Republican congressman fuels Egyptian conspiracy theories

TPM noted this two months ago, and I've been meaning to blog about it since then. They called it The Weirdest Story in the History of the World:

I noticed what I have to say is one of the most fascinating and weirdest developments in Egypt’s now week long coup/revolution/uprisingthing. There are a lot of people in Egypt who aren’t just mad at Morsi and upset with the US for not more forcefully supporting his ouster. Many actually think the US is actively supporting a Muslim Brotherhood takeover of the country. And just to be certain we’re crystal clear: I don’t mean supporting Morsi and the Brotherhood as the legitimate government because they won a fairly free national election. I mean a conspiracy to help the Brotherhood take over the country, even to the extent of rigging the election that brought him to power.

This is actually something we covered in some depth last year. But the best capsule summary I’ve found is this piece by Robert Mackey in the Times’ Lede blog. The upshot is this: we all know all the whackadoodle conspiracy theories from the right about Obama being a secret Muslim. But there’s also a more specific sub-whackadoodlism pushed by members of Congress and a group of DC-based Islamophobe activists that argues that the Obama administration has actually been infiltrated by Islamists in sympathy with the Muslim Brotherhood.

Like I said, we covered this last year and I remembered it pretty vividly. But I didn’t grasp until this weekend how far it had spread within Egypt or how prevalent an assumption it had become within the anti-Morsi protest community.

Most of this comes from the Frank Gaffney world, allied with the usual suspects in Congress: Gohmert, Bachmann, et al. You’ll probably remember the charges about Huma Abedin, Hillary’s Clinton’s longtime assistant/advisor and, weirdly enough, Anthony Weiner’s wife. There’s been a long series of accusations that she’s a Brotherhood plant at the heart of Obama administration foreign policy making. The charges became so widespread that John McCain felt it necessary to go to the Senate floor to defend her.

There are many, many other examples of this kind of craziness. Abedin is only one high-profile example. But the key point is that what most of us here take as fringe Crazy has germinated into a full-fledged set of conspiracy theories in Egypt, perhaps one of the most astounding Internet era feedback loops yet seen.

Get this? Both sides in Egypt hate us, both sides think we're helping their enemies, because of lunatic stuff coming from Republican congressmen - leaders in the Republican Party, not just random crazies.

Of course, the Muslim Brotherhood hates us, because they're not crazy enough to believe this stuff - crazy, yes, but not that crazy. But that's how conspiracy theories work, isn't it? It's never a conspiracy to help your side, but always something you oppose.

But their opponents hate us, too, because crazy talk from Republican lunatics has convinced them that we're secretly on the side of the Muslim Brotherhood! Indeed, not just that, but that we've intervened (past actions of the CIA have made almost anything plausible to foreign nationals) to put them in power in Egypt!

Obviously, that's batshit crazy, but Egyptians probably don't know a whole lot more about us than we know about them. Sure, no one in America with two brain cells to rub together pays any attention to what Louie Gohmert or Michele Bachmann says, but all Egyptians see is that they're among the leaders of our country.

Heck, Bachmann even ran for president last year! She was even leading in Republican polls at one point. (Apparently, there are a lot of people in America who don't have two brain cells to rub together.) And they both get elected to help lead our nation at (nearly) the highest levels. They may be crazy, but there's a lot of crazy people in America who support them.

Do they believe the crazy stuff they say? Who knows? Either way, they're still in good standing in the Republican Party. These days, crazy isn't a problem for a Republican politician. Furthermore, even mainstream Republican leaders will say anything, do anything, and support anyone who attacks our president, no matter how crazy it is and no matter what it does to our country.

(Although I must give John McCain credit for defending Huma Abedin, I should note that, in many other ways, he's done everything he could to woo the far-right crazies, since he faced a primary challenge in his own party the last time he sought re-election.)

If Egyptians actually believe it, well, then it must be working, right? What this does to our standing in the world, what this does to our ability to influence other countries, what this does to our efforts to promote peace in the Middle East,... none of that matters to the GOP. (Well, when you're willing to destroy our economy just for political advantage, what won't you do?)

