Haley, Israel and the fine art of reality inversion
U.S. Permanent Representative to the UN, Nikki Haley meets Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at his office in Jerusalem, June 7, 2017. Image credit: U.S. Embassy Tel Aviv/ flickr
By Michael Howard | American Herald Tribune | November 7 ,2017
Last month, US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley stated that, should Rex Tillerson find himself cashiered, she would not replace him as secretary of state. “I want to be where I’m most effective,” she said. Whatever that means, we can all breath a sigh of relief. With the intellectual capacity of Sarah Palin, Haley is as clueless, and thus as dangerous, as they come. Her commitment to alternative facts (of the sort the US government has been churning out for decades) is absolute; lest we forget, she reminds us every time she opens her mouth. Depending on the mood I’m in, a Haley speech is either infuriating or darkly comedic. Indeed, many of them could double as trenchant satire, and it is sometimes easy (and comforting) to forget that she is actually speaking on behalf of a global empire.
Haley’s latest performance, a speech to the Israeli-American Council, ought to come with a warning advising viewer discretion, so divorced is it from reality. As the name suggests, the Israeli-American Council is yet another space for Zionist fanatics to reaffirm their love of Israel and, by implication, their hatred of Palestinians, who surely deserve all that they get—or rather don’t deserve what Israel takes, namely arable land, water resources, self-determination, national dignity, individual livelihood and, for many, life itself.
You’ll recall, if I may digress, that in its most recent military attack on Gaza, which took place in the summer of 2014, the IDF killed over 2,000 Palestinians, of whom 1391 were civilians. That’s twenty-eight civilians per day. “Of the Palestinians killed who did not take part in the hostilities,” B’tselem, reported, “180 were babies, toddlers, and children under the age of six. Another 346 were children from age six through seventeen, and 247 were women between the ages of 18 and 59. Another 113 were men and women over the age of sixty.” Which is to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands of Gazans who were displaced, or of the immense damage done to Gazan homes and infrastructure.
By comparison, seventy Israelis were killed in the fighting, sixty-four of them soldiers.
The sheer brutality of Operation “Protective Edge,” as the Israeli’s euphemized the slaughter, made it impossible for any remotely decent human being to rationalize. As the world looked on in disgust, and human rights organizations condemned Israel’s war crimes, then-President Barack Obama (who everyone is so very nostalgic about) droned on about Israel’s “right to defend itself.” “No nation should accept rockets being fired into its borders, or terrorists tunneling into its territory,” he declared, adding, “we are hopeful that Israel will continue to approach this process in a way that minimizes civilian casualties.” The key word there, continue, implies that Obama was satisfied with the IDF’s tactics. In his view, civilian casualties were in fact being “minimized.”
Not to be outdone, Hillary Clinton (another liberal superhero) took things a step further, stating that “Israel did what it had to do to respond to the rockets,” and that “ultimately the responsibility [for all the dead civilians] rests with Hamas.” Hillary went on to cite the “fog of war” as a reason to disregard reports of Israeli atrocities, which were only being denounced, she said, because they were committed by Jews. At the end of the day, “you can’t ever discount anti-Semitism.” Right on, Hil.
Therein lies the essence of the “special relationship” between the US and Israel: Israel runs amok, and the US exploits its status as global superpower to see that there are no repercussions. That’s not quite good enough for the Israel lobby, however (it’s never enough), so the US throws in $4 billion in free military aid every year. After all, “vulnerable” Israel, with its illegal cache of 400 nuclear weapons, faces an existential threat from “hegemonic” Iran, which has zero nuclear weapons and has never invaded another country.
This arrangement would perhaps make sense—from a cynical point of view—if it was mutually beneficial. But of course it’s not. Quite the reverse, actually. The United States’ unswerving support for Israel, along with its own blood-drenched legacy in the Middle East, has made it the primary target for Wahhabi terrorists. If you don’t believe me, read Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America,” in which American support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine is cited as his number one justification for 9/11. Bin Laden was obsessed with Israel-Palestine, as was/is Ramzi Yousef, who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993. That nothing can justify such acts of mass murder is beside the point: the point is that, by enabling Israel (a morally reprehensible act in itself), the US government puts its own citizens in the crosshairs—for nothing. It’s all risk and no reward. You can decide for yourself whether you think it’s worth it.
With that said, Israel does occasionally pretend to show gratitude for the United States’ masochistic generosity. Getting back to Haley, she opened her speech to the IAC by highlighting the fact that Israel is the only country in the world that supports our decades-long economic war on Cuba. Last week, another UN resolution was adopted calling for an end to the embargo. “The whole world sides with Cuba. Well, almost the whole world. The vote this year was 191 to 2,” Haley said with perverse delight. “Only Israel stood with America against the brutal regime in Cuba.” This strange boast triggered a round of applause from the audience. Then Haley went in for a joke, employing a tone and expression reminiscent of a 1950s TV commercial: “You know what they say: quality is more important than quantity.”
It doesn’t really get more bizarre than this. Here we have a matter of great geopolitical import, and the American empire’s ambassador to the UN is cracking lame soccer mom jokes to an audience of American Zionists. Is she sincerely proud of the fact that the US and Israel stand isolated on this issue? Does she actually believe that the rest of the world is in the wrong, and that only the US and Israel are able to perceive the moral righteousness inherent in strangling the Cuban economy? Does she have any clue as to why the embargo was imposed in the first place? Why it’s still being imposed more than fifty years later? I think the answer to the first two questions is yes, and I’m certain the answer to the second two is no. Our ambassador to the UN, who our whack-job president reportedly wants as his secretary of state, is a half-wit. She’s completely out of her depth and she doesn’t even know it.
