Occupied Palestine: How the West Was Lost (Photo Essay by Bob Simmons)

Posted on July 24, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Damascus Gate, Jerusalem. The West Bank or Judea has always tried to solve things with walls… but somehow they always fail. Photo by Bob Simmons / The Rag Blog.

Occupied Palestine:
How the West Was Lost (A photo essay)

Words and images by Bob Simmons / The Rag Blog / July 24, 2009

Last week I had an opportunity to visit the West Bank (Israel), or its preferred name, Occupied Palestine. I was with a group of doctors called Physicians for Peace who had invited me along to shoot some video and photos.

I was starkly introduced to how the mainstream picture of the area is distorted in the USA media, and how the constant pressure and humiliation that Palestinians have endured for now more than sixty years is deftly avoided in the reports for American consumption.

Stateless inside their own country, the Arabic residents of the former Palestine suffer a gradual but relentless ethnic cleansing effort that keeps them in political and cultural exile. It is something in the USA we used to call “separate and unequal.” One suddenly understands the meaning and the reasons for the word “intifada” or uprising.

Nothing exemplifies this Middle East apartheid better than the West Bank wall that is being built with the assistance of U.S. funds at a rate of $3.5 million dollars a mile. It is a bigger and better, more high tech version of the wall between East and West Berlin that fell at the end of the cold war. It is the symbol and the fact of Israel’s shame. There is almost a hundred miles of it as it dissects and bisects the country as the Israelis build another settlement on an Arab hillside.

What follows are my notes and some photos. If you can’t get there for yourself, perhaps these will give you a tiny taste of why conflict in this area will continue until some form of justice is granted to the Palestinians who remain in the West Bank and who have not yet fled to become second-class refugee citizens all over the Middle East. Or maybe peace will only be achieved when the last suitcase is packed and the last olive grove is dozered under an Israeli tank?

It may be a cliché or a commonplace that Occupied Palestine — or Israel’s “West Bank” — is a land of contrasts and paradoxes, but that fact is never so sharply defined as when one has the opportunity to share the lives of the residents. One won’t really gather a deep understanding in a few days, but the media veil that filters the light from this part of the world can begin to lift, and we can call it a start.

My first impressions of the citizens of Ramallah are of a basically decent people who have been dealt a lousy hand by history. Worse, they haven’t played that hand very well either. In a culture this generous and hospitable, it makes one doubly sad to sense the feelings of resignation and desperation that are cloaked by the smiles. But in the early morning dark when you turn on one of the radio channels and listen to the prayers you can hear the bone deep sadness in the call of the muzzeins. For some reason I kept thinking this is really the blues, and about as soulful as it gets. I wasn’t ready to jump on a rug and devote my life to Allah, but I suddenly understood the urge a little better.

I went to Ramallah with Physicians for Peace, a group of doctors who do missions in a half dozen medically challenged countries. The doctors donate their time and efforts, as well as often pay their own fares and housing costs, in order to help bring modern medicine to places that have limited access to current therapies and techniques. The local populations get the benefit of the procedures and therapies, but more important, the local medical infrastructure gets new training and collegial support from the visiting team. New friends and colleagues are created, and they take another small step, changing the world a few friends at a time.

As for the West Bank and Gaza, many of you know the story of the 1948 partitioning of former Palestine for the creation of the Jewish state of Israel. I won’t dwell on it. There are thousands of papers and histories of the events of that momentous year and its disastrous aftermath. A new nation may have been born, but a very old one was thrown into the dustbin of history, except that there were five or six million quite alive people who found that dustbin an unacceptable place.

Facts about the West Bank

There are approximately 640 checkpoints on roads and intersections in the West Bank. The Israeli Defense Force mans these stations with young soldiers all of whom seem to have a bit of “tude” toward their “customers.”

Palestinians, Arabs, non-Jews have differing status at each of these checkpoints. These differences are carefully delineated and marked on one’s identification documents. Arab descent is glaringly noted; whether you are Jewish, Christian, or other is also noted. Your license plate separates you. If you have a mustache, if you wear European sunglasses or have a woman in the car with you in a hijab scarf you can be sure you will get special attention, meaning that your moment at the checkpoint can stretch into an hour while some detail of your “papers” is gone over, and over, and over. This happens every day. Even a trip to the grocery store can become a hellish experience if the paperwork is outdated or not correct in every detail. It defines the meaning of a police state.

There are close to 600,000 Palestinian displaced refugees living in the West Bank, with a total population of 2.5 million overall, including (not confirmed) approximately 200,000 Israeli settlers occupying hilltops and recently built villages and settlements… this process continues unabated.

Palestinians are not allowed in Israel without a rigorous documenting procedure, and even then only on a limited basis for even the Israeli born. Many, if not the majority, of Palestinian villages and neighborhoods are now separated by the Israeli wall which has been constructed in a strategic manner to divide the Palestinian territory into isolated segments. This dividing line between the two societies almost assures that there can be no peace between the cultures. Dividing a state along race lines is universally condemned in all parts of the world, except Israel. It can be termed by no other name than race warfare and ethnic cleansing.

It is true that the number of suicide bombs in Israel has been much reduced by this policy, but at the same time army assaults on Palestinian civilians in the West Bank continue on a daily basis.

I am in a car with the director of a local hospital. He demonstrates the five pieces of ID that he must show ten to twenty times a day to one “authority” or another in order to simply navigate the streets of East and West Jerusalem and to travel to the West Bank. With his car with green Palestinian plates, there are certain roads that he may not take. No matter that he was born in Jerusalem. He is of Arab descent.

Munir was kind enough to drive us down to Jericho and the Dead Sea. Munir was born in Puerto Rico and is part of the Palestinian Diaspora. He has a U.S. Passport and has returned to live in WB with his family. Munir gave me an earful

This is a section of the Ramallah wall between East Jerusalem and the “no man’s land” and Israel. The balloon graffiti is by the English artist Banksy.

