Why Obama May Lose to Romney

The tremendous loss in Wisconsin, in which Governor Scott Walker was not recalled by a larger percentage of voters than originally elected him demonstrates how weak the Democratic Party has become and gives insight into why Obama may lose to Romney this year. Nobody is sure what Romney stands for, not least conservative Republicans who will vote for him as their only way to unseat Obama. The problem is that Obama stands for even less. His shameful absence from Wisconsin shows that he has no principles that he cares about and will fight for. Obama's love of appeasement and his subservience to finance capital rule out a campaign in which he could effectively challenge Romney on the economic issues. Obama's adventurist foreign policy is indefensible, though Romney will attack it as not being adventurist enough, and Obama will play into that by bragging about his worst sins. I think it will become increasingly apparent that Obama is unable and unwilling to do or say what he would need to in order to win the election. I do not say this or make this prediction with any satisfaction. I say it because it appears to me that this scenario is likely to occur.

Intellectual Honesty and Political Expediency

Norman Finkelstein has built a career on rigorous intellectual honesty, which I respect, whether I agree with every detail of his position or not. Therefore, I was shocked to hear him this morning on Democracy Now!  advocate what I could only interpret as a call to abandon intellectual honesty in favor of unity in achieving political goals. Finkelstein documents a significant and measurable shift in Jewish opinion toward Israel, particularly among younger Jews. He sees political openings as a result and calls for support for a two-state solution. He further argues that to go further is some kind of "political crime" because it betrays the possible for the unattainable. He says that he has been working for Palestinian rights for 30 years and wants something to show for it.

Personally, I began working for Palestinian rights in 1970, the same year that I began to work against apartheid in South Africa. In those nearly 42 years, I have striven for intellectual honesty both in its own right but also because I see it as the only way to successfully shift the discourse by moving people to deal with facts, history, and logic. I do not think the call for a two-state solution is intellectually honest for anyone with deep knowledge and understand of the facts, history, and logic. It is quite clear that no peaceful and just solution in Palestine can coexist with an apartheid Zionist state of Israel, and it is now even clear to many who used to advocate a two-state solution.

Intellectual honesty demands that we assert that states have no absolute or inherent right to exist. Human beings have that right but not states. The right of a state to exist is always conditional, and it is precisely conditional on its behavior toward those over whom it rules. Without their consent, a state has no right to exist. That was why the apartheid state of South Africa had to be dismantled and replaced by a democratic state. By the same token, there will be no peace in Palestine short of a solution which is based on both democracy and secularism. I would add that the same is true of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and many other countries. Whether there is one democratic, secular state or two or three is the business of those who now live in Palestine and Israel, but it is intellectually dishonest to pretend that a solution exists which preserves the Zionist state of Israel.

That leads me to the second demand of intellectual honesty. Political Zionism is and always has been a form of racism. Specifically, it grows from and is imbued with European anti-Semitism which asserted that European Jews were foreigners who did not belong there and should go somewhere else. The founders of Zionism embraced this anti-Semitism and thus became the first genuinely self-hating Jews. On this foundation, they have constructed an entire mythos, such as the existence of a "Jewish people," the idea of  "a land without people for a people without a land," and so on. These intellectually dishonest myths must be confronted as, for example, Israeli history professor Shlomo Sand has done in his book, "The Myth of the Jewish People."

It is the colonial "logic" of Zionism which lies at the heart of the Israeli conquest and occupation of Palestine and the dispossession of its indigenous inhabitants. The Zionist movement harnessed their anti-Semitism into racism against non-Jewish Palestinians, though there is also of course lots of racism against Israeli Jews with Arab origins. To solve the conflict in Palestine without dealing with Zionism as the underpinning of Israeli apartheid is as unthinkable it would have been to solve the conflict in South Africa without dealing with apartheid. Note that this is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. South Africa is still struggling to find its way, but it can at least begin to do that since the abandonment of the apartheid system. It is necessary for Israel to abandon its apartheid system and the racist ideology which underpins it before there can be progress toward a solution.

I can accept that someone who is not familiar with the facts and history of Palestine can go astray on these issues, but I am shocked by Finkelstein's call for intellectual dishonesty in the name of political expediency. I do not agree with him that such a course will lead to a solution of anything.

