A new poll from Monmouth State University released Monday shows 41 percent of respondents are unsure if the deal should be inked while 32 percent think lawmakers should not support it and 27 percent think they should. And according to The Hill, 35 House Democrats support the deal and 29 are undecided while 18 Senate Democrats support and 20 are undecided.
The Rhode Island congressional delegation is on the fence, too.
“Congressman Langevin continues to review the agreement and consider the options in advance of Congressional action this fall,” said his spokeswoman Meg Geoghegan. “He has not yet made a final decision on how he will vote on the issue.” Rich Luchette, a spokesman for Congressman David Cicilline said simply, “Congressman Cicilline is reviewing the proposed agreement.”
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse “hasn’t announced a position on the Iran deal yet,” according to spokesman Seth Larson. And Chip Unruh, spokesman for Senator Jack Reed, said the ranking member of the RI delegation, and a nationally-regarded foreign policy expert, “continues to thoroughly review.”
As a ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Reed has been conducting hearings on the issue with Arizona Sen. John McCain. The Hill lists Reed in the yes column but RIPR coverage from July 16 says Reed “has not decided whether he supports President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.” Unruh said The Hill “must be speculating.”
Speculation or not, The Hill lists noted progressive leaders Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders as supporting the deal.
This agreement is obviously not all that many of us would have liked but it beats the alternative – a war with Iran that could go on for years,” Sanders said, according to The Hill. And quoting her from the Boston Globe, Elizabeth Warren has said, “The question now before Congress — the only question before Congress — is whether the recently announced nuclear agreement represents our best available option for preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. I am convinced that it does.”
Progressives have largely supported the deal with Code Pink calling it “a great victory for peace-loving people around the world.” The New York Times has a 200 word summary of the deal.
]]>However, anyone with a grip on even a small shred of reality, regardless of political standing, should be able to see that both sides are lying through their teeth and this whole production has been one long charade that has caused unnecessary suffering for only one group of people, the general population of Iran. When the US instigated a series of sanctions against Iran, the supreme leader and president never were forced into austerity, they remained quite well-off and could rely on a host of luxuries provided by a variety of sources. Instead, it was the everyday people of Iran who suffered. I happened to be acquainted some time ago with an Iranian emigre whose father died due to taking a batch of medication that was of inferior grade, something that could have been avoided had the sanctions regimen not been in place. What did his government do so that his father deserved to die?
The reality is not ultimately simple, but the truth is much more easy to digest than the lunacy being fed to us by both CNN and Fox News. However, to understand this, we need to hold a thorough discussion of the international context in which this occurs and include in it a critical view of our connection to Israel. As a forewarning, those who believe that Israel and the Jews in general are running the show will find no comfort here, I do not see a grand conspiracy where the Jewish State controls American policy. In fact, I see it as the exact opposite, Israel and its leadership act solely on the allowance of the United States and have always only gone as far as Washington will allow them. After the devastation in Gaza last summer, Benjamin Netanyahu’s stunt speaking to Congress last spring behind Obama’s back, and the election of a deeply reactionary government in Israel shortly thereafter, the Israelis may be finding themselves more and more recieving support only in the neoconservative halls of power in the District of Columbia, but the puppet master of all things speaks with an American accent, not a Hebrew one.
However, Iran does have a stated opposition to Zionism and the actions of the State of Israel. In order to properly discuss this, we need to unpack the term Zionism and distinguish it from Judaism as a religion.
