I confess that it is incongruous for a peace theorist to recommend that people go to see a flag-waving war movie. The contradictions of this notwithstanding, I hope that people will go to see Red Tails, the movie about the Tuskegee Airmen produced by George Lucas and directed by Anthony Hemingway. I urge people to see the movie so that it will make money and thereby take away one Hollywood excuse for why it does not make more movies about African-American heroes and sheroes. If this movie makes money, perhaps it will be easier to get big-screen movies or television movies or mini-series made about people such as African-American diplomat Ralph Bunch or activist and educator Mary McLeod Bethune and others.

George Lucas spoke with Jon Stewart about the difficulty in getting Red Tails made. African-Americans are supporting the movie; however, this is an important movie for everyone to support.

First, I say and say again that war is the worst crime that humanity perpetuates against itself. Mahatma Gandhi was correct when he called war organized murder. Former French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin was also right when he said “war is always the sanction of failure.” When the first projectile flies, we see a failure of imagination, communication and diplomacy. Just peace theory hopes to make the principles of just peace accepted universal principles that will guide the moral thinking and political commitments of people across the globe.

When people ask me the wolf at the door question – what does the world do with people such as Hitler and regimes such as the National Socialists in Germany when they threaten the world’s security? – I say that peacemaking is a day to day work and that the logic of peace ought to make the logic of war unthinkable. We stop the wolf before he gets to the door. The world is not there yet.

New Gingrich Speaking at CPAC 2011. Flicker / Gage Skidmore

A recent political debacle over Obama’s recess appointments raises a fascinating constitutional question and highlights the troubling, aggressive relationship that has developed between the President and Congressional Republicans. This case offers an opportunity to also examine the behavior of Congressional Republicans and the party’s Presidential candidates.

When I first heard about Congress adding a provision to a Defense Authorization bill that would allow for the U.S. MILITARY to arrest and indefinitely detain American citizens, without trial, just for being suspected of supporting anyone who was “engaged in hostilities against the United States,” I assumed it was just the work of some whacky right-winger who knew that the language didn’t have a chance of surviving the first round of mark-ups in conference committee. When the Senate and House overwhelmingly voted for the bill, with the President signing it in the dead of night when no one was looking, it struck me that something very strange was happening, and so far, no one has offered a serious explanation of why this bill came to be and is now law.

How has it come to this? How is it possible that President Obama will be the one to codify, for the first time since the McCarthy era, the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens?

I will get to the answer. However, first, let me defend the title of this post by making clear that the revised National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) set to be signed by Obama – called “an astonishing attack on our civil liberties” by Sam Seder – indeed legislatively grants the U.S. military the authority to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens on American soil without a trial or charge.

While this codified detention authority is intended to be used on terror suspects, the categories of those who can be detained are so slippery and amorphous that they could, in the future, be potentially applied to anyone.

Donny Shaw at OpenCongress offers an analysis I wholly support:

The language of the bill authorizes indefinite military detention without trial for anyone who has “substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners.” The key phrases there – “substantial support,” “associated forces,” “hostilities” – lay the groundwork for the military’s detention power to be extended beyond al-Qaeda and the Taliban to anyone providing support for potentially any group that is hostile towards the U.S., domestic or abroad. For example, if a lone-wolf domestic terrorist claimed allegiance to an activist group or cause, nothing in this prevents the military from labeling the entire group “hostile” and using this power to detain them without trial. And the consistent over reactions to social uprisings of the increasingly militarized police forces across the U.S. does not help assuage concerns that this language could be used to justify cracking down on legitimate, constitutionally protected political action.

UNESCO's headquarters in Paris, where the Palestinians were granted full membership on Monday, allowing them to register important sites on the World Heritage List. Photo by Matthias Ripp.

On Monday, the United States earned two dubious distinctions. First, it became one of only 14 nations (out of 173) to vote against Palestinian admission into UNESCO – the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Second, it became one of only two nations (Canada being the other) to vindictively punish UNESCO for admitting Palestine as a full member by immediately cutting off U.S. funding, which comprises 22 percent of the organization’s budget, or $70 million annually.

