YOU CANNOT CRITICIZE ISRAEL IN THIS COUNTRY AND SURVIVE
Helen Thomas Cries, Denies Anti-Semitism, Calls President Obama 'Reprehensible'
Text by Associated Press
MARION, Ohio — In a radio interview, former White House correspondent Helen Thomas acknowledges she touched a nerve with remarks about Israel that led to her retirement. But she says the comments were "exactly what I thought," even though she realized soon afterward that it was the end of her job.
"I hit the third rail. You cannot criticize Israel in this country and survive," Thomas told Ohio station WMRN-AM in a sometimes emotional 35-minute interview that aired Tuesday. It was recorded a week earlier by WMRN reporter Scott Spears at Thomas' Washington, D.C., condominium.
Thomas, 90, stepped down from her job as a columnist for Hearst News Service in June after a rabbi and independent filmmaker videotaped her outside the White House calling on Israelis to get "out of Palestine." She gave up her front row seat in the White House press room, where she had aimed often pointed questions at 10 presidents, going back to Dwight D. Eisenhower.
She has kept a low profile since then.
In the below clip (via Mediaite), Thomas can be heard crying after learning that President Obama condemned her remarks about Israel on the "Today" show, calling them "offensive and out of line."
"I think he was very unfair, and I return the compliment on his remarks," Thomas said. "Reprehensible."
"(It was) very hard for the first two weeks. After that, I came out of my coma," Thomas said.
Rabbi David Nesenoff, who runs the website rabbilive.com, said he approached Thomas after he'd been at the White House for Jewish Heritage Day on May 27. He asked whether she had any comments on Israel.
"Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine," she replied.
"Remember, these people are occupied and it's their land. It's not Germany, it's not Poland," she continued. Asked where they should go, she answered, "They should go home."
"Where's home?" Nesenoff asked.
"Poland, Germany and America and everywhere else," Thomas replied.
"I told him exactly what I thought," she told Spears.
Spears said during the interview that some accounts left off her reference to America and gave the wrong impression that Thomas was referring to World War II.
"I was not talking about Auschwitz or anything else," she said.
"They distorted my remarks, which they obviously have to do for their own propaganda purposes, otherwise people might wonder why they continue to take Palestinian land," said Thomas, a daughter of Lebanese immigrants who over the years did little to hide her pro-Arab views. There was no explanation of whom "they" referred to.
When she soon began getting calls about her remark, "I said this is the end of my job."
She issued an apology, she told the radio interviewer, because people were upset and she thought she had hurt people. "At the same time, I had the same feelings about Israel's aggression and brutality," Thomas said.
Asked whether she's anti-Semitic, she responded "Baloney!" She said she wants to be remembered for "integrity and my honesty and my belief in good journalism" and would like to work again.
Spears said Thomas granted him the interview because the two had developed a friendship during previous interviews she had done with the station in Marion, 42 miles north of Columbus in central Ohio.
Their discussion also touched on current politics, particularly on women.
Thomas described Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton as "a hawk." "I thought women in politics would have more compassion, be more liberal," Thomas said.
As for Sarah Palin, Thomas said she believed the former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential candidate was ambitious enough to run for president.
"That would be a tragedy, a national tragedy," she said, describing Palin as "very conservative, reactionary, unbelievable."
Asked about tea party-backed Republican Delaware Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell, Thomas responded with one word: "Frightening."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/13/helen-thomas-im-not-antis_n_760789.html
From Apartheid South Africa to Palestine
"To Exist is to Resist"
By PATRICK BOND
October 13, 2010
On a full-day drive through the Jordan Valley late last month, we skirted the earth’s oldest city and the lowest inhabited point, 400 meters below sea level. For 10,000 years, people have lived along the river separating the present-day West Bank and Jordan.
Since 1967 the river has been augmented by Palestinian blood, sweat and tears, ending in the Dead Sea, from which no water flows out, it only evaporates. Conditions degenerated during Israel’s land-grab, when from a peak of more than 300,000 people living on the west side of the river, displacements shoved Palestinian refugees across to Jordan and other parts of the West Bank. The valley has fewer than 60,000 Palestinians today.
But they’re hanging in. “To exist is to resist,” insisted Fathi Ikdeirat, the Save the Jordan Valley network’s most visible advocate (and compiler of an exquisite new book of the same name, free for internet download: www.maan-ctr.org/pdfs/exit.pdf. At top speed on the bumpy dirt roads, Ikdeirat maneuvered between Israeli checkpoints, through Bedouin outposts in the dusty semi-desert, where oppressed communities eke out a living from the dry soils.
