Uncle Sam’s Friends and Family Plan. By Steve Breen.

Uncle Sam’s Friends and Family Plan. By Steve Breen. Real Clear Politics, October 23, 2013.

What Makes a Sex Shop Halal? By Katelyn Fossett.

What Makes a Sex Shop Halal? By Katelyn Fossett. Foreign Policy, October 23, 2013. Also here.

Loving Us to Death: How America’s Embrace Is Imperiling American Jewry. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

Loving Us to Death: How America’s Embrace Is Imperiling American Jewry. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, November 2013.

Why Bother Being Jewish? By Caroline Glick. NJBR, October 8, 2013.

American Jews: Laughing But Shrinking. By Jonathan S. Tobin. NJBR, October 1, 2013. With related articles.

 

This Egyptian Writer is Way, Way Too Excited About the Country’s Military Leader. By Max Fisher.

This Egyptian writer is way, way too excited about the country’s military leader. By Max Fisher. Washington Post, October 24, 2013. Also here.

Catch the Al-Sisi mania. By Lubna Abdel Aziz. Al-Ahram Weekly, September 17, 2013.

The Rihanna Israel-Palestine Controversy That Never Really Happened. By Max Fisher.

The Rihanna Israel-Palestine controversy that never really happened. By Max Fisher. Washington Post, October 24, 2013. Also here.

Fisher:

U.S.-based Barbadian pop star Rihanna’s big concert in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv had one very brief, strangely political moment. When performing the song “Pour it Up,” according to Israeli newspaper Haaretz, she substituted the lyric “All I see is dollar signs” with the phrase “All I see is Palestine.”

 

The switch-up generated controversy and discussion on the Israeli Web and in somesegments of the Arab press. It was picked up by lots of American aggregators. The choice of words seemed not just political but deeply provocative.

 

Except it turns out that it didn’t really happen.

 

First, here’s why it was controversial. It wasn’t clear whether the lyric was meant as simply a generic nod to Palestinians, perhaps a subtle suggestion that Rihanna’s audience of some 50,000 think about the Palestinian territories and Israeli policy toward them, or whether it meant something more.

 

Much of the online discussion focused on the fact that Rihanna apparently did not say the word “Israel” during her performance and had come under pressure to cancel her show from some pro-Palestinian groups that support boycotting Israel. In singing “all I see is Palestine” in the middle of Tel Aviv, was Rihanna suggesting that the city should be considered not part of Israel, but part of a single Palestinian state? Didn’t that sound uncomfortably close to the rhetoric of anti-Israeli groups that insist the entire country is illegitimate and should be dissolved?

 

If these sound like overwrought questions to you, then it turns out that you are correct. Simone Wilson, a writer at the site JewishJournal.com who has been impressively persistent in covering this story, got ahold of a cellphone video recorded by a fan at the concert. And it turns out, as best one can tell from watching the video, that Rihanna used the normal lyrics. She didn’t mention Palestine at all. Wilson also noted that a Jerusalem Post reporter had expressed earlier skepticism about the controversial lyrics, pointing out that no other Israeli journalist at the concert had heard “all I see is Palestine.”

 

The whole episode was pretty silly. So why are you reading about it? Because this is a reminder of how remarkably sensitive the politics of the Israel-Palestinian conflict can get, and indeed always are. The mere hint of a one-word political statement by a 25-year-old Barbadian pop star, during a highly non-political event, was enough to generate controversy and debate in multiple countries.

 

The fight over symbolism can sometimes feel almost as vicious as the fight for territory; recall the endless rounds of controversy and allegation and conspiracy-theorizing over the photos of children who were killed or wounded during the November clashes between Israel and Gaza. The difference, of course, is that what Rihanna said, or in this case didn’t say, is of next-to-zero actual significance. What is of significance is that both parties to  the Israel-Palestinian conflict are so primed for controversy and outrage, so hawkishly ever-alert for the slightest indication of someone taking sides, that this incident would become a story at all.

America’s Original Sin: The Legacy of White Racism. By Jim Wallis.

America’s Original Sin: The Legacy of White Racism. By Jim Wallis. Sojourners, November 1987.

The Most Controversial Sentence I Ever Wrote. By Jim Wallis. Sojourners, October 24, 2013. Also at The Huffington Post.

12 Years a Slave: A Conversation on Race. Sojourners.

The Blood and Tears, Not the Magnolias: 12 Years a Slave Holds Nothing Back in Show of Suffering. By Manohla Dargis. New York Times, October 17, 2013.

What Really Became of Solomon Northup After His “12 Years a Slave?” By Mark Robichaux. Wall Street Journal, October 23, 2013.

Twelve Years a Slave. By Solomon Northup. New York: Miller, Orton, and Mulligan, 1855. More editions here. Audio book here and here.




Wallis (Original Sin):

The United States of America was established as a white society, founded upon the genocide of another race and then the enslavement of yet another.

