never underestimate the ignorant
On May 26, 2:58 pm, dick thompson <rhomp2...@earthlink.net> wrote:
> http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/get-green-brown
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It would appear, according to the Associated Press's Christopher
Rugaber, that something unusual had to explain why initial unemployment
claims as reported by Uncle Sam's Department of Labor rose to a
seasonally adjusted 424,000 during the week ended May 21 when they were
expected to decline. In previous weeks, poor performances have been
explained by DOL spokespersons as due to the unusually late Easter, the
weather, Japanese supply interruptions, and Jupiter not being aligned
with Mars (okay, I'm kidding about the last one).
Apparently, one thing is for certain in AP-Land: The troubling
400,000-plus plateau in weekly initial claims can't possibly have
anything to do with Obama administration's economic policies (or lack
thereof).
Today, as Bloomberg noted, the Department of Labor offered up no
excuses: "There were no special factors behind last week's increase, a
Labor Department official said as the figures were released."
Rugaber wasn't satisfied with that answer, and decided he would roll out
one of his own without any evidence. The AP reporter has also developed
a strange obsession with reminding everyone on a weekly basis when
initial claims peaked (bolds are mine):
The number of people seeking benefits rose by 10,000 to a seasonally
adjusted 424,000, the Labor Department said Thursday. No states cited
extreme weather as a factor in the increase, a department spokesman
said. Tornadoes and floods have devastated several states in the Midwest
and South in the past month.
Applications are above the 375,000 level that is consistent with
sustainable job growth. Applications peaked at 659,000 during the recession.
How weird is it that a reporter would attempt to cobble together an
excuse when the DOL, which has been more than glad to supply one or more
in previous weeks, didn't have any?
As to the ritual citation of the 659,000 claims during the recession,
it's getting more than a little old, as is the selectivity in data
reporting designed to make things appear better than they really are.
Chris, initial claims peaked during the week ended March 28, 2009, well
over two years ago. Let's look at what has happened since June 2009,
when the recession as normal people define it ended:
During the recession's last full week, initial claims were 601,000.
For the next 21 months, initial claims slowly declined. During each of
the four weeks in the period that ended April 2, they averaged just over
390,000, getting somewhat close to the 375,000 the AP reporter dubiously
claims is "consistent with sustainable job growth."
Then "something" happened. In each of the past eight weeks, as seen
below, seasonally adjusted claims have been over 400,000:
In fact, the four-week moving average has been over 430,000 during each
of the past four weeks.
While quoting from the AP's obfuscatory report and compare those quotes
to reality, here are three questions for the wire service and Chris
Rugaber (I could come up with more):
Is it more important that initial claims had their "first increase in
three weeks," or that they have remained stuck above 400,000 for the
past eight?
Is it more important that claims "peaked at 659,000 during the
recession" over 110 weeks ago, or that the four-week moving average has
stubbornly trended upward for most of the past eight weeks?
Is it more important that the four-week moving average "declined for the
first time in seven weeks," or that it's barely lower than the 441,500
reported during the week of November 13, 2010 (and will more than likely
be revised upward next week)?
The questions answer themselves.
Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.
Comments [moderated] (0)
Initial Unemployment Claims Exceed Expectations (i.e., They Went Up,
When They Were 'Expected' To Go Down)
Filed under: Economy,Taxes & Government — TBlumer @ 8:51 am
The hits just keep on coming:
In the week ending May 21, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted
initial claims was 424,000, an increase of 10,000 from the previous
week's revised figure of 414,000. The 4-week moving average was 438,500,
a decrease of 1,750 from the previous week's revised average of 440,250.
Heres the updated chart, which once again shows the previous initial
release upwardly revised:
"Unexpectedly," via Reuters:
Figures showing new claims for U.S. unemployment benefits unexpectedly
climbed to 424,000 last week from a revised 414,000 in the prior week
also put pressure on the market.
Can't wait to see the latest batch of excuses.
________________________________________
UPDATE: At the Street.com — "Economists were expecting jobless claims to
drop to 400,000 …"
UPDATE 2: The not seasonally adjusted claims number is about 9% below
last year's for the same week. That's a narrower year-over year
difference than most previous weeks.
UPDATE 3: Eight weeks ago, an analyst confidently asserted that "The
downtrend … is undeniable." Uh, no.
UPDATE 4: Chris Rugaber at the Associated Press trots out a potential
excuse even when DOL says it isn't one –
No states cited extreme weather as a factor in the increase, a
department spokesman said. Tornadoes and floods have devastated several
states in the Midwest and South in the past month.
I don't blame Rugaber for asking the question. But when the answer is
no, you don't bring it up, you look for other explanations. Really
Chris, you could as easily have written that "No states cited people
leaving their jobs but hedging their bets by filing for benefits in the
run-up to last week's end-of-the-world theatrics."
