Carl,
Look for Bernie's entire speech which I posted yesterday. There's a great
deal about Israel, but he also covers other foreign policy. Perhaps the best
thing about it is that he states opposition to regime change and indicates
that the US should not be directly involved in mid east conflicts. It leaves
a lot to be desired, as does his take on Israel, but it is a whole lot
better than that of the other candidates of the major parties.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Wednesday, March 23, 2016 12:38 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Bernie Finally Addresses Israel-Palestine
There is one rather positive note regarding the Corporate Mass Media.
Despite its ability to control the news and slant it to the Corporate
Empire's needs, there is enough slop over from all the campaign speeches,
that it is no longer possible for a candidate to say one thing to one
audience and something entirely different to another, without the public
knowing.
Actually, credit should really go to the internet and to the public media
that has grown up outside the Mass Media, and forces the Mass Media to pay
some attention to subjects and people that they would rather not report on.
Take the shameless pandering of the Republican candidates and Hillary
Clinton at the recent Aipac conference.
Somehow I struggled through four of the most blatant ass-kissing speeches
that I've had the misfortune to listen to this year.
I only heard excerpts of Sander's speech, so I can't really say just how
much he pandered. But overall I am not a supporter of Bernie's foreign
policy. I know that he can't take on our overly fat military budget and
still have an outside chance of winning the nomination, but if he were
elected, the full court press would be on in an all out effort to pull him
into line. The problem is that we cannot afford the massive military
spending and afford the long neglected needs here at home.
But at least we do have some ability to view our future president grovelling
before Israel. Reminds me of Little David with his slingshot, staring old
Goliath straight in the belly button.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/23/16, S. Kashdan <skashdan@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Bernie Finally Addresses Israel-Palestinespeak.
By Richard Silverstein
Tikun Olam, March 22, 2016
http://www.richardsilverstein.com/2016/03/22/bernie-finally-addresses-
israel-palestine/
Bernie Sanders offered to address Aipac's national conference via live
video
feed as almost every Israeli prime minister has done and many
presidential candidates as well (Romney was the last in 2012). He
chose not to speak live
because there are a series of extremely important western primaries
which may make or break his candidacy. He needed to be campaigning out
west. So Aipac invented a rule that no presidential candidates are
permitted to address the audience via video and rejected his offer to
high.
Instead, Sanders delivered the speech in the most unlikeliest of
places,
Mormon-country: Utah.
I've now read the speech and I have to say that I'm very pleasantly
surprised. Given that I wrote last week that Bernie couldn't possibly
acquit
himself well facing this conundrum, he pulled off something quite
politically adept. He will not have satisfied the die-hard
pro-Palestine activists like Steven Salaita. Hell, the speech doesn't
even satisfy me fully. But it's far better than any other presidential
candidate in this election cycle and probably better than any
presidential candidate in the history of the country.
Among the most important achievements are simply that he mentioned
Palestine
at all. And he did so often:
I am here to tell the American people that, if elected president, I
will work tirelessly to advance the cause of peace as a partner and as
a friend to Israel.
But to be successful, we have also got to be a friend not only to
Israel, but to the Palestinian people, where in Gaza unemployment
today is 44 percent and we have there a poverty rate which is almost as
Gaza siege.
So when we talk about Israel and Palestinian areas, it is important to
understand that today there is a whole lot of suffering among
Palestinians and that cannot be ignored. You can't have good policy
that results in peace
if you ignore one side.
Of course, you know that Barack Obama understood this as well. He
may've hinted around the edges at holding these views. But he never
said them. More
importantly, he never followed up on any hopeful rhetoric he espoused
with concrete action. There were attempts, but they were feeble and
weren't advanced with firmness and conviction.
Returning to Bernie's speech, he did not mention Palestine to make
demands upon Palestinians or wag his finger at them telling them what
they must do if they expect anything from the world. That's what all
the other candidates, including Hillary Clinton and even Barack Obama,
do. Sanders affirmed Palestinian suffering. He called for an end to the
Think of how radical that was--and this:didn't say).
Peace will require strict adherence by both sides to the tenets of
international humanitarian law. This includes Israeli ending
disproportionate responses to being attacked...
This implies that Israel's massacre of Palestinian and Lebanese
civilians in
multiple wars violated international law. No U.S. president or
candidate has
ever said or even implied that.
Also, Bernie avoided so many pitfalls into which other less adept
candidates
fall. He didn't demand that Palestinians recognize "the Jewish state"
of Israel. He said they must recognize Israel. Period. Of course,
Palestinians
already recognize Israel (since the PLO did so in 1988). So that
statement is almost redundant, unless it was directed at Hamas (Bernie
such a reality.
There was no demonization of Hamas. No reference to Palestinians as
terrorists.
That being said, there are portions of the speech which lapse into
liberal Zionist nostalgia for an Israel that has long since receded
into the distant
past: the reference to our "shared values" and mutual democratic
traditions
and embrace of the rule of law. These are quaint notions which no
longer hold true in Israel (and they're under fire here in this
country as well, but to a lesser extent). It's almost inexcusable for
a presidential candidate as smart and progressive as Sanders not to face
What we all admire about Bernie is his refusal to embrace sloganeeringparade.
or empty rhetoric or cheap political tricks. He speaks his mind,
unfiltered. He
faces reality undaunted and unfazed. But not when it comes to Israel.
