Thought for the Day

[buttslinger]

...Pecker has photos of one man's pecker, does he have photos of the President's pecker...

Wait a minute,...uh, yeah here it is, chapter 9, page 265 from Mueller's report......PUTIN has the pics of Preze"s pecker, Peckar has the pics of Cruze"s Dad shooting Kennedy. FAKE NEWS FAKE NEWS!!!!!!!


Seriously, I hope the Democrat's one wish is Wisdom, because we're going to have the Mother of all messes when this is over.

[filghy2]

Who gains from watching boys comparing their peckers, and does it mean size matters?

It certainly does to Trump. https://www.thecut.com/2016/03/donal...s-moments.html

According to Stormy Daniels, it is smaller than average and shaped like a toadstool. If there are pictures, I really hope I never see them. It's bad enough to be constantly seeing that weird hair and orange face.

[broncofan]

I find myself without political company. Ilhan Omar, a Congresswoman, recently said "it's all about the benjamins (meaning money)" in response to a tweet about the basis for U.S. Congressional support for Israel.

It has been widely portrayed as anti-semitic and I don't think it is. She clarified her statement to say that she was speaking about AIPAC and its lobbying activities on behalf of the Israeli government.

This has long been a hot button issue because it is very easy to talk about lobbies, particularly AIPAC, in ways that could raise the most resonant anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. If you think about what a foreign lobby does, you have the seeds of many of the accusations that have been directed at Jews for centuries. Money for favors? Check. Lobbyists pay money and they buy influence, and though I think AIPAC doesn't directly contribute to campaigns, they spend money in the hopes of obtaining favorable legislation for Israel. In discussing an Israeli lobby, a person could, if they didn't limit their argument to actual lobbyists, portray Jewish people as being perfidious, sneaky, and powerful beyond rational explanation.

The problem with saying Omar's comment is anti-Semitic is that she didn't actually do those things. Would I have preferred seriousness of purpose to a glib statement about money? Sure. After all, the best antidote to the accusation that you're engaged in conspiratorial stereotyping is to be specific and clear about the parameters of what you're talking about.

For instance, if one looks at the ways one could talk about the Israeli lobby in anti-Semitic ways, it makes Omar's comment look benign. One could accuse any Jewish person they disagree with of being in "the lobby" and basically portray it as an amorphous agglomeration of Jews. But all she did was say that Congress' disposition is influenced by the money of AIPAC. I'm sure it is.

The reason I said I find it strange is that people have portrayed this as similar to some of the Labour crises. That seems bizarre and ill-informed to me.

Can you imagine a U.S. Congressman circulating a petition on behalf of Gilad Atzmon? Look him up. An MP did that and pretended he didn't know who he was when I, an American, first heard of the guy a decade ago. I feel the U.S. is far too restrictive of this conversation and allows fair comment to be portrayed as bigotry, whereas elsewhere fairly clear hatred is portrayed as fair comment. Also, many of the things that I saw in Labour didn't have anything to do with Israel, like when Damien Enticott said that "Talmud Jews need executing". It's hard to draw fair comment from a statement like that, but some people were able to infer that we weren't objecting out of genuine concern but rather out of an illicit motive to harm the party that spoke for Palestinian rights. Go figure. What a mess. I fully support the Democratic party and only wish more people had stood up for Omar, who raised a hot button issue, one that needs to be spoken about sensitively, but was not anti-Semitic.

[filghy2]

I wonder if the criticism of her would be so vehement if she was not a Muslim. I agree than accusations of anti-semitism are too often used to dismiss criticism of Israeli government policies and other countries' support for them.

Ironically, the Israeli government has been establishing closer relationships with right-wing nationalist governments in Europe who have a history of anti-semitism but are prepared to support Israel's own nationalist policies.

[broncofan]

I wonder if the criticism of her would be so vehement if she was not a Muslim.

It depends who the criticism is from. Some of the "criticism" of her was openly Islamophobic (see Lee Zeldin). The reaction of the Republican party is hypocritical and ridiculous. Other people had concerns that she first referred to money and seemed to indicate it completely accounted for their support of Israel. It's unprovable either way, but we speculate about other lobbies in exactly the same way. Who has not said that the NRA's activities buy legislation? It's not provable either.

