Dear chaverim v’mishpocha, sorry for the long hiatus since my last post. As Mark Twain warns in The Innocents Abroad, it’s easier to begin a travelogue than to keep it going: "At certain periods it becomes the dearest ambition of a man to keep a faithful record of his performances in a book; and he dashes at this work with an enthusiasm that imposes on him the notion that keeping a journal is the veriest pastime in the world, and the pleasantest. But if he only lives twenty-one days, he will find out that only those rare natures that are made up of pluck, endurance, devotion to duty for duty’s sake, and invincible determination may hope to venture upon so tremendous an enterprise as the keeping of a journal and not sustain a shameful defeat." "If you wish to inflict a heartless and malignant punishment upon a young person," he adds, "pledge him to keep a journal a year." Rest assured, I'm not so young anymore, and my hiatus was only that and not a defeat.
Let me pick up where I left off: with the Wisconsin primary. While I voted for Clinton, I was not terribly upset to see Obama win big in the Badger State. What does upset me – what increasingly angers and disgusts me, in fact -- is the smear campaign being waged against Obama, based on innuendo, insinuation, and outright lies, that he is anti-Israel, un-American, and some kind of crypto-Muslim fifth columnist (as if Muslim Americans cannot be loyal Americans). What offends me even more is that the campaign appears to be aimed especially at Jewish voters in an effort to manipulate Jewish votes. (This just in: I’m not so easily stampeded.) Now, lest this smear campaign be seen not as an attempt to manipulate Jewish voters, but rather as an attempt by the shadowy and supposedly omnipotent “Israel Lobby” to manipulate the American public, I want to point out that the Israeli press (where I have been learning about this campaign) has done a nice job of exposing and debunking it. Here are a few examples:
Obama and the Jewish question
Yedioth Ahronoth interview with Obama
Obama: Not only Likudniks can be pro-Israeli
Obama tells Jewish leaders: I have never been a Muslim
On the other side of the Atlantic, the leaders of nine national Jewish American organizations and seven Jewish members of the United States Senate forcefully condemned the smear campaign against Obama in January. (“If ever there was a concentrated deployment of American Jewish power for a single cause,” quipped The Forward, “this was it.”)
My friend and colleague Jeff Weintraub has also shed valuable light on the smear campaign:
Obama and Israel
Jewish organizations denounce an ugly e-mail slander campaign against Obama
Why Obama is good for the Jews
And so too has The Forward:
Nader, Obama and Israel
Both the smear campaign against Obama and the invocation of the “Israel Lobby” by the far left and the far right to account for wars and policies they don’t like suggest a distressing revival of what Richard Hoftstadter called the paranoid style in American politics. Like former Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy, its adherents today ask, “How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster?” As Hofstadter showed, this paranoid style has a long history. In the nineteenth century it was Catholics who were accused of delivering America to disaster. In the twentieth century it was Communists. Today, it’s Muslims (or, more accurately, a Presidential candidate who is mistakenly believed to be a Muslim) and Jews.
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I am also growing more and more dismayed by this trend. But I respectfully disagree that American Jews are its primary target audience. I think this smear campaign aims to discredit Obama in the eyes of the not-so-closeted racists. Since, of course, his opponents can't explicitly use the race card, they attempt this sort of insinuations. What is worse, in my opinion, is that even the best and smartest media outlets fail to expose and condemn this for what it is -- pure bigotry.
Just earlier today, CBS's 60 Minutes had a story on the upcoming Ohio/Texas primaries that profiled an Ohio town of Chillicothe (not far from Wisconsin Yankee's ancestral home) and a few of its residents. One of these Chillicothians, a white blue-collar man probably in his mid-forties, told the reporter that he was leaning towards Obama (the guy is about to lose his factory job and medical coverage that comes with it) but was seriously concerned by Obama's Muslim roots and the fact that he won't "swear on the Holy Bible." The reporter did not ask the man why it was bad to be a Muslim (in a country whose Constitution explicitly protects one's right to exercise a religion of his choice!). Instead the story turned to interrogating Clinton, who is presumed to be behind some of these rumors, whether she believed Obama was indeed a Muslim. Her reply was almost as disturbing as the journalist's omission to follow up with the Chillicothian: more concerned with her own image than constitutional liberties that she is supposed to protect if elected president, she insisted she did not have any information that would lead her think her opponent was a practicing Muslim (although she had a weird smirk on her face). She did not even try to insist that this should not matter, at least in this country!
So, the story, instead of being about hidden -- or not so hidden -- racism still palpable in the US, became about "dirty tactics" of one candidate against another. In the end, existing stereotypes and emerging insinuations about both Democratic candidates -- she is a wicked bitch, he is a clandestine infidel -- got reinforced. Sad, to say the least.
Although I emphasized the targeting of Jewish voters, I agree that Jews are only one of several groups being targeted. On Jan. 30 The Forward reported: "The entire affair is described ... as a struggle for the hearts and votes of American Jews. In fact, though, the reports [about Obama] first surfaced a year ago on decidedly non-Jewish conservative Web sites. Red-state Christians are buying into them at least as fast as nervous Jews are."
From a different angle, J. commented (in an e-mail) that American Jews were not just targets; it seems that some (right-wing) individuals in the American Jewish community have been participating in the campaign against Obama. But I think this buttresses my point: rather than pointing to the machinations of a monolithic, unified "Israel Lobby," the campaign has revealed internal divisions and conflicts among American Jews. Still, I think it's significant (and heartening) that much of the organizational and institutional leadership of the American Jewish community has come out against it.
In any case, I am as dismayed as AP that the media and politicians sworn to uphold the Constitution haven't confronted this campaign - and the bigotry it feeds on and reinforces - more forcefully.
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