The Prince of Poets: Arab Poetry’s Answer to American Idol

My latest article on 3QuarksDaily:

Imagine an American TV network deciding to take the American Idol format and apply it to poetry; lining up poets to read their poems in front of temperamental judges while the nation gets out its mobile phones to vote for its favorite poet. One can be sure the show would not survive the first commercial break before the chastened executives pull the plug on it and replace it with yet another series on the Life and Times of Nicole Ritchie. Yet, that was exactly the formula for the latest TV sensation to take Arab countries by storm.

Perhaps the only thing that is as hard as translating Arab poetry to other languages is trying to explain to non-Arabs the extent of poetry’s popularity, importance and Arabs’ strong attachment to it. Whereas poetry in America has been largely reduced to a ceremonial eccentricity that survives thanks to grants and subsidies from fanatics who care about it too much, in the Arab world it remains amongst the most popular forms of both literature and entertainment. Whereas America’s top poets may struggle to fill a small Barnes & Noble store for a reading, Palestine’s Mahmoud Darwish has filled football stadiums with thousands of fans eager to hear his unique recital of his powerful poems. And while in America a good poetry collection can expect to sell some 2,000 copies, in the Arab world the poems of pre-Islamic era poets are still widely read today in their original words, as are those from the different Islamic eras leading to the present. The late Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani had a cult following across the Arab world, and his romantic poems have for decades constituted standard covert currency between lovers.

The Arab World has had its own enormously successful pop music answer to American Idol in Superstar which has concluded its fourth season with resounding success, unearthing some real stars of today’s thriving Arabic cheesy pop scene. But a few months ago, the governors of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi took a bold move by organizing a similar contest for poets. This comes as another step in Abu Dhabi’s ambitious attempts to use its petro-dollars to transform itself into the capital of Arab culture, and one of the world’s leading cultural centers; a Florence to Dubai’s London.

The show, named Prince of Poets, was an enormous success. Some 4,000 poets from across the Arab world sent in submissions to be considered. 35 were chosen for the show, and millions of viewers from across the Arab world tuned in to watch them recite their poetry, get criticized by Arab poetry’s answer to Simon Cowell, Paula Abdul and Randy Jackson (5 older poets and professors), improvise verses on the spot, and address wide-ranging issues from women’s rights, Iraq, love, democratization, Palestine and the old staple of Arab poetry: self-aggrandization. The winner would not only gain fame, but also a grand prize of 1,000,000 UAE Dirhams ($270,000).

The success of the show was wilder than anyone could’ve expected. The Arab press has had reports about how it has achieved the highest ratings in its spot, overtaking football matches and reality-TV; and millions have paid for text messages to vote for their favorite poet.

The turning point in the show’s popularity, many have speculated, came when young Palestinian poet, Tamim Al-Barghouti, read his poem “In Jerusalem“. Tamim, who is a distant cousin and close friend of mine, is the son of famous Palestinian poet and writer Mourid Al-Barghouti (author of the excellent I Saw Ramallah) and Egyptian novelist Radwa Ashour. Tamim’s charisma, poetry, personality and politics captured the imagination of the Arab world. A veteran of years of student political activism in Palestine and Egypt, Tamim was once deported from Egypt by the authorities after engaging in one too many anti-Iraq War protests for the liking of Egypt’s regime. He then moved to America where he completed a Ph.D. in Political Science at Boston University in only three years, before working for the United Nations in Sudan. Through all of this, he has managed to publish four collections of poetry that have received critical acclaim and is expanding his Ph.D. thesis into a book on political identity in the Middle East to be published in 2008. He is now headed to Germany to become a fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study.

While many contestants opted away from talking about politics in their poems, hoping to not cause any grievance to the generous leaders of the United Arab Emirates who are hosting this show, or to any of the other Arab leaders, Tamim’s poetry was almost entirely political. Whether it was about Palestine, Iraq, or Arab dictatorships, Tamim was as courageous as he was eloquent, raising a few eyebrows in the quiet Emirate where discussing regional politics is not considered the wisest choice of discussion topic.

“In Jerusalem” is a poetic diary of Tamim’s last visit to his land’s occupied capital; a sad traverse through its occupied streets defiled by the occupation soldiers and the illegal settlers living on stolen Palestinian land, and around the apartheid walls choking the city with their racist denial of Palestinians’ basic freedoms and rights. Nonetheless, the poem ends on a cheery and optimistic tone, leading to the jubilant excitement with which the Arab world enjoyed the poem.

