"Not You! You!!!"

Posted on April 8, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Tibet and Palestine
By Uri Avnery

[Uri Avnery is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom. He is a contributor to CounterPunch’s book The Politics of Anti-Semitism.]

“Hey! Take your hands off me! Not you! You!!!”–the voice of a young woman in the darkened cinema, an old joke.

“Hey! Take your hands off Tibet!” the international chorus is crying out, “But not from Chechnya! Not from the Basque homeland! And certainly not from Palestine!” And that is not a joke.

Like everybody else, I support the right of the Tibetan people to independence, or at least autonomy. Like everybody else, I condemn the actions of the Chinese government there. But unlike everybody else, I am not ready to join in the demonstrations.

Why? Because I have an uneasy feeling that somebody is washing my brain, that what is going on is an exercise in hypocrisy.

I don’t mind a bit of manipulation. After all, it is not by accident that the riots started in Tibet on the eve of the Olympic Games in Beijing. That’s alright. A people fighting for their freedom have the right to use any opportunity that presents itself to further their struggle.

I support the Tibetans in spite of it being obvious that the Americans are exploiting the struggle for their own purposes. Clearly, the CIA has planned and organized the riots, and the American media are leading the world-wide campaign. It is a part of the hidden struggle between the US, the reigning super-power, and China, the rising super-power – a new version of the “Great Game” that was played in central Asia in the 19th century by the British Empire and Russia.
Tibet is a token in this game.

I am even ready to ignore the fact that the gentle Tibetans have carried out a murderous pogrom against innocent Chinese, killing women and men and burning homes and shops. Such detestable excesses do happen during a liberation struggle.

No, what is really bugging me is the hypocrisy of the world media. They storm and thunder about Tibet. In thousands of editorials and talk-shows they heap curses and invective on the evil China. It seems as if the Tibetans are the only people on earth whose right to independence is being denied by brutal force, that if only Beijing would take its dirty hands off the saffron-robed monks, everything would be alright in this, the best of all possible worlds.

There is no doubt that the Tibetan people are entitled to rule their own country, to nurture their unique culture, to promote their religious institutions and to prevent foreign settlers from submerging them.

But are not the Kurds in Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria entitled to the same? The inhabitants of Western Sahara, whose territory is occupied by Morocco? The Basques in Spain? The Corsicans off the coast of France? And the list is long.

Why do the world’s media adopt one independence struggle, but often cynically ignore another independence struggle? What makes the blood of one Tibetan redder than the blood of a thousand Africans in East Congo?

Again and again I try to find a satisfactory answer to this enigma. In vain.

Immanuel Kant demanded of us: “Act as if the principle by which you act were about to be turned into a universal law of nature.” (Being a German philosopher, he expressed it in much more convoluted language.) Does the attitude towards the Tibetan problem conform to this rule?
Does it reflect our attitude towards the struggle for independence of all other oppressed peoples?
Not at all.

What, then, causes the international media to discriminate between the various liberation struggles that are going on throughout the world?

Here are some of the relevant considerations:

– Do the people seeking independence have an especially exotic culture?

– Are they an attractive people, i.e. “sexy” in the view of the media?

– Is the struggle headed by a charismatic personality who is liked by the media?

– It the oppressing government disliked by the media?

– Does the oppressing government belong to the pro-American camp? This is an important factor, since the United States dominates a large part of the international media, and its news agencies and TV networks largely define the agenda and the terminology of the news coverage.

– Are economic interests involved in the conflict?

– Does the oppressed people have gifted spokespersons, who are able to attract attention and manipulate the media?

From these points of view, there is nobody like the Tibetans. They enjoy ideal conditions.

Fringed by the Himalayas, they are located in one of the most beautiful landscapes on earth. For centuries, just to get there was an adventure. Their unique religion arouses curiosity and sympathy. Its non-violence is very attractive and elastic enough to cover even the ugliest atrocities, like the recent pogrom. The exiled leader, the Dalai Lama, is a romantic figure, a media rock-star. The Chinese regime is hated by many – by capitalists because it is a Communist dictatorship, by Communists because it has become capitalist. It promotes a crass and ugly materialism, the very opposite of the spiritual Buddhist monks, who spend their time in prayer and meditation.

When China builds a railway to the Tibetan capital over a thousand inhospitable kilometers, the West does not admire the engineering feat, but sees (quite rightly) an iron monster that brings hundreds of thousands of Han-Chinese settlers to the occupied territory.

And of course, China is a rising power, whose economic success threatens America’s hegemony in the world. A large part of the ailing American economy already belongs directly or indirectly to China. The huge American Empire is sinking hopelessly into debt, and China may soon be the biggest lender. American manufacturing industry is moving to China, taking millions of jobs with it.

Compared to these factors, what have the Basques, for example, to offer? Like the Tibetans, they inhabit a contiguous territory, most of it in Spain, some of it in France. They, too, are an ancient people with their own language and culture. But these are not exotic and do not attract special notice. No prayer wheels. No robed monks.

The Basques do not have a romantic leader, like Nelson Mandela or the Dalai Lama. The Spanish state, which arose from the ruins of Franco’s detested dictatorship, enjoys great popularity around the world. Spain belongs to the European Union, which is more or less in the American camp, sometimes more, sometimes less.

The armed struggle of the Basque underground is abhorred by many and is considered “terrorism”, especially after Spain has accorded the Basques a far-reaching autonomy. In these circumstances, the Basques have no chance at all of gaining world support for independence.

The Chechnyans should have been in a better position. They, too, are a separate people, who have for a long time been oppressed by the Czars of the Russian Empire, including Stalin and Putin. But alas, they are Muslims – and in the Western world, Islamophobia now occupies the place that had for centuries been reserved for anti-Semitism. Islam has turned into a synonym for terrorism, it is seen as a religion of blood and murder. Soon it will be revealed that Muslims slaughter Christian children and use their blood for baking Pitta. (In reality it is, of course, the religion of dozens of vastly different peoples, from Indonesia to Morocco and from Kosova to Zanzibar.