This funding cut was made due to U.S. legislation, over 15 years old, mandating a “complete cutoff of American financing to any United Nations agency that accepts the Palestinians as a full member.” However, those who have attempted to defend America’s move based upon a 15-year-old legal trigger – particularly when new legislation can always be written – fail to acknowledge the damage America is inflicting upon itself as it presses forward with an unbalanced foreign policy approach via-a-vis the Israelis and Palestinians.

As Daniel Levy notes in Foreign Policy:

America’s objections to the Palestinian move ring hollow across much of the world, and especially the strategically vital Middle East region. Its withholding of UN payments…is nothing short of a combination of the absurd and the vindictive. As former Senator Tim Wirth has pointed out this will be sapping to America’s soft power capacity. And if it continues, there may be more practical consequences, for instance, in regards to loss of American influence at the International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Intellectual Property Organization.

A painting on an outer wall of the former U.S. embassy in Tehran. Flickr / pooyan

On October 11 U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced that an Iranian plot to assassinate a Saudi Arabian foreign minister had been broken up by an undercover Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent. According to the complaint, an American-Iranian tried to hire a Mexican drug cartel on behalf of Iran’s Quds Force to assassinate a Saudi Arabian diplomat in Washington D.C. As Hillary Clinton said, “You can’t make this stuff up.”

The question is, did the government actually make it up?

Despite Obama’s claim to have secret irrefutable evidence supporting the accusations, his administration has not made this evidence public. Thus, it is too early to pass judgment on the accuracy of the complaint and the truth of the accusation.

While it may sound conspiratorial to suggest that the Obama administration is fabricating intelligence to achieve some ulterior motive, the quality of available evidence is not very persuasive. It is particularly reasonable and perhaps even prudent to reserve judgment in light of U.S. intelligence failures in the past. The accusation is convenient for the administration’s efforts to isolate Iran internationally and many Americans would believe it – some because they want to – even if there isn’t proof. Still, it seems unlikely that the Obama administration will be able to successfully leverage these accusations to achieve increased international support for sanctions against Iran, as Biden suggested would occur, without more definitive evidence.

President Lyndon Johnson meets with Israeli Ambassador Abba Eban on May 26, 1967. / White House Press Office

Obama sincerely engaged the Israeli-Palestinian peace process early in his term, but his latest speech at the United Nations suggests that he is acquiescing to Israeli interests. There is rich precedence for Obama’s behavior starting in June 1967, when Israel took its current form.

In declassified recordings throughout the 1967 Israeli-Arab conflict, President Johnson balances contradictory foreign and domestic pressures. This struggle is reflected in his five principles for peace introduced at the United Nations. The first is recognizing Israel. The fifth principal, territorial integrity, receives particular attention from Arab leaders, but Israeli interests force Johnson to allow for a Jerusalem exception. He suggests that Israel is not after Egyptian and Syrian territory, but “on Jordan, they hope that’s negotiable. This little area [Jerusalem]….I think that we have some chance on it.” Dean Rusk warned Abba Eban that mishandling Jerusalem could create “strong anti-Israel feeling in the United States,” but Johnson seemed more concerned about a pro-Israel backlash and didn’t press the issue.
Johnson ultimately succumbed to congressional pressure by authorizing the largest arms deal to Israel at that time, initiating what has become emblematic of the U.S.-Israeli relationship. Obama must deconstruct this historic dynamic and ask himself: is this really in our best interest?

Source: David Johnson, Robert. “Lyndon Johnson and Israel: The Secret Presidential Recordings.” Tel Aviv University, July 2008.

by Stephen Zunes

During the Bush administration, I wrote more than a dozen annotated critiques of presidential speeches. I have refrained from doing so under President Barack Obama, however, because – despite a number of disappointments with his administration’s policies — I found his speeches to be relatively reasonable. Although his September 21 address before the UN General Assembly contained a number of positive elements, in many ways it also contained many of the same kind of duplicitous and misleading statements one would have expected from his predecessor. Below are some excerpts, followed by my comments.

On Palestinian Statehood and Middle East Peace:

Obama at the U.N.

One year ago, I stood at this podium and I called for an independent Palestine. I believed then, and I believe now, that the Palestinian people deserve a state of their own. But what I also said is that a genuine peace can only be realized between the Israelis and the Palestinians themselves. One year later, despite extensive efforts by America and others, the parties have not bridged their differences… It’s well known to all of us here. Israelis must know that any agreement provides assurances for their security. Palestinians deserve to know the territorial basis of their state.

