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TMI Show Ep 35: “Assad Falls; What Now for Russia in the Middle East?”

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Ted Rall

Ties between Syria and Russia go back not only through the Soviet Union but even to Czarist Russia. Now, presumably because Russia is so focused on Ukraine, it was unable to save its ally, President Bashar al-Assad, from being deposed by Islamist insurgents. Assad is safely in Moscow but Damascus is a different matter.

Americas who remember the optimistic coverage of the fall of Baghdad in 2003 know better than to take similar images and coverage seriously now. International security analyst and Russia expert Mark Sleboda joins Ted Rall and guest co-host Robby West (filling in for Manila Chan) on “The TMI Show” to talk about the broad international implications of the collapse of the Syrian state, rising instability, and where Russia and Iran go now when it comes to influence in the Middle East.

TMI Show Ep 34: “The Talibanization of Syria”

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Ted Rall

This feels like a movie you’ve seen before: a secular socialist government where women and ethnic minorities have rights that are respected is targeted by the United States and its allies in large part because it shows that left-wing politics can be successful. The Carter administration armed the mujaheddin in Afghanistan, setting the stage for Al Qaeda and 9/11. The Bush Administration overthrew Saddam Hussein in Iraq, creating a failed state that became a vassal of Iran and a home for ISIS. Obama killed Muammar Qaddafi in Libya, creating a failed state where slave markets have reappeared and radical Muslim fundamentalists hold sway. Now an officially designated terrorist organization has, with the help of the US and Israel, overthrown Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

Will Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and its reformist leader Ahmad al-Sharaa keep their promise to limit their ambitions to Syria? Will they impose radical Taliban-style sharia law on Syria? What are the implications for Russia, which accepted Assad but did not provide sufficient air support to protect his regime? Israel has already started bombing Syria, saying that its 1974 peace deal was with the Assad government which no longer exists; will the war in Lebanon and Gaza spread into Syria even more? What are the security implications for Israel, which wanted this regime change, right next-door?

No Place for Violence

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Ted Rall

Even as he funnels tens of billions of dollars in weapons to Israel to help it bomb the Gaza Strip, President Biden lectures college students about being too violent as they try to protect themselves from riot police.

Correlation Does Not Equal Causation, Even in Gaza

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Ted Rall

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his supporters keep repeating the talking point that all of the civilian casualties in Gaza should be blamed upon Hamas because Hamas begin the latest conflict with his attack on October 7. By their logic, literally anything that they chose to do after October 7 would be justifiable.

Dither Accompli

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Ted Rall

The Biden Administration is setting the stage for tacitly endorsing Israel’s war against Gaza by remaining publicly silent until, ultimately, they finally come out in favor of a ceasefire. But it’ll only happen after Gaza is destroyed and its Palestinian inhabitants have been driven out into the desert.

Who Are These Jew-Hating Maniacs?

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Ted Rall

If you were determined to destroy Israel’s international reputation and influence, and encourage anti-Semitism, you couldn’t possibly be more effective than the current Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu and its war against Hamas in Gaza.

Israel Is Not Acting in “Self-Defense”

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Ted Rall

            “Thou shalt not kill” is probably the oldest and most widespread moral and legal edict in human civilization, common to nearly every culture. However, there is one universal exception: even in countries that prohibit capital punishment and euthanasia, murder is permitted in self-defense.

            At this writing, Israel has murdered more than 7,000 Gazan residents over the last three weeks. Israel and its supports say this bloodbath is justified as self-defense. “Israel has a right to defend itself and its people,” President Biden said on October 7th, hours after Hamas fighters killed more than 1,400 Israelis.

            Is it really “self-defense”?

            Israel is framing its war against Gaza as a nation’s legitimate right, under international law, to defend itself. “We are in a war for our sovereignty, for our existence, and we have set ourselves two fundamental objectives: to eradicate Hamas’s military and governmental capabilities and to do everything possible to bring the hostages held by the Palestinian Islamist group back home,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told TV viewers. “There is no place for a balanced approach. Hamas must be erased off the face of the planet!” added Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen.

            There is nothing balanced about Israel’s response. Carpet bombing has destroyed nearly half the homes in the Gaza Strip. Israel has killed many times more Palestinian civilians than it lost on October 7th. A ground invasion will unleash more misery and mayhem.

            Reasonable people may disagree over whether Israel’s response is justified or likely to prove effective.

No one should call it self-defense.

            International law clearly governs how a nation like Israel is supposed to respond to an attack like October 7th. Article 51 of the U.N. Charter permits “self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations”—the exact situation here—“until the [U.N.] Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.” As a U.N. member state, Israel should have requested assistance from the Security Council. They still ought to.

