BOLLING: We’re actually experiencing situations where dangerous countries al Qaeda will send a pregnant woman over here, have a baby, and then start to train these babies to be terrorists, is that right?

GOHMERT: Well, Eric, it’s not just a theory. It first came to my attention. Some of us were traveling to the Middle East last August, a year ago. And a lady on the plane was telling one of our group that they were about to have their second granddaughter. Her husband was with Hamas, her grand — I’m sorry her son-in-law was with Hamas. And that they were going to do with the second as they did with the first grandchild. Daughter is going to come to America right before it’s born on a tourist visa. Have the baby. They just like the option of having American citizens in the family. [...]

We’re bringing them over here on tourist visas, some illegally, letting them be born here and saying this is an American citizen. So come back in 20, 25 years when you’re ready to blow us up.

Watch it:

Gohmert then went on to argue that “people are confused by the 14th amendment” and that the whole problem would be solved if a law was passed that says that anyone who comes on a visa is not subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S. government. According to Gohmert, this makes perfect sense because the “Constitution just anticipates different groups will have different rights.”

To begin with, since 9/11, travelers from most parts of the world who want to come to the U.S. on a tourist visa have to undergo a rigorous process just to obtain permission to enter the U.S. They must provide evidence which shows the purpose of the trip, submit fingerprints and photographs, and undergo an interview by a visa officer at the US Embassy. The requirements for anyone seeking to obtain a green card, which include a criminal background check, are even more stringent. And if Gohmert suspects the pregnant mothers of future terrorists are coming into the U.S. illegally, he may want to focus on fixing the broken immigration system rather than trying to rewrite the Constitution.

Ultimately, an isolated conversation with a “lady on the plane” on the way back from a first class trip to the Middle East doesn’t sound like a good reason to upend the 14th amendment. The Constitution is vague about a lot of things, however its citizenship clause is unambiguous. In an article released by the Center for American Progress, its authors argue “[e]leven years and a bloody Civil War later, when the framers of the 14th Amendment composed its text, they explicitly rejected the notion that America is a country club.” A couple centuries later, the U.S. Supreme Court explicitly confirmed in United States v. Wong Kim Ark that anyone born in the United States would be a citizen regardless of their parents’ nationality.

Finally, mandating that anyone who comes to the U.S. on a visa is not subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S. government would be a recipe for disaster. It would mean that, like diplomats, immigrants and tourists would enjoy legal immunity in the U.S. Their U.S. born children wouldn’t be citizens, but if they committed a crime — for example, a terrorist act — they would not be subject to the jurisdiction of U.S. courts and legal authorities.

In an interview Friday with Fox Business’ David Asman — who asked in a recent blog post, “Is the president funding terrorism?” — Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) claimed that the aid “rewarded” Hamas, and that it showed Obama was siding with Iran and Hamas over Israel:

BACHMANN: I also don’t think it was a a good signal for the president to give $400 million in aid to Gaza. He had a choice to make last week. The president had a choice between standing with Benjamin Netanyahu, or standing with Ahmadinejad and Hamas. Hamas is a terrorist organization. This should not have been a difficult choice, but the President chose to stand with Hamas and then they were rewarded this week with $400 million in aid. Gee, you don’t think that will embolden them to take future aggressive actions against Israel, do you? [...]

ASMAN: Are you going to start up some sort of congressional investigation to look into this, because it would literally be against the law to contribute money to an organization that funnels money to terrorists. [...]

BACHMANN: And again, I’m against sending this $400 million to Hamas. I think it’s a very foolish thing to do to reward them for these aggressive actions that were taken last week.

Watch it:

Just about every part of Bachmann’s argument, from the facts to the conclusions, is wrong. First of all, the $400 million Obama promised goes to Gaza and the West Bank, and the majority of it will almost certainly go to the larger West Bank. Secondly, none of the money will go to Hamas. The funds will instead be distributed through NGOs and the U.N., as has been U.S. policy in Gaza for some time.