It used to be that both political parties put America first. Oh, they were always ambitious for political power, sure. But there were limits to what they'd do for political gain. They wouldn't actually harm America just to further their own political ambition.

Well, when it comes to today's Dixiecrat Republican Party, those days are gone. Those limits are gone. Now, they'll do anything to gain political power again. If they have to damage our country in order to gain political points, they'll do it. They don't even hesitate these days.

Think of it as phase two in the American Civil War. They lost the first time, in the 1800s, and they lost again when it came to racial segregation. But they haven't stopped fighting. (And they might even be winning in the war on women.)

Ten years later, how the war was sold

Here's a great article in The Guardian by Valerie Plame Wilson, the CIA officer who was outed by the Bush administration, and her husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson. Ten years later, how did the Bush administration sell a war with Iraq, and why did we buy it?

It has been 10 long years since "Shock and Awe" – the opening bombardment of Baghdad – lit up the skies above the Tigris. A decade later, we know far more about the case the Bush administration made to the world to justify its war of choice to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Books like Hubris by David Corn and Michael Isikoff, and British commission and US Senate reports have catalogued the extent to which intelligence was misused to mislead the public. ...

For nearly a year prior to the invasion, President Bush and his administration peppered the airwaves with serious accusations against Saddam Hussein, including claims of aluminum tubes that could be used in centrifuges to enrich uranium, and of Iraqi efforts to purchase uranium yellowcake from Africa. The intelligence supporting the claims was either not believed or was highly disputed by the experts. But that did not stop senior government officials from repeating them incessantly; nor did it prevent the powerful neoconservative ideologues who were the war's most fervent supporters from parroting them with menacingly jingoistic passion.

Who can forget the trademark line, delivered by Condoleezza Rice:

We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.

At that point, I don't think I believed much of anything coming from the Bush administration, but I still respected Colin Powell, and I believed what he said in that speech at the United Nations ten years ago. I believed, as he claimed, that they had proof of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

I still saw no justification for going to war, not then, at least. After all, we were already involved in one war. How many did we need to wage simultaneously? And the United Nations was still in Iraq, still looking for those WMDs. Why not let them continue to look?

After all, we still enforced a "no fly" zone above Iraq, too. Did we really have to invade the country? Right then?

But as it turned out, even Powell's speech wasn't true:

As Valerie watched the speech unfold on TV from CIA headquarters that morning, she experienced what can only be described as "cognitive dissonance". It became clear, as Powell laid out the case for war (with CIA Director George Tenet sitting conspicuously just behind the secretary's right shoulder), that his robust claims about the state of Iraqi WMD simply did not match the intelligence which she had worked on daily for months. ...

The implications suddenly become obvious: we were watching a kabuki play and the outcome was predetermined. The Bush administration was determined to go to war, however bad the intelligence, and not even Secretary of State Powell was going to stand in the way.

We swept all of this under the rug. At the urging of Republicans, and abetted by the timidity of Democrats, we swept all of the disasters of the Bush administration under the rug, from the failure to prevent 9/11 to the lies which got us to invade an innocent country to the torture of prisoners of war to the outing of Valerie Plame herself to the economic collapse we're still struggling to overcome.

And all of that makes the hypocrisy of Republicans determined to milk every bit of political advantage from Benghazi, where four Americans died (when more than four thousand died in Iraq, and almost three thousand on 9/11), so infuriating.

Make no mistake, I'm almost as angry at the Democrats, for their timidity, as I am at the Republicans, for their hypocrisy and their lies. But if we're not going to investigate this stuff, let's at least make sure we never forget it!

Chuck Hagel's 'Friends of Hamas'

Funny, isn't it? Well, not really. But at least the Republicans are eating themselves.

Here in Nebraska, I'm quite familiar with Chuck Hagel, since he used to be our senator. He's a conservative Republican, so I never voted for him, but I still respected him.

I disagree with Hagel about most things, but he's not insane. In fact, that's why he's no longer our senator. He wasn't insane enough for today's Republican Party, so he quit, rather than face a likely primary fight.