            Israel’s claim to self-defense ended hours after the Hamas attack, when the IDF had killed or routed all Hamas fighters on Israeli territory and retaken control of the areas that had previously been overrun. The status quo ante was restored as of October 8th, with the exception of the more than 200 hostages seized from Israel and now held by Hamas in Gaza.

            After Israel secured the areas broached by Hamas, a different body of law applied. Israel’s bombing campaign, which began on October 8th, might only be justified as a preemptive act of self-defense—a military campaign to prevent future terrorist attacks by Hamas. The Bush Administration claimed that its invasion of Iraq fell into this category, but that war clearly failed the so-called “Caroline test” formulated by the U.S. in the 19th century and which now guides international law. In 1837, Secretary of State Daniel Webster declared that a nation-state could only justify the use of military force in a case of imminent threat that was “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment of deliberation” and, these conditions being satisfied, military action should be proportional: “nothing unreasonable or excessive; since the act, justified by the necessity of self-defense, must be limited by that necessity, and kept clearly within it.”

Self-defense is not a blank check for unlimited vengeance or retribution. Being angry or insulted or traumatized does not justify revenge. A nation-state is only permitted to apply the bare minimum of force necessary to repel or neutralize a threat.

That’s not what Israel is doing to Gaza. Dropping 8,000 bombs on a tiny densely-populated area, cutting power and communications and indiscriminate assaults are not needed to keep Hamas from reentering Israel. Netanyahu’s stated goal of regime change, toppling the Hamas government, is hardly a bare minimum requirement to reduce the threat to minimal levels. It is maximalist. It is illegal.

It is an obscenity.

If anyone doubted that Israel has already gone far beyond what is permitted under international law, the heated rhetoric of Israel’s leaders and its patron the U.S. make that clear: the State Department sent internal memos to its officials warning them not to use the phrases “de-escalation/ceasefire;” “end to violence/bloodshed” or “restoring calm.”

When you’re censoring calls for calm, you’re probably on the wrong side of the law.

What constitutes self-defense for a nation-state is similar to that for an individual. Laws in the U.S. vary by state; Florida’s “stand your ground” law grants more leeway than New York, which requires you to retreat if possible and only permits you to use deadly force if you believe you or someone else are at imminent risk of physical harm. Basically, though, self-defense as a defense to a murder or manslaughter charge ends when the threat, which must be substantial and likely to occur, ends.

May I kill a robber who points a gun at me? Maybe. The moment he drops his weapon and turns tail, however, the answer is no. If at that point an assailant has hurt and/or robbed me, it is completely understandable that I might want to chase him down and hurt him to get even. It would also be illegal.

What should I do, nothing? No. I should call the cops. For a nation-state the U.N., not Israel or the U.S., is the world’s policeman. Israel should request assistance from the U.N.

Of course, a threat does remain from Hamas. Specifically, Israeli hostages are in danger. Rockets are fired into Israel. But neither justifies carpet-bombing or a ground invasion.

Bombing actually imperils the hostages. Hamas’ primitive rockets without guidance systems kill an average of three Israelis a year. As deplorable and tragic as those killings are, a bombing campaign that has killed over 7,000 people in three weeks is wildly disproportionate under the Caroline test.

The “rules-based international order” has obviously broken down. Who can remember the last time U.N. troops parachuted into a crisis zone in order to establish peace and order, much less did it well? Israel can be forgiven for dismissing that option out of hand. But just because everyone breaks the rules doesn’t mean they’re not still the rules.

What Israel is doing can be characterized in many ways.

But it’s not “self-defense.”

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

This Idea Could Come in Handy

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Ted Rall

Senator Marco Rubio points out about the explosion of violence between Israel and Palestinians: “The only response that you’ve seen from Israel is in response to these [Arab] attacks, and they live in a very tough neighborhood and they’ve made abundantly clear if you hit us, we’re going to hit you back five times harder.” This is reminiscent of tactics used by Nazis in German-occupied Europe, in which they promised to kill 50 locals for every German soldier killed by the Resistance.

End Military Aid to Israel

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Ted Rall

Israel-Gaza violence intensifies – in pictures | World news | The Guardian

            Riding in the back of a truck into Afghanistan during the 2001 U.S. invasion, a journalist colleague from Russia who served in the Red Army during the 1980s asseverated that he was happy to be back in country. “Because this time,” he said, swinging his hands to indicate the swarms of refugees, bombed-out villages and nearby artillery fire, “all this shit belongs to you.” He pointed at me, the American. I looked around and immediately drew the obvious conclusion: we should get the hell out of Afghanistan.