The US does not fear Moscow as it fears Beijing. Unlike China, Russia does not look like a country that could dominate the 21st century. The West has no interest in renewing the Cold War, as it has in renewing the Crusades against Islam. The poor Chechnyans, who have no charismatic leader or outstanding spokespersons, have been banished from the headlines. For all the world cares, Putin can hit them as much as he wants, kill thousands and obliterate whole towns.

That does not prevent Putin from supporting the demands of Abkhazia and South Ossetia for separation from Georgia, a country which infuriates Russia.

If Immanuel Kant knew what’s going on in Kosova, he would be scratching his head.

The province demanded its independence from Serbia, and I, for one, supported that with all my heart. This is a separate people, with a different culture (Albanian) and its own religion (Islam).

After the popular Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic, tried to drive them out of their country, the world rose and provided moral and material support for their struggle for independence.

The Albanian Kosovars make up 90% of the citizens of the new state, which has a population of two million. The other 10% are Serbs, who want no part of the new Kosova. They want the areas they live in to be annexed to Serbia. According to Kant’s maxim, are they entitled to this?

I would propose a pragmatic moral principle: Every population that inhabits a defined territory and has a clear national character is entitled to independence. A state that wants to keep such a population must see to it that they feel comfortable, that they receive their full rights, enjoy equality and have an autonomy that satisfies their aspirations. In short: that they have no reason to desire separation.

That applies to the French in Canada, the Scots in Britain, the Kurds in Turkey and elsewhere, the various ethnic groups in Africa, the indigenous peoples in Latin America, the Tamils in Sri Lanka and many others. Each has a right to choose between full equality, autonomy and independence.


This leads us, of course, to the Palestinian issue.

In the competition for the sympathy of the world media, the Palestinians are unlucky. According to all the objective standards, they have a right to full independence, exactly like the Tibetans. They inhabit a defined territory, they are a specific nation, a clear border exists between them and Israel. One must really have a crooked mind to deny these facts.

But the Palestinians are suffering from several cruel strokes of fate: The people that oppress them claim for themselves the crown of ultimate victimhood. The whole world sympathizes with the Israelis because the Jews were the victims of the most horrific crime of the Western world.

That creates a strange situation: the oppressor is more popular than the victim. Anyone who supports the Palestinians is automatically suspected of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.

Also, the great majority of the Palestinians are Muslims (nobody pays attention to the Palestinian Christians). Since Islam arouses fear and abhorrence in the West, the Palestinian struggle has automatically become a part of that shapeless, sinister threat, “international terrorism”. And since the murders of Yasser Arafat and Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the Palestinians have no particularly impressive leader – neither in Fatah nor in Hamas.

Read all of it here.
CounterPunch / The Rag Blog

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To Gratify One Man’s Stunted Imagination

Posted on April 8, 2008 by RagBlog


CAROLINE ARNOLD: Soldiers in modern wars all die in vain
By Caroline Arnold / April 6, 2008

Benjamin Franklin may or may not have said it, but it’s a suggestive metaphor for a dilemma of democracy, as well as for our present predicament in the U.S.: “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.”

We see Bush and the big corporations as wolves — strong, sharp-toothed, predatory and scheming; we see the people as lambs — weak, dependent, aimless and confused (and call them, derisively, “sheeple”). It’s easy to see the rich and powerful wolves deliberating our economic crisis, our Iraq crisis, our oil crisis, and easier still to predict who they’ll have for lunch.

The rest of the aphorism, “Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote,” also has attractive resonances. Indeed, both wolves and sheeple — and our boy-warrior Dubya — tend to accept without question the notion of “arms” as necessary defensive and aggressive tools, and “liberty” as the right to use them against any of our neighbors we decide to define as wolves.

In the meantime, our media — newspapers, TV, blogosphere — bring us daily news of the state of the real world:

“Wall Street Shows Optimism That Crisis Is Fading” (New York Times, 4/2/08); the article suggests that investors are confident that they will continue to make money and therefore all is well.

I don’t see much of that confidence here in Portage County. My friend, Bonny, proprietor of Bonny’s Bread, writes “I’m feeling a tad panicked at things I have no control of. Namely the economy, prices on my flour up a sudden 50%. … The thought of asking $7.50 (per one-pound loaf) … has me just frozen with frustration.”

Debby Missimi, director of food pantries and hot-meals programs for Family & Community Services, notes that higher prices at the grocery stores are bringing in more low-income families needing food while reducing the amounts of money and food middle-income families can donate for them. “We’re squeezed,” she says, “I don’t know where it will end.”

My son, faced with spending $40 per week for gasoline to get to his job in Akron, has turned to a motorcycle for commuting, a choice his wife (and his mother) would rather he didn’t have to make. But selling his house and moving to Akron is not a choice, nor is quitting a good job and expecting to find another in Portage County.

The news article tells us how we should think and talk about reality. The grass-roots stories tell us about the reality people live in. None of these stories fit easily into a Wolves & Lamb metaphor of democracy.

But these metaphors and figures of speech still have a powerful influence in our society. Arming the lambs is a favorite, and I doubt there is any hope of persuading a substantial constituency that they can be forbidden to own guns. We might be able to agree to regulate ammunition — licensing individuals to buy ammunition the way we license drivers, or requiring “prescriptions” for ammunition the way we require them for drugs. But that seems only a little less absurd and unlikely than expecting thousands of free and righteous gun-owning lambs to form a militia, storm the White House and deliver Bush and Cheney to the International Court of Justice.

