How the Rich Really Play, “Who Wants To Be An Ivy Leaguer?”

On March 14, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

by Daniel Golden

My 2006 book, “The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges — and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates,” was intended as a work of investigative journalism.

But many of its more affluent readers embraced it as a “how to” guide. For years afterward, they inundated me with questions like, “How much do I have to donate to get my son (or daughter) into Harvard (or Yale, or Stanford)?” Some even offered me significant sums, which I declined, to serve as an admissions consultant.

They may have been motivated by a tale I told in the book about a youth whose admission to Harvard appears to have been cemented by a $2.5 million pledge from his wealthy developer father. The then-obscure Harvardian would later vault to prominence in public life; his name was Jared Kushner.

Those requests from people who misunderstood my aim in writing the book came back to mind on Tuesday when I heard about the latest and most brazen scandal involving upper-crust parents — including chief executives, real estate investors, a fashion designer and two prominent actresses — manipulating college admissions.

One would think that the rich and famous would care less than the rest of us about foisting their children on elite colleges. After all, their kids are likely to be financially secure no matter where, or if, they go to college. Yet they seem even more desperate — to the extent, according to a complaint, that dozens of well-heeled parents ponied up six or seven figures for bogus SAT scores and athletic profiles for their children to increase their chances at Yale, Stanford and other brand-name universities.

The parents allegedly paid anywhere between $200,000 and $6.5 million to William Rick Singer, who ran a college counseling business in Newport Beach, California. Singer in turn bribed standardized test administrators and college coaches in upper-class sports like crew, sailing and water polo, even staging photos of the applicants playing various sports, prosecutors said.

The parents “chose to corrupt and illegally manipulate the system,” Andrew Lelling, U.S. attorney for Massachusetts, said at a press conference Tuesday. “There can be no separate college admissions system for the wealthy.”

Perhaps these parents were pining to boast at Hollywood cocktail parties about their Ivy League imprimatur. Possibly their offspring, like those of many successful families, lacked the motivation to strive and excel academically, and without a substantial boost would have been consigned to colleges of lesser repute.

In any event, such allegedly criminal tactics represent the logical, if extreme, outgrowth of practices that have long been prevalent under the surface of college admissions, and that undermine the American credos of upward mobility and equal opportunity. Although top college administrators and admissions officials were apparently unaware of the deception, their institutions do bear some responsibility for developing and perpetuating the system that made it possible.

I began looking into this issue in 2003, at a time when the U.S. Supreme Court was considering the fairness of affirmative action for minorities. I documented another form of affirmative action — for the white and privileged.

According to one poll after another, most Americans believe that college admissions should be based on merit, rather than wealth or lineage. Through their own intelligence and hard work, students with the best grades, the highest test scores, the most compelling recommendations and other hard-earned credentials achieve a coveted ticket to higher education — and with it, enhanced prospects for career success and social status. So goes the legend perpetuated by elite colleges, anyway.

But decades of investigating college admissions have led me to conclude that, for rich and famous families, it’s more like a television game show, “Who Wants to Be an Ivy Leaguer?” complete with lifelines for those who might otherwise be rejected. Instead of phoning a friend or asking the audience, the wealthy benefit from advantages largely unavailable to middle-class and poor Americans — what I described in my book as “the preferences of privilege.”

The best-known and most widespread of those preferences is conferred on alumni children, known as “legacies,” who tend as a group to be disproportionately white and well-off. But rich applicants whose parents didn’t attend the target university, like Kushner, still have a leg up.

Rich candidates can enhance their standardized test scores with test-prep and tutoring. They don’t have to rely for college recommendations and advice on an overburdened public high school guidance counselor with a caseload of hundreds of students. Instead, their parents can afford a private counselor who discreetly advises the desired university that the family has a history of philanthropy and, in case of acceptance, would be inclined to be especially generous.

Similarly, inner-city schools often don’t field teams in patrician sports like crew, squash, fencing and the like. But prep and suburban schools do, giving their affluent students an opportunity for the significant edge given to recruited athletes, even in upper-class sports limited to a relative few. Colleges favor recruits in these sports at least partly for fundraising reasons; they’re important to wealthy alumni and donors who played them in college or enjoy them as leisure activities.

So the parents charged in the current case followed customary practices of the entitled: hiring a private counselor, getting test help and participating in a patrician sport. The difference is that they allegedly took blatant short cuts: The counselor was unscrupulous, a stand-in secretly took the tests and the applicants didn’t actually play those sports. But, without the tilted system of preferences already in place, the parents would have had to choose a different route — or actually let merit determine their children’s college destiny.

Ilhan Omar Exposes US Hegemonic Positioning and Takes on Both Political Parties    

On March 14, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Somali-American Ilhan Omar is a member of the US House of Representatives from Minnesota’s 5th district. Elected to the United States Congress in November 2018, Omar is a critical and strong voice that advocates for progressive policies and lawmaking in regards to housing, a living wage, student debt forgiveness, and the protection of immigrants.

Since February 2019 Omar has come under attack for tweeting, retweeting, deleting, stating and restating, a number of positions, including of course that financial resources generated by pro-Israel lobbying groups served as motivation for American political support of Israel. Omar is currently facing another onslaught by high powered Democrats for subsequent comments she made regarding Israel. This after a recent racist depiction of Omar by the West Virginia GOP in a poster linking her to the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Since these more recent developments, House Resolution 183, in historic fashion, issued the word “Islamophobia,” (deeper in the text) and was to many, a sign of progress in marking the first time there has been a formal condemnation of this term. Furthermore, the three leading Democratic nominees for 2020 all issued defenses of Omar, showing that the bottom up defenses of Omar has reached the mainstream and political center.

Can it really be believed that Omar is a bigot that demonstrates a bias? Likely no, but in some ways imagined antisemitism is no match for real Islamophopia within the Democratic Party.

