Israel's deputy defence minister yesterday warned his country was close to launching a huge military operation in Gaza and said Palestinians would bring on themselves a "bigger shoah," using the Hebrew word usually reserved for the Holocaust. News Item - Guardian

"Relativizing" the Holocaust, comparing it to any other event, diminishing its uniqueness, is considered by Jews and by many others as a grave insult to Hitler's Jewish victims and a proof of antisemitism. In what light are we supposed to read the Israeli defense minister statement threatening the Palestinians of Gaza with a Holocaust? Does he mean that since he already has the Palestinians in a concentration camp, that he is now preparing to exterminate them? Is he relativizing the Holocaust?

However that may be, his language is perfectly outrageous.

If I say that, am I "relativizing the holocaust"?

Meanwhile the candidates to the US presidency are lining up to swear eternal loyalty to Israel.

I think that there will be no meaningful debate on Israel, or much of anything else, till after the presidential elections. The elections drain all the vitality from the news cycle. Strangely enough, they put all serious political discussion into the deep freeze. The candidates and their handlers craft positions and try to avoid being shot down. The world burns, but the US elections come first.
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There are scurrilous and totally unfounded attacks circulating in the Internet accusing Barack Obama of being a crypto-Muslim and an enemy of Israel. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I think that is stupid for anyone to say or to suggest that Barack Obama is not a friend of Israel, a Christian, or that he in any way supports the Palestinians. Everything he says or has said, does or has done, his every vote in the Senate, bears this out. I repeat, that this line of attack is both ignorant and stupid.

What I do find strange is that at the same time some of Obama's most enthusiastic supporters think that, in spite of his support for Israel and his conspicuous Christianity, that simply because of his color or because he is famously named "Barack Hussein" that this is going to simultaneously have some enormous "healing" or soothing effect on America's relations with the Islamic world.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

As I have had it explained to me, if your father and grandfather were Muslims and if you have a Muslim name, but profess another religion publicly and support the enemies of Islam (Israel) that makes you an apostate. Here is a quote from the Wikipedia article on the subject of apostasy.

The four major Sunni and the one major Shia Madh'hab (schools of Islamic jurisprudence) agree that a sane adult male apostate must be executed

If you look up the subject in Google you will find some 1,160,000 entries referring to the subject. Laws to this effect are on the books of several Muslim countries at this very moment.

So really, we cannot have it both ways*. It seems to me obvious that for the United States of America to elect a president named "Barack Hussein", who is a practicing Christian and a supporter of Israel would be seen by Muslims as the ultimate provocation and the fulfillment of the most paranoiac fantasies of the most extreme Salafists.

They would say that this is what America does to Muslims: not only does it kill and persecute Muslims, it takes the son and grandson of Muslims and turns him into the chief killer and persecutor of Muslims. A Muslim version of Damian.

The bottom line is that you can't have it both ways. It is one thing if somebody named "John" or "Hillary" bombs Pakistan or Iran and supplies the Israelis with weapons and quite another if someone with  "Hussein"  anywhere in his name does it... It's adding insult to injury.

I think that Obama's supporters should make right wing voters and people like Daniel Pipes see what a unique occasion the presidency of Barack Obama would give them to take yet another opportunity to mortally offend Islam.

*For the curious here is a link to Namoura

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"Bullshit" is a word found neither in Shakespeare nor the King James Bible and yet it is perhaps America's greatest contribution to the common heritage of the English speaking peoples.

It holds a wealth of meaning and whatever its humble etymology, it gives a name to something that is the greatest danger to America, its republic, its institutions, its people and through them the health and sanity of the entire world.

In truth, you you don't have to be an assiduous reader of Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal or Thomas Frank to get a grip on the throbbing thickness of American Bullshit, to a clear eye it is ubiquitous and so penetrating that perhaps only a starveling yogin trained down fine in some Himalayan cave would be immune to it.

The daily labor of cleansing its Augean mess from the heart and mind is a duty paid to sanity and the bride price of a limpid heart.

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This is something that I have been groping my way toward saying: that Barack Obama is cynically and heartlessly exploiting America's racial divide for his own benefit.

