Monthly Archives: June 2010

After its second consecutive display of judicial activism on the matter, the Supreme Court has reiterated that individual’s have a Constitutional Right to bear arms. In popular lore – as accepted by the Court’s conservative majority – individuals have a right to protect themselves against an oppressive government. As I have written before, deep in the American historical consciousness, there is this romantic notion of the Founding Fathers as revolutionaries. If in fact that is the basis on which the Second Amendment stands, then under today’s standard wouldn’t our “revolutionaries” who were insurgents and fought by guerrilla warfare, be considered today analogous to terrorists? And how different is a Jihadist than an insurgent whose reason for fighting is to defend one’s nation?

(As an aside, the term “jihad”, roughly meaning “struggle”, outside of the spiritual context was historically used to refer to an obligation to defend one’s nation against foreign attack. In modern Arabic, the term is also a common first name amongst Arab Christians).

Isn’t there something incredibly Jihadist in the psyche of the American who truly believes that the Second Amendment grants an individual the right to armed insurgency? The whole idea of “Second Amendment Remedies” is a fairly standard Republican talking point spewed from the likes of Newt Gingrich to Sharron Angle. According to Ms. Angle,

You know, our Founding Fathers, they put that Second Amendment in there for a good reason and that was for the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government. And in fact Thomas Jefferson said it’s good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years. I hope that’s not where we’re going, but, you know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying my goodness what can we do to turn this country around? I’ll tell you the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out.

As is usually the case, though, we don’t always appreciate that each of our American values be spread around the world. Also times change. For example, contrary to British protests, our closest allies, the Israelis, unashamedly commemorate the Israeli terrorist bombing that killed British and Arab citizens in 1946. And even though idealist American writers such as Hemingway and Langston Hughes, took up arms against the Franco regime during the Spanish Civil War, under the current political climate, fighting an oppressive regime is tantamount to an act of terrorism against the U.S., even when the U.S. is not a party to that conflict (as is the case of Somali Americans traveling to take up arms in Somalia). During the war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, then Senators Dole and Lieberman had proposed a bill to lift the arms embargo, so as to give the Bosnians a fair chance. Can you imagine our Second Amendment guardians in favor of exporting an American style right to bear arms to the Afghanis, Iraqis or even the Palestinians?

So for all those who believe in this radical Jihadist reading of the Second Amendment as a fundamental pillar of American democracy, should the U.S. be pushing a similar right to bear arms when promoting democracy around the world?

I recently observed that in the face of the undeniable fact of Israeli’s existence — a country that is a member of the U.N., with embassies around the world, universal health care, 8,419 millionaires (2,519 new ones since 2008), nuclear weapons, and billions of dollars in aid from the world’s largest military power —  the real question should be whether the Palestinians have a right to exist.

Today, according to the Associated Press, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman answered that question: “As an optimist, I see no chance that a Palestinian state will be established by 2012.” In other words, not yet.

At the suggestion of ReWrite, here is a video from The Chappelle Show that serves as a good accompaniment to yesterday’s post on the Republicans’ cynical worldview of due process for corporations only.

There are always two sides to every story, at least that is what we are supposed to believe. Personally, in this story I have no stake. I am not a Christian or Muslim Arab and I am not a descendant of European or American Jews. As an American – and one who grew up amongst a large Jewish minority outside of Washington, DC, I do have a certain natural affinity for Jewish culture. As a matter of fact, I have probably been to a synagogue (for bar mitzvahs and weddings) more times than I have been in a Christian church of any denomination.

Furthermore, I – with my well-trained American olfactory sense for sniffing political incorrectness and racism – now live in Europe and can attest to the fact that Europe is not an option for Jews. Even more than a half century after the Holocaust, I cannot think of a single European country that is comfortable with sharing its society with a non-indigenous, non-Christian minority. Europeans define themselves as European, not on shared values or citizenship (in a strictly political sense), but on ethnicity alone. Full stop. It shouldn’t be surprising then that while most Europeans would not consider themselves anti-Semitic, the vast majority side with the Palestinians over the Israelis. Ironically, though, Europeans are more openly hostile to Muslims than they are to Jews.

So there you have it: regardless of what Helen Thomas may think, Jews of European descent really don’t have the option of going back to Europe. On the other hand, though, you have all of the Palestinians – both Christians and Muslims – who have spent the last half century asking themselves why they should have to pay the price for the Europeans’ brutality towards the Jews. They’re wondering why an American from New York or a Russian has more rights in and to the land they grew up in than they do. And just as I have grown up with the children of those who were forced to flee for their lives from Europe to the U.S., I also know Palestinians who have lost their family homes, quite literally, to Americans and Europeans resettling in Israel.

So without taking any sides – once again as I have absolutely no stake in the dispute – I read Rabbi David F. Nesenoff’s critique of Helen Thomas in today’s Washington Post. Rabbi Nesenoff happens to be the person to whom Ms. Thomas uttered those very unfortunate words about how the Jews should leave Palestine and return to Europe and America, inevitably causing Thomas to resign her position as a White House journalist.

Interestingly enough, what Rabbi Nesenoff finds most troublesome is that Ms. Thomas justified her comments by declaring that she was “from Arab descent”. (Ms. Thomas’ father was an Arab Christian immigrant to the U.S.)

For the next few paragraphs Rabbi Nesenoff discredits Thomas’ conclusion with a few different predictable arguments about the inherent anti-Semitism in her statement and how it denies a two-state solution to the crisis, and even how the Bible grants this land to the Jews. But in the end, he too denies the other’s right to co-exist, offering little more than the exact mirror of Thomas’ “because I am from Arab desecent”:

My grandmother used to kibitz, “Friends you choose; family you’re stuck with.” The Jew is stuck with Israel. There is no ungluing the connection. It is beyond the ambiguous term “chosen people”; they are “the people who have no choice.” It is more than a religious belief; it is a value and a moral barometer of the Earth. History, truth, integrity and the foundation of our world are not negotiable.

In other words, this land is mine because I am Jewish. And you are not.

At least both of them are comfortable in the U.S., as long as they don’t move to Arizona.