Palestinian newspapers have dubbed Tamim The Poet of Al-Aqsa; his posters hang on the streets of Jerusalem and other Palestinian cities, where key-chains are being sold with his picture on them. Sections of the poem have even become ring-tones blaring out from mobile phones across the Arab World, and 10-year-old kids compete in memorizing and reciting it. Hundreds of thousands of people have seen Tamim’s poems on Youtube and other video websites.

But perhaps Tamim’s most amazing feat was how he has galvanized all Palestinians into following him and supporting him. After all of the troubles that Palestine has been through recently, and all the divisions that have been spawned within the Palestinian people, it was very refreshing to finally find something that unequivocally unites all Palestinians, and rouses millions of Arabs behind the cause that was tarred recently by the actions of some Palestinians.

This unifying effect was most glaringly captured when the TV stations of both Hamas and Fatah threw their support behind the unsuspecting Tamim, broadcasting his poems repeatedly, and urging people to vote for him, catapulting him from a little known young poet into a symbol of national resistance and unity. Finally, after months of divisions amongst Palestinians, there was something uniting them: a reminder of the true essence of the cause of the Palestinians, of the real problem, the real enemies and the real need for unity to face these challenges for the sake of Palestinian people and their just cause.

All of which made the final result of the contest most surprising. After having consistently received the highest ranking from the viewers’ votes and the unanimous flattery of the judges, and after a barn-storming flawless last poem that had the judges gushing, Tamim ended up in fifth place out of the five finalists. The poetess that was expected to most strongly challenge Tamim, the Sudanese Rawda Al-Hajj, who had focused her poems on women’s empowerment, finished fourth. The winner, perhaps unsurprisingly, was Abdulkareem Maatouk, a poet from the host country, the United Arab Emirates, whose poems had steered clear of anything political or controversial.

Though Tamim refused to comment, speculation was rife that the results were rigged. That Tamim and Rawda, widely viewed as the two best poets, would finish bottom of the finalists was certainly implausible, and one could not help but imagine that politics came into play. Abu Dhabi may want to fashion itself as the capital of culture, but it probably values its political stability more than any cultural pretenses. Arab regimes may have behaved like warring tribes with narrow self-interest over the past century, but there is one thing in which their cooperation was always exemplary: the effective suppression of all voices of dissent. As the contest became more popular, and the crown of the Prince of Poets more prestigious, it may have become too hard for the organizers to accept giving the trophy to a Palestinian rabble-rouser who in one of his poems bemoaned the times that have “degraded the free amongst us, and made scoundrels into our rulers.”

Nonetheless, there is no doubt who the real winner was; it was not just Tamim and his poetry which will now rival Mahmoud Darwish’s as the voice of the Palestinians, but also the Palestinian people who were reminded of the meaning of their unity, and their cause, which has found its best advertisement that has strengthened the mutual affection, dedication and support of millions of Arabs in the midst of one of its darkest hours.

59 Years of Nakba

Today is the 59th anniversary of the saddest day in the history of Palestine, the day in which racist Zionist colonialism completed the destruction of more than 500 towns, the dispossesion of around a million refugees, the murder of thousands and the establishment of a settler colonalist regime that subsits to this day.

Never will Palestinians anywhere forget this day. And never will we stop working to end its tragic legacy which continues to this day to oppress millions.

Like Apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia, this settler colonial regime is destined to be defeated. It will be defeated simply because we Palestinians are incapable of being defeated.

Nothing that the criminals in charge of the racist Zionist regime ever do will succeed in destroying the Palestinian will to return and end settler colonialism in Palestine. The Palestinian will to return is stronger than ever.

In the refugee camps of Gaza, Jenin, Nablus and the rest of Palestine; in the refugee camps of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt; in their exiles in Arab countries, Europe, the Americas and the world over; millions of Palestinians–young and old– will reflect on this day and remember their inalienable right to return to their homes.

As an old song by Fairouz said:

Another day has passed

Our exile has increased by one day

And our return has drawn one day nearer

Make sure to check out www.PalestineRemembered.com, and excellent resource for everything related to the Nakba with full documentation of Zionist crimes, massacres and village destruction.

Also, George Bisharat has an excellent editorial in the San Fransisco Gate about what exactly the Nakba means to millions of Palestinians, and why its rememberance is not only vital for the sake of remembrance, but also vital for the future.

