It's Still Wrong, Paul

One of Paul Mirengoff's recent pet projects is viciously smearing Obama foreign policy adviser Samantha Powers. In the wake of no less of a conservative voice than Max Boot telling Mirengoff-source Noah Pollack to chill, Paul hesitated a half-step before reiterating the same bogus claims he's forwarded the last several go-arounds.

The first two points of contention -- the ones Power now describes as "weird" -- came out of a 2002 interview where she was asked about the Israeli/Palestine situation. Here's her quote:

Putting something on the line might mean alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import; it may more crucially mean sacrificing -- or investing, I think, more than sacrificing -- billions of dollars, not in servicing Israel's military, but actually investing in the new state of Palestine, in investing the billions of dollars it would probably take, also, to support what will have to be a mammoth protection force, not of the old Rwanda kind, but a meaningful military presence.

Paul says that this shows that she wants to invade Israel and cut off all funding to its military.

I have two jabs and a haymaker here. My right jab is that, as Boot himself notes, many Israelis would be pleased if a NATO protection force was available to actually protect them from Palestinian intrusions. It'll never happen, because the international community will never put its own bodies on the line to protect Jews, but Power takes seriously at least as a moral matter this obligation to protect. My left jab is simply that Power is not saying we should cut Israel's military aid. She's saying that we should invest billions in creating a Palestinian state, as opposed to simply beefing up Israel's security yet more. I read her statement as saying we need to do both -- sure, Israel needs to be secure, but that's not going to fix the problem short- or long-term. Long-term, we need to invest in state building, not in giving Israel the option to occupy indefinitely.

But here's the haymaker: Look at the question she was asked!

Let me give you a thought experiment here, and it is the following: without addressing the Palestine - Israel problem, let's say you were an advisor to the President of the United States, how would you respond to current events there? Would you advise him to put a structure in place to monitor that situation, at least if one party or another [starts] looking like they might be moving toward genocide?

Notice anything peculiar? Like, say, the the last clause? If a genocide breaks out, then damn straight I think an international military presence should move in on the scene, and I don't care whether its the Israelis, Palestinians, Iranians, or Sudanese perpetuating the slaughter. This may be why Power finds this whole discussion "weird" -- aside from the most fervent anti-Zionist contingent, it's weird to think of Israel suddenly engaging in genocidal rampage. If Paul's point is that even in the face of genocide we should leave the Israelis (or Palestinians, for that matter) be, then I think we depart company, and he departs civilized company.

The second set of allegations stem from a 2007 interview where Power is accused of saying that Israel is responsible for the war in Iraq. This is maliciously false, as demonstrated by looking at the full text of the question and answer, where she says nothing of the sort, although if you cherry-pick the parts where she talks about Iraq and Israel, and omit the parts where she talks about broader structural forces these are examples of (along with Halliburton, which is the clearer link to Iraq), maybe it can look that way. This is not a matter of interpretation. This is a matter of Paul Mirengoff lying through his teeth without the slightest sense of guilt about it.

The final two cases are Power quoted a UN leader calling Israelis "bastards" without, apparently, swearing to personally desecrate his grave for it, and Power wondering why, if the New York Times believed there were war crimes in Jenin (and she doesn't say who committed then), why didn't the NYT lead with that as its headline? The last one doesn't come with any link to original source material, which is something Paul's friends have played fast and loose with before. But in any event, this is thin gruel for Mirengoff to say someone is reviving "the blood libel", but there you go.

Concludes Paul: "To me, it seems clear that, collectively, these positions overwhelmingly show Power to be anti-Israel."

Concludes me: "To me, it seems clear that, collectively, these statements overwhelmingly show Mirengoff to be a party hack who is willing to lie without compunction."