It goes without saying that Haley pandered throughout her speech; when she wasn’t offering fulsome praise of Israel and Jewish people she was whining about the UN, a “hostile place” where a “caricature” of Israel has allegedly been painted. The use of “caricature” in this context is obviously, and disgracefully, designed to evoke images of Streicher-esque caricatures of Jews; thus Haley implicitly conflates legitimate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, a familiar Zionist tactic. She proceeded to take a shot at Barack Obama, who we have seen was an avid apologist for Israeli terror. Nevertheless, he can never be forgiven for refusing to veto a non-binding (i.e. meaningless) Security Council resolution demanding that Israel cease its settlement activity in the occupied territories. To reiterate: the Obama administration did not vote in favor of the resolution; they merely neglected to veto it (Obama vetoed an identical resolution in 2011). With the US abstaining, it passed, and Netanyahu promptly announced that Israel would be expanding settlements deeper into the West Bank, demonstrating again that Israel is a rogue state with no regard for international law.
Letting the resolution pass, Haley said, “was a cowardly act, and a real low point for America at the UN.” Almost as low as the song and dance she performed before the Security Council in the wake of the chemical incident in Khan Sheikhoun, Syria, wherein she exploited images of dead children to whip up public hysteria and garner support for Trump’s cruise missile attack, an illegal act of aggression promoted with vim by the major media.
Haley’s speech of course included all the usual platitudes regarding Iran. You know the drill: Iran supports terrorists, Iran supports Assad, Iran is testing missiles, Iran is arming the Houthis in Yemen, Iran is allied with Hezbollah, the nuclear agreement is bad news, blah, blah, blah. Referencing Trump’s decision to let Congress “review” the multilateral nuclear deal and decide unilaterally whether it needs to be modified (or scrapped altogether, despite Iran’s full compliance with its terms), Haley said: “Congress now has the opportunity to bring the debate about the Iran nuclear deal out from the fantasy world created by the Obama echo-chamber and into the real world where it belongs.” Again, one stands in awe of her utter lack of self-awareness.
Haley and I do agree on one thing: the UN Human Rights Council is a joke. Not because, as Haley says, it seeks to discourage businesses from operating out of illegal Israeli settlements, but rather because countries like Saudi Arabia, a staunch US ally and one of the worst human rights violators on the planet, have seats on the council. Needless to say, Haley’s speech included no reference to Saudi war crimes in Yemen, where over 5,000 civilians have been killed since 2015, the vast majority of them by the Saudi-led—and US-supported—coalition. Millions more are suffering from famine, while thousands of new cases of cholera are reported every day.
“There simply is no explanation the USA or other countries such as the UK and France can give to justify the continued flow of weapons to the Saudi Arabia-led coalition for use in the conflict in Yemen,” an exasperated Amnesty International representative said in September. “It has time and time again committed serious violations of international law, including war crimes, over the past 30 months, with devastating consequences for the civilian population.”
I think it’s safe to say Nikki Haley won’t be presenting images of dead or starving Yemeni children to the Security Council. At least not until we have reason to invade Saudi Arabia.
The Two Elie Wiesels
Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, Romanian-born Holocaust survivor and author of the classic novel, “Night.”
Elie Wiesel spoke out eloquently against violence and injustice… except when he endorsed them.
By Kathryn Shihadah | If Americans Knew | November 6, 2017
Elie Wiesel was born in 1928 to a prominent Jewish family in Romania. By the age of 15, he found himself in Auschwitz concentration camp, where his parents and one of his three siblings died. After the liberation of the camp, he spent time in France.
After a short time, Wiesel went to work as a translator for Irgun, a terrorist group that had a reputation for bombing and shooting innocent Arab Palestinians. It was during Wiesel’s Irgun days that the group participated in the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre, in which over 250 unarmed Palestinian civilians were brutally murdered.
For ten years after the war, Wiesel says he would not speak or write about his experiences. Eventually he wrote a memoir, which was later abridged and translated into English as Night. Despite questions about its truthfulness (“in its central, most crucial scene, Night isn’t historically true, and at least two other important episodes are almost certainly fiction”), It has become a classic.
Eventually, Wiesel became a prominent advocate for peace and justice around the world.
His activism included speaking out for Soviet, Ethiopian, Romanian, and Ukranian Jews, as well as Vietnamese boat people, victims of South African apartheid, genocide in Bosnia, Darfur, and Armenia, and other at-risk groups around the world.
In 1986, Elie Wiesel received the Nobel Peace Prize for his work to end violence, oppression, and racism. The Nobel Committee stated: “Wiesel’s commitment, which originated in the sufferings of the Jewish people, has been widened to embrace all repressed peoples and races.” His profound experiences, and his profound response, birthed in him the words of his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech:
… When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant… that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe… There is much to be done, there is much that can be done. One person… one person of integrity, can make a difference, a difference of life and death.
I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them.
In The Watchtower (June 15, 1995), he declared,
The duty of the survivor is to bear testimony to what happened . . . You have to warn people that these things can happen, that evil can be unleashed. Race hatred, violence, idolatries—they still flourish.
Mr. Wiesel must have forgotten his own advice, because in the ensuing years, he missed many opportunities to speak out, to bear testimony – opportunities that were literally right under his nose.
For example, in 1999 he endorsed NATO bombs that were blowing up civilians and journalists in Yugoslavia; in 2003 he advocated for war against Iraq, declaring it a necessary moral act because the situation was “a moral crisis similar to 1938.”
And Wiesel was consistently unmoved when the victims under his nose were Palestinian.
The phenomenon of ignoring Palestinian victims, known in activist circles as PEP—Progressive Except Palestine—is a primary enabler of the ad nauseum occupation of the West Bank, the siege of Gaza, and the systemic oppression of Palestinians within Israel itself. Many groups and individuals that are devoted to justice stop short of defending the oppressed people of the Holy Land.
Mr. Elie Wiesel, the “messenger to mankind,” ought to have been above that kind of limited thinking, but he was not.
