23rd August 2010, 11:42 am by Stan
Pamela Geller, the once-obscure right-wing blogger known for peddling hateful, wildly over-the-top rhetoric (she once claimed that Barack Obama was the bastard stepchild of Malcom X) and for pulling stunts like taping a harangue against Muslims while clad in a bikini, has parlayed the anti-mosque hysteria sweeping across America into mainstream media attention just in time to promote her new book…
FULL
Curt:
The article compares Pamela mit Joe. I think that a better comparison is mit the Know Nothing Party of the 19th Century.
23 August 2010, 12:56 pmStan:
Here’s Glenn Greenwald’s fine short piece, and a creepy video:
FULL
23 August 2010, 3:22 pmMichael Anderson:
Here is an interesting piece from Foreign Policy In Focus, on “law” in America. The comparison to the Roman rule of law is inescapable, and this whole mosque business makes me think of when the Romans made Christianity the state religion—banishing all others…
Can We Talk?
Law became sexy in the mid-1980s. I still find this a bewildering transformation in American society. At the time, I thought that there could be nothing quite so boring as a court case or a legal brief. But then the TV show L.A. Law debuted in 1986, and lawyers never looked so good. The following year, Scott Turow published Presumed Innocent, and several years after that John Grisham brought out his second novel, The Firm. U.S. publishing was never the same.
Since then, law has thoroughly permeated our popular culture.. But I wonder whether it has also taken over the way we think. I’m not talking about the how litigious we are in the United States. I’m talking about how we talk.
In the courtroom, the truth is arrived at in an adversarial manner. There are two sides. They present their cases. They examine and cross-examine. They challenge and dispute and argue. And then the judge or the jury decides which side wins. The prosecutor and the defense don’t help each other. They don’t try to arrive at the truth together. They are matter and anti-matter – and if the two sides were to somehow touch, the legal system would explode. There are other models present – the consensus of the jury, the more congenial atmosphere of alternative dispute resolution. But the essential confrontation between two frequently irreconcilable versions of the truth has had a powerful influence over the way we interact.
The controversy du jour is whether an Islamic cultural center should be built a couple blocks from the former site of the World Trade Center in New York City. One side says that such a building would desecrate the memory of those who died on 9/11. The other side says that freedom of religion is a core value in this country. For me, the issue is a no-brainer. The center promotes inter-religious and intercultural dialogue, which is precisely what we need more of to prevent future attacks. As Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) rightly points out, “I appreciate the depth of emotions at play, but respectfully suggest that the presence of a mosque is only inappropriate near ground zero if we unfairly associate Muslim Americans with the atrocities of the foreign al-Qaida terrorists who attacked our nation.” The opponents of the center – with their “Islam is the enemy” posters – are as fundamentalist in their outlook as the jihadists they oppose.
Can I persuade the other side of my views? Can they convince me? We are as far apart as prosecution and defense.
“What’s the likelihood of changing anyone’s opinion, especially a couple of strangers?” David Sedaris asks in a recent New Yorker piece. “If my own little mind is nailed shut, why wouldn’t theirs be?” Why stop at strangers? Really, what’s the likelihood of changing the opinions of our friends or our families? In America, we put politics into the same category as religion and sex: conversation stoppers. Because we’re not in the habit of conversing reasonably on these topics, they burst out of us in uncontrolled spasms, as repressed urges do in our dreams and nightmares.
In an intriguing serendipity, the Sedaris article appears a few pages away from George Packer’s in-depth article on the deterioration of our country’s premier talking shop: the Senate. Democrats and Republicans no longer talk to one another, professionally or casually. The same Jeff Merkley was shocked to discover the lack of debate across party lines. “The amount of real deliberation, in terms of exchange of ideas, is so limited,” he says. Perhaps the Senate has simply become more honest, since Washington has always been more about power than ideas.
Our two-party system – and the red state/blue state divisions that it engendered – looks more and more like a divided courtroom. There are only two political positions; third parties have no place in the system. Bipartisanship, moreover, has become an endangered species. I don’t want to romanticize any golden age of bipartisanship. We had a bipartisan consensus on invading Iraq, supporting Israel right or wrong, and many other misguided foreign policies. I don’t want a stifling consensus to replace a sterile confrontation. I want to see informed discussion on how we can deal with the obvious problems the country faces: the economic crisis, the disastrous wars, the impending energy-environmental apocalypse. Instead, we have flame and counter-flame about the mosque at ground zero that is neither a mosque nor at ground zero.
