Obama and AIPAC/Israel

There's a lot of excitement around Obama right now. Some of the folks who have been waving his flag for more than 2 years are feeling pretty good about themselves. Even some of the folks who have been on the fence at least since Edwards left the race (but likely far longer than even that) are slowly coming around and supporting him too. And it's easy to point at HRC's mistakes and flubs and get kind of comfortable in thinking that Obama represents something different, something new, some kind of change. In other words, a lot of people are starting to buy the hype. Persuasive marketing, done long and hard enough, works.

Even I got caught a little, though not directly. A few days ago, I posted this angry response to Clinton's address at the AIPAC convention. I didn't get a hold or an earful of Obama's speech, but just felt compelled to write something after hearing her live on C-SPAN. But now I've read/heard Obama's comments. And he's not much better, and I would argue, possibly worse than HRC on the whole issue of Israel/Palestine.


Check out some of his comments here. Of course he's not going to be wholly critical of Israel with this audience, but there's not a single word in here and Israeli restraint, curtailing the settlements, or anything else of its kind. It's as if the issue has only one side: that of the Israeli lobby and the hard right government folks there (not the general public, IMHO). It's scary how easy it is for him to just dismiss Palestinian rights the way that he has been doing - and so publicly.

It leaves a very bitter taste in the mouth, and I really hope that people who seem to be losing all perspective start to remember that the way he deals with this question and issue may reflect how he'll deal with a slew of things domestically: the most powerful, well-funded group, or at least that which he fears the most, will pull the strings. It is for this reason, specifically, that I cannot support him.

Just thinking more about the plight of the Palestinian people - they are a people displaced and now vilified for their displacement. It's really kind of crazy. And you know - the rhetoric has made all Palestinians into threats or "terrorists" - women, children, and men. Kind of reminds me of how Jewish people were so discriminated against around Europe (Germany's particular legacy makes it easy for Spain, France, and all the rest to hide from their own shameful histories). After WWII and Hitler, guilt set in a bit and there were some steps to try to ameliorate the harm of the earlier animus.

But nowadays in this age of permanent news cycles that magnify small or isolated incidents into mass conspiracies, where this "war on terror" is never-ending and forever pitted against the eternal enemy, with an olive complexion and Muslim name, I don't know if there's any "redemption" in sight for the besieged and embattled common Palestinian people, at least in the U.S. and Britain.  Who in the world community will champion their cause and relieve them from their precarious position: caught between a small minority set on severe violence, and one of the most deadly state military presences in the world?

There is little hope that that champion will be the next American President. And the only former President who makes much sense on their future is a peanut farmer from Georgia who is part of an old guard, at least generation preceding Prez Clinton.

It's all pretty depressing, really. So please don't tell me to get on the Obama bandwagon, unless the driver shows me he isn't driving off the cliff on this issue.

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HR Clinton and AIPAC/Israel

Had I the time or the inclination, I would go ape-shit (in a bad way) about Clinton's speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) tonight. I didn't hear Obama's, but I'm sure it was adequately fucked up, as I'm sure Bush and his underlings and all the others are as well.

But I got to hear HRC on C-Span live, and her terrible characterizations of Palestinians and her chauvinistic statements about fully supporting Israel ($2 Bn a year for "defense"?!) boiled my blood.

I guess it's a quintessential American value: the brutal subjugation of an entire people on the justification that "this land is now our land, now get the fuck off or die." Like I've said before, Manifest Destiny, anyone?

So I'm not surprised, but she even got the "debacle in Durban" -- the first global conference on racism, where there was a motion to characterize Zionism (the militant political ideology to expand Israel at any cost - human or otherwise) as racism, that resulted in the U.S. happily (and conveniently) walking away from the discussion. We're going to get to a point where the U.S. and Israel are alone in their inability to fully confront the evils associated with their founding, while the rest of the world moves on. I mean, even Australia is moving closer to understanding that its shameful legacy with its own aboriginal populations must be confronted. But it's easy to stick your head inthe ground when no one else can bully you into accepting the brutal truth of your own nation's sins.

