07/19/2004: "Middle East lunacy from the Christian Century"

James Wall, the editor of the flagship publication of the mainline, Christian Century, has posted an editorial on the Middle East on the magazine's Web site that can only be called disgraceful. Wall writes:

[A]fter 1967, Israel emerged as a powerful military ally, on call as needed. With the Iraq war and its occupation aftermath, the White House looked for help with an Arab opponent. "Who you gonna call?"

Robert Fisk of the London Independent offers this answer: "The actual interrogators accused of encouraging U.S. troops to abuse Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib jail were working for at least one company with extensive military and commercial contacts with Israel. The head of an American company whose personnel are implicated in the Iraqi tortures, it now turns out, attended an 'anti-terror' training camp in Israel and, earlier this year, was presented with an award by Shaul Mofaz . . . the Israeli defense minister."

Fisk's reporting is so highly propagandistic that his name has become a verb on the Internet, so often have his articles been deconstructed by those who care about facts. This quote is a prize example: no where in it does he directly say that anyone at Abu Ghraib, or the company any of them worked for, actually learned anything about "torture" from any one in Israel. The quote in fact says nothing substantive about Israel at all. But it implies all kind of evil stuff. Thus is Israel tied to the biggest scandal yet in Iraq, despite a complete lack of evidence of any actual connection.

When the New York Times delivered false information to its readers, it placed friendship above serious and responsible journalism. The Times was no doubt influenced by its belief that so long as Saddam Hussein was in power and making threatening gestures toward Israel, the whole region was in danger. Hussein was a wicked dictator whom the United States supported during his ten-year war against Iran, a conflict in which Hussein committed some of his worst atrocities against enemies and his own citizens. But was he really that big a threat either to the U.S. or to the region?

Anyone who reads the Times with any frequency at all knows that it is no friend of Israel's. The "false information" about Iraqi WMD it delivered to readers, supposedly out of "friendship" for Israel, was basically the same information the rest of the media reported, and was based on flawed intelligence from a variety of sources. Saddam Hussein invaded both Iran and Kuwait, but beyond that I can't think of any reason why he could be considered a threat to anyone.

U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East has always been rooted in the need to protect the region's rich oil fields, first from the Soviet Union during the cold war, and now from unreliable local dictators like Hussein. (For reliable dictatorships, see Saudi Arabia.) Our support for Israel is consistent with the realization that in a region where allies are not always under your control, you need a strong military friend. And unlike any of the Arab states, Israel has a strong political support base in the U.S., a reality of domestic politics that is never far from the reelection strategies of American politicians.

American support for Israel couldn't possibly have anything to do with shared values, mutual practice of democracy, or Israel's status as the only nation in the region which accords its citizens anything like the freedoms Americans hold dear, could it? Of course our Middle East policy has to do with oil. But Wall's refusal to mention anything else is a gross distortion of our relationship with our ally.

Until 9/11 it seemed that the U.S. might be able to persuade Israel to end its illegal occupation. But when terror became the U.S. foreign policy focus, Sharon quickly linked his fight against Palestinians to the U.S. fight against worldwide terrorism. Resistance to occupation is not terrorism, of course, but U.S. politicians of both parties embraced the word of a friend and agreed that the situations were similar. It was an easy call. Both the resistance and the terror had come from people who speak Arabic and the majority of whom follow the Islamic faith.

Which is how racism�the blanket condemnation of a racial group for ulterior purposes�enters the picture and emerges as the subtext of Middle East policy.

And here Wall goes over the line. What forms have Palestinian "resistance" taken? Suicide bombings, attacks on civilians, attacks on schoolchildren. That's not terrorism? When Sharon linked 9/11 to Israel's fight against terrorism, he wasn't talking about strikes or demonstrations, he was talking about murder. But apparently in James Wall's world, murder isn't terrorism, it's "resistance to occupation, and pointing out that Hamas and Fatah's Martyrs Brigade are terrorist organizations is "racist," because they are actually "resistance fighters." At this point in Wall's article, there's little to distinguish his argument from that of International ANSWER and the other Israel-hating loons of the far left.

As I said, disgraceful.