Comments [moderated] (3)
1Q11 GDP, First Revision (052611); Stays at an Annualized +1.8%
Filed under: Economy,Taxes & Government — TBlumer @ 7:44 am
The initial report in late April came in at an annualized 1.8%.
This link is predicting an upward revision to 2.2%. This one has 2.1%,
while noting that "even a GDP revision on the higher end of the scale
would still mark sluggish growth that is unlikely to pull down
unemployment over the long term."
Reuters has a consensus prediction of 2.1%.
The report will appear here at 8:30 a.m.
Here it is — another disappointment compared to expectations:
Real gross domestic product — the output of goods and services produced
by labor and property located in the United States — increased at an
annual rate of 1.8 percent in the first quarter of 2011, (that is, from
the fourth quarter to the first quarter), according to the "second"
estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the fourth
quarter, real GDP increased 3.1 percent.
The GDP estimates released today are based on more complete source data
than were available for the "advance" estimate issued last month. In the
advance estimate, the increase in real GDP was also 1.8 percent.
So the Reagan vs. Obama post-recession scoreboard remains as follows:
I'd say today's disappointment is another example of Gangster
Government's Economic Shadow.
_______________________________________
UPDATE: At Business Insider — "What's worse, personal consumption fell
to 2.2% from 2.7%, when it was expected to rise to 2.8%." There's the
influence of "The Shadow" again.
Comments [moderated]
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For example, Volkswagen Passats.
Signaling that it is more committed to the North American market than
ever before, the company has designed a version of its midsize sedan,
the Passat, specifically for American tastes and is building it in a $1
billion plant in Tennessee rather than importing the same car sold in
Europe.
They are building it here for the most practical of reasons, costs:
By manufacturing locally, and buying 85 percent of the North American
Passat's parts from nearby suppliers, the company is able to greatly
reduce its costs. Executives said the savings was the biggest reason
Volkswagen could charge less for the Passat, even while adding standard
features like dual-zone climate control and Bluetooth connectivity. Some
specifications were also changed from the 2010 version — no 2011 model
was built — like dropping a turbocharged engine from the base model.
Building Passat in Tennessee reduces shipping and labor costs, but more
important it keeps profits from being wiped out by unfavorable currency
exchange rates. That is a big reason other foreign carmakers like Toyota
and Honda build a majority of the vehicles they sell in North America at
plants on the same continent.
(The article doesn't mention that some of those same manufacturers are
now exporting some of the cars they build here, again because of cost
advantages.)
This decision by VW is especially significant because they tried, once
before, to build cars in the United States — and failed. (They had a
plant in Pennsylvania in the 1980s. A unionized plant. The new one in
Tennessee is non-union.)
- 2:15 PM, 25 May 2011 [link]
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Let me begin with the obvious: When two sides distrust each other as
much as Israelis and Palestinians do, successful negotiations will
almost certainly have to be secret. By trying to negotiate in public,
Obama has made a private deal less likely.
Even those who don't follow these events closely could see that
happening. Obama began by calling for unilateral Israeli concessions,
and did so in an insulting way. (Obama and his team may have been hoping
to drive Prime Minister Netanyahu from power.) The Israeli government,
naturally, hardened their stance. The West Bank Palestinians demanded
that the Israelis give in before they would even start to negotiate.
And when the Obama administration couldn't deliver those Israeli
concessions, the West Bank government moved closer to Hamas, its deadly
enemies in the Gaza Strip.
If Obama had said nothing, we might have seen, instead, the continued
growth of pragmatic cooperation between the West Bank government and
Israel. The successes of that cooperation, though neither side
celebrated them in public, were already, when Obama took office, great
enough to give us hope for more cooperation between the two sides.
Sometimes, the best thing a president can say is — nothing.
(It is understandable, I suppose, that an academic like Mead, who is
judged by his words, would not realize that Obama should say less. But I
think that any good negotiator, any good marriage counselor for example,
would understand the value, in some situations, of silence.)
- 8:25 AM, 26 May 2011 [link
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According to the chart, world wide, derivative contracts now have a
face value of about $600 trillion. (Down, by the way, from about $670
trillion in 2008.)
By way of comparison, the United States GDP is valued at about $15
trillion a year. Our GDP is usually valued at somewhere between 20 and
25 percent of the world's GDP. If we use the lower number, then the
world's GDP is about $75 trillion a year.
So the face value of the those derivatives is about eight times as
large as the world's GDP.
That suggests, at least to me, that the world has too much invested in
those derivatives, though I should add, immediately, that I have no
claim to understand even the basics about those markets and that I
recognize that derivatives can often be useful.
But I would like to see an explanation of that number.
(According to the article, European Union regulators are investigating
whether big banks have been rigging the markets in one kind of
derivatives, credit default swaps, and may extend the investigation to
other kinds.
There's nothing implausible about the idea; as Adam Smith wrote,
centuries ago, competitors often fix prices, or in some other way,
conspire against the public. You can have great respect for markets, as
Smith did, and still recognize that temptation.)
