Phil Green (Gregory Peck) is a magazine writer assigned to do a story about anti-Semitism. He poses as a Jew and faces discrimination in all walks of life.
This diary is not about anti-Semitism or Gregory Peck. It is about Obama and features an article by Bruce Dixon titled: Obama (and Big Media) Turn Blind Eye to Israeli Apartheid. Bruce Dixon is the Managing Editor of the Black Agenda Report. He wrote this story after he became somewhat miffed by Obama’s and Big Media’s elective ignorance of Israel’s Apartheid style of government during Obama’s recent trip to the Middle East. We are immediately reminded here of Reagan’s support for South Africa’s Apartheid government in the 1980s. Reagan of course did not win over all Americans to his anti-Black views and eventually, South African Apartheid was taken down. By whom? By us, you, and people who were incapable of tolerating racial injustice of the likes meted out by the Afrikaners.
Today it is the right wing Israeli Zionists who have taken up that role, and it is actually South Africans (like Mandela, Tutu, Kasrils, and others) who are speaking out loudly against apartheid practices in Israel.
So where the hell was Obama regarding this matter during his recent Israel trip? Listen to Bruce Dixon and learn a bit about political make-believe: the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy with which politicians like Obama and the mainstream media treat Israel.
Israel is now an apartheid state, according to the publisher of Ha’aretz, that country’s largest circulation daily newspaper. The occasion was the recent renewal of Israeli citizenship laws, which refuse to recognize marriages and families among most of the Arabs living in that country. How can Barack Obama, himself the son of an American mixed marriage remain an apparently uncritical supporter of Israeli apartheid, and why does corporate media continue to pursue a longstanding “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy toward the odious policies of racial and ethnic discrimination in Israel?
The presidential campaigns of Democrats and Republicans are no more about placing issues before the US public than competing commercials for new cars or bottled water are about the facts. Brought to us by the same corporate marketers that sell us lifestyles and beer, mainstream presidential campaigns aim to establish and exploit visceral, fact-proof loyalties to the brand of a party or candidate. The fact-proof nature of the Obama brand, and the lengths corporate media go to protect it were on prominent display during the candidate’s brief visit to Israel Palestine this week.
Barack Obama’s smiling brown face and Kansas-Kenya parentage are key elements in the Obama brand, that hazy image of progressive, post-racial transformation at home and abroad which lie at the heart of his appeal. At the same time, Barack Obama is committed to preserving what he calls Israel’s “identity as a Jewish state”, the polite term for what much of the rest of the world recognizes as an apartheid state.
A June 29 editorial by no less a member of the Israeli elite than Amos Schocken, the publisher of Ha’aretz, Israel’s daily newspaper of record is titled “Citizenship Law Makes Israel An Apartheid State” The gist of it is that the Israeli government prohibits recognition of marriages or family reunions between Arabs with Israeli citizenship and Arabs who live within the borders of Israel-Palestine in the bantustans of Gaza and the West Bank — inside the borders of Israel-Palestine but without Israeli citizenship.
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In this, it would be a mistake to believe that the Israeli tail is wagging the dogs of US presidential candidates and Big Media. The heavily militarized and nuclear armed state of Israel is entirely dependent upon US military aid, economic support, and political patronage. Israel is the direct recipient of more than six billion US tax dollars annually. Israel could not continue its brutal annexation policies, its militarized wall, its “settlement” of Palestinian lands or any of its other objectionable policies without the complete and bipartisan support of US ruling circles. For the US, Israel is a kind of offshore military base, a nuclear-armed white enclave in the middle of millions of brown people who sit atop a large share of the world’s most accessible oil.
(snip)
US public opinion, like that in the rest of the world, persistently calls for a more just and even-handed US policy toward Israel-Palestine. But corporate media and the US political elite, including Barack Obama continue to ignore them. On this issue, as Salon’s Glen Greenwald writes, public opinion is pretty well irrelevant.
If, as some Obama supporters claim, there is a “movement” which he listens to, and which potentially influences his positions, this would be a good time and place for it to speak up. If they can’t or won’t, it’s one more piece of evidence that the Obama candidacy is as people-proof as any other corporate one, that there is and never was any “Obama movement” with an objective beyond November, and that Obama is just another brand name, like Monsanto, or Ford, or Exxon.
So what has all this to do with Gregory Peck? Peck, as everyone knows was obsessed with humanitarian causes, such that roles in movies like Gentleman’s Agreement were well suited to him. It also makes one wonder what he would have thought about Israeli apartheid given his concerns about “gentleman’s agreements” like the “don’t ask, don’t tell” understanding some Americans once had about keeping Jews in their place?
So we have here another slant on Obama that we can take or leave. But Dixon does have a point: we don’t ask or tell.
