Ronald Radosh's Blog, page 15

China Remembers Mao … on the Eve of His 120th Birthday

China, as we have been well reminded today by the Washington Post, is celebrating the  120th anniversary of Chairman Mao’s birthday. It’s no secret why even today’s state-capitalist China — held together in a fragile fashion by its ruling Communist Party — is seeing fit to mark the occasion. Mao is the link to its continuing legitimacy as a ruling group. Its ideology is no longer Marxist-Leninism, but Market-Leninism. Its “get rich quick” philosophy has created a slew of new billionaires, who live in mega mansions that are far greater than any in West Palm Beach or Malibu, but whose inhabitants swear fealty to the wisdom and guidance of the party leaders.

The ruling Communists eschew democracy; continue to jail dissidents in harsh prisons; and occasionally break out anti-corruption campaigns, in which former party leaders are brought down a notch and either imprisoned, executed, or subject to house arrest.  Those who write forbidden thoughts are not allowed to have their fellow countrymen read them. The Internet is severely restricted, and censors regularly pick out major Western websites which Chinese users find they are unable to access. We might think the New York Times is a leftist paper, but try to log on to it from a Chinese Internet provider. Good luck.  You never know when something in its pages might prove to be embarrassing to the comrades in charge of propaganda.

When I was in China for one of those State Department public diplomacy tours in 2000, before our highly contested election that year, I spoke all over the country to explain our American political system, how it worked, and to lecture on the meaning of political democracy. The last day in Beijing, before I was about to leave back for the States, the American embassy phoned to say they had managed to book me on the most popular talk program in the country, in which I and an interviewer — a political scientist from the university who had his own popular program, something akin to Charlie Rose on PBS here — would conduct the discussion.

It was a big coup to place me on the program, the embassy spokesman told me. They never had been able to do that before. I got to the station on time, and presented my views much as I had in lectures at universities and public forums. These, of course, were limited to those who came to hear me. The show was taped, and I was told it was to be broadcast later that evening, in prime time. I received a call from the embassy again. The censors viewed it before airing, and right before airtime, they re-broadcast an old program, putting my interview into the ashcan. The reason, the embassy told me, was that they thought my comments on political democracy were too volatile to be heard by a vast audience.

Mao never believed in political democracy. As Gao Wenqian, once a leading Chinese Communist and now a dissident who advises the group Human Rights in China and lives in our country, explained in an op-ed:

It’s no surprise that China’s leaders have chosen to honor Mao with such pomp. In the decades following the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949, Mao’s cult of personality formed the cornerstone of the one-party system…now, as the economy has slowed, China’s leaders have found it necessary to defend the Communist Party’s monopoly on power by invoking the nation’s “glorious” history — with Mao’s legacy its most potent tool.

Mao killed millions. The death toll alone of the “Great Leap Forward” was somewhere between 36 million and 45 million. During all that time, Mao and his leaders lived in luxurious surroundings, where servants galore rewarded every whim.

The irony is that the most corrupt and self-serving leaders, like the now-imprisoned Bo Xilai, were the first among the Party leadership to revive Mao’s legacy and urge a return to Maoism.  He, and those who purged and imprisoned Xilai, now evoke Mao’s name and legacy to serve the political ends they favor.

In another brave op-ed published outside China, a former aide to ousted Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang, a dissenter named Bao Tong who is now under house arrest, writes about how the myth of Mao still hangs over China today, and prevents the country from moving forward towards freedom.

Mr. Tong begins with Mao’s pre-Communist promise to create a “New Democracy,” which he rightfully says was a ruse meant to win allies in Mao’s fight against Chiang Kai-shek.  All of Mao’s promises were lies — the peasants got no land, all freedoms including the right to strike were taken from factory workers, and those who owned property found that the state and the party now owned them.

A New Wrinkle in the Mandela Story: Mandela Trained for Terror by the Mossad!

The revelation in Haaretz, the left-wing Israeli daily newspaper, that the Mossad trained Nelson Mandela in Ethiopia throws a new wrinkle into the Mandela story.

The world already knew that Mandela was trained in sabotage and terrorist tactics. This occurred when he left South Africa for Ethiopia to set up a secret underground military apparatus for the African National Congress that would then wage guerrilla attacks against the apartheid regime.

The assumption was that he got his training — as he probably did as well — from the KGB or the GRU, Soviet intelligence agencies that were seeking to establish proxies in Africa loyal to communism and the Soviet Union. But until the story that appeared yesterday, no one knew that Mandela “was trained in weaponry and sabotage by Mossad operatives in 1962, a few months before he was arrested in South Africa.”

The Mossad, the writers reveal, also tried their best to convert their subject — whom they did not realize was Nelson Mandela until he was arrested in South Africa — to the philosophy of Zionism. Mandela, who had support from Jewish Communists at home as well as from other liberal Jews opposed to apartheid, was evidently familiar with both the pre-state Haganah in British-occupied Palestine, and with Zionism in particular.

