New, and wrenching, video from Sana Kassem is up at Norman Finkelstein’s site, using the Bob Dylan anti-war anthem.

“The Gaza Massacre” from Sana Kassem on Vimeo.

The sharpest edges of President Obama’s counterterrorism policy, including the use of drone aircraft to kill suspected terrorists abroad and keeping open the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have broad public support, including from the left wing of the Democratic Party.

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that Obama, who campaigned on a pledge to close the brig at Guantanamo Bay and to change national security policies he criticized as inconsistent with U.S. law and values, has little to fear politically for failing to live up to all of those promises.

The survey shows that 70 percent of respondents approve of Obama’s decision to keep open the prison at Guantanamo Bay. . . . The poll shows that 53 percent of self-identified liberal Democrats — and 67 percent of moderate or conservative Democrats — support keeping Guantanamo Bay open, even though it emerged as a symbol of the post-Sept. 11 national security policies of George W. Bush, which many liberals bitterly opposed.

Repulsive liberal hypocrisy extends far beyond the issue of Guantanamo. A core plank in the Democratic critique of the Bush/Cheney civil liberties assault was the notion that the President could do whatever he wants, in secret and with no checks, to anyone he accuses without trial of being a Terrorist – even including eavesdropping on their communications or detaining them without due process. But President Obama has not only done the same thing, but has gone much farther thanmere eavesdropping or detention: he has asserted the power even tokill citizens without due process. As Bush’s own CIA and NSA chief Michael Hayden said this week about the Awlaki assassination: “We needed a court order to eavesdrop on him but we didn’t need a court order to kill him. Isn’t that something?” That is indeed “something,” as is the fact that Bush’s mere due-process-free eavesdropping on and detention of American citizens caused such liberal outrage, while Obama’s due-process-free execution of them has not.

Beyond that, Obama has used drones to kill Muslim children and innocent adults by the hundreds. He has refused to disclose his legal arguments for why he can do this or to justify the attacks in any way. He has even had rescuers and funeral mourners deliberately targeted. As Hayden said: ”Right now, there isn’t a government on the planet that agrees with our legal rationale for these operations, except for Afghanistan and maybe Israel.” But that is all perfectly fine with most American liberals now that their Party’s Leader is doing it:

Fully 77 percent of liberal Democrats endorse the use of drones, meaning that Obama is unlikely to suffer any political consequences as a result of his policy in this election year. Support for drone strikes against suspected terrorists stays high, dropping only somewhat when respondents are asked specifically about targeting American citizens living overseas, as was the case with Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni American killed in September in a drone strike in northern Yemen.

The Post‘s Greg Sargent obtained the breakdown on these questions andwrote today:

The number of those who approve of the drone strikes drops nearly 20 percent when respondents are told that the targets are American citizens. But that 65 percent is still a very big number, given that these policies really should be controversial.

And get this: Depressingly, Democrats approve of the drone strikes on American citizens by 58-33, and even liberals approve of them, 55-35. Those numbers were provided to me by the Post polling team.

It’s hard to imagine that Dems and liberals would approve of such policies in quite these numbers if they had been authored by George W. Bush.

Indeed: is there even a single liberal pundit, blogger or commentator who would have defended George Bush and Dick Cheney if they (rather than Obama) had been secretly targeting American citizens for execution without due process, or slaughtering children, rescuers and funeral attendees with drones, or continuing indefinite detention even a full decade after 9/11? Please. How any of these people can even look in the mirror, behold the oozing, limitless intellectual dishonesty, and not want to smash what they see is truly mystifying to me.

One of the very first non-FISA posts I ever wrote that received substantial attention was this one from January, 2006, entitled “Do Bush Followers have an Ideology”? It examined the way in which the Bush-supporting Right was more like an “authoritarian cult” rather than a political movement because its adherents had no real, fixed political beliefs; instead, I argued, their only animating “principle” was loyalty to their leader, and they would support anything he did no matter how at odds it was with their prior ostensible beliefs. That post was linked to and praised by dozens and dozens of liberal blogs: can you believe what authoritarian followers these conservatives are?, they scoffed in unison. Here was the crux of my argument:

Whether one is a “liberal” — or, for that matter, a “conservative” — is now no longer a function of one’s actual political views, but is a function purely of one’s personal loyalty to George Bush. . . .

