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joe lieberman
The Political Rise of Arab Americans Shows the Value of Sticking Around and Fighting
Today, despite the horrors of genocide in Gaza, we must never forget that we retain the capacity to make change.
Apr 10, 2024
Two seemingly unrelated events of the last week have caused me to reflect on the long journey we’ve taken to Arab American empowerment. The first was the March 27 death of former Senator Joseph Lieberman. This was followed by the 28th anniversary of the tragic death of former Secretary of Commerce Ronald Brown on April 3.
Arab Americans were provided the opportunity to enter U.S. politics as an organized community in the 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns of Jesse Jackson. Because it was the first campaign to welcome Arab Americans by name, the community enthusiastically responded. We registered new voters, organized to elect a record number of delegates to the national convention (over 80, when in previous years there had never been more than a handful), with many hundreds more participating in state party conventions and passing Palestinian statehood resolutions in 10 states.
Despite our successes, or more likely due to them, the resistance by pro-Israel groups to our involvement increased dramatically. They smeared us and pressured candidates and elected officials to reject our support. In 1984, for example, the presidential campaign of Walter Mondale returned Arab American contributions and in 1998, the Michael Dukakis campaign rejected an endorsement from Arab American Democrats.
Change is never easy and never comes by itself, it requires hard work and allies.
After the 1988 campaign, as Ron Brown was set to begin his chairmanship of the Democratic Party, he pledged to end this exclusion. His first meeting as chair was with me, saying he wanted to send the message that Arab Americans had a home in the Democratic Party. As he introduced me to key staff, he announced to all that this was a new day for Arab Americans in the party. And it was.
A few months later he became the first party chair to address an Arab American convention. One of his staff told me that before coming into our meeting he had an “emergency coffee” with a major pro-Israel donor who told him, “if you even walk into that room, I’ll pull my donations and get others to join me.” I asked Brown what he was going to do. He said, “I’m going to speak to Arab Americans.”
The problems we faced didn’t end. Pressure was placed on other candidates and elected officials on the local levels to exclude Arab Americans—and many did. By the time we got to the 1992 Democratic Convention, we were frustrated by the block we encountered in trying to work with the Clinton campaign.
At the convention, I was approached by David Ifshin who served both as legal counsel to AIPAC and as an official in the Clinton campaign. He said to me, “I understand Arab Americans are trying to get into the campaign.” He then used an obscene expletive saying there was no place for us and we ought to go elsewhere.
I was angered and told Ron Brown what had just occurred. He told me he’d been working on it but that he too had difficulty breaking through, as there were other officials committed to blocking our entry. He suggested that I also try other routes.
As I had an upcoming meeting scheduled with Senator Lieberman to discuss another matter, I thought I’d also tell him about my encounter with Ifshin. I knew the Senator and I didn’t agree on much, but I had found him to be thoughtful and open to dialogue. I was right. He was so outraged by the Ifshin story that he promptly called the Clinton campaign headquarters and demanded that they meet with Arab Americans and invite them to play a role in the campaign. The next day we were invited to meet and find our place in the campaign. During the next few months, we demonstrated our capacity to work and were never again excluded from any Democratic presidential campaign.
When Bill Clinton entered the White House, he welcomed us in and gave us a seat at the table, providing Arab Americans with unprecedented access and opportunities to engage in policy discussions on a range of foreign and domestic policy concerns.
Along the way, at times I despaired of ever seeing Arab Americans overcome the objections of those who wanted to exclude us from participating in the political mainstream. At one point I told Jesse Jackson that I was ready to quit. He looked at me sternly and said, “Never do that, because it’s exactly what your enemies want you to do. What they’re most afraid of is that you’ll stick around and fight.” That’s exactly what we’ve done, and today, despite the horrors of genocide in Gaza, we must never forget that we retain the capacity to make change. Look at what’s been done: amazingly diverse mass mobilizations calling for a cease-fire and questioning U.S. arms for Israel; over 150 cities calling for an end to the Israeli war; a remarkable national movement demonstrating to President Joe Biden that there will be electoral consequences to his policies; and a growing drift of public opinion in an anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian direction.
Change is never easy and never comes by itself, it requires hard work and allies. That’s what it took to get to where we are today. And that’s what today’s Arab American activists are doing to challenge the U.S.’ failed policies toward the Palestinian people.
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Joe Lieberman, Iraq War Cheerleader and Killer of Public Option, Dead at 82
"Joe Lieberman's legacy will live on as your medical debt."
Mar 27, 2024
While current and former officials across the U.S. political spectrum shared praise for and fond memories of former Sen. Joe Lieberman in response to news of his death on Wednesday, critics highlighted how some of his key positions led to the deaths of many others.