On October 11, 1962, two months after Mandela’s arrest in South Africa, the Mossad sent a letter to its officers that was stamped “Top Secret”:

The Mossad sent the letter to three recipients: the head of the Africa Desk at the Foreign Ministry, Netanel Lorch, who went on to become the third Knesset secretary; Maj. Gen. Aharon Remez, head of the ministry’s department of international cooperation and the first Israel Air Force commander; and Shmuel Dibon, Israel’s ambassador to Ethiopia between 1962 and 1966 and former head of the Middle East desk at the Ministry.

The subject line of the letter was “the Black Pimpernel,” in English, the term the South African media was already using for Mandela. It was based on the Scarlet Pimpernel, the nom de guerre of the hero of Baroness Emma Orczy’s early 20th century novel, who saved French noblemen from the guillotine during the French Revolution.

“As you may recall, three months ago we discussed the case of a trainee who arrived at the [Israeli] embassy in Ethiopia by the name of David Mobsari who came from Rhodesia,” the letter said. “The aforementioned received training from the Ethiopians [Israeli embassy staff, almost certainly Mossad agents] in judo, sabotage and weaponry.” The phrase “the Ethiopians” was apparently a code name for Mossad operatives working in Ethiopia.

The report also noted that Mandela greeted everyone with the term “shalom,” and was most familiar with the problem of the world’s Jews and with Israel. He appeared to the Mossad agents as an “intellectual,” but most tellingly “he expressed socialist worldviews and at times created the impression that he leaned toward communism.”

On that, the Mossad had it right. Their training of him did not pay off. From the start, Mandela supported the Soviet Union and its foreign policy, and befriended leftist African tyrannies as well as Yassir Arafat and the PLO.

A Sad Day for the Academy: The ASA Vote to Boycott Israel

Yesterday, the American Studies Association voted to approve the National Council’s resolution to endorse an academic boycott of Israel. In yesterday’s vote, 66.05% of voters endorsed the resolution, while 30.5% of voters voted no and 3.43% abstained. The relatively small 5000 member academic group is largely composed of leftist or left-leaning academics, and I am not surprised that the small amount who actually voted–1252 out of the entire membership–voted in favor.

The reason that the vote has received so much publicity is because the ASA has become the second American group to join its European counterparts in calling for such boycotts. The even smaller Association for Asian American Studies passed a similar resolution last April, without much publicity.

Yes, as many have pointed out, the vote is largely symbolic. Yet the board members who rammed the vote through without fully announcing its campaign do not seem to even slightly comprehend their hypocrisy. Scores of regimes throughout the world — including Iran, North Korea, Communist China, Castro’s Communist Cuba, Assad’s Syria, and many others — lack any rudiment of real academic freedom. Dissenting scholars are simply not hired or, if exposed by informers for the regime, are immediately fired. Yet the ASA has picked on the Middle East’s only existing democracy to protest and call for an academic boycott.

Indeed, Israel has many left-wing scholars who regularly in the press and in their academic works, especially in history and the humanities, freely criticize the government and society in which they live. Hasn’t the ASA ever heard of the group long ago dubbed “the New Historians,” whose works challenge Israel’s very legitimacy? Actually, the ASA position is even opposed by the Palestinian Authority’s leader, Mahmoud Abbas. An advisor and spokesman for Abbas, Majdi Khalidi, told the Times: “We are neighbors with Israel, we have agreements with Israel, we recognize Israel, we are not asking anyone to boycott products of Israel.” It’s pretty extreme to be to the left of the very Palestinians the ASA claims to be defending. (I leave it for another time to question Khalidi’s claim that they “recognize Israel.”)

If you go to the list of supporters, directly after the report of the membership vote, you will see the second name. It is none other than the former Communist Party, U.S.A leader Angela Y. Davis. In her statement attached to her name, Davis says:

The similarities between historical Jim Crow practices and contemporary regimes of segregation in Occupied Palestine make this resolution an ethical imperative for the ASA. If we have learned the most important lesson promulgated by Dr. Martin Luther King—that justice is always indivisible—it should be clear that a mass movement in solidarity with Palestinian freedom is long overdue.

Davis also was a member of the Black Panther Party and lover of the black terrorist George Jackson, who died in a prison shootout. His younger brother Jonathan took a judge hostage and was killed in a courtroom, using guns he had taken from Davis’ home, for which she was put on trial. The Black Panther Party, which called itself Marxist-Leninist, believed that the heart of the Middle East conflict, as Stephen Norwood reports in an important new book, “was a war between heroic Palestinian guerrillas and ‘Israeli pigs.’” The BPP believed that Jews had no claims whatsoever to Palestine. Ancient Hebrews only lived there for 100 years, while the Arab Palestinians had a “continuous residence in Palestine until they were expelled by the Zionists in 1948.”

The Search for Nuance about Nelson Mandela — as the World Celebrates His Legacy

As South Africans mourn the passing of Nelson Mandela, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find any honest and balanced assessments of Mandela’s legacy. Indeed, particularly on the broadcast media, including Fox News, it seems to be all accolades with nary a word of criticism.

Instead, you have many sites by liberals condemning conservatives for their view of the African National Congress back in the 1980s, during the Reagan years. At the New Republic, Isaac Chotiner argues, for example, that conservatives viewed their struggle through the prism of the Cold War, and hence thought nothing of backing apartheid because that government was our ally against the Soviet Union.  Liberals like Chotiner argue that the ANC had to take allies where they found them. Yet their struggle was moral and should have been supported then by the United States.

