The Pollyanna "Liberals" Were Wrong about Iran & Khomeini; Now Wrong about PLO/PA and the Muslim Brotherhood

A lot of the so-called "liberals" & "progressives" in the United States have long championed the causes of tyrants abroad, whether Stalin or Castro or --more recently-- the Muslim Brotherhood and so on and so forth. This has often been done by presenting the tyrants or would be tyrants as representing the democratic will of the people or as being liberal, progressive and tolerant themselves. A classic case of how this was done appeared not long after Khomeini's regime took power in Iran. The new regime was extolled for its civil libertarian commitment.

We now know that Khomeini and his successors were and are anything but devoted to liberal values, to civil liberties, democracy, etc. However, Kai Bird, a very prominent "leftist" and "progressive" in the 1960s and 1970s fought valiantly to present this false image of Khomeini & Co. to the American public. When you read Mr Bird, think of the academic and media advocates of the Iran regime or the Muslim Brotherhood or Hamas or Fatah/PLO, and so on, today.

Bird wrote the following in an article that was featured on the front page of the "Liberal" weekly The Nation magazine [31 March 1979]:

. . .  there is every reason to believe that the still unpublished Constitution [of the brand new Iranian Islamic Republic] will include all the elements of a liberal democratic system. Minister of Information Nasser Menachi,  a close confidant of Bazargan and a man with impeccable civil libertarian credentials, told The Nation that "the new Constitution --which has been drafted by five foreign-trained jurists-- contains the strongest possible civil libertarian guarantees. . . . and Khomeini himself  has approved the document with but the most minor changes, a fact which should be read as an extremely good sign." The Ayatollah will reportedly have no formal office in the proposed Islamic Republic. Elections are scheduled to be held within several months after the adoption of the Constitution.
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Isn't this all just too noble, too precious, too lofty to be believable? It hardly corresponds to how the Ayatollah Khomeini and his successors have actually ruled Iran.

Does everyone see the pattern in this excerpt here? Consider the style here against the background of the tens of thousands --or hundreds of thousands or millions-- of victims of the Iranian regime over the years? Look at the grand phrases in this not very long paragraph: liberal democratic system & impeccable civil libertarian credentials & the strongest possible civil libertarian guarantees. 

How many readers of Emet m'Tsiyon would want to depend upon the civil libertarian guarantees of the Iranian regime? Now just how is it that Kai Bird and his editors at The Nation could not foresee what the Khomeini regime would produce, a regime that tramples civil liberties and pays lip service to them at best? A regime that is a caricature of democracy where the leading ayatollah, called the Supreme Guide, has the final say on everything, whatever the parliament may think?

Why couldn't Bird and his The Nation friends understand that the books that Khomeini had written, books in which he expressed a desire for a political regime based on Islam, Shiite Islam, explained what he would do if and when he took power? That that was the kind of regime he would erect and that civil liberties would bow before the needs of the regime of ayatollahs implementing Islam as they saw it and interpreted it? Did they ask what would happen to ethnic and religious minorities in Iran, such as Jews, Bahais, or Sunni Muslims, for that matter? Did Bird & Co. ask how women would fare under the ayatollahs who would apply strict Shiite Muslim rules to them? Did they ask whether Khomeini's ostensible loyalty to or tolerance for democracy and civil liberties, and the comforting, liberal-sounding slogans that he and his associates threw out from time to time might not have been mere dissembling for the purpose of gaining and consolidating power?