Then there’s “Enhanced interrogation techniques.” Given that waterboarding is now too commonplace, too conflicted and too comic (McCain, Guiliani and Huckabee made jokes about it) to deter terrorists, perhaps Bush should consider some more abhorrent, more cruel and prolonged techniques that might be more persuasive. Impalement worked well for the ancient Assyrians as well as Vlad III Dracula. The Roman Empire found crucifixion useful in “neutralizing” threats to state security, though with the unintended consequence of providing the centerpiece for a religion that swept the world. However, Christianity redeemed its reputation for brutality with burning at the stake during the Inquisition.

How about the gobbledegook about not wanting our soldiers to die in vain? Here’s another take on that reality: 4,000 American soldiers have not died in vain — they died to bring pain, humiliation and death to thousands of Iraqis: they died to make Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prison possible, to destroy Fallujah, to bring bombs down on the heads and homes of peasant families, to secure profits for multinational corporations, to command oil supplies, to spread fear, and to gratify one man’s stunted imagination.

Whatever are we thinking? Somehow I am reminded of Milton Drake’s 1943 jingle:

Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey

The glib phrases of the media and popular culture betray us; we let foolish metaphors — or arrant fictions — drive our actions. We need more plain speech; less media and mediafication of public information systems.

Last week Cheney dismissed all the lambs’ concerns about Bush’s war and policies with a “So?”

We-the-sheeple have to take up that challenge. If we don’t like Bush’s war, don’t want our nation to practice individual and collective violence on other humans, what are we going to do about it?

We are all humans, not wolves and lambs; guns and torture are not adequate to secure democracy or protect us from one another. Democracy cannot function under torture, secrecy, spying and fear. Soldiers in modern wars all die in vain.

“Democracy is … voting on what to have for lunch.” Woovsied lamms unless they own handguns. Lamzy divey. So? A kiddley divey. too. Wouldn’t you?

Source

Liddle Lamzy Divey
By Karen

I don’t care how many ‘e’
sounds
are tacked on
to tripe– tripe
it remains
and
only
speaks
to the moosh
side of the
brain

where we still
wear
diapers

and
dribble pee

on
to thee
margins. Most of us
outgrow it

but
some
of us are stuck

in Cutesy Pukesey-land,
where
baby voices
weirdly
will rise up

from
rumpled
skin

to make
my own

crawl.
Takes
all kinds.
You

have to

sort.

Know your
tarnation
level.


Source

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The State May Not Humiliate Anyone

Posted on April 8, 2008 by RagBlog

Saving the American Left: The Case for a New Progressive Creed
By Bernard Chazelle / April 7, 2008

The American left is in the throes of an existential crisis. Some say it’s a failure of nerve, others a loss of belief. It is the latter. Neoliberalism has sucked the oxygen out of the left by deflating the political sphere to the economic one. The left must articulate a new creed around three principles: empowerment (the economic is ancillary to the political); social justice (the disadvantaged have an unconditional claim upon the collectivity); and decency (the state may not humiliate anyone). To make its case, the left must redefine that most exalted form of self-interest, patriotism, as pride in a society that grants all of its members the means to belong.

First, the mythology:

* Democrats burst with Big Ideas. Unfortunately, ballots and Big Ideas don’t mix and the timing is never quite right. But you watch. Once the Congress is theirs, once the White House curtains have been picked, the Dems will get crackin’ on ’em Big Ideas—or on the reelection campaign, whichever comes first.

* Big Ideas being what they are, big, squeezing them into words can be a challenge. Luckily, with academia’s brightest bulbs lighting up the pup tent, liberals can articulate better than anyone why it is they can’t articulate anything. So they’ll pen earnest treatises on the need to call taxes “membership fees” and trial lawyers “public protection attorneys.” Like it or not, this has proven quite effective, and Howard Dean, for one, likes to credit Lakoff’s framing theories for his victorious run for the White House.

* Who cares if the Clintonistas and their merry band of DLC hangers-on spoiled the broth with their third-way brand of workfare centrism and smiley-face imperialism? Across the blogosphere, a nascent grassroots movement is afoot, blowing the winds of change against the Repub-lite sellout show. It’s coming. This time, it’s really coming!

Like all myths, these wishful fantasies contain a grain of truth: Democrats are diffident, tactical, and quick to concede the terms of the debate. The netroots channel genuine passion about liberal causes and the blogs are buzzing. There is palpable excitement out there on the left. A pity there is no there there. America has lefties but no left.

The verdict is brutal. By virtually any measure, the United States is the least progressive nation in the developed world.(1) It trails most of Western Europe in poverty rates, life expectancy, health care, child care, infant mortality, maternity leaves, paid vacations, public infrastructure, incarceration rates, and environmental laws. The wealth gap in the US has not been so wide since 1929. The Wal-Mart founders’ family owns as much as the bottom 120 million Americans combined.(2) Contrary to received opinion, there is now less social mobility in the US than in Canada, France, Germany, and most Scandinavian countries.(3,4) The European Union attracts more foreign students than the US, including twice as many from China. Its consensus-driven polity, studies indicate, has replaced the American version as the societal model to which the developing world aspires.(5)

And yet could America be a right-wing nation of closet lefties? A Zogby poll reveals overwhelming support for rehabilitation over incarceration for young offenders. In an NES survey, those who want “government to provide many more services even if it means an increase in spending” outnumber backers of spending cuts by 2 to 1. A Pew study cites the same ratio of people who consider corporate profits excessive. It also finds that a majority of Americans believe “government should help the needy even if it means greater debt.” (6)