The Cold War, he argues, “prevented many of the people fighting it from viewing Mandela in anything but Cold War terms.” How, he asks, could anyone even think of the apartheid regime as part of the Free World? The Cold War, he writes, “didn’t require anyone to wear these blinders.”

Strangely, but predictably, Chotiner does not ask why Nelson Mandela and the Communist leadership of the African National Congress — which was controlled completely by the South African Communist Party — did not see any contradiction between their own calls for sanctions against the regime (as well as requests for international solidarity) and their support of the most brutal and repressive Communist regimes and leftist tyrannies, including Gadaffi’s Libya and Fidel Castro’s Cuba.

The issue was raised in the New York Times by former executive editor Bill Keller, in a column titled provocatively: “Nelson Mandela, Communist.” Acknowledging that Mandela was probably both a Party member as well as on its ruling Central Committee, Keller, unaware that the SACP had acknowledged his membership proudly a few days earlier on its own web page, asked a simple question: “Does it matter?”

Keller answers his rhetorical question the following way: People say one thing, but party platforms and ideology are often ignored. This, he says, is what the pragmatic Mandela did. Conservatives who harp on it are engaging in “gleeful red-baiting.” The truth, he writes, is that Mandela “was at various times a black nationalist and a nonracialist, an opponent of armed struggle and an advocate of violence, a hothead and the calmest man in the room, a consumer of Marxist tracts and an admirer of Western democracy, a close partner of Communists and, in his presidency, a close partner of South Africa’s powerful capitalists.”

In other words, he was a man of contradictions. His alliance with and membership in the SACP was simply a “marriage of convenience,” in a movement with few friends. He was able to receive money and arms from his Soviet and Chinese comrades for their “feckless armed struggle.” Despite ideology, when push came to shove, the pragmatists and the realists won out.  Mandela emerged from prison a changed man, who brought reconciliation to his native land that could have erupted in civil war, and both avoided bloodshed and gave his backing to South African capitalists who could have been his enemy.

His Party membership can be explained simply by the fact that the Marxist-Leninist group was the only political group that allowed whites, blacks, Indians and mixed-race people as members.

The Search for Nuance about Nelson Mandela- as the World Celebrates his Legacy

As South Africans mourned Nelson Mandela today, amid a gathering in Soweto’s soccer stadium that was telecast throughout the world, it becomes increasingly difficult to find any honest and balanced assessments of Nelson Mandela’s legacy. Indeed, particularly on the broadcast media, including Fox News, it seems to be all accolades, nary a word of criticism.

Instead, you have many sites by liberals condemning conservatives for their view of the African National Congress back in the 1980’s, during the Reagan years. At TNR, Isaac Chotiner argues, for example, that conservatives viewed their struggle through the prism of the Cold War, and hence thought nothing of backing apartheid because that government was our ally against the Soviet Union.  Liberals like Chotiner argue that the ANC had to take allies where they found them. Yet, their struggle was moral and should have been supported then by the United States.

The Cold War, he argues, “prevented many of the people fighting it from viewing Mandela in anything but Cold War terms.” How, he asks, could anyone even think of the apartheid regime as part of the Free World? The Cold War, he writes, “didn’t require anyone to wear these blinders.”

Strangely, but predictably, Chotiner does not ask why Nelson Mandela and the Communist leadership of the African National Congress- which was controlled completely by the South African Communist Party- did not see any contradiction between their own calls for sanctions against the regime and their requests for international solidarity, with their support of the most brutal and repressive Communist regimes and leftist tyrannies, including Gadaffi’s Libya, and most prominent of all, Fidel Castro’s Cuba.

The issue was raised up front in this past Sunday’s New York Times by former executive editor Bill Keller, in a column titled provocatively: “Nelson Mandela-Communist.”  Acknowledging that Mandela was probably both a Party member as well as on its ruling Central Committee, [Keller was unaware that the SACP had acknowledged his membership proudly a few days earlier on its own web page] Keller asked a simple question: “Does it matter?”

Keller answers his rhetorical question the following way: People say one thing, but party platforms and ideology is often ignored. This, he says, is what the pragmatic Mandela did. Conservatives who harp on it are engaging in “gleeful red-baiting.” The truth, he writes, is that Mandela “was at various times a black nationalist and a nonracialist, an opponent of armed struggle and an advocate of violence, a hothead and the calmest man in the room, a consumer of Marxist tracts and an admirer of Western democracy, a close partner of Communists and, in his presidency, a close partner of South Africa’s powerful capitalists.”

In other words, he was a man of contradictions. His alliance with and membership in the SACP was simply a “marriage of convenience,” in a movement with few friends. He was able to receive money and arms from his Soviet and Chinese comrades for their “feckless armed struggle.” Despite ideology, when push came to shove, the pragmatists and the realists won out.  Mandela emerged from prison a changed man, who brought reconciliation to his native land that could have erupted in civil war, and both avoided bloodshed and gave his backing to South African capitalists who could have been his enemy.

His Party membership can be explained simply by the fact that the Marxist-Leninist group was the only political group that allowed whites, blacks, Indians and mixed-race people as members.