Moreover, Bachmann’s claim that the aid package means Obama “chose” Hamas over Israel is complete nonsense. Beyond that fact that Obama has repeatedly stressed his support for Israel, U.S. aid to Israel easily dwarfs that to the Palestinian territories, and aid to Israel has actually increased under Obama. This fiscal year, the administration budgeted $2.7 billion for Israel, while it plans to give $2.85 billion in FY 2011.

Beyond this, Bachmann’s claim is based on the false suggestion that aid to Gaza is unprecedented. President Bush continued to fund humanitarian operations in Gaza, even after Hamas won an election and took control in 2006. As the New York Times noted soon after Obama took office, “By seeking to aid Gazans but not Hamas, the administration is following the lead of the Bush administration, which sent money to Gaza through nongovernmental organizations.” Under Bush, U.S. giving nearly doubled to the U.N. agency which provides services to Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, and neighboring countries. The Bush administration increased aid to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees from $137 million in FY 2006, when Hamas took over, to $268 million in FY 2009, Bush’s last budget.

Bachmann doesn’t explain how aid for school construction in Gaza will help President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran, but considering that she called Obama’s supposed appeasement of the country “worse than Neville Chamberlain” two days before the administration led the U.N. in passing the strictest sanctions yet on Iran, she probably can’t explain it.

Hamas, the Palestinian faction viewed by many in the West as a nest of terrorists and Islamic hard-liners, is battling a curious new epithet: moderate.

Fifteen months after a punishing Israeli offensive failed to dislodge Hamas from power in the Gaza Strip, rival resistance groups and some former supporters say the organization has become too political, too secular and too soft.

“People in the street say Hamas has changed,” said Abu Ahmed, spokesman for the military wing of Islamic Jihad, a Palestinian armed group in Gaza that complained recently that Hamas had arrested four of its militants as they tried to attack Israeli soldiers near the border. “They’re paying a price for that. People need to know that Hamas is still committed to the resistance.”

I’ll take that as evidence that more efforts should have been made to engage Hamas’ leadership, rather than the pursuit of this isolation strategy. Leaders of movements tend to find it to be in their interest to moderate in exchange for a slice of meaningful power. The US-Israeli concept has been that if we act in a punitive way toward Hamas-controlled Gaza, that Palestinian opinion will magically become more moderate but the real consequences are likely to be the reverse.

“This is a moment of very tough choices, with no dominant approach with obvious advantages,” said Gidi Grinstein, president of the Reut Institute, a policy research group in Tel Aviv. “Obama is being pushed to go for a Palestinian national unity government, negotiations and a comprehensive settlement. But it would be a mistake to push the two-state solution toward a moment of truth when it is in a moment of weakness, and when there is both a civil war and a deep constitutional crisis on the Palestinian side.”

Egypt, Saudi Arabia and even some in Israel favor a national unity government that would enable the Palestinian Authority to be seen as at least notionally in charge of the rebuilding in Gaza. But even if the antipathies between Hamas and Fatah, which controls the West Bank, could be overcome, a deal would almost certainly entail early elections that Fatah might very well lose.

The Gaza war has been bad for Fatah, and its popularity is plunging. Hamas is feeling victorious after surviving the Israeli pounding and is unlikely to allow Fatah to restore its presence, even for an election, in an angry Gaza.

This is a pretty neat trick. Israel launches a war in Gaza that’s allegedly supposed to weaken Hamas. Then Israel declares victory, even though the war has in fact strengthened Hamas and weakened Fatah. Then thanks to Fatah’s weakened position, it’s impossible to forge a unity government. But absent a unity government, it’s unreasonable for Israel to negotiate—Q.E.D.! It puts one in a mind of the time when it was impossible with Israel to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority because it was run by a corrupt and incompetent Fatah. No negotiations until political reform! Then when the elections were held, it turned out that the opposition—Hamas—won. And then Israel couldn’t negotiate with Hamas!