Slurring Words

I really shouldn't be surprised or upset by this, but I am. In the wake of my last post pointing out that in no way, shape, or form is Samantha Power a disciple of the Walt/Mearshimer thesis, Paul Mirengoff at Powerline has decided instead to double-down on the argument -- claiming that she "actually goes even further than Walt and Mearsheimer" and taking portions of this interview wildly out of context to assert she's making "some sort of modern blood libel." We already had an email conversation in which I explained why the spin he's putting on this interview is completely bogus, but Mr. Mirengoff apparently prefers to play shock jock.

This was a slimy, disgusting political hit job that showed reckless disregard for truth or decency. I had hoped that he'd show me a bit more respect than this, but the desire to smear Obama and his advisers trumps all.

I'll be keeping that in mind.

Is Samantha Power a Closet Walt & Mearsheimer Disciple?

It doesn't make sense to me, but at the end of this post Paul Mirengoff asserts that Obama adviser and foreign policy guru Samantha Power "subscribe[s] to the Walt-Mearsheimer thesis that that the U.S.-Israel relationship is the product of Jewish power politics, rather than strategic interest."

He's not the only one saying this. Here's The American Thinker making a similar claim, as well as Anti-Liberal Zone.

Noah Pollak appears to be the source, linking to this May 2007 interview with Professor Power. I've bolded the part they think is important, but I include the entire question for context:

Q. Though some analysts see U.S. foreign policy woes as a recent phenomenon, you argue that recent foreign policy missteps by current U.S. leaders have exposed and exacerbated long-standing structural and conceptual problems in U.S. foreign policy. Please explain.

Power: It is tempting to see Iraq as the source of all our woes now, whereas I see Iraq as the symptom, in some measure, of a number of longstanding trends and defects in American foreign policy.

One example is the US historic predisposition to go it alone. Because we have long undervalued what international institutions have to offer, we believed that we could go into Iraq, and as soon as we declared the mission accomplished, we expected to be able to turn the problem over to others, regardless of how they had been treated in the run up to the invasion. This thinking is very flawed, but not all that new. In a uni-polar world, the Clinton Administration was able to get away with an instrumental relationship with international institutions, but that is harder with the rise of new powers who are willing to challenge the United States in international bodies. It is also harder now that the Iraq war itself has exposed so many US weaknesses.

In addition, we long saw international authorization as a luxury, something good for global public opinion, but not very relevant to US national security. But what we have seen, by revealing our indifference to international legitimacy both in the Iraq war and in the practices carried out in our counter-terrorism efforts – the disavowal of the Geneva conventions, prisoner abuse, extraordinary rendition, etc. – is that being seen to thumb our nose at international law actually has profound security ramifications, as more and more people seek to take up arms against U.S. citizens and interests.

Another longstanding foreign policy flaw is the degree to which special interests dictate the way in which the “national interest” as a whole is defined and pursued. Look at the degree to which Halliburton and several of the private security and contracting firms invested in the 2004 political campaigns and received very lucrative contracts in the aftermath of the U.S. takeover of Iraq. Also, America’s important historic relationship with Israel has often led foreign policy decision-makers to defer reflexively to Israeli security assessments, and to replicate Israeli tactics, which, as the war in Lebanon last summer demonstrated, can turn out to be counter-productive.

So greater regard for international institutions along with less automatic deference to special interests – especially when it comes to matters of life and death and war and peace – seem to be two take-aways from the war in Iraq.

This is not the W&M hypothesis. At worst, it's a very diluted form of their thesis, in that it argues that sometimes the US listens to pro-Israel special interests, and that sometimes leads to bad results. This, she says, is emblematic of a broader, systemic flaw in how the US conducts foreign policy -- we let special interests construct what the "national interest" is and it leads us away from where we ought to go (Contra Pollak, it is not arguing in any way that Israel was responsible for America's war in Iraq).

