Ronald Radosh's Blog, page 8

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel to Me and Others: Don’t Live Past 75!

Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel has just announced that he plans on dying at age 75  and implies that the rest of us should work toward achieving this too. His article  is perhaps the single most outrageous and despicable screed written this entire year. One must also consider that this proposal is not being made by just any medical doctor. Dr. Emanuel, brother of Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago, is a major advocate of universal health care and was a key advisor to the president on formulating the Affordable Care Act, or as we know it, Obamacare.

Indeed, a few years ago, Emanuel was accused by Betsy McCaughey and Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, among others, of favoring euthanasia and death panels for individuals. Dr. Emanuel argued that in fact he is a well-known opponent of euthanasia, and that, as the details in his Wikipedia entry  note, his talk about “rationing” medical treatment concerned only the “allocation of very scarce medical interventions such as organs and vaccines,” not preventing the elderly who want medical treatment for illnesses from getting what they need. Emanuel said he was angry that what he wrote was taken out of context: “I find it a little dispiriting, after a whole career’s worth of work dedicated to improving care for people at the end of life, that now I’m ‘advocating euthanasia panels.’”

There is a serious discussion about how much treatment should be given at the very end of life, especially if a terminally ill patient would be worse off as a result. But in his Atlantic article, Dr. Emanuel makes us revisit the charges made against him some years ago and reevaluate whether his critics were not so far off in their claims.

Here is his argument neatly summed up at the start of his lengthy essay:

But here is a simple truth that many of us seem to resist: living too long is also a loss. It renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived. It robs us of our creativity and ability to contribute to work, society, the world. It transforms how people experience us, relate to us, and, most important, remember us. We are no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic.

And later:

I am talking about how long I want to live and the kind and amount of health care I will consent to after 75. Americans seem to be obsessed with exercising, doing mental puzzles, consuming various juice and protein concoctions, sticking to strict diets, and popping vitamins and supplements, all in a valiant effort to cheat death and prolong life as long as possible. This has become so pervasive that it now defines a cultural type: what I call the American immortal.

If young Zeke wants to stop living at 75, that’s fine with me. But the arguments he lays out are not really meant to be just about himself. He argues that essentially, one should stop living after he or she has led a complete life. According to him, by 75, people have passed their creative peaks. It is all downhill from there. They are being kept alive by the likes of flu and pneumonia shots, vaccines, antibiotics, and better medical care, which keeps them going instead of allowing nature to take its course. That is why, he says at one point, he does not believe people should get flu shots in their 60s: because each one taken by an elderly person is depriving a younger person who needs it to live a full life from having access to it. (He does not explain why both cannot get them.)

Our New War Against ISIS: Should Congress Ask for a Declaration of War?

In his Wednesday evening speech to the nation, President Barack Obama told Americans that he would consult with Congress about his new strategic plans to “degrade and destroy” ISIS, or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. He did not say, however, that he would go to Congress and ask them for a declaration of war. The Constitution, which he is pledged to uphold and defend, gives the right to declare war to the people’s representatives in Congress, not to the commander-in-chief.

Yet the question must be raised, and undoubtedly will be by more than a few members of Congress: Does Obama have the untrammeled right to declare war without their consent? Last week, former Senator Joseph Lieberman argued in the Wall Street Journal that he in fact can do so. The tension between the two branches of government, Lieberman argued, has always been “resolved in favor of presidential authority.” Congress can declare war, the senator says, but the president has “the inherent power to make war.”

The problem, however, is a serious one for Barack Obama, particularly because when he was in the Senate, he and other Democrats argued that the Bush intervention in Iraq was illegal and immoral and should quickly be brought to an end. We all remember the chant, “No Blood for Oil.” When Bush changed course and announced the surge, Obama unsuccessfully introduced the “Iraq War De-Escalation Act of 2007” in the Senate, seeking to deny the additional troops that Bush had requested and demanding that American troops be redeployed from Iraq by 2008.  Under Obama’s bill, Congress would have held oversight over the president, who would have to report to them every 90 days. In a statement at the time, Obama argued that “no amount of American soldiers can solve the political differences at the heart of somebody else’s civil war.”

Senator and presidential candidate Barack Obama also told the Boston Globe the following in a 2007 interview:

The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation. . . . In instances of self-defense, the President would be within his constitutional authority to act before advising Congress or seeking its consent. History has shown us time and again, however, that military action is most successful when it is authorized and supported by the Legislative branch. It is always preferable to have the informed consent of Congress prior to any military action.

Obama won the White House promising to extract Americans from other nations’ civil wars. Last May, he said in a speech at the National Defense University, “I look forward to engaging Congress and the American people in efforts to refine, and ultimately repeal” the 2001 law’s mandate that Congress passed to give the Bush administration the power to go into Iraq. He added, “I will not sign laws designed to expand this mandate further,” before insisting that “history” and “democracy” demand that “this war, like all wars, must end.”

How times have changed. Now Obama finds himself in the position of asking the American people to do just the opposite, by way of an extended “counter-terrorism operation” — as John Kerry called Obama’s war plans — without formal congressional approval or action. As Howie Carr asks so mockingly: “Whatever happened to Cindy Sheehan? Where is Code Pink? I haven’t seen an ‘Endless War’ bumper sticker in years, since 2009 to be exact.”

Obama’s spokesmen claim that the authority Congress gave George W. Bush in 2001 to move militarily against any country or force responsible for the 9/11 attacks is applicable to the present situation. As press secretary Josh Earnest argued, the president believes that the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) “continues to apply to this terrorist organization that is operating in Iraq and Syria.”

There is more than one problem with this analogy. Al-Qaeda attacked the United States directly, and America’s military reaction was a response to that specific act of war. ISIS has taken possession of an area surrounding Iraq and Syria larger than the state of Maryland, and has now some 30,000 troops on the march and ready for further battles. They also have American weaponry, a disciplined armed force, and a (short) record of functioning as an actual state in the territory they now possess. But they have not, as yet, attacked the United States itself. So by Obama’s own previous statement, fighting ISIS is not at present a response to an imminent danger or a matter of self-defense.

Obama’s New ‘Strategy’: Will It Work? And How will Republicans Respond?

Dressed marvelously in a tan suit, Obama confessed at a recent press conference that “we don’t have a strategy” for dealing with ISIS/ISIL.  Now he appears to have come up with one. As a New York Times report by Helene Cooper explains:

President Obama escalated the American response to the marauding Islamic State in Iraq and Syria on Friday, recruiting at least nine allies to help crush the organization and offering the outlines of a coordinated military strategy that echoes the war on terror developed by his predecessor, George W. Bush, more than a decade ago….Mr. Obama said the effort would rely on American airstrikes against its leaders and positions, strengthen the moderate Syrian rebel groups to reclaim ground lost to ISIS, and enlist friendly governments in the region to join the fight.

