David K. Shipler's Blog, page 14

By David K. Shipler
                Donald Trump, who has come to realize that he was born in the wrong country, has ordered his Trump Organization to look for one to buy that he can run unimpeded by legislators, judges, news reporters, experts, and meteorologists. He thinks it would be great fun after leaving the presidency.                 “Maybe one of those shithole countries,” he reportedly told Ivanka just before she set out for Latin America. “Look around down there, will you? I’d rather one of them than in Africa . . .” The rest of his sentence is unprintable.                Word has gone out in high-powered real-estate circles that Trump is willing to pay a small fortune for a nation where he can draft his own weather maps predicting what he has imagined, publish his fantasies in every newspaper, turn every newscast into unreality TV, make skeptical questioning a felony, reward corruption as smart business, and summon nubile young women to his palace. (He wants a Trump Palace, preferably on a hilltop flattened for a golf course.)                Trump has told associates that the property must have this key quality: no constitution, or at least one that can be ignored. The US Constitution is a royal pain, as he keeps discovering, and he’s sick and tired of trying to get around it. “In the old adage,” he told one close aide, “the price of real estate is determined by three factors: location, location, and location. What I’m looking for is a place that is valuable because it is lawless, lawless, lawless.”                Hearing about this, a disillusioned, patriotic Trump voter declared, “It is terribly selfish to say this, but let’s hope his search for a ‘shithole country’ is successful before he turns ours into one.”

By David K. Shipler
                Before Israel became extremely right-wing, officials used to be eager to make their case with facts and reason. They were so confident in the legitimacy of their position in the Arab-Israeli conflict that they actually seemed to welcome a good opposing argument, because they thought they had a better one. When I arrived there in 1979 after four years covering the Soviet Union, the refreshing air of openness by government was like a tonic. There were exceptions, but as a rule, Israel’s officialdom didn’t try to silence painful disagreement. Comfort with flagrant debate was one of Israel’s most admirable qualities.There is still plenty of noisy, acerbic dispute in the country. But the government lost its footing in denying entry to two Muslim US congresswomen, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, who wanted to visit the West Bank to champion the Palestinian cause and condemn Israel’s continuing “occupation.” That would have been an annoyance that the old Israel could have handled with sensible rebuttal, and hopefully some healthy introspection. In an earlier time, leaders stood tall in self-assurance. In the new Israel, it seems, they cower pathetically in fear of on-the-ground criticism.The ironic result is the opposite of what President Trump imagined. He had said that Israel would look weak if it allowed Omar and Tlaib to visit. Israel now looks weak for having banned them—and for taking Trump’s bad advice. (Of course Trump’s idea of weakness is that you listen respectfully to views that differ from your own. He doesn’t seem to realize how weak he looks in his thin skin.) This episode brings to mind Israel’s decision in 1979 to allow Jesse Jackson to enter the country for a highly publicized visit to Israel and the West Bank. Because of Jackson’s pro-Palestinian tilt, Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan convinced Prime Minister Menachem Begin to deny Jackson any meetings with senior government officials, a rebuff that displeased some of Begin’s aides, who thought Begin himself should have met him. Yet the discomfort with Jackson’s views, including his earlier anti-Semitic remarks, did not rattle the conservative governing coalition enough to block his trip.Jackson acknowledged Jews’ past of persecution by visiting Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial museum. But he made a fool of himself by spending an hour in the Kalandia refugee camp north of Jerusalem without asking a single question of Palestinian residents. Instead, he used the crowded camp as scenery for his TV sound bites, a venture in self-promotion, not fact-finding. Mayor Teddy Kollek said that on a tour of Jerusalem’s Old City, Jackson seemed most interested in having his picture taken. When I duly wrote as much, Jackson went home and gave an interview dismissing my coverage as the work of a Jewish reporter. (I’m not Jewish.) So, did Israel suffer a mortal blow by tolerating his posturing? We know the answer.Whether Omar and Tlaib would have damaged themselves on such a trip is an open question, but it’s clear that Israel could have engaged them in a productive way. Doors could have been opened for discussions with senior officials, political and military. An agenda could have included briefings on critical security issues, on past peace plans, on Israel’s long sense of vulnerability. The two might have visited Yad Vashem as well. A tour of Jewish history could have been imparted to provide context for understanding the deep ties to that land by Jews as well as Muslims. In the old adage, you can’t kick a person toward you.After the ban, Israel’s interior minister made a humanitarian exception for Tlaib to visit her grandmother on the West Bank if she would pledge not to advocate during her trip for the boycott movement that she supports. She ended up not agreeing to be silenced, and not going. If Israel had felt compelled to impose conditions on the visit, high-level meetings and briefings would have been more useful. Such invitations Omar and Tlaib could not have refused! It’s unclear how well they would have listened or how amenable they would have been to revising their thoughts about this complex conflict. But if they were open to learning, they would have come out with a more sophisticated grasp of the clash of historical narratives, of the competition of nationalisms, the rising religious dogmatism on both sides. They would have understood the passionate attachment to Jerusalem that animates many Israeli Jews as well as Palestinian Muslims. And then, Omar and Tlaib would have returned home as more persuasive articulators of policy. But persuasion is not a hallmark of either American or Israeli politics these days. We are in an age where few people on either side of an argument care to use considered facts and reason to get through to the other. We are in a mode of shouting at each other, not listening to each other. Politics has devolved into scrambles for whipping up your most zealous supporters, which you don’t do with calm appeals to serious discussion. Not only for Trump, but also for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who faces an election next month, the parochial takes priority over the country.In this instance, Israel forfeited its ability to make its case.

