International Justice Not Glen Beck Political Dogma 
Dec 2006

The first time I saw Glen Beck on TV my first thought was, "this guy must be CNN's answer to FOX News Bill O'Reilly".   You know the kind of specimen I am talking about.  They work really hard at projecting themselves as honest, clear thinking, straight shooting, conservative, "no spin" spokesmen for America's good old boys and girls.  They evidently get good ratings because they stay carefully on the grass roots popular side of the issues, thereby telling the aforementioned exactly what they want to hear.  My second thought was, "How long will it be before this guy manages to totally turn my stomach."  I used to watch Bill O'Reilly quite regularly, just for a view into what the right wing goons were currently peddling.  After a while the attrition from O'Reilly's manure became more than I could bare.  Although new to the TV commentator scène, Glen Beck is doing a masterful job of working toward the same status. 

My distaste for Glen Beck's spiel reached a new watermark with his diatribe against Jimmy Carter's book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid", for which Beck was intent on painting Carter as a deluded old fool for his take on the Palestine Israel conflict.  With all his sound and fury Beck did little more than cherry-pick what inaccuracies the book allegedly contained, equivocate about the appropriateness of the title, and rehash the Israeli propaganda machine's old party line.  I guess I should not be surprised, CNN has a history of sucking up to Benjamin Netanyahu and the rest of the Israeli settlement mongers.   The latter is something that CNN has repeatedly indulged at the expense of any fair and balanced presentation of the facts.   

What facts did Beck manage to avoid in his assessment of Jimmy Carters book?  First and foremost, international law forbids acquisition of land by military force.  Israel has been in violation of that simple unequivocal mandate ever since the six day war, and that happened decades ago.  For the same long time Israel has been in violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, which require Israel to relinquish all lands seized during the six day war and either repatriate or provide reparation to all Palestinian's who were made refugees by Israel's aggression.  Those are immutable facts that Beck failed to give even the slightest mention.  Now then, if Israel is allowed to thumb its nose at international law and the United States continues to support Israel in thumbing its nose at international law, what message does that send to the larger middle eastern world?  Stated another way, if Israel supported by the United States is allowed to continue to break international law, then what grounds are there to expect any middle eastern nation to toe the mark regarding territorial boundaries, support of terrorism, WMD proliferation, or anything else?  Absolutely none!  If anything, Israel's defiance of international law legitimizes in the eyes of many middle eastern people, dangerous radicals like Hamas, Hezbollah, al Qaeda, and Iran and Ahmadinejad.  This is the bad brew that has been fermenting for decades and Israel and Washington have no one to blame but  themselves.  Burying the nation's head under a mound of pro Israel propaganda bigotry will not make it go away.

Undoubtedly, Israel has a right to exist, but not on lands that were ceded to the Palestinian's by the United Nation's.   The fact is that the Palestinian lands that Israel currently occupies are now laced with Israeli settlements in violation of international law.   The fact is that Israel's wall is not situated on the United Nations authorized borders between Palestine and Israel, but rather on Palestinian land, thus cutting Palestinians off from both their land and other Palestinians in violation of international law.  That is the sense of "apartheid" that the Israeli wall has created in violation of international law. 

Beck made much to do about Carter's insights concerning failed negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian authority when Arafat was alive and Ariel Sharon was still in office.  It is true that Arafat did walk out on those negotiations where "ninety-five percent" of Palestine's demands were supposedly offered up by Israel.  Then again, the Israeli view of ninety-five percent  versus what it was for Arafat were not necessarily the same thing.  Moreover, as one of my previous posts suggested and Carter's book tended to confirm, there were things going on around the negotiations that very evidently never surfaced in the popular news wires.  Israel had been whittling away at Palestinian holdings for decades.  A seemingly inconsequential five percent was therefore far from trivial.  If the Israelis were willing to propose a "ninety-five percent" solution, as they claim, then why didn't they come to the table with the full one hundred percent?   It is very doubtful that Arafat would have lightly decided to walk away from any negotiations that were legitimate.    On the other side of the dispute, Sharon himself would never have agreed to anything that included Israel's conformance to Resolution 242, which mandated relinquishment of all existing settlements and and accountability for the repatriation or reparation of Palestinian refuges.   In fact, Sharon had vowed never to conform to such mandates.  Yes, Clinton blamed Arafat for the breakdown in negotiations, but Clinton and his democratic constituency was decidedly in bed with Israel, not Palestine.  Further, it was Clinton himself that popularized the notion of "disputed territories" which divisively became part of the pro-Israel propaganda rhetoric.

It is also a fact that for decades the US has supplied Israel with billions of dollars a year in foreign aide while the Palestinians have received little more than chump change in comparison.  What kind of message can that be expected to send?  During the 2006 conflict with Hezbollah over the abduction of a couple of Israeli solders,  Israel vowed to turn Lebanon's clock back twenty years and proceeded to lay to waist a goodly portion of southern Lebanon's cities and towns in an attempt to drive Hezbollah out.  The final result was pretty much a standoff with Hezbollah winning a huge political victory for having stood up to the Israeli war machine.  Moreover, the massive destruction that Israel inflicted on southern Lebanon's civilians also ultimately played into the hands of Israel's advisories.   Hezbollah vowed to rebuild southern Lebanon and straight away organized work gangs and proceeded to dispense very large amounts of cash dollar money to individual Lebanese civilians who had been victimized by the destruction,  all complements of the Iranian government.   As the old saying goes, "money talks, BS walks".   The message sent to Palestine and Lebanon is that if you are looking for justice, do not look to the US and Israel, because you will receive none.  Look rather to your middle eastern brothers who will not let you down.  The bottom line is that Israel's conduct has been a stone in the shoe of international justice and US credibility in the Middle East for many years.  The fact that radical Islamic elements exist that seek the total destruction of Israel simply does not justify Israel's sustained violation of International law.   The American people and Washington must wake up to that fact and revise US policy toward Israel and Palestine to something credible.