Having ineptly handled  his earlier press conference, the president clearly wants to be viewed as being at the top of his game by leading a new international effort to confront these radical Islamists. His goal now is “to degrade and ultimately defeat ISIL,” in the same manner as the U.S. had gone after al-Qaeda. This, he says, can be accomplished without the use of U.S. combat troops.

The strategy is based on expanded air power and bombings, while trying to help the anti-ISIS forces on the ground composed of elements of the supposed “moderate” Free Syrian Army, Iraqi government and Shia military forces opposed to the Sunni extremists, and the Kurdish Peshmerga, while avoiding having U.S. armed troops fighting on the ground. Among his coalition partners would not only be the Western powers, but Jordan, the Gulf States and the Saudis who would finance it. The administration’s offer of $500 million to train and support supposedly vetted moderates from the Free Syrian Army seems rather paltry and hardly sufficient for the necessary tasks ahead. Also problematic is the administration’s belief that there are any truly moderate anti-Islamist groups large and strong enough to  make a difference.

Writing in the Washington Post, Robert H. Scales, a retired Army major general and commander of the U.S. Army War College, argues that the newly advanced strategy is not sufficient to do the job of destroying ISIS. Scales argues for the need to adopt the strategy introduced in Iraq by the former chief of the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command, General Stanley McChrystal. It is based on “substituting skill, information and precision for mass, maneuver and weight of shell.” It was first used after Sept. 11, 2001, when Special Forces units worked with the Afghan Northern Alliance to fight the Taliban with precision air strikes overhead teamed with trained and proven ground fighters who would kill “much larger aggregations of enemy” while minimizing the death of friendly forces and civilians.

The opposite of “shock and awe” used at the start of the war against Saddam Hussein by Donald Rumsfeld, it is based on hard intelligence from informants, NSA surveillance, and careful planning and rehearsals for military action. By using intelligence to assist the troops doing the fighting, and armed and unarmed drones, they can, as Scales writes, “obliterate the enemy in the dead of night.”

But, he writes,  Obama is not yet willing to undertake a “scaling-up of the method, never attempted before.” As of now, ISIS is well-armed, controls a huge amount of territory, and we do not have ready the men and military equipment that can do the job, including an enlarged group of fighters, advanced and superior equipment available only to the Special Operations Command, and many more drones.

His main point is correct:

The Islamic State cannot be defeated by diplomacy, sanctions, coalitions or political maneuverings. Its fighters must eventually be killed in large numbers, and Americans will never allow large conventional military forces to take them on. The butcher’s bill would simply be too large. The only sure means for defeating the group is with a renewed, expanded and overwhelming legion of capable special fighters who have learned through painful trial and error how to do the job.

Will Obama do what is necessary? And if he finally decides that he must undertake a vast expansion of the war against ISIS, will he do it without a congressional resolution supporting U.S. escalation, which many in Congress are demanding? The argument for congressional authorization stems from the early days of the Vietnam War’s expansion, when without such a declaration, the Tonkin Gulf Resolution authorizing a response to an attack on U.S. ships from North Vietnamese boats was used by LBJ as an excuse for massive U.S. escalation.

Former Senator Joseph Lieberman, writing in the Wall Street Journal, argues that such a resolution is not necessary. The Constitution, as he reads it, gives the commander-in-chief the “inherent power to make war,” especially since the enemy is not waiting to advance and fight.

Harry S. Truman, when using the cloak of a UN “police action,” brought the U.S. into action against the North Korean forces seeking to overthrow the U.S. ally South Korea. The old-Right Republicans, led by Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft (“Mr. Republican”), opposed Truman for not going to Congress and asking for a declaration of war, and condemned his ordering American troops to fight in Korea. Taft said that Truman’s intervention “violated all the precedents which have been established as to the limitations of the President’s power to make war,” and was “an absolute usurpation of authority by the President.”

The similarity between Taft’s position and that taken today by Rand Paul, as well as many libertarians and the paleoconservatives at The American Conservative magazine, is worth noting. No wonder the self-proclaimed non-interventionists at antiwar.com, like Justin Raimondo, who calls the recent events a “manufactured conflict,” are furious at an important article by Sebastian Payne and Robert Costa.

The Left’s Attempt to Institutionalize the Rewriting of US History: A New Step Forward Through their “Long March Through the Existing Institutions”

Recently, a few conservative intellectuals have raised serious questions about the College Board’s effort to develop a new curriculum for the Advanced Placement history courses. Stanley Kurtz, at National Review Online, writes that “this Framework will effectively force American high schools to teach U.S. history from a leftist perspective.” Naturally, the College Board argues that its intent is only to provide “balance,” to streamline the curriculum, and to enhance teacher flexibility. In other words, all benign matters that educators should welcome.

Are Kurtz and the other critics, like National Association of Scholars executive Peter Wood, right in their criticism? Wood argues in a preliminary report, like Kurtz, that “this newest revision, however, is radical.” The board, he notes, citing other critics, is substituting a specific curriculum in place of their previous broad frameworks, promoting a negative view of the United States, and erasing major figures (the Founding Fathers, of course) from American history.

Wood is concerned that “perhaps more than other parts of the college curriculum,” the board is turning history “into a platform for political advocacy and for animus against traditional American values.”  Moreover, he thinks that the “College Board has turned AP U.S. History into a briefing document on progressive and leftist views of the American past.  It is something that weaves together a vaguely Marxist or at least materialist reading of the key events with the whole litany of identity group grievances.”

We have seen this particularly in the books of Howard Zinn and his followers, and in the book and video series on World War II and the Cold War by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick. And, as we know, their works are widely adopted in the assigned readings of many high school teachers and college professors. Within the academy, there has also been a widespread adoption of monographs that are based on race, class and gender to the exclusion of the old type of political history that once exemplified the best the profession had to offer.

These charges have led to an attack on the board’s critics, as revealed in this harsh column in the Los Angeles Times by  columnist Michael Hiltzik. Its blaring headline reads: “The right wing steps up its attack on the teaching of U.S. history.” Rather than address the substance of the claims made by critics like Wood and Kurtz, Hiltzik offers his readers a standard left-wing McCarthyite smear, arguing that it is nothing less than “an anti-intellectual assault.” He accuses Kurtz of declaring that a “grand conspiracy” exists made up of left-leaning history professors to emasculate their profession by belying the concept of “American exceptionalism.” (Kurtz’s answer to Hiltzik can be found here.)

To weigh the accuracy of the claims made by Kurtz and Wood, I read the College Board report. As a historian of recent America, 1900 to the present, and U.S. foreign policy in the 20th century, I evaluated what the curriculum offers in the area of my own expertise. I’ll start with Period 7, 1890-1945. Take as an example how it frames questions about Progressivism and the New Deal. The report puts it this way:

Progressive reformers responded to economic instability, social inequality, and political corruption by calling for government intervention in the economy, expanded democracy, greater social justice, and conservation of natural resources.