People who self-identify as “conservatives” and have always been considered to be conservatives become liberal heathens the moment they dissent, even on the most non-ideological grounds, from a Bush decree. That’s because “conservatism” is now a term used to describe personal loyalty to the leader (just as “liberal” is used to describe disloyalty to that leader), and no longer refers to a set of beliefs about government.

That “conservatism” has come to mean “loyalty to George Bush” is particularly ironic given how truly un-conservative the Administration is. . . . And in that regard, people like Michelle Malkin, John Hinderaker, Jonah Goldberg and Hugh Hewitt are not conservatives. They are authoritarian cultists. Their allegiance is not to any principles of government but to strong authority through a single leader.

As this post demonstrates, long before Barack Obama achieved any significance on the political scene, I considered blind leader loyalty one of the worst toxins in our political culture: it’s the very antithesis of what a healthy political system requires (and what a healthy mind would produce). One of the reasons I’ve written so much about the complete reversal of progressives on these issues (from pretending to be horrified by them when done under Bush to tolerating them or even supporting them when done by Obama) is precisely because it’s so remarkable to see these authoritarian follower traits manifest so vibrantly in the very same political movement — sophisticated, independent-minded, reality-based progressives — that believes it is above that, and that only primitive conservatives are plagued by such follower-mindlessness.

The Democratic Party owes a sincere apology to George Bush, Dick Cheney and company for enthusiastically embracing many of the very Terrorism policies which caused them to hurl such vehement invective at the GOP for all those years. And progressives who support the views of the majority as expressed by this poll should never be listened to again the next time they want to pretend to oppose civilian slaughter and civil liberties assaults when perpetrated by the next Republican President (it should be noted that roughly 35% of liberals, a non-trivial amount, say they oppose these Obama policies).

One final point: I’ve often made the case that one of the most consequential aspects of the Obama legacy is that he has transformed what was once known as “right-wing shredding of the Constitution” into bipartisan consensus, and this is exactly what I mean. When one of the two major parties supports a certain policy and the other party pretends to oppose it — as happened with these radical War on Terror policies during the Bush years — then public opinion is divisive on the question, sharply split. But once the policy becomes the hallmark of both political parties, then public opinion becomes robust in support of it. That’s because people assume that if both political parties support a certain policy that it must be wise, and because policies that enjoy the status of bipartisan consensus are removed from the realm of mainstream challenge. That’s what Barack Obama has done to these Bush/Cheney policies: he has, as Jack Goldsmith predicted he would back in 2009, shielded and entrenched them as standard U.S. policy for at least a generation, and (by leading his supporters to embrace these policies as their own) has done so with far more success than any GOP President ever could have dreamed of achieving.

UPDATE: The Advocacy Center for Equality and Democracy documentshow much public opinion has changed on these issues under (and as a result of) the Obama presidency: “under the leadership of a President who campaigned with the promise to close the facility, . . . support for the detention center may be at its highest level ever.”

The country is broke! Now it’s time for everyone, rich and poor, to roll up their sleeves (if they have any) and pitch in.

Popout

Also see, from earlier today, Phan Nguyen’s post - When Desmond Tutu got the ‘Penn BDS’ treatment

Alan Dershowitz at UPENN last night (Photo: Stephanie Nam/Daily Pennsylvanian)

The Israel apologists are out in full force as the Penn BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) conference kicks off tonight. The usual suspects (plus a Philadelphia Daily News columnist) are employing the same tired smears to discredit the BDS movement.

Alan Dershowitz delivered a speech to “a full house” which garnered “applause throughout the talk,” the Daily Pennsylvanian reports.  The university paper also reports:

The Chair of the Penn Board of Trustees, David Cohen, introduced the event with a message on behalf of President Amy Gutmann. “We are unwavering in our support of Israel” he read. “We do not support the message or the goals of BDS…”

Penn’s Political Science and Philosophy, Politics and Economics departments, Penn Democrats and College Republicans were among the other sponsors of the event.

For more on David Cohen and his role at NBC, see Phil Weiss’ post here.

Here’s some of what Dershowitz said last night in his Jewish Federations-sponsored speech (taken from notes that are imperfect, so these aren’t direct quotes):

–Israel needs to send more women and people of color to make its case.

–Professors at the University of Pennsylvania who support BDS are complicit with evil.

–Protecting Israel is one of the great human rights issues of the 21st century.

–(During the audience Q and A): Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein hate America. They hate liberalism. They hate Western values. Make it clear that people who love liberty love Israel.

