Middle East

The following is a transcript of a TRNN interview with Ralph Nader. You can view the video of the interview here.

Tony Judt's boldly titled New York Times Op-Ed, "Israel Without Clichés" (June 9, 2010), is a wolf in sheep's clothing if ever there was one.

The essay advertises itself as "cleaning house" with respect to the "tired accusations and ritual defenses" typical of Middle-East discussions, as if, in effect, it will even-handedly take on the "clichés" of both sides. In fact it merely reasserts all the "tired accusations" against Israel and dismisses all the "ritual defenses."

No. 1: Israel is being/should be delegitimized

Over the past week, there's been a lot of talk over how the West has "lost" Turkey. Even Defense Secretary Robert Gates seems to be buying into this line of thinking.

Your concept of "Israeli security" is probably wrong. If you're a part of the hoards of people protesting Israel's interception of the flotilla, you just don't get it: Israel will risk everything if it thinks its security is the least bit in jeopardy. If you're Israeli and believe in the need for overwhelming violence, your grasp of "security" is outdated, outmoded and unsustainable.

Several days ago, in a critique of the Obama response to the Israeli attack on a Turkish ship, former national security advisor Richard Allen brought up the response of Ronald Reagan to the 1981 Israeli destruction of the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq. Based on what Mr. Allen describes as Mr. Reagan's "extensive preparation" and "deeply held principles on foreign policy," Mr. Reagan's response was: "Boys will be boys." Mr.

The fact that writing about Helen Thomas just a few days after she resigned feels like old news, tells you something about what's wrong with the media and our country today.

After a journalism career spanning almost seventy years, Thomas was taken down in less than two minutes. Which is the running time of the video where she made the remarks that forced her to resign her job, lose her book collaborator, her lecture agent and have a high school cancel a graduation speech she was scheduled to deliver.

In trying to change direction and find "a better approach" to dealing with the long running crisis facing Gaza, the Obama Administration is confronting several deeply entrenched obstacles.

Assume the following hypothetical situation for the purposes of this discussion: One of the violent drug cartels based in Mexico takes over the City of Tijuana. The Mexican government has no apparent ability to change this fact by force or otherwise. Our American government, in an effort to continue its battle to keep drugs out of the United States, takes on this cartel. In return, the cartel begins plotting a series of attacks across the border that land in San Diego. The cartel periodically fires rockets across the border at San Diego.

In light of Turkey's reaction to the Israeli attack on the Gaza-bound flotilla last week, media pundits and policy wonks are already underlining the demise of the US-Turkish special relationship. The growing chorus of critics miss one vital point. Turkey was criticizing Tel Aviv's military overkill off the Gaza coastline, not Washington's.

First came the clash at Davos in January 2009, when Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan walked off the stage after an angry exchange with the Israeli president, Shimon Peres during a panel discussion on Gaza at the World Economic Forum. Then came the surprise uranium deal with Tehran, undermining Western pressure on Iran to come clean about its nuclear program, followed by the Israeli assault on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, which sailed under Turkish flags, sending shockwaves throughout the world.