I am not going to enjoy watching the fight within the Jewish Community over the Iran deal:
“I think it’s going to be a really epic fight. The foreign policy fight of a generation,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of J Street, a liberal advocacy group. “It pits folks who brought us the Iraq war and whole neocon worldview versus the Obama worldview and the concept that we can confront enemies with diplomacy.”
The problem is that I have no respect for the side that thinks the Iran deal should be unraveled by Congress. They have no answers for what comes after that. None.
All they have is a vague sense that maybe we’ll be forced to create a regime change in Iran.
That’s it.
They have nothing else, including any earthly idea how a war with Iran will play out or how Iran will emerge on the other side as a less dangerous and friendlier member of the international community with no regional ambitions and no desire for a nuclear weapons capability.
Thank god for J Street, though, or this would really get ugly.
It seems to me that this is less a fight within the Jewish community as it is a fight between Jewish donors such as Adelson/Saban, and then the people who reside within the Jewish community themselves. It’s the same as it ever was: the most hardcore anti-Zionists I know are themselves Jewish (and not the ultra-orthodox kind, either), while the Greater Israel minority teams up with Christofascists to set the terms of what the debate is or should be. The good news is that maybe this will reveal what’s behind the mask of AIPAC and their supporters; maybe we can even have our Democratic nominees stop attending their conferences (lol, fat chance, I know).
Of course, Jeffrey Goldberg seems intent on being the arbiter of who is “pro-Israel” and who is not, implying that J Street isn’t a “pro-Israel” group at all (which to me is like Gun Owners of America accusing the NRA of not being pro-gun).
Just yesterday I saw a TV ad against the agreement. I didn’t catch the group’s name (in tiny text at the end of the ad) but clearly the big money is already afoot.
Sheldon Adelson is either being coy about who he backs in the 2016 Presidential race or has yet to decide among those that have been kissing his …
Saban is all in. And she’s already declared that she’ll be a better friend to Israel than Obama has been.
The secret is that the Likud government has no interest in any “what comes after” because they’re just fine with the status quo: it keeps Israeli voters frightened and voting for a policy of racist bluster instead of desperately needed economic reform and resolution of the West Bank and Gaza situation.
And Iran terror works pretty well for Republicans too. But The Forward is saying their mail on the deal is above all “partisan” and we know the Jewish community remains fundamentally Democratic and is changing its views on the Middle East along with the president and the party. A J Street poll last month found 59% of American Jews favored the deal (more than the population at large, 53%). It will be a minority of Jews, with Adelson money and the Republican machine, that try to sink the agreement.
Exactly. There are a whole bunch of problems in the world like this that we might have a decent shot at solving if it weren’t for the fact that a lot of people see those problems as gifts that keep on giving.
The problems in the world really aren’t my problem. It always astonishes me how much we invest in the goings on half way around the world. I despise our military involvement in the middle east. It is at best counter productive but ultimately just plain evil.
If the Sunni and shia and jewish want to murder each other over magic, then there is little rational people can do to solve that particular problem.
I suggest we all focus on our own lives, our own family, and our own friends. The rest of the world can take care of itself. Every moment our so-called leaders spend thinking about people in the middle east is a moment they aren’t thinking about the problems in America. Attacks like 9/11 and all the terrible things that has happened since are the result of US politicians meddling and interfering where we don’t belong.
When will we finally learn that america is not a global force for good? It is just another violent actor on the stage. It’s time to bring the curtain down and walk away.
Say what you will, pax Americana is good for business.
Lots of things are good for business. You could kill your competitor, blow up their factories and offices, steal their products and sell them as your own. All good for business.
Of course you are right… Money makes the world go ’round. Let’s not pretend our exceptional interference is anything noble… it is just greed.
Yes, well I am trying not to put too much value judgement on it; but there it is. There are many nations who benefit from this arrangement without necessarily supporting American geopolitical aspirations.
When asked if I ‘believe’ in American exceptionalism I usually respond that I’m quite certain the US has an exceptionally large and powerful blue-water navy. It’s not an accident or necessarily a bad thing.
I knew it! The deal is anti-Semitic.
It does seem that these bullshit charges of anti-Semitism are losing their sting, at least. That’s partly thanks to Netanyahu, I suppose, what with the depths he stooped to in the last election.
It’s really isn’t a question of whether you’re Jewish or Iranian anyway, but whether you’re a thug and a liar. I’m sure there are plenty of thugs and liars in the Iranian regime, but I’m not going to assume that they’re all thugs and liars. And I’m sure as hell not taking Bibi’s word for it.
Bibi Netanyahu is the Bill Kristol of Israel: the best course of action is always to do the opposite of what he says.
The only thing that is vague about the Neocon agenda is their communications.
The entire reason for the sanctions and axis of evil and all that was/is regime change. If we need to attack them at some point to get regime change, so be it. Although Bibi seems much more game for an attack than our home-grown idiots do.
The whole thing now about the nuke deal is a red herring. NONE of this is about nuclear weapons. It is about making Iran weak, and somehow, someday we get regime change. Like has worked so well with Cuba.
The following a real hoot!:
…how Iran will emerge on the other side as a less dangerous and friendlier member of the international community with no regional ambitions and no desire for a nuclear weapons capability.