I think other parts of the Jewish community are concerned about the way lobbying activity can so easily turn to conspiracy talk. But, you have to deal with that when you get there. I haven't much enjoyed being asked who my Zionist paymaster is by idiots because I disagree with some harebrained thing they've said, but some topics will be a lightning rod for those people. You can't blame the person just for raising a legitimate topic of discussion.

A good example: David Duke is offering support for Omar. Is that damning for her? Of course not. Everyone with a brain knows that yes, a Neo-Nazi will try to mainstream anything that will make some segments of the Jewish community a bit uncomfortable. But it does have an emotional effect that is hard to avoid.

I definitely think her being Muslim plays a role but the discussion of concerted behavior by any segment of the Jewish community is hot button.

[Stavros]

This has long been a hot button issue because it is very easy to talk about lobbies, particularly AIPAC, in ways that could raise the most resonant anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. If you think about what a foreign lobby does, you have the seeds of many of the accusations that have been directed at Jews for centuries. Money for favors? Check. Lobbyists pay money and they buy influence, and though I think AIPAC doesn't directly contribute to campaigns, they spend money in the hopes of obtaining favorable legislation for Israel. In discussing an Israeli lobby, a person could, if they didn't limit their argument to actual lobbyists, portray Jewish people as being perfidious, sneaky, and powerful beyond rational explanation.

The famous or notorious power of the 'Israel Lobby' in Washington begs the question: is it really as influential as people say it is, compared to, say the 'fossil fuels lobby' or 'Big Pharma'? One way of answering the question would be another question: would the Middle East policy of the USA be different if the 'Israel Lobby'did not exist? I am inclined to the view that it would not.

Consider the recognition of Israel in 1948. It may be the case that supporters of the Zionist project -not all of them Jewish- lobbied Washington even before the full extent of the Holocaust was revealed. And it is the case that President Truman was sympathetic to Zionism as a humanitarian project. However, when he suggested to Prime Minister Attlee that the British allow Jewish immigration into Palestine, and Attlee responded by suggesting the US share the governance of Palestine, Truman stepped back. Similarly, Truman through his Secretary of State, George Marshall, was aware that Arab opinion was opposed to the creation of Israel and that Marshall himself was too, indeed at one time Marshall threatened to resign over the issue. But when on the 14th of May the US offered Israel de facto recognition, Truman remarked they had got in there before the USSR, which gave de jure recognition three days later -the US not giving Israel de jure recognition until 1949.
https://historylessons.net/trumans-c...cognize-israel

If the US was thus acting as much in a context of Cold War as sympathy for Zionism, would the absence of a Zionist lobby have made any difference to that decision? Now consider the USA's first military intervention in the Middle East, Operation Blue Bat in Lebanon 1958. The Christian government of Camille Chamoun had been harassed by Lebanese Muslims acting in solidarity with Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser, who formed the 'United Arab Republic' in 1958 with Syria which was accused by Chamoun of infiltrating weapons into Lebanon that would be used to attack his government. The point is that when the US intervened, it was justified by the 'Truman Doctrine' to 'intervene to protect regimes it considered threatened by international communism' (the USSR began selling arms to Egypt in 1948, increasing their support in 1955 two years after the Revolution). And thus one could add that the moment when the USA formally took sides in the Middle East in 1967, for Israel and against the Arabs, it was either overt support for Zionism, or the Cold War view that the Arabs -principally Egypt- had become clients of the USSR and logic thus dictated that Israel require protection from Communism -or a mix of both. The irony here is that Israel in 1948 declared itself a Socialist state, which -even if only nominally- it remained under Labour rule until the Likud election victory of 1977, but that the US either did not regard Israel as a Socialist state, and its relations with the USSR by 1967 had deteriorated, or took those factors into account. Given the strange incident of Israel's attack on the USS Liberty during the 1967 War, one wonders if the Johnson administration took a longer term view and just accepted that the incident was a regrettable mistake.

