Neda, Obama, Iran -- and Israel

Joan Walsh in this morning's Salon gets it mostly right.

Salon.com | Neda, Obama, Iran -- and the rest of us

The neocon fools who've been hollering for Obama to intervene more strongly with the Iranian regime need to sit down and shut up. And the world at large would do well to stand up for Neda Agha-Soltan and the other Iranians (so many of them, as Walsh notes, women) who're putting their lives on the line - or have already lost them.

However, Walsh also cautions against over-identifying with Neda, who, she notes, was not especially political, just a philosophy student who loved to sing. In my opinion, perhaps all the more reason to identify with her. According to the LA Times report, she and some friends were simply driving in Tehran, were held up by the traffic, and got out to see what was happening - when she was struck by the bullet that killed her. She apparently aspired to become a tour guide, perhaps someone who some day might have introduced some American or European traveler to the grandeur and sophistication of iran's history and culture. All that potential, now obliterated, in an instant.

The "defeated" candidate Mir-Hossein Moussavi has called for a national mourning of Neda's death. The regime has spoken out strongly against any such thing, and will likely bring out its enforcers to squelch any demonstrations. It remains to be seen if the protestors will persist, but their cause may have been struck a very debilitating, perhaps lethal blow by Israeli prime minister Netanyahu and president Shimon Peres. Both of them have come out strongly against the Iranian Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and the "victorious" presidential candidate (and still president) Mahmud Ahmadinejad, and have insisted that the relationship between Iran and Israel might indeed improve with a regime change. As my friend Barbara A. also pointed out to me, evidence of support from the "Zionist" entity may well be the kiss of death for Moussavi's movement. And I have to wonder if Netanyahu knew that all along. Even if Moussavi had won (or somehow emerges atop the pile when all this is over), Iran would likely have continued its uranium-enrichment program, which in time would have left it more capable of producing a nuclear weapon if the leadership decided to move in that direction. But it would be much more difficult for Netanyahu to issue jeremiads about a new Holocaust and the new Nazis in Tehran when the public face of the regime is a reformist and artist and not a hard-liner who looks forward to the Mahdi's imminent return.

Important message from a sympathetic friend

If anyone is on Twitter, set your location to Tehran and your time zone to GMT +3.30. Security forces are hunting for bloggers using location/timezone searches. The more people at this location, the more of a logjam it creates for forces trying to shut Iranians' access to the internet down. Cut & paste & pass it on...

The martyrdom of "Neda"

via "War in Context" - with link to Robin Wright's essay in Time magazine. The video is compelling, horrific, all too real - and as Wright notes, her martyrdom and the subsequent mourning provide a sense of renewal for the protestors against the regime.

I believed at first that in time the protests would simmer down. I'm no longer so sure. And I do believe that the Islamic Republic of Iran is somehow turning a corner, but toward what, I don't know. I don't think anybody knows.

And meanwhile, how many of us remain complacent?

Roger Cohen from the Streets of Tehran

Not too often these days that a Western reporter gets in there with the protestors so much that he's affected by the police tear gas. Excellent reporting. We can only hope that he and others can keep it coming.

June 21, 2009

Op-Ed Columnist

A Supreme Leader Loses His Aura as Iranians Flock to the Streets

By ROGER COHEN

TEHRAN — The Iranian police commander, in green uniform, walked up Komak Hospital Alley with arms raised and his small unit at his side. “I swear to God,” he shouted at the protesters facing him, “I have children, I have a wife, I don’t want to beat people. Please go home.”

A man at my side threw a rock at him. The commander, unflinching, continued to plead. There were chants of “Join us! Join us!” The unit retreated toward Revolution Street, where vast crowds eddied back and forth confronted by baton-wielding Basij militia and black-clad riot police officers on motorbikes.

Dark smoke billowed over this vast city in the late afternoon. Motorbikes were set on fire, sending bursts of bright flame skyward. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, had used his Friday sermon to declare high noon in Tehran, warning of “bloodshed and chaos” if protests over a disputed election persisted.

He got both on Saturday — and saw the hitherto sacrosanct authority of his office challenged as never before since the 1979 revolution birthed the Islamic Republic and conceived for it a leadership post standing at the very flank of the Prophet. A multitude of Iranians took their fight through a holy breach on Saturday from which there appears to be scant turning back.