Democratic leaders, bless their souls, believe no such nonsense. They’ll warn you incessantly that any public policy leaning a nano-angstrom to the left is a suicide pact. They’ll brush off any talk of raising the top marginal tax rate of 35% to anything approaching the 70% of the Nixon years.(7) Yes, the progressive Bill Clinton expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit and signed the Family and Medical Leave Act. He also increased extreme poverty despite high economic growth.(8) He extended the death penalty to non-homicides and oversaw the largest increase in incarceration rates in the 20th century (double what it was under Reagan).(9,10) He exacerbated inequalities, gave up on Kyoto, and, by his own Labor secretary’s account, presided over “one of the most pro-business administrations in American history.” (2,11) His signature social policy, welfare reform, dismantled one of the pillars of the New Deal: the federal cash assistance program for 9 million poor children (AFDC).(12)

By contrast, the conservative Richard Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency, extended the Clean Air Act, introduced the Supplemental Security Income program (to assist the elderly and the disabled), launched the Minority Business Development Agency, signed the Occupational Safety and Health Act, and implemented the first federally-mandated affirmative action program.(13) Nixon was a “Southern strategist” and a right-wing crook: he was also to the left of Bill Clinton.

The senior Democratic senator from New York, the “ultra-liberal” Chuck Schumer, recently killed efforts to raise the tax rate of hedge fund managers to that of his cleaning lady: a nice government handout to overpaid bankers that is worth, annually, half of the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children.(14,15) “I am not a populist,” said Schumer.(16) (Maybe just an opportunist.) During the 2008 presidential campaign, the New York Times gently mocked John Edwards’s unauthorized concern for the poor as “raw populism.” (17) That word again. The other P-word, poverty, has acquired in the liberal mind the cosmic permanence of gravity. Much like in the Middle Ages, short of killing the poor, the thinking goes, one cannot kill poverty—even in the richest nation on earth. This capitulation to imaginary laws of economics marks the ascendancy of neoliberalism as the dominant dogma of the ruling class. This is a worldwide phenomenon but its origins are uniquely American. One may wonder: if it’s worked against the interests of so many, how then did it happen?

Read all of it here (with notes). Information Clearing House.

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Government Too Often Goes for Military Solutions

Posted on April 8, 2008 by RagBlog

From the San Antonio Current, with thanks.

John Stanford and those calling for an end to the war in Iraq gather from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. every Thursday at the intersection of Commerce and Flores streets in San Antonio.

Patient, persistent, peaceful
By Greg Harman

John Stanford was among a core group of protestors that first gathered outside San Antonio City Hall two weeks after the attacks of 9/11 to urge a nonviolent response to the assault. The world wept in candle-lit vigils over the loss of life in New York, Washington, D.C., and a Pennsylvania field.

And the world waited, anxiously, to see how the United States would respond to the assault by a small band of motivated killers.

Today, as the U.S. occupation of Iraq enters year five, Stanford is still hopeful that human and political patterns may be adjusted to lead us onto the road of peace at last.

You’ve been meeting downtown with other folks opposed to the U.S. moving on Iraq militarily for years, is that right?

That’s right. We started meeting September 25, 2001. We were in solidarity with the victims of 9/11 — that was two weeks after 9/11 exactly — but we were also opposed to any military action being taken to bomb a country into submission because we didn’t think that would solve the problem … We were opposed to war.

Do you think we could have avoided some of the steps that have happened?

Yeah, we could have avoided that all. We could have not bombed Afghanistan, and a lot of people lost their lives. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. We brought al-Qaeda into Iraq.

Do you think people in San Antonio are beginning to see how the country was duped on Iraq?

I think people all over the country are. Don’t you? There’s no doubt that people see this.

What kinds of numbers come out on Thursday afternoons?

It varies. The people that have been putting out leaflets have been pulling in a few more just recently. I would say now we have about nine to 11. We used to have fewer.

We haven’t given it much publicity. We haven’t been making phone calls for people to come out on the whole. We have a good response from passersby.

It was a lot of horn-honking going on this last Thursday.

[Laughing] It usually is, yeah.

Is it frustrating to feel that support on the city streets for ending the war, but then have no commitment nationally?

It doesn’t frustrate us, because we know we have to work harder to get Congress to take a position. It’s disappointing that Congress has not responded more to what I think was a vote by the people against the war a couple of years ago. [Congress] has voted money for the war, has continued to vote money for the war. I think Congress needs to cut all funds for the war … That’s what we need to do. More and more are getting killed, injured, getting damaged for life, both physically and psychologically. We’ve killed many, many thousands over in Iraq — maybe millions — and created refugees. And certainly devastated the country.

Are you able to look back at any time in our country’s history when we didn’t opt for military solutions to difficult challenges?

They’ve been rare in recent history, certainly. I think there have been some efforts from some people. Many efforts from many people, but our government has too often gone in for military solutions.

How do we transform our foreign policy, how do we transform our country from an increasingly militarized state to one that operates with respect for human rights and negotiation and fairness?

That’s a difficult question, but I think as people are educated more, as these issues are brought out more, as people understand more about what’s going on, we can put more pressure on the government.

Basically, I think we need a change in the economic system toward socialism. I think we need to educate for that also. I think under socialism there would not be the drive for war, the drive for empire, the drive for conquering other peoples and acquiring the resources of other peoples.

I think under capitalism that much can be done to change foreign policy. Increasingly, there are groups that are against the foreign policies that result in sweatshops and the oppression of other peoples and strain the natural resources of other countries. There are a number of different movements that move toward these ends.

So are you optimistic that with education and the empowerment that comes with that, that human culture will be able to grow beyond where we’ve been?

Yes, I certainly am. Yes. Otherwise I wouldn’t be out in the street demonstrating.

Source

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Government Opposes Habeas Corpus in Case Before Supreme Court

Posted on April 7, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Another Test for Habeas Corpus

One of the dismal hallmarks of the Bush administration’s conduct of the war on terror has been its obsession with avoiding outside scrutiny of its actions, including by the federal courts. In particular, it has attacked habeas corpus, the guarantee that prisoners can challenge their confinement before a judge. The administration is doing so again in an important Supreme Court case concerning the habeas rights of American citizens held abroad. The justices should rule that the detainees have a right to review by a United States court.