Just a few hundred meters away from such villages, like plush white South African suburbs drawing on cheap black township labour, stand some of the 120 Israeli settlements that since the early 1970s have pocked the West Bank. The most debilitating theft is of Palestinian water, for where once peasants gathered enough from local springs and a mountain aquifer to supply ponds that fed their modest crops, today pipe diversions by the Israelis’ agro-export plantations leave the indigenous people’s land scorched.
From the invaders’ fine houses amidst groves of trees with green lawns, untreated sewage is flushed into the Palestinian areas. The most aggressive Israeli settlers launch unpunished physical attacks on the Palestinians, destroying their homes and farm buildings – and last week even a mosque at Beit Fajjar, near Bethlehem.
The Gaza Strip has suffered far worse. Israel’s ‘Operation Cast Lead’ bombing and invasion in early 2009, the 1400 mainly civilian deaths, the use of white phosphorous, political assassinations and the relentless siege are responsible for untold misery. International solidarity activists – including a Jewish delegation last month – are lethally attacked (nine Turks were killed in May) or arrested while trying to sail ships to Gaza with emergency relief supplies.
As Ikdeirat pointed out, the Jordan Valley’s oppression appears as durable, for Netanyahu vowed in February this year ‘never’ to cede this space to the land’s rightful owners. On our way back up to Ramallah for an academic conference, Ikdeirat looked down on his homeland from the western mountains, and outlined the larger struggle against geopolitical manipulation, land grabbing, minority rule, Palestinian child labour on Israeli farms and other profound historical injustices.
Given the debilitating weaknesses within Palestine’s competing political blocs - Hamas in besieged Gaza and Fatah in the Occupied West Bank, as well as the US-Israeli-Fatah-backed unelected government in Ramallah led by the neoliberal prime minister (and former World Bank/IMF official) Salam Fayyad - this is a struggle that only progressive civil society appears equipped to fight properly.
To illustrate the potential, 170 Palestinian organizations initiated the ‘Boycott, Divest, Sanction’ (BDS) campaign five years ago, insisting on the retraction of illegal Israeli settlements (a demand won in the Gaza Strip in 2005), the end of the West Bank Occupation and Gaza siege, cessation of racially-discriminatory policies towards the million and a half Palestinians living within Israel, and a recognition of Palestinians’ right to return to residences dating to the 1948 ethnic cleansing when the Israeli state was established.
The BDS movement draws inspiration from the way we toppled apartheid: an internal intifadah from townships and trade unions, combined with financial sanctions that in mid-1985 peaked because of an incident at the Durban City Hall. On August 15 that year, apartheid boss PW Botha addressed the Natal National Party and an internationally televised audience of 200 million, with his belligerent ‘Rubicon Speech’ featuring the famous finger-wagging command, “Don’t push us too far.”
It was the brightest red flag to our anti-apartheid bull. Immediately as protests resumed, Pretoria’s frightened international creditors – subject to intense activist pressure during prior months - began calling in loans early. Facing a run on the SA Reserve Bank’s hard currency, Botha defaulted on $13 billion of debt payments coming due, shut the stock market and imposed exchange controls in early September.
Within days, leading English-speaking businessmen Gavin Relly, Zac de Beer and Tony Bloom began dismantling their decades-old practical alliance with the Pretoria racists, met African National Congress leaders in Lusaka, and initiated a transition that would free South Africa of racial (albeit not class) apartheid less than nine years later.
Recall that over the prior eight years, futile efforts to seduce change were made by Rev Leon Sullivan, the Philadelphia preacher and General Motors board member whose ‘Sullivan Principles’ aimed to allow multinationals in apartheid SA to remain so long as they were non-racist in employment practices.
But the firms paid taxes to apartheid and supplied crucial logistical support and trade relationships. Hence Sullivan’s effort merely amounted, as Archbishop Desmond Tutu put it, to polishing apartheid’s chains. Across the world, taking a cue from the internal United Democratic Front, activists wisely ignored attempts by Sullivan as well as by ANC foreign relations bureaucrat (later president) Thabo Mbeki to shut down the sanctions movement way too early.
