The death of Lauren Bacall, the last of World War II’s pinup girls, reminds us of how far distant that era is becoming. The WWII generation of men and women failed to prevent the Holocaust, but their rhetoric and actions prevented Hitler from completing it. The contrast with today is palpable. In 1941, before Pearl Harbor but after the Fall of France, FDR used the analogy of lending a neighbor your garden hose if his house was on fire and thereby keeping the fire from spreading to your own house, to gain support for Lend Lease military aid to Churchill’s Great Britain. Now, the Conservative government of David Cameron—bowing to both public opinion polls and the Liberal Democratic Arab panderers in his own coalition—has conditionally barred arms sales to Israel in the event of any further hostilities with Hamas, thereby empowering the genocidal terrorist organization. FDR extended “a garden hose”—or lifeline—to an earlier generation of Brits. Now, the UK government offers the Jewish state a noose, inviting it to hang itself. For shame. In France, where the WWII Resistance—in whose ranks men and women like the great Jewish medieval historian Mark Bloch made a modern existential commitment and died fighting Hitler to redeem the honor of their country from Vichy collaboration—Christophe Barbier, the force behind France’s left-of-center magazine “L’Express”—has castigated Jews who leave France in response to the rising tide of Muslim-driven anti-Semitism “deserters” while castigated those who stay for assertive self-defense, support for Israel, and the ultimate sin of supports for Marine Le Pen’s ultra-nationalists. Despicable is too kind a word for Barbier’s betrayal of the highest values of the French Republican tradition that once rallied decent Frenchmen to free Captain Dreyfus but has now sunk so low. FDR denounced Mussolini’s attack on France in terms of “the hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back” of its neighbor. Now, France—whose foreign minister talks of “imposing” a disastrous peace on Israel—has stabbed in the back the Jewish state it once supported. There are hardly words harsh enough to characterize this betrayal. One might take some comfort in the prophetic assurance that God will not be mocked, and today’s true deserters, some day in the not too distant future, will get their comeuppance.
Barack Obama entered the presidency with millennial expectations—fed by analogies between the Great Depression and the new Great Recession—that he would be “another Lincoln” or, more often, “another FDR.” “Newsweek” even photoshopped an image of the two on its cover. I don’t think it needs much elaborating that, neither at home nor abroad, has Obama proved a reincarnation of Franklin Roosevelt. However, I think an analogy between the Roosevelt and Obama presidencies, c. 1938 and 2014, has something to offer. Simple dichotomies between domestic and foreign policy should be avoided–but if Roosevelt was tested at home in 1933, he was tested globally in 1938 as the world tried appeasement and then skidded toward war. A man of consistencies as well as contradictions, FDR was a consistent liberal who believed that presidential leadership could change the direction of the country as well as the world. The year 1938 was a severe testing time because his New Deal, after half a decade of of economic progress, had lost steam as the country relapsed into a new recession. Through the force of global events and the evolution of his foreign policy vision, Roosevelt gradually changed the subject from domestic doldrums to international threats, a gradual process completed when—after Pearl Harbor—“Dr. New Deal” was replaced by “Dr. Win the War.” The analogy between 1938 and 2014 is not perfect yet interesting. After six years, two liberal presidencies had run out of steam domestically—Roosevelt’s because failing fully to end the Depression he inherited from Herbert Hoover, Obama’s for complicated politico-economic reasons including failure fully to end the Recession that he inherited from George W. Bush. The other parallel is a world situation careening out of control—now in the Mideast and Eastern Europe, then in Europe and the Far East. FDR had failed to make much of a foreign policy impact up to that point because of his priority on domestic recovery and deference to the traditional world powers that gave the world Munich. Nobel Peace Prize winner Obama, on the other hand, has his fingerprints much more on the current crisis, by virtue of the failings of his global “apology tours,” his “leading from behind” in places like Libya,Syria, and Iraq, and his naïve pushing “the reset button” of U.S.-Russian relations in a way that Vladimir Putin took as a green light for aggression. All of these points border on the obvious. But one comparison between then and now is less marked upon. In both 1938 and 2014, the liberal vision seemed to have topped out. The leading liberal economists of that era were talking about a “new normal” of 10 percent unemployment; those of this era are whispering about a “new normal” of just 2 percent annual GDP growth—half the historical, post-recession norm. Neither then nor now has the public shown much liking for liberals preaching a new austerity while still lacking a compelling vision of how to meet new international threats to the American Dream. Of course, World War II cut the Gordian Knot for American liberalism then by both restoring full employment and catapulting a progressive nation into world politics. Walter Isaacson in “Time” magazine has just pontificated on how “Obama Can Save His Legacy.” Significantly, however, Isaac—in urging Obama to copy TR’s “Bully Pulpit” and end his posture of “standing above the fray”—focuses entirely on initiatives to revitalize “American economic opportunity.” Apparently, Isaacson either himself lacks a dynamic foreign policy vision (including a new commitment to human rights) or can’t imagine Obama under any circumstances embracing one. Could a repeat of the 9/11 attack, which reprised Japan’s 12/7 attack, prove a wild card and game changer revitalizing the Obama presidency? Perhaps. But it seems unlikely for two related reasons. First, Obama has proven himself an “anti-FDR” who polarizes the public (as FDR also did sometimes) but without then unifying it around a new consensus. Second, FDR had a real knowledge of world affairs, going back to his youthful travels to Europe and his service in Woodrow Wilson’s WWI government. Obama may think he understands the twenty-first century world, but the world he understands seems more like a videogame simulation than the real one. Is Obama’s failure personal and the result of what political scientist James Barber classified as “an active negative” presidential personality (like Richard Nixon, among others) characterized as energetic but joyless, aggressive, highly rigid, and narcissistically self-centered? Or is it the wider failure of a political class: America’s “new class” leadership which identifies with non-American elites yet whose “progressivism” thinly veils a provincial notion of how the world really works? Since the time of Mark Twain’s “Innocents Abroad,” observers have been amused by Yankee confidence that all that’s needed to solve the world’s problems is up-to-date plumbing and a dose of liberal optimism. Fused with both unprecedented power and sophistication, the American formula worked remarkably well for a half century after World War II. It’s no longer working, and its naivety is no longer amusing. Neither Barack Obama or the media and academic elites that used to fawn over him have any real answers. Nor do Republicans. One can envision a 2016 presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney decided on the issue of who better can manage the mess.
