Mencken's "Boob Dictionary"

My column as it appeared in the Baltimore Sun, Sunday, February 19, 2016
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-boob-dictionary-20160220-story.html

What's Bibi done for the U.S. lately?

By G. Jefferson Price III

     A few questions come to mind after Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s speech to members of Congress.

     Netanyahu repeatedly proclaimed his gratitude for the abiding U. S. support of Israel. “I want to thank you, Democrats and Republicans, for your common support for Israel, year after year, decade after decade. . . . Thank you America. Thank you for everything you do for Israel.”

     Here’s a question: What have you done for the United States, Bibi? Is it the construction of all those settlements illegally placed on occupied territory in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Golan Heights in direct defiance of international law and the specific policy of the United States government? Is it the relentless Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip marked by the occasional retaliatory assaults using U.S. supplied weapons, that in the last round left almost 2,000 Palestinians dead, the vast majority of them innocent civilians?

     Netanyahu’s adoring supporters in Congress would not pose these questions but the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz raised the issue in an editorial that appeared the day after Netanyahu’s speech, declaring that he ignored . “the real existential threat to Israel and its ability to survive as a “Jewish and democratic state”: the unending occupation of the territories. Israel’s insistence on ruling over millions of Palestinians in the West Bank who lack civil rights, expanding the settlements and keeping residents of the Gaza Strip under siege is the danger that threatens its future.”

     Or, in the catalog of what Netanyahu has done for the United States, might we include his personal part 13 years ago in the drumbeat for the invasion of Iraq.

  The Israeli prime minister’s speech to Congress this week was a redux of the case that Netanyahu – out of office at the time -- was making in print and in person before congress 13 years ago joining in the clamor for a U.S. invasion of Iraq.

     Writing in the Wall Street Journal Netanyahu declared “Two decades ago it was possible to thwart Saddam's nuclear ambitions by bombing a single installation [as Israel had done in 1981]. Today nothing less than dismantling his regime will do. For Saddam's nuclear program has changed. He no longer needs one large reactor to produce the deadly material necessary for atomic bombs. He can produce it in centrifuges the size of washing machines that can be hidden throughout the country – and Iraq is a very big country. Even free and unfettered inspections will not uncover these portable manufacturing sites of mass death.”

There were no nukes in Iraq, nor were there any of the other weapons of mass destruction that the circle of Bush neo-cons, joined by Israeli hawks like Netanyah, claimed there were in order to justify the invasion of Iraq.  The price to America: More than four thousand Americans killed in Iraq; more than 32,000 wounded. Some estimates put the number of Iraqis killed at more than 200,000.    Finally, when it’s all added up, estimates are that the war in Iraq will have cost the U.S. taxpayer somewhere between two and three trillion dollars. That’s not to mention the power vacuum caused by regime change that left Iran with unprecedented sway in Baghdad and ISIS holding terrifying sway in northern Iraq.

 So what does the United States get in return “for everything you’ve done for Israel?” Judging by Tuesday’s scene in the capitol, it’s the opportunity to stand in thunderous applause on the side of whatever Netanyahu believes is best not only for Israel, but for the United States as well. That seems to be good enough for Republican Speaker John Boehner and pretty much all the members of his party in Congress.

    But there were exceptions for which Americans may be grateful in the long run. They include the 50 who refused to attend the Netanyahu adoration exercise. And there was, most powerfully, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the House Minority Leader who was understandably outraged by the whole show: “I was near tears throughout the Prime Minister's speech -- saddened by the insult to the intelligence of the United States . . .  and saddened by the condescension toward our knowledge of the threat posed by Iran and our broader commitment to preventing nuclear proliferation."

FDR's promise to Saudi King, quickly broken

By G. Jefferson Price III

  If President Barack Obama had waited a few more weeks to meet up with King Salman bin Abdulaziz al Saud, who succeeded his brother Abdullah on the throne of Saudi Arabia last week, they could have marked the 70^th anniversary of the first meeting between a Saudi monarch and a U. S. president.

     That meeting occurred February 14, 1945 between President Franklin Roosevelt and King Abdulaziz ibn Saud, the first king of modern Saudi Arabia, who was transported from the Saudi port of Jidda aboard a U. S. Navy destroyer to the secret rendezvous with Roosevelt awaiting him aboard a U.S. cruiser in the Great Bitter Lake of the Suez Canal.