- 2:28 PM, 26 May 2011 [link
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[If Obama wins a second term, there will be nothing political to prevent his raw emotions from bubbling to the surface. df]
NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE
May 26, 2011
Obama's hard-Left tilt is real... depending on how the next presidential election turns out, we're going to meet him again in 2013.
By Stanley Kurtz
It's time to revisit the issue of President Obama's Palestinian ties. During his time in the Illinois state senate, Obama forged close alliances with the most prominent Palestinian political leaders in America. Substantial evidence also indicates that during his pre-Washington years, Obama was both supportive of the Palestinian cause and critical of America's stance toward Israel. Although Obama began to voice undifferentiated support for Israel around 2004 (as he ran for U.S. Senate and his national visibility rose), critics and even some backers have long suspected that his pro-Palestinian inclinations survive.
The continuing influence of Obama's pro-Palestinian sentiments is the best way to make sense of the president's recent tilt away from Israel. This is why supporters of Israel should fear Obama's reelection. In 2013, with his political vulnerability a thing of the past, Obama's pro-Palestinian sympathies would be released from hibernation, leaving Israel without support from its indispensable American defender.
To see this, we need to reconstruct Obama's pro-Palestinian past and assess its influence on the present. Taken in context, and followed through the years, the evidence strongly suggests that Obama's long-held pro-Palestinian sentiments were sincere, while his post-2004 pro-Israel stance has been dictated by political necessity.
Let's begin at the beginning — with the controversial question of whether Obama's cultural heritage through his nominally Muslim Kenyan father and his Muslim Indonesian stepfather, along with his having been raised for a time in predominantly Muslim Indonesia, might have had some effect on the president's mature foreign-policy views. Obama supporters often mock this idea, but we have it on high authority that Obama's unusual heritage and upbringing have had an effect on his adult views.
Top presidential aide and longtime Obama family friend Valerie Jarrett was born and raised in Iran for the first five years of her life. In explaining how she first grew close to Obama, Jarrett says they traded stories of their youthful travels. As Jarrett told Obama biographer David Remnick: "He and I shared a view of where the United States fit in the world, which is often different from the view people have who have not traveled outside the United States as young children." Remnick continues: "Through her travels, Jarrett felt that she had come to see the United States with a greater objectivity as one country among many, rather than as the center of all wisdom and experience." Speaking with the authority of a close personal friend and top political adviser, then, Jarrett affirms that she and Obama reject traditional American exceptionalism. One hallmark of America's exceptionalist perspective, of course, is our unique alliance with a democratic Israel, even in the face of intense criticism of that alliance from much of the rest of the world.
Obama's close friend and longtime ally, Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said's successor as the most prominent American advocate for the Palestinians, goes further. Khalidi told the Los Angeles Times that as president, Obama, "because of his unusual background, with family ties in Kenya and Indonesia, would be more understanding of the Palestinian experience than typical American politicians." Khalidi's testimony is important, since he speaks on the basis of years of friendship with Obama.
Those who know Obama best, then, affirm that his foreign-policy views are atypical for an American politician, and are grounded in his unique international heritage and upbringing. That is important, because our core task is to decide whether Obama's pro-Palestinian past was a stance rooted in sincere sympathy, or nothing but a convenient sop to his leftist Hyde Park supporters. Jarrett and Khalidi give us reason to believe that Obama's decidedly pro-Palestinian inclinations are rooted in his core conception of who he is.
Obama came to political consciousness at college, and prior to his discovery of community organizing late in his senior year, his focus was on international issues. Obama's memoir, Dreams from My Father, highlights his anti-apartheid activism during his sophomore year at California's Occidental College. Obama's anti-apartheid stance, however, was part of a far broader and more radical rejection of the West's alleged imperialism. Obama himself tells us, in a famous passage in Dreams, that he was taken with criticism of "neocolonialism" and "Eurocentrism" during these early college years.
What Obama doesn't tell us, but what I reveal in Radical-in-Chief, my political biography of the president, is that he was a convinced Marxist during his college years. More important, once Obama graduated and entered the world of community organizing, he absorbed the sophisticated and intentionally stealthy socialism of his mentors. Obama's socialist mentors strongly supported what they saw as the "liberation struggles" carried on by rebels against American "oppression" throughout the world. So Obama's continuous radical political history strongly suggests that his early support for Palestine's "liberation struggle" grew out of authentic political conviction, not pandering.
Although Obama has long withheld his college transcripts from the public, the Los Angeles Times reported in 2008 that Obama took a course from Edward Said sometime during his final two undergraduate years at Columbia University. This was just around the time Obama's ties to organized socialism were deepening, and certainly suggests a sincere interest in Said's radical views. As Martin Kramer points out, in his superb 2008 review of Obama's Palestinian ties, Said had just then published his book The Question of Palestine, definitively setting the terms of the academic Left's stance on the issue for decades to come.