There is no indication that Progressive reform actually may have been instituted by corporate regulators for their own benefit, at the expense of small manufacturers and producers. This argument, by historians like Gabriel Kolko, James Weinstein and Martin J.Sklar, whose pioneering work changed the standard view of progressivism, is not even raised as an alternative way to comprehend the Progressive era. The paragraph, as structured, reflects the old traditional left/liberal view of the Progressive Era, and takes it as a given.

The Left’s Attempt to Institutionalize the Re-writing of US History: A New Step Forward Through their “Long March Through the Existing Institutions”

Recently, a few conservative intellectuals have raised serious questions about the College Board’s effort to develop a new curriculum for the Advanced Placement in History courses. Stanley Kurtz, in “The  Corner” at National Review Online, writes that “This Framework will effectively force American high schools to teach U.S. history from a leftist perspective.” Naturally, the College Board argues that its intent is only to provide “balance,” to streamline the curriculum, and enhance teacher flexibility. In other words, all benign matters that educators should welcome.

Are Kurtz and the other critics, like National Association of Scholars executive Peter Wood, right in their criticism? Wood argues in a preliminary report , like Kurtz, that “this newest revision, however, is radical.” The Board, he notes citing other critics, is substituting a specific curriculum in place of their previous broad frameworks, promoting a negative view of the United States, and erasing major figures (the Founding Fathers, of course) from American History.

Wood is concerned that “perhaps more than other parts of the college curriculum,” the Board is turning history “into a platform for political advocacy and for animus against traditional American values.”   Moreover, he thinks that the “College Board has turned AP U.S. History into a briefing document on progressive and leftist views of the American past.  It is something that weaves together a vaguely Marxist or at least materialist reading of the key events with the whole litany of identity group grievances.”

We have seen this particularly in the books of Howard Zinn and his followers, and in the book and video series on World War II and the Cold War by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick. And as we know, their works are widely adopted in the assigned readings of many high school teachers and college professors. Within the academy, there has also been a widespread adoption of monographs that are based on race, class and gender to the exclusion of the old type of political history that once exemplified the best the profession had to offer.

These charges have led to an attack on the Board’s critics, as revealed in this harsh column in The Los Angeles Times by  columnist Michael Hiltzik. Its blaring headline reads: “The right wing steps up its attack on the teaching of U.S. history.” Rather than address the substance of the claims made by critics like Wood and Kurtz, Hiltzik offers his readers a standard left-wing McCarthyite smear, arguing that it is nothing less than “an anti-intellectual assault.” He continues to accuse Kurtz of advocating that a “grand conspiracy” exists made up of left-leaning history professors to emasculate their profession by belying the concept of “American exceptionalism.” (Kurtz’s answer to Hiltzik can be found here.)

To find out the accuracy of the claims made by Kurtz and Wood, I read the College Board report. As a historian of recent America, 1900 to the present, and U.S. foreign policy in the 20th Century, I evaluate what the curriculum offers in the area of my own expertise. I’ll start with Period 7, 1890-1945. Take as an example how it frames questions about Progressivism and The New Deal. The report puts it this way:

Progressive reformers responded to economic instability, social inequality, and political corruption by calling for government intervention in the economy, expanded democracy, greater social justice, and conservation of natural resources.

There is no indication that progressive reform actually may have been instituted by corporate regulators for their own benefit, at the expense of small manufacturers and producers. This argument, by historians like Gabriel Kolko, James Weinstein and Martin J.Sklar, whose pioneering work changed the standard view of progressivism, is not even raised as an alternative way to comprehend the Progressive era. The paragraph as structured reflects the old traditional left/liberal view of the Progressive Era, and takes it as a given.

Referring to the New Deal era, the authors write:

The liberalism of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal drew on earlier progressive ideas and represented a multifaceted approach to both the causes and effects of the Great Depression, using government power to provide relief to the poor, to stimulate recovery, and reform the American economy.

Radical, union and populist movements pushed Roosevelt toward more extensive reforms, even as conservatives in Congress and the Supreme Court sought to limit the New Deal’s scope.

The above paragraphs are standard left-wing history, offering an analysis that has been challenged by many historians,(including myself here on a leftist site- and the same essay in a book I co-edited on the site of the laissez-faire Von Mises Institute). The Board presupposes that the New Deal was a positive advance on the earlier progressivism, that it stimulated recovery, which it did not since quickly the U.S. entered what was dubbed “the Roosevelt depression”, and it omits the failures and challenges to the large business dominated orientation of the New Deal as reflected in the corporatist structure of The National Recovery Administration (NRA). It is skewered to reflect the position that the pressure from the Left was good and necessary, since it led to more extensive reforms that of course, conservatives opposed.

Turning to Period 8, 1945-1980, I find that the Board’s proposals for teaching foreign policy are at first more balanced. The proposal states accurately that the US “sought to stem the growth of Communist military power and ideological influence, create a stable global economy, and build an international security system.” It also notes that the US sought “to ‘contain’ Soviet-dominated communism through a variety of measures, including military engagements in Korea and Vietnam.” In Latin America, the Board says later, the US “supported non-Communist regimes with varying levels of commitment to democracy.” It does not condemn these policies, letting readers make their own judgments. Perhaps it is because the early Cold War policies were implemented by the liberal administration of Harry S. Truman, and not by conservative Republicans.

When it comes to the later period, however, when Republicans controlled the administration, the period synopsis is particularly biased and egregious. This is evident on its discussion of the Reagan administration’s foreign policy. The Board writes:

President Ronald Reagan, who initially rejected détente with increased defense spending, military action, and bellicose rhetoric, later developed a friendly relationship with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, leading to significant arms reductions by both countries.

This is indeed biased in the way that Peter Wood specifies, in a preliminary evaluation for the National Association of Scholars, about the period Recent America- 1900 to the present. Wood writes the following as evidence for why he sees the Board’s proposal as little more than leftist propaganda:

The selection of these three key concepts and subsidiary themes for “Period 9” (the last 34 years) is odd.  Any effort to distill to a handful of points the rush of contemporary and near-contemporary events is, of course, fraught with difficulty. But where some see the rise of “a new conservatism in U.S. culture and politics,” others with equal justification see the rise of an aggressive new progressivism in U.S. culture and politics. Where APUSH sees “the rapid and substantial growth of evangelical and fundamentalist Christian churches,” others with equal justification see the rapid and substantial growth of multiculturalism and secularist ideologies such as diversity, feminism, sustainability, and gay rights.

Where APUSH sees a key concept in “the end of the Cold War and new challenges to U.S. leadership in the world,” others with equal justification see the liberation of Europe from a tyranny rooted in the outcome of World War II and the final discrediting of communist ideology.  Where APUSH emphasizes President Ronald Reagan’s “friendly relationship with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev” and “significant arms reductions by both countries” as the hallmark of President Reagan’s foreign policy, others with equal justification see President Reagan’s commitment to a nuclear deterrent in the face of the Soviet-sponsored “nuclear freeze” movement and his advancement of the “Star Wars” nuclear defense initiative as turning the tide against the Soviets.

