The war on terror: violence always breeds more violence

Peter Beinart’s post at the Daily Beast on President Obama’s approach to terrorism makes a lot of sense, especially if you accept the notion that regardless of your good intentions, violence always breeds more violence.

Beinart, senior political writer at the Daily Beast, begins:

President Obama isn't nearly as scared of the terrorists as Bush was—and that’s precisely why al Qaeda is falling apart.

Republicans think about terrorism the way Democrats think about poverty. Democrats know their anti-poverty policies don’t always work. But they tell themselves that at least their hearts are in the right place, at least they care about the problem.

That’s the way Republicans think about terrorism. In unguarded moments, honest Republicans will admit that not all of the Bush administration’s anti-terror policies worked. But they tell themselves that at least they know America is at war; at least they know the terrorists are evil; at least they really care about the problem.

It’s precisely because Obama doesn’t see the terrorist threat as quite so epic that al Qaeda is falling apart.

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Protecting the U.S. homeland: waging peace instead of war

Photo left: Julie Costa of Global Volunteers

Since 9/11, the United States has understandably been preoccupied with defending itself against terrorists, and we continue to expend vast amounts of blood and treasure in fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In the meantime, we’ve paid little attention to those who have chosen to wage peace instead of war, e.g., Julie Costa of Global Volunteers and Dr. Adil Ozdemir, a teacher and interpreter of Islam at St. Thomas University in St. Paul, Minn.

A volunteer manager for Global Volunteers, Julie has personally served on volunteer teams at four domestic sites and in 13 different countries:

Julie speaks movingly of her experiences serving on volunteer teams, which have included helping build a preschool in a fishing village in Ghana, West Africa; holding abandoned babies in Romania’s former iron-crib; debating human rights issues with college students in China; and providing literacy based tutoring to Cook Islanders in the South Pacific.

“Every one of these experiences has changed me in a profound way,” Julie said. “It is a much more intimate experience than going somewhere as a tourist. Virtually everyone who returns from serving on a team says the same thing, ‘I got back much more than I gave.’ That has always been my experience, as well.”

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In his peace waging efforts, Dr. Adil Ozdemir (photo on right) a native of Turkey, reminds his students of the commonalities among major world religions:

The Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have several important foundational ideas in common beginning with monotheism, Adil explains. He points out that although there may be subtle differences among them, "each of these faiths teaches that every person deserves dignity, integrity, and respect with utmost love and care."

Adil reminds us that members of the above religions hold in common principles of human freedom and responsibility in caring for creation that ultimately lead to judgment and accountability. He notes that Islam, the youngest of the three faiths, honors Jesus, respects the Judaic and Christian prophets, and reveres the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, while at the same time offering new revelations by Mohammed.

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Congressional bipartisan coalition introduces the International Violence Against Women Act

If you can’t understand why the United States ranks 31st overall in the Global Gender Gap and 70th in the political empowerment of women, just scan the hostile readers’ comments that fill message boards every time anyone posts an article supporting women’s rights here or abroad.

For starters, read the first three sickening comments at Politico in response to an opinion piece posted yesterday afternoon by Sen. John F. Kerry, Rep. Bill Delahunt, Kerry Kennedy, and Larry Cox. Titled Protection for women a top foreign policy priority, the article begins:

Rita Mahato, a mother of three, works as a health adviser for the Women’s Rehabilitation Centre (WOREC) in Nepal, counseling rape victims and registering cases of domestic violence routinely dismissed by the local police. In June 2007, a mob of more than 60 men surrounded her offices, threatening to rape and kill Rita and her colleagues – demanding that they end their work. Three years later, Rita and her team continue to be threatened, harassed and physically abused, yet the police have failed to take action. Despite threats to her life, Rita perseveres defending the human rights of women and seeking justice for victims of domestic and sexual violence.

Sadly, Rita’s experience is not unique: women around the world are subject to abuse and many also face extreme poverty.

