https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/01/24/kevin-mccarthy-and-the-telling-state-of-the-republicans/

The House Speaker has appointed three extreme members to its main investigative body while blocking two Democrats on spurious grounds.

The demeaning spectacle through which Kevin McCarthy, after 14 failed votes, finally convinced 21 radical holdouts to allow him to at last become Speaker of the US House of Representatives appears to be just the beginning of a period of misrule. His committee assignments leave little doubt the worst is yet to come.

During this fiasco, GOP members called each other, with as much plausibility as hyperbole, metaphorical “hostage takers”, “Taliban”, and “terrorists”. In front of a shocked live TV audience, incoming armed services committee chairman Mike Rogers lunged at holdout Matt Gaetz, but was physically restrained from attacking him.

Mr McCarthy gave into virtually every demand any Republican made of him, because he could afford to lose no votes, including agreeing to allow any member, alone, to make a “motion to vacate” which could remove him from his speakership at any moment. He thereby agreed to become the political prisoner of his “hostage taking” colleagues. The implications for governance are dire.

He reportedly made numerous concessions about committee posts, but nobody forced him to assign apparently compulsive fabulist George Santos to the small business and science committees, appointments so obnoxious they are essentially trolling the entire country.

Mr Santos is wanted in Brazil for stealing a cheque book from a man his mother worked for as a nurse in 2008 and purchasing $1,314 in clothing from… a small business. Brazilian police documents show Mr Santos confessed before disappearing and sending the case into limbo. Now he has suddenly reappeared on the floor of the US Congress, Brazilian authorities have reopened it.

He has yet to explain how, after a lifetime of modest income, he suddenly started reporting huge paydays in the past two years and lent his own campaign $700,000. The answer could well involve his work in 2020-2021 for Harbour City Capital Corp, which US financial authorities have described as “a classic Ponzi scheme” to defraud investors of up to $17.1 million. But at least it wasn’t a small business.

Mr Santos should also fit right into the Science Committee, since he claims to have played a significant role in developing carbon capture technology during a non-existent career in finance and boasted about numerous equally non-existent university degrees.

From the preposterous to the sinister, Mr McCarthy has appointed three of his most extreme members to the crucial Oversight committee, the House’s main investigative body.

Marjorie Taylor Greene is known for a litany of bizarre views, including that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were a hoax (she has since somehow been persuaded that they actually occurred), appearing to endorse killing prominent Democrats like Nancy Pelosi, and her recent boast that if she had orchestrated the January 6 insurrection, “we would have won” and “it would’ve been armed”. Mr McCarthy appears to think all this also made her an ideal addition to the House Homeland Security Committee.

Paul Gosar is another strong supporter of the insurgency, notorious for close ties to the white supremacist movement and strange conspiracy theories about the dangers of fluoridation of water (a paranoid fixation on the American extreme right since the late 1940s). Lauren Boebert was one of the anti-McCarthy holdouts and had been noted for her personal closeness to Ms Greene until they had a notorious shouting match over Mr McCarthy in a Capitol Hill ladies’ room that Ms Boebert called “ugly” and “nasty”.

All three have promoted farcical QAnon conspiracy theories. They also endorse false claims that the 2020 election was somehow “stolen” from Donald Trump and promote the racist “great replacement theory” which posits a conspiracy to overwhelm and displace white populations in the West through nonwhite immigration.

All three were also assigned to the house judiciary committee led by prominent firebrand Jim Jordan. Along with the Oversight Committee, it will likely spearhead a push by Republicans to spend most of their time and energy in the next two years investigating President Joe Biden on a range of issues, most notably the business activities of his son, Hunter.

A 2020 Republican-led Senate investigation found no evidence of wrongdoing by either Mr Biden or his son involving Hunter’s service on the board of the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma Holdings. It did confirm, as is obvious, that Hunter Biden inappropriately sought to “cash in” on his family name and thereby created “the appearance of a conflict of interest” given his father’s then-role as US vice president.

These committees are unlikely to reproduce such a level-headed, sober conclusion or evince the least interest in many highly suspect business activities of Mr Trump and his children during his presidency. But Mr Jordan has signalled his interest in interfering in ongoing federal criminal investigations into Mr Trump and his allies, already leading to a rebuke by the Department of Justice of a request for information into several sensitive probes.

Mr Jordan has created a subcommittee to study the purported “weaponisation” of the federal government, precisely including “ongoing criminal investigations”. It could involve efforts to disrupt investigations and potential prosecutions of Mr Trump and his allies, including subcommittee member Scott Perry, whose mobile phone was seized by the FBI in its inquiry into efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Mr Perry has dismissed observations of this obvious conflict of interest by saying he merely faces “an accusation”.

Instead, Mr McCarthy has vowed to block two key democrats – ranking member Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell – from the vital intelligence committee in a gesture of obvious and petty vengeance, largely on behalf of Mr Trump.

Yet all this is unlikely to go beyond political kabuki designed to get these politicians on television and raise money. The Department of Justice is not going to allow a subcommittee to acquire sensitive details of ongoing criminal probes. And it seems unlikely the House will discover any evidence of corruption by Mr Biden.

Mr Santos can provide slapstick comic relief as these committees indulge in film noir theatrics. Yet the dysfunctionality and extremism of the new House threatens all-to-real consequences regarding the “debt ceiling”.

The “hostage takers” are vowing to hold the “full faith and credit” of the US to ransom for major spending cuts. The White House correctly says it won’t negotiate over Congress refusing to pay its existing bills. But a default would probably precipitate a US and global financial meltdown. Even for Republicans, that would not be fun and games.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/01/20/bob-dylans-book-is-among-the-essential-and-diverse-political-writings-of-the-past-year/

Bob Dylan on modern song, two histories of America’s policies towards Israel, new biographies of John Donne and Led Zeppelin, and the rise of Iran’s national security state are standouts.

In two recent columns in these pages, I looked at some significant nonfiction books published last year, but several others should not be left unexamined.

Anyone interested in Middle East issues should eagerly seek out The Arc of a Covenant by Walter Russell Mead and We Are Not One by Eric Alterman. They provide very different perspectives on the history of the US-Israel relationship and can be read in harmony and/or counterpoint.