Like many, he viewed Israel through rose-colored glasses, despite his first hand knowledge. Wiesel could have, should have spoken out against the oppression of Palestinians, but instead sided with the oppressors. It has become the task of others to correct a Nobel Laureate.
Exhibit A, the Goldstone Report, 2009
Richard Goldstone
Elie Wiesel chose the wrong side when it came to the Goldstone Report, commissioned by the United Nations. The independent fact-finding team, which began its work in April 2009, was headed by Jewish (and Zionist) South African Richard Goldstone. Its task was to investigate alleged violations of international human rights and humanitarian law during Operation Cast Lead. Although the scope of work was originally to examine Israeli actions only, Goldstone insisted on probing the Palestinian side as well.
The 3-week conflict, also known as the Gaza War and the Gaza Massacre, was Israel’s attempt to stop rocket fire and weapon smuggling by Palestinians. Casualties included over 1,400 Palestinians dead and 13 Israelis – 4 from friendly fire.
Prime Minister Netanyahu called the whole investigation a “kangaroo court,” and Israel refused to cooperate with the team or to grant visas for the investigation.
The report, presented in September 2009, concluded that both the Israeli Defense Forces and Palestinian militants had committed war crimes, charging that Israel’s military campaign was “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate, and terrorize… and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability.” It also accused Israel of collective punishment in the years-long economic blockade of Gaza.
The report described “an overall policy aimed at punishing the Gaza population… possibly with the intent of forcing a change [in its support for Hamas].”
(As an aside, the use of violence against civilians to force a political change is the definition of terrorism.)
The report continued:
[T]here appears also to have been an assault on the dignity of the people… in the use of human shields and unlawful detentions… vandalizing of houses… obscenities and often racist slogans, all constituted an overall image of humiliation and dehumanization of the Palestinian population.
The mission further considers that the series of acts that deprive Palestinians in the Gaza Strip of their means of subsistence, employment, housing and water, that deny their freedom of movement and their right to leave and enter their own country, that limit their rights to access a court of law and an effective remedy, could lead a competent court to find that the crime of persecution, a crime against humanity, has been committed.
Israel rejected the report, while Hamas reluctantly accepted it.
Ian Kelly of the US State Department complained that the report (which, keep in mind, addressed a conflict in which Palestinian deaths were 100 times higher than Israeli deaths), “focuses overwhelmingly on Israel’s actions.” Nobel Peace laureate and former prime minister Shimon Pares considered the report a “mockery of history” and accused the team of failing to “distinguish between the aggressor and a state exercising its right to self-defense.”
Israel’s use of white phosphorus in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead was a flagrant violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. “While the international community might be horrified by the use of phosphorous, this is overlooking the issue that hundreds of half-ton bombs are being dropped on Gaza on civilian targets on a daily basis,” said Raji Sourani, head of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) in Gaza.
Elie Wiesel joined in the criticism of the Goldstone Report:
One thing is clear to me, that document was unnecessary.
Without explaining his first statement, he added, significantly,
I can’t believe that Israeli soldiers murdered people or shot children. It just can’t be.
(No doubt the families of the 1,400 dead Palestinians – half of them civilians, 252 of them children – would dispute this statement.)
American Jewish journalist Peter Beinart took Wiesel to task for these statements:
Wiesel takes refuge in the Israel of his imagination, using it to block out the painful reckoning that might come from scrutinizing Israel as it actually is… “We are making the lives of millions unbearable,” declares one former Shin Bet head, Carmi Gillon, in the film “The Gatekeepers.” In the West Bank, Israel has become “a brutal occupation force,” notes another, Avraham Shalom. A third, Yuval Diskin, calls the occupation a “colonial regime.”
These men don’t hate Israel; they have dedicated their lives to protecting it. But unlike Wiesel, they are discussing the real Israel, not the one they have constructed in their minds. Why is Elie Wiesel, one of the world’s great champions of human rights, denying the human rights abuses to which even Israel’s own former Shin Bet chiefs have testified?
Rabbi Brant Rosen concurred:
As far as I’m concerned, Justice Richard Goldstone is precisely the kind of courageous Jewish moral hero that Wiesel himself purports to be: someone committed to advocating for universal human rights even when doing so might mean holding our own community painfully to account. As for Wiesel, I’m finding his words and actions increasingly craven. No one begrudges him his opinions – but it’s time he dropped the pretense that he’s somehow beyond the political fray.
Under great pressure from the Jewish community in his home of South Africa, Goldstone eventually backpedaled somewhat on one of the charges. However, he failed to address new evidence that actually reinforced his original findings, as well as a report on Israel’s failure to investigate its violations of the laws of war.
Wiesel declined to acknowledge Israel’s need for censure, expressing that
[Richard Goldstone] has a good name, and I’ve known him for years… He should have refused to head the committee, because of the anti-Israel mandate under which it was established.
This refusal to stand up for the oppressed contradicts the vow he made in his commencement speech at Washington University, St. Louis:
In fact it is the otherness of the other that makes me who I am. I am always to learn from the other. And the other is, to me, not an enemy, but a companion, an ally, and of course, in some cases of grace, a friend. So the other is never to be rejected, and surely not humiliated.
and the words of his Nobel acceptance speech:
None of us is in a position to eliminate war, but it is our obligation to denounce it and expose it in all its hideousness. War leaves no victors, only victims. War dehumanizes, war diminishes, war debases all those who wage it. The Talmud says, “Talmidei hukhamim marbin shalom baolam” (It is the wise men who will bring about peace).
One might expect Mr. Wiesel to lay low for a good, long time after such blatant duplicity. One would be mistaken.
Exhibits B and C: Visit to the White House and public/open letter to Obama, 2010
In May of 2010, Elie Wiesel was invited to the White House for lunch with Israel’s greatest benefactor, the President of the United States. Wiesel, master of persuasion and nuance, decorated for his efforts to end violence, oppression, and racism, had the ear of the leader of the free world.
