I, Obstreporous Peasant
By Mitch Berg
I sat in on “Radio Free Nation”, Marty Owings’ Blogtalkradio show last Saturday night.
Marty had booked Minnesota Fifth District representative Keith Ellison. Ellison appeared for about 45 minutes. For the first 25 minutes, the Representative talked about his economic platform:
- “Reform” of regulations for financial services companies
- “Strengthening Union Rights”, as he referred to it, via the Empoyee Free Choice Act
- Changing Capitalization requirements for bank assets.
So if you leave out the odd reference to Sean Hannity being a “bigot”, and conservatives “winking” at Von Brunn (the Holocaust memorial murderer), and his line that the US needs to stop “toeing the line for Israel” if we want peace in the Middle East? Fairly uneventful.
Sorta.
I got my chance to ask questions about 36 minutes into the netcast.
I asked my first question: since, in his response to a previous panelist about the solution to the Palestinian/Israeli problem, Representative Ellison said that it was (closely paraphrasing) up to the people to push a solution (and the people wanted the solution!), I asked, given that the charter of the Hamas government that the people of Gaza elected to power in a landslide calls in as many words for the destruction of Israel as a nation and people, how we could expect “the people” of Gaza to really want “peace”?
Well, I tried to ask.
His immediate response? “How many Palestinians do you know?”, followed by a fairly peevish little tirade.
I’m not sure if he wanted me to respond “some of my best friends are Palestinians”, or if he was just acting like a lawyer and trying to buffalo my question or what. You can listen, if you’d like, to try to pick apart the tirade that follows. I don’t want to say Ellison is “typical” of Minneapolis DFLers in being unable to hold a civil conversation with a dissenter (after all, I had a great time interviewing RT Rybak).
But I don’t think Ellison appreciates us peasants questioning our betters one little bit.
But we’ll find out – maybe. If you recall, about a year ago – responding to Andy Birkey’s observation that Michele Bachmann only appeared on conservative media (which the last year has pretty well belied in any case), I sent invites to a slew of regional DFLers – Senator Klobuchar, Candidate Franken, Representative McCollum, Mayor Rybak…
…and Keith Ellison.
Only Rybak responded (as noted above). Ellison’s press people didn’t even give us the courtesy of a “screw you, peasant”.
So I took the liberty of asking again.
We’ll see how that turns out.
June 15th, 2009 at 6:23 am
ETA of Peev’s obligatory response that Ellison is your intellectual superior in every way???
June 15th, 2009 at 8:37 am
Ha! Instead of trying to affect U.S. law as a Representative, he spends his time protesting. The man is a stooge.
June 15th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
I agree with Ellison on this. I don’t think that the full spectrum of views held by Israelis is very well presented to the US audience.
Given that Netanyahu has come out in favor of a possible two-state solution, and given that there was a pro-US switch in the recent election in Lebanon, and what appear to be other shifts in the region, I see at least a chance for progress. It will be interesting to see what happens next in Iran as well; the current regime seems to be less than stable.
I was treated to an assessment of the Palestinian problem while in Israel from a Sabra – a Jew whose family had never left Israel during any of the diasporas. A Sabra who was a major in Israeli airforce intelligence (retired / not so retired), who was old enough to have been around as a child becoming an adult when Israel became a nation. He represented to us that the Palestinian problem could be resolved with help from the Arabs, but that the various arab groups exploited them as pawns to be a problem for the Jews. Only grudgingly did he admit that the Israelis treated them as pawns as well, as second class citizens who were treated badly, rather than all citizens being treated in an equal and democratic manner. (My observations about Palestinians was made solely by what I observed while there, not preconceptions before arriving btw.)
Obama and Ellison are correct I think in believing we need to have a relationship with both the arabs and the israelis – for our benefit AND for theirs. It is a ‘junior high’ mentality that we have to be ‘friends’ with one or the other, that we cannot have a relationship with both. We CAN, and be a better friend to Israel in promoting peace for both in the process by doing so.
There are plenty of arabs, and palestinians, and iranians, and lebanese, et al, who are perfectly willing to accept Israel. Egypt has, Jordan has a working relationship. It is manipulative and deceptive cherry-picking to present the opinions of those who are not willing to accept Israel as representing everyone. Overly simplistic as well.
There is a significant segment of Israelis who would happily live without fear of suicide bombers, without having to spend such a large percentage of their government budget on weapons and armed forces, and who live in peace with their arab/muslim neighbors despite the differences. The arrangement with Egypt has worked for 30 years; time for similar agreements with the other parties in the region. Naturally, the extremists on both sides will try to prevent it. Maybe they will be less successful NOW.
June 15th, 2009 at 1:14 pm
Dog Gone said:
“There is a significant segment of Israelis who would happily live without fear of suicide bombers”
Oh really? That’s great! Problem solved.
June 15th, 2009 at 1:19 pm
“How many Palestinians do you know?”
So, if Ellison doesn’t know any holocaust survivors does that mean it never happened?
June 15th, 2009 at 1:50 pm
“It is manipulative and deceptive cherry-picking to present the opinions of those who are not willing to accept Israel as representing everyone. ”
Hamas is the elected representative of the Palestinians. Here are excerpts from their charter.
“Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.” (The Martyr, Imam Hassan al-Banna, of blessed memory).
“The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up. ”
“There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors.”
June 15th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
DG,
It WOULD have been manipulative cherry-picking had I been speaking of the attitudes of individuals – but I wasn’t, and his attempt to turn it into that was a manipulative strawman.
I noted – CLEARLY – that Hamas won a *democratic* election, and (in a followup question) that indoctrination of Palestinian children to hate Jews is an ongoing tradition in Palestinian government schools. It’s government policy and attitudes of the people overall, not as individuals, that I asked about. I think Ellison blew his gasket to turn the argument away from the facts of THAT issue, which takes the story away from platitudes and forces one to confront some real social ugliness (as MoN noted above).
I wasn’t the one cherrypicking.
June 7th, 2010 at 12:01 pm
[…] year on Marty Owings’ “Radio Free Nation”, I got a chance to ask Representative Keith Ellison if he, in his capacity as the first Muslim in Congress and one of the most powerful people in the […]