This wall cost approximately $3.5 million per mile to construct. It snakes all over the country, starting and stopping in almost random fashion to the untrained observer. One can be shot, just as they were during the Berlin Wall days, if caught trying to go over it. The amount of U.S. funds that went into the building of this wall is undetermined. One thing for sure, it was not insignificant. Ask Joe Lieberman.

From my little daily journal:

The Palestinians, whether they know it or not have the air of a beaten people. Some have a resigned and philosophical attitude, some are angry with a barely suppressed edge, yet they all struggle on knowing that each day will bring its own set of challenges. These are challenges not put in place by pure chance or life itself, but as though there were an active evil alive in the world that made plans to make them suffer. It is not the indifference of the Universe, but the face of an arrogant and vindictive policy that is put in place in order to subjugate and humiliate a population that is not secretly despised.

This is the situation. The Palestinians know they have lost, at least in any real world way. Now they only want to salvage their lives and dignity and be spared further abuse. Yet each day, the powers that be conspire to divide, conquer, and confiscate land, to pass new discriminatory laws against simply existing. The Israeli settlements bloom. Each month a new hilltop sprouts a few Israeli trailers, followed by construction of houses, then fencing, then a road. Suddenly another fifty acres is added to the archipelago of Israeli islands in the Palestine sea. The pressure mounts as Israel’s plan to push all Arabs out of the former Palestine takes another olive grove. The settler’s attitude is, they are Arabs, they can go to any other Arab country. We are Jews, we have only here to make our stand, and the relentless pressure continues. No matter that the Palestinians have 2,000 years of tenancy, they are being cleansed, family by family, acre by acre.

Checkpoint Ramallah

This checkpoint is a constant traffic jam. It can take 20 minutes or two hours to get through. It is like a country border crossing. Cars are subject to random search. Documents are vetted. Guns are pointed in people’s faces every day.

Says it all.

Over 400 Km of barriers erected to separate the quarrel. It cost more than the entire health budget.

Checkpoint Ramallah A kid hangs out.

More from checkpoint dystopia.

I am not sure what the sign says, hunting supplies perhaps? Actually I think it is a memorial to an Intifada fallen hero.

Kids can get shot doing this. I met one in the hospital who had been shot in the legs 4 times breaking bones and probably crippling him for life. He was 15.

Not all of the wall is bricks and mortar. Some is just wire and sensors.

The slow erosion of Palestinian lands:

My Conclusion (from the journal again)

The wall and the history are irrefutable. The Israelis want it all. Maybe they don’t want it today, but they are patient. They know that they can continue to make life so difficult on the resident Arab population that eventually everyone will just have to leave. It is a two or three hundred year game for the hard Zionists who believe that the homeland is for Jews and Jews alone. The Palestinians I spoke with echoed this sentiment. They know what is happening, and some are determined to make it as difficult as possible. Some are looking for another place to eventually move. They know their chances of actually winning anything back is infinitesimally small. So they send a member of the family out into the world to find a refuge to run to when the day finally comes. A cousin goes to Saudi Arabia, a brother moves to Detroit, sister Reema has married and lives in Southern Brazil… the diaspora slowly grows.

BUT…

Not everyone is in the dumps.

Ramallah skyline from hotel… The large house in the foreground belongs to the local Ramallah Volvo dealer. Obviously not all suffer in the West Bank.

Strangely, in central Ramallah, there is a kind of prosperity that one does not expect. Buildings are going up. Apartment high rises sprout everywhere, and there are many cars on the street. The air might be of resignation, but there are some who are making hay while the sun shines. Though there is a small local economy, much of the income of the West Bank comes from foreign aid. The Palestinian Authority, the inheritors of the Al Fatah seem to be in charge of who gets what, and in so doing, are unequivocally in bed with the Israeli authorities. It is no wonder that Hamas in Gaza gets trusted and the PA seems to be reviled or at best accepted as “the only game in town,” however corrupt it might be. If Amehd wants to get a permit to sell apples, he has to go to the PA, and then the PA asks the Israelis if he can, and Amehd has to pay both of them to get his license. So it goes. Still, in this equation, no one is looking out for the “Palestinian people,” whatever that phrase means.

And the struggle beats on. A Palestinian wedding or 10 seems to happen every night. Cars drive by honking. Finally someone is going to get something they want in this country that finds itself so shut in from so many sides. But if you can have more than one wife… well, personally I don’t like to think about what THAT would be like.

[Bob Simmons is a veteran broadcaster with over 30 years experience in most aspects of radio. He has been everything from deejay to station owner, from talk show host to news writer. He is a graduate of the University of Texas and presently lives in Austin where he has business interests and pursues his longtime avocations of photography and video production.]

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Hoosiers and Health Care : WellPoint’s Susan Bayh

Posted on July 24, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Political wife: Susan Bayh, with husband Evan Bayh, D-Indiana, owns between $500,000 and $1 million in employee stock in health insurance giant WellPoint.

Susan Bayh and WellPoint:
What Hoosiers know about health care

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / July 24, 2009

My own preference would be —- and you may have found common ground here this morning on Easter, which is appropriate —- deal with the inefficiencies, figure out a way to make the private marketplace accomplish our public good, only have the government role as a backstop, as a last resort, if the private sector has just failed to meet the challenge. — Evan Bayh on Fox, Sunday, April 12, 2009

Senator Evan Bayh is one of those so-called “blue dog” Democrats who remain ambivalent about parts of the Obama political agenda, particularly the Employee Free Choice Act (despite his long-time popularity with Indiana trade unionists) and health care reform.

Hoosiers see through Bayh’s principles for opposing these centerpieces of economic and social reform. Evidence is particularly clear on what is behind Bayh’s opposition to any change in health care policy in the United States.

For example, Fort Wayne’s Journal Gazette reported on December 15, 2007 (Sylvia A. Smith, Washington editor) that the senator’s wife, Susan Bayh, earned $248,700 from stock options she “earned” from participation on the corporate board of WellPoint, Inc. and sold when the stock was at its highest price. Over the prior four years, the paper reported, Bayh earned money from sales of stocks eight times from Wellpoint, the health insurance giant; Curis Inc., a pharmaceutical developer, and the E-Trade bank. She gained $1.7 million in pre-tax earnings from seven of these transactions.