Wiesel once said,
Mankind needs peace more than ever… Mankind must remember that peace is not God’s gift to his creatures, it is our gift to each other.
According to a recent study, almost 80 percent of IDF forces in the West Bank are there to protect settlements, with the remainder scattered along the Green Line. “[Netanyahu] has been kidnapped by the settler lobby and is pursuing a policy that harms the security of every Israeli,” said Knesset member Erel Margalit in June 2017.
But instead of speaking of peace, he chose as his topic of conversation, “don’t pressure Israel to cease settlement activity in Jerusalem.”
President Obama, who strongly opposed settlements, simply listened politely.
For good measure, Wiesel also undertook a PR campaign in the form of a public letter, which appeared in The International Herald Tribune, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. He painted an idyllic picture of his homeland of Israel:
“[F]or the first time in history, Jews, Christians and Muslims all may freely worship at their shrines. And, contrary to certain media reports, Jews, Christians and Muslims ARE allowed to build their homes anywhere in the city.”
It didn’t take long for the record to be set straight—by prominent Jewish Jerusalemites—who published a letter of their own in the New York Review of Books, correcting Wiesel’s false statements:
We write to you from Jerusalem to convey our frustration, even outrage… We cannot recognize our city in the sentimental abstraction you call by its name.
We invite you to our city to [see that] Arabs are not allowed to build their homes anywhere in Jerusalem. You will see the gross inequality in allocation of municipal resources and services… Sheikh Jarrah, where Palestinian families are being evicted from their homes to make room for a new Jewish neighborhood… Silwan, where dozens of houses face demolition because of the Jerusalem Municipality’s refusal to issue building permits to Palestinians.
Another Israeli who weighed in on the housing issue was former Israeli Cabinet Minister Yossi Sarid, who addressed Wiesel in Ha’aretz,
Someone has deceived you, my dear friend. Not only may an Arab not build “anywhere,” but he may thank his god if he is not evicted from his home and thrown out onto the street with his family and property.
Israeli Daniel Seidemann, a “one-man early-warning system” for changes in Jerusalem that undermine the peace process, called Wiesel’s words “factually inaccurate” and “morally specious.” He gave specific examples:
So while Wiesel may purchase a home in anywhere in East or West Jerusalem, a Palestinian cannot.
Due to Israeli restrictions, today it is easier for a Palestinian Christian living just south of Jerusalem in Bethlehem to worship in Washington’s National Cathedral than to pray in Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher.
Today a Muslim living in Turkey has a better chance of getting to Jerusalem to pray at the Old City’s al-Aqsa mosque than a Muslim living a few miles away in Ramallah.
Another Israeli who called Wiesel out for inaccuracies was Ha’aretz writer Gideon Levy:
If I were Elie Wiesel, such a famous Holocaust survivor, a Nobel Prize laureate whose voice is heard in high places, I would ask my friend in the White House, for the sake of peace, Israel’s future and world peace: Please, Mr. President, be forceful. Israel depends on you as never before. Isolated as never before, it’s as good as dead without American support. Therefore, Mr. President, I would say to Obama over the kosher meal that was served, be a true friend of Israel and extricate it from its misfortune…
Instead… Wiesel haggled for wholesale postponement… To postpone. Postpone and postpone, like Netanyahu, who sent him, asked him to do.
And finally, both European and American Jewish leaders—some of whom had lived in Israel—circulated petitions garnering thousands of signatories,
The European petition, “A Call To Reason,” signed by over 5,000, stated that
the occupation and the continuing pursuit of settlements in the West Bank and in the Arab districts of Jerusalem . . . are morally and politically wrong and feed the unacceptable de-legitimation process that Israel currently faces abroad.
The American petition, “For the Sake of Zion,” echoed the European document, adding,
[W]e abhor the continuing occupation that has persisted for far too long; it cannot and should not be sustained. [W]e call upon Israel immediately to cease construction of housing in the disputed territories.”
Wiesel was apparently unconvinced, rendering hollow his earlier pronouncement that
the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference. Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies. To be in the window and watch people being sent to concentration camps or being attacked in the street and do nothing, that’s being dead. (US News & World Reportt, 27 October 1986)
Exhibit D: Ha’aretz ad congratulating settlers in East Jerusalem, 2014
Due to his global fame, Elie Wiesel was offered positions on boards of directors all over Israel. The one he chose to accept was the chair of the board of Elad.
Elad is a right-wing NGO which operates in East (Arab) Jerusalem. The organization has two objectives: to settle Jews in the primarily Arab neighborhood of Silwan, and to operate tourist and excavation sites. The settlement aspect of the project involves expelling Palestinians. Richard Silverstein dubbed Elad’s aggressive settler movement “Jewish jihad, literally a Jewish struggle for dominance of the Holy City.” (For details, read this.)
Israeli police oversee the demolition of a Palestinian home in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan. Settler organizations Elad and others have worked to take over and demolish Palestinian homes in order to move Jewish families in. (More information here.)
In early October, 2014, Ha’aretz had reported that Elad was in the market for Israeli Jews to temporarily live in 25 recently-purchased apartments in Silwan, guarding them until the new Jewish settlers moved in. The job description: “In principle, you’re supposed to be quiet and simply occupy the compound… As far as we’re concerned, you live in the house, but it’s better if you have a weapon.”
Silwan’s Palestinian residents have, in the last two decades, been subject to eviction, home demolition, and aggressive buy-outs, transforming their neighborhood a Jewish-Israeli controlled enclave. According to Ha’aretz, “Life in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan has become unbearable, both for the Jewish settlers who would like to be able to leave home without being stoned and the Palestinians who suffer the heavy hand of the police and the settlers’ security guards.”
