[Peace-discuss] Abe Foxman & Isaac Herzog: Cancel Bibi’s Speech to Congress

[E. W. Johnson]

I suggest that the Democrats and Republicans take a bipartisan approach 
to stifling free speech,
after all, they both hate it.

Construct a small "free speech cage" in some remote spot.

A free speech cage is an ideal example of what the mainstream stands for,
a cage providing the perfect ironic symbolism.

I know, I know.  It's been done before.

But it's still effective.


On 02/11/2015 10:56 PM, C. G. Estabrook via Peace-discuss wrote:
> "Dear Mr. Netanyahu, please don’t cancel your speech"
> --Philip Weiss on February 10, 2015
>
>     
> The pressure keeps mounting on Benjamin Netanyahu to arrange 
> a face-saving means of cancelling his speech to both houses of 
> Congress next month lest he create a rift between the U.S. and Israel. 
> Almost every Zionist and Israel-supporter seems to agree about this, 
> from Nancy Pelosi to Abraham Foxman to J Street to Michael Oren (It 
> could hurt our efforts to act against Iran) to Shmuel Rosner (For 
> Israel’s sake) to Tom Friedman (“Israel and its defenders are already 
> under siege on college campuses across America”).
>
> It feels inevitable that in a day or so, the Israeli government 
> is going to announce some lame excuse or other — Sara Netanyahu’s 
> bottle bill, a border incident, a new settlement project, a collapse 
> of a party list in the election campaign, or a crisis over Netanyahu’s 
> son’s dating habits — that will allow the prime minister to change 
> the speaking gig.
>
> Only Netanyahu himself seems determined to go forward.  [...]
>
> And I agree with him. Dear Mr. Netanyahu, please don’t cancel 
> your speech. This speech is too important to cancel. For three reasons:
>
> 1. The speech should go on because its historical amazement — 
> the spectacle of a warmongering foreign leader rebuking the U.S. 
> president on his foreign policy before a joint session of Congress — 
> will catalyze an important political debate over the American people’s 
> interest in the Middle East. The United States and Israel have a 
> genuine difference over Iran policy. For a bunch of crazy reasons, but 
> reasons all the same, Israelis describe the Iranian nuclear program as 
> an “existential” threat. No American feels that to be true. And the 
> more vigorous this debate, more Americans will get to talk about why 
> Israel has nuclear weapons, whether its regional superpower rival can 
> be contained (as the Soviet Union was contained within our memories, 
> for many years), whether all American options really should be on the 
> table. Americans have a right to reach the conclusion that Iran is not 
> a big problem for us, and that we need to be friends with an advanced 
> society of 75 million people, almost all Muslims. The Netanyahu 
> speech, filled with fire and brimstone, will allow them to do so. In 
> fact, so many Americans will conclude that there should be no military 
> response to Iran’s nuclear program that they will enable Obama to 
> reach a deal with Iran, and help to end the cold war between the U.S. 
> and Iran that has helped to make the Middle East an east-west 
> battleground.
>
> 2. The speech will drive a wedge between an important segment of 
> the American power structure (progressive Democrats, led by Barack 
> Obama) and Israel, at last. This is the real reason that people oppose 
> the speech; it threatens the health and vigor of the Israel lobby by 
> making Israel support a political football. These supporters don’t 
> want any daylight between any part of the American power structure and 
> Israel because Israel needs the U.S. more than anything and it must 
> never be politicized. As Tom Friedman explains, “Israel needs the 
> support of more than just Congress or one party.” J 
> Street: “Israel… will always need support from across the American 
> political spectrum to feel truly secure.” I.e., the president and 
> Democratic liberals have to be in bed with Israel along with everyone 
> else in Washington. But if the speech takes place, and the lobby loses 
> the blind support of progressive Democrats, the American people will 
> get to debate Israel policy and maybe even speak critically about all 
> the stuff that Israel is doing, like massacring Palestinians in Gaza 
> and building colonies on Palestinian land. Right now those issues are 
> not discussed openly in the U.S. power structure and leading media. 
> But if the speech happens and Obama/Biden turn their backs on 
> Netanyahu, and so do a dozen or two Democrats– and the rightwing 
> Israel groups then launch a shaming policy against those 
> Democrats for alleged betrayal — progressives will then speak openly 
> (on MSNBC and CNN) about why they boycotted the speech. That would 
> change American politics. As Ari Fleischer says, wisely. “If they 
> [Dems] boycott the speech, they’ll be casting their lot with the more 
> liberal, not pro-Israel base of the party, and that would be 
> a shocking development. It would be a radical break.” Exactly. That’s 
> why several excellent groups have called on our politicians to 
> “boycott” the speech.
>
> 3. The speech might allow a long-suppressed argument 