Prof Mead is the preeminent scholar of US foreign policy formation. His books, particularly Special Providence, are invaluable guides to how political, cultural, religious, economic, and other forces produced these national stances. His superb new book traces the development of the “special relationship,” including the unique US commitment to Israel’s “Qualitative Military Edge” over any regional rivals.

In his element, Prof Mead is peerless. The Arc of a Covenant is therefore indispensable to understanding how and why Washington developed its policies towards Zionism, Israel, and the Palestinians. Like many of his key subjects, he has a clear sympathy for, and preference towards, Israel over the Palestinians. And while he plainly makes every effort to be fair, his singular understanding of American policy and its context is not matched when it comes to Israel. Even more, at times he struggles to understand Palestinian experiences and perspectives.

In this book and his Wall Street Journal columns, Prof Mead somewhat anachronistically continues to treat the Palestinian cause as essentially a thwarted quest for independent statehood without recognising that this is only one solution to the core problem of mass statelessness and the quest for citizenship – in whatever country – that Palestinians are increasingly embracing. That all-to-common blind spot both arises from and facilitates a relatively non-problematised emotional support for Israel, but it misses what is now arguably the key problematic.

Prof Alterman’s task is slightly narrower, tracing the Jewish-American discourse on Israel. His engaging book is more openly, if not actually, polemical. He reads the evolution of Jewish American thinking regarding Zionism and Israel from an increasingly widespread centre-left perspective disturbed by the repression the occupation inflicts on Palestinians as a community and by statelessness as a human rights crisis for Palestinian individuals.

Prof Alterman charts a detailed historical, intellectual and, perhaps above all, emotional map of the deep rift between Jewish-American impulses to be supportive of Israel and, simultaneously, increasingly unwilling to deny the categorical indefensibility of the apartheid-like occupation. However, like Prof Mead, he is most comfortable with American and even Israeli topics, and sometimes seems drawn towards conventional wisdom or outdated ideas regarding Palestinians and other Arabs. This appears to be an occupational hazard for American historians, Jewish and Gentile alike, although Palestinians and other Arabs have typically failed to explain themselves adequately or effectively.

The most recent American Nobel Laureate in literature, Bob Dylan, has long occupied a fascinating intermediate zone between his Jewish heritage and his (apparently still quietly strong) Christian beliefs. Last year he produced his most remarkable book yet, The Philosophy of Modern Song, a splendid collection of 66 short essays on songs ranging from Steven Foster’s “Nelly Was a Lady” written in 1849 (though he discusses a 2004 rendition) to just two written in the 21st century. Most are from the 1940s and 50s, when Mr Dylan was a young sponge soaking up American culture as fast as humanly possible.

There is not much philosophy in the book, but plenty of poetic flourishes in his often-mesmerising commentaries. As befits the work of a recording artist, it’s best listened to as an audiobook. Mr Dylan’s own voice, eerily distant, tinny, and echoing, like the signal from a mysterious, far-off radio station, croaks out many of the best passages. Listeners will ideally switch between the audiobook and an easily created playlist of the songs, massively enriching the experience.

At 81, he still strikes the pose of a cynical outsider casting a jaundiced eye on everything: “You’re sitting in the shade, slumped out, anonymous, incognito, watching everything go by, unimpressed, hard-bitten – impenetrable.” One of the richest passages involves a meditation on the difference between the outlaw, a figure he celebrates and identifies with, versus common criminals, no matter how powerful, whom he detests and dismisses. Modern, basically rock, song is essentially by and about the outlaw, facing down the “real criminals” lurking behind various masks of authority.

Among the most notorious rock outlaws, at least in their own minds, Led Zeppelin, are finally the subject of a book that takes them seriously enough as cultural figures, even caricatures, yet not too seriously (none of their songs could conceivably make it into Mr Dylan’s book). Led Zeppelin: A Biography by Bob Spitz tells the story of Jimmy Page’s wildly successful yet critically reviled band and its colossal influence in a serious yet often hilarious narrative. The original “Spinaltap,” Led Zeppelin possessed little creative energy, apart from Mr Page’s extraordinary riffs and solos, and increasingly relied on the brilliant, thunderous drumming of John Bonham. Yet they left their mark on a vast array of performers that followed them, plus a trail of self-destructive mayhem few ever equaled, or dared to try.

From the ridiculous to the sublime, noted children’s author Katherine Rundell’s biography, Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne cuts through centuries of erudite criticism by reading every facet of the Renaissance poetic genius’ complex, and often contradictory, life and work through the defining theme of transcendence into infinity. He fixated on the prefixes trans- and super- in words throughout his work. This excellent analysis helps explain why, for example, Donne embraced yet feared mortality even more than his contemporaries also working in the shadow of the Black Death.

Honourable mention must go to The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher that makes a devastating case against social media’s malign impact; Secret City, James Kirchick’s riveting and wildly entertaining account of the often unseen and typically unwelcome gay underbelly of Washington power; and Political Succession in the Islamic Republic of Iran by Ali Alforneh (my colleague at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, which published the book), that updates and elaborates his long-standing thesis that theocratic governance in Iran is giving way to a national security state dominated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

When you get through all those, you’ll be just in time for my suggestions about the best nonfiction from 2023.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-01-18/firing-professor-who-showed-muhammad-for-islamophobia-harms-islam?srnd=opinion&sref=tp95wk9l

Students who pushed for the firing of a Hamline University professor are trying to force their narrow definition of Islam on a diverse cultural kaleidoscope.

In the name of combating Islamophobia, Hamline University in Minnesota has committed a particularly egregious exercise in Islamophobia.

Last October, Erika López Prater, an adjunct professor teaching a global art history class, included a masterpiece of 14th-century Islamic art depicting the Prophet Mohammed receiving Koranic revelations from the archangel Gabriel. Recognizing that some Muslims regard depictions of the prophet (and in some extreme cases, anyone at all) as blasphemous, she provided repeated advance warnings to her students, both in the course syllabus and in class.