Taken in isolation, each of these positions has a patina of reasonableness but the overall pattern is of a government that’s much more interested in finding reasons to forever-forestall negotiations—expanding settlements all the while—than in finding a route to peace.

The air strike on Sayyam was apparently an attempt by Israel to deliver an image of victory in its offensive against Hamas. The Israel Defense Forces understands that Hamas’ agreement in principle to the Egyptian proposal for a cease-fire in Gaza signals that the campaign is nearing its end.

In an interview with Haaretz in November 1995, Sayyam said, “I do not hate [Israelis] for being Jewish or Israeli but because of what they have done to us. Because of the acts of occupation.”

In response to a question about whether he saw a chance for change in relations between Palestinians and Israelis, he said, “It is difficult to forget what was done to us. If the reason for the hate will not exist, everything is possible.”

Now what’s the “real” Hamas here? Honestly, I have no idea. I have no idea how it is that people reach such firm conclusion about who it is and isn’t possible to negotiate with. I think the record of history is simply that these things are very uncertain. If you look, for example, at the series of events from the Anglo-Irish War through the Irish Civil War and the Irish Free State era, I don’t really know how anyone would have predicted in advance which people would turn out to be the irreconcilables and which would turn out to be open to compromise.

Jeffrey Goldberg had a piece on Hamas in yesterday’s New York Times that Noam Scheiber hailed as “hands down the best thing I’ve read since the Gaza conflict started.” Jon Chait deemed it “fantastic” and recommended this conclusion especially:

The only small chance for peace today is the same chance that existed before the Gaza invasion: The moderate Arab states, Europe, the United States and, mainly, Israel, must help Hamas’s enemy, Fatah, prepare the West Bank for real freedom, and then hope that the people of Gaza, vast numbers of whom are unsympathetic to Hamas, see the West Bank as an alternative to the squalid vision of Hassan Nasrallah and Nizar Rayyan.

I wasn’t that big a fan of the piece, analytically, though it certainly is admirably witty. But be that as it may, it would certainly be desirable to see the more practical crew running Fatah having more support and control over the situation. But Israel’s attacks on Gaza are causing the reverse to happen just as the war in Lebanon 30 months ago had that effect. And, indeed, how Israel’s settlement expansions and growing network of roadblocks and special highways crossing the West Bank are weakening Fatah and the forces of Palestinian moderation. And of course recall that it was deliberate Israeli—and American—policy to weaken Fatah for years after the collapse of the Camp David talks. This “help Hamas’s enemy, Fatah” strategy is fine but it needs to be backed up by real steps. And the United States probably needs to take the lead since the Israeli political dynamic has become myopically focused on short-term issues. A president willing to demand a real freeze on settlement activity would be a great first step.

One interesting issue in the current crisis is how come Hezbollah hasn’t acted aggressively to start up a second front in the north while the IDF is conducting major operations in Gaza. Abu Muquwama has some plausible sounding speculations about this. One could, I think, probably construct other scenarios. Part of the reason is almost certainly just status quo bias and inertia — on any given day, Hezbollah has a strong presumption against undertaking a dramatic escalation of the conflict with Israel.

But note that while one can adduce all kinds of reasons to explain Hezbollah’s actions, none of them are consistent with the (apparently popular in Israel as well as among US neocons) line of thinking which holds that both Hamas and Hezbollah are nothing more than puppets of Iran and extensions of Tehran’s relentless drive to eradicate Israel.

Of course, Hamas running Gaza is a relatively recent phenomenon and it’s not as if Israel was completely unconcerned with Hamas back then. On the contrary.

