Mitt Rmoney, obviously stung by the criticism of his remarks attributing the differences between per capita GDP in Israel and Palestine being largely attributable to "culture," has now claimed in an interview with Fox News that he wasn't talking about Palestinian culture at all:
Under fire from Palestinian leaders for recent comments suggesting that Israel's economic success is borne out of its "culture," Mitt Romney on Tuesday attempted to clarify his remarks, telling Fox News in an interview that he had not talked about "the Palestinian culture or the decisions made in their economy."
"I'm not speaking about it, did not speak about the Palestinian culture," Romney told Fox's Carl Cameron, taped before the candidate's departure from Poland. "That's an interesting topic that perhaps could deserve scholarly analysis but I actually didn't address that. I certainly don't intend to address that during my campaign.
http://www.cbsnews.com/...
More below the fold.
True, he didn't specifically use the words "Palestinian culture," but when you compare the GDP difference between two countries, and then attribute the difference in large part to "culture," it's understandable that people will deduce that you're comparing the two cultures. In fact, if that's NOT what you're talking about, it's difficult to understand what you ARE talking about, other than just uttering words to hear the sound of your own voice.
Romney claims the bad publicity is all because the evil news media are trying to distract attention from the economy. Of course, just about everybody in the world thought he was talking about Palestinian culture as compared to Israeli culture. Ironically enough, even his defenders at Faux News claim that he was RIGHT about Palestinian vs. Israeli culture, not that he was talking about something else, as this conversation among Fox talking heads makes clear: http://video.foxnews.com/...
But there's one big problem with his theory that he wasn't talking about Palestinian culture, aside from the fact that there is simply nothing else that he could possibly have been talking about when he was ascribing the difference in GDP in large part to cultural factors, and that is that HE'S SAID IT BEFORE. As Greg Sargent of the Washington Post reports, Rmoney wrote a book entitled "No Apologies" in 2010 (or at least, had somebody ghost write it for him), in which me made the same point:
In chapter 10 of No Apology, Romney writes of his travels:
I wondered how such vast differences could exist between countries that were literally next door to each other. How could Americans be so rich and Mexicans so poor? How could Israelis have created a highly developed, technology-based economy while their Palestinian neighbors had not yet even begun to move to an industrial economy? As I traveled to Africa, Asia, the Middle East, South American, and to both halves of Europe that had previously been divided by the Iron Curtain, I discovered that the prosperity gap is really a canyon. Why is that?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Sargent points out that after discussing Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs and Steel, Romney goes on to answer his own question by saying the following:
Harvard professor David Landes’s Wealth and Poverty of Nations adds crucial insight as to why some nations prosper and others do not. His examination concludes that “culture makes all the difference,” not only when it comes to understanding why great civilizations failed in the past, as described earlier, but also in explaining why differences between nations exist today. What people believe, value, strive for, and sacrifice for profoundly shape the nature of their society and affect its prosperity and security. So while America’s abundant natural resources certainly facilitated its ascent, it is America’s culture that enabled the nation to become and remain the most powerful and beneficent country in the history of humankind.
Landes has been criticized for being highly Eurocentric, a charge that he pretty much thoroughly embraces. He thinks the recent dominance of Europe and North America is pretty much due to the superiority of European culture. Well, perhaps, but that doesn't explain why Europe was an economic backwater for long periods of history compared to such places as East Asia, South Asia, West Asia, and the Nile Valley. And it doesn't explain the current economic rise of East Asia. Diamond's analysis, while certainly not ignoring culture, places much more emphasis upon external factors such as the fact that Eurasia is oriented on an east-west axis, meaning that agricultural improvements can be transmitted largely along the same latitude for long distances, and that Europe's long and highly indented coastline gave it numerous good natural harbors. Perhaps the ease of Europe's conquest of the Western Hemisphere had something to do with culture, but it also had a great deal to do with the fact that throughout much of the Western Hemisphere, native populations were drastically reduced by European diseases long before the first European appeared in that area.
But Rmoney's philosophy seems clear and consistent: Countries and individuals that are economically successful are that way exclusively because they are BETTER. And since he seems largely ignorant of the world, it's easy to ignore all of the contrary evidence, such as the fact that in West Africa, Levantine Arabs (and especially Palestinians) are the dominant economic force. Does he even have any idea that in the shtetls of Eastern Europe, most Jews were poor, and that their poverty was used by their non-Jewish neighbors as part of the justification for discrimination against them -- discrimination that of course reinforced their poverty? I frankly doubt it. But the attitude that wealthy nations or individuals are simply better than less economically sucessful ones is certainly consistent with his absolute outrage at President Obama's suggestion that successful businessmen owe much to things like public infrastructure, their teachers, etc.
I wish the press would ask Mitt Romney, and keep asking him until they get an answer, the question that I ask in this diary title: If you weren't talking about Palestinian culture, what the hell WERE you talking about?