President Janet Napolitano Yesterday, the Brandeis Center joined the AMCHA Initiative and ten other groups writing to University of California President Janet Napolitano to condemn a statement by the joint council of the UAW 2865 union announcing the union’s intent to support the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The UAW 2865 represents teaching assistants, tutors and readers at the nine teaching campuses of the University of California. The joint council indicates that it will seek a full membership vote on the BDS statement in the coming year. The groups especially criticized the unions’ statement that union members have an obligation “as educators” to teach “the social issues of our time, including pressing global struggles such as the struggle of the Palestinian people for liberation from settler-colonialism and apartheid.” LDB President Kenneth L. Marcus commented, “The union is effectively announcing that its members will abuse their positions by indoctrinating undergraduate students with blatantly politicized, intellectually dishonest, and extraordinarily biased propaganda. This is not what teaching assistants are paid to do, nor is it a proper function of the union. Instead of engaging in proper collective bargaining activity, the union is urging teaching assistants to misuse the classroom for political indoctrination.” The groups’ letter cautioned that “if TA’s, tutors and readers feel free to ‘teach’ anti-Israel propaganda and promote BDS to their undergraduates, it can’t help but create a hostile, anti-Semitic environment for many Jewish students, who have already reported in the UC Jewish Student Campus Climate Report that campus-based BDS activities ‘project hostility, engender a feeling of isolation, and undermine Jewish students’ sense of belonging and engagement.'” The letter urged President Napolitano to publicly reaffirm the university’s policy on course content, provide public assurances that she will not allow UAW 2865 members to promote anti-Semitic propaganda anti-Israel boycotts as part of their contractual teaching responsibilities, and instruct the university’s collective bargaining representatives to reject any UAW Local 2865 proposals which seek to inject their positions on Israel into the University’s dealings with the union. The groups also urged Napolitano to reject any effort by UAW Local 2865 that any pension fund provided by the University for its employees adhere to any policies of divestment or boycott of businesses that directly or indirectly have business, cultural or academic relations with Israel. (more…)
Recently, the U.S. FAA broke new ground diplomatically by embargoing flights to Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport in a move that did more harm to the Jewish state than thousands of Hamas rockets. Now, the FAA has had to act at home by declaring “a no fly zone” over Ferguson, Missouri, to promote unfettered law enforcement operations, following racial unrest in the wake of the police shooting of an unarmed African American teenager.
No, not Palestine. Hamas–recognized by the “New Republic.” See http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119064/b-yehoshua-israel-should-call-hamas-enemy-not-terrorists Hamastan–from de facto to de jure–would become the hottest new international lawyers’ IPO, i.e., a state with all the rights and none of the responsibilities of other states. The next step would be for Israel to arm Hamas–a lucrative franchise–and also an ingenious solution to the problem of sibling rivalry with the Palestinians for the Jewish state. This on the theory that, if you’re younger brother repeatedly hits you in the side of the head with a two-by-four, you should wait until he grows into muscular manhood, and only then try to disarm him or hit him back. That way, your parents (or the international community) will commend your “proportional response.” Such an approach would also give Cain legal standing to sue Abel for making him brotherless in the International Criminal Court.
LDB President Kenneth L. Marcus contributes a chapter on “Three Conceptions of Religious Freedom” to Hanoch Dagan, Shahar Lifschitz and Yedidia Z. Stern’s newly released volume on Religion and the Discourse of Human Rights (Jerusalem, Israel: Israel Democracy Institute, 2014) (downloadable here). The volume marks the inauguration of an important human rights program at the Israel Democracy Institute, while Marcus’ contribution reflects the expansion of the Brandeis Center’s work on anti-Semitism and religious discrimination. Religion and the Discourse of Human Rights is the product of the first international conference of IDI’s Religion and Human Rights project, which explores the existing and potential relationships between the Jewish tradition, in all of its forms in the past and present, and the doctrine of human-rights, in its broadest sense. Marcus’ essay addresses three conceptions of religious freedom in American constitutional law, explaining how traditional approaches do not always adequately protect the rights of religious minorities such as Jewish Americans. This research grows out of the Louis D. Brandeis Center’s work advancing the civil rights of Jewish students in American universities in situations where they are sometimes denied protections that are routinely extended to members of other groups. Mr. Marcus delivered an early version of this paper in at the Israel Democracy Institute in Jerusalem in 2012. The presentation can be viewed in this video. (more…)