He doesn't deserve this mess. He doesn't deserve the lies being spread about him. But it's his own party. If you're sane, you don't belong in today's Republican Party. And if you stick around anyway, your own party will eventually make that very clear. (Colin Powell gets much the same treatment these days.)

As a Republican politician, Chuck Hagel supported this kind of stuff. Oh, I'm not claiming that he took part in it himself, but at the very least, he knew that it was happening. It is, after all, the very heart of Fox 'News.' So he actually benefited from it, when it was directed - as it usually is - at Democrats.

Well, that's how the Republican Party operates, and has operated for years now. And Hagel is still a Republican. So, at some level, I'm enjoying this, even though Hagel doesn't really deserve it.

As Cenk Uygur points out (from this column at Slate), it started with a right-wing blog post where, as usual, the author just pulled a wild claim out of his ass. Then, the rest of the right-wing blogosphere repeated it, and soon it was everywhere in the right-wing bubble.

After all, where there's smoke, there's fire, right? Of course, they're all smoking the same stuff! That reality-free bubble they all inhabit is so full of smoke they can't see anything else, but it's all coming from within the bubble itself.

And if that's not enough, here's the sequel:

A conservative blog today claimed that Hagel suggested in the speech that Israel controlled the State Department. The former Republican senator has come under fire from Republicans for being critical of Israeli policy in the past and referring to the “Israel lobby,” so the State Department quote would be problematic, if true.

It turns out Hagel may have said no such thing, though he did talk of cooperation with Iran on Afghanistan, including the idea of reopening a consulate in the country, which may pose its own political problems.

But the increasingly unhinged campaign against Hagel has been so single-minded in its quest to dig up dirt on him that it has seized on anything that has even a whiff of pro-Palestianian, anti-Israel slant, no matter how dubious. For instance, the bogus claim that Hagel received donations from a nonexistent group called “Friends of Hamas” plays perfectly into the notion that he coddled the sometimes terrorist group that controls the Gaza Strip. But it has the disadvantage of being untrue.

Applying the Republicans’ standard on Hagel to others — including themselves — complicates the situation.

Take Sen. Jim Inhofe, for instance. He’s the ranking Republican member on the Senate Armed Services Committee and has been one of the leading figures opposing Hagel’s nomination. Inhofe told Foreign Policy’s Josh Rogan that Hagel’s relatively soft stance on Hamas, among other things, meant that Inhofe could not support him.

But in 2006, after Hamas won the Palestinian elections, Inhofe did not seem concerned. Hamas has done “some good things, even as a terrorist group,” he told the Oklahoman. He compared the group to one of the country’s largest charities, saying Hamas is like “the Salvation Army with loaded guns.” [And we all know how Republicans love guns. I'm sure Inhofe thinks the Salvation Army should carry loaded guns.]

“I would prefer that they not have won, but I don’t think it’s the end of the world,” he added.

The quote may not be damning on its own, but if there were a concerted smear campaign against Inhofe’s stance on Israel, it would be about as bad as anything brought against Hagel. In other words, using his current standard, Jim Inhofe might have a hard time voting to confirm Jim Inhofe.

The problem with Hagel? The entire problem with Hagel? It's just the fact that President Obama has nominated him. That's it.

Republicans are so determined to oppose Barack Obama on everything, no matter what it is, that they'll gnaw off their own leg if that's what it takes. Well, we saw this with 'Obamacare,' too. As soon as the Democrats adopted the Republican position, it became 'socialism' to the GOP.

Personally, I hope that Obama keeps nominating Republicans for government positions. I'm really enjoying the feeding frenzy, even though Chuck Hagel doesn't actually deserve this kind of treatment.

Republican caterwauling and outrage

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Spiking the football, huh? Can Republicans get any more ridiculous? Of course, if Republicans had a functioning cerebral cortex, they probably wouldn't be Republicans.

And the really funny thing is that Mitt Romney did say he wouldn't go after Osama bin Laden in Pakistan - and so did plenty of other Republicans.