According to reports, no one appeared concerned before the online class, and she shared the work of art, along with many others. Afterward, a Muslim American student complained to the university, others not enrolled in the class piled on, and Hamline declared that exposing students to this significant masterwork of Islamic art was “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic.” López Prater has now been told her contract will not be renewed and, as a disposable adjunct, has no defense other than the fact that she did nothing wrong.

The fundamental questions raised by this case are what is Islamophobia, what is Islam, and who speaks for Muslims? When I was earning my Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in the 1990s, I was involved in a lot of campus activism, and I recognized this dynamic at Hamline instantly. This student and her allies are using a phony complaint of discrimination as a power play.

Rationalizing their response, university officials noted that, “To look upon an image of the Prophet Muhammad, for many Muslims, is against their faith.” As someone raised and imbued with Islamic values, I know this is true. But no one compelled anyone to look at such an image, and why would one teach an art history course without showing one of the subject matter’s masterpieces?

What these students are saying is not that they shouldn’t have been required to look at the image, since most weren’t even in the class, but that this image should never be shown. Thus they are asserting the right to define what is and is not Islamic, and to speak on behalf of all Muslims. In its craven rush to placate an aggrieved minority, the university is endorsing a reactionary effort to police the meaning of Islam at Hamline and, potentially, US higher education in general.

The miniature comes from a 14th-century Persian classic called The Compendium of Chronicles, which was authored, illustrated, commissioned and enjoyed by Muslims. It occupies a noteworthy place in the artistic history of Islamic civilizations. To brand its display — with ample “trigger warnings” — as blasphemous is to shrink the history of Islam into a small and impoverished cage.

Nearly one in four persons in the world is Muslim; Islamic civilization has been one of the most diverse subset of human cultures since its birth in the 7th century. There isn’t much difference between the word “person” and the word “Muslim” in our community, because given this kaleidoscopic chronological and geographic diversity, virtually every human proclivity and experience is represented somewhere in Islamic cultures.

For example, even though most Muslims agree alcohol is religiously proscribed, the idea that Muslims don’t drink doesn’t survive contact with any diverse group of real-life Muslims, or even many of the greatest Islamic civilizations. As for the sexual prudery one sees in many Arab nations today, simply look at past literature, beginning with the 15th-century Arabic sex manual The Perfumed Garden, or, more edgy, the pederastic poetry of the revered and reviled 9th-century master Abu Nuwas.

Yet across the globe, religious conservatives want to exercise power and control to eliminate any diversity. Western progressives frequently side with them because they don’t recognize, or don’t care, that doing so constitutes an alliance with religious reactionaries who only appear “authentic” because of their stridency. Liberal institutions like Hamline are content with the lowest common denominator if it shuts up protesters, and adjunct professors are easy scapegoats.

American Muslim organizations are divided on this incident. The Muslim Public Affairs Council has supported López Prater, while the local chapter of the more conservative Council on American-Islamic Relations joined the blasphemy brigade of aggrieved students. (CAIR’s national organization took a more ambivalent stance.)

If American universities are serious about treating Islam and Muslims with respect, López Prater needs to be rehired, and no other college should fall into such infantilizing ploys. Fear of the full complexity of Islam as a social text and the dizzying variety among Muslims, their cultures and civilizations — today and throughout history — is a real, insidious and dangerous form of Islamophobia.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/01/09/new-books-shed-light-on-us-history-as-a-guide-to-the-present/

They examine White understandings of freedom, the strategies and tactics of the civil rights movement, and US history since WWII.

At their most instructive and useful, national histories function like tapestries that knit together many narrative strands, both consensus and contested. The increasingly bitter battles over historical narratives now exemplify the deepest divisions in a fracturing US. The weave is unravelling badly.

While liberals use the institutional power of universities and the entertainment industry to promote their preferred storylines, Republican state legislatures are using the coercive force of government to outlaw teaching about the most unflattering aspects of US history — slavery, segregation and racism — plus gender and sexuality.

Several new books shed important light on this intensifying struggle.

The Donald Trump movement that culminated in a failed coup and the January 6 insurrection, attacking the constitution and the state in the name of patriotism and “freedom”, was the culmination of a lengthy resurgence of white grievance and resentments. This return of the repressed had obvious way stations in Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” in 1968 that welcomed pro-segregation forces into the Republican Party, the rise of Pat Buchanan, Rush Limbaugh and his talk radio imitators, and, especially, Alabama governor George Wallace until he was crippled by a would-be assassin in 1972.

Whether he knows it or not, Mr Trump’s most immediate precursor was Wallace, whose attitudes and agenda he often seems to channel in a kind of uncanny demagogic seance. Freedom’s Dominion by Jefferson Cowie is a breakthrough in situating the Trump movement in its broadest historical context, though briefly acknowledging that is left for the very end of the book.

Prof Cowie builds on the insight, best developed by the sociologist Orlando Patterson, that for many white Americans, and other some dominant communities around the world, “freedom” has meant the prerogative to oppress, dispossess, enslave or abuse others in the pursuit of the crudest individual and communal self-interest. The presumed loss of an assumed privilege of white Christian national pre-eminence is the primal fuel driving the Maga faction and its allies and antecedents.

Freedom’s Dominion begins and essentially ends with Wallace, an arch-segregationist (whose eventual repentance is another story). It is remarkably sweeping, tracing patterns of freedom as the right to dominate in Wallace’s homeland of Barbour County in south-eastern Alabama during four key historical periods: the brutal white invasion of Alabama and dispossession of the indigenous Creek Nation resulting in the infamous Trail of Tears ethnic cleansing; violent resistance to Reconstruction after the Civil War; the savage reimposition of white supremacy and segregation; and efforts to preserve that system despite the civil rights movement and anti-discrimination mandates from the federal government.

Prof Cowie reads this history as a continuous struggle between local control and independence from national authority as the key to the freedom to oppress versus fitful and often unsuccessful, although sometimes decisive, intervention by the federal government to enforce the law to protect minorities. This notion of freedom as the right to dominate, and at least scoff at restraints and requirements imposed by Washington, is central to the Trump movement, which, as I noted in these pages a year ago, is typified by its hatred and rejection of the national government and its agencies.