W&M, of course, argue that US foreign policy in the area is controlled by the "Israel Lobby", and more importantly, that this is a unique exception to the way foreign policy decision-making operates. Far from being emblematic of anything, the Israel Lobby, from W&M's Realist stance, represents a dangerous exception to the Laws of the International System, which dictate that nation's have fixed and concrete security interests and always pursue them. This exceptional quality is the key reason why W&M's thesis is so offensive -- it's essentially an argument about Jewish hyperpower. But that makes it qualitatively different from persons (like Power) who believe that many factors beyond bare security interests influence how foreign policy operates, and observes that special interests advocating for Israel are one of them.

It is, of course, possible that Power has written something more directly on point that affirms W&M's hypothesis. But I highly doubt it, seeing as they come from drastically different schools of thought on international relations. W&M's thesis operates from a premise that Power doesn't share -- namely, that domestic, moral, or transnational forces never exert meaningful influence on foreign policy. Power appears to believe the opposite -- that these factors are extremely important influences on foreign policy decision-making (for good and for ill).

UPDATE: I sent Paul an email and asked for clarification. He responded with another Power quote, that her version of a sound mid-east policy would require "'alienating a domestic constituency.' That's close enough to the Walt-Mearsheimer thesis for me."

Not only is that not even close to the W&M thesis, it borders on being a truism. Americans (including Jewish Americans) have differences on what we want our mid-east policy to be. For example, I suspect Paul and I differ significantly. One of us is going to be alienated by whatever proposal ends up being adopted. If it's now controversial to point that out, we've got a serious problem on our hands.

Of course, to reiterate again, Walt & Mearsheimer's thesis is not about who opposes their ideal vision of mid-east policy. It's about their perception that the Israel Lobby possesses extreme control over US foreign policy that leads us to do things their predictive model says shouldn't happen. When we collapse every policy that deviates from the Commentary Magazine line as "subscribing to the Walt-Mearsheimer thesis", we're exploding their argument way beyond its actual scope.

Tax Cut Druggies

Commenting on the upcoming stimulus package, the keen economic minds at Powerline inquire:

Along with election-year cash, the plan will include some tax breaks for businesses that are intended to stimulate investment. These are probably a good idea. I wonder, though: if more money in the hands of taxpayers and lighter tax burdens on businesses are now urgently needed to rally a slumping economy, why wouldn't it be a good idea to have lower tax burdens all the time?

I know just how they feel. When I urgently need painkillers because my body's in trouble, my doctor prescribes morphine. But then I wonder, why wouldn't it be a good idea to be strung-out on opiates all the time?

Seriously, they've got to be joking with this logic. The point of a stimulus package is to provide a temporary boost to the economy. It's not designed to increase economic growth permanently, and if it's built into the system, the economy would adjust around it (with unpredictable results) and the next time it slumped, which it will, we'd need to lower taxes again (at which point Powerline would wonder why not make it permanent again, until our tax rate was a flat 1% and the government was so weak we could be overrun by a squad of Haitian bellhops). Drug addicts know that you can rather quickly adapt to any level of stimulant -- for it to have any effect, you need to keep increasing the dosage.

On the other hand, even if Powerline's correct, a permanent working stimulus would not be a good thing either. Again, the point of a stimulus package is to provide a temporary boost in economic activity to get folks through tough times. You don't want that supercharger running when thing are good, else the economy get, well, over-stimulated (and we all know what happens then). Controlled growth is the key -- ask the Hoover administration what happens when things go too fast.

Blog Buddies!

In this post, Paul Mirengoff of the right-wing Powerline Blog refers to South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham (R) as "the Arlen Specter of the South". What's bizarre about that is that I can very much imagine any number of liberal blogs referring to Graham in the very same way -- but for very different reasons. Paul presumably groups Graham with Specter as insufficiently conservative Republicans who don't sufficiently lock-step with the prevailing conservative line (his words may vary). Liberals, by contrast, attack Graham and Specter as pretending to truly agonize over issues like torture and indefinite detention before voting to clear every obstacle towards bringing them into being. For being utterly spineless enablers, in other words, of the very projects the Powerliners are angry they are not sufficiently gung-ho about ushering in.

