President Obama in Israel

If you can overlook Chuck Todd's stupid questions - and of course we can, and should - this has been a fantastic historical trip for President Obama. And goodness knows it has been more successful than Mitt's #Romneyshambles when he tried to declare war on Iran even though he held no elected office and was just a guy from Michigan.

This is a speech of hope. Blessed are the Peacemakers, as Jesus said. I am so proud today I voted for this President.
Full Speech Transcript Here on Daily Beast

First, peace is necessary. Indeed, it is the only path to true security. You can be the generation that permanently secures the Zionist dream, or you can face a growing challenge to its future. Given the demographics west of the Jordan River, the only way for Israel to endure and thrive as a Jewish and democratic state is through the realization of an independent and viable Palestine. Given the frustration in the international community, Israel must reverse an undertow of isolation. And given the march of technology, the only way to truly protect the Israeli people is through the absence of war – because no wall is high enough, and no Iron Dome is strong enough, to stop every enemy from inflicting harm.

This truth is more pronounced given the changes sweeping the Arab World. I recognize that with the uncertainty in the region – people in the streets, changes in leadership, the rise of non-secular parties in politics –it is tempting to turn inward. But this is precisely the time to respond to the wave of revolution with a resolve for peace. As more governments respond to popular will, the days when Israel could seek peace with a handful of autocratic leaders are over. Peace must be made among peoples, not just governments. No one step can change overnight what lies in the hearts and minds of millions. But progress with the Palestinians is a powerful way to begin, while sidelining extremists who thrive on conflict and division.

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Israel Hammers Gaza

It seems to me that Israel Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu's only skill is to make war instead of peace. And unfortunately the people in Gaza are sitting ducks, and when they fight back he blames them and punishes them even more. Now the violence is spreading into Syria and Egypt, which is dangerous. Interestingly, Reuters is reporting a massive hacking attack directed at the Israeli Government.

NBC News Story

Updated at 5:14 p.m. ET: TEL AVIV, Israel - Israel was prepared to substantially broaden its operation in the Gaza strip, the country's prime minister said on Sunday as its military planes continued to bomb targets in Gaza City.

"The Israel Defense Forces have attacked more than 1,000 terror targets in the Gaza Strip," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at a cabinet meeting. "We are exacting a heavy price from Hamas and the terrorist organizations and the Israel Defense Forces are prepared for a significant expansion of the operation."

. . . Meanwhile, President Barack Obama said he fully supported Israel's right to defend itself but cautioned against a ground offensive.

"If this can be accomplished without a ramping up of military activity in Gaza, that is preferable," Obama said. "That's not just preferable for the people of Gaza, it's also preferable for Israelis because if Israeli troops are in Gaza they're much more at risk of incurring fatalities or being wounded."

Reuters

More than 44 million hacking attempts have been made on Israeli government web sites since Wednesday when Israel began its Gaza air strikes, the government said on Sunday. Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz said just one hacking attempt was successful on a site he did not want to name, but it was up and running after 10 minutes of downtime.

Typically, there are a few hundred hacking attempts a day on Israeli sites, the ministry said. Attempts on defence-related sites have been the highest, while 10 million attempts have been made on the site of Israel's president, 7 million on the Foreign Ministry and 3 million on the site of the prime minister.

A ministry spokesman said while the attacks have come from around the world, most have been from Israel and the Palestinian territories.

"The ministry's computer division will continue to block the millions of cyber attacks," Steinitz said. "We are enjoying the fruits of our investment in recent years in developing computerized defence systems." Steinitz has instructed his ministry to operate in emergency mode to counter attempts to undermine government sites.

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Romney on Palestine: Apartheid Better than Peace

Mother Jones has posted another portion of the "Secret Video." This time Mitt talks to his wealthy donors about Israel and the Palestinian Problem, but also get other glimpses into his foreign policy agenda. Perhaps this is what he talked about with his old friend Bibi Netanyahu on his trip to Israel?

From Mother Jones

He paints Obama as "naive" on foreign policy and someone who gets by merely on charm alone. Romney misses the intense irony of this statement, coming from someone who bungled his European trip so badly and insulted our closest and most easily charmed ally, Great Britain. Obama never did that, LOL. Note: My daughter just pointed out to me that Romney made these statements in May, before his ill-fated European Tour. Little did he know just how naive he was.