What Keller ignores, as do others, is that Mandela not only accepted the Party positions, but used its strength to turn the once non-violent ANC to terrorism, as well as to an alliance in which the worst left-wing tyrannies were endorsed and supported. Mandela himself welcomed Fidel Castro with open arms, calling him upon his release from prison the leader of a country that “stands out head and shoulder above the rest…in its love for human rights and liberty.”  This about a country in which political opponents were regularly tortured and starved in the most brutal prisons, and in which many prisoners received and served far longer sentences in prison than Mandela himself.

After his release, he welcomed Muammar Gadaffi to South Africa, calling him a comrade and praising his dictatorial regime as a land of freedom. Libyan exiles protested and pleaded with Mandela for his support, telling him that his backing of Gaddafi was an insult to the “thousands…who are still in the jails of the tyrant, subjected to torture on a daily basis for asking nothing more than what you and the people of South Africa have asked for “to breathe free in our own land.”

Mandela responded by saying that the internal conditions of these countries were their own business, and any interference from other nations was a violation of their sovereignty. Somehow, the very acts of solidarity he asked for from the West was wrong when victims of human rights violations by leftist regimes requested the same kind of support he and the ANC expected during the years of apartheid.

No one has made this point better than Michael Moynihan, who writes: “For a man imprisoned for his political beliefs, he had a weakness for those who did the very same thing to their ideological opponents, but were allowed a pass because they supported, for realpolitik reasons, the struggle against Apartheid. So Mandela was painfully slow in denouncing the squalid dictatorship of Robert Mugabe. He was rather fond of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro (it won’t take you long to find photos of the two bear-hugging each other in Havana) and regularly referred to Libyan tyrant Muammar Qaddafi as “Brother Leader of the Revolution of the Libyan Jamahariya.” It was on a return visit to Robbin Island, when Mandela, as president, announced with appalling tone deafness that he would invite both Castro and Qaddafi to South Africa.”

Moreover, during the years of armed struggle, the ANC ran brutal training camps in which scores of young blacks were purged as unreliable, and tortured and then burned to death in the chosen method of the ANC—necklacing- the term used for putting them in rubber auto tires and setting them afire. It was for this reason that even Amnesty International refused to give him the status of “political prisoner,” as a critical report in  conservative Catholic magazine Crisis points out.

As author Timothy J. Williams writes in this magazine, the record of South Africa today is also Mandela’s legacy:

Mandela did, however, leave behind another socialist nightmare in the making. With their motto of “liberation before education,” the ANC has proved itself completely incapable of governing, and South Africa is sliding into chaos at an alarming rate. Since 2004, South Africa has experienced almost constant political protests, many of them violent. Activists like to refer to the nation as the most “protest-rich in the world,” which, along with prison camps, is the only type of “riches” a socialist nation can produce. The nation is staggered by unemployment, corruption throughout all levels of the police, military, and civil service, and ubiquitous, inescapable crime. Life in South Africa is far more dangerous, especially for blacks and women, than it was under Apartheid. With about fifty murders a day, the nation is now among the undisputed murder capitals of the world, most of these crimes going uninvestigated. The astounding estimates of other violent crimes, including rape, are almost impossible to believe. But only the truth of such figures could account for the fact that the private security business in South Africa is the largest in the world, with over a quarter-million private security guards in a nation of under 53 million.

If you don’t trust Williams’ account, read the frank article in TNR by reporter Eve Fairbanks, who lives in and reports from South Africa. While the media at today’s memorial report on how everyone in South Africa loves Mandela and what he did for them, Fairbanks reports the truth:

People are deeply, deeply disillusioned with the leaders who’ve followed Mandela, both official African National Congress politicians and emotional leaders like Mandela’s offspring. Mandela’s relatives seem to have bucked his example entirely; some have banked millions in mining, an industry against which the apartheid-era ANC railed against as the heart of South Africa’s satanic injustice, while others havecashed in with a reality TV show. The allegations against the politicians in actual office are more troubling. The country’s second democratically-elected president, Thabo Mbeki, was bitterly criticized for denying South Africa’s AIDS epidemic. Mbeki’s successor, President Jacob Zuma, was prosecuted for both rape and racketeering; he was acquitted of the former, and the latter charges were dropped on technicalities, but recently a huge scandal around taxpayer-funded upgrades to his massive home dominated the papers until Mandela’s—for Zuma, very propitiously timed—death. Daily, the whole black political class is accused in the media of corruption in the awarding of government contracts and greed in treating itself to swanky vacations and flashy vehicles. “They were heroes,” one of the students standing beside me on the police line mused grimly, “but then they started buying cars.” As they buy cars, economic growth has slowed, basic education has fallen into disrepair, and inequality has deepened. This fall, The Economist concluded in a cover package pessimistically titled “Cry, the Beloved Country” that South Africa “is on the slide both economically and politically” and that the ANC’s “incompetence and outright corruption are the main causes.”

