Once upon a time, the American Jewish Congress, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Anti Defamation League of B'nai B'rith seemingly drove a marathon news cycle of outrage against MoveOn (dot) org, because someone in a contest posted a 30-second video comparing the Bush-Cheney administration to Hitler's Germany.  More recently, the highest paid broadcaster in radio history, Rush Limbaugh said that "Adolf Hitler, like Barack Obama, also ruled by dictate...," and rambled on like that, comparing liberals, environmentalists and Nancy Pelosi to Nazis.

As Glenn Greenwald notes,

It's really amazing -- though not at all surprising -- that when an anonymous Internet user compares Bush to Hitler, the media goes into Full Hysteria Alert, but when the most influential conservative figure in the country does the same thing, they utter barely a peep of recognition.  We'll see if that changes as America's leading Jewish groups -- and even some principled conservatives -- issue rather harsh condemnations of Limbaugh's comments.

While I remain skeptical about the oft-stated power of the American Jewish establishment when it comes to setting the bar of politically correct discourse, in this case I would really love to see them drive the news cycle as long and hard against a popular conservative demagogue as the news industry whipped up its outrage at MoveOn for an anonymous and ultimately deleted entry in an open video contest. 

But what is more likely to happen is a bittersweet recognition that this kind of power really has much less to do with any contrivances of "political correctness" than it does about the confluence of moneyed interests.  In this particular case, we have a glaring example of the extent to which both cable and network news and health insurance are comfortably deregulated industries that will do whatever they must do to stay that way.

Does Crown Prince of Bahrain Shaikh Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa exhibit responsible Arab leadership, or reveal himself as a Zionist tool...?

Essentially, we have not done a good enough job demonstrating to Israelis how our initiative can form part of a peace between equals in a troubled land holy to three great faiths. Others have been less reticent, recognizing that our success would threaten their vested interest in keeping Palestinians and Israelis at each other's throats. They want victims to stay victims so they can be manipulated as proxies in a wider game for power. The rest of us -- the overwhelming majority -- have the opposite interest....

Some Arabs, simplistically equating communication with normalization, may think we are moving too fast toward normalization. But we all know that dialogue must be enhanced for genuine progress. We all, together, need to take the first crucial step to lay the groundwork to effectively achieve peace. So we must all invest more in communication.

Discuss....

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad chose the occasion of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's first meeting with President Obama -- wherein Nentanyahu's emphasis on Iran is supposed to be greeted with skeptical derision by all good Blogistani intelligentsia -- to announce the successful test firing of the Sejil-2 missile capable of striking Israel.

Together Through Life

Grave Digger: Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, union scale.

Feel free to add on to the list in comments....

Last weekend on a rightwing talk radio program Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) declared herself a foreign correspondent, behind enemy lines, hoping to keep her constituents "armed and dangerous" against the impending "energy tax," as she refers to the proposal of industrial cap-and-trade carbon emissions regulations. Clearly, as Bachmann's spokesperson explained, the Representative was speaking metaphorically. But there is a pattern of violent metaphor developing in the rhetoric of the minority party's leadership.

Last month, Sean Hannity's website featured a users' poll discussing the best ways to violently overthrow the government, given the choices of military coup, armed rebellion or war of secession. Now a reasonable interpretation is that this is all just fun and games. But if we stop to consider the size and tempramental diversity of their audiences, the proliferation of firearms and the passions animating the margins of our politcal discourse, it is not beyond the range of possibilities that individuals and/or groups will eventually act out these goofy fantasies with violence.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) reports a rise in the organization of active hate groups in the United States from 888 in 2007 to 926 in 2008. Americans are no strangers to our own brand of modern terrorism, from the anti-government militias that produced Terry Nichols and Timothy McVeigh who slaughtered 168 people with a truck bomb at the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, to racist pseudo-religions like the World Church of the Creator that produced Benjamin Smith who murdered Northwestern basketball coach Ricky Birdsong and shot up ten other people in a shooting spree from a north side Chicago Jewish neighborhood to rural Indiana.

