His Big Mouth Could Get People Killed

16 Comments

1. 

   sherifffruitfly on December 11, 2011 at 7:40 pm

   You mean like “bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran” ?

   It’s how republicans, and their electorate, is.

   Despite “progressive” lies about Obama being a warmonger.

2. 

   shan on December 11, 2011 at 7:52 pm

   Remember Bush talked trash with Ahmadinejad for 8 years and accomplished nothing beyond ignoring Iran’s nuke program.  

   • 

     Jinchi on December 12, 2011 at 7:07 am

     Right. The same with North Korea. And I remember a lot of sabre rattling against China in the months before 9/11.

     The problem is, these guys are always looking for someone to go to war with. It might not be Iran, but it will be somebody.

3. 

   TarheelDem on December 11, 2011 at 8:00 pm

   It seems the Democrats are going out of their way to try to lose.

   Noah Rothman, Politicology: Occupy Wall Street Banned From Democratic National Convention

   Charlotte, North Carolina, the host city for the Democratic National Convention next year to renominate President Obama, has announced that it will not tolerate planned Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. Rather, the city council enacted a series of restrictions on the allowed locations in which protesters can demonstrate and the outright ban on overnight stays.

   New York Magazine reports: “The North Carolina city, sometimes called the “Wall Street of the South,” is not taking any chances, and is already working to pass an ordinance that would make occupying downtown spaces with tents a “public nuisance,” in addition to banning “noxious substances,” padlocks, and other camping equipment. The fact that it would knock out the city’s current overnight demonstrators is an added bonus.”

   The constitutionality of the ruling is already being challenged by the National Lawyers Guild, which has been providing the Occupy movement with free legal services and counsel.

   It’s not a done deal yet, but did the Democratic Party learn nothing from the way Richard J. Daley handled demonstrators in 1968.

   I don’t know if this is the idiot Charlotte City Council or whether it is being driven from Chicago or DC, but this is absolutely not the way to handle protests at a convention.

   You don’t discourage folks who are protesting the limitations on Constitutional rights by passing bullshit ordinances that take more of those rights away.

   If this is the way it goes down, meet President Gingrich.  Unless Tampa is more chaotic. (In Tampa, the TPD has purchased at least one APC).

4. 

   opit on December 11, 2011 at 8:36 pm

   “think about how Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s more provocative statements are exaggerated and used as a constant justification for using aggression against his country”
   There’s much more to that than is Politically Correct
   http://opitslinkfest.blogspot.com/2011/12/11-december-blogs-im-following.html#uds-search-results  “NPT TRAP”
   is one ; “Ahmadinejad Quotations” another  
   Systematic misrepresentation is used to pervert the non English speaking leader’s words to contradictory nonsense. You see, he not only promotes nuclear disarmament, but criticizes Israel on the treatment of Palestinians as replicating the sufferings of the Holocaust in Europe upon innocents.
   CASMII will flesh out the narrative.

5. 

   Phil Perspective on December 11, 2011 at 8:56 pm

   It probably helps him in both the primaries and the general election. But it’s not a good thing for America. It’s probably not even a good thing for Israel.

   It helps in the general election?  Says who?  In case you haven’t noticed, the Democrats in DC are far to the right of America on the issue of Israel.  AIPAC has way, way more influence than their meager numbers would indicate.

6. 

   shergald on December 11, 2011 at 9:35 pm

   Says JUAN COLE: Washington Actions on Palestine don’t Differ from Gingrich’s Words

   Who can disagree. But here’s his view of the Gingrich blunder on Palestinians, which may top his earlier notion to appoint John Bolton as Secretary of State if he wins the nomination and presidency.

   Newt Gingrich has been trying for the monetary backing and votes of Jewish Americans and Christian Zionists by taking up the positions of the Israeli far Right. He promises to move the US embassy to Jerusalem (disputed territory under international law) just because right wing Jewish nationalists insist that all of Jerusalem belongs to them and because they intend gradually to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians from the city.

   And, now he has begun talking like an Israeli propagandist from the 1950s, saying that there had never been a Palestinian state in history, that the 11 million Palestinians are an invented nation, that there is no difference in the attitude of the PLO and Hamas toward Israel, and that all Palestinians are terrorists. His remarks have been condemned by other politicians as extreme, but that is hypocritical. America acts as Gingrich talks.