–Attacking Iran would not be preemptive, it would be reactive. Iran is already engaging in war with Israel. It has armed Hezbollah, Hamas….Israel has a right to attack.

–2 state solution would require a military presence in Jordan Valley in case there’s an incursion from Iraq. Iraq is becoming Iran. They take their orders from Iran.

–(In response to an audience member asking how to respond to an Arab student who says, you support gay rights but you took my land):

The land which is now Israel was barren land…Israeli policy was to never throw indigenous Arabs off the land. Israel’s birth certificate is cleaner than almost any modern country’s birth certificate. It was established legally. You can complain about America or Canada or Australia or New Zealand. Israel was much more humane.

–Palestinians have been on the wrong side of every war. They wanted to establish a concentration camp in Nablus [in the context of World War Two].

(To get a sense of Dershowitz’s support for torture and violence, read Max Blumenthal’s Op-Ed in the Daily Pennsylvanian.)

But Dershowitz’s rhetoric is nothing compared to the hysterical editorial printed by the New York Daily Newstoday, surely reflecting owner and right-wing Israel supporter Mort Zuckerman’s line on BDS:

The University of Pennsylvania, one of America’s most respected bastions of higher education, plays host on Friday to the start of an odious conference destined to pulse with anti-Semitism.

Penn ought to be ashamed.

Called the National BDS Conference, the event is dedicated to undermining the very existence of Israel on the libel that the country is an illegitimate “occupation” and guilty of subjecting Palestinians to “apartheid” akin to how South Africa so brutally oppressed blacks…

In America, dangerous and reprehensible speech is best met with the truth. Spoken loud and clear. Spoken directly to the forces of hate. So if you’re near Philly and can spare the time, trek down to the BDS conference and tell them just how wrong they are.

And finally, Stu Bykofsky, who once wrote ”ONE MONTH from The Anniversary, I’m thinking another 9/11 would help America,” pens this column:

One week after Holocaust Remembrance Day, the carnival of hate known as the National Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Conference arrives at the University of Pennsylvania today, its clown car stocked with lies, half-lies, white lies and bald-faced lies, playing to the ignorant.

It gets no sympathy from Penn, which rejects its theme. Penn believes in free speech, as does Israel, the target of the hate fest. Free speech, and most human rights embedded in Western societies, are absent in Arab states.

That is the truth, which is poison to BDS, which immorally equates Israel with white-dominated South Africa, and even Nazi Germany. That’s what follows when you ally yourself with those who deny the Holocaust.

When Jeffrey Goldberg employed similar rhetoric, likening the BDS movement with Nazi Germany, this is what I wrote:

Goldberg, and others like him, are guilty of conflating Israel with Judaism, and Jews with Israelis. The BDS movement is not an economic boycott directed against Jews; it is a boycott movement directed against the State of Israel, which labels itself the Jewish State, because of its flagrant violations of international law and its continued occupation of Palestinian land. As Alisa Solomon, co-editor of Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, told me in 2009, “it’s a very dubious and dangerous collapse when ‘Jew’ and ‘Israel’ are conflated. Anti-Semites do it a lot, and unfortunately, powers of the Israeli state do it as well.”

Invoking Nazi Germany’s policy of boycotting Jewish-owned businesses as a way to smear the BDS movement is a cheap trick that has no merit. Nazi Germany instituted a blanket boycott, with no end in sight, that was directed at a persecuted minority just because of their religious faith. The BDS movement is targeting a state, asking Israel to comply with their obligations under international law, because of their unjust and oppressive policies towards the Palestinian people. There are many Jewish organizations that support the movement, including inside Israel.

This is nothing less than a full-scale campaign to tar the BDS movement as anti-Semitic and akin to Nazi Germany. I’ll leave you with Omar Barghouti’s eloquent response in the UPENN student paper, which Adam Horowitz highlighted earlier:

As to the venomous and patently false anti-Semitism smear thrown recklessly and maliciously at BDS activists in an explicit attempt to bully them into silence, it is increasingly seen today as a weapon of intellectual terror that is employed to stifle debate and free speech when the subject is Israel’s occupation and apartheid or the generous U.S. support for both. This time around, though, with the BDS movement’s solid human rights and international law credentials and track record, the anti-Semitism smear is hardly working.