The two plaintiffs in the case, which was argued in March, are American civilians in Iraq. Shawqi Ahmad Omar and Mohammad Munaf are being held at an Army-run detention center in Baghdad, for transfer to the Iraqis on criminal charges. Mr. Munaf’s conviction on kidnapping charges was overturned, but he may face further charges. Mr. Omar was captured by the American military at his home in Baghdad, and was accused of harboring insurgent fighters. Both men claim to be innocent. Human rights groups warn that they could face torture if they are transferred to Iraqi custody.

Mr. Omar and Mr. Munaf are asking a federal court to review their confinement. Just four years ago, the Supreme Court upheld the habeas rights of an American citizen, Yaser Hamdi, who was captured by the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan in 2001, and then imprisoned in Navy brigs in the United States.

The Hamdi decision should settle this case. To get around this recent precedent, the administration claims that the men are beyond the reach of American courts because the troops holding them are part of a multinational force authorized by the United Nations. The administration is relying on a Supreme Court ruling from 1948, Hirota v. MacArthur, that rejected habeas corpus petitions from Japanese prisoners who were being held in Japan under the authority of the Allied Supreme Commander there, Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

The Hirota case is inapplicable because it involved Japanese soldiers, not American citizens. Even if that were not so, the chain of command of the military in Iraq runs to the president. The administration cannot pretend the United States military in Iraq is not an American force in order to evade American law.

The administration is no doubt hoping that the changes in the makeup of the court since Hamdi was decided will produce a different result. For the sake of civil liberties and the court’s own integrity, it should not. At the oral argument, Justice David Souter called the administration’s reasoning “a little scary.” Extremely scary is more like it.

Source. Editorial / New York Times / April 7, 2008

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The Killing of Civilians Has to Stop, on Both Sides

Posted on April 7, 2008 by RagBlog

Bare survival is now a way of life for Gaza’s children

Gaza’s Crushed Childhoods
by Queen Rania Al Abdullah

Ayman is a soft-spoken 14-year-old boy in Jabalia City, Gaza. His family is poor, and his parents have already sold almost all their furniture to pay for food and schooling for their children. Recently, after collecting a government food handout, Ayman’s father, who has been unemployed since March 2006, had to sell the milk to pay for the journey back home.

Ayman works very hard in school and dreams of a future career. But, with 47 students in his cramped classroom and double shifts the norm, his learning environment is very stressful. Home is no refuge: the recent incursion into Jabalia was 200 meters from where Ayman lives. The shooting and shelling so terrorized his five-year-old sister that she still wakes up screaming at night.

Ayman’s experience is all too familiar in Gaza’s crowded, crippled neighborhoods, where those who are least to blame for the troubles are suffering the most. Indeed, among Gaza’s 840,000 children – of which 588,000 are refugees – Ayman’s story is luckier than many. Since the recent escalation of violence that began last month, at least 33 Palestinian boys and girls have been killed and many more injured or maimed – caught in the crossfire, shot in their living rooms, or struck by explosions in their own backyards. On February 28, four children playing soccer were hit by a missile, which dismembered them so completely their own families could not identify their bodies.

Ayman, his siblings, and all Gaza’s children are finding their lives diminished each day – a cruel, slow suffocation of their spirit and their dreams. Instead of enjoying expanding horizons, they are trapped in a virtual prison, where things that every child should be able to take for granted are instead being taken away: the right to play, to go to school, to have enough to eat, to have light to study by at night, and to feel safe in their own homes. The weight of one of the world’s longest-running conflicts is resting on their thin shoulders, crushing their childhood and inflicting psychological scars that may never heal.

Palestinians were once reputed to be among the best-educated people in the Middle East; today, after years of violence, isolation, and poverty, their proud tradition of educational excellence has been shattered. Almost 2,000 children in Gaza have dropped out of school in the last five months. Those who remain must share tattered textbooks and do without crucial resources.

The January 2008 semester exams at schools in Gaza operated by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) found 50-60 percent failure rates in mathematics and a 40 percent failure rate in Arabic – the children’s native language. Despite this, Ayman insists, “I want to be an educated person. I want to be an engineer to build my country.”

Let the world recall that Gaza’s crisis is a manmade disaster. And let the world take note that conditions are worse today than at any time since the occupation began. Seventy-nine percent of Gaza’s households live in poverty; eight out of ten depend on food assistance. Almost half the labor force is unemployed; local industry has collapsed. Water and sewage systems are failing; garbage is piling up in the streets.

UNICEF is working around the clock to restore a sense of normalcy for Gaza’s youth – developing remedial worksheets to help children keep up with their studies; creating sports and recreation programs in schools; and working with communities to establish play areas where kids can be kids in safety. UNICEF works with partners to get water, hygiene, and medical supplies to households and health facilities. And UNICEF-supported counseling teams are spread across the area, helping Palestinian parents and children cope with the burden of stress.

But, while UNICEF is doing all it can to comfort those in the midst of Gaza’s madness, only political leaders can bring the dreadful nightmare to an end. It is time for new engagement. The siege must be lifted. The killing of civilians has to stop, on both sides. Palestinian and Israeli children deserve to grow up in peace. And leaders on both sides, supported by the international community, must join in the kind of honest dialogue that is the only viable path toward achieving it.

Ayman’s father quietly says, “My children are my hope.” The children of Gaza are a light in the darkness. They deserve a chance to shine.

Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan is UNICEF Eminent Advocate for Children. This commentary is published by DAILY NEWS EGYPT in collaboration with Project Syndicate (www.project-syndicate.org).