   It is important to note that only a minority of Jewish Americans agrees with Gingrich. Some 37 percent of American Jews say in polling that they don’t have a strong attachment to Israel (there is no reason for them to; they aren’t from there). Two-thirds of Jewish Americans would trade land for peace in the Mideast. Jewish Americans have often been the social conscience of America in the past century, and the vast majority of them would not dream of voting for someone like Gingrich, who is all about giving more to the super-wealthy and taking away things from the workers. Gingrich’s positions are not meant to appeal to Jews in general, but rather to a handful of American billionaires, some of them Christian Zionists and others Jewish hyper-nationalists.

   Gingrich’s assertions about the poor Palestinians have been refuted by two generations of scholarship by academic historians who actually study Palestinians in Arabic, and Gingrich has in any case made his allegations a simple-minded way that makes them hard to take seriously.

   The important thing to realize is that Gingrich is not an outlier in Washington, and that the US government consistently acts as though it believes exactly what Gingrich says.

   I don’t mean to be unfair to Barack Obama, who came into office with, I think, generally benign intentions toward the Palestinians. But that is sort of like swimming into shark-infested waters with generally benign intentions toward minnows. Obama tried hard to set up some meetings, which the Likud Party torpedoed by insisting on expanding squatter settlements on the territory over which they were negotiating. The Palestinian leadership for once declined to offer a fig leaf to this naked theft of their own territory, and sensibly decided that far right wing prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu is not serious about negotiating with Palestinians. (And, indeed, why bother, since they don’t exist).

   But after some efforts, behind which he never put his own prestige and in which he never intervened with the office of the presidency, Obama gradually started giving The Likud Speech, which American politicians believe is central to raising funds from Jewish Americans for their campaigns. Aside from pressing for negotiations, and sometimes snubbing Netanyahu, Obama has been a helpless giant in the face of the settler-industrial complex, and in recent months he has allowed it to occupy his rhetoric.

   How many tens of thousands of further Israeli squatters are now residing on Palestinian territory compared to January of 2009? How many Palestinian civilians (including children) have Israeli forces killed out of disregard for the lives of non-combatants? How many Palestinian mosques and other properties have been attacked or burned by violent Israeli squatters? How many Palestinians have been evicted from their homes? For some ( of these mostly untold stories on this side of Atlantic, see this site) and that of the invaluable B’Tselem.

   If you believed what Gingrich says he believes, wouldn’t you stand by and watch all this happen without lifting a finger to stop it? And isn’t that exactly what the US has done? So what is the difference, practically speaking, for the average Palestinian being deprived of life, liberty and happiness by a brutal and grasping Israeli colonial occupation- what is the real difference between Gingrich’s honestly expressed views and those of mainstream Washington?

   The US government is spineless before right wing Israeli provocations. Did Israel from 2007 want to impose an illegal blockade on Palestinian children and other non-combatants in the Gaza Strip, putting them on “a diet” and keeping them on the edge of humanitarian disaster? Wikileaks revealed that the State Department did no more than tut tut at these war crimes. The US government has responded far more vigorously to college students downloading some music files than it has to Israeli squatters stealing much of the West Bank’s best land.

   So, maybe it is for the best that Gingrich put aside the polite language of negotiation and peace process and Palestinian state, and told it like it is. He doesn’t believe that the Palestinians have any legitimate claims at all, and that is that. In which case their children can at will be thrown into food insecurity, and their land can be stolen from them, and they can be chased off into the great inchoate mass of “Arabs” with no bad conscience.

   As for the substance of what Gingrich said, it is first of all stupid, and second of all wrong.

   It is stupid because all nations are invented, and they have all been invented in the past couple hundred years. There were peoples in pre-modern times, but in the absence of printing, literacy, modern communications, and the new post-empire model of the Enlightenment state with its educational institutions, they weren’t really nations. Those who supposedly spoke a common language couldn’t even understand one another across regions (north and south Italy, e.g.) As Eric Hobsbawm observed, people think that nations created states, but in fact states created nations. States standardized languages, e.g.

   So the Palestinians aren’t more of an invented nation than anyone else.

   Gingrich said that there had never been a Palestinian state in history. If you want to play the romantic nationalist game of finding ancient forebears for modern nations, it would be easy in the case of the Palestinians, who were mentioned by the ancient Egyptians and Assyrians. But today’s Palestinians are equally descended from the ancient Canaanites and as well as from the ancient Jews.