Wiesel and the organization he headed, Elad, placed the following announcement in Ha’aretz on October 10, 2014:
On the eve of Sukkot, we are happy to congratulate the dozens of Jewish families that are joining the Israeli settlement of Ir David [the settlers’ name for Silwan]. We salute the Zionist work of those who take part in this mission. Strengthening Jewish presence in Jerusalem is the challenge for all of us, and by your act of settlement you make us all stand taller.
Ha’aretz once again put the matter in perspective:
We must reckon with Wiesel’s erasure of others’ suffering as seriously as we embrace the remembrance of our own… The memory of our collective suffering, articulated by Wiesel and others, grants us the ability to see and to understand the collective pain of others… What are we to do with the fact that… Wiesel was head of the board of Elad, an organization at the forefront of expelling Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem? That he worked to further a violent religious nationalist agenda?
In fact, Wiesel’s work with Elad was at odds with not only social justice, but even with his own words. In 2011 he had declared at the commencement of Washington University in St. Louis,
The greatest commandment, to me, in the Bible is not the Ten Commandments… My commandment is, “Thou shall not stand idly by.” Which means when you witness an injustice, don’t stand idly by. When you hear of a person or a group being persecuted, do not stand idly by… You must intervene. You must interfere. And that is actually the motto of human rights… And therefore wherever something happens, I try to be there as a witness.
(Except, of course, when the persecuted are Palestinian.)
Exhibit E: Open letter regarding Netanyahu’s speech to Congress, 2015
Early in 2015, as President Obama was hammering out a nuclear agreement with Iran, PM Benjamin Netanyahu wished to bend Congress’ ear to halt the negotiations. Republican House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell essentially arranged the speech behind Obama’s back, to “make sure that there was no interference.”
Once word got out, President Obama declined to attend the speech. Elie Wiesel then went into action, publishing – with the help of pro-Israel Rabbi Shmuley Boteach – an open letter:
Many centuries ago a wicked man in Persia named Haman advised, “There exists a nation… It is not in our interest to tolerate them.” And the order went out to all the provinces to “annihilate, murder, and destroy the Jews. Now Iran, modern Persia, has produced a new enemy…
Should we not show our support for what might be the last clear warning before a terrible deal is struck [between the US and Iran]?… As one who has seen the enemies of the Jewish people make good on threats to exterminate us, how can I remain silent?… Will you join me in hearing the case for keeping weapons from those who preach death to Israel and America?
Ha’aretz stepped up to challenge Wiesel’s assumptions, pointing out that he
makes two assertions, neither of which he makes any effort to prove. The first is that the United States and Iran are on the verge of “a terrible deal.” What makes the deal, which has not even been struck, “terrible?” Wiesel doesn’t say. The second is that a nuclear Iran would likely mean “‘the annihilation and destruction’ of Israel.” This, too, requires evidence that Wiesel does not provide.
The Ha’aretz authors also point out that Wiesel’s appeal to the biblical story of Esther is flawed because it is incomplete. The account states that after Haman fell from power, Persia’s Jews
“with the stroke of the sword, and slaughter, and destruction… slew of their foes seventy and five thousand.”
If the Book of Esther offers a haunting warning of the violence Jews can suffer, why does it not also warn us of the violence Jews can inflict? And if Wiesel is so alarmed by threats of nuclear annihilation, why does he keep embracing his former patron Sheldon Adelson, who in 2013 urged the United States to drop an “atomic weapon” in the Iranian desert, and then, if the Iranians don’t halt their nuclear program, drop one “in the middle of Tehran” so the Iranians are “wiped out.”
Progressive Jewish American organization J Street reacted strongly to the scheduled speech behind which Wiesel stood so firmly. Responding to Netanyahu’s claim that he would be speaking as a representative of all Jewish people everywhere, the group created a petition entitled “I’m a Jew. Bibi does NOT speak for me.” 20,000 signatures indicated that not all Jews favored his Iran policies or his relationship with the White House.
Wiesel wanted to keep weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of Iran, ignoring the irony of Israel’s own nukes at the ready, and the incongruity of Israel’s de facto “it is not in our interest to tolerate” position toward Palestinians.
But again, Wiesel’s own words were even more haunting than the witness of thousands of other Jews.
There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest. The Talmud tells us that by saving a single human being, man can save the world.
Conclusion
We ask, over and over, how a people who have suffered so much could inflict so much suffering on another people. We wonder how a man who has so precisely described evil could not recognize it in front of him, how he could speak so eloquently about compassion but fail to have a morsel of it for his neighbors.
Hussein Ibish, writing for Foreign Policy, makes sense of the moral quagmire of Elie Wiesel’s mind:
[T]he underlying assumption is irredeemably flawed. It presumes that people, whether individuals or collectivities, somehow learn from their negative experiences not to repeat them.
Of course, that is not the case. “Hurt people hurt people.” Maybe Elie Wiesel was too broken by his experiences to see clearly what his Israel was doing. Maybe he deserves a pass.
In that case, it behooves the new generation of Israelis and pro-Israel individuals and groups to do what Wiesel could not: take off the rose-colored glasses; do the hard work of acknowledging past and present wrongs. Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly. As Wiesel once said,
I have to be self-conscious of what I’m trying to do with my life.
Kathryn Shihadah is a staff writer for If Americans Knew.
Why Doesn’t the Born Leader of the Feminist Movement Speak for Me Too?
By Melissa Garriga | CounterPunch | November 6, 2017
“Along Came Hillary”
Twitter had its fun a couple of weeks ago, when the children’s book, Hillary Rodham Clinton: Some Girls Are Born to Lead, resurfaced. The book was originally published in January of 2016, in the middle of Hillary’s campaign for presidency. I don’t recall if the book received much fanfare when released but honestly who can remember every insane moment of the traveling circus known as the 2016 Presidential Election. Among many, over exaggerated accomplishments the book disgustingly attributes to Hillary, the biggest one comes from when Hillary graced the world with her presence. The author suggests that in the 1950s we were living in a man’s world and it wasn’t until Hillary came along (was born) that woman began to become accomplished. As several have pointed out, many great and accomplished women have flourished before tiny Hillary was even conceived. This Daily Wire article perfectly captures the problematic page and gives great examples of the recent reaction.