Khamenei has taken a radical risk. He has factionalized himself, so losing the arbiter’s lofty garb, by aligning himself with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad against both Mir Hussein Moussavi, the opposition leader, and Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a founding father of the revolution.

He has taunted millions of Iranians by praising their unprecedented participation in an election many now view as a ballot-box putsch. He has ridiculed the notion that an official inquiry into the vote might yield a different result. He has tried pathos and he has tried pounding his lectern. In short, he has lost his aura.

The taboo-breaking response was unequivocal. It’s funny how people’s obsessions come back to bite them. I’ve been hearing about Khamenei’s fear of “velvet revolutions” for months now. There was nothing velvet about Saturday’s clashes. In fact, the initial quest to have Moussavi’s votes properly counted and Ahmadinejad unseated has shifted to a broader confrontation with the regime itself.

Garbage burned. Crowds bayed. Smoke from tear gas swirled. Hurled bricks sent phalanxes of police, some with automatic rifles, into retreat to the accompaniment of cheers. Early afternoon rumors that the rally for Moussavi had been canceled yielded to the reality of violent confrontation.

I don’t know where this uprising is leading. I do know some police units are wavering. That commander talking about his family was not alone. There were other policemen complaining about the unruly Basijis. Some security forces just stood and watched. “All together, all together, don’t be scared,” the crowd shouted.

I also know that Iran’s women stand in the vanguard. For days now, I’ve seen them urging less courageous men on. I’ve seen them get beaten and return to the fray. “Why are you sitting there?” one shouted at a couple of men perched on the sidewalk on Saturday. “Get up! Get up!”

Another green-eyed woman, Mahin, aged 52, staggered into an alley clutching her face and in tears. Then, against the urging of those around her, she limped back into the crowd moving west toward Freedom Square. Cries of “Death to the dictator!” and “We want liberty!” accompanied her.

There were people of all ages. I saw an old man on crutches, middle-aged office workers and bands of teenagers. Unlike the student revolts of 2003 and 1999, this movement is broad.

“Can’t the United Nations help us?” one woman asked me. I said I doubted that very much. “So,” she said, “we are on our own.”

The world is watching, and technology is connecting, and the West is sending what signals it can, but in the end that is true. Iranians have fought this lonely fight for a long time: to be free, to have a measure of democracy.

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the Islamic revolution, understood that, weaving a little plurality into an authoritarian system. That pluralism has ebbed and flowed since 1979 — mainly the former — but last week it was crushed with blunt brutality. That is why a whole new generation of Iranians, their intelligence insulted, has risen.

I’d say the momentum is with them for now. At moments on Saturday, Khamenei’s authority, which is that of the Islamic Republic itself, seemed fragile. The revolutionary authorities have always mocked the cancer-ridden Shah’s ceding before an uprising, and vowed never to bend in the same way. Their firepower remains formidable, but they are facing a swelling test.

Just off Revolution Street, I walked into a pall of tear gas. I’d lit a cigarette minutes before — not a habit but a need — and a young man collapsed into me shouting, “Blow smoke in my face.” Smoke dispels the effects of the gas to some degree.

I did what I could and he said, “We are with you” in English and with my colleague we tumbled into a dead end — Tehran is full of them — running from the searing gas and police. I gasped and fell through a door into an apartment building where somebody had lit a small fire in a dish to relieve the stinging.

There were about 20 of us gathered there, eyes running, hearts racing. A 19-year-old student was nursing his left leg, struck by a militiaman with an electric-shock-delivering baton. “No way we are turning back,” said a friend of his as he massaged that wounded leg.

Later, we moved north, tentatively, watching the police lash out from time to time, reaching Victory Square where a pitched battle was in progress. Young men were breaking bricks and stones to a size for hurling. Crowds gathered on overpasses, filming and cheering the protesters. A car burst into flames. Back and forth the crowd surged, confronted by less-than-convincing police units.

I looked up through the smoke and saw a poster of the stern visage of Khomeini above the words, “Islam is the religion of freedom.”

Later, as night fell over the tumultuous capital, gunfire could be heard in the distance. And from rooftops across the city, the defiant sound of “Allah-u-Akbar” — “God is Great” — went up yet again, as it has every night since the fraudulent election. But on Saturday it seemed stronger. The same cry was heard in 1979, only for one form of absolutism to yield to another. Iran has waited long enough to be free.