Source

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A Review of the Republican Tarot – R. Jehn

Posted on April 7, 2008 by RagBlog

The Pictorial Key to the Republican Tarot: A Review
By Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog

When Mariann Wizard first began mentioning her book in the works, I didn’t think I would ever find much impetus to acquire and read it. I’m not superstitious and don’t particularly believe in divination, I disdain Republicans, and I read enough political crap as it is. But Mariann thought better of my notion and sent a copy of her book to me with heartfelt good wishes for my enjoyment as I read her new work.

Read this book to learn something you never knew about a Republican (e.g., Dick Nixon was a cousin of the exiled King of Albania). Or read this book to divine the future (e.g., Mariann devotes an entire chapter to “The Art of Tarot Divination,” where she reminds us that it is as much about patter as it is about patterns).

Or best by far, read this book for a good laugh. For example, she writes “While I do not think that there is a pathology dedicated to politics, about various public extravagances no one can question their derangement, and if anyone does, you have only to show him or her this present volume to set aside all doubt.” That just about covers it!

Only a marvelously talented writer could describe Abraham Lincoln this way: “While the words ‘simple backwoods lawyer’ follow his name as the words ‘poop in the woods’ follow a bear, Lincoln was a successful railroad lawyer and a sophisticated philosopher.”

Mariann has chosen carefully in assigning the various Republican players to the roles in the Tarot deck. For example, she has selected Dick Nixon to play “Death.” How appropriate for someone who did his best to kill off the presidency itself. The Emperor could be none other than Ronald Reagan, for who else did so much in the early stages to bring down the Empire? As she writes, “… the sun shines brightly on-screen … allud[ing] to Reagan’s notoriously sunny outlook on problems (homelessness, joblessness, international ridicule) endured by ordinary Americans,” a benign version of Caligula at his best.

The Bush family is bestowed an entire Lesser Arcana Suite of its own, with natural roles being given to George, Sr. as the Player, Barbara as the Lady, George, Jr. as the Knave, and Jeb and Neil as the Varlets. As Mariann writes of the Varlets, “their bland, featureless, sunny surroundings reflect the essential rootlessness of a family which lived in 17 different cities and 29 houses as they were growing up.” But I’m giving away the story.

I guarantee two things if you read the Republican Tarot: you’ll learn more than you ever wanted to know about majour 20th century Republican players and you’ll laugh a hell of a lot more than you could possibly anticipate. Do yourself a favour: buy this book and enjoy every second of it. Then, one evening when you’re asking yourself what you should be doing, it will strike you that you have never divined your future from Mariann Wizard’s Republican Tarot, and your time will be filled with laughter, excitement, and good cheer.

Taroting in my two cents’ worth.

Ain’t those Republicans just a hoot! Well, Miz Wizard has captured them in all their, shall we say, zaniness. The book is delicious satire with lots of enlightening Republicana tossed in. It’s as offbeat and delightful as is its author.

Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog

Go here to find Mariann Wizard’s The Pictorial Key to the Republican Tarot.
For more about Mariann Wizard, go here.

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The MSM: Dictating What You’re Allowed to Know

Posted on April 7, 2008 by RagBlog

The US Establishment Media in a Nutshell
by Glenn Greenwald / April 5, 2008

In the past two weeks, the following events transpired. A Department of Justice memo, authored by John Yoo, was released which authorized torture and presidential lawbreaking. It was revealed that the Bush administration declared the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights to be inapplicable to “domestic military operations” within the U.S. The U.S. Attorney General appears to have fabricated a key event leading to the 9/11 attacks and made patently false statements about surveillance laws and related lawsuits. Barack Obama went bowling in Pennsylvania and had a low score.

Here are the number of times, according to NEXIS, that various topics have been mentioned in the media over the past thirty days:

“Yoo and torture” – 102
“Mukasey and 9/11″ — 73
“Yoo and Fourth Amendment” — 16
“Obama and bowling” — 1,043
“Obama and Wright” — More than 3,000 (too many to be counted)
“Obama and patriotism” – 1,607
“Clinton and Lewinsky” — 1,079

And as Eric Boehlert documents, even Iraq — that little five-year U.S. occupation with no end in sight — has been virtually written out of the media narrative in favor of mindless, stupid, vapid chatter of the type referenced above. “The Clintons are Rich!!!!” will undoubtedly soon be at the top of this heap within a matter of a day or two.

“Media critic” Howie Kurtz in the Washington Post today devoted pages of his column to Obama’s bowling and eating habits and how that shows he’s not a regular guy but an Arrogant Elitist, compiling an endless string of similar chatter about this from Karl Rove, Maureen Dowd, Walter Shapiro and Ann Althouse. Bloomberg’s Margaret Carlson devoted her whole column this week to arguing that, along with Wright, Obama’s bowling was his biggest mistake, a “real doozy.”

Obama’s bowling has provided almost a full week of programming on MSNBC. Gail Collins, in The New York Times, today observed that Obama went bowling “with disastrous consequences.” And, as always, they take their personality-based fixations from the Right, who have been promoting the Obama is an Arrogant, Exotic, Elitist Freak narrative for some time. In a typically cliched and slimy article, Time’s Joe Klein this week explored what the headline called Obama’s “Patriotism Problem,” where we learn that “this is a chronic disease among Democrats, who tend to talk more about what’s wrong with America than what’s right.” He trotted it all out — the bowling, the lapel pin, Obama’s angry, America-hating wife, “his Islamic-sounding name.”

Read all of it here.

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A Wider Middle East War Is Still Very Likely

Posted on April 6, 2008 by RagBlog

Lightning over Northern Tehran

British fear US commander is beating the drum for Iran strikes
By Damien McElroy / The Telegraph / April 4, 2008

British officials gave warning yesterday that America’s commander in Iraq will declare that Iran is waging war against the US-backed Baghdad government.