Were Bird and his friends naive, ignorant, simpleminded or simply deceitful? We may ask the same question today about Washington policy specialists and American academics who promote the cause of the Muslim Brotherhood or Hizbullah or Hamas or Fatah or the so-called "palestine liberation organization."
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Now that we know what "liberal" establishment journalism and its predictions are worth in the United States -- and elsewhere, let's talk a little about Kai Bird. He was known as being hostile to Israel back in the 1960s, when that was less fashionable than today. He had been in Israel during his rather privileged childhood when his father, an American diplomat, and his family lived in the Jordanian-occupied sector of Jerusalem from which all Jews were driven out, starting in December 1947. Young Master Bird crossed the Armistice Line, the Green Line, every day that he went to school. This was the Anglican school on Street of the Prophets [רחוב הנביאים] in "west Jerusalem" under Israeli control. The school is still there although in the past 20 or 25 years it has raised its stone outer wall by three or four feet. Little Master Bird crossed on every school day the Mandelbaum Gate, actually a border crossing built partly over the home of a family named Mandelboym [the proper Yiddish pronunciation]. The house had been destroyed in the fighting in 1948. The colony of Westerners living in Jordanian-occupied Jerusalem was notorious in those days for being fanatically anti-Israel and anti-Jewish. Bird and his family lived in the Sheikh Jarrah quarter near the Orient House, the American Colony Hotel, and the old Jewish neighborhoods of Shimon haTsadiq, Nahalat Shimon, and Siebenbergen Houses from which the Jewish residents had been driven out in December 1947 and January 1948.

From the Mandelboym Gate crossing Bird and his schoolmates from the Jordanian sector traveled down Tribes of Israel Street [Shivtey Yisra'el שבטי ישראל], formerly St George Street under the British, which name Jordan kept for the street on its side of the armistice line. The pupils traveled for about one-half kilometer down to Street of the Prophets, turning right into and traveling on it for about a kilometer or more. They were escorted, to my knowledge, by armed Israeli troops. But they were also protected by the power and prestige of the empires and governments that they and their families represented.

As to Kai Bird's honesty, I have read several reviews of his autobiography for this blog post, and I don't find any reference to his  activity with the American "New Left" in the 1960s, 1970s and afterwards. I have to conclude that he left that information out of his book. He apparently decided that references to his "New Left" activism would not be useful or beneficial to him or his political purposes.

More on the US pro-Islam, pro-Arab Policy

US policy in the Middle East in the 20th century followed in the footsteps of British Middle Eastern policy, and can be seen as a continuation of it. It was no accident that the British upper crust called the American elite "our American cousins." Indeed, this was often true in a literal sense as many titled Britishers married rich American men and women. Therefore, cousins were found on both sides of the Atlantic.

British policy announced a pro-Islamic turn in 1920 when the Supreme Command of the WW One allies, the Entente powers, ordered the Greek army to stop advancing in Anatolia, and thereby to stop defeating the Turkish army. There is reason to believe that Britain was the leading power pushing for the order to the Greeks to stop. In that same year, British officers in Jerusalem --in what was then officially called Occupied Enemy Territory Administration-South-- encouraged Haj Amin el-Husseini to instigate anti-Jewish riots in order to discourage Great Power approval of the Jewish National Home principle at the San Remo Conference. This British encouragement for Arab violence against Jews in Israel was not at that time the official policy out of London but seems to have been a local initiative of British officers in the country, some or all of whom had been influenced by the notorious Tsarist forgery/plagiarism, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Later, the London policy towards the Jewish National Home followed the local initiative and became hostile to the Jews, encouraging Arab hostility to Jews in the country. In other words, the Arabs became a tool of London for its own anti-Jewish hostility.

Back in Anatolia, in 1922, naval ships of the UK, US and other Western Great Powers watched as Ataturk's new Turkish army drove the Greeks of Anatolia and Smyrna into the sea at the Smyrna port, although Greek boats of all sorts were allowed to pick up refugees. Meanwhile, the powers did not oppose renewed massacres of Armenians in the city [see George Horton, Marjorie Housepian]. The new revolutionary Soviet Union also sided with the Turks in those years, thereby taking the same stance as the Western capitalist powers.