Suicide bomber kills 25 or more near Kirkuk - while Iran explodes

Remember Iraq, where we've more or less declared victory because the Surge worked? Well, even as US troops pull out of Iraq's cities, the sectarian and ethnic fissures are nowhere close to mending. Especially in the north, where tensions between Arabs and Kurds (and, in this instance, Turkmen) about land and oil continue to erupt into violence. Today, at least 32 killed, more than 100 hurt (and "hurt") is an umbrella that covers a lot of injuries, many of them maiming and life-ruining, or life-threatening.

Iran, however, is getting most of our attention, with thousands demonstrating against the regime, riot police out in force with tear gas, water cannons, and truncheons; and the Wall Street Journal and other neocons (or even so-called moderates like David Brooks on last evening's PBS News Hour) hammering Mr. Obama for not coming out more strongly for the demonstrators. IMO, he has indeed shown his support; but beyond that line he dare not tread lest in doing so he legitimize even harsher actions against them. Iran needs to work this out without the US jumping in to complicate things. And remember that this is not simply a matter of angry young students blowing off steam. The opposition camp includes some stalwarts of the 1979 Iranian revolution (none moreso that Mr. Mousavi himself) as well as highly respected ayatollahs, some of whom have earned much greater respect as learned and pious scholars than has the Leader and supreme guardian, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

And if you don't believe that the stakes here in re the future of Iran and its relations with Israel are pretty high, take note of this analysis via the Tehran Bureau.

Mir-Hossein Mousavi's long night

The Leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has made it plain to the leaders of the opposition and their hundreds of thousands of followers: any more protests are going to bring mass bloodshed inflicted by the forces of the regime. PBS reported on the Lehrer News Hour this evening that the basij militias, a major prop of the regime and notorious for their violence, are right now on the streets with guns and chains.

Tomorrow may turn out to be one of the most pivotal days in modern Iranian history. If Messrs. Mousavi, Karroubi, Khatami et al. decide to stand down from their opposition, the new pro-democracy movement may fizzle. If they decide to stand against the regime, the toll in lives may be horrible.

But the students and other anti-regime protesters may decide to stand up and go to the streets no matter what Mousavi et al. decide to do. This evening Juan Cole posted a translation of a blog entry by a young Iranian planning to be on the street in protest tomorrow, fully aware that he may not ever get home.

Resurgent neocons

Salon columnist Gary Kamiya today takes on the neocons (e.g., Robert Kagan and Charles Krauthammer, whose recent pieces I've blogged about - here and here - as well over the last few days) and pretty well demolishes their arguments in re President Obama's decision not to inject himself into the current Iranian situation. He highlights several other of the usual suspects as well (Danielle Pletka and the WSJ), not to mention John McCain, whom he quotes:

"Look, these people are bad people and I know that it was unpopular to call them part of an axis of evil or whatever it was, but we just showed again that an oppressive regime will not allow democratic elections, free and democratic elections."

Sounds like our last president, doesn't he - with this talk of "bad people"? At least he didn't resort to the oh-so-overplayed "mad mullah" trope.

Meanwhile, a recent essay by another neocon, Frank Gaffney (who goes unmentioned in Kamiya's piece), is getting attention somewhere I wish it wasn't. I speak of Pakistan, where Tariq Fatemi, reviewing Obama's Cairo speech in the English-language paper Dawn , notes

Obama’s background has been regularly targeted by rightwing commentators in both the US and Israel. This is likely to become more vicious. Evidence of this has come from Frank Gaffney, who heads Washington’s Centre for Security Policy. Writing in the Washington Times, he claims that his study of Obama’s policies and pronouncements leads him to the conclusion that Obama could be ‘considered America’s first Muslim president’. He adds that ‘there is mounting evidence that the president not only identifies with Muslims but actually may still be one himself’. In support of this preposterous claim, Gaffney states that Obama’s reference to the Quran, as ‘holy’ and invoking peace on the Prophet (PBUH) was not right.

Gaffney once upon a time was very high up in National Security Council circles. One might think that he'd have the US's interests sufficiently at heart to remember that the US is now working very hard with the (very pro-Islam) Pakistani government and military against the Taliban, both to keep Pakistan bolstered and to improve the situation in Afghanistan, where (remember?) thousands of US troops are stationed, with more on the way. But Gaffney considers it not at all imprudent to label Obama as the US's first Muslim president - and to do so in way that implies that surely this must be a very bad thing. Nothing like winning hearts and minds, Frank.