He concludes:

In sum, almost every item in the APUSH picture of recent history seems to argue for one side of a dispute.  It is, of course, possible that teachers of AP courses will themselves recognize that one-sidedness and attempt to correct it.  But the AP U.S. History exam will be keyed to the College Board’s agenda, not whatever corrective lens teachers may provide.

Is Wood correct? On its treatment of Reagan, he certainly is. Jeffrey Herf in his book on the European Missile crisis of the 80’s, War By Other Means: Soviet Power, West German Resistance, and the Battle of the Euromissiles,  shows that missiles put into West Germany offset the Soviet introduction of its missiles in Eastern Europe, which helped maintain deterrence and thus  helped prevent a substantial danger posed by Soviet adventurism. In opposing the stationing of the missiles in Western Germany, the Western peace movement echoed Soviet propaganda and in essence took the position of the Soviet Union which favored unilateral disarmament by the West. Nowhere is such a counter narrative mentioned or even cited as a possible alternative analysis, as it should have been.

Moreover, it is widely recognized that the Soviet economy could not expand while putting all its budget into defense spending, and that Reagan policies helped expose the contradictions in Soviet economic planning that exacerbated its decline. As for “bellicose rhetoric,” the term itself accepts left/liberal attacks on Reagan, and most probably is referring to the accurate description by Reagan of the Soviet Union, when he called it an “evil empire,” and when he challenged Gorbachev in Berlin to “tear down this Wall.”

On domestic policy, the Board argues that “As liberal principles came to dominate postwar politics and court decisions, liberalism came under attack from the left as well as from resurgent conservative movements,” which is certainly true. It does not tell students how to expand on this, although it suggests in the way the curriculum is worded that the effort to expand the definition of “rights” is positive, and that those pressuring for more “social and economic equality” and who seek to “redress past injustices” are correct. In mentioning LBJ’s Great Society, it ways that “Liberalism reached its zenith” with the Great Society programs and by Supreme Court decisions that “expanded democracy and individual freedoms, Great Society social programs and policies, and the power of the federal government,” then concluding that “these unintentionally helped energize a new conservative movement that mobilized to defend traditional visions of morality and the proper role of state authority.”

This characterization assumes the success of Johnson’s Great Society programs, and the summary does not indicate anywhere that in fact they failed, and in the long run, compounded the problems they supposedly have solved, such as increasing welfare dependency. It also suggests critics of its plans were all conservatives, giving students no leeway to learn that liberals like Daniel Patrick Moynihan became sharp critics of the programs, including welfare and efforts to end racism by government edict without addressing problems in the culture that prevented African-Americans from moving from poverty to the middle class. It suggests that the only other critics were on the left, and that they assailed liberals for “doing too little to transform the…status quo at home and pursued immoral policies abroad.” Clearly, the wording used expresses the authors’ own bias towards the viewpoint of the Left, and is written in a manner suggesting that the authors agree with that Left perspective, while denigrating any criticism made from the right.

The report is better when the section comes to how a student might answer an essay question (pp.117-120 of the report) on how the New Deal, the Great Society and conservative movements would deal with how to change the federal government’s role in American society. The Board presents different ways in which a student might answer the question in a successful essay, on whether the New Deal was conservative or revolutionary, or made minor reforms but hedged on whether or not to do more, and whether or not the New Deal was “substantial but had negative effects.” Students, it notes, can even modify the question and answer it differently than suggested, by arguing the New Deal took a “middle course” between groups calling for radical change and others advocating minor incremental reforms. The section on how students might answer a complicated essay question is not biased, and it appears almost as if someone else other than the previous authors wrote this section.

Except for the two areas I point to, the long discussion on how essays may be answered and early Cold War U.S. policy, critics Stanley Kurtz and Peter Wood are correct in their arguments. Kurtz makes it quite clear that he is not asking for having conservatives demand that history be taught only from the viewpoint of scholars on their side of the political divide. What he is concerned with is the demand that it be taught only from the side of the Left, but rather, as he puts it, be taught “from various perspectives.” He lets readers see the evidence that the Left only wants is position adopted and taught. At one point he refers to a speech by Thomas Bender that appears on the College Board’s own website. Bender writes that early American history “is not only about utopian dreams of opportunity or escape, whether from religious persecution or from poverty. It is also about the beginnings of capitalism, and it is about capture, constraint, and exploitation.”

Bender is the man who Kurtz points “is the leading spokesman for the movement to internationalize the U.S. History curriculum at every educational level,” a major critic of the idea of American exceptionalism, and a scholar who has played a major part in the development of the new approach now offered for the AP courses. Clearly, what Bender wants is a history that makes the United States as a nation to be viewed in the context of world history, and as an example of capitalism which is intrinsically described as the root cause of imperialism, war and world poverty.

Bender’s claim for teaching a history that will change the way in which American History is taught is the scholarly example of Barack Obama’s campaign speech in which he said we were steps away from a “fundamental transformation” of the United States. The newly proposed AP placements test curriculum is part of the New Left’s goal of making “a long march through the existing institutions” that would end with a new radicalized United States, on the road to socialism.   By emphasizing hegemony in the sphere of culture, taking their cue from the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, they have now moved a further step ahead in that long march.

Our Bien Pensant American Historians: The New Friends of Hamas

In July of 1945, an organization called the Friends of the Haganah was created by American Jews, to support the defense forces of the Jewish community in Palestine.  They knew that the Yishuv-the name of the Palestinian Jews who had built up the basis for a future state-were living under the dire threat of constant attacks by the surrounding Arab states.

How things have changed. Nowhere has this been illustrated better than in the recent petition signed by over 200 American historians, (who now claim over 1000 signatures) condemning Israel for its “disproportionate” use of force and demanding the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza, a permanent end of the Israeli blockade of Gaza, and most telling of all, the suspension of US military aid to Israel, until such time that aid is no longer used for “the commission of war crimes.” Nowhere in the petition is Hamas mentioned. (The list of those who were the initial signers and writers of the petition can be found here.) In essence, those who signed the document can be called “the Friends of Hamas.”

As a historian who has studied the American far Left for many years, and decades ago was part of it, I immediately noticed that its signatories were veterans of both the Old Left- the Communist Party and its fellow travelers, and veterans of the already old New Left of the 1960s.  The instigators include Bettina Aptheker, Ros Baxandall, Staughton Lynd, Paul Buhle, Linda Gordon, Stuart Ewen, Jon Weiner and Marilyn Young, well-known leftists of yesteryear.  The full list of signers even includes Norman Markowitz, a proud Communist Party member who teaches at Rutgers University. Also included are quite a few influential historians at major American universities.