To make such a statement today is to be immediately accused of being rhetorical or, worse yet, of being “reminiscent of the ’60s.” The reaction is instructive and revealing. The historical record of how white Europeans conquered North America by destroying the native population and how they then built their new nation’s economy on the backs of kidnapped Africans who had been turned into chattel are facts that can hardly be denied. Yet to speak honestly of such historical facts is to be charged with being polemical or out of date. Why?

 

One reason is that racism is no longer a hot topic. After the brief “racial crisis” of the ’60s, white America, including many of those involved in the civil rights movement, has gone on to other concerns. Also, the legal victories of black Americans in that period, as far as most white Americans are concerned, have settled the issue and even left many asking, “What more do blacks want?”

 

Federal courts have recently interpreted civil rights legislation—originally designed to redress discrimination against black people—as applying to the grievances of whites who believe affirmative action programs have “gone too far.” In addition, popular racial attitudes have changed, attested to by the opinion polls and the increased number of black faces appearing in the world of sports, entertainment, the mass media, and even politics. After all, The Cosby Show is the highest-rated TV series in the country, and Jesse Jackson is running for president.

 

Indeed, in the two decades since the passage of momentous civil rights legislation, some things have changed and some things haven’t. What has changed is the personal racial attitudes of many white Americans and the opportunities for some black Americans to enter the middle levels of society. (The word “middle” is key here, insofar as blacks have yet to be allowed into the upper echelons and decision-making positions of business, the professions, the media, or even the fields of sports and entertainment where black “progress” has so often been celebrated.) Legal segregation has been lifted off the backs of black people with the consequent expansion of social interchange and voting rights, and that itself has led to changes in white attitudes.

 

What has not changed is the systematic and pervasive character of racism in the United States and the condition of life for the majority of black people. In fact, those conditions have gotten worse.

 

Racism originates in domination and provides the social rationale and philosophical justification for debasing, degrading, and doing violence to people on the basis of color. Many have pointed out how racism is sustained by both personal attitudes and structural forces. Racism can be brutally overt or invisibly institutional, or both. Its scope extends to every level and area of human psychology, society, and culture.

 

Prejudice may be a universal human sin, but racism is more than an inevitable consequence of human nature or social accident. Rather, racism is a system of oppression for a social purpose.

 

In the United States, the original purpose of racism was to justify slavery and its enormous economic benefit. The particular form of racism, inherited from the English to justify their own slave trade, was especially venal, for it defined the slave not merely as an unfortunate victim of bad circumstances, war, or social dislocation but rather as less than human, as a thing, an animal, a piece of property to be bought and sold, used and abused.

 

The slave did not have to be treated with any human consideration whatsoever. Even in the founding document of our nation, the famous constitutional compromise defined the slave as only three-fifths of a person. The professed high ideals of Anglo-Western society could exist side by side with the profitable institution of slavery only if the humanity of the slave was denied and disregarded.

 

The heart of racism was and is economic, though its roots and results are also deeply cultural, psychological, sexual, even religious, and, of course, political. Due to 200 years of brutal slavery and 100 more of legal segregation and discrimination, no area of the relationship between black and white people in the United States is free from the legacy of racism.

 

IN SPIRITUAL AND BIBLICAL terms, racism is a perverse sin that cuts to the core of the gospel message. Put simply, racism negates the reason for which Christ died—the reconciling work of the cross. It denies the purpose of the church: to bring together, in Christ, those who have been divided from one another, particularly in the early church's case, Jew and Gentile—a division based on race.

 

There is only one remedy for such a sin and that is repentance, which, if genuine, will always bear fruit in concrete forms of conversion, changed behavior, and reparation. While the United States may have changed in regard to some of its racial attitudes and allowed some of its black citizens into the middle class, white America has yet to recognize the extent of its racism—that we are and have always been a racist society—much less to repent of its racial sins. 

And because of that lack of repentance and, indeed, because of the economic, social, and political purposes still served by the oppression of black people, systematic racism continues to be pervasive in American life. While constantly denied by white social commentators and the media, evidence of the persistent and endemic character of American racism abounds.

. . . .

 

THE STRATEGIES FOR HOW black people must confront and finally overcome the ever-changing face of white racism in America must always originate within the black community itself. White allies have and can continue to play a significant role in the struggle against racism when black autonomy and leadership are sufficiently present to make possible a genuine partnership. But an even more important task for white Americans is to examine ourselves, our relationships, our institutions, and our society for the ugly plague of racism.

 

Whites in America must admit the reality and begin to operate on the assumption that theirs is a racist society. Positive individual attitudes are simply not enough, for, as we have seen, racism is more than just personal.

 

All white people in the United States have benefited from the structure of racism, whether or not they have ever committed a racist act, uttered a racist word, or had a racist thought (as unlikely as that is). Just as surely as blacks suffer in a white society because they are black, whites benefit because they are white. And if whites have profited from a racist structure, they must try to change it.

