Djene Bajalan and Michael Brooks give their view from the left on the issue of Ilhan Omar's voting "present" on the resolution condemning the Armenia genocide that I talked about in my previous post, Ilhan Omar and the Turkey QuestionJacobin 11/01/2019:
First, Omar might balk at the use of genocide recognition as a “cudgel.” However, given Turkey’s ongoing campaign of ethnic cleansing and brutalization of the Kurds it is precisely the moment for such recognition. Indeed, Eroğan’s plan to “cleanse” Turkey of three to four million Syrian refugees by deporting them to a small strip of desert — a plan announced to the whole world at the United Nations in late September — also has ominous echoes of what the Ottomans did to the Armenians in 1915.
Second, it seems naive at best to believe that the debate on the Armenian genocide can be decoupled from politics, especially given the social and political taboo in Turkey against discussing the massacre. Worse still, the “leave it to the academic consensus” echoes Turkish talking points. There is no serious debate about whether the Armenian genocide was a genocide. Decades of scholarship have shown that the Committee of Union and Progress that governed the Ottoman Empire during the First World War sought to destroy its Armenian population. Most recently, Turkish scholar and dissident Taner Akçam has provided extensive documentation of the systematic nature of the assault visited upon the Anatolian Armenians. To draw an analogy, the debate about Armenian genocide is akin to the debate about whether Hitler sought to annihilate the Jewish people.
Finally, Omar’s demand that no recognition of the Armenian genocide take place until other historical crimes are acknowledged is a case of what-aboutism — one that is especially jarring because it comes from the mouth of such a committed advocate of solidarity and human rights. [my emphasis]
It's important to keep in mind that Turkey is a NATO ally. It was always one of the big risks in direct US military involvement in Syria is that in practice it put the US in opposition to a Turkish direct involvement. The Kurdish ethnic-cleansing operation against the Syrian Kurds is wrong and the US should be condemneing it (rather than greenlighting it!) and trying to arrange a peaceful solution. But for now, it looks like that ship has sailed.
The Pentagon is using a well-known two-steps-to-the-right tactic to avoid becoming immersed in regional chaos. It is observing acts of war while not preventing them from happening in order to appease an ally that has more political clout than another partner—and a stockpile of U.S. nuclear weapons in its backyard. In fact, an official at the U.S.-led counter-ISIS coalition recently reiterated to the National Interest that “no U.S. forces will participate in operations related to the implementation of the ‘safe zone.’”
But he goes on to explain that this is more complicated that it might sound from that summary. For one thing, professional hawks have their own agenda on Syria that doesn't entirely align with the Administration's current policy. The US troops in the Deir ez-Zor to enforce Trump's take-the-oil policy are another complication. And Petti's report suggests that observed movements of US troops may not align with the current stated policy. And:
The Rojava Information Center, a collective of journalists based in northeast Syria, and Deirezzor24 both reported that coalition aircraft bombed pro-Assad forces in the eastern countryside of Deir ez-Zor on October 29. But a [US] coalition spokesman says that no such military action has occurred.
“The Coalition did not conduct airstrikes in Syria in recent days,” the spokesman told the National Interest. “The Coalition de-conflicts military operations with other forces operating in Syria through pre-existing communication channels and interlocutors.”
When dealing with particular issues with Turkey, I don't think the US should treat NATO as a sacred cow. But even if we want some kind of revision - we revised it by expanding the membership several times since 1989 - it would be reckless to do it by Presidential whim.
[Syrian President Bassar] Al-Assad branded [Turkis President Tayyip] Erdogan an American agent in his invasion of Syria. He warned that if Turkey continued on its present path, at some point the Syrian Army would have no choice but to go to war with the Turkish invasion force.
(This is just bluster. Al-Assad’s army is small, weak, and poorly equipped whereas Turkey is a member of NATO with a big new American arsenal. Turkey is four times as populous as Syria and would make mincemeat of it. Syria’s only advantage is its Russian patron, and it is Moscow that will get Turkey back out of Syria over time, by reassuring Ankara on its security concerns. Russian gendarmes are already patrolling part of the border). [my emphasis]
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar attracted criticism even from some of her admirers (of which I'm one) on the left with her decision to vote "Present" on a House resolution recognizing the Armenian genocide of 1915-1923.
Omar said that while she believes that accountability for human rights abuses is "paramount," she also believes that "accountability and recognition of genocide should not be used as a cudgel in a political fight. It should be done based on academic consensus outside the push and pull of geopolitics."
If Congress truly wishes to acknowledge historic crimes against humanity, Omar added, it should look closer to home.