For Palestinians, memory matters
It provides a blueprint for their future

George Bisharat
Sunday, May 13, 2007

Why do some people have the power to remember, while others are asked to forget? That question is especially poignant at this time of year, as we move from Holocaust Remembrance day in early spring to Monday’s anniversary of Israel’s declaration of independence on May 14, 1948.

In the months surrounding that date, Jewish forces expelled, or intimidated into flight, an estimated 750,000 Palestinians. A living, breathing, society that had existed in Palestine for centuries was smashed and fragmented, and a new society built on its ruins.

Few Palestinian families lack a personal narrative of loss from that period — an uncle killed, or a branch of the family that fled north while the others fled east, never to be reunited, or homes, offices, orchards and other property seized. Ever since, Palestinians worldwide have commemorated May 15 as Nakba (Catastrophe) Day.

No ethical person would admonish Jews to “forget the Holocaust.” Indeed, recent decades have witnessed victims of that terrible era not only remembering, but also regaining paintings and financial assets seized by the Nazis — and justifiably so.

Other victims of mass wrongs — interned Japanese Americans, enslaved African Americans, and Armenians subjected to a genocide that may have later convinced Hitler of the feasibility of mass killings — receive at least respectful consideration of their cases, even while responses to their claims have differed.

Yet in dialogues with Israelis, and some Americans, Palestinians are repeatedly admonished to “forget the past,” that looking back is “not constructive” and “doesn’t get us closer to a solution.” Ironically, Palestinians live the consequences of the past every day — whether as exiles from their homeland, or as members of an oppressed minority within Israel, or as subjects of a brutal and violent military occupation.

In the West we are amply reminded of the suffering of Jewish people in World War II. Our newspaper featured several stories on local survivors of the Nazi holocaust around Holocaust Remembrance Day (an Israeli national holiday that is widely observed in the United States).

My daughter has read at least one book on the Nazi holocaust every year since middle school. Last year, in ninth grade English literature alone, she read three. But we seldom confront the impact of Israel’s policies on Palestinians.

It is the “security of the Jewish people” that has rationalized Israel’s takeover of Palestinian lands, both in the past in Israel, and more recently in the occupied West Bank. There, most Palestinian children negotiate one of the 500 Israeli checkpoints and other barriers to movement just to reach school each day. Meanwhile, Israel’s program of colonization of the West Bank grinds ahead relentlessly, implanting ever more Israeli settlers who must be “protected” from those Palestinians not reconciled to the theft of their homes and fields.

The primacy of Jewish security over rights of Palestinians — to property, education, health care, a chance to make a living, and, also to security — is seldom challenged.

Unfortunately, remembering the Nazi Holocaust — something morally incumbent on all of us — has seemingly become entangled with, and even an instrument of, the amnesia some would force on Palestinians. Israel is enveloped in an aura of ethical propriety that makes it unseemly, even “anti-Semitic” to question its denial of Palestinian rights.

As Israeli journalist Amira Hass recently observed: “Turning the Holocaust into a political asset serves Israel primarily in its fight against the Palestinians. When the Holocaust is on one side of the scale, along with the guilty (and rightly so) conscience of the West, the dispossession of the Palestinian people from their homeland in 1948 is minimized and blurred.”

What this demonstrates is that memory is not just an idle capacity. Rather, who can remember, and who can be made to forget, is, fundamentally, an expression of power.

Equally importantly, however, memory can provide a blueprint for the future — a vision of a solution to seek, or an outcome to avoid. My Palestinian father grew up in Jerusalem before Israel was founded and the Palestinians expelled, when Muslims, Christians and Jews lived in peace and mutual respect. Recalling that past provides a vision for an alternative future — one involving equal rights and tolerance, rather than the domination of one ethno-religious group over others.

Thus, what Palestinians are really being commanded is not just to forget their past, but instead to forget their future, too. That they will never do.

George Bisharat is professor of law at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. He writes frequently about the Middle East.

Bill Maher on US Government

Bill Maher’s ‘New Rules’ from a couple of weeks ago makes a very good point about “elites” in government.

The amount of unqualified cronies and morons appointed to the US Government is seriously mind-boggling, and goes a long way towards explaining ever single fuck-up this country has had recently from Hurricane Katrina to the Justice Department firings of US Attorneys.

But what is most interesting in my opinion is how the Republicans benefit from their own incompetence: whenever government fucks up, their talking heads all over the media will use that as support for their view that government is fundamentally corrupt, inefficient and useless, and that we should therefore reduce the size of government and elect more Republicans to save us from the scourge of big government. Then America rewards Republicans for their incompetence and they continue it, producing a self-sustaining cycle of incompetence and corruption.