The story also listed Susan Bayh’s 2007 public transactions including, in January, the purchase of 3,333 shares of WellPoint stock at $44.18 per share and selling them for $78 earning $112,722, and, in May, the acquisition of the same number of shares and selling them for $84.98 per share earning $135,978.In 2006, Bayh bought 20,001 shares of WellPoint and sold them earning $796,078.

The Lafayette Journal and Courier (Maureen Groppe, Gannett Washington Bureau) reported on June 15, 2009 that Susan Bayh owns between $500,000 and $1 million in employee stock in the “Indianapolis-based insurance giant,” WellPoint. WellPoint is one of eight corporate boards she sits on including the Curis, the pharmaceutical developer.

Daniel Lee, Indianapolis Star columnist reported on May 17 that the WellPoint executive board is trying to influence the public debate on health care to forestall the emergence of a “public option.” If that is not possible, Lee suggested, private insurers would want to create a system in which private companies control the public option. Lee quoted Common Cause CEO, Bob Edgar, who said that “many of the corporations who benefit from health care have come around to realize that while they may lose some of the things they were hoping to protect, if they move to universal coverage there will be more money across the board for everybody.”

WellPoint, with 35 million customers, is the largest commercial insurance provider, controlling Blue Cross and Blue Shield. The company made $2.5 billion in profits in 2008. Spokespersons have said that they could support expanding coverage to the 45 million without coverage and even could drop restrictions on coverage to people with pre-existing health problems. Brad Fluegel, Chief Strategy Officer of the company, said that “we can do it in a way that’s fair and equitable for folks. There is no need really for a government-run plan.”

As to WellPoint’s political activity, in 2006 the company gave $430,580 to federal candidates; 16% to Democrats, 82% to Republicans and two percent to Joe Lieberman. Lee indicated that in 2008 WellPoint spent $4.33 million on federal lobbying and made three million calls to consumers.

And then there are critically placed political influentials such as Susan Bayh. Although the Senator is “agnostic” on health care, his aides point out that the couple do not discuss any issues related to WellPoint.

If any one believes these spokespersons, I have a Hoosier bridge I can sell them cheap.

[Harry Tarq is a Hoosier. He is a professor in American Studies who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical, where this article also appears.]

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Revising History in Texas : Christ in the Classroom

Posted on July 23, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Cartoon from San Francisco Sentinel.

Last week, Stephen Colbert tipped his ironic hat to the Texas State Board of Education. The board had already allowed creationism to be considered in Texas biology classes, the comedian said approvingly, and now it was pushing for more Christianity to be taught in U.S. history. But why stop there? Colbert asked. What about math? Five plus two doesn’t have to equal seven — not if you’re Jesus. And for that matter, what about penmanship? Why not teach students to really CROSS their T’s?

There’s truthiness in those jokes. Of the six people who the board appointed as “experts” to review the current curriculum, three are on record as Christian soldiers, battling to bring back a golden age of God in American government. — Houston Chronicle.

Christian right aims to change history lessons in Texas schools

State’s education board to consider adding Christianity’s role in American history to curriculum

By Chris McGreal / July 23, 2009

The Christian right is making a fresh push to force religion onto the school curriculum in Texas with the state’s education board about to consider recommendations that children be taught that there would be no United States if it had not been for God.

Members of a panel of experts appointed by the board to revise the state’s history curriculum, who include a Christian fundamentalist preacher who says he is fighting a war for America’s moral soul, want lessons to emphasize the part played by Christianity in the founding of the U.S. and that religion is a civic virtue.

Opponents have decried the move as an attempt to insert religious teachings into the classroom by stealth, similar to the Christian right’s partially successful attempt to limit the teaching of evolution in biology lessons in Texas.

One of the panel, David Barton, founder of a Christian heritage group called WallBuilders, argues that the curriculum should reflect the fact that the U.S. Constitution was written with God in mind including that “there is a fixed moral law derived from God and nature,” that “there is a creator” and “government exists primarily to protect God-given rights to every individual”.”

Barton says children should be taught that Christianity is the key to “American exceptionalism” because the structure of its democratic system is a recognition that human beings are fallible, and that religion is at the heart of being a virtuous citizen.

Another of the experts is Reverend Peter Marshall, who heads his own Christian ministry and preaches that Hurricane Katrina and defeat in the Vietnam war were God’s punishment for sexual promiscuity and tolerance of homosexuals. Marshall recommended that children be taught about the “motivational role” of the Bible and Christianity in establishing the original colonies that later became the US.

“In light of the overwhelming historical evidence of the influence of the Christian faith in the founding of America, it is simply not up to acceptable academic standards that throughout the social studies (curriculum standards) I could only find one reference to the role of religion in America’s past,” Marshall wrote in his submission.

Marshall later told the Wall Street Journal that the struggle over the history curriculum is part of a wider battle. “We’re in an all-out moral and spiritual civil war for the soul of America, and the record of American history is right at the heart of it,” he said.

Dan Quinn of the Texas Freedom Network, which describes itself as a “counter to the religious right,” called the recommendations “troubling.”

“I don’t think anyone disputes that faith played a role in our history. But it’s a stretch to say that it played the role described by David Barton and Peter Marshall. They’re absurdly unqualified to be considered experts. It’s a very deceptive and devious way to distort the curriculum in our public schools,” he said.

Quinn says that the issue is likely to lead to a heated political battle similar to the one in which the religious right tried to force creationism onto the curriculum. While it wasn’t able to inject religious theories into the classroom, the Texas school board did make changes to teaching designed to undermine lessons on evolution such as introducing views that the eye is so complex an organ it must have involved “intelligent design”.

“I think, as there was with science, there’s going to be a big political battle,” he said.