She argued that such a step "must include both the heinous genocides of the 20th century, along with earlier mass slaughters like the transatlantic slave trade and the Native American genocide, which took the lives of hundreds of millions of people in this country." For this reason, Omar said she voted "present" on the bill. [my emphasis]
This tweet by Michael Brooks retweeting a criticism by TYT reporter Ken Klippenstein is an example of criticism of her from the left:
Trash vote and trash statement. She’s really good and there are geopolitical reasons behind the vote. She should hear from everyone how absolutely awful this is https://t.co/aUo5eXQOdT
That doesn‘t mean we can‘t argue for a broader definition. The attorney Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959) who is credited with inventing the term genocide (in the 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe) did employ a wider definition himself. This short video from the US Holocaust Museum remembers Lemkin, Eyewitness Testimony: Raphael Lemkin:
But the wider the definition, the more examples people have to accuse countries of hypocrisy when they single out a genocide for condemnation. Jeffrey Ostler, an actual scholar of genocide, discusses at some length the challenges in applying the concept to one of the examples Congresswoman Omar used in his book, Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas (2019).
Comparing genocides to one another unfortunately can lead to some frivolous political rhetoric along the lines of my-genocide-is-worse-than-your-genocide. It can be a real rhetorical minefield.
I spent some time in the 1990s trying to learn about the Nazi Holocaust and to understand how it is treated in various historical narratives. That included learning about some of the polemical arguments made by people who want to minimize the seriousness of the Holocaust in some way.
One example of that produced a public discussion in Germany in the 1980s that became known as the Historikerstreit (historians' dispute). This was an argument among scholars that was conducted in the popular press. (Matthias von Hellfeld, Vor 25 Jahren: Der HistorikerstreitDeutsche Welle 20.07.2011) It was kicked it off by a 1986 editorial column by Ernst Nolte, a German historian who (at least until then!) was a respected one. Nolte's earlier work on fascism, particularly his 1963 book published in English in 1965 as The Three Faces of Fascism; Action Francaise, Italian Fascism, National Socialism, is still regarded as an important work.
But in 1986, Nolte made the bizarre argument that I will summarize this way: because the Soviet Union had set up concentration camps, this inspired Hitler's idea of exterminating the Jews. So Stalin was responsible for the Holocaust. Other historians and the well-known Frankfurt School philosopher Jürgen Habermas criticized Nolte's piece, though there were prominent historians who were at least partly supportive of Nolte.
Nolte and his partisans didn't put it that crassly. But his argument served to shift part of the blame and responsibility for the Holocaust away from Hitler and Germany. "Did the [Soviet] 'Gulag Archipelago' not exist prior to Auschwitz?" asked Nolte, who referred to the Holocaust as an "Asiatic" act, i.e., not genuinely German or European. In other words, he used the comparison as a deflection from the historical seriousness of the Holocaust. He also wrote, "Auschwitz does not result primarily from traditional anti-Semitism and was not at its core a mere 'genocide', but rather the reaction to the extermination processes of the Russian Revolution born of fear," i.e. German fear of the Russians. In other words, the Holocaust wasn't really a "genocide", and the Commies were to blame anyway.
The Allied bombing of Dresden in 1945 also plays a role in Holocaust denier polemics. The argument is, look at how savagely the Allies bombed and killed Germans in Dresden and that shows what murderous intentions they had against all Germans, so the Holocaust was a response to those evil intentions. The decision against the far-right historian David Irving in Irving v. Penguin Books Limited, Deborah E. Lipstat (2000) has an excellent discussion of Irving's own revisionist and inaccurate historical accounts of the bombing of Dresden. And it describes how this can be used in a narrative that tries to minimize the Holocaust:
Irving has also made broader claims which tend to minimise the Holocaust. For example he has claimed that the Jews in the East were shot by individual gangsters and criminals and that there was no direction or policy in place for mass extermination to be carried out. I do, however, accept that Irving expressed himself in more measured language on this topic than in the case of the gas chambers. But he has also minimised the number of those killed by means other than gas at Auschwitz and elsewhere. Having grossly underestimated the number who lost their lives in the camps, Irving is prone to claim that a greater number than that were killed in Allied bombing raids on Dresden and elsewhere. He has, moreover, repeatedly claimed that the British Psychological War Executive ingeniously invented the lie that the Nazis were killing Jews in gas chambers in order to use it as propaganda. (p. 176) [my emphasis]
So comparing genocides can be tricky.
And this is a big reason why I currently tend toward a more conservative definition of what constitutes genocide and try to orient my view around the international law version enshrined in the Genocide Convention.
Particularly as historical awareness of the Holocaust in the US and Europe has grown over recent decades, the term "genocide" has understandably taken on an implication of the worst of all possible crimes. So there is a temptation to apply it as a superlative to more and more situations. So people talk about a genocidal war in Vietnam, a genocidal war in Yemen, the slave trade as genocide, settler colonialism in the Western Hemisphere as genocide. But the Genocide Convention established genocide as a distinct type of crime, not as something that applies to all wars or all famines or all discrimination.
And there are reasons for that. Criminal law discriminates between different degrees of illegal killing. In the US, manslaughter is distinguished from second degree murder and both are distinguished from first degree murder. There is also a category of murder "with special circumstances," i.e., killing involving unusual cruelty. These don't mean that society considers any of these kinds of killings okay. It does mean that it does make distinctions based among other things on motive and intentions.