Before Barack Obama got bin Laden, Republicans were doing their very best to ignore him, due to the uncomfortable fact that Bush had failed at it (supposedly our whole justification for invading Afghanistan) and that the guy he did go after, Saddam Hussein, had nothing to do with 9/11, had never attacked us, and was no threat to America whatsoever (but had, if no WMDs, certainly a great deal of oil).

Jon Stewart continues hammering Fox 'News' idiots in this followup clip (spoiler: Republicans don't get any less ridiculous). But instead of embedding that, I thought maybe I'd post the Barack Obama campaign ad they're complaining about:



As I say, it wasn't just Mitt Romney who specifically said he wouldn't go into Pakistan after bin Laden. In 2008, John McCain made a particular point of criticizing Barack Obama on that very issue, and plenty of other Republican leaders jumped on the bandwagon. (Obama had just said that he wouldn't rule it out.)

And note Romney's comment: "It's not worth moving heaven and earth, spending billions of dollars, just to catch one person." In fact, that was our entire justification for invading Afghanistan! Bush didn't spend billions of dollars on it, but trillions of dollars! And thousands of American lives. And he failed completely.

Barack Obama - remember how "weak" he was supposed to be on terrorism? remember how he believed in "appeasing" the terrorists, according to the GOP? - showed us how we should have gone after Osama bin Laden in the first place. And it wouldn't have cost us trillions, or even billions.

And we wouldn't still be stuck in a quagmire of a war, either, if we'd done it his way. Oh, Barack Obama deserves plenty of credit for this one. I hope he uses it to kick Republican butt all the way to November (and beyond).

The end of the Iraq War

(John Cole)

Unfortunately, David Emanuel Hickman wasn't greeted with flowers when he came home.

Or maybe he was:

Hickman, 23, was killed in Baghdad by a roadside bomb that ripped through his armored truck Nov. 14 — eight years, seven months and 25 days after the U.S. invasion of Iraq began.

He was the 4,474th member of the U.S. military to die in the war, according to the Pentagon.

And he may have been the last.

With the final U.S. combat troops crossing out of Iraq into Kuwait, those who held Hickman dear are struggling to come to terms with the particular poignancy of his fate. As the unpopular war that claimed his life quietly rumbles to a close, you can hear within his inner circle echoes of John F. Kerry’s famous 1971 congressional testimony on Vietnam:

How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?

It was quite a mistake, too. Not just 4,474 young Americans dead, but nearly 32,000 injured, often horribly - maimed, burned, and disfigured, with brain injuries, amputations, castrations, and other terrible, terrible injuries. (Modern medicine is so good these days that soldiers with truly horrific injuries can still survive the experience.)

Not to mention hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead - men, women, and children. And trillions of dollars wasted (direct and indirect costs, including caring for our injured soldiers). And now, every nation in the world has seen the danger of an out-of-control America and how, if Saddam Hussein really had developed nuclear weapons, we would have left him alone, as we do North Korea.

That's certainly a lesson Iran has taken to heart!

(David E. Hickman, 23 - photo by Zack Zornes)

No senior Iraqi government officials even showed up at our exit ceremony. But Iran was cheering wildly. After all, we took out Iran's worst enemy and ended the rule of Sunni Muslims in Iraq, giving control to the majority Shiites - like Iran's leaders. The funny thing is that Saddam Hussein, as a secular Muslim leader, was also the enemy of al-Qaeda.

Yeah, crazy isn't it? We took out the enemy of both of our enemies in the region. And why? Iraq was no threat to us. Iraq had never attacked us and, obviously, would never have dared to do so.

Even clear back in 1990, before Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, he checked with the American ambassador first, to make sure we'd be OK with that. Imagine his dismay when those assurances turned out to be worthless! That was the first President Bush.

At any rate, we'd still maintained a no-fly zone over Iraq since that war. And the United Nations was continuing to inspect for "weapons of mass destruction." Even if Saddam Hussein still had such things (he didn't), why not let the UN do its job? After all, we were already bogged down in one unnecessary war, one that we might have been able to win, if we hadn't taken our eye off the ball.