 

To benefit from domination is to be responsible for it. Merely to keep personally free of the taint of racist attitudes is both illusory and inadequate. Just to go along with a racist social structure, to accept the economic order as it is, just to do one's job within impersonal institutions is to participate in racism in the ’80s.

 

Racism has to do with the power to dominate and enforce oppression, and that power in America is in white hands. Therefore, while there are instances of black racial prejudice against whites in the United States today (often in reaction to white racism), there is no such thing as black racism. Black people in America do not have the power to enforce that prejudice.

 

White racism in white institutions must be eradicated by white people and not just black people. In fact, white racism is primarily a white responsibility.

 

We must not give in to the popular temptation to believe that racism existed mostly in the Old South or before the 1960s or, today, in South Africa. Neither can any of our other struggles against the arms race, war in Central America, hunger, homelessness, or sexism be separated from the reality of racism.

 

The church must, of course, get its own house in order. It is still riddled with racism and segregation. The exemplary role of the black church in the struggle against racism offers a sharp indictment to white churches, which still mostly reflect the racial structures around them.

 

The church still has the capacity to be the much-needed prophetic interrogater of a system that has always depended upon racial oppression. The gospel remains clear. The church still should and can be a spiritual and social community where the ugly barriers of race are finally torn down to reveal the possibilities of a different American future.


Wallis’s article is another left-wing diatribe against Jacksonian America as irredeemably racist, sexist, homophobic, and xenophobic. A classic example of liberal exploitation of white guilt. While Wallis is right about the central role of white supremacy in much of American history, he indulges in left-wing demagoguery when he accuses all white Americans, simply by being white Americans, of perpetrating racism, exploiting minorities, and benefiting from structures of racial domination. He is obliviously to the desperate situation of the white Jacksonian working and middle classes. Wallis wrote this article in 1987. In 2010 he accused the Tea Party of racism, saying it was driven by “an undercurrent of white resentment.”

Remembering Larry Goodwyn. By William Greider.

Remembering Larry Goodwyn. By William Greider. The Nation, October 23, 2013.

Michael Barone: America is a Multicultural Country from Our Colonial Beginnings. By David Austin Walsh.

Michael Barone: America is a Multicultural Country from Our Colonial Beginnings. Interview by David Austin Walsh. History News Network, October 21, 2013.

Political Science Says Syria’s Civil War Will Probably Last at Least Another Decade. By Max Fisher.

Political science says Syria’s civil war will probably last at least another decade. By Max Fisher. Washington Post, October 23, 2013. Also here.

Armed intervention and civilian victimization in intrastate conflicts. By Reed M. Wood, Jacob D. Kathman, and Stephen E. Gent. Journal of Peace Studies, Vol. 49, No. 5 (September 2012). Also here.

Veto Players and Civil War Duration. By David E. Cunningham. American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 50, No. 4 (October 2006).

The Critical Barrier to Civil War Settlement. By Barbara F. Walter. International Organization, Vol. 51, No. 3 (Summer 1997).

The Four Things We Know About How Civil Wars End (and What This Tells Us About Syria). By Barbara F. Walter. Political Violence at a Glance, October 18, 2013.

Why Do Some Civil Wars Last So Much Longer Than Others. By James D. Fearon. Stanford University, July 12, 2002.

Civil war termination. By James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin. Stanford University, September 12, 2008.

How Israeli Society Remained Intact. By Yossi Klein Halevi.

How Israeli society remained intact. By Yossi Klein Halevi. The Times of Israel, October 22, 2013.

Resolving Israel’s internal war of atonement. By Yossi Klein Halevi. The Times of Israel, September 9, 2013.

Why Things are Looking Good for Israel. By Jonathan (Yoni) Shimshoni and Nimrod Hurvitz. History News Network, October 21, 2013.

The Post-Islamist Era. By Ali Ibrahim.

The Post-Islamist Era. By Ali Ibrahim. Asharq Al-Awsat, October 22, 2013.

Why China’s Middle Class Supports the Communist Party. By David S.G. Goodman.

Why China’s middle class supports the Communist Party. By David S.G. Goodman. The Christian Science Monitor, October 22, 2013.

Those in the West commonly believe that economic growth and a burgeoning middle class in China will lead to democratic reform. But research on China’s middle class shows its lack of opposition to the Communist regime as well as some support for the party-state.

The Republican Schism: Main Street vs. K Street/Wall Street. By Erick Erickson.

The Republican Schism. By Erick Erickson. RedState, October 22, 2013.

Erickson:

There is a data set within yesterday’s CNN poll that even CNN largely overlooked, but that explains so much of the current tension within the Republican Party.