   If Gingrich meant to argue that Palestine was never an administrative unit of Muslim states, this is incorrect- under the Mamluks it was one of the five districts of Syria and had its capital at Jerusalem.

   Palestine was a known place in medieval Islam. People referred to it as a place. It was sometimes the name of an administrative unit. There are coins stamped Filastin. People who lived in that area were Filastinis or Palestinians. Over time, 80% of them came to be Muslims, with the rest Christians. Between 1000 AD and 1800 AD there were very few Jews in geographical Palestine (Bonaparte found 3,000 or so as I remember).

   That Palestinians were part of the Ottoman Empire is irrelevant to whether they are a nation or not. You could make all the same assertions about Albanians that Gingrich made about Palestinians. There was no Albanian state in antiquity. They were ruled by the Byzantine, Bulgarian, Serbian and Ottoman Empires. There was no Albanian province under the Ottomans.

   But Gingrich does not assert that the Albanians are not a nation. It is not necessary to denationalize the Albanians. None of Gingrich’s campaign contributors wants to make the Albanians stateless and homeless and steal all their land and property.

   If you want a “national” precedent for the Palestinians, in the 18th century when the Ottoman Empire had largely decentralized, Jazzar Pasha ruled Palestine from Akka and successfully fought off Napoleon Bonaparte.

   As for Palestinians being “Arabs,” actually no Palestinians would have called themselves Arabs in the nineteenth century, except Bedouins. The word then for the most part meant pastoral nomad. The idea of a pan-Arab nation only arises in the 20th century, and it hasn’t been notably successful. The only thing “Arabs” have in common is that they speak Arabic. But it is arbitrary that we call all forms of Arabic “Arabic,” but we do not speak of Romance as a language. The difference between Moroccan spoken “Arabic” and the “Arabic” spoken in southern Iraq is greater than the difference between Spanish and Portuguese.

   The British Empire conquered Palestine during WW I and the League of Nations created a Mandate of Palestine, which it scheduled to become a nation-state, as with Syria and Iraq. The only reason Palestine did not is that the British derailed the League of Nation mandate for Palestine by promoting the immigration of European Jews, who were meant to be imperial allies (as the French promoted Maronite Christians in Lebanon, a country they carved off from Syria for imperial purposes).

   The European Jews ultimately formed a third of the population in Mandate Palestine, and at the end of WW II, they became militant, formed militias, assassinated officials, engaged in terrorism, and ultimately chased the British out and ethnically cleansed some 700,000 Palestinians, allowing them to create the state of Israel. The 1948 war did not necessitate the ethnic cleansing. Jordanian forces never threatened to come into the territory designated for Israel in the UNGA partition plan.

   Parts of Mandate Palestine — Gaza and the West Bank- escaped the Israelis’ control in 1948. But in 1967 the Israelis conquered these remaining Palestinian territories and have ruled them militarily ever since (they rule Gaza by controlling its air, sea and land borders and occasionally bombing or invading it). Contrary to the law of occupation, the Israelis have been settling on and stealing Palestinian land in the West Bank on a large scale ever since.

   The Palestinians who were forced north to Lebanon still for the most part live in refugee camps. Their accent is immediately discernible. They cannot own property and cannot easily get a work permit. They are in a set of large jails. They have no hope. They will not be given Lebanese citizenship because the French set Lebanon up as a country of religious communities, with the Christians dominant. For 300,000 or 400,000 Sunni Muslims to be given citizenship in a country of 4 million would shift power decisively toward the Sunnis, disadvantaging the wealthy and powerful Christian minority and the Shiite plurality.

   So it isn’t true that the Palestinians are monochrome “Arabs” who, having been stripped of their property by the Israelis and expelled from their homes, could easily just be Arab somewhere else.

   The Israelis committed a tort against the Palestinians when they ethnically cleansed them in 1947-48, for which they have never paid a dime in compensation. The Israelis continue to keep millions of Palestinians stateless and without meaningful human rights, under brutal military occupation.

   The complicity of official Washington in this ongoing crime against a whole people angers the Muslim world and causes many of America’s problems with the region, as Stephen Walt points out.