In terms of popular polemics involving genocide, it's important to keep in mind that the more broadly a particular term is applied, the greater the risk that its meaning will become blurred, or that it will lose some of its intellectually and emotionally evocative power. To put it in a more exaggerated way, if every kind of collective violence is genocide, genocide becomes just another word for collective violence.
I've always remembered the line used by Richard Nixon's Vice President Spiro Agnew in dismissing contemporary criticisms from antiwar activists that the Vietnam War was immoral. He brushed it off by saying, "All wars are immoral." Which meant in practice, no wars are immoral. On its face, it was a radical pacifist position, though no sentient being took Agnew or Nixon to be radical pacifists. Actually, Agnew's position was also directly sneering at over a millennium of Christian religious traditions on the Just War, as well as similar traditions in other religions. And, however imperfectly the religious doctrines or international law have functioned in limiting violence, it is illegal in international law to invade another country that is not threatening the invader. The defendants in the Nuremberg Trials were accused and convicted of waging "aggressive war," the legal term used there for an illegal invasion. A secular version of the Just War doctrine, in other words.
Telford Taylor, the chief American chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, wrote in Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy (1970):
The lack of a satisfactory definition of "aggressive war" ... should not be taken as a sufficient argument against its use as a description of unlawful international conduct. In fact, as the discussion and application of the standard since it came into common parlance reveals, it is not significantly different from the tests for the lawful use of defensive force in our domestic criminal law. As we have already seen, the parallelism is of long standing. There is remarkable similarity between the criteria stated by Suarez and Grotius for distinguishing the just from the unjust war, and the provision of the New York Penal Law specifying. the circumstances under which force may rightfully be used: to defend one's sell, one's property or to assist other persons engaged in defending themselves or their property. [my emphasis]
Agnew, in other words, watered down the concept of a war being immoral to the point of rendering it meaningless. Political speech can have that effect on the meaning of words and phrases. Actual experts on the subject, like Taylor in that case, have a more substantive take.
And here's where Ilhan Omar's position calls attention to some important considerations, though I do wish she had voted for the resolution. If we actually consider the fate of native populations in the Western Hemisphere after European colonization as genocide, people have a substantive point in arguing that the US - and every Latin American country, for that matter - are acting hypocritically in criticizing other countries for genocide if they haven't condemned their own genocides against native peoples.
I'm going to put on my Reluctant Realist hat for a couple of minutes here and say that foreign policy, unfortunately, runs to a large degree on hypocrisy. If the US waits to condemn wrongs and injustices abroad until it has formally condemned and made just restitution for every domestic wrong, it will never condemn any foreign wrong whatsoever. And that would not be a good outcome, either.
Yes, of course, these condemnations have political considerations involved with them. That doesn't mean we shouldn't ever do them. It does mean, though, that it's legitimate for Members of Congress to criticize the political considerations being applied in individual cases.
I just happen to disagree with Ilhan Omar's vote on this one.
Do Democrats really think we can be more divided than we are? What does that look like? Outright civil war? Is that what they think impeaching Trump will lead to?
If that's so we are already so far gone they might as well just turn the government over to the GOP and go home.
"Sometimes people act as though it's impeach or nothing. It's not that," she said. "It's a path that is producing results and gathering information and some of that information is that this administration wants to have a constitutional crisis because they do not respect the oath of office that they take to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States ... We won't go any faster than the facts take us or any slower than the facts take us."
Democrats supporting Pelosi's surrender-on-impeachment position argue that the Democratic Party should focus instead on stressing their popular issues for the 2020 elections. But Pelosi herself doesn't seem to be doing such a good job on that, either. One most obvious devices that she and the Democratic majority in the House have at their disposal is pass popular laws and programs in the House and thus force the Republican Senate and the White House to take a position on them. The Dems understandably mocked the Republicans for passing Obamacare repeal dozens of times when Obama was President even though they knew that Obama would veto any such bill. But that action not only pleased their base but validated that position among their base and establish that as an important signature partisan issue.
Pelosi did pass an election-integrity bill that included some excellent positions that would motivate the base and appeal to swing voters. Ed Kilgore wrote about how it even demonstrated an unusual instance of that party unity that establishment Democrats claim to value when they tell progressives not to criticize Joe Biden (House Democrats Pass Landmark Voting Rights Bill on a Party-Line VoteNew York 03/08/2019):
Aside from its scope, what’s most remarkable about HR1 is that every single House Democrat voted for it ...
And every Republicans voted against it, which means the GOP is determined to use barriers to full participation in elections - along with related abuses like partisan gerrymandering and unregulated campaign spending - to maintain its competitive position, regardless of public opinion.
It’s quite a shift from how the two parties divided on the original Voting Rights Act, in which 61 House Democrats voted “no” while 112 House Republicans voted “yea.” As recently as 2006, George W. Bush signed a bill extending the VRA, including the key provision SCOTUS struck down seven years later. Full party polarization on voting rights is a very recent development. [my emphasis]
Great! The Democrats pass a bill with popular measures against money in politics that also challenges and highlights the Republicans' racist vote-suppresison tactics against African-Americans and Latinos, and every Republican House vote was against it.