 

Long after we are dead, pundits and political reporters will still talk about the Rockefeller Republicans vs. the Conservatives and other such archaic divisions that no longer exist except in the rhetorical habits of pretentious political reporters. The real division within the Republican Party now isn’t even between those who call themselves tea partiers fighting the establishment. “Tea party”, like “conservative” and “Republican”, has less meaning these days and I increasingly dislike using the word. Admittedly though, everyone would consider me one based on the general parameters of what the tea party is.

 

In any event, the real fight within the Republican Party now is between those who believe we actually are at the moment of crisis — existential or otherwise — and thereby must fight as we’ve never fought before and those who think the GOP can bide its time and make things right.

 

At this moment, this boils down to a fight largely between Main Street and the K Street/Wall Street Alliance within the GOP. This gets us back to the CNN poll and the data set even CNN really missed.

 

CNN asked, “Do you think it is good for the country or bad for the country that the Republican Party is in control of the U.S. House of Representatives?” 54% say it is bad for the country. The polling is among all adults. With registered voters the number is 52%. With likely voters it would probably be a 50-50 proposition. The follow up question was not whether the public would prefer the Democrats to be in charge, but “If you had to choose, would you rather see John Boehner remain as Speaker of the House, or would you rather see Boehner replaced as Speaker by another Republican?” 63% of adult Americans would like him replaced.

 

Go into the subsets for far more interesting numbers.

 

One-third of self-described conservatives think it is bad for the country that the GOP is in charge of the House of Representatives compared to only 14% of people self-identified as supporting the tea party. 55% of conservatives want John Boehner replaced by another Republican. 60% of those who support the tea party want Boehner replaced.

 

While the margin of error goes up significantly in the subsets, this is a pretty consistent finding and one that complicates a lot of reporting about voter angst and anger toward the GOP. A lot of conservatives are angry at the GOP too. They want a Republican Party willing to fight They are gravitating toward candidates and third parties willing to fight and eschewing those who are too establishmentarian.

 

Add in another poll. Almost half of Americans want every member of Congress replaced. “Among Republicans and Republican leaners, a 52% majority say Congress would be better off if most of the current members were replaced,” USA Today reports. Likewise, a recent Pew survey showed that roughly a third of Americans want their own member of Congress replaced. Usually the polling shows people want congressmen replaced, but they like their own congressmen. Now, at its highest level in a very long time, people want their own congressman replaced too.

 

While all the polling suggests a very real anti-establishmentarian mood in the country and within the GOP, small donors are gravitating toward conservative groups willing to fight. Heritage Action for American, Club for Growth, FreedomWorks, Senate Conservatives Fund, Madison Project, etc. are all seeing small donors and activists gravitating to them. As attacks on these groups intensify from Republicans in Washington, their support from the grassroots correspondingly intensifies.

 

This is shaping up to be a more destructive primary season for the GOP Establishment than either 2010 or 2012. Making it even more brutal, the Chamber of Commerce and large corporatist donors are teaming up to help the Establishment. With a base already feeling ignored by the K Street/Wall Street alliance whispering in the Establishment’s ear, the Chamber and large donor support of Establishment candidates will just give the base and conservatives more fodder for attacks.

 

Ultimately though, and this is the key everybody is missing, we have arrived at this point because the leadership of the party has fundraised off its opposition to Obamacare in two campaign cycles, but has never aggressively sought to oppose it legislatively.

 

There will be hell to pay because of it.

Krugtron the Invincible. By Niall Ferguson.

Krugtron the Invincible. By Niall Ferguson. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. The Huffington Post, October 8-10, 2013.

Civilizing the Marketplace of Ideas. By Niall Ferguson. Project Syndicate, October 14, 2013.

Much Bigger Than the Shutdown: Niall Ferguson’s Public Flogging of Paul Krugman. By Ralph Benko. Chicago Tribune, October 21, 2013.

Why Russia Is Growing More Xenophobic. By Ilan Berman.

Why Russia Is Growing More Xenophobic. By Ilan Berman. The Atlantic, October 22, 2013. Also at IlanBerman.com.

Misreading a Russia on the Run. By Ilan Berman. IlanBerman.com, October 7, 2013.

Russia’s Demographic Revolution. By Daniel Pipes. National Review Online, October 22, 2013.

Russia’s Muslims Begin Talking about a “Muslim Russia.” By Paul Goble. Window on Eurasia, December 18, 2007.

Learning to Lean In Together. By Paula Derrow.

Learning to Lean In Together. By Paula Derrow. New York Times, October 17, 2013.

Krauthammer On Things That Matter. By Peter Wehner.

Krauthammer On Things That Matter. By Peter Wehner. Commentary, October 22, 2013.

Wehner:

Things That Matter is a collection of Charles Krauthammer’s extraordinary writings over the last 30 years. For those of us who have admired Krauthammer from the moment we first read him–and for a younger generation, from the moment they first watched him on Fox News–this volume has obvious appeal. It’s a marvelous, and at times quite moving, collection.

