Middle East peace can't be won by all take and no give

I despair of Benedict Brogan. He claims today in the Telegraph that President Obama's new stance on the Middle East peace process constitutes a "giveaway" to the Palestinians that would leave Israel "where it was before the Arab world tried to drive the Jews into the sea". But let's look at what Obama is and isn't actually saying. He suggests that a Palestinian state should be broadly based on the pre-1967 boundaries, but with land-swaps to square the circle of the enormous, illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank. He excludes the question of East Jerusalem altogether, even though it has an overwhelmingly Palestinian population, and like the West Bank was ruled by Jordan before 1967. He also leaves open the possibility that the Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war will have to give up the right of return to their homes in what is now Israel. So if all that constitutes a "giveaway", it rather begs the question of what on earth Brogan would see as a just peace. A Palestinian state consisting of just Gaza, and the rump of the West Bank that will be left once the prime swathes of land confiscated by Israeli settlers are ripped out? That wouldn't be so much a "giveaway", as a legitimisation of Israel's slow-motion "takeaway" over the last few decades.

Not even the most moderate of Palestinian negotiators would ever accept such a settlement, so what Brogan is offering is a prescription for ongoing conflict. How that will assist Israel's long-term security is something of a mystery.

If you can't understand why healthcare reform is evil, you really need to listen to this historical figure I've been putting words into the mouth of

After President Obama's health care bill narrowly squeaked through the House of Representatives yesterday, I thought today would be a suitably entertaining day to venture back into the right-wing American blogosphere, and I wasn't disappointed. William Teach of Right Wing News concedes that a Democratic congressman's assertion that the bill will revolutionise health care is right, but "would sound a whole lot better if you could hear it in a 1930's Russian or German accent". (I'm guessing Mr Teach might just be one of the 70% of Americans who don't own a passport.)

He also rather archly wonders what "the Founders, who shed blood to create a new country" would be thinking today. But why stop there? I bet the Three Wise Men would have been thoroughly appalled as well (after all, if the Baby Jesus had been covered by health insurance they'd never have found him in a stable). And there's little doubt Moses would have had some pretty trenchant things to say on the subject.

Was it right to award Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize?

I must admit my first reaction when I vaguely heard something about the news earlier today was "that can't possibly be right", so I suppose that ought to answer my own question. But of course the Nobel Committee has often in the past awarded the prize to a person of goodwill (or assumed to be of goodwill) as a kind of exhortation to them to continue striving for peace in the future. It can indeed be a powerful incentive - if, several years down the line, nothing has been accomplished, or things have actually got worse, the prize can become almost a mark of shame rather than pride. That was for a time, it's worth remembering, the case for John Hume and David Trimble, who were given the award at a relatively early stage of the Northern Ireland peace process, which still had "many a slip twixt cup and lip" to come. During those slips, it was often suggested to Hume and Trimble that they ought to return the prize money. Did this factor shame them (or rather Trimble and his colleagues in particular) into pushing for a durable settlement? It's hard to see it as an overriding factor, but it certainly can't have done any harm.

The recognition for Obama can also, I think, be justified simply on direction and speed of travel. For a country that less than a year ago was perceived (probably accurately given its capacity to project its will onto others) as the greatest threat to world peace to have transformed itself into a force for reconciliation in many arenas does indeed look impressive. If Obama had succeeded the Clinton administration, it would look rather less so. But it's the paradox of the Peace Prize that it is typically awarded to people from countries that have recently stoked conflict - how else could it have gone to Northern Ireland twice?

I'm writing this in blissful ignorance of what the conservative American blogosphere have made of this news. I'm about to dive in and discover. I'm sure they will be thoroughly magnanimous, pleased that the leader of their country has received this extraordinary accolade, regardless of any political differences...

Meanwhile, back on Planet Palin...

So in the end I needn't have worried - Obama's stardust didn't even come close to sealing the 2016 Olympics for Chicago. Completely predictable that the President's domestic enemies would try to score points over his part in this failure, but also completely misplaced - from what I can gather about the patterns of voting in the first round, delegates were to some extent voting in informal regional blocs. This placed Chicago at a natural disadvantage, given that the US has fewer natural 'tribal' allies than the other three contenders. But the stage where this political point-scoring goes beyond being merely misplaced and becomes...well, surreal, is the stage at which people start suggesting that Sarah Palin would have had a better chance of convincing the IOC delegates of Chicago's merits than Barack Obama.

The truly scary thing is I think they actually believe it.

Also worthy of note is this startling summary by 'consultant' Bill Mallon of what the rejection of Chicago tells us about the nature of the IOC itself -

"that reveals that they’re so euro-centric and international-centric, it’s ridiculous"

Euro-centric for sending the Olympics to Rio de Janeiro? OK...

But what on earth does 'international-centric' actually mean? From my limited knowledge of Ameri-speak, I can only deduce that it's supposed to mean that the IOC is 'centred' around the 96% of the world's population who live outside the United States. Heaven forbid!

Winning without stardust

I hadn't even been aware that today was decision day for the 2016 Olympic venue candidates until I caught about two seconds on the news this morning. So I had a quick rummage around on the internet in an attempt to ascertain which city is favourite. The first two results that came up - dated early September - said Tokyo is the favourite. The third and fourth results, from the last day or two, said Chicago is the slight favourite in a very close race, with only Tokyo now thought to be out of the running. That's quite a turnaround in the space of a few weeks, and I can't quite work out how it's happened. The only explanation I can find as to why Tokyo might not be considered suitable is that it's too close geographically to the 2008 host city Beijing - but wasn't that fact already known in early September?

Anyway, perhaps it's wrong of me, but my instinct is to hope that any city but Chicago wins, for two main reasons. The Olympics were held in Los Angeles in 1984, in Atlanta in 1996 - is there some kind of unwritten law that the games have to be held in the US at least once every two decades? Given that no South American city has ever been host, yet another trip to the US really would seem like overkill. My second reason is the sight of Barack Obama arriving in Copenhagen to press the case for Chicago. How is Brazil, Spain or Japan supposed to compete with that kind of stardust? And more to the point, why should they need to? I could never quite understand how Tony Blair supposedly had such an impact in sneaking London's victory four years ago, given that a) London is London regardless of whether it has a PM with a winning smile (yuck), and b) he was never going to be PM in 2012 anyway, so any assurances he offered the delegates were fairly meaningless. (Some would say all Blair assurances were meaningless in any case.)

On the basis that it's South America's 'turn', I'll be keeping my fingers crossed for Rio tonight.

If you thought the 'four candles' sketch was funny, wait till you hear the hysterical Obama 'ice cream' gag!

If you believed the events of recent months might have significantly healed the racial and cultural divide in the US, take a look at this viral e-mail my mother received earlier today from an American pal of hers who appears to be just slightly right-wing -

"Ben and Jerry's is coming out with an unbelievable new ice cream in honor of the messiah who was just sworn in as our 44th President. It is being churned in Washington DC and appropriately being named:
'Baracky Road'
half chocolate and half vanilla surrounded by fruits and nuts"

To quote Rowan Atkinson in Blackadder II, if I appear not to be laughing it's only because I fear my sides would split. There have of course been a lot of e-mails over the last couple of years claiming to prove that Obama is a Muslim or a terrorist or not a natural-born citizen or whatever, but this is the first openly racist one I've come across and I was genuinely quite shocked (as was my mother).

For a (marginally) more harmless laugh on the same topic, you could try this old favourite, the Conservapedia entry for Barack Obama. You might think it's a deliberate self-parody, but it's not!