On Israel´s war...

I was talking to a family member over Skype the other day and was asked how the media was covering the war in Lebanon. I said that it was very different than the coverage in the U.S.—the Brazilian newspapers had taken a decidedly anti-Israeli standpoint, something which they probably would have done anyway but was exacerbated by the deaths of seven Brazilians during the first days of the conflict.

I also noted that I was hearing very different interpretations from some Jewish people here in São Paulo. “Look what they’re doing to Israel!” someone said to me last week. “Do you see?” I initially took her at face value—I interpreted her comment as being about Hezbollah. As time has passed, however, I came to wonder. The night before this woman made that comment to me, a Lebanese man who is living in Brazil (but is not a citizen) was going off on Israel and a mutual friend put her arm around him and said, “Calm down. Everyone knows that Israel is wrong.”

So this brings up an important question in my mind: is the pro-Israel/anti-Israel polemic that you see in the U.S. coming to Brazil? The two groups have always functioned fairly well in Brazil by maintaining the appearance of “Convivência”—the ability to live side by side. I think this has been helped along both by Brazilian (and Luso-Brazilian) cultural expectations but also by the fact that around half of the Sirio-Lebanese immigrants to Brazil were Christians and therefore the Sirio-Lebanese ethnic identity is as tied to being from a specific ethnicity as being Arab or Muslim. What happens, however, when this breaks down? Increasingly, I am noticing that a politically active intellectual left opposes Israel wholesale and I hear a rather absurd number of anti-Semitic comments. Some Jews, meanwhile, are turning their anger and frustration toward Arabs or Muslims. I have also seen this in the U.S. over the last few years and, again, it worries me. It worries me that for some Jews, criticism of Israeli political policy is seen as anti-Semitism and it worries me that many people on the political left have become so anti-Israel that they have, in fact, become anti-Semitic and insensitive to Zionism. Or perhaps more accurately, they were always anti-Semitic but it has suddenly become politically acceptable to express this publicly.

So I was looking at a newspaper online yesterday and I began to wonder what the New York Times was saying. I took two screenshots, one last night and one this morning. The Folha was most interested in the bombing of the U.N. post and the U.S. veto of a condemnation of Israel’s activities while the Times was interested in Israeli losses.

Heloísa Helena and So-called Third Parties

Meet the third-place candidate in the Brazilian elections. I did. Her name is Heloísa Helena and she is one of the senators who was expelled from the PT during the first year of Lula´s presidency for going against the party line on some critical votes, most notably pension reform. She really made her name, however, when she cried on the senate floor. Since then, Heloísa Helena became one of the founders of the PSOL which might be described as the workers´ wing of the Workers´ party if only they were attracting the workers and not the old socialists from the PT.

In order to attract the left, the party (which is admittedly still very young) will have to concentrate more on populism and its image. Heloísa Helena is an interesting spokeswoman for this image. On television, she has her severe ponytail and is portrayed as kind of an emotional woman both in her activities on the senate floor and on the campaign trail. The Folha in the last few days noted that she was having "woman problems" on Sunday and a blog in the same newspaper sayed that she had blown her top over pressing questions about taxes. My sense is that they are trying to undermine her as a candidate by pointing to "feminine" responses to issues and it makes me wonder what woman could run a serious campaign--the alternative would be what happened to Marta Suplicy, who was seen as hard, aloof and elitist.

I must say that in person, Heloísa Helena is very warm and nice (she is, after all, a nurse); she certainly has potential to appeal to the masses if only she can meet them and get beyond the press. The press, however, will never be her friend. The conservative media outlets (Globo, Estadão) favor Alckmin while left-leaning media sources are worried about the PSOL managing to split the progressive vote not only in the presidential election but in congressional elections; the rise of the party as embodied by Heloísa Helena could spell difficulty for the PT. Interestingly, at the moment, she seems to be undermining Alckmin every bit as much as she is undermining Lula; the polls show that she is taking intellectual elite votes from the "main" opposition candidate.