Civil society ratcheted up anti-apartheid BDS even when FW DeKlerk offered reforms, such as freeing Nelson Mandela and unbanning political parties in February 1990. New bank loans to Pretoria for ostensibly ‘developmental’ purposes were rejected by activists, and threats were made: a future ANC government would default.
It was only by fusing bottom-up pressure with top-down international delegitimization of white rule that the final barriers were cleared for the first free vote, on April 27 1994.
Something similar has begun in the Middle East, as long-overdue international solidarity with Palestinians gathers momentum, while Benjamin Netanyahu’s bad-faith peace talks with collaborationist Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas go nowhere. Yet if another sell-out soon looms, tracking the 1993 Oslo deal, we can anticipate an upsurge in BDS activity, drawing more attention to the three core liberatory demands: firstly, respecting, protecting and promoting the right of return of all Palestinian refugees; secondly, ending the occupation of all Palestinian and Arab lands; and thirdly, recognizing full equality for the Palestinian citizens of Israel.
Abbas and Fayyad are sure to fold on all of these principles, so civil society is already picking up the slack. Boycotting Israeli institutions is the primary non-violent resistance strategy.
BDS, says Omar Barghouti of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (http://www.pacbi.org), “remains the most morally sound, non-violent form of struggle that can rid the oppressor of his oppression, thereby allowing true coexistence, equality, justice and sustainable peace to prevail. South Africa attests to the potency and potential of this type of civil resistance.”
For more than 250 South African academics (plus Tutu) who signed a BDS petition last month, the immediate target was Ben Gurion University (BGU). During apartheid, the University of Johannesburg (UJ, then called Rand Afrikaans University) established a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) for scientific exchanges with BGU, which came up for renewal at the UJ Senate on September 29 (details are at http://www.ujpetition.com/).
Perhaps influenced by Mandela’s ill-advised acceptance of an honorary doctorate from BGU, the UJ Senate statement was not entirely pro-Palestinian, for it promoted a fantasy: reform of Israeli-Palestinian relations could be induced by ‘engagement’. Shades of Sullivan empowering himself, to try negotiating between the forces of apartheid and democracy.
On the one hand, the UJ Senate acknowledged that BGU “supports the military and armed forces of Israel, in particular in its occupation of Gaza” – by offering money to students who went into the military reserve so as to support Operation Cast Lead, for example. To its credit, the UJ Senate recognized that “we should take leadership on this matter from peer institutions among the Palestinian population.”
On the other hand, in an arrogant display of constructive-engagement mentality, the UJ Senate academics – many of whom are holdovers from the apartheid era - resolved to “amend the MOU to include one or more Palestinian universities chosen on the basis of agreement between BGU and UJ.”
Fat chance. The UJ statement forgets that Palestinian universities are today promoters of BDS. Even Al Quds University, which historically had the closest ties (and which until Operation Cast Lead actually encouraged Palestine-Israel collaboration), broke the chains in early 2009, because, “Ending academic cooperation is aimed at, first of all, pressuring Israel to abide by a solution that ends the occupation, a solution that has been needed for far too long and that the international community has stopped demanding.”
The man tasked with reconciling UJ’s Senate resolution with Middle East realpolitik is UJ Deputy Vice Chancellor Adam Habib. In 2001 he founded our University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society, and led substantial research projects nurturing progressive social change. Habib was banned from entering the United States from 2006-10, for his crimes of being Muslim and speaking at a 2003 anti-war protest, and he is probably the most eloquent and highest-profile political analyst in South Africa today.
However, Habib made a serious mistake, when recently remarking: “We believe in reconciliation... We’d like to bring BGU and Palestinian universities together to produce a collective engagement that benefits everyone.”
Even Habib’s enormous persuasive capacity will fail, if he expects liberal Zionists to recognize the right of Palestinians to self-determination and Israel’s obligation to comply with international law. Writing in the newspaper Haaretz in early October, BGU official David Newman celebrated Habib’s remark and simultaneously argued, point-blank (with no acknowledgement of the South Africa case), “Boycotts do nothing to promote the interests of peace, human rights or – in the case of Israel – the end of occupation.”
(Yet even Israel’s reactionary Reut Institute recognizes BDS power, arguing in February 2010 that a “Delegitimization Network aims to supersede the Zionist model with a state that is based on the ‘one person, one vote’ principle by turning Israel into a pariah state” and that “the Goldstone report that investigated Operation Cast Lead” caused “a crisis in Israel's national security doctrine… Israel lacks an effective response.”)