Obama’s stated support for the establishment of a Palestinian state based roughly on Israel’s pre-1967 borders is far more explicit than that of any previous president, subjecting him to harsh criticism from both Republicans as well as a number of Congressional Democrats. However, given that the Palestine Authority has already “provided assurances” for Israel’s security by agreeing to, as part of a final peace settlement,an internationally supervised disarming of any and all irregular militias, a demilitarization of their state, and the banning of hostile forces from their territories, only to be met by Netanyahu’s continued refusal to withdraw from the occupied territories, it raises questions as to why Obama implied that both sides needed to “bridge their differences.”

by Richard Wolf

Congressman Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference 2011 in Washington, DC. Ryan, among other Republicans, has described Obama's deficit reduction plan as "class warfare." (Photo: Gage Skidmore)

Republicans and conservatives have done us a service by describing federal policies in terms of “class war.” But by applying the term only to Obama’s latest proposals to raise taxes on the rich, they have it all backward and upside down. The last 50 years have indeed seen continuous class warfare in and over federal economic policies.

But it was a war waged chiefly by business and conservatives. They won, as we show below, and the mass of middle-income and poor Americans lost. Obama’s modest proposal for tax increases on the rich does not begin a class war. On the contrary, it is a small, modest effort to reduce the other side’s class war victories.

Big business and conservatives have worked to undo the regulations and taxes imposed on them in the wake of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Then, an upsurge in labor union organization (the Congress of Industrial Organizations sweep across basic US industries) and in membership in both the socialist and communist parties gave Franklin Delano Roosevelt the support and the pressure to tax business and the rich. He took their money to pay for the massive federal hiring program (11 million federal jobs filled between 1934 and 1941) and to start the Social Security Administration etc. He regulated their business activities to try to prevent devastating capitalist depressions from recurring in the nation’s future.

Since the end of the Great Depression – and especially since the 1970s – the class warfare waged by business and its allies (most conservatives in both parties) was successful. For example, at the end of World War II, for every dollar Washington raised in taxes on individuals, it raised $1.50 in taxes on business profits. In contrast, today, for every dollar Washington gets in taxes on individuals, it gets 25 cents in taxes on business. Business and its allies successfully shifted most of its federal tax burden onto individuals.

As we often do in the magazine, the website, and in our emails, here are responses you are unlikely to read or hear or see in the mass media to the President of Palestine Abbas and the Prime Minister of Israel Netanyahu in relationship to what they have been doing at the U.N. Our first respondent is a Palestinian activist in Ramallah, the second a Jewish columnist in NYC.

Here is the first response from Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh, originally posted on his blog:

Kudos Mr. Abbas

Mahmoud Abbas gave a brilliant speech at the United Nations, getting rounds of applause from most of the representatives. I think it demonstrated clearly and unambiguously that the Palestinian leadership has been “unreasonably reasonable” and has instead seen the hopes of peace and of millions of Palestinians suffering for 63 years dashed on the rock of Israeli expansionist, colonial, and apartheid policies. He explained that Israel has been taking one unilateral action after another each resulting in more pain and suffering for our people. Going to the UN, he explained is putting things back where the problems started (he did not use the last two words but I do). He said a word that I think he should defend strongly that no person or country with an iota of logic or conscience should reject the Palestinian state membership in the UN or its formation in the 22% of historic Palestine that is the West Bank and Gaza. I think he took a courageous step and gave a good performance. Now we here on the ground in Palestine hope and will push for additional follow-up steps. From our own perspective, three things are critical:

truthout.org

Subscribers to Tikkun and Members of NSP are mostly united in strong criticism of Obama’s failures–failures due NOT solely to the obstruction of Republicans and his own conservatives in the Democratic Party, but to his failure to articulate and fight for a larger vision. Had he done so, a growing number of liberals and progressives agree, the American people might have responded enthusiastically. They don’t blame him for failing to produce, they blame him for failing to fight for what he claimed to believe in. Last week, for example, with the nation hoping to hear a visionary economic plan, instead heard a wimpy and ineffective one–instead of the New New Deal for a Caring Society that we and many others have been advocating. Of course it would be blocked by the Republicans, but imagine how different people in the US would have felt if they felt that there was someone championing a New New Deal that would among other things spend enough money to put everyone back to work who wants to work!!! Just having that alternative as something to fight for would have electrified the country and finally defined Obama in a winnable way.