     Roosevelt was on his way home from Yalta, the Crimean resort town where he had held what was to be his last summit meeting with the leaders of America’s allies in World War II, Josef Stalin of the Soviet Union and Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Great Britain.

      Roosevelt’s chief  reason for meeting the king was to secure advantages for U. S. oil interests over those of Great Britain in the exploitation of the vast oil resources of the Saudi kingdom. They could not have picked a more appropriate date than St. Valentine’s Day for the beginning of what would abide as one of history’s most enduring love affairs between two countries whose cultures were as different then as they are today.

    The romance even included a vow quickly broken.

    The cultural differences were stark enough in this early meeting, turning the transport of Ibn Saud and his party into a bizarre challenge for the commanders of U. S. naval ships in the final days of World War II.

     Arranged in the utmost secrecy, Ibn Saud was to be taken to Roosevelt from Jidda aboard the U.S.S. Murphy. The Saudi king showed up with an entourage of some 200, including women from his harem, according to published descriptions of the voyage by Col. W. A. Eddy, the U. S. minister to Jidda, and Capt. John S. Keating, commander of the destroyer squadron that included the Murphy.

     Both Americans were appalled by the prospect of throwing together the king’s harem and the all-male crew of the Murphy who had been at sea and at war for more than three years. Equally appalling, in addition to his human entourage the king wanted to transport with him enough live sheep to guarantee that Islamic dietary laws restricting consumption to freshly slaughtered livestock would be followed.

    The human entourage was ultimately reduced to 48 people with no women, but including coffee servers, cooks and six huge Nubians with swords. The animal cargo was reduced from 100 to seven. “As the Murphy steamed out of Jidda harbor, to the amazement of the sailors, one of the sheep was already being skinned on the fantail of the destroyer,” Eddy recalled.

     In the two-night and a full day voyage, the king and his entourage stayed and slept under tents and over carpets that had been laid down on the deck of the Murphy. The king sat on a throne all day facing the forward deck except for the six times a day when he was called to prayer and faced toward Mecca whose direction would be determined by the Murphy’s navigator.

     Roosevelt and Ibn Saud seem to have immediately warmed to each other. In an exchange of gifts, the king gave Roosevelt an Arab robe of camel hair embroidered with gold threat, hand-painted bottles of perfume and a jewel-encrusted sword and dagger.
     Learning that the king was virtually immobilized by various infirmities, Roosevelt gave him one of his spare wheelchairs. He also gave him a DC-3 airplane equipped with a throne that swiveled so he could face Mecca at any time without standing.
     But Roosevelt could not move Ibn Saud on the issue of Jewish immigration to Palestine. Ibn Saud repeatedly rejected Roosevelt’s assertions that the Jews of Europe deserved a safe haven in Palestine after the horrors of the Holocaust.
     “Let the Germans pay,” Ibn Saud told Roosevelt, according to Eddy’s account of the meeting. “Amends should be made by the criminal, not the innocent bystander. What injury have the Arabs done to the Jews of Europe? It is the Christian Germans who stole their homes and lives.”
     Roosevelt did not agree with this formulation, but he did promise that with regards to the future of Palestine, which was then under British mandate, his government would not act in a way that would offend Arab sensitivities.
     On April 5, 1945, Roosevelt sent a letter to Ibn Saud confirming the promise he had made aboard the Quincy.

     "Your Majesty will recall that on previous occasions I communicated to you the attitude of the American Government toward Palestine and made clear our desire that no decision be taken with respect to the basic situation in that country without full consultation with both Arabs and Jews. ... [D]uring our recent conversation I assured you that I would take no action, in my capacity as Chief of the Executive Branch of this Government, which might prove hostile to the Arab people."

     Seven days after that letter was sent, Roosevelt was dead. Harry S. Truman became president and Roosevelt’s promise was set aside in favor of a policy that exists to this day.

      In 1947 Facing down critics warning him against a bias in favor of the partition of Palestine and the creation of a Zionist state, Truman explained: "I'm sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands of people who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents."

     G. Jefferson Price III is a former Middle East correspondent and foreign editor of The Baltimore Sun.

Saudi Arabia's brutal punishment of dissident

     By G. Jefferson Price III

Last Friday, as the world’s attention was riveted on the terrorists who murdered   French journalists for publishing cartoons and texts lampooning Islam and the Prophet Mohammed, a 30-year-old Saudi Arabian father of three was brought in shackles to the public square outside the Al Jafali mosque in the Saudi port city of Jeddah where he was flogged with 50 lashes of a cane.

