When John Bolton, who now said he is considering a run for the US presidency, was set to testify in July 2006 before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee during his failed effort to get the Senate to confirm his nomination as US Ambassador to the United Nations, I got an early copy of his "prepared remarks" for the hearing. These remarks were handed to me as I walked in to the meeting.
Then as Bolton walked in, we were hurriedly given an updated set of remarks. I knew something must have changed -- and I went through the material page by page until I realized that what had been struck was a zinger that Bolton had been saying in the press frequently with regard to the Israel-Lebanon War.
What was struck was this line:
But it is a mistake to ascribe a moral equivalence to civilians who die as the direct result of malicious terrorist acts, the very purpose of which are to kill civilians, and the tragic and unfortunate consequence of civilian deaths as a result of military action taken in self-defense.
Bolton, strangely, was going out of the way to argue that the value of innocents killed on one side of a military equation were not equal to the lives of those on the other side. In other words, for Bolton, innocent life does not equal innocent life.
Those attacked -- in this case an attack against Israeli military troops who are deployed both for security and occupation can justify Israel's response that kills and wounds many uninvolved with the attack in question. No need to justify, to rationalize, or even to express remorse. Bolton's argument goes that those killed by way of Israel's counter-response were in the way and are not the equivalent of lives lost, though far fewer by any measure, on the Israeli side.
This dismissal of the value of Muslim and Arab lives by prominent voices has spread to America -- and this trend is deeply, profoundly anti-American, but it is real nonetheless.
Whether it is the efforts to demonize those who would place a Mosque to promote cultural understanding near Ground Zero in New York or the crazy pastor who wants to get headlines by a Koran-burning, it is now a fad of the pugnacious, jingoistic right wing to flirt with racist, bigoted anti-Arab, anti-Islam symbolism that reminds one of the fears that led to the internment of Japanese Americans, as Nicholas Kristof points out in an article asking some of these same questions.
And now the editor in chief of one of Washington's most venerable rights-concerned journals of opinion, Martin Peretz, has written clearly that he doubts that Muslim lives are worth much and that in his gut he doesn't believe Muslims deserve the protections of American laws and civil rights.
Nick Kristoff writes:
For a glimpse of how venomous and debased the discourse about Islam has become, consider a blog post in The New Republic this month. Written by Martin Peretz, the magazine's editor in chief, it asserted: "Frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims."
Mr. Peretz added: "I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment, which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse."
One of my late mentors, Hans Baerwald, taught me that the only way to get a real rather than shallow sense of a political system's norms and operating behavior was to watch it under stress.
With commentary like that we have seen from John Bolton, Martin Peretz, Richard Cheney, Liz Cheney, Glenn Beck, and saw in the political maneuvering of Cheney Chief of Staff, David Addington, we unleashed an America that defiles key aspects of its own DNA and that is less-trustable by the rest of the world today.
To take this further, I think the debate today is not about the treatment of Muslims of those of Arab descent, but about the United States itself.
John Bolton and Martin Peretz, in undermining America's core values of a big-tent approach to accommodating and absorbing other societies, are not performing a patriotic duty -- but are displaying the opposite of American patriotism.
-- Steve Clemons publishes the popular political blog, The Washington Note. Clemons can be followed on Twitter @SCClemons
Follow Steve Clemons on Twitter: www.twitter.com/SCClemons
What must always be ultimately sad, however, is when we, through our collective politics, absolve ourselves, or at least try to, from any final responsibility. So many deaths, over time, and with ever increasing complication, and the best we can still do is employ the title of "collateral circumstances". And then act like we did almost nothing, while time and events inevitably erode the personal defenses that we believed were impregnable when we built them.
I agree the Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other areas of engagement are the latest to be callously extirpated but I hardly think John Bolton is new to this party ... and it is doubtful the American approach will change.
Remember the immortal words of General Jacob Smith in the Philippine American War when he retaliated against the people of Samar:
"I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better it will please me. I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities against the United States.”
The American Way.
"Mr. Peretz added: 'I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment, which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.'"
I cannot believe that Mr. Peretz would be expressing concern if Muslim are "worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment" because they will just go ahead an abuse it when we have so many examples of it already. --The Florida "pastor", Newt Gingrich's latest off-the-wall statement, etc. What's a few more?
No questions lives do matter to every nation. However when at war every nation tries to save lives of its citizens first. Remember end of WW2 allies attacking Germans or US attacking Japanese or recent Iraq-Iran war. In every case each side attacked its enemy with almost no regards to civilian casualties of the other side in order to save their own people, not for sheer evil of kill.
I guess what Martin Peretz meant was that Muslims done harm to each other in much greater proportion then non Muslims to them. (90% of casualties in Iraq caused by Muslims on Muslims violence)
Do you need more examples?
The comparison wold work if some Muslim nation was involved in the conflict as US in Iraq and blamed all the time for all Iraqi casualties.
Besides my main point was that regardless of religion countries at war try to save their people first.
No nation has mastered this skill. The fact that Israel is expected to is the primary issue.
The Israelis simply want to be left alone to live in peace. After all these years they have developed a heavy-hand at counter-attack. I do not think any modern, well armed nation would have done otherwise.
Are you joking??? Is that why they are stealing occupied WB land and water resources?
Stop playing the victim, please
The Arab world lays down their arms tomorrow and promises no retaliation. Voila! Peace in the Middle East.
The Israelis lay down their arms tomorrow and promise no retailiation. Voila! No Israel.
1. The losers don't get to make demands from the winners and especially not under threat of terror.
2. The negotiations should relate to the position of the Israeli borders, NOT to the EXISTANCE of Israeli borders.
3. Any agreement must be binding and not simply a starting point for another intafata.
I find these ground-rules to be normal and fair.
"Just like in any African Nations, blacks think that black life is cheap." Hiram Evans (Third leader of the KKK)
Same racists different century.
And, of course, if you are proposing war without civilian casualties, that fantasy ended 70 years ago or so..
The occupation breeds resistance. Occupying power responses to the resistance. Which act is terrorism and which act is self defence? This depends which side you are on.
Sure.
You know your side.
I know mine
You look at me
I look in your eye
And of course, now we have travelled far enough down a path that allows to actually say - with no guilt - that your life is meaningless to us.
So the real question you have to ask yourself is, how are you to protect you and yours when those same people come after you, and then hide like cowards? The face of war has drastically changed and that's part of why were are in the impasse we are now; just as in Nam, with the "bomb them back to the stone age" idea floated out--no one had the will to do that, but the alternative was horrible war of attrition on both sides, and/or leaving; eventually we left. We face that same choice in Afghanistan.