The petition is a document created by a group called “Historians Against the War.” It refers not to the current war in Gaza, but to the war in Iraq, as exemplified by a panel sponsored by the group held about it in 2003, which I wrote about here. The group actually had its origins in the effort by leftist historians to create a caucus within the historical profession made up of historians opposed to the war in Vietnam. Then, and now, the group was composed of historians of the far Left. At their start, and it is hard to imagine, they were actually a minority of the historical profession.

What is different about this anti-Israel petition, is that the signers are writing not simply as American citizens opposed to Israel, but as “historians,” whose credentials are being used as evidence that their position in the profession gives them more expertise to comment on Israel’s would be perfidy. As historian K.C. Johnson writes at Minding the Campus, “This approach is odd given that many of the organizing signatories appear to have no academic specialty in U.S. foreign relations, Israeli history, or Palestinian history, the subjects of the petition.” To put it bluntly, the claim to be speaking as historians is nothing less than an attempt to fool the gullible into listening to them. Undoubtedly they are intelligent, Johnson says- a claim that I actually dispute- but, he adds, “they seem to possess no more academic qualifications to comment on U.S. foreign policy or Israeli-Palestinian security relations than random people wandering Central Park.”

Given that Central Park is in New York City, I actually think that the random bicyclist or walker in the park has ten times more wisdom than any of these historians. Even the left-wing Mayor Bill DeBlasio heralds his pro-Israel views, undoubtedly because he realizes that his own leftist base is out of touch with the majority sentiment of the city’s residents.

More importantly, the petition is not just anti-Israel, it is pro-Hamas. In a forthcoming op-ed that will appear in The American Interest by historian Jeffrey Herf, (to which a link will be provided when it is put online) he notes the spurious nature of their charges. They argue for Israel’s guilt without attempting to prove their case.  To the left, this conclusion is simply a given. The actions of Hamas, which has fired more than three thousand rockets into Israel, cynically use civilians as human shields as they launch them from mosques, hospitals, UN schools and from heavily populated civilian areas, is not even mentioned once in the historian’s petition.

The demands they make upon Israel, Herf argues, without corresponding demands made on Hamas, is in essence repeating Hamas’ demands as their own. The petition writers do not even mention that the fighting in Gaza began with Hamas’ aggression.  This is, Herf continues, a major change in the Left’s position taken over many years. Once a movement that always claimed to be “anti-fascist” above all, it is now supporting and praising the equivalent of the Islamic fascists.

Herf makes a sound analogy between their position and that taken by the old Communists in the years of the Nazi-Soviet Pact from Aug. 1939 to June 1941. Just as the Communists ignored fascism- the Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov famously said that “fascism is a matter of taste,” the historians now justify many of the Islamists’ actions as a cultural difference that Westerners should respect.  Recall that historian Joan Scott of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton a few years ago refused to condemn Tariq Ramadan’s failure to oppose the stoning of women to death in Muslim nations. Stoning, she said at a forum, was an aspect of their culture that we had to understand.

What explains these historians’ actions? Do they really want to be known as supporters of Hamas? Have they bothered to read the Hamas Charter?  If not, how can they purport to be scholars and historians?  Either they have read it and ignore it; or are so negligent as to not have bothered to learn what Hamas’s beliefs and aims are.  It is especially shameful that these senior scholars, many of whom are historians of Germany no less and are proud of their anti-fascism, totally ignore the nature of Israel’s enemy.

There is an answer to why these historians are all anti-Israel, and it is the same answer I gave in my column last week. The American Left, following the long standing stance of its British comrades, favors an alliance with the West’s greatest enemies. The Left is now defined by one thing—hatred of and opposition to Israel. The hatred of their own country-they used to spell it as “Amerika”- has now been replaced by their hatred of Israel. As for Hamas, its own agenda is eerily similar to that of ISIS. True, they do not behead their enemies or crucify them. But as Alan Dershowitz notes in an important op-ed appearing today, “Hamas has probably killed more civilians — through its suicide bombs, its murder of Palestinian Authority members, its rocket attacks and its terror tunnels — than ISIS has done.” As for its own tactics, he says, they are the moral equivalent of beheading:

And it matters little to the victim’s family whether the death was caused by beheading, by hanging or by a bullet in the back of a head. Indeed most of ISIS’s victims have been shot rather than beheaded, while Hamas terrorists have slaughtered innocent babies in their beds, teenagers on the way home from school, women shopping, Jews praying and students eating pizza.

Shame on these supposed intellectuals, historians all, who have abandoned the most basic tenants of the historical method to propagandize for the Islamists, whom the late Christopher Hitchens aptly referred to as “Islamofascists.” As Roger Cohen of The New York Times wrote recently, the recent conflict has shown “how the virulent anti-Israel sentiment now evident among the bien-pensant European left can create a climate that makes violent hatred of Jews permissible once again.” For the Europeans, he writes, “not having a negative opinion of Israel is tantamount to not having a conscience.”

Writing in The Washington Post, columnist Richard Cohen asks “how did the moral center of the American left get so isolationist and selfish?” He adds another question: “Why does it see no difference between a moral obligation to save lives, [he refers to Israel’s self-defense measures taken against Hamas rockets] by avoiding murder-not just with humanitarian measures-and a kind of militarist lust” exemplified by Hamas?

Both columnists- men who are often critical of various Israeli policies-understand the legitimacy of Israel’s current fight against its enemies. How different are their arguments than these would-be intellectuals and historians, who indeed reveal themselves as nothing more than part of the bien pensant group of thoughtless intellectuals, who spout anti-Semitism as a new form of wisdom.

They exemplify well what in the 1920s, the French writer Julian Benda called La Trahison des clercs, roughly translated as The Treason of the Intellectuals. In an introduction to a new printing of the book, my PJM colleague Roger Kimball writes that once the intellectuals abandoned their traditional scholarly and philosophical set of ideas, they “had lately allowed political commitment to insinuate itself into their understanding of the intellectual vocation as such.” He quotes Benda who wrote that “Our age is indeed the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds.” The historians who wrote the current petition verify Benda’s insight, as well as his statement that the current work of intellectuals was a “cataclysm in the moral notions of those who educate the world.”

These words indeed do apply to these thoughtless historians, who whether they intend it to or not, have come down on the side of not only Israel’s  enemies, but the humanistic values they purport to hold.  Let us respond by no longer listening to anything these people write, including all their books and articles.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Hillary Conundrum: What Does She Really Believe, and When Did She Believe It?

Hillary Clinton’s recent Atlantic interview with Jeffrey Goldberg has produced a storm, both by comments from the usual pundits as well as among the ranks of the left-wing of the already very liberal/left Democratic Party. Many conservatives have responded by calling attention to Hillary’s obvious failures, to write off what she has had to say as of no consequence except for revealing her hypocrisy. No one put it better than Bret Stephens in The Wall Street Journal. He dubs her arguments as nothing but her “self re-invention as a hawk,” made because she “belatedly needs to disavow the consequences of the policies she once advocated,” and possibly because “she believes in whatever she says, at least at the time she’s saying it.”