Lieberman's family said the 82-year-old died at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital after a fall at his home in the Bronx. He served in the Connecticut Senate, as the state's attorney general, and in the U.S. Senate—initially as a Democrat and eventually as an Independent. He was also Democratic former Vice President Al Gore's running mate in the 2000 presidential election.
"Up until the very end, Joe Lieberman enjoyed the high-quality, government-financed healthcare that he worked diligently to deny the rest of us. That's his legacy," said Melanie D'Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Health, which advocates for universal, single-payer healthcare.
As Warren Gunnels, majority staff director for Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee Chair Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.),
explained, "Joe Lieberman led the effort to ensure the Affordable Care Act did not include a public option or a reduction in the Medicare eligibility age to 55."
Noting that Lieberman also lied about the presence of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq—which was used to justify the 2003 U.S. invasion—Gunnels asked, "How many people unnecessarily died as a result?"
He was far from alone in highlighting the two defining positions.
The Lever's David Sirota declared, "RIP Joe Lieberman, Iraq War cheerleader who led the fight to make sure Medicare was not extended to millions of Americans who desperately needed the kind of healthcare coverage he enjoyed in the Senate."
The Debt Collective said on social media that "Joe Lieberman killed so many people when he killed the public option. Not to mention all the people he killed by cheerleading every war and every lie that led to war. A truly horrible person with a shameful legacy."
Journalist Jon Schwarz pointed out that Lieberman continued to lie about the WMDs long after the claims were debunked.
FormerMSNBC host Mehdi Hasan noted that Lieberman declined an opportunity to apologize for the disastrous war, sharing a clip from his on-camera interview with the ex-senator in 2021.
And please don\u2019t give me this \u2018don\u2019t speak ill of the dead\u2019 stuff - 1) I\u2019m not speaking ill, I\u2019m stating facts, and 2) public figures are public figures, and their obits reflect their legacies and so we should be honest in our accounts of their legacies. Not offensive but honest— (@)
"We lost a giant today. I often disagreed with Joe Lieberman but he was always honorable in the way he called for American troops to murder people abroad so he could get his jollies," said Matt Stoller of the American Economic Liberties Project in a series of sarcastic social media posts.
"Joe Lieberman balanced his love of other people fighting in immoral wars with a commitment to preventing Americans from getting healthcare," Stoller added. "Even after his Senate career, he showed his strong democratic values by lobbying for Chinese telecom firms. We will miss this man."
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Has Nothing Been Learned Since 2003? Corporate Media Welcome Back Iraq War Hawks To Make Case for Iran
"No voices calling for peace. No voices critical of empire. Just establishment media and current and former Pentagon officials who feed off the trillion dollar war machine."
Jan 08, 2020
As President Donald Trump spent the early days of 2020 instigating and then backing down from a potentially catastrophic confrontation with Iran, corporate media in the U.S. turned to the very same people who promoted the country's worst foreign policy disaster in a generation to advocate for repeating the mistakes of two decades ago.
The decision of networks and cable news outlets like CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News to bring on a stream of past advocates for and architects of the 2003 invasion of Iraq was panned by progressives who watched in horror and frustration as the same arguments were deployed in service of all-out war with Iran.
"It's War Inc. all over again," tweeted The Nation's Dave Zirin.
\u201cIt\u2019s War Inc. all over again. No voices calling for peace. No voices critical of empire. Just establishment media and current and former pentagon officials who feed off the trillion dollar war machine.\u201d— Dave Zirin (@Dave Zirin) 1578022989
Trump's ordered assassination of Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani on January 3 proved the catalyst for escalated tensions between the U.S. and Iran. It also opened the door for news outlets to welcome back some of the key Bush-era war cheerleaders.
"In a sane and just society, the architects of the nearly 17-year-old war in Iraq--which is still ongoing and has left an estimated half-million people dead--would face war crimes charges and those who cheered them on would be thoroughly discredited."
--Jessica Schulberg, HuffPost
The more things change, the more they stay the same, wroteRolling Stone's Tim Dickinson.
"The Trump administration's sudden, violent confrontation with Iran stands in contrast to the methodical march to war with Iraq under George W. Bush and his neoconservative cabinet in 2003," Dickinson wrote. "But the rhetoric around the two conflicts has been strikingly similar--as has the reliance on 'razor thin' evidence of an imminent threat to establish a cause for war."
Soleimani's death by drone strike was celebrated in real time by former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer, who spent the run-up to the Iraq War selling the public on the necessity of the conflict.