By David K. Shipler
                Jared Kushner’s economic proposal for the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip is comprehensive, bold, and visionary, full of noble goals in commerce, trade, agriculture, manufacturing, road-building, local electricity production, water supply, education, vocational training, health care, women in the workforce, and the arts. Titled “Peace to Prosperity,” it imagines the West Bank as a trading center akin to Singapore or Dubai. Its calls for judicial independence, dependable contract law, anti-corruption measures, and administrative transparency that would be hailed by any “good-government” advocates. It envisions some $50 billion in international grants, loans, investments, and global expertise.                  This would be nothing to sneer at if it related to reality. But to take it seriously, you have to play Let’s Pretend. So let’s pretend that the West Bank and Gaza constitute a normal country, independent but poor, with no Israeli overlords, and free to accept whatever outside assistance it chooses. Let’s pretend that the Palestinian rulers control their own borders so that people and goods can move easily, as Kushner recommends. Let’s pretend that West Bank land is all under Palestinian authority, rather than being fragmented into leopard-spot jurisdictions favoring expanding Israeli settlements and security concerns. And let’s pretend that the radical group Hamas no longer controls Gaza with a policy of relating to Israel by rockets alone.                 In that fictional environment, Kushner’s plan is utopian in the best sense of the word. The document is silent on the longstanding Israeli-Palestinian conflict, so depending on how charitable a reader wants to be, Kushner’s effort is either ignorant or presumptuous, either blind to the political resolution that would be required before his proposals can be implemented, or based on an assumption that a resolution will have occurred.It should be obvious that this pretty economic dream cannot be realized without the political dream of Palestinian independence. The point could have been made dramatically by the Palestinian leadership, which missed an opportunity by boycotting the conference in Bahrain where the plan was presented. Also absent was Israel, which would have to make significant concessions.It’s unclear exactly what Kushner and the Trump administration wanted or expected out of this proposal. President Trump displays a belief that money is the pivot point of human behavior, as in his promise to Kim Jong-un of North Korea that his country “would be very rich” if it relinquished nuclear weapons in exchange for aid and investment. So, did the Trump family think that dangling prosperity in front of the Palestinians might bribe them into a conciliatory political posture? If that’s the case, Kushner and his colleagues have no grasp of the dynamics of Palestinian nationalism. While economic hardships weigh on many Palestinians, especially in the deep poverty of Gaza, the long-running conflict with Israel has been a territorial dispute fueled by the clash of historical narratives, national aspirations, and religious extremism on both sides.When Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital by moving the US embassy there, he foreclosed an American role in mediating impartially between Israel and the Palestinians, who also covet Jerusalem as their capital. When his ambassador, David Friedman, supported the prospect of Israel’s partial annexation of the West Bank—and given his support of Jewish settlements there—he slammed the door on Palestinian regard for the sincerity of any US proposal.Indeed, ProPublica reported a year and a half ago that the Kushner Companies Charitable Foundation had contributed to the West Bank settlement of Beit El, from which militant Israelis harass and attack Palestinians. Significantly, Kushner’s economic plan makes no mention of the settlements, which have intruded on Palestinian grazing land and uprooted vineyards and olive groves. It laments the small amount of agriculture on the West Bank and calls for Palestinians’ “access to more land.” Is this a coded statement of opposition to Jewish settlements, or is it just plain hypocrisy?Similarly, the plan’s repeated recommendations for the relatively free movement of people and goods across borders with Jordan, Egypt, and Israel could be read as a challenge to the intricate, onerous checkpoints and barriers that Israel employs around the West Bank and Gaza. Kushner envisions vibrant Palestinian production and exports with outside assistance to “develop beneficial free trade agreements.” He praises the talents of the Palestinian diaspora and urges technical help from Palestinians living abroad—who would probably not be allowed in under current Israeli policy. The plan also revives the old, abortive idea of a land route open to Palestinians, through Israel, between Gaza and the West Bank. Is he pressing Israel for fundamental change, or is he anticipating such a relaxation of tensions that fears of terrorism would no longer be an issue?Ever since Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan and the Gaza Strip from Egypt in the 1967 war, Palestinians have found themselves largely stymied by Israeli authorities in developing their own substantial economic base. In the early 1980s, some international non-profit organizations were barred by the Israeli military government in the territories from giving seed money to embryonic manufacturing enterprises. Farming declined as land was confiscated and exports into Israel were restricted to curtail competition with Israeli producers. That threw more and more Palestinians into Israel proper for wage labor, where the pay is much higher than in the territories. But after Palestinian terrorist attacks prompted Israel to close and restrict border crossings, the commute became virtually impossible from Gaza and difficult from the West Bank.The West Bank economy has improved somewhat, but whether Israel will permit or encourage the scale of independent Palestinian entrepreneurship and international trade proposed by Kushner is an open question.And whether a Palestinian leadership would welcome the Kushner approach is also a question, given that it envisions a model of minimal government regulation and maximal capital enterprise, plus tax reform, that follows conservative Republican ideology. He urges strong property rights and a central registration of land ownership (many Palestinians have no deeds, which has made their land vulnerable to takeover by Israeli settlers). He suggests that a Palestinian government should privatize certain services.The plan advocates massive funding in areas where his father-in-law’s administration has already cut off American aid. Is this another bit of hypocrisy, or a statement of dissent? And what of these statements, which might be applied as a counterpoint to Trump’s own behavior in office: “Good governance requires rigorous systems that empower people to hold institutions accountable.”“Robust civil society institutions and a free press are important parts of any well-functioning democracy. Preserving and expanding these important institutions within the West Bank and Gaza will require new laws and practices that protect their independence and improve their capacity.”Hear! Hear!