It doesn’t have to be that way. That’s why today a bipartisan coalition, led by Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) in the Senate and Congressmen Bill Delahunt (D-Mass.) and Ted Poe (R-Texas) in the House, will introduce the International Violence Against Women Act (IVAWA). Introduction of this bill supports the efforts of President Obama and Secretary Clinton to rightly put women at the very center of a broad global security agenda that factors in the great challenges of our decade and invests in the world’s peacemakers.

Passage of the bill is critical. Every day, women and girls are battered, beaten, raped or otherwise brutalized. In some countries, more than 70 percent of women have been the victims of domestic violence. And, for most of these women, justice is elusive, because where violence against women is endemic, so too are impunity and poor governance. Not only can they expect police, prosecutors and judges to refuse to investigate cases against their perpetrators, too often, they can also expect to be condemned, shamed and even punished themselves.

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Maureen Dowd offers balanced coverage of Obama’s Q and A with Repubs

Wow. It’s hard for me to admit this and even go so far as to link to her op-ed in today’s NY Times, but of all the coverage I’ve scanned of Obama’s much heralded Q and A with the Republicans the other day, Maureen Dowd has offered the most balanced account of the occasion. Hey, she even acknowledged that despite his emergence from his “Camus coma,” Obama got his comeuppance a few times from Utah’s freshman member of the House, Republican Jason Chaffetz.

Is it too much to hope that our punditry is finally emerging from its comatose state evident since Barack Obama first-stepped on the national stage?

Read Dowd’s entire column here:

U.S. ranks 70th in the world in political empowerment of women

After the treatment Hillary Clinton received during the 2008 Democratic primary, I was not surprised to learn today in Ruth Marcus’ column, submitted to the Washington Post from Davos, that the United States ranks 31st in the Global Gender Gap Index – and hey, look at this: we rank 70th in the category of political empowerment.

As I’ve suggested before, America should be embarrassed to lecture the rest of the world on human rights issues - what with its treatment of women, and it’s recent experiments in using torture to obtain intelligence information from “enemy combatants” picked up off the streets in various countries without benefit of formal charges.

But back to the gender gap. Marcus reports:

The focus is on the gap between men and women in each country rather than women’s overall levels of achievement there, so countries are ranked based on the gender differential rather than development level. At the top of this year’s heap, once again, were the Scandinavian countries: Iceland ranked first, followed by Finland, Norway and Sweden. But the rest of the top 10 was a global grab bag: New Zealand was number five, then South Africa, Denmark, Ireland, the Philippines and Lesotho. At the bottom was Yemen, with Chad, Pakistan, Benin, Saudi Arabia and, surprising to me, Turkey, which was a notch below Iran.

The United States ranked No. 31, about where it’s been for the last few years but worse than its No. 23 ranking from the first survey, in 2006. This relative backsliding is unusual: Of the 115 countries that have been covered in all four years, 97 improved their rankings.

Read more of the shameful details here.

Tavis Smiley, Michael Beschloss, and the continued PBS assault on Bill and Hillary Clinton

I used to get angry when the right criticized PBS for having a liberal bias in its political coverage. No more. That was before the 2008 Democratic primary when I saw Shields, Brooks, and Lehrer repeatedly treat Hillary and Bill Clinton with lip-curling contempt. PBS has been at it again this week, once again demonstrating their “do or say whatever it takes to support Barack Obama attitude,” even if it means trashing two fellow Democrats who have given him their complete support throughout his first year in office.

Just prior to Obama’s first State of the Union speech, the network aired Tavis Smiley’s interview with Hillary Clinton, which I watched with mixed feelings. On one level, Smiley was treating the secretary of state with apparent awe for her hard work and dedication, but on another level there was unmistakable condescension in his every comment about her.

And there was outright misrepresentation of the facts in his first mention of her trip to Africa where she exposed herself to dangerous conditions in the East Congo, the rape capital of the world, to make a stand for women’s rights.