Nonsense and Lies on the Middle East

I expect to hear nonsense and lies from the US government and news media such as NPR on just about every political topic and especially on the Middle East. Today, I listened to a ridiculous "expert" advocate intervention in Syria on NPR so I was moved to write again. Let's start at the high level and then move down. The overwhelming threat to peace and security in the Middle East comes from US allies such as Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Qatar and, of course, from the US government itself (let's not forget what they are up to in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen, to name only a few places). Once one understands that, it becomes possible to make sense of the region and its events. Since that flies in the face of what is normally heard, I'll explain it a bit. Saudi Arabia and Qatar are funding Islamic extremists in Syria, Egypt, and other countries. The Israeli government is led by Zionist extremists not only bent on military action against Iran and Lebanon but committed to continued conquest of the West Bank. US meddling in Yemen has caused the tiny Al Qaeda cell there to grow significantly, and the US debacles elsewhere in Iraq, for example, are now well-known. Is it a coincidence that Iran, Syria, and Hezbolleh, who are under constant attack by the US government and media are the principle obstacles to US, Saudi, Qatari, and Israeli goals, goals which would greatly increase the suffering of the people in the Middle East? If you think it is a coincidence, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. Are the regimes in Iran and Syria undemocratic and vicious toward dissent from their citizens? Undoubtedly, that is the case, though no more so than Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Israel, for example. It is the broad picture which explains the selective outrage against Iran and Syria but not against Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, or Israel, all massive human rights violators. Defenders of Israel often accuse its critics of selective outrage, but if this campaign is not a prime example of selective outrage, I have never seen one. Iran is a religious dictatorship, though it at least has a semblance of democracy, which is more than can be said for Saudi Arabia. The campaign against the nonexistent Iranian nuclear weapons program is now sputtering to an end, though it appears that the sanctions will persist much longer. One of the effects of US intervention in Iraq has been to bring friends of Iran into power there. For now, at least, the US and Israeli campaign against Iran is in bad shape. Hezbolleh still has tremendous support in Lebanon and is not an easy target either for the US government or for Israel, which was defeated by Hezbolleh last time Israel attacked. Hezbolleh is stronger now than it was then. So, that leaves Syria. Is it, therefore, any surprise that we have a concerted campaign against the Syrian government from our government and media? Some will say that is because of the atrocities going on there. I have no doubt that the Syrian regime is heavyhanded, vicious, and violent toward opposition. However, the armed opposition (armed principally by Saudi Arabia and Qatar and now covertly aided by Western countries) is also heavyhanded, vicious, and violent and may well be the perpetrator of some of the atrocities attributed to the Syrian regime. Bashir Assad is not stupid, but his regime is stupid, and I think it is likely that he has not much control over the army and police as he told Barbara Walters when she interviewed him. The first point, though, is not to accept at face value the claims made that the Syrian government is responsible for the atrocities we hear about. We need to demand proof and more and more reliable proof than was provided of the WMDs in Iraq. The second point is to beware of all foreign intervention, which is not interested in the welfare of the people of Syria but is interested in removing Syria as an obstacle to US, Israeli, Saudi, and Qatari goals. Personally, I wish the Syrian people well. I wish the Arab spring could lead them to democracy and prosperity under a secular regime. But what I don't wish is for them to have to live under a fascist Islamic regime which provides them with no freedom or justice but does open the door to US and Israeli domination. That is where I see the armed Syrian opposition leading. So, all support for freedom and democracy for the Syrian people but no support for the armed Syrian opposition. That is the only principled position in my view.

More on the Alternative Narrative on Syria

Some of this alternative narrative has appeared on Democracy Now! and on KPFA but not enough. It is clear now that Israel and the US are engaged in a concerted campaign against Iran, Syria, and Hezbolleh, not because of nuclear weapons, human rights, or anything of the sort, but only because these three are the principal obstacle to Israeli and US military domination over the region. We increasingly hear a demand from the US government that Bashir Assad must step down. That is particularly interesting because I hear reliable reports that Assad is not in full control over the Syrian regime and particularly not over the army. He says that, and many Syrians and others believe him. He has very substantial support still in Syria. It would be a tragedy if Assad were forced to step down and the most hardline part of the regime took full control and stopped even the small number of reforms Assad tried to implement. In any case, it is very important to resist the kneejerk and very shallow campaign against Syria and Iran. Its success would probably mean more Israeli invasions of Lebanon, more war, more human suffering.