Habib deserves far better than a role as a latter-day Leon Sullivan uniting with the likes of Newman, and I hope he changes his mind about ‘engagement’ with Zionism.
After all, last year I witnessed an attempt to do something similar, also involving Habib and BGU. At the time of Operation Cast Lead and the imposition of the siege, Habib, Dennis Brutus, Walden Bello, Alan Fowler and I (unsuccessfully) tried persuading two academic colleagues - Jan Aart Scholte of Warwick University and Jackie Smith of Notre Dame - to respect BDS and decline keynote speaking invitations to an Israeli ‘third sector’ conference.
BGU refused to add Palestinian perspectives (a suggestion from Habib), and the lesson I quickly learned was not to attempt engagement, but instead promote a principled institutional boycott. Today as then, what Habib forgets is Barghouti’s clear assessment of power relations: “Any relationship between intellectuals across the oppression divide must be aimed, one way or another, at ending oppression, not ignoring it or escaping from it. Only then can true dialogue evolve, and thus the possibility for sincere collaboration through dialogue.”
The growing support for Palestinian liberation via BDS reminds of small but sure steps towards the full-fledged anti-apartheid sports, cultural, academic and economic boycotts catalyzed by Brutus against racist South African Olympics teams more than forty years ago. Today, these are just the first nails we’re hammering into the coffin of Zionist domination – in solidarity with a people who have every reason to fight back with tools that we in South Africa proudly sharpened: non-violently but with formidable force.
Patrick Bond, a Durban-based political economist and co-editor of the new book Zuma's Own Goal, was a recent visitor to Palestine at the invitation of Birzeit University in Ramallah.
http://www.counterpunch.org/bond10132010.html
The Real Bibi
His Father's Boy
By URI AVNERY
October 13, 2010
Which is the real Netanyahu?
- Bibi the weakling, the invertebrate, who always gives in to pressure, who zigzags to the left and to the right, depending whether the pressure comes from the US or from his coalition partners?
- The tricky Likud chief, who is afraid that Avigdor Ivett Lieberman might succeed in pushing him towards the Center and displace him as the leader of the entire Right?
- Netanyahu, the man of principle, who is determined to prevent at any cost the setting up of the State of Palestine, and is therefore using every possible ruse to sabotage real negotiations?
The real Netanyahu – stand up!
Hey, wait a minute, what’s going on here? Do I see all three of them rising?
THE FIRST Netanyahu is the one who meets the eye. A leaf in the wind. The con man without principles and with plenty of tricks, whose sole aim is to survive in power.
This Netanyahu practically invites pressure on himself.
Barack Obama pressured him, so he agreed to the settlement freeze – or the perceived settlement freeze. In order to avoid a crisis with the settlers, he promised them that after the agreed ten months, the construction boom would be resumed with full vigor.
The settlers pressured him, and he did indeed resume the building at the appointed time, in spite of the intense pressure from Obama, who pushed for an extension of the moratorium for another two months. Why two months? Because the congressional elections take place on November 2, and Obama desperately needs to avoid a crisis with the Jewish establishment before that. For this end, he is ready to sell Netanyahu the whole inventory – arms, money, political support, a set of guarantees about the outcome of the negotiations that have not yet even begun. Sixty days! sixty days! my kingdom for sixty days!
Netanyahu is now zigzagging between these pressures, trying to find out which is the stronger, which one to give in to, how much and when. In his dreams he probably feels like the Baron von Munchhausen, who found himself on a narrow path, with a lion behind him getting ready to spring and a crocodile in front of him opening its awesome jaws. (If I remember right, the baron ducked and the lion jumped straight into the jaws of the reptile.)
This is the great hope of Netanyahu. AIPAC will help to deliver Obama a crushing defeat in the elections, Obama will deliver a crushing blow to the settlers, and Baron von Netanyahu will rub his hands and survive to fight another day.
Is this the real Netanyahu? For sure.
BUT THE second Netanyahu is no less real. This is Tricky Bibi who is trying to out-fox Tricky Ivett.
Lieberman astounded the UN General Assembly, when, as the Foreign Minister of Israel, he addressed this august body from the rostrum.
Because our Foreign Minister did not rise to defend the policies of his country, as did his colorless colleagues. Quite the opposite: from the UN rostrum he vigorously attacked the policy of his own government, giving it short shrift.