But if you're thinking that didn't seem to make much of an impact in news coverage and public impressions, there's a good reason for that. Look at the date: "03/08/2019 Passed/agreed to in House: On passage Passed by the Yeas and Nays: 234 - 193." March 8 was a Friday. Here's Chuck Todd's opening comment on Meet the Press that Sunday, March 10: "This Sunday, divided Democrats: Bernie versus Biden, progressives versus traditional Democrats, highlighted by this comment from freshman Congresswoman Ilhan Omar." (my emphasis)
ED O'KEEFE: The House this past week had the vote on a resolution condemning hate of all sorts because of what one congresswoman had said, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.
A vote in the House of Representatives to condemn bigotry, and the 2020 Democratic presidential field comes into a little better focus, just two of the stories shaping our week, and topics for analysis by Shields and Gerson. ...
So, Mark, let's talk about this anti-bigotry resolution the House passed yesterday. It was originally they were looking at talking just about anti-Semitism, but they decided to do something bigger than that, passed overwhelmingly.
What do you make of this approach by Democrats? What were they dealing with here?
Lazy media groupthink and sensationalism? That goes without saying. But the more relevant point here is that Nancy Pelosi undercut the campaign-reform and vote protection bill's political value by taking the initiative to target Congresswoman Ilhan Omar for a comment that it took some imagination to spin as anti-Semitism. Among Mark Shields stumbling comments about it in that segment:
Well, I guess I think the speaker [Pelosi] had a — didn't seek this fight, didn't want it.
And, certainly, it's not something the Democrats — the Democrats had to confront it. There's no question about it. But, I mean, we're talking about a president, Judy — let's be very blunt about it — who, when the white supremacists marched through the streets of Charlotte with torches, saying, "Jews will not replace us," said there's good people on both sides.
I mean, so this is — if you want to see anti-Semitism ...
Pelosi's attack on Congresswoman Omar was so weak that other Democrats in the House refused to go along with it, requiring her to water down the resolution she proposed to a meaningless, platitudinous condemnation of all hate.
And dozens of Republican Members of Congress voted against even that.
In other words, Pelosi's resolution, which she initiated and which other Democrats refused to support in its original form, was something done on her own initiative. You expect the Republicans to try to use some other issue or pseudoscandal to distract from the significant of the campaign-contribution and voting bill. But if the Democrats do that job for them, it doesn't require much effort on their part.
Establishment Democrats and various pundits keep telling us what a Master Legislator Nancy Pelosi is. Which is particularly embarrassing in this case, essentially since shet nullified the publicity and political benefit that the House Democrats could have generated with that bill by herself pushing a pseudoscandal against a Democratic Congresswoman. The only way that is Master Legislating is if she intentionally stepped on her own party's message.
But I'll be generous and assume it was a clumsy self-own by the Master Legislator. A really significant, clumsy self-own. Of which the Republicans took full advantage, of course. Something the Democrats seem almost incapable of doing.
And we haven't seen Master Legislator Pelosi set up any comparable opportunities to use their House majority to make the kind of political case they should have been able to make with the March 8 bill.
But she tells us the Democrats need to concentrate on other issues and forget about impeaching Trump.
The Republicans are willing to fight and lose with Congressional votes that gin up the base and use that to their political advatage. Democrats aren't. And on impeachment, the Democrats would have to be willing to take the risk of fighting and losing on removing Trump. Because the only way the Democrats can force Republican Senators to take a stand on it is to impeach Trump without being guaranteed in advance a Senate vote to remove him.
Pelosi's latest excuse for supporting Trump in avoiding impeachment is to argue that Trump "is almost self-impeaching," which apparently means he's making himself more unpopular and so he will lose the 2020 election and so we should forget about impeaching him. A video of her Thursday press conference is here from PBS Newshour. In her opening statement, she does talk about passing a bill to block the Republicans' efforts to allow health insurers to decline people for preexisting conditions, "the Administration's reckless sabotage of the Affordable Care Act". Whether she will exploit that sure-to-be-blocked-in-the-Senate bill politically more effectively than she did with the March 8 bill remains to be seen. I'm sure there's another progessive Democratic Member of Congress who needs to be rebuked if the Democrats start getting good press from aother one of this attempts.
And, no, dull press conferences by the Master Legislator won't be enough to dramatize Democratic programs being blocked by Republicans. Especially when she insists on repeatingly using the word "bipartisanship" during them.