But, and this is the point, did the Israel lobby influence Johnson's decision, or was the USA's alliance with Israel shaped entirely by the Cold War? I suspect it was, as the Chinese might put it, 70% Cold War, 30% Zionism. Even before the 1967 War the USA had persuaded Israel to allow weapons it was sending to the Yemen to pass through Israel and across the Giulf of Aqaba to Saudi Arabia, at the time fighting a proxy war with Egypt, thus presenting the case of the Communist-backed Egypt against the American backed Saudi Arabians. It was not noted at the time that the best judgement one could make of both armies was that 'they were not very good on the battlefield', while the incendiary rhetoric of Nasser insisted Egypt was about to inflict a savage defeat on Israel. And yet, Indar Rikhye once remarked that for all the propaganda, the blunt reality was that the Egyptians had taken possession of Soviet MIG fighter jets, but when the 1967 war broke out the only pilot who knew how to fly them was an Indian.

If the Cold War shaped US policy in the Middle East, the 1979 Peace Treaty between Israel and Egypt did not bring this to an end, for while Anwar el-Sadat broke off Egypt's relations with the USSR, the latter simply reinforced their support for Syria, and in various loops with Iraq so that the 'Russian threat' in the Middle East did not diminish in 1979, while the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the Soviet Intervention in Afghanistan eventually led the 'war on terror' to replace the Cold War.

In all this, there is no doubt that the Israel Lobby has promoted Israel among legislators in Congress, but so too have the 'Evangelical Christians' with their apocalyptic vision which to me often sounds overtly anti-Jewish, while at various times the 'Fossil Fuel' lobby has got stuck in with the result that Israel and Saudi Arabia are de facto allies, the most salient losers in all this being the Palestinians, whose lobbying efforts if they even exist, are feeble to the point of being without purpose. One wonders if the new generation of Congressional Representatives will make any difference, given that the House by tradition at least does not formulate foreign policy.

It may be that the Israel Lobby is more successful in reverse, that is, through its campaigns with its supporters that tell them this or that Senator or Congressional Representative is 'bad for Israel' or 'good for Israel' but I don't know if any conclusive research can prove that bad publicity has cost a sitting representative their seat.

Ultimately, the questions must focus on the aims of US policy in the Middle East, what it actually achieves, and the longer term impact. The region remains volatile, partly due to chronic interventions that cause more problems than they solve, and we have yet to know if Netanyahu will be defeated in the elections this year and Israel take a new direction, particularly with regard to the illegal occupation of the West Bank, illegal settlemens, and Palestinian rights. The Lobby has a voice, and at the moment a sympathetic ear in the White House in the case of Jared Kushner (one doubts his father-in-law cares about the Middle East other than the flow of 'lovely dollars' from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf into his bulging pockets), but so far too Kushner's policy making has been inept and counter-productive to peace in the region. One can only hope this will end in 2020, though I don't expect radical changes to US policy in the region.

[broncofan]

The history you present makes sense up to a point in time but if the cold war is not still raging then some would say that basis for support has expired and yet Congress still mostly supports Israel. Evangelical Christians support Israel for theological reasons that some might call anti-Semitic but which Israelis and other Jews aren't concerned about because they don't believe the theology.

I think the reason a lobby could be very effective despite not spending as much money as people think is that it's NOT an issue that many people think about in the voting booth. The number of people who vote based on foreign entanglements is probably a small percentage of the population and so if there's a lobbying interest, that provides Congressmen an incentive not to adjust to changing attitudes. As a result, one hears a lot of clichés, almost reflexive support, and very little specific policy analysis.

After reading your post, I think the Cold War history is most relevant to explaining the origin of the alliance, but inertia and a whole confluence of factors might explain continued support ranging from: the belief that Israel is Western (maybe a carryover from the Cold War), Evangelical support, lobbying, and the fact that it doesn't play a lot at the polls.

When people discuss lobbies, the tendency is to overplay a lobby's influence, purely because a lobby is only effective if it causes legislators to act in ways that don't reflect the public's views. We say the NRA completely accounts for support of guns in this country but the anti-democratic effect is probably more subtle than that. We have a culture where guns play a disproportionate role in people's lives. Many of the legislators who take money from the NRA are probably already positively inclined towards the militarization of civilian life in ways that don't make sense to many people around the world myself included. But maybe without the NRA they would consider all sorts of gun safety proposals that don't interfere with their general pro-gun view.