The official policy of the Government of Israel is to conduct direct negotiations with the Palestinian leadership, in order to achieve a final peace treaty within one year.
Nonsense, said the Foreign Minister of that same government. Rubbish. There is no chance at all of a peace treaty, not within a year and not within a hundred years. What’s needed is a Long-Term-Interim-Agreement. In other words, the continuation of the occupation without time limits.
Why did Lieberman give this performance? He was not addressing the few delegates who had remained in the UN assembly hall, but the Israeli public. He challenged Netanyahu: either dismiss me or pretend that the spittle on your face is rain.
But Netanyahu did not dismiss and did not react, except for a weak statement that Lieberman was not expressing his views. And this why? Clearly, if Netanyahu were to kick Lieberman’s party out of the government and bring in Tzipi Livni’s Kadima Party, Lieberman would do to Netanyahu what Netanyahu did to Yitzhak Rabin. He would declare him a traitor selling out the fatherland, an enemy of the settlements. His devotees would parade around with posters of Netanyahu in SS uniform or wearing a keffiyeh, while others performed arcane Kabbalah rituals to bring about his death.
Lieberman would raise the flag of the Right, split the Likud and take sole possession of the entire Israeli Right. He believes that this is the way to become Prime Minister.
Netanyahu understands this perfectly. That’s why he is restraining himself. As a man who grew up in the United States he probably remembers what Lyndon Johnson said about J. Edgar Hoover: Better to have him inside the tent pissing out, then outside the tent pissing in.
AND PERHAPS this Netanyahu – the second one – does not really object to the plan outlined by Lieberman at the UN assembly.
The Foreign Minister was not content with rejecting peace and bringing up the idea of the Long-Term-Interim-Agreement. He described the solution he has in mind. Not surprisingly, it is the electoral platform of his party, Israel Beytenu (“Israel Our Home”). In essence: Israel, the “Nation-State-Of-The-Jewish-People”, will be free of Arabs, or, translated into German, Araberrein.
But Lieberman is a humane person, and does not advocate (at least in public) ethnic cleansing. He does not propose a third Naqbah (after the 1948 Palestinian catastrophe and the 1967 expulsion). No, his solution is far more creative: he will separate from Israel the Arab towns and villages along the Eastern border, the so-called “triangle”, from Umm al-Fahm in the North to Kufr Kassem in the South This area, together with its inhabitants and lands, would be joined to the territory of the Palestinian Authority, and in return Israel would annex the Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
That raises, of course, several questions. First, what about the Arab concentrations in Galilee, which include dozens of villages, towns like Nazareth and Shefa Amr, and the Arab population in the mixed towns, Haifa and Acre? Lieberman does not propose to transfer them too. Neither does he propose to give up East Jerusalem, with its quarter of a million Arab residents. If that is the case, is he prepared to leave in the “Nation-State-Of-The-Jewish-People” more than three quarters of a million Arabs? Or does he dream at night, lying in his bed, of conducting ethnic cleansing after all?
A second question: to whom will he transfer the Arab towns and villages of the ‘triangle”? Without a peace treaty, there will be no Palestinian state. Instead, there will remain the Palestinian Authority, with its few small enclaves all subject to Israeli occupation. The Long-Term-Interim-Agreement would leave this situation, more or less, intact. Meaning that this area, now part of Israel, would become a territory under Israeli occupation. Its inhabitants would lose their status as Israeli citizens and become an occupied population, devoid of civil rights and human rights.
As far as is known, not a singe Arab leader in Israel agrees to that. Even in the past, when it seemed that Lieberman agreed to the establishment of a Palestinian state and wanted to transfer to it the Arab areas of Israel, not a single Arab leader in Israel agreed. The Arab citizens of Israel, a population approaching a million and a half, are indeed a part of the Palestinian people, but they are also a part of the Israeli population.
Netanyahu is certainly afraid of Lieberman, but can it be that he did not condemn Lieberman’s UN speech because he secretly shares his views?
In any case, this week Netanyahu announced that he is adopting Lieberman’s baby, the demand that non-Jewish (meaning Arab) people who wish to obtain Israeli citizenship swear allegiance not just to the State of Israel and its laws, as is usual, but to “Israel as a Jewish and democratic state”. This is a nonsensical and meaningless addition, solely devised to provoke the 20% of Israelis who are Arabs. One might as well demand candidates for US citizenship swear allegiance to the “United States as a White Anglo-Saxon Christian and democratic nation”.