By David K. Shipler
                On the night of August 4, 1964, as two US destroyers were reporting attacks by North Vietnamese PT boats in the Tonkin Gulf, Navy Commander James Stockdale took off from the USS Ticonderoga to fly support. He spent more than 90 minutes below 2,000 feet searching for North Vietnamese vessels. “I had the best seat in the house to watch that event,” he wrote in a book twenty years later, “and our destroyers were just shooting at phantom targets—there were no PT boats there . . . there was nothing there but black water and American firepower."                Yet the imagined incident, coming two days after an actual attack, prompted President Lyndon Johnson to denounce Hanoi’s “repeated acts of violence” and order a bombing run against a North Vietnamese oil depot. The sortie of 18 planes was led, ironically, by Stockdale, who knew conclusively what had not happened but followed orders to help “launch a war under false pretenses,” as he said in his book. (He was shot down on a later mission, spent seven years as a POW, and in 1992 ran for vice president on Ross Perot’s ticket.)                The cautionary tale of the Tonkin Gulf has been revived in recent days by the Trump administration’s assertions of absolute certainty that Iran was responsible for attacks on two oil tankers. The evidence is sketchy—primarily a video showing Iranian Revolutionary Guards removing, not planting, a limpet mine—and sundry sightings of Iranian vessels in the area, as they always are. There might be intercepted communications, called SIGINT (signal intelligence) in the trade, but they haven’t been released.So the nature of Iran’s involvement is far from clear, and a close look at the Tonkin Gulf episode can be instructive, for it contained plenty of doubt at the time, including ambivalent eyewitness accounts by sailors, a misunderstood North Vietnamese communication, previous commando raids on North Vietnam, and other elements kept from the American public. Indeed, as declassified documents and recorded White House conversations have since revealed, both Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and President Johnson had doubts about whether the second attack had actually occurred. Several days later, Johnson said, “Hell, those damn stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish.”Yet the president used it to inspire Congress to approve the broad war authorization known as the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, passed by the House unanimously and with just two dissenting votes in the Senate. It’s possible that another pretext would have been found for going to war, but this one stands as the benchmark of history.                Presidents had more credibility then. Perhaps high-level lying since has had the bizarre virtue of promoting skepticism, for today it’s hard to imagine widespread acquiescence to making war against Iran. Thanks to the chronic mendacity of the Trump administration, preceded by the Bush administration’s fantasies of Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction,” a certain distrust has become a sign of civic health.                Americans were dramatically deceived over the Tonkin Gulf. They were not fully informed that for months before the incident, the US Navy and the CIA had been supporting repeated raids by South Vietnamese commandos and patrol boats on North Vietnamese islands and coastal installations. According to a definitive history by the US Naval Institute’s Naval History Magazine, OPPLAN 34A, as it was named, conducted two attacks on islands 25 miles apart the night of July 30-31. The USS Maddox was also in the area collecting electronic intelligence on radar frequencies, navigational aids, and the like.    Days later, on Aug. 2, a real attack on the Maddox did occur. Three North Vietnamese PT boats launched several torpedoes at the Maddox, which was not hit. The boats were damaged by gunfire from the ship and US aircraft.                The attack was interpreted in Washington as a major act of aggression against American forces. But from what is now known, it appears to have been a local commander’s initiative to retaliate for the commando raids and coastal assaults. So said the head of the Institute of Military History, Gen. Nguyen Dinh Uoc, at a conference in Hanoi organized by McNamara in 1997.                In 1964, McNamara had publicly and falsely denied knowledge of any South Vietnamese raids, but privately he suspected that Tonkin Gulf was retaliation for them, as he told Johnson in a recorded call declassified in 2005. “There's no question but what that had bearing on it,” he said to the president. “On Friday night, as you probably know, we had four TP [sic] boats from [South] Vietnam, manned by [South] Vietnamese or other nationals, attack two islands, and we expended, oh, 1,000 rounds of ammunition of one kind or another against them. We probably shot up a radar station and a few other miscellaneous buildings. And following 24 hours after that with this destroyer in the same area undoubtedly led them to connect the two events.”                It was the second “attack” on Aug. 4 that clinched the narrative of North Vietnamese aggression against US forces. It never occurred, as accumulated evidence shows and as McNamara was told in November 1995 by Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, North Vietnam’s wartime military commander.                Reports from the Maddox and another destroyer, the USS Turner Joy, were contradictory and full of illusions—phantoms, as Stockdale later wrote. The night was stormy, with high seas that created false contacts on radar. Although the ships were 100 miles offshore, sailors thought they saw lights from enemy vessels passing close at hand. As the Maddox took evasive action, sonar operators probably thought they detected torpedo wakes when they were picking up propeller wash against the rudder during sharp turns.                To add to the confusion, the destroyer task force commander, Captain John Herrick, first called an attack into question, then provided contrary information. His first message said: “Review of action makes many reported contacts and torpedoes fired appear doubtful. Freak weather effects on radar and overeager sonarmen may have accounted for many reports. No actual visual sightings by MADDOX. Suggest complete evaluation before any further action taken.” A second message said that the Turner Joy’s crew had spotted two torpedoes on sonar and nearby lights visually.                Further, the National Security Agency picked up a North Vietnamese transmission: "Shot down two planes in the battle area. We sacrificed two comrades but all the rest are okay. The enemy ship could also have been damaged.” The author of the Naval History Magazine report, Lieut. Commander Pat Paterson, found that the message was about the actual attack on Aug. 2 “but had been routinely transmitted in a follow-up report during the second ‘attack.’ The North Vietnamese were oblivious to the confusion it would generate.”                In fact, however, it didn’t generate confusion. It was misinterpreted as the smoking gun by McNamara and hawkish advisers to the president. Johnson was pressed to act, and he did. Later analysis of SIGINT showed that some communications were mistranslated, bore altered time stamps, and contained information never provided to the White House. Significantly, no North Vietnamese radio transmissions were intercepted during the night of Aug. 4, a silence that should have been a red flag.                Today, Trump is being pressed on Iran by his hawkish advisers, National Security Adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Gone from his administration are the restraining voices of former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, who analyzed the Tonkin Gulf fiasco in his book, Dereliction of Duty, and of former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.                With chilling relevance to today, the historian and journalist Gareth Porter wroteon the 50th anniversary in 2014, “The deeper lesson of the Tonkin Gulf episode is how a group of senior national security officials seeks determinedly through hardball – and even illicit — tactics to advance its own war agenda, even though they knew the President of the United States was resisting it.”

