By Jonathan Miller, on Thu Jul 19, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET
For those in the RP Nation following the narrow defeat of an Israel divestment effort within the Presbyterian Church (USA), here is the front line perspective of one of the principal leaders of the effort to clock divestment, Ethan Felson, the vice president and general counsel for the Jewish Council for Public Affairs:
The Presbyterian Church (USA)’s 220th General Assembly had just cast its first vote on an anti-Israel divestment resolution when the spin began. Major news outlets and activists on each side could hardly wait for the debate to finish the next day before declaring winners and losers.
This was my fourth GA and one thing I’ve learned is that reality lies somewhere between the headlines. Here are some reality checks on the GA.
* The defeat of divestment was narrow — and it wasn’t.
The widely reported 333-331 vote earlier this month was on a motion to substitute a positive investment minority report for the main divestment resolution. This means the very first time the plenary had a chance, it shot down divestment. It was close, but in subsequent votes the positive approach passed by a much wider margin — and additional pro-divestment motions continued to fail by increasingly wider margins. The Positive Investment substitute — passed 369-290 — calls for financial support for projects that include collaboration among Christians, Jews and Muslims and that will help develop viable Palestinian infrastructure, job creation and economic development.
* The PCUSA is different from other churches – and it isn’t.
Think of the most intense anti-Israel delegitimizers you’ve ever seen, heard or read. They run the show at the PCUSA.
Before the GA, the PCUSA’s coordinator of social witness policy defended divestment, attacked positive investment and said an Israel-apartheid comparison is unavoidable. An advisory committee called as its resource person before the GA’s Middle East committee a Jewish representative from an anti-Zionist group that actively favors boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS). Even the church’s executive council backed divestment.
But there were also several major Presbyteries, seminary presidents, former national moderators and other key leaders who opposed divestment. One group, Presbyterians for Middle East Peace, successfully advocated for a balanced approach that was clearly more in keeping with the mind-set of Presbyterians.
By Jonathan Miller, on Wed Jul 18, 2012 at 3:00 PM ET
A few months ago, I reviewed Peter Beinart’s trashy, error-filled hit-job on the State of Israel, The Crisis of Zionism.
As more and more Zionists have piled on, it seems as if Beinart is seeking the aid and comfort of some of Israel’s — and Judaism’s — worst enemies. This week, the Atlantic exposed Beinart’s new relationship with the uber-controversial, anti-Zionist Web site, Mondoweiss:
Yesterday, Peter Beinart’s pluralistic blog, Open Zion, published a post by Alex Kane, a staff writer for a website called Mondoweiss.It’s impossible to peer into the hearts and minds of the people who edit the site, but Mondoweiss often gives the appearance of an anti-Semitic enterprise. Site founder and editor Phil Weiss, a former writer for the American Conservative when Pat Buchanan was editor, wrote this past May, “I can justly be accused of being a conspiracy theorist because I believe in the Israel lobby theory … certainly my theory has an explanation of the rise and influence of the neocons. They don’t have a class interest but an ideological-religious one.”
An April 2011 article on the site strongly implied that Mossad agents were involved in the murder of Italian activist Vittorio Arrigonni, an assertion for which there’s no factual evidence. In 2011, contributor Max Ajl argued against “left-wing” condemnation of the Itamar massacre, in which attackers killed five members of a settler family, including a three-month old baby. In 2009, Jack Ross, who has contributed to the white nationalist, Holocaust-denying journal The Barnes Review, argued on Mondoweiss that “it was not the appeasement, but the internationalist hubris and bellicosity of Chamberlain which started World War II.” In other words, lay off the Nazis.
One winner of Mondoweiss’ recent “New Yorker parody contest” was a bizarre entry in which former Israeli Prime Minister has a teary reunion with the ghost of his long-lost father: Adolf Hitler.
Philip Weiss has found evidence of Jewish influence and Jewish perfidy in everything from NPR to the names of the buildings at Harvard University to an innocuous statement by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. Weiss has argued that the “Jewish presence in the Establishment” imposes its own single-minded, communalistic interests upon the whole of American and British society. “Don’t you see,” he wrote in a post also suggesting “Zionists” were to blame for the outbreak of the Iraq war, “the vociferousness and effectiveness of the Israel lobby make this conflict Our Conflict!” Ironically, Weiss also believes that Zionism entails Jewish self-hatred.
Is Alex Kane, the Mondoweiss writer whose post was featured on Newsweek’s Open Zion, responsible for all this? Of course not. But he is a Mondoweiss staff reporter. Publicly, he does not challenge the site’s lunacy. And Open Zion, in carrying a byline from Mondoweiss, incorporates not just Kane but the Mondoweiss reputation and all of its sordid baggage into its larger conversation.