BUT IT is quite possible that there is a third Netanyahu, who stands taller than the others.
This is the Netanyahu who always believed in a Greater Israel, and who has never given up the ideology which he suckled with his mother’s milk.
The veteran Israeli journalist Gideon Samet goes further: he believes that Binyamin Netanyahu’s main motivation is his total obedience to his old father.
Ben-Zion Netanyahu is now 100 years old, and in full possession of his mental faculties. He is a professor of history, born in Warsaw, who came to Palestine in 1920 and changed his name from Mileikowsky to Netanyahu (“God has Given”). He has always been on the extreme right-wing fringe. Ben-Zion Netanyahu spent several periods of his life in the US, where his three sons grew up. When in 1947 the UN General Assembly adopted the plan to partition Palestine between a Jewish state and an Arab state, father Netanyahu signed a petition, published in the New York Times, condemning the resolution in the strongest terms. Returning to Israel, he was not accepted into the new Freedom Party (the forerunner of Likud), because his views were too extreme even for Menachem Begin’s tastes. He claims that he was barred from a professorship in the Hebrew University because of his opinions, and his bitterness about this poisoned the atmosphere at home.
The professor’s special field is Spanish Jewry, with the emphasis on the Spanish Inquisition. He condemns the Jews who were baptized (the Marranos) and says that the great majority of them were eager to be assimilated into Christian Spanish society, contrary to the official heroic myth, which says that they continued to practice the religion of their forefathers in secret.
When Netanyahu the son transferred a part of Hebron to the Palestinian Authority, his father rebuked him and stated publicly that he was unfit for the job of Prime Minister, fit at most to serve as Foreign Secretary. But the son made a huge effort to remain true to his father’s views, and that is the main motivation for his policy. According to Samet, he would not dare to face his father and tell him that he had given away parts of Eretz Israel.
I tend to accept this version. Netanyahu will never agree to be responsible for the establishment of the State of Palestine, will never conduct serious peace negotiations – unless under extreme duress. That is all there is to it, everything else is hollow talk.
If the real Netanyahu were called to stand up, all three, and perhaps a few more, would rise. But the third one is the most real.
Uri Avnery is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom. He is a contributor to CounterPunch's book The Politics of Anti-Semitism.
http://www.counterpunch.org/avnery10132010.html
The Waning of Obama
Fanon, D'Souza, Obama and the Echoes of Colonialism
By VIJAY PRASHAD
October 13, 2010
Barack Obama, Dinesh D’Souza and I went to college at almost the same time. Obama was at one end of Los Angeles (Occidental College), while I was at the other end (Pomona College). “We smoked cigarettes,” Obama wrote in Dreams From My Father, “and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society’s stifling constraints. We weren’t indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated.” My cigarettes didn’t have tobacco in them, and thanks to KSPC’s press pass I spent as much time outside the Roxy “discoursing” with such luminaries as Jello Biafra and Nina Hagen; I imagine if Obama had turned the corner, he might have joined us. We had Fanon and radical feminism in common. California über alles!
Dinesh was on the other coast, at Dartmouth, where I imagine him in an Oxford shirt and tie, smiling in his quiet way on the deck of some plutocrat’s house where his Dartmouth Review colleagues repaired for the weekend. When I first read his Illiberal Education (1991), I longed to reach out and hand him a joint. My best classes in college had us read the books that Dinesh excoriated: Fanon, for instance. It tells you something about how poorly Dinesh reads when you get to his section on Fanon's Wretched of the Earth (pp. 78-79). “Much of his book is a crude rationalization of violence,” writes our Dartmouth graduate. Anyone who has actually read the book knows that “Concerning Violence” is only one chapter in a very complex book about the legacy of colonialism and the post-colonial present (another chapter, “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness” is a fierce indictment of the post-colonial regimes, and it does not “cater to a guilty Western audience”).