The president's foreign policy, in my opinion, is formed in part by a perception he has that his magnetism, and his charm, and his persuasiveness is so compelling that he can sit down with people like Putin and Chávez and Ahmadinejad, and that they'll find that we're such wonderful people that they'll go on with us, and they'll stop doing bad things. And it's an extraordinarily naive perception.

He also rambles on about Iran again. I think he is fixated.

If I were Iran, if I were Iran—a crazed fanatic, I'd say let's get a little fissile material to Hezbollah, have them carry it to Chicago or some other place, and then if anything goes wrong, or America starts acting up, we'll just say, "Guess what? Unless you stand down, why, we're going to let off a dirty bomb." I mean this is where we have—where America could be held up and blackmailed by Iran, by the mullahs, by crazy people. So we really don't have any option but to keep Iran from having a nuclear weapon.

Good idea - a man who wants to be President of the U.S. suggesting that the Iranians should attack Chicago, which also happens to be Obama's hometown. It was a sure bet he wasn't going to say "Boston."

The other side of the West Bank, the other side of what would be this new Palestinian state would either be Syria at one point, or Jordan. And of course the Iranians would want to do through the West Bank exactly what they did through Lebanon, what they did near Gaza. Which is that the Iranians would want to bring missiles and armament into the West Bank and potentially threaten Israel. So Israel of course would have to say, "That can't happen. We've got to keep the Iranians from bringing weaponry into the West Bank." Well, that means that—who? The Israelis are going to patrol the border between Jordan, Syria, and this new Palestinian nation? Well, the Palestinians would say, "Uh, no way! We're an independent country. You can't, you know, guard our border with other Arab nations."

And now how about the airport? How about flying into this Palestinian nation? Are we gonna allow military aircraft to come in and weaponry to come in? And if not, who's going to keep it from coming in? Well, the Israelis. Well, the Palestinians are gonna say, "We're not an independent nation if Israel is able to come in and tell us what can land in our airport." These are problems—these are very hard to solve, all right?

And I look at the Palestinians not wanting to see peace anyway, for political purposes, committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel, and these thorny issues, and I say, "There's just no way." And so what you do is you say, "You move things along the best way you can." You hope for some degree of stability, but you recognize that this is going to remain an unsolved problem.

More at Mother Jones

Guns, Germs, Steel and Mitt Romney

Today there's a brouhaha over the anthropological bestseller called Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond. Diamond's theory is that geography is destiny insofar that latitude, land fertility, access to the ocean, and quality of food have always made some civilizations possible, and some cultures more prosperous.
For an Overview: See PBS

This is about Mitt Romney relying too much on the advice of his Neocon handlers. It's about wrong-headed thinking that could lead to World War Three. It's about a candidate thinking he's really really smart when he keeps displaying stark evidence that he isn't. And it's about an author who wants to distance himself as fast as possible from Mitt Romney.

Romney mentioned Diamond's book in his Jerusalem speech this week. In an essay on Daily Kos, Meteor Blades points out that the "ultrahawkish senior foreign policy adviser Dan Senor" is probably the member of Romney's camp who gave him the literary name to drop.

From the speech:

I noted that part of my interest when I used to be in the world of business is I would travel to different countries was to understand why there were such enormous disparities in the economic success of various countries. I read a number of books on the topic. One, that is widely acclaimed, is by someone named Jared Diamond called Guns, Germs and Steel, which basically says the physical characteristics of the land account for the differences in the success of the people that live there. There is iron ore on the land and so forth.

Then later in the speech, Romney seemed to tie Guns, Germs and Steel to another book called The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor by David Landes, and these statements put Romney in hot water with the Palestinians when he said this in Jerusalem:

He says if you can learn anything from the economic history of the world, it's this: culture makes all the difference. Culture makes all the difference. And as I come here and I look out over this city and consider the accomplishments of the people of this nation, I recognize the power of at least culture and a few other things.
As you come here and you see the GDP per capita, for instance, in Israel which is about $21,000 dollars, and compare that with the GDP per capita just across the areas managed by the Palestinian authority, which is more like $10,000 per capita, you notice such a dramatically stark difference in economic vitality

Notice that Romney mentioned "several books" and implied that one book was somehow lending creedence to the other and to his hypothesis about why Palestinians are not able to make as much money as the Israelis.


