On our Zoom call this Friday we’ll talk about the World Cup and what it can teach us about views in the Arab world (and beyond) about Israel, the Palestinian struggle, and the Abraham Accords.
The call will be at a special time: 1:30 PM EST (not the usual Noon). There will be no Zoom calls on December 23 or 30.
Our guest this Friday will be University of Richmond Assistant Professor of Political Science Dana El Kurd, who has conducted fascinating research about the Abraham Accords—both the lack of support it enjoys among ordinary people in the Arab world and its impact on human rights. Here’s an essay she wrote last summer in the Washington Post on how normalization with Israel is helping Arab dictatorships repress their people. Here’s one she wrote last month about the impact on normalization of Israel’s new, right-wing, government.
As usual, paid subscribers will get the link this Wednesday and the video the following week.
Sources Cited in this Video
Tucker Carlson’s monologue about Brittney Griner and Paul Whelan.
The 2021 Pew Research Center poll showing that Republicans believe white Americans face the most discrimination of any major racial group.
Paul Whelan’s brother applauds Brittney Griner’s release.
Things to Read
In Jewish Currents (subscribe), I wrote about the Biden administration’s refusal to establish any meaningful red lines in response to Israel’s new far-right government.
On MSNBC, I talked with Mehdi Hasan about Benjamin Netanyahu’s claims that Palestine was “barren” until the Zionist arrival and that the Arabs who lived there did nothing to develop it. (Here’s Netanyahu’s full interview with Jordan Peterson where he makes these allegations.)
I also talked with Mehdi about why it’s possible—even logical—for right-wing American politicians to celebrate Israel and peddle antisemitism at the same time.
On Tuesday, December 13 at Noon ET I’ll be participating in a panel sponsored by The Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies at UMass Amherst on antisemitism in the United States.
That evening I’ll be on a panel sponsored by Jews for Racial and Economic Justice about the 2022 midterm elections.
Last weekend at the J Street Conference, Ayman Odeh, the Palestinian politician who leads Israel’s Hadash Party, recounted a conversation he had with the late Israeli scholar Zeev Sternhell about fascism. It’s a remarkable, and terrifying, speech.
I’ve been recently enjoying the Tel Aviv Review podcast. Here’s a terrific interview they conducted recently with Hebrew University Professor Hillel Cohen on his new book, Haters: A Love Story, about the relationship between Mizrahi Jews, Ashkenazi Jews, and Palestinians.
See you Friday at 1:30,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Hi. Our guest this Friday is going to be Dana El Kurd, a professor at University of Richmond, talking about the World Cup and what we’ve learned about opinion in the Gulf, in the broader Middle East, about Israel, about the Palestinians. It’s really been, I think, a remarkable kind of cultural moment to see that the Palestinian cause remains a very powerful cause in the Middle East, and not just in the Middle East, just judging from the reaction of people. And Dana has done a lot of fascinating work about public opinion in the Gulf, in the Middle East, about the Abraham Accords, about normalization with Israel, and I think is really the perfect person to kind of put this moment into context and to help us understand how some of the kind of arguments that became very prominent in Washington about how people didn’t care about the Palestinians anymore in the Arab world turned out to have been based on very, very faulty assumptions. And then we will not be having Zoom calls the following two Fridays on the 23rd and the 30th, and we’ll pick up again in the new year.
I wanted to talk a little bit at about the Brittney Griner affair—you know Brittany Grinner is the WNBA basketball star held by Russia and whose release was just negotiated by the Biden administration—but to talk about the response to her release as an episode in the production of white supremacy. I think that white supremacist politics has been an enormously powerful force in the United States in recent years. Just to give you an example, statistically, of how potent it is, the Pew Research Center last year did a study and they asked people who was more discriminated against: white Americans or Black Americans. Among Democrats, Democrats by a margin of 67 points said that Black Americans are more discriminated against. Republicans, by a margin of 9 points, said that white Americans are more discriminated against. Republicans were also twice as likely, by margin of two to one, to say that white Americans were discriminated more than Hispanics and Asians, for instance.
And this is I think a huge force in Republican politics today: this imagined notion that America was essentially an equal country, and now it is an unequal country because its government and its key cultural institutions—the media, Hollywood, you know, big business—essentially discriminate against white people. This is really a kind of fantastical notion, but I think it’s a very powerful notion. And in understanding why this exists, the role of conservative media is really crucial. A lot of people talk about, well, how did people develop these views that led them to vote for Donald Trump? These things don’t happen out of nowhere. There are kind of political and media entrepreneurs who fuel this again and again.