In his What’s So Great About America (2002), Dinesh has a chapter called “Two Cheers for Colonialism,” a little play on E. M. Forester’s 1951 Two Cheers for Democracy. It is perhaps useful to mention that Dinesh D’Souza was born in Goa in 1961, the year that the Indian republic invaded the Portuguese colony, annexed it to India, and undermined the Bamon (Roman Catholic Brahmin) community to which D’Souza’s family belongs. Dinesh’s allergy to anti-colonialism cannot be reduced to India’s invasion of his family’s domestic bliss (for that would be as reductive as what he does to Obama in his new book), but it is certainly useful context. In What’s So Great, Dinesh quotes a line from Fanon, which he repeats in his new book: “The well-being and progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians and the yellow races” (p. 76 of Wretched).
Historians are now quite in agreement that the emergence of capitalism in the Atlantic world benefitted greatly, if not was produced by, the values appropriated from the slave trade and colonial plantation labor. Fanon’s dictum is humdrum. Not so for Dinesh, and the Right, who would much rather take Max Weber’s view, that capitalism emerges because of the Protestant instinct towards thrift. If you take Weber’s position, then resentment for colonial wrongs and poverty due to the political economy of colonialism are off the table. The answer to the whinging from the South: get on with it. Without a consideration of the history of colonialism, and of the unequal political-economic arrangements of our current world, people in the United States don’t have enough tools to properly grasp the contemporary international dynamics. If it is ignorance you want, or simply arrogance, Dinesh is good stuff.
Dinesh’s handle on Fanon and neo-colonialism was weak then, and incoherent now. In his new book, The Roots of Obama’s Rage, Dinesh reaches into the deep well of conspiracy and paranoia to make Obama the Manchurian President. Obama, for Dinesh, is neither a liberal, nor a socialist in the European sense. Worse than that, Obama is literally a child of his father (whose dreams he continues to dream). Barack Obama, Sr. (1936-1982) came to Hawaii as a student, married Ann Dunham, and they gave birth to their only child, Barack “Barry” Obama. Obama, jr. was born in 1961, and saw his father until early 1964 (when his parents divorced) and then again briefly in 1971. Their contact was limited, and Senior’s influence was mute.
What the Father was, the Son becomes: that is Dinesh’s method. In July 1965, in the heyday of the Third World Project, Obama, Sr., published an essay in the East Africa Journal called “Problems Facing Our Socialism.” It is standard fare for a government economist of his caliber, particularly in his avowal of self-reliant growth for his country (Kenya) and anxiety over too close association with either the Atlantic bloc (laissez faire, in his terms) or the Warsaw Pact (“Marxian socialism”). Every country wants to be independent, he argues, so non-alignment with the superpowers is the natural bent of most new nation-states. The problem is how to break out of dependence. But there are limits “because of our lack of basic resources and skilled manpower, yet one can choose to develop by the bootstraps rather than become a pawn of some foreign power such as Sékou Touré did” (the reference is to Ahmed Sékou Touré’s policy of linking Guinea’s development to the USSR; to be fair, Touré tried to make good with JFK, but lost the momentum when he blamed the CIA for the arrest of a Guinean delegation in post-coup Ghana in 1965). Obama, Sr., wants not association with Moscow, nor with Washington or London. He wants Kenya to rule itself (or at least be ruled by the post-colonial elite who took over western Nairobi for its ecumene).
Dinesh misses the plot of the essay. He paints Obama, Sr., as a radical Third World nationalist in the mold of Modibo Keïta and Kwame Nkrumah. This is superficial. Obama, Sr., was certainly a Kenyan nationalist, one who was eager for a fair bargain for the Kenyan people, but he was not Africa’s Castro. He was more like Rómulo Betancourt, the bourgeois leader of Venezuela whose nationalism was only as fierce as his attachment to the survival of his country. Or else, his essay reads very much like Alexander Hamilton’s remarkable, and little read, 1791 “Report on Manufacturers.” Can’t get much more patriotic than that. Nevertheless, both Newt Gingrich and Glenn Beck jumped up and down in glee in agreement with Dinesh. This is the kind of blather that passes for analysis on the Right. There is no need for the fantasy critique of Dinesh D’Souza, or the mad hatter slogans of the Tea Party. To them, the slogan of Talleyrand, “All that is exaggerated is insignificant.”
