From Buckley to Hezbollah

"If you had a European prime minister who experienced what we've experienced it would be expected that he would retire or resign."

Gollum in his cave

When no less a Republican deity than William F. Buckley, the Grand Poobah of the conservative movement, proclaims that the Republican president should step down, it is long past time for everyone else—across the entire political spectrum—to see the Bush crew for the bumbling clowns they are and, at the very least, stop taking them seriously.

But no, the sycophantocracy is still mesmerized and enamored of its favored role at ringside.  The band plays obliviously on, the conglomerized news outlets continue gushing out pabulum by the truckload.  You want celebrity gossip and sex advice?  No problem.  But if you're trying to understand what's really going on in the world, look elsewhere.

This emperor is naked and it's time to publicly acknowledge it.  Two and a half years remain before this catastrophically ignorant/insane administration is replaced, assuming the United States still holds elections for national office by then.  This country and the world cannot tolerate two and a half more years of mounting disasters, each instigated as a desperate ploy to distract attention from the last.  There must be a strong and genuine opposition perspective in the mainstream media, something that's been AWOL far, far too long.

Sure, there are reasons.  Screw the reasons.  The mess in Iraq is the fault of the President, as is the mess in Louisiana.  Now we have Israel attacking Gaza and Lebanon, a mess in which the United States is implicated as a full participant.  What's next?  Syria?  There are indications that Bush is pressuring Israel to extend the war there.  Syria could become another Iraq.

But then maybe you disagree.  Maybe you feel that, when it comes to holy support for the state of Israel in her hour of need against the terrorist threat from Palestinian Gaza and Hezbollah in the north, it would be heretical, possibly even anti-semitic, to suggest that support be other than total.  If that is what you think, you are in good company.

Consider that the slaughter of innocents, whether by Hezbollah, Hamas, Al Qaeda, Americans in Iraq or the Israelis, is always wrong and should never be tolerated.  As the number of civilian dead in Lebanon surges past 500 (600 according to the Lebanese government), nobody can in good conscience stand by and remain silent as thousands more are threatened by Israel's actions.

Israel is presented to the American audience as a victim of terror, but its own longstanding policy vis-a-vis its neighbors is one of unrelenting intransigence and state terror, and its policy regarding the Palestinians has always been designed to destroy their national aspirations.  Everyone knows that the Palestinians abducted an Israeli soldier (we even know his name: Shalit), and this act is commonly regarded as the precipitating event of the ongoing incursion into Gaza, which has so far killed over 100 people, but most people are unaware that Israel abducted two Palestinian civilians only the day before—a small but typical example of how our understanding is manipulated.

The state of Israel has been in existence for nearly sixty years, and in all that time it has not been able to resolve the Palestine problem, the festering wound that is the actual root cause of the current conflict.  The reason for this failure has nothing to do with a historical enmity between the Arabs and the Jews.  It has everything to do with the calculation by Israel's government that truly resolving the Palestine issue is not in Israel's interest.

During the 1982 invasion, Israel killed 18,000 people in Lebanon.  Eighteen thousand.  How many must die this time?  An answer to that question was provided by the Israeli chief of staff, Dan Halutz, who ordered his pilots to destroy ten apartment buildings for every Katyusha rocket that lands in the environs of Haifa.  (Or is it every rocket that lands in Israel?  I forget.)  This is apparently what is meant by Israel's "measured response," and it fits the longstanding pattern.

The massive destruction from aerial bombardment and resulting human suffering and loss of life also guarantee that there will be another round of violence in the next generation cycle, and in our extremely dangerous era of nuclear proliferation, that leads straight to a holocaust.  It's simple, inexorable logic.

Ergo, anyone who does not support Israel in its hard-line reliance on a military solution cares more about the fate of the Israeli Jews than, for example, the Democrats in congress, who are unanimous in their support—a cynical political calculation based on their perceived need to win votes in the upcoming election.  They don't present a genuuine opposition and therefore don't deserve to win, but then anyone in congress who is targeted by the Israel lobby (AIPAC) has a major problem on his or her hands.  As an example of AIPAC's influence, the resolution unanimously approved in congress "condemning Hamas and Hezbollah and their state sponsors and supporting Israel's exercise of its right to self-defense" was written by AIPAC, not by members of congress. (Read John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's paper on the influence of the Israel lobby, which has aroused considerable controversy, including a rebuttal by Alan Dershowitz.)

QUESTION:  Who is responsible for educating the electorate about such a crucially important issue?

ANSWER:  The press.

Frank Rich is a lonely voice at the NYT along with Krugman and Herbert, but their editorial influence is severely limited by the TimesSelect subscription wall.  The New Republic has been unreliable for decades and should not be forgiven for favoring the war.  TNR's Gates-sired offspring in the electronic realm, Kinsley's Slate, defines a liberalish center, but is mostly just clever snottery served up with cool iconoclastic attitude.  (Though I admire Michael and seek out his own essays, elsewhere.)  In disdainful silence we shall pass over the rancid buffoonery of Christopher Hitchens to skip directly to the MSNBC Mama-ship, which is, with the single exception of the brilliant and forthright Eric Alterman, a barren wasteland along with the other big portal sites.

Warning:  To avoid toxic contamination, the Surgeon General advises total abstinence from the entertainment spectacle of television news.

PBS's News Hour is engaging but compromised by its peculiar brand of competitive advocacy journalism, wherein Subject Matter Experts confound us with in-depth squawkery on both sides of every issue until there's no longer any such thing as The Truth.

In the absence of a single source for reliable and objective news analysis, there is no choice but to hunt around and look at everything.  The editorials in Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, are particularly valuable, as are those in the Lebanense newspaper The Daily Star.  Both of these are available online.  Also important is Alex Cockburn's site, Counterpunch.org, though I've noticed that my links for articles there are (surprise!) being blocked somewhere.  Due to that censorship, I emphasize the importance of that site, and recommend particularly the entries by Uri Avnery, the Israeli peace advocate who took the initiative to talk to the PLO long before the government did and whose articles are also available here, and also the articles by Alex himself, who is controversial in some quarters but whose writing is cogent and worth reading.  (I haven't mentioned the mighty Juan Cole only because I've done so before, but he has become the go-to source for this topic as he has been for Iraq for the last three years.)

If you belong to a public libary, you might be able, as I am, to get around the TimesSelect subscription wall by accessing the online archives for the New York Times, which contain everything up until the prior day (yesterday).  The Middle East Research and Information Project is another source, available here.  Then there is the BBC and the other British outlets (The Guardian, The Independent, The Financial Times).  Other sources are listed on Juan Cole's site.  Among these are often found links to the writing of Helena Cobban, whose current article in the Boston Review about Hezbollah is here and whose website is here.