Social studies teachers will meet shortly to consider the panel’s views and make their own recommendations to the board of education which has the final say. The board is dominated by conservatives who appointed Barton and Marshall to the panel.

Other states will be watching what happens in Texas carefully as the religious right campaign seeks new ways to insert God into the classroom after the courts limited the extent to which creationist theories could intrude on the teaching of biology. But religion is not kept out of schools entirely. Many children recite the pledge of allegiance in class each morning which includes a reference to the U.S. as “one nation under God.”

The panel made other recommendations.

Barton, a former vice-chairman of the state’s Republican party, said that Texas children should no longer be taught about democratic values but republican ones. “We don’t pledge allegiance to the flag and the democracy for which it stands,” he said.

And while God may be in, some of those he influenced are out.

According to a draft of guidelines for the new curriculum, Washington, Lincoln and Stephen Fuller Austin, known as the Father of Texas after helping to lead it to independence from Mexico, have been removed from history lessons for younger children.

There’s no doubt that history education needs a boost in Texas.

According to test results, one-third of students think the Magna Carta was signed by the Pilgrims on the Mayflower and 40% believe Lincoln’s 1863 emancipation proclamation was made nearly 90 years earlier at the constitutional convention.

Source / Guardian, U.K.

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Kate Braun: Lammas Seasonal Message

Posted on July 23, 2009 by RagBlog


Lammas Seasonal Message
By Kate Braun / The Rag Blog / July 23, 2009

“The shadows sway and seem to say Tonight we pray for water…”

Saturday, August 1, 2009, is the celebration of Lammas (First Harvest, Harvest Home, Lughnasadh). This festival can also be celebrated on July 31 or August 2, but the Sun must be in 15° Leo and this is usually nearer August 5. This year, Lammas falls on a Saturday, Saturn’s Day. Saturn moves in direct motion now; there is a stronger sense of purpose and direction, a feeling of responsibility understood and accepted. This is a solemn fire festival made more solemn by the excessively high temperatures and extreme drought in Austin and Central Texas.

Celebrate outdoors if at all possible; build a fire in the grill or barbeque pit and take care no sparks fall – most of the lawns I see are sere and brown; the danger of fire is real. Roast some lamb, ears of corn; skewers of veggies in season, such as zucchini, eggplant, onion, green peppers, summer squash; enjoy foods made using corn, rye, wheat, apples, berries, anything that is in season and, preferably, locally and organically grown. Decorate your dining table and the surrounding area using the colors red, gold, orange, yellow, bronze, citrine, gray, and green. Wear these colors yourself and encourage your guests to do likewise. Decorate with arrangements of fresh fruits and veggies, corn dollies, sun-wheels, sickles, and scythes.

Be sure to bless the tools of your trade by wafting smoke from your fire over them; this will lead to prosperity in your work in the coming year. If you have not made a fire outdoors, light some blessing incense and waft the smoke over your tools with a feather.

Share leftovers with all your guests, but each guest must take another guests leftovers, not his own. This is more ritual for continuing prosperity. If there are fewer guests than leftovers, it is best to give these leftovers to the needy, the homeless. Save and plant seeds from the foods eaten that have seeds. If the seeds germinate, honor the plant.

The spiritual focus of Lammas is on Mother Earth, her health, her status in our lives. Having a story-telling interlude, when all have eaten their fill, letting each guest tell a tale of Demeter, Ceres, Freya, and other Grain Goddesses, will lead thoughts in that direction. One of the rituals associated with this celebration is to bake a loaf of bread in the shape of a man, rather like a gingerbread man, and serve him to the guests, each of whom will tear off a piece of the breadman and feed it to his neighbor at the table, saying “May you never be hungry” or “May food be always at your table”, or some similar blessing. A piece of the breadman is reserved to be thrown into the ceremonial fire as a prelude to another ritual that can be performed: let each guest write their regrets (or symbols of them) on a piece of paper, wrap the paper in corn husks and throw into the fire. The breadman’s burning paves the way for shifting your thoughts from the regretful past to the hopeful future; burning your regrets demonstrates you are ready to move forward.

Reminder: I will be participating in the LSM Metaphysical Fair at the Radisson Hotel, 6000 Middle Fiskville Rd. in Austin, TX, between Highland Mall and Lincoln Village, on Saturday and Sunday, August 22 & 23, 2009. If you come to this fair because you read about it here and choose to get a Tarot reading from me at this fair, mention this newsletter and you will get 5 extra minutes free.

Tarot by Kate 512-454-2293
www.tarotbykatebraun.com
kate_braun2000@yahoo.com

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Sheehan: With an ‘F’ for the First 6 Months, That Leaves Plenty of Room for Improvement

Posted on July 23, 2009 by RagBlog


Obama: More Polished Than the Last Puppet
By Cindy Sheehan / July 22, 2009

“When a government lies to you, it no longer has authority over you.” Cindy Sheehan. Dallas, 2005

Okay, so the United States of America has had a new puppet regime for six months now. I was never so much into giving Obama a “chance” and I think it’s way past time to call Obama and his supporters out, like we called Bush and his supporters out. Our Presidents are merely puppets for the Robber Class and Obama is no exception.

I am observing very little “change” in actual policy, or even rhetoric from an Obama regime. Granted, his style and delivery are more polished than the last puppet, but especially in foreign policy, little has changed. Evidently we elect Presidents based on empty rhetoric and if we can find someone who can say very little using many words, that’s better. I knew a year ago when Obama and his ilk were blathering on about “change” that they didn’t mean positive “change” for us, but it’s a shame Obama’s voters didn’t ask him to be a little more specific or demand some good “change.”

Besides foreign policy where he is a complete disaster, it appears Obama’s jobs program is little more than adding tens of thousands of troops to an already bloated military, instead of bringing troops home from anywhere. Billions will go to the money trap of the Pentagon to invest in recruiting, where the budgets of peace groups who do counter recruitment are tanking.