> between neoconservatives (or Israel firsters, as MJ Rosenberg calls 
> them) and our coalition of leftwing Palestinian solidarity activists 
> and national interest types to take center stage in US politics. Think 
> about it: the only people who want this speech to happen now are our 
> side, the Palestinian solidarity types, and the hard-core neocons. 
> Why? Because we both think we can win. We think we will do so by 
> having our issue discussed by the American people, while the neocons 
> are possessed by blind zeal; they think they will win in the same way 
> that they manipulated the power structure before the Iraq war, by 
> fearful politics, by blustering about WMD and the threat to the U.S. 
> and the threat to political donations. I think the neocons have 
> miscalculated out of hubris. This is a group led by Bill Kristol, who 
> once bragged that he purged the “oldfashioned Arabists” from the 
> Republican Party in the 1990s. Well the “Arabists” haven’t gone away. 
> There are still millions of them in America, people who actually care 
> about Palestinian human rights. The noble Kayla Mueller of Prescott 
> Arizona who just died at the hands of ISIS was one of them.
>
> If the speech goes forward, people will be openly debating 
> Israel’s influence in our politics, and the absence of a voice for the 
> other side. They will discuss whether the tail is wagging the dog, and 
> why we are at war in the Middle East– or “how did we get into this 
> mess” (as Tom Friedman puts it). They will get to talk about the three 
> root causes of the conflict (Zionism, Palestinian resistance, 
> inflexible U.S. support for Zionism).
>
> The Netanyahu speech will be a great shock to the American system, and 
> a healthy one: it will set off a long needed and long denied conversation.
>
> So please Mr. Netanyahu, don’t cancel your speech.
>
> - See more at: http://mondoweiss.net/2015/02/netanyahu-cancel-speech
>
>
> On Feb 7, 2015, at 4:18 PM, Robert Naiman <noreply at list.moveon.org 
> <mailto:noreply at list.moveon.org>> wrote:
>
>> Dear C. G. Estabrook,
>>
>> As the controversy surrounding Benjamin Netanyahu proposed speech to 
>> Congress on March 3rd reaches new heights, one of the Jewish 
>> community’s top leaders is calling on the Israeli prime minister to 
>> stay home, the /Jewish Daily Forward /reports: [1]
>>
>>     Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti Defamation League,
>>     said that the political uproar ignited by Netanyahu’s invitation
>>     to speak to a joint meeting of Congress makes such a move
>>     unhelpful and therefore it should be scrapped.
>>
>> In Israel, Labor Party chief and Zionist Camp leader Isaac Herzog 
>> said Netanyahu must cancel his speech to Congress due to the 
>> antagonism his address has caused in Washington, the /Times of Israel 
>> /reports: [2]
>>
>>     “The time has come when Bibi (Netanyahu) must announce the
>>     cancellation of his visit to Congress,” Herzog said... “In
>>     conversations I’ve held with many European and US leaders, it is
>>     clear there is great anger over Netanyahu diverting the
>>     discussion on Iran’s nuclear program for political gain, and
>>     turning it into a confrontation with the president of the United
>>     States."
>>
>> The /Times of Israel/ says that some 40 Democrats are already 
>> expected to boycott Netanyahu’s speech if it goes forward on March 3, 
>> a number that could grow. Vice President Joe Biden [3], Rep. Jim 
>> McGovern (D-MA), Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA) [4], Rep. Earl Blumenauer 
>> (D-OR) [5], Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D-NC), Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) [6], 
>> Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC), Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ), Rep. Barbara 
>> Lee (D-CA), and Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY) [7] have publicly said that 
>> they will not attend the speech if it goes forward on March 3.
>>
>> *Reps. Keith Ellison, Steve Cohen, and Maxine Waters are circulating 
>> a letter to Speaker Boehner among their colleagues, urging that the 
>> speech be cancelled.*[8] The letter is supported by *J Street* and 
>> *Americans for Peace Now*. Here’s how you can help:
>>
>>     1. *Join Abe Foxman & Isaac Herzog in calling for the speech to
>>     be cancelled by signing and sharing our petition at MoveOn.* If
>>     you’ve already signed, thank you for taking action! Please share
>>     it again to help us get more signers! *Every signature generates
>>     an email to Congress.
>>
>>     * *http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/bibi*
>>
>>     2. *Call your Rep. at 202-224-3121 and urge them to sign the
>>     Ellison letter urging that the speech be cancelled*. If you’ve
>>     already called, please call again! Every call counts in shaping
>>     the perceptions of Members of Congress.
>>     When you’ve made your call, *please report it here*:
>>
>>     *http://justforeignpolicy.org/act/bibi-ellison-call-in*
>>
>>
>> Thanks for all you do,
>>
>> Robert Naiman
>> Just Foreign Policy
>
>
>
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