I think you're right that AIPAC does not explain the U.S.' alliance with Israel or even explain the endurance of it but I think it does prevent Congressmen from modifying their positions based on actions Israel takes that are counter-productive or violate international law. A lobby is probably best at creating inertia, and subtly decreasing the sensitivity of legislators to changing attitudes.

[broncofan]

https://twitter.com/Baddiel/status/1098560476630446080

I think this tweet highlights an interesting trend that is occurring in Britain largely from sympathizers of the Labour party: the leveraging of the Palestinian cause to harass Jews and impinge on Jewish life in the UK. Apparently this school requires the ratification of a society for it to become an official group. There is a student association for nearly every minority group, but the Jewish group has been voted against by over 200 students and might fail because of Zionism or something like that. The school assures people in a lukewarm tone that though there were concerns, it will probably pass. But it's amazing how loose the link can be to the idea of Jewish statehood before people will find an excuse to single out their Jewish students.

https://www.jta.org/2018/11/05/globa...nagogue-attack

This was another thing that I had seen. Can you imagine voting down a motion to condemn a murderous attack on a place of worship? I would vote for that motion if the attack occurred in the most remote region of Earth against the congregation of a religious community I'd never heard of. Apparently the most common objection was that there was too much focus on anti-Semitism this, anti-Semitism that. As though the idea of the motion was really a group seeking special treatment. The British Labour party should discourage its membership from behaving in ways that are so laced with irrational hostility and resentment if they want people to stop talking about it. It gets a disproportionate amount of attention because their facebook pages and twitter accounts look like nothing I've ever seen from anti-racists.

I've actually written a bar mitzvah speech for any Corbynite fortunate enough to be invited. It's short but I think it gets right to the point: "out of my deepest respect for the Jewish tradition and this rite of passage into manhood, I now hold you legally and morally responsible for the human rights violations of Israel. Congratulations on becoming an adult."

And while I was asked to separate this topic and have flirted with the idea of a thread, I would like to collect the evidence. I guess my question is what is going on and how many times do I have to watch the Al Jazeera documentary the Lobby with Joan Ryan and the Israeli in the bar to understand how a deadly synagogue attack in Pittsburgh really has to do with Israel, and a Jewish society in a school, and according to Derek Hatton any Jew who doesn't say what he wants when he wants it.

[Stavros]

https://twitter.com/Baddiel/status/1098560476630446080

I think this tweet highlights an interesting trend that is occurring in Britain largely from sympathizers of the Labour party:
https://www.jta.org/2018/11/05/globa...nagogue-attack

This was another thing that I had seen. Can you imagine voting down a motion to condemn a murderous attack on a place of worship? I would vote for that motion if the attack occurred in the most remote region of Earth against the congregation of a religious community I'd never heard of. Apparently the most common objection was that there was too much focus on anti-Semitism this, anti-Semitism that. As though the idea of the motion was really a group seeking special treatment. The British Labour party should discourage its membership from behaving in ways that are so laced with irrational hostility and resentment if they want people to stop talking about it. It gets a disproportionate amount of attention because their facebook pages and twitter accounts look like nothing I've ever seen from anti-racists.

Your link in the second example to the JTA does them no favours. Here is the second paragraph:

Steve Cooke, secretary of the Norton West branch in the Stockton North constituency of about 67,000 people near Scotland, submitted the motion for a vote following the Oct. 27 shooting attack.

-Stockton-on-Tees is as close to Scotland as New York is to Canada.
-Stockton North might have 67,000 constituents, but Norton West branch does not, in the council elections in 2015 on a turnout of 72.5%, the total number of votes cast was 6,613. I doubt the Norton West Branch has more than a few hundred members if that, and the active members they do have will be known to the General Management Committee of the CLP, so who knows what else is going on there? A comment that does not depart from the resolution itself, which was valid and could easily have been passed without causing a fuss. They have made themselves look foolish in the way it has been handled.