In this interview, I spoke to Richard Falk about the history of Zionism, Islamophobia and the pressure and vulnerability pundits, authors, academics (including himself) and elected officials like Congresswoman Omar face when they take on machine politicians and the established order especially in the American foreign policy arena.

Daniel Falcone: Going back to when this all started about a month ago, can you briefly remind readers of what your initial reactions were to Ilhan Omar’s tweets and to the course of events that quickly followed soon after? Did she misspeak? Isn’t the Lobby (or AIPAC) “small potatoes” compared to other groups or official US policy in the first place?

Richard Falk: When I first heard these comments by Ilhan Omar I was glad that there was a new voice in Congress that would speak up on behalf of the Palestinian people so long subjected to a daily ordeal whether they are living under occupation, as a discriminated minority in Israel, or in refugee camps in occupied Palestine and neighboring countries, or existing in involuntary exile.

Although I welcomed her critical remarks on AIPAC, and later on the dual loyalty of some Americans when it comes to Israel, they struck me as familiar and reflective of reality as to have become almost innocuous truisms. How wrong I was!  On further consideration, it became clear to me that her remarks (of course, exaggerated in their intended meaning by being torn from the wider context of the full statements) were treated as so inflammatory not so much because of their content, but because of their source, a black-Muslim-American woman, and her status as a newly elected member of Congress.

The essence of what she had to say was hardly the stuff of fiery radicalism. After apologizing for what might have unintentionally been hurtful to Jews, convincingly distancing herself from real anti-Semitism (hatred of Jews) her message was true but important only because she as a newly elected congressperson was willing to declare her concerns in high visibility settings:

“I reaffirm the problematic role of lobbyists in our politics, whether it be AIPAC, the NRA or the fossil fuel industry…It’s gone on too long and we must be willing to address it.” And “I want to talk about political influence in this country that says it is O.K. to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”

The overblown response to these Omar tweets had the effect of mobilizing the liberal and Christian Zionist establishments in and out of Congress. These groups pressed Democrats in Congress to give concreteness to their allegations by their angry calls for apologies, retractions, and censure. Those outraged insisted that the truths Rep. Ilhan Omar dared speak were nothing less than ‘familiar anti-Semitic tropes.’ This expansion of anti-Semitism from its base meaning, the hatred of Jews, is a tactic used to spread the net of anti-Semitism much wider. This referral to ‘tropes’ is an insidious way of substituting ‘political correctness’ for the transparencies of truthfulness.

Once this enlarged anti-Semitic card is on the table, the accuracy or inaccuracy of Omar’s statements becomes irrelevant, and any attempt by the person so accused to justify their assertions by pointing to the facts only aggravates the sin, and reinforces the allegation. In effect, freedom of expression takes a back seat when an anti-Semitic trope is invoked by defaming critics.

This dynamic is even more problematic when the speaker has a status that bestows prestige and is capable of wielding influence. It has been extremely helpful to Israel over the decades to have virtual unanimity in the U.S. Congress on any agenda item that touches its interests or assesses its behavior. It puts critics of Israel in the larger society on the defensive, and makes support for Israel so bipartisan as to become virtually absolute – and making opposition to any important pro-Israel initiative, for instance annual military appropriations, becomes politically untenable.

Such a tactic has been highly effective in the past. It has made anyone politically foolish enough to defy this overarching consensus exceedingly vulnerable to political defeat in the next scheduled election. Such a person is clearly targeted, and yes, by AIPAC, rich Zionist donors, and pro-Israeli Christian lobbies and likely the lucky opponent will have trouble spending all the money pouring into his or her campaign coffers.

This pattern of ‘enforcing’ unanimity can be traced back at least as far as the experience of Paul Findley, a courageous, moderate, and humanly decent Congressman from Illinois, who was blacklisted and politically defeated after serving ten term after he raised his voice to decry the unbalanced approach relied on by the U.S. Government to manage the Israel/Palestine relationship.

Ever since he lost his House seat in 1982 Findley has devoted himself to exposing and criticizing the role that AIPAC plays using language not dissimilar to that employed by Omar. See his important book They Dare Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby (1985, 2003).

It is not only Findley that has been targeted over the years, but several others who fall afoul of AIPAC’s disciplinary code, including such distinguished figures as Charles Percy, Adlai Stevenson III, Pete McCloskey, and above all, Cynthia McKinney, the only woman and African American on this honor roll. To deny or obscure such a cause and effect relationship is tantamount to swallowing the Kool Aid of Zionist thought control. I can only wonder whether Congresswoman Omar was aware of this background when she decided to speak out forcefully, yet in a moderate tone delivering a message that cannot be factually refuted hence the messenger becomes the target.

Status matters in these campaigns to defame critics of Israel. When someone as prominent as Richard Goldstone associated his name with a UN fact-finding inquiry into Israeli wrongdoing arising from the 2008-09 attack on Gaza he suffered mightily from the backlash. The Report reached conclusions critical of Israel that were fact-based, rather restrained given the evidence, and fully documented. Impressions of fairness were further strengthened by coupling the accusations against Israel with harsh denunciations of Hamas’ unlawful acts of retaliation. Such characteristics of the Report did nothing to tone down the fury of Israeli reactions, which singled out Goldstone with vituperative rage. Although Goldstone was at the time a widely admired international figure who had won international recognition for his anti-apartheid role in South Africa, neither his eminence nor his legal professionalism protected him from the slash-and-burn tactics of his detractors – quite the contrary.

The heaviest defamatory artillery was deployed to mount an intense attack on his person and reputation. Despite his lifelong Zionist connections, Goldstone was denounced, censured at the highest levels of government in Israel with the negative chorus joined by several leading political figures in the U.S. He was even accused of authoring ‘a blood libel’ against the Jewish people. It turned out that Goldstone couldn’t withstand these pressures and backed down in humiliating fashion without the support of any of the three other distinguished members of the UN commission team.