By David K. Shipler
                In a rare moment of candor and accuracy, President Trump today used the word “incredible” to describe his press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Upon her announcement that she will be leaving the post, Trump tweeted, “She is a very special person with extraordinary talents, who has done an incredible job!”                The entire White House press corps suddenly found itself in unfamiliar agreement with a tweet from on high.                Reactions to the unprecedented spasm of presidential honesty came swiftly from an array of eighth-grade English teachers. “While the adjective ‘incredible’ has been corrupted in slang to substitute for such superlatives as “amazing’ and ‘extraordinary,’” said Mrs. Matthews of Chatham (NJ) Junior High School, “all of my students know very well that it means, ‘not believable.’ Its root is credo, Latin for ‘I believe,’ and is made negative by the prefix ‘in.’” For emphasis, she slapped her 15-inch ruler on her desk, her routine method of keeping her students awake and attentive.                Trump surely knows the proper definition of “incredible,” several other teachers observed, because he went for a couple of years to Fordham, a Jesuit college where precise thinking and respect for language are de rigueur, and then to an Ivy League school, the University of Pennsylvania.                Jane Doe, who covers the White House for the East Overshoe Gazette summed up the feeling among her colleagues: “We just hope his next press secretary is less incredible.”
In case you’re wondering, this is satire—although the Trump tweet is real.

By David K. Shipler
“It reminds me of the Soviet Union.”--Philip B. Duffy, president of the Woods Hole Research Center, on the Trump Administration’s politicization of climate science.
                The spectrum of political and social views is usually pictured as a straight line running from left to right. But the range of positions on some matters might better be rendered as a circle, with the line bent around until the two extreme ends are joined in common excess.                Take the rejection of science, for example. On the right are the deniers of all the careful and extensive research documenting the human contributions to global warming. On the left are the deniers of all the careful and extensive research into the human immune system’s activation by means of vaccines. They are not identical in their suspicion of elites in the scientific community, but they are close enough to be put together at the bottom of that circle.                And anti-Semitism. Typically seen on the extreme right among neo-Nazis and other white supremacists, ugly manifestations have also surfaced on the left. In the US, some college students have mixed anti-Semitic stereotypes into their criticisms of Israel, as has Democratic Congresswoman Ihlan Omar. Britain’s Labour Party is under investigation for anti-Semitism by the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission. Seven members of Parliament quit Labour in February in protest over its leadership’s failure to deal sufficiently with anti-Semitism as well as Brexit.                 Left-right similarities can be seen on some college campuses that have been stages for intolerant assaults in both directions. Shortly after 9/11, conservative students and alumni monitored and reported liberal professors for views expressed in and out of class, and tried to get some fired. More recently, liberal and minority students have shouted down conservative and racist speakers, or have pressed administrators to disinvite them. These attempts to silence expression are less prevalent than they appear from the news coverage they receive, but they have special gravity at institutions supposedly devoted to free intellectual inquiry. In places of higher learning, especially, a viewpoint considered offensive is best confronted with solid research, sound argument, and precise rebuttal.For years, the conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh has been lambasting liberals as terrible people, unworthy of dignity or respect. We’ve witnessed the distaste on TV at Trump rallies, where dissenters have been roughed up as Trump cheers on the attackers. It would be wrong to see a false equivalency, because Democratic leaders have not encouraged liberals to use violence, far from it. But many on the left use epithets, branding Trump supporters as thuggish, narrow-minded, and unworthy of respect—“deplorables,” in Hillary Clinton’s term.So toxic are current political differences that conversation across the lines are practically impossible, especially in workplaces and families. If the differences do surface, they can be painful, as they were for Susan P., an IT specialist at a Massachusetts company. When the facilitator of a management seminar asked all those who had voted for Trump to stand, Susan was the only employee who rose to her feet. A gasp swept across the room. And then, for months, four of her coworkers refused to speak to her, she said. Only eventually, when they needed her technical help, did they finally break their silence.She and other Trump supporters in the liberal milieu of Massachusetts keep a low profile, she explained, connecting almost secretly by detecting one other’s politics through oblique remarks and guarded hints. Suppression of dialogue covers a large part of the circular spectrum.It’s obvious, too, that dictatorship and its proponents come in both leftwing and rightwing varieties, sometimes in the same country over time. Under communism, Hungary was a leftwing autocracy that muzzled the press, coopted the judiciary, and operated an oppressive system. Hungary under Viktor Orban is now a rightwing autocracy that muzzles the press, undermines the independent judiciary, and operates an increasingly oppressive system. Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro and the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte are more alike than different, notwithstanding their location at the linear spectrum’s remote left and right, respectively.Although Trump denounces Maduro and has tried to overthrow him, the president’s affinity for an array of strongmen spreads far and wide in the spectrum. He admires (perhaps envies) the likes of Duterte, Orban, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi of Egypt, and others who would not be clustered on a line but certainly should be at the point on a circle where extremes connect.Some of Trump’s language is eerily familiar to anyone familiar with Soviet history. Stalin had upstanding citizens condemned to imprisonment or execution as “enemies of the people.” No free press existed under communism; facts and truth were endangered species. In the rightwing Trump administration, facts and truth are endangered species, and the free press is condemned by Trump as the “enemy of the people,” while still protected by the bulwark of the First Amendment.Other peculiar shadows of Soviet-style autocracy have flickered across the landscapes of conservative American administrations. Rightwing American ideologues (libertarians excepted) and leftwing Soviet ideologues both believed fervently in expansive executive power against weak legislative branches. Under President George W. Bush, Arabic speakers in the US Army were tainted by suspicions of disloyalty, just as German speakers were in the Soviet Red Army. [See The Rights of the People, pp. 382-84.] The Bush Justice Department questioned prospective employees about their political attitudes to be sure they weren’t Democrats, as Soviet authorities used to demand communist orthodoxy from candidates being screened for government positions.                