Because of those remarks, Palestinian negotiator Sa'eb Erekat responded called Romney a racist.
via CNN:

This man, before he came here, he should have got some education about Israelis, Palestinians, and the region. . . . The Romney statements on Jerusalem and the racist statements about the Israeli culture being superior to the Palestinian culture reflect someone who needs to be educated, who needs knowledge. His statements are serving those extremists in the region now . . .

Romney seems to miss the rich irony that the Jews were a people without a country after World War II, and that's why they went to fight in Palestine. In Biblical times, the Jews were enslaved to the Babylonians, then the Egyptians, then Greeks and Romans, before being denounced for centuries by the Catholic Church,. By Romney's hypothesis, they were in the same position as the Palestinians throughout history, therefore all their "cultural values" were somehow inferior, which is ridiculous, since those same values are praised today as successful and part of the "Judeo-Christian" heritage of the West. I honestly don't want to know what Romney thinks of the Holocaust - good grief.

While Guns, Germs, and Steel is not my favorite book, and seems to overstate the obvious point -  that a successful culture needs location, location, location - for Romney to mention the book in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was misguided and just plain weird.

If Romney's handlers had bothered to read the introduction to the book, they would have noticed that the author was careful not making judgments about one people over another, one culture over another. He points out that all great civilizations have influences from other cultures. Hunters/Gatherers are no less "successful" than civilized peoples in Western Europe.

From page 8 of the Prologue:
"My motive for investigating these geographic differences in human societies is not to celebrate one type of society over another but simply to understand what happened in history."
~ author Jared Diamond

Now the author has written a OP-Ed in the New York Times in which he sounds like the Anti-Romney and makes it clear he did not approve of Romney's Israel speech, or of Romney as a candidate:

Romney Hasn’t Done His Homework
. . . It is not true that my book “Guns, Germs and Steel,” as Mr. Romney described it in a speech in Jerusalem, “basically says the physical characteristics of the land account for the differences in the success of the people that live there. There is iron ore on the land and so forth.”

That is so different from what my book actually says that I have to doubt whether Mr. Romney read it. My focus was mostly on biological features, like plant and animal species, and among physical characteristics, the ones I mentioned were continents’ sizes and shapes and relative isolation. I said nothing about iron ore which is so widespread that its distribution has had little effect on the different successes of different peoples. (As I learned this week, Mr. Romney also mischaracterized my book in his memoir, “No Apology: Believe in America.”)

. . . Can we assume that the United States, blessed with temperate location and seacoasts and navigable rivers, will remain rich forever, while tropical or landlocked countries are doomed to eternal poverty?

Of course not.

. . . Our geography won’t keep us rich and powerful if we can’t get a good education, can’t afford health care and can’t count on our hard work’s being rewarded by good jobs and rising incomes.

Here's the excerpt from Mitt Romney's book No Apology: The Case for American Greatness, in which he misrepresents Diamond's thesis, via AtlanticWire. There's something rather odd the way Romney goes from "Iron Curtain" to "Weapons" of Iron Ore to describe why some cultures are thriving while some are not. It's a word association worthy of Sarah Palin for sure. (I realize the type is small to fit the page, so zoom in with CTRL+ or click the pictures to see a larger view).

Palestinians are "Those People" to Romney

We would think that Mitt Romney could hide his class consciousness for just a little while on a foreign policy trip in the most volatile area of the world.

Nahhhhh . . . he just can't do it. His sense of "us" versus "them" is just too ingrained. There's always the "in group" and the "out group," very cut and dried to him, as when he attacked another student with long hair who "didn't look right" in his old school. I'm sure this comes from his wealthy upbringing, and perhaps his sense of moral righteousness as a Mormon. He seems to believe, and it is shared with many Evangelicals, that the Jewish state is so important to the fulfilling of some Biblical prophecy that they should get whatever they want. And Palestine is in the way of that prophecy, so they don't matter.  Therefore, Romney feels he can diss the Palestinians in favor of his rich Jewish donors and God will smile down on him and make him President of the United States. *gag*

Here is the worst part of his Jerusalem speech, in which is compares the West Bank to Mexico.

As you come here and you see the GDP [gross domestic product] per capita, for instance, in Israel which is about $21,000, and compare that with the GDP per capita just across the areas managed by the Palestinian Authority, which is more like $10,000 per capita, you notice such a dramatically stark difference in economic vitality." Mr. Romney told a group of donors gathered at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. He added: "And that is also between other countries that are near or next to each other: Chile and Ecuador, Mexico and the United States

But wait, is Mexico an occupied country? They have problems, yes, but mostly of their own making. No one is bombing Mexico or keeping citizens from looking for jobs in Mexico City.