With this retraction totally lost the respect of the human rights community without regaining respectability among Zionists. Goldstone’s turnaround demonstrates how effective these Israeli tactics can be in silencing its critics, evading truth, and shifting the policy conversation from the message (in this instance, the Report) to the messenger.

My own analogous experience at a much lower level of international visibility was rather similar. As long as I was a dissenting professor on Israel/Palestine, I was more or less ignored, but when I was appointed as UN Special Rapporteur for Occupied Palestine all hell broke loose. I received death threats and hate mail calling me many names, but concentrating on depicting me as ‘a notorious anti-Semite’ and ‘a self-hating Jew.’ This campaign of defamation continued unabated during my six years holding this UN position, yet immediately after my term ended in 2014 the attacks subsided, although they were revived in 2017 when a UN report that I jointly authored was released. Its carefully constructed arguments showed that Israel was an apartheid state according to the criteria established by international criminal law. Unlike Goldstone, I refused to back down or shut up, and for this stubbornness I paid a different kind of price.

The experience of Ilhan Omar is, of course, more extreme and revealing than mine. It is a grim reminder that whenever African Americans are allowed on the plantation, they are slapped down harshly if they become ‘uppity.’ Although born and raised in Somalia, Omar was nevertheless perceived as uppity. There is a Jim Crow element present here that is being applied especially since 9/11 to Muslims. A large part of what is operating here is to paint Ilhan Omer as an anti-Semite because it is not politically correct to be explicitly Islamophobic, but it is quite all right to be indirectly so beneath the banner of solidarity with Israel.

In effect, it is bad enough if Muslims are seen, and worse, if they are heard and still worse if they somehow obtain an official platform from which to speak, and worst of all, if they use this platform to speak out in ways that expose truths long swept under the rug. To some degree the racist mentality directed previously at African Americans has shifted its center of gravity to Muslims, and reaches fever levels, when the perceived offender is not only Muslim but also African American.

Recent events confirm that the orchestrated backlash becomes more vicious if the criticism of Israel issues forth from the mouth of a person of color who enjoys a high intellectual or cultural status. The Temple professor, Marc Lamont Hill, was almost instantly dismissed from his role as a commentator and consultant to CNN merely because he used the phrase ‘from the river to the sea’ to describe Palestinian rights in the course of a judicious and humane speech on the conditions of a true peace between Israel and Palestine delivered at the UN a few months ago. Hill responded to the pressure by offering an explanatory apology for any misunderstanding he might have unintentionally caused. He eventually managed to survive demands that he be dismissed from his tenured professorship. Even so, the public pounding Hill endured surely sent a chilling message to others throughout the country who might be tempted to speak out, and is likely to result in a sharp decline in the number of invitations he receives to speak at academic conferences at least for five years or so.

In other words, whether knowingly or not Illhan Omar poked her head into this lion’s den, and it has had consequences that are likely beyond her imagining at the time she spoke out. Omar definitely touched a raw nerve by so defiantly challenging this bipartisan consensus to refrain from criticisms of Israel and its support system — particularly, when her comments seemed to be saying that it is impossible to reconcile such loyalty to a foreign country with the obligations of an elected American official to give priority to national interests.

Daniel Falcone: On December 13, 2011 Thomas Friedman of the New York Times wrote in reference to Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to US Congress that the “ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel Lobby.” He received some criticism for it, but no liberal called it an “anti-Semitic trope” either literally or in proportion to the reaction of Omar’s word choice. Can you unpack the difference between Friedman saying this and Omar? I think Omar was really speaking to US hegemony and this all indirectly makes the point that in the US, it’s okay to use “tropes” as long as you hate Muslims more.

Richard Falk: My prior response sets the stage for my response to this question. Friedman’s stature and generally supportive role for Israeli policies, although acutely critical of Netanyahu, led even most militant supporters of Israel to construe his comments as narrowly confined to Iran’s nuclear program. The strong Israeli objections to the nuclear deal so scrupulously negotiated with Russia bothered many Jews, even including many Zionists. As suggested, Friedman although prominent and influential, did not have an official position in government or an international institution, and the defiant Netanyahu speech on a question not primarily directly related to Israel was then testing the outer limits of bipartisanship with respect to Israel. The whole episode seemed primarily intended by his Republican hosts as a slap at the Obama presidency, and his nuclear diplomacy.

Even on this occasion, Friedman was characteristically careful to couple his criticisms of the Israeli approach to security issues under Netanyahu with affirmations of a continuing belief in the sanctity of the Jewish state and an avowal of a two-state solution as still the only solution that could be feasible and might be negotiable. [See his “Ilhan Omar, AIPAC, and me,” with the super-revealing and self-serving sub-head, “The congresswoman and I have a lot in common — but not her stance on Israel,” NY Times, March 6, 2019,] This continues to be the liberal Zionist line, but it is rather self-contradictory.

Any close observer should realize that the broad spectrum of Israeli public opinion now is definitely opposed to the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state under any conditions.  The Likud has by way of the settlement movement to foreclose a two-state solution as a feasible political option. Friedman is no fool. He too must be aware of this. It prompts raising a question parallel to that suggested by the title of a Murakami work of fiction, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. My question: What is Friedman really talking about when he talks about the two-state solution?

Friedman’s remarks were framed around the particular event of Netanyahu’s speech, and were not formulated to be heard as a general indictment of AIPAC or to call attention of his readers to the disproportionate influence exerted by pro-Israeli viewpoints on foreign policy. Some years ago when John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt published The Israel Lobby their book was sharply attacked as anti-Semitic because it mounted a general argument about the distortion of American foreign policy in the Middle East. The central contention of the book was that American foreign policy quite often was bent to accommodate Israel’s national interests at the expense of American regional interests in the Middle East.