The whole thing was just completely insane! But the Bush administration was faith-based. They believed what they wanted to believe, just like Republican leaders now. They sneered at the "elites" who actually knew something about the Middle East. And Iraq's oil wealth was very seductive, especially since our president and vice-president were both former oil executives. Remember how the war was supposed to "pay for itself"?

Did we invade Iraq to steal their oil? I doubt it. I think it was more a matter of right-wing ideologues, chickenhawks almost to a man, believing what they really wanted to believe. They loved war - as long as there was no danger of them or theirs having to fight and die in it - but Afghanistan was just too boring. It was so primitive there were no good targets for our high-tech weapons.

They wanted to find an excuse to invade Iraq. They believed we'd be greeted as liberators, because that's what they wanted to believe. They believed the war would somehow "pay for itself," because that's what they wanted to believe. (Well, they believed that cutting taxes on the rich would pay for itself, too, for the exact same reason. When you're faith-based, you tend to believe whatever you want.)

(Pat Oliphant)

And now, Republicans are clamoring for war with Iran. Well, that's the other thing about faith-based thinking - you don't learn from your mistakes. Evidence isn't important, only faith. And when you know you're right, when you're absolutely certain that you've got God and the right on your side, then you'll keep making the same mistakes over and over again.

After all, your dogma just can't be wrong, right?

The death of Muammar Gaddafi

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Think about how this would have gone if a Republican president had been in charge. Yeah, and for the death of Osama bin Laden, too.

Obviously, there would have been an orgy of über-patriotism. Heck, George W. Bush would probably have worn his flight suit even to bed! And he would have pranced around playing "Commander-in-Chief" more than he did already.

Republicans would have exulted in that orgy, but Democrats would have tried to outdo even them in conspicuous, over-the-top patriotism. Can you imagine, in that circumstance, anyone shrugging it off as a win for Britain and France, not America? Can you imagine even that "too soon to tell" narrative from a Democrat, if a Republican had accomplished all this?

Muammar Gaddafi (or however you spell it - there are a million different ways in the Western press) was a murderous madman who oppressed his own people and hated America. You cannot exult in the death of Saddam Hussein - at the cost of trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives - without being even happier at this result, at no cost in American life at all (and very little financial cost, relatively speaking).

Unless you're a Republican, of course. If you're a Republican, then anything a Democrat does is reason for disapproval and dismay. If Barack Obama walked on water, it would be seen as showboating, and they'd claim he was pretending to be Jesus (while also insisting that George W. Bush showed him how to do it).

Crazy, isn't it? "Is there no one, is there no Republican that can be gracious and statesmanlike in this situation?" No, Jon Stewart, there isn't. That's the Republican Party in America these days.

But I do like Andrew Sullivan's comment about this (posted earlier): "To rid the world of Osama bin Laden, Anwar al-Awlaki and Moammar Qaddafi within six months: if Obama were a Republican, he'd be on Mount Rushmore by now."

QOTD: A tale of two presidents

Quote of the Day:

A reader writes:

Bush and Saddam - One Trillion dollars and thousands of US lives.

Obama and Qaddafi - One Billion dollars and zero US lives.

Meep Meep indeed.

And this time, the Arab world loves us as well.

To rid the world of Osama bin Laden, Anwar al-Awlaki and Moammar Qaddafi within six months: if Obama were a Republican, he'd be on Mount Rushmore by now. - Andrew Sullivan

Nice poster!

(via Pharyngula)

Nice poster from the Students and Academics International Assistance Fund in Norway. Of course, the Iranian Embassy is protesting (Google translation).

Egyptian Muslims shield Coptic Christians

Well, this is encouraging news:

Egypt’s majority Muslim population stuck to its word Thursday night. What had been a promise of solidarity to the weary Coptic community, was honoured, when thousands of Muslims showed up at Coptic Christmas eve mass services in churches around the country and at candle light vigils held outside. (see photo gallery)

From the well-known to the unknown, Muslims had offered their bodies as “human shields” for last night’s mass, making a pledge to collectively fight the threat of Islamic militants and towards an Egypt free from sectarian strife.