 

But I want to draw attention to the book’s introduction, which is new and autobiographical. Krauthammer writes about his upbringing and journey from medicine to politics, including a fascinating account of his intellectual evolution. What people might also find interesting is that his book was originally going to be a collection of his writings about everything but politics–on things “beautiful, mysterious, profound or just odd.” I’ll let Dr. Krauthammer takes it from there:

But in the end I couldn’t. For a simple reason, the same reason I left psychiatry for journalism. While science, medicine, art, poetry, architecture, chess, space, sports, number theory and all things hard and beautiful promise purity, elegance and sometimes even transcendence, they are fundamentally subordinate. In the end, they must bow to the sovereignty of politics.

 

Politics, the crooked timber of our communal lives, dominates everything because, in the end, everything – high and low and, most especially, high – lives or dies by politics. You can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. This is not ancient history. This is Germany 1933 . . . Politics is the moat, the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians. Fail to keep them at bay, and everything burns.

In reflecting on the place of politics in the hierarchy of human disciplines, and building on the observations of John Adams, Krauthammer writes, “the glories yielded by such a successful politics lie outside itself. Its deepest purpose is to create the conditions for the cultivation of the finer things, beginning with philosophy and science, and ascending to the ever more delicate and refined arts.” He adds this: “the lesson of our history is that the task of merely maintaining strong and sturdy the structures of a constitutional order is unending, the continuing and ceaseless work of every generation.”

 

If, as the saying goes, every anthropologist loves his tribe, then I suppose that everyone who has devoted his or her life to public affairs (as I have) loves politics. Now it would be silly to pretend that politics doesn’t include some darker sides; that it doesn’t draw to it people who are narcissistic, who thirst for power for its own sake, and who choose their self-interest over the general interest. And much of politics, depending on the level at which one is involved, can involve mundane and fairly prosaic matters. All true. (And all qualities attendant less to politics per se than to our fallen human nature.)

 

But there is also this. We should care about politics because political acts can have profound human consequences. It makes a very great difference whether people live in freedom or servitude; whether government promotes a culture of life or a culture of death; whether the state is a guardian or an enemy of human dignity. The end of government, James Madison wrote, is justice.

 

So yes, politics and governing is fraught with temptations and dangers. There are plenty of people who bring dishonor to the enterprise. But at the risk of sounding out of touch with our times, there is something ennobling about politics, at least when done properly. We cannot neglect the importance of our laws or the political philosophies in which we root our laws because we cannot neglect their influence on our lives. Such are the duties of citizenship in a free society.

 

That is, I think, what Charles Krauthammer is saying; and why what he is saying matters so very much.

The Coming Era of Tiny Wars and Micro-Conflicts. By Tom Engelhardt.

Why Washington Can’t Stop: The Coming Era of Tiny Wars and Micro-Conflicts. By Tom Engelhardt. TomDispatch, October 22, 2013. Also at The Nation, Real Clear World.

Terror: The Hidden Source. By Malise Ruthven. New York Review of Books, October 24, 2013. Review of The Thistle and the Drone: How America’s War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam. By Akbar Ahmed. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2013.

The Idiocy of the Arab Cultural Boycott of Israel. By Ray Hanania.

The idiocy of the cultural boycott of Israel. By Ray Hanania. Saudi Gazette, October 20, 2013.

Hanania:

Arab extremists love to hate Israel. It doesn’t matter whether relations with Israel are good, bad or ugly. They hate Israel, no matter what. Their goal is to turn back the clock and travel back into time so they can do what their predecessors failed to do in 1947, prevent the division and destruction of Palestine by the United Nations mandate and block the creation of Israel. Their strategy to achieve this goal is as stupid as is their leadership, which is driven not by reasoned, commonsense strategies for success, but by formulas of failure based on unrestrained emotion and hatred.

 

This hatred of Israel and Jews is not embraced by all Arabs. In fact, most Arabs don’t hate Israel or Jews. They are just mad at Israel and Jews. They are mad because they recognize the righteousness of the Palestinian cause.

 

But the extremists, who are a minority faction in our Arab community, step in and bully the mainstream Arabs into silence. Arabs are afraid to stand up to the extremists who often direct their hate and anger against Arabs even more than they do against Israel. So the mainstream Arabs remain silent. It’s better to not say anything, the moderates mistakenly conclude, than to stand up to the fanatics.

 

That’s why the fanatics hate me so much. I reject their failed leadership and their absence of commonsense strategies to achieve a Palestinian state. And I reject their idiotic mob mentality that denounces anyone who does anything in Israel.

 

Oh the extremists love you when you don’t cross that line of “normalization,” which is to act in a moral and ethical manner in dealing with Israel. And for years they loved me when I criticized Israel, but kept my mouth shut about their extremist fanaticism that enabled violence and that is as much to blame for Palestine’s failure as is Israel’s own extremist movement which has blocked Palestine.

