Speaking of Kristol
Apparently Kristol is back to making shit up:
THE WEEKLY STANDARD has learned that senior Obama administration officials have been telling foreign governments that the administration intends to support an effort next week at the United Nations to set up an independent commission, under UN auspices, to investigate Israel’s behavior in the Gaza flotilla incident. The White House has apparently shrugged off concerns from elsewhere in the U.S. government that a) this is an extraordinary singling out of Israel, since all kinds of much worse incidents happen around the world without spurring UN investigations; b) that the investigation will be one-sided, focusing entirely on Israeli behavior and not on Turkey or on Hamas; and c) that this sets a terrible precedent for outside investigations of incidents involving U.S. troops or intelligence operatives as we conduct our own war on terror.
Pretty impressive list: You can’t have an independent investigation because a.) other people have done worse, b.) independent commissions are “one-sided,” and c.) you don’t want to set the precedent of actually looking into when nations murder civilians. The White House is already denying this, and given Kristol’s track record on everything, your guess is as good as mine whether there will be an investigation.
But once again, it is the stubbornness of Israel that is causing this. They refuse to even hold their own Israeli-led investigation, and on top of that, seem dead set against letting anyone know what happened other than through 10 second youtube snippets released through the IDF propaganda wing. Why else did they confiscate all the videos and cameras and refuse to the return them? That just makes it look as if you have something to hide.
As always, lately, Israel’s worst enemies are her alleged best friends.
A political move that might, on an outside chance, force us to address our own bad behavior during the “War on Terror” and make the responsible people face the consequences of their illegal actions?
Heavens to Betsy, I think that might actually be why we voted the Democrats into office in the first place, at least according to every poll on God’s green earth at the time. Will wonders never cease?
June 11th, 2010 at 2:33 pm
This is bad news. I was hoping Obama would call for an independent investigation, but now that Kristol says it will happen I am near certain I will be disappointed. It is official: there will be no US calls for an independent investigation.
By the way, Bill Kristol and friends are more of an existential threat to Israel than Iran and Hamas combined.
June 11th, 2010 at 2:35 pm
the standard is rather low at that weekly. i bet tunch could jump over the bar they set for themselves.
June 11th, 2010 at 2:37 pm
Well, if the Obama admin was going to support the UN inquiry, they won’t now. They can’t break Kristol’s unbroken string of wrong-about-every-fucking-thing, which stretches all the way back to when he uttered his first word, mistakenly addressing his “mama” as “dada.”
June 11th, 2010 at 2:38 pm
I’ve noticed this is a favorite canard of movment Conservatives. Glenn Beck told his audience to read a book by a Nazi? So what—Robert Byrd was in the KKK 80 years ago.
Remember, Republicans are against moral relativism.
June 11th, 2010 at 2:38 pm
Do worse incidents really happen all the time around the world? Maybe when North Korea torpedoed that ship, but North Korea isn’t exactly a member state of the UN.
Am I right that the US was initially pushing for Israel to conduct its own investigation to preempt the UN from commissioning one, but then Israel wouldn’t even go along with our idea?
June 11th, 2010 at 2:40 pm
Well, I think to balance it out and not pick on Israel, they should set up a Dick Cheney / George Bush one, also too. That ought to rattle the neocon cage.
June 11th, 2010 at 2:42 pm
@Steve:
An Israeli internal investigation of IDF behavior? I Can’t. Fucking. Wait.
If I can get that first and exclusive, hell, I might be able to snag a position at the New York Times. Then again, I think I could go ahead and write the story now with Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, and Google’s archives of past Times cover stories.
June 11th, 2010 at 2:43 pm
Considering that most of our foreign aid money goes to Israel, it’s kind of understandable that America would pay extra attention to them.
June 11th, 2010 at 2:52 pm
@Betty Cracker:
Have you seen a picture of Gertrude Himmelfarb? That was an honest mistake.
June 11th, 2010 at 2:53 pm
Non-Israeli-edited video of the raid here.
June 11th, 2010 at 2:55 pm
Gah, screw moderation, nytimes has some non-Israeli edited video below:
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.c.....online/?hp
June 11th, 2010 at 2:56 pm
@TR: That’s a man, bay-bee! /austinpowers
June 11th, 2010 at 2:57 pm
I wonder if this prediction indicates that Kristol has become wise to the Kristol effect, whereby anything he predicts proves to bring the opposite.
June 11th, 2010 at 2:58 pm
It’s also to be recalled that every time there is an international commission investigating Israeli and other actor behavior after some awful war or incident, Israel and the United States just flash their middle fingers, say “Fuck YOOOO!”, complain about it being biased and not understanding that tiny itty bitty poor unarmed Israel is about to be PUSHED INTO THE SEA, and also the international community just hates Israel.
The IDF will carry out an investigation, but that’s mainly because the IDF always carries out an investigation of Israeli military operations. I’m sure they’ll find that though things could have been done better, everything Israeli forces and policymakers did was entirely justified.
June 11th, 2010 at 2:59 pm
She would be nowhere without these people, so her best friends continue to be her best friends.
June 11th, 2010 at 3:00 pm
@jwb:
Sort of a Kristol Bloop Persuasion.
June 11th, 2010 at 3:02 pm
@General Egali Tarian Stuck:
Heh.
June 11th, 2010 at 3:02 pm
@Oscar Leroy:
That’s always struck me as a lame explanation, given that Egypt is the #2 recipient of our foreign aid and they’re hardly the #2 recipient of our attention.