After Obama finished his initial community-organizing stint in Chicago and graduated from Harvard Law School, he settled down to a teaching job at the University of Chicago around 1992, and went about laying the foundations of a political career. Sometime not long after his arrival at the University of Chicago, Obama connected with Rashid Khalidi.
To say the least, Rashid Khalidi is a controversial fellow. To begin with, although Khalidi denies it, Martin Kramer has unearthed powerful evidence suggesting that Khalidi was at one time an official spokesman for the Palestine Liberation Organization. Also, in the years immediately prior to his friendship with Obama, Khalidi was a leading opponent of the first Gulf War, which successfully reversed Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. According to Kramer, Khalidi condemned that action as an American "colonial war," insisting that before we could end Saddam's occupation of Kuwait, we would first have to end Israel's supposedly equivalent occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. As Kramer puts it, Khalidi's influence helped turn the University of Chicago of the Nineties into "the hot place to be for . . . trendy postcolonialist, blame-America, trash-Israel" scholarship.
While we don't know exactly when their friendship began, Khalidi was reportedly present at the famous 1995 kickoff reception for Obama's first political campaign, held at the home of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. That is no minor point. We'll see that as Khalidi's close friend and political ally, Ayers played an integral role in the story of Obama's relationship with Khalidi.
In May 1998, Edward Said traveled from Columbia to Chicago to present the keynote address at a dinner organized by the Arab American Action Network, a group founded by Rashid and Mona Khalidi. We've known for some time that Barack and Michelle Obama sat next to Edward and Mariam Said at that event. (Pictures are available.) It has not been noticed, however, that a detailed report on Said's address exists, along with an article by Said published just days before the event (Arab American News, May 22, June 12, 1998). Between those two reports, we can reconstruct at least an approximate picture of what Obama might have heard from his former professor that day.
For the most part, Said focused his article (and likely his talk as well) on harsh criticisms of Israel, which he equated with both South Africa's apartheid state and Nazi Germany. Said's criticisms of the Palestinian Authority also were harsh. Why, he wondered, weren't the 50,000 security people employed by the Palestinian Authority heading up resistance to Israel's settlement building? In his talk, Said called for large-scale marches and civilian blockades of Israeli settlement building. To prevent Palestinian workers from participating in any Israeli construction, Said also proposed the establishment of a fund that would pay these laborers not to work for Israel. Presciently, Said's talk also called on Palestinians to orchestrate an international campaign to stigmatize Israel as an illegitimate apartheid state.
So broadly speaking, this is what Obama would have heard from his former teacher at that May 1998 encounter. Yet Obama was clearly comfortable enough with Said's take on Israel to deepen his relationship with Khalidi and his Arab American Action Network (AAAN). We know this, because Ali Abunimah, longtime vice president of the AAAN, has told us so.
In many ways, Abunimah is the neglected key to reconstructing the story of Obama's alliance with Khalidi and AAAN. While Abunimah's accounts of Obama's alliance with AAAN have long been public, they are not widely known. Nor have Abunimah's writings been pieced together with Obama's history of support for AAAN. Doing so creates a disturbing picture of Obama's political convictions on the Palestinian question.
In late summer 1998, for example, a few months after Obama's encounter with Edward Said, Abunimah and AAAN were caught up in a national controversy over the alleged blacklisting of respected terrorism expert Steve Emerson by National Public Radio. In August of that year, NPR had interviewed Emerson on air about Osama bin Laden's terror network. According to columnist Jeff Jacoby, however, Abunimah managed to obtain a promise from NPR to ban Emerson from its airwaves, on the grounds that Emerson was an anti-Arab bigot. It took Jacoby's research and public objections to lift the ban.
Attempting to bar an expert on Osama bin Laden's terror network from the airwaves is not exactly a feather in AAAN's cap. Yet Obama continued his relationship with AAAN. Abunimah himself introduced Obama at a major fundraiser for a West Bank Palestinian community center a short time later in 1999. And that, says Abunimah, was "just one example of how Barack Obama used to be very comfortable speaking up for and being associated with Palestinian rights and opposing the Israeli occupation."
The year 2000 saw yet another public clash between Ali Abunimah and Jeff Jacoby over terrorism, along with a deepening alliance between Obama, Khalidi, Abunimah, and AAAN. In May 2000, Abunimah published a New York Times op-ed taking issue with a State Department report on the rising threat of terrorism from the Middle East and South Asia. The report focused on al-Qaeda, in particular. This was one of the most timely and accurate warnings we received in the run-up to 9/11. Yet Abunimah trashed the report. In a longer study released around the time of his op-ed, Abunimah went further, questioning Hezbollah's designation as a terrorist organization, and suggesting that we ought to be, at the very least, "deeply skeptical" of the State Department's warnings about Osama bin Laden.