Iran set for day of mourning after protest deaths

Important news from Reuters. And bear in mind that in a Shiite context such as this, a day of mourning is much more than bowing heads in prayer and being sad. Friday is going to be a politically and emotionally charged day to celebrate the new martyrs of what may a new phase of Iran's Islamic Revolution. How the regime responds is going to be crucial. How well the Mousavi faction can sustain the on-the-streets pressure and demonstrations will also be crucial. But more and more observers are now saying that something fundamental has changed inside Iran. The Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Guardian of the Islamic Republic, at this point is not in control of the situation. Moreover, his favored candidate, Mahmud Ahmadinejad, cannot seriously claim that he has an overwhelming popular mandate to lead the country.

As for the vote recount, Khamenei is trying to buy time by throwing the Mousavi supporters a very small bone. The recount is only partial, and it has been entrusted to a hard-line supporter of the regime. Unless a recount were to reverse the election (highly unlikely), it will have no credibility with the Mousavi people. And if the recount were to substantiate claims of voting fraud and imperil Ahmadinejad's "victory," let's not forget that he too has millions of supporters among the urban poor, as well as in rural towns and villages.

Obama, Siding With the Iranian Regime?

Neocon WaPo columnist Robert Kagan today tries to stick it to President Obama as a hypocrite for not coming out openly in support of the Moussavi movement as the Iran post-election cauldron bubbles. Kagan does make a good point in noting that what's happening now complicates Obama's strategy in regards to the Iranian nuclear program. But then he goes so far as to claim that "once Mousavi lost, however fairly or unfairly, Obama objectively had no use for him or his followers," and then goes on to claim that

Obama's policy now requires getting past the election controversies quickly so that he can soon begin negotiations with the reelected Ahmadinejad government. This will be difficult as long as opposition protests continue and the government appears to be either unsettled or too brutal to do business with. What Obama needs is a rapid return to peace and quiet in Iran, not continued ferment. His goal must be to deflate the opposition, not to encourage it. And that, by and large, is what he has been doing.

Agreed. But Kagan then goes on to put Obama squarely on the wrong side of history, and freedom, for that matter. That strikes me as a low blow. For Obama to come out squarely behind the Moussavi party puts a huge handful of arrows into the regime's quiver. As several experts with a sense of Iran's history have noted, Iranians of all political stripes tend to be hugely paranoid about intervention by outside parties into their politics. From the time of the Qajar dynasty of the 19th and early 20th centuries, through the reign of the Pahlavis, Iran suffered constant meddling from Britain, Russia, and the US - including, of course, the 1953 coup fomented by the CIA that brought down a popular prime minister and secured the reign of an oppressive shah.

Obama surely is aware of this history. Kagan, as an historian with several books to his credit, ought to be. Shame on him.

Live-Tweeting the Revolution

A marvelous string of Twitter feeds from and/or about what's been happening in Iran. Amazing! and glorious! I wish them well!

Is the US economy about to implode?

It's not often that I come across a piece that forecasts a disaster so utter and complete, and I would ordinarily write it off to a writer off his meds. . . except that the author here (Chris Hedges) is a Pulitizer Prize winner, and he cites for corroboration two pieces published in the Financial Times (no lefty rag, that) and the London Review of Books, which does not tend to publish stuff that's not well researched and well argued.

I also note that I saw at least two reports today that major world leaders (who are indeed attending the meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization) were calling for other reserve currencies besides the dollar.

The American Empire Is Bankrupt

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090614_the_american_empire_is_bankrupt/

Posted on Jun 14, 2009

By Chris Hedges

This week marks the end of the dollar’s reign as the world’s reserve currency. It marks the start of a terrible period of economic and political decline in the United States. And it signals the last gasp of the American imperium. That’s over. It is not coming back. And what is to come will be very, very painful.

Barack Obama, and the criminal class on Wall Street, aided by a corporate media that continues to peddle fatuous gossip and trash talk as news while we endure the greatest economic crisis in our history, may have fooled us, but the rest of the world knows we are bankrupt. And these nations are damned if they are going to continue to prop up an inflated dollar and sustain the massive federal budget deficits, swollen to over $2 trillion, which fund America’s imperial expansion in Eurasia and our system of casino capitalism. They have us by the throat. They are about to squeeze.