The authors were, of course, not members of Congress and the anti-Semitic slur of their accusers never became a matter of public debate. Mearsheimer and Walt possessed impeccable academic credentials backed up by senior appointments at leading universities. This Zionist pushback was not very severe or sustained, although it was serious enough to tarnish their mainstream media acceptability to some extent. Objectively, it was absurd to attack such academic experts, both known to me personally, who are above all prominent in the field of international relations as ‘political realists.’ It seems evident that they were not motivated by any particular empathy for the Palestinians or hostility to Jews, but were acting on their consistently expressed belief that a rational foreign policy must be based on interests of the nation and not be shaped by pressures mounted by special interests of an ethnic minority, private sector actors, or on behalf of the paid lobbyists of a foreign government.

What is paramount to observe when comparing Friedman to Omar is the reality of a double-standard. Ilhan Omar became especially vulnerable because she is Muslim, African, and an immigrant, as well as being a newly elected member of Congress. If she had made these comments back in Minnesota with tweets or at a community meeting in her neighborhood, it might have produced some angry reactions from local Zionist activists, but no likely wider ripples. If she held a still higher public office in Washington than at present the attack on her would likely have been even more intense, as Jimmy Carter discovered when he titled his unwaveringly moderate book on Israel/Palestine ‘Peace or Apartheid’ The book was essentially a plea for peace and a warning about the consequences of kicking the can further and further down the road.

There is also the question about whether American foreign policy is shaped by the Israeli lobby or that Israel and the United States share common policies toward the region. If the latter is the case then it is a matter of convergence, not Zionist influence that explains the course of American policy. Both views can be supported, especially if it is accepted that Zionist and AIPAC influence may be greater at some times than at others. For instance, it would seem that the two countries are quite closely aligned on counterterrorism policy in the post-9/11 context.

Yet when it came to the 5 + 1 2015 Nuclear Agreement with Iran, it was evident that the White House was pursuing a line of policy at variance with the priorities of Israel’s approach toward Iran. In this regard, when major geopolitical interests are at stake, and an American president is sensitive to their significance, variance with Israeli preferences will be acted upon, despite domestic friction generated by AIPAC and other lobbying groups. Under the Trump presidency, the approach to Iran converges to a far greater degree than with Obama, which seems both to reflect greater responsiveness to Netanyahu’s influence but also appears consistent with Trump’s view of Iran as a threat to regional order in the Middle East that is most consistent with American security.

Daniel Falcone: In this entire conversation, not many people are mentioning how anti-Semitic Zionism is, and it’s something sadly under-discussed in educated US opinion. Can you unpack this for me?

Richard Falk: This is an entirely appropriate question that goes to the heart of what might be described as ‘the use and misuse of anti-Semitism’ in political discourse. The issues raised are complicated because there are variations based on place and historical circumstances.

Of course, the shocking suggestion that Zionism can be responsibly accused of anti-Semitism is treated as an affront by almost every Zionists and most Jews. Some Jews have been brainwashed to an extent that they believe strongly that Zionism is unconditionally dedicated to providing sanctuary for Jews in a Jewish sovereign state, and to the practical necessity of achieving this goal combined with its biblical justifications and its anticipated success in restoring Jewish self-esteem individually and collectively.

Yet there were anti-Semitic sentiments even in the writings of Theodor Herzl and Chaim Weizmann, the intellectual fathers of the Zionist movement, decrying the image and behavior of Jews in the diaspora, almost vindicating their non-acceptance by the hegemonic political cultures and social structures of Europe. Zionist thought sought to free Jews from persecution, but also to have a state of their own worthy of gentile respect.

It is also true that Zionism has from its origins has been preoccupied with the establishment and security of a Jewish state, and since 1948 fiercely defensive of Israel. Yet Zionism has always exhibited a pragmatic and opportunistic side that made it at all stages seem beneficial for the Zionist movement to work jointly, even collaboratively, with the most extreme anti-Semitic forces unleashed in Europe after World War I or in the regional neighborhood and global setting that Israel inhabits.

In this regard, the Zionist vision of a Jewish state in ‘the promised land’ seemed like an extreme utopian conception at its outset. We should remember that at the time when the Zionist movement was formally launched in 1897 the Jewish population of Palestine was 8%, and when the Balfour Declaration pledging support for a Jewish homeland was issued in 1917, the Jewish population had only risen to 8.1%, and even after the forced displacement during the period of Nazi ascendancy, Jews were only 30% of Palestine in 1947 when the partition plan was endorsed by the UN General Assembly.

How in the world could Zionists hope in an era of rising nationalism around the world hope to establish a Jewish state in what had so clearly become a non-Jewish society? This was the animating puzzle that has haunted Zionism in the course of becoming a political project rather than a utopian phantasy. And it continues Israel by making governance and security depend on apartheid structures that make the continuing claim of being “the only democracy in the Middle East” a mockery (when the circumstances of the Palestinian people as a whole is taken into account.)

Without entering into the details of a complicated history, the grounds on which a kind of Zionist anti-Semitism was erected, involved persuading, and in some instances coercing Jews to emigrate to Palestine. In other words, only by making life in the diaspora unbearable for Jews could the Zionist project advance towards its goals in Palestine. In this sense, the rise of hatred of Jews throughout Europe, and especially Germany, in the period after World War I did encourage the Jewish option. Beyond this, the anti-Semitic leadership in Poland, Hungary, Rumania, as well as Nazi Germany, had a common interest with Zionism in inducing Jewish emigration.

This led the Polish Government to help train elite Zionist militias and supply weapons so that the Zionist penetration of Palestine would not meet with failure when it encountered resistance. In other words, diaspora Jews were being manipulated, including after World War II, to choose Palestine rather than other destinations, including those who had survived the death camps of the Holocaust.