This is the 3rd week in July and already it’s the deadliest month for US and coalition troops deaths in Af/Pak. Who would ever have thought when violence is surged, then deaths would surge, also? I think I’ve seen this movie before.

The blueprint for this disastrous administration came early when O appointed nothing but neocons to his foreign policy team. The Secretary of State and the National Security advisor have even both admitted that the Council on Foreign Relations/Henry Kissinger are calling the shots.

Sec. Clinton at a speech at the new HQ for the Council on Foreign Relations:

I have been often to, I guess, the mother ship in New York City, but it’s good to have an outpost of the Council right here down the street from the State Department. We get a lot of advice from the Council (Council of Foreign Relations), so this will mean I won’t have as far to go to be told what we should be doing and how we should think about the future.

National Security Advisor, James Jones, who also VERY coincidentally, I’m sure, was on the boards of directors of Chevron and Boeing, had this to say earlier this year:

As the most recent National Security Advisor of the United States, I take my daily orders from Dr. Kissinger. Jones was also giving a speech to the Council on Foreign relations at the time. Kissinger is a fabulous role model for war, don’t you think.

How many deaths will Kissinger be forced to atone for when he goes to the same place as McNamara? Wherever prosperous war criminals go to when they die?

As an early, ardent and unapologetic supporter of the Bush Pre-emptive Wars of Aggression Doctrine, Sec. Clinton showed her true colors early on in her tenure as an elected official and, of course, Jones is a war profiteer. Added to this mix is George Bush’s SecDef, Robert Gates, and these are just the main players. Contrary to his “promise” Obama has appointed former lobbyists to key positions in the Pentagon.

We all know all of these things, but the more things “change” the more they stay the same. Apparently the OBots are co-opting the excuses of the BushBots to justify their savior’s surge in Afghanistan and Pakistan and broken promise after broken promise in Iraq.

The other day Howard Dean, on DemocracyNow!, told Amy Goodman that although Iraq was bad, we need to stay in Afghanistan because, first and foremost, for the women:

And if we leave, women will experience the most extraordinary depredations of any population on the face of the earth. I think we have some obligation to try and see if we can make this work, not just for America and our security interests, but for the sake of women in Afghanistan and all around the globe. Is this acceptable to treat women like this? I think not.

Laura Bush earlier this year:

“There’s still a risk to women in Afghanistan. I hope the people of the United States will stay committed. We don’t want to see Afghanistan go back to what it was before.”

I have been on my Myth America Book Tour for three months now and almost everywhere I go, an older white male will stand up and say: “Cindy, we really need to stop allowing Iraq to distract us. Afghanistan always was the place we needed to focus our attentions!” And besides the other neocon reasons given for why US troops need to decimate that country further and kill more innocent women and children is: you guessed it: For the women!

So, we are literally sending in the cavalry to rescue the poor women of Afghanistan, and the patriarchal state apparatus and its zombie adherents don’t care how many women we have to kill to save them.

Disgusting.

I give Obama an “F” for his first six months. There has been nothing to like from his continuing the Bush failed economic policies to excluding single-payer advocates from the table. Not to mention reinforcing and protecting Bush Crimes.

The good news is: He’s got plenty of room for improvement!

Source / Information Clearing House

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Baghdad Embassy Too Big for Reduced American Mission in Iraq – Duhhhh!!

Posted on July 23, 2009 by RagBlog

And how many other King George projects will prove to be just a bit oversized for reality? We won’t be hearing the last of this sort of thing for awhile, me thinks.

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog


Report: Big cuts needed at huge Baghdad embassy built by Bush
By Warren P. Strobel / July 22, 2009

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Embassy in Iraq, the government’s largest overseas diplomatic mission, is significantly overstaffed and needs to be downsized to reflect the reduced American role in the country, according to a new State Department report.

“There is a clear consensus from the top to the bottom of the embassy: The time has come for a significant rightsizing,” says the report Wednesday by the department’s inspector general.

The report came as President Barack Obama met Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki in Washington for talks on the significant changes in the U.S.-Iraqi relationship. American combat troops ceased operations in Iraqi cities on June 30, Maliki’s government has become more assertive about exercising Iraqi sovereignty and Obama has shifted the attention that his predecessor put on Iraq to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In addition to downsizing the embassy, the report recommends ending the Provincial Reconstruction Teams by 2011, which have been the prime U.S. tool for rebuilding civilian life in Iraq’s provinces.

“For some, it (the downsizing) is much overdue, as they believe the ‘civilian surge’ went too far,” the report says. “For others, it is a necessary result of the now-changed circumstances in Iraq and in our bilateral relationship.”

The American Embassy in Baghdad became a symbol of the Bush administration’s ambitions to remake Iraq. A huge new structure was built on the banks of the Tigris River, at a cost of more than $700 million, and hundreds of civilian experts from agencies across the U.S. government were deployed to help with reconstruction.

The 103-page inspector general’s report gives high marks to embassy personnel for what it calls an exemplary relationship between American civilians and the U.S. military in Iraq.

It also reports that there is “a culture of working seven days a week.” Given the near-constant security threats, “almost any other (American diplomatic) mission would have remained closed,” it says.

The report recommends, however, that the State Department launch a review to downsize the embassy staff. It says that at the new compound, which became fully occupied in January, 1,200 people are “jammed into apartments designed for about 600.”

“After rightsizing, the embassy should be able to carry out its mission in Iraq with a staff able to fit comfortably in 600 apartments,” it says.

A senior State Department official, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because the official wasn’t authorized to be quoted by name, said that newly arrived U.S. Ambassador Chris Hill was reviewing staffing levels in Baghdad.

The report says that with former President George W. Bush’s emphasis on Iraq, the embassy was permitted to grow largely without regard to the usual budget constraints on U.S. missions overseas.

“Given the high priority placed on Iraq, and the policy of the previous administration to encourage all relevant U.S. agencies to send employees to the embassy and the PRTs, many of the normal limits on staffing have not been imposed,” it says. “Cost has not seemed to be a factor.”