Thing is, many Israelis know better, and there's definitely some level of understanding with regular people about how the question of Israel/Palestine should move beyond "they don't want to recognize our right to exist" to a more detailed parsing of the issues. I don't know if Americans can do the same with the legacies of slavery, decimation of the native population, and everything that came after these things.

But that speech was intolerable, and I'm so sick of hearing every politician with any aspiration to keep or advance in their political careers remaining 100% wholly uncritical of Israel's actions. Shit, I'd consider it something noteworthy if they even mentioned anti-Arab racism and xenophobia in the same speech as antisemitism (no hope for the same paragraph or sentence of course, and disregarding the fact that Arabs are also Semites, but somehow that has been lost in every modern discussion at this point).

The state of Israel is not just a victim: it's also an aggressor in this whole situation. Perhaps the image of besieged state fighting for survival is romantic, or perhaps some kind of national guilt from America's failure to intervene in the treatment and slaughter of the Jewish people for years before finally getting involved in WWII has permeated American politics (I doubt it). Whatever it is, this one-sided approach to the whole thing is incredibly troubling. How can America have any moral authority when it is so totally biased in an arena where one side is using sophisticated war technology that we've provided and the other is using the military equivalent of slingshots and bows and arrows?

What happened to "We are all Palestinian"?

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Free Tibet!

The escalating tensions between China and the displaced Tibetan populations in India and the diaspora should hopefully raise people's consciousness about the egregious human rights violations that plague this relationship. I hope that more Asian Americans are very critical of what China has done to the Tibetan people - "saving" Tibet is not enough. Tibet must be free.

And people should disassociate their ethnic/racial pride as Asian Americans of Chinese descent from the nation/state of China - who you are is not defined by the political nation from whence your forebears came. South Asian Americans/Brits/Canadians are some of the fiercest critics of their countries of origin - because they have a legitimacy that may turn more heads than random white people. But for some reason, people don't always seem that comfortable with other Asian nations (show me that I'm wrong).

I've long considered Tibetans to be South Asian brothers and sisters, not that the boundaries matter that much, but they are a strong and proud people, and I don't really have a lot of faith that ever-more capitalist India will continue to be a safe-haven for Tibetans, even though so many of the young folks who are willing to march/fight for Tibetan freedom were actually born in India. How long before the Indian middle class says "let's cut this vestige of failed socialist Nehruvian policies - Tibetans are an internal matter for China to deal with, and we should stop letting them in."

Now is the time, I think, for some movement on this issue. But I want to learn more about it before I just shoot off from the heart without knowledge.

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Asian Americans and Palestine

Does Asian America care about what's happening in Palestine? Sometimes I wonder if folks even see how connected it is to this nation we strive to imagine (or thrive by collecting a paycheck on). More on that in a minute. But seeing the thousands of people streaming across the border from the besieged Gaza territories into Egypt really shook me - I wasn't paying attention to the sealing of the border and embargo that Israel had placed on the territory over the past weeks. People needed food and goods to survive: they were buying what they needed from across the border, not stealing.

I live in relative comfort, and am afforded the luxury to complain on these pages. But real people are struggling with real crisis, and sometimes it gets me how people are so selective about what they care about. A touchstone moment for me was a conversation I had with an activist and lawyer friend years ago who I respect for his commitment to civil political rights of Asian/immigrant communities here, in NYC. We were having some kind of conversation about recent events and I mentioned some things I'd heard about overseas in an Asian nation that doesn't get much play in the media (or didn't at that time). He said, both with some level of chagrin, but mainly with a "don't have the time" response that he really has no idea of what's happening around the world - he's too focused on the fight in front of him.

This isn't uncommon, but the moment is frozen in my memory because the date was Sept. 10, 2001, and the nation I was talking about was Afghanistan. It wasn't that I knew something was up - it was actually a conversation about the Taliban's destruction of the Buddhas of Bamyan earlier that year - but even at that time, his relatively sharp rebuke about not knowing/caring about world affairs struck me. Of course, it was only days later that the Taliban became a known and familiar group on the American landscape, but only after something happened here.