Zionism was formalized as a secular political ideology in 1897 by the Austro-Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl as a reaction to the anti-Semitic Dreyfus Affair in France. Over the next two decades, various ideas and proposals were floated for the location of a Jewish homeland, including Uganda and Argentina. However, at the end of the First World War, the Zionist movement engaged first France and then Great Britain in a series of discussions that ultimately led to them serving as a proxy colonial army for the Europeans in historic Palestine, a major port on the Mediterranean of the then-crumbling Ottoman Empire. After the formalization of the Balfour Declaration, the Zionist movement engaged in a 30-year effort that included the organs of a modern state and the dispossession of the native indigenous people, the Palestinian Arabs, from the land. It should be noted here that the pre-Zionist Jewish community of Palestine, the Old Yishuv, viewed Zionism as a heretical trend and opposed it on religious and ethical grounds. With the coming of the Second World War and the Nazi persecution of European Jewry, the Zionist movement saw their opportunity to take advantage of the situation and make a final claim for statehood. In 1948, the United Nations granted the Zionists a partition of over 50% of the total landmass of historic Palestine. In the wake of the declaration of the State of Israel, the various Zionist militia movements engaged in a brutal series of ethnic cleansings of the Palestinians, which included rape, murder, and theft of both property and land, a tragedy the Palestinians today call the Nakba. Since 1948, the Israeli government has engaged in a continued regime of repression that has included multiple wars and occupations of lands. Since 1967, despite the protestations of the Old Yishuv and outside resistance by groups like the Orthodox Jewish Neturei Karta sect, Israel has effectively turned what was once a secular atheist movement into a religious one through what is called the settler movement. After illegally dispossessing Arabs of their lands, the IDF will then build small cities, illegal under international law, and install as residents messianic Israelis who believe they will hasten the coming of the Messiah by creating a wider Jewish nation-state. This is in direct violation of Israeli and international laws.
That Iran would oppose such a state of affairs is not by definition anti-Semitic. Anti-Semitism has classically been defined as an irrational hatred or fear of Jews, traditionally related to either Christian blood libel prejudices or conspiracy theories about the role of Jews in international finance or governance. What the Iranians oppose is a series of socio-political moves made by the Israeli government that brutalizes the livelihood of Muslim and Christian Palestinians. Consider this statement by Ayatollah Khomeini himself:
Of course, the reaction has been nuclear from Netanyahu.
Ted Cruz, for example, has tried to add an amendment to any agreement that would require Iran recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state (meaning a polity that explicitly denies rights to non-Jews such as the Christian, Muslim, and atheist Palestinians). And because the Republicans have split the Congress, it could very well come to pass that this deal could get sunk. And if that were to happen, both sides of the Bush/Clinton 2.0 ticket are adamant hawks who would be willing to bomb Iran. Of course, it is also becoming clear that the two candidates who have essentially bought their party’s nominations are failing dismally with primary voters. Jeb Bush is unable to distance himself from the neocons that defined the cabinets of his father and his brother while embracing the Tea Party, whereas Hillary Clinton is falling apart due in no small part to Bernie Sanders, who surprisingly packed an Arizona convention center to the gills last weekend. I remain skeptical of Sanders for a variety of reasons, but unless the status quo is upturned, this very good deal with Iran could be foiled, resulting in further victimization of the Iranian people.
]]>Monday Nov 25, 2013
North Kingstown, RI — Good morning, Ocean State. This is Bob Plain, editor and publisher of the RI Future blog podcasting to you from The Hideaway on the banks of the Mattatuxet River behind the Shady Lea Mill in North Kingstown, Rhode Island.
Its Monday, November 25th, the first day of the rest of our lives with Iran … and here on the home front it’s freezing outside. In fact, the last time it was this cold for this long, it was February! And don’t expect it to get any warmer until Wednesday, when it’ll be raining cats and dogs. This will obviously stink for all the folks traveling home to see friends and family … but Thanksgiving and Buy Nothing Day will be cold and sunny so you can enjoy high school football and a post-meal walk and then on Friday, you can take in a Walmart protest and the winter coat exchange at the State House.
If you’re looking for a holiday charity to support …. the ProJo says Speaker Gordon Fox and Majority Leader Nick Mattiello are holding fundraiser on December 4 … The House Leadership PAC only has $66,000 on hand, so you can drop off second hand clothes and cans of food at Camile’s on Federal Hill after purchasing a $125 ticket. It costs less to Springsteen than Speaker Fox.
WPRI reports that 34 percent of students from the urban core – Providence, Pawtucket, Central Falls and Woonsocket aren’t graduating from high school on time. What do you want to bet this 34 percent of the population some day becomes the roughly one-third of the state on food stamps and become most of the 15 or 20 percent of the state that can’t find a job. Meanwhile … on NBC 10 Wingmen this weekend, Justin Katz, Bill Rappleye and I debate whether or not Rhode Island’s economic woes are pretty much isolated to the urban core. You can watch that video on RI Future….
It’s not true that Rhode Island only tops the charts when it comes to bad business rankings … our very own Superman building was named Gizomodo’s number 1 zombie tower in the nation. The empty icon was abandoned by Bank of America last year, and now the building owners are suing the super-sized bank for $23 million, saying it left our Industrial Trust Tower a wreck.