To the extent the guy on the street has strong feelings about the I/P situation it’s not because they care passionately about making sure our foreign aid is well spent.
Anyway, my question was serious: do much worse incidents happen all the time around the world without sparking UN investigations? That seems like a silly claim to me. This wasn’t the Falkland Islands, but it was a fairly big deal.
June 11th, 2010 at 3:08 pm
I’m more and more convinced that this is an elaborate conspiracy by the Republicans to pry away the Jewish vote from the Dems because they have lost the Latino vote for a generation…
Am I on to something?
June 11th, 2010 at 3:08 pm
@beltane: Word.
June 11th, 2010 at 3:26 pm
Actually, for the last few years much more foreign aid went to Afghanistan and Iraq (you can decide if it was “aid”), and a huge amount has begun flowing to Pakistan. The latest figure I have found from FY2009 was about $2.5 billion to Israel, and then typically you have “loan guarantees” which are basically giveaways too, because they’re pretty much always forgiven.
June 11th, 2010 at 3:31 pm
You might consider rephrasing this. “Back to” would imply that at some point he stopped.
June 11th, 2010 at 3:36 pm
@Steve: There have been UN or UN-sponsored (including sub-organizations such as the UNCHR, ILO, WHO) commissions of inquiry after many of the violent events of Central American civil wars (Guatemala’s Reagan-sponsored genocide, El Salvador), in Darfur, East Timor, Guinea, Nigeria, the former Yugoslavia, Zimbabwe pushing continues for an inquiry into Burma, etc. It’s not just Israel.
Just because no one here pays attention doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
June 11th, 2010 at 3:43 pm
That’s hardly a surprise given the United States’ recent track record of civilian murder. (http://www.collateralmurder.com/)
June 11th, 2010 at 3:51 pm
@El Cid: Well that’s what I would assume (although genocide is obviously a much bigger deal than the flotilla incident). I mean, I just don’t think there are that many incidents from one week to the next where the military of one country ends up killing citizens of another country without some kind of investigation. But to hear these people, it’s like the equivalent of the flotilla incident happens every day and only poor Israel gets singled out.
June 11th, 2010 at 3:56 pm
Hey now, the Israelis did hold their own investigation! The IDF took a full 24 hours to investigate before declaring their actions wholly reasonable and justifiable!
June 11th, 2010 at 3:59 pm
@Steve: A lot of times the pressure for an inquiry increases when it presses a conflict between a variety of nation-states, particularly when there is something like regional disputes or stability at stake.
In one case, that of Israel shelling a UN refugee camp in Lebanon in 1996, killing 100, including UN officials, and giving the excuse that they had old maps, the UN had a more direct incentive to investigate. They found that Israel could not be reasonably said to have shelled the camp by accident or error, and in the end, no one gave a shit, Israel didn’t do anything different, the US didn’t care, and there you have it. A decade later Israel attacked South Lebanon again and Hezbollah militarily drove them out.
June 11th, 2010 at 4:05 pm
@Steve:
That’s my favorite thing about these kinds of comments. The countries that do worse things are countries we expect to be behaving badly: Sudan, Iran, North Korea, Burma… I mean Myanmar… I mean Burma… oh fuck it, and so on. “Don’t torture and mutilate people” is kind of a bare minimum standard, and one we can’t really live up to ourselves, now can we? And thus we reach the crux of Kristol’s true motivation: We can’t be hypocrites, now can we?
June 11th, 2010 at 4:14 pm
@El Cid: I wish the UN would tell us whether we really bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade by mistake.
June 11th, 2010 at 4:15 pm
Bibi: ....so this schwartze Obama says to me, “You need to halt construction on that project in East Jerusalem.” And I said, “Oh, yeah? Blow it out your ear, punk. What are you gonna do about it?” And he just looks at me for a while, like’s he’s thinking or some shit, and then he says, real quite-like, “We’ll see,” and walks away. What a pansy, right? I own that guy!
Heh heh heh.
June 11th, 2010 at 4:33 pm
@Steve: Given that the U.S. holds a permanent veto on the Security Council, this (PDF) was the extent of UN Security Council action regarding the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy:
June 11th, 2010 at 4:39 pm
Edited for clarity.
June 11th, 2010 at 4:41 pm
@Steve:
That’s always struck me as a lame explanation, given that Egypt is the #2 recipient of our foreign aid and they’re hardly the #2 recipient of our attention.
While I agree with you that a lot of people criticize Israel for other reasons and to push other agendas, I think one can make a pretty convincing argument that the only reason we give Egypt so much money (about the same or more than what we give Israel) is to keep them from harming Israel. In other words, we pay Egypt protection money on Israel’s behalf.
This is why the money we give Egypt HAS to be spent on defense (and thus mostly returns to US defense contractors) while the money we give Israel has no strings attached.
June 11th, 2010 at 5:09 pm
About three quarters of the bullshit in the world stems directly or indirectly from the unresolved conflict between Israel and its neighbors. Seems to me that taking a small step toward averting a conflict between Israel and Turkey would be a worthy goal and near the top of the UN’s to-do list.
June 11th, 2010 at 6:46 pm
Sure, he’s making this shit up, but it had its intended effect: It places the WH on defense and makes it even harder for the WH to contemplate even symbolic actions to restrain the out of control government in Israel.
As Kristol well knows, propaganda doesn’t have to be remotely true to work, if deployed effectively.
June 11th, 2010 at 9:03 pm
Typical hasbara. Here’s the proof:
http://www.hrw.org/en/news/200.....ent-and-so
June 12th, 2010 at 7:18 am