The embassy employs 1,873 people, including locally hired staff, and more than 13,000 contractors, the report says.

Source / McClatchy

Thanks to Juan Cole, especially for the “Duhhh !!” in the headline / The Rag Blog

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Witch Doctor Obama : Conservative Activist Circulates Racist Image

Posted on July 23, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Though I am hesitant to forward such horrific racist imagery, I also believe it absolutely necessary for our readers to know that this kind of right wing white supremacist activity is flourishing, even among conservaties who retain a modicum of respectability. It is a frightening and dangerous trend and one to which we must pay attention.

Please let us know if you think the value of alerting the public to this kind of activity outweighs any harm that might be caused by its further circulation.

Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / July 23, 2009

This racist image has been distributed by conservative activist Dr. David McKalip.

On Sunday night, Dr. David McKalip forwarded to fellow members of a Google listserv affiliated with the Tea Party movement the image [at top]. Above it, he wrote: ‘Funny stuff.’

By Zachary Roth / July 23, 2009

The election of our first black president has brought with it a strange proliferation of online racism among conservatives.

And we’ve got the latest example.

On Sunday night, Dr. David McKalip forwarded to fellow members of a Google listserv affiliated with the Tea Party movement the image [above]. Above it, he wrote: “Funny stuff.”

Now, Tea Party activists trafficking in racist imagery are pretty much dog bites man. But McKalip isn’t just some random winger. He’s a Florida neurosurgeon, who serves as a member of the American Medical Association’s House of Delegates.

He’s also an energetic conservative opponent of health-care reform. McKalip founded the anti-reform group Doctors For Patient Freedom, as well as what seems to be a now defunct group called Cut Taxes Now. Last month he joined GOP congressmen Tom Price and Phil Gingrey, among others, for a virtual town hall to warn about the coming “government takeover of medicine.” And in a recent anti-reform op-ed published in the St. Petersburg Times, McKalip wrote that “Congress wants to create larger, government-funded programs for health care and more bureaucracy that ration care and impose cookbook medicine.”

Asked about the email in a brief phone interview with TPMmuckraker, McKalip said he believes that by depicting the president as an African witch doctor, the artist who created the image “was expressing concerns that the health-care proposals [made by President Obama] would make the quality of medical care worse in our country.” McKalip said he didn’t know who created it.

But pressed on what was funny about an image that plays on racist stereotypes about Africans, McKalip declined to say, instead offering to talk about why he opposes Obama’s health-care proposals.

“I have a busy day,” he said eventually, before ending the call.

Source / TPM Muckraker

Thanks to S.M. Wilhelm / The Rag Blog

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COMICS / Paul Buhle : Beyond the Superhero

Posted on July 23, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Pages from Die Stadt (1925), a “novel in woodcuts” by anarchist artist Frans Masereel (1889–1972). Masereel’s novels are not usually treated as “comics.”

Beyond the superhero

With the boom in graphic novels, comics are likely to appear anywhere — sometimes lavish and funded by patrons of the arts, sometimes strictly ephemeral and popular enough to claw back costs.

By Paul Buhle / The Rag Blog / July 23, 2009

Comic art has been global for at least a century. Comic strips have passed from nation to nation through the commercial press and, at least now and then, the socialist and communist countries.

The woodcut novels of Belgian leftwinger Frans Masereel would have been the greatest, but were not usually treated as “comics.”

Until the last couple of decades, most of the exchanges involved European and U.S. exports and imports. Manga from Japan changed things, but so has the work of unique geniuses like Osamu Tezuka, Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman, joined more recently by Marjane Sartrapi and Alison Bechdel among others.

With the boom in graphic novels, comics are likely to appear anywhere — sometimes lavish and funded by patrons of the arts, sometimes strictly ephemeral and popular enough to claw back costs.

Too often they mirror the violence and racial sentiments of the superhero genre that first made U.S. comic books famous and grandly profitable, providing wartime reading among soldiers a long way from home. But not always, not by a long shot.

The absence of corporate domination of comic art in Canada, experts say, has opened the door to some of the most artistic productions in the English language via Montreal’s Drawn & Quarterly press.

Its publications are not political as such, but the artist known only as Seth, for example, has delivered extended treatments of the essential loneliness of modern middle-class life, looking a few generations back and forward to the present. He also drew and wrote from oral history the saga of his father’s desperately poor 1930s childhood in the maritime provinces.

Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography by Chester Brown.

Highest plaudits must go to Chester Brown’s Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography, which traces the life of the Metis and the curious leader of the resistance during the British invasion of central Canada in the mid-19th century.

Drawn & Quarterly is also the best publisher of admired Chicago artist Chris Ware, an inward and backward-looking artist who nevertheless reveals from time to time how he despises the presumptions of empire and the layers of psychological distortion necessary to keep the citizenry in line.

Then there is Aya by African writer Marguerite Abouet and French artist Clement Oubrerie, a trans-border collaboration of another kind. An adolescence-gender drama that relates daily life in the Ivory Coast of the 1970s, it depicts a recently decolonized society making use — or misuse — of its resources, cutting down the forest for agricultural production and creating a surplus for a degree of comfort for the urban lower-middle classes.

A young woman aspires to be a doctor but finds herself trapped on all sides, helping a friend seek an abortion and then accept the finality of single motherhood instead. Not much else happens out of the everyday. But the color work is lovely to look at and the attempt at realism notable.

Beyond Drawn and Quarterly, there is Nelson Mandela: The Authorised Comic Book, an African but also global story of another kind. First published in South Africa last year and printed in China, like the most lavish comic art these days, it appears this month in a U.S.-British edition released by the Nelson Mandela Foundation.

Researched, storyboarded, drawn and inked by a team so large that no artist’s credit appears on the cover, it is somewhat grey in more than one sense.

The South African Communist Party’s role has been minimized, even though individual Communists achieve heroic status. The art seems to me both stiff and predictable. On the other hand, the saga of struggle against racism, like the courage of the protagonist, should leave an indelible impression on young readers in particular.