A strong statement from General David Petraeus about Iran’s intervention in Iraq could set the stage for a US attack on Iranian military facilities, according to a Whitehall assessment. In closely watched testimony in Washington next week, Gen Petraeus will state that the Iranian threat has risen as Tehran has supplied and directed attacks by militia fighters against the Iraqi state and its US allies.

The outbreak of Iraq’s worst violence in 18 months last week with fighting in Basra and the daily bombardment of the Green Zone diplomatic enclave, demonstrated that although the Sunni Muslim insurgency is dramatically diminished, Shia forces remain in a strong position to destabilise the country.

“Petraeus is going to go very hard on Iran as the source of attacks on the American effort in Iraq,” a British official said. “Iran is waging a war in Iraq. The idea that America can’t fight a war on two fronts is wrong, there can be airstrikes and other moves,” he said.

“Petraeus has put emphasis on America having to fight the battle on behalf of Iraq. In his report he can frame it in terms of our soldiers killed and diplomats dead in attacks on the Green Zone.”

Tension between Washington and Tehran is already high over Iran’s covert nuclear programme. The Bush administration has not ruled out military strikes.

In remarks interpreted as signalling a change in his approach to Iran, Gen Petraeus last week hit out at the Iranian leadership. “The rockets that were launched at the Green Zone were Iranian-provided, Iranian-made rockets,” he said. “All of this in complete violation of promises made by President Ahmadinejad and the other most senior Iranian leaders to their Iraqi counterparts.”

The humiliation of the Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki by the Iranian-backed cleric Moqtada al-Sadr in fighting in Basra last week triggered top-level warnings over Iran’s strength in Iraq.

Gen Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the US ambassador to Baghdad, will answer questions from American political leaders at the US Congress on Tuesday and Wednesday before travelling to London to brief Gordon Brown.

The Wall Street Journal said last week that the US war effort in Iraq must have a double goal.

“The US must recognise that Iran is engaged in a full-up proxy war against it in Iraq,” wrote the military analyst Kimberly Kagan.

There are signs that targeting Iran would unite American politicians across the bitter divide on Iraq. “Iran is the bull in the china shop,” said Ike Skelton, the Democrat chairman of the Armed Services Committee. “In all of this, they seem to have links to all of the Shi’ite groups, whether they be political or military.”

Source

Petraeus Testimony Next Week Will Signal Iran Attack
By Paul Craig Roberts / April 5, 2008

Today the London Telegraph reported that “British officials gave warning yesterday that America’s commander in Iraq will declare that Iran is waging war against the US-backed Baghdad government. A strong statement from General David Petraeus about Iran’s intervention in Iraq could set the stage for a US attack on Iranian militiary facilities, according to a Whitehall assessment.”

The neocon lacky Petraeus has had his script written for him by Cheney, and Petraeus together with neocon warmonger Ryan Crocker, the US governor of the Green Zone in Baghdad, will present Congress next Tuesday and Wednesday with the lies, for which the road has been well paved by neocon propagandists such as Kimberly Kagan, that “the US must recognize that Iran is engaged in a full-up proxy war against it in Iraq.”

Don’t expect Congress to do anything except to egg on the attack. On April 3 the International Herald Tribune reported that senators and representatives have made millions of dollars from their investments in defense companies totaling $196 million. Rep. Ike Skelton, the Democrat chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, is already on board with the attack on Iran. The London Telegraph quotes Skelton: “Iran is the bull in the china shop. In all of this, they seem to have links to all of the Shi’ite groups, whether they be political or military.”

All Skelton knows is what the war criminal Bush regime tells him. If Iran really does have all these connections, then it behooves Washington to cease threatening Iran and to make nice with Iran in order to stabilize Iraq and extract the US from the nightmare.

Reporting from Tehran on April 4, Reuters quotes Mohsen Hakim, whose father, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leads the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, an ally of the Maliki US puppetgovernment in Iraq: “Tehran, by using its positive influence on the Iraqi nation, paved the way for the return of peace to Iraq and the new situation is the result of Iran’s efforts.”

Instead of thanking Iran and working with Iran diplomatically to restore stability to Iraq, the Bush regime intends to expand the nightmare with a military attack on Iran. Ryan Crocker was quick to dispute Hakim’s report that Iran had used its influence to end the fighting in Basra. Crocker alleged that Iran had started the fighting. The absurdity of Crocker’s claim is obvious as even the neocon US media reported that the fighting in Basra was started by the US and Maliki in an effort to clear out the Shi’ite al-Sadr militias. Most experts saw the attack on al-Sadr for what it was: an effort to remove a potential threat to the US supply line from Kuwait in the event of a US attack on Iran.

Crocker alleges that the rockets dropping on the Green Zone during the Basra fighting were made in 2007 in Iran. As should be obvious even to disengaged Americans, if Iran were to arm the Iraqi insurgency, the insurgents would have modern weapons to counter US helicopter gunships and heavy tanks. The insurgents have no such weapons. The neocon lie that Iran is the cause of the Iraqi insurgency is just another Bush regime lie like the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and connections to al Qaeda and the lie that the Taliban in Afghanistan attacked the US.

The Bush regime will tell any lie and orchestrate any event in order to “finish the job” in the Middle East.

“Finishing the job” means to destroy the ability of Iraq, Iran, and Syria to provide support for the Palestinians and for Hezbollah in southern Lebanon against Israeli aggression. With Iraq and Iran in turmoil, Syria might simply give up and become another American client state. With Iraq and Iran in turmoil, Israel can steal the rest of the West Bank along with the water resources in southern Lebanon. That is what “the war on terror” is really about.

The entire world knows this. Consequently, the US and Israel are essentially isolated. The US can only count on the support that it can bribe and pay for.