Fairbanks dares, in a liberal publication, to point out what you will not hear on TV and radio by the mainstream press, and asks this tough question: “Great leadership involves building a political culture that mirrors your virtues. Can a leader truly be considered great if those who come right on his heels are terrible?” Praising Mandela for honesty himself in the post-apartheid government, she nevertheless concludes that “Mandela didn’t do enough to actively establish a culture of honesty, selflessness, and good conduct in the government he founded.” She adds that  Mandela also “vigorously defended an ANC leader named Allan Boesak who was accused of embezzlement, even directing his Minister of Justice to make a speech supporting Boesak. (Boesak was soon convicted and sentenced to six years in prison.)”

You wouldn’t know much of that by our media reports, which celebrates Mandela as if he was a saint, and which really amounts to self-glorification and their desire to identify with the old opponents of apartheid. So Kudos to Eve Fairbanks, for her courage in daring to spoil the party by telling some of the uncomfortable truths the regular media does not let anyone know about.

Yes, Nelson Mandela deserves credit for South Africa avoiding a civil war, for not creating an all black racist government, and for creation of a commission that allowed those who had engaged in unconscionable acts to atone for their crimes and that created the structure that allowed the society to move on. One must also remember that the collapse of the Soviet Union- its main benefactor- did a lot to prevent the country from becoming an African version of the old Stalinist state. With the Soviets not around to back them into becoming another “People’s Democracy,” there really was no option around but to allow capitalism to continue.

Yet, if one takes the case of its most likely next president- Cyril Ramaphosa-one can see the corruption that allowed the former left-wing socialist union leader to become one of the wealthiest businessmen in the country. Like Russia after the fall, where the former Communists grabbed the wealth of the nation for themselves, leading ANC and Communist leaders did the same.

In 2012, the ANC directed police shot down striking mine workers in cold blood—something that the ANC in the years of the “liberation struggle” would have never tolerated from the apartheid regime. 34 miners were shot in the back and killed, and 78 other seriously injured. Ramaphosa, the former head of the Mineworkers Union, called the strikers guilty of “dastardly criminal conduct.”  He is widely regarded as the man who was responsible for the police response to the strike. When ANC leaders now own the mines, they have a different set of standards.

In honoring Nelson Mandela, let us not forget his easily found out “dark side.” To ignore it is to fail to understand why South Africa is in such trouble today.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Liberal Supporters of Max Blumenthal and the Campaign to Delegitimize Israel

Last week, I wrote about the New America Foundation’s sponsorship of Max Blumenthal’s vicious screed against Israel. Now that the event is over, James Fallows has taken to the web pages of The Atlantic to praise the reprehensible bigot and ignoramus Blumenthal, whose book he describes as “ a particular kind of exposé-minded, documentary-broadside journalism whose place we generally recognize and respect.” Fallows also adds that “items like this one in Commentary had said that New America should not provide a platform for what it claimed was destroy-Israel hate speech. Some members of the board got personal email pitches to the same effect.”

The column in Commentary by Jonathan S. Tobin appeared after mine on these pages, and Tobin credits my column in alerting him to Blumenthal’s appearance. As for the personal e-mails, I addressed one of them to a Board member whom I am in touch with, as did other individuals whom I told about the scheduled event. One person I know wrote to Ann-Marie Slaughter, who did not respond to the e-mail he sent.

Now, Fallows charges us with censorship, and with trying to stand against free speech. Tobin accurately calls Blumenthal’s book one with a “complete lack of intellectual merit or integrity.” So when Fallows says everyone respects and recognizes his courageous journalism, he is speaking only for himself.

Sadly, his blog indicates that the campaign for delegitimizing of Israel is succeeding among liberal sectors of our intellectual class, who are now welcoming as good journalism the worst kind of gutter tripe, that even The Nation magazine’s Eric Alterman has shown is so poor that in a blog he wrote that it could have  been published by “The Friends of Hamas Book Club,” if such a group existed. Evidently Mr. Alterman, himself a man of the far Left, does not realize how far in the cesspool his liberal and leftist colleagues have fallen.

As for censorship, and calls that the NAF Board should have considered not sponsoring a talk about his book, this is hardly an assault on free speech. There are scores of serious critical books about Israel that are worth having a dialogue with authors about. This is not one of them. That a book exists- and there are hundreds they could have chosen from- does not mean that such a book should receive the imprimatur of the New America Foundation

By Fallows’ own admission, what Blumenthal does is find anti-democratic extremists in Israel. He then paints a picture showing his readers that their existence reveals the true Israel—a bigoted, anti-democratic state content to oppress all whom stand in the way of keeping it a Jewish state. With his one-sided attack, Blumenthal hopes to sway the American public against the United States keeping Israel as an ally.

Blumenthal has a right to his views. He found a publisher, and they are giving him quite a tour and send-off. To urge a distinguished liberal think-tank to reconsider being one of the venues for his views is hardly a clarion call to suppress speech. It is simply an attempt to suggest to the Board and leaders of NAF to question whether they really believe liberalism in America means supporting a speaker whose book has been praised by none other than David Duke.

Let us then ask, since David Duke is one of Mr. Blumenthal’s fans, and is happy that what he has been saying for years is now being said by Max Blumenthal, whether if the same book had come out by Duke, whether or not the NAF Board would ask him to speak, and whether Peter Bergen would be the willing chair of the event? Would James Fallows take to the pages of The Atlantic to praise Duke’s courage and integrity, and condemn anyone who suggested that the NAF not use its facilities and its reputation as an endorsement of David Duke’s book? I think we all know the answer. And since there is little difference in what Duke says about Israel than Max Blumenthal says, it is perfectly reasonable to try and let the Board of NAF know why so many of us are disheartened at their decision to hold this talk, and to add to the growing animus against Israel by our intellectual liberal class.