Sycophants who are prepared to abandon principles are readily available at both extremes. You can read about Stalin’s skill in cultivating a quivering mass of subordinates anxious to please, for fear of their lives. President Trump, even without the gulag or the firing squad as penalties, has succeeded in promoting anxiety among trembling political appointees eager to kneel before his narcissistic whims. To wit, the recent impulse by White House operatives and mid-level Navy officers to cover, block, or move the destroyer John S. McCain so the president, on his visit to Japan, wouldn’t see or be photographed near the ship that bears the name of the late senator (and his father and grandfather) whom Trump continues to despise. Crew members who wore their ship’s name on their uniforms were blocked from attending Trump’s Memorial Day speech.American pluralism prevents the imperious presidency from corrupting the entire society. Attitudes and impulses of those in power matter, however, even as they are restrained by the constitutional system. So, the resemblance between fawning over Trump and deferring to autocrats is a matter of degree, but that doesn’t make them as different as Americans would like to think.Collaboration is a complicated chemical reaction of strength at the top and weakness below; the United States, it seems, is not entirely resistant. The point was demonstrated in Trump’s televised cabinet meetings of agency heads who decorated him with effusive praise as if they were playing in politburo-type pageants of fearful flattery. Americans who care have observed that communist apparatchiks and official Trumpist apologists stand together at the bottom of that circular spectrum.Christopher Wren, with whom I shared the Moscow Bureau of The New York Times, used to say that doctrinaire Soviet officials reminded him of the Southern segregationist leaders he covered during the civil rights movement: dogmatic, authoritarian, brutal, intolerant of any view besides their own. No analogy is perfect, but that one sure came close.

By David K. Shipler
                After years of dithering about the immigration issue, the national Bad Spellers (BS) movement has finally endorsed President Trump’s border wall and other tough restrictions. But the organization also warned that his proposal to base immigration on merit would pose great dangers to American culture.                “The risks are obvious when you look at the pictures and the names of the eight co-winners of the Scripps National Spelling Bee,” said a BS statement. “Rishik Gandhasri, Saketh Sundar, Shruthika Padhy, Sohum Sukhatankar, Abhijay Kodali, Christopher Serrao, Rohan Raja—and, by the way, the only one who seems like a white Anglo, Erin Howard. All these kids with families originally from India or somewhere else in South Asia who can spell all those ridiculous words that nobody ever uses—are they even English words?”                BS went on to point out what every red-blooded American knows, that the right to misspell is enshrined in the Constitution (First Amendment) and exemplified by our president, who was made an honorary member of BS even before his inauguration. “Donald Trump is a true repesentative [sic] of the Peopel [sic],” said the announcement at the time. “He knows how to capitalize randomely [sic] and use apostrofes [sic] at will. He’s all about substence [sic], not spelling.”                The fear, BS explained, is that hordes of hostile “aliens” will invade the country and undermine its devotion to the pluralism of spelling and grammar, which are core principles practiced daily in tweets, emails, conversations, and even classrooms. The evolution of the English language will be frozen at a pompous stage. It is obvious from the spelling bee results, BS argued, that immigrants’ high regard for education and their ambition to get ahead threaten American values. “Here is the question: What freedom do we have if not the freedom to spell as we wish?”                In an effort to appeal to Trump, BS drove its point home with this: “The insistance [sic] on propper [sic] spelling is just another form of political correctness.”
Full disclosure: This is satire!

By David K. Shipler
                Ronald Young died last year. He served his country for his entire adult life, not in uniform but in the ranks of those unsung Americans who campaign for peace, who use not lethal arms but the weapon of morality to call their country to its highest values. They should also be honored on Memorial Day.For Ron’s memoir, Crossing Boundaries in the Americas,Vietnam and the Middle East, I wrote a preface from which this essay is adapted. It calls upon us to consider what lenses we use to see ourselves and our past.History is written by the victors, as Winston Churchill observed. It is then interpreted by the powerful, and periodically reinterpreted as values mature and new voices are heard. In other words, history is malleable. Russians under communism used to joke about the disappearance of important figures from official recollections: “What is the definition of a Soviet historian?” The answer: “A person who can predict the past.”We Americans like to think we’re more truthful than autocracies, and we are, but only to a degree. While no central government dictates what we learn about our history, we have multiple versions manipulated instead by a thousand points of institutional bias, from the Texas school board’s textbook requirements to the museums and monuments scattered across the country. In democracies, too, what is taught and known about the past is shaped by the cultural consensus of the present.Not long ago, Native Americans (then called “Indians”) appeared in classrooms and films as ruthless primitives. If they were occasionally admired, it was only for their savage nobility—their exotic rituals and canny self-reliance—or as collaborators with the white man against their own. I went to school in the 1950s, and I cannot remember reading a line in a textbook or hearing a sentence from a teacher about the atrocities visited upon them.Nor was slavery sufficiently woven into the American story. Not until the waning years of the twentieth century did visitors to Monticello, Mount Vernon, and other plantations see anything of the majority of residents who had lived there—the enslaved blacks who built and labored on the land. Tours concentrated on the owners’ elaborate mansions, furniture, silverware, and china.That this has changed—that the powerless are now