In all fairness, the Ocean State does well on many rankings not related to ALEC’s agenda … like recently the Providence was named the fourth best city for hipsters, behind only Portland, New Orleans and San Francisco.
Russ Moore writes in GoLocal in a column praising business owners, “Nobody can tell me that the government bureaucrat is a public servant but a private sector business owner isnt.” Well … perhaps somebody should, because one works for the public and the other works for him or herself. This isn’t to say that business owners aren’t good people, but Moore says there would be no public sector without the private sector. Yeah, because the human race would wither and die without a seaside restaurant at which to enjoy fried seafood….
GoLocal also profiles Rebecca Fisher, a Middletown shift captain and thus the highest ranking female fire fighter in state history. “Being a female firefighter is really the same as being a firefighter,” she said, adding, “The job does not change based on your gender.”
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse was mostly correct to classify Republicans under the age of 35 think climate change deniers are “ignorant,” “out of touch” or “crazy,” ruled Politifact. Gene Emery gives him points off for only relying one poll … anyone want to pay Joe Fleming to ask 500 young Rhode Island Republicans this question?
The brilliant Scott MacKay of Rhode Island Public Radio has a , the possible progressive choice for governor in 2014. Comparing him to Angel Taveras, MacKay says, “Pell had a different head start. Hes a son of wealth, WASP privilege and summers in Newport.”
Reverend T. J. Jemison, who in Baton Rogue, Louisiana in 1953 organized one of the first bus boycotts, died last week. He co-founded with Martin Luther King and others the Southern Christian Leadership Council.
Today in…
1911, Emiliano Zapata, Mecixan revolutionary, first proclaims the Plan de Ayala, which demanded elections and land be returned from big hacendados to villagers. In short, “Tierra y Libertad!”
1963, Young JFK Jr. bravely salutes his fallen father.
1968, Revolutionary and Pulitzer-winning writer/reporter/yellow journalist-turned upstart socialist politician Upton Sinclair dies in Jersey.
1986, Attorney General Edwin Meese admits that money from selling arms to Iran was used to fund rebels trying to overthrow a democratically-elected government in Nicaragua.
1970, Sax player Albert Ayler is found floating in the East River … here he is performing Swing Low Sweet Chariot recorded in New York City six years earlier…
]]>Essentially panelists sought to convince progressives that although sanctions in Iraq led eventually to the disastrous invasion and occupation, this time it will be different. War weariness, a faltering domestic economy, a changed Middle East, and the “one extraordinary difference, unilateralism,” as Senator Reed put it, make it different than 2003. Certainly there are some differences, but I couldn’t help but think the panel should have asked, Iraq 1990 All Over Again? As the Times put it in 2003:
For many people, the sanctions on Iraq were one of the decade’s great crimes, as appalling as Bosnia or Rwanda. Anger at the United States and Britain, the two principal architects of the policy, often ran white hot. Denis J. Halliday, the United Nations humanitarian coordinator in Iraq for part of the sanctions era, expressed a widely held belief when he said in 1998: ”We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and terrifying as that.” Even today, Clinton-era American officials ranging from Madeleine K. Albright, the former secretary of state, and James P. Rubin, State Department spokesman under Albright, to Nancy E. Soderberg, then with the National Security Council, speak with anger and bitterness over the fervor of the anti-sanctions camp. As Soderberg put it to me, ”I could not give a speech anywhere in the U.S. without someone getting up and accusing me of being responsible for the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children.”
I asked exactly that question when given the chance. I traveled a bit in the Middle East in the 90s and was approached by an Iraqi who begged me to tell people back home the effect the sanctions were having on Iraqi civilians. “You’re killing the children and old people,” he said with the hope that if Americans only knew we’d stop. That’s a difference now too. Americans can no longer claim to be unsure or blissfully ignorant. We now know the effect these sanctions will have on the civilian population.
As Madeline Albright said it, “this is a very hard choice, but the price–we think the price is worth it.” Heather Hurlburt, a speechwriter for Albright, similarly defended the calculus of the collective punishment of civilians as preferable to war. But these rationalizations conveniently omit the effect the sanctions and the Clinton administration’s eventual signing of the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 had in laying the groundwork for the Bush invasion. By 2003 the die was cast, and progressives could do little to stop it. The question now, will we do it all over again? Just don’t say you couldn’t have known.
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