An anguished confession by “President Baruch O Bema,” as channeled through Phil Wolfson:

When I took office, I had convinced many of you that I would be honest, forthright, for democracy for all, against big corporate and financial interests and would champion an economic, emotional, cultural and political resurgence and rectification after the greed and near fascism of the Bush years. Many of you thought I would bring honesty back to politics and that I was made of other stuff — good stuff. There was great enthusiasm for my administration and me and I made promises, even vows, that my presidency would be different and usher in a new era of intelligence, capability, and justice. I had spoken clearly and frequently about the environmental crisis, about international corporatism’s grip on the political system, about the need for campaign finance reform.

I have to confess: I was posturing to get elected and had no intention of doing anything but supporting the system as it was, promoting U.S. imperial ambitions abroad, supporting global finance corporatism and making sure that the rich folks I truly admired and who helped me out, many of them information age capitalists, would have their interests served. So here we are, approaching three years into my term and things are a wreck. I have to come clean.

Oy, the war makers are now pretending to be ending the war. But they are not doing so.

Credit: Truthout.org.

How long will we tolerate these deceptions? Our tax money is paying for the continued use of drones against the people of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Osama bin Laden is dead. Al-Qaida is relatively crippled. We don’t need to continue fighting in Afghanistan.

Last night, President Obama announced a plan for Afghanistan that will leave nearly 70,000 troops on the ground at the end of his first term. That’s still almost double the number of troops President Bush had in Afghanistan.

Call the White House now at 1-202-456-1111 and tell them you’re disappointed in President Obama’s plan and want to see the war end sooner.

Then, write to me to tell me how your call went.

While the press is portraying this plan as a large withdrawal from Afghanistan, the fact is that the administration is still investing billions of dollars and risking thousands of lives for a failed strategy. And risking the lives of so many civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And we still don’t know when those 70,000 soldiers will come home to their families, because under the guise of withdrawing troops, this latest plan keeps the longest war in American history going indefinitely.

That’s why the NSP (Network of Spiritual Progressives) is teaming with Peace Action West to urge that President Obama bring all the troops home by September 2012, not just a symbolic fraction of the troops who are there.

As you may have noticed, superstar academic Cornel West has been in some public hot water for a recent web interview in which he made some, well, not very nice comments about president Obama. West, who writes on culture, politics, religion, and race, and who tends to shuttle between Princeton and Harvard, accused the nation’s first African-American president of being the puppet of Wall Street interests, uncomfortable in his own black identity, and more likely to be hanging out with “white and Jewish men,” then the brothers and the sisters. West was bitter about not getting an invitation to the inauguration, and that Obama was no longer returning his phone calls. And this despite his own hard work in getting Obama elected.

Comments on West were predictable. Most of them were wholesale attacks on his intelligence, character, or even sanity (A Boston Globe article credited some observers with suggesting that he was both a blowhard and “unhinged.”) Of West’s few defenders, the most striking was radical journalist Chris Hedges, who believes that West is a major social prophet and that West’s critics can’t even carry West’s computer paper.

Look around the web and you’re sure to find lots more about this encounter, and here are my few cents.

Tikkun ally and policy analyst M.J. Rosenberg looks at the recent behavior of the right wing pro-Israel lobby AIPAC and detects an agenda of undermining and discrediting Obama, not to mention anyone seeking peace between Israel and Palestine. Meanwhile, Obama says he will veto the Palestinians’ attempt to get UN recognition, because he thinks they should instead go back and negotiate with Netanyahu who meanwhile is building more and more Israeli presence in the West Bank. That demand for “negotiations now” is shown to be a non-starter in the editorial today in Ha’aretz newspaper and in the analysis provided by the moderate King of Jordan. Please read this to understand why, unless Palestinians get more leverage through the UN, no move toward peace is going to happen as long as Netanyahu or his right-wing supporters are still shaping Israeli policy.