I find  Trevor Phillips's observations very insightful. No black leader in America has nerved himself up to say this, but I'm sure many are thinking along the same lines

From the Times of London:

One of Britain’s most influential black figures today accused Barack Obama of cynically exploiting America’s racial divide and gave warning that he could prolong, rather than heal the rift.

Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, claimed that the Democratic front-runner would ultimately disappoint the African-American community and dismissed the notion that he would be "the harbinger of a post-racial America" if he becomes the country’s first black President.

Writing in Prospect, the monthly current affairs magazine, Mr Phillips suggested that guilt over transatlantic slavery was behind Mr Obama’s support from middle class whites.

"If Obama can succeed, then maybe they can imagine that [Martin Luther] King's post-racial nirvana has arrived. A vote for Obama is a pain-free negation of their own racism. So long as they don't have to live next door to him; Obama has yet to win convincingly in white districts adjacent to black communities," he wrote.

Mr Phillips compared Mr Obama to Bill Cosby and Oprah Winfrey, prominent black “bargainers” – those who strike a deal with white America not to make an issue of historical racism if their own race is not used against them.

But, in a warning to the Democratic candidate, he added that Cosby now cut a “sad and lonely figure” because he had abandoned the moral weapon used by figures such as Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X and Jesse Jackson in insisting that “in the end, salvation for blacks won’t depend on the actions of whites.”

"In truth, Obama may be helping to postpone the arrival of a post-racial America and I think he knows it," Mr Phillips wrote. "If he wins, the cynicism may be worth it to him and his party. In the end he is a politician and a very good one: his job is to win elections."

He added: "If he fulfils the hopes of whites, he must disappoint blacks – and vice versa."

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For me, the most sinister thing about America is how it tames, absorbs, trivializes and somehow manages to package and market absolutely everything in true, Milo Minderbinder fashion. "Big Brother meets the cash nexus".

Every insight into the workings of the human mind that science stumbles onto is used to "optimize" the population, mold its thoughts and especially its choices, and most especially its spending "decisions". We and our minds are here to be processed as efficiently and as thoroughly as if we were battery chickens... Ever feather, every bone.

That is what I fled from, but it promises to follow me to the ends of the earth.

I think before we go on, you should read an excerpt from Thomas Frank's must-read classic, "Conquest of Cool". After reading this, I think you'll understand me and my Obamamania-phobia, and perhaps even understand your own self, a little better:

  Regardless of the tastes of Republican leaders, rebel youth culture remains the cultural mode of the corporate moment, used to promote not only specific products but the general idea of life in the cyber-revolution. Commercial fantasies of rebellion, liberation, and outright "revolution" against the stultifying demands of mass society are commonplace almost to the point of invisibility in advertising, movies, and television programming. For some, Ken Kesey's parti-colored bus may be a hideous reminder of national unraveling, but for Coca-Cola it seemed a perfect promotional instrument for its "Fruitopia" line, and the company has proceeded to send replicas of the bus around the country to generate interest in the counterculturally themed beverage. Nike shoes are sold to the accompaniment of words delivered by William S. Burroughs and songs by The Beatles, Iggy Pop, and Gil Scott Heron ("the revolution will not be televised"); peace symbols decorate a line of cigarettes manufactured by R. J. Reynolds and the walls and windows of Starbucks coffee shops nationwide; the products of Apple, IBM, and Microsoft are touted as devices of liberation; and advertising across the product category sprectrum calls upon consumers to break rules and find themselves. The music industry continues to rejuvenate itself with the periodic discovery of new and evermore subversive youth movements and our televisual marketplace is a 24-hour carnival, a showplace of transgression and inversion of values, of humiliated patriarchs and shocked puritans, of screaming guitars and concupiscent youth, of fashions that are uniformly defiant, of cars that violate convention and shoes that let us be us.

What I am pointing out here, is that what was a historically unrepeatable, "before and after", period, one that truly brought "change" both good and bad, a period that was genuinely subversive, painful, destructive-creative, revolutionary, fresh, startling and real has been repackaged and recycled until now it is tame, stale and manageable.