Fascinating contrast, no?

Yak Yak Yak

Scott Johnson channels Bill O'Reilly:

I'm scheduled to appear on a short segment of Hannity & Colmes around 8:15 p.m. (EDT) this evening to discuss Lynne Stewart's placement on the faculty of Hofstra University Law School's "Lawyering at the Edge" legal ethics conference. My counterpart on the segment is Temple University hip-hop professor Marc Lamont Hill. As Jack Paar used to say, I kid you not. I will declare victory if I am able to get a word in edgewise.

Huh? Since the chance that Hannity & Colmes will work aggressively to shut down their conservative guest ranges from slim to none, I can only imagine that Scott thinks Hill will filibuster him all night. But why would one assume that? Is there something about "hip hop professors" that makes them presumptively incapable of serving on televised panels? In general, I'm not sure what's the motivating factor behind Scott's apparent shock that there is such thing as a "hip hop" professor (would you prefer nobody studies it at all?). In any event, Hill is a serious scholar, but he's showing up on a Fox talk show. So I doubt there's much risk he'll be able to even finish a sentence, much less talk Scott out of the room.

Incidentally, Hill is also a co-blogger on BlackProf. You can access an archive of his posts here.

The Strawman that Broke My Back

I try to ignore most right-wing posts that purport to attack "multiculturalism." I know that they have no knowledge of the theoretical or academic underpinnings of multiculturalism, what the movement actual advocates for and represents, or even, beyond a bare-bones caricature, what the term even means. It is a waste of my time, and yours, to highlight every single boneheaded post or article that purports to indict multiculturalism simply by pointing out an instance of somebody doing something stupid or evil, with a racial/cultural component.

But browsing through Powerline, I came across this post by Scott Johnson which just popped my eyes out.

One of the basic tenets of the contemporary liberal faith is the beauty of "diversity." Every day the dogmas of multiculturalism are promulgated relentlessly by our schools, newspapers and media, and public authorities. The transformation of the United States by waves of immigration from non-European countries is always depicted as a phenomenon to be celebrated, as are the immigrants' religions and cultures.

Minneapolis and St. Paul have been deeply affected by the large number of Somali and Hmong immigrants who have made the Twin Cities metropolitan area their home. Their occasionally disturbing cultural practices and the related social costs are rarely discussed.

Despite the liberal dogmas of multiculturalism, for example, one of Minnesota's leading left-wing legislators was responsible for legislation criminalizing the Somali practice of female genital circumcision in Minnesota in 1994. Her feminism trumped her multiculturalism. Female genital mutilation was not much of a problem in Minnesota before Somalis settled here in the 1980's and 1990's.

Normally, I'd skip over some of the minor misrepresentations and just hit my main beefs, but I'm trying to achieve catharsis here so let's go for the whole hog. Briefly:

1) Multiculturalism is mocked by mainstream media sources--it's a running joke of liberalism gone amok. And certainly our schools don't teach it all beyond dull platitudes about how "everybody is special" but really we're all the same (which is kind of the opposite message from multiculturalism, but whatever). Certainly, I became a fan of multiculturalism in spite of my education at the uber-liberal Walt Whitman High School, not because of it. I can scarcely think of anything I learned from my HS curriculum that even remotely pointed towards a multiculturalist point of view.

2) I don't know who is "rarely" discussing problems within immigrant communities. Among conservatives, nothing seems to provide more glee that discussing how backwards and scary brown people are. And among liberals, I've noticed an acute awareness of difficulties in immigrant communities. Attending college in Minnesota for the past three years, I don't think anybody I've seen is not aware of the particular issues and problems faced by Hmong and Somali immigrants. Problems such as female genital mutilation (FGM) are hardly mysteries to American feminist and multicultural groups--I've seen countless discussions about how horrid the practice is, and what are the best strategies for ending it.

