Maureen Dowd, "Liz Cheney: Desist!": Wearing Her Ignorance on Her Sleeve

Maureen Dowd knows nothing about the Middle East, but this has never prevented her from writing about it. Worse still, when convenient, she knows how to turn a blind eye to human rights abuses in this part of the world. During 2010, when she waltzed off to Saudi Arabia, there was nary a mention in her subsequent New York Times op-eds of the horrifying abuse of women in the desert kingdom, be it honor killings, child brides, or the imprisonment and whipping of women who are gang-raped (see, for example: http://jgcaesarea.blogspot.com/2010/03/shame-on-maureen-dowd.html and http://jgcaesarea.blogspot.com/2010/03/maureen-dowd-ignores-honor-killings-in.html). Obviously, any mention of these phenomena would have caused her instantly to become persona non grata among the Saudi royalty who hosted her, and this would have spoiled her trip.

Two years have transpired since her shameful sojourn in Saudi Arabia, but Dowd still remains utterly in the dark concerning the Middle East. In her New York Times op-ed "Liz Cheney: Desist!" (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/07/opinion/dowd-liz-cheney-desist.html?ref=opinion), she again wears her ignorance on her sleeve. Dowd writes:

"Romney crudely painted Obama as an Arab sympathizer. 'As president, my first foreign trip will not be to Cairo or Riyadh or Ankara,' he said. 'It will be to Jerusalem.'"

Unbeknownst to Dowd, Turkey is not an Arab country.

More to the point, however, why did Obama visit Cairo, Riyadh and Ankara, but refuse to touch down in neighboring Israel? Is there anything wrong with visiting allies? Perhaps Israelis would be less suspicious of Obama's ultimate gameplan had he deigned to make this amicable stopover.

And whereas Dowd was unwilling to write of Saudi human rights abuses while in Riyahd, she is today happy to vent criticism of Israeli "abuses" of women's rights from Washington:

"Romney wrote a blank check to Bibi Netanyahu, who governs a nation roiling with reactionary strains, ultra-Orthodox attacks on women and girls and attempts at gender segregation".

Dowd apparently is unaware that although a woman has never served as president of the US, Golda Meir served for many years as prime minister of Israel. Dowd apparently also doesn't know that the parliamentry head of Israel's opposition is a woman, or that the outgoing chief justice of Israel's supreme court is a woman.

Netanyahu's government tolerates ultra-Orthodox discrimination against women? Consider the following article from Israel's leading leftist newspaper, Haaretz (http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/netanyahu-israel-is-a-democracy-and-won-t-tolerate-discrimination-1.403473):

"'Israel is a Western liberal democracy and as such its public space is open and safe for all, men and women,' Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at the start of Sunday's cabinet meeting. 'There is no place in [Israel] for discrimination. The police will continue to arrest all those who spit, raise their hand, and harass.'

. . . .

At the meeting, Netanyahu called on government offices and law enforcement authorities to remove signs that call of women to use the other side of the street.

Energy and Water Minister Uzi Landau said: 'Haredi [ultra-Orthodox] extremists should be dealt with like leftist anarchists and right-wing settler youth - decisively.'

Netanyahu is to meet on Sunday with ultra-Orthodox politicians to ask them to speak out against the segregation of women in public places by extremists in the Haredi community."

Nice try, Maureen. No need to allow the facts on the ground to get in the way of your opinion pieces. By the way, when was the last time you visited Israel?

Dowd acknowledges, "The Israeli fear of an Iranian nuclear weapon must be respected, not least because the regime intent on developing this weapon is the world’s greatest center of Holocaust denial." However, she then immediately declares that she would "feel better if our partner was not the trigger-happy Netanyahu, who makes hysterical arguments even in the absence of a dire threat."

Netanyahu is "trigger-happy"? Again, unbeknownst to Dowd, almost a day does not go by without a rocket or missile being fired by terrorists at civilian targets in southern Israel, yet "trigger-happy" Netanyahu has not sent the IDF back into Gaza.

Dowd would have us believe that Israel is not facing a "dire threat." That is easy enough for her to say writing from Washington. But whereas Dowd acknowledges that Iran is the world's greatest center for Holocaust denial, she purposefully fails to mention that Ahmadinejad has called for Israel to be wiped off the map, and that Supreme Leader Khamenei recently called Israel “a cancerous tumor that must be removed, and God willing it will be” (http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2012/02/10/193813.html).

Not "dire" enough? In January, US Secretary of Defense Panetta stated that Iran is one year away from producing a nuclear weapon (http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/panetta-iran-is-one-year-away-from-producing-nuclear-weapon-1.409983); however, if Israel is to act on its own, it has less than a few months to damage Iran's nuclear weapons producing infrastructure before it goes deep underground.

Sorry, Maureen, but concerning the Middle East, you truly are vacuous.