An important companion to Freedom’s Dominion, also published last year, is Waging a Good War by military historian Tom Ricks, which presents a major new gloss on the other side of the civil rights struggle. The book is subtitled A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968, though this analogy is not original to Mr Ricks. Especially during this classical phase, the civil rights movement often referred to itself as a righteous nonviolent army waging a war of successive campaigns, and frequently invoked military and paramilitary metaphors.

By subjecting this well-established history to a rigorous application of this analogy, Mr Ricks manages to shed important new light on the successes and failures of the most consequential grass roots movement in the US since the Civil War. At times, these comparisons seem strained, such as likening the first freedom rides to the Doolittle bombing raids over Tokyo in the early phases of the Pacific theatre of the Second World War, but for the most part the reading holds up very well and adds a great deal to what otherwise seemed a thoroughly explicated part of recent US history.

For a broader understanding of US history since the Second World War, the definitive volume is undoubtedly Winds of Hope, Storms of Discord: The United States since 1945 just penned by the Palestinian-American historian Salim Yaqub (full disclosure: Salim and I have been close friends since we were eight-year-old children in Beirut). But Prof Yaqub’s volume is unique in covering US history from the end of the Second World War until virtually the present day, past the January 6 insurrection.

In less than 600 pages, he manages to weave together virtually all crucial developments regarding the relationship between the government and economy; the US global role; demographic transformation; growing disagreements between Americans; and the impact of increasingly rapid and disruptive technological change. It is the ideal introduction for apt high schoolers, any college students and all general readers not thoroughly immersed in contemporary US history.

Prof Yaqub makes this potentially stultifying narrative compellingly readable. It zips along seamlessly, while making all the connections between the data points needed to form a beautifully integrated history. It should be translated into Arabic and widely distributed and read in the Middle East as soon as possible.

Prof Yaqub has been previously known for two masterful books on US-Arab diplomatic and political relations in the 1950s and 1970s. Unsurprisingly then, he begins with the captivating story of how two sons of the Turkish ambassador to the US in the 1930s and ’40s became fanatical fans of the black music scene in Washington and beyond, and went on to found Atlantic records, one of the premier blues, R&B and, ultimately, rock labels. Ahmet Ertegun became a central figure in US popular culture and the founding chairman of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

This story, which opens the book’s introduction, is the only real nod to Prof Yaqub’s previous scholarly work, and Salim’s personal Middle Eastern background. Then flows a comprehensive and impeccable contemporary history of America, which, like Freedom’s Dominion, is required reading for anyone who wants to understand why and how the US enters 2023 simultaneously so truly great yet so profoundly troubled.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/01/06/the-kevin-mccarthy-spectacle-bodes-ill-for-the-us/

His humiliation is unheard of and yet another blow to Trump. Could the GOP go the way of its Whig predecessors?

On Thursday, the US House of Representatives conducted a remarkable 11 inconclusive votes for Speaker. This means no representatives can be sworn in and no congressional business done. Republicans, who obtained a razor-thin majority in the November election, appear feckless, disunited, unfit and uninterested in governing. That bodes extremely ill for the country in general over the next two years.

California representative Kevin McCarthy, endorsed as “my Kevin” by former president Donald Trump, is being opposed by about 20 hardliners, leaving Democratic minority leader Hakeem Jeffries consistently coming in first place, supported by all 212 of his Democratic colleagues.

Mr McCarthy has been offering ever-greater concessions, and Mr Trump ordered his followers to get in line, to no avail. The degrading spectacle is a predictable comeuppance for Mr McCarthy, who initially angrily blamed Mr Trump for the January 6 insurrection, only to recant, travel to Florida to bend the knee and kiss his ring, and bow to each and every demand in order to try to gain the speaker’s chair. His humiliation is unheard of. And it is another yet devastating defeat for Mr Trump.

But the inability of the razor-thin Republican majority in the House to even select a speaker raises deafening alarm bells. Congress at a minimum must approve the budget, appropriations bills, and, above all, recurring extensions of the debt ceiling. The last issue is most alarming. The US President, Joe Biden, may be compelled to take unprecedented unilateral action to prevent the US from defaulting on its financial obligations if this current spectacle is anything to judge by.

The anti-McCarthy holdouts are acting like hostage takers who don’t want a ransom. They just want to accumulate hostages. Like Seinfeld, it’s a show about nothing. Mr McCarthy has offered everything to the rebels, short of picking up their dry cleaning and babysitting their children. But concessions aren’t the point. Disruption, performative anger, chaos, and, especially, television hits are.

Nancy Pelosi, now arguably the greatest House speaker ever, had a comparably narrow margin, and managed to get a great deal done. And the two other protracted Speaker confrontations were about immensely substantial disputes.

The issue in 1923 was about farming versus manufacturing interests. And in 1855-56, the quarrel was the expansion of slavery into western territories, which both pro-and antislavery forces understood would determine the viability of the atrocious practice in the US into the foreseeable future. That was ultimately decided by the US Civil War, the bloodiest conflict in American history.

But there is nothing significant Mr McCarthy’s opponents claim to want that he does not also advocate. Politics for most of the Republican Party, has become practically devoid of content – the last party platform merely said it stood for whatever Mr Trump wanted at any given moment – and has instead degenerated into an exercise in theatrical preening and posturing, exactly what is happening on the House floor this week.

You could see it as a dangerous game or a fatal illness. The US has a two-party system, but, historically, parties come and go.

The 1855-56 House Speaker contest solidified the emergence of the Republican Party, displacing the dying Whig Party, which had no remaining core or vision. In 1849, the Whigs nominated and secured the election of Zachary Taylor, universally regarded as one of the worst ever US presidents. A dissident faction of “Conscience Whigs” emerged that eventually formed the basis of the Republican Party. That does not sound unfamiliar.

Given the spectacle in the House this week, all conjecture that the Republican Party may have become radicalised and polarised, even against itself, beyond redemption and political usefulness seems increasingly less far-fetched.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-01-05/netanyahu-s-new-partners-waste-no-time-undermining-him?srnd=opinion&sref=tp95wk9l

Itamar Ben-Gvir’s visit to the Temple Mount wasn’t just about Israeli politics, it was part of a threat to the Abraham Accords.