And then after bringing up this volatile issue in his Israeli speech, today Romney told CNN that "the issue of settlements is something which should be discussed in private by the American president and our allies."

Okay, that sounds familiar, doesn't it?  Romney once again mentions that "quiet room" he referenced once before when, not surprisingly, he was discussing inequality between two groups - rich and poor Americans. I think these are code words - "private" and "quiet" - that show he is embarrassed by inequality and injustice, but the rich just don't speak of such things, else they might have to feel guilty about their vast wealth, and that is an unacceptable idea.  He doesn't have much empathy for those "beneath" his status, but maybe he has learned over the years that he lacks that human feeling that would connect him as a human. This is why some refer to him as "Romneybot" - something is missing in the emotional intelligence department.

January 2012, from the Matt Lauer Today Show Interview:

I think it's about envy," Romney replied. "I think it's about class warfare. I think when you have a president encouraging the idea of dividing America based on 99 percent vs. 1 percent, and those people who've been most successful will be in the 1 percent, you've opened up a whole new wave of approach in this country which is entirely inconsistent with the concept of one nation under God.

. . . Lauer asked, "Are there no fair questions about the distribution of wealth without it being seen as envy, though?"

"You know I think it's fine to talk about those things in quiet rooms," Romney said. "But the president has made this part of his campaign rally. Everywhere he goes we hear him talking about millionaires and billionaires and executives and Wall Street. It's a very envy-oriented, attack-oriented approach."

If Romney likes the "quiet room" approach so much, why is out there at the Wailing Wall making speeches about Israel without once mentioning the plight of Palestine? Why is it "class warfare" when Obama points out inequality, but off-limits to question when Romney compares the Palestinians and the Israelis?

Is he implying that all the problems of the Middle East are economic, and that perhaps the Palestinians are just envious? That's the way Romney's mind seems to work, with money and privilege being the only goals people aspire to in his private world.  What about just having enough to take care of your children? What about keeping your ancestral land?

He loves to invoke all that weight of the Holy Bible, plus the Book of Mormon in a roundabout way, but forgets that the Palestinians are vastly more connected to Jerusalem than his mythical Lost Tribe of Israel here in the United States.  I think most people who comment on Romney are missing that crucial point - Romney thinks he and his wife have more "divine right" to be there in Jerusalem than a people who have lived there for thousands of years.

Romney is just way out of his depth on the international stage, and sounds more like Sarah *doofus* Palin every day.

The White House had this to say through Deputy Press Secretary, Josh Earnest, via MSNBC:

"One of the challenges of being an actor on the international stage, particularly when you’re traveling to such a sensitive part of the world, is that your comments are very closely scrutinized for meaning, for nuance, for motivation," Earnest said, adding, "and it is clear that there are some people who have taken a look at those comments and are scratching their heads a little bit.”
When pressed, Earnest stopped short of elaborating on the larger implications of Romney’s comments.
“I would leave it to Gov. Romney to explain them, to the extent that there’s some measure of confusion."

You can say that again! Confusion reigns, although spokesperson Andrea Saul says Romney's words "grossly mischaracterized" although it's difficult to see just how Romney was misunderstood. Perhaps if the Romney advisers were doing a better job of helping their guy choose his words more carefully, and avoid all these racist dog whistles, everything would make more sense.

Mr. Romney, please go into a "quiet room" and think about it!

Wall Street Journal: Romney Irks Palestinians

Mr. Romney's figures Monday were inaccurate and underestimated the actual GDP gap between the economies. Per capita GDP stood at $31,400 for Israel last year, while Palestinians' per capita GDP was $1,500 in 2010, according to an April 2012 World Bank report, which attributed the figure to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.

Palestinians also rejected the comparison as inappropriate, pointing out their lack of sovereignty and the limitations enforced by Israeli military authorities.

"If he checked his facts, he would know why the Palestinians actually have to build an economy when they have no freedom of movement, no human rights, no fundamental freedoms," said Hanan Ashrawi, a Palestinian legislator and a top official in the Palestine Liberation Organization. "We can't even control our natural resources, including our human resources; and then he compares us to our occupiers?"