   Gingrich’s remarks were headlined at Aljazeera and even as we speak have stirred a wave of anger at the United States. But it is not because he has put forward a new American position. It is because he has confirmed what the Arab public had perceived as US policy all along. The US is an accomplice in the erasure of a whole people, in keeping them in an estate. of statelessness, only a little elevated from that of slavery, and in helping further expropriate them on a daily basis.

   http://www.juancole.com/2011/12/washington-actions-on-palestine-dont-differ-from-gingrichs-words.htm
   l

   Sorry. I ended up quoting the whole piece, with permission of course.

7. 

   TarheelDem on December 11, 2011 at 9:55 pm

   It would provide an opening for rethinking the US policy with Israel if there was another point of view.  If only…

   And I know where you can cut $3 billion from the deficit.

8. 

   priscianus jr on December 11, 2011 at 10:05 pm

      Gingrich is pandering to the Republican Jewish Coalition. At the same time they are trying to put pressure on Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, chair of the Democratic National Committee.
      This strategy is not going to work any more than any of the other stupidly evil republican schemes.
   http://miamiherald.typepad.com/nakedpolitics/2011/12/gop-rivals-blast-obama-in-front-of-jewish-repub
   licans-debbie-wasserman-schultz-fires-back-.html
      But it does explain a lot of the dog-whistling that’s been going on this week, like Mitt Romney calling Obama an “appeaser” in fron to the Republic Jewish Coalition.
   http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-57339492-503544/obama-ask-bin-laden-if-im-an-appeaser/
      “At the Republican Jewish Coalition forum, Jews commemorate the miracle of incredibly religious Christian presidential candidates fighting over who loves Jews more.”
   http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-december-8-2011/the-matzorian-candidate?xrs=share_copy

9. 

   Snarki child of Loki on December 11, 2011 at 10:41 pm

   So, according to Newt, the palestinians are “an invented people”. Sounds a bit, mm, ARTIFICIAL.

   But corporations are perfectly okay as people. Gotcha.

10. 

    Quentin on December 12, 2011 at 8:55 am

    Who cares whether Gingrich’s ignorant statement is good or bad for either the US or for Israel. Everyone’s so worried about US-ians being killed or Israelis coming under fire. For crying out loud, they’re the oppressers in this clusterfuck. They’re not the victims. Not by a long stretch. The victims are the Palestinians. Good business stealing other peoples land, houses, orchards, whatever. Good democracy that encourges a client state to behave that way. Today Juan Cole hit the nail on the head: Gingrich says what US policy expresses by its actions but not its words—the Palestinian nation is a nonentity that has to be sacrificed to Israeli lust and voraciousness. And Hillary Clinton is still bouncing around in her new punk persona stating that if Iran gets nuclear weapons the region would become destabilized without recognizing that her Israeli masters have completely destablizied the region by its nasy, sadistic behavior, including nuclear weapons. That’s what Gingrich was saying, Go Israel. Clinton would not have the guts. Nor would her boss Obama.

    • 

      Quentin on December 12, 2011 at 8:55 am

      Palestine for the Palestinians.

    • 

      Hurria on December 12, 2011 at 6:31 pm

      Thank you! I couldn’t care less whether Gingrich flapping is fat, ingorant mouth is bad for the U.S. or Israel. LET it be bad for the world’s biggest bullies to have the rantings of the front runner for the presidential candidacy be bad for America, and LET all the pandering to Israel and AIPAC be bad for Israel. They’re not the victims here, and they’re not the ones whose very existence is being denied.

11. 

    joe from Lowell on December 12, 2011 at 3:44 pm

    Arthur Gilroy helpfully published a clinical description of sociopaths in a recent comment about Newt Gingrich: http://www.mcafee.cc/Bin/sb.html

    You’re talking about this:

    Irresponsibility/Unreliability
    Not concerned about wrecking others’ lives and dreams. Oblivious or indifferent to the devastation they cause. Does not accept blame themselves, but blames others, even for acts they obviously committed.

    Read the whole thing.  Newt meets almost all of them.

12. 

    Hurria on December 12, 2011 at 6:35 pm

    What’s the big uproar about? Gingrich was only parrotting the tired old standard line we’ve been hearing from Zionists/Israelis/AIPAC’ers since before Israel became a state.

    • 

      joe from Lowell on December 13, 2011 at 1:30 pm

      It’s a big deal that that Zionist/Likudnik line is now being spoken by the frontrunner for a major American party’s presidential nomination.

      Obama, McCain, Bush, Kerry, Gore, Dole, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Mondale, Carter, Ford, Nixon…none of them spoke like this.