Replace Iran with US and cry.
These religious fights are always a bit pathetic. It’s like they can’t help themselves. It doesn’t really matter which religion it is… they all are so full of hate that there is little to do but watch and hope they kill each other before they kill me.
I kind of do want to watch. I hope this takes us a step closer to treating Israel as the normal nation it is.
This is as important an issue as we’ve seen in some time. Super important that the hard right is beaten back on this. I have many Jewish family members and friends who think the deal should be scuttled. It will be so gratifying if we can beat them. About as satisfying as giving Bibi a good hard kick in the nuts.
Why do they ‘think’ the deal should be scuttled?
In some eleventy-dimensional way it seems that Congress’ failure to authorise the use of force in Syria when given the chance has enabled Obama’s subsequent foreign policy on Cuba and now Iran in spite of their intended interference. Bibi’s electioneering speech was the icing on the cake.
Meanwhile the usual suspects are blasting away at how ‘weak’ his foreign policy seems to them and their target electorate when Americans generally are aligned with peaceful, and hopefully, prosperous solutions. It seems to me he has the Republicans walking the plank on these issues and they may not even realise it yet.
They have a very definitive plan for what to do after they unravel the deal in Iran: Shovel more of other people’s children into their God of War’s jaws to satisfy their bloody ambitions to rule the world with an iron fist.
They’ve already lost, they just don’t know it.
What we’re seeing and are going to see for a long time yet is a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing. But watch out for dirty tricks.
You know, it took over half a century but eventually we found a way to describe the confederate flag as the symbol it is: the American Swastika.
Can we now also describe the right wing Israelites for what they really are? Jewish Nazis.
Yes, the Nazis hated Jews more than anything else. But the extremist Jews, who – sadly – are part of an extremely large minority of the Israeli voting population but are a small minority of the Jewish population elsewhere – fit the Nazi description in every meaningful way.
They LOVE investing all power and trust in an authority that has zero restriction on using the military to slaughter others who are deemed enemy.
They believe that they are genetically superior to their enemy. A death of the enemy is something to be celebrated.
They believe that there enemy deserves extremely minimal rights – and that every resistance attempt their enemy has made justifies even fewer rights.
They believe that there is some sort of divine-sourced right that they have over their enemies land. Dammit, they need some lebensraum.
Jewish Supremacists. Jewish Nazis. I don’t care what you call them. There are another evil the world has to deal with.
This places the Nazis in the same category as American settlers.
I don’t buy that at all.
While American settlers can use a bit of historical revision to better reflect their savagery and genocidal effect, they shouldn’t not be revised all the way to highly-efficient death camps.
Smallpox infected blankets and death marches to comparatively infertile lands was highly-efficient.
Still not Treblinka.
How can we know when US records weren’t kept? Both were genocides. Doesn’t serve any purpose to debate whether one genocide was worse than another. A reason why we should be extremely careful in the use of the word genocide.
I think it makes sense to distinguish between what happened here in the New World when Europeans came into contact with the native population and the deliberate, state-sponsored extermination of an entire people. If you don’t want to or know how to make that distinction then you won’t make it.
If we’re going to be accurate, Nazi Germany didn’t originally intend to exterminate an entire people. They encouraged emigration. But the state policies did change rapidly.
Taking lands away from native populations in N. America was always state sponsored in one form or another. (Mormons taking over the Utah territory might be an exception — they did it on their own.)
Guess taking over two hundred years to complete the looting, we can view the deaths of native peoples as “collateral damage.” A shame that only 5-10% survived and were forced to live on state sponsored reservations.
Whole Foods Exploits Prison Labor for Your Goodies, While Ripping You Off Just when you thought John Mackey, Whole Foods CEO, could’t be a more loathsome creature, he found a way.
No particular love for Whole Foods — my preferred grocery retailer is a German megaconglomerate that sells house labels with a homespun folksy twist — but there isn’t a single supply chain that isn’t rotten to its core. Remember the CIW tomato campaign? There’s Sakuma farms in Washington that supplies a ton of berries (organic and otherwise) under the Driscoll Farms label. There’s the awful practices of the meat industry, of course, and that’s without even considering the sweatshop labor that makes >95% of the clothes purchased in the US and elswhere.
I mean, I’m under no illusions about ALDI/Trader Joe’s and sure as hell can’t imagine that Kroger, Safeway/Albertsons, Wal-Mart, or any of those guys are even as good as Whole Foods’ labor practices, never mind better.
Some are better than Whole Foods at least on one important measure. United Food and Commercial Workers
Well the entire reject -the – agreement side never admits Iran is fighting ISIS. lots of up-is-downism
Hillary weighing in
Where have I heard that “Trust, but verify” phrase before? Let me see now …
Combine that with her claim that she’ll be a better friend to Israel than Obama has been and only those falling off turnip trucks can’t connect the dots.
You can only wonder who she thinks she is.
Oh, she knows who she is. But that won’t get her to the WH.
“Don’t trust, but verify” is pure Clintonian. I think she made a gaffe riffing on Reagan and nobody noticed or cares; it nearly inverts the meaning of the original.