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While missing the hell out of Jerry Garcia, many here among us are aware that the surviving core of the Good Old Grateful Dead has reassembled from time to time since Jerry left us.  Most recently last year, first for an Obama benefit on the eve of California's Super Tuesday primary and followed up by an autumn U Penn benefit show with the Allman Brothers Band heading into the home stretch.  For the sake of meaningless disclosure, I personally fall into the Phil camp, and the recent vintage Phil & Friends lineup including Dylan vet Larry Campbell on lead guitar was tremendous last summer.  Meanwhile, I have heard lots of good things about Bobby's Rat Dog from those whose opinions I greatly respect.

So, who's got some stories from the old days, and who's checking out The Dead on their Spring Tour?

As often as people don't appreciate their teachers while they're in school, leadership fails to appreciate academia as much as it should.

Reality Based Community's Jonathan Zasloff reports hearing Palestinian scholar and Peoples' Voice Accord co-author Sari Nusseibeh speak last Monday night,

George Mitchell, Nusseibeh suggested, should take an American peace plan (and he made it clear that it should be the People's Voice framework) to both Netanyahu and Abbas.

He should then publicly challenge Netanyahu to place this plan on the Israeli ballot as a referendum. Netanyahu would not have to endorse the plan, but rather allow the voters to decide whether they would accept it as long as the other side does.

On the Palestinian side, he should publicly challenge Abbas to call for new elections (due in the PA thus year in any event) and run on that platform for his presidential campaign -- accepting the plan as long as the Israeli electorate does.

Nusseibeh believes -- and I agree with him -- that such a public offer would be difficult for either side to refuse. It would not require Netanyahu to endorse the plan, but would undermine him politically if he refuses to allow the voters to decide. It would give Abbas a concrete platform and plan to rid the Palestinians of the occupation.

...

This is worth a try. It is better than anything else yet proposed. Is anyone listening?

It's not just for "Zionist neocon Likudniks" anymore.  JTA reports,

When the Algerian diplomat, Idriss Jazairy, argues that anti-Semitism's definition should be expanded to include Arabs, who are a Semitic people, the director of the Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust at Touro College, Anne Bayefsky, shot back. The greatest source of anti-Semitism today operates "under the guise of anti-Zionism and anti-racism activities," epitomized by the U.N. Human Rights Council's disproportionate focus on criticizing Israel, she said.

When Bayefsky spoke, Jazairy immediately raised his hands to form a T - as in "time-out" - and the forum's chairwoman, Libyan Najat Al-Hajjaji, began tapping her gavel, cutting off Bayefsky to permit Jazairy to respond. Bayefsky was allowed to resume, but was interrupted twice more by Al-Hajjaji's gavel and Jazairy's interjections.

Looking forward to the sequal to Durban in Geneva next month....

While the more progressive among us demand war crimes charges against Israeli military and political leadership for its Gaza campaign, would it make too much of a Zionist thug to suggest that Hamas and its political and military leadership be hauled into the dock as well?

From Ha'aretz:

Footage of a presenter on the Arabic language television station Al-Arabiya apparently confirms that Hamas fired at least one rocket from close to a building used by journalists during the 22-day conflict between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

The Israel Defense Forces shelled the building, drawing international condemnation, and television networks with offices in the building denied that rockets had been launched from anywhere nearby.

But the recording, filmed by an Israeli and released Tuesday by Israel's Foreign Ministry, shows Al-Arabiya presenter Hanan Al-Masri saying that a Grad rocket had been fired from a location near the studios at Al-Shuruk tower in Gaza City. Al-Masri did not realize that she had been caught on camera.

WATCH THE VIDEO

In the comments sections below Cafe featured columns discussing the Arab-Jewish or Israel-Palestine conflict (call it what you will), is often at least one complaint about the lack of Arab or Palestinian voices in our mix of featured columnists.  Since it is not as if there are no Arab- and Palestinian-American writing and publishing, I must agree that it seems a strange and unnatural lack of representation in a forum so widely read, respected and cited as TPMCafe.  Meanwhile, two pieces have just showed up on a casual run among my own regualr station stops along the Information Superhighway this morning.  Both, I am proud to say, come from my native Chicago:

 

Hesham Hassaballa,

 

I believe the vast majority of American Muslims and Arab Americans feel the same way I do about this conflict. They are terribly hurt by the suffering of innocent Palestinians who have nowhere to run from the Gaza onslaught, but they do not think that the appropriate response is to hurl more death and destruction at Israeli civilians in a twisted form of revenge. Like our Jewish counterparts, we also think that "there has to be another way of doing this."