seen—is a tribute to America’s sporadic capacity for self-correction. We hail Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement that were so vilified and spied upon by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. What an FBI memo called a “demagogic speech” that made King “the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country” we now celebrate as one of the most inspiring pieces of eloquence in our history: “I have a dream.”Yet even this evolving self-portrait underestimates a whole subculture of America’s sons and daughters who struggled against established policies and norms. They include blacks who sacrificed to overturn segregation and whites who journeyed south to join them in the civil rights movement. They include those who defied the military draft to resist the war in Vietnam, protested United States aid for Latin American dictatorships, urged nuclear disarmament, demanded protection of the environment, and called broadly on their country to stand for peace and humane justice—not easy standards for a superpower to achieve, evidently.These Americans have been the backbone of our conscience. If we sing of their achievements too softly, we miss essential ingredients of our country’s greatness.Ron Young was one of those Americans. I first met him when he and his wife, Carol Jensen, visited Jerusalem, where I was a correspondent, from their home base of Amman, Jordan. Their task, for the Americans Friends Service Committee, was to cross the rigid boundaries that divided Israelis and Arabs—and the internal boundaries that divided Israelis and Arabs among themselves—so they could report to Quakers back home on the state of the Middle East and its faltering peace process.Being a reporter was my job, too. But Ron and Carol seemed to be doing much more. In harvesting competing perspectives, they were also seeding a measure of interaction and dialogue. They were carrying the contrasting views across those boundaries and leaving them for contemplation by the other side. To believe that this would make a difference took enormous faith in people’s good sense and their capacity to listen, especially to voices different from their own.Given the absence of Israeli-Palestinian peace nearly forty years after their efforts, you might conclude that their faith was misplaced. But they never struck me as naïve. They honored the decency in people, respected their need for dignity, and looked at hard truths with a clear gaze. We need more of this realistic idealism. Lofty goals cannot be reached by cynicism.So Ron’s story was the country’s story—or, a part of the country’s story not usually told vividly. Because he came of age by following pathways that led through the most momentous protest movements in the nation’s postwar experience, his personal narrative filled in the picture of a turbulent society reaching for moral poise.He told me little of this during our long conversations about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during those years in Jerusalem. Perhaps I never asked—a grievous failing for a reporter. But he also never volunteered, a measure of his humility. He was not a man obsessed with himself.But he was a man driven by the desire to see injustice made right—not with the flashing rhetoric of hyperbole, not with unprovable accusations of conspiracy or venality, but with the quiet assurance that understanding can be nourished from those seeds of listening.At a time when organized religion is most publicized for its intolerance, Ron held regard for the clergy of diverse faiths as catalysts of change. That began at the height of efforts to topple Jim Crow segregation, when he dropped out of Wesleyan to work at a black church in Memphis under the Reverend James Lawson, Jr., who set him to reading and thinking about topics far beyond the immediate racial conflicts, including the threat of nuclear war.Ron visited the Dominican Republic after the United States invasion, went to Uruguay for a conference on nonviolence and social change, and would have been drawn more deeply into Latin America were it not for the escalation of the war in Vietnam.He worked for the religious and pacifist organization, the Fellowship of Reconciliation. He burned his draft card, campaigned with the peace movement, and led a delegation including religious leaders for discussions with non-communist South Vietnamese who opposed the war. His anti-war credentials enabled him to visit North Vietnam in 1970 as part of a small group of religious figures to deliver mail to and from American POWs and their families.In later years he translated those early contacts with religious leaders into a longterm effort toward Middle East peace. It’s hard to think of anyone else with his deep experience who could mobilize Muslim, Jewish, and Christian clergy in the way that he did, to keep pressing the United States to keep Israeli-Palestinian peace prospects alive.Ron was 75 when he died of septic shock. I don't know if he would want a flag lowered to half mast, but he deserves the tribute as much as any soldier who falls in battle. If you are ever tempted to despair that Americans have lost their moral compass, look into Ron Young’s generous life of active idealism. And remember that he has not been alone.

By David K. Shipler
                If the Trump administration goes ahead with its plan to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, hundreds of thousands of US citizens could face federal prosecution for providing funds and leadership to mosques and Islamic community centers across the country. That is because federal law prohibits “material support” for terrorist groups, and some key Trump insiders accept the slanderous allegation by anti-Islam activists that the Brotherhood effectively owns mosques and has infiltrated the United States.                Muslim Americans and their institutions could also face rising jeopardy from local authorities and organized citizens, who would employ the designation to mobilize fear. Mosques already have difficulty in some locations getting zoning changes and building permits, and extremists could easily use the official label of “terrorist” to justify vigilante violence. In other words, the hatred stoked by President Trump and some of his allies would be granted the force of law.While President George W. Bush kept the anti-Muslim movement at bay, even after 9/11, Trump has surrounded himself with admirers and promoters of vitriolic alarmists who portray Islam in sinister terms reminiscent of the smears and suspicions fueled by hunts for communists in the McCarthy era of the 1950s.Stephen Miller, a leading White House adviser, has a long record, dating back to his senior year at Duke in 2007, of imagining what he terms “Islamofascism” as being at war with Western civilization. Stephen Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, remains in the president’s inner circle after running Breitbart, the rightwing outlet that helped promulgate baseless assertions that Islamic centers were fronts for the Muslim Brotherhood’s stealthy program to subvert America by imposing Sharia, Muslim