I fully understand Stephens’ reaction to what Hillary Clinton said in the interview, but I think he neglects to take into consideration evidence that indicates she, while serving as his secretary of State, privately fought him tooth and nail, and presented advice that Obama rejected.

Read this article by Daily Beast writer Josh Rogin for a presentation of evidence for this argument. Rogin writes:

Clinton and her senior staff warned the White House multiple times before she left office that the Syrian civil war was getting worse, that working with the civilian opposition was not enough, and that the extremists were gaining ground. The United States needed to engage directly with the Free Syrian Army, they argued; the loose conglomeration of armed rebel groups was more moderate than the Islamic forces — and begging for help from the United States. According to several administration officials who were there, her State Department also warned the White House that Iraq could fall victim to the growing instability in Syria. It was all part of a State Department plea to the president to pursue a different policy.

Stephens correctly cites Hillary’s well-known errors: favoring diplomatic engagement with Iran; the early praising of Bashar Assad as a “reformer”; favoring a “reset” of relations with Vladimir Putin’s Russia; her attacks on Bibi Netanyahu when demanded by the president; and her support for Mubarak in Egypt. Others add what they see as her attempts to cover up her failures over the murders by Islamists of four Americans in Benghazi.

But see what Hillary had to say in her interview. She includes the neglected advice on dealing with Syria and Assad by arming moderate rebels, and her equation of the fight against both communism and fascism with the fight against Islamism — her understanding that jihadist groups’ “raison d’être is to be against the West,” and hence they must be contained, deterred, and defeated. She also called for a tough policy to prevent Iran from getting the bomb, and showed that she opposes the Obama policy one can rightfully call appeasement. She continues to argue that Obama’s Syria policy was a complete failure, one that led to ISIS, a group far more extreme than even the Taliban.  She writes that during the Cold War, “we did have a kind of overreaching framework about what we were trying to do that did lead to the defeat of the Soviet Union and the collapse of communism,” an objective which the U.S. “achieved.” As she said in the most quoted part of the interview, “Don’t do stupid stuff” is “not an organizational strategy.”

Most importantly, Hillary Clinton defended Israel in the strongest possible terms, at a moment when most Democrats are turning away from any support of the Jewish state, and when the entire Western Left is opposed to its very existence. She cites anti-Semitism as one great motive behind the attacks on Israel, calling the gang-up on Israel “uncalled for and unfair.” She blasts Hamas as the sole culprit responsible for the recent Gaza war, for stage-managing what journalists could be allowed to report from Gaza, noting: “There’s no doubt in my mind that Hamas initiated this conflict and wanted to do so in order to leverage its position.” Finally, she says that “the ultimate responsibility [for the Gaza war] has to rest on Hamas and the decisions it made.”

She went so far as to praise Netanyahu by saying: “If I were the prime minister of Israel, you’re damn right I would expect to have control over security [on the West Bank], because even if I’m dealing with Abbas, who is 79 years old, and other members of Fatah, who are enjoying a better lifestyle and making money on all kinds of things, that does not protect Israel from the influx of Hamas or cross-border attacks from anywhere else. With Syria and Iraq, it is all one big threat. So Netanyahu could not do this in good conscience.”

Republicans and conservatives cannot complain that Democrats are abandoning Israel, and then when a leading Democrats boldly comes to Israel’s defense, attack them for doing so. After all, Hillary is hardly endearing herself to the left-wing base of the Democrat Party by taking this stance.

Indeed, recent polls show that the position she has staked out is causing her support to quickly erode, making many Democrats favorable to a challenge to Hillary from her left. According to these polls, she is also losing ground among the vital independent vote. Joe Scarborough has a few times called Hillary “a neo-con’s neo-con,” and as if to prove that point, the Weekly Standard wickedly ran her comments online as a guest editorial, signed “Hillary Rodham Clinton, for the editors.”

It is also clear that today, many Republicans and conservatives are leaning towards the non-interventionist position advocated by Senator Rand Paul and libertarian think tank the Cato Institute, as well as the editors and writers of Reason magazine and The American Conservative. Hillary’s position may lead Paul’s supporters to double their effort to make him the Republican presidential candidate in 2016.

Is she being politically shrewd? I doubt it. Perhaps these are really her views, and she believed that for the good of the country, she had to present them. She may have indeed not acted upon them when she was in the administration, and did things she privately did not believe in, such as her soft policy on Putin. Hypocritical or not, I thank Hillary for saying what had to be said, and for espousing a policy that harks back to that of the Cold War liberals in Harry Truman’s days — that of a muscular liberal interventionism that was committed to fight tyranny and destroy totalitarian regimes.

The American Left: Friends of Our Country’s Enemies

The American Left used to be patriotic. In its heyday, Eugene V. Debs never attacked America, and the socialist vision he advocated was in his eyes a way to realize the promise of America. As for the American Communist Party, in reality the tool of Stalin’s USSR, it pretended in the 1940s to be pro-American, and its chairman, Earl Browder, coined the slogan “Communism is 20th century Americanism.” This pretense came to an end during the Cold War, when the Left supported the Soviet bloc and all of its policies, and argued that America was in the process of becoming a nascent fascist state.

The remnants of the ’60s New Left identified with America’s new enemies, especially North Vietnam, Communist Cuba, the PLO, and, in the ’80s, Sandinista Nicaragua. After 9/11, many of its adherents took the position that the United States had the terror attack coming to it, since the perpetrators had taken 3000 lives in protest against America’s imperial ambitions and control.

This led Michael Walzer, the social-democratic intellectual, to pen an article called “Can There Be a Decent Left?” Walzer courageously took on many of those on his side of the spectrum, hitting them for accepting the “blame America first” doctrine to explain foreign policy defeats; for not criticizing any peoples or nations in the Third World; for believing in what he called “rag-tag Marxism”; for failing to oppose dangerous jihadists and Islamist states; and for refusing to blame anyone else for the world’s wrong except the United States.

I wonder what Walzer would write today if he examined his article anew. If one looks around at the Left’s response to Hamas’ actions in Gaza and its attacks on Israel, and its view of Islamist fascism in countries like Iran, Syria and among the ISIS forces seeking to take over Iraq, it is clearer than ever that the Left has one function — to support the enemies of democracy. Operating in the United States, Britain and France, the Western Left takes the opportunity to speak freely in the democracies in which they live, to openly support and express their solidarity with democracy’s most fervent enemies.

Some would question why this Left, perhaps numerically small in terms of the entire population of the Western nations, is so important. Aren’t they really marginal? The answer is that in the United States, as well as in Great Britain, the positions of the far left have now become mainstream, and influence those in political power. So it is with the Democratic Party.