3) The idea that, because there are negative elements to a particular group culture, we should decry their presence entirely, is a particularly weird claim to make on a variety of levels. I'd imagine it is true that the twin cities did not have a big FGM problem until Somali immigrants started arriving, but that's about as meaningful as saying America didn't have a slavery problem until White people started arriving. Meanwhile, the absorption of the whole by the part also seems to be a bit of a double standard. Those of us with a bit more intellectual agility than Johnson possesses can believe there are benefits from incorporating a diverse array of cultures, backgrounds, and experiences into our institutions, without approving of each and every cultural practice that comes our way. For example, despite having many cultural practices I find abhorrent, offensive, or just annoying, I am generally pleased when a given institution has at least some American presence, and think the world is a better place when there is at least some American influence. I know that, while the "manifest destiny" mentality, or the long history of racism, or (ironically enough, given the topic of Johnson's post) our relative apathy towards spousal violence (demonstrated by a culture of silence, strong pressures not to go the police, misogynistic views that give men considerable latitude to deal with "their" women, and a general belief that such issues are "private" matters best kept out of the public eye--reasons that will sound familiar if you keep reading....) are all things about American culture that need to be critiqued and reformed, there are also plenty of good things about American culture that deserve to be promulgated throughout the world. Nimbleness is a useful trait to have.

4) This is perhaps the thing that most ticked me off: What evidence does Scott provide that multiculturalists sanction, ignore, or otherwise condone this behavior? Normally, here is where we get some fringe academic taken out of context to do the work, but Scott doesn't even provide that. Instead, he points out a "left-wing" legislator who worked to toughen penalties for FGM. Well gosh, wouldn't that seem to indicate that the defenders of multiculturalism are equally appalled by FGM and wish to put a stop to it? No, apparently it just means that the legislator let her "feminism trump[] her multiculturalism." Aside from the fact that this is the only time you will ever here Scott Johnson use "left-wing feminism" as anything but a swear word, the entire argument is just breath-taking in how far it has to stretch out to make sure it condemns the right people. As we will see below, even the barest familiarity with the multicultural position would show that it takes precisely the culture-conscious position Scott wants it to take, rendering his whole argument a bizarre "12 wrongs make a right" tenor.

Okay, back to the main. Johnson links to this story about an attempted murder of a wife by her husband in a Somali immigrant family. The story delves into how the particulars of Somali cultural practice often make these crimes hard to prosecute. There is a culture of silence surrounding domestic abuse, which prevents reform from penetrating. There are strong community norms that seek to "deal" with such abuses in-house, without informing relevant authorities. Victims are pressured into keeping silent and not going to the police. All of this "suggest[s] a specific cultural component that is uncomfortably subsumed within the category of 'domestic abuse.'" This obfuscation, we are led to believe, is a product of adherence to the multiculturalist dogma.

This, to be blunt, is a spectacularly ignorant claim. Why? Because the multiculturalist movement has been saying precisely what Scott is arguing for decades. Multiculturalists have specifically critiqued how maintaining a universal narrative of such concepts like "domestic abuse" tends to inadequately account for the way abuse plays out in minority communities, thus rendering them particularly under-protected and enhancing their subordinated status. I am baffled as to how anyone with even a remote awareness of the tenets of multiculturalism (and here we may have our problem) could miss this, as the need for particularized analysis of minority-group practices as part of reformist agendas is probably the single most central insight to the entire multiculturalist agenda. For example, here's Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, known as the founder of the Critical Race Feminism movement and certainly someone who would fit into the "multiculturalist" label, on some of the specific cultural barriers that make it more difficult for immigrant women to escape domestic abuse via "conventional" (mainstream, White) means:

[C]ultural barriers often further discourage immigrant women from reporting or escaping battering situations. Tina Shrum, a family counselor at a social service agency , points out that " .... Just to find the opportunity and courage to call us is an accomplishment for many [in the Asian community]." The typical immigrant spouse, she suggests, may live "[i]n an extended family where several generations live together, there may be no privacy on the telephone, no opportunity to leave the house and no understanding of public phones." As a consequence, many immigrant women are wholly dependent on their husbands as their link to the world outside their homes.