As Abunimah continued to downplay the threat from bin Laden, his ties to Obama deepened. In 2000, AAAN founder Rashid Khalidi held a fundraiser for Obama's ultimately unsuccessful congressional campaign. Abunimah remembers that Obama "came with his wife. That's where I had a chance to really talk to him. It was an intimate setting. He convinced me he was very aware of the issues [and] critical of U.S. bias toward Israel and lack of sensitivity to Arabs. . . . He was very supportive of U.S. pressure on Israel." Obama's numerous statements over the years criticizing American policy for leaning too much toward Israel were vivid in Abunimah's memory, he says, because "these were the kind of statements I'd never heard from a U.S. politician who seemed like he was going somewhere rather than at the end of his career." Obama's criticism of America's Middle East policy was sufficient to inspire Abunimah to pull out his checkbook and, for the first time, contribute to an American political campaign.
Within a year, Obama did Khalidi and Abunimah a good turn as well. From his position on the board of Chicago's Woods Fund, Obama, along with Ayers and the other five members of the board, began to channel funds to AAAN, totaling $75,000 in grants during 2001 and 2002. Now Obama and Ayers were effectively supporting the pro-Palestinian activism of AAAN's vice-president, Abunimah, and funding an organization founded by their mutual friends, the Khalidis, in the process.
In the first year of the Woods Fund grant, Abunimah was the focus of a critical Chicago Tribune op-ed by Gidon Remba, a former translator in the Israeli prime minister's office. Pointing to Abunimah, among others, Remba decried attempts by "Yasser Arafat's Arab-American cheerleaders" to "vindicate the resurgence of attacks on Israeli civilians by Palestinian gunmen and Islamic suicide bombers." Yet Obama and Ayers re-upped AAAN's money in 2002.
An August 2002 profile of Abunimah in the Chicago Tribune quotes a supporter of Israel noting that, while he has heard Abunimah deplore terrorism, he has never heard Abunimah affirm that he "supports the continued right of Israel to exist alongside a future Palestine." That is because Abunimah does not appear to recognize such a right. Instead, Abunimah favors a "one-state solution," in which Israel's identity as a Jewish state would be drowned out by an influx of Palestinian immigrants seeking the "right of return." Abunimah's book, One Country, which spells out his one-state solution, features an extended comparison between Israel and South African apartheid.
For Bill Ayers, Abunimah's claims that Israel is an apartheid state, along with his arguments that international law at times licences violent resistance against Israel, surely resonate. As I show in Radical-in-Chief, Ayers has never abandoned his Weatherman ideology. The reason Ayers refuses to repudiate the Weathermen's terrorist past is that he sees the group's violent actions as justified resistance to the "internal colonialism" and apartheid of a racist American society. That likely explains why Ayers happily channeled grant money to AAAN, which makes a Weatherman-style argument against Israel.
In the acknowledgments of Resurrecting Empire, a monograph he worked on toward the end of his time in Chicago, Khalidi credits Ayers with persuading him to write it. A core theme of Resurrecting Empire is that the problems of the Middle East largely turn on America's failure to force Israel to resolve the Palestinian question. This claim that Israel is the true root of the Middle East's problems is what Martin Kramer identifies, correctly, I think, as the key lesson imparted to Obama by Khalidi.
Khalidi left Chicago in 2003, after the now-famous farewell dinner at which Obama thanked Khalidi for years of beneficial intellectual exchange. The article in which the Los Angeles Times reports on that dinner adds that many of Obama's Palestinian allies and associates are convinced that, despite his public statements in support of Israel, Obama remains far more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause then he has publicly let on.
Specifically, Abunimah has said that, in the winter of 2004, Obama commended an op-ed Abunimah had just published in the Chicago Tribune, saying, "Keep up the good work!" (This is likely the op-ed in question.) According to Abunimah, Obama then apologized for not having said more publicly about Palestine, but also said he hoped that after his race for the U.S. Senate was over he could be "more up front" about his actual views.
It didn't turn out that way. Once Obama's new-found stardom gave him national political prospects, he swiftly shifted into the pro-Israeli camp, to Abunimah's great frustration. Would a reelected Obama finally be able to be "more up front" about his pro-Palestinian views, belatedly fulfilling his promise to Abunimah? In short, was Obama's pro-Palestinian past nothing but a way of placating a hard-Left constituency whose views he never truly shared? Or is Obama's post-2004 tilt toward Israel the real charade?
The record is clear. Obama's heritage, his largely hidden history of leftist radicalism, and his close friendship with Rashid Khalidi, all bespeak sincerity, as Obama's other Palestinian associates agree. This is not to mention Reverend Wright — whose rabidly anti-Israel sentiments, I show in Radical-in-Chief, Obama had to know about — or Obama's longtime foreign-policy adviser Samantha Power, who once apparently recommended imposing a two-state solution on Israel through American military action. Decades of intimate alliances in a hard-Left world are a great deal harder to fake than a few years of speeches at AIPAC conferences.
The real Obama is the first Obama, and depending on how the next presidential election turns out, we're going to meet him again in 2013.
— Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and the author of Radical-in-Chief.