Already, sensible liberals show that they understand how dangerous it is for them to be taking this path. Alan Dershowitz told Breitbart News that “Max Blumenthal is well outside the acceptable range of rhetoric about Israel. His constant comparisons between Nazi Germany and the Jewish state establish him as an extremist bigot whose greatest appeal is to anti-Semites and others who apply a double standard to the Jewish state.” Dershowitz has it right. No “decent person,” he continued to say, “should ever support the views expressed by Max Blumenthal.”

Dershowitz’s comments came after it was revealed in Buzzfeed by reporter Rosie Gray that Max Blumenthal’s father, journalist Sidney Blumenthal, is going to bat for his son’s book in a big way. The problem is that Sidney Blumenthal may still be on the Clinton’s payroll, and is listed in The Atlantic as an advisor to the Clinton Foundation. Dershowitz is obviously concerned that should Hillary Clinton decide to run, her association with Sidney Blumenthal could hurt her campaign, unless she dissociates herself with his defense of Max’s book.

I have a simple response to James Fallows and Peter Bergen. Shame on both of you, for trying to make Max Blumenthal into a respectful journalist. By doing so, you harm your own integrity and reputation. As for myself, I would rather be called a censor and an opponent of free speech by James Fallows than be seen as lending credibility to a cheap extremist like Max Blumenthal.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hillary, or Warren? Get Ready for Democratic Party’s Tilt to the Far Left

As pundits spend much time commenting about the factions dividing the Republican Party — Tea Party radicals poised in opposition to mainstream, old-guard, establishment liberals — the Democrats are suffering their own largely unreported symptoms of a serious new dividing line.

Look no further than Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. As the Washington Post reported on Sunday, “a more liberal and populist voice is emerging within a Democratic Party already looking ahead to the next presidential election.” And its candidate is none other than Senator Warren. The new movement is what journalist Zachary A. Goldfarb calls “both a critique of Obama’s tenure and a clear challenge to Hillary Rodham Clinton, the party’s presumptive presidential front-runner, who carries a more centrist banner.”

Leave aside Goldfarb’s characterization of Hillary Clinton as a centrist (many would simply describe her as an opportunist  who will shift to whatever stance the base wants in order to obtain their votes). While many conservatives see our current president as a man of the Left (which he undoubtedly is), his leftist critics see him as a man who bent to Wall Street, who keeps his private views to himself, and who only tries to achieve his social-democratic aims by stealth means.

Warren, to the contrary, is upfront about what she favors: taxing the rich in order to fund left-wing economic programs.

Warren would not even countenance any reforms to Social Security that might save the program by major fixes. Instead, as Jon Cowan and Paul Kessler write:

Sen. Warren wants to increase benefits to all seniors, including billionaires, and to pay for them by increasing taxes on working people and their employers. Her approach requires a $750 billion tax hike over the next 10 years that hits mostly Millennials and Gen Xers, plus another $750 billion tax on the businesses that employ them.

This is the program the new Democratic Party far left is calling “economic populism,” itself a misleading term masquerading the upfront socialist economics advocated by its proponents. Their new program includes calls for taxing the rich, demanding legislation that would create a giant increase in the federal minimum wage, and concentrating on programs they claim would greatly reduce “economic inequality.” Aiding them in this new propaganda offensive is, of course, the pages of the New York Times. A few days ago, the paper debuted a new series on the topic in the Metro section, which ended all pretense of separation of the news pages from those of the editorial section and the views of its editors.

As Ira Stoll wrote at Smartertimes.com yesterday: “The Times metro section as propagandist for the de Blasio administration’s grim class warfare focus is off to quite a start.”

The New America Foundation Disgraces Itself and Spreads Anti-Israel Hatred

There is no American hater of Israel and all it stands for more extreme than the young, would-be journalist Max Blumenthal. The son of former Clinton administration staffer Sidney Blumenthal, he is author of a book so steaming of hatred for Israel that it makes the work of Noam Chomsky seem moderate in comparison. It has received blurbs and endorsements from Stephen Walt (of Walt and Mearsheimer), Rashid Khalidi, Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian and Chris Hedges, among others. In other words, all the usual suspects are pushing it.

The Nation, the leading magazine of the far Left, featured a lengthy excerpt for its cover story in the November 4th issue. Trying to appease their few remaining supporters of Israel, it also ran a short one and a quarter page rebuttal by their regular columnist, Eric Alterman. He sees himself as a critical supporter of the Jewish state, regularly writing in opposition to both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as well as most Israeli policies, with which he strenuously disagrees.

Yet Alterman, having read Blumenthal’s book, dubbed it “The ‘I Hate Israel’ Handbook,” noting that some chapters “are titled to imply an equivalence between Israel and Nazi Germany,” such as chapters titled “The Concentration Camp,” “The Night of the Broken Glass,” and one would-be humorous and juvenile chapter titled “How to Kill Goyim and Influence People.” Alterman’s bottom line is this:

Alas, his case against the Jewish state is so carelessly constructed, it will likely alienate anyone but the most fanatical anti-Zionist extremists, and hence do nothing to advance the interests of the occupation’s victims.