There is so much more to say on comics’ global reach. Scratch a little harder and small items like the Canadian Mayday: A Graphic History Of Protest, a lively 24-pager recently published in Vancouver, are likely to turn up. But this column is merely a first look.

[Paul Buhle is an educator and historian and a publisher of left wing comic books. His latest book is The Art Of Harvey Kurtzman (Abrams), an exploration of the genius who created Mad Magazine and brought together John Cleese and Terry Gilliam of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. His writing about comic art and other subjects will continue to appear in The Rag Blog. This article was also published in Morning Star, U.K.]

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Feed the Blogger

Posted on July 23, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE

Photo and design by James Retherford / The Rag Blog.

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Steve Weissman : Chinese Revolt Exposes Washington’s Folly

Posted on July 23, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Rebiya Kadeer” : Her skirts are hardly snow white. Photo from the Sunday Morning Herald.

Chinese Revolt Exposes Washington’s Folly

Rebiya Kadeer, the fascinating woman at the center of the cock-up, would never be taken for a modern-day Mata Hari.

By Steve Weissman / The Rag Blog / July 23, 2009

As the People’s Republic of China brutally puts down unrest among the Uyghurs, a Turkic people in the Central Asian province of Xinjiang, the Obama administration is facing a diplomatic balls-up.

Like the neighboring Tibetan Buddhists, the Uighur Muslims have fought for centuries against their mistreatment by the Han Chinese, whose massive immigration into Xinjiang now threatens to swamp Uyghur culture and identity in its ancient homeland on the Silk Route. But, as much as one may sympathize with the Uyghurs, as I do, it hardly helps that their expatriate leaders turn out to be all too publicly on Washington’s payroll.

Just how will Secretary of State Hillary Clinton explain that to Beijing? Even more important: Did Mrs. Clinton even know that we were funding the Uyghur rebels? Did President Obama and his national security advisors? Or did they all leave key aspects of our foreign relations with China to Radio Free Asia, which the CIA created at the start of the Cold War, and the National Endowment for Democracy, which President Reagan created to handle CIA activities whose cover had been blown?

Rebiya Kadeer, the fascinating woman at the center of the cock-up, would never be taken for a modern-day Mata Hari. A grandmother in her sixties with a long graying braid down to her waist, she is a former laundress whose investments in real estate and department stores made her, in her own words, China’s richest woman. She now lives in exile in a northern Virginia suburb, thousands of miles away from Xinjiang, or East Turkestan, the historic name that Kadeer prefers to use.

The Chinese accuse Kadeer and her World Uighur Congress of using telephones and the Internet to “mastermind” the biggest threat to Beijing since the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square. Taking a leaf out of George W. Bush’s “War on Terror,” the Chinese also claim that Kadeer works with the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, which the U.S. State Department has listed as a terrorist group.

Kadeer rejects both charges, but her skirts are hardly snow white. Like a government-in-exile, her World Uyghur Congress claims that it “represents the collective interests of the Uyghur people both in East Turkestan and abroad.” The group actively promotes the right of her people “to use peaceful, nonviolent, and democratic means to determine the political future of East Turkestan.”

Such a future would likely lead to complete independence, which the Chinese see as separatist and seditious. Kadeer herself denies being “a separatist,” but said just this month that China’s actions over six decades have forced every Uighur to want independence.

The problem for Washington is that our official National Endowment for Democracy (NED) funds Kadeer’s activism. In 2008 alone, NED gave $146,000 to the World Uyghur Congress, $269,000 to the Uyghur American Association, which Kadeer also leads, and $134,805 to the International Uyghur Human Rights and Democracy Foundation, which Kadeer found in 2005 after serving nearly six years as a political prisoner in China.

NED makes no secret of its support for Kadeer, whom it celebrates as “the Mother of All Uyghurs.” Just last month, NED cosponsored a conference on East Turkestan, at which the group’s long-time president Carl Gershman gave a speech praising Kadeer and her work. A left-behind neocon, Gershman regularly uses his official position, however shadowy, to encourage on-going embarrassments for Beijing.

Washington’s Radio Free Asia (RFA) similarly engages in ad hoc foreign policy-making. On the Internet and in broadcasts in Uyghur and other languages, RFA features Kadeer and gives its audience detailed instructions on how to get around Beijing’s Internet blockage and radio jamming. Significantly, Beijing turned against Kadeer after her husband Sidik Rouzi left China and went to work for RFA.

Gershman’s NED and the RFA reach back to the Cold War, and their ideological zeal has remained part of the not-so-secret policy of previous administrations. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice lobbied the Chinese to free Kadeer from prison in 1995, and President Bush met with her privately and publicly praised her at a conference “on democracy and security” in Prague in June 2007.

The all-too-obvious goal was to brand Kadeer as the Uyghur Dalai Lama. This should bring to mind the game nations play, as when President Bush first met with the Buddhist leader in Washington and then turned his back on Tibet at the opening ceremony of last year’s Olympics in Beijing.

Whatever individual Americans think of Rebiya Kadeer and her remarkable life story, what sense does it make to continue tying Washington to a breakaway movement in China? What will Obama and Clinton do if Kadeer’s efforts truly gain traction within China? And, pardon the obvious, how would our leaders respond if Beijing started putting its money and propaganda broadcasts behind Puerto Ricans, Texans, Alaskans, or Native Americans who wanted independence from the United States?

All this arises just a month after the Obama administration refused to allow 17 Uyghur detainees from Guantanamo from settling in the United States. American officials had long ago cleared them of being terrorists, but Obama sent them packing to Bermuda and Palau.

If, as he often says, the president wants America to lead by example, he should reverse his earlier policy and invite the Uyghur detainees to live in the U.S.A. Nothing would do more to promote our commitment to human rights and to removing the knee-jerk terrorist stigma from Muslims of all nations.

[A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France. For previous articles by Steve Weissman on The Rag Blog, go here.]