BDS is categorically opposed to all forms of racism, including Islamophobia, anti-black racism and anti-Semitism. Anchored in international law and universal principles of human rights, BDS calls for equal rights for all humans, without discrimination. This universalist commitment has enabled BDS to spread in recent years at a spectacular rate within the mainstream of western societies, achieving one success after another, in the economic, academic and cultural boycott spheres. Israel is conceding that it is losing the battle for hearts and minds not just in Europe but also on U.S. campuses. Thus the panic, the vilification and the bullying attempts to crush the BDS conference at Penn.

In light of the attacks against the upcoming Penn BDS conference, I offer a reminder of the time Desmond Tutu got the “Penn BDS” treatment at other US universities, even when he wasn’t talking about BDS or Israel.

The article below was written in the summer of 2010, soon after the Olympia Food Co-op decided to boycott Israeli goods. At the time, many non-Jewish white progressives in Olympia felt they should defer to the “Jewish community’s” wishes on the Palestine/Israel issue.

It was a tokenizing and racist sentiment that made “the Jews,” collectively, the final arbiters of what goes on in the Middle East and what could be done to Palestinian lives. I wrote a long response in Olympia’s alternative newspaper criticizing the idea that Jews (and only certain Jews) somehow “owned” the Palestine/Israel conflict and that they had the final say on the issue.

The piece below was one of two unpublished “case studies” that accompanied my response, demonstrating that even Desmond Tutu had to answer to an imaginary concept of a collective monolithic Jewish identity in the United States. (The other case study dealt with who gets to own the “apartheid” label.)

Case study: Who owns Desmond Tutu?

In the spring of 2007, South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu was invited to speak at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota as part of a joint project with PeaceJam International, a youth-empowerment organization that connects the leaders of tomorrow with Nobel peace laureates.

Unfortunately, the university neglected to consult the monolithic “Jewish community.” Julie Swiler of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas informed the university administration that Tutu had previously made comments about Israel “that were especially hurtful” to Jews. Swiler claimed that “there’s a consensus in the Jewish community that his words were offensive.”

The university, in consideration of supposed Jewish sensitivities, disinvited Tutu.

University vice president Doug Hennes explained, “We had heard some things he said that some people judged to be anti-Semitic and against Israeli policy,” and thus Tutu’s words were “hurtful to some members of the Jewish community.”

Elsewhere, Hennes said, “He [Tutu] has been critical of Israel and Israeli policy regarding the Palestinians, so we talked with people in the Jewish community and they said they believed it would be hurtful to the Jewish community” to have him come speak.

University president Dennis Dease claimed that some of Tutu’s statements on Israel

have been hurtful to members of the Jewish community. I spoke with Jews for whom I have great respect…I am not in a position to evaluate what to a Jew feels anti-Semitic and what does not. I can, however, take seriously the judgments of those whom I trust by not putting St. Thomas in a position that would add to that hurt.

One could suppose that Dease was either being a good ally to Jews, or he was blaming the Jews. Another possible assessment is that Dease and his administration colleagues were simply spineless and were pandering to an imaginary monolithic Jewish voice.

The accusations against Tutu were based on a speech he gave on April 13, 2002, in which he compared what he witnessed in the occupied territories to what black South Africans experienced under apartheid. Julie Swilerclaimed that the speech “questions Jewish faithfulness to God” and that Tutu had compared Israel to Hitler. However, neither statement was ever made in the speech.

The original claim could possibly be traced to a press release issued by the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), dated April 29, 2002. The press release, entitled, “Tutu Ignores Sheikh’s Calls to Murder Jews,”extrapolated parts of Tutu’s speech to imply that he had compared Israel to Hitler. The press release also quoted ZOA president Morton Klein as saying, “As a child of Holocaust survivors, I am deeply offended by Archbishop Tutu’s vicious libel that Israel is comparable to Hitler.”

And while St. Thomas disinvited Tutu out of respect for the vague sensibilities of a few Jews, the university had no such qualms when Ann Coulter spoke at the university two years earlier. The university did not seek input from members of the Muslim community who might be offended by statements Coulter had made—for example, that the US should “invade [Muslim] countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity,” and that Muslims should not be allowed to fly in planes and should instead “use flying carpets.”

Ann Coulter at the University of St. Thomas, April 18, 2005

After much national pressure, the University of St. Thomas eventually relented and re-invited Tutu. However, the context of Tutu’s invitation was altered. Tutu was now additionally invited “to participate in a forum to foster constructive dialogue on the issues that have been raised.” In other words, even though he had done nothing wrong, Tutu was asked to explain in dialogue with Jews why he had done it.