The religious extremists brought into the Israeli government by returning Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week wasted no time in confirming fears they would gleefully play with fire. This isn’t simply about domestic politics: Provocations by right-wing leaders have already drawn the ire of Israel’s Arab neighbors and even President Joe Biden’s administration; they threaten to fan Palestinian violence and undermine the Abraham Accords that normalized diplomatic relations with the United Arab Emirates and other Arab states.

On Tuesday, the new minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, made a brief visit to a flashpoint of religious passions known to Muslims as the Haram al-Sharif. The site includes the iconic Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, whose golden dome dominates the Jerusalem skyline, and the Temple Mount, presumed to be the site of the Second Jewish Temple that was destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD.

The visit created an uproar of criticism, but so far, thankfully, no violence. Ben-Gvir is a proud Jewish supremacist who in 2007 was found guilty by a Jerusalem court of supporting a terrorist organization and inciting racism. He fully understands the symbolic resonance of a trip to the temple site by Israeli officials.

The Haram al-Sharif is controlled by an ancient Muslim religious trust called the Waqf. Jews, Christians and others are welcome to visit, but the Israeli rabbinate strongly discourages Jews from going there; prayer in the area is reserved to Muslims. Israel’s control of East Jerusalem, which it has occupied since 1967 and claimed to annex in 1980, has involved a commitment to maintain the “status quo” at religious sites, an arrangement that was formalized by the 1878 Treaty of Berlin. But a growing number of Israelis are determined to undo that status quo, either slowly or quickly.

Global Muslim sensitivities arise from fears that, ultimately, Israel will demolish the Haram al-Sharif and construct a Third Temple. This is definitely a minority view in Israel, but it’s growing and creeping into the cabinet.

Ben-Gvir’s visit was meant to communicate official Jewish power there. After the last such provocation, when newly installed Prime Minister Ariel Sharon conducted a heavily armed march on the holy site in 2000, a wave of violent confrontations degenerated into the calamitous second Palestinian intifada. About 3,500 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis, mostly civilians on both sides, were killed in the subsequent five years of fighting.

Ben-Gvir hasn’t merely set off Palestinian outrage. Jordan, which Israel recognizes as the custodian of Muslim and Christian holy places in occupied East Jerusalem, said it was willing to enter “a conflict” if Israel overturns the status quo. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre warned that “any unilateral action that jeopardizes the status quo is unacceptable.”

The UAE, which has entered into an unprecedented wide-ranging partnership with Israel since initiating the 2020 Abraham Accords — and even sought to build relations with Ben-Gvir by hosting him on a visit to its embassy in Tel Aviv in December — condemned his actions as “the storming of Al-Aqsa Mosque courtyard.” Netanyahu was forced to postpone a much-anticipated visit to the Gulf state scheduled for next week. The UAE joined China in arranging to bring the matter before the UN Security Council in coming days.

Netanyahu has said that normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia is one of his main goals. That was already a considerable long shot, but it took Ben-Gvir only a handful of days to make it even more difficult. The kingdom strongly condemned the action and is taking the matter to the 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation.

Netanyahu has promised he can control his fundamentalist coalition partners, but all he was able to do in this case was to convince Ben-Gvir to keep the visit brief and the timing secret. It was likely just an early taste of the provocations that lie ahead. The goal of the US and Israel’s other partners, including the UAE, should be to convince Netanyahu to reconsider the price he paid to cobble together a government and try to forge a new coalition with less radical figures such as former Defense Minister Benny Gantz.

Netanyahu is obviously uncomfortable with new political allies so far to his right; last month he reportedly told Ben-Gvir to “calm down.” But such extremists cannot be controlled. They can only be coddled or removed. And removing them is what Netanyahu — and if not him, then the Israeli public — must do to avoid another eruption of violence in the occupied Palestinian territories and perhaps a fracturing of Israel’s nascent ties with the Arab world.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/01/03/the-best-literature-on-trump-is-not-fiction/

Ironically, Trump also inspired the worst piece of fiction from last year: George Santos’s resume.

Joe Biden may be a remarkably successful, albeit low-key, US President, but his predecessor, Donald Trump, continues to grab the headlines. Last year saw the best batch yet of journalistic books on the Trump administration, several of which deserve particular attention.

Ironically, Mr Trump’s influence also inspired the worst piece of fiction last year, the manufactured resume of George Santos, one of New York’s newly elected representatives. He appears to have fabricated almost every element of his purported biography. The unheard of levels of shamelessness and disregard for truth modeled by Mr Trump reached their apotheosis in Mr Santos.

Confirming this new ethos of zero standards, the Republican Party appears happy to welcome him into its congressional ranks, its silent leaders blithely unconcerned that he won election by presenting voters with an entirely fictional persona behind which the real, unaccomplished mediocrity lurks.

Returning to the most harshly realistic non-fiction, The Report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol is surely one of the most important volumes in US history. The committee succeeded admirably in its evident twin goals: to create the first, and perhaps only, official account of Mr Trump’s attempted coup that culminated in the insurrection, and to essentially lay out the case for criminal charges against the former president and several of his aides, including his former chief of staff Mark Meadows and attorneys John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark and Rudy Giuliani, among others.

The report and related committee work is vast: 800 pages plus numerous appendices and invaluable transcripts of depositions that the committee is releasing online. The report itself establishes beyond doubt that Mr Trump privately accepted and understood that he lost the election and outlines in impressive detail the numerous unlawful schemes he organised to retain power anyway.

The transcripts are filled with damning nuggets, such as that a breast pocket card was placed in front of Mr Trump at 2.44pm stating that a civilian – almost certainly one of his supporters – had been shot in the chest outside a main Capitol Building interior door. The card remained there for almost two hours before he did anything to quell the insurrection.

Still, the report is a political document, not journalism or history. It is not objective, although it does purport to be essentially fair. Naturally, Mr Trump and his supporters are dismissing it as “worthless” partisan propaganda, but they don’t have a credible counter-narrative and are not likely to develop one. It is much more probable that the committee’s work will serve as the basis for criminal prosecution, if not of a former president, then at least for his worst coup plot enablers.