Those who read Fanon seriously are not blind advocates of Obama’s innings in the White House. Indeed, the Left has been far more sincerely critical of the genuine problems in Washington than the Right, which is keen on wedge issues, on lies and on diversions. I wanted Obama to win the 2008 election for one simple reason: it was a stubby brown finger in the eye of white supremacy. I had few expectations for his presidency. In early 2009 I began to write a play set in the White House Master Bedroom, with Barack and Michelle Obama in bed, reading Fanon and Toni Cade Bambara, wondering what they were doing in this mess. Sandwiched by Wall Street and the Pentagon, by the far Right Republicans and the near Right Democrats, there was so little room to maneuver. The electoral calendar (elections every two years) precludes any long-range reform, and the corporate money (Citizens United) makes it hard to sell any long-term policy in a media-saturated political climate. The context leaves them in a miserable state.
Obama, the person, is not relevant to me. Even the most radical person in the White House would not be able to move an agenda without some fundamental reform of the political system, or an active people’s movement ready to beat back the Right and the plutocrats, as well as to hold its leader accountable. Nothing like that now, or in the near future. In December 1971, Newsweek put our predicament well, “The relationship between money and politics is so organic that seeking reform is tantamount to asking a doctor to perform open-heart surgery on himself.” It is not just money, as I’ve pointed out, but the electoral calendar, and indeed the archaic system of the Electoral College, of the demographic inequality in the Senate, and of fear among the population to break from the comforts of the two-party system. In 2008, Robert Kuttner (founder of The American Prospect) wanted Obama to “restore taxes on corporations and the wealthiest Americans, reduce spending on foreign wars, incur temporary larger deficits, and use the proceeds for very substantial social investments” (Obama’s Challenge). Such idealism always results in acute disappointment.
The dark night of the Bush years, and the immense frustration with the result of his 2004 re-election, provided the electricity for the 2008 election campaign. Obama appeared not so much for his own views, or lack thereof, but as one of Hegel’s Heroes, those who derive “their purposes and their vocation, not from the calm, regular course of things, sanctioned by the existing order; but from a concealed fount, from the inner Spirit, still hidden beneath the surface.” The standard bearer had to be Myth, and so he won with a margin of seven million votes. It had to be so. Unlike Hegel’s Hero, however, Obama could not move the inner kernel to burst its shell into pieces. He was paralyzed by it.
Circumstances might have forced him to inhabit the progressive ideal, but Fanon’s “granite block,” the vast pressure of Wealth and Power, took its revenge on History. It is this that holds the attention of Tariq Ali, whose The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad (Verso, 2010) documents the collapse of the Myth into a thousand pieces (David Remnick’s The Bridge, Knopf, 2010 admits to much of the same defenestration of a New Deal charter into the Potomac, where it floated past the Pentagon to hearty cheers). Tariq indicts Obama for hypocrisy and a failure of nerve, whether in dealing with the banking crisis or the escalation in Afghanistan. The charge sheet is comprehensive, but of course not exhaustive (it is a 100 page book).
It is even stronger in Cathy Cohen’s powerful Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics (Oxford, 2010), which shows how black youth remain in structural desolation, with few good jobs, high rates of incarceration and no trust in the institutions that seem to encage them. Politicians like to reduce the structural problems to personal failures, to blame the victim in some ways, because it is much easier and cheaper to do so (eat better, don’t drink soda, they tell the poor; far more difficult to force the food industry to stop using high fructose corn syrup, fat and salt to addict us). Cathy will have none of it. She is fierce in her recovery of the structural dynamic, and in insisting that the malaise in public policy be removed in favor of a forthright acknowledgement of the barriers put before the disposable classes in the country.
The insistence on the structural returns us to colonialism and to Fanon. American power falters in the thickets of its wars. If one knows nothing of one’s enemy, then one must only strive for its obliteration. There is something genocidal about the refusal to understand (this is an ethic shared by Islamic fundamentalism and Washington globalization). The charge of naïveté is thrown at those who counsel dialogue, but the same indictment applies to those whose foreign policy starts and ends with the B2 stealth bomber. It is of course naïve to expect the leadership of al-Qaeda and the Obama administration to conduct a conclave. It is, however, reasonable to demand that the inequities of colonial rule and the unequal architecture of the post-colonial world order be redressed to create the conditions in the future for human relations to be possible. Such was the demand of the Third World Project, of which Fanon was such an important intellectual figure. We can get out of the severe conflicts of our time only if we restore meaning to the great ideas of the Project.
Vijay Prashad is the George and Martha Kellner Chair of South Asian History and Director of International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford, CT His most recent book, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World, won the Muzaffar Ahmad Book Prize for 2009. The Swedish and French editions are just out.
http://www.counterpunch.org/
October 13, 2010
Posts