religious law.Frank Gaffney, who served on Trump’s transition team, distorts Islamic sources to create an ominous specter of community centers, mosques, and Muslim organizations controlled by the Brotherhood. Gaffney has been praised by Bannon as “one of the senior thought leaders and men of action in this whole war against Islamic radical jihad.” Between 2013 and 2017, Mike Pompeo, now Secretary of State, appeared on Gaffney’s radio program 34 times, according to The Atlantic.Such people might have been relegated to the ranks of cranks in pre-internet and pre-Trump days. They would have been handing out leaflets on street corners or mailing broadsheets to a limited like-minded audience. In the digital era, though, they have become a cottage industry of slick websites with the deceptive look of careful research and solid argument, complete with videos and links to sources whose exaggerations are repeated and requoted in such circular fashion that flaws are hard to see without careful, skeptical examination. Human Rights Watch, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Southern Poverty Law Center have all denounced this coterie of Islam watchers. The movement gained access to the White House with Trump’s election. The first victory was the president’s ban on immigration from Muslim countries, initially rejected by the courts and then partially upheld by the Supreme Court. A second victory would be outlawing the Muslim Brotherhood.Most attention to this prospect has been focused on its complications for foreign policy, since the Brotherhood is a legitimate—and nonviolent—political player in Morocco, Turkey, Tunisia, Algeria, Kuwait, and Jordan. The terrorist label was promoted by Egyptian president Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, the former army chief who ended the Brotherhood’s brief rule in 2013. (One might ask how the Brotherhood could take over the US if it couldn't even control Egypt for more than a year.)Indeed, the Brotherhood opposes a number of Arab autocrats. But it is fragmented and diverse, and while it has spawned violent offshoots, such as Hamas, it probably doesn’t meet the legal criteria for the terrorist designation by the State Department. Experts in the Defense and State Departments are reportedly opposed to the label, which would prohibit American officials from engaging in certain diplomacy and military cooperation in the Middle East.But there would be more harm inside the US, where the designation could impair First Amendment freedoms of association and speech if the FBI and federal prosecutors accepted the anti-Islam activists’ assertions about the role of the Muslim Brotherhood. One of the many provisions in the Patriot Act following 9/11 imposes long prison sentences for anyone who “knowingly provides material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization, or attempts or conspires to do so.” Although the law contains a caveat that it should not be “construed or applied so as to abridge” constitutional rights, it bars “training” and “expert advice or assistance,” which certainly can fall into the category of speech. Indeed, the Supreme Court has ruled that “material support” can include pro-democracy training abroad by American non-profits where the trainees are affiliated with a terrorist-designated organization. This inhibits efforts to help bring combatant groups into civil society.  Anti-Islam alarmists such as John Guandolo, a former FBI agent and Marine officer, try to get around the constitutional obstacle by arguing that Islam is not truly a religion but “a complete way of life, social, cultural, military, and political system governed by a foreign law, Sharia.” As head of Understanding the Threat, he has trained local police and sheriff’s departments wherever he can overcome local Muslims’ objections. At the end of a training for civilians that I attended, I asked what victory for his cause would look like. He replied: “The Muslim Brotherhood is decimated. They are designated by the US government as a terrorist organization, we have shut down all MB Islamic centers, all Iranian centers, and we have locked up all the MB officials in the United States. That’s a good start. And all those who have aided and abetted them are locked up after being tried in federal courts.” A book by Guandolo contains a boilerplate affidavit for law enforcement to get search warrants of mosques and Islamic centers, stating, “Your affiant believes that Probable Cause exists that the Islamic Center of [fill in the blank] is part of the Muslim Brother­hood’s ‘Islamic Movement’ inside the United States whose stated objective is the overthrow of the United States government and the establishment of an Islamic State, including the use of violence in our local area.” Guandolo is quoted frequently on Breitbart, and has been a guest on the radio show of Fox News host Sean Hannity, who talks regularly with Trump. Guandolo claims that he can spot a “Sharia-compliant” Muslim by his closely trimmed mustache and unruly red beard, and in March 2018 took and tweeted a photo of a Southwest Airlines employee who fit the profile, labeling the man “a Sharia adherent Muslim (aka jihadi) at my plane.” The airline called the tweet “cruel and inappropriate.” Several months later, after Guandolo blamed the Democrats for the shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue, Twitter suspended him from its site. For the linchpin of their scary fantasies, Guandolo and his comrades, including Sean Hannity, rely on an exaggerated reading of a single copy of a document written in 1991, found by the FBI in the basement of a Virginia home, entitled “Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America.” In researching my book, Freedom of Speech, I drilled down into this document, questioned its purveyors, and came up with zero justification for citing it as a source of concern. It calls for “a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.” It lists current and would-be organizational friends of the Brotherhood. And from these two elements the anti-Islam alarmists spin their terrible specter of existential threat. They picture the memo as a plan and conveniently avoid quoting its passage making clear that the author, Mohamed Akram, is offering a proposal, not pronouncing policy. Some have inflated his position in the Brotherhood to General Masul [leader] when his memo is actually addressed to the General Masul. He appears on one membership list at a mid-level position in the Brotherhood. Nowhere do the alarmists cite a document showing that his 28-year-old suggestion was adopted by higher authority.Similarly, the argument that the Muslim Brotherhood owns mosques and Islamic centers relies on the memo’s list of friendly organizations, which was introduced into evidence in the 2007 case against the Holy Land Foundation, a Texas-based charity convicted in a retrial of sending funds to Hamas. The anti-Islam propagandists who smear those organizations with the stain of terrorism have acquired standing with the White House, and now are poised to place many Muslim citizens at grave risk.