 

This week, a Palestinian-Jordanian band based in Amman, Jordan, Autostrad, applied and received a visa from Israel’s embassy in Amman, Jordan, to perform in Israel. Performances were booked in Nazareth and Haifa in Israel, and in Ramallah and the Golan Heights in the Occupied Israeli territories.

 

The extremists are now engaged in bullying the members of the band, calling them “traitors” and “mutaba” or, in English, “normalizers.” They are being denounced as “Palestinian Zionists,” a label some of the fanatics have thrown at me for committing the “ultimate haram” – I married a Jewish woman and have a Jewish son.

 

But I urge Autostrad to stick to their principles. If we believe Israel must be a democratic country where Jews and non-Jews should be treated equal, then we can fight to bring equality to the non-Jews of Israel, Arabs who are citizens who suffer discrimination for many reasons. One reason is that Israel discriminates against non-Jews, citizens or not citizens. And another reason is that the Arabs are failures at fighting for Palestinian rights in Israel and in the Middle East.

 

That’s right, let me repeat it. The Arabs are failures at fighting for Palestinian rights. Their emotion overcomes logic and reason so they are incapable of being effective. They can’t establish a Palestinian state because they are consumed with destroying Israel.

 

Well, Israel happens to have Palestinians living in it and they deserve to see and hear Autostrad and other performers who are bringing their message of peace to the world. In fact, Palestinians should go out of their way to bring their message and their culture not just to Arabs in Israel but to Israelis and to American Jews.

 

You can’t beat Israel with hate. But you can achieve freedom through principle and justice and fairness. We need to send our message and communicate our rights to the Israelis as much as we need to support those Palestinians who suffer under Israel’s racist societal policies. Instead of yelling and screaming hate against Israel at Arab conferences, we should be bringing our talents and culture and the power of our Palestinian heritage inside Israel to Israeli audiences.

 

Let them see who we really are, because we are not the fanatics and the extremist activists who use hatred to silence the Arab majority. We are a culturally rich people with a history and I will use every opportunity to take that culture and present it to Israelis and Jews whenever I can in columns and yes, even through standup comedy. Humor is the most powerful means of communication and comedy is a powerful means of confronting hatred and discrimination.

 

While the Palestinians wait another 65 years for an intelligent activist leadership to arrive, we should resist the idiot fanatics who try to silence us and bully us with names like “mutaba” and “normalization.” We should stand up for our rights and bring our message of peace directly into Israel.

 

In 2007, during three comedy tours of Israel that I performed, dozens of Israelis came up and said that it changed how they viewed us. It made them see us as human beings, rather than as terrorists who wanted to blow them up. It replaced the ugly stereotype that some activists reinforce with their stupidity and hatred with an image that the Palestinians are a just and fair people. We are a good people. Palestinians are a moral people and a principled people.

 

We, the Palestinians, are not the loudmouthed, but small collective of extremists who spew vicious hatred and promote confrontation and would rather have violence and conflict than peace. We Palestinians want our state. But we also want peace. We want an environment where we can be free to travel, live and respect each other.

 

If that is what normalization means, then the extremists can call me whatever they want. I just won’t be a loser like them who drags Palestine down to their failed insanity of hatred.

American Muslims Performing Hajj Attacked in Saudi Arabia. By Rahat Husain.

Americans performing Hajj attacked in Saudi Arabia. By Rahat Husain. Washington Times, October 18, 2013.

Chicago Stealing from Poor, Giving to Rich. By Walter Russell Mead.

Chicago Stealing from Poor, Giving to Rich. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, October 22, 2013.

Mead:

Chicago, like New York City, is becoming a microcosm of California, a two-tiered society where public policy props up and privileges the tastes of the rich while ignoring the needs of the poor. A new piece in City Journal explains that Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s ostensibly painful and difficult cuts to services like public safety and schools are actually more like a diversion of funds from blighted residents to wealthy ones. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been used to fund a bike share program, a “riverwalk”, a hiking trail, and (what else?) a sports arena, even as Chicago public education and law enforcement sectors are facing deep crises.

 

City Journal explains that Mayor Emanuel is relying on something called Tax Increment Financing (TIF) subsidies to fund upper-class projects at the expense of basic social services, in the hopes of luring in new wealthy residents and keeping the ones who are thinking about moving:

Chicago’s TIF program has long been criticized as a mayoral slush fund. Ostensibly a tool for redeveloping blighted neighborhoods, TIF enables any new tax dollars generated in a district—the so-called “increment”—to be fed back into a special fund that can only be spent in that district. This projected revenue stream can be used to back bonds to finance infrastructure and jump-start development. At least, that’s the theory. Many of Chicago’s most prosperous neighborhoods are located in TIF districts and have generated huge incremental revenues. The Central Loop TIF district took in nearly $1 billion over its lifetime. When the district was slated to expire due to a statutory sunset, the city created the giant LaSalle Central TIF—covering a booming part of the West Loop—to replace it. None of the taxes from new developments in these districts flows automatically to police, libraries, parks, or schools. The funds go into the city’s TIF account, and the mayor has discretion on how they’re spent. Some TIF funds have been used for construction of new schools, but more than half have been handed out as subsidies to private businesses. The true purpose of Chicago’s TIF districts—which now take in about $500 million per year—appears to be tending to high-end residents, businesses, and tourists, while insulating them from the poorer segments of the city.