That was 20 years ago. We were just getting in. But us being us—trying to win hearts and minds with corrupt proxies—and the Afghans being the Afghans—only able to agree on one thing, their intolerance of foreign domination—humiliating defeat and withdrawal were inevitable from the start.

            It would be impossible to overstate the advantages of not doing something, of not playing any role, of standing aside and allowing a situation to evolve or devolve without any involvement on your part. Like in the movie “War Games,” you win by doing nothing.

            This is a lesson that American foreign policy makers need to internalize more than any other. So do American voters, constantly tricked into lesser-of-two-evils conundra. We don’t have to vote for either lousy candidate. We don’t have to get involved in other countries’ politics or their wars. When all the options in a given situation stink to high heaven, the morally-correct choice is to sit on your hands and let someone else wallow in the morass.

            The latest ebullition of violence between Israel and Palestine makes the case for isolationism. Militant right-wing Jewish settlers encouraged and protected by the government of corrupt Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are trying to evict hundreds of Palestinian families from homes they have owned for decades in East Jerusalem, the Arab-dominated future capital of a Palestinian state if one is ever established. The settlers argue in court that the land in question was originally owned by a Jewish trust and should revert accordingly. However, as The New York Times notes, the apartheid regime treats people differently depending on their ethnicity: “Israeli law allows Jews to reclaim ownership of land they vacated in 1948, but denies Palestinians the right to reclaim the properties they fled from in the same war.”

            The Israelis are brutalizing protesters and bombing Gaza; the Hamas government of Gaza is firing rockets into Israel. As usual, Israel is deploying disproportionately more violence: 67 Gazans and 7 Israelis have died so far.

The United States government sometimes pretends to be an “honest broker” in the Middle East crisis. Truth is, we have our fat thumbs on the scale and everyone knows it. The abyss between our yay-peace-and-democracy rhetoric and the reality of our foreign policy is a steaming pile of hypocrisy.

The U.S. turns a blind eye to Israeli violence and theft of Arab land, rarely lifting a finger to move toward a two-state solution while loudly decrying Arab violence against Israelis. The U.S. sends $4 billion a year to Israel—enough to give free healthcare to 1.4 million Americans if we wanted to. Joe Biden recently restored $235 million in assistance to the Palestinian Authority that had been cut off by Trump—less than one-sixteenth of the package to Israel.

When the Israeli Air Force bombs apartment buildings full of civilians in densely-populated Gaza City, Palestinians get blown to bits using guided bombs and missiles fired from F-16s and F-35s made in Texas and California. The IDF targets street demonstrators in the West Bank with teargas canisters and stun grenades fired from launchers manufactured by a company based in Pennsylvania.

Israel’s mayhem is brought to you by America. Few Americans are aware of that. But Palestinians and Muslims around the world are.

Even if you support the existence of the Jewish state, and even if you think the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel goes too far, you should be able to view ending U.S. military aid to Israel (without boycotts or other sanctions) as a moral imperative. It would also be a smart foreign policy choice that would reduce global anti-Americanism as well as the chances of a future 9/11-type terrorist attack.

Contrary to Likud propaganda, cutting off military assistance would not create an imminent existential threat. Between the $85 billion of U.S. aid to Israel since 1949, its robust economy and closer ties to many of its Arab neighbors, there is little danger that this tiny, ferocious country would get pushed into the sea. And if that were to change, we could reevaluate the situation and resume funding—assuming Israel decided to try to make peace and were to cooperate with the establishment of a free and independent Palestine.

It is hardly surprising that Israel’s right-wing government cashes the blank check to do whatever the hell they feel like that we send them every year. The only way we can hold Israel accountable for repeated escalations, land grabs and ongoing brutality is to stop sending the gravy train. Will cutting off the cash change their behavior? Maybe. Whatever Israel decides to do on its own, however, it will do without our blessing and without our funding.

Often the best thing to do is nothing at all.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Now available to order. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

The New York Times Called a Famous Cartoonist an Anti-Semite. Repeatedly. They Didn’t Ask Him for Comment.

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Ted Rall
Image result for cartoonist antonio cartoon
The cartoon by António Moreira Antunes that prompted the perpetual ban on political art in the New York Times.

            Earlier this year the Portuguese cartoonist António Moreira Antunes drew one of the most controversial political cartoons in history. His cartoon about U.S.-Israeli relations sparked so much controversy that The New York Times, whose international edition published it in April, decided to fire its two staff cartoonists, neither of whom had anything to do with it. Then the Times permanently banned all editorial cartooning.

            Antunes took the most flak from the Times itself, as it furiously backpedaled from its own editorial decision to publish his cartoon. In five news stories and editorials, the Newspaper of Record unreservedly described Antunes’ cartoon as anti-Semitic. American media outlets followed the Times’ lead.