Pres. Obama’s much publicized speech on the Middle East at the State Department on May 19th caused a stir by advocating an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement based upon the pre-June 1967 borders (the so-called Green Line), with modifications in the form of “land swaps” negotiated between the parties. This has been the general framework that moderate and pro-peace Israelis and Palestinians have promoted since at least 1995, when it was realized that most West Bank settlers live in thickly-populated “settlement blocs” contiguous with the Green Line. Unfortunately, too many people (most importantly, Prime Minister Netanyahu) seized upon Obama’s statement about the pre-June ’67 lines, disregarding his call for trading territory.

That Netanyahu and so many others found this controversial, illustrates how far we’ve come from a peace agreement almost arrived at in 2008. It also indicates that the US needs to be more assertive in helping the parties finally achieve peace.

Jeremy Ben-Ami

I awoke on Friday morning, May 20, to watch Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J Street, on Democracy Now, and I’m glad I did. He performed well under difficult circumstances, being double-teamed by anti-Israel author Norman Finkelstein and Palestinian-American human rights lawyer Noura Erakat, who argued that international law and justice demand that Israel simply withdraw to the pre-’67 lines, without requiring an exchange of territories.

The program led me to some insights. For one thing, although he does not advocate Israel’s destruction (as many assume), Norman Finkelstein seems emotionally consumed by hostility toward Israel. (He’s suffered as a result–e.g., not obtaining tenure at a university–but he is a caustic polemicist and not a fair-minded scholar.) He–along with the very articulate and impressive Ms. Erakat–epitomizes doctrinaire and rigid thinking in insisting that Israel totally withdraw to the pre-June ’67 lines.

We at Tikkun magazine commend President Obama for his call for the US to align with democratic forces in the Middle East, and for a resumption of negotiations between Israel and Palestine based on the 1967 borders, his recognition that the Palestinian people have the right to govern themselves and reach their potential in a sovereign and contiguous state, and his re-affirmation of Israel’s right to complete security.

However, we share with many in the peace movement a deep disappointment that President Obama is not willing to present a detailed US plan for what a just and lasting agreement would look like, and then spend time selling that plan to the people of Israel and Palestine (even though that will require going over the heads of the leaders of both countries).

Instead, by putting forward only a small fragment of what a genuine peace accord would include, President Obama set himself up for the response that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu gave: that giving up the West Bank settlements would endanger Israeli security. Only a full blown plan including the details of how to provide security and justice for both sides, will advance the peace process–and the absence of such a plan was precisely what made the Oslo Accord signed under President Clinton ultimately a failure. President Obama must not hide behind the empty slogan that no one but the Israelis and Palestinians can determine the contours of the peace they seek–this merely avoids what the peace movements have asked for, namely his strong intervention to win over the hearts of Israelis and Palestinians to a peace plan that he could propose (e.g. one based on the proposal of Tikkun magazine). Vigorously seeking to build support for such a plan by visiting and presenting it directly to the Israeli and Palestinian people, does not constitute imposing a solution, but introducing concrete ideas that could re-invigorate the voice of the peaceful in both Israel and Palestine.

President Obama was foolish to describe Palestinian attempts to gain recognition at the United Nations this coming September as an attempt to “delegitimate” Israel. That Palestinian strategy is completely non-violent and helps clarify to Israel without any anti-Semitic elements the strong desire of the world community that Israel should return to the pre-’67 boundaries with some minor border changes that will allow Israel to incorporate some of the West Bank settlements closest to Jerusalem.

To mostly positive media reviews, President Obama yesterday addressed the Chamber of Commerce in Washington. Though a number of stories describe the reception afforded the president as rather chilly, the coverage tends to present him as focused on the economic recovery, and reaching out to his political opponents in order to spark job creation.

Egyptians Demand Democracy in Tahrir Square. Creative Commons/Ahmad Hammoud.

With the political crisis unresolved in Egypt, the volume of U.S. media coverage continues to dwindle — but remains considerable. For the first time since the protests began, not all three networks led with the story, which continues to receive coverage on the front pages of major dailies.

Reports and analyses agree that the Obama administration, after what the AP describes as “several days of mixed messages about whether it wants to see [Hosni] Mubarak stay or go,” yesterday “conceded Monday that it will not endorse the demands of Egyptian protesters” for the “embattled” president Mubarak “to step down immediately, saying a precipitous exit could set back the country’s democratic transition.” The administration “coalesced around a position that cautiously welcomes nascent reform efforts begun by newly appointed Vice President Omar Suleiman that may or may not result in Mubarak’s resignation before September.”