The result of this situation includes moments like the following Brooks-and-Shields segment this past Friday. Back in 1991, after two terms of Reagan as President and Old Man Bush in his first term, it was the smug conventional wisdom that of course Repubolicans would win the Presidential race of 1992. Mark and Bobo seemed to be having a 1991 flashback. It sounded like whatever the Democrats do about Trump will help the Republicans, and whatever they don't do about Trump will help the Republicans. Shields and Brooks on Trump's subpoena standoff, China trade warPBS Newshour 05/10/2019; transcript here:
Mark sounds especially intimidated by polls showing that Trump has "91 percent approval among Republicans." Wow! An authoritarian rightwing party's partisans support their Party's authoritarian rightwing President. I guess that means all the Democrats can do is what they do best:
Rachael Bade and Mike DeBonis reported on this moment during the Democratic establishment's attempt to discredit Congresswoman Ilhan Omar over her criticism of the Israel lobby. It's a data point that informs the discussion about whether Pelosi is a "master legislator" (a favorite media talking point) or sympathetic to Democratic progressives (‘Like herding cats’: Pelosi struggles to unify Democrats after painful fight over anti-Semitism) Washington Post 03/11/2019:
To me, this is the most telling portion:
During a leadership meeting on Tuesday night, Pelosi grew angry and raised her voice to Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) when Dingell pulled out her phone and read a tweet by Ocasio-Cortez, according to two people who were there and requested anonymity to disclose details of a private meeting.
In the tweet, Ocasio-Cortez defended Omar, her close friend, as Pelosi and her leadership team were readying an initial version of the resolution responding to Omar’s foreign allegiance remark.
In the meeting, Dingell agreed with Ocasio-Cortez’s assessment that House Democrats shouldn’t be focused on rebuking one of their own but should also be calling out homophobia, racism and xenophobia in general. According to the people in the room, Pelosi was offended at the suggestion that Democrats didn’t already stand up against all forms of hate and grew visibly angry.
As it turned out, Dingell wasn’t the only lawmaker who wanted to broaden the scope of the resolution.
The Congressional Black Caucus - furious that their colleagues hadn’t done more to call out racist comments in the past - agreed, as did some of Omar’s liberal colleagues and several Democrats running for president, who took to Twitter and pushed back against Pelosi’s original plan focusing on anti-Semitism alone. A Pelosi spokesman said the speaker supported broadening the language all along.
The Democrats in the House and the Senate have been far too mild in general about calling out racism, Islamophobia, and, yes, anti-Semitism. So far as I can see, Christian fundamentalist groups like John Hagee's Christians United For Israel are the biggest ideological group promoting anti-Semitic attitudes today with their End Times ideology/theology that looks forward to a supposedly divinely ordained mass slaughter of Jews. They are the direct breeding ground for anti-Semitic terrorist violence, although the Chritian Identity ideology is very important on the far right. But Hagee-style fundi Christian Zionists are important and very influential in the Republican Party. The Democrats should be actively challenging ideologies like this. But they are reluctant to take on the Christian Right on anything that might sound vaguely like a "religious" matter.
Pelosi's use of the Ilhan Omar controversy in that matter was an important illustration of how cynical she is willing to be in fighting Democratic progressives. And how willing she is to use very belabored interpretations of their comments to bash them.
The Ilhan Omar flap was a self-induced fumble on the part of the establishment Democrats that illustrated some unpleasant facets of the current Democratic Party. Such as, their unwillingness to challenge the rightwing Netanyahu government in Israel even when it works against the self-defined interests of the United States, and even less so leverage American civilian and military aid to demand changes in the settlement policies, for instance, that the US rightly recognizes as in violation of international law.
It also revealed the Democrats' unwillingness to challenge Islamophobia, and even a willingness to play on it. Ilhan Omar is a black Congresswoman who is Muslim, relatively young (37), progressive on most issues, and an immigrant from Somalia. By bashing her, Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer could give a nod to conservative white voters who would never vote for a Democrat in 1000 years that Democrats, too, can be anti-Mulsim, anti-black, anti-immigrant, and against uppity young women - all in one package!
Is that a stretch? I don't think so. There are various kinds of people promoting anti-Semitism. White Christian Congressman Gym Jordan, for instance. (Zack Ford, Ilhan Omar’s critics have little to say about Jim Jordan’s anti-Semitic tweetThink Progress 03/04/2019) But the biggest group by far is made up of fundamentalist Christians. And this isn't a recent recognition. Michael Lind did a great review essay 24 years ago on Pat Robertson's book The New World Order (1991) that details how Robertson presents an anti-Semitic vision of history, Rev. Robertson’s Grand International Conspiracy TheoryNew York Review of Books 02/02/1995. Robertson did a follow-up book along the same lines, The Turning Tide: The Fall of Liberalism and the Rise of Common Sense (1993). Lind noted in 1995 that Robertson "is the founder and leader of the most powerful grass-roots movement in American politics today", meaning the Christian Coalition, then the most prominent Christian Right group.
Robertson is still around, though his personal influence is not so dominant among the Christian Right as it was in 1995. But anti-Semitic theology is just as present if not more so today as it was 24 years ago. Much of it centers around "End Times" theology, the most prominent versions of which look forward with happy anticipation to the day that all the Jews in the world will be "gathered" into Greater Israel where most of them will be slaughtered in a huge war. The remaining few Jews will then convert to Christianity and the Second Coming of Christ can occur. There are variations on the details. One of the fundamentalists in the following video has the unslaughtered Jewish remnant converting when Jesus returns to Earth. Why Evangelical Christians Love IsraelVice News 05/15/2018 (published on YouTube):
The establishment Democrats are willing to challenge Christian fundamentalist political positions. But they are not willing to directly challenge this kind of incredibly influential anti-Semitism directly. Because Democrats have been tiptoing around Christian fundamentalists since 1978. So when we see things like the Trump-Pence Administration flaunting with their friendship with John Hagee, leader of the group Christians United For Israel (CUFI), a large and prominent fundamentalist group that promotes an anti-Semitic End Times ideology (Kelsey Bradshaw, S.A. pastor John Hagee meets with President Trump to discuss international affairsSan Antonio Express 04/05/2017), the Democrats don't rush to denounce them in public, much less try to pass censure resolutions against them.