Most of this has been done by my own generation (now 60+) who took over decades ago from bemused, older marketing executives who didn't understand "our" new culture. They don't want the same thing to happen to them so they have decided to freeze time and sterilize young people's minds by continually rewinding and replaying their own youth. We are living in a classic-decadent period.

So by now, decades later, what passes for America's perception of reality has been manipulated and packaged by elderly former hippies or wannabes and their apprentices. Sophisticated (hip) and cynical to the point of nihilism, they have been pimping their youth (and mine) ever since. Barack Obama is the first, chemically pure, slickly packaged, political expression of Thomas Frank's observations.

To compare Obama with Martin Luther King, the talk of "change" and "yes we can", is no deeper than Nike's slogan, "just do it!" I am saddened by how Obama's emptiness is taken for value. As if the voters were confusing Starbucks with Vienna's Café Sperl... But then, they already do that almost every day of their lives.
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The New York Times has an article that, with a totally straight face compares Barack Obama to Dr. Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, who were assassinated within a few weeks of each other in 1968. Here is a sample:

There is a hushed worry on the minds of many supporters of Senator Barack Obama, echoing in conversations from state to state, rally to rally: Will he be safe? In Colorado, two sisters say they pray daily for his safety. In New Mexico, a daughter says she persuaded her mother to still vote for Mr. Obama, even though the mother feared that winning would put him in danger. And at a rally here, a woman expressed worries that a message of hope and change, in addition to his race, made him more vulnerable to violence. “I’ve got the best protection in the world,” Mr. Obama, of Illinois, said in an interview, reprising a line he tells supporters who raise the issue with him. “So stop worrying.” Yet worry they do, with the spring of 1968 seared into their memories, when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated in a span of two months.

In my opinion this should be accompanied by a disclaimer, "I'm Barack Obama and I approve of this message", because it is straightforward propaganda and a gross manipulation if ever I saw one. The message being that the "change" that Obama propose is in some way comparable to the kind of change that King and RFK were pushing for, or that the climate today in anyway resembles that of 1968.

I have an almost total recall of that period. The European student rebellion, in which I had a small, walk on, part was in full swing and the entire western world was in ferment. Everything was changing at breakneck speed, politics, sex, music and dope were all taking new forms daily. The effect was dizzying. King and Kennedy were symbols of what was the sudden and deeply traumatic destruction of the familiar. There was deep rage and fear lurking everywhere. To be a symbol of what was, in fact, a revolution was to have a target hung around the neck. Another icon of the period, John Lennon, ended up finally paying the same toll.

How can anyone compare our post-post- post, period to that one, or Obama's stream of vacuous platitudes to what RFK and King represented?

This is what gets me incensed, how ersatz this Obamamania all is... It's like comparing poor little Amy Winehouse to Stax/Atlantic.
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Instead of ranting about Obama, today I'd like to comment briefly on something serious: Kosovo. It's something I've been avoiding, because it's a touchy subject here in Spain: Spaniards are outraged at the United States violating Serbia's sovereignty as it might set a bad example for the separatist movements in Catalonia and the Spanish Basque country.

Personally, I don't think the Spaniards really have that much to worry about, as I cannot imagine the Catalans resigning themselves to never seeing Barça and Real Madrid play against each other again, except maybe, by chance, once or twice a decade, in the Champion's League.

Athletic Club Bilbao, never gets to Champions and so they would never ever play Real Madrid again. I just can't imagine that happening. However, as it makes my Spanish friends very nervous, I have avoided the subject.

The people who are really nervous, and with reason are the Israelis. The Kosovo precedent is directly applicable to the "Occupied Territories"... even more so as Israel's sovereignty over the West Bank has never been officially recognized by anyone.