“We either live together, or we die together,” was the sloganeering genius of Mohamed El-Sawy, a Muslim arts tycoon whose cultural centre distributed flyers at churches in Cairo Thursday night, and who has been credited with first floating the “human shield” idea.

Among those shields were movie stars Adel Imam and Yousra, popular Muslim televangelist and preacher Amr Khaled, the two sons of President Hosni Mubarak, and thousands of citizens who have said they consider the attack one on Egypt as a whole.

“This is not about us and them,” said Dalia Mustafa, a student who attended mass at Virgin Mary Church on Maraashly Street. “We are one. This was an attack on Egypt as a whole, and I am standing with the Copts because the only way things will change in this country is if we come together.”

In the days following the brutal attack on Saints Church in Alexandria, which left 21 dead on New Year’ eve, solidarity between Muslims and Copts has seen an unprecedented peak. Millions of Egyptians changed their Facebook profile pictures to the image of a cross within a crescent – the symbol of an “Egypt for All”. Around the city, banners went up calling for unity, and depicting mosques and churches, crosses and crescents, together as one.

Are we starting to see a backlash against Islamic terrorism? Well, the fact is, Americans tend to see the Islamic world as a monolith, but that's far from the truth. And thinking like that just helps the extremists.

I can't say much about this - I don't know that much - but it's great to have good news to report occasionally.

My enemy, my ally

My previous post got me thinking about Israel's recent bloody misstep. As Ed Stein noted, it was obviously a setup, and Israel walked right into it. But was it just incompetence, or were there Israelis who wanted exactly what their enemies wanted from that situation? Were they allies in that?

I'm not very familiar with Israeli politics, so let me give you an example of what I mean that's closer to home. For almost a decade, America has been battling Islamic terrorists. Terrorism is a tool of the weak. If al-Qaeda could face America openly, it would. Since they're far too weak for that, they use terrorism, instead, hoping to provoke an excessive reaction (just like the organizers of that fleet hoped).

The attacks on September 11, 2001 were designed with that in mind. Nineteen religious fanatics shocked the nation and certainly got the response they'd hoped for. In fact, al-Qaeda was probably overjoyed with how it worked out. This was a criminal act by a handful of religious nuts, and we could have kept it that way. We've faced terrorism before, and we've rightly treated it as a crime. And after 9/11, we had the whole world behind us. We could have kept that support and enlisted the rest of the world in a massive criminal probe to bring the guilty to justice.

That would have been the smart thing to do, and no doubt it would have been disappointing to our enemies. Luckily for al-Qaeda, though, they had allies here. Oh, those Americans were still their enemies, but they were allies in wanting the same thing at the time. We ended up doing exactly what al-Qaeda wanted, and that was only partly due to incompetence and human nature. Mostly, it was because all too many Americans wanted what the terrorists wanted.

Some of those people were in the media. Al-Qaeda wanted to shock America and needed us to focus obsessively on the attacks, and the media were their allies in this. Yes, that's their job, but they still had a financial interest, as well as individual personal interests, in making the most of this tragedy. 9/11 was a gift to the national media. I don't want to blame them for that, but merely to point out that their interest was aligned with al-Qaeda's. To that extent, they were allies.

More importantly, the Bush administration was allied with al-Qaeda in wanting the same wild over-reaction. George W. Bush had been elected as a "compassionate conservative" less than a year before, and he really wasn't taken very seriously. In fact, he was rather a joke, widely considered an amiable idiot - a nice guy, but not too bright. It's hard to believe now, but Dick Cheney was expected to be the steady hand in the White House.

With few exceptions (most notably the despised "moderate," Colin Powell), the administration was full of chickenhawks - right-wingers who loved war, but not for themselves. Bush, whose whole family had strongly supported the Vietnam War, used their connections to avoid fighting in the war himself. But by making this attack a "war," rather than the criminal act that it really was, he got to prance around in a flight suit and play commander-in-chief. For a chickenhawk, what could be better?