By Jonathan Miller, on Tue Jul 17, 2012 at 5:00 PM ET
As we suffer from record temperatures this summer, the New Yorker’s Elizabeth Coilbert discusses the dire consequences of our extreme climate changes:
Corn sex is complicated. As Michael Pollan observes in “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” the whole affair is so freakishly difficult it’s hard to imagine how it ever evolved in the first place. Corn’s female organs are sheathed in a sort of vegetable chastity belt—surrounded by a tough, virtually impenetrable husk. The only way in is by means of a silk thread that each flower extends, Rapunzel-like, through a small opening. For fertilization to take place, a grain of pollen must land on the tip of the silk, then shimmy its way six to eight inches through a microscopic tube, a journey that requires several hours. The result of a successfully completed passage is a single kernel. When everything is going well, the process is repeated something like eight hundred times per ear, or roughly eighty thousand times per bushel.
It is now corn-sex season across the Midwest, and everything is not going well. High commodity prices spurred farmers to sow more acres this year, and unseasonable warmth in March prompted many to plant corn early. Just a few months ago, the United States Department of Agriculture was projecting a record corn crop of 14.79 billion bushels. But then, in June and July, came broilingly high temperatures, combined with a persistent drought across much of the midsection of the country.
“You couldn’t choreograph worse weather conditions for pollination,” Fred Below, a crop biologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told Bloomberg News recently. “It’s like farming in Hell.” Last week, the U.S.D.A. officially cut its yield forecast by twelve per cent, citing a “rapid decline in crop conditions since early June and the latest weather data.” Also last week, because of the dryness, the U.S.D.A. declared more than a thousand counties in twenty-six states to be natural disaster areas. This was by far the largest such designation the agency has ever made. In the past month, as the severity of the situation has become apparent, corn prices have risen by more than forty per cent. Since so much corn is used to feed livestock, it’s likely that the increase will translate into higher prices for dairy products and beef—although, as many have pointed out, beef prices were already rising, owing to last year’s devastating drought in Texas.
Up until fairly recently, it was possible—which, of course, is not the same as advisable—to see climate change as a phenomenon that was happening somewhere else. In the Arctic, Americans were told (again and again and again), the effects were particularly dramatic. The sea ice was melting. This was bad for native Alaskans, and even worse for polar bears, who rely on the ice for survival. But in the Lower Forty-eight there always seemed to be more pressing concerns, like Barack Obama’s birth certificate. Similarly, the Antarctic Peninsula was reported to be warming fast, with unfortunate consequences for penguins and sea levels. But penguins live far away and sea-level rise is prospective, so again the issue seemed to lack “the fierce urgency of now.”
The summer of 2012 offers Americans the best chance yet to get their minds around the problem. In late June, just as a sizzling heat wave was settling across much of the country—in Evansville, Indiana, temperatures rose into the triple digits for ten days, reaching as high as a hundred and seven degrees—wildfires raged in Colorado. Hot and extremely dry conditions promoted the flames’ spread. “It’s no exaggeration to say Colorado is burning,” KDVR, the Fox station in Denver, reported. By the time the most destructive blaze was fully contained, almost three weeks later, it had scorched nearly twenty-nine square miles. Meanwhile, a “super derecho”—a long line of thunderstorms—swept from Illinois to the Atlantic Coast, killing at least thirteen people and leaving millions without power.
Click here to read the full article: “Is the Heat Wave of 2012 What Climate Change Looks Like?”
By Jonathan Miller, on Mon Jul 16, 2012 at 11:00 AM ET
And now from the other side of The New York Times, here’s CAMERA:
In the New York Times’ front page story today about a volunteer national service program in Israel, reporter Jodi Rudoren notes that “62 percent of the Arab public backed the program.”
It is curious, then, that 82 percent of the article’s quoted words from Arabs are spoken against national service. (This figure actually understates the disproportion. It includes everyone quoted except for two Israeli professors, both of whom highlight only Arab perspectives against national service. And it does not include the quoted words of posters that likewise argue against the program.)
The problem here is not that Rudoren provides fake quotes. Of course she doesn’t. It’s an issue of framing. Even though most Arabs in Israel support national service, the piece is written in a way that leaves readers with an overwhelming and predominant sense of Arab opposition to the program.
Readers hear from a single young Arab girl, Nagham Ma’abuk, who supports and participates in the national service program. But her voice gets lost in a staccato of quotes by opponents of integration and national service: Ehab Helo comes out against integration with the state. Radical Arab parliamentarian Hanin Zoabi jumps on the opportunity to level sharp words agaist national service, and against Israel as a whole. Four teenagers express that they are “against, against, against and against” the program. Rozeen Kanboura adds another “against.” And Ayan Abunasra makes her “articulate” case in opposition to the program.
This is analogous to a presidential debate in which viewers hear from one candidate, then from his opponent — and then from each member of the opponent’s senior campaign team. A stacked deck affects perception.
By Jonathan Miller, on Fri Jul 6, 2012 at 9:15 AM ET
In a vote that has been closely scrutinized and anticipated here at The Recovering Politician — and discussed in detail in this column I published at The Huffington Post last week — the Presbyterian Church (USA) rejected a misguided proposal to divest from companies that do business with Israel. The razor thin margin 333-331 proves the adage that every vote does indeed matter.
A deeply divided Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) on Thursday became the latest American church to shy away from divesting in companies that supply equipment to Israel to enforce its control in the occupied territories, after a passionate debate that stretched late into the evening and a vote that was nearly a tie.