Dan Friedman
NYC
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[If Obama wins a second term, there will be nothing political to prevent his raw emotions from bubbling to the surface. df]
NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE
May 26, 2011
Obama's hard-Left tilt is real... depending on how the next presidential election turns out, we're going to meet him again in 2013.
By Stanley Kurtz
It's time to revisit the issue of President Obama's Palestinian ties. During his time in the Illinois state senate, Obama forged close alliances with the most prominent Palestinian political leaders in America. Substantial evidence also indicates that during his pre-Washington years, Obama was both supportive of the Palestinian cause and critical of America's stance toward Israel. Although Obama began to voice undifferentiated support for Israel around 2004 (as he ran for U.S. Senate and his national visibility rose), critics and even some backers have long suspected that his pro-Palestinian inclinations survive.
The continuing influence of Obama's pro-Palestinian sentiments is the best way to make sense of the president's recent tilt away from Israel. This is why supporters of Israel should fear Obama's reelection. In 2013, with his political vulnerability a thing of the past, Obama's pro-Palestinian sympathies would be released from hibernation, leaving Israel without support from its indispensable American defender.
To see this, we need to reconstruct Obama's pro-Palestinian past and assess its influence on the present. Taken in context, and followed through the years, the evidence strongly suggests that Obama's long-held pro-Palestinian sentiments were sincere, while his post-2004 pro-Israel stance has been dictated by political necessity.
Let's begin at the beginning — with the controversial question of whether Obama's cultural heritage through his nominally Muslim Kenyan father and his Muslim Indonesian stepfather, along with his having been raised for a time in predominantly Muslim Indonesia, might have had some effect on the president's mature foreign-policy views. Obama supporters often mock this idea, but we have it on high authority that Obama's unusual heritage and upbringing have had an effect on his adult views.
Top presidential aide and longtime Obama family friend Valerie Jarrett was born and raised in Iran for the first five years of her life. In explaining how she first grew close to Obama, Jarrett says they traded stories of their youthful travels. As Jarrett told Obama biographer David Remnick: "He and I shared a view of where the United States fit in the world, which is often different from the view people have who have not traveled outside the United States as young children." Remnick continues: "Through her travels, Jarrett felt that she had come to see the United States with a greater objectivity as one country among many, rather than as the center of all wisdom and experience." Speaking with the authority of a close personal friend and top political adviser, then, Jarrett affirms that she and Obama reject traditional American exceptionalism. One hallmark of America's exceptionalist perspective, of course, is our unique alliance with a democratic Israel, even in the face of intense criticism of that alliance from much of the rest of the world.
Obama's close friend and longtime ally, Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said's successor as the most prominent American advocate for the Palestinians, goes further. Khalidi told the Los Angeles Times that as president, Obama, "because of his unusual background, with family ties in Kenya and Indonesia, would be more understanding of the Palestinian experience than typical American politicians." Khalidi's testimony is important, since he speaks on the basis of years of friendship with Obama.
Those who know Obama best, then, affirm that his foreign-policy views are atypical for an American politician, and are grounded in his unique international heritage and upbringing. That is important, because our core task is to decide whether Obama's pro-Palestinian past was a stance rooted in sincere sympathy, or nothing but a convenient sop to his leftist Hyde Park supporters. Jarrett and Khalidi give us reason to believe that Obama's decidedly pro-Palestinian inclinations are rooted in his core conception of who he is.
Obama came to political consciousness at college, and prior to his discovery of community organizing late in his senior year, his focus was on international issues. Obama's memoir, Dreams from My Father, highlights his anti-apartheid activism during his sophomore year at California's Occidental College. Obama's anti-apartheid stance, however, was part of a far broader and more radical rejection of the West's alleged imperialism. Obama himself tells us, in a famous passage in Dreams, that he was taken with criticism of "neocolonialism" and "Eurocentrism" during these early college years.
What Obama doesn't tell us, but what I reveal in Radical-in-Chief, my political biography of the president, is that he was a convinced Marxist during his college years. More important, once Obama graduated and entered the world of community organizing, he absorbed the sophisticated and intentionally stealthy socialism of his mentors. Obama's socialist mentors strongly supported what they saw as the "liberation struggles" carried on by rebels against American "oppression" throughout the world. So Obama's continuous radical political history strongly suggests that his early support for Palestine's "liberation struggle" grew out of authentic political conviction, not pandering.
Although Obama has long withheld his college transcripts from the public, the Los Angeles Times reported in 2008 that Obama took a course from Edward Said sometime during his final two undergraduate years at Columbia University. This was just around the time Obama's ties to organized socialism were deepening, and certainly suggests a sincere interest in Said's radical views. As Martin Kramer points out, in his superb 2008 review of Obama's Palestinian ties, Said had just then published his book The Question of Palestine, definitively setting the terms of the academic Left's stance on the issue for decades to come.