Alas, the record might never be complete since shocking new testimony reveals that Mr Meadows was seen unlawfully burning piles of government documents in his office on at least a dozen occasions.

Last year saw several excellent efforts at journalism as the rough draft of history on the Trump administration. The Divider by the husband-and-wife team Peter Baker and Susan Glasser is the best and most comprehensive single-volume account of his four tumultuous years in power.

At first glance it seems a straightforward, detailed 752-page chronology. But, as the title suggests, the authors slowly tease out how Mr Trump was a purveyor and creature of division. He came to power by recklessly dividing the country, he ran his administration by constantly dividing his staff, and it ultimately becomes clear he is divided against himself, a lonely, hollow figure driven by endless appetites and boundless grievances, but without a real core identity.

In Confidence Man, Maggie Haberman reads Mr Trump’s presidency through his earlier incarnations as a brash young New York City outer-borough rich kid trying to break into the haughty world of the Manhattan social elite. Many of his grievances were clearly formed by his ongoing failure to gain such acceptance. Haberman goes further than anyone yet in examining how the villainous attorney Roy Cohn and his unscrupulous and domineering father Fred Trump were the two primary influences shaping, and warping, his personality and worldview. Haberman’s book is mainly useful for those who know little about Mr Trump’s life before his hit TV show The Apprentice, but there is much more to be done to link the different periods in his life.

Thank You for Your Servitude by Mark Leibovich is surely the most entertaining book yet written about this dark political episode. He explores the various ways through which Mr Trump’s minions, no matter how apparently accomplished, ended up debasing themselves in his orbit, and how, no matter how earnestly they began, they almost inevitably were left corrupted or degraded, or both. The razor-sharp cynicism of the prose mirrors its subject matter, frequently provoking irrepressible laughter.

The guiding metaphor is “the joke” that all insiders are convinced they “get”, meaning that they are supposedly not taken in by Mr Trump’s, or arguably Washington’s, absurdist masquerades that are frequently no better than professional “wrestling” routines. Yet, with rare exceptions, they eventually realise that “the joke” is on them. The American voting majority appears to have come to that very conclusion. They “get it”, and they’re not amused.

In Why We Did It, Tim Miller, a former Republican insider who recoiled from Mr Trump’s anti-democratic movement, tries to explain why, rather than how, this so often happens. He outlines his experiences as a right-wing true believer who became increasingly disaffected, but the most potent passages consider why so many traditional conservatives allowed Mr Trump to transform their party and their own politics into an extremist, quasi-authoritarian, and often racist faction with little resemblance to the business-oriented policies associated with, for example, Ronald Reagan. Miller doesn’t uncover many rational answers, and the explanations mostly feel inadequate. But it is a fascinating, extremely intelligent, and creditable first effort to decipher a complex and mysterious, perhaps ultimately irrational, and hence inexplicable, conundrum.

There are some major gaps left in the early literature covering Mr Trump’s calamitous presidency. There is, for instance, no serious and successful evaluation of the QAnon phenomenon that remains extremely dangerous and increasingly boosted by Mr Trump. Nonetheless, these books and a few others constitute an excellent start.

But while the Trump chapter in American politics may be turning its last pages, the Trump saga clearly has many more chapters yet to be written. There’s certainly a great deal more ink, though hopefully not more blood, yet to be spilled by the 45th US president.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2022/12/26/biden-should-run-again-in-2024/

The 80-year-old president faces a momentous decision about his running mate.

The end-of-year holiday season is usually a retrospective time in Washington. But at the end of 2022, Americans appear tired of the rearview mirror and ready to look forward. Eyes are therefore starting to focus on 2024, and whether US President Joe Biden will run for re-election.

Mr Biden is, thus far at least, easily the most impressive American president since I moved to the US in 1980. His almost exactly two-year-old tenure has been extraordinary. He has quickly accumulated a small mountain of very significant and highly progressive domestic legislation affecting sectors ranging from child and health care to the tax code, to hard infrastructure and manufacturing investment, and, perhaps most significantly, climate change. It is the most masterful legislative performance since Lyndon Johnson in 1964-1965. Mr Biden did it all with a razor-thin majority in the House of Representatives and none at all in the 50-50 Senate (although Vice President Kamala Harris was empowered to break ties).

On foreign affairs, he aced by far the biggest test of his, and any recent, administration: the macro-historic crisis posed to the international system by Russia’s calamitous invasion of Ukraine. He united the western alliance confronting Moscow and working with Kiev to ensure that Russia’s initial aim to eliminate Ukraine as an independent nation and distinct society was roundly thwarted.

The stated and correct goal is ensuring that Russia does not benefit from what President Vladimir Putin finally admits is a war without being able to launch another aggression against any of its neighbours in the foreseeable future. Nato is now stronger than in many decades, and is expanding to include two key new members, Sweden and Finland. Mr Biden impressively walked the fine line between mobilising the western alliance to defeat Russia’s aims in Ukraine without intervening directly.

As Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told a joint session of Congress in Washington last week, this support for Ukraine “is not charity. It’s an investment in the global security and democracy that we handle in the most responsible way”. Even some of the most sceptical Republican right wing and Democratic leftist isolationists were eventually forced to their feet by the emotive intensity of Mr Zelenskyy’s words. The Biden administration’s framing of the war as a historic turning point for the global order is what prepared so many Americans and other westerners to acknowledge, however reluctantly, that the Ukrainian President’s narrative about the war is essentially correct.

Mr Biden has had his share of significant, sometimes embarrassing, failures. His legislation, however impressive, fell far short of his grandiose vision and promises from the campaign. Many liberals feel left out or abandoned.

The withdrawal from Afghanistan was an utter shambles. Although any US withdrawal was bound to be chaotic, the Biden administration erred in believing the Afghan government and military could hold on for months, or at least weeks, when they could not hold on for more than a few hours. This led to terrible failures like deserving Afghans being left behind.

