In these days of Occupy Wall Street demonstrations across the U.S., it's important to see what motivates Obama administration policies here and abroad. Mr. Obama, as a candidate, had to bat away accusations that he was close, too close, to Rashid Khalidi, a radical Palestinian Arab intellectual. Candidate Obama then soothed worried friends of Israel, by minimizing his intellectual fealty to Khalidi, saying merely that "[Khalidi provides] consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases" on matters related to the Arab-Israeli conflict. How humble. How becomingly modest.
Rashid Khalidi is a professor at Columbia University, Mr. Obama's alma mater. Khalidi holds the Edward Said Chair in Modern Arab Studies at that distinguished Ivy League school. The late Edward Said (sigh-EED) gained respect among left-leaning intellectuals for his numerous writings on Orientalism, the notion that Western colonial powers viewed Arabs, Asians, Africans and Latin Americans as lesser peoples, as "others." But Said was most famous--or infamous--for some direct action. He was photographed throwing stones at Israeli forces as they departed South Lebanon in 2000. Harmless, Said claimed, he was only practicing with his son. But deadly stoning was the weapon of choice for the intifadas engineered by Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas against Israeli soldiers. Arafat and Abbas knew that teenage boys throwing stones with lethal accuracy would play well in the Western media, including especially in the pro-PLO precincts of CNN.
At home, the Occupy Wall Street crowd quickly descended to anti-Semitism. They are protesting income inequality, they say, but their cry of 99% against the 1% is a veiled reference to American Jews, who constitute less than 2% of the U.S. population. More than a few anti-Semitic signs and demonstrators have been drawn to Zuccotti Park, in Lower Manhattan.
In Israel, author George Gilder points out, Arabs were wealthier on the West Bank of the Jordan River and in the Gaza Strip than any Arabs in the world. This, in territories administered by Jews that had no oil. From 1967, when Israel won the Six-Day War against four Arab enemies, until 1991, when Arafat instigated the first of his intifadas (stone-throwing riots by youths) and initiated suicide bombings as a terror tactic, Arabs working with the Israelis prospered and lived healthier longer lives.
Despite vast oil revenues in much of the Arab world, Gilder notes in his important book , The Israel Test, the Arab peoples who live in these countries are poor. We have only to contrast the vast wealth amassed by the late and unlamented Muammar Gaddafi (estimated at $200 billion) with the wretched state of the average Libyan to see this. This was equally true of Iraq. The Saudi people, while materially better off than many Arabs, nonetheless are denied religious and civil rights. Arab rulers keep their peoples at bay by blaming all their troubles on the Jews, on Israel.
Gilder sees a direct link from attitudes toward Israel, attitudes toward Jewish excellence, and attitudes toward free enterprise itself. Occupy Wall Street today is protesting against income inequality. They have been embraced by President Obama, whose stated goal is to "spread the wealth around." Asked by an interviewer if he would seek tax increases on the wealthy even if that meant lower tax revenues for the government, Mr. Obama said he would, for the sake of "fairness."
From each according to his abilities to each according to his need: that's the standard Marxist formulation. Left unsaid is that it is Mr. Obama and his administration that decide whose needs are met and how much to take from those with abilities.
Gilder challenges us to ask ourselves what we think about excellence--that of Jewish achicvers and all those others who excel. Do we resent their achievement? Do we attribute it to some evil conspiracy? Do we want to drag them down? Or do we want to emulate them, study, work hard, invent, create, and share our own ideas?
Gilder writes: "With wealth seen as stolen from the exploited poor, the poor in turn [are given] a license to dispossess and kill their oppressors and to disrupt capitalist economies. This is the foul message of Franz Fanon, Hamas, al-Qaida, Hezbollah, and the academic coteries of Chomsky, Zinn, and a thousand Marxist myrmidons across the campuses of the world. But no capitalist system can sustain prosperity amid constant violence. The idea that suicide bombing is a tolerable policy that can be extenuated by alleged grievances is preposterous. It is the violence that makes necessary the police measures that render economic progress impossible, particularly for the groups associated with the attacks. By justifying violent attacks on a civilized democracy -- and then condemning the necessary retaliatory defense -- leftists would allow no solution but tyranny."