But a black, immigrant Muslim Congresswoman criticizing the influence of the Israel lobby in promoting US support for the rightwing Netanyahu government, that's something Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer were willing to jump on right away, fecklessly dancing to the Republicans' tune, as they so often do.
Part of what establishment Democrats have done to appear at least critical-minded toward Republican and far-right Islamophobia is to urge that the national, state, and local governments work with members of the American Muslim community to combat extremism. One of the biggest American and European criticisms of Muslim extremism and even Islam generally is their hostility to women's rights. Far-right parties in Europe who are conservative or even hostile toward protecting women's rights, like the far-right Austrian FPÖ and their partners in the "turquoise" faction of the Austrian Christian Democratic (ÖVP) party, use women's rights as one of the main slogans for their Islamophobia and general hostility to Muslims. And as a cover for their own anti-women's-rights stances.
Rep. Ilhan Omar (DFL-MN), along with over thirty members of the House Democratic Caucus, introduced the Federal Worker Childcare Protection Act of 2019 today—which ensures that federal employees affected by the shutdown are eligible for reimbursement of their childcare expenses. ... There are about 100 childcare facilities in federal buildings across the country providing care to 7,500 children a day, two thirds of whom are children of federal employees. As long as those daycares are closed, many parents are paying double – fees to their interim provider, on top of fees to the closed daycare to maintain their child’s place once the government reopens.
“What this bill does is simple: it makes sure that the people who are suffering because of the President’s manufactured crisis are at the very least able to cover their childcare expenses,” Rep. Omar said. “This bill is personal for me. I am a working parent with three beautiful children and I know firsthand the costs associated with child care.”
But the Democratic establishment isn't interested in Omar as a model of a small-d democratic and successful Muslim woman. (Much less a large-d Democratic one!) They are more interested in discrediting her as a progressive and a black Muslim immigrant woman. Even at the cost of stepping on the publicity for their own HR1 bill to secure elections and fight corruption. All while tip-toing around Republican white supremacy and anti-Semitism.
The most recent attacks on Representative Omar are based on her answer to a broad question about anti-Semitism during a recent town hall meeting at Busboys & Poets in Washington, DC. I was there, sitting just a few feet from Omar, asking a question during the Q&A. She never said that Jews have dual loyalty. She never expressed “prejudicial attitudes” or supported “discriminatory acts” against Jews or anyone else. And yet that is the language being proposed for a Democratic Party–sponsored resolution aimed at undermining Omar’s credibility, and likely that of Rashida Tlaib, the other Muslim woman just elected to Congress. Like Omar, Tlaib, who is Palestinian, stands forthrightly in support of Palestinian rights, against the power of the pro-Israel lobby and other lobbies that use money to influence Congress to support guns, environmental destruction, and Israeli violations of human rights—and she stands against racism and anti-Semitism.
These members of Congress understand that real anti-Semitism in the United States has been rooted in white supremacy since the Ku Klux Klan reemerged in 1915 and added Jews to the African Americans who had long been their primary target. That’s the real anti-Semitism we’re seeing — the violence of the Charlottesville march by Nazis and the Klan, the Pittsburgh synagogue murders, all of it rooted in white supremacy. Criticism of Israel, and of its human-rights and international-law violations and its lobbies, is simply not anti-Semitism. [my emphasis]
The white Christian fundamentalist anti-Semites are also among the whites most likely to support intense white supremacist ideas and practices. And Donald Trump. The prominent "Ex-Eveangelical" writer Chris Stroop (also a scholar of Russia) writes about the centrality of the Christian Right to the radicalization of the Republican Party and to Trump's grassroots supprt (#ChristianAltFacts, or, how the Christian Right Broke America 02/24/2017)
Fundamentalists–including the vast majority of white Evangelicals in the US–are inherently authoritarian. Authoritarianism, for its part, is a form of abuse on a social scale that depends on gaslighting, hence post-truth politics and “alternative facts.” And ... it is the Christian Right’s #AltFacts, post-truth ethos that has radicalized and overtaken the Republican Party. Having broken one of our two major parties, the Christian Right broke America. It’s been a long time coming, but here we are–and since those of ex-Evangelicals who grew up indoctrinated and mobilized to fight the culture wars have been well aware of the plan, many of us are particularly angered and even retraumatized by the white Evangelical backlash that, with 81% of the white Evangelical vote, has brought us the disastrous Trump presidency. [my emphasis]
The controversies around Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar are instructive. As numerous writers, a number of them themselves Jewish, have explained at length, there was nothing antisemitic or even particularly controversial about what Omar has said about the pro-Israel lobby in DC, which, contrary to what some pundits might tell you, is not synonymous with the Jewish community. Nonetheless, she received a torrent of attacks, much of it from the pro-Israel Right, casting her comments as antisemitic.
