Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2000, pages 61-62

People Watch

Pander Pas de Deux

By Lucille Barnes

There's not much real Middle Eastern significance to the probable senatorial contest in New York (where the primaries won't be held until next September) between New York's Republican Mayor Rudy Giuliani and first lady Hillary Clinton. We love visiting New York since Giuliani became mayor, but concluded long ago that it is because most of the people there are a lot more polite than their pandering mayor. For example, in 1995, after Yasser Arafat had been formally invited to a concert in honor of the 50th anniversary of the United Nations, Giuliani had the head of the Palestinian Authority escorted out of the hall before the concert could begin. Giuliani has often been accused of "running for mayor of Jerusalem," but that night he apparently thought he was the U.S. secretary of state's evil twin.

As for Hillary, although when they were younger she had closer personal ties with AIPAC officials than did her husband, she endeared herself to Middle East peace activists when she said, in talking to a mixed group of Israeli and Palestinian students in 1998, that the Palestinians (like virtually everyone else in the world) should have a state of their own. We thought then and now that she had backed into it accidentally, but at least had the grace not to back out of it in unseemly fashion.

That was then. But now that she's a candidate, she's backed down. Unfortunately, unlike her Teflon husband, she's Velcro and everything unseemly that she does—like pandering to New York's "Jewish vote"—seems to stick to her.

On a November visit to Israel and the West Bank she politely listened to Suha Arafat describe the carnage wrought on Palestinians by Israeli "poison gas" and afterward exchanged kisses with the wife of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat. The next day Mrs. Clinton found herself being accused of acquiescing by her silence in "lies" about the Israelis that, by the end of the week, had been escalated by radical Jewish leaders and pandering presidential candidates in the U.S. into a "blood libel." Meanwhile Hillary had dutifully denounced the statement in the interest of getting a Democrat elected senator in New York. Had anyone bothered to check the record or tried to be heard through the din, however, the public might had learned that what Mrs. Arafat obviously was referring to were Israel tear gas attacks that, according to a 1993 statement by the Palestine Human Rights Information Center in the United States, had caused 93 deaths since 1987. The gas canisters, which are manufactured in Pennsylvania, clearly warn against usage in enclosed areas. Yet the Israelis repeatedly shot them into houses full of people under curfew, and even into hospital wards into which stone-throwing children allegedly had run during the Palestinian intifada. Palestinian hospitals reported large numbers of miscarriages caused by the tear gas, which was particularly toxic to children, the elderly, and people suffering from lung problems.

Hillary Clinton and daughter Chelsea traveled on to Jordan where they were photographed visiting the grave of the late King Hussein in the company of his American-born widow, Queen Noor. Then on a late November meeting in New York Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak told the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations that the first lady's visit was "highly successful, highly moving" and had "contributed to the peace process." Therefore, despite all the uproar in the mainstream press, and even more of it in the New York Jewish weeklies about Hillary and Suha,if both candidates reach the general election conservative Jewish New Yorkers (of whom there are a few) probably will vote for Rudy and liberal Jewish New Yorkers (of whom there used to be many) probably will vote for Hillary. What's disappointing is that no one has mentioned that, together, New York's huge Muslim and large Arab-American population probably equal more than half the Jewish population in the state. If Hillary weren't now straining so hard to outpander Rudy, she could probably have counted on the support of most of those pro-Palestinians. Maybe she'll get it anyway.

A vote for an independent presidential candidate in the 2000 general election next November is pretty much a wasted vote, because there is no massive voter discontent, as has been the case in some recent election years, and there is no serious rebellion within either party. Clearly, therefore, the winner in 2000 will be a Republican or a Democrat. But fairness dictates taking note of Reform Party primary candidate Patrick J. Buchanan's Dec. 16 press conference in which he called for "a more moral foreign policy." We've long admired Buchanan's clear explications of the differences between American and Israel interests.

Now Buchanan has called, most eloquently, for an end of U.S. sanctions that are killing the children of Iraq. And he has pointed out the hypocrisy of U.S. sanctions against two other Islamic countries, Libya and Iran. "Iran may be responsible for the deaths of scores of Americans [but] China, North Korea, and North Vietnam are responsible for the deaths of 100,000 U.S. soldiers," Buchanan declared. "Yet we engage Vietnam, send foreign aid to North Korea, and provide China with a $60 billion annual trade surplus." Perhaps it's worth mentioning, also, that in closing his press conference remarks Buchanan mentioned that the current "unique season" included the last Hanukkah, the last Ramadan and the last Christmas of the millennium.