But as I wrote back on the 29th, something you need to look at here is the risk that weakening Hamas will only lead to the rise of more extreme groups. The high level of power that Hamas had achieved as of last week was, after all, precisely the result of a deliberate Israeli campaign to weaken Fatah. The hope was that this would bring some more accommodationist Palestinians to the fore, but instead the reverse happened. And now that Israel is going about trying the same thing with Hamas, one needs to worry that Hamas will be displaced by Salafist groups who think Hamas is too weak-kneed. Matt Duss goes into detail on this but suffice it to say that the years of fighting in Iraq have seeded the Middle East with Salfists possessing battlefield experience who are looking for new causes that people will rally behind.

Israel barred men younger than 50 from entering Jerusalem mosques for Friday prayers and closed West Bank border crossings in hopes of preventing protests or violence over its bombing campaign in Gaza. [...] Thousands of police officers patrolled the streets of the old city and east Jerusalem. Only Palestinian men over 50 who held Israeli-issued identity cards were allowed inside mosques to pray. No such restrictions applied to women.

Concern over potential attacks prompted Israel to close all entry points from the West Bank until Saturday night.

The Defense Ministry said it would consider allowing passage for “those in need of humanitarian or medical aid as well as other specific incidents.”

Such are the wages of life as a subject people. The Jerusalem Post writes about “a general curfew on the West Bank” being imposed, though they don’t go into detail about what exactly that means. Obviously, the overwhelming majority of Palestinians had no intention of killing any Israelis this morning, but everyone takes the hit. Meanwhile, I heard on NPR this morning that Hamas had specifically disclaimed any interest in a cease-fire — apparently their view is that if they can provoke Israeli into launching a bloody ground operation in Gaza that this will help their movement and nevermind the cost to people.

Israel has a problem with Hamas because Hamas believes Israel has no right to exist. If Hamas lay down all its weapons, Israel would lift its blockade. If Israel lay down all its weapons, Hamas would kill as many Israelis as it could.

One way to reply to this is à la Ezra Klein who observes that at some point you need to judge based on what’s actually happening. And what’s been happening is that whatever Hamas’ ambitions may or may not have been, they were scattering short-range inaccurate rocket fire on Israel that was causing little damage. Israel struck back with actions that have killed hundreds of Palestinians and pushed over a million more closer to the brink of starvation. And in general this is an important aspect of the conflict — irrespective of intentions, over the years you have many more dead Palestinian civilians than Israeli civilians.

But another piece of the puzzle is that though American Jewish liberals tend to take a lot of comfort in the idea of Israel’s good intentions and good faith throughout this whole process, there’s a reason approximately no Arabs anywhere in the world see it that way. All throughout the “peace process” years — through the good ones and through the bad ones — Israel continued expanding both the geographical footprint of its settlements and the population living upon them. For most of this time, Israel has often appeared unwilling to enforce domestic Israeli law on the settler population, to say nothing of abiding by international law or agreements made. And while Israel has stated a desire to leave the Gaza Palestinians alone in their tiny, overcrowded, economically unviable enclave, the “disengagement” from Gaza has never entailed letting Palestinians control their borders or exercise meaningful sovereignty over the area. The proposal has basically been that if Palestinians cease violence against Israel, then the Gaza Strip will be treated like an Indian reservation. Israel’s policy objectives in the West Bank appear to be first seizing the choice bits of it, and then withdrawing behind a wall with the residual West Bank treating like post-”disengagement” Gaza.

I’m not a believer in violence, and so I certainly don’t think that Hamas’ rocket attacks have been an appropriate, morally defensible, or effective means of protesting this one-sided bargain. But it’s important to understand that it’s simply not the case that Hamas is the only party to this conflict that’s working toward unreasonable goals.

It’s a little hard to believe that there’s actually more bizarre stuff in Sarah Palin’s interview with Katie Couric, but Jeffrey Goldberg rightly calls attention to this revealing exchange:

KATIE COURIC: “What happens if the goal of democracy doesn’t produce the desired outcome? In Gaza, the U.S. pushed hard for elections and Hamas won.”