Bernie fell into a hasbara trap when he echoed the standard pro-Israel
rap against Hamas: it allegedly siphoned off international
humanitarian aid and
used it instead to build tunnels to kill Israelis:
I condemn the fact that Hamas diverted funds and materials for
much-needed construction projects designed to improve the quality of
life of the Palestinian people, and instead used those funds to
construct a network of tunnels for military purposes.
Building tunnels is not a terribly expensive enterprise, especially
compared
to the cost of an Apache helicopter or F-16. I do not know where Hamas
found
the few millions which went to building these tunnels. But one thing
is
certain: when a foreign enemy attacks your home you are entitled to
defend it. That means you are entitled to fight on your own home
ground and attack
the invading enemy. So why would Bernie attack Palestinians for
defending themselves from Israeli invasion?
In the most disappointing passage, Sanders once again affirms his
embrace of
the two-state solution and calls for a resumption of the
tried-and-failed strategy of renewed negotiations:
I firmly believe that the only prospect for peace is the successful
negotiation of a two-state solution.
The first step in that road ahead is to set the stage for resuming the
peace
process through direct negotiations.
Progress is never made unless people are prepared to sit down and talk
to each other. This is no small thing. It means building confidence on
both sides, offering some signs of good faith, and then proceeding to
talks when
conditions permit them to be constructive. Again, this is not easy,
but that
is the direction we've got to go.
Bernie, I don't know how many times we gotta tell ya: that horse has
left the barn. Peace talks are a dead-end. Especially peace talks
aimed at arriving at a two-state solution. Israel simply has no
interest in it. Not just Netanyahu, who of course has no interest in
it. But no Israeli Jewish party has an interest in the hard
compromises necessary to secure peace. So
why deceive yourself?
Though hopeful rhetoric always sounds better on the stump than the
downbeat,
the truth is that the U.S. cannot influence a positive outcome in the
region
until we are willing to stare an Israeli leader in the face and say:
no more. Until a U.S. president is willing to say to the Israel lobby
(that is,
Aipac): no more. Not just say it, but do something about it.
That will be hard. Very hard. Perhaps impossible. But someone's gotta
break
the logjam and do it. To those who call it "the impossible dream,"
remember
how many decades the world thought the Cold War was permanent, that
Communism was the most powerful competitor of the democratic west,
that the
Iron Curtain seemed impregnable? How long did it take for it all to
come tumbling down?
I have little doubt that this is what will happen in the
Israel-Palestine conflict. We are already moving very, very slowly in
that direction. It may
take years. But once a certain threshold is reached, the denouement
will be
relatively quick.
Bernie may not be there yet. But unlike any other presidential
candidate of
this or any other generation, he has the capacity to learn from his
mistakes
and get things right. At least I hope so.
On a related note, I simply don't have the heart or stomach to offer
an analysis of Donald Trump's speech. But I can't get away without
mentioning the priceless tidbits about the danger Donald faced when he
agreed to accept
the dangerous honor of being Grand Marshall of New York's Israel Day
brains.
Apparently, there was a Hezbollah hit on him that somehow missed its mark.
The would-be assassins took the D train instead of the L and by the
time they got there Donald had retired to Tavern on the Green or his
rooftop aerie at Trump Tower.
The second piece of pricelessness was Donald's touting of his daughter
Ivanka's new-found religion, Orthodox Judaism, and the "beautiful
Jewish baby" she carried in her Jewish tummy. Did I say shameless
pandering? But half the audience was composed of Jewish bubbehs and
zaydehs. They ate it up
I'm sure.
But seriously, no media outlet has yet noted that one of the foreign
policy
brain trust Trump has appointed includes Walid Phares. Phares' main
claim to
fame was as a commander of Phalangist death squads during the Lebanese
civil
war. He's managed in the intervening decades to rebrand himself as a
serious
Middle East analyst. By "serious," that means that as a Lebanese
Christian he only hates Muslims, but no longer puts bullets in their
Saban.
Donald's not the first GOP presidential candidate to invite Phares to
offer
his foreign policy "insights." He served a similar role for Mitt Romney.
Phares joins Frank Gaffney as two of the strangest Islamophobe foreign
policy advisors in this campaign. Gaffney has joined Ted Cruz' team as
chief
Muslim-hater. A small note about a Cruz "Gaff" (pardon the expression)
in his Aipac talk. In deriding Trump for using the term "Palestine,"
Cruz said
that everyone knows "Palestine hasn't existed since 1948." Um, no,
Ted. You
couldn't even read your own hasbara cue cards. Every hasbarist worth
his salt knows there never has been a Palestine. Let's get our
arguments straight!
Probably, Cruz (or whoever the dolt was who wrote his speech) was
thinking of the British Mandate, also known as Mandatory Palestine.
That did end with
the British withdrawal in 1948.
Regarding odd foreign policy advisors, Hillary's got one of her own: a
Hollywood-Wall Street billionaire who ripped off a Japanese anime show
and turned it in the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. That would be Haim
Saban is widely believed to be a Mossad asset, as I've reported here
numerous times.
Full transcript is at:
https://berniesanders.com/sanders-outlines-middle-east-policy/