In his novel The Dean’s December, Saul Bellow writes: “[Alexis de] Tocqueville was dead right when he said that Americans (democrats everywhere) had no aptitude for conversation, they lectured. Bombast, clichés, chewed-up newsprint, naturally made the other party tune out.” In the court room, the two sides know that at least they have an audience. But in all the invective that we unleash on ourselves – and I am part of this incessant outpouring of opinion – we are either preaching to the choir or reaching deaf ears. Unlike de Tocqueville, I believe that democracy depends on political conversations.. We get lots of talk – on talk radio, on TV, in the halls of Congress, at our dining room tables – but not a lot of the authentic back-and-forth.
In the 1960s, the slogan was “tune in, turn on, drop out.” Nearly a half-century later, in the angrier times in which we live, we’re more likely to embrace the slogan “tune out, turn off, drop dead.”
24 August 2010, 1:18 pmMichael Anderson:
@ Stan:
A damn creepy video indeed. I take comport in Mencken at this time, who said that a human with a shred of sense stays away from a mob.
24 August 2010, 1:27 pmm.c.:
I bet Geller & Robert Spencer have big money backers who let these two clowns do some of their dirty work. Even Mark Potok has said she’s out of bounds. But the dog whistles continue…. In any other land, they would be in some mental facility.
26 August 2010, 12:21 pmVJP:
We’re reliving history, just substitute a different country and a religion.
29 August 2010, 2:39 pmm.c.:
It used to be the fenians, then the anarchists, then the fascists, then the communists, then the ….
30 August 2010, 2:24 pmHenry:
The State and Local Bases of Zionist Power in America
By James Petras Ph.D. –
September 01, 2010 “Information Clearing House” — -Any serious effort to understand the extraordinary influence of the Zionist power configuration over US foreign policy must examine the presence of key operatives in strategic positions in the government and the activities of local Zionist organizations affiliated with mainstream Jewish organizations and religious orders.
There are at least 52 major American Jewish organizations actively engaged in promoting Israel’s foreign policy, economic and technological agenda in the US (see the appendix). The grassroots membership ranges from several hundred thousand militants in the Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA) to one hundred thousand wealthy contributors, activists and power brokers in the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). In addition scores of propaganda mills, dubbed think tanks, have been established by million dollar grants from billionaire Zionists including the Brookings Institute (Haim Saban) and the Hudson Institute among others. Scores of Zionist funded political action committees (PAC) have intervened in all national and regional elections, controlling nominations and influencing election outcomes. Publishing houses, including university presses have been literally taken over by Zionist zealots, the most egregious example being Yale University, which publishes the most unbalanced tracts parroting Zionist parodies of Jewish history (Financial Times book review section August 28/29 2010). New heavily funded Zionist projects designed to capture young Jews and turn them into instruments of Israeli foreign policy includes “Taglit-Birthright” which has spent over $250 million dollars over the past decade sending over a quarter-million Jews (between 18-26) to Israel for 10 days of intense brainwashing (Boston Globe August 26, 2010). Jewish billionaires and the Israeli state foot the bill. The students are subject to a heavy dose of Israeli style militarism as they are accompanied by Israeli soldiers as part of their indoctrination; at no point do they visit the West Bank, Gaza or East Jerusalem (Boston Globe August 26, 2010). They are urged to become dual citizens and even encouraged to serve in the Israeli armed forces. In summary the 52 member organizations of the Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations which we discuss are only the tip of the iceberg of the Zionist Power Configuration: taken together with the PACs, the propaganda mills, the commercial and University presses and mass media we have a matrix of power for understanding the tremendous influence they have on US foreign and domestic policy as it affects Israel and US Zionism.
[...]
The danger is that the US Zionist support for the ultra-rightist and racist regime in Israel is leading them to join forces with the far right in the US. Today Jewish and Christian Manhattan rednecks are fermenting mass Islamic hatred (the so called “Mosque controversy”) as a distraction from the economic crises and rising unemployment. Zionist promotion of mass Islamofobia, so near to Wall Street, where many of their fat cats who profit from plundering the assets of America operate, is a dangerous game. If the same enraged masses turn their eyes upward toward the wealthy and powerful instead of downward to blacks and Muslims, some unpleasant and unanticipated surprises might rebound against, not only Israel’s operatives, but all those wrongly identified as related to a misconstrued Jewish Motherland.
More:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article26283.htm
1 September 2010, 4:53 pm