     Friday’s 50 lashes were only a small part of the penalties heaped upon Raif Badawi for running a website inviting public discussion – and criticism – of the powerful clerics who hold sway in Saudi Arabia, enabled and empowered by the Saudi royal family.

     Under the terms of his punishment, Badawi will be back for 50 lashes again this Friday and every Friday for 19 weeks until he has received the full 1000 lashes of his sentence – unless, that is, the Saudis do as they have been asked to do by the U. S. government which called on “Saudi authorities to cancel this brutal punishment and to review Badawi’s case and sentence.”  In addition to the flogging, Badawi has been sentenced to 10 years in prison and fined a million Saudi riyals – about $266,000.

     And the U. S. government just wants our Saudi so-called allies in the war on terror to “review Badawi’s case and sentence.”? Actually, Badawi’s case already has been reviewed. In 2013, he was sentenced to seven years in prison and 600 lashes, but a Saudi court reviewing the case increased the penalty to the current ten years and 1000 lashes.

     These people are not our allies in the war on terror. Their own inhumane treatment of their own people enables, facilitates and inspires jihadists like the ones whose most recent targets were the journalists in Paris and the innocent clientele of a kosher grocery store on the outskirts of the French capital.

    An unnamed ‘Saudi official” is quoted in press reports denouncing the attacks in Paris last week as a “Cowardly terrorist act which Islam as well as other religions reject.” From the ruling royals: silence.

     And what would they call the public beating and imprisonment of Raif Badawi? An act of courage?

    Amnesty International, which denounced the Saudi conduct as a vicious act of cruelty, published an eyewitness description of the flogging that took place after Friday prayers at the Al Jafali mosque:

   According to this eyewitness: Badawi was removed from a bus in shackles and brought to the public square in front of the mosque in the middle of a crowd. 

 “A crowd gathered in a circle. Passers-by joined them and the crowd grew. But no one knew why Raif was about to be punished. Is he a killer, they asked? A criminal? Does he not pray?” the witness said.  

 “A security officer approached him from behind with a huge cane and started beating him. Raif raised his head towards the sky, closing his eyes and arching his back. He was silent, but you could tell from his face and his body that he was in real pain. The officer beat Raif on his back and legs, counting the lashes until they reached 50.”

     In support of the assertion that the Saudi kingdom is an ally in the war on terrorism, the Saudi embassy in Washington’s website presents a document entitled: The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia: Initiatives and Actions to Combat Terrorism,” the document describes the Saudi concept of a “Counter-Radicalization Program”:

     “The purpose of the program is to combat the spread and appeal of extremist ideologies among the general populous. It strives to instill the true values of the Islamic faith, such as tolerance and moderation. Central to this effort is education about the dangers of radical Islam—consisting of school and religious programs and popular pronouncements, and the provision of positive, alternative outlets for at-risk groups—such as encouraging participation in sporting events and athletic programs, social outings, etc.”

     “Tolerance and moderation?” How are these represented in the public beating and imprisonment of Raif Badawi for trying to open discussion about religious fanaticism and its hold on power in the Saudi kingdom?

     If it weren’t for the brutal realities of life in the kingdom and the utter hypocrisy of its rulers, these attitudes would be laughable, certainly worthy of satire and aggressive lampooning.

     Raif Badawi’s website did not come close to the level of insult or vulgarity served up by Charlie Hebdou in Paris.  In the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, that would have constituted apostasy for which the penalty in the kingdom is death. Precisely the sentence carried out by the terrorists in Paris last week.

    

     G. Jefferson Price III is a former Middle East correspondent and foreign editor of the Baltimore Sun.

    

Reflections on Gaza

     By G. Jefferson Price III

 

     Last Saturday, we celebrated the 31^st birthday of our youngest son, Sebastian. He was born in a maternity hospital on the outskirts of Jerusalem, across from the Qalandia Palestinian refugee camp where there is an Israeli checkpoint on the road from Jerusalem to Ramallah and further along to Nablus. Passage on that road was pretty easy then, even for Palestinians; now it is not.

     I was stationed in Jerusalem then as the Middle East correspondent for The Baltimore Sun. The morning of my son’s birth, July 26, 1983, I had gone to Gaza to interview a 38-year-old Palestinian mother of ten children, sitting in the rubble of her ramshackle home that had been demolished by the Israelis because it had been constructed beyond the legal boundary of the UN refugee camp where she lived.

