Politics

By Shibley Telhami The Brookings Institute The United States has just signed an unprecedented military aid deal with Israel totaling $38 billion. What’s remarkable about the agreement is that the United States is committing to significant levels of aid to Israel over a period of 10 years. The fact that Israel is the recipient of … Continued

Asa Winstanley 

Electronic Intifada

A millionaire donor to the UK’s Labour Party has been suspended by party officials after lashing out at supporters of left-wing leader Jeremy Corbyn as Nazis.

The BBC reported on Sunday that Michael Foster had been suspended for breaching party rules prohibiting abuse.

Foster is a supporter of Israel, and last year heckled a speech where Corbyn urged a lifting of Israel’s blockade of Gaza.

A letter from general secretary Iain McNicol notifying Foster of his suspension cited an article written by Foster in the Mail on Sunday, the BBC reported.

In that article, published in August, Foster raged against Corbyn and his Nazi “stormtroopers.”

Foster had been so outraged at Jeremy Corbyn’s history of Palestine solidarity activism that he attempted to use his millions to fix this year’s leadership election against him.

Foster took the Labour Party to court in July in an effort to force Corbyn off the ballot.

Backlash
Foster received some backlash for his article, even among other anti-Palestinian propagandists.

One member of the executive of the Jewish Labour Movement – a pro-Israel group of party members – wrote that Foster’s remarks were “regrettable, and there is a strong case to argue that he should retract them.” Nazi analogies should not be made, Jay Stoll wrote in a Times of Israel blog post.

One of the concluding recommendations of the Chakrabarti Inquiry into allegations of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party states that Labour members should “resist the use of Hitler, Nazi and Holocaust comparison.”

But Foster doubled down instead of apologizing.

In a second article in the Tel Aviv daily Haaretz, Foster wrote that “Corbyn, like all tyrants … will fall” and that “the Holocaust is my history … I will use it when I see an analogy in front of me.”

Foster’s suspension comes amidst mounting evidence of thousands of politically motivated suspensions of Labour Party members and supporters – most of whom are pro-Corbyn.

In August, shadow chancellor John McDonnell accused Labour headquarters of a “rigged purge” against Corbyn, after it suspended Ronnie Draper, the head of the bakers’ union.

Draper is a noted pro-Corbyn figure and the union he is elected to lead has been one of Corbyn’s most active supporters.

McDonnell said that “Labour party members will not accept” the purge, and cited Labour headquarters’ inaction over Foster’s “stormtroopers” article as evidence that McNicol’s team is biased against Corbyn.

The suspension of Foster on Sunday probably represents a concession by party officials towards the leader’s office. Draper’s suspension was also lifted last week.

Showbiz agent
Michael Foster made his millions as a show business agent for actors including Sacha Baron Cohen and Hugh Grant. Foster apparently still represents radio host Chris Evans.

He has donated more than $533,000 to the Labour Party over the years. This includes tens of thousands to Liz Kendall, the Blairite leadership candidate in last year’s election contest (she came last with 4.5 percent).

He tried his hand at politics by running as a Labour parliamentary candidate in Cornwall during last year’s general election, but was beaten by his Conservative rival.

During that campaign, Foster reportedly harassed a female rival candidate as a “cunt” and threatened to “destroy” her.

At a Labour Friends of Israel reception last year, Foster drew attention to himself by standing on a chair and heckling Corbyn by screaming “Oi! Oi! Say the word ‘Israel!’”

Freshly elected leader, Corbyn had told the assembled audience that the siege of Gaza must end.

In his recent Haaretz article, Foster wrote that he was a supporter of former Labour leader Tony Blair. Blair has been a staunch supporter of Israel’s military attacks on Lebanon and Gaza that inquiries by the UN and independent organizations found involved large-scale war crimes.

The Haaretz article also notes in a postscript that Foster “works with Shaharit” – an Israeli think tank which openly operates in settlements built on stolen Palestinian land in the West Bank.

All Israeli settlements are illegal under international law.

Court case
Foster’s contention that Corbyn needed the nomination of 51 Labour lawmakers to run for party leader again was rejected by the High Court in July.

A majority of Labour’s national executive had ruled that Corbyn, as the incumbent leader, did not need MPs’ nominations.

Corbyn is the run-away favorite to win an election contest for party leader, which was triggered in July.