On these questions, the answer of the left-liberal wing of the Democratic Party, and the even further far left-wing base, makes the Democrats as an entire group unable to take any steps that endanger their electoral chances, unless the party’s leaders continually kowtow to the leftist base. They fear that if they took tough interventionist positions that would offend them, it might lead the Left to opt out of voting in the coming November elections, as well as not rallying behind whomever the Democrats pick as their candidate for the 2016 presidential race. There are, of course, some exceptions. Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey is one Democrat who has continually called for tough measures against Iran, much to the consternation of others in his own party.

Obama, as the New York Times’ Peter Baker explains, has spent his entire time as president doing everything to end any military action by the U.S. in Iraq, not even leaving a residual force that could be used should it become necessary. And yet, the force of events has led him to intervene with air strikes against the ISIS (or ISIL) in the very country he thought he’d never have to use the American military in any capacity. Now he has to contend with the possibility that should ISIS manage to move to take over Irbil and move closer to Baghdad, he very well might have to consider extending the range of his current action.

The left-wing of the Democratic Party is not happy. Baker interviewed Phyllis Bennis, who works at the far-left Institute for Policy Studies (not, as Baker describes it,“a research organization for peace activists”). The NYT does not let its readers know that Bennis herself is a person who believes that Israel’s very creation was illegitimate, and who supports “the right of return” and has previously criticized moves taken by Israel against Hamas. As for the IPS, as one can find at Discover the Networks, during the Cold War it was a major group disseminating Soviet disinformation and working to push the United States to the far left.

It is not surprising to find that Bennis told Baker that Obama’s action “is a slippery slope if I ever saw one,” and that “whatever else we may have learned from the President’s ‘dumb war,’ it should be entirely clear that we cannot bomb Islamist extremists into submission or disappearance.” Bennis does not suggest what course she thinks the U.S. should take to deal with its dangerous enemies, perhaps because what worries her is not their goals, but America responding to the danger at all.

The American Left: Friends of our Country’s Enemies

The American Left used to be patriotic. In its heyday, Eugene V. Debs never attacked America, and the socialist vision he advocated was in his eyes a way to realize the promise of America. As for the American Communist Party, in reality the tool of Stalin’s USSR, it pretended in the 1940s to be pro-American, and its chairman Earl Browder coined the slogan “Communism is 20th Century Americanism.” This pretense came to an end during the Cold War, when the Left supported the Soviet bloc and all of its policies, and argued that America was in the process of becoming a nascent fascist state.

The remnants of the 60s New Left identified with America’s new enemies, especially North Vietnam, Communist Cuba, the PLO, and in the 80s, Sandinista Nicaragua. After 9/11, many of its adherents took the position that the United States had the terror attack coming to it, since the perpetrators had taken 3000 lives in protest against America’s imperial ambitions and control.

This led Michael Walzer, the social-democratic intellectual, to pen an article called “Can There Be a Decent Left?” Walzer courageously took on many of those on his side of the spectrum, hitting them for accepting the “blame America first” doctrine to explain foreign policy defeats; for not criticizing any peoples or nations in the Third World; for believing in what he called “rag-tag Marxism,” for failing to oppose dangerous Jihadists and Islamist states; and for refusing to blame anyone else for the world’s wrong except the United States.

I wonder what Walzer would write today if he examined his article anew. If one looks around at the Left’s response to Hamas’ actions in Gaza and its attacks on Israel, and its view of Islamist fascism in countries like Iran, Syria and among the ISIS forces seeking to take over Iraq, it is clearer than ever that the Left has one function—to support the enemies of democracy. Operating in the United States, Britain and France, the Western Left takes the opportunity to speak freely in the democracies in which they live, to openly support and express their solidarity with democracy’s most fervent enemies.

Some would question why this Left, perhaps numerically small in terms of the entire population of the Western nations, is so important. Aren’t they really marginal? The answer is that in the United States, as well as in Great Britain, the positions of the far Left have now become mainstream, and influence those in political power. So it is with the Democratic Party.

On these questions, the answer of the left-liberal wing of the Democratic Party, and the even further far left-wing base, makes the Democrats as an entire group unable to take any steps that endanger their electoral chances, unless its leaders continually kowtow to its leftist base. They fear that if they took tough interventionist positions that would offend them, it might lead the Left to opt out of voting in the coming November elections, as well as not rallying behind whomever the Democrats pick as their candidate for the 2016 presidential race. There are, of course, some exceptions. Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey is one Democrat who has continually called for tough measures against Iran, much to the consternation of others in his own party.

Obama, as The New York Times’ Peter Baker explains, has spent his entire time as President doing everything to end any military action by the U.S. in Iraq, not even leaving a residual force that could be used should it become necessary. And yet, the force of events has led him to do what he never thought would occur, to intervene with air strikes against the ISIS (or ISIL) in the very country he thought that he had put an end to any possibility of using the American military in any capacity. Now he has to contend with the possibility that should ISIS manage to move to take over Irbil and move closer to Baghdad, he very well might have to consider extending the range of his current action.

The left-wing of the Democratic Party is not happy. Baker interviewed Phyllis Bennis, who works at the far left Institute for Policy Studies (not as Baker describes it-“a research organization for peace activists.”) The NYT does not let its readers know that Bennis herself is a person who believes that Israel’s very creation was illegitimate, and who supports “the right of return” and has previously criticized moves taken by Israel against Hamas. As for the IPS, as one can find at Discover the Networks, during the Cold War it was a major group disseminating Soviet disinformation and working to push the United States to the far left.

It is not surprising to find that Bennis told Baker that Obama’s action “is a slippery slope if I ever saw one,” and that “Whatever else we may have learned from the President’s ‘dumb war,’ it should be entirely clear that we cannot bomb Islamist extremists into submission or disappearance.” Every bomb recruits more supporters.” Bennis does not suggest what course she thinks the U.S. should take to deal with its dangerous enemies, perhaps because what worries her is not their goals, but America responding to the danger at all.

As for the Left’s position on the fight Israel is waging against Hamas, the Left sides with Hamas and views it as a victim of Israeli aggression and colonialism. One has to merely turn to the lead editorial in the current issue of The Nation, titled “Israel Must Stop Its Reign of Terror,” in which Katrina vanden Heuvel and her colleagues explain that it was a “brute incursion by Israel” into Gaza that started the current war, and has resulted in a “bloodletting” in which Israel’s bombings “pummeled Gaza into a landscape of human despair.” The editorial continues to accuse Israel of obliterating “entire families of twenty and thirty,” of leveling whole neighborhoods, and killing 74 per cent of Palestinians who were innocent civilians.

The Nation editorial then argues that “a flagrantly asymmetrical conflict between occupier and occupied” has been portrayed “as a fight between equals,” and hence the U.S., “a highly biased superpower,” is trying to pretend it is an honest broker. They even say that the U.S. has “lined up to affirm Israel’s ‘right to self-defense,’” a step they imply is unnecessary for Israel to take. They see some hope that John Kerry and the President have “expressed frustration with Israel’s shattering disregard for Palestinian lives.” They protest that after Kerry turned for help to Hamas’s sponsors, Qatar and Turkey, backing a peace proposal that would have met all of Hamas’ demands,  Israel’s response to Kerry was to not “even contemplate lifting the seven-year siege of Gaza.”