From her entire trip to Africa, Smiley chose to highlight an incident when Clinton rightfully objected to a student’s question regarding what her husband thought about an issue.

In concert with his sexist colleagues in the media, Smiley failed to get the put down that any self-respecting contemporary woman in Clinton’s circumstances would have experienced in that situation. Instead, our smug, superior news correspondent referred to Clinton’s objection to the question as a “gaffe.”

I never learn. I made the mistake of tuning in the NewsHour the day after Obama’s State of the Union address to watch Judy Woodruff moderate a panel that included so-called historian Michael Beschloss. Historians put aside their biases and record history objectively, right? My jaw dropped in astonishment as I heard Beschloss attempt to prop up Obama by accusing Bill Clinton of having done whatever it took during his first term to get re-elected. It was about then that I hit the off button on my remote.

I don’t understand how American TV viewers continue to support PBS in response to its recurrent fundraising drives in which its spokespersons boast about the network’s objective and balanced news coverage. Personally, I will never send PBS a dime.

By the way, Beschloss didn’t succeed in his efforts to elevate Obama by smearing Bill Clinton. Not by a long shot. In this morning’s NY Times column, Paul Krugman puts Obama’s puny stabs at leadership in perspective:

Wait, it gets worse. To justify the freeze, Mr. Obama used language that was almost identical to widely ridiculed remarks early last year by John Boehner, the House minority leader. Boehner then: “American families are tightening their belt, but they don’t see government tightening its belt.” Obama now: “Families across the country are tightening their belts and making tough decisions. The federal government should do the same.”

What’s going on here? The answer, presumably, is that Mr. Obama’s advisers believed he could score some political points by doing the deficit-peacock strut. I think they were wrong, that he did himself more harm than good. Either way, however, the fact that anyone thought such a dumb policy idea was politically smart is bad news because it’s an indication of the extent to which we’re failing to come to grips with our economic and fiscal problems.

It’s time we all asked ourselves, what’s going here?

President Obama’s State of the Union: Hey, America, fixing our economy is just a big athletic contest!

Well, yes, I sat up and listened to President Obama’s first State of the Union address. Overall, I felt mildly dismayed, but not surprised, by how the president’s audience cheered on the several occasions when he mouthed the usual clichés to arouse America’s competitive spirit in relationship to the rest of the world, for example:

From -- from the first railroads to the Interstate Highway System, our nation has always been built to compete. There's no reason Europe or China should have the fastest trains or the new factories that manufacture clean-energy products.

It was kind of like listening to a basketball coach rev up his team before the big game with all the loyal fans present. As was to be expected, the fans stood up and cheered on cue.

Sadly, I did not hear an alternative vision of how America could play a leadership role in promoting a level of global prosperity that would at least allow the people of every nation the opportunity to provide food, clothing, and shelter for their families. But then that would require an emphasis on cooperation rather than heightened competition.

I had to shake my head when President Obama offered a disclaimer for Candidate Obama who was swept to victory on his repeated pledges to transform the world in six days and rest on the seventh. Instead of “Yes, we can,” the president spoke more humbly a year after he took office:

I campaigned on the promise of change, change we can believe in, the slogan went. And right now, I know there are many Americans who aren't sure if they still believe we can change, or that I can deliver it.

But remember this: I never suggested that change would be easy or that I could do it alone. Democracy in a nation of 300 million people can be noisy and messy and complicated. And when you try to do big things and make big changes, it stirs passions and controversy. That's just how it is.

I beg to differ: Candidate Obama may never have suggested that change would be easy, but nowhere in his heated rhetoric did this superb motivational speaker warn his typically youthful, shouting, and foot-stomping followers of the hard road ahead.

And he’s still not being 100 percent honest and straightforward with the American people by implying that overcoming the financial meltdown and high levels of unemployment is comparable to a rigorous pick-up basketball game in which the USA team in its red, white, and blue uniforms can easily overcome its international competition.