Alterman clearly agrees with Blumenthal that Israel is to blame for “the occupation,” but even he cannot help but note that “Blumenthal evinces no interest in the larger context of Israel’s actions;” and that he completely shows no interest in all the serious threats Israel faces from its many foes, which Alterman is compelled to acknowledge are very real and menacing to the Jewish State. He notes that Blumenthal complains about Israeli textbooks which he says “indoctrinate Jewish children into the culture of militarism,” while never saying one word about the Palestinian and Arab textbooks which do not even show Israel as a nation on their maps, and which regularly attack Jews as sub-human. As Alterman puts it, “Did it not occur to Blumenthal…that Palestinians have textbooks at all?”

Will Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin Enter the GOP Presidential Sweepstakes? Why I think He makes a Viable Candidate.

Yesterday, I attended the lecture by Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin at The American Enterprise Institute. (You can watch the video here. ) After he was through, a discussion was held by National Review political journalist Robert Costa, and Weekly Standard reporter Steve Hayes, moderated by Walker’s co-author, Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen.

The mainstream media has, since the New Jersey victory of Gov. Chris Christie, practically anointed him as the GOP frontrunner for the most likely candidate to win a national election in 2016. Christie was featured on the cover of Time, and appeared on virtually every TV Sunday talk show following his triumph. Despite serious problems about his ability to transfer his East Coast win to the Midwest and Southern GOP primaries, and the question of whether or not his aggressive New York-Jersey “in your face style” will play elsewhere, the media and many pundits have acted as if the question of who will get the Republican nomination is all but over.

Those who have looked no further than Christie many years before an actual candidate has been chosen should take a deep breath and reconsider. They should, especially, take a good close look at Governor Walker. Listening to him and talking to him briefly after his speech, one is struck about how down to earth he is. Scott Walker is the opposite of a striving, somewhat phony politician. He comes off as a regular guy, a man of principle who believes in the concept of public service, who is serious, thoughtful, and anything but the caricature of a sleazy politician in it for power. Moreover, he is solidly middle-class. No one can confuse him or brand him the way that Mitt Romney was — a candidate of the super-rich who disdains and scorns the 47 per cent.

Indeed, Walker said during his talk that while he has great respect for Romney and thinks he would have made a great President, he was shortsighted not to stress that conservatives favor an opportunity society in which those on the bottom rungs have the ability and the encouragement to move into a better place for themselves and their children — just as hard working-class people and poor immigrants have done in America’s past.

Walker, I believe, is a potential candidate who has the ability to bridge the gap between the Tea Party and regular Republicans, emphasizing what all conservatives agree upon, and helping to create a conservative majority and a center-right nation. Today, writing in The Wall Street Journal, Walker spelled out some of the same themes he addressed in his speech.

He emphasizes that conservatives do not have to compromise their principles to win, and take a supposedly wise turn to the center in order to gain a victory. No one, as Thiessen said yesterday, can accuse Walker of being the kind of man who gives up his principles to score votes, or who cannot stand firm under great pressure.

Remember all those TV reports during the siege by the Left of the Wisconsin State Capitol before the recall vote in Wisconsin? Thiessen was there, and reported how the unruly mobs — thugs in fact — were banging on his door trying to break in, and doing everything possible to prevent the Governor from conducting business. Not only did he remain calm and proceed to do his job, he stood firm against the teacher’s union. When they agreed to give some on pensions and contributions to their health care if  Walker gave in on compulsory dues check, Walker held firm. As we all know, he won and was victorious in the recall election despite a huge campaign against him and massive rallies of the Left’s troops.

Moreover, as Walker points out, 11% of Wisconsin’s voters voted for both him and Barack Obama! That, as he writes, means that one of nine voters who voted for him in the recall election planned to vote for Obama a few months later. To put it as boldly as possible: liberal Obama supporters voted for an outspoken conservative who did not moderate his position to gain their votes! Walker adds that recent polls reveal that 11% of the people in  Wisconsin still support him and Obama.

Governing as a “conservative reformer” — advocating the path suggested by Senator Mike Lee in his recent National Review article and elsewhere — Walker has had major success. People expected the sky to fall after he won election, given the dire predictions made by his opposition. Instead, they found jobs were saved, the schools have not suffered, and he reformed collective bargaining in the public sector against tremendous odds. A $3.6 billion deficit was turned into a $760 million surplus, and in addition, Walker was able to cut taxes as well.

As to the prospects for replicating this nationally, Walker knows that whoever becomes the GOP’s nominee, that candidate has to win the same Obama-Walker voters in Wisconsin. That means Reagan Democrats — the white working-class, and those who are “independent, reform-minded voters.” After all, these non-partisan voters want change, and they will support the type of candidate from either party who can offer them a better future. Given that liberal Democrats are the true reactionaries, trying to turn back the clock to follow Woodrow Wilson’s statist path, a solidly conservative Republican who has come up with real answers to the problems of this era can win.

