[Peace-discuss] Campaign occludes another issue

[C. G. Estabrook]

["America must pull its military forces out of Iraq and the Middle East, leaving 
the peoples of the region to decide their own future." The policy of both Obama 
and McCain is of course the opposite.  --CGE]

	Fisk 'shocked' by US failure to debate conflict in Israel
	By Amol Rajan
	Monday, 13 October 2008

A feisty debate between Robert Fisk and the author Professor Sir Lawrence 
Freedman brought The Independent Woodstock Literary Festival to a close on a 
high note last night.

The absence of a debate on the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians in the 
US presidential elections was "shocking", Fisk told a packed hall at Blenheim 
Palace, the grand 18th-century home in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, which hosted the 
festival.

"America must pull its military forces out of Iraq and the Middle East, leaving 
the peoples of the region to decide their own future," said Fisk, an author and 
Middle East correspondent for The Independent. He said the US and its allies had 
"built a new Iron Curtain from the ice cap to the equator", and added that the 
result of the elections on 4 November "would not make the slightest bit of 
difference in the Middle East".

"America's uncritical support for Israel is going to continue," he said.

Professor Freedman, of King's College, London, however, provided stiff 
resistance, arguing that the United States must play a constructive role in the 
region and around the globe.

The debate was one of a series of discussions with leading figures from the 
worlds of literature, the arts and politics that have engrossed audiences since 
the festival began last week.

Only a few hours before Fisk and Professor Freedman's appearance, the acclaimed 
historian, Simon Schama, spoke to The Independent columnist Deborah Orr about 
his new book The American Future: A History, which accompanies a current BBC series.

Hundreds watched Schama lament the collapse of American self-confidence under 
George Bush. The historian, who spent much of his career at Oxford but is now 
based at Columbia University in New York, made no attempt to hide his view that 
the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama, could help renew the ideals that 
inspired the birth of the American nation.

Speaking in the splendour of the palace Orangery, Schama described Mr Bush as a 
"comical little front man" for what ought to be considered the "Cheney 
administration".

Schama also derided the Republican presidential candidate, John McCain, for 
running a divisive campaign that would backfire in states that didn't already 
support him.

And he said that vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin's comment at a rally 
last week that Mr Obama "is not a man who sees America the way that you and I 
see America" had racist undertones that made it "morally repellent". It was, 
Schama said, "code for depicting Obama as the Other". [Schama doesn't mention 
what the comment is really about: class. --CGE]

In one of the early highlights of the festival, the Conservative Party leader, 
David Cameron, took to the stage on Friday in an apparent attempt to cast 
himself as the heir to Tony Blair. In an interview with Simon Kelner, 
editor-in-chief of The Independent, Mr Cameron, who celebrated his 42nd birthday 
last Thursday, declared: "I'm a very straightforward person."

The comment invoked Mr Blair's assertion that he was "a pretty straight kind of 
guy".

Other prominent speakers to draw large crowds included the typically forthright 
war correspondents Martin Bell and Ann Leslie, novelists Elizabeth Jane Howard 
and P D James, 85 and 88 respectively, and two Independent columnists: novelist 
Howard Jacobson and chef Mark Hix.

Dame Ann, promoting an autobiography which includes compelling details about her 
time on the front line, issued a hurried apology after uttering a four letter 
expletive in Woodstock's Church of St Mary Magdalene.

©independent.co.uk

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/fisk-shocked-by-us-failure-to-debate-conflict-in-israel-959303.html