Given the prevailing rhetoric over the last few years, one would have expected the Democratic party and its boosters to close ranks around Omar. After all, they’ve spent the Trump administration celebrating women’s defiant voices in politics, urging others to listen and believe women, and making the defense of immigrants a key plank of the party, while valorizing black women and their pivotal electoral role. And here they were faced with a barrage of dishonest attacks on not just an outspoken woman, but an outspoken black, Muslim, refugee woman, whose voice her political opponents were trying to silence at the same time as they lobbed racist attacks at her and she faced death threats.
Instead of adhering to their self-declared principles, the party and its prominent loyalists instead quickly joined the right-wing pile-on against Omar, to the point of putting offensive, racist words in her mouth that she never actually said. In some cases, the same people who jumped to criticize her and silence her voice had previously expressed platitudes about women and girls persevering against adversity, and black women being the party’s backbone. [my emphasis in bold; internal links omitted]
And, of course, it remains the case that Israelis themselves seem to be far more willing to criticize Israel's most questionable policies than even Democratic Members of Congress in the US:
“When the hell will someone in this government let the Israeli public know that this is a country for all its citizens and that every person is born equal. And also, that the Arabs are human beings,” @GalGadot https://t.co/gt5Cc0dK4v
The Young Turks made a good report and discussion on an important case in which the Democratic House took the unusual-for-them step of passing a bill that is both substantively good and excellent for them politially, an voting and ethics reform package that would counter Republican voter-suppression tactics and put some new limits on corruption through campaign donations. As they explain, all Republicans voted against it. So it gives the Democrats an obvious win by getting the House Republicans on record as being pro-corrupütion and against protecting elections, right?
Ana Kasparian notes that "the media doesn't care" about policy issues. But the panel goes on to discuss the ways that Democrats could use this bill as a way to generate controversy against the Republicans. Because, as Cenk Uygur notes, "if the media doesn't like policy, which it doesn't, they love controversy."
But not only did Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic establishment not take an aggressive strategy for promoting the controversy of Repüublicans being pro-corruption and anti-clean elections. They gave the Republicans and the media the Ilhan Omar flap to crowd out the message the Democrats should have been emphasizing.
The Democrats do something that's not only right but that the Democratic base finds attractive and exciting. But not only to they stumble in setting up the issue against the Republicans. They went did one more favor for the Republicans by publicly bashing Congresswoman Ilhan Omar with concocted outrage over her mild public criticism of the Israel lobby. Which was a controversy against a Democrat which the Democratic establishmenbt in the House leadership headed by Pelosi generated themselves. And, of course, that gave the media a controversy to bloviate over, one that worked against the Democrats.
The wonder is not that the Democratic Party loses so often despite its (official) policies being more popular than those of the Republicans. The wonder is that this Democratic Party ever wins anything at all.
My favorite weekly political commentary segment to take measure of the state of conventional political wisdom of the moment, the PBS Newshour Political Wrap, illustrates how badly the Democrats fumbled with their mini-jihad against Ilhan Omar, Shields and Gerson on Democrats’ bigotry resolution, Trump investigations 03/08/2019 (transcript here):
They talked about the Omar controversy, Trump's whining over Congressional investigations, and whether Joe Biden would run for President again. The Democrats' impressive bill to protect elections and reduce corruption didn't come up.
Michael Gerson, sitting in for Bobo in this segment, seemed unusually agitated, often speaking in such a weepy-sounding voice that I thought he might go all Meghan McCain on us.
Mark Shields could have been better on the Omar issue. But he was more good than bad, saying things like this:
Well, I guess I think the speaker had a — didn't seek this fight, didn't want it.
And, certainly, it's not something the Democrats — the Democrats had to confront it. There's no question about it. But, I mean, we're talking about a president, Judy — let's be very blunt about it — who, when the white supremacists marched through the streets of Charlotte with torches, saying, "Jews will not replace us," said there's good people on both sides.
I mean, so this is — if you want to see anti-Semitism ...
Susan Davis reports on the Democratic establishment's effort to brand at least one of its Muslim Members of Congress as anti-Semitic based on their criticism of the Democrats' often extremely one-sided and conservative Israel policies in Democrats Planning Another Public Rebuke Of Rep. Ilhan OmarNPR 3/04/2019.
The fact that there is an Israel lobby is not news. John Mearsheimer's and Stephen Walt's landmark political science study on it, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy was published in 2007, though the reality was well known long before 2007. The most prominent group among that lobby is AIPAC, which tends to support hardline rightwing Israeli government positions. There are more liberal and critical elements of the lobby, like the liberal group J Street, which criticizes some of Israel's democratic deficits and foreign policy positions. And an important part of the lobby also consists for far-right fundamentalists Christians, who support hardline rightwing Israeli governments for their own bizarre mixture of political, theological and even racial motives, i.e., white nationalist fundamentalists often see Israel as a bastion of white supremacy.