As Walker writes, this means a “reform agenda that is hopeful and optimistic,” not one based on government run entitlements in which the technocrats of the corporate state make the decisions that impact our lives, as is the case with the current Obama Care disaster. Walker writes:

The way Republicans can win those in the middle is not by abandoning their principles. To the contrary, the courage to stand on principle is what these voters respect. The way to win the center is to lead.

That’s why those arguing that conservatives have to “moderate” their views if they want to appeal to the country are so wrong. If our principles were the problem, then why are so many Republican governors winning elections by campaigning on them? Since Barack Obama took office in 2009, the GOP has gone from controlling both the legislature and governor’s mansion in nine states to 23 states today. Not one sitting Republican governor has lost a general election since 2007.

Obviously, Walker is seriously considering whether or not he should enter the race. It is clear, however, that he believes a good candidate cannot come from the Senate or the House, with the exception, as he said in his speech,  his friend and fellow Wisconsinite, Paul Ryan.  Walker notes that the kind of divisive fights in Washington over things like the fiscal cliff and the shutdown are different from fights in the states. Here, he writes, Republicans “focus on improving education, caring for the poor, reforming government, lowering taxes, fixing entitlements, reducing dependency, improving health care, and creating jobs and opportunity for the unemployed.” 

So the question remaining is Walker, or someone else, more easily able to win the country and appeal to the vital bloc of independents? Some would say that he is too  low-keyed and not charismatic, and that he cannot create the kind of enthusiasm that many of Senator Ted Cruz’s supporters have for him. Others argue that someone like John Kasich might have more of a chance, and would be a stronger candidate. And in the discussion at AEI, Marc Thiessen doubted that if Ryan decided to be a nominee, that Walker would go up against him. Robert Costa, however, disagreed, and thought he would not attack Ryan in any debates, but merely stay in and try to make the case for himself.

Having seen Walker in the flesh, I, like so many others, cannot help but be very, very impressed. He is a solid and decent family man, who has a core set of beliefs he affirms and boldly stands for, and knows how to talk to voters, even those who differ with him. They may disagree, but they respect him for his beliefs, and know that he will fight for them. I’m sure Scott Walker has not as yet decided what he will do, but I for one, hope he does enter the race.

 

The Left Worries about what Obamacare’s Failure Means for the Future: What We Must Do to Respond

The latest polls tell us the brutal truth: Each day, Barack Obama’s popularity declines and more and more Americans are coming to reject Obamacare. It is no wonder that, quite suddenly, the president and Nancy Pelosi are referring to it as the Affordable Care Act — a blatant attempt to dissociate the measure from the president. The ABC News/Washington Post poll, for example, tells us that 56% of the public disapprove of the job Obama is doing and 55% disapprove of ObamaCare.

Writing in National Journal, Josh Kraushaar tells us in plain words that “there’s nothing that Democrats want more than to change the subject from Obamacare.”  Congressional Democrats especially “don’t want to be dealing with a drip-drip of news about premiums going up, patients losing their doctors, and a broken health care website as they face angry voters in 2014.” Obamacare, in other words, is a gift to conservatives and Republicans that never stops giving.

What really worries them, as Kruashaar puts it, is that over time “enough Democrats may join Republicans to decide to start over and scrap the whole complex health care enterprise.” If they weren’t so worried, the president would not have come up with his “fix” that, in reality, threatens the entire exchange market, which is the essence of the ACA.

So, at a moment when “even its most ardent supporters are running for the hills,”  it is no wonder that the American Left is beginning to worry that their entire social-democratic and socialist agenda is in danger of complete collapse. They are right to be worried, when already they have found that blue-state Democratic liberals — all bona fide “progessives” — joined Republicans to vote for GOP legislation that would help destroy the law. Here is what Maryland Rep. John Delaney, a Democrat in the bluest of the blue states, had to say: the ACA “is not working.” And Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick of Arizona said that Obamacare “is a disaster for the working families in my Arizona district who badly need quality, affordable health care.” They know that Obamacare is not giving them that, and indeed, is making things worse.

The biggest freak-out came on the website of the New Republic, from none other than its self-proclaimed renewed-Marxist journalist, John B. Judis.  Republicans will maintain control of the House in 2014, he writes, and there are “warning signs” about whether Democrats can even keep the Senate. This assessment comes from the man who is co-author of The Emerging Democratic Majority. So if Judis believes the party he supports is now in grave danger of losing both houses of Congress, one must pay attention.

He tells us that in North Carolina in August, Senator Kay Hagan was up eight points over her Republican challenger, according to Public Policy Polling. Now she is tied. And he warns us that in Montana, South Dakota, and West Virginia, Democrats are now the underdog.  Indeed, he thinks the Democrats could even lose Senate races in Iowa and Michigan!

But what really worries TNR’s most left-wing columnist and editor is what it could mean for the entire progressive — i.e., leftist — agenda. Acknowledging that Americans have, since the days of the  Founding Fathers, always had a distrust of government, Judis thinks that the entire edifice of “Americans’ support for government social and economic programs” is in danger of being eroded. “But if Obamacare doesn’t work as promised,” he writes,  “then its failure will have reinforced for a generation the argument against any government initiatives.” The country, he is concerned, might be doomed to “inaction.”