An attempt by Labour MPs to oust Corbyn in June failed after party members and activists rallied behind Corbyn.

But in a separate case, in which Foster was not involved, the Court of Appeal ruled that almost 130,000 new Labour members who had joined since January could not vote in the current leadership election.

Corbyn’s leadership has brought an influx of new activists and supporters. Labour is now thought to be the largest political party in Europe, with more than half a million members.

Source: electronicintifada.net

By Abigail Hauslohner 

The Washington Post

Farooq Mitha’s friends, seated in a tight circle at a mosque here on a recent evening, told it to him straight.

“This would be the easiest election to take Muslims for granted,” said Mohammad Mubarak, a lawyer, as several of the other Muslim American political activists nodded.

The prospect of a Donald Trump presidency may frighten plenty of Muslim voters, the group told Mitha, but Hillary Clinton isn’t particularly popular, either. In the Democratic primary, many Muslim voters backed Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.). Clinton was too hawkish for them — and may still be even if she earns their votes.

And then there are voters such as Oz Sultan, a counterterrorism analyst and commentator in New York who calls himself “a lifelong conservative.”

“I don’t think Hillary Clinton has the ability to keep our country safe,” he said Wednesday from his home in Harlem, after watching Trump speak at a national security forum. Sultan’s biggest concern is the Islamic State, and Clinton “has gone on a destabilizing spree,” he said, noting the Obama administration’s military offensive in Libya.

Registered Muslim American voters are a starkly diverse and growing constituency, and Mitha, 34, who was named Clinton’s Muslim outreach director last month, is trying to woo them all.

Back in this Gulf Coast city where he grew up, he expected a tough crowd. He already had held roundtable discussions in Michigan, Ohio and Virginia, and he knew that some Muslims in his hometown viewed Clinton as too right-wing or centrist on issues of domestic spying and Middle East policy.

His counter: “I don’t think a presidential campaign has ever hired anyone to do Muslim outreach,” Mitha told his friends. The campaign has looked at the numbers and embarked on an unprecedented outreach to a voting bloc that has the potential to decide elections in several swing states, where support for Clinton has been ticking downward since the Democratic National Convention.

Take Florida, where Clinton remains locked in a tight race with Trump. In a state where the 2000 presidential election was decided by a 537-vote margin for George W. Bush, there are about 180,000 registered voters who are Muslim, Arab and South Asian, the civic nonprofit Emerge USA estimates.

Two years ago, Muslims made up just under 1 percent of the U.S. population, according to the Pew Research Center’s 2014 Religious Landscape Study. But the population is growing; Emerge USA, which collects data on Muslim voters and has a political action committee to support candidates, puts the number at closer to 2 percent of the population.

Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia “alone add up to almost 1 million Muslim voters,” said Khurrum Wahid, a Miami-based lawyer and the organization’s founder. “With a decent voter turnout in those states, Muslims will be the swing vote in both the presidential and many close House races.”

Most Muslim Americans now lean Democratic, according to the Pew study. In past decades, many were fiscally conservative, pro-family and eager to see their cities get tough on crime. Surveys conducted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the American Muslim Alliance in the aftermath of Bush’s 2000 election found that between 72 percent and 80 percent of Muslims polled said that they had voted for him. But after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and Bush’s rhetoric on religion and decision to invade Iraq and Afghanistan, the majority began voting Democratic.

At the same time, Muslims are generally less politically active than the larger American population; only 62 percent of those who were U.S. citizens were certain that they were registered to vote, compared with 74 percent of adult U.S. citizens overall, according to Pew.

To reach those voters, the Clinton campaign has appointed two state-level Muslim outreach coordinators to work with Mitha, and the campaign also has dispatched Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), the first Muslim elected to Congress, and Huma Abedin, Clinton’s close adviser and deputy campaign manager, to key swing states across the country.

Ellison estimates that he has met with at least 10 Muslim groups since the July convention. One recent Monday morning, he showed up in a tiny Orlando doctor’s office where the campaign was holding its kickoff phone bank for Muslim volunteers and rattled off reasons Muslims should vote for Clinton.

She has fought for children’s rights, he said. She stood up for Abedin when the Trump campaign attacked her. And she has gone out of her way to meet with Muslims, Ellison said, stopping in his home district of Minneapolis to meet with Somali American community leaders.