(As an aside, I had never heard the term "commander-in-chief" used so much as during the Bush administration. Previous presidents, starting with George Washington himself, had emphasized the civilian nature of their position. We had never before been led by caudillos, and, in fact, our Constitution specifically set civilian rule above the military. Our president was never the commander-in-chief of civilians. But Bush's supporters acted like being president was just a minor sideline for the commander-in-chief. And Bush got to play soldier with no danger to himself.)

Right-wing ideologues in the Bush administration and Congress saw 9/11 as a great opportunity. By making this a "war," they could do anything they wanted. The Democrats, eager to prove their patriotism, just rolled over and played dead. Well, according to Fox "News," it was treason to criticize a president in wartime. (Funny how that's changed now, isn't it?) The point is that Republican politicians from the president on down had reason to ally with al-Qaeda on this. GOP politicians wanted an over-reaction to the attack, which is exactly what al-Qaeda wanted.

There were other al-Qaeda allies on the right, too. Al-Qaeda wanted to present America's response as a war on Islam, and they found eager allies in the Christian right who've been battling America's separation of church and state for two hundred years. Both sides wanted the same message to be spread, that America was a "Christian nation" fighting against the Muslim people. Although they hated each other, they were allies in this.

Likewise, many right-wingers just wanted an enemy. Those people had been devastated when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended, because they'd lost their great enemy. These are people who really need an enemy, for some reason, and they leaped to embrace the "war on terror" with great relief. They, too, were allies with al-Qaeda in the matter of over-reacting to 9/11.

The point is that we did exactly what al-Qaeda wanted us to do - wildly over-reacting to their terrorist attack - because there were powerful segments of the American population, including the White House and the majority party in Congress, with interests aligned with al-Qaeda in that particular respect. They were, in effect, allies.

Al-Qaeda's opponents in this were those of us who see America as a secular nation of diverse beliefs, those of us who wanted to hunt down the criminals who attacked us, in cooperation with the rest of the world, those of us who wanted to deny the terrorists the hysterical reaction they'd hoped to provoke. Sadly, we had no power at all in the days, months, and even years after 9/11.

Are there people in Israel who wanted that bloody incident just as much as the organizers of the fleet did? Perhaps they dread any movement toward a peaceful solution in the Middle East? Perhaps they're always looking to drive a wedge between Israel and America? Perhaps they just hate so fiercely that any excuse for bloodshed is welcomed? I don't know much about Israeli politics, but it really wouldn't surprise me. Of course, incompetence is always a plausible excuse, too.

Outrage

Ed Stein's comments:

This cartoon is in no way intended to absolve Israel of its actions. I’ve been a critic of the way Israel deals with the Palestinians for years. Many years ago, when Israel first occupied the West Bank and Gaza, Amos Oz, the great Israeli novelist (and soldier in the ‘67 war), realized that the occupation was a huge mistake–that Israel would lose its soul if it became an occupier, that it would not be able to function both as a democracy and as an oppressor. He was denounced as a traitor, but he was right. The boarding of the “humanitarian relief” vessels attempting to run the Israeli blockade of Gaza was only the latest in a long series of missteps by Israel as it struggles to maintain its deeply flawed policy. That the Turkish relief effort was a setup from the beginning (the stated goal was to goad Israel into a violent response, and it succeeded) is beside the point. Israel gave the world community yet another reason to condemn its actions.

All that said, the hypocrisy of many of those who express such concern for the plight of the Palestinians is especially galling given the scant attention those same folks pay to the human rights atrocities committed by other, more malignant states. Where is the scalding denunciation of North Korea for its torpedoing of the Cheonan and the death of 46 South Korean sailors, the calls for Hamas and Hezbollah to stop lobbing rockets at civilians, the fury over Iran’s routine executions of dissidents? Who among Israel’s critics also stand against China’s appalling suppression of Tibetan nationalism? Where are the voices demanding an end to Cuba’s dictatorship?