A pack of Jew-lovers

Ali Abunimah is Electronic Intifada co-founder. Here he talks to Amy Goodman about the presidential candidates:

A pre-note:

What's the meaning of "pack"?

* a group of people or things: a pack of fools; a pack of lies.
* a group of certain animals of the same kind, esp. predatory ones: a pack of wolves.

Here is what he says about Obama. Please note the barely concealed verbal violence of the way he describes the presidential nominees:

... they have all gone out of their way to express full support for what Israel is doing. Barack Obama is not distinguished from the rest of the pack, except by for how far he has moved to try to appease AIPAC and pro-Israel movements.

I remember, Amy -- I knew Barack Obama for many years as my state senator -- when he used to attend events in the Palestinian community in Chicago all the time. I remember personally introducing him onstage in 1999, when we had a major community fundraiser for the community center in Deheisha refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. And that's 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. And just yesterday, he apparently sent a letter to Zalmay Khalilzad, the US ambassador at the UN, to urge the US not to allow any resolution to pass criticizing Israel and saying how Israel was forced to impose this barbaric medieval siege on [Gaza].

About Clinton:

...we saw Hillary Clinton, the moment her political ambitions became pronounced, shift. You'll remember, when she spoke in the 1990s in favor of a Palestinian state, since then she has become one of the most anti-Palestinian hawks. For example, a couple of years ago, she went and staged a photo opportunity in an Israeli settlement by the apartheid wall and talked about how the wall was necessary. This wall, of course, which has been condemned as illegal by the International Court of Justice, which has ordered Israel to tear it down, Hillary Clinton went and stood in front of it and endorsed it.

John McCain

... talks like a maverick on other issues, but on this one he has gone out of his way to offer full support for Israel.


Implicit in Abunimah's complaints is the convinction that all presidential candidates are actually corrupt, no better than beasts of prey, posturing for the sake of the Jewish vote. He expresses the classical victim syndrome, of whining and eschewing all responsibility for any agency in the Palestinian choices for their own misery.

He should be reading with extra care Bradley Burston's letter to Palestinians in order to get an idea as to a much stronger "why" Obama, Clinton, McCain are not fiercer champions of the Palestinian cause:

Worse, perhaps, is the way in which you took deadly aim at the concept of land for peace, and destroyed it, perhaps for all time. Your artful justifications of using Gaza settlement ruins for Qassam launchers wash with no one. You have justified every last claim and prediction of the Israeli right. You have lost immeasurable international support. You are looked upon abroad as Polarized to the heart, paralyzed by internal strife, and unable to arrive at, abide by, or implement decisions.

True, Israel was once isolated, stigmatized, universally condemned, boycotted. But your actions, and those of Bin Laden and Iran, have effectively welcomed Israel into the good graces of a range of countries which have begun to think twice about you. And have ceased to care about you. No country in the world - Israel included - has cried wolf more often in the past than you have. Now, when your distress is truly worse than ever, the cry has fallen on deaf - or hostile - ears.

...Your celebration of terror has alienated many of your closest friends. You did this. You. No one else. You have convinced exactly those Israelis who were willing to trade the West Bank for peace, that this would be a literally fatal error.

...Last month, as if to remove the remainder of doubt, the veteran Palestinian Authority Representative in Lebanon.. told a Lebanese television station, "Let me tell you, when the ideology of Israel collapses, and we take, at least, Jerusalem, the Israeli ideology will collapse in its entirety, and we will begin to progress with our own ideology, Allah willing, and drive them out of all of Palestine."

AMNON RUBINSTEIN also on The Jerusalem Post, further explains why Palestinians are no longer as warmly supported as they used to be just a few years ago:

Such is the Hamas policy: not only an endless blood-letting war against the Zionist entity, but also a readiness to lose their hold over Gaza as part of this war. This signifies a readiness not only to sacrifice the lives of men, women and children, but also a readiness to sacrifice the very regime they established not long ago through a violent coup. In other words, it is a process of political suicide writ large: The shahid is not only the individual, but the regime itself.

Suicide in the struggle against Israel has acquired a degree of legitimacy the West cannot even fathom.

This unpalatable conclusion must be confronted. On the one hand, it should drive us to increase our efforts to reach some sort of modus vivendi with the PLO to decrease the impact of the fanatics (despite the fact that any such compromise will be rejected by Iran and its cohorts); while on the other hand, Israel, as well as the West, should be prepared for a long, irrational and costly war, unlike any other fought in the past.

And here is some further illumination from an unexpected quarter