The Nation offers its own proposal for what America should do: demand an “international arms embargo on Israel,” as well as ending “Israel’s collective punishment on Gaza.” They note that these demands are supported by 64 Nobel laureates and “public figures” such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Noam Chomsky as well as “legal experts” Noura Erakat (daughter of the PLO’s lead negotiator) and Peter Weiss, whom you can read about here. These measures, they conclude, are a blueprint, “at once necessary and aspirational, to end the crisis.”

That editorial was written before the 72 hour cease-fire was violated by Hamas, and before the warfare started up, and before Israel responded with a forceful series of new air strikes in Gaza. The Nation’s first online response to the recent resumption of the Gaza war is an editorial by Zoe Carpenter, She accuses the hawks- all the regular suspects-of “angling” to get us into a new war, and who she predicts will soon “call for escalating a conflict in the Middle East.” In Iraq, as she sees it, rescuing the Yazidis from the mountain in which they took refuge is simply “a defensive rationale” for military strikes. Humanitarian aid to the suffering Yazidis in her eyes is but “a moral gloss for military action.” Obama’s limited action in Iraq, she fears, will lead to an escalation of the war.

So whether the enemy is Hamas in Gaza or ISIS in Iraq, the Left has one position: The United States must stay out, and stop using its armed forces to advance the hidden agenda of the imperialist United States or the colonialist Israeli regime, which itself is illegitimate. The Left’s voice is that of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Pretending to be anti-fascist, they portray actual contemporary fascists- the Islamists in the Middle East- especially Hamas- as fighters for liberation against Israel’s oppression. Carpenter worries that Obama’s limited action will have “undesirable, cascading consequences.”

In his book Antisemitism and the American Far Left, historian Stephen H. Norwood ends his tome by noting that since the 1960s, the American far left has echoed both extremist Palestinian propaganda as well as the old  Communist anti-Zionist positions of the 1920s and 30s, demonizing Zionism and “condemning Israel with increasing fervor…and calling for its destruction.” The Left thinks of themselves as secular democrats, while in reality they work to empower the forces of radical Islam that “would replace Israel with an Arab dictatorship unwilling to extend rights to minorities and women.”

That Left, he acknowledges, has “entered the mainstream.” We have seen it this past week, as CNN adopts the position of the far Left. Appearing on the network, Lee Habeeb boldly pointed out “There is no moral equivalence between those who target civilians and use them as human shields and those who target the evil who do such a thing,” and that CNN has gone beyond that, in effect “becoming a public relations outfit for this evil.” I would also note that the network had hired Michael Oren as an analyst on the Middle East. They soon removed him from that position. When he now appears on CNN, which is not so often, they identify him as Israel’s former Ambassador to the United States. In his place, the network has hired the opponent of Israel’s actions, Peter Beinart, the voice of left-leaning Jews who identify with or belong to J-Street.

One CNN reporter, Martin Savidge, even argued that the Hamas tunnels were legitimately used as a weapon of war by Hamas since it used them to hit soldiers, who are “legitimate targets.” He found Hamas’ argument that the tunnels are used to wage war and to not go after civilians “very compelling.” Any media outlet that treats Hamas propaganda as correct, and that views Hamas as an equal power deserving air time with supporters of Israel, or which adopts and echoes its positions,  has adopted the strategy of the Left—that of legitimizing very real and dangerous enemies and portraying them as representatives of the oppressed.

Rest assured that if the Administration responds to reality, and let us say, decides to send military arms to the Kurds so they can have the ability to fight ISIS and not be defeated, the Left’s chorus will howl. Recent polls already have shown that most Democrats have already turned against Israel, and only 31 percent think Israel’s war with Hamas is justified.  Hence the Democrats fear not going along with the Left. Unless they appease the far left in its own ranks, previously mainstream Democrats fear electoral defeat, and hence many will respond positively to far left appeals and protests. The Left’s marginality will not matter- what they think and call for has entered the mainstream.

What Hamas Believes, and Why It Must Be Delegitimized and Fought

Once Israel destroys all the tunnels it can find dug by Hamas and withdraws its troops, demands will again be made on Prime Minister Netanyahu to agree to sit down with Hamas and work out a lasting cease-fire as well as a peace agreement. We know that as of today, Hamas’ leadership has said any such agreement must include the complete opening up of the borders on all sides of Gaza, and a lifting of the blockade imposed by Israel. Hamas’ leadership has made it most clear that they will not agree to any arrangement that does not satisfy all of their demands.

Why does Hamas make it crystal clear that it will not accept any real peace that does not give it what it desires? What else does Hamas want and why is it so determined to destroy Israel? What ideology do its leaders and members subscribe to? These are the questions most of the media fail to ask.

Today, in a pathbreaking and revealing interview, Nic Robertson of CNN sat down in Qatar — Hamas’ protector — with Hamas’ political leader, Khaled Mashaal. Robertson did not mince words, and asked Mashaal the tough questions he obviously did not expect.

Both the Israeli and American narrative, Mashaal said, was a “lie.” Hamas’ leader actually said with a straight face that Hamas did not fire rockets from schools, mosques and other populated areas, and never put the people of Gaza in harm’s way. Israeli rockets, he said, were purposefully aimed at civilian inhabitants. Moreover, he continued to claim that the thousands killed in Gaza by Israel’s forces, when compared to the relatively few Israeli deaths, is proof enough that it is Israel alone that was guilty of intentionally killing civilian non-combatants.

Robertson stood out from all his media counterparts in not letting Mashaal get away with such drivel. He pointed out that if there were not as many Israeli casualties, it was not for the lack of Hamas trying. The “Iron Dome” has saved Israeli lives, and Hamas seeks to fire so many rockets in the hope that some will get by Iron Dome’s capabilities and explode in civilian areas.

Mashaal told Robertson the following:

We are stronger than they are in the justness of our cause. We are the rightful owners of the land, and they are the thieves of the land. We are the victims and they are the murderers. But despite this we might not win a battle or two completely, but at the end we will win the war. Our steadfastness is a victory. To kill their soldiers while they kill our civilians is also a victory for the Palestinian cause and Hamas.

To understand what Hamas is all about, one has to turn to historian Jeffrey Herf’s important article about the organization. Based on a close reading of the Hamas charter, Herf shows that its aims and its ideology and philosophy are “rooted in the totalitarianism and radical anti-Semitism that has undergirded Islamism since its rise in the 1930s and 1940s.”  This truth, he correctly writes, is one “unnoticed by reporters, editors, and pundits who race to comment on Hamas’ war with Israel.”