In other parts of the British Empire, the British encouraged Muslims against non-Muslims, and Arabs against non-Arab Muslims. In India, the UK encouraged Muslim demands for a separate state ["pakistan", which had never existed before] against the aspiration of the Indian National Congress for a unified India. In the former Ottoman Empire, the UK saw to it that the vilayet [province] of Mosul, inhabited not by Arabs but by Kurdish Muslims , Assyrian Christians, Jews and smaller ethno-religious groups, be transferred to the new, British-sponsored Kingdom of Iraq and taken away from the new Turkish Republic. Some say that this was because oil had been discovered in and around the city of Mosul, which would be more under British influence as a part of Iraq --then under a British mandate-- than as a part of Turkey. In Iraq, the British winked at the massacre of thousands of Assyrians in 1933 at the hands of the Iraqi Arab army.

During WW2, the UK violated its mandate to foster development of the Jewish National Home by severely limiting the number of Jews to be allowed to immigrate into the Jewish National Home when the Jews most needed a home. This was the notorious 1939 White Paper policy. More generally, UK foreign minister Anthony Eden came out in support of pan-Arab nationalism by calling for formation of what became the Arab League. Eden's speech came on 29 May 1941, just three days before the notorious pro-Nazi pogrom against Jews in Baghdad [1 & 2 June 1941]. Hence, it would have been only natural for Eden to keep British troops outside Baghdad at that time from intervening to stop the massacre of the Jews. Be that as it may, British troops there at that time did not intervene.

When the Jewish underground in Israel was fighting for independence and to have the UK let Jewish Holocaust survivors into the country, the UK continued to refuse to honor its commitments under the mandate. Although Pres. Truman had called for 100,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors to be allowed into Israel by the UK in 1946, by 1947 the US State Dept and other USGovt agencies were encouraging the Arab war effort against the as yet unborn Israel. Here the US slipped into the role of continuing the British anti-Jewish, pro-Arab, pro-Muslim policy.
The UK in Israel supported Arab forces against the Jews, fighting the Jews directly in Yafo [Jaffa] and in Jerusalem.

In 1952, British and US operatives encouraged and helped Nasser and his pro-Hitlerite "Free Officers" to overthrow the parliamentary monarchy of King Farouq. Mubarak belonged to the regime put in place by Nasser and the "Free Officers" in 1952. In that year, American mainstream publications celebrated the fall of King Farouq by explaining that the rebels were against Farouq's "corruption." In Iraq, in the 1960s and 1970s, the USA supported the Arab national socialist Ba`ath Party, the crowning glory of which was Saddam Hussein. After Israeli aircraft had destroyed the Iraqi Osirak atomic development facility [1981], the US administration wanted to denounce Israel for this defensive action, although it did not because public opinion was with Israel. The US also formally "recognized" the PLO in November 1988, although high level contacts with the PLO had gone on for decades.

In early 1979, the Carter Administration --its foreign policy directed by the Sorcerer's Apprentice, Zbigniew Brzezinski-- helped the Islamist fanatic Ayatollah Khomeini, take over Iran. Was Zbig unaware of Khomeini's fanaticism and bigotry? It was no secret to specialists on Iran at that time where Khomeini stood. Likewise, James Clapper, Obama's director of national intelligence [Intelligence?], knows where the Muslim Brotherhood stands and pretended it was something else. Interestingly, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's national insecurity advisor has also been an advisor to Obama. Zbig's grand theory was and --apparently-- still is to build up Islamic fanaticism. No doubt in pursuit of this purpose, Obama sent Zbig to Damascus in February 2008, months before his election. Zbig was probably supposed to tell Junior Assad that if Obama were elected, then the Assads would have a friend in the White House. The fact that Damascus and Assad's very own mouth are world centers of Judeophobic agitprop and hate indoctrination, did not deter either Zbig or Obama.

These facts among others are the background to Obama administration efforts to put the Muslim Brotherhood in power in Egypt. I think that the disciples of Zbig succeeded all too well in Iran. We don't need another Khomeini, this time in Egypt. But stopping Obama's goal from being realized needs constant criticism of Obama for the dangerous course that he is taking.

Sources
Mitchell Bard, The Arab Lobby (New York: Harper Collins 2010) [a lengthy excerpt is found here]
Isaiah Friedman, British Pan-Arab Policy, 1915-1922 (2009) [see synopsis here & here]
Martin Gilbert, Exile and Return (London 1978)
George Horton, The Blight of Asia [Horton was the US consul in Smyrna in 1922]
Marjorie Housepian, The Smyrna Affair
Lord Kinross, Ataturk; A Biography of Mustafa Kemal (1965)

Richard Meinertzhagen, Middle East Diary
Jacques de Morgan, The History of the Armenian People (Boston: Hairenik Press 1918)
Horace Samuel, Revolt by Leave (London)
E K Sarkisian & R G Sahakian, Vital Issues in Modern Armenian History (Watertown, MA: Armenian Studies 1965)
Shlomo Slonim, "The 1948 American Embargo on Arms to Palestine," Political Science Quarterly, (Fall 1979)
Bernard Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe, 1939-1945.
_ _ _ _ _ _. The British in Palestine: The Mandatory Government and the Arab-Jewish Conflict 1917-1929. (British Historical Society)
Meir Zamir [see several online articles by Zamir on British policy in the 1944 to 1948 period in HaArets & Jerusalem Post]
William Ziff, The Rape of Palestine

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One Jerusalem on the changes in Egypt [includes link to Victor David Hanson].
2-24-2011 At least one mainstream journalist, Arnaud de Borchgrave, talks common sense about the Muslim Brotherhood. If he could only get the ears of Obama, Hilary, James Clapper, and the other fantasy mongers in the Administration [here]
Another MSM journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg, also gives helpful info about the MB's hatred of Jews, specifically Qaradawi's explanation that Muslim hatred of Jews is rooted in Islam and that Muslims must kill all Jews before Judgment Day can come [here]. For those unfamiliar with Islamic lore, this article demonstrates that hatred for Israel is rooted in Islam's hatred for Jews and has nothing especially to do with "settlements" or "occupation."

"Leftist" English Prof Publishes Propaganda Excuses for Obama in the Nation Mag

When fascism comes to America,
it will be called anti-fascism.
attributed to Huey Long, governor of Louisiana

The Nation mag today is a rag publishing support for State Dept postions in the name of Leftism [whatever that means today]. At one time, back in the 1940s, it criticized the State Dept for its anti-Israel policy . Now it supports State Dept policy. This may be due to a series of ownership changes that the weekly underwent back in the 1970s. One purchaser was Hamilton Fish IV [or the III or the V?]. Young Fish's grandfather was Republican Senator Hamilton Fish who, to be honest, provided some help to the campaign to save Jews during the Holocaust, going so far as to criticize President Franklin Roosevelt [as I recall]. Where young Fish or his successor owners stood I don't know. As far back as 1979, the Nation supported Ayatollah Khomeini's takeover of Iran, which was also supported by Zbigniew Brzezinski, at that time, Jimmy Carter's national insecurity advisor. Zbig is now advising the Obama campaign for president. Zbig's presence in his campaign indicates the fraud of Obama's claim to represent the new, the fresh, the innocent, untainted by Washington's corruption. That fakery by Obama shows just how dangerous he could be.

Obama's campaign of fraud & imposture has thankfully run into some snags, including a silly Harvard Professor who can't keep her mouth shut. Samantha Power embarassed Obama repeatedly during her European tour and has since resigned. Curiously, Zbig wanted Samantha Power to stay with the Obama campaign. Maybe he wanted her as a soft-feminine face to cover his brutal plans to bring the world more Khomeinis, more Hamas gangs, and more Hizbullah.
Here's a gem from a Nation editorial in support of the Khomeini takeover of Iran in 1979. After Khomeini's takeover of Iran in early 1979, supported by the Brzezinski/Carter team, a committee was appointed in Iran to draw up a new constitution. The Nation described the members of this committee as men of:

"impeccable civil libertarian credentials."

Today, everyone can judge the civil libertarian nature of the Iranian regime for himself.

Be that as it may, recently, a Nation columnist Eric Alterman, an English prof at Brooklyn College, has written a propaganda tract defending Obama, Zbig, & Company. Alterman exemplifies several propaganda techniques in his article: appeal to authority, omission of vital information, sneering at opponents and critics rather than answering them substantively..

Here is a column by Richard Cohen of the Washington Post, of all papers, that details Obama's offensive relationship with a Judeophobic minister who admires the Judeophobic demagogue, Louis Farrakhan.

Debbie Schlussel uncovered evidence of "Nation of Islam" personnel on the Obama staff in DC and in his campaign.

Alterman defends Obama by omitting information & misrepresenting Obama's critics.

During the past few months a small group of neoconservative Jews, many of whom hold key positions in the world of official Jewish institutions, have been working to undermine the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama with a series of carefully planted character assassinations and deliberately misleading innuendo.

So the opposition to Obama is based on innuendo and character assassination. No mention of his minister, Rev Wright's attacks on Israel appears in the article. Indeed, Rev Wright does not appear at all in the article. Nor does Tony Rezko, a Chicago slumlord and Obama's Syrian financier, appear in the article. But further down in the article, Alterman mentions the concerns that some Jews have over Zbigniew Brzezinski being one of Obama's advisors. We ought to conclude that Zbig is his main foreign policy advisor, since he has already undertaken a trip to Syria on Obama's behalf. What does it mean that Obama's foreign policy advisor goes to visit Syria, a bloodthirsty Arab dictatorship which just happens to be the junior partner in an alliance with Islamofascist Iran, a country where the present regime was helped to take power by that same Brzezinski in 1979??? Alterman treats all this as mere "guilt by association," like the often reckless guilt-by-association charges made by Senator Joseph McCarthy back in the early 1950s.

. . . the neoconnish campaign against Obama was not able to gain much traction. Perhaps as a consequence, as the Forward {Alterman quotes the "leftist" Jewish paper, once the major Yiddish newspaper in the United States-Eliyahu} has editorialized, "the attacks on Obama have metastasized into a wide-ranging assault on his associations." These attacks, as blogger Matthew Yglesias notes, have largely amounted to the following: "First Obama was an anti-Semite because Zbigniew Brzezinski is an anti-Semite. Then Obama was an anti-semite because Robert Malley is an anti-semite. And now according to [Commentary's Noah] Pollack [sic] it's Samantha Power who's tainted by Jew-hatred."

Well, maybe they are really Judeophobes, including Malley whose father was a Jewish Communist. Let's just wonder at this point at how the son of a prominent Communist becomes a high official of the State Department, whereas back in the fifties, Communists were anathema in the United States. Zbig was raised in Nazi Germany as the son a Polish diplomat there. While in office as jimmy carter's gray eminence [eminence grise] Zbig helped Khomeini takeover Iran, as said above, badgered poor Menahem Begin to make concessions to Nazi-sympathizer Anwar Sadat, and turned his back on the civil war in Lebanon, which the US could have done much to alleviate. Moreover, by supporting Khomeini, Zbig opened the way to all kinds of horrors, the Iranian bomb and the fanatic ayatollahs oppression of their own people and the Hizbullah, which killed hundreds of Americans in bombings in Beirut. By using fanatic Sunni Muslims to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, Zbig helped to make Osama bin Ladin into a major threat to the world.
All this seems either unknown to Alterman and Matthew Iglesias or is unimportant to them. Of course, Alterman also tries to belittle Zbig's advisory relationship to Obama.

According to a report in Newsweek, Ann Lewis, a senior adviser to Hillary Clinton, made reference during a conference call with Jewish leaders to Brzezinski, whom she falsely labeled Obama's "chief foreign policy adviser." (In fact, according to Brzezinski, he has advised Obama on a total of one occasion.) While Brzezinski did anger some Jews with his endorsement of the controversial Walt/Mearsheimer book, his views are not only well within the foreign policy mainstream; they are also completely consistent with those expressed by a majority of American Jews--far more so than those hawks who profess to speak in their name.

Besides groundlessly belittling the Zbig-Obama relationship, there are other curiosities in this statement. First, our "leftist" Alterman lightly steps over the very deceitful walt-mearsheimer book, a propaganda tract written by two very Establishment political scientists, indeed w&m are State Dept consultants. Then, Alterman tells us that Zbig's views are "well within the foreign policy mainstream." How is it that our "leftist" Alterman defends a maker of foreign policy whose views are "mainstream," that is, Establishment?? Further, just which foreign policy views of Zbig are consistent with those of most American Jews. A few months after 9-11, Zbig was interviewed for the French paper, Le Monde. He was asked if he had any regrets for arming and aiding otherwise the Muslim fanatics fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, since some of them, led by Bin Laden, had carried out the 9-11 attack. No, he said, he had no regrets since Soviet losses in the Afghan war had brought down the Soviet Union. In other words, everything was OK. I hope those Americans who advocate a foreign policy based on "pure American interests" consider this answer by Zbig. Recall that the Soviets, however evil they were throughout the world, never carried out mass murder attacks on American civilians within the United States. That's how Zbig is loyal to the safety of American civilians.
Alterman makes another curious defense of Robert Malley mentioned above.

CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America. . . [declared] that Malley's articles on Middle East issues "demonize Israel only slightly less than his father." This is nonsense, naturally. Former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger and former State Department officials Dennis Ross, Martin Indyk, Aaron David Miller and Daniel Kurtzer, all of whom worked with Malley, signed a letter denouncing "a series of vicious personal attacks" against him.

So "leftist" Alterman wants us to take the word of Malley's State Dept and National Security colleagues that "personal attacks" on Malley were "vicious" and presumably unjustified. Bear in mind that Sandy Berger is notorious for stealing and destroying US govt documents in order to protect himself from criticism. Berger was also the national insecurity advisor when the Clinton Adminstration went to war against Serbia, twice. Does "leftist" Alterman approve of those wars?? Could a "vicious" critic of US policy in the Clinton years see those wars as "imperialist"??? Those wars helped to ethnically cleanse hundreds of thousands of Serbs from Croatia and Kossovo. They also helped to set up a govt of drug smugglers and white slavers in Kossovo. Is all that OK with Alterman?? By the way, I have put in boldface Alterman's remark that it's "nonsense" that Malley is less an enemy of Israel than his father, Simon Malley. Does Alterman's remark mean that Malley hates Israel more than his father did??

Let's conclude with some warnings about Obama that Alterman ridicules:

Morton Klein, who heads up the . . . Zionist Organization of America, . . . term[ed] the notion of an Obama presidency "frightening." He was joined by Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice president of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the umbrella group that professes to speak for all American Jews. Hoenlein told the Israeli daily Ha'aretz that Obama's talk of "change" could prove "an opening for all kinds of mischief" and gave voice to what he termed "a legitimate concern over the zeitgeist around the campaign."

Now, full disclosure. I have met both Klein and Hoenlein. In fact, I first met Hoenlein many years ago. I have not always agreed with him, but I always believed that Hoenlein was an honest man who spoke his sincere beliefs. Further, Dr Hoenlein has a PhD in political science, whereas we are told that Alterman is a "Distinguished Professor of English." That alone does not mean that Hoenlein is superior in the knowledge of politics to Alterman. But since Zbig was and is a prominent political scientist, it is more likely that Hoenlein is familiar with Zbig's often terrifying writings than Alterman and it is likely that Hoenlein understands these matters better. Indeed, I wholeheartedly agree with Hoenlein that Obama's demagogic talk about "change" could open the door for "all kinds of mischief." Alterman belittles all of these very genuine concerns that an informed, intelligent and civilized man ought to share.
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Here is more on Obama, the Obama-Zbig connection and on Alterman:
Noah Pollak responds to Alterman on the Contentions blog.
Ted Belman of Israpundit on Zbig: here & here & here
Spengler, columnist for the Asia Times, examines Obama's character.
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Coming: More lies of the "peace process," peace follies, propaganda, Jews in Jerusalem, Hebron, the Land of Israel, etc.