“The Clinton campaign is more inclusive of the Muslim community than any presidential campaign that I’ve ever seen,” he told the group of phone bank volunteers that included doctors, lawyers, college students, Palestinian Americans, Guyanese Americans, Kenyan Americans and others.

The sheer diversity
One of Clinton’s challenges is the population’s sheer diversity. Nearly a third of all Muslim Americans are black, according to Pew, some of them with deep roots in the distinctly American sect the Nation of Islam. Others — about eight in 10 — are immigrants or the children of immigrants. Muslim Americans come from different ethnic, linguistic and cultural backgrounds; span the economic spectrum; and have policy opinions and priorities that can be just as divergent, community leaders say.

Some, like Sultan, are even likely to vote for Trump, who has called for a ban on Muslim immigrants and surveillance of mosques.

“I know, personally, three doctors” who are voting for him, Azhar Subedar, an Islamic scholar, told Mitha in Tampa.

The Trump campaign did not respond to questions about whether it is also trying to attract Muslim voters or considers the constituency a potential tipping point in any swing states.

This cycle, get-out-the-vote efforts are surging in Muslim communities. The Clinton campaign, Emerge USA, the Washington-based Arab American Institute, CAIR and a range of smaller, local organizations, including mosques, have held voter registration drives, candidate forums and phone banks.

The most common arguments for Clinton offered by her Muslim advocates tend to revolve around Trump.

“Obviously, this election has a sense of urgency that we haven’t felt before,” said Muna Jondy, a Syrian American activist and lawyer from Flint, Mich. “Because it’s not just an option between a Republican and a Democrat. It’s between a fascist and another person.”

“Never before in the history of America has a major party had someone who was screaming bigotry into a megaphone,” Ellison told the phone bank volunteers in Orlando. “No Muslim can sit around and let this happen.”

The Trump factor “doesn’t work with everyone,” said James Zogby, the president of the Arab American Institute, who served as a campaign adviser to Sanders.

Support for Sanders among Muslim voters was “huge,” said Ellison, who also backed Sanders. A Muslims for Bernie 2016 Facebook page, with 7,465 likes, still exists. A Muslims for Hillary 2016 Facebook group has 820 members. Muslims for Trump has 428.

Sanders’s supporters say that, unlike Clinton, the senator from Vermont spoke out about key Muslim voter concerns, such as the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.

“It was an issue that always existed in our community,” said Nuren Haider, 31, who is running for Orange County commissioner in Florida. “But he brought it to the limelight,” said Mohammad Shair, a 23-year-old Florida law student who now plans to vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein.

Ellison tries to remind the disenfranchised Muslims who supported Sanders that Clinton has done a lot of good. He tells them that she regrets her vote in favor of the Iraq War — and that there are congressional votes he regrets, too.

“I also tell them: ‘There’s going to be a president, and it’s not going to be one of these third-party candidates. It’s going to be the Democrat or the Republican. . . . So understand the clear and present danger presented by the alternative,’ ” he said.

That binary choice makes some Muslim voters “feel like they have no choice,” Amina Spahic, the Tampa Bay regional director for Emerge, told Mitha and the others who gathered at the mosque in Tampa.

Mubarak, the Tampa lawyer, said he regretted his votes for President Obama and what he considers the administration’s hawkish drone policy and increased federal surveillance of Muslims. He wants to believe that Clinton would be different. But “the problem is we’ve been burned before so many times,” he said, “and frankly we’re tired of it.”

To those voters, Clinton’s statements on the issues provide little reassurance.

The campaign website’s explanation of her stance on combating terrorism starts with the words “radical jihadists” — a term that some Muslim activists say stigmatizes Islam. Her national security page makes prominent reference to “protecting Israel” but no similar reference to Palestinians and Syrians, which some voters say they’d like to see. In a March speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a lobbying group that aligns with the Israeli right and is opposed by many liberal American Jews, she twice referred to “Palestinian terrorists.”

Ghazala Salam, a Clinton delegate at the Democratic National Convention in July who chairs the American Muslim Democratic Caucus in Florida, said the former secretary of state is simply the most qualified to do the job. Whether you like all of her policies or not, Salam said, she knows how to deal with the outside world.

Skeptical Muslim voters are “coming around,” she said, and what they do next will be critical to the future of Muslim participation in U.S. politics.

Had Muslims been more politically engaged before the 2016 campaign, “we would have not really heard a person like Trump come out and say openly the things he did about Muslims,” Salam said. “For it not to happen again, we have to have proactive engagement in every level of government.”

