Saturday, October 24, 2009
That's the title of a very nice op-ed Romney wrote for the Manchester (NH) Union Leader:
The world is fast becoming a more dangerous place. Liberty and peace are threatened in new and frightful ways. Russia is returning to its authoritarian ways, fueled by its energy stranglehold on Europe.
China has married the power of free enterprise with the oppression of Communist rule. Violent jihadists are fighting to crush people and nations across the globe.
And rogue nations with maniacal autocrats are recklessly pursuing nuclear capabilities that put the world in jeopardy. Left unchecked, a nuclear race will be joined by many, many others.
For all these reasons, America needs strong allies.
This is one reason why I am so very concerned by the current drift in our government's relationship with Israel. In pursuit of a peace process, the United States today has exerted substantial pressure on Israel while putting almost no pressure on the Palestinians and the Arab world...
Read it all. This via Jennifer Rubin, who calls it good politcs:
...It's telling that Romney chose to place this in a New Hampshire paper. The home of the first-in-the-nation primary still demands some attention. But it's also interesting that Romney, at least now, is choosing to make foreign policy and Israel specifically such prominent issues. One can argue that this is simply smart politics -- hitting the president where he's weak, demonstrating greater comfort with a subject his opponent dominated in the last presidential run, and appealing not only to Jewish Republicans (they may be a minority of Jewish voters but they play an active role in the party monetarily and otherwise) but also to evangelical Christians (whose affection for Israel is boundless)...
Eh. I'll be honest. I take issue with nothing Rubin says here, but is this approach -- a focus on the Middle East that many will read as bellicose -- the best bang for the buck, particularly amongst libertarian-minded New Hampshire conservatives? Probably not. It's still about the economy, and to the extent the great middle cares about Iran, for instance, you've got to make it very very clear what the direct tie to American interest is. I've talked to more than one Boston radio host who's informed me that while they'd love to talk about Israel, the Middle East and terrorism more often, whenever it comes up the phones go dead. And pandering to Jewish conservative votes? Good luck with that. Romney does do a decent job of bringing the issue home, however, and what I really like is that since there isn't a lot of payoff with a piece like this, and even some risk (witness the comments), it says to me this is what Mitt Romney really feels. That's a good thing.
Fine piece but as an example of why the phones go dead, it isn't just the economy that's affecting people in the US but also serious (very serious) issues far closer to home.
Yesterday there was a piece on CNN about Juarez, Mexico, which is right across the border from us. Murders related to drug violence and gang activity have soared. I believe the death toll for this year alone is more than 2,000 people.
This is in ONE small Mexican town.
Drug and gang violence and poverty afflict us on our side of the border as well. A huge wildfire in the Los Angeles area is thought to have been accidentally set by marijuana farmers using our national forests to grow drugs, which will then add to the misery in our cities and directly or indirectly contribute to violence, poverty and misery in Mexico too as well as other countries south of the border, where drug cartels are more powerful than governments.
I don't see why people around the world continue insisting that the Middle East and specifically Israel constitute The Greatest Threat To Peace And Stability On The Planet given that hunger afflicts one billion people - 1/6 of the people on the planet - and casual and drug or poverty related violence claims thousands and thousands of lives in major cities every year.
Far more children and young people are killed in gang related slayings in one or two US cities annually than in the Gaza war. I'm sure that if we looked around the world at the plight of the poor we'd see similarly awful statistics.
Here in the US former homeowners live in homeless shelters. In Rio, in Mexico city, millions of people live in cardboard boxes. Hunger is real in the US. Grinding poverty, hopeless, terrible poverty, afflicts countless people here and elsewhere in our own hemisphere and eventually that affects all of us.
So I'm grateful to Mr. Romney but I totally understand why the lines go dead.
The Arab/Israeli conflict is important particularly and primarily to people who are directly involved.
It's fascinating too because people have managed to create a situation, over several decades, in which propaganda, religion and incitement have rendered solutions nearly impossible unless everybody decides to sit down and grow some common sense and reason and also some compassion for people who are after all practically relatives.
This is unlikely in a region where we now see Lebanon declaring a hummus and tabouli war on Israel, claiming that the Israelis are "stealing" Lebanese cuisine.
So much as we all love hummus and tabouli and declare (insert tabouli recipe, religion or border here) to be The Right One - in objective terms the Arab/Israeli conflict pales in comparison to the situation of people who are living, right here and all over the world in fear of their lives, in fear of hunger, poverty and disease and the destruction of our children and our civilization and our environment from internal threats and from anarchy right on our border and even within our cities.
In our hemisphere this has resulted primarily from poverty and from a lack of meaningful, lucrative employment and one could argue as well that we've lost a core set of values, that people are seduced by easy money and by the easy lure of drugs that banish reality at the terrible cost of addiction and even greater poverty, and a slide into crime and despair.
Nobody, no neighborhood, no suburb is safe as long as any of our citizens are vulnerable to these threats. Violence, misery and despair have a way of travelling.
In Rio de Janiero, site of the 2016 Olympic Games, a police helicopter was shot out of the sky by criminals. Kids in Chicago have been beaten to death by their peers. None of us is safe from an unstable economy.
On the other side of this coin we see brutal, repressive governments that lash women for speaking freely or torture, rape, imprison and even kill people for having the "wrong" opinion.
This too is sadly common throughout the world, as are terrorism, civil war and violence that claim millions.
Maybe the people hanging up the phone realize this. In spite of Israel's enormous and enormously negative PR footprint, when it comes right down it, this planet has much more serious problems and I think the collective "we" should start focusing on them.
This most especially means "human rights" groups at the UN and elsewhere who somehow miss the fact that a key element of human rights is having enough to eat, having a reasonable expectation of surviving to be a decent age and not having to live in a box.
Such a perspective might also relieve the pressure on Israelis and Palestinians and allow them to figure things out, find some common ground as human beings and create a workable solution to their problems.
This won't happen as long as they're pawns in somebody else's game.