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Tuesday, November 27, 2007

The Return of the Roundup

[I'm not saying the blogging hiatus is done for sure....but suddenly I had the energy to do a regular post, as opposed to the lazy stuff I've been doing the last couple post (for the MySpace blog at least).

In good news, I finally did what I should have done long ago: I uninstalled and then re-installed Firefox. God, I LOVE Firefox!! Internet Explorer is horrible. I mean, how is it that I updated to a newer version yesterday and its actually slower, and more prone to crash and lose all tabs than the older version? Maybe its no coincidence that today is the day I chose to start blogging again.]

[End of Post Update: I decided against adding a Miscellaneous section, opting to add those in a latter post, or perhaps in a stand alone post]

For todays roundup I have a few things in store:

- The Middle East Peace Summit in Annapolis
- Immigration and Racism
- Miscellaneous (but interesting stuff)

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The Middle East Peace Summit in Annapolis

Recently Israel and the Palestinians (and by that I mean only the Fatah-run Palestinian Authority...more on that in the next story) have come together, along with with the US and representatives of various Arab governments in an international summit to revive the stalled Peace Process. (AFP)

Israel and the Palestinians opened a major international conference here Tuesday with a pledge to immediately resume talks frozen for seven years and seek a deal by the end of 2008.

Flanked by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas, US President George W. Bush read out a joint statement agreed just moments before the meeting began in Annapolis, Maryland.

"We agree to engage in vigorous, ongoing and continuous negotiations and shall make every effort to conclude an agreement before the end of 2008," the statement said.

Abbas said the conference and international climate presented an exceptional opportunity for peace that would "not repeat itself," while Olmert vowed Israel was prepared to make a "painful compromise" to achieve peace.

Launching the biggest initiative of his presidency to revive the Middle East Peace process, Bush, who is nearing the end of his eight-year term, said the time was now ripe for an end to the six-decade conflict.

"In light of recent developments, some have suggested that now is not the right time to pursue peace. I disagree," Bush told delegates from more than 50 countries and organizations.

"I believe that now is precisely the right time to begin these negotiations -- for a number of reasons," he insisted, citing a new willingness among the leaders of both sides, and global support for fresh negotiations.

Also he added "the time is right because a battle is underway for the future of the Middle East -- and we must not cede victory to the extremists."

Now, I'm not sure how this international summit will end, but I have nothing but all the best wishes that President Bush (and I have no choice but place my faith in him here...), the Israelis, Palestinians, and the surrounding Arab countries can really come together and hammer a peace deal.

Such a deal would be such a great achievement and development in the Middle East (and for perceptions of the US in the Middle East).

In an administration that has failed in everything, and deservedly wrought the shame and criticism of the whole world, I seriously would not mind one bit if he partially saved his legacy and pulled out something good with this summit...in fact I would be ecstatic for a true deal.

With that said, it should never be forgotten that the deterioration of Israel/Palestinian relations was enabled in no small part by the "green-light" President Bush gave at the beginning of his administration for Israel to "get tough" with the Palestinians. Well, they certainly did, and violence ensued for quite a while, making coming together for negotiations again extremely unlikely until now.

But there are some concerns with the conference. For one neither Hamas will attend, nor will Iran attend.

Hamas has denounced the conference and thousand of Hamas supporters waving the group's green flag demonstrated in Gaza City Tuesday to reject the US-championed conference.

Why is this a problem? Well, you may remember a while back that there was a mini-Palestinian civil war between Islam-oriented Hamas and the secular-oriented Fatah, the end result being the forceful expulsion of Fatah from the Gaza Strip.

In other words, the Palestinians and their lands are divided. There is no one person controlling or purporting to speak for all Palestinians. And that complicates the international summit because, without the presence of Hamas (which I doubt the US would accept anyways) at the summit, any agreement entered into by the Palestinian Authority (Fatah) would not cover or bind the other Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. And that is problematic.

And Iran, as one of the big backers of Hamas, and a significant (and ever increasing) power in the region, really should be at that conference as well. Again, I doubt the US would let them in...they would probably think it was rewarding Iran with legitimacy or something...

Actually, I might have jumped the gun a bit since the next link in the roundup deals with the reactions of many foreign policy heavy-weights: Hamas and Iran should be involved in the Summit

Via Steve Clemons of TPMuckracker:

This tidbit just appeared in Robin Wright's recent reporting on the Annapolis Summit in an article titled "Iran: The Uninvited Wildcard in Mideast Talks":

Iran will still have leverage in the event of peace, Arab officials concede. Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal said yesterday that any peace agreement would eventually have to include Hamas, since it controls Gaza and half the Palestinian Authority. Moreover, the two major Palestinian parties -- Hamas and Fatah, which controls the West Bank -- would need to join a national unity government, he said.

An agreement signed by Israeli and Palestinian leaders would need ratification by their respective parliaments, and Hamas still controls the Palestinian parliament.