     The woman’s name was Fatma Ubeid. The Israelis had demolished her home only two days after she delivered her tenth child whom she was nursing while sitting on a dilapidated couch amid the rubble of her home. Today, her children would be in their thirties or forties, if they are still alive. Survival was never easy in the Gaza Strip, even when the Israelis were not pounding the place to smithereens as they were on my son’s most recent birthday last month when The New York Times reported: “More than 140 bodies were recovered across Gaza on Saturday — including 21 members of one family — raising the Palestinian death toll to 1,139, most of them civilians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. On the Israeli side, 42 soldiers and three civilians have been killed.”

        One hundred and forty bodies, including 21 members of one family!  Why is the life of one Israeli worth so much more than the life of one Palestinian, or, as in this case, a hundred Palestinians?

      If the children of Fatma Ubeid left homeless by the Israeli army on the morning of my son’s birth 31 years ago are still alive, I expect they are very angry people. They have had good cause to be angrier and angrier since the Israelis tore down the roof from over their heads leaving them to baste in the merciless heat, trying to comfort their wailing mother. Nothing the Israelis have done in the ensuing three decades has brought comfort or encouragement to the people who live in Gaza. Quite the opposite. So much so that we should not be surprised that they hate the Israelis enough to want to kill them even if they have to kill themselves in the process.

      Gaza is a desperate place. On the best of days, it is a shit hole, quite literally. A Palestinian population of more than 1.5 million lives there crammed onto a squalid piece of land that is less than half the size of Cape Cod. And nothing really works.

      Electric power is sporadic – practically non-existent now that the Israelis have destroyed the main power plant.

. The water is unclean.

   The sewage system – such as it is -- is overwhelmed. (You get a pretty clear picture of this on most days flying into Tel Aviv airport over the mud-colored waste that flows directly into the Mediterranean Sea from Gaza.)

    The unemployment rate in Gaza is over 30 per cent.

   The vast majority of the population is not originally “from” Gaza. They are the direct descendants of Palestinians who fled or were driven from their homes in what is now Israel during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. They have been refugees for more than half a century now in a place that originally was viewed as a temporary haven.

     Israeli mythology asserts that those who fled were enthusiastically following the exhortations of the Arab states that were so confident of victory that they soon would be able to return to their homes. Most of those who fled though were just trying to get out of the way. Many others were driven from their homes by the Israelis. Whole Arab villages were wiped out in the process.

     And here is a most important fact in any discussion about the difference today between the Israeli experience in Israel and the Palestinian experience in Gaza. It is a difference that no one seems to be talking about.

      An Israeli family that feels threatened by the rockets from Gaza can move to a safer place, even leave Israel for a safer country any time they want to.

     A Palestinian family in the Gaza Strip cannot do that. At one end of the Gaza Strip Israel controls the border and hardly anyone is allowed out. At the other end Egypt controls the border and hardly anyone is allowed out that way. There is no airport for Palestinians to fly out. Leaving by boat is not possible. The Israel navy has the coastline blocked.

     So Gaza is a trap. And the people trapped there are being killed or wounded by the hundreds and thousands. They must be terrified. And they must be enraged. Enraged enough to want to kill their lifelong enemies. And given that Washington supplies Israel with weaponry that goes far beyond the stuff needed for the protective shield that has worked so successfully against missiles launched from Gaza, it’s hardly surprising that Americans are also considered the enemy.

.     And these Palestinians are not going away. Instead the entrapped and enraged population of Gaza (not to mention the West Bank) increases exponentially. Thirty years ago the population was half a million. Today it is three times as many and growing.

     Thirty years ago Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization was the pariah that Hamas is treated as today. What, then, will tomorrow bring us and them?

    Probably something a lot scarier. Try the Islamic State in Palestine.

    

I Like Ike 

"Should any political party attempt to abolish Social Security . . . you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are Texas millionaires. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."

          Dwight D. Eisenhower, during his campaign for the Republican Party presidential nomination in 1952.

         Reading this passage in Michael Korda's biography "IKE: An American Hero," provided a marvelous reminder that the GOPs division between moderates and a hardline right, is nothing new. The hardline wing of the GOP, headed then by Sen. Robert A. Taft of Ohio, not only wanted to undo Social Security and other programs of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, just as the GOP today wants to undo President Obama's Affordable Care Act, they also opposed the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the billions spent in the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe from the ashes of World War II.

Crimea: Thought for the day

Putin:
 Rhymes with Stalin
'Nuf said