It’s a win-win situation if you’re a corrupt megalomaniac Republican, or one of their minions like Monica Goodling and Michael Brown.

Finkelstein demolishes Dennis Ross’ lies

If I were to be asked to give two words that summarize why there is no peace in Palestine, I could hardly think of any better candidates than “Dennis” and “Ross”.

This isn’t to say that this demented liar is the reason there is no peace; that would be giving a stupid minion like him too much credit. But what this says is that in a time when a despicable racist liar like Ross can get a job as a “mediator” of negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis; use that job as a mercenary for the Israelis; get a free pass in propagating outright lies about his role in the process and the process itself; have his lies published in a book that sells massively and is then used by “experts” to justify positions on the Middle East; and continue to make millions portraying himself as an honest peacemaker–no wonder there is no peace in the Middle East.

Ross is the “mediator” who was too upset that Barak offered too much concessions to the Palestinians, he even said: “If Barak offers anything more, I’ll be against this agreement.” Let’s remember that anything that Barak offered was at best a Bantustan solution that would’ve made the leaders of apartheid South Africa in the 1970’s look generous. Ross then made a career out of trumpeting these concessions as a “Generous Offer”.

I will write more when I have time about Ross and his lies and racist and fatal commitment to Israeli racist hegemony; but for now, I will leave you with this excellent, thorough and comprehensive demolition job carried out by Norman Finkelstein in the latest issue of the Journal of Palestine Studies.

This sentence from Finkelstein sums up perfectly the problem with Ross’ demented perception of the conflict:

“Palestinian demands appear maximal while Palestinian concessions appear minimal because Ross ignores international law.”

He goes on:

whether at Oslo or Camp David: the Israelis might have had to settle for much less than they wanted, but the Palestinians had to settle for much less than they were owed. To curb one’s desires is fundamentally different from surrendering one’s rights. In disregarding international law, Ross obscures this crucial distinction. Concomitantly, he obscures the fact that throughout the peace process, all the genuine concessions came from the Palestinian side.

Finkelstein ends his piece with this conclusion:

Judging from Ross’s account, Camp David failed because Palestinians stubbornly clung to the illusion that they had real needs. Had they understood that all they really needed was symbols, Palestinians would have leapt at the generous Israeli offer. The root of the problem, again, appears to be that Palestinian “sense of entitlement”: Camp David might have succeeded if only Palestinians grasped that they aren’t real, actual human beings.

Incidentally, the Journal of Palestine Studies is such an excellent scholarly resource for the conflict. One can only wish that people would read this journal instead of the bucket-loads of inimitable crap emanating from the likes of Ross, Thomas Friedman and Jeffrey Goldberg.

Circling The Wolfies

Our bitter vengeful baying-for-blood World Bank correspondent is back with more gems about the one man band of incompetence, racism, nepotism, sadism and downright pathetic idiocy that is Paul Wolfowitz.
He has filed this report from the frontlines of The War on Neoconservatism:

Oh, the tangled web we weave… when we are corrupt megalomaniac bastards unaccustomed to accountability and the uniform application of ethical standards.

To summarize:

1) Wolfie arranged extraordinary (and extraordinarily out of line) compensation packages for his political and physical lovers, and then tried to blame it on the Board of the World Bank. For full report click here, go to posting of 4/13 “GAP Points Out Bank Board Given Wrong Information”, and see second link.

2) The World Bank Staff Association (and the Financial Times, and others) have called for Wolfie’s resignation.

3) His girlfriend, Shaha Riza, took a leave of absence from the Bank (before Wolfie was president) to work as a subject expert for a US defense contractor in Iraq without disclosing the employment to the relevant Bank authorities, in violation of Staff Rules.

4) The relatively new Managing Director of the World Bank appointed by Wolfie, Juan Jose Daboub, former government official of El Salvador (and founding member of the far-right party ARENA, which has well-documented relations with 80’s civil war death squads) and active Opus Dei member, personally directed the removal from the Madagascar Country Assistance Strategy and the Health, Nutrition and Population Sector Strategy all references to the phrase ‘family planning’. Apparently, he felt the need to overturn decades of official policy because family planning falls ‘under the purview of UNFPA’. Read The Emails here.