Since Israel was established it has struggled to gain acceptance as a legitimate state. It did gain entry into the UN, but it was subject to aggressive hostility from its Arab neighbors and from Pro-Palestinians sentiments in the global South. Again it reacted by bonding to the extent possible with anti-Semitic governments and civil society movements. Netanyahu has developed cordial relations with the anti-Semitic leader, Viktor Orban, of Hungary and Israel has been supplying weapons and helping train policy and paramilitary training to many extreme rightest governments over the years.

It also courted the support of Christian Zionism, which while fanatically pro-Israeli is also anti-Semitic in the prime sense of wanting Jews to leave America and elsewhere, retuning to Israel. Their rationale is religious, based on their interpretation of the Book of Revelations, (specifically in prophesy) that the Second Coming of Jesus will only occur when all Jews return to Israel. It is also anti-Semitic in its vision that after the return of Jesus, Jews will be given an opportunity to convert to Christianity, which if refused, will lead those Jews that refuse to damnation.

Daniel Falcone: Noam Chomskymentioned this past summer how Israel was losing its support as the “darling of liberal America” as it moved more and more to support right-wing regimes in the era of Trump. At the time, it made much sense but this seems to be incredibly short lived. Does his type of observation reflect the purpose of the recent backlash?

Richard Falk:I believe both developments are occurring, and are connected. There are many confirmations of weakening public support for Israel due to many factors, and it would seem that the citizenry in America would accept as a positive initiative, presidential moves toward a more balanced approach. Such an approach to be credible would have to confront some difficult issues. The U.S. would have to react against Israeli flagrant violations of international humanitarian law with respect to Israeli reliance on excessive force in responding to the Palestinian demonstrations at the Gaza fence that have occurred every Friday throughout the entire year.

Beyond this, a balanced approach would have to voice support for the Palestinian right of self-determination based on the equality of the two peoples. Even more ambitiously, if the objective of American diplomacy was to become a sustainable peace rather than a ceasefire, Israel would have to be pressed to dismantle the apartheid structures it has relied upon to subjugate the Palestinian people and crush resistance to the imposition of a Jewish state on an essentially non-Jewish society. If these steps were to be taken the foundation for a peace process would finally have been laid. On such firm ground a political compromise begins to be imaginable that mechanisms for peaceful coexistence and mutual respect could finally shape the future for both peoples.

Since Israel is losing this base of strong support in the liberal sectors of American society, the pushback by pro-Israeli militants has grown uglier, and more severe, verging on the desperate, mainly relying on defamation while foregoing appeals to ethics and law. From this perspective, a strong control over Congress has become more important than ever for Israel as a means to insulate policymaking from a potentially threatening democratic sentiment critical of Israel and its policies. As with gun control, taxation, and the legalization of marijuana, the preferences of the citizenry are blocked by money and lobbying.

The Palestinian cause has been at a particular disadvantage in Congress due to its inability to mobilize countervailing force to challenge and fracture the pro-Israel consensus. This has created this mindlessly one-sided phenomenon, defying evidence and law that can only be understood as ‘the deformation of democracy.’ For a person in Congress to express their true beliefs or to honor their conscience by opposing Israel has in the past amounted to political suicide, while covering up Israeli wrongdoing has no down side whatsoever for elected officials. This is not healthy.

The most intriguing question posed by the Ilhan Omar incident is whether the tide is turning. On the one side, are the AIPAC style enforcers punishing any member of Congress that seems to be challenging the bipartisan consensus. On the other side, is a recognition that there is growing sympathy for the Palestinian people, and that is time to reset American policy on Israel/Palestine, and indeed toward the whole of the Middle East. In retrospect, it seems that pro-Israeli neocons helped push the United States to launch the disastrous Iraq War in 2003, and is now, with the full backing of the Trump White House edging toward an even more disastrous war initiated against Iran.

The deferral of the vote on a bill framed to condemn as anti-Semitism the sort of allegations of collective Jewish influence has been called ‘a political earthquake’ because it discloses tensions within the ranks of the Democratic Party on how to respond to Omar’s controversial tweets, and this a definite weakening of the earlier consensus. As with the dramatic Angela Davis turnaround in Birmingham, there may now be expanded space and protection for criticism of Israel and the tactics of Zionist enforcers.

Significantly, also, several Democratic presidential aspirants, including Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris have spoken in defense of Ilhan Omar. The dust has yet to settle, but even this degree of ferment may be a healthy sign of better times ahead.

Daniel Falcone: Lawrence Davidson recently pointed out how pro-Palestinian politicians might have to carefully craft their language to prevent the intentional distortion of their words. Since he wrote this however, and added a superb update and follow up, it seems that no matter how careful their words are, Omar’s or others, rebukes will be commonplace as a result of political differences. It’s not really what she said, it’s the implications of how it can be utilized in redirecting American foreign policy beyond Netanyahu to extend to bipartisan policies overall. I’m reminded of Davidson’s additional takes on J-Streetas contributing to ideological gatekeeping. What are your thoughts?

Richard Falk:  I find Lawrence Davidson’s commentaries on important public issues to be incisive, developing morally coherent and politically progressive interpretations of complex and often controversial issues. Here, I feel however, that Davidson could consider those in the Zionist camp that seek to discredit a message critical of Israel — as rather indifferent to whether the formulations are carefully crafted or not. Their sole objective is to discredit the messenger, which has the added benefit of shifting the conversation away from what was said to who said it. This shifting of the conversation is as important as the defamatory undertaking, and thus even if the person escapes with their reputation more or less undamaged, the discussion will be about whether the allegations were well founded or not. We see that with the Omar experience.

Of course, if there are phrases that can be lifted from the offending statement or document that makes the work of defamation and distraction easier to accomplish, so much the better. But even if the message, tweet, or document was the work of heavenly scribes it would not deter defamation if the criticism has political traction.