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A Nuclear Burma? My Oh Myanmar

Posted on July 22, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Senior General Than Shwe, Burmese head of state.

Nuclear weapons for Burma?

It will do no one any good, including the Burmese people, to allow these bloodthirsty nuts to get nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them.

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / July 22, 2009

Does the thought of North Korea having nuclear weapons and missles frighten you? Well, how about the thought of North Korea selling that technology to one of the bloodiest military dictatorships in the world — Burma. (I refuse to call it Myanmar because that’s what the military leaders in charge want us to do.)

That’s the rumor going around diplomatic circles, and it looks like the United States government is taking it seriously. Secretary of State Clinton says, “We know that there are also growing concerns about military cooperation between North Korea and Burma, which we take very seriously. It would be destabilising for the region. It would pose a direct threat to Burma’s neighbours.”

It certainly would destabilize the region. A country doesn’t develop nuclear missile technology to control its own population (besides they seem to be doing very well at that with the weapons they already have). The only real use for that technology is to threaten or attack other countries.

Do the military dictators in Burma harbor delusions of becoming the “big dog” in South and Southeast Asia? Do they want to use the threat of nuclear destruction to control the region? We already know this is a regime that has absolutely no respect for human life when it comes to getting what they want. These guys may actually be depraved enough to use nuclear weapons if they get them.

Frankly, the United States has too many friends in the area to allow Burma to become a nuclear nation. There are also several countries in the area that are unlikely to allow that to happen. I’m thinking of India and China, who won’t want to be put in the position of a possible nuclear war or intimidation from Burma. Either could take action on its own. So could Vietnam. They proved with Cambodia that they won’t let some nut destabilize the region.

What makes the U.S. government think Burma is trying to get nuclear weapon technology? There is no “smoking gun” evidence yet, but there are some worrying signs. First, the Burmese government has been doing business with Namchongang Trading Company (NCG). NCG is a North Korean company that trades in nuclear technology. It’s chief executive is a nuclear expert who was once North Korea’s delegate to the International Atomic Energy Agency. The company also helped Syria build a nuclear reactor (which was destroyed by the Israelis).

Second, Burma has tried to get some suspicious high technology. David Albright, head of the Institute for Science and International Security (which monitors nuclear proliferation), said, “This is hi-tech equipment, capable of making very high precision components. It has other end uses, but it’s hard to see why else Burma would be buying it.”

Third, a North Korean and two Japanese businessmen were arrested last month for trying to export a magnetometer to Burma. This is a necessary element in missile guidance systems.

Fourth, two years ago, Burma tried to buy the technology for a nuclear reactor from Russia. Russia bowed to international pressure and canceled the deal.

Fifth, the North Korean freighter (Kam Nong I), which had made trips in the past to Burma, turned around and went back to North Korea after it could not shake a U.S. Navy ship that was tailing it. South Korean Intelligence says “satellite images suggested the Kang Nam I was carrying equipment for a nuclear programme and Scud-type missiles.”

That’s plenty enough to bother me. It looks like it’s time to do something about the military dictators of Burma. It will do no one any good, including the Burmese people, to allow these bloodthirsty nuts to get nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them.

[Rag Blog contributor Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger, an excellent Texas political blog.]

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Moral High Ground: Elusive for the US Government

Posted on July 22, 2009 by RagBlog

I will take some issue with Professor Cole, insofar as he does not acknowledge the extent of the bad behaviour by the United States government over the years, regardless of the political party in control. He writes as though it is only the Bush/Cheney regime that tortured and violated the Geneva Conventions. He is wrong – every administration since the Geneva Conventions were adopted has bent the rules a little, or a lot, depending on political expediency. Let’s not pretend that the United States is the role model for the world. Other nations are aware that the US is actually the greatest terrorist threat, not these small extremist groups around the world.

Let’s be completely clear about the facts. And the first fact is that the US never had the moral high ground in this discussion.

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog

The picture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed deliberately released by the CIA in violation of the Geneva Conventions.

US Has Lost Moral High Ground on Treatment of Prisoners
By Juan Cole / July 22, 2009

The US military has, understandably and correctly, condemned the coerced video of a US soldier taken hostage by Taliban in Afghanistan.

But I fear that the argument that the public humiliation of prisoners is against international law won’t take the US very far after 8 years of Bush-Cheney.

After the evidence surfaced that the US military took all those humiliating pictures of prisoners at Abu Ghraib to blackmail them by threatening to make them public, the US assertion of support for this principle of the Geneva Conventions will be met with, well, let us say substantial skepticism.

In fact, as I was reminded by a former ambassador, the Bush-Cheney-Yoo-Armitage gutting of US conformance with the Geneva Conventions really makes it difficult for Washington credibly to complain about the treatment of any of our captured soldiers. The Taliban could hold the soldier hostage forever if they follow the principle put forward by Sen. Lindsey Graham. They could (God forbid) put him in stress positions naked and threaten to release the pictures to his family, and they would have done nothing that Rumsfeld’s Pentagon had not done routinely and on a vast scale.

The US refusal to so much as investigate American officials implicated in torture and breaking international law also does not help us gain credibility on seeing to it that those who mistreat our troops are tried on those charges. We even have Dick Cheney defending waterboarding, for which Japanese generals were tried and executed after WW II. It is disgusting.

And huffing and puffing that the Taliban are not a government won’t get us very far either. They control 10 percent of the country.

You obey the Geneva Conventions and the rest of international law on the treatment of captives because it gives you the moral high ground with regard to the treatment of our troops. Not doing so endangers every single one of our men and women in uniform. The chickenhawks who called such international agreements ‘quaint’ and outmoded should be drafted and sent to the front.

What is really scary is that the shadowy set of secret military and intelligence teams charged by Cheney to break international law are continuing to do so despite President Obama’s orders to cease torture. Obama had better get a handle on this issue, because it could well blow up in his face, in fact, Cheney may intend it to do so. I think there are still people in the US government who take their cues from the latter rather than the former.

Source / Informed Comment

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