Chicago is clearly afraid of sharing Detroit’s fate: losing wealthy residents and their sizable tax dollars. Mayor Emanuel is banking on the hope that keeping the rich folk happy will provide enough revenue over the long run to fund the social services that the less fortunate depend on. This is a big gamble: if the $100 million waterfront boardwalk and $54 million biking trail turn out to be boondoggles that do nothing for the one percent, the closure of dozens of public schools and thinning out of a police force during an internationally famous murder epidemic will be difficult to defend. Our guess is that Chicago will continue to hemorrhage the residents it has faster than it can attract high-income new ones.

 

But if it pays off, Chicago will approach something like Mayor Bloomberg’s New York. Under Bloomberg, New York thrived as the “Luxury City,” home to a small contingent of super rich, accompanied by a large, struggling servant class. It’s possible, if not always easy, for these two groups to coexist, but the high taxes, regulations, and high cost of living have driven the middle class out in droves. The cutting edge of blue urban policy, then, is catering to the rich at the expense of the middle class.

 

Cutting funds from schools, police, libraries, and parks while funding chic promenades and trendy nature walks to mollify the rich is not what many blue city voters think they’re voting for.

 

New York’s Blue Suicide. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, October 15, 2012.

Well-Heeled in the Windy City. By Aaron M. Renn. City Journal, October 16, 2013.

Rahm Emanuel splurges on amenities for the elite, while poor and middle-class Chicagoans suffer.

The gentry liberals. By Joel Kotkin and Fred Siegel. Los Angeles Times, December 2, 2007.

They’re more concerned with global warming and gay rights than with lunch-pail joes.

Kotkin and Siegel:

After decades on the political sidelines, liberalism is making a comeback. Polls show plunging support for Republicans and their brand of conservatism among young, independent voters and Latinos. But what kind of liberalism is emerging as the dominant voice in the Democratic Party?

 

Well, it isn’t your father's liberalism, the ideology that defended the interests and values of the middle and working classes. The old liberalism had its flaws, but it also inspired increased social and economic mobility, strong protections for unions, the funding of a national highway system and a network of public parks, and the development of viable public schools. It also invented Social Security and favored a strong foreign policy.

 

Today’s ascendant liberalism has a much different agenda. Call it “gentry liberalism.” It’s not driven by the lunch-pail concerns of those workers struggling to make it in an increasingly high-tech, information-based, outsourcing U.S. economy – though it does pay lip service to them.

 

Rather, gentry liberalism reflects the interests and values of the affluent winners in the era of globalization and the beneficiaries of the “financialization” of the economy. Its strongholds are the tony neighborhoods and luxurious suburbs in and around New York, Washington, Boston, San Francisco and West Los Angeles.

 

Just as the number of industrial workers and traditional middle-class households has declined, the ranks of the affluent class have grown. From 2000 to 2005, the number of millionaires in the U.S. rose 26%. Meanwhile, households with incomes of more than $100,000 a year were the most rapidly growing income category, according to Ogilvy & Mather demographer Peter Francese. From 1994 to 2004, the number of six-figure-income households jumped 54%.

 

Although many of the newly affluent are – as is traditional – politically conservative, a rising number of them are turning left. Surveys done by the Pew Research Center indicate that an increasing number of households with annual incomes greater than $135,000 – the nation's top 10% – are moving toward the Democrats. In 1995, there were nearly twice as many Republicans (46%) as Democrats (25%) in this category. Today, there are as many Democrats (31%) as Republicans (32%).

 

The political upshot is that Democrats now control the majority of the nation’s wealthiest congressional districts, according to Michael Franc of the conservative Heritage Foundation.

 

In part, this is because the Democratic gains in the 2006 elections were in affluent districts once held by the Republicans. In Iowa, for instance, the three wealthiest districts now send Democrats to Washington, and the two poorest are safe Republican seats.

 

Perhaps the best indicator of the growing political power of gentry liberals, however, is their ability to generate campaign contributions. Chiefly drawing on Wall Street, Hollywood and the Silicon Valley, this year's Democratic presidential candidates have raised 70% more money than their GOP counterparts, according to the Wall Street Journal. The securities industry, which awarded Republicans 58% of their campaign dollars in 1956, gave the GOP only 45% in 2006. In the newest sectors of the securities industry, most notably hedge funds, Democrats are favored. This year, hedge fund managers have given 77% of their contributions to Democrats in congressional races, reported the Journal.