Again the case of Goldstone and my own experience at the UN is instructive. The report of the Goldstone Commission was never subjected to substantive criticism by those who mounted their scathing attacks on Goldstone’s character. In my case, my twelve reports as Special Rapporteur received almost no substantive criticism from Israel or its puppet NGO, UN Watch, which trained all of its guns on my supposedly anti-Semitic character, or on my supposedly incendiary views on such irrelevant issues as the Iranian Revolution or comments on the Boston Marathon massacre.

The crucial point here is what I have previously argued. These defenders of Israel are not trying to win an argument about disputed facts and rival interpretations of law. They are trying to make the author of what is objectionable to the Zionist outlook so disreputable that whether the analyses are true or false becomes irrelevant. I used to tell the official delegates at the UN in Geneva and New York that you only had to be 10% objective to reach the same factual and legal conclusions that were set forth in my reports. In other words, if this is more or less correct about Israeli encroachments on human rights in the course of maintaining control of Occupied Palestine, then it would be a fool’s errand to try to engage on substance.

The situation in Congress is quite special because unanimity on Israeli support has prevailed, and is itself seen as being so valuable for Israel, making any significant departure a risky course for a politician to take as the record shows. The attack on Ilhan Omar may have gone too far, given who she is, what she actually said, and the more progressive trends evident in the American voting public. Just as her status and identity make her especially vulnerable it also makes those who support a pluralist, democratic country fight back on her behalf.

The experience of the human rights award given last October by the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute (BCRI) can be seen as a precursor of the Omar experience, especially the backlash against the backlash. At first, caving to pressures attributed to the Jewish community in Birmingham BCRI rescinded the award. What followed was unprecedented—surging protests against this action, and a reversal by BCRI with an announcement that the award had been restored. At this point it is not known whether Angela Davis will go along with the original invitation to speak at an awards event. What makes this incident relevant is that it shows that even when a black woman activist is targeted in this punitive manner, countervailing forces are now fighting back. Ilhan Omar’s experience reinforces this new encouraging reality, which will undoubtedly ebb and flow as these forces battle it out for ascendancy.

We have not yet reached the outcome of the Omar firestorm but it could be that the attackers will back off, especially given the dark clouds forming over Israel in the shape of Netanyahu’s embrace of electoral support from the overt extreme right and the rather weak presidential and congressional responses to White Supremacist language from within their ranks or at the notorious Charlottesville demonstrations.

The House Resolution passed by a vote of 407-23 is a barometer of shifts in tone and substance even in the Congress. After an acrimonious week of debate about a resolution that was a thinly veiled attack on Omar for her supposed anti-Semitism, the text of the resolution passed on March 7th was broadened to become a condemnation of all form of intolerance, specifically mentioning “African Americans, Native Americans, and other persons of color, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, immigrants and others” so victimized.

It pleased many that Islamophobia was finally formally condemned, and in this context elevated to a rank of equivalence with anti-Semitism.

As expected, such encouraging moral correctives angered pro-Israeli militants who called the revised resolution ‘spineless’ and even ‘disgusting,’ They were upset that the resolution withdrew the privileged status of the Holocaust in the annals of intolerance, and denied Jews and anti-Semitism exclusivity when it comes to victimization. It is precisely this feature that I find encouraging, making it a form of poetic justice that Ilhan Omar could end up voting in favor of a resolution originally brought forward with the intent of branding her as guilty of anti-Semitism.

Daniel Falcone: Jeremy Corbyn is another decent person that faced heavy criticism and allegations for his word choices regarding the Holy State. It’s been pointed out by some progressives that the more progressive left tolerates or openly supports Corbyn and Omar’s “anti-Semitism” only because they want to emphasize their opposition to the illegal settlement expansion and to fend off the hard right. They argue, that’s no excuse to let the “trope” making off the hook. Meanwhile, since this sentiment has been expressed, the same people have not condemned the racist and demeaning Islamophobic depiction of Omar by the West Virginia GOP. Largely because, and cynically so, it was suspected that her own identity insulated her from her initial comments in the first place. Carlos A. Rivera-Jones remarked that, “As long as you hate Muslims (and people identified as Muslims, like Palestinians) more than Jews, you are not anti-Semitic and this is the hegemonic position [in the US].” Could you comment?

Richard Falk: The guns of liberal Zionism are booming. Bret Stephens, proud of his call for the resignation of Netanyahu demonstrating to his satisfaction that American Zionist do not walk in lockstep submission to Israel and its strong prime minister, feels free to condemn Omar for what he calls ‘Corbynism.’ [Bret Stephens, “Ilhan Omar Knows Exactly What She Is Doing,” NY Times, March 7, 2019] What this slur intends to convey is that the person can be personally free of anti-Semitic hatred of Jews, and yet because of their distaste for Zionism or Israel, still qualify as ‘anti-Semites’ because they invoke ‘the tropes’ used to mobilize hatred of Jews through the ages. Her tweets about dual allegiance and Jewish money used to silence critics of Israel serve as evidence.

I consider this kind of demeaning attack on Jeremy Corban and Ilhan Omar to be irresponsible to the point of generating the very feelings it purports to be condemning. For such morally sensitive and political progressive personalities to be so smeared because they point to features of reality associated with this unprecedented ‘special relationship’ or their willingness to befriend those that make such criticisms of the use of Jewish power to hide Israeli injustice. Such lines of attack are not only intended to narrow freedom of expression when it comes to Israel but also to rely on a dragnet sort of argument that rests on guilt by association.

Again to illustrate from my own experience a major English newspaper carrying on their vendetta against Corbyn published a picture of him and me at an event in London where we discussed the Palestinian ordeal, contending that by appearing with an anti-Semite like myself Corbyn was linking arms with anti-Semitism.

