The Rag Blog

“It’s no great secret why the Jewish agencies continue to trumpet support for the discredited policies of this failed administration. They see defense of Israel as their number-one goal, trumping all other items on the agenda. That single-mindedness binds them ever closer to a White House that has made combating Islamic terrorism its signature campaign. The campaign’s effects on the world have been catastrophic. But that is no concern of the Jewish agencies.” – December 8, 2006 statement by JJ Goldberg, editor of Forward (the leading Jewish weekly in the United States)

Introduction:

Many Jewish writers, including those who are somewhat critical of Israel, have raised pointed questions about our critique of the Zionist power configuration (ZPC) in the United States and what they wrongly claim are our singular harsh critique of the state of Israel. Some of these accusers claim to see signs of ‘latent anti-Semitism’, others, of a more ‘leftist’ coloration, deny the influential role of the ZPC arguing that US foreign policy is a product of ‘geo-politics or the interests of big oil. With the recent publication of several widely circulated texts, highly critical of the power of the Zionist ‘lobby’, several liberal pro-Israel publicists generously conceded that it is a topic that should be debated (and not automatically stigmatized and dismissed) and perhaps be ‘taken into account.’

ZPC Deniers: Phony Arguments for Fake Claims

The main claims of ZPC deniers take several tacks: Some claim that the ZPC is just ‘another lobby’ like the Chamber of Commerce, the Sierra Club or the Society for the Protection of Goldfish. Others claim that by focusing mainly on Israel and by inference the ‘Lobby’, the critics of Zionism ignore the equally violent abuses of rulers, regimes and states elsewhere. This ‘exclusive focus’ on Israel, the deniers of ZPC argue, reveals a latent or overt anti-Semitism. They propose that human rights advocates condemn all human rights abusers everywhere (at the same time and with the same emphasis?). Others still argue that Israel is a democracy – at least outside of the Occupied Territories (OT) – and therefore is not as condemnable as other human rights violators and should be ‘credited’ for its civic virtues along with its human rights failings.

CARROLLTON – Phyllis Broomfield barely sleeps these days and occasionally skips work, lost in a haze of anguish over the death of her son.

Second Lt. Johnny Craver was 37 when he died two months ago, killed in Baghdad when an improvised explosive device detonated. He was supposed to be home for Christmas.

“I don’t even want to have holidays this year,” Broomfield said. “I don’t know that I can. Every day since October 14, I just wonder how I am going to go on.”

Broomfield’s grief, enhanced by the holiday season, is a too-familiar pain for Lee Price, the director of Fort Hood’s Casualty Assistance Center. At least 59 soldiers from Texas have died in Iraq in 2006, and at least 250 since the war began in March 2003. Nationally, nearly 3,000 soldiers have died in Iraq and more than 350 in Afghanistan.

For families dealing with the loss of a fallen soldier, “the holidays bring out the best and bring out the worst” of emotions, Price said. The warm feelings associated with the season often make people dealing with death and loss feel worse, leading many churches to hold somber Blue Christmas services to help those left behind.

Broomfield has her bad days and her worse days. Her first Christmas since her son’s death will be as wrenching as any.

End This War

The cruelty—the utter contempt for common decency and common sense—of this government was on full display last week when agents of the Department of Homeland Security’s division of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), some in riot gear, stormed into six Swift & Company plants in Cactus Texas; Grand Island, Nebraska; Greeley, Colorado; Hyrum, Utah; Marshaltown, Iowa; and, Worthington, Minnesota. They detained 1282 day shift workers, roughly 10% of the entire workforce. Workers on other shifts were left to worry.

Inside the plants workers were separated into two groups: US citizens and non-US citizens. Non-US citizens were herded on to buses and transported to deportation centers, some in distant states. Families were wrenched apart. In some communities children were left in school at the end of the day with no one to pick them up. Immigrant communities were in shock.

The raids were clearly calculated to spread terror. Michael Chertoff head of the Department of Homeland Security ominously put it this way:

It’s going to be a deterrent to illegal workers. It’s going to cause them [immigrant workers] to say that, you know, this happened in Swift, it could easily happen somewhere else. In fact, I’m pretty much going to guarantee we’re going to keep bringing these cases.”