Right wing Israeli commentator Caroline Glick who is solidly aligned with the American neocons had this to say in the Jerusalem Post:

The emergence of a potentially destabilizing state in Kosovo is clearly an instance of political interests trumping law. Under international law, Kosovo has no right to be considered a sovereign state. Even UN Security Council Resolution 1244 from 1999, which the KLA claims provides the legal basis for Kosovar sovereignty, explicitly recognizes Serbian sovereignty over Kosovo. For Israel, Kosovo's US-backed declaration of independence should be a source of alarm great enough to require a rethinking of foreign policy. Unfortunately, rather than understand and implement the lessons of Kosovo, the Olmert-Livni-Barak government is working actively to ensure that they are reenacted in the international community's treatment of Israel and the Palestinians. Today, Israel is enabling the Palestinians to set the political and legal conditions for the establishment of an internationally recognized state of Palestine that will be at war with Israel.

And in the English edition of the semi-official Egyptian news paper Al-Ahram John Whitbeck wrote:

American and EU impatience to sever a portion of a UN member state (universally recognised, even by them, to constitute a portion of that state's sovereign territory), ostensibly because 90 per cent of those living in that portion support separation, contrasts starkly with the unlimited patience of the US and the EU when it comes to ending the 40-year-long belligerent Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (no portion of which any country recognises as Israel's sovereign territory and as to which Israel has only asserted sovereignty over a tiny portion, occupied East Jerusalem). Virtually every legal resident of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip seeks freedom, and has for over 40 years. For doing so, they are punished, sanctioned, besieged, humiliated and, day after endless day, killed by those who claim to stand on the moral high ground.(...) Of course, to prevent the US and the EU from treating such an initiative as a joke, there would have to be a significant and explicit consequence if they were to do so. The consequence would be the end of the "two-state" illusion. The Palestinian leadership would make clear that if the US and the EU, having just recognised a second Albanian state on the sovereign territory of a UN member state, will not now recognise a Palestinian state on a tiny portion of the occupied Palestinian homeland, it will dissolve the Palestinian Authority (which, legally, should have ceased to exist in 1999, at the end of the five-year "interim period" under the Oslo Accords) and the Palestinian people will thereafter seek justice and freedom through democracy, through the persistent, non-violent pursuit of full rights of citizenship in a single state in all of Israel/Palestine, free of any discrimination based on race and religion and with equal rights for all who reside there.

And not only the Israeli ultra-ultras are in a panic. Here is Bradley Burston in Haaretz:

The Palestinians have kept their ultimate doomsday weapon under tight wraps for 40 years. Israel knew about it. Israelis senior commanders could only pray that the Palestinians would never take it out and put it to actual use. Every Israeli soldier who served in Gaza knew about it, and also knew the hollowness in the declarations of IDF brass that "The army will now how to deal with it, should it happen." In all of Israel's vast arsenal of defense hardware and technology, there is nothing that can effectively counter it. That is what makes it a weapon so powerful we dare not speak its name: non-violence.(...) At the back of the minds of Israeli statesmen, diplomats, police officials, and defense planners, was an awareness that the true power of the Palestinians had nothing to do with stone-throwing, Molotov cocktails, grenade attacks, knifings, suicide bombings, assault rifle drive-by's, or Qassam rocket barrages. They knew that the true power of the Palestinians to damage Israel also had nothing to do with incitement, institutional anti-Semitism in schools, or declarations of revolution until victory and the ultimate replacement of the Jewish state by an independent Palestine. The true power of the Palestinians, the bottom-line dread of the Israelis, was embodied in only four words: Get up and walk. The theory - expounded by Palestinian moderates for year after year, supported by Israeli leftists - was that a determinedly peaceful demonstration in which thousands and thousands and still more thousands of Gazans headed for the Israeli border, would do more for the cause of Palestinian independence and freedom that all the gratuitous violence of the last 40 years of armed struggle combined.

Why the United States would choose to do something with such potentially perilous effects on Israel at this precise moment is an interesting question. I cannot answer it. Is anyone else asking it?
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I'm getting tired of playing Jeremiah and I'm sure my readers got there first. In the "Book of Lamentations", God told Jeremiah, "You will go to them; but for their part, they will not listen to you".

It sure does look like Senator Barack Obama is going to take the Democratic Party's presidential nomination.

The media certainly think so. Matt Drudge - a sign of our times if ever there was one -- gloats daily over Hillary's decline, after flirting with her outrageously in the opening weeks.