...

President-elect Barack Obama, who, distressingly, long remained silent about the latest crisis, is set to take office in two weeks. He must strive for this "middle way" and work with all of us in the United States - American Jews, American Arabs and Muslims, and many others - who are pro-peace, pro-Israel and pro-Palestine....

 

Ray Hanania,

 

Have we deteriorated so much as a people, Jews and Arabs, that we can simply turn away from the suffering of the other, and even justify it when confronted by pointing to the deaths on our sides?

Uglier than the massacres and bloodied scenes filled with body parts are the crowds of people who easily come together in anger and blame the other side while never assuming any blame themselves.

...

As a Palestinian Arab, I'm a willing to stand with any Jew or Israeli who has the courage to stop blaming the other side. Stop defending violence of any kind. Stop the justification. Stop the killing. Stop the violence.

Stand together and focus on one answer. Peace. Respect for life.

We can recognize this is difficult. We can accept we have different views of history. We can accept that peace is not easy. But can we accept that not acting means more death? Can we accept that by pointing fingers of blame at each other, we are accomplices to the hatred that drives the carnage?

 

Speculation runs rampant over what can possibly account for this.  I only slightly regret that the grim idea that crosses mine is that such voices as these cannot drive enough conflict to generate the hitcounts of some of the Cafe's more regular, provacative featured writers.

Will Senate Democratic leadership commit itself to fight for the seat of Al Franken of Minnesota as much as it has committed itself to fight against the seat of Roland Burris of Illinois?

TPM features a couple of front page items reporting the incestuous financial dealings between Bernie Madoff's investment firm and the Security and Exchange Commission, including a link to a (sub. only) Wall Street Journal piece reporting internal SEC scrutiny of the relationship between Bernie Madoff's niece and chief securities compliance official Shana Madoff and former SEC senior inspections and compliance official Eric Swanson, who were married in 2007. 

Meanwhile, one of the philanthropic organizations taken down with the scandal is the Robert I. Lappin Charitable Foundation, a group that Ha'aretz describes as "a charity aimed at reversing assimilation and intermarriage...."

"The money needed to fund the programs of the Lappin Foundation is gone," the Massachusetts-based foundation said on its Web site, adding all staff had been let go. "It is with a heavy heart that I make this announcement," Robert I. Lappin, the foundation's trustee, said in a statement.

Funny, the name Eric Swanson doesn't sound Jewish....

My friend's estranged wife is scheduled to leave Tuesday morning for Mumbai on a two-month work project.  While this surely has no profound effect on the horror inflicted on Mumbai by a group calling itself the Deccan Mujahedin and witnessed by the world on our 24-7 news channels, it personalizes the attacks for a small circle of friends here in the Fox Valley watershed of the Great Lakes Basin.  Particularly unsettling are the reports that the terrorists raiding the Taj and Oberoi Hotels were conscientiously selective of hostages holding British and American passports.

Meanwhile, the news coverage of the coordinated attacks inflames the cynic in me, with its speculations over motivations and identities of the attackers.  While it may be "safe" to presume that the attackers come from India's Muslim community, it is no less irresponsible of the multinational news business to speculate ad nauseum in lieu of any confirmed facts.  We have learned nothing from Oklahoma City, least of all the similarities in temperament between our own homegrown terrorists with those of the all-purpose Islamist variety as both are prone to spectacular outbursts of violent intolerance toward any and all perceived threats to some Traditional Way of Life.

At the Saddleback event, John McCain affirmed his opinion that life begins at conception.  But what does the word of God have to say about it?

(Exodus 21:22-25) When two men fight, and one of them pushes a pregnant woman and a miscarriage results, but no other damage ensues, the one responsible shall be fined according as the woman's husband may exact from him, the payment to be based on reckoning.  But if other damage ensues, the penalty shall be life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.

  Thus, since the word of God determines that no life (nor eye, nor tooth, nor hand, nor foot) is taken in an induced miscarriage, then life cannot begin with conception, and abortion is not murder, in any so-called "Judeo-Christian tradition."