By David K. Shipler
It is so easy for President Trump and his allies to distract Democrats into skirmishes on the sidelines of the big game. Yes, it’s outrageous that Attorney General William Barr played spin doctor on the Mueller report by distorting its content. Yes, it’s even more outrageous that Barr is defying a Congressional subpoena to be questioned yet again about why he said what he said about the report.But what’s really important is what the report itself says, not what Barr says about it. That’s what Democrats should be focusing on. For if you read all 448 pages, as every citizen should, you’ll see a troubling picture emerge of a bizarre, uneducable president who tries to run the government as if he were the head of a crime syndicate.He uses his office to manipulate and intimidate. He lies to his aides, and they lie to him. He grooms himself as a cult figure whose approval is granted or withheld to the favor or detriment of acolytes. Some tell him they will obey even as they decide to defy him. He issues implicit threats (though not of violence, so far), and clearly expects his underlings to break the law on his behalf. When they do not, they are deemed “weak” and marked for retribution.  More to the point of the Mueller investigation, the evidence in the report supports an assessment that Trump did, indeed, attempt to obstruct justice in at least two of the cases investigated, and possibly in another five. Mueller stops short of making that judgment explicitly. But since his report is like a legal textbook on the conditions required to make the charge, and his evidence on both sides of each question is spread out dispassionately in precise detail, even a layman can see the obvious.This is what Democrats should be talking about. This is what they should be holding hearings on. They don’t need Barr to pillory, and they don’t need the “unredacted” version of the report. There is plenty in the public pages if anybody bothers to wade through the dry prose.At the report’s end, Mueller writes something akin to a legal brief, rebutting arguments by Trump’s lawyers that obstruction statutes are too narrow and the Constitution too broad in its grant of executive power to permit a president to be charged for such behavior. With citations of Supreme Court opinions and discussions of legislative intent, Mueller has produced a document ready-made for a prosecutor wishing to defend any appeal against either criminal charges or impeachment.The national interest might have been better served if Mueller had not punted on the bottom-line question of whether he thinks Trump tried to obstruct justice. “We determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment,” he writes, content with an approach that responsible journalists know as a kind of forensic exercise: on the one hand this, on the other hand that. Let the readers make up their own minds. “While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime,” Mueller says, “it also does not exonerate him.”Yet the evidence he lays out so impartially draws you to a conclusion in almost every instance. Mueller defines the three conditions that must be met for an obstruction charge: first, an obstructive act likely to interfere with an investigation; second, a nexus between the act and an official proceeding such as a grand-jury or law-enforcement investigation; and third, an intent to impede the investigation.
(Late today, more than 450 former federal prosecutors issued a letter concluding that Trump would have been charged with obstruction had he not been president.)The two Trump activities that appear to satisfy all three conditions involve his praise and hints of a pardon for Paul Manafort, his former campaign manager, and his efforts to limit the scope of the special counsel’s investigation to future elections, excluding 2016.Trump frequently used the Mafia term “flip” to disparage insiders who turn state’s evidence, and Manafort won Trump’s accolades for refusing to “break.” By contrast, Trump called Michael Cohen, his former lawyer, a “rat” for cooperating with the special counsel.    “There is evidence that the President's actions had the potential to influence Manafort's decision whether to cooperate with the government,” Mueller says in his analysis of whether Trump committed an obstructive act. The report notes that while Manafort pleaded guilty in one case and entered a cooperation agreement, he lied to investigators after Trump “suggested that a pardon was a more likely possibility if Manafort continued not to cooperate with the government.” Further, Trump’s public statements during Manafort’s trial in another case, “including during jury deliberations, also had the potential to influence the trial jury.”A nexus with an ongoing investigation clearly existed, Mueller finds, and the intent condition was also satisfied: “Evidence concerning the President's conduct towards Manafort indicates that the President intended to encourage Manafort to not cooperate with the government.” Sections on Roger Stone, Trump’s adviser, are blacked out, because his prosecution is ongoing.Trump’s attempts to limit the investigation’s scope also appear in the report as having met the obstruction law’s three conditions. This came about as Trump tried to get Attorney General Jeff Sessions to scale back the investigation to future elections, although Sessions had recused himself. Oddly, Trump picked as his messenger Corey Lewandowski, a private citizen and former campaign manager. Lewandowski never delivered the request. The attempt “would qualify as an obstructive act if it would naturally obstruct the investigation and any grand jury proceedings that might flow from the inquiry,” Mueller writes, stopping short of giving the obvious answer. Since a grand jury investigation had become public knowledge at the time, the nexus to an official proceeding would exist if limiting the investigation “would have the natural and probable effect of impeding that grand jury proceeding.” That sounds like a no-brainer.Finally, the report is crystal clear on intent: “Substantial evidence indicates that the President 's effort to have Sessions limit the scope of the Special Counsel's investigation to future election interference was intended to prevent further investigative scrutiny of the President's and his campaign's conduct.”Mueller’s evidence places other episodes in a gray area between probable and iffy. Among those, the case against Trump seeming strongest is his repeated demand that Mueller be removed. Since the investigation would have continued anyway, “a factfinder would need to consider whether the act had the potential to delay further action in the investigation, chill the actions of any replacement Special Counsel, or otherwise impede the investigation.” The other two conditions—the nexus and the intent—appear to have been satisfied in Trump’s desire to get rid of Mueller. Trump’s actions portrayed by the report as less certain to qualify as obstruction of justice include his appeal to James Comey, the FBI director, to lay off Michael Flynn, the national security adviser; his dismissal of Comey; Trump’s repeated efforts to get Sessions to “unrecuse” himself and take over the investigation; and his orders to White House Counsel Don McGahn to deny that he tried to fire Mueller. Various caveats and questions are raised in all these cases, although a layman could be forgiven for seeing fire where there is smoke.The report is refreshing because it embraces ambiguity where relevant, leaves room for debate on each of these episodes, and is full of solid research and sound reasoning, a rare display these days of intellectual honesty and impartial integrity.Yet even without a final, ringing declaration of judgment, its cascading evidence provides a cumulative indictment of Trump—if not criminally, then in the broader sense of the term, as a president incapable and unfit, ignorant or indifferent to the law and the Constitution, unwilling to learn, and thoroughly incompetent to govern in a system that restrains authoritarianism. The Democrats should forget Barr and concentrate on what the report tells us about Trump.