Source: www.washingtonpost.com

By Zeina Azzam

The Hill 

I am a Palestinian-American and part of a 3.6 million-strong community of Americans who trace their roots to an Arab country. Since I turned 18, I have participated in Democratic Party primaries and have usually voted for the main Democratic presidential nominee. My views generally can be described as supporting Democratic Party politics. This primary season, I was squarely in the Bernie Sanders camp. But now that Hillary Clinton has received the Democratic Party nomination, I am having trouble with the idea of voting for her in November.

For me it is not possible to choose to vote for a presidential candidate based on their views regarding the Israeli-Palestinian issue. This is because every major party nominee for president I’ve ever known has professed to be a staunch supporter of Israel, so my support for Palestinian freedom and human rights would have left me no one to vote for.

So I was heartened when Bernie Sanders made history during his campaign by bringing up the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during the presidential debate last April, criticizing Hillary for her lack of concern for Palestinian lives and rights.

The idea that the United States should view the rights of Israelis and Palestinians equally was new, especially in a national forum such as a presidential debate. In addition, Sanders was bold in affirming publicly that as it pursues justice and peace, the United States does not always have to agree with Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. He also pushed Clinton regarding her barely mentioning the Palestinians in her AIPAC speech.

For her part, last fall Clinton wrote an op-ed, “How I Would Reaffirm Unbreakable Bond With Israel—and Benjamin Netanyahu,” in which—yet again—she painted Israel as a victim, with not one mention of Israel’s wars on Gaza or the nearly 50-year-old military occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. She also announced that one of her first acts in office as president would be to invite Netanyahu to the White House. Last year, Clinton wrote a letter to Israeli-American billionaire Haim Saban saying that she would make countering the grassroots Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights a priority and sought his advice for how to work together in this regard. Saban, of course, is one of the largest individual donors to the Democratic Party and has said, “I’m a one-issue guy, and my issue is Israel.” Hillary Clinton has been cozying up to Saban over the years; he and his wife contributed to her two Senate campaigns and are now the top donors to her presidential campaign.

Clinton’s unquestioning partisanship vis-à-vis Israel, embarrassing pandering to its supporters, and deliberate ignorance of basic rights for Palestinians upsets and alienates many of us, and not just Arab Americans. According to polls, Democrats and Americans in general are far more critical of Israel and its policies, and far more supportive of Palestinian rights, than Clinton and other members of the Democratic party establishment. According to a Pew poll released in released in May, more liberal Democrats (40 percent) sympathize with the Palestinians than do with Israel (33 percent). And according to a poll released by the Brookings Institution in December 2015, 75 percent of Democrats and 80 percent of independents want the United States to be impartial when it comes to Israel and Palestine. Further, fully half—49 percent—of Democrats would support sanctions or stronger measures against Israel over the construction of Jewish settlements on occupied Palestinian land, which violates longstanding US policy and international law.

Many of us wonder, will Clinton strive at all to make Washington “an honest broker” during negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians? How beholden will she feel to the influences of her billionaire supporters? Will her narrow view of justice and fairness expand to consider the human and national rights of Palestinians? So far, her words have given us no reason to be optimistic.

Although I have learned not to base my vote for president only on a candidate’s views regarding Israel and Palestine, these issues remain very important to me and to the growing number of Americans who support peace in the Middle East based on principles of fairness, justice and equality. So why does Clinton portray herself as progressive in many social and political arenas, such as civil rights and women’s rights, but not when it comes to human rights for millions of suffering Palestinians?

I ask, does Clinton want my vote? I live in a swing state, Virginia, and I would guess that my vote will count in this upcoming election. But she is not making any effort to espouse policies that will win me over—and others like me—and in fact is ignoring us altogether. If she wants to win my vote, and to stand on the right side of history, Clinton must begin to demonstrate that she values the lives and rights of Palestinians as much as those of Israelis.

Source: thehill.com

by James J. Zogby

Arab American Institute 

Late last year, as the primaries were just heating up, pundits and commentators were busy trying to make sense of the Donald Trump phenomenon. His stump speeches were more akin to the stream of consciousness rantings of an out-of-control id than what was expected from a serious presidential candidate. He frequently contradicted himself and, more often than not, told bold-faced lies. He insulted groups and individuals, making his party’s leaders squirm. And yet his crowds were huge and passionate and his poll numbers were high and getting higher. The political class was baffled.