The rest of the book takes you through Hillary’s life in the same bullshit, ridiculous way it introduces the fierce feminist. But that got me thinking, it’s easy to dress up and over glamorize someone’s past but if you were going to give praise to a powerful and strong feminist today, would little Hillary Rodham Clinton make the cut? And if so, I have to ask, why isn’t she speaking for me too? More specifically, as the magical and wonderful feminist glass-breaker that her undiscerning followers love to adore, why hasn’t she spoken more about #MeToo?
#MeToo
You have to live under a rock (or in the woods) lately to not be aware of the recent revelations of sexual harassment and rape by men in power. Almost daily now, new accusations and stories are being revealed. Women are exposing men from various media, film, music, and political spectra worldwide. Women are using the strength they find in other women coming forward to build up courage to tell their own story. Actress Alyssa Milano started the hashtag #MeToo as a way for women to share (if they can) that they too have been sexually harassed and victimized by a man. The hashtag has spread like wild-fire.
Curiously missing from the national conversation of sexual harassment however is the voice of our leading First Lady of feminism, Hillary Clinton. When the allegations began to stack up against Harvey Weinstein, a major political donor for the Clinton campaign, Hillary responded by admitting she was “shocked’ and “appalled” and she even eventually agreed to give the $26,000 dollars that Weinstein has donated to her campaigns over time.
“Shocked”
Studies estimate that 1 in 3 women have been sexually harassed in the workplace. No one should find this statistic alarming, least of all women. In fact, given that statistic it is easy to say that almost every working woman in the United States probably knows a coworker or has even seen another female coworker being sexually harassed. In many cases sexual harassment is Quid Pro Quo, that is harassment by a person in power, who uses that power to leverage sexual favors and advances. In the cases that are headlining the news now, it is often Quid Pro Quo sexual harassment. What I find peculiar, what we should all find striking, is throughout her professional career, Hillary Clinton has never had a #MeToo moment to share. Surely Hillary, working her way through a man’s world, has met a “Harvey Weinstein” of the legal world, the White House, the United States Senate, or even the US State Department. In fact, statistically speaking, across her career path, she should have either been a victim, seen someone being victimized, or had a co-worker confide their story to her.
But Not Surprising
Even though it is unlikely that Hillary has never experienced a #MeToo situation, it is not surprising in the least that she would not share such an experience. There are many reasons why people do not speak out about being victimized by sexual harassment and/or assault. One reason, they may still be under the thumb of that person and they fear job loss and/or retaliation. However, for Hillary “the girl born to lead”, this is not the case now. In fact, Hillary’s public opinion on sexual harassment seems to offer more sympathy to the perpetrator and not the victim. It suggests that maybe she views sexual harassment with a more conservative perspective – something the girl asked for, a means to a way, men being men. From her days as a defense attorney to her reign as our country’s First Lady, Clinton has defended the guilty men more than the victims. Aside from politicizing, Alicia Machado, during the election and making Pussy Hats a thing, Clinton was never really the fierce feminist for sexual harassment/assault victims, such as young Kathy Shelton and never gave agency to Monica Lewinsky, Juanita Broderick, and the long list of women harassed by her husband.
Feminist Are Made Not Born
The problem with Michelle Markel’s children’s book is its pure fantasy, poorly based off a real-life character. Leaders are not necessarily born ready to lead and feminists are most certainly not born. Through life experiences women become feminists. Women gradually become feminists through obstacles they face and decisions they have to make. They see a path for women, one where you proudly defend equality and a woman’s choice while simultaneously defending the right to not be sexually harrassed/assaulted by those in power. They choose not to go down a path where they sit silently throughout the years and watch a system use and abuse women in the name of professional advancement. Hillary Clinton may have been born a leader but she was not born a feminist leader. Through her silence and defense of sexual misconduct and perpetrators she chose her path, the path that made her born to lead through the establishment she so desired.
Deconstructing the Climate Demagoguery of the Wine Country Wildfire Tragedies
By Jim Steele | Landscapes and Cycles | October 25, 2017
As sure as the winds will blow, climate demagogues hijack every human tragedy to amplify fears of rising CO2 concentrations. Despite that fact other critical factors were keys to understanding the devastation of the Wine Country fires, politicians like Hillary Clinton, Al Gore and Governor Jerry Brown were quick to proclaim climate change had made the fires worse than they would have been.
Climate researcher Kevin Trenberth has long tried to undermine the foundations of science by discarding the null hypothesis. Without formal testing whether a tornado, hurricane or wildfire event is within the expectations of natural variability, Trenberth simply asserts every tragedy is made worse by rising CO2. Accordingly, he is interviewed by climate change propagandists after every weather tragedy. In an interview with InsideClimateNews a few months before the Wine Country wildfires Trenberth continued to proselytize his views, “Whatever conditions exists, they’re always exacerbated by climate change. There’s always that heat variable, the increased risk.”
Indeed heat is always a variable, but usually it has nothing to do with CO2. Sadly, due to his extreme beliefs Trenberth often confuses climate with weather.
Similarly, Daniel Swain who authors a good California Weather Blog, unfortunately strays when he tries to interject CO2-climate change into an otherwise good weather analysis. Writing the fires should also be looked at from “the long-term climate context,” he argued the “record-hottest summer” dried out the vegetation exacerbating the fire conditions. But he too failed to separate natural climate and weather events from his hypothesized contributions from CO2. As will become clear from a more detailed analysis, climate change played no part in the wildfire devastation.