5) This last point isn’t yet under discussion by the Board as reflective of Wolfie’s ethics, but it should be (and will be investigated by the WB Ethics Committee)… Wolfie has another major conflict of interest because he personally, in his capacity as Deputy Secretary of Defense, approved multi-billion single source contracts to Halliburton, and then, in his capacity as President of the World Bank Group, sits on the International and Advisory Monitoring Board, which is to oversee the appropriate use of precisely those funds.

Here is another article I wrote for the Spectator, this one from March:

Apartheid Comes to New Jersey
Saifedean Ammous
3/5/07

It was a cold Sunday morning in Teaneck, N.J. Some two-hundred-odd Jewish-Americans were entering the Orthodox synagogue Congregation B’nai Yeshurun where they were to hear a sales pitch by the Amana Settlement Movement aimed at convincing them to buy homes in illegal Israeli settlements.

America, the land that gave the world the separation of church and state, is hosting an auction where only members of one religious group can buy property.

And here I am, a Palestinian who grew up hundreds of meters away from some of these very settlements. I cannot buy any of these houses and am not admitted into the auction room. Literally and figuratively left out in the cold, I light a cigarette and get over it immediately; being denied entry is not an entirely novel experience for a Palestinian.

A group of around 50 pro-peace activists gather outside to protest the auction. Rabbi Steven Pruzansky comes out to speak to journalists; he doesn’t seem to understand the controversy. “Everyone can buy land anywhere. I was in the Bahamas and they were selling land; in Florida they sell land to anyone, why can’t we buy land in Israel?” When a journalist mentions to him that these are colonies for Jews only, he says that he prays hard for peace, and looks forward to the day when Jews and Arabs can live together, but for now this is hard because of the “security situation.” It doesn’t occur to him that this “security situation” may itself be the result of these exclusive colonies being built on stolen Palestinian land.

I ask a middle-aged man leaving the presentation what he thought of it. He tells me he will definitely move to Israel one day. I ask him if he knows anything about the legal status of these settlements; he tells me it is “unclaimed land.” I mention to him a recent report by Israeli group Peace Now which finds that 40 percent of settlements are built on confiscated private Palestinian land (as opposed to the other 60 percent that are built on illegally occupied land.) “Peace Now and B’Tselem are the two most anti-Semitic organizations in the world,” he replies, “Can they prove it?”

I tell him that this is based on documents from Israel’s “Civil Administration” and that the Israeli government never denied these reports, but he’s having none of it. I ask him if he thought about asking Amana about the legality of the land, but he answers with a stern “No, I don’t want to ask them. I don’t need to know.”

One of my most vivid memories of growing up under Israeli apartheid came in the summer of 1993, when our house in Ramallah would receive water only three days a week. I remember driving one day near the colony of Shilo (back in the good old days when we could still drive between Palestinian cities) and witnessing the water sprinklers bursting at full blast outside the settlement to water the surrounding hills, ensuring the view for the colonialists was a little greener. Someone today will buy a house in Shilo, and in a few years, on a hot summer day, she will wake up to this beautiful green view, while I would wake up praying there would be enough water to shower.

Settlements receive around 10 times the amount of water per capita that Palestinian cities and villages receive. While we had to resort to buying plastic dishes to cut down on dish-washing, they would spend their days in swimming pools enjoying the lush green views afforded to them by their sprinklers.

And today, this colonialism is taken to absurd lengths. Having helped turn the West Bank into the world’s biggest constellation of ghettoes surrounded by walls and racially-exclusive colonies and roads, Amana was still not satisfied. Nor were they satisfied with the economic and political support that the American government provides to the Israeli government’s abuses of human rights and international law. They had to squeeze money from the people of New Jersey to build more exclusive illegal colonies, dispossess more Palestinians, and take more water from my family. All part of “Keeping the Zionist Dream Alive,” as the Amana brochure put it.

Watching the quintessentially American family of a dad, mom, and three kids emerge enthusiastically from their blue Ford SUV toward the auction made me think of all the families I knew whose lands were taken by Israel; often forcefully displaced and separated, these families can not even buy these lands back if they wanted to. In “The Only Democracy in the Middle East,” real estate is run by imaginary ghosts from 3,000 year-old books that displace families from their only homes to auction them as second and third homes to Americans.

I wonder what drives this beautiful family to wake up on a Sunday morning and go find out about joining a colonial project instead of going to the mall; contributing to its success with their money by not knowing and not wanting to know about the reality of what they are getting into. It sounds too banal to be true, but a consumerism that willfully and consciously chooses to be blind to the consequences of its purchases is helping prop up the world’s only remaining colonial apartheid system.