Language barriers present another structural problem that often limits opportunities of non-English-speaking women to take advantage of existing social support services. Such barriers not only limit access to information about shelters, but also limit access to the security shelters provide. Some shelters turn non-English-speaking women away for lack of bilingual personnel and resources. These examples illustrate how patterns of subordination intersect in women's experience of domestic violence." [Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, "Intersectionality and Identity Politics: Learning from VIolence against Women of Color," reprinted in Feminist Theory: A Reader 2nd Ed., Wendy K. Kolmar & Frances Bartkowski, eds. (Boston: McGraw Hill, 2005), pp. 533-542, 535]

Far from ignoring the cultural component to such violence, Crenshaw stresses it as an integral part of determining how to redress it. If our normal anti-abuse measures involve women calling a hotline, for example, Shrum's experience would let us know this will be inadequate for many Asian immigrant women. I, too, have written posts on how knowledge of specific cultural practices is essential if we are to truly to enact a progressive agenda respecting the rights of women in a pluralist, multi-cultural society. Amazingly, this leads to yet another irony--dealing with the "cultural component" to abuse cases (among others) requires a viewpoint that is conscious of these differences and may require different resources and responses for different communities. In other words, it will be (shudder) color-conscious. So it is that, while Johnson is quite willing to pontificate on the problem, he probably will stand in opposition to the solutions that would be indicated by the issues he is bringing up because they won't be "color-blind" (who wants to do an over/under on how often "the soft bigotry of low expectations" will be deployed in that future post?).

I could elaborate on the multicultural prescription for dealing with domestic violence at greater length, but that would digress from the point of this post, which is that multicultural feminists have been doing exactly the work Johnson says we should be doing, for far longer than he's cared about the issue, and will continue to do so long after he loses interest in the plight of Somali immigrant women. Any good multiculturalist will tell you that spousal abuse is a problem in the Somali community, and a problem in the White American community, and that both problems will require different approaches to solve because both problems are tied up in particular cultural practices that change the structural terrain. Know thy enemy, and don't be ignorant. Sheesh.

Race Talk = Race Card

I need help from someone who is more attuned to conservative race discourse to help explain this to me.

Okay, so there has been a bit a flare-up between the camps of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, over statements by a former Clinton-camper (David Geffen) who now is supporting Obama. During the dueling press releases, Obama's camp argued:

"We aren't going to get in the middle of a disagreement between the Clintons and someone who was once one of their biggest supporters," Obama communications director Robert Gibbs said. "It is ironic that the Clintons had no problem with David Geffen when was raising them $18 million and sleeping at their invitation in the Lincoln bedroom. It is also ironic that Senator Clinton lavished praise on Monday and is fully willing to accept today the support of South Carolina State Sen. Robert Ford, who said if Barack Obama were to win the nomination, he would drag down the rest of the Democratic Party because he's black."

Gibbs is not exaggerating, Senator Ford (who is himself Black) most certainly did say just that:

"It's a slim possibility for him to get the nomination, but then everybody else is doomed . . . . Every Democrat running on that ticket next year would lose - because he's black and he's top of the ticket. We'd lose the House and the Senate and the governors and everything."

Now, merits of the political analysis aside, Ford is basically saying "don't nominate Obama because he's Black."

Picking up the story, Powerline gleefully notes that "Barack Obama is playing the race card against Hillary Clinton!"

My question is: Is there any possible way for a Black public figure in America to talk about race in a manner that is not immediately tarred as "playing the race card"? Up until today, I'd have said, "when they're protesting the argument that Black people shouldn't be nominated for President," but apparently our horizon as been pushed yet further back.

And so, this whole line of argument remains incomprehensible to me.