J Street has released the following statment from J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami, criticizing the Knesset's recent approval of a commission of inquiry into Israeli non-governmental organizations focused on issues of human rights and civil society:
J Street strongly objects to the Knesset's approval of a commission of inquiry into Israeli human rights and civil society organizations. The proposed commission reeks of McCarthyism and is an affront to fundamental democratic and Jewish values.
As American Jews and supporters of Israel, we believe that Israel must strive to embody the values on which it was founded: democracy, justice, and equality. Unfortunately, yesterday's political action contradicts those very values, which are in the country's Declaration of Independence and Law of Human Dignity.
We urge the Knesset to stop trying to silence organizations based on ideology and to focus instead on reversing policies that are undermining Israel's long-term security as a Jewish, democratic homeland. As Yedioth columnist Boaz Okon writes, "Instead of dealing substantively with the criticism leveled at Israel's actions in the territories and with regard to minorities and foreigners... an attempt is being made to intimidate those who swim against the current."
Israel is not delegitimized and its democracy not weakened by important organizations like B'Tselem, Yesh Din and Breaking the Silence, among many others, that are working every day against long odds to combat increasing strands of racism, authoritarianism and McCarthyism emerging throughout Israel's politics and society.
We will continue to stand with the Israeli and Palestinian leaders and activists who are exercising their legitimate democratic rights and working for a strong, democratic Israel at peace with its neighbors. We applaud the members of Knesset and Israeli leaders, including, among others, Knesset speaker Reuben Rivlin, Welfare & Social Services Minister Isaac Herzog, Ministers Benny Begin and Miki Eitan, and MKs Shlomo Molla and Meir Sheetrit, who have spoken out against this harmful motion.
The more Israel tries to silence those who warn of its slide into the abyss, the faster it goes into the abyss.
The decision taken by the Knesset plenum yesterday, to create a parliamentary investigative committee for "the phenomenon of de-legitimization of the IDF in the world on the part of Israeli organization", has nothing whatsoever to do with an investigation. Israel has investigative procedures: if there's a suspicion of a crime, either the police or the GSS investigate it, and transfer the information they gather to the prosecution, which then decides if an indictment is in order; then the courts have their say - admittedly, all too often sounding suspiciously like the prosecution.
What the Knesset did yesterday was de-legitimizing of a political camp; an accusation of treason by one camp of another, masquerading as an investigation.
In light of the recent debates stirred up by Israel's bombarment and invasion of Gaza, I've decided to reprint a story I wrote for Random Lengths News in September 2007, dealing with the resurgence of McCarthyite suppression of dissent in academia, with a particular focus on the attacks against Norman Finklestein. The store is reprinted in full on the flip.
In Part 1, I took note of the reportage casting Fox News as "populist" highlighted by Kargo X, and wrote:
While the notion of Fox News as "populist" is a ludicrous rightwing perversion in one sense, it is quite accurate in another sense we dare not ignore--and that is, quite simply, that it reflects the truest test of elite power--the ability to define the essential contours of populist thought, and to cast someone else as the dreaded "elite".
In this diary, I want to dig back into history, and uncover some key turning points that brought us from the economic populist solidarity of the New Deal to the sorry state we find ourselves in today, where the Democratic Party is still virtually clueless about how to respond to such outrageous lies. A key figure in this story is the pivotal Republican President of the past 75 years--Richard Nixon.
While Barack Obama and legions of his supporters insist on seeing Reagan as his hagiographers have painted him--as a trascendental transformative figure--the simple reality is that he was nothing of the sort. He was the beneficiary of an enormous amount of high-power myth-making. But Nixon was the one who made it all possible.
I've argued elsewhere about why 1968 was a de-aligning election--ending the "New Deal" Fifth Party System, in which Democrats dominated Congress and the presidency as thoroughly as any party has ever dominated a party system, and ushering in the only party system in American history in which the dominant "party" is divided government. Now, in an excerpt from his new book, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, Rick Perlstein provides a striking snapshot of how that deeply split 1968 election sent down much deeper splits into the bedrock of American politics. The excerpt, "Then No One Would Be a Democrat Anymore" (at American Prospect Online) describes the progression of blue-collar anti-anti-war violence, rioting, and eventual mass marching that thrilled Nixon with the prospect of a vast political realignment:
Nixon had tried to talk to the student demonstrators. He concluded he preferred the hard hats. "Thinks now the college demonstrators have overplayed their hands," Haldeman wrote in his diary, "evidence is the blue collar group rising against them, and [president] can mobilize them."
New York construction workers now took every lunch hour for boisterous patriotic demonstrations. So did hard hats in San Diego, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh. Some of the rallies were not entirely spontaneous: "Obviously more of these will be occurring throughout the nation," White House staffer Stephen Bull wrote in a memo to Chuck Colson, "perhaps partially as a result of your clandestine activity." Peter Brennan, the combative head of the Building Trades Council of Greater New York, accused of organizing the "hard hat riot," defiantly denied it -- then showed what he could do as an organizer: one hundred thousand marchers on May 20, complete with a cement mixer draped with a LINDSAY FOR MAYOR OF HANOI banner. Signs read GOD BLESS THE ESTABLISHMENT and WE SUPPORT NIXON AND AGNEW. Time called it "a kind of workers' Woodstock."
STATE BLOGS