The night before coming here, this family doubtlessly weighed the option of joining this project against skiing, shopping, or visiting relatives. Unfortunately for my future bathing prospects, they have decided to join in Amana’s quest to “Keep the Zionist Dream Alive.”

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© Copyright 2007 Columbia Daily Spectator

The Antiwar Movement & Palestine

Here’s a little article I wrote for the Columbia Spectator a couple of months ago:

Recognizing Palestine’s Struggle
Saifedean Ammous
1/26/07

As anti-war activists prepare to march on Washington, D.C. on Saturday demanding an end to the war in Iraq, one issue will be conspicuous by its absence from the agenda of the majority of groups participating: Israel’s despicable oppression of Palestinians.

That this issue is left out of the march is more significant than it may initially seem. After all, there are many worthy causes around the world that are not mentioned in this anti-war march. Yet, not mentioning Palestine in the antiwar movement reflects an absurd short-sightedness in dealing with the Middle East. It will doom this movement to failure if the benchmarks for its success are set to a reasonable standard beyond the myopic (and by now largely inevitable) “Bring the Troops Home.”

First, the moral case: if the antiwar movement opposes the war on Iraq because of moral concerns, it is baffling it would remain silent on Palestine. Israel has set up walls and checkpoints that separate farmers from their lands, students from their schools and universities, patients from their hospitals, and fiances from each other. In effect, Israel has in place a colonial system of apartheid in the West Bank where close to half a million Jews get superior access to all resources, live in their Jewish-only communities, drive on roads for Jews only, and are completely separated from any contact with Palestine’s non-Jews. No wonder that Archbishop Desmond Tutu has denounced Israel’s policies in Palestine as worse than those of the apartheid regime in South Africa.

When confronted with these facts, some members of the antiwar movement will concede that the Palestinian situation is bad, but will wash their hands of it by saying that it is not America that is engaged in such policies and that the antiwar movement is a domestic movement aimed at exerting domestic pressure on the American government. They couldn’t be more wrong.

Whereas Americans are not carrying out the actual oppression in Palestine, America is as morally culpable as Israel in these actions. American aid (both military and civilian) subsidizes the racist occupation and settlements with billions of taxpayer dollars, leading to a situation where each Israeli citizen receives more money from the U.S. federal government than citizens of most American states do. In fact, America gives more to Israel than it gives to all of Sub-Saharan Africa combined.

Further, the political cover that has allowed Israel to continue in its delinquent disregard for international and human rights laws only comes thanks to the continued, unconditional, and morally complicit diplomatic and political cover it gets from the world’s only remaining superpower. America allows Israel to continue to oppress Palestinians. Moral opposition to the Iraq war has to be accompanied by moral opposition to Israeli apartheid.

Now we turn to the practical case. Many argue that in order for the antiwar movement to be effective, it needs to concentrate only on Iraq. Asking for too much is a recipe for achieving too little, we are told, and in order to save Iraq we may need to forget about Palestine. After all, politics is not all about morality, and politicians need to prioritize.

I disagree. It is flawed for the movement to think that the only problem with America’s Middle Eastern foreign policy is the occupation of Iraq. Continued support for Israel’s crimes is the root of the problem and has radicalized anti-American fervor since long before the Iraq debacle. Iraq has worsened this, but even if the situation there were to be magically resolved, this would still not end the anti-Americanism and the rightful resentment that the majority of Arabs and Muslims feel. It is surely not a solution, just a reversal of one of the many grave mistakes America has committed. But don’t take my word for it.

The Iraq Study Group’s report clearly states that America must engage in finding a real solution to the Israel-Palestine problem in order to succeed in Iraq and the wider region. From Jimmy Carter to Philip Zelikow to Zbigniew Brzezinski to Brent Scowcroft, a growing number of foreign policy experts and scholars agree with this proposition. As Martin Luther King said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

The antiwar movement continues to fudge the issue, carefully circumventing any serious discussion of America’s Middle East policy. It is truly a remarkable nadir for an antiwar movement to have a moral position inferior to that of hard-nosed, Cold War no-nonsense realists.

Neither immorality nor nationalistic chauvinism nor even bigotry could amply explain the antiwar movement’s silence on Israel-Palestine. The most flattering explanation one can find is ignorance, though more likely, it is a unique mix of cowardice, folly, and pathetic political hackery.

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© Copyright 2007 Columbia Daily Spectator