One Sunday morning, the Washington Post and New York Times both ran what purported to be “analysis” pieces arguing that Trump might not be as right-wing as some feared. Their methodology was questionable, at best. Both authors argued that maybe the best way to discern the candidate’s real policy positions would be to take his contradictory pronouncements on any number of issues and attempt to reconcile them. Both concluded that maybe the candidate was indulging in his own crude form of triangulation and that the real Donald Trump was neither a true conservative nor a liberal, but a moderate, at heart!

The entire exercise was as amusing as it was wrong-headed. What they didn’t understand then, and what apparently many pundits still don’t get, is that policies, or even words themselves, don’t matter to Donald Trump. It’s the performance and the reaction it gets that counts. All the rest is misdirection designed to confound gullible analysts and garner more attention.

This game of misdirection was on full display during the past few weeks leading up to Trump’s big immigration performance on Wednesday. The speech had been scheduled and then cancelled a few weeks back—all of which made its delivery more anticipated. And so while Hillary Clinton was raising money, delivering serious policy addresses, and staving off more bad news related to her never-ending email saga and issues related to the Clinton Foundation, Trump was titillating the media with the possibility that his position on immigration might be evolving.

Was he moderating his views to appease Republican office-holders who needed their standard-bearer to moderate his positions? Was he attempting to broaden his own appeal to win Hispanic and African American voters? Was he finally making the long-awaited shift to becoming “a real presidential candidate?”

While television pundits bloviated and the columnists filled pages of newsprint speculating about his intentions, Trump gleefully led them all on a wild goose chase. Even the candidate’s supporters got caught up in the game. Some attempted to explain away a possible shift, arguing that “he never really meant that stuff about mass deportations or the wall”. Others worried that any softening would cost him dearly since his base support came from hard core nativists who believed that the wall would be built, Mexico would pay for it, and all “illegals” would be deported.  

The day before his much hyped “policy speech” on immigration, Trump announced that he would fly to Mexico to meet with that country’s president. All eyes were now just where he wanted them—on him. The media frenzy grew. It was “all Trump, all the time”. One network even featured a countdown clock in the corner of the screen counting down the seconds to the “big speech”.  

What was thought to be “a bold and risky” meeting in Mexico turned out to be a rather ho-hum affair. The wildly unpredictable controversial American candidate met with the wildly unpopular Mexican president and both said little that was of interest to anyone. It was left to the media to make the absence of fireworks into a big story. And then it was on to the speech.

What I always find intriguing about Trump policy speeches is the delivery. Whenever he attempts a major policy address he has taken to reading his remarks, rather awkwardly, from a teleprompter. But Trump, being Trump, can’t help but go off-script. He reads a line and then makes a comment—as if to agree with what he just read. The overall effect is a bit comical.    
The speech was reported by Trump opponents to be “an exercise in hateful rhetoric” filled with misstatements of fact and by supporters to be a “restatement, with added details, of Trump’s hardline position” on immigration. In reality, it was both and more—it was a show, and, for Trump, that’s what matters.

Fact checkers had a field day pointing out that Trump misstated, exaggerated, or just plain made up statistics or claims contained in his remarks. To his already bigoted position on which immigrants would be allowed into America, Trump added new, deeply disturbing criteria—new immigrants must be shown to “share our values and love our people” and that they be selected on the basis of “their likelihood of success in US society”.

But the speech was also filled with Trumpian contradictions. At one point, the candidate reaffirmed that there would be no amnesty and that those here illegally would have to return to their countries, while in another place he suggested that those who are here illegally who have families and are working hard could stay—but then left that hanging without clarification. One network, falling for this misdirection, ran a lower third saying “Trump softens, hardens, softens stand”.

In the end, however, it’s important not to be carried away with analyzing what he said or attempting to discern what he meant. It’s a fool’s errand trying to make sense out of nonsense. Because for Donald Trump, the policy formulations don’t matter, neither do the misstatements, exaggerations or contradictions. What matters is that he built a “huge” audience in front of which he performed well. He appeared presidential in the afternoon and then reverted to hate-filled demagogue at night—and his folks loved the incitement and loved him. Like everything else he does, it was a show. All the rest was misdirection designed to confound and draw more attention—and he loved every minute of it.  

Source: www.aaiusa.org