconsciously become an agent for whatever that commercial strategy is,” Taibbi said of the press in our corporate-run political theater.

“What we call right-wing and liberal media in this country are really just two different strategies of the same kind of nihilistic lizard-brain sensationalism,” Taibbi wrote in “Insane Clown President.” “The ideal CNN story is a baby down a well, while the ideal Fox story is probably a baby thrown down a well by a Muslim terrorist or an ACORN activist. Both companies offer the same service, it’s just that the Fox version is a little kinkier.”

The pseudo-events on television displace reality. This is how a reality star becomes president. Sixty million people think Trump’s manufactured persona—the predominate tycoon—on “The Apprentice” is real. Our perception of the truth is determined by what appears on the screen. If an event is never broadcast, it somehow never happened. The electronic image is the word of God. The corporate state controls most of what is seen and heard on television, what ideas and events can be discussed in the mainstream media and what orthodoxies, including neoliberalism and the war industry, must never be questioned. We suffer an intellectual tyranny as pervasive as that imposed by fascism and communism. Trump, who is as gullible as the most habitual television viewer, exemplifies our cultural and political death. He is no more “authentic” than Hillary Clinton. But he appears on our screens as more authentic because he is more deeply embedded in the medium that controls our thoughts. He is what is vomited up from the perverted zeitgeist of a nation entranced and dominated by electronic hallucinations.

“People have this idea that Trump has no connection with the ‘common man,’ but he does,” Taibbi said. “He has exactly the same media habits that ordinary people have. He believes the stuff that he reads on the internet and watches on television implicitly and unquestioningly. That is what gives him that connection with people. He thinks like they do. He has the same habits they have. A classic example is the thing with the so-called 3 million illegal … voters. He reads that, probably in an Infowars story, it’s policy like two minutes later. He doesn’t go through the process of asking himself if it’s untrue. He’s a perfect consumer in that respect. That’s what makes him so dangerous.”

“[George W.] Bush was child’s play compared to what we’re dealing with now,” Taibbi said. “Bush was a puppet. He was a vehicle for a very familiar form of right-wing capitalist politics. This Trump thing is totally different. Trump really is the actual engine behind this phenomenon during the entire campaign. There were no people behind the man, I don’t think. The presidential campaign has no relation to the issue of whether or not you can govern effectively. The campaign is a television show. The values that decide whether a person becomes a candidate or can’t become a candidate are more or less arbitrary. It has a lot to do with the commercial value of the candidate. You can’t have an unentertaining candidate because the press needs to make money. They will unconsciously gravitate towards someone who does what Trump does, which is get [website] hits and eyeballs and ratings.”

Trump’s popularity increased the more the establishment condemned him. This would have sent a profound and disturbing message to anyone not as clueless as our liberal elites. They did not get it. They thought they could trot out Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Hollywood celebrities and get the rubes to fall for their routine one more time. They thought the country would again obey.

The liberal class, by embracing neoliberalism and refusing to challenge the imperial wars, empowered the economic and political structures that destroyed our democracy and gave rise to Trump. Multiculturalism, when it means, to use the words of Cornel West, nothing more than having a president who is a “black mascot for Wall Street,” betrays the disenfranchised and endows the ruling elites with a false progressivism, a false humanism and a false inclusiveness.

Hillary and Bill Clinton, Joe Biden and the current Democratic Party leadership designed and built the massive system of imprisonment, essentially ended welfare, expanded our wars and pushed through NAFTA. They destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands of poor and working-class families and are responsible for the mounds of corpses in the Middle East. Yet these liberal elites speak as if they are champions of racial and economic justice. They appear in choreographed pseudo-events to demonstrate a faux compassion. Now they have been exposed as fakes.


A genuine populism, one defined and often articulated by Bernie Sanders, could sweep the Democratic Party back into power. Regulating Wall Street, publicly financing campaigns, forgiving student debt, demanding universal health care, bailing out homeowners victimized by the banks, ending the wars in the Middle East, instituting a jobs program to repair our decaying infrastructure, dismantling the prison system, restoring the rule of law on the streets of our cities, making college education free and protecting programs such as Social Security would see election victory after election victory.

But this will never happen within the Democratic Party. It refuses to prohibit corporate money. The party elites know that if corporate money disappears, so do they. The party’s hierarchy, pressured by Obama and the Clintons, elevated Tom Perez over Keith Ellison—whom a major donor to the party, Haim Saban, condemns as an “anti-Semite” because of Ellison’s criticism of the Israeli government—to head the Democratic National Committee. They will press forward repeating the same silly slogans and trying to use the now ineffective Force choke on their political enemies. They may have lost control of the Congress and the White House and hold only 16 governorships and majorities in only 31 of the states’ 99 legislative chambers, but they are incapable of offering any meaningful alternative to neoliberalism and empire. They are devoid of a vision. They can only moralize. They will continue to atrophy and enable the consolidation of an American fascism.

Fyodor Dostoevsky excoriated Russia’s bankrupt liberal class at the end of the 19th century. Russian liberals mouthed values they did not defend. Their stated ideals bore no relationship to their actions. They were filled with a suffocating narcissism.

In “Notes From Underground,” Dostoevsky lampooned the defeated dreamers of the liberal class, those who preached goodness but lived in moral squalor. These defeated dreamers denounced the social and cultural depravity they had largely created. They had an open disdain for the uneducated, the poor, the working class, the lesser breeds beneath them. And in the end they ushered in a moral nihilism to empower a dangerous class of demagogues, killers and fools.

“I never even managed to become anything: neither wicked nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect,” the Underground Man wrote. “And now I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and utterly futile consolation that it is even impossible for an intelligent man seriously to become anything, and only fools become something. Yes, sir, an intelligent man of the nineteenth century must be and is morally obliged to be primarily a characterless being; and a man of character, an active figure—primarily a limited being."