Gilder's "Israel Test" is not one our Ivy Leaguer president can pass. Of course, Mr. Obama does not support terrorism. But he is giving $500 million this year to the PLO--which has simply deconstructed and re-defined its support for suicide bombers and stone throwers. The president simply shares the worldview of the academy--in which Israel is much to blame for "Mideast turmoil" as her attackers are. He believes that fairness requires redistribution of what he terms "the nation's wealth." He sees our Judeo-Christian heritage not as the bedrock of American Exceptionalism, but as merely one part of the broad tapestry of American life.
Barack Obama's intellectual world is one in which Fanon, Chomsky, Zinn, and those neo-Marxist thinkers hold sway. Only free societies can create enough surplus wealth to support such dissident scholars and their "myrmidons" in the Occupy Wall Street Movement in their midst. But such societies--in the U.S. and Canada, in Western Europe and in Israel--will not survive if they do not understand and protect the very foundations of their own freedom.
True and well said
israelis benefit enough from the relationship with the US as it is. They should stop complaining with their palms open and just say thankyou somettimes.
One thing though: in 1991 the first intifada, started in 1987 without Arafat, but co-opted by him and his myrmidons, had already petered out.
The unprecedented gulf of terrorism and suicide-homicide attacks we saw in the 1990's and during the second intifada (planned by Arafat) overtook Israel soon after the start of the "Peace Process".
The Arabs have all the money. Indescribable wealth due to oil. The princes and sheiks live like the AGA Kahn (while their populace live in near poverty) protected by the US mility complex
They buy of the UN they buy off Obama they buy off Cameron. They buy off the PLO
Yet the Jews are blamed.
Iran and S Arabia two worst nations in ME. Let them cancel each other out so we can all live in peace and prosperity
For the first 3 years he was "struggling" with HIS agenda, and now he is struggling with how to get reelected.
If you really believe that "the 1% is a veiled reference to American Jews" then you should be arrested for hate speech. Since when do we accept the notion that Wealthy = Jewish? Or that people who complain about bankers are actually complaining about Jews?
So, no hate speech, at all. Just telling it like it is with many people.
Do you have any evidence that anti-Semitism is a part of the Occupy movement, or do you simply accept that if they don't like bankers, then they don't like Jews. And it you do, how do "Jew" and "banker" become synonyms in your head -- and why?
In this 2009 book Mr. Gilder makes the case for Israel, portraying a conflict of barbarism, envy and death against civilization, creativity and life.
Gilder reveals Israel as a leader of human civilization, technological progress and scientific advance. Tiny Israel stands behind only the United States in its contributions to the hi-tech economy. Israel has become the world's paramount example of the blessings of freedom.
And yet Israel is the most hated nation in the world today.
Israel is hated as the US is hated, because Israel is successful, because Israel is free and because Israel is good.
Hostility to Israel and toward the US arises primarily from hostility toward capitalist creativity. Anti-Semitism has always arisen from envy and greed, even if cloaked in Nazi or Marxist "moral" critiques of commerce, portraying Jewish enterprises that enrich the world as parasitical or even critical conspiracies. Rooted in a Marxist zero-sum-game theory of economics, this vision has fueled the anti-Semitic rantings of Hitler, Arafat, Bin Laden and histories other notorious haters.
Wherever Jews are free to invent and create, they achieve conspicious success, arousing envy and resentment. Jewish scientists and entrepreneurs forged much of the science and wealth of our era.
Israel today concentrates the genius of the Jews and thus the resentment of the failed states that surround her.
Equating the two does not help Israel or Jews living anywhere in the world.
The area Israel has tried to give the Palestinians three times is properly described as “disputed” rather than “occupied.” In 1922, the League of Nations? designated it as the national home of the Jewish people. In 1937, in response to Arab pogroms, the Peel Commission proposed two states, which the Jews accepted and the Arabs rejected. In 1947, the UN proposed another two-state solution; the Jews accepted and the Arabs rejected it. When the Arabs started a war, Jordan illegally occupied a portion of Palestine — an occupation never recognized by the UN, U.S., Soviet Union, or any Arab country. In 1967, when it joined still another war against Israel, Jordan lost the land it unlawfully held. It is currently held by the only entity with even a shadow of a legal claim to it: the Jewish state.
With the demise of the peace process – the victim of too many Palestinian rejections of a state, too many wars after withdrawals from disputed land, too many years of Palestinian refusals to negotiate without pre-negotiation concessions designed to pre-determine the issues to be negotiated – it is time to return to first principles.
Continued
When Gilder jumps on the band wagon, you know that horse is heading for the barn.
Edward Said symbolically threw a stone at the occupation. At no time was an IDF soldier in danger.