Jun 4th, 2009 at 8:23 pm
All The Right Enemies
Mark Kleiman: “Hezbollah, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, John Bolton, Hugh Hewitt, and the Republican Jewish Coalition, and John Boehner all disliked the President’s speech.”
And, look, it’s no coincidence. Extreme elements on both sides of a conflict are in a symbiotic relationship. Islamist violence against the west strengthens the hand of the nationalistic right in the United States. But nationalist militarism from the United States strengthens the hands of violent radicals in Muslim countries.
Update I should say that I shouldn't have followed Kleiman's lead in lumping the Muslim Brotherhood in with Hamas and Hezbollah. The latter are violent organizations and the Brotherhood isn't—the distinction is important.
47 Responses to “All The Right Enemies”
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June 4th, 2009 at 10:18 pm
There weren’t all against the speech, and I don’t think that’s such a bad thing either.
June 4th, 2009 at 10:20 pm
My link didn’t seem to work initially:
http://www.deccanherald.com/content/6300/arabs-say-aye-obama-speech.html
June 4th, 2009 at 10:24 pm
Excellent point Matt. Glad to see people using obvious linkage of the militant right wing.
June 4th, 2009 at 10:31 pm
Substitute “Israel” for “the west” and “the United States” and you’ve come to the heart of the political problem over there.
June 4th, 2009 at 10:32 pm
I wouldn’t list the Muslim Brotherhood as a good enemy. I think that could be said of them 20, 30 years ago, but nowadays I think the jury is out as to whether they’re all reformed now or not.
June 4th, 2009 at 10:33 pm
During the campaign I was always stuck by the similarities between Obama ‘08 and Clinton ‘92, none more so than his good luck in his enemies, and the nuttiness he inspired in them.
June 4th, 2009 at 10:50 pm
Yeah, Clinton was so lucky in his enemies that they only stopped about 90% of his agenda and nearly removed him from office.
June 4th, 2009 at 11:14 pm
I really despise golden means fallacy bullshit.
If you are sitting in a bar and someone says 2+2=4 and the other guy says 2+2=6 there is nothing at all meritorious about jumping up and claiming that obviously 2+2=5 and a pox on both their houses for thinking otherwise.
Maybe, Obama is right. I’m not saying he’s not, but I *detest* this line of thinking and it’s at the heart of what’s wrong with American journalism as it’s taught.
June 4th, 2009 at 11:17 pm
Don’t forget the lunatic right wing settler community of Israel. They were pretty outraged too. But then, they’re always crazy outraged.
June 4th, 2009 at 11:34 pm
Nobody’s proposing a golden mean. Hizbollah and Hugh Hewitt are in basic agreement that 2+2 = 5. It’s in both their interests to lie about the equation.
June 4th, 2009 at 11:44 pm
Odd as it may seem to many here, I have never understood Jewish Republicans any more than I can understand Black Republicans or Gay Republicans.
But Yglesias as usual forces me to rethink my prejudices. It’s really pretty offensive to equate the Republican Jewish Coalition, or for that matter even Bolton or Boehner, no matter how piggish, with Hamas and Hezbollah when it comes to extremism.
June 4th, 2009 at 11:59 pm
Hewitt et.al. disagreed and legitimately wondered if anything remotely close to practical policy could ensue from it.
Matt liked the speech. So did the mullahs and Ahmadinejad (who don’t give a damn about the President’s lineage or the civil rights history of the US) and who presently will concur with rockets, truck bombs, and whatever else Obama green-lights by jaw/jaw and the “strongest possible condemnations” at the UN.
Cheap points for the hopey/pony challenged via imbecilic equivalence mongering is Matt’s chief stock-in-trade. It’s also almost too easy to mimic.
June 5th, 2009 at 1:03 am
Is there any actual evidence that Ahmadinejad “liked the speech”? I could only find the reaction of Supreme Leader Khamenei who said that the Muslim world “hated America”.
June 5th, 2009 at 1:08 am
Is there any actual evidence that Ahmadinejad “liked the speech”?
Well, no there’s not. Ahmadinejad probably didn’t like the speech since — according to NPR today — it helped give a huge push to moderate Iran pres candidates.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104967655
June 5th, 2009 at 1:25 am
Michael Moore, moveon.org, and al Queda basically said the same thing about the Iraq War. So, they’re pretty much the same. Bush had all the right enemies.
June 5th, 2009 at 1:25 am
Add to the list the greatest fuckface ever known to human civilization. A nasty germ in every sense of the word: Daniel MOTHERFUCKING Pipes.
June 5th, 2009 at 1:28 am
The Obama speech was so deep and so intricate that I could spend two lifetimes contemplating its nuances, its almost infinite angles.
But this is the right-wing response thread, so I will just comment on the angle of the speech, the minuscule portion of it, that dealt with the American right.
The Obama speech tacitly but clearly expressed the idea that these people are, in fact, cowards. Not physical cowards, although most of the men and women that make up the American right are most assuredly that, but something far, far worse. They are, contemptibly, intellectual cowards.