Daniel Falcone: There are journalists and liberal critics of Omar’s “tropes” that state that opposition to US/Israel policy on the one hand is fine, but reinforcing conspiracy theories are not. This is entirely understandable yet I don’t see J-Street type rhetoric translating into meaningful shifts in policy construction. Could you comment on the limitations of partisan criticism of Israel when it seems it should be bipartisan?

Richard Falk: I think that identifying and criticizing collective efforts to control debate on Israel/Palestine or to intimidate defections from bipartisan unity in the Congress and elsewhere that call attention to the biasing of legislative scrutiny and procedures, it is characterized as an anti-Semitic trope, which is supposed to establish taboos that if violated, generate a justifiable contention of anti-Semitism. The plausibility of this use of ‘tropes’ is the purported link to the historical experience of conspiracy theories used by right wing movements to mobilize fear and hatred of Jews, fabricating Jewish plots to use Jewish money to penetrate and dominate the centers of power, and even to take over control of the whole world (for example, the Elders of Zion).

It is false reasoning to merge criticisms of actual collective action that is fact-based with fabricated conspiracies designed to generate fear and hatred, and give rise to persecution or worse.

Daniel Falcone is an activist, educator and journalist in New York City. Follow his work at: @DanielFalcone7.

Richard Falk is a world famous international law scholar and activist. 

Why Would We Want to Spread Liberal Democracy?

On March 14, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

In March 2009, Foreign Affairs magazine published the article “How Development Leads to Democracy,” by Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, two of the most well-known political scientists in the field today.

Respected in academic circles for their studies on culture and modernization theory, the pair argue that democratic government—in the modern Western sense of the term—is prohibitively difficult to maintain in a country without a relatively developed economy, a desire for participatory government, or the rule of law. They contend that, without one of those favorable pre-existing circumstances, maintaining democracy will be a daunting task.

Yet many in government and the media have yet to learn this basic lesson.

As Inglehart and Welzel observe, among those countries that “democratized between 1970 and 1990,” democracy endured “in every country that made the transition when it was at the economic level of Argentina” or higher. But in the nations below that level, it endured for a dismal average of “only eight years” before foundering. Indeed, the more developed and socially “modernized” a country becomes, the more difficult it is to avoid the growth of democratic institutions.

“Today,” Inglehart and Welzel declare, “it seems clear that the causality runs mainly from economic development to democratization” rather than the other way around. Democracy, in other words, cannot be forced.

Democratization is foiled, according to Inglehart and Welzel, when the bulk of a given population remains, out of necessity, focused on mere “survival values,” as opposed to the “self-expression” values that place primacy on personal agency and make the establishment of democratic government more likely. Military intervention cannot alter this basic, structural, social fact.

In their article, Inglehart and Welzel also outline several of the historic iterations of modernization theory, and how each attempts to define and characterize the process by which “traditional” societies become “modernized.”

“At the height of the Cold War,” they write, a particular “version of modernization theory emerged in the United States that portrayed underdevelopment as a direct consequence of a country’s psychological and cultural traits. …The rich Western democracies, the theory went, could instill modern values and bring progress to ‘backward’ nations through economic, cultural, and military assistance.”

“By the 1970s, however,” they continue, “it had become clear that assistance had not brought much progress toward prosperity or democracy—eroding confidence in this version of modernization theory.” Yet to this day, it seems that some policymakers and pundits have never accepted the widespread failure—or at the very least, underperformance—of the development assistance strategy.

Even in the wake of President Trump’s long overdue reorientation of American foreign policy, some doctrinaire neoconservatives seem unwaveringly committed to a permanent and extensive—perhaps even expanded—American military presence across the world. In the past, they have explicitly coupled this commitment with the spread of democracy to “backward” countries.

To give the neocons their due, pundits do occasionally animadvert against the war in Iraq and other uses of the American military without doing sufficient research. And certainly American withdrawal from overseas involvements can pose serious dangers of its own. At the height of the Cold War, such an interventionist approach probably seemed much more reasonable. There are hardly ever easy solutions to geopolitical problems.

But war, in one way or another, always brings disaster. Even if, in a given conflict, one side is clearly in the right, no modern war was ever perfectly carried out. There are often grievous impacts on innocent bystanders whose ramifications last decades after hostilities are formally concluded. Consequently, America should only employ military force with serious forethought and a clear and legitimate objective in mind, in keeping with the stipulations of just war theory. No war should ever be conducted on the basis of political ideology, regardless of what that ideology might be. We must always, as Saint Augustine did, beware the “love of violence” and “lust of power” that war can engender.

We ought not imagine that 1941 can never repeat itself—we should maintain our armed forces and our overseas alliances, and actively defend our own governmental institutions. But we should also not be so naïve as to think that democracy can, or should, be spread at sword point across the earth. Catastrophe always accompanies such utopian pursuits.

There is no moral dictate that compels one to spread democracy qua democracy by force—let alone by Bismarckian blood and iron.

Inglehart’s and Welzel’s 2009 article advances a view of modernization that is arguably at odds with the basics of modern conservatism (let alone traditional conservatism or paleoconservatism). For example, they describe the decreased emphasis on “religion” and “national pride” that accompany “modernization,” along with other relativist and arguably anti-Christian trends, in seemingly indifferent and even positive tones.

Nonetheless, their work holds an important lesson. If one recklessly decides to advance the “cause of democracy” by force, one is bound to fail unless the country one targets is not already amenable to one’s aim. All else being equal, one might just as well wait for the trends of modernization to run their course, and maybe try to influence the process through peaceful, voluntary means.

As an aside, a question remains: if “modernization” and “democratization”—as Inglehart, Welzel, and the political left generally understand them—are even indirectly corrosive to religion and patriotism, should they be pursued at all? If they serve to attack the groundwork of Judeo-Christian morality and therefore of civilization itself, which are what “modernization theory” and democracy purport to interpret and represent, respectively, are they goals worth pursuing?