Enough. Enough, enough, enough! Enough with the spin and re-spin. Enough with slandering those who question this abortion of a war. And enough with the war itself. The time to put a stop to this madness was long ago. But we didn’t. Instead we allowed a clutch of half-mad fundamentalists unleash a bloody, unless, un-winnable war that’s killed maybe hundreds of thousands. A war that has become an insatiable black hole that sucks in more lives every day.

Now the President, and his shrinking circle of fellow travelers, want to send up to 35,000 additional US troops into that black hole. He will also ask Congress for a couple of hundred billion more dollars (we don’t have) to pay for two more years of war.

Enough! We should have said enough, meant it, and forced it long ago. But today is all we have, and today is a far better day than tomorrow, to say it, “enough already!”

To Democrats, like Hillary Clinton and Harry Reid, I say, get with it or get the hell out of the way. You’ve hidden behind your triangulated, mealy-mouthed, obfuscated, do-nothing, take-no-risks, non-positions for too long. And, to our shame, we have allowed you to get away with it. Enough of that too.

The time has come for Democrats to do something for change, to stand for something, for a change. We are onto your dodge, you excuses, which can be summarized something like this:

“Sure I voted to give the President permission to attack Iraq. But I did so only to give him negotiating power. I didn’t think he would really do it. And I sure didn’t vote for the kind of incompetence we’ve seen in conducting the war.”

Oh, how tidy. How minced. How nauseatingly weaselly. That vote was four years ago. Where the hell have you been since? That vote was 2951 dead US GI’s ago. Since Democrats and Republicans in congress has voted over $350 billion in funding to facilitate that deadly incompetence. So shut up with that crap, Hillary. You and Democrats like you, have your own penance to do, your own crow to choke down, your own shame to shoulder. And the best way to begin is to learn how to say, “enough!”

The tragedy unleashed by the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq defies description. According to the most recent findings of the Lancet medical journal, the number of “excess deaths” in Iraq since the U.S. invasion is more than 650,000. “Iraq is the fastest-growing refugee crisis in the world,” according to Refugee International: nearly two million Iraqis have fled the country entirely, while at least another 500,000 are internally displaced. Basic foods and necessities are beyond the reach of ordinary Iraqis because of massive inflation. “A gallon of gasoline cost as little as 4 cents in November. Now, after the International Monetary Fund pushed the Oil Ministry to cut its subsidies, the official price is about 67 cents,” the New York Times notes. “The spike has come as a shock to Iraqis, who make only about $150 a month on average-if they have jobs,” an important proviso, since unemployment is roughly 60­70 percent nationally.

October 2006 proved to be the bloodiest month of the entire occupation, with more than six thousand civilians killed in Iraq, most in Baghdad, where thousands of additional U.S. troops have been sent since August with the claim they would restore order and stability in the city, but instead only sparked more violence. United Nations special investigator Manfred Nowak notes that torture “is totally out of hand” in Iraq. “The situation is so bad many people say it is worse than it has been in the times of Saddam Hussein.” The number of U.S soldiers dead is now more than 2,900, with more than 21,000 wounded, many severely.

The underlying trend is clear: each day the occupation continues, life gets worse for most Iraqis. Rather than stemming civil war or sectarian conflict, the occupation is spurring it. Rather than being a source of stability, the occupation is the major source of instability and chaos.

A determined outpouring of 40,000 people, stretching 20 city blocks, rallied here on Dec. 16 to denounce the police killing of 23-year-old Sean Bell, an unarmed Black man who died after a hail of 50 police bullets on the morning of his wedding day. The crowd loudly chanted their demand for an end to racist police brutality.

Demonstrators marched down Fifth Avenue, home to some of Manhattan’s most high-end department stores and boutiques, on one of the busiest shopping days of the year. The police, who had originally penned in one lane of traffic for the protest, were forced to open the entire avenue for the crowd.