            “I’m not anti-Semitic, I’m anti-Zionist,” Antunes told me. “In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict I am in favor of two countries and I am against all annexations made by Israel.” The Times censored Antunes’ side of the story from its readers.

            Was Antunes’ cartoon, a metaphorical illustration depicting Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a dog leading a blind President Trump, anti-Semitic? That question is both inherently subjective and eminently debatable. “The cartoon is not anti-Semitic, but many political and religious sectors classify any criticism of Israeli policies as anti-Semitic,” Antunes said in an interview.

            Pro-Israel groups disagreed. On the other hand, many cartoonists thought there was nothing wrong with it.

            But that’s not how the Times covered it. In article after article, Antunes’ cartoon was described as anti-Semitic. It was an objective truth. No one could doubt the cartoon’s anti-Semitism more than the fact that Washington is the capital of the United States.

            “Times Apologizes for Publishing Anti-Semitic Cartoon,” read the headline on April 28th.

            Not “allegedly anti-Semitic.”

            Not “cartoon criticized as anti-Semitic.”

            In an April 30th editorial, the paper called Antunes’ work “an appalling political cartoon” and “an obviously bigoted cartoon.” It explained: “The cartoon was chosen from a syndication service by a production editor who did not recognize its anti-Semitism.” Not “its possible anti-Semitism.”

            Two more articles on the subject appeared on May 1st: “Times Disciplines Editor and Cancels Cartoon Contract Over Anti-Semitic Drawing” (we don’t know what that discipline entailed, but unlike the cartoonist, the editor wasn’t fired) and “After the Publication of an Anti-Semitic Cartoon, Our Publisher Says We’re Committed to Making Changes.” The text of both pieces described the cartoon as self-evidently anti-Semitic.

            On June 10th a Times article announced the end of political cartooning in the Gray Lady. Antunes’ cartoon, the Times stated flatly, contained “anti-Semitic imagery.”

            Accusing a political cartoonist of anti-Semitism is as serious as it gets. So something jumped out at me as I read the Times’ repeated characterizations of Antunes’ cartoon as anti-Semitic, so devoid of mitigating language: where was his response?

            “The New York Times never contacted me at any time,” Antunes now says.

            I reached out to the Times about this; I asked why they didn’t talk to him and how the paper made the determination that Antunes’ cartoon was anti-Semitic. James Bennet, the editorial page editor who banned cartoons and presumably wrote the editorials, did not reply to my repeated queries. (I gave him nearly a week to do so.) Neither did two reporters who authored pieces about Antunes.

            I did hear back from Stacy Cowley, who wrote the April 28th piece. “I dug around online and was unable to find any contact information for Mr. Antunes,” Cowley explained. “He has no publicly posted contact information that I could find, and as of the date I wrote my article, he had not publicly commented to any other news outlets about his cartoon. (Had he done so, I would have linked to and quoted his comments.)” Cowley said she tried to reach the editors of Antunes’ home paper in Portugal. She noted that she was working on a tight deadline.

            I reached Antunes via Facebook; he replied via email.

            Contacting the subject of a news story for comment is Journalism 101, a basic ethos taught to students at high school newspapers. That goes double when the article is critical.

            “Few writers need to be reminded that we seek and publish a response from anyone criticized in our pages,” the Times says in its Guidelines on Integrity. “But when the criticism is serious, we have a special obligation to describe the scope of the accusation and let the subject respond in detail. No subject should be taken by surprise when the paper appears, or feel that there was no chance to respond.” Given the gravity of the criticism leveled against Antunes, the Times appears to have fallen woefully short of its own standards.

            OK, Cowley was on deadline. What about the other articles? They appeared days later. One ran six weeks later. Antunes isn’t a recluse—he’s one of the most prominent cartoonists in Europe. I found him. So did other newspapers.

            The Times could have contacted the New York-based syndicate from which it bought Antunes’ cartoon; the syndicate has his contact information, as they do of all their contributors.

            Though scarred by his experience, Antunes says that he has not lost business. “The U.S. media” he says, “are prisoners of political correctness, right-wing turning [sic] and social media.” Europe, he says, is more tolerant.

            What’s clear is that the Times threw its cartoonist under the bus in a shockingly cavalier fashion—a practice that has become so common that it’s contributing to the imminent extinction of political cartooning.

            The Times owes Antunes an apology. They owe the two fired cartoonists their jobs back, along with back pay. Political cartoons should resume their rightful place in the paper.

            Finally, the Times owes its readers an assurance that they will never again succumb to the siren call of “fake news” as part of an ethically-challenged witch hunt.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Francis: The People’s Pope.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

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