There are meetings being held Monday and Tuesday in Yekaterinburg, Russia, (formerly Sverdlovsk) among Chinese President Hu Jintao, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and other top officials of the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The United States, which asked to attend, was denied admittance. Watch what happens there carefully. The gathering is, in the words of economist Michael Hudson, “the most important meeting of the 21st century so far.”

It is the first formal step by our major trading partners to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. If they succeed, the dollar will dramatically plummet in value, the cost of imports, including oil, will skyrocket, interest rates will climb and jobs will hemorrhage at a rate that will make the last few months look like boom times. State and federal services will be reduced or shut down for lack of funds. The United States will begin to resemble the Weimar Republic or Zimbabwe. Obama, endowed by many with the qualities of a savior, will suddenly look pitiful, inept and weak. And the rage that has kindled a handful of shootings and hate crimes in the past few weeks will engulf vast segments of a disenfranchised and bewildered working and middle class. The people of this class will demand vengeance, radical change, order and moral renewal, which an array of proto-fascists, from the Christian right to the goons who disseminate hate talk on Fox News, will assure the country they will impose.

I called Hudson, who has an article in Monday’s Financial Times called “The Yekaterinburg Turning Point: De-Dollarization and the Ending of America’s Financial-Military Hegemony.” “Yekaterinburg,” Hudson writes, “may become known not only as the death place of the czars but of the American empire as well.” His article is worth reading, along with John Lanchester’s disturbing exposé of the world’s banking system, titled “It’s Finished,” which appeared in the May 28 issue of the London Review of Books.

“This means the end of the dollar,” Hudson told me. “It means China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran are forming an official financial and military area to get America out of Eurasia. The balance-of-payments deficit is mainly military in nature. Half of America’s discretionary spending is military. The deficit ends up in the hands of foreign banks, central banks. They don’t have any choice but to recycle the money to buy U.S. government debt. The Asian countries have been financing their own military encirclement. They have been forced to accept dollars that have no chance of being repaid. They are paying for America’s military aggression against them. They want to get rid of this.”

China, as Hudson points out, has already struck bilateral trade deals with Brazil and Malaysia to denominate their trade in China’s yuan rather than the dollar, pound or euro. Russia promises to begin trading in the ruble and local currencies. The governor of China’s central bank has openly called for the abandonment of the dollar as reserve currency, suggesting in its place the use of the International Monetary Fund’s Special Drawing Rights. What the new system will be remains unclear, but the flight from the dollar has clearly begun. The goal, in the words of the Russian president, is to build a “multipolar world order” which will break the economic and, by extension, military domination by the United States. China is frantically spending its dollar reserves to buy factories and property around the globe so it can unload its U.S. currency. This is why Aluminum Corp. of China made so many major concessions in the failed attempt to salvage its $19.5 billion alliance with the Rio Tinto mining concern in Australia. It desperately needs to shed its dollars.

“China is trying to get rid of all the dollars they can in a trash-for-resource deal,” Hudson said. “They will give the dollars to countries willing to sell off their resources since America refuses to sell any of its high-tech industries, even Unocal, to the yellow peril. It realizes these dollars are going to be worthless pretty quickly.”

The architects of this new global exchange realize that if they break the dollar they also break America’s military domination. Our military spending cannot be sustained without this cycle of heavy borrowing. The official U.S. defense budget for fiscal year 2008 is $623 billion, before we add on things like nuclear research. The next closest national military budget is China’s, at $65 billion, according to the Central Intelligence Agency.

There are three categories of the balance-of-payment deficits. America imports more than it exports. This is trade. Wall Street and American corporations buy up foreign companies. This is capital movement. The third and most important balance-of-payment deficit for the past 50 years has been Pentagon spending abroad. It is primarily military spending that has been responsible for the balance-of-payments deficit for the last five decades. Look at table five in the Balance of Payments Report, published in the Survey of Current Business quarterly, and check under military spending. There you can see the deficit.

To fund our permanent war economy, we have been flooding the world with dollars. The foreign recipients turn the dollars over to their central banks for local currency. The central banks then have a problem. If a central bank does not spend the money in the United States then the exchange rate against the dollar will go up. This will penalize exporters. This has allowed America to print money without restraint to buy imports and foreign companies, fund our military expansion and ensure that foreign nations like China continue to buy our treasury bonds. This cycle appears now to be over. Once the dollar cannot flood central banks and no one buys our treasury bonds, our empire collapses. The profligate spending on the military, some $1 trillion when everything is counted, will be unsustainable.