The Ignition Component
Fire danger rating systems analyze 1) an ignition component, 2) a fuel component and 3) a spread component to determine how to allocate fire-fighting resources and when to issue public alerts. Natural fires are caused by lightning, and so good weather models can forecast the short-term probability of lightning fires. Lightning fires are also more likely during warm and moist seasons enhancing their window of predictability. Unfortunately, Cal Fire reports 95% of California fires are unpredictably ignited by humans.
Climate alarmists like Dr. Trenberth have blithely suggested global warming is increasing the fire season stating, “In the West, they used to talk about a fire season, the fire season used to be 60 days, then 90 days, and now they think it’s year-round. There’s no pause.” Tragically that uncritical belief in a climate-related extended fire season has been parroted by lay person and scientists alike. But the facts show the observed extended fire season is due to human ignitions. Blaming climate change is fake news!
In a 2017 paper researchers reported that across the USA from 1992 to 2012, “human-caused fire season was three times longer than the lightning-caused fire season and added an average of 40,000 wildfires per year across the United States. Human-started wildfires disproportionally occurred where fuel moisture was higher.” Furthermore “Human-started wildfires were dominant (>80% of ignitions) in over 5.1 million km2, the vast majority of the United States, whereas lightning-started fires were dominant in only 0.7 million km2.”
We can reduce some human caused ignitions. The Wine Country fires were not ignited by lightning but all observations suggest they were started by downed power lines in high winds. A year ago, California legislators introduced a bipartisan bill aimed at reducing wildfire ignitions from powerlines. Although governor Brown hypes the unsubstantiated dangers of climate change, he vetoed the bill which would have promoted real action to prevent well-known human causes of wildfires. Preventing powerline ignition could have prevented the Wine Country tragedy.
The Fuel Component
Fire ecologists will estimate a fire’s potential intensity by calculating the Energy Release Component (ERC), a measure of the potential heat energy per square foot. ERC is a function of the biomass both dead and alive, and the biomass moisture content. As fuels increase and as fuels dry the ERC increases. Live fuels are modeled such that maximum moisture content coincides with the peak growing season, and declines thereafter as the plants go dormant. Moisture content of dead fuels are modeled according to their diameters.
Depending on their diameters, dead fuels will lose moisture as they equilibrate with their dry surroundings at rates that vary from 1 hour to 1000 hours or more. To aid in firefighting management decisions, fuels are categorized into 4 groups as described in Gaining an Understanding of the National Fire Danger Rating System published by the National Wildfire Coordinating Group
1-Hour Time-lag Fuels “consist of herbaceous plants or round wood less than one-quarter inch in diameter. Also included is the uppermost layer of litter on the forest floor.” The ERC of these fuels and thus the fire danger, can change throughout the day. Dead grass as well as twigs and small stems of chaparral shrubs are 1-hour fuels, and those fine fuels sustained the rapid spread of the Wine Country fires. Assertions that recent and past summer droughts or decades of climate change had dried the fuels and exacerbated the Wine Country fire danger have absolutely no scientific basis. The approach of the hot, bone-dry Diablo Winds would have extracted all the possible moisture from the dead grasses and chaparral twigs within hours, regardless of past temperatures. Trenberth and Swain simply confused rapid weather changes with climate change.
The critical “long-term context” they never discussed is that a century of fire suppression allowed destructive levels of fuel loads to develop, increasing the biomass component of the ERC estimate. As populations grew, so did the demand to suppress every small fire that could threaten a building. Natural small fires reduce the fuel load, whereas fire suppression allows fast drying fuels to accumulate. Unfortunately, fire suppression only delays the inevitable while stocking more fuel for a much more intense blaze. Local officials and preservationists have long been aware of this problem, and controlled burns to reduce those fuels were being increasingly prescribed. Tragically, it was too little too late.
Figure 1: A prescribed control burn in Wine Country
10-Hour Time-lag Fuels are “dead fuels consisting of round wood in the size range of one quarter to one inch in diameter and, very roughly, the layer of litter extending from just below the surface to three-quarters of an inch below the surface.” The fuel moisture of these fuels vary from day to day and modeled moisture content is based on length of day, cloud cover or solar radiation, temperature and relative humidity.
100-Hour Time-lag Fuels are “dead fuels consisting of round wood in the size range of 1 to 3 inches in diameter and, very roughly, the forest floor from three quarters of an inch to four inches below the surface.” Moisture content of these fuels are also a function of length of day (as influenced by latitude and calendar date), maximum and minimum temperature and relative humidity, and precipitation duration in the previous 24 hours.
Much of the chaparral shrubs produce twigs and stems in size ranges of the 1-hr, 10-hr and 100-hr fuels. These fuels were most likely the source of burning embers that high winds propelled into the devastated residential areas. Again, these dried out fuels are the result of a natural California summer drought and short term weather conditions such as the bone-dry Diablo Winds that arrive every year.
Figure 2 Moisture content of 3-8 inch diameter fuels from March to December
1000-Hour Time-lag Fuels are “dead fuels consisting of round wood 3 to 8 inches in diameter or the layer of the forest floor more than about four inches below the surface or both”. These larger fuels are more sensitive to drought conditions that existed months earlier, so it could be rightfully argued that a hotter drier July and August made these fuels more flammable in October and exacerbated the fires.
Fire ecologists planning prescribed burns to reduce fuel loads, wait until the 1000-Hr fuels’ moisture content is reduced to 12% or lower. If these larger fuels are dry, it is certain the smaller fuel categories are dry as well, so that all fuels will be highly flammable. As seen in the graph above (Figure 2) 1000-hr fuels reach that critical dryness threshold by July 1st and remain below that threshold until mid-October when the rains begin to return. Contrary to Trenberth’s blather, California’s fire season has always lasted 90+ days. Undoubtedly the unusually hot and dry 2017 summer would have lowered 1000-hr fuel moisture content even further. Nonetheless those fuels become naturally flammable every summer. Furthermore, these larger fuels were less often burned and thus insignificant factors in regard to the fires rapid spread. The rapid spread of the fires was due to consumption of the rapidly drying fuels.