After Obama finished his initial community-organizing stint in Chicago and graduated from Harvard Law School, he settled down to a teaching job at the University of Chicago around 1992, and went about laying the foundations of a political career. Sometime not long after his arrival at the University of Chicago, Obama connected with Rashid Khalidi.
To say the least, Rashid Khalidi is a controversial fellow. To begin with, although Khalidi denies it, Martin Kramer has unearthed powerful evidence suggesting that Khalidi was at one time an official spokesman for the Palestine Liberation Organization. Also, in the years immediately prior to his friendship with Obama, Khalidi was a leading opponent of the first Gulf War, which successfully reversed Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. According to Kramer, Khalidi condemned that action as an American "colonial war," insisting that before we could end Saddam's occupation of Kuwait, we would first have to end Israel's supposedly equivalent occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. As Kramer puts it, Khalidi's influence helped turn the University of Chicago of the Nineties into "the hot place to be for . . . trendy postcolonialist, blame-America, trash-Israel" scholarship.
While we don't know exactly when their friendship began, Khalidi was reportedly present at the famous 1995 kickoff reception for Obama's first political campaign, held at the home of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. That is no minor point. We'll see that as Khalidi's close friend and political ally, Ayers played an integral role in the story of Obama's relationship with Khalidi.
In May 1998, Edward Said traveled from Columbia to Chicago to present the keynote address at a dinner organized by the Arab American Action Network, a group founded by Rashid and Mona Khalidi. We've known for some time that Barack and Michelle Obama sat next to Edward and Mariam Said at that event. (Pictures are available.) It has not been noticed, however, that a detailed report on Said's address exists, along with an article by Said published just days before the event (Arab American News, May 22, June 12, 1998). Between those two reports, we can reconstruct at least an approximate picture of what Obama might have heard from his former professor that day.
For the most part, Said focused his article (and likely his talk as well) on harsh criticisms of Israel, which he equated with both South Africa's apartheid state and Nazi Germany. Said's criticisms of the Palestinian Authority also were harsh. Why, he wondered, weren't the 50,000 security people employed by the Palestinian Authority heading up resistance to Israel's settlement building? In his talk, Said called for large-scale marches and civilian blockades of Israeli settlement building. To prevent Palestinian workers from participating in any Israeli construction, Said also proposed the establishment of a fund that would pay these laborers not to work for Israel. Presciently, Said's talk also called on Palestinians to orchestrate an international campaign to stigmatize Israel as an illegitimate apartheid state.
So broadly speaking, this is what Obama would have heard from his former teacher at that May 1998 encounter. Yet Obama was clearly comfortable enough with Said's take on Israel to deepen his relationship with Khalidi and his Arab American Action Network (AAAN). We know this, because Ali Abunimah, longtime vice president of the AAAN, has told us so.
In many ways, Abunimah is the neglected key to reconstructing the story of Obama's alliance with Khalidi and AAAN. While Abunimah's accounts of Obama's alliance with AAAN have long been public, they are not widely known. Nor have Abunimah's writings been pieced together with Obama's history of support for AAAN. Doing so creates a disturbing picture of Obama's political convictions on the Palestinian question.
In late summer 1998, for example, a few months after Obama's encounter with Edward Said, Abunimah and AAAN were caught up in a national controversy over the alleged blacklisting of respected terrorism expert Steve Emerson by National Public Radio. In August of that year, NPR had interviewed Emerson on air about Osama bin Laden's terror network. According to columnist Jeff Jacoby, however, Abunimah managed to obtain a promise from NPR to ban Emerson from its airwaves, on the grounds that Emerson was an anti-Arab bigot. It took Jacoby's research and public objections to lift the ban.
Attempting to bar an expert on Osama bin Laden's terror network from the airwaves is not exactly a feather in AAAN's cap. Yet Obama continued his relationship with AAAN. Abunimah himself introduced Obama at a major fundraiser for a West Bank Palestinian community center a short time later in 1999. And that, says Abunimah, was "just one example of how Barack Obama used to be very comfortable speaking up for and being associated with Palestinian rights and opposing the Israeli occupation."
The year 2000 saw yet another public clash between Ali Abunimah and Jeff Jacoby over terrorism, along with a deepening alliance between Obama, Khalidi, Abunimah, and AAAN. In May 2000, Abunimah published a New York Times op-ed taking issue with a State Department report on the rising threat of terrorism from the Middle East and South Asia. The report focused on al-Qaeda, in particular. This was one of the most timely and accurate warnings we received in the run-up to 9/11. Yet Abunimah trashed the report. In a longer study released around the time of his op-ed, Abunimah went further, questioning Hezbollah's designation as a terrorist organization, and suggesting that we ought to be, at the very least, "deeply skeptical" of the State Department's warnings about Osama bin Laden.