“We will have to finance our own military spending,” Hudson warned, “and the only way to do this will be to sharply cut back wage rates. The class war is back in business. Wall Street understands that. This is why it had Bush and Obama give it $10 trillion in a huge rip-off so it can have enough money to survive.”

The desperate effort to borrow our way out of financial collapse has promoted a level of state intervention unseen since World War II. It has also led us into uncharted territory.

“We have in effect had to declare war to get us out of the hole created by our economic system,” Lanchester wrote in the London Review of Books. “There is no model or precedent for this, and no way to argue that it’s all right really, because under such-and-such a model of capitalism ... there is no such model. It isn’t supposed to work like this, and there is no road-map for what’s happened.”

The cost of daily living, from buying food to getting medical care, will become difficult for all but a few as the dollar plunges. States and cities will see their pension funds drained and finally shut down. The government will be forced to sell off infrastructure, including roads and transport, to private corporations. We will be increasingly charged by privatized utilities—think Enron—for what was once regulated and subsidized. Commercial and private real estate will be worth less than half its current value. The negative equity that already plagues 25 percent of American homes will expand to include nearly all property owners. It will be difficult to borrow and impossible to sell real estate unless we accept massive losses. There will be block after block of empty stores and boarded-up houses. Foreclosures will be epidemic. There will be long lines at soup kitchens and many, many homeless. Our corporate-controlled media, already banal and trivial, will work overtime to anesthetize us with useless gossip, spectacles, sex, gratuitous violence, fear and tawdry junk politics. America will be composed of a large dispossessed underclass and a tiny empowered oligarchy that will run a ruthless and brutal system of neo-feudalism from secure compounds. Those who resist will be silenced, many by force. We will pay a terrible price, and we will pay this price soon, for the gross malfeasance of our power elite.

Where Anti-Semitism is mainstream?

Thus does WaPo columnist Richard Cohen describe "vast parts of the Muslim world" today. He uses James von Brunn's killing of a guard at the Holocaust Museum as his jumping-off point - and then tries to emphasize his point by throwing in a reference to a horrific blood-libel persecution of Holocaust-survivor Jews in 1946. It's certainly an event that needs to be noted and remembered, but perhaps it's unfair to do so here, where he's trying to tar the entire Muslim world with the anti-Semitism brush.)

I don't dispute for a second that too many Muslims (and Christians - and people in general) hold some weird, destructive beliefs about Jews. Those ideas are detestable, and people ought to know what's going on.

But why write about this now? When the President is trying to reach out to the Arab-Iranian-Muslim world, in large part to protect Israel, mostly from its own idiotic settlement policies in the West Bank? Why not note instead - or at least in addition - the story of the Arab doctor from Gaza whose daughters were killed by Israeli bombing, but who is now reaching out to build bridges between Arabs and Jews?

And for that matter, why not take note of the source from which Cohen gets many of the examples he cites? He bases his report on articles culled by MEMRI (the Middle East Media Research Institute). MEMRI has become notorious for its singling out of media reports that document alleged Arab perfidy and bigotry. Of course, Cohen may not know that MEMRI was founded by former Mossad operatives. No agenda there.

And finally, why not take at least some note of the extent to which the increase of this anti-Semitism in the Arab world is relatively recent, and in many ways builds upon post-1948 anger in the wake of the serial dispossessions of hundreds of thousands of Arabs (Muslim and Christian) in the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan? It was not too long ago that many thousands of Americans - including leading citizens like Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh - held terribly anti-Semitic views, and announced them rather openly. One of the actor Gregory Peck's great movies, "Gentleman's Agreement" (1947), deals with the anti-Semitism that was rampant in the US even after WWII. And as late as 1960, the director Otto Preminger in his famous movie "Exodus" made a point of exposing the latent anti-Semitism in American audiences by casting blue-eyed box-office idol Paul Newman (who was, in fact, half-Jewish) in the lead role as a Zionist "freedom fighter" and another young, platinum-blonde actress, Jill Haworth, as one of the young Jewish immigrants to Palestine. His point here being, "Gee, Jews look just like us, or even better." In 1960s America, it's a point that unfortunately still needed to be made.

And my point being, finally, how much less anti-Semitism might there be in the Arab (and Muslim) world if the Jewish state in Palestine had been established under different conditions, or if its later leaders had refrained from further sabotaging the perception of Israel through their policies of colonization of lands "conquered" from Arabs?