Another serious flunk involves ongoing chaos at the US southern border. Like all his recent predecessors, Mr Biden has failed to find any solution, in part because Republicans don’t really want one, preferring to blame liberals for supposedly wanting “open borders”. But he has not done anything dramatic to even appear to be tackling the issue, thereby ceding ground to shameless Republican governors who grandstand, most recently by apparently bussing confused migrants to the Vice President’s residence in the middle of the night and the freezing dead of winter.

The President’s messaging has often been abysmal, featuring constant underselling, and literally as well as figuratively mumbling through key teachable moments. In his “major speech” on September 1, Mr Biden bungled dreadfully by conflating urgent efforts to preserve the US constitutional order with his own specific policies. And while he pulled his party very much to the center, and therefore to a historic triumph in the midterms, many Americans have been allowed to remain convinced that the Democratic Party is much more liberal than it actually is.

Finally, the President is definitely showing his age. So is the 76-year-old Donald Trump. But even though Mr Biden appears impressively fit, he looks and sounds every bit of his 80 years. I just made the case that he should definitely run again, given his remarkable record of success. But he will be on the verge of 82 in early November 2024, meaning he will be asking voters to trust him to lead the country until he is 86. A few countries have had chief executives that old, but for Americans, it would be a new watershed and one many, including plenty of Democrats, will not welcome.

Most importantly, he will have to be completely confident in his Vice President, absolutely certain this individual is ready to step into power with no notice whatsoever. Does Ms Harris fit the bill? Most of the country does not appear convinced yet. This may be another of Mr Biden’s most striking failures. He certainly has not given her a starring role, to say the least, except as the public face of the administration’s underwhelming border policies, the ultimate US political crown of thorns.

Her supporters think she had an excellent 2022, pointing to her role at the Munich Security Conference on the eve of the Ukraine invasion, barnstorming national condemnation of the Supreme Court’s repeal of abortion rights, and diplomacy in Asia. But it has not been enough to elevate her sufficiently to stand next to an 82-year-old running mate and say, “re-elect us with confidence”.

Jill Biden is reportedly convinced her husband should run for re-election. She’s right. No other Democrat, or Republican for that matter, is remotely as well positioned for victory. His more complex decision will be about Ms Harris. If he’s not convinced she’s completely ready, it is time to look for somebody else, such as governors Gretchen Witmer of Michigan or Jared Polis of Colorado.

Mr Biden should run again, but he needs to think very carefully about his confidence in Ms Harris. He can almost certainly win, even if he were to rile some Democrats by replacing her. But, if he thinks she’s up to the job, he must now invest far more attention and planning in preparing her to serve as president and the public to see her as ready for the White House.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/2022/12/19/musk-and-trump-are-at-the-centre-of-disunity-in-the-us/

Two recent public dumps of private communications reveal the pervasiveness of conspiracy theories dividing America.

Last week, two large dumps of what were originally assumed to be private conversations demonstrated the depth of discord among Americans. But the differences between the two sets of conversations and reactions to them are stark and revealing.

New Twitter owner Elon Musk sent private correspondence from within the company before he took over to several bloggers to try to prove it had been highly biased against the right and, especially, former US president Donald Trump. The political news website Talking Points Memo published 2,319 text messages to and from then White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, as Republicans sought to overturn the 2020 election, setting the stage for the January 6 insurrection.

The failed coup remains the biggest dividing line in a fractured American polity. That is likely to get worse as the January 6 Committee is expected to recommend serious criminal charges against Mr Trump at their final hearing on Monday. They plan to urge the Department of Justice to charge Mr Trump with obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the US, and, most significantly, insurrection.

It is just a recommendation, but it will further damage him. Mr Trump faces possible indictment in Georgia, related to the effort to overturn the election there. New York prosecutors are re-examining his payment of hush money to two of his former paramours. Mr Trump’s then attorney, Michael Cohen, who made the payments, was sentenced to three years in prison.

Mr Trump’s “major announcement” last week turned out to be an astonishingly cheesy offer of $99 virtual NFT “trading cards” depicting the former president in various pseudo-heroic poses. Even his closest allies expressed disgust at the demeaning spectacle, reminiscent of the worst late-night television.

In this context, Mr Musk released his “Twitter files” to several bloggers, urging them to demonstrate that the company conspired to support Democrats and harm Republicans, especially Mr Trump. Yet the messages don’t demonstrate anything of the kind. What they show is an overwhelmed company struggling, and often failing badly, to establish and enforce reasonable and consistent content standards. That much was already obvious.

The messages reveal the former Twitter leaders were liberals, made mistakes, and blundered by blocking tweets linking to a New York Post article about a laptop supposedly belonging to President Joe Biden’s son Hunter immediately before the 2020 election. Twitter even briefly suspended the Post’s account, demanding they delete all references to the story, which Twitter suspected might have been Russian disinformation.

Amid an enormous backlash, the ban was quickly lifted. Twitter admitted it was a huge error. The “Twitter files” show the messy, often unpleasant, sausage-making that went into that aggressively pursued mistake. The right is indignantly insisting the messages demonstrate that Twitter, and they imply all major social media before Mr Musk, was constantly conspiring against conservatives and plotting to promote a liberal agenda. That is a considerable exaggeration. These “files” don’t alter the essential narrative most sensible Americans have long ago concluded regarding these well-known Twitter controversies.

Moreover, the “files” are not being released in full, or with any transparency. They are being selectively published by certain bloggers selected by Mr Musk. The project would be a lot more credible if the public were shown the entire “files” rather than carefully curated titbits.

Mr Musk’s arbitrary and authoritarian content management is infinitely more biased and less systematic than his predecessors. He has welcomed back some of the worst bad actors and suspended the accounts of those who have apparently annoyed him. He was even threatened with EU sanctions because of these abuses.

Whatever their failings, his predecessors were at least trying to establish a system and a clear process. For Mr Musk, “le tweet c’est moi.” At least he seems to be having a jolly good time.

By contrast, the Mark Meadows text messages are deeply alarming. The former Chief of Staff provided them to the January 6 committee before he suddenly cut off all co-operation in December 2021.