A similar qualification occurred in 2009, when Desmond Tutu was invited to deliver the commencement address at Michigan State University’s graduation ceremony. The Anti-Defamation League called on MSU to “reconsider the invitation” because Tutu “has been a vocal and strident critic of Israel” and had supposedly “conveyed outright bigotry against the Jewish homeland and the Jewish people” through “odious anti-Israel and anti-Jewish expressions.” Most of all, the ADL was concerned about “Tutu’s longstanding support for boycotting Israel.”

To MSU’s credit, it did not disinvite Tutu. However, MSU President Lou Anna Simon accepted that Tutu was somehow “a controversial speaker” and said the university would

provide opportunities for our campus community to hear alternate points of view. In this case, we will work with our Jewish Studies Program, MSU Hillel, and the broader Michigan Jewish community to develop these opportunities.

Once again, although Tutu did nothing wrong, and even though he wasn’t invited to speak about Palestine/Israel, his appearance was predicated on the university committing to giving certain Jewish organizations a special soapbox to dispute the South African archbishop.

This concession is usually termed “balance” or “respect for Jewish sensitivities.” The reality was that a prominent South African leader who fought for equality in his home country was made beholden to an imaginary Jewish monolith in the United States.

Omar Barghouti, who was smeared in Professor Ruben Gur’s outrageous broadside against the Penn BDS conference, has been given a chance to reply. He shows that while Israel’s defenders will stoop to slurs, lies and fear mongering in their attempt to derail the BDS movement, supporters of Palestinian rights only need to rely on the values leading the BDS movement – freedom, justice and equality. From Barghouti’s Daily Pennsylvanianarticle “We — the global 99% — shall overcome!“:

Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions is primarily about freedom, justice and equality. The BDS movement, which is led by the BDS National Committee (BNC), the largest coalition in Palestinian civil society, is today challenging Israel’s multi-tiered system of oppression against the Palestinian people, which constitutes settler-colonialism, occupation and apartheid.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu is among the most eloquent voices accusing Israel of practicing apartheid against the Palestinian people. Leading South African Christian voices have told their Palestinian counterparts that Israel’s apartheid is “in its practical manifestations even worse than South African apartheid.”

With its continued siege of the occupied Gaza Strip; its wild construction of colonial settlements and the wall in the occupied West Bank, especially in and around Jerusalem; its intensifying forcible displacement of whole Palestinian communities in Jerusalem, the Jordan Valley and the Naqab (Negev); its adoption of a battery of vile racist laws and its obdurate denial of the UN-stipulated right of return for Palestinian refugees, who constitute the majority of Palestinians, Israel has embarked on an entirely more belligerent and violent phase in its feverish attempt to extinguish the question of Palestine.

Israel and its lobby groups, which even Thomas Friedman accuses of “buying and paying for” allegiance in Congress, have been trying to delegitimize the Palestinian quest for equal rights under international law by portraying the BDS Call’s emphasis on equal rights and the right of return as aiming to “destroy Israel.” If equality and justice would destroy Israel, what does that say about Israel? Did equality and justice destroy South Africa? Did they destroy Alabama? Of course not. Justice and equality only destroy their negation, injustice and apartheid, and this is precisely what Israel and its lobbies are running scared of, the effective and sustainable challenge of Israeli apartheid and colonial rule.

As to the venomous and patently false anti-Semitism smear thrown recklessly and maliciously at BDS activists in an explicit attempt to bully them into silence, it is increasingly seen today as a weapon of intellectual terror that is employed to stifle debate and free speech when the subject is Israel’s occupation and apartheid or the generous U.S. support for both. This time around, though, with the BDS movement’s solid human rights and international law credentials and track record, the anti-Semitism smear is hardly working.

BDS is categorically opposed to all forms of racism, including Islamophobia, anti-black racism and anti-Semitism. Anchored in international law and universal principles of human rights, BDS calls for equal rights for all humans, without discrimination. This universalist commitment has enabled BDS to spread in recent years at a spectacular rate within the mainstream of western societies, achieving one success after another, in the economic, academic and cultural boycott spheres. Israel is conceding that it is losing the battle for hearts and minds not just in Europe but also on U.S. campuses. Thus the panic, the vilification and the bullying attempts to crush the BDS conference at Penn.