Moreover, is the United States—a representative republic whose Constitution and Declaration of Independence do not bear even a single use of the word “democracy”—bound to uphold “modern liberal democracy” as an axiomatic principle even within its own borders, let alone across the globe?

I think the answer to all these questions is categorically “no.”

Defending legitimate American national interests and supporting the fair treatment of others is quite different from insisting on the establishment of global secular democracy. The reality is that we have a duty, as William F. Buckley Jr. put it, to “stand athwart” that system’s radical excesses, not blithely encourage them.

In her 2000 book Democracy by Force: U.S. Military Intervention in the Post-Cold War World, Karin Von Hippel examined “four US-sponsored interventions (Panama, Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia).” She attempted “to provide a greater understanding of the successes and failures of US policy,” and “to provide some insight into the conditions under which intervention and nation-building are likely to succeed.”

In his review of Von Hippel’s book in Foreign Affairs, Philip Zelikow characterized American nation building and modernization efforts as representing a sort of “secular evangelism.” However improper, that description hits on a key truth. If one truly believes, in a quasi-theological way, that “liberal democracy” is the only legitimate form of government, why shouldn’t one spread that government with evangelistic fervor?

Yet nowhere does just war theory demand wars to “spread liberal democracy.” Neither does the U.S. Constitution bear an injunction to “guarantee to every state in this union a ‘liberal democratic’ form of government,” much less to coercively spread such a system across the world.

At any rate, the “democracy” that neoconservatives and many on the left want to spread today bears little resemblance to the idea of robust democracy that, say, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had in mind when he made his “Arsenal of Democracy” speech in December 1940, just before America entered the Second World War.

There is no equivalence between—on one hand—a philosophy that encourages same-sex unions, the killing of children in utero, and the establishment of secular socialism, and—on the other hand—the form of government enjoined by the U.S. Constitution. There is likewise no equivalence between modern liberal democracy and the core beliefs of Western civilization. To claim that democracy, even in its healthy state, ought to be spread by force is to undermine the most basic tenets of both legitimate government and civilization itself. We should recognize this misguided quest for secular domination for what it is. In short, we should “stand athwart” the idea, and ensure that it never again defines American foreign policy.

Jack Howard Burke is a contributor to National Review. He is also a former contributor to the Fordham Political Review, a former White House intern, and served as a congressional staff member.

The Senate just voted to end U.S. support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen

On March 14, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

WASHINGTON — A bipartisan group of senators joined their House colleagues in voting to cut off U.S. military support in Yemen’s civil war, a rebuke of President Donald Trump and a challenge to his authority to deploy U.S. forces without going to Congress.

The legislation, which passed by a vote of 54 to 46, is also viewed by many as a direct reprimand of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for what U.S. intelligence agencies have reported was his role in overseeing the brutal slaughter of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Some opponents argue the Yemen war has nothing to do with Khashoggi, but proponents disagree.

“This is a direct response to the Khashoggi killing,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), an original sponsor of the resolution, told reporters in the Capitol. “The Yemen war is Mohammed bin Salman’s baby. It’s his top priority in the region. By ending our participation with this war, we are making a clear statement that we don’t trust this regime anymore.”

Supporters are cheering the historic effort by Congress to reassert its constitutional power to declare foreign wars by invoking the Wars Powers Resolution of 1973, an effort that grew in earnest at the end of the last Congress when the Senate passed this measure, though it was blocked from a vote by former Speaker Paul Ryan.

The House has already passed a similar measure but the Senate version is a little different, so it has to pass that chamber again before it will be sent to President Trump who has vowed to veto it.

Trump has taken the side of Saudi Arabia and argued the billion dollar arm deals with the U.S. ally is more important than the slaughter of Khashoggi, which is why many senators say they had to go over the president’s head.

“It’s a clear message to Saudi Arabia that we are not going to put up with this past approach that they’ve used with the United Stated,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the Senate Minority Whip, told VICE News. “For a lot of us their money doesn’t count.”

While several Republicans supported the resolution, a large block sided with Trump even though they still wanted to rebuke the crown prince for his alleged role in the killing. Some opponents argue it was too narrow.

“The resolution as it’s drawn does not assign the appropriate responsibility to Iran,” Sen. James Risch (R-Idaho), the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told VICE News.

The legislation was supported by every Democrat, and was also sponsored by Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah who says the legislation is an important step for Congress as an institution.

“Today we have the opportunity to reassert Congress’ constitutional role over declaring war and over putting American blood and treasure on the line,” Lee said on the Senate floor ahead of the vote. “The evidence is clear that we ought not be involved in this unconstitutional, unjustified and ultimately immoral war.”

Many lawmakers are also up in arms because its estimated that more than 85,000 children have starved to death since the conflict began, while another 14 million Yemeni people are reportedly starving. Supporters are also angry with Saudi officials for using American weapons to target civilians, including schools, homes and businesses.

“Why is this administration so enamored with a regime that, yes they live in a dangerous neighborhood, but clearly has not been able to utilize some of our best military technology in ways that it was meant to be used?” Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, told VICE News. “You can target your adversaries and not take out civilians at unprecedented levels.”

But Trump’s taking the crown prince’s word over that of senior intelligence officials seemed to galvanize support in the Senate from lawmakers who remain appalled by the killing and the administration’s handling of it. Senators are also frustrated that the administration has still refused to send the Senate a certification of who U.S. intelligence officials have determined killed Khashoggi.

“It’s just flouting the Congress,” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) told VICE News at the Capitol. “There is a pattern in this White House to believe they can do anything without [Congress].”

A bipartisan group of lawmakers are now hoping this resolution’s passage will change that pattern from the Trump administration and force them to take Congress’ role in foreign policy much more seriously.

Cover image: U.S. President Donald Trump walks on the South Lawn of the White House, on March 10, 2019 in Washington, DC. Trump spent the weekend at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Bech, Fla. (Photo by Al Drago/Getty Images)