Syria: Where is the Alternative Narrative?

Let me first state that I have never been an admirer of the Syrian governments of the Assads, father and son, just as I was never an admirer of Saddam Hussein. I do consider the leftwing of the Ba'ath Party, which both of them hijacked, to have been a very progressive, secular movement in the Arab world, and the secularism and freedom for women which predominated in both countries is a direct result. All of that said, I have to point out the almost total censorship in the news we are getting in the USA about Syria. When I talk to friends in Beirut and East Jerusalem and when I read news reports from India and Russia, there is another narrative which almost never appears in the USA, not even on KPFA or Democracy Now! This morning I listened to an old friend Reese Erlich on KPFA, and he dismissed this narrative in what I consider a naive and shallow way. The only exception is the reporting of Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker, particularly his June article on Iran. He asserted at that time--and I also heard it on Democracy Now!--that the real danger in the region is not Iran but Saudi Arabia, which is flooding Syria and Lebanon with money and arms going to jihadist extremists. The monolithic narrative that we hear in the USA is that there is a democratic movement fighting the government in Syria. Reese at least acknowledged that the opposition is armed and killing soldiers and police, but he dismisses any notion of foreign invovement. Certainly, there is a genuine democracy movement in Syria and certainly the government has used terrible repression against it. But the alternative narrative is that there is also a foreign-subsidized heavily armed jihadist opposition which is not only fighting the government but other Syrians. The censorship of this narrative from nearly all USA reporting is highly disturbing to me. It smacks of manipulation of the news at very high levels. But the absence of mention of this narrative by reporters like Reese and Amy Goodman is doubly disturbing. Only Seymour Hersh covers it and only as a sidebar on the story about the nonexistent nuclear weapons development program in Iran. None of us knows exactly what is happening in Syria, but that makes it even more irresponsible to not at least mention this alternative narrative in reporting. There is a huge Saudi-funded, jihadist party in Lebanon, too, and who is talking about that? It's time to focus our attention on what is occurring in the world without ideological blinders imposed by the US government and its allies.

Capitalism and Greed

My nephew and I had a disagreement about what's wrong. I say capitalism and he says greedy capitalists. He argues that capitalism is not the problem that it has produced many great innovations and that the problem is that we just need to reign in the greed of some capitalists. I agree that much progress was made over the feudal era, but I disagree about greed. Capitalism is a system based on greed, and without greed it cannot function. The basic assumption in capitalist theory is that when people act in their own self-interest, the market will balance it all out for the best outcome for all. I have argued that that assumption is fundamentally false in another blog. The problem, however, is that those who define their self-interest as greed are those rewarded by capitalism. They amass the wealth and thus the power. The ultimate pursuit of greed under capital is finance capital, the making of profit without producing anything. It's natural that the greedy would take over finance capital. Where else can a person earn billions of dollars without having to produce something that contributes to the well-being of society? Thus, capitalism rewards the greedy in direct proportion to their greed. You cannot eliminate greed without moving on past capitalism. You have to change the rules which determine who is rewarded and how. You cannot just reform capitalism with careful regulation. You would have to regulate it to the point that it is not capitalism any more. This thought is not original with me. Lenin wrote something similar long ago. He was asked why we could not reform capitalist society to favor those who work, to provide benefits to the many, etc. He answered that we could do that, but then it would not be capitalism any more. We need to recognize that in order to appreciate what needs to change to make this world a better place to live in.

Occupy Wall Street

This movement is the most hopeful sign any of us have seen in the USA since the Wisconsin revolt. It has the potential to unite very disparate groups because it focuses on the deepest roots of most of our social and economic problems, finance capital. It is spreading rapidly across the USA and internationally. Nobody knows what will come of it, but at least it is pointed in the right direction. I hope it will expose Barack Obama as the servant of finance capital that he is, part of the problem and not part of the solution.