See also online:
Mearshimer and Walt, The Israel LobbyLondon Review of Books 28:6 03/23/2006
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (60-page article) Middle East Policy 13:3 Fall 2006. Former President Jimmy Carter published a critical analysis of problematic Israeli policies in 2006, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. (See Jimmy Carter Defends 'Peace Not Apartheid'NPR 01/25/2007.) The irreversibility of the settlement process has greatly advanced since then. The two-state solution seems now completely impossible for all practical purposes, and Israel does confront the real choice of being a Jewish-majority state or a democracy.
I won't bother here hashing through the truisms that clutter around discussions of the Israel lobby: it's perfectly legitimate for American citizens and politicians to advocate for support for Israel; the US and Israel are countries with some national interests that coincide and others that conflict; anti-Semites criticize Israel, seeking to equate Jews in general with bad poilicies of Israel; some anti-Semites support Israel, notably many of the Christian fundamentalists who do so based on a sick theological construct of apocalyptic Scriptures that looks forward to the day that most Jews of the world will be killed in a massive war; a majority of American Jews (the US is the country in the world with the largest Jewish population numerically) are critical toward many Israeli policies, far more so than conservative Jews or Christian fundamentalists.
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar is currently a metaphorical punching-bag for Democrats who generally support hardline Israeli policies and who want to pander to Islamophia; Omar is Muslim and wears a hijab headscarf in Congress.
The current Democratic establishment's hostility to Omar is part of their larger freakout over the new strength and Congressional presence of Democratic progressives. I know corporate Dems take any kind of observation that Democratic hostility toward progressives who support programs a majority of not just Democratic voters but the public generally could wind up provoking a full-blown party split. But it could.
As Davis reports:
The latest controversy follows comments Omar made at an event last Wednesday at Busboys and Poets, a politically minded coffee shop and restaurant chain in Washington, D.C., that held a "progressive town hall" with Omar and fellow freshman Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich. The duo are the first Muslim women to serve in Congress. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., and Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., also attended the town hall.
"I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is OK to push for allegiance to a foreign country," Omar said at the event. The statement has sparked a furious response from senior Democrats and Jewish groups.
Josh Marshall makes what I take to be a good-faith commentary on why Democrats should be especially careful about public references that could be taken to invoke the infamous "dual loyalty" trope. (The Problem with Ilhan OmarTPM 03/03/2019) I wouldn't join his particular criticism of Congresswoman Omar in this situation. Because, as he himself point out in the piece, Americans who are pushing for allegiance to Israel are primarily rightwing Christian fundamentalists, not Jews:
American citizens are entitled to espouse foreign policy views of whatever sort they want. The American Jewish community’s support for Israel has had a decisive impact on US foreign policy toward Israel going back decades. Anyone with the vaguest acquaintance with recent American history knows this. But it is equally true that the anchor of unequivocal US policy support for Israel today and specifically the Israeli right is far more anchored among conservative white evangelical Christians than it is among Jews. As anyone who follows these issues knows, the American Jewish community is increasingly divided over the policies of the rightwing governments which have dominated Israel for the last generation. [my emphasis]
The Israel lobbies that direct campaign money to representatives and senators insist that Israeli policy of imposing Jim Crow discrimination on Palestinians in the Occupied Territories never be criticized on the floor of Congress. They also insist that the US give Israel, a relatively wealthy country, $3 billion in aid every year on top of other extensive grants and perquisites, despite what the UN says are war crimes committed on a daily or weekly basis. ...
The hypocrisy of her critics on this issue is breathtaking. For nearly a year, Israeli snipers have shot down unarmed, unthreatening peaceful protesters on the Gaza side of the border, which is just murder. Israeli soldiers have killed hundreds this way, including small children, women, medics and journalists, and wounded thousands more with live ammo or military grade tear gas.
It's worth recalling one of the more diplomatically questionable occasions in American history, the time in 2015 Israeli Prime Minister addressed a Joint Session of Congress at the invitation of the then-Republican majority in both Houses, asking them to oppose President Obama's policy on Iran, i.e., the official policy of the US Government, and instead support his own government's position, The Netanyahu speech controversy, explained by Zack BeauchampVox 03/03/2015.
While the Democratic establishment panders to Islamophobia to bash Democratic progressives, the dominant narrative of corporate Democrats since the 2016 election is that Donald Trump is in some way working for the interest of the Russian government. They may be correct. But it's pretty severe cognitive dissonance for Democrats to criticize Congresswoman Omar while making a major theme of Trump's compromising links to a foreign government. Here's Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016 calling Trump a Putin "puppet," which sounded less persuasive to the average viewer then than it would today. But she is nevertheless accusing him of allegiance to a foreign power. i.e., a much more specific claim than Ilhan Omar's comment for which she's most recently drawing such criticism, Trump to Clinton: 'No, You're the Puppet'Bloomberg Politics 10/19/2016:
