Time Mag's Joe Klein Vents Fury at Israeli PM

Ricki Hollander
CAMERA Media Analysis
01 June '11

http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=2&x_outlet=37&x_article=2054

Professional journalists are ostensibly governed by a code of ethics requiring them to report fairly and accurately about events and issues that shape the world. Not only news reporters, but political columnists as well, are obligated under well-known standards to stick to the truth. The most persuasive opinion writers are those who lay out verifiable facts and interpret their larger meaning for readers, persuasively but dispassionately, without emotion.

Time Magazine's political columnist, Joe Klein, however, is clearly not amongst this group. Klein's May 26th column, "What Bibi Gains by Misrepresenting Obama's Middle East Policy," written after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put forth Israel's negotiating position in Congress, overflows with burning hostility toward Netanyahu and his stance on Israel's borders. Of course, Klein did not acknowledge his own animosity toward his subject matter; he attributed this instead to President Obama:

...it wasn't hard to imagine smoke jetting from the President's ears as Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, willfully misinterpreted Obama's statement about the need to renegotiate Israel's borders...

But it was quite obvious whose ears were jetting smoke, and that smoke clouded the factual accuracy of his column.

Far from "wilfully misinterpreting" Obama's statement, Israel's leader was objecting to the president's departure from previous US administration policy, which had always avoided publicly delineating baseline borders and thereby leaving little room for negotiation and compromise. Arab-Israeli peace negotiations have always been based on UN Resolutions 242 and 338, which did not envision Israel returning to the June 4, 1967 (i.e. 1949 armistice) lines, as they were considered indefensible. While Obama later sought to justify his public declaration that "1967 lines"would serve as a starting point for negotiations, by indicating his reference to "mutually agreed swaps," columnist Charles Krauthammer pointed out the weakness of that argument :

"Mutually" means both parties have to agree. And if one side doesn't? Then, by definition, you're back to the 1967 lines. Nor is this merely a theoretical proposition. Three times the Palestinians have been offered exactly that formula, 1967 plus swaps — at Camp David 2000, Taba 2001, and the 2008 Olmert-Abbas negotiations. Every time, the Palestinians said no and walked away. ["What Obama Did To Israel," May 27, 2011]

Is Barack Obama the Last Best Hope of Hamas?

Jonathan Tobin
Contentions/Commentary
18 February '10

Barack Obama’s belief in “engagement” with America’s enemies hasn’t worked out too well with Iran but that doesn’t stop his No.1 fan at Time magazine from encouraging the president to try his luck with Tehran’s ally Hamas. That’s the upshot of Joe Klein’s lament, in which he criticizes Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s tough talk with the Arab world at the Brooking Institution’s U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Qatar. Klein, along on the junket with Hillary, wasn’t terribly interested in the secretary’s obituary of Obama’s failed outreach to Iran. But he did have harsh words for her summary of the situation in Gaza, which she rightly blamed on Hamas’s violence. The fate of Gaza, solidly in the hands of Iran’s terrorist proxy, would, she said, have to await a comprehensive settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Indeed, as long as an Islamist rejectionist group controls Gaza, nothing can be done about the place.

That answer pleased neither the Arabs nor Klein. The writer places the blame on Israel for Obama’s acknowledged failure in the Middle East, while ignoring the fact that neither the supposedly moderate Palestinians of Fatah nor the extremists of Hamas have any interest in learning to live with a Jewish state, no matter where its borders are drawn.

Yet rather than concentrating our energies on preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons — a development that would undermine the security of most of the Arab world as well as present an existential threat to Israel — Klein wants the United States to concentrate its energies on finding a way to lift the partial international blockade on the terrorist state in Gaza.

(Read full post)

Obama’s Diplomacy Dilemma

Peter Wehner
Contentions/Commentary
15 October 09

Earlier today Jen highlighted a Washington Post story, which reports this:

After nine months of shuttle diplomacy by U.S. special envoy George J. Mitchell, the gap between Israeli and Palestinian leaders appears to have grown, and it now includes not only a dispute over Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank, but also renewed tension over Jerusalem, disagreement over the framework for the talks and controversy over a UN report on alleged war crimes during Israel’s offensive in the Gaza Strip last winter.

This report about events on the ground merits comparison to Joe Klein’s column in Time, in which he lays out his thoughts on how President Obama could earn his Nobel Peace Prize. (Even Klein admits he didn’t deserve it yet on the merits.) While acknowledging that Mitchell’s efforts seem to be “slouching toward catatonia,” Klein writes:

An opportunity for a grand gesture may be developing in the most unlikely of locales: the Middle East. . . . The moment may be at hand for a dramatic U.S. initiative, even from a no-drama President. “The two sides seem unable to make peace on their own,” says Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser. “I think it would make a lot of sense for the President to announce what he thinks a Middle East peace plan should look like.” The elements of such a plan are widely known. Bill Clinton announced a version of it in December 2000, as he was leaving office. Brzezinski cites four major components: a return to 1967 borders, with land swaps enabling Israel to keep many of its existing settlements; no right of return for Palestinians who left, or were forced off, their lands when Israel became a state; Jerusalem as the capital of both Israel and Palestine; and an international peacekeeping force replacing the Israelis currently patrolling the Jordan River Valley.

I have gone on at length before about Klein’s geopolitical and national-security record and the quality of his analysis. Let’s just say he was once a fine reporter on urban issues. (Bill Clinton did announce his version of a Middle East peace in December 2000. The Israelis met almost every conceivable Palestinian demand — and in response the Palestinians declared a second intifada against Israel.)

But what of Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of the architects of the many and sundry Carter calamities? I could go on at length about those, too, but perhaps it’s sufficient to draw attention to a memorandum from Brzezinski to President Carter on the topic of “Islamic Fundamentalism.” Here (found on page 564/Appendix II of Brzezinski’s paperback volumePower and Principle) is what he wrote on February 2, 1979:

The conclusion from several studies done in the intelligence community is that we should be careful not to overgeneralize from the Iranian case [the overthrow of the Shah and the ascent to power of Ayatollah Khomeini]. Islamic revivalist movements are not sweeping the Middle East and are not likely to be the wave of the future. The foreign policy consequences of this strengthening of Islamic sentiment are mixed. It is more difficult to resolve the Arab-Israeli disputes; moreover, conservative Muslims are often xenophobic. If we emphasize moral as well as material values, our support for diversity, and a commitment to social justice, our dialogue with the Muslim world will be helped.

The Iranian revolution, of course, ranks with the French Revolution in terms of its reach and influence, one of the few revolutions that actually deserves the name. And the consequences of that revolution have been harmful for America, for the Muslim world, and for civilization itself.

Apparently Dr. Brzezinski’s strategic insights and foresight were as good then as they are now.

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