Of course, Americans of all kinds just tuning out of world dynamics isn't a new observation, and bringing it up here isn't a revelation. But I feel like folks should wake up and think about the interconnections, especially if they profess some kind of community kinship across the fragile coalition of Asian America and/or they say that they believe in justice. One of the biggest gaps in Asian American spaces and dynamics, aside from the very familiar "East/South/Southeast/Pacific Islander" tensions, is around questions of solidarity, especially related to the faith-based concerns for Asian Muslims and other non-Christians. I haven't read/seen much on this, and I don't have empirical data, but I want to put some things out there that I hope to get back to at some point.

I've mentioned before (I think, and if not, it's a pending post that I will definitely get to soon), that while the narrative of Asian American (and broader) cultural studies sometimes suggests that traditions and sharing around food are one of the ways that different communities build solidarity, there's often a gap for people who observe dietary restrictions. So where the whole "we all eat with chopsticks" or "rice is central" themes are nice, it makes it hard to break bread with APA compatriots when the bread has lard and there's pork or meat in every other dish.

Not understanding how a simple issue like poor menu planning can immediately alienate and make folks less open to collaboration when it excludes consideration of vegetarian and halal diets is a fundamental failing of a lot of pan-Asian American efforts. You want to think that the community and political stuff should take precedence, but I've heard time and again that when something so simple is completely not considered, people lose faith that there's any point in trying for the bigger issues. I've seen this change gradually in cities on the East Coast, perhaps because South Asians and others are still more active in pan-Asian spaces, but it's pretty terrible on the West coast and other places. If I'm going to end up at a "community" dinner where I can't order something, I might as well be part of the NRA.

The bigger picture here, though, is that there are feelings of solidarity and empathy that a lot of people within "Asian America" feel for people suffering under systems of oppression around the world, aside from their so-called homelands. I can't think of a situation more relevant to more people I know than Palestine. The extreme injustices perpetrated as part of the Israeli oppression and occupation, and the world community's acceptance of state actions that are wholly unacceptable in almost any other part of the world, angers many people. No one is condoning outright acts of violence by either side, but state actors have to be held in check by the world community. And beyond an observation of world politics, this really affects the local.

The human rights violations perpetrated by the Israeli government are well-documented and hard to contest. And many see the struggle of the Palestinian people (not the military or insurgency leaders - just the ordinary people) as emblematic of how the rights of certain people -- Arabs, Muslims, whomever else -- are disposable on the global stage. And that's one of the reasons that a lot of people who are not personally tied to Palestine feel so strongly about the plight of the Palestinian people: that so many people who claim to care about rights don't care about Palestinians means that there are some rights that the world community just doesn't care about. And for the last sixty years in Palestine, that's Arabs and/or Muslims. In Kashmir, that's Muslims and Hindus. In tribal lands around the world, that's indigenous peoples. In China, that's Tibetans, Buddhists, Christians. In Burma, it's ethnic minorities and freedom fighters. In Sudan, it's the African Muslims and Christians. And the list is ever long.

Though the conditions aren't as bad in the United States for many of us, seeing that people aren't incensed (or often, are clueless) about the direct ramifications and echoes of these world phenomena upon our states of Asian America reminds people of how a lot of AA leaders played a game of "not our problem' for state actions against Muslims and South Asians in the wake of 9/11.

On that tip, there are some Asian American leaders out there who either don't see why the Israel/Palestine question is relevant, or have actually bought into the idea that the Israeli state is justified in anything/everything that it does. I understand that it is scary for many mainstreamers to voice an open anti-Zionist position because the fringe have convinced the world that speaking out against anything to do with Zionism is anti-Jewish (is speaking out against "Manifest Destiny" in the U.S. anti-European/white, or anti-oppression?). I guess the intersections of faith and politics are hard to navigate, but the perpetrator and originator of the most egregious violence is a state actor preserving power by stoking flames of intolerance and hatred between people with so much in common. Our understanding of Theo-Political fascist states should not be shaped by Dubya's rants. Just look at Modi's Gujarat.

So I'm very unhappy with the way that a lot of people, especially those in positions where they purport to represent Asian America, don't ask critical questions and come up with a reasoned orientation to the situation. By being so out of touch, they continue to show us how they will not be able to hold together an effective, progressive Asian American coalition that recognizes and stands against oppression, regardless of whether it directly (or at least, obviously) affects their interests. It's time to hold them accountable.

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