The decision not to divest, the culmination of an eight-year process, was watched intensely by Christians, Jews and Palestinians in the United States and in the Middle East. It is likely to bring a sigh of relief to Jewish groups in Israel and the United States that lobbied Presbyterians against divestment, and to dismay the international movement known as B.D.S. — Boycott, Divest and Sanctions — which advocates using economic leverage to pressure Israel to return occupied land to the Palestinians.
By a vote of 333 to 331, with two abstentions, the church’s General Assembly voted at its biennial meeting in Pittsburgh to toss out the divestment measure and replace it with a resolution to encourage “positive investment” in the occupied territories. The results were so close that, when posted electronically in front of the convention, they evoked a collective gasp. After two and a half hours of passionate debate, the replacement resolution to invest in the territories passed more easily, 369 to 290, with eight abstentions.
Presbyterians in favor of divestment said that their church could not in good conscience hold stock in companies that they said perpetuate an unjust occupation and undermine the search for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. But opponents said that divestment would unfairly vilify Israel, and accomplish little but further polarization.
This is great news for justice, peace, and the historic alliance among Jews and Presbyterians. The close vote, however, confirms that much work needs to be done in educating American liberals about the extraordinary liberal democracy that is Israel.
By Jonathan Miller, on Thu Jul 5, 2012 at 10:00 AM ET
Recent reports have some speculating — most prominently his widow — that the late PLO President Yasir Arafat may have died from illicit poisoning.
Larry Ben-David (NOT the Israeli version of Larry David) argues in The Times of Israel that the claim is a distraction from the clear probability that Arafat died of AIDS:
Less romantic and mythical, however, is the more likely cause of Arafat’s death – AIDS.
Arafat’s sexual proclivities have been an open secret for years. The former head of Rumanian intelligence, Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa , disclosed in his book “Red Horizons,” that one of his officers reported, “the ‘Fedayee’ [Arafat’s code name] is in his bedroom making love to his bodyguard. The one I knew was his latest lover. He’s playing tiger again. The officer monitoring his microphones connected me live with the bedroom, and the squawling almost broke my eardrums. Arafat was roaring like a tiger, and his lover yelping like a hyena.”
In an in-depth 1976 biography of Arafat, writer Thomas Kiernan chronicled the life of a young Arafat in Cairo. When Arafat discovered his girlfriend, Jinan al-Oraby, was friendly with the daughters of the Harkabis, an Egyptian Jewish family, he arranged for the murder of their father. When Jinan expressed sorrow for her friends, “Yasser went into a rage… he proceeded to beat me, tearing my clothes off…he threw himself on me… He tried to penetrate me, but he could not do so. This made him even more irrational.”
Kiernan also relates Arafat’s relationship with a boy, Ahmed, whose parents ended up on the Israeli side of the border after the 1948 war. An associate of Arafat’s related, “Yasser tried to get the boy to publicly denounce his parents…Yasser really loved the boy. He was delicate, sensitive, like a flower. He was very much a part of Yasser’s inner circle – four of five boys who lived in the same place, and well, you can imagine what I mean.”
Kiernan continued: Arafat held a “kind of formal hearing for the boy” because of his refusal to denounce his parents. “Arafat sobbed and sobbed as [a young associate] proceeded to castrate the boy. The next day the boy was dead.”
On Tuesday, I will be visiting Pittsburgh to perform my Pink Floyd hit “The Wall” at Consol Energy Center. By coincidence, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) has gathered this week in Pittsburgh.
One issue the Presbyterians will be debating is whether to take action in support of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation in the West Bank, under siege in Gaza and as second-class citizens in Israel under the rule of the apartheid government there.
I write in support of those Presbyterians who would like their church to divest its holdings in three U.S. companies — Motorola Solutions, Hewlett-Packard and Caterpillar. These companies profit directly from Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank and suppression of the Palestinian people in both the West Bank and Israel itself.
While there are very legitimate issues with the Israeli government’s handling of the West Bank’s disputed territories (I support the transfer of most of these lands to a new Palestinian state), the notion that Gaza is under siege by Israel (when Hamas just fired 150 rockets last week into civilian Israeli territory), or that Palestinians who live in Israel proper are second-class citizens under an apartheid regime (when they share every single right and responsibility of citizenship as their Jewish neighbors), cannot be classified as anything but malicious lies.
The decision to divest is an independent issue, and while I am strongly opposed for the reasons I outline here, reasonable minds certainly can differ. But if people base the decision on Waters’ lies, they are doing a great disservice to the dialogue.
The answer? We do need education. Indeed someone just wrote a good book on the subject…
By Chris Schulz, RP Staff, on Fri Jun 29, 2012 at 3:00 PM ET
The Politics of the Planet
How do we balance the need for dams as sources of energy with a desire to be environmentally responsible; especially in third world countries? [bbc.com]
The path to a greener a city can be smelly, but it is certainly worth it. [nytimes.com]
An interesting look at who is eating meat and what goes into that hamburger in terms of energy and water. [npr.org]
An update on the Colorado fires, thousands have been evacuated. [latimes.com]