Swain is fond of finding a “record setting” metric to bolster his climate change assertions. As such, he noted the “record-hot summer had dried out vegetation to record levels” and linked to a graph tweeted by John Badoglio showing October ERC values for the past 30 years were at a record high in 2017 (in part because of delayed rains). However, that “record” was also largely irrelevant. The ERC calculation is heavily biased by the greater biomass of the larger 1000-hr fuels that would indeed get drier as the autumn continued without rain. Still those larger fuels were insignificant contributors to the rapidly spreading fire. As seen below (Figure 3), the grasses have been entirely burnt while the larger shrubs and trees, as well as the woody debris near the base of the trees (in the upper left) have not been consumed. In fact many of the trees are still alive. The potential energy estimated by the “record ERC” was only partially realized. It was the fast-drying dead grass and chaparral shrubs that turned potential ERC into meaningful fiery heat.
Figure 3
The Spread Component
“The spread component is defined as “the theoretical ideal rate of spread expressed in feet-per-minute.” Wind speed, slope and fine fuel moisture are key inputs in the calculation of the spread component, thus accounting for a high variability from day-to-day.” Thus, a combination of dry fuels and high winds typically result in fire-watch and red-flag warnings one day and no warnings days later as the winds subside. Forest rangers are well aware that September and October bring the powerful Diablo Winds of Santa Rosa as well as the Santa Anas of southern California, and with those winds comes the highest fire danger.
Cliff Mass is an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington and author of the superb Cliff Mass Weather and Climate blogs. An October 16th post provides an excellent summary of the metorological conditions that created the fierce winds driving the Wine Country fires. In essence, a strong approaching wind flow (the Diablo Winds) coupled with a thermal inversion near the top of the mountains that border the Santa Rosa valley, accelerated winds into a 60 to 90 mile per hour downslope wind event, a phenomenon known as a mountain wave. Those high winds snapped power line poles and ignited fires. The regional topography also funneled the winds and fire down the valley, taking dead aim at the heart of Santa Rosa. The topography had guided a similar fire in 1964, the Hanley fire, which was started by a carelessly discarded cigarette. Unfortunately without much concern, most of the burnt homes in the Tubbs fire had been built on top of the burnt grounds of that previous Hanley fire, despite public protests.
Were those high winds perhaps exacerbated by climate change? Highly unlikely!
The Diablo Winds affecting Santa Rosa or the Santa Annas of southern California are driven by cooling seasonal temperatures in the high deserts to the east. The inner continent cools faster than the oceans, setting up a pressure gradient driving the winds toward the coast. The winds then heat adiabatically rising 5 degrees Celsius for every 1000 feet of elevation descent. An adiabatic rise in temperature means no added heat from any source and basic physics tells us temperatures can rise adiabatically simply due to compression. Thus an air mass that originated near Flagstaff Arizona at a 6,900 foot elevation, could adiabatically warm by 30 degrees as it reaches sea level.
The flow direction of winds are largely driven by unequal seasonal changes in temperatures. During the summer the interior heats faster than the oceans, such that a cooling onshore wind reduces interior temperatures. This pattern reverses in the autumn as the interior lands cool faster than the ocean creating an inland high pressure that drives the Diablo and Santa Anna winds toward the coast. Despite declining solar insolation, this autumn wind flow causes coastal California to experience some of its hottest days of the year in September and October, commonly referred to as Indian summer. Similarly a pressure system that inhibited the cooling onshore winds around San Francisco, resulted in a record hot summer temperature. By simultaneously opposing cooling sea breezes while bringing warm winds that were adiabatically 5 to 10 degrees warmer, temperatures rise and relative humidity falls. The result is bone-dry hot Diablo winds that suck the moisture from land and vegetation wherever the winds pass.
To restate the forces driving the winds, the Diablo winds are the result of a pressure gradient resulting from an interior that cools cooler faster than the ocean. If CO2 is warming the earth to any significant extent, then we would expect that warming to prevent the inner continent from cooling as quickly as it did decades ago. Thus CO2-global warming would predict a decline in that pressure gradient and a weakening of these winds.
To summarize, none of the fire components- ignition, fuels, or spread – had been affected by climate changes.
Finally, keen observers will notice that entire blocks of houses, and entire neighborhoods were completely burnt to the ground, in contrast to neighborhood trees that often remained relatively unscathed. This suggests that the high winds rapidly carried burning embers from the grassland and chaparral into these developments. While the trees did not trap the embers, the buildings did. I would expect we will soon hear about investigations inquiring into why these residences were not required to erect more fire safe structures, especially when built in a known fire-prone habitat in a high wind corridor. The simple requirement of constructing eaves in such a manner that prevents the trapping of burning embers and fire-proof roofs may have saved many homes.
Indeed there are many lessons that will allow us to prevent such wildfire disasters in the future if we have accurately determined the causes of these fires. Cliff Mass notes that our short-term weather models had accurately predicted the time and place of the fiercest winds. That information could be used to temporarily shut down the electrical grid where power lines are likely to ignite fires. We can bury power lines below ground. We can remove the high fuels loads that accumulated during a century of misguided fire suppression. Insurance companies can demand higher rates unless proven precautions are undertaken. It is those lessons that Gore, Clinton, Brown should be promoting to inform the public. Trenberth and Swain should be informing the people of the natural weather dangers that are inevitable. There is no evidence that climate change, whether natural or anthropogenic, exacerbated the ignition, fuels or spread components of these deadly fires. And worse, their obsessed belief that rising CO2 concentrations worsen every tragedy only distracts our focus from real life-saving solutions.
Jim Steele is Director emeritus Sierra Nevada Field Campus, San Francisco State University and author of Landscapes & Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism
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