Thursday, September 2, 2010

Green-Lined: Is Obama engaged in agitprop?

by Yisrael Medad

Is Washington engaged in a subversion agitprop campaign? Against an ally?

According to the Jerusalem Post:

"The Geneva Initiative unveiled a campaign partially funded by the USAID in which Palestinian leaders speak to the Israeli public in video clips, telling Israelis that there is a Palestinian partner for an agreement. Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat, secretary-general of the PLO Executive Committee Yasser Abed Rabbo and Fatah Central Committee member Jibril Rajoub have recorded short messages: 'I am your partner. Are you my partner?' In the clips, the Palestinians speak about what they label missed opportunities, and ensuing disappointments as well as potential perils of missing the current opportunity to reach an agreement based on the two-state solution."

UPI adds that:

"The US government was approached to fund the campaign by the Geneva Initiative founders, who drew up an agreement in 2003 to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The US Agency for International Development, or USAID, invested close to $250,000 toward the creation of the billboards."

In a previous post at Greenlined (as well as this one) I took note of the practice of the Consulate-General of the United States in Jerusalem, which oversees all diplomatic activity in the capital, both east and west, in addition to the territories of Judea and Samaria, to simply ignore the Jews residing in the area. The President of NOW visited Israel, but was not introduced to religious women -some I know to be fierce feminists - rather only spoke with Israeli activists in Tel Aviv, whom I will make an educated guess did not exactly express support for Jewish residency across the Green Line.

Basketball teams come. Civic education workshops and democracy seminars are run where they presumably learn about non-discriminatory practices. Archaeological sites benefit from heritage funding, but only as "Palestinian" locations despite Jewish Biblical evidence. In all of those above instances, the US bodies involved are simply practicing discrimination based on national-ethnic lines.

United States law makes it illegal to discriminate on a genetic base. Other laws make it illegal for employers to discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion or sex. Title VII of of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 declares it illegal to discriminate against an individual because of birthplace, ancestry, culture or linguistic characteristics common to a specific ethnic group. But, I guess, what is good at home can be flouted abroad.

I can understand the wish of the United States to assure peace in this region, but in a previous act of Congress on September 21, 1922, Congress passed a joint resolution expressing support for a homeland in Palestine for the Jewish people. At that time, the territory of that homeland not only included Judea and Samaria, but TransJordan as well. I can well see an administration policy to advance the idea of an Arab state of Palestine (one that the Arabs refused in 1947 because it permitted Jews their own state as well), despite my opposition.What is intolerable is the idea that while doing so, Jews are discriminated against. It is not taken into consideration that the Arabs demanding this state are also insisting that all Jews currently residing in the territory will be expelled and their homes taken away. Will the March of the Trail of Tears be repeated 180 years later?

One additional point: At this moment, for a political advocacy group to exploit USA tax-exempt monies to launch this campaign is not only a blunder of oversight procedures by some State Department person (if that was what it was to be generous), but it makes a mockery of a supposedly unknown-until-now unit within the IRS that seems to have taken aim at the pro-Israel "Z Street" group, causing them to go to court to gain a legitimate tax-exemption status.


Yisrael Medad
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

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