In the December 1999 issue of his enlightening and amusing subscription newsletter, Sobran's: The Real News of the Month, Washington political commentator Joseph Sobran noted that among continuing "obsessive attacks on Pat Buchanan," the Weekly Standard "has accused him of "calumnies" for saying that New York Times columnist William Safire "has always put Israel a little bit ahead of this country." Said Sobran, "That's understatement, not calumny; and anyway, Safire had accused Buchanan of anti-Semitism. Zionists resent any usurpation of their right to practice unanswered character assassination."

Sobran's (which costs $59.95 per year or $100 for two years and can be reached at P.O. Box 1383, Vienna, VA 22183-1383 or telephone [703] 255-2211) reports also that Norman Podhoretz, former editor of the American Jewish Committee's magazine Commentary, published a sweeping attack on Buchanan that filled almost a whole editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. In the article Podhoretz accused Buchanan of reviving "the old canard of 'dual loyalty.'"

Wrote Sobran: "Canard? What is the pro-Israel lobby in business for, if not to seek the welfare of Israel at the expense of the United States? It's no good pretending the two countries' interests are identical; that would be impossible. In all the years I've been reading such Zionist publications as CommentaryÉI have never come across an article asking whether what was good for Israel might sometimes be costly to the United States. But I have read several hate-crazed articles blaming the Holocaust on Christianity." Sobran concludes his essay on "the hate campaign against Buchanan" with the most quotable quote of the year: "Evidently you're now an anti-Semite not if you hate Jews, but if they hate you."

In a Nov. 18 press conference held in Washington, DC by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Chicago teacher and Palestinian-American human rights activist Ali Abunimah cautioned the international media against getting ahead of the investigation into the cause of the Oct. 31 crash of EgyptAir Flight 990 in which all 217 people on board were killed. "It is disturbing that the media has made such an easy association between an Islamic prayer and a criminal act," Abunimah said, "as if the two naturally go together—as if merely praying is evidence of a terrorist act."

And on a closely related subject, CAIR has issued a press release crediting a new American Muslim Internet news service called iViews.com with revealing some things Washington Report readers didn't know, but should, about Charles Jacobs, founder of the American Anti-Slavery Group and the driving force behind efforts to publicize allegations of slavery in Sudan. Jacobs, according to the Islamic news service, is or has been associated with at least four hard-line pro-Israel groups. They include the National United Coalition for Israel (NUCI); American Friends of the Israeli Double Column Plan, which apparently promotes a formula for Middle East peace in which Israel would annex more Palestinian land; The Mosaic Group, Inc., which Jacob calls a group of Jews and Christians focused on the "media and propaganda war" against Israel "run by Arab Americans and their friends"; and the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), whose paid ads in pro-Israel publications like The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, and Jewish community newspapers are well known for their pro-Israel slant.

There seems to be no Middle East connection, as yet, with the arrest, announced Nov. 29, of Navy Petty Officer First Class Daniel King, a 40-year-old code expert, on charges of passing secrets to Russia. King was assigned to the Navy's decoding unit based at the Fort Meade headquarters of the National Security Agency, the U.S. government's most heavily classified department, which is charged with surveillance of communications around the world. A Reuters dispatch quoted military officials as saying the alleged disclosure "was not as serious as the breach of security in previous Navy espionage cases such as that of Jonathan Jay Pollard, who began serving a life sentence in 1986 for handing sensitive information to Israel." King, who was charged on Nov. 5, was described by military officials as "a very confused individual."

One of America's best-known Arab Americans, National Public Radio talk show hostess Diane Rehm, has written a memoir, entitled Finding My Voice, which describes her radio career and her life as the daughter of an immigrant family consisting of a hard-working traditional father and a complex, secretive mother whose behavior toward her two daughters included alternating periods of silence and rage. The wife of a U.S. State Department attorney and mother of their two children, Rehm is fighting her own personal battle with spasmodic dysphonia, a neurological disorder affecting her vocal cords.

"Brother David," an American native of Syracuse New York who has lived in Jerusalem for some 20 years and whose full name is David William Garden, became the 60th "millennial cultist" to be deported by Israeli authorities on suspicion of planning violence during the millennium year. He was arrested on Oct. 25 along with another American who calls herself Sister Sharon. The two rented inexpensive apartments to their followers on the Mount of Olives in a Palestinian neighborhood. A Palestinian neighbor told journalists, "I never saw anyone with a problem from them. They gave the children here used clothes they got from the United States. They gave some to my children, too." Before Israeli authorities put him on a plane for the United States, Brother David had said that by 2000 he hoped to attract as many as 500 born-again Christians to be with him and have what he called "front-row seats" for the second coming of Jesus Christ.

Lucille Barnes covers Washington, DC for U.S. and Middle East publications.