 

Gentry liberalism is not an entirely new phenomenon. Its intellectual roots can be traced to historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s 1948 book, The Vital Center. Schlesinger himself was the archetype of the gentry liberal. A product of Harvard University, he was as comfortable in the fashionable precincts of Manhattan’s Upper East Side as he was advising presidents in Washington. Schlesinger was suspicious of the traditional liberalism of President Truman, who baldy appealed to the basic interests of returning middle- and working-class veterans of World War II.

 

In The Vital Center, Schlesinger dismissed both the then-largely Republican business class, as well as mainstream Democratic politicians like Truman, because he thought they were too craven in their appeals to middle- and working-class interests. He believed that government should be in the hands of “an intelligent aristocracy” – essentially men like himself – whose governance would be guided by what it considered enlightened policy rather than class interests.

 

Since the 1960s, the intellectual class epitomized by Schlesinger has grown many times over. Academic liberals have become something of a political power in their own right. College campuses constituted the largest single base of contributors to the 2004 presidential campaign of Sen. John Kerry. Professors are among the highly compensated and pampered professional cadres of the knowledge economy – which also includes lawyers, engineers, doctors, wealth managers, investors and other educated professionals – that make up the ranks of gentry liberalism and flatter the politicians who advocate its positions.

 

Gentry liberalism has established a strong presence on the Internet, where such websites as MoveOn.org and the Huffington Post are lavishly funded by well-heeled liberals. These and other sites generally focus on foreign policy, gay rights, abortion and other social issues, as well as the environment. Traditional middle-class concerns such as the unavailability of affordable housing, escalating college tuitions and the shrinking number of manufacturing jobs usually don’t rank as top concerns.

 

But gentry liberalism’s increasingly “green tint” distances it the furthest from the values and interests of the middle and working classes. Leading gentry liberals, whether on Wall Street, in Hollywood or in Silicon Valley, are among the greatest scolds on global warming. They justifiably excoriate the Bush administration for its overall environmental record, but some of them – movie stars, investment bankers, dot-com billionaires – are quick to insulate themselves from charges that their private jets or 20,000-square-foot vacation homes in Nantucket spew prodigious amounts of carbon dioxide. Repentance typically includes the purchase of carbon “offsets,” parcels of rain forests, hybrid vehicles or solar panels.

 

The gentry liberal crusade to tighten U.S. environmental regulations to slow global warming could end up hurting middle- and working-class interests. U.S. industry needs time and incentives to develop new technologies to replace carbon-based energy. If it doesn’t get them, and an overly aggressive anti-carbon regime is instituted, the shift of manufacturing, energy and shipping jobs to developing countries with weak environmental laws and regulations could accelerate.

 

Ignoring these potential Third World environmental costs would result only in shifting the geography of greenhouse gas emissions without slowing global warming – and at a terrible cost to jobs in the U.S.

 

The ascent of gentry liberalism remains largely unchallenged, in part because of the abject failure of the Republicans to address middle-class aspirations in a serious way and in part because of the absence of a strong pro-middle-class voice among Democratic presidential contenders, with the exception of former Sen. John Edwards. As a result, Democrats are unlikely to stop, let alone reverse, the current economic trend that dispenses major benefits to gentry-favored sectors such as private equity firms, dot-com giants and entertainment media.

 

Over the last half a century, liberals have moved from strong support for basic middle-class concerns – epitomized by the New Deal and the G.I. Bill – to policies that reflect the concerns and prejudices of ever more elite interests. As a result, neither party speaks for broad middle class concerns.

 

The nation deserves better than that.

Can America Rediscover Its Jeffersonian Foreign Policy? By George Friedman.

Can America Rediscover Its Jeffersonian Foreign Policy? By George Friedman. Real Clear World, October 22, 2013.

Why Muslims Should Love Secularism. By Hussein Ibish.

Why Muslims should love secularism. By Hussein Ibish. NOW Lebanon, October 22, 2013.

Though secularism is widely misunderstood as anti-religious and iconoclastic, all it means is the neutrality of the state on religious affairs.

Assad’s Terror-Famine. By Michael Weiss.

Assad’s Terror-Famine. By Michael Weiss. Real Clear World, October 20, 2013. Also at NOW Lebanon.

No Ordinary Violence. By Sam Harris.

No Ordinary Violence. By Sam Harris. SamHarris.org, October 11, 2013.

Islam and the Misuses of Ecstasy. By Sam Harris. SamHarris.org, June 9, 2013.

Sam Harris slurs Malala: Famed atheist wrongly co-opts teenager’s views. By Murtaza Hussain. Salon, October 19, 2013.

Head-in-the-Sand Liberals. By Sam Harris. NJBR, February 1, 2013. Originally published September 18, 2006.