"Unless you bring Hamas in tune with what is happening on the peace side, you are really not fulfilling a basic requirement," Faisal said. "One man cannot make peace; not even half a people can make peace," he told a roundtable of U.S. journalists. "There has to be consensus about peace among the Palestinians for this to go smoothly."

I just thought it worth noting that people ranging from former Secretary of State Colin Powell to former New Jersey Governor and Bush administration cabinet member Christine Todd Whitman (who headed the National Democratic Institute election monitoring mission of the 2005 Palestinian elections) to former US Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki to former National Security Advisors Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft to former Senators Nancy Kassebaum Baker, Gary Hart, Lincoln Chafee, Larry Pressler, Birch Bayh and many others from both sides of the aisle agree with the Saudi Foreign Minister.

And that is why it is so important to have Iran at the table: The leverage they have with Hamas, and the pressure only they could put on Hamas could make a deal palatable to both sides that much more likely. Of course this all assumes that Iran would be invited...

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Immigration and Racism

Pat Buchanan is back, and he's coming out with a new book. For those who don't know Pat Buchanan all too well he can properly be described as a big time nativist on immigration, and I would argue...well, he's kinda racist. Let's read what he had to say on Sean Hannity's show.

Buchanan: "America [is] committing suicide" while "Asians, Africans, and Latin American children come to inherit the estate"


MSNBC political analyst Pat Buchanan appeared on the November 26 edition of Fox News'
Hannity & Colmes to discuss his new book, Day of Reckoning: How Hubris, Ideology, And Greed Are Tearing America Apart (Thomas Dunne Books, November 2007), in which he writes that America is "on a path to national suicide" and later asks: "How is America committing suicide?" answering: "Every way a nation can." He proceeds to claim that "[t]he American majority is not reproducing itself. ... Forty-five million of its young have been destroyed in the womb since Roe v. Wade, as Asian, African, and Latin American children come to inherit the estate the lost generation of American children never got to see."

On
Hannity & Colmes, Buchanan asserted: "You've got a wholesale invasion, the greatest invasion in human history, coming across your southern border, changing the composition and character of your country. You've got the melting pot that once welded us all together, which has broken down." Co-host Sean Hannity went on to ask him: "Do you really believe that America, the country we all love as we know it, is in jeopardy of existing?" Buchanan responded: "I think America may exist, but I'll tell you this: I do believe we're going to lose the American Southwest. I think it is almost inevitable." He continued: "If we do not put a fence on that border ...you're going to have 100 million Hispanics in the country, most of them new immigrants from Mexico, which believes that belongs to them.

There are several things here which set me off.

First is this whole nutball conspiracy that grips the imaginations of Republicans, conservatives, and anti-immigrant people that Mexicans coming into the US want to bring the Southwest US back to Mexico and they are achieving this by demographics first, and when there are soooo many Mexicans you can't go 2 steps, they suddenly secede back to Mexico....

Yeah, I KNOW that sounds crazy!!! But these people live in real fear of such a ridiculous notion...as if that would ever happen!!

That's just crazy, but it is the next thing which really rubs me the wrong way about these people.

Read what he says again: The implicit assumption, the implicit argument that Buchanan and people like him make are that anybody that is not from the white-majority (even US citizens by birth like myself who happens to be Mexican-descended) is not really American like white people are the "real Americans."

"as Asian, African, and Latin American children come to inherit the estate the lost generation of American children never got to see."

And this is what makes some of these nativists racist: They believe, I mean it goes without saying for them, that only Americans of the "majority" (i.e. White) are true Americans. What it also means is that Buchanan and his type would never consider me, my family, nor most of my friends as "real Americans." Because my parents where both from Mexico, am I not an American like all others?

And that really does piss me off. The nerve of this jackass to tell us who is the real American and who isn't!!

And if you think about it, it's so amazingly ridiculous: Unlike many countries, being American has never been about any particular race or ethnicity. It is the very nature of this nation that it has served as a place where many peoples, races, colors, and religions have come together, all at once different, and at the same time all American.

Because being American is not about any race, it is about what binds all these people of such diverse backgrounds as one people: It is not any one religion, or race, but a shared abstract identity of being American.

Our shared American history, our shared perception as being American, and our shared veneration of our "civic-religion" that is our knowledge, respect, and veneration for The American System as it is embodied in the system passed down to us from the Founders in the United States Constitution.

This is not Japan, where ethnicity and nationality are more closely involved in what goes into definining what "being Japanese" means. In America, it is more abstract...and in that way it has the potential to be much more inclusive. One of the reasons, I suspect, that this nation has always benefited and gained from every wave of immigration it has seen, and not suffered so much as in many European nations:

Here it doesn't matter where you come, or where your parents came from because any and all people can become Americans.

And they are all "real" American, no matter what people like Buchanan have to say.

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