At the NATO-Russian summit in Bucharest, Romania, on April 4, Russian President Putin said: “No one can seriously think that Iran would dare attack the U.S. Instead of pushing Iran into a corner, it would be far more sensible to think together how to help Iran become more predictable and transparent.”

Of course it would, but that is not what the warmonger Bush regime wants.

Perhaps the British government has derailed the plot to attack Iran by leaking in advance to the London Telegraph the disinformation Cheney has prepared for Petraeus and Crocker to deliver to the complicit US Congress next Tuesday and Wednesday. On the other hand, the US puppet media is likely to bury the real story and to trumpet Petraeus claims that Iran has, in effect, already declared war on the US by sending weapons to kill US troops in Iraq.

By next Thursday we will know from how the Petraeus-Crocker dog and pony show plays in the US Congress and media whether the Bush Regime will commit yet another war crime by attacking Iran.

Paul Craig Roberts a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, has been reporting shocking cases of prosecutorial abuse for two decades. A new edition of his book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, a documented account of how Americans lost the protection of law, is forthcoming from Random House in March, 2008.

Source

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People Enjoy Killing Each Other?

Posted on April 6, 2008 by RagBlog
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Hot Shots and Classic Takes

Posted on April 6, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Too purty not to post.

Classic 1949 Chevy Pick-up Truck with the Lone Star Flag Plate. Photo by E. Joe Deering / Houston Chronicle.

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Understanding Iraq : Maybe This Will Help

Posted on April 6, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Suppose Texas was like Iraq
By Gwynne Dyer / April 6, 2008

London — Suppose the shoe were on the other foot. Suppose that the former United States had splintered into half a dozen fragments after the South won the Civil War 145 years ago.

Suppose all the Arabs lived in a single, powerful state, but had no oil. Suppose an Arab military force was currently bringing peace and freedom to the oil-rich, violence-torn country of Texas.

What would they be reading in the Arab newspapers five years after the occupation of Texas?

They’d be learning about the minute doctrinal differences and the irreconcilable rivalries between Catholic Hispanics and Protestant Anglos, and even between Southern Methodists and Southern Baptists. They’d all know about Texas’ long love affair with guns, as if that explained why Texans were killing Arab soldiers.

They’d constantly be reminded that the dominant minority in east Texas is African-American, while in west Texas it is Hispanic, as if that explained anything. Leader writers in Arab newspapers would be speculating about which of the many Texan militias could be persuaded to side with the Arab troops in the task of pacification.

Everybody in the Arab world would know far more about Texas than any sane non-Texan should ever want to know — without understanding anything at all. And then the Arab troops would go home sooner or later, and everybody in the Arab world would forget all those intricate details about Texas again.

Well, the shoe is not on the other foot. It’s American troops in Iraq, not Arab troops in Texas, so it’s the Western media that are filled with minutiae about the rivalries among Iraqi sects, parties and militias. We’ve just had a fairly intense week of it, with the Baghdad government that is dominated by two Shiite parties, Dawa and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, using the national army to attack the militia of a third Shiite faction, that led by Muqtada al-Sadr.

There are also the Kurds (aligned with the U.S. but divided among themselves) and the Sunni Arabs (who were fighting the Americans last year but are mostly allied with them at the moment, though that alliance may now be fraying). But the main event last week was between the Shiites.

For the record, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s attempt to shut down Muqtada al-Sadr’s militia, the Mahdi army, has failed. Al-Maliki’s offensive against the Mahdi army in Basra stalled after four days, with three-quarters of the city still in the hands of the militia. Meanwhile heavy fighting spread to four other cities in the south and to Baghdad itself, and U.S. ground troops were drawn into the fighting to cover the Iraqi army’s failures.

Al-Maliki, who had been full of bluster at the start, declared himself surprised by the strength of the resistance (although nobody else was). He stopped the offensive and extended his deadline for disarming the militias by 10 days. Then, after frantic scurrying around behind the scenes, a deal emerged in which Muqtada al-Sadr gently let him off the hook.

Sadr declared March 30 he was ordering the Mahdi army to stop fighting and get off the streets, but demanded that the government stop “illegal and random raids” (that target his followers) and release all detainees (including hundreds of Mahdi army members) who have been arrested without formal charges.

And Sadr’s spokesman made it very clear that no weapons would be handed in.

Al-Maliki did not argue. The offensive has been called off, and the Mahdi army is still intact. As al-Maliki’s spokesman put it, “the government will . . . implement the law against those who do not obey the instructions of the government and of Sadr.”

The latter comes out of this confrontation stronger than ever, having faced down al-Maliki (with the full weight of the U.S. behind him), and then winning extra points for being the peacemaker.

But the saga of the past week is just more minutiae, of no great relevance to the future of Iraq, let alone of the U.S. No matter who ends up running Iraq, all the American troops will go home in the end. And whatever happens in Iraq after that, although of great importance to Iraqis, will be of little interest to Americans.

This does presume, of course, that post-occupation Iraq will not be run by bloodthirsty and intolerant fanatics whose only goal in life is to attack the U.S. But that was never remotely likely at any stage of the game. The notion that this is anybody’s primary motive in the Arab world, even that of the bloodthirsty and intolerant fanatics who run “al-Qaida in Mesopotamia,” is just a self-centered American fantasy.

Ten years from now, all that painfully acquired knowledge about the details of Iraq’s internal rivalries will be long gone from American minds. Even in Iraq, few people will remember what happened last month in Iraq or give a damn about it. And the main conclusion of the American public about the Iraq adventure, as it has long been about Vietnam, will be (as Talleyrand said about one of Napoleon’s stupider decisions) that “it was worse than a Crime; it was a Mistake.”

Gwynne Dyer’s new book, “After Iraq,” has just been published in London by Yale University Press.

Source. Japan Times
From Hunter Ellinger / The Rag Blog

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