"I think it is entirely possible that this is going to be a catalyst inside Iran where the people celebrate this killing of Soleimani," Fleischer told Fox in the hours after Soleimani's killing, flanked by Bush administration advisor Karl Rove.
\u201cAri Fleischer: "I think it is entirely possible that this is going to be a catalyst inside Iran where the people celebrate this killing of Soleimani"\u201d— Jason Campbell (@Jason Campbell) 1578020173
In contrast to Fleischer's prediction, Soleimani's funeral and remembrance ceremonies over the weekend turned out mourners enraged at the assassination across Iran in the millions. Former Vice President Dick Cheney's similar claim in 2002 that U.S. troops in Iraq would be "welcomed as liberators" was equally true.
Fleischer was nonetheless welcomed back to Fox on Tuesday and Wednesday to give his thoughts on the conflict and attack Democrats for questioning the rush to war.
"It's concerning, to say the least, to see some of the biggest backers of the Iraq War--an abject failure that, coupled with the ongoing war in Afghanistan, has cost the United States trillions of dollars and thousands of lives--are publicly (and in some instances, gleefully) opining about the potential impact of war with Iran, in some cases even using the same rhetorical stylings to do so," saidVox's Jane Coaston of the similarity in rhetoric.
On MSNBC, which bills itself as a liberal alternative to right-wing behemoth Fox, host Ari Melber on January 7 in the wake of Iranian retaliation for the assassination spoke to former General Barry McCaffrey, who called for a devastating response against Iran.
"Our only good response at this point is an overwhelming dominance of air and naval power that can be employed against the Iranian homeland," said McCaffrey.
\u201c"Liberal" MSNBC guest Gen. McCaffery: "Our only good response at this point is an overwhelming dominance of air and naval power that can be employed against the Iranian homeland"\u201d— Andrew Lawrence (@Andrew Lawrence) 1578442020
Unmentioned in the segment was McCaffrey's position on the board of Raytheon, a major U.S. weapons suppplier.
The next day, Melber hosted former Sen. Joe Lieberman, a one-time Democrat whose embrace of the Bush administration's push for war across the Middle East led to an unofficial expulsion from the Democratic Party in 2006, though Lieberman was re-elected as an independent.
Not disclosed by Melber to his audience? The fact that Lieberman works for Israel Aerospace Industries, a defense company with $1 billion in sales in the U.S.
Melber did not respond to a request for comment at press time.
As Popular Information's Judd Legum reported Thursday morning, Lieberman and McCaffrey are hardly alone in advocating for war in the media without revealing their financial interests in the conflict. Legum lists nine former government officials with ties to the defense industry who are being presented to the American people as experts without noting their connections to the military industrial complex.
One of the people profiled by Legum is Michael Chertoff, the former Bush-era secretary of Homeland Security. On CNN, Chertoff claimed Trump has unilateral power to attack Iran and start a war.
But, Legum pointed out, there was some context for those remarks conveniently left out of the coverage:
Neither Chertoff nor CNN disclosed that Chertoff is chairman of the board of the American subsidiary of BAE Systems, the fourth largest weapons manufacturer in the world.
Print media was not immune to the lack of accountability shown by tv. On January 5, the Washington Post ran a piece by former Bush administration national security advisor Stephen Hadley saluting the assassination of Soleimani and calling for war if necessary.
That Hadley is on the board of Raytheon alongside MSNBC's McCaffrey did not receive a mention.
The onus for disclosure, wroteEyes on the Ties reporter Rob Galbraith, is on the Post's editor Fred Hiatt:
Running another hawkish column by Hadley without noting his enormous financial incentive to stoke the engines of war shows that the Post in general, and Hiatt in particular, has failed to learn anything from Syria, Iraq, or any of the other times that war profiteers have used their pages to clamor for missile strikes and invasions. This is made all the more egregious since, however dismissively, Hiatt acknowledged Hadley's conflict of interest in 2013, and yet still went ahead and printed his op-ed today without disclosing this conflict--again.
"It's not 2003, but it sure feels like it," wroteHuffPost's Jessica Schulberg in a piece detailing a number of the Bush administration officials and varied Iraq War boosters brought on by the corporate media to discuss the push for war.
"In a sane and just society, the architects of the nearly 17-year-old war in Iraq--which is still ongoing and has left an estimated half-million people dead--would face war crimes charges and those who cheered them on would be thoroughly discredited," Schulberg continued. "Instead, they are the 'experts' praising President Donald Trump's decision to assassinate top Iranian military commander Gen. Qasem Soleimani and offering the public insight on the way forward with Iran."
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