(1) Newt Gingrich and the Middle East: Calculated Muslim-Baiting…….

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Gingrich’s faltering presidential campaign was completely resuscitated by a 5 million donation from Las Vegas casino king and super-Zionist Sheldon Adelson. (According to Wikipedia, Adelson is currently the 8th wealthiest American and 16th wealthiest person in the world, with a net worth of $23.3 billion.) Rising from the ashes, Gingrich now has won the South Carolina primary and has a decent chance of becoming the Republican presidential nominee…… Adelson and his Israeli-born wife, Miriam, have spent time and money lobbying for a bill to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Gingrich has promised that his first executive order as president would be the embassy move. Adelson is an ardent Zionist. Since 2007 the Adelson Family Foundation has made contributions totaling $100 million to Birthright Israel, which finances Jewish youth trips to Israel, Adelson is such a hard-line Zionist that he even stopped supporting AIPAC when it appeared to support a 2007 peace initiative championed by Olmert, President Bush, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. In 2009, the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), which is a hard-line Zionist group that wants Israel to retain the occupied territories and expand the Jewish settlements, presented Adelson its most distinguished and historic award, the Theodor Herzl Gold Medallion for outstanding achievement in Zionism. His wife received the Louis D. Brandeis Award. The couple now have their names on one of ZOA’s major awards, the Dr. Miriam & Sheldon Adelson Defender of Israel Award. Adelson is intimately involved in Israeli politics………..

Newt Gingrich has promised to move the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. That is a standard promise for most presidential candidates in the United States, and reneging on the promise afterwards is also standard procedure. The idea of where the embassy is located has no strategic implications, and I suspect that most Arab regimes will just do some posturing and then accept it. Unless it is moved to East Jerusalem.

Gingrich does not seem to believe that the Palestinians deserve their own state(-let) on the West Bank (and Gaza?). This may seem like a strongly pro-Israeli policy, but it is not necessarily so in the long-term. It means he prefers Israel to annex territory covering anywhere between 2 to 3 million more Palestinian Arabs (in addition to Arab Israelis who are less than 24% of the population). Yet what would they do with all these Arabs? Citizenship and voting rights mean a huge, nay a seismic, political shift. An apartheid-type policy is not an option in this day and age (even the Bahrain regime on the Gulf is having trouble keeping its apartheid policy intact). Besides, it would truly upset and turn off most Jewish-Americans who would not condone such policy (in comparison Jewish-Russians probably wouldn’t give a fig about it, nor would the “Christian” right).
Gingrich has also done some of the usual Republican Muslim-baiting. He made some appropriate (to the right wingers) noises about the dangers the Shri’a law presents to the United States. He knows there is no such danger because it won’t happen. He also was slated to share the speaking stage with Dutch Neo-Nazi politician and rabble-rouser Geert Wilders at an anti-Muslim rally a couple of years ago in New York, but he was smart enough to go AWOL on that day. His Muslim-baiting is calculated, unlike that of some other republicans: that only means he is smarter than his colleagues in the Party.

I have not posted anything recently about my earlier suggestion that Newt Gingrich take a hike, literally, on the Iraq-Iran border. That was meant to shore up his foreign policy credentials.  But that hike may be impossible now, given that overt American military presence in Iraq is limited to John McCain and Joe Lieberman camping in Falluja. (Congressmen don’t get much in-depth foreign policy experience unless that sit on certain specialized committee or subcommittee. Just look at poor Rick Santorum, the subject of my next brief posting).
Cheers
mhg



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