And the Brittney Griner case, I think, is a really good example, a kind of case study in how this plays out. So, there is another US hostage in Russia—a former marine, a white straight man named Paul Whelan. Brittney Griner is Black and also LGBT. And so, Griner was released and Whelan was not. Now the Biden administration says that the Russians did not offer Paul Whelan, that they had asked for both Whalen and Griner in response as a trade for this Russian arms dealer, Victor Bout, and the Russians only offered Griner. And that’s not an implausible argument given that the Russians claim that Whelan was a spy unlike Griner, so they might have had some particular reason to be less forthcoming about his release. And also, Paul Whelan’s own family, which has actually celebrated Brittney Griner’s release, has validated the Biden administration’s claim that there was not an option to get their brother out in addition to, or even instead of, Brittney Griner.
But Tucker Carlson—and I want to talk about Tucker Carlson’s monologue on this because I think it’s such a striking example of how the production of white supremacist narratives—takes off from the idea that this is not true. His only piece of evidence is that there was an unnamed senior Biden official who said at one point to NBC News that they could have chosen Whelan over Griner. Then that was actually recanted, and NBC changed their story. All the media outlets reported that there was not an opportunity to choose Whelan instead of Griner. But there was this one outlier quote from one senior administration official. Again, if this were really the case, then I think the Whelan family above all would have been likely to have denounced the decision by Biden to trade Griner for Bout and not Whalen. The fact that they endorsed that, I think, suggests that there’s very little evidence to suggest that in fact the Biden administration did choose Griner over Whelan.
But this becomes the key assumption for Tucker Carlson in his monologue. And I want to quote at some length Tucker Carlson’s monologue because I think it’s such a striking example of how white supremacist politics is fueled. So, Carlson says, ‘why did they make that choice,’ meaning choosing Griner over Whelan. Tucker Carlson says, ‘well, you should know that Whelan is a Trump voter and he made the mistake of saying so on social media. He’s paying the price for that now.’ So, first of all, he’s suggesting that Biden discriminated against Whelan because he’s a Republican. And then Tucker Carlson goes on to say, ‘Brittney Griner is not. She’s got very different politics.’ And this is Carlson: ‘Brittney Griner despises the United States. She’s been very vocal about that. This country is so repellent and immoral that two years ago she said, I honestly feel we should not play the national anthem during our basketball season.’ You notice that Carlson doesn’t mention that that’s in the wake of the George Floyd incident. He doesn’t mention George Floyd, but he describes this is simply to say that Griner has a hostility to the United States. And so, Carlson says, ‘she hates the country so much she doesn’t want to hear its anthem. That’s the kind of position that gets you rewarded by Joe Biden.’ So, there’s that. And then Carlson goes on: ‘then there’s the matter of identity, which is central to equity.’ This is Carlson: ‘Brittney Griner is not white. She’s a Lesbian. Now, those facts might seem irrelevant to you, but they’re not irrelevant to the Press Secretary, who acknowledged that Griner was a lesbian of color.’ And then Carlson says: ‘you see? You get more rights based on what color you are, what sexual orientation you are in Joe Biden’s America.’ And then Carlson ends by saying: ‘that’s not how this country works or has ever worked.’
The last line is really extraordinary, right. Tucker Carlson is saying that the Biden administration is discriminating in favor of a Black person and a lesbian, discriminating against a white male. And this represents for Carlson an inversion of how America has always operated because he says, ‘that’s not how this country has ever worked’—discrimination based on color and sexual orientation. An astonishing statement, right, because of course for the vast, vast majority of American history, America has profoundly practiced discrimination against Black people, against LGBT people. But Tucker Carlson suggests that, in fact, the norm in this country was equality under the law for everybody, and what’s happened is the country has been seized by Black people, by LGBT people, by their liberal Democratic supporters, who have now turned this into a discriminatory regime against people like Paul Whelan who have the misfortune of being white and straight.
And if you think about this narrative being repeated on Fox News, conservative media, by Republican politicians literally every single day for years and years and years now—not just during the Trump period but really you can see a lot of it going back to the Obama years and even before that—you see the production of this idea that in fact what we need in America is a movement to make America equal again by ending the discrimination against white people, against straight people, against men, and that only then can we restore America to its true character. And that is a really core part of the essence of the politics that is that is so powerful today in the Republican party. And you see how people like Tucker Carlson can take an incident like Brittney Griner and fit it in to this enormously dangerous and toxic narrative that I think threatens liberal democracy in the United States and threatens the safety and rights of people like Brittney Griner and other people who are Black, who are LGBT, who are women.
And so, again, our call on Friday is with Dana El Kurd. We’ll be talking about the World Cup and the Abraham Accords. Hope to see you then.
How the Conservative Media Fuels White Supremacy