However, Hillary might pull it off yet, the Clintons are like the guy with the funny haircut in "No Country for Old Men".... you don't want to turn your back. And of course, as Al Gore said, "It isn't over till the fat lady sings", (the fat lady sang for him, but it didn't get him anything but a Nobel Prize).

But, ok, ok, let's assume for argument's sake that Obama has got it in the bag. What's next? It's kind of tricky in my opinion.

The first thing Obama will have to do on nailing down the nomination is to stop massaging his movement and veer toward the center. This is going to disappoint some of those who applaud when he blows his nose, but if he doesn't move to the right and convince people who give this fainting and speaking in tongues the fish eye, he won't have a chance.

When searching for the center he will run into his greatest weak point, his nil military credibility. He has never even served in the armed forces. Bill Clinton and Dubya hadn't either, you say? At the time both of them came to office, there were no serious military threats to the USA. That has all changed.

The United States is presently fighting two wars and has a good chance of losing them both. At this moment both Iraq and Afghanistan are relatively quiet and there has not been a terrorist attack on the US "homeland" since 9-11. All of that could change in a moment. When the snow melts in Afghanistan this spring the fighting will get very hot and will last well into the fall.

As to terrorism: Osama bin Laden has done very well with the Republicans and I imagine he would do his little bit to keep them in the White House. A major terrorist attack in the USA would win the election for McCain outright. And we haven't mentioned the Balkans, that could all go blooey at any moment.... and with no troops to spare.

Then there is Iraq. Some think that Iraq is "winnable", but they are talking in terms of something like nearly twenty years. Military überpundit, Anthony H. Cordesman writes in the Washington Post:

What the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan have in common is that it will take a major and consistent U.S. effort throughout the next administration at least to win either war. Any American political debate that ignores or denies the fact that these are long wars is dishonest and will ensure defeat. There are good reasons that the briefing slides in U.S. military and aid presentations for both battlefields don't end in 2008 or with some aid compact that expires in 2009. They go well beyond 2012 and often to 2020.

This means that talk of a quick withdrawal from Iraq will meet with stiff, well documented, establishment resistance and not just from the neocons and AIPAC.

That means trouble for Obama. I can't really see any vice presidential candidate that would give him any credibility here except Wesley Clark. Have I missed somebody? The Democrats hold very strong cards on economic issues, but when it comes to war fighting... All it took was an "October surprise" video of Osama bin Laden's to sink John Kerry, and he was a war hero!

If I were John McCain, I would play this card very strongly. In fact if I were McCain I would choose as my running mate no other than Colin Powell. It is a fact that if the "Powell Doctrine" had been applied, either the invasion of Iraq wouldn't have taken place or enough troops would have been sent to stop the anarchy that followed. McCain, the hero of Vietnam, running with an African-American general on the ticket, would be hard to beat... in less, of course, there were breadlines by November.

Whoever gets to be President had better not have made too many promises about "restoring America's position" in the world. It isn't doable. Nobody seems to want to break the bad news to the American people, but the party is over. Bush is merely the face on the decline, not the decline itself. Tony Karon has a wonderful post on this called "Honey I shrank the superpower". I quote:

The gangster movie Miller’s Crossing offered a profound mediation on the nature of power in one petty thug’s warning to his boss: “You only run this town because people think you run this town.” Bush’s catastrophic mistakes have inadvertently revealed the limits of U.S. power, making it abundantly clear to both friend and foe that Washington is no longer in charge. (...) The fading of Pax Americana in the wider Middle East is partly a product of Bush’s over-reach and over-reliance on force and the threat of force. But it is also a symptom of epic, economically-driven shifts — the rise of China and India, Russia’s resurgence and Europe’s steady expansion, to name a few — that have redefined the global power equation.

The key word is Bush's has revealed the limits of American power. Bill Clinton was like the magician, David Copperfield, much smoke and mirrors, and Bush is like a kid's birthday party magician who puts his hand in the hat and pulls out nothing but rabbit poop.

The limits are real and everybody, everywhere, is in on the gag by now, except, it seems, a lot of American voters.

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