Talking Points Memo and their investigative reporter Hunter Walker posted them in full, along with excellent analysis. The texts demonstrate a zealous commitment by numerous Republican notables and members of Congress to a coup and overturning the 2020 US Presidential election.

Congressman Ralph Norman, for example, demanded the White House invoke “Marshall Law,” a misspelling of martial law also used in the same context – to suspend the Constitution and keep Mr Trump in power – by Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Some text messages are borderline deranged and manic, spilling out into many hundreds of words. They embrace and promote ridiculous conspiracy theories from sources as farcical as a dodgy Romanian YouTube account.

Such conspiratorial ravings are not new to anyone who has ventured down the rabbit hole of right-wing extremism. They have a consistent style and illogic. What’s new and truly shocking is that many Republican legislators appear to really believe them. Time and again they depict the country in an existential crisis or even war, often invoking a divine plan or the will of God to justify a coup.

When politicians spout conspiracy theories in speeches or on television, sensible people generally assume that they are just pandering and indulging in shameless political theatre. That’s bad enough, but the Meadows texts appear to demonstrate that many elected Republicans earnestly and fervently believe this balderdash. That’s incredibly frightening.

Some of them are actually being promoted. Representative Ted Bud, whose texts repeated preposterous theories about foreign manipulation of voting machines, has been elected senator from North Carolina, a major upgrade.

It’s all very revealing.

The “Twitter files” show often unpleasant liberals trying, and frequently failing, to create a workable standards system. Mr Musk is treating Twitter as a personal playground to settle his grievances and explore his issues. He’s making them look like the proverbial stable geniuses.

The texts disturbingly demonstrate that many politicians who spout conspiracy theories in public also seem to believe them in private. Mr Trump’s $99 virtual trading cards of himself as Superman and Rambo actually illustrate the depth of his diminishment.

Yet Mr Trump is the essential figure conjoining the Meadows and Twitter messages. The Great Divider is still the centre of national disunity and chaos. The January 6 committee’s forthcoming criminal recommendations bring him one step closer to the dock. It seems almost inevitable he will face criminal charges. That could drag American discord down to depths of acrimony Mr Musk can only dream of promoting.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-12-19/us-and-saudis-end-rift-over-oil-production-cuts-yemen-and-china?srnd=opinion&sref=tp95wk9l

The Biden administration has stopped complaining about oil production cuts and did the Saudis favors on Yemen aid and a Khashoggi lawsuit.

After weeks of recriminations between Washington and Riyadh following the Saudi-led OPEC+ production cut on Oct. 5, it appears that the longstanding partnership has weathered this storm and is quietly emerging stronger than ever.

The most recent indication of improved relations was an intervention by the White House, threatening a presidential veto, forcing Senators to put off a vote on a bill banning US support for Saudi military activities in Yemen.

President Joe Biden’s administration cited language that would define intelligence sharing and support operations as “hostilities,” saying this could severely damage US support for Ukraine and other partners such as Israel. This is pretty much sophistry: The proposed legislation deals specifically with US-Saudi relations. In truth, the White House’s objections just made the case for preserving the defense relationship with Saudi Arabia, including in Yemen.

There is a growing understanding in the administration and among some in Congress that the main obstacle to a lasting cease-fire in Yemen comes from Iran-backed Houthi militants rather than Saudi Arabia. More important, most of those serious about US global strategy have realized that a vital American competitive advantage depends on preserving security in the Persian Gulf and the Arabian and Red Seas — in particular, the chokepoints of the Suez Canal, Bab el-Mandab and the Strait of Hormuz.

Anger over oil pricing has also subsided. The most recent OPEC+ meeting, on Dec. 4, ended with an agreement to continue the reduced production quotas set in October. But this time there was no US backlash. That’s because the Saudis proved correct that production reductions would not cause prices to soar.

The current price per gallon at pumps around the US is politically and economically acceptable to the administration. Fears that the Russian economy would be unduly strengthened didn’t materialize. (Russia is the “plus” in OPEC+.)

The October quarrel was also linked to the midterm elections, with many Democrats suspecting, without evidence, that Riyadh was attempting to help Republicans. Given that the Democrats overperformed spectacularly, those misgivings became moot. The Saudis would have figured prominently in any blame game following a Democratic debacle, but that didn’t happen.

Even the much-ballyhooed state visit to Saudi Arabia by Chinese leader Xi Jinping, accompanied by a long list of mutual cooperation agreements between the two countries, appears to have done little to antagonize Washington. While the US rightly regards its presence in the Gulf region and surrounding areas as key leverage in great-power competition with Beijing, it doesn’t have a problem with its Gulf Arab partners strengthening ties with their biggest customer, at least to some degree.

As long as China-Gulf Arab relations are based on commerce, investment and even infrastructure projects that don’t have potential military or intelligence uses, such agreements are tolerable to Washington. Indeed, they help undermine the China-Iran partnership that’s a long-term concern to the US. And while we haven’t seen all the details, nothing that’s known thus far about the new Saudi-Chinese agreements touches any third rails.

There have been other signs of better relations. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates reportedly played a key role in mediating the prisoner exchange that freed US basketball star Brittney Griner from a Russian prison. In early November, US jets were scrambled in an assertive flight toward Iran that apparently deterred a planned attack against Saudi Arabia.

And on Nov. 18, the Biden administration ruled that, as a foreign head of government, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has immunity from civil lawsuits in US courts — in this instance, regarding a suit related to the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018.

In sum: Over the last few months US-Saudi ties have passed a series of significant tests, any of which could have done considerable long-term damage. But behind the scenes, the relationship is not only repairing, it’s being reconceptualized on both sides in a way that should make it stronger.

No longer is it simply a matter of trading oil for security, rendering Saudi Arabia, as some hostile members of Congress put it in October, a “client state.” Even if that was never fully true, there is a growing understanding among national security professionals on both sides that this is a relationship of partners seeking mutual goals, such as maritime security that benefit both, with significant burden sharing.

That’s a far more sustainable basis for cooperation in an increasingly multipolar era. Ironically, it has quietly taken root just when many thought the US-Saudi partnership was in its death throes.