Their refusal -not their inability- to allow themselves to think in complex ways, to embrace contradictions, to seek solutions -conjured in vortex of the mind- to seemingly intractable conflict, precludes the possibility that these men and women could ever know what it is to be truly courageous.
June 5th, 2009 at 2:00 am
Matt Broder?
June 5th, 2009 at 2:07 am
[...] via Matt Yglesias, Obama seems to have all the right enemies: “extreme elements on both sides are in a symbiotic [...]
June 5th, 2009 at 2:26 am
By transitive property, Dick Cheney is a terrorist.
June 5th, 2009 at 2:31 am
The only enemy of extremism is moderation. As strange as it might seem, the extremists need each other. Extremists need opposition to survive. They have to fight someone, and the moderates aren’t good targets.
June 5th, 2009 at 2:41 am
I hate sloppy golden-meanism as well. “The truth lies somewhere in between.” There’s no reason to suppose it must. Maybe one side or the other is entirely correct. Maybe “both sides” as you frame the question are wide of the mark in the same direction. “If both sides are angry, I must be doing it about right.” Yeah, or maybe your solution is just so stupid that both sides can agree on that.
But that’s not really what Yglesias is doing here. He’s pointing out that the extremists on both sides aren’t opposites at all: they share a common interest in preserving the status quo and prolonging the conflict in its’ current form.
To point out that all the people who really want peace are pleased with the speech, and all the people who really don’t are displeased is precisely the opposite of lazy difference-splitting.
June 5th, 2009 at 3:46 am
And I sit here, listening to Patti Smith’s ‘Horses,’ and realize that it makes the exact sense now that it did then. And that nothing has changed. I was young when it came out, and Matt wasn’t even close to being born. And we were fucking up the world. And doing a good job of it, thank you. But I look at the world now, and we are doing the same thing. And now I know. I was in Thailand eight years ago with this beautiful woman, and I asked her about the local history. She didn’t know about it, and I asked her why. And she says: “Why you worry about past, same thing happen every time.” I wanted to offer a contradiction, but then I realized that she was right. Turns out, there was only one thing I could teach her: how to swim. She hated it at first, but she did learn it. She married some Dutch guy and has done very well for herself. But she had a funny thing happen to her. She happened to come back to Thailand for a vacation, and the Tsunami came. She was washed away by it, but there was one thing that saved her. She knew how to swim. And then she understood why I wanted her to learn that. So I did teach her something she can value. But she still taught me more. And it’s that all our thinking means nothing, we will do what everyone has always done. It’s said that those who don’t know history will repeat it. But it’s even worse for those of us who do know history. We are condemned to watch in horror as the same shit keeps happening again.
And I can keep listening to Patti Smith, and it still sounds new.
June 5th, 2009 at 3:57 am
As for Israel, nothing has changed. And it never will. I will die, and this crap will still be going on. When you younger people die, it will still be the same. We’ve had these silly beliefs that maybe something will change, but it never does. And it never will.
June 5th, 2009 at 4:23 am
If we truly want peace in the region, we have to stop thinking that we’re on the right course just because we p-ss Hamas off.
Fortunately, Matt mischaracterized Hamas’ reaction (via Matt’s own link):
Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhum cautiously welcomed Obama’s speech but called for his words to be followed by action.
Barhum said Obama’s address “must be judged not on its form, but by the policies that Obama will apply on the ground to respect the freedom of people and their democratic choices and the right of the Palestinian people to its land.”
Matt’s argument would suggest that Obama’s speech failed because Hamas cautiously welcomed his words. But I submit that the opposite is true: Hamas’ moderate reaction is the best evidence of Obama’s success.
June 5th, 2009 at 4:49 am
I like spiders. They are hard workers and master builders.
To make a web, they release a thread to be carried by the wind and repeat the process until one takes hold. When it does, they traverse the lone thin thread to the other side, from where they begin the process of complex construction. The framework and the radii come first. The spider then constructs the spiral network, starting from the hub, spinning outward to the web’s extremities.
The strongest part of the web is not the web’s geographic center within the framework. The strongest part of the web is where the threads are most concentrated -the hub of the web.
http://www.badspiderbites.com/spider-web-construction/
June 5th, 2009 at 5:31 am
Is there any actual evidence that Ahmadinejad “liked the speech”? I could only find the reaction of Supreme Leader Khamenei who said that the Muslim world “hated America”.
It interesting that the timing of the speech is right near the Iranian and Lebanese elections. Ahmadinejad had a televised debate with his opponent:
“He also took issue with Mr. Ahmadinejad’s constant questioning of the Holocaust, saying that it harmed the country’s standing with the rest of the world and undermined its dignity. “For the past four years you kept saying that the United States is collapsing,” Mr. Moussavi said. “You have said Israel is collapsing. France is collapsing.”
He added, “Your foreign policies have been based on such illusional perceptions.”"
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/world/middleeast/04iran.html?_r=1
Well the US economy was collapsing, it’s decelerating now.