SARAH PALIN: “Yeah, well especially in that region, though, we have to protect those who do seek democracy and support those who seek protections for the people who live there. What we’re seeing in the last couple of days here in New York is a President of Iran, Ahmadinejad, who would come on our soil and express such disdain for one of our closest allies and friends, Israel … and we’re hearing the evil that he speaks and if hearing him doesn’t allow Americans to commit more solidly to protecting the friends and allies that we need, especially there in the Mideast, then nothing will.”

As Goldberg says, the issue here isn’t that she gave a bad answer, rather “the issue here is that she didn’t know the question.” Indeed. This is one of those hard questions where you don’t expect a thoughtful, well-informed person to have a quick and easy answer. But by the same token, you do expect a thoughtful, well-informed person to be aware of the basic contours of the situation — the U.S. told the Palestinians that there could be no peace deal with Israel unless they held free and fair elections, then free and fair elections were held, and Hamas won. This is especially interesting in light of the fact that Palin has an Israeli flag in her office. It ought to tell you something about Israel’s false friends in the Christian Zionist movement that they feel free to take strong positions on life-and-death issues of middle east policy without having even a vague familiarity with the situation.

In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, Commentary‘s Gabriel Schoenfeld warned of a “growing pro-Obama/anti-McCain axis,”* an Ecumenical Legion of Doom that, in Schoenfeld’s telling, includes Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, the leaders of Hamas, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmedinajad, and North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il:

The obvious possibility…is that one or more of these players might do everything in its power to hurt Mr. McCain and help Mr. Obama. Dramatic action keyed to our internal politics is, after all, already a page in some of our adversaries’ playbooks.

Today, Alex Koppelman notes that Schoenfeld’s argument manages to ignore everything that we have learned about the way that groups like Al Qaeda use media:

Schoenfeld…reached back to the 2004 presidential election, writing, “In 2004, Osama bin Laden’s television appearance only a weekend before the presidential election may have been a naked attempt to influence the outcome by reminding voters that he was still at large and President Bush’s policy had failed.”

Conspicuously absent from Schoenfeld’s argument that these various groups would want Obama as president and would take some action to help him, and from his discussion of the 2004 bin Laden videotape, is one very important point: The CIA believed that bin Laden wanted the tape to help President Bush, not his Democratic opponent, Sen. John Kerry.

Indeed, it’s important to recognize what a propaganda bonanza the neoconservative “war on terror” has been for Osama bin Laden, as well as for extremists, Islamic and otherwise, throughout the world. (The only thing that Kim Jong-Il, Ahmadinejad, Putin, and Hugo Chavez really have in common is the extent to which Bush’s arrogant unilateralism has helped justify the further consolidation of their political power.) The attacks of 9/11 made bin Laden a major figure in Arab media and culture; the decision by Bush and the neocons to cast him as the sinister leader of a global Islamofascist movement made him a legend. Simply put, Bush’s policy response to 9/11 has done more to promote bin Laden’s ideology than a hundred 9/11s. John McCain’s insistence on treating “Islamic extremism” as the “the transcendental challenge” indicates that he simply doesn’t grasp this.

*Why do neocons love that word, “axis” so much? Partly because the World War II allusion allows them to indulge their Churchill fetish. But mostly because it enables them to create the impression of an enemy “alliance” where there is no real evidence of any such thing, in order to conflate various extremist groups with differing, and often conflicting, goals and ideologies into a single Islamofascist Frankenstein’s monster, which they can then use to scare the simple villagers who read their magazines into voting for their preferred candidates.

There’s no denying that there are real threats out there in the world. The problem is that conservatives by and large have demonstrated over the past seven years that they are incapable of actually tackling the 21st century threats. They are stuck in a World War II mindset that is irrelevant to today’s challenges – after spending nearly a trillion dollars and grinding down our military, terrorist attacks have increased, the Al Qaeda threat remains real and present, and the positions of autocrats from Pyongyang to Moscow to Riyadh has gotten stronger.