On the Baddiel tweet, there has been a long and sorry history with regard to Jewish Societies in English universities. I was in a university in 1986 or thereabouts when the National Union of Students submitted a resolution to all its members which called for the denial of Jewish Societies the right to affiliate to the NUS. I am not sure, but I think the resolution originated in the Socialist Workers Party and was proposed by their members, and passed at an executive meeiting of the NUS which meant it had to be rolled out across the country. The resolution when it came up for discussion produced the largest gathering of students we had seen at an NUS meeting, and was moved, not by any NUS members in the University by by two representatives of the NUS, one of whom was Palestinian in origin. If I tell you that when I saw it I was staggered to see it had 40 clauses you may understand that student politics may not always need to be taken seriously even when it causes such hurt, indeed, insult. The Resolution was not passed by the students and the debate such as it was produced some memorable moments -one member of the SWP Students section, known affectionately as Swizz (short for Swindled rather than Swiss) ended the meeting screaming 'I want to change the structure of society!' though he may have been drunk at the time. One of his comrades, whom I knew because he married a student I knew quite well, is now a foghorn in Momentum.
I tend to see these issues as the kind of student issues that you can trace back for years and which never seem to change, and are often found at the beginning of the academic year when first years 'get involved' and before they get lumbered with essays and course work. In those days you could guarantee that between late September and the end of October angry students would be staging a protest outside the nearest supermarket to campus selling South African produce calling for boycotts, and mostly ignored by shoppers who, if they were like me, did not buy South African oranges anyway.

But yes, the sentiments behind this sort of thing are intolerant and based on ignorance and prejudice, but rarely produce their desired outcome, it is gesture politics of the worst kind.

One afterthought -in another university I was involved in, the Islamic Society came close to being prosecuted. Because of my interest in the Middle East and some work I was doing with students from Libya, Saudi Arabia, Oman and the Yemen, I was aware of the arguments they were having with each other and browsed the Islamic Society pages, only to discover to my horror that there were large sections that offered advice, not on 'how to shop in the UK' or 'how to claim housing benefit' but advice on how to be a good Muslim. When I read the pages on women, the page on 'Women working' said that 'capitalism is a Jewish plot to destroy the family' -for women's work is family work, an odd thing to say to a student whose intention might be to be a doctor- I cut and paste it into a search engine to find it was a direct quote from Sayed al-Qutb's Signposts, a text much admired by Osama bin Laden, and extremists sympathetic to his cause (though at the time he was in Afghanistan fighting the Russians and unknown to us) -I guess this shows that students tend to be 'radicals' because Qutb has never been anything other than an extremists. I don't know what happened next but the Islamic Society's web-pages were suddenly locked behind a password entry system, and that lack of transparency which might have spared them prosecution nevertheless seemed to me to be a basic violation of student politics. Publish and be damned.

One final thought: Israel has spent $100 million on the successful launch into space of a rocket headed to the Moon. What a criminal waste of money! Two or so years ago there was a huge demonsration in Tel-Aviv by young people who can't buy an apartment because affordable housing in the urban areas between Tel-Aviv and Haifa has been disappearing as 'property inflation' puts it beyond most Israelis -why spend $100m on the Moon when people want somewhere to live? Better still, how about spending $100m providing Palestinians on the West Bank with a decent and reliable water supply?
What did Bette Davis say in Dark Voyager? Oh Jerry, let's not ask for the moon. We have the stars...'

[Stavros]

Legislators in Georgia's House of Representatives have passed a bill that could ban most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.
The bill aims to outlaw terminations carried out after a foetal heartbeat is detected and is similar to restrictions under consideration in Mississippi, Florida, Kentucky, Ohio and South Carolina.
Mr Setzler claimed that the bill sought "to recognise that the child in the womb, that is living distinct from their mother, has a right to life that is worthy of legal protection."https://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...-a8813416.html

This is an abuse of the English language- how can a foetus be described as 'living distinct from their mother' when by definition a foetus is utterly dependent on the mother for life? It doesn't make sense to attempt to qualify what pregnancy is in order to ban abortions. So much law to protect the unborn child, so little respect for it after it is born.