I thought it was funny when Molly Ivins would call the Texas religious right Shiite Baptists.
June 5th, 2009 at 7:16 am
Mr. Yglesias’ favorite columnist doesn’t like President Osamas’ focus on settlements.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/04/AR2009060403811.html?sub=AR
June 5th, 2009 at 7:23 am
Re Joe
Actually, Mr. Pipes father, Richard Pipes was an even bigger fuckface then his son. Back in the early 1980s, Pipes pere and associates authored a screed claiming that the former Soviet Union was surpassing the US in military ability, this when, as history has shown, the former Soviet Union was, in fact, in the midst of economic collapse. The screed was influential in the expansion of the US Military forces which cost hundreds of billions of dollars which could have been better spent elsewhere.
June 5th, 2009 at 7:27 am
I still wet my bed sometimes.
etc
June 5th, 2009 at 8:12 am
They used to say that about Northern Ireland.
June 5th, 2009 at 8:42 am
The speech was bullshit, full of (intentional) category errors: the “Muslim World” (whatever it means) is not in the same category as “America” (meaning the US government). Ethnocentric racist movement is not in the same category with anti-colonial struggle of the Palestinian people.
It’s all bullshit, and who cares about speeches anyway.
June 5th, 2009 at 8:56 am
I do! I like speeches abb1. I like them a lot. I can’t stand parades, though. When someone mentions a parade, I reach for my revolver.
June 5th, 2009 at 8:58 am
Re abb1
Israel uber alles.
June 5th, 2009 at 9:23 am
I do! I like speeches abb1. I like them a lot.
Sure, some people are plain irrational, not that anything is wrong with that. Go ahead and enjoy it, Max, if that’s what turns you on. And always remember: you are special.
But the rest of us should know better and ignore all the bullshit and nonsense spewed by grandstanding politicians.
June 5th, 2009 at 9:25 am
SLC, please. Again, whether or not you are intending to be parodistic or sarcastic, you just end up sounding like abb1 and similar hateful (literally — full of hate) people yourself when you say things like this.
June 5th, 2009 at 9:29 am
Do people even remember that the Clinton years caused a significant chunk of the party to vote for someone else, leaving us with GWB?
Yeah, he was really lucky…
June 5th, 2009 at 10:20 am
I think Matt is making an argument about political space. Look it up if you don’t know what it means.
Extremism begats more extremism. It always works this way. Obama’s speech was about breaking that cycle. That yeah all these groups have a lot to disagree about but by not putting those differences aside we ensure extremism gets to dominate the political space.
Ask Northern Ireland about this. Sure the situation in the details is different but the broad application of the lessons of political space are the same.
June 5th, 2009 at 10:38 am
[...] Kleiman and Matt Y, quoting Mark. Ta-Nehisi Coates quoting Matt quoting [...]
June 5th, 2009 at 10:39 am
thanks for that completely surprising and hard-to-find link, SLC. who knew that krauthammer wouldn’t like obama speaking as if Palestinians had a legitimate gripe?
June 5th, 2009 at 10:52 am
Re benjoya
Actually, I was trying to goad Mr. Yglesias into commenting on Dr. Krauthammers’ column, which was successful as he cited it in a post above.
June 5th, 2009 at 11:12 am
[...] all didn’t like President Obama’s speech in Cairo. Which means the speech was the perfect one to give. Banish [...]
June 5th, 2009 at 11:53 am
And there goes Krauthammer, with the same stuff about grandmothers and babies and adding onto houses.
I don’t get it. The US population grows without anyone having to build houses on Canadian soil. How come every time someone puts on a Barry White record in Israel, they have to annex a little bit more of the occupied territories?
June 5th, 2009 at 1:18 pm
Update: both Hamas and Hezbollah certainly have been much less violent than Zionists. Not to mention that both organization emerged as a reaction to various Zionist aggressions and acts of ethnic cleansing.
June 5th, 2009 at 2:51 pm
The Muslim Brotherhood has moderated itself quite a bit since their hanger-ons (if not outright members) killed Sadat. But I’ve heard they still have ties to Palestinian and Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Does anyone have specifics about this?
June 5th, 2009 at 2:56 pm
fostrert:
As for Israel, nothing has changed. And it never will. I will die, and this crap will still be going on. When you younger people die, it will still be the same. We’ve had these silly beliefs that maybe something will change, but it never does. And it never will.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this thing was going on twenty years from now, but I don’t think we can project that far in the future. People said similar things about the “Irish Troubles” in 1916 and 1971, but look where we are now with that.
June 5th, 2009 at 5:34 pm
I actually would lump the three together. While the MB has renounced violence, they are openly supportive of Hamas and Hizbullah, including their actions. They have renounced terrorist attacks but consider most forms of violence against Israel as legitimate forms of resistance. Their belief, which is pretty common in the population, is that groups like Al-Qaida are bad, but Hamas is only fighting for their freedom.
Kropotkin
I don’t know of any current connection to Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and I’m pretty positive they don’t have any links to any radical Egyptian organization.