As Abunimah continued to downplay the threat from bin Laden, his ties to Obama deepened. In 2000, AAAN founder Rashid Khalidi held a fundraiser for Obama's ultimately unsuccessful congressional campaign. Abunimah remembers that Obama "came with his wife. That's where I had a chance to really talk to him. It was an intimate setting. He convinced me he was very aware of the issues [and] critical of U.S. bias toward Israel and lack of sensitivity to Arabs. . . . He was very supportive of U.S. pressure on Israel." Obama's numerous statements over the years criticizing American policy for leaning too much toward Israel were vivid in Abunimah's memory, he says, because "these were the kind of statements I'd never heard from a U.S. politician who seemed like he was going somewhere rather than at the end of his career." Obama's criticism of America's Middle East policy was sufficient to inspire Abunimah to pull out his checkbook and, for the first time, contribute to an American political campaign.
Within a year, Obama did Khalidi and Abunimah a good turn as well. From his position on the board of Chicago's Woods Fund, Obama, along with Ayers and the other five members of the board, began to channel funds to AAAN, totaling $75,000 in grants during 2001 and 2002. Now Obama and Ayers were effectively supporting the pro-Palestinian activism of AAAN's vice-president, Abunimah, and funding an organization founded by their mutual friends, the Khalidis, in the process.
In the first year of the Woods Fund grant, Abunimah was the focus of a critical Chicago Tribune op-ed by Gidon Remba, a former translator in the Israeli prime minister's office. Pointing to Abunimah, among others, Remba decried attempts by "Yasser Arafat's Arab-American cheerleaders" to "vindicate the resurgence of attacks on Israeli civilians by Palestinian gunmen and Islamic suicide bombers." Yet Obama and Ayers re-upped AAAN's money in 2002.
An August 2002 profile of Abunimah in the Chicago Tribune quotes a supporter of Israel noting that, while he has heard Abunimah deplore terrorism, he has never heard Abunimah affirm that he "supports the continued right of Israel to exist alongside a future Palestine." That is because Abunimah does not appear to recognize such a right. Instead, Abunimah favors a "one-state solution," in which Israel's identity as a Jewish state would be drowned out by an influx of Palestinian immigrants seeking the "right of return." Abunimah's book, One Country, which spells out his one-state solution, features an extended comparison between Israel and South African apartheid.
For Bill Ayers, Abunimah's claims that Israel is an apartheid state, along with his arguments that international law at times licences violent resistance against Israel, surely resonate. As I show in Radical-in-Chief, Ayers has never abandoned his Weatherman ideology. The reason Ayers refuses to repudiate the Weathermen's terrorist past is that he sees the group's violent actions as justified resistance to the "internal colonialism" and apartheid of a racist American society. That likely explains why Ayers happily channeled grant money to AAAN, which makes a Weatherman-style argument against Israel.
In the acknowledgments of Resurrecting Empire, a monograph he worked on toward the end of his time in Chicago, Khalidi credits Ayers with persuading him to write it. A core theme of Resurrecting Empire is that the problems of the Middle East largely turn on America's failure to force Israel to resolve the Palestinian question. This claim that Israel is the true root of the Middle East's problems is what Martin Kramer identifies, correctly, I think, as the key lesson imparted to Obama by Khalidi.
Khalidi left Chicago in 2003, after the now-famous farewell dinner at which Obama thanked Khalidi for years of beneficial intellectual exchange. The article in which the Los Angeles Times reports on that dinner adds that many of Obama's Palestinian allies and associates are convinced that, despite his public statements in support of Israel, Obama remains far more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause then he has publicly let on.
Specifically, Abunimah has said that, in the winter of 2004, Obama commended an op-ed Abunimah had just published in the Chicago Tribune, saying, "Keep up the good work!" (This is likely the op-ed in question.) According to Abunimah, Obama then apologized for not having said more publicly about Palestine, but also said he hoped that after his race for the U.S. Senate was over he could be "more up front" about his actual views.
It didn't turn out that way. Once Obama's new-found stardom gave him national political prospects, he swiftly shifted into the pro-Israeli camp, to Abunimah's great frustration. Would a reelected Obama finally be able to be "more up front" about his pro-Palestinian views, belatedly fulfilling his promise to Abunimah? In short, was Obama's pro-Palestinian past nothing but a way of placating a hard-Left constituency whose views he never truly shared? Or is Obama's post-2004 tilt toward Israel the real charade?
The record is clear. Obama's heritage, his largely hidden history of leftist radicalism, and his close friendship with Rashid Khalidi, all bespeak sincerity, as Obama's other Palestinian associates agree. This is not to mention Reverend Wright — whose rabidly anti-Israel sentiments, I show in Radical-in-Chief, Obama had to know about — or Obama's longtime foreign-policy adviser Samantha Power, who once apparently recommended imposing a two-state solution on Israel through American military action. Decades of intimate alliances in a hard-Left world are a great deal harder to fake than a few years of speeches at AIPAC conferences.
The real Obama is the first Obama, and depending on how the